Postcolonial world literature: Narration, translation, imagination

Thesis Eleven ◽  
2021 ◽  
pp. 072551362199470
Author(s):  
Dirk Wiemann ◽  
Shaswati Mazumdar ◽  
Ira Raja
Keyword(s):  
World Literature ◽  
Single Units ◽  
Critical Perspective ◽  
Neoliberal Globalization ◽  
Contemporary World ◽  
Postcolonial Criticism ◽  
Colonial Expansion ◽  
The World

Postcolonial criticism has repeatedly debunked the ostensible neutrality of the ‘world’ of world literature by pointing out that and how the contemporary world – whether conceived in terms of cosmopolitan conviviality or neoliberal globalization – cannot be understood without recourse to the worldly event of Europe’s colonial expansion. While we deem this critical perspective indispensable, we simultaneously maintain that to reduce ‘the world’ to the world-making impact of capital, colonialism, and patriarchy paints an overly deterministic picture that runs the risk of unwittingly reproducing precisely that dominant ‘oneworldness’ that it aims to critique. Moreover, the mere potentiality of alternative modes of world-making tends to disappear in such a perspective so that the only remaining option to think beyond oneworldness resides in the singularity claim. This insistence on singularity, however, leaves the relatedness of the single units massively underdetermined or denies it altogether. By contrast, we locate world literature in the conflicted space between the imperial imposition of a hierarchically stratified world (to which, as hegemonic forces tell us, ‘there is no alternative’) and the unrealized ‘undivided world’ that multiple minor cosmopolitan projects yet have to win. It is precisely the tension between these ‘two worlds’ that brings into view the crucial centrality not of the nodes in their alleged singularity but their specific relatedness to each other, that both impedes and energizes world literature today and renders it ineluctably postcolonial.

scholarly journals DISCOURSES THAT MATTER: WOLE SOYINKA’S THEATRE AS A FORM OF REPRESENTING AND READING THE WORLD

2014 ◽  
Vol 1 (14) ◽  
Author(s):  
Rosa Branca Figueiredo
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Literary Criticism ◽  
Cultural History ◽  
World Literature ◽  
Aesthetic Theory ◽  
Wole Soyinka ◽  
Contemporary World ◽  
Religious Extremism ◽  
The World ◽  
Professional Critics

Abstract: Wole Soyinka is a most significant figure in contemporary world literature. From the perspectives of the politics of postcolonial writings, perhaps the ultimate challenge of the complexity of Soyinka’s works and career lies in the fact that the metanarratives that imaginatively and discursively underwrote the great liberation movements of the twentieth century do not feature in his works in their conventional and familiar configurations. Overarching all the struggles waged by these movements is the struggle for self-representation as the existential and expressive roots of human freedom.The best examples of this structure in Soyinka’s theatre are A Dance of the Forests, Kongi’s Harvest, Madmen and Specialists and From Zia With Love. Soyinka’s critical essays also operate in a great variety of social and intellectual contexts and cover an extraordinary range of topics, including literary criticism and aesthetic theory, theatre and cultural history, political power and ideology, and, more recently religious extremism and nuclear pollution. One “form of attention” which has been influential in the reception of Soyinka’s works is that of professional critics, especially with regard to the institutionalisation of the academic study of Anglophone writings of the developing world in the second half of the twentieth century.

The Scale of Global Modernisms: Imperial, National, Regional, Local

PMLA ◽  
2016 ◽  
Vol 131 (5) ◽  
pp. 1372-1385 ◽  
Author(s):  
Harsha Ram
Keyword(s):  
World Literature ◽  
Singular System ◽  
World System ◽  
World Market ◽  
Modern World ◽  
Cultural Resources ◽  
Literary Scholarship ◽  
Contemporary World ◽  
Nation States ◽  
The World

