Global geopolitics has shifted dramatically over the last thirty years. After the vanishing expectations of a unipolar international system led by the United States, China has gained an increasingly dominant role in areas as innovative as quantum computing, robotics and artificial intelligence. In the non-digital dimension, the eastern superpower has made gigantic investments in its Belt and Road Initiative, which include the development of a massive network of highways, industrial centers, harbors, pipelines and bridges, among many other works of infrastructure. These investments allow for the connection of more than 60 countries worldwide, guaranteeing China s energetic security, easier conditions for trading goods and services and, perhaps more importantly, a significant influence in the political and economic events of the world. States with political regimes as diverse as those of Russia and India are part of this growing network; in various cases, in exchange for the benefits associated wi th being part of it, major concessions were made. By way of illustration, Sri Lanka and Pakistan, among others, given their lack of capacity to pay for sorne of the works, have agreed to forfeit control of specific areas of their territories.

Since the first decades of the 19th century, Goethe's concept of 'world literature' has constituted a key approach to further disciplines such as philology, historiography and comparative literature. In recent years , the research conducted by Franco Moretti and Pascale Casanova has once again put this topic at the center of the debate. Both elaborate theories that reformulate, sometimes radically, the geoliterary object of comparative literature. The articles in this volume propose a response to these critical-theoretical challenges from Latin America, evaluating their contributions to the reading of regional literary production from the paradigm of 'world literature'. Additionally, these studies propose alternative critiques to the limitations of models such as Casanova's the 'world republic of literature' and to methodologies based on instruments such as Moretti's 'graphs, maps and trees'. In this way, some of the leading figures of Latin American literary and cultural studies question the legitimacy of this new interpretative model and its ideological and epistemological implications for the case of Latin America.