The phrase Zhongguo yu shijie, "China and the world," traceable in Chinese only as far back as Liang Qichao (1873-1929), calls for interpretation. Even if only a figure of style, it betokens an imagination of China as separate from "the world," as needing to form a relation with that "world," perhaps even condemned to engaging the "world" only defensively and as a last resort. The continued life of the cliché in the era of globalization raises questions about the stories we tell about China's participation in the world projects or pictures of our own time-- the way we conceive of the widening of literary canons no less than our imaginations of the political order of the coming decades. The essay examines several such stories offered by recent historians and economists, focusing on the "and" of "China and the world."

Few readers of “world literature” are aware that Indonesia is home to some of the world’s oldest literary traditions. Poetic texts, based on Sanskrit models and written in Old Javanese on copper inscriptions, date from the beginning of the ninth century; literature in Old Malay, influenced first by Sanskrit, then by Arabic and Persian, begins at about the same time. Modern Indonesian literature is the heir to both these traditions, as well as to literature from China and the West. In the case of the only modern Indonesian writer who commands a world readership, Pramoedya Ananta Toer, however, the focus of critical commentary has been on the anti-colonial and nationalistic thematics of his work, rather than on the deeper, older currents of world literature found within his texts. In this essay I want to argue that in order to read modern Indonesian literature as “world” literature, it is not enough to recognize its relevance to the study of Third World nationalism and postcoloniality. As suggested by one of Pramoedya’s short stories, Indonesian texts are central rather than peripheral to the history of how literary forms have been circulating around the globe for centuries, assuming local shapes while retaining global meanings.

Like the literatures of many cultures and nations, Arabic literature is caught between the new offers of a global age, and a needful balance between tradition and the engulfing market economy, with its many demands on nationhood. The case is even more acute for the Arabs due to a strong power of the past when there was an Arab empire with its own politics of cultural and economic expansion that widely differ from the ones usually associated with the New World Order. Narratives deal with this complexity in a number of ways that can be historically mapped in colonial, post-colonial, and global terms. The colonial desire to duplicate itself in a nation state that is not fully acclaimed as legitimate offspring receives great attention in a large number of narratives, by the Egyptian Tawfiq al-Hakim, the Iraqi Dhu al-Nun Ayyub, and the Sudanese Tayyib Salih, to mention a few. The post-colonial is more pivotal, as the nation-state may well succumb to the market economy to solve its consistent estrangement from the people, and sustain the power of its elite. The Egyptian Sunallah Ibrahim’s Committee is the most representative text that has a sharp critique of both the corrupt nation-state and the global order in its most devastating and secretive dealings with third world countries. This not the same track as the one followed in a narrative by the Saudi woman lawyer Raja Sani’ in her novel Riyadh Chicks. The internet is the medium and narrative circuit in this work. Through the author’s messages and survey of responses we get acquainted with the byways of tradition as manipulated and used by the empowered to preserve hegemony, whereas upper class women are given space to argue and fight for more freedom. Poetry and drama are no less engaged, and trajectories of modernity and tradition are no longer as clear cut as the ones shown in earlier writings.

In Latin America and the Caribbean, modernity is haunted by the return of its antithetical, premodern other—the Baroque. I argue that the Neobaroque—the recuperation of the "obsolete" baroque in twentieth-century literary and artistic production—constitutes what critic Irlemar Chiampi calls Latin America's alternative modernity. My analysis discusses key theorists and problems of the Neobaroque and the New World Baroque (Alejo Carpentier, José Lezama Lima, Bolívar Echevarría and others) within the context of alternative modernity studies (Dipesh Chakrabarty, Néstor García Canclini, and others). In particular, it addresses the creation of new temporalities and subjectivities that undermine Eurocentric modernity's plot of linear developmentalism. The emergence of the Neobaroque and the New World Baroque is driven by political desire, social creation and the notion of reorigination: alternative Latin American Baroques are the products of the transformative ingestion, transculturation, and recoding of a major expressive form (the metropolitan implant of the official Baroque) at the hands of colonized subjects forced to inhabit them. The article closes with a discussion of Carpentier's novel Concierto barroco (1974), a musicological and historical fantasy and a fictional rendering of the transformations giving rise to the Neobaroque and New World Baroque.