World literature and the geographies of resistance

This text proposes a new definition of world literature: an archive of democratic mechanisms external to state power.

Accordingly, 'World Literature and the Geographies of Resistance' takes shape as an exploration of nonstate space - territories of self-government that contest the vertical command structures of the state.

Joel Nickels argues that literature devoted to these processes of spatial occuption can help us imagine democratic alternatives to state space and to the regime of legalized dispossession that goes under the name of globalization.