| Noting the risk that the globalizing of literary studies "may simply reinforce the developments it is attempting to examine and assess," Giles Gunn insists that literary critics analyze not only how cultural material has been produced by globalizing trends, but also how it has subjected those trends to scrutiny. It is this work that my dissertation undertakes. The fictions that I examine in this study represent and revise the global histories of the past and present, including the indigenous narratives that are, in Homi Bhabha's words, "internal to" national identity itself. These works, taking as their subjects European unification, the AIDS epidemic, the new South Africa, and the human rights movement, test the infinite demands for justice, including legal and economic justice, against the shifting borders of the nation. Confronting the pervasiveness of ethical claims, the disjointing of the global field of action, and the impediments to social redistribution, they commit to the non-finality, which is emphatically not the deferability, of justice. These fictions are engaged in rethinking ethics and politics---habits of feeling, modes of responsibility, and practices of citizenship---for the global future. It is in such efforts that I identify them as cosmopolitan. |
