The Novel after the Global Turn: Decentered Perspectives from the Spanish Literary Field 1

: This essay addresses current debates on the global novel through the analysis of two contrasting yet comparable case studies: J. M. Coetzee’s “Jesus” trilogy— The Childhood of Jesus (2013), The Schooldays of Jesus (2016), and The Death of Jesus (2019)—and the significantly less well-known novel Sudd (2007), by the Spanish novelist and travel writer Gabi Martínez. Mobilizing a growing body of criticism, we identify a key constellation of social, political, affective, and ethical concerns that are increasingly present in recent theories of the novel— such as global interconnectedness and violence, cosmopolitanism, a new order of affects , humanitarianism, translatability, and planetarity—and discuss them through our two case studies. Working from different narrative aesthetics and unequal positions in the literary system, Coetzee and Martínez thwart exclusive adherence to normative or pragmatic approaches to the global novel, evincing the unevenness of international circulation and academic institutionalization against the backdrop of global Anglophone literature.

4 between Coetzee's "Jesus" trilogy and Martínez Sudd shows that studies focusing only on poetics or circulation might reach contradictory conclusions with regards to the global novel.
Ultimately, their comparison demonstrates the nodal tensions and challenges in this emerging field of study.
By producing a critical state of the art, this essay assesses the uses, scope and challenges of a growing body of criticism and literary theory that, from different theoretical perspectives and drawing on a varied set of contemporary novelists, is contributing to think the genre in global terms. We argue that while current still-evolving theorizations of the global novel offer meaningful insights into the nature, value, and behavior of a critical corpus of contemporary novels, there is still much work to be done in order to better understand this new trend in contemporary fiction. The primary goal of this essay is thus twofold: first, to systematize the existing literature on the global novel and identify the main nodes and challenges of this scholarly debate; and, second, to take these ideas further through an analysis of Martínez and Coetzee's case studies that considers how the two authors engage with global poetics and circulation in comparable yet very contrasting ways.

A Critical Unfolding of the Global Novel
In the context of global studies, scholars seem to agree that the novel no longer accounts for the nation, but rather for the world as an "imagined community"-to use Benedict Anderson one more time. They not only conceive of the genre in relation to the challenges of a post-1989 world, such as hyperconnectivity, planetary environmental justice, and international human rights; they do so from a renewed self-awareness about the place of literary studies within the humanities and social sciences. Calls for collaborative and interdisciplinary work are becoming urgent in the study of global culture and society, 4 and these collaborations are also opening up new ground in the study of the novel, where the effort to move beyond Author Accepted Manuscript 5 national frontiers has encouraged a redrawing of traditional disciplinary boundaries. From cross-disciplinary perspectives like ecocriticism, cosmopolitanism, and translation studies, novel studies scholars are connecting the genre to previously unacknowledged fields: literature and ecology, in the "planetary novel" (Keith) or "planetary petrofiction" (Tanaka); literature and human rights, in the "human rights novel" (Dawes "Novel"); literature and migration, in the "migrant" (Armstrong "Migrant") or the "expatriate novel" (Irr); or literature and translation, in "born-translated novels" (Walkowitz).
