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This chapter addresses the dynamics of world literature from a postcolonial angle, integrating the role of the cultural industry in the dynamics of literature across borders. It focuses on the role of texts in reshaping cosmopolitan imaginaries, accounting for the tension between commercialization and the politics of resistance. In particular, the chapter addresses the role of digital technologies in articulating the worldliness of literature not just through circulation and reception but also through new narrative strategies and tropes that open up new scenarios for thinking and imagining migration beyond the limits of borders and geography. It takes as case studies Chimamanda Adichie’s Americanah (2013), in which blogging is used as a form of advocacy, Hamid Mohsin’s Exit/West, which introduces the expedient of magic doors as portals to overcome the sense of stuckness of migration, and the poems of Warson Shire, who emerges as a prominent new Instapoet capable of cutting across audiences, generations and media platforms.

This chapter addresses the dynamics of world literature from a postcolonial angle, integrating the role of the cultural industry in the dynamics of literature across borders. It focuses on the role of texts in reshaping cosmopolitan imaginaries, accounting for the tension between commercialization and the politics of resistance. In particular, the chapter addresses the role of digital technologies in articulating the worldliness of literature not just through circulation and reception but also through new narrative strategies and tropes that open up new scenarios for thinking and imagining migration beyond the limits of borders and geography. It takes as case studies Chimamanda Adichie’s Americanah (2013), in which blogging is used as a form of advocacy, Hamid Mohsin’s Exit/West, which introduces the expedient of magic doors as portals to overcome the sense of stuckness of migration, and the poems of Warson Shire, who emerges as a prominent new Instapoet capable of cutting across audiences, generations and media platforms.

Ideas, motifs, aesthetics, bodies of knowledge, texts, genres and literary worlds have travelled for centuries along Silk Road’s multiple networks of circulation connected through myriad contact hubs located across many temporal and spatial planes. This chapter argues that the Silk Road offers a roadmap for thinking about modes of circulation in world literature in ways that take us beyond the linear trajectory of West influencing the East, the centrifugal proliferation of the European novel around the world, the centripetal East coming to the West for a place, and the single temporality of the global visions of “modern” “colonial” and “postcolonial” “planetarity,” “globalization.” It offers two examples. The 1001 Nights is a classic example of the global circulation of a “text” beyond “translation-as-circulation” and the confines of monologically defined language, nation, genre and historical period. Coffee is a site of global connectedness and intercultural exchange in a comparative analysis of coffee in five literary works from Egypt, Japan, Palestine, Taiwan and Turkey. The global pasts of coffee give shape to the literary world and worldliness; however, each is uniquely mapped by the itinerary of coffee and the cultures it has picked up on the way.

Many current paradigms of world literature, aligned to world-systems theory or Casanova’s “world republic of letters,” assume a diffusionist model of literature that situates the origins of literary modernity in the West. This model has found particular favour in the privileged case of the novel, but how do things stand with other genres? This essay examines the physiology, a popular quasi-journalistic genre dedicated to the taxonomic description of mores, customs and social types. Popularly associated with the figure of the urban flaneur and subsequently critiqued by Walter Benjamin, the physiology peaked under the July Monarchy in France and gained unprecedented success in Russian letters where it served to generate the basis of a non-bourgeois public sphere, after which it was also adapted to the circumstances of Russia’s own imperial borderlands. This paper outlines the essential contours of the physiology as it arose in France, in terms of its internal poetics as well as its social currency, and compare its French life with its Russian metropolitan counterpart, where it was transformed from a paraliterary genre to one that would occupy the centre of the Russian literary life in the transition from romanticism to realism. Its subsequent life in the Caucasus region reveals the rise of a colonial urban aesthetics of the picturesque. Does this story confirm or confound the diffusionist model? The essay’s external trajectory confirms the European origins of the genre and its subsequent circulation throughout the Russian empire, from metropole to periphery. A discussion of genre, however, requires more than an account of its its immanent structural features or its subordination to a singular external socio-spatial logic. The social life of circulating genres points to their divergent role in different literary systems, and to the distinct formal and ideological solutions they propose within regional or local contexts. It would appear, then, that the diffusionist model is pertinent to the movement of some hegemonic genres in the modern era, but that the centre/periphery model needs to be complemented by greater attention to the trans/regional and the local as defining levels of geographic scale in the realm of cultural production. Only a trans-scalar analysis, moving between multiple spatial levels, allows us to honour what humanists celebrate as cultural specificity without sacrificing the global perspective offered by world-systems theory.