Call for Papers

Seminar on “Global Cosmopolitanisms” for the 2026 meeting of ACLA (American Comparative Literature Association) at Montreal, Canada, from February 26 to March 1.

Since at least the nineteenth century, literature produced in what is today known as the Global South has been expected to be simultaneously cosmopolitan and nationalist. 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. 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 of composing operas in Italian (Carlos Gomes, Raoul Hügel, Eliodoro Ortiz de Zárate, Remijio Acevedo Gajardo), and later the common practice of composing songs in English (Caetano Veloso, Sepultura, Milton Nascimento, Los Mac’s, Los Vidrios Quebrados, to name a few). On the other hand, these cosmopolitan artworks 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 the cosmopolitan ambitions of these works, the resistance they often provoked, and their creative originalities and potentialities.

Paper proposals should be submitted to the ACLA portal (https://www.acla.org/seminar/86e7768c-2fcc-4b55-8e50-c3006db0ad63