It is true that attention to the novel has been the hallmark of well-established theories of world and global literature. Closely linked to world and global literary studies but conducted through their own scholarly channels, discussions about the global novel as such, however, are fairly recent. Since O'Brien and Szeman's early special issue of 2001, reflections on the genre have spread rapidly, especially in the US but also beyond it. Key contributions by Annesley, Calabresi (Letteratura, Narrare), Gupta (Globalization), Bessière, Coletti, Walkowitz, Hoyos, Beecroft (Ecology, "Tropes"), Kirsch, and Ganguly (This Thing) account for the emergence of a new field. In 2016, leading institutions and journals such as the newly founded Society for Novel Studies (SNS), in association with Novel: A Forum on Fiction, celebrated its first biennial conference confronting the novel "in or against world literature" (Marx and Armstrong), and at least two panels at the ACLA's 2019 Annual Meeting were entirely dedicated to the global novel. 5 The same year, the Institute of the Humanities and Global Cultures at the University of Virginia and the journal New Literary History co-sponsored a symposium on the subject, which has just been published into the special issue "The Global Novel: Comparative Perspectives" and which also positions itself against straightforward assumptions of global exchangeability (Ganguly "The Global" vi). 6 This upsurge of focus on the global novel within literary studies has fueled new debates around the theory of the novel, like those related to the genre's autonomy or the Author Accepted Manuscript 6 return of genre theory as a useful tool for conceptualizing the novel in the era of globalization. 7 No general consensus has emerged, however, about the definition of the genre, which still spurs heated discussion. This is clear, for instance, in the varied and sometimes competing terminology employed. The specificity and value of the term "global" novel (Morace, Kirsch, Haley, Jackson, Rosen, Hoyos, Erwin) often competes with a variety of other tags, such as "world" (Ganguly This Thing, Irr, Coletti, Morace, Denning), "international" (Nadiminti), "transnational" (Jay), "cosmopolitan" (Shaw Cosmopolitanism, Levin), or "planetary" novel (Keith, Heise, Taylor), and it collides just as much with other overlapping labels and expressions such as "fictions of the global" (Barnard "Fictions," O'Brien and Szeman), "fictions of globalization" (Annesley), or "the globalization of the novel and the novelization of the global" (Siskind).
The most elaborated distinction between "world," "global," and "planetary" points at three different approaches to the novel. Stemming from an effort to amplify the postcolonial de-Orientalizing move, the term "world" mostly affiliates the novel to a critical perspective (Casanova, Moretti, Damrosch, Beecroft) that detaches itself from the term "global," which is sometimes accused of referring to the capitalist and neoliberal political effects operating in a global market (Apter, Walkowitz, Habjan). In light of criticisms of the term "world" as apolitical and thus complicit with neoliberal globalization's tendency to privilege certain elite academic sites of enunciation (Apter, Hoyos, Siskind), the term "planetary" has arisen with a more political agenda that deliberately seeks to encompass a multicultural, diverse planet (Spivak, Keith, Taylor, Moraru Reading). This term has later been aligned with post-human concerns, specifically those theorized from the ecology-centered perspective of ecocriticism (Heise). 8 The attempts to define and even posit as opposites 9 these three competing approaches-the world, global and planetary novel-reveal a deep discrepancy between an Author Accepted Manuscript 7 aesthetic, normative understanding of the genre, on the one hand, and a more materialistic approach that is attentive to the economic and political pressures of the global market, on the other. As we will argue, the distance between these two approaches cannot be dismissed, since the discrepancy between them lies at the center of most unresolved issues surrounding the global novel. Aesthetic and thematic definitions of the global novel criticize the overdeterministic nature of more material approaches that pay attention to massive circulation through the capitalist publishing industry, choosing instead to celebrate the novel's worldliness; that is, the novel as "an active power of world making that contests the world made by capitalist globalization" (Cheah 303). Materialist, pragmatic definitions of the genre, in turn, call out the idealism-and elitism-of aesthetic, normative views, which are of clear Heideggerian descent, and question both the alleged autonomy of the novel and its performative agency in the world. Spatial circulation, material and historical conditions of production, translation, reception, and institutionalization are key to these pragmatic approaches, under which the study of materiality in literary fields does not necessarily imply a derivative conception of the novel, or the novel's complete assimilation to the global capitalist market. 10 By acknowledging the tension between poetics and material conditions while trying to avoid its limitations, we aim to identify some key critical concerns that span both sides of the global novel debate, in order to test them through the analysis of our case studies. Both Coetzee and Martínez demonstrate (and resist) the value (and pitfalls) of current theorizations of the genre. Coetzee's "Jesus" trilogy and Martínez's Sudd display the specific concerns and features that critics addressing the global novel have identified as common. Nevertheless, when viewed from the perspective of their material conditions of circulation, the novels operate in radically opposed ways. Among others, we identify a set of notions that critics focusing on the poetics of the global novel recurrently work with: interconnectedness, global Author Accepted Manuscript 8 violence, cosmopolitanism, affect, humanitarianism, translatability, and planetarity. These concepts are increasingly present in recent theories of the novel, and they signal a productive path towards a working definition of the genre. These key social, political, affective, and ethical forces do not appear simultaneously or homogeneously in the emergent corpus of global novels, but they generate fertile perspectives that cross various vectors, mostly narratological and thematic.
