"Postcolonial Studies and World Literature" (original) (raw)
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World Literature and Postcolonial Studies, Part II
Journal of World Literature, 2020
Part two of the special issue of World Literature and Postcolonial Studies comes out during extraordinary times. The world is fighting a global pandemic. "I can't breathe" and "Black Lives Matter" are no longer expressions that are meaningful only in America. Rather, they have become calls to unite the world against bigotry, racism, and injustice. Meanwhile, Covid-19 has exposed racial, class, and economic inequalities all around the world. If in America, the global pandemic re-emphasized the failing healthcare system, in India it brought forth the biggest movement of people from urban centers to rural communities. Indeed, the migrant crisis in India could only be compared with the plight and tragedy of people during the 1947 partition, many of whom walked for thousands of miles to reach "home." Though the essays published in this special issue were selected before the global pandemic, the revisions and the preparation of the manuscript took place at a time when events were canceled, air and train travel was impossible, and countries were under lockdown. One cannot imagine bringing out this special issue, which has contributions of authors residing in different parts of the world, working on, to name a few, Korean, Australian, Maghrebi, Syrian, Welsh literatures, had the world not been connected through the circulatory network of the internet. Not surprisingly, then, the co-editors see the theme of circulation and movement running through the essays collected here. Often world literature is thought in simple terms as a literature in translation, circulating and leaping across national boundaries only in a handful of languages. Postcolonial literature, on the other hand, is usually assumed to be writing back to a colonial center and circulating in colonizer's languages. Yet both views shouldn't stray too far from actual realities on the ground. A study of literature in translation
World Literature, Critical Approaches: Reading Postcolonial Environments
Course Syllabus, 2023
Course Description: In this course, we will travel through historical moments guided by the stories that map our worlds and our political imaginations. We will seek to unsettle conventional categories of “world” as we carefully reorient ourselves in relation to the texts under study—novels, stories, and poems that demand a rearticulation of the so-called “archetype.” As we travel across continents, guided by Imbolo Mbue or Helena María Viramontes, we will consider the trajectories of power that they map and the aesthetic forms that are neither universal nor derivative, but persistently and indignantly local—that is, materially and historically situated. We will begin with a consideration of the political stakes of “worlding” literature before embarking on a three-pronged journey: texts that map empire; stories that illuminate the sacrifice zones of our contemporary petrosphere; and narratives that demand a consideration of the role of energy in the construction, dissemination, and interpretation of aesthetic form. Required texts: Aimé Césaire, Discourse on Colonialism, ISBN-13: 978-1583670255 Patrick Chamoiseau, Slave Old Man, ISBN-13: 978-1-62097-588-6 Amitav Ghosh, Sea of Poppies, ISBN-13: 978-0312428594 Shailja Patel, Migritude, ISBN-13: 978-1885030054 Helena María Viramontes, Under the Feet of Jesus ISBN-13: 978-0452273870 *All readings appended with an asterisk (*) will be made available on Canvas.
The basic premises of Pheng Cheah's book are encapsulated in its title: first, that any consideration of world literature requires a return to theorizing " world " beyond its spatial dimensions, and second, that postcolonial literature bears a unique relationship to world literature in its ability to challenge hegemonic understandings of what that world is. As a field, World Literature is often criticized for being apolitical—for performing a disingenuous depoliticization rooted in the logic of equivalency, where one text from the Global South is easily substituted for another, and for turning a blind eye to the structures of power that postcolonial theory brings to critical attention. Where inequalities are acknowledged, it is often done with a center-periphery model of a world system in mind, applying an evolutionary logic that has at its core a notion of Eurocentric teleological progress. Cheah is certainly no stranger to these debates, and his contribution critically considers the positionality of world literature vis-à-vis histories of imperialism, global capital, and modes of cosmopolitan belonging. Cheah's stated aim is to rethink " world " as a temporal category, and, in the process, to reorient critical thought toward the relationship of literature to the world—a question wholly different from the ways in which literature circulates within that world. He rightly notes that the
World Literature, Cosmopolitanism, Globality, 2019
World literature/liberal globalization-Notes for a materialistic metacritique of Weltliterary studies The following pages assume that, in view of the recent theoretical inflation in the field of world literature studies, it is necessary to introduce a critical consciousness that reflects on this theoretical discourse. Of course, this operation would not be aimed at restoring some kind of national, philological, or even arealbased reading scheme. All these are frameworks of understanding which I myself consider to a certain extentsince they were constituted as a response to specific and past historical circumstancesto be obsolete, or, it could be said, difficult to maintain from an updated analytical point of view. Rather, the proposal consists in interrogating the form, time, and place from which the theoretical statement is issued, that is, the material conditions of its production, in order to reveal ideological prescriptions that regulate it and that, by general convention, do not usuallyperhaps as a preventive measureget debated. On the other hand, just as it should be assumed that the Nation State constitutes a historical and historicizable event that does not make it possible to explainnor would it be advantageous to do socertain dimensions of the literary phenomenon; a similar premise would be applicable, as a starting hypothesis, to the "world", understood, of course, not as a geographical unit but as support for an imagined community of a relatively organic nature, that is to say, a type of configuration that, despite containing in itself a multiplicity of temporal, cultural, political, etc., orders, would presuppose that these compartmentalizations, and in particular their "sub-" worlds, would be capable of being translated, without major distortions, into the lingua franca of the world. Josefina Ludmer once said, "Yo soy crítica, no soy el Mesías" (Ludmer/Achugar 1991: 42). This proposal assumes that the function of criticism would not be to elaborate answers or solutions, but just the opposite: to open questions, to break down hegemonyof whatever kindand, in this way, to promote a constant improvement of the established systems of thought. Criticism would be, as Ludmer also reflected at that time, a destructive rather than a constructive practice. Thus, it would not seek to design a new order or offer remedial solutions for the existing one, but rather point out inconsistencies or expose fallacies, without having to measure the consequences of its intervention or offer tools for the eventual reconstruction. This, as Terry Eagleton would argue, would be the mission of critique: not to address texts within the reading conventions pre-established by the status quo. What Open Access.
The evident interconnectedness of the contemporary world, the increasingly porosity of borders and the development of communication technology necessarily forces us to think about literature on a global level. The study of World Literature, of what exactly World Literature entails, what it includes, and of how we, as readers, students and academics, can successfully tackle the global literary production effectively, allows us to access a wider, more inclusive perspective on the production of texts and culture in the world, while taking into consideration the dense network of international links we are inevitably a part of. From approximately the second half of the 20 th century, the academic debate regarding the choice of methodology for the study, teaching and analysis of World Literature, has become more heated and controversial, and it still hasn't exhausted itself. The chronological correspondence between the beginning of World Literature studies and the publication of seminal texts on post-colonial studies is not a coincidence: the Warwick Research Collective, amongst a variety of scholars holding a similar view, identifies an inherent connection between the issue of world literature studies and post-colonial (and neo-colonial) discourse: '"World literature" is in the first instance an extension of comparative literature, and might be understood as the remaking of comparative literature after the multicultural debates and the disciplinary critique of Eurocentrism' 1 .