Mapping Minor/Small and World Literatures (2025)

“Minor” genres in postcolonial literatures: New webs of meaning

Journal of Postcolonial Writing, 2018

Novel in Between: the Necessity of Semi-Periphery for Peripheral Literature in World Literature

Humanities Bulletin, 2019

Diasporic narratives live a nomadic existence, wandering in the in-between space of core and periphery, with the final destination to be somewhere, at best, closest to the core and, due to the transnational cultural different, what we may call Semi-Periphery. Mandanipour combines the semiotics of words and forms to showcase the unattainability of the core literature for a diasporic process of thinking, subjects, and forms, all of which still function under erasure and censorship. This paper is going to study the resistance of a diasporic narrative, which both defies and is defied by the standard sets of the core of world literature. It focuses on the resistance of the simultaneously present mechanics of typing and process of thinking in Shahriar Mandanipour's Censoring of an Iranian Love Story: A Novel.

2018/2019. "'Minor' Genres in Postcolonial Literatures" (Journal of Postcolonial Writing, 2018: 54.1). Hardback 2019 (Routledge Special Issues as Books)

Journal of Postcolonial Writing (2018); Routledge (2019) , 2018

This special issue takes as its main starting point the realization that, since their institutionalization in the mid-1980s, postcolonial studies have privileged a certain generic body of cultural productions, namely the novel. Mindful of the lack of postcolonial scholarship devoted to form, this volume sets out to examine how shifting the ground of analysis to generic issues, in particular to those genres understudied within the postcolonial framework, might signify on postcolonial cultures and societies, and might even extend our understanding of the literary as a whole. The ‘minor’ genres that we expect to work on include (but are not limited to) short stories, novellas, poetry, drama, essays, prose-poems, verse-novels as well as comics and intermedial productions.

The Routledge Companion to World Literature and World History

2018

Globalisation and Literary History

Bulletin of Latin American Research, 2006

Last week I was at a meeting of Latin American scholars who were debating a joint project provisionally titled, ' Between Power and Knowledge. Towards a History of Intellectual Elites '. It soon became clear that all of the terms of the title including ' between ' were to be contested. Such radical revisionism also haunts Latin American literary studies as we attempt to rethink national and regional cultures in what is now regarded as a post-national moment, one in which there has been a rejection of linear historical narrative, a questioning of the very term ' Latin American ' as a self-explanatory framework and of literature as an evolving series of well defi ned genres and movements, evaluated according to not always very clear aesthetic criteria and with regard for linguistic virtuosity. The national and continental imaginaries, deployed in Neruda ' s Canto General , in Gabriela Mistral ' s Canto a Chile , in López Velarde ' s Suave Patria , and explored, re-evaluated and condemned in countless novels, are diluted or dissipated as Latin American writers now situate their narratives in Siberia, Germany, Africa, London, Paris or a myriad of other places or abandon the nation ' s capital for its margins and provinces. When I began teaching in the early sixties, it was quite common for people to ask what was ' my ' country, taking it for granted that one specialised in a national culture. José Donoso remarked on the fact that it was uncommon in 1960 to hear laymen speak of the contemporary Spanish American novel: 'there were Uruguayan, or Ecuadorian, Mexican or Venezuelan novels ' (Donoso, 1977: 10). Yet many writers, most prominently Borges, had already repudiated the idea of a purely national tradition. Cortázar (1969) boasted of the mental ubiquity afforded him because of living and writing in Paris, and Donoso (1977: 19) enthusiastically supported the ' disfi guring contamination of foreign languages and literatures '. But this did not mean that they did not situate their writing within the nation, although their view was often oblique. There was an abundance of terms-dependency, underdevelopment, Third World, periphery-to which thinking about the nation was yoked (Escobar, 1995), and there was anxiety over anachronism, over the time warp, over the need to attain parity, or, as Octavio Paz put it (e.g. Paz, 1967), to inhabit a time when Latin Americans would be in synchrony with the rest of the world, a synchrony which the novelists felt themselves to have attained. The boom was a coming of age, an entry into adulthood, and a refusal to be identifi ed with the rural or with anachronistic narratives such as the ' novela de la tierra ' .

