NATIONAL LITERATURE IN TRANSNATIONAL TIMES: WRITING TRANSITION IN THE “NEW”

SOUTH AFRICA – VILASHINI COOPPAN

 Benefits of globalization  increasing connection of nations, cultures and economies as

well as the reconfiguration of academic disciplines from national to global frameworks.
 Intellectual globalization is marked by the rejection of the nationally-constituted society
as the appropriate object of discourse and a commitment to conceptualising the world
as a whole.
 What does it mean for comparative literature and postcolonial studies to envision the
globe?
 They have in common disciplinary histories that posit the nation as the founding origin.
However, disciplinary history do most justice to transformative energies of the present
moment when they choose to trouble the trajectory that places nation first and globe
after.
 The rise of nationalism as a principle of differentiation coincides with a culture of
cosmopolitanism in comparative literature’s history. The liberation of the decolonized
nation coincides with the consolidation of a broader Third Worldism in postcolonial
studies’ history  this argues for a long historical interpenetration of nation and globe.
