Post-Global Aesthetics: World Creation and Exhaustion in 21st Century Latin American Literatures

• Applicant: Professorin Dr. Gesine Müller
• Subject Area: European and American Literary and Cultural Studies
• Term: since 2022
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 494083909

Phenomena such as the Covid-19 pandemic, climate change, and the global surge of political populism have demonstrated that the most recent phase of accelerated globalization is over. New categories and concepts are needed in order to respond to this exhaustion of the global project while devising alternative models and ideas of globality. The project aims to investigate these highly topical responses in their aesthetic and material manifestations under a “post-global” banner. “Post-globality” denotes a critical response framework that helps us understand the problematic dimensions of this current phase of globalization while seeking out new forms of world creation—including and especially in literature. These responses particularly relate to ecological issues around Anthropocene narratives, geopoetics, the digital revolution, and epidemic realities and fictions, which we intend to investigate in their interconnectedness.This project builds directly on the results of my ERC Consolidator Grant project “Reading Global,” which investigated the period up to the turn of the millennium. The new project adopts the premise that, especially since the 2008 financial and economic crisis, Latin American literary production has experienced a fluctuating dynamic between exhaustion and creation that is pioneering post-global aesthetics around the planet. As a regional sphere of experience, Latin America is paradigmatic of the inconsistencies of the (post-)global: Authors there, more than anywhere else, have been responding to the asymmetries of globalization processes in works of literature that enjoy worldwide circulation via strong connections to Western markets and narrative forms. The project approaches these phenomena from different perspectives in two sub-projects. The first sub-project examines the literary formal language of post-global aesthetics and asks about new imaginaries of globality. In the second sub-project, a material perspective is decisive. How do selected works of post-global Latin American literatures circulate? How is world literature created in a post-global era?

• DFG Programme: Research Grants