— Pepe Karmel As an art historian and sometime curator, my version of this question is to ask: how should we teach and exhibit “global” art? For art prior to around 1870, the answer is relatively unproblematic. Encyclopedic museums in…
Global World Literature: From the Premodern to the Postnational
— David Damrosch The discipline of Comparative Literature developed in tandem with the European nationalism that it at once embodied and opposed. In the postwar era, postcolonial studies opened a far wider frame of reference, while still largely following established…
Reframing the Enlightenment in a Global Context: Raynal’s _Histoire des Deux Indes_
— Luis Ramos What if we were to view the Enlightenment less as an intrinsically Western idea and more as a new approach to knowledge prompted by a prolonged period of European exploration and colonial expansion? Drawing from the recent…
Shapes of Time, Shapes of Curriculum
Molly Martin Innovations in literary studies over the past decades, potentially but not necessarily brought about as a response to the rise of Global Studies, allow one to access a more global orientation through a number of commonly practiced methods:…
Émile Mâle: A Cautionary Tale
I wanted to briefly engage the question of the consequences of a global consciousness on the study of the arts, particularly the critical practice of meaningful inclusion of extra-Western European traditions. The contemporary moment is not the only one to…
A Genealogical Approach to Pedagogy
— Mahnaz Yousefzadeh In his discussion of criteria for creating a humanistic curriculum in world literature, David Damrosch brings attention to the impossibility of adopting the anthological logic of inclusion and addition. In his statement that “other approaches are needed”…
Enlightenment as Western Project
— Mahnaz Yousefzadeh In an exemplary articulation of cultural incommensurability, Borges’s “Averroes’ Search” imagines the difficulty of the Medieval Islamic philosopher Averroes in translating Aristotle’s Poetics. He then reflects on the absurdity of the task he himself had undertaken, to understand…
Multilingualism and Monolingualism
— Eugene Ostashevsky I wish to address the issues of multilingual writing and of the overcoming of the national language paradigm, as suggested in Focus III. My two main texts will be Beyond the Mother Tongue: The Postmonolingual Condition by…
Postnational Humanities and the Beatles
— Brian Culver The touchstone passage from Jan Nederveen Pieterse’s Globalization and Culture highlights three of the reasons that the humanistic disciplines have been largely reluctant to adopt the insights of Global Studies. First, the isomorphism of place, people, and…
Global Aesthetics: A Conundrum?
— Emily Bauman In the second edition of Shawn C. Smallman and Kimberley Brown’s Introduction to International and Global Studies the authors pose a telling question to their student readers: “Why do you think the fine arts are sometimes forgotten…