Introduction
Journal: Comparative Literature
Year: 2023

Abstract This special issue provokes a radical reconsideration of the pasts and futures of world literature thirty years after the dissolution of the Soviet Union, accompanied by triumphalist declarations of the end of history. Conceived in the wake of racial justice protests in the summer of 2020 and completed amid the invasion of Ukraine in 2022—two events with global reverberations that decisively punctured the illusions of a post-imperial, post-socialist, and post-racial world order homogeni