This seminar will explore how geographies beyond South Asia shaped the production, reception, and circulation of its literatures in the 19th and 20th centuries. Contrary to recent approaches that stress the globality of contemporary Anglophone writing, we will show how the world and its many composite spaces reflect a long trajectory of interaction with South Asian literatures across Urdu, Hindi, Punjabi, Bengali, Tamil and, indeed, English. This seminar will explore how these and other South Asian literatures conceived certain regions of the world as significant horizons of literary practice. How did Cold War demarcations of the First, Second, and Third World shape mid-century Hindi and English writing? How did the complicated history of Indian migration to Africa shape the continent’s image in Gujarati and Bengali literature? And how did Urdu writers interpret Ottoman Turkey and Andalusia against their modern colonial context? Such questions reflect the variety of spaces and themes under consideration. The seminar will examine not only specific geographies but also the world as a meta-category in South Asian literary cultures. What place did the world as such occupy in genres such as the ghazal, memoir, novel, magazine, and travelogue? How did writers, characters, and works situate themselves in relation to this scale of belonging, especially as it became increasingly accessible and graspable via technologies such as the steamship, railway, plane, radio, and T.V.? Ultimately, at stake in these discussions will be an understanding of South Asian literatures and the world as mutually embedded rather than contingently related categories.