The World Is Bent: Plasticity, Globalization, and the Cosmopolitan Critic

ABSTRACT Remarking on the rapid and widespread changes associated with globalization at the turn of this century, Thomas Friedman declared that “the world is flat.” He was referring to what he imagined as a leveled playing field among different countries in a global economic system dominated by multinational corporations. But as Ranjan Ghosh’s The Plastic Turn (2022) reveals, the world in an era of globalization is not so much flat as “bent,” tending toward flexible yet firm structures that affect everyday life on the planet. Such a plasticized world system, with its lack of traditional parameters and its dynamic micropolitics, poses challenges to both world literature and the potential cosmopolitan criticism associated with it. This article examines that the plastic turn, as analyzed by Ghosh, discloses new arrangements of power and knowledge in the contemporary world system, thus paving the way for different forms of cosmopolitan criticism in the twenty-first century.