---

This book is about how the marketing of transnational cultural commodities capitalizes on difference and its appeal for cosmopolitan consumers in our postmodern globalized world. At what price? What ethical and political conundrums does the artist/writer/reader confront when going global? This volume analyzes why difference - whether gender, sexual, racial, ethnic, or linguistic - has become such a prominent element in the contemporary cultural field, and the effects of this prevalence on the production, circulation and reception of cultural commodities in the context of globalization. At the intersection of globalization, diaspora, postcolonial and feminist studies in world literature, these essays engage critically with a wide variety of representative narratives taken from diverse cultural fields, including humanitarian fiction, multilingual poetry, painting, text-image art, performance art, film, documentary, and docu-poetry. The chapters included offer counter-readings that disrupt hegemonic representations of cultural identity within the contemporary, neoliberal and globalized landscape.

---

Contributors.- Introduction: Interrogating the Production, Circulation and Reception of ´Difference´ in Globalized Cultures; Belén Martín-Lucas and Andrea Ruthven.- Subversive Translation and Lexical Empathy: Pedagogies of Cortesia and Transnational Multilingual Poetics; Merlinda Bobis.- The Production and Productivity of Humanitarian Fiction: Postcolonial Shame and Neocolonial Crises; David Callahan.- Still Devouring Frida Kahlo: Psychobiography versus Postcolonial and Disability Readings; Zo‰ Brigley Thompson.- The World Republic of Readers; James Procter.- Success and the City: Working in the World´s Capital in Monica Ali´s Brick Lane ; Darragh Patrick Hall.- Borderless (Alien)Nations: Disposable Bodies and Biopolitical Effacement in Min Sook Lee´s Docu-Poem; Libe García Zarranz.- Public Art in the Production of a Global City: Jamie Hilder´s Clashing Versions of Vancouver; John Havelda.- A Nation Goes Adrift: Subaltern Inter-Identity in José Saramago´s The Stone Raft ; Maria Sofia Pimentel Biscaia.- ´Something Terrible Happened´: Spectacles of Gendered Violence and Nadine Gordimer´s The House Gun ; Sorcha Gunne.- Alternative Modernities and Othered Masculinities in Mira Nair´s The Namesake ; E. Guillermo Iglesias Díaz.- (Un)Veiling Women´s Bodies: Transnational Feminisms in Emer Martin´s Baby Zero ; Aida Rosende Pérez.- Index.

---

Belén Martín-Lucas is Associate Professor in the fields of Postcolonial, Diasporic and Gender Studies at the University of Vigo, Spain. She has published extensively on transnational literature from feminist perspectives, and co-edited nine scholarly collections and journal special issues on globalization and nationalism.

Andrea Ruthven is Lecturer in the English and Modern Languages and Literatures Department at the University of Barcelona, Spain, and in the English Department at Mediterrani University College, University of Girona, Spain. Her research focuses on contemporary women´s writing, feminist theory and gender studies.

---