This introduction positions the essays in this special issue in relation to Pascale Casanova’s model of inequality and value in the world republic of letters. Arguing that the vernacular has been an overlooked or underelaborated concept in subsequent world literary theorizations, the essay then proceeds to discuss the shifting value and nature of the vernacular – a concept that only has meaning if it is understood relationally. Both the vernacular and world literature are therefore utilized as heuristic tools, enabling dialogues across entrenched linguistic, cultural and theoretical boundaries. Hence, the unorthodox combination of South African, North American, Indian, Swedish, Russian, Mozambican and Latin American perspectives presented here.

This book explores literary works and practices – always existing in the dynamic relation between locations and orientations – in a series of carefully designed case studies. Explicitly expressed or implied, manifesting itself sometimes as dislocation and disorientation, the claiming of space by any symbolic means necessary is revealed as a constant effect of literary endeavors. In dialogue with geopolitics of culture, sociology and anthropology, attention to literary locations and orientations brings spatial particularity into the study of world literatures.

These case studies demonstrate that four key terms (cosmopolitan, vernacular, location, orientation) can frame analyses of very different types of literary acts and texts in the contemporary period, allowing for distinctions that are not captured within the grids of other conceptual pairs like centre-periphery, local-global, postcolonial-metropolitan, North-South. With this framing, expressive practices in a wide range of regions – including Europe, Africa, the Middle East and the Pacific – are analysed in ways that bring out how spatiality is at stake in the cosmopolitan-vernacular dynamic.

Black Moses was spiteful. He was not fond of slavery. And he was not fond of statues, whether they were of gold or stone or flesh or mind.

I was born in 1974 in Bosnia, which at the time was in the federation of socialist Yugoslavia. I’m of Bosniak ethnicity, which the government used to call Muslim ethnicity (yeah). Ideologically speaking, I come from a mixed Muslim-Communist family. Imagine that chimera, two scary things in one package, but do not be afraid. 

Now I live in Sweden, the home of the Nobel Prize. In December 2019, I was one of the organizers of a protest against the awarding of the Nobel Prize in Literature to the genocide denier Peter Handke in central Stockholm. This protest, the kind hitherto unseen in Swedish history, was, to the surprise of our little team, covered by world-wide media. My speech, which relied heavily on the wisdom of the late Toni Morrison, was quoted in The Intercept, The New York Times and The Washington Post, and in many European and Asian languages I do not speak.

And now, strangely enough for a Balkan boy, I want to discuss race. 

A Bosnian Swedish writer considers how extreme nuances and barely perceptible differences, which signify no change in the core meaning of a word, still evoke connotations that widen gaps between us rather than allowing us to trivas with words.

When I was rather new to Sweden, with only a few years of refugee life behind me, I worked in a group of care assistants, and when one of us died, we all went to his funeral. The priest pulled out an electric guitar and played a famous pop song by Ulf Lundell, “Jag trivs bäst i öppna landskap.” I was lost for words, of course, but quite enjoyed it. My first big culture clash. The main verse translates roughly as “I best enjoy being in vast landscapes,” but the Swedish verb trivas really means to thrive, to grow, and in more everyday use to feel good and at home. You can trivas at work or trivas with someone. It signifies that everything is just Swedish lagom, just enough, balanced. It doesn’t ooze the intensity of strong love but evokes a preferred mood or a mode of being. Perhaps it is like that line of Raymond Carver, “In addition to being in love, we like each other and enjoy one another’s company.” I think there is a way to trivas with words and for words to trivas with you like you can trivas with someone you love. It hasn’t always been like that. There is also a way to live with words that make the ground arid. A way to always and utterly distrust words.

Looking at Mohsin Hamid's How to Get Filthy Rich in Rising Asia in terms of Saskia Sassen's The Global City, I argue that the dynamic between functionality and dysfunctionality of the infrastructure (Larkin) of postcolonial cities in global economies constitutes, in part, the city-as-oeuvre of its citizens (Lefebvre).

Coming from the perspective of World Literature Studies, this essay views Ms. Marvel series as post-9/11 Muslim-American work whose iconography is deeply transnational. Situated in what Alexander Beecroft termed national literary ecology, Ms. Marvel contains strong features of what the anthropologist Ulf Hannerz called ‘transnational connections.’ Ms. Marvel is built, at its core, around the problematic of superhero iconography in relation to the gender and ethno-religious identity, in particular reductive stereotypes of Muslim identity in the post-9/11 USA. I argue that Ms. Marvel’s transnational character arises from a dynamic oscillation between a location in the American literary ecology and an orientation to globalised form of Islamic culture. The comic hybridises American superhero iconography with the ethos of her Islamic heritage and as such creates a rich transnational image-text that vies for a place in the developing ecology of global literature.

