The first part of this essay offers considerations of the deep background of our topic. It develops a notion of planetarity (distinct from enviornmentalist romanticism) as an alternative to globality. I propose a new analysis of the globalizing promise of unmediated cyberliteracy which is analysed from a rereading of Marx's discussion of use and use-value, labor and laborpower; thus knowledge and data -- neither binary oppositions nor identical. The second part of the essay studies the sharpest contrast to planetarity: nationalism. It takes two examples of the new US nationalism -- described by Donald Pease as a displacement of the doctrine of "manifest destiny" -- and suggests something like a homological relationship between them. The first is the post facto construction of the resistance to the World Trade Organization meeting in Seattle as a general political signifier. The texts studied are a documentary video and various eyewitness accounts. The second is the increasing inclusion of South Asia in Asian-American Studies. The text is André Gunder Frank's re-examination of Asia in his recent work. If the first essay suggested a coalition between Comparative Literature and Area Studies that is not necessarily a response to the changing times, this final section of the final essay shows the new Comparative Literature operating to qualify some of the enthusiasms bred by the times.