In a recent book i suggested that what haunts the field of southern studies is not the proverbial specter so much as an insistent materiality that troubles and illuminates the spaces, communities, and minds of the southern United States. I made a case for human materiality, in its diverse manifestations and histories, as an important methodological tool in the study of the cultural logics, illogics, and resistances that have shaped and sometimes stymied life in what Leigh Anne Duck calls “the nation's region” (Watson 9-27). Here I want to make a briefer but complementary case for the centrality of other materialities in scholarship on that region. To access them effectively, southern studies will need to forge closer, more creative ties with the field of environmental studies and with the habit of mind that Timothy Morton calls “the ecological thought.”

World Literature is a Notoriously Ambiguous Term. Since Goethe Began Referring to a Universal Weltliteratur IN 1827, the meaning of world literature has passed through many mutations, and, with the resurgence of interest in the term that followed David Damrosch's publication in 2003 of his provocative What Is World Literature?, it has generated a good deal of controversy. Although it appears to describe a type of literature or group of texts, world literature is more often used to designate a critical perspective. World literature is not so much a canon of works conceived to be globally or universally significant as an approach to literary criticism. What this critical approach entails, however, is often unclear and frequently freighted with cultural and sociopolitical assumptions that challenge the supposed openness of world literature. Most theorists agree that the notion of world literature invites exploration of the ways in which texts exceed national borders, but the relative status of national and international sociocultural frameworks remains highly contentious, as do critics' understandings of a text's “worldliness” and mode of circulation. As Franco Moretti famously asserts, world literature is “not an object, it's a problem”; it requires ongoing debate.

Considering that it was summertime, the weather in New England was puzzlingly cold. Nonetheless, the men in the seabeaten wooden ship offered thanks, in the Protestant fashion, for the bounty of fresh provisions: oysters and seals; vast herds of deer, tule elk, and pronghorn. Mutual curiosity informed their encounters with the people they met. The English admired their extraordinary basketwork, their shell ornaments, their headpieces of brilliant black condor feathers.

If the bio- and ethnoscapes of this New England sketch seem a little off, it is because I have moved its longitudal coordinates west by fifty degrees and spun the time setting of an originary North American encounter back by several decades. The English sailors and supplicants were not Puritan separatists but the remainder of Sir Francis Drake's circumnavigation expedition, which made landfall along the Pacific coast—by most estimates, in northern California—in 1579. The story of their several weeks' stay there is speculative in many senses. The fortuitously named Golden Hind returned loaded with treasure; the marker that Drake supposedly placed near his landfall buttressed unfulfilled English territorial claims for many years after; and in our own day historians, anthropologists, and geographers both trained and untrained continue to debate the precise location of Nova Albion. This is the very stuff of which counterfactual histories and speculative historical fictions are made: what if other Englishmen had later returned with settlers and supplies? If the English colonial project along the North American Pacific had rooted itself earlier, and farther south than Vancouver, would its later pattern of settlement have pulsed west to east across the continent instead of east to west?

Large-scale industrial processes and networks of extraction, slow violences wrought across toxic landscapes, and rapidly shifting atmospheric, oceanic, and hydrologic cycles are altering the conditions of human and nonhuman existence in ways that challenge the limits of existing media technologies. The last of these transformations—the fluctuating distributions of water—is the focus of this essay. Hydrologists are struggling to model and predict the intensities of drought, the changing supply of watersheds, the dispersions of chemicals through streams and rivers, and the failures of aging infrastructure. Water transports contaminants too small to identify by sight, requiring technologies that can register tiny particles on a massive scale. Water complicates boundary-making projects—it moves easily across local and regional zones, human and nonhuman bodies, and atmospheric, terrestrial, and marine ecologies. Global weather patterns and distribution infrastructures shape its circulation, yet its material effects depend greatly on local conditions.

Raúl Coronado'S Ambitious and Beautifully Realized Book About The Literature Of Failed Republican Revolution in Late-eighteenth- and early-nineteenth-century Texas is a major contribution to the expanding field of scholarship that recovers, contextualizes, and interprets Tatino/a writing. This wide-ranging study traces the influence of scholastic thought in Spain and Spanish America, culminating in a discussion of the resonances of that intellectual tradition after 1848, as newly conquered Tejanos faced expropriation and violence by United States Americans. Coronado shows how the ideas of Thomas Aquinas and his Spanish interpreters—notably Francisco Suárez (1548-1617), a Jesuit and the leading member of the Thomist School of Salamanca, whose ideas were broadly influential in the Hispanic world—presented a durable alternative to the liberal philosophy of John Tocke and Adam Smith. In part through Suárez's influence, the Roman Catholic concept of the corpus mysticum fed into a distinctive vision of the modern republic that elevated the pueblo over the individual. That this alternative tradition failed initially to gain political and cultural ground explains the melancholy title of Coronado's study, while the possibility of recuperating this history as a usable past animates the project as a whole.

