Geopolitics and World Literature

Although geopolitics only has become a real buzzword over the last few decades, in one form or another the concept and its practice have been around since the beginning of mankind. So has been their enshrinement in literature. Geopolitics these days is most often discussed in the field of political science, but it is already figured in that discipline’s forerunner historiography. A more systematic approach to geopolitics emerged around the turn of the twentieth century. The same period also saw the first systematic approaches to world literature as a field of study. The geopolitical changes caused by two world wars and their aftermath, postcolonialism, decolonization, globalization, the rise of East and South Asia, and most recently refugee, health, and climate crises, all have greatly affected the theory and practice of world literature.