Global interconnectedness is one of the main concerns across both sides of the global novel debate. Annesley proposes that narratives such as Don DeLillo's Underworld (1997) explore interconnectedness by experimenting with techniques such as a narrative structure based on lines of connection in order to describe "the network of connections that characterize globalization" (65), and contradiction in order to challenge "the readings of globalization in terms of homogenization and coordination" (73). This hyperconnectivity promotes new ways of understanding a shrinking global time and space that, as De Blasio suggests, "si riflette nel romanzo contemporaneo dissolvendo ogni ancoraggio spaziale: i luoghi diventano scenografie interscambiabili" ('is reflected in the contemporary novel's dissolving of each spatial anchoring: places become interchangeable scenographies, ' 17).
From a technical standpoint, this shrinking and hyperconnectivity drive novelists to represent "temporal simultaneity" and multiple geographies (Barnard "Fictions" 207) and temporal networked structures (Edwards 16), as well as to employ more fitting narrative plot strategies, such as Hoyos' "emplotment of globalization" (2) and the multi-strand plot that Beecroft ("Tropes") distinguishes as "the plot of globalization," experimented in novels such as David Mitchell's Ghostwritten (1999) and films like Alejandro González Iñárritu's Amores Perros (2001) andBabel (2006). 11 Global violence is another distinguishable concern in the debates around the new genre. Narratives of globalization use multiple, intertwined characters and stories to reveal Author Accepted Manuscript 9 the interconnected nature of problems that go beyond national borders (O'Brien and Szeman)-problems intrinsic to globalization, such as "world crime syndicates, labor migration, tourism and terrorism" (Barnard "Fictions" 211). Some novels, for example, contribute to shaping and exposing a crisis discourse-for Dan and Wajno-Owczarska, this trend is inherent to globalization-or to shaping particular aesthetics, like that of the 2007-8 financial crisis (Gupta "Crisis") or that of nuclear disasters (Jiménez). Global violence novels deal with drug traffic wars, as in Roberto Bolaño's Los detectives salvajes (1998) and 2666 disparity it generates (Shaw "Globalization" 34), a significant group of novels produce a global consciousness that would hold "the potential to be a facilitator of cultural convergence, acting as a potent mechanism in the spread of ethical values, and opening established national allegiances or ethic ties up to a more cosmopolitan ethos . . . . In this regard, cosmopolitanism emerges as a response to globalisation" (Shaw Cosmopolitanism 9). This is seen in novels that address multicultural encounters and display the contemporary These new cosmopolitan communities have also produced a concern for new affects that novels cannot respond to in the same manner as the traditional family-based domestic novel (Armstrong "Future," "Affective," Berman) does. Armstrong's idea of what comes after family-"a community of human beings violently detached from the traditional sources of feeling" ("Future" 9)-has prompted a renewed humanitarian ethics of the novel form.
Barnard has referred to this ethics as "a kind of globalization of compassion" ("Fictions" 209); Kirsch describes the novel's attempt "to reckon with humanity as such" (13); and Ganguly argues for a new "humanitarianism" (This Thing 1-37) that furthers the important work on the novel and the human rights discourse done by scholars like Slaughter or Anker.
More recently, Dawes ("Novel") has distinguished "the novel of human rights" as a subgenre of the contemporary novel that uses distinctive narrative devices such as the "justice plot" and the "escape plot," although his analysis is limited to US fiction.