Big Nations' Literature and Small Nations' Sociology

Etnoloska Tribina, Vol. 42 No. 35, 2012

This paper explores literary authors as cultural brokers in the context of world literature. Vignettes from literary events illustrate that what is today understood as world literature is fiction from Third World countries translated into English, written largely by migrant writers for the consumption of metropolitan readers who sample them as ethnographies of unknown places. Authors feature on the stage of world literature as representatives of their ‘culture as a whole’. The only way for them to be consecrated through translation into English is to write a sociology of their ‘culture’, sustaining that culture’s fixed, backward, and romanticised images through thick descriptions of its ethnos.

Sounding the Break: African American and Caribbean Routes of World Literature

2014

The idea of "world literature" has served as a crucial though underappreciated interlocutor for African diasporic writers, informing their involvement in processes of circulation, translation, and revision that have been identified as the hallmarks of the contemporary era of world literature. Yet in spite of their participation in world systems before and after European hegemony, Africa and the African diaspora have been excluded from the networks and archives of world literature. In Sounding the Break, Jason Frydman attempts to redress this exclusion by drawing on historiography, ethnography, and archival sources to show how writers such as Edward Wilmot Blyden, W. E. B. Du Bois, Zora Neale Hurston, Alejo Carpentier, Derek Walcott, Maryse Condé, and Toni Morrison have complicated both Eurocentric and Afrocentric discourses of literary and cultural production. Through their engagement with and revision of the European world literature discourse, he contends, these writers conjure a deep history of literary traffic whose oral and written expressions are always already cosmopolitan, embedded in the long histories of cultural and economic exchange between Africa, Asia, and Europe. It is precisely the New World American location of these writers, Frydman concludes, that makes possible this revisionary perspective on the idea of (Old) World literature.

The Novel in or against World Literature. SNS at Pitt 2016: call for papers

Reviews: Sounding the Break: African American and Caribbean Routes of World Literature; "Shuttles in the Rocking Loom": Mapping the Black Diaspora in African American and Caribbean Fiction

Journal of American Studies, 2017

Provincializing World Literature: Multilingualism, Resistance and Literary Internationals Seminar organizer: Dr Neelam Srivastava

World literature has become hegemonic in the English humanities, subsuming postcolonial, minority, and 'Anglophone' writing into its capacious remit. Influential narratives of the field favour a systematic approach, in which the centre-periphery model reigns supreme. The premise of this panel is that if world literature can be conceived as a corpus of texts that rise to planetary status through a literary market whose mechanisms of selection and gate-keeping rely on the university, prize culture, and a multinational publishing industry, its interpretative paradigms need to move beyond the analysis of the hierarchies of international capital to include language and translation. This panel invites papers exploring alternatives to world literature studies in the criticism of contemporary texts. The aim is to question world literature as a (mappable) system, one that uncannily echoes the " EU-niversalization " of global literary publishing, marked by the dominance of the Anglophone novel. Prevailing models of " world literature " often separate the literary from the political. For Pascale Casanova, literary internationalism means " standing united against literary nationalism, against the intrusion of politics into literary life ". This panel seeks to set the idea of an internationalist literature and Casanova's " literary internationalism " against each other. In our reading, internationalist literature is premised on a multilingual literary sphere in which translation plays a prominent role. Decolonization struggles show that revolution and culture are interdependent , and that resistance is translatable across different contexts. We welcome proposals that train their gaze on a different temporality, namely on short-lived, topical, and/or politically oriented literature, often produced with little to no infrastructure. By eschewing a fixation with " universal " literary values, we aim to revalue the contingent and political imperatives of the historical " moment ". Such an emphasis would offer a riposte to the center-periphery model, shifting it instead to the vital South-South alliances that permitted the formation of " literary internationals " in the period of decolonization and after —alliances which appear to have been largely forgotten in contemporary theorizations of the world-literary field. Paper topics might include, but are not limited to: • Alternative theoretical models to " world literature " • " Resistance literature " (e.g. protest poetry, Dalit writing) • The role of radical/independent presses in disseminating anti-imperialist and marginal writings; • Anti-colonial/Third-Worldist periodical culture (e.g. Présence Africaine, Lotus: Afro-Asian Writings, El Moudjahid) • Internationalist networks during colonialism and decolonization that fostered the emergence of a " resistance " aesthetics, such as Congresses of Black Writers and Artists, All-India Progressive Writers' Association, PEN • The role of translation in disseminating literature in non-metropolitan languages Deadline for submitting paper proposals: September 23, 2016 ACLA website: http://www.acla.org/