While this future world literature is hospitable—more broadly, to aspiring critics, and, in a more specialized sense, to literary scholars like myself working primarily not in “world literature” or even comparative literature, but in a single national tradition—it is also exclusive. The usual pieties of criticism would suggest that exclusivity is a bad thing; but in the context of the history Allan tells, we understand exclusivity to be a byproduct of creating any practice or forming any community. World literature will always be defined against something, but we can take Allan’s account as a prod to be more aware of the specific aspects of what gets co-opted as its foil. Being aware of one’s limits is not necessarily a guarantee of being generous or accurate in recognizing that which lies outside them; however, Allan’s book offers ways of reading—e.g., attending to the “social life” of texts—that support our perception of the details in literary and extra-literary accounts of “literacy’s other.” Just as Allan teaches us to think of world literature as a set of practices rather than a corpus of works, his own book is less a template than a portable set of tools with which to do work in literary studies now, and to construct the future of our shared discipline.