Another concern that we consider key in the global novel debate is multilingualism and translation. Walkowitz branded the "born-translated novels" as works that are written for translation and as translations; that is, works "pretending to take place in a language other than the one in which they have, in fact, been composed" (4). This approach considers translation as a means of achieving global circulation and gaining "worldwide audiences" for leading figures in the pantheon of world literature (Kirsch 22). However, uses of multilingualism and translation might prove more contextually and intertextually elaborate than Walkowitz considers, even hindering circulation, since translation can be used to add layers of cultural references, as Morace and Bencomo argue, making reception more complex. Sociological scholarship, with its critical interest in assessing the scope (Levin, Author Accepted Manuscript 11 Nadiminti) and limitations (Sánchez-Prado, Aguilar, Horta) of circulation and global and national markets, uncovers assumptions that reveal the global novel corpus to be a contradictory one, as we will see later in this essay.
Finally, we can identify a growing concern for the planet, not only in its multicultural planetarity (Spivak, Keith), but also in its environmental sustainability, which is at risk in the age of the Anthropocene (Heise "Globality"; Boes; Taylor). This age has produced novels troubled by massive oil drilling, as in Frank Schätzing's Der Schwarm (2004), or by rising sea levels, as in Paolo Bacigalupi's The Windup Girl (2009). In many instances, these novels use science-fiction techniques (Heise Sense), epic narrative modes (Boes), and global environmental settings.

Contrasting Poetics and Circulations: The Global Novel at Work
At once an object and an agent of globalization, the global novel is generally discussed as a narrative form concerned with pressing global issues like the ones analyzed above. Yet paying exclusive attention to the novel's poetics, on the one hand, or the various ways in which it circulates within the global market, on the other, tends to lead to partial, if not misleading conceptions. In this section, we will analyze the similar poetics and contrasting circulation of Martínez's Sudd and Coetzee's "Jesus" trilogy so as to shed light on some of these conceptions, as both case studies thwart exclusive adherence to poetic and materialist approaches to the global novel in its critical examination. These similarities and contrasts show the challenges in producing a clear conceptualization of the "global novel".

Gabi Martínez, Sudd (2007)
The non-Spanish Peninsular reader will most likely be unfamiliar with Gabi Martínez, a Spanish writer, journalist, screenwriter, and traveler born in Barcelona in 1971, better known for his non-fiction than his novels. Reviewed by well-known literary critics in the Spanish press, Martínez has been placed among a young generation of Spanish avant-garde authors who are breaking away from the novel's nationally-centered tradition. He has been included in the so-called "generación Nocilla" (Gil González) due to the way he thematizes globalized society by means of genre hybridization, imbrication with media (as in Ático , 2004) Sudd tells the story of a group of people from different nationalities in a peace mission seeking to end a 20-year civil war and rebuild "the City" in an unnamed country in inland Africa near the biggest swamps on Earth, Sudd, which they have to cross in a ship.
The ship gets trapped between floating vegetal islands, which creates an emergency situation that results in a resource shortage and a conflict over authority. By using his multi-lingual skills, the narrator becomes the ship leader, the "omnipotente gobernador del caos.
Gobernador del Sudd" ('omnipotent governor of chaos. Governor of Sudd, ' Martínez 265). 12 Thematically and formally, it is hard to find a novel that more clearly suits discussions about the poetics of the global novel. Sudd unites the core concerns stated above: cosmopolitanism, global capitalism, planetarity, and multilingualism and translation. It problematizes cosmopolitanism by putting into play a set of characters whose definition relies on individual experiences linked to cultures, languages, and conflicts in their original countries. The novel gathers a group of local tribal leaders; a cruel Sudanese war soldier and his sick wife; a Canadian photographer; a French biologist; an English oil company businessman; five Chinese real-estate businessmen; a local minister; the captain and his Author Accepted Manuscript 13 daughter; Spanish and Chinese translators; and a large, nameless group of local tribal warriors and people.
