Early Globalities, and Its Questions, Objectives, and Methods: An Inquiry into the State of Theory and Critique

The study of the global past in deep time sets in the foreground many questions that also bedevil literary theory today. That convergence — between how to study the global past and how to read literary texts — drives this essay’s critical examination of salient methods, concepts, and objectives, and of the politics of endeavor. As examples, the essay analyzes historiographies of the global current today, asking what is at stake in reading global premodernity, and reading literary texts, at a historical moment when universities from Texas to Minnesota, Oxford to Illinois, North Carolina to California are beginning to study early globalities, a Global Middle Ages, or a “Medieval Globe.”