What remains of European thought in law and literature’s “global turn”? To address the question, this article reopens Nuruddin Farah’s Gifts (1993) alongside modern and contemporary writings on globalization, cosmopolitanism, and their (de)constitutive medial conditions. Scholarship in law and literature, comparative literature, and world literature are first reviewed for their disclosed risks and potentials of attending to postcolonial literature in the name of globalization. This is followed by a return to Farah’s novel and its pertaining European intertexts, including Immanuel Kant’s essays on cosmopolitanism, enlightenment, and book publishing. I suggest that these key exchanges between Farah’s critique of humanitarian aid in late-1980s Somalia and Kant’s classics reflect the importance of (re)staging dialogues between postcolonial literature and the European legacy as we work towards a planetary discourse of law and literature.