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This concluding chapter looks ahead at the trope's afterlives in the twentieth century, considering briefly how Silver Age and Soviet writers made use of the geographic imaginary that they inherited. In post-Soviet times, the provinces continue to accrue meanings both positive and negative. This is seen in books, films, and television series that veer back and forth between versions of the Silver Age myth (provintsiia as repository of purity and cultural authenticity) and much darker views that once again depict provintsiia as locus of degradation and moral decay. Finally, the chapter concludes by reflecting on the relationship between Russian provinciality and the problematic (Western) idea of “World Literature.” This in and of itself is a category from which Russian texts, no matter how “worldly” or how widely circulated, have been almost wholly excluded.

The romantic idea of the writer as an isolated genius has died, but there are few studies documenting the sociology of publishing, particularly the role of “gatekeeping.” How do friends, agents, editors, translators, small publishers, and reviewers—not to mention the changes in technology, copyright, and the industry—shape the literary process? This matrix is further complicated when books cross cultural and language barriers—become part of World Literature. This study builds on the work of Pierre Bourdieu, Randall Collins, and David Damrosch, describing the multi-layered gatekeeping process after the 1960s. It focuses on Gabriel García Márquez, Charles Bukowski, Paul Auster, and Haruki Murakami. Tracing their rise, it takes issue with the interpretations of World Literature offered by Pascal Casanova and Franco Moretti. It poses four counter-examples in Rigoberta Menchu, Diane di Prima, Lydia Davis, and Banana Yoshimoto, showing that the genre is neither a “republic” nor a genre.

This concluding chapter takes its title from a book of photographs about Australia published in 1931 by E. O. Hoppé. The cover of The Fifth Continent showed the photographer atop a globe looking back at a map of Australia, and it is this attempt to reconstitute the world in relation to alternative spatial perspectives that provided the impetus for Hoppé’s work. Similarly, to read authors such as Slessor or Dark in parallax with canonical types is not only to correlate relatively neglected figures with modernism’s larger orbit, but also to highlight various neglected aspects of more established writers, the complex ways in which their narratives face backwards as well as forwards. The particular force of backgazing within a sphere of modernism thus lies in the way it resists conventional classifications by projecting not an oppositional but a reversible world, one whose boundaries are rendered enigmatic.

Marlene van Niekerk’s novels Triomf (1994) and Agaat (2004) set new standards for Afrikaans fiction. This chapter canvasses the author’s abiding concerns with the forced adoption of the temporality of another—another political order, another cultural identity—that was at the heart of apartheid ideology, and with the multiple disappointments (missed appointments, frustrated desires) that resulted. Focusing on Agaat, it considers the role of the novel (and of the character Agaat within it) as a prosthesis that makes transmission—and critique—of culture possible. Turning to debates about the shape of World Literature, and the place of South African writing within it, the chapter also asks what the translation of Agaat into English suggests about the fates of writing from a specific national and linguistic context when taken up by a discipline that flattens difference.

The first chapter turns to Tagore, whose auto-translations stand as examples of degraded art both because translations fail to meet the criteria of aesthetic originality and because the critical consensus around Tagore’s English works is that they fail to transmit the beauty and flair of their Bengali originals. Rather than discount Tagore’s translations, I centralize them and examine how he turned unglamorous, second-order acts of literary production, such as compilation, translation, and editing, into modernist strategies for preserving linguistic difference and partial unintelligibility as a style of transnational contact across imperial lines of power. Through my close readings of Nationalism (1916) and The Home and the World (1919), I show how Tagore treated his Bengali originals not as hermetically-sealed, finished works of art, but rather as repositories of material. Their translation and rearrangement into English allowed him to mediate between utopian internationalisms that dreamed of perfect communication between nations and autarkic nationalisms that argued for the cultural self-sufficiency of the nation as a marker of its readiness for sovereignty. Against both these more absolutist positions of globalism and nationalism, Tagore’s auto-translations intervene with a model of national autonomy that precludes cultural organicism and a model of internationalism that makes imperfect communication a feature of globalized collectivity with which to grapple rather than an obstacle to overcome.

The understudied archive of Muslim slave narratives demands a reconfiguration of the early history of New World Black literature, on the one hand asserting Arabic letters and Orientalist mediations as foundational discursive sources while on the other hand directing greater attention to narrative production in West Africa, the Caribbean, and Latin America. Consistently marked in their time and ours by a racist dialectic of amnesia and surprise, these Muslim narrators draw upon devices of the Arab-Islamic tradition even as they anticipate the experiences of administrative detention, of the expired visa, of deportation, and of repatriation. In their enduring oscillation between obscurity and legibility, and in our own efforts to assemble their traces, we must confront and honor these narrators’ eventual retreat from interpellation, a reticence that vexes even as it structures the archive of the Global South Atlantic: resistant, dispersed, decentered, and opaque.

Poetic language and literary history mattered to Hannah Arendt in her thinking about community because they told a story about how political worlds, whether bound by nation states or by international laws and treaties, traffic with the worlds we imagine and create. These worlds are not equivalent, but the idea of the world making potential of literature that she inherited from German Romanticism also gave her the means to re-imagine new political terms for humanity at mid-century. What Arendt first described in 1949 as ‘the right to have rights’ had its own poetry. Returning to her work on Rahel Varnhagen, pariah literature, and Bertolt Brecht, this chapter shows how Arendt’s political theory was indebted to her developing understanding of the world-making capacities of poetry and writing in her own period of statelessness.

Few historical figures of the 20th century are as intriguing from a Transatlantic perspective as Leon Trotsky. Trotsky can be thought of as “transatlantic” in at least three ways. First, and perhaps most obviously, we can consider Trotsky’s transnationalism in terms of the internationalist basis and verve of his political theories. Second, we might explore how Trotsky’s exilic fate placed him in contact with intellectuals, followers and enemies in multiple linguistic and cultural communities in Europe, Turkey and the Americas—places in which he could further observe the “unevenness” of capitalism in space and time. Third, we might consider the cultural representations of the Old Man’s exile and assassination at the hands of a Catalan Stalinist agent, Ramón Mercader, in Coyoacán Mexico in 1940, whereupon the Revolutionary leader becomes a vessel of Hispanic Atlantic contemplation and circulation.

Transatlantic Studies seeks to provoke a discussion and a reconfiguration of area studies. Within departments of Spanish, Portuguese, Latin American Studies, and Iberian Studies, the Transatlantic approach critically engages the concepts of national cultures and postcolonial relations among Spain, Portugal and their former colonies in the Americas and Africa. Like its objects of study, Transatlantic Studies transgresses national boundaries instead of assuming the nation-state as a sort of epistemic building-block. But it attempts to do so without dehistoricizing the texts and other cultural products it brings under analysis. The thirty-five essays comprised in this volume are geared toward an audience of undergraduate and graduate students, as well as faculty colleagues who teach transatlantically oriented courses. They encompass nearly every decade in the last two centuries: from the Napoleonic invasion of the Iberian peninsula in the spring of 1808 and the subsequent movements of Latin American independence, through the transatlantic avant-garde, to current migration movements between Latin America, Africa, and the former Iberian metropoles. While each essay addresses a specific topic, our contributors also open up new questions for discussion and research, point to further readings, and suggest specific primary sources that can be used in the classroom.