Global Cosmopolitanisms
Description
Since at least the nineteenth century, literature produced in what is today known as the Global South has been expected to be both cosmopolitan and nationalist at the same time. On the one hand, it seemed that all institutionalized forms of literature (from prose fiction and historiography to performing arts and cinema) were alien to the so-called periphery—especially in the Latin American context. The creation of these literatures was not simply about serving their own national communities from within, but also about embracing a form of cosmopolitanism—an appropriation of the literary languages of Europe and the United States. Often, such literary works were written in languages unfamiliar to the local population, aiming for a kind of spectral international recognition. Examples include Latin American writers composing books and plays in French (Joaquim Nabuco, Visconde de Taunay, Pires de Almeida), the widespread practice (sometimes by choice, sometimes by necessity) of composing operas in Italian (Carlos Gomes, Raoul Hügel, Eliodoro Ortiz de Zárate, Remijio Acevedo Gajardo), and later even the common practice of composing songs in English regardless of the composer's position within the popular music spectrum (Caetano Veloso, Sepultura, Angra, Milton Nascimento, Los Mac's, Los Vidrios Quebrados, to name a few). On the other hand, these cosmopolitan works of art faced increasing scrutiny and even mockery during the twentieth century for their perceived lack of nativism and vernacular authenticity. The aim of this seminar is to critically explore both movements—not only within Latin America, but across the entire Global South—by addressing both the cosmopolitan ambitions of these works and the resistance they often provoked. We are particularly interested in moments when such literary works are accused of lacking nationalism, and how we might engage with and reassess this ostensibly “unnational” literature, seeing its potentialities and originalities. We welcome papers that address these issues across all forms of media produced in the Global South—film, theater, novels, historiography, essays, and more.
Schedule
Papers
Speaker Bio
Tamara Albarracín Sánchez est doctorante à l’Université de Barcelone (UB), sous la direction de Dunia Gras et Maria Grau-Perejoan. Sa thèse propose une analyse sociologique des trajectoires d’écrivaines latino-américaines et caribéennes en Europe au XXIᵉ siècle. Elle est membre du réseau doctoral Understanding Latin-American Challenges in the 21st Century (LAC-EU).
Speaker Bio
Daniel Rees (he/him) is a PhD student at the German section of the University of Cambridge. His research focuses on multilingualism across contemporary German, Japanese, and English poetry. He is writing his dissertation on the poetic and translational praxes of Paul Celan and Yoko Tawada and is based at Waseda University in Tokyo during the 2025-6 academic year.
Speaker Bio
Shobna Nijhawan is associate professor of Hindi at York University (Canada). She is the author of Hindi Publishing in Colonial Lucknow. Gender, Genre and Visuality in the Creation of a Literary Canon (2018), Women and Girls in the Hindi Public Sphere. Periodical Literature in Colonial North India (2012) and co-editor (with L. Brueck, C. Gupta and H. Harder) of Literary Sentiments in the Vernacular. Gender and Genre in Modern South Asia (2022).
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Speaker Bio
Marcos Padrón Curet is pursuing a PhD in Spanish and Portuguese at Princeton University. He received a Master’s in Lettres Modernes from l'École Normale Supérieure de Lyon, and holds a B.A. from Haverford College. His research examines modern Latin America, focusing on travel writing and the politico-aesthetic potential of literature. He has presented his work at international conferences including King’s College London, Harvard University, and l'École Normale Supérieure de Lyon.
Speaker Bio
Alyssa Cottle is a musicologist who specializes in music making and sound in Latin America in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Currently, she is a Western Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of Western Ontario's Don Wright Faculty of Music. She earned her PhD in Historical Musicology at Harvard University in 2025, and earned her BA in Music magna cum laude from Occidental College in 2015.
Speaker Bio
Arooj Zubair is a PhD student in History at Koç University whose work focuses on Mughal and Ottoman empires in a comparative and connected perspective. Her work explores the intersections of literature, history, and political imagination in postcolonial and early modern contexts. With prior training in English and Comparative Literature, her research combines historiographical analysis with literary theory to examine how empires articulated sovereignty beyond nationalist categories.
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Speaker Bio
João is ABD at Harvard University in the Department of Romance Languages and Literatures
Speaker Bio
Graduated in History from the University of São Paulo. Master’s in Contemporary Western Societies from Université Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne. PhD in History from Université Paris-Saclay (thesis: Cosmopolitism on Stage: Spectacle and Society in Peripheral Modernity, Rio de Janeiro and São Paulo, 1822–1930). Currently a research fellow at Casa de Velázquez (Madrid), studying performance and cultural transfers between Europe and Brazil (19th–early 20th c.).
Speaker Bio
João Victor Silva is an actor, director, and researcher. An Honorary Fellow in the Department of Spanish and Portuguese at the University of Wisconsin–Madison and a PhD candidate in English Literary Studies at the University of São Paulo, he studies intersections of early 20th-century American music and cinema with Brazilian revue theater. He recently published Cia. da Revista – 25 anos (Ercolano), documenting the troupe dedicated to exploring revue theater.