Hospitalized while on vacation in Turkey, the author encounters a Babel of languages and, in old photographs and smudged bedsheets, traces of a past that both includes and eludes him.

Hamid's novelistic project is a creative examination of the relationship between the micro movements of individuals and the macro processes of globalisation. The micro movements of individual human agents are related to their political being-in-the-world and their geographical location. Using Sheppard's notion of 'wormhole travel', I examine how geographical location affects political agency. In particular, I employ the notion of 'positionality' to say something meaningful about the way location and connectivity of cities, global conglomerates and populations affect the ability to develop individual political agency in a globalised world. Hamid's novel questions the popular notion that globalisation is an external factor, which affects everything from the way we conceive of planetary geography to national and global economies and social action as such. I argue that political agency in this novel involves an increase in ideologically-informed will to affect one's life as a citizen, or, to use Hamid's own metaphor, to an ability to create 'a firefly's glow bright enough to transcend the boundaries of continents and civilizations'.

Zlatan, the golden boy (literal meaning of his first name), must be one of the most famous Swedes of all time, among the likes of Abba and Björn Borg. He received the Swedish Golden Ball prize seven years in a row, and I can tell you that his four goals against England at the Friends Arena north of Stockholm — which included one of the greatest goals in football history — conquered Swedish hearts that had been closed to him.

But feelings will always be mixed. Sweden, and I guess other people around the world, love him, hate him, love to hate him, love that they love him, and hate that they love him. There may be other ways to relate to him, but indifference is seldom an option, even for someone like me who has no clue about sports.

Iconized migrant writers such as Michael Ondaatje, Salman Rushdie and Ben Okri use their fictional worlds to articulate the ways in which existential “nervous conditions,” caused by violent postcolonial history, drive individuals to rework the critical notions of freedom, authenticity and community. This existential thread in their works has been largely ignored or left undeveloped in literary criticism. Although Rushdie has argued that they primarily write back to the imperial centre(s), in their signature novels, The English Patient, Midnight’s Children and The Famished Road, these writers also respond to their conflicting cultural and ethnic heritages. They dramatize characters in traumatic struggles with individual and communal identity, belonging and affiliation. As a way of coping with their identity crises, most characters succumb to the political rhetoric of communalism and evince desires for preservation of their original ethnic and cultural identities. At the same time, the traumatic political and cultural climates induce the central characters to experiment with their singular ways of being free and authentic. To begin with, in response to old and new forces of orthodoxy, these characters are driven to estrangement and a powerful desire for self-sufficiency. Yet, since this individualist desire clashes with their need for communal sharing, they enact a form of creative destruction of their inherited identities, their singular selfhood and communal identity. They give rise to new forms of bonding that transcend ethnic, racial, cultural, geographical and political parameters. They experience a certain plurality of singular selfhood and participate in forms of “inoperative” communities which elicit bonds without ties and coexistence without the necessity of a common work and essence.

A war refugee from Bosnia now living, writing, and teaching in Sweden reviews Quo Vadis, Aida?, the Oscar-nominated film about a UN translator in Srebrenica when the Serbian army takes over the town in July 1995. After considering both the praise and the criticism, he ultimately asks: Why are we fretting as if this movie is the first and last expression of the Bosnian genocide?

There is no other way for me but to be personal in my review of Jasmila Žbanić’s Quo Vadis, Aida? Being personal is the only way, for me, to be objective. After all, writing this, I’m wearing several hats: a survivor of war, a refugee, a writer, a literature professor.

Quo Vadis, Aida? takes place in eastern Bosnia in July 1995. Aida is a translator for the UN in Srebrenica at the time the Serbian army takes over the town, and her own family ends up among the thousands of civilians looking for shelter in the UN camp. The title comes from the famous episode in early Christianity when St. Peter, fleeing crucifixion in Rome, meets the risen Jesus who asks him Quō vādis? (Whither goest thou?), to which he replies, Rōmam eō iterum crucifīgī (I am going to Rome to be crucified again). Cross-cultural resonances abound when the Muslim Aida, as an insider to the negotiations between the UN and the Serb army, keeps running back and forth between men of power, hoping her meager access to political strategies will help her save her husband and her two sons.

