For almost three decades, Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak has been ignoring the standardized "rules" of the academy and trespassing across disciplinary boundaries. Today she remains one of the foremost figures in the study of world literature and its cultural consequences. In this book she declares the death of comparative literature as we know it and sounds an urgent call for a "new comparative literature," in which the discipline is given new life - one that is not appropriated and determined by the market. Spivak envisions a comparative literature that respects linguistic diversity, the aesthetic power of literature, and the political consequences of reading and writing about the works of other cultures.