Only the choice of a cosmopolitan situation in Sudd enables the novel's conflict to happen, since the plot develops from a linguistic and cultural misunderstanding: the narrator leads the people in the "inferior level" of La Nave (the Ship) to believe that a revolt against the food rationing policy has already started, instigating a mutiny. This situation might be explained through Deer's concept of "cosmopolitan scene," a device which has not yet been The kind of cosmopolitanism that forms the backbone of Sudd's plot is not, however, in line with Shaw's cosmopolitanism, which assumes the idea of global citizenship and calls for a global ethics that could be mistaken for the narrator's satisfaction to "sentirme cosmopolita" ('to feel cosmopolitan,' 31). Rather, it is closer to the conflictive and neoliberal uses of cosmopolitan discourse and operations highlighted by Robbins's argument in The Beneficiary, where cosmopolitanism is an ideological discourse about the global leveraged to favor capitalist interests elsewhere. Indeed, La Nave's expedition is financed by the English oil company Norton, and it seeks "gente simbólica" ('symbolic people, ' 17) to configure a cosmopolitan team that would perform "un hecho significativo" ('a significant event,' 17) so Author Accepted Manuscript 14 as to show the world a peace mission that will end the globally infamous horrors of the civil war. This mission is tailored to produce a visually powerful global message of international agreement-one of those codified war images that operate through what Ganguly explains as the "mediatization of distant suffering, and the emergence of a humanitarian sensibility" (This Thing 37) in a kind of story that she understands as characteristic of the novel as a global form. In Sudd, international and local powers artificially construct the cosmopolitan scene in the service of a spectacular, global ethical and humanitarian response that will in fact acquiesce to the capitalist interests in the area. Ironically, though, the media operation is truncated when La Nave gets trapped in the Sudd swamps and the ship's communication system is cut off. The cosmopolitan scene in this case sinks into an invisible yet major violent conflict where the most powerful individuals take advantage of the lack of witnesses, revealing the dark side of cosmopolitan encounters.
The use of an open, natural space as the novel's setting makes this narrative situation possible. The Sudd swamps are read as "un laberinto móbil" ('a moving labyrinth,' 56), "un reino sin límites, de confines corredizos" ('a limitless kingdom of moving borders,' 56), one of those type places that, according to Rosen, global novels find most productive for representing a neutralized yet interconnected world. In this case the setting is not an airport, hospital or supermarket, but a vast natural space, similar to other global environments such as deserts, oceans, or jungles. Furthermore, as the narrator and the biologist's reflections suggest, the swamp brings the events to a planetary level, as "Norton y su gente . . . no respetan los mínimos naturales. Solo quieren ganancias, petróleo, y venga a perforar, perforar, perforar, y a gasear, gasear, gasear. Eso sí es un problema serio, ¿ve? Van a cargarse el planeta, van a destrozarlo todo" ('Norton and their people . . . do not respect natural basics. They only want benefits, oil, and drilling, drilling, drilling, and gas, gas, gas. That is a real problem, you see? They are going to destroy the planet, devastate it,' 61). The Sudd swamps also offer the opportunity to establish and negotiate social rules anew. However, the outcome is rather pessimistic: since the characters are lost and trapped in this muddy, vegetal environment, the effort to build of a multicultural cohabitation ends in death, starvation, power struggles, and gross inequalities. For all these reasons, Sudd is, as an early review of the novel suggested, "un perfecto símbolo de la globalización" ('a perfect symbol of globalization, ' Hevia). Like Coetzee's trilogy, it would perfectly suit the features discussed in scholarly debates on the global novel.
Nevertheless, in contrast to Coetzee's, according to definitions of the global novel that assume circulation in global markets, it would be hard to think of Martínez's Sudd as one.
