Cosmopolitan Fictions

Book excerpt: Participating in the reframing of literary studies, Cosmopolitan Fictions identifies, as "cosmopolitan fiction", a genre of global literature that investigates the ethics and politics of complex and multiple belonging. The fictions studied by Katherine Stanton represent and revise the global histories of the past and present, including the "indigenous or native" narratives that are, in Homi Bhabha's words, "internal to" national identity itself. The works take as their subjects: * European unification * the human rights movement * the AIDS epidemic * the new South Africa. And they test the infinite demands for justice against the shifting borders of the nation, rethinking habits of feeling, modes of belonging and practices of citizenship for the global future. Scholars, teachers and students of global literary and cultural studies, Cosmopolitan Fictions is a book to want on your reading list.