It is often forgotten that the humanities—which are made up of history, philosophy, literary studies, philology, rhetoric, art history, musicology, and linguistics—are characterized not so much by their objects of study, which can change over time, as by their focus on reading, the reading of verbal texts, primarily, but also reading in the sense of decoding and recoding images, sounds, and movements. The disciplines that compose the humanities teach different kinds of reading practices. The products of these disciplines for the most part belong to the class of prose and poetic discourses. This is why they may often look similar or even the same, especially when they are cast in the same mode: narrative, argumentative, descriptive, or expressive as the case may be.

Recently, scholars have questioned the need for southern literary studies. Why have a separate field when so much scholarship in the past decade has sought to break down the southern isolationism that characterized studies of the South for most of the twentieth century? Global South studies and the new southern studies have shaped the field and pushed it in this direction, while transatlantic, transpacific, and even planetary studies are part of the academic vernacular.

There is a “World” of Difference Between the Benign Descriptive Tautology of the Phrase World Literature When it is Used to indicate, with its phenomenological innocence, literature from a variety of sites and in various languages and the same phrase when it is used to indicate a unitary mode. I distinguish between these concepts by placing quotation marks around the phrase when the second sense is meant. “World literature” indeed results from an act of ideological and hegemonic production: it is a tendentious, normative category with all the magisterial and juridical authority of a taxonomic rubric. In a classic Althusserian sense, the phrase, in quotation marks, actively interpellates the world and the world responds to the ideological hail. In so doing the world constitutes itself epistemologically as certain and determinate. The hail privileges and exemplifies a particular configuration of the world, inevitably alienating and “othering” the possibility of infinite alternative configurations and constellations as various and protean as the world itself. The crucial difference is that until the moment of the hail, world literature just “was,” doing its thing expressively, speaking profusely and in polyglot chaos and richness without necessarily speaking for itself in a unitary, prescriptive, representational, and representative mode. To put it simply, every literature in the world was in the world, and this fact needed no reiteration, no self-conscious validation. Where else would anything or any literature be except in the world? Why not just let world literature be in its various sites, languages, and configurations?

The Number of Conferences, Books, Essays, and Anthologies Dedicated to the Topic of World Literature Amply Testifies to a growing interest in the subject among literary scholars. In one sense, this interest within literary studies is perfectly comprehensible. It corresponds to a profound sense of a shrinking globe in which once-distant cultures are put in ever-closer proximity. The thinking goes something like this: if the world is becoming one, mustn't the literature of that world, too? In essence, the idea of world literature is the affirmative answer to some such commonsensical question, never mind that all the evidence points to a more complicated reality. Despite all the falling walls and speeding planes and globally communicating technologies (which doubtless do shrink distances), the world does not seem to be becoming one and indeed remains as complexly riven today as it ever was. There is no need to rehash the multiple genealogies—most often traced back to Goethe through René Wellek, Erich Auerbach, and Karl Marx, sometimes with a brief detour to Rabindranath Tagore—that underlie contemporary notions of world literature. The books, essays, and anthologies I allude to above sufficiently provide these genealogies. I have written elsewhere about my skepticism regarding the intellectual and political viability of the world literature project, suggesting that the notion of world literature always, and to little advantage, produces a fixed notion of the world (Flesh xvii, 124-36). In contemporary versions of the world literature project, the world becomes a reductive enumeration of cultures that have produced “masterpieces,” or “great works,” deemed good enough to enter a global canon. I am mainly skeptical of the idea of world literature because of this reductive impulse: I don't believe the idea can ever avoid a problematic diminution of the world or of the literary work.

Recently, news outfits, pundits, and academics have taken to referring to “the global south.” In many respects the south finally matters. As a political moniker, this term comprises the countries in Africa, Central and Latin America, and most of Asia. It designates the entities with medium or low human development, according to United Nations indexes.

