About Andrew N. Rubin
Andrew N. Rubin is a Scholar in Residence in English and Comparative Literature and Critical and Postcolonial Theory at Georgetown University. His most recent book, Archives of Authority: Empire, Culture, and the Cold War, was published by Princeton University Press in 2012 in its TransNation/Translation series. He is also the co-editor of Adorno: A Critical Reader and the co-editor of The Edward Said Reader, as well as a forthcoming edition of Said’s collected works. He has written extensively on Edward W. Said, Theodor Adorno, George Orwell, and Joseph Conrad, and more widely on subjects such as the category of world literature and transnational modernisms for journals including Alif: Journal of Comparative Poetics, The South Atlantic Quarterly, The Journal of Palestine Studies, Arab Studies Quarterly, The Nation, The New Statesman, and al-ahram. In 2006, he was nominated by the B(R)ussel’s Tribunal Human Rights award for his essay in The New Statesman on the assassination of Iraqi academics and intellectuals. In 2007, he was the recipient of a Lannan Residency. He is currently working on a manuscript entitled Imperial Traces: Late Imperialism and the Terrain of World Literature, and has recently completed a monograph entitled Exiled in America: José Marti, Hannah Arendt, C. L. R. James, and Edward Said. More information can be found on
A forum for the critical engagement with the category of World Literature, its significance, including a discussion of systematic theories of its development as well as its tensions with postcolonial literature and the various registers of silence that are its condition of possibility.