The Alien films (1979, 1986, 1992, 1997) have inspired a substantial body of scholarship in gender studies, which has examined feminine monsters and motherhood. However, with the introduction of the prequels, Prometheus (2012) and Alien: Covenant (2017), interest has shifted from the monster to its creation and the question of “true” origins. This chapter utilizes the phenomenology of Martin Heidegger to show how the Alien prequels characterize humans as defined by a concern with their being (Dasein) and a relation to Being (Sein). Ridley Scott’s prequels ask the audience to rethink the relationship between beings and Being through the image of bodily interdependence. The drive to create, change, and metamorphose continuously positions the human among abject bodies that help define us, yet in relation to which we ourselves can be perceived as the abject that must be rejected. The Alien itself loses importance as the story of the metamorphosing Alien-man-machine trinity emerges.

The Craft of Editing offers a rare insight into the unique dynamic between author and editor. In this illuminating book, Adnan Mahmutović and Lucy Durneen lead a cohort of industry experts to bring transparency to the mystique that often surrounds the craft and practice of editing. Using genuine case studies from published works – including annotated manuscripts – this book prepares writers for potential dialogue and critique from editors. The Craft of Editing follows the journey from rough draft to publication, an essential part of any writing experience, while showing the singular and authentic approach each editor takes. Using original pitches, debates, emails, and instant messages to shed light on the collaboration between authors and editors, The Craft of Editing is an indispensable tool to creative writers and students alike.

Robert Gottlieb said that ‘the editor’s relationship to a book should be an invisible one but invisible or not, the implication is nonetheless that it should exist’. This article examines the writer–editor relationship that Gottlieb describes as ‘fraught with difficulty’ (but equally encouraging of what Toni Morrison calls ‘imaginative recklessness’) from the perspective, as Barthes might have it, of both the ‘ones who write’ and also ‘the ones who rewrite’. As editors for the journals Short Fiction and Two Thirds North and published short story writers, ourselves, we reflect on contemporary reading aesthetics as much as creative practice, with specific reference to published stories in draft and final-edit forms in order to work towards piecing together a poetics of editing in relation to short fiction.

Chilean author Roberto Bolaiio (1953-2003) has achieved considerable critical and commercial success among a global English readership. Breaking into the US market, which has an important mediating role for the international circulation of texts, is a rare feat for a non-Anglophone author and requires some explanation. This paper looks at the rise of Bolailo in terms of major theories on world literature. We find that his success fits into a combination of explanatory models (Casanova, Moretti, Thomsen), but it also reveals interesting mismatches and problematic aspects that show a need to update existing theories. Our analysis, which focuses on the treatment of Bolano in the American market, shows a great need for transnational forms of analysis across linguistic barriers.

Following Eric Hayot's argument that modernity is a theory of the world as the universal, this paper traces the world concept in Marvel Comics industry (MC) and its synergy with the film industry of the Marvel Cinematic Universe (MCU). Speaking from the field of World Literature Studies, I show how superhero comics activate the world concept through the global dissemination of the infinitely stretchable Marvel Universe. My argument is that by operating in terms of a universe with moldable diegetic rules, the popular culture of MC and MCU does not merely reflect the current state of the world concept, but also affects its evolution and its spread. The universality of the modern worldview has come to be less concerned with the realist effect and more with increasing all-inclusiveness and infinite stretchability. The increased plasticity of the world concept puts a great pressure on world literary ecologies and increasingly expands and shapes what Beecroft called global literary ecology. What Marvel Comics has done in recent decades, especially through the interplay with the film industry, is to show how the expansion of the world concept entails that however large we imagine the world to be, it is always already too small.

After meeting at a short-fiction conference, Adnan Mahmutovic and Lucy Durneen began talking to one another about his childhood love of comics and his efforts to preserve them during the Bosnian War (1992-95). Durneen encouraged Mahmutovic to write an essay about these experiences and, inspired by their conversation, wrote a connected though independent story of her own. Here they join the two, creating a hybrid essay that braids together their two histories. Ultimately the two connect through friendship and the importance of preserving our most miraculous stories. To hear them read their essays, visit WLT's website.

Across generations and genres, comics have imagined different views of the future, from unattainable utopias to worrisome dystopias. These presaging narratives can be read as reflections of their authors' (and readers') hopes, fears and beliefs about the present. This collection of new essays explores the creative processes in comics production that bring plausible futures to the page. The contributors investigate portrayals in different stylistic traditions-manga, bande desinees-from a variety of theoretical perspectives. The disparate yet coherent picture that emerges documents the elaborate storylines and complex universes comics creators have been crafting for decades.