Over the past three decades, few words have radiated more seductive power or generated more controversy than “globalization.” This MLA special session is theoretically inspired by Faisal Devji’s The Terrorist in Search of Humanity (Columbia, 2008), where Devji argues that it was the emergence of the globe as a political concept at the onset of the Cold War that made it possible to articulate, to evaluate, and to dispute normative accounts of the inexorability and singularity of globalization. By bringing together texts written in four languages – Bengali, Spanish, German, English – over the course of what the economist Giovanni Arrighi has identified as the “long twentieth century,” this session proposes to go beyond approaches to comparative literature that either presuppose the globe as an existing theater of operations, as a scale of interaction, or as a geographic frame of analysis. Instead, we take our critical inspiration from Jacques Derrida’s approach to historical semantics and to conceptual history in Rogues (Stanford, 2005), which instantiates what the philosopher Leonard Lawler describes as Derrida’s persistent effort to “un-close” the sphericity of thought by opening it to the radically other (“Jacques Derrida,” 2023). This session proposes to build on this deconstructive practice through close readings that “un-close” contemporaneous presentations of the globe as a figure for the unity of humankind, highlighting how invocations of the cosmic, the spiritual, and the religious might open conceptions of humankind to the other.

(First 15-18 minutes): Through a reading of the Mexican writer Álvaro Enrigue’s 2013 novel Muerte súbita, Rodrigo Leon Barrios will argue that Enrigue presents the Baroque as the first planetary culture arising from reciprocal material, temporal, and symbolic flows between the Old and the New Worlds, suggesting that the creation of the world is an unfinished process and an aesthetic problem. Through the figures of Caravaggio and Don Diego de Alvarado Huanintzin – a Nahua feather artisan who produced a feather mitre that eventually reached Rome – Enrigue conceives of art as a hybrid object that condenses different irreducible worldviews which, rather than cancelling one another out, generate a semantic proliferation characteristic of the Baroque. Barrios draws on Jean-Luc Nancy to propose that the novel articulates a process of “mondialisation” (2002) rather than globalization, in which the world is created simultaneously from multiple places and temporalities, thereby displacing the teleological linearity of modernity.

(Second 15-18 minutes): Continuing to foreground a critique of modernity’s teleology, Apala Das’s paper traces Rabindranath Tagore’s invocation of the ascetic figure variously across his genres. Das argues that prior to offering aestheticized models of sovereignty and masculinity, Tagore’s ascetic figures embody disciplinary models which make space for evaluations of modernity’s teleologies. Through close readings of a diverse range of Tagore’s underexplored works – such as his short story “Ghater Katha” (“The Ghat’s Story”) (1884); his pyramidally structured play Achalayatan (“The Immovable Edifice”) (1912); and his one-act play Sanyasi (“The Ascetic”) (1917) – Das shows that Tagore ingeniously adapts textual genres to stage the emergence of nascent and vague forms of subjectivity, subalternity, or sovereignty at the zones of encounter with the ascetic figure. Das shows that in situating the ascetic figure strategically in his works, Tagore offers us not ways of being disciplined but renunciatory models of relating to disciplinary modernity. Das’s reading of Tagore thus seeks to “un-close” humanistic readings of Tagore’s religio-spiritual and ethico-political models.

(Third 15-18 minutes): Finally, through an overt focus on the interrelation between the spiritual and the global, Mimi Winick’s paper looks to longer prose forms to show how 20^th century writing on art and religion featured a specific model of enduring transcendence. Winick’s paper adds to previous scholarship on transcendent experiences in literature which has largely focused on concentrated forms such as lyric poetry, the epiphanic moment in novels, or film montage. Winick presents evidence from the writings of the dancer Isadora Duncan, the Theosophists Annie Besant and C.W. Leadbeater, and the painter Wassily Kandinsky. As essays in periodicals and collaboratively written books and pamphlets show, these writings shuttle their readers into modes of attention that switch between reflection and absorption in ways that structure the experiences of sustained transcendence these writers linked to a new global spiritual order.

(Final 15-20 minutes: Q&A and presider comments)

This session closely relates to MLA 2027’s Presidential Theme “Emancipatory Narratives” in that it conceives of the globe as a metaphorical “crossroad” intersecting “possibility and risk.” It also reaches beyond literary studies to invite cross-disciplinary perspectives from art history, rhetoric, urban studies, religious studies, and political theology.