Sudd has only been translated into Serbian and adapted into a graphic novel by Tyto Alba ("In Conversation") calls "the cultural gatekeepers of the metropoles of the North," "who decide which stories by the South about itself will be accepted into the repertoire of world literature and which will not," the decision to publish first in Spanish and other non-English languages like Dutch is a clear political gesture against the economical and ideological hegemony of global English. 14 Interestingly enough, while the Spanish-language press has highlighted the relevance of Coetzee's gesture, United Kingdom and United States media outlets have tended to ignore it, even though The Death of Jesus was widely advertised as one of the most anticipated novels of 2020 in the English-speaking world. 15 In Coetzee's most recent fiction, his characters also show a curious predilection for Spain, as in "A House in Spain" (2000), included in Three Stories, and "La anciana y los gatos" ('The Old Woman and the Cats,' 2013), compiled in Siete cuentos morales. 16  Simón and David, a middle-aged man and a five-year-old boy who has been separated from his mother, start their adventure at this fragile point, hardly knowing anything about each other or themselves. In the trilogy's third book, as in The Schooldays of Jesus, David, Simón, and Inés (the boy's adoptive mother) have settled down as a family in the new town of Estrella, where David has now fallen prey to a mysterious disease. Five years have passed since they first arrived in the small town of Novilla, but the language that Simón had found so hard to master then-those "Spanish words that do not come from our heart" (Childhood 77)-no longer seem to be an impediment to self-knowledge, or at least that is what he tells David during one of their conversations: "Who was I, Simón, before I crossed the ocean?
Who was I before I began to speak Spanish?" (Death 13).
In what can be interpreted as an attempt to provincialize the novel, instead of globalizing it, 17 Coetzee's strategy of positioning himself and his fiction in an alternative relationship with the prevalence of English also functions as a thematic, conceptual, and formal device. Throughout the pages of all three novels, Coetzee often cites Spanish words and expressions and reproduces parts of the dialogue in this language, thematically and formally reflecting on the foreignness of both the story (the characters and the community they settle in) and Coetzee's own writing, thus problematizing the affiliation of the original text with a unique national and linguistic tradition. The trilogy is therefore "born translated," after Walkowitz's hypothesis, in at least two ways: pragmatically, for the novels premiered in Dutch (The Childhood of Jesus, The Schooldays of Jesus) and Spanish (The Death of Jesus) rather than English, and thematically or structurally, for all three novels are written as translations; that is, they pretend to take place in Spanish as a way to "remind us that English has not always been the principal medium of literary circulation. David from the census in the second novel: "You don't have a name, you don't have a number. That is enough to make you invisible," Simón explains to the boy. "But don't worry, we can see you. Any ordinary person with eyes in his head can see you" (Schooldays 255).
As is the case for many migrants and expatriates across the globe, in Coetzee's slow allegory, the experiences of alienation, estrangement, and marginality reveal the covert violence of the state towards non-citizens without rights. 19 Simón and Inés have no rights to David, their beloved son who is not really their son, and they are forced to abandon him to the orphanage of Dr. Julio Fabricante, where he will be able to be "a real orphan" (Death 4).
And they have no rights later on, when the boy is sent to the hospital, nor when it is time to decide what to do with his remains. At David's tomb in the orphanage, the inscription reads: "David, Recordado con afecto" (Death 173); the word "afecto," "affection," here devoid of all meaning. Simón's family-which was never a proper family, as the insidious Dmitri cares to remind him ("the truth is, you were never a happy family, never a family at all" 179)points to a whole new order of affects in the sense theorized by Armstrong, that is, "a community of human beings violently detached from the traditional sources of feeling" ("Future" 9). As Coetzee shows in this tale of stepfather and stepson (David/Jesus), which is not in itself a new thread in his fiction, 20 the traditional family (and the type of domestic realism that it gave rise to) has shifted towards a strange new form of affective community that, in turn, is shaping a growing body of contemporary fiction.
