This course explores approaches to literature and transculturation in the context of new understandings of human and textual border creation and crossings. Topics include the ethics of dividing cultural products along ethnic, linguistic, and national lines on the one hand and classifying phenomena as global on the other, and the possibilities and ramifications of cross-cultural study. We also examine the relationship between creative production/literary scholarship and ethnic studies, empire and (post)colonialism, identity, travel/migration/exile/diaspora, labor, war, trauma, multilingualism, translingualism, literary reconfiguration (adaptation, intertextuality), and world literature. Course readings are drawn from Africa, Asia, and the Americas.