Visualizing fiction, verbalizing art, or from intermediation to transculturation (original) (raw)

2015, World literature studies

Preliminary remarks Comparative literature as a typical 19 th-century positivist and Eurocentric discipline was based on specific analytical operations such as comparison, looking for similarities rather than differences, and rigid disciplinary and geo-local divisions. It operated in terms of influences, borrowings, typological affinities and constellation of national literatures within the restricted core-European idea of world literature and habitually sought Oriental and African motifs in Western fiction and never the other way round, because it was grounded in the modern human taxonomy constructing a negative image of the other in order to affirm the same. 1 Today the previous division into the West and the rest is dysfunctional at best, as serious and ironic borrowings and influences work both ways-which does not mean that the structural asymmetries are gone. Western and non-Western theorists have come up with different definitions for this complex and chaotic contemporary situation. French aesthetician Nicolas Bourriaud addresses this tendency under the name of altermodern aesthetics, which has appropriated and politically neutered the concepts of transit and creolization borrowed from the postcolonial genealogy of knowledge (2009b). Bourriaud claims that both postmodernism and multiculturalism are now passé and we are living in a homogenous global culture of mixed and lost origins, marked by intensified and simplified contacts, journeys and migrations, translations and subtitles, a culture from which any artist regardless of his or her genealogy can borrow techniques and devices. The main motif of altermodernity then is wandering in time, space and various media forms (2005). Arguing with Bourriaud and other Western neo-universalizing positions that ignore and erase the continuing structural inequalities and lingering Western canonical dominance, decolonial artists, theorists and activists have come up with a different transmodern (in the sense of overcoming modernity) idea of aesthesis instead, as opposed to the Western-tailored aesthetics (Estéticas Decoloniales 2010, Mignolo 2013, Tlostanova 2013). This ongoing debate demonstrates the way the old Orientalism/Occidentalism divisions are being reformulated in today's glocalized culture. The two important contemporary tendencies in the interaction of art and fiction can be defined as transculturation and intermediation, marked by specific forms of