The complicated reciprocities between self and world, roots and routes, local and global that galvanize theorists and advocates of cosmopolitanism have been career-long preoccupations of Rushdie. Opposed to exclusionary identity politics, cosmopolitan inclusiveness values commonalities of belonging, mixed identities, and respect for others’ lives, values, and cultures. The novel as a genre promotes such principles, and a typical Rushdie novel, with its panoramic and kinetic narrative, large cast of characters, temporal and spatial expansiveness, exuberant fusion of realism and magic, otherworldly forays, and dizzying range of references and allusions, seems to aspire to such inclusiveness in its form and style. Midnight’s Children thematizes an inclusive vision of India (and Bombay as its microcosm) that becomes attenuated and threatened in later novels. Migrant characters and overseas cities dominate The Satanic Verses and the late twentieth- and twenty-first-century novels, but as Rushdie the privileged middle-class Indian migrant author becomes Rushdie the controversial celebrity and member of global elites, cosmopolitanism as an ideal comes under pressure both within his books and in critical discourses surrounding them. This chapter argues that cosmopolitanism, whether achieved or merely aspired to, whether associated with celebratory or limiting visions of rootlessness, remains tenacious in its hold on his and his characters’ imaginations.

Edward Said’s lifelong commitment to Romance philology and the discipline of Comparative Literature gave him an unusual and critical angle on the globalization of culture and ideas. This chapter explains that heritage and demonstrates the usefulness and power of that critique.

Ideas, motifs, aesthetics, bodies of knowledge, texts, genres and literary worlds have travelled for centuries along Silk Road’s multiple networks of circulation connected through myriad contact hubs located across many temporal and spatial planes. This chapter argues that the Silk Road offers a roadmap for thinking about modes of circulation in world literature in ways that take us beyond the linear trajectory of West influencing the East, the centrifugal proliferation of the European novel around the world, the centripetal East coming to the West for a place, and the single temporality of the global visions of “modern” “colonial” and “postcolonial” “planetarity,” “globalization.” It offers two examples. The 1001 Nights is a classic example of the global circulation of a “text” beyond “translation-as-circulation” and the confines of monologically defined language, nation, genre and historical period. Coffee is a site of global connectedness and intercultural exchange in a comparative analysis of coffee in five literary works from Egypt, Japan, Palestine, Taiwan and Turkey. The global pasts of coffee give shape to the literary world and worldliness; however, each is uniquely mapped by the itinerary of coffee and the cultures it has picked up on the way.

This chapter argues for a shift in perspective from Max Weber's theory of value to a theory of worldliness, one drawn from the thought of Martin Heidegger and Hannah Arendt. Worldliness points to how our involvement in the everyday world is never reducible to technical calculation. The chapter uses this idea to illuminate the relationship between democratic action and the welfare state. Technical calculation, which strives to treat subjects as objects, is mediated by a material world that constitutes a space of collective, non-technical judgments. Welfare institutions, then, are both mechanisms of technical control and worldly objects that form the potential context for political judgment and mobilization. Heidegger and Arendt's analysis of worldliness provides theoretical tools for envisioning the welfare state as a site of democratic mobilization and participation-a perspective embodied in the response of the German workers' movement to Bismarck's reforms. The chapter concludes by examining this response, reconstructing the distinctive socialist vision of social reform.