Over lunch with two philosophy professors, i asked their views of what i understood to be a central ambiguity in kant's Critique of Judgment. The question proved controversial for reasons I had not anticipated. One of my interlocutors grew agitated.

How Do Printed Objects Help Political Subjects Make and Remake Worlds? This is One of the Central Questions Animating Raúl Coronado's brilliant book A World Not to Come: A History of Latino Writing and Print Culture. I believe Coronado is one of the most gifted and imaginative literary scholars working today. What is more rare, his writing is both provocative and a pleasure to read. Casting himself as a genealogist, he deploys previously little-known printed materials to tell a dramatic story, and he tells it with a narrative confidence seldom seen in studies that rely, as his ultimately does, so heavily on the close reading of texts.

In a series of discontinuous but deeply contextualized studies situated on the borderlands of Mexico and the United States, advancing from the 1810s to the 1850s and taking readers at times much further back (into, say, the diffusion of scholastic thought), Coronado traces a history of foreclosed revolutionary possibilities, of discursive dead ends and epistemological ruptures, and of the failure of communities to become anything but imagined. He probes understudied people, texts, and episodes for what they can tell us about the complex processes of the experience of modernization—and by modernization he means the major movements of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries for republicanism, capitalism, individualism, secularism, and nationalism. He uses this discontinuous narrative also to arrest what he takes to be a misguided quest among some in his field for a different kind of genealogy: an unbroken lineage of Latino identity and subjectivity that centers on resistance. Instead, he narrates the making of a people as the unintended consequence of individuals who had hoped and failed to make a nation.

I Spent Muggy Chicago Summers Indoors, Tapping at my Keyboard, Churning Out Pages of My Book Manuscript, Following the paths of people's lives, obsessing over the right turn of phrase. When I grew lonely (which I always inevitably did), I'd head out to the Starbucks on Wilson and Magnolia, comforting myself with the sounds of people around me. I wrote better late at night, when night had descended and lulled everyone to sleep. I felt then a great sense of relief, tranquility, buoyed by nothing else but the swirl of ideas, because everyone around me in my world had settled down for the night. It was then that I was not distracted by the world of the living. Summer in Chicago, after all, was an exuberantly social season. The city exploded with life; throngs of runners would peel their shirts off in the humid heat as they sprinted along Lakefront Trail. But for me, invitations to barbecues, beach parties, and weekend getaways to Saugatuck were left unanswered: I had my book to write.

This entry into southern studies spins off a certain strain of black cultural criticism, especially as it concerns my engagement with black speculative text and what I call speculative race theory. The black speculative project—what Alondra Nelson and others roughly twenty years ago were terming afrofuturism, an idea that has since gained popularity as a branded aesthetic interest—is driven by literary, visual, musical, and various other intellectual work that evidences a dynamic intersection of race, space, time, and newer technologies. Also prominent in much of this text is a sequence of tropes common to post-Souls cultural production, particularly narratives of containment and flight coupled with representations of selected subjectivities as more provisional than guaranteed. Al Green's tune “Gotta Find a New World” comes to mind as a poignant escapist critique, and Syreeta Wright's “Black Maybe” serves as a haunting inventory of tense potentialities. In these instances the futurist sentiment is present, but the expected tech might be slightly latent. Many of these anticipations—relatively successful or not—are launched from the south, from a south, or from a southern idea. This set of remarks is as much a black speculative venture as it is a southernist exercise. Or perhaps it is the one in theory because it is in fact the other.

On my first day as an undergraduate at the university of konstanz, i attended a lecture i had been particularly looking forward to: an introduction to philosophy. The professor, Jürgen Mittelstraß, began by declaring that he hoped very few of us would become professional philosophers—ideally, none. Philosophy was a kind of training that should be carried into other endeavors, not pursued as an end in itself. I got really mad. After the lecture I marched into his office and declared that I was going to be the exception. He smiled and kindly took me under his wing for the rest of my studies. But somehow, after majoring in analytic philosophy in college, I began to gravitate toward literature and theater, probably because I had been doing a lot of extracurricular theater along the way. When, twenty years later, I wrote to tell him what had become of me, he revealed that he had once contemplated a career in theater himself.

The rest of this essay devotes itself to an elaboration of that claim. Along the way I review the claim's implications for the study of literature in the world. I argue that assertions of fundamental difference, whether genetic or historical, reproduce the worst habits of Eurocentric thought.