What does it mean when we say that something “goes global”? This book argues that in order to understand what this phrase means, we must think of the global as both imaginary and real, fictional and material, and contingent on a partly intentional, partly accidental U.S. infrastructure of culture and media that has proliferated across the planet since the end of the Second World War. To this end, the book studies cultural productions that make the global American media environment visible and even potentially hackable, whether those texts are Italian Westerns from the 1960s, Jamaican dancehall music from the 1970s and 80s, Thomas Pynchon’s novel Gravity’s Rainbow (1973), Jamaica Kincaid’s book A Small Place (1988), Octavia E., Butler’s novel Parable of the Sower (1993), Toni Morrison’s novel A Mercy (2008), or Teju Cole’s fictional texts, essays, and internet art (2007-23). Encompassing literary criticism, cinema studies, media studies, Africana thought, and global studies, this book argues that only through a thoroughly interdisciplinary and international approach can we begin to grapple with America’s role as the medium of invention for our unendingly shrinking world, and with the always-changing conditions for conceiving of the planet as a unified totality. As a work of interdisciplinary scholarship, the book recommends itself to scholars of global American studies or any of the disciplines and subfields upon which it touches. These disciplines include 20th- and 21st-century American literary history, globalization studies, cultural studies, and media studies; the subfields include Italian cinema of the postwar period, sound studies, and the study of the epic as a genre.

Morten Hansen is an Assistant Professor at Bowdoin College’s Department of English. He received his doctorate from the University of Virginia. His teaching and scholarship focus on the intersections between globalization, media, and modern and contemporary American culture. His interdisciplinary scholarship on Jamaica Kincaid and new modes of the epic, on Toni Morrison and the birth of global space, and on the artist Robert Smithson, media, and globalization has appeared in Comparative Literature, LIT: Literature Interpretation Theory, and American Studies.