The Case for the Globality of Twenty-First-Century Poetry

Abstract

alt Hunter joins an ongoing movement in literary studies beyond regionalist and nationalist paradigms. Readers will find his book Forms of a World: Contemporary Poetry and the Making of Globalization a complement to Jahan Ramazani’s 2009 A Transnational Poetics, insofar as both critics read across hemispheres to make apparent the ways in which contemporary poetry filters and reimagines global circuits of exchange. The two differ in their theoretical commitments: whereas Ramazani draws on transnational studies, Hunter understands contemporary globality through a critique of capitalism. Accordingly, Forms of a World is the first to read Anglophone poetry of the late twentieth and twenty-first century alongside simultaneous developments in patterns of capitalist accumulation. While he acknowledges the large-scale and long-term effects wrought by the capitalist world-system since its inception approximately five hundred years ago, Hunter understands globalization as an era of capitalism that is only decades old. It follows, then, that when Hunter calls a poem “global,” he means to imply nothing in particular about subject matter, circulation, or authorship. Instead, a global poem is, for him, one that belongs to a period beginning in the 1970s, when a new production and financial system marked by transnational accumulation emerged to supplant earlier, national L O U I S E M C C U N E