As for Coetzee's well-known concern for the planet and its inhabitants, human and non-human, it is worth mentioning how the trilogy immerses the reader in a dystopian world where the relationships are marked by love and affection as well as by violence and conflict. This is clear in the central storyline of The Schooldays, with Dmitri's puzzling crime, but also in smaller episodes, most of them involving animals, like the old mare named El Rey who is Author Accepted Manuscript 21 sacrificed by its owners (Childhood 233-37), the cruelty of the farm children towards the ducks (Schooldays 6-12), or the altercation between the old dog Bolívar and the lamb (Death 96-7). Also, the fact that all three novels happen in a world that does not exist yet but also seems past, with hardly any marks of a specific time or place, situates the story and its characters in a sort of deterritorialized afterlife where we all come to die and be born again somewhere else, with another name, perhaps speaking another language. Although our test cases might follow the current poetics of the global novel as developed in the reviewed scholarship, the fact that their material circulations and literary statuses are profoundly asymmetrical poses questions that call for a response. It is here where our comparison and contrast of the selected novels is revealing. While it might be assumed that a global novel poetics might trigger global circulation, it is not at all clear that this is so.
Recent sociological approaches illuminate some of these questions and help dismantle certain theoretical assumptions, especially the premise that circulation occurs globally and homogeneously. Comparing Coetzee and Martínez sharpens our understanding of the variables and specificities of the circulation of novels that might be understood as global from a poetical point of view. When observed closely, circulation of these products is profoundly uneven, as in the case of the "Jesus" trilogy and Sudd. This comparison participates of this recent sociologist approach that understands that the "world-literary system" has a "combined and uneven development", as the Warwick Research Collective argues  and that the neoliberal cultural practices that help build a robust unequal literary market are also diverse and heavily depending on their specific contexts .
For example, international conglomerates like Penguin Random House/Alfaguara in Latin America and Spain operate in a decentralized manner, through a mixture of national and international market-driven strategies that result in profitable-but-uneven paths of distribution and circulation . As a result of the centripetal dynamics of the global publishing market, perhaps, global novel scholars tend to focus on a corpus that has been produced, circulated, and deemed prestigious in the Anglophone literary field. Even in those cases in which authors' non-US origins or filiations are emphasized, as with Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Bilal Tanweer, Kiran Desai, or Mohsin Hamid, it is telling that the first three have all undertaken Creative Writing master's programs in the U.S.
(Nadinminti), and Hamid received both a bachelor's and a J.D. from Ivy League institutions. Author Accepted Manuscript 23 A similar argument can be made about the weight of the global economy of cultural prestige (English), with the growing influence of international book prizes, such as the Booker Prize, which might have created its own cosmopolitan aesthetics (Levin), or the Nobel Prize's canonization effects.
In the same vein, if we look at the difficulties encountered by now-enthroned Latin American global authors of the 20th century like Carlos Fuentes or Roberto Bolaño, in their efforts to publish in New York, it becomes apparent how "in postwar American foreign lists, the pressure to domesticate was not to an international literary field, but to the very specific fissures and pressures of an American market" (Horta 1). The example of the Mexican author Jorge Volpi-who favored German and Central European references and dialogue and refused to feed the global market's demand for exoticism from Latin America-offers yet another argument for problematizing the global dynamics of the publishing sphere, for it questions "the idea that cosmopolitanism and nationalism are mutually exclusive, or that Latin American writers must relinquish entire parts of their intellectual genealogy in order to appease market or academic demands" (Sánchez Prado 99). Also paradigmatic in this sense is the case of Clarice Lispector, who is acclaimed in world literature anthologies as the stand-in for Brazilian literary specificity, even as her previous difficulties with the national and international circulation of her work are ignored (Aguilar). Value standards, institutional prestige, and material conditions of production generate different circulation patterns and establish new literary canons that often leave little room for young, foreign authors (and especially female authors) writing outside the commercial and institutional Anglophone networks.
The choice to privilege a small, independent Argentinian publishing house like El contrasting cases of Coetzee and Martínez demonstrate is that we need to push the study of the emerging "global" novel towards an articulation of aesthetic and material perspectives that provide less strained, uneven corpuses and a more nuanced approach to a very heterogeneous, yet still intelligible phenomenon. Ours is, therefore, an invitation to weigh the potential ethics and transformational power of novels along with the actual material conditions of their production, circulation, and critical reception. Meanwhile, we will await the critical assessment of how Coetzee's latest trilogy works in the interstices between two languages, and for an editorial project to embark on the translation of Martínez's novels.