Explores the relationship between literature and international relations and considers how writing resists norms and puts any fixed or final idea of community in question. Part I examines the European context (1860 to 1945) and Part II analyses the traditions of disruptive writing that emerged out of sub-Saharan Africa and south Asia after 1945. Peter D McDonalds scholarly Artefacts of Writing presents a challenge -- again, at once perspicacious and playful -- to how we read literature in a time when diversity is being invoked again, but when its promise will lead to disappointment unless we tackle the question with imagination and singularity, as McDonald does.