Abstract: The evidence that Western literatures and cultures have been active constituents of globalization processes from early modernity onwards burgeons on a daily basis. However, the question remains open as to the manner in which this state of affairs has to be dealt with. There is an obvious split between the celebratory perspective of its carriers and the traumatized perspective of its victims. This renders globalization either as a strategic project imposed from above by Western powers or as a spontaneous interlocking of the subalterns that grows from below. Whereas the first, colonial model of globalization connects from the center outward and leaves the subalterns disconnected from one another, the postcolonial model of globalization connects these subalterns to one another, transforming the imposed global designs. I have already taken issue with the first model in my Tracing Global Democracy. In this paper I will focus on the second model, which, to oppose the first model's market-driven common denominators, insists on literary works' irreducible difference. As I will try to demonstrate, it emerged in the transdisciplinary field at the intersection of trauma and memory studies, culminating in Emily Apter's advocacy of a plurality of ‘untranslatable' world literatures in her Against World Literature (2013). After critically examining this model, which departs from literature's unhomeliness in the same uncritical way as the first model departs from literature's homeliness, I propose an alternative model, which departs from “traumatic constellation” as a simultaneously homely and unhomely birthplace of literary works.

Key words: globalization, traumatic constellation, zone of indistinction, identification, memory