Building on examples from recent Iranian/Farsi and Kurdish literature, this article investigates the politics of national, regional and diasporic literatures in the increasingly globalized literary market. In an economically globalized world, literature industries can no longer operate within the limits of national/regional and linguistic borders without running the risk of losing their competitive edge. Thus, more than any other time in history, contemporary authors and publishers should dream of ‘going global’. In countries such as Iran the modernist tendency of translating world classics into Farsi has recently been coupled with a tendency to address global audiences with translatable and salable literary products. On the other hand, the need for literary novelty in the global market has given rise to a luring demand for foreign and exotic literatures in English. The interaction of these two forces has worked out, in recent years, what might be called the dialectic of the global and the peripheral in literature. The resulting literature is a ‘force field’ in which different, sometimes opposing, political agendas and different identity formations are played out and reconciled.