One of the Principal Challenges Facing the Study of Global Modernisms, as of Any Transnational Cultural Phenomenon, is the question of scale. In declaring the contemporary world to be “one, and unequal,” several recent theorizations of world literature rest on the foundational assumption of a unified—albeit uneven—planetary scale (Moretti, “Conjectures” 56; see also Casanova 62-74; WREC 6-12). As such they model the dynamic of literary circulation across world regions according to the geographic distances, as well as the disproportionate access to socioeconomic and cultural resources, that separate and distinguish the world's centers from their peripheries. These distances, and the inequalities they generate, are perceived as the necessary by-products of two spatial logics, that of the expanding world market and that of the modern Westphalian system of sovereign and competing nation-states. To posit the modern world as a singular system has the undoubted merit of acknowledging the structural connectedness of its operative inequalities, arising from the territorial partition of the globe by the imperial powers during the final decades of the nineteenth century and from its simultaneous unification in the wake of accelerating trade and new infrastructures of transport and communication. Nevertheless, the premise of a singular modernity (Jameson 142) has been repeatedly challenged (Chakrabarty 6-16; Mitchell; Scott 113-15; Orsini). It has been faulted for its developmentalist logic, involving an implied or explicit adherence to the related assumptions of linear or stadial historicism and spatial diffusionism, which together reduce the negotiated impact of modernity on the world's far-flung regions to a process of top-down modernization originating in and imposed by the West. The force of this critique is blunted once the world system (Wallerstein; Hopkins et al.) is grasped as a profoundly uneven totality, allowing us to view the multiply differentiated space-times that coexist in the global present as produced by the imbalances constituting the world system as such (in literary scholarship, see Anderson, “Modernity”; Moretti, Modern Epic 50-52; Wollaeger 13-14; Lazarus 232-41, WREC 1-95; for corresponding debates in historiography and the social sciences, see Harootunian 62-63; Cooper 113-49; Chibber).

When Literary Relations End

2020 ◽  
Vol 5 (2) ◽  
pp. 278-297
Author(s):  
Jing Tsu
Keyword(s):  
Science Fiction ◽  
World Literature ◽  
Chinese Literature ◽  
Literary Aesthetics ◽  
Contemporary Chinese Literature ◽  
Contemporary World ◽  
Literary Space ◽  
The World ◽  
Literary Relations ◽  
Contemporary Chinese

Abstract Of the existing approaches to engaging with world literature, Pascale Casanova’s contribution remains the most prescient and relevant to the contemporary world. In this paper, I examine Casanova’s legacy in the context of contemporary Chinese literature – not only as the Sinophone, Chinese, or diasporic, but also in terms of the diverse genrification and creation of new types of media for literary inscription that border on obliterating the primacy of literary aesthetics. Is this a threat to the literary establishment, as it has been practiced, critiqued, and known in the European lineage? I argue that the literary space has never been in starker contrast with the world space, and that the emergence of a different “world normal” is challenging and fortifying Casanova’s legacy in deeply profound ways. To be examined, among others, are recent debates over world and Sinophone literature, science fiction, internet fiction, and diasporic writings.

Indonesian Literature’s Position in World Literature

TEKNOSASTIK ◽  
2018 ◽  
Vol 14 (2) ◽  
pp. 1
Author(s):  
Dina Amelia
Keyword(s):  
World Literature ◽  
The Other ◽  
National Literature ◽  
Western World ◽  
The World ◽  
The One ◽  
The Voice

There are two most inevitable issues on national literature, in this case Indonesian literature. First is the translation and the second is the standard of world literature. Can one speak for the other as a representative? Why is this representation matter? Does translation embody the voice of the represented? Without translation Indonesian literature cannot gain its recognition in world literature, yet, translation conveys the voice of other. In the case of production, publication, or distribution of Indonesian Literature to the world, translation works can be very beneficial. The position of Indonesian literature is as a part of world literature. The concept that the Western world should be the one who represent the subaltern can be overcome as long as the subaltern performs as the active speaker. If the subaltern remains silent then it means it allows the “representation” by the Western.

Comparing Comparisons: Political Implications of Different Notions of Difference

2016 ◽  
Vol 13 (1) ◽  
pp. 7-26
Author(s):  
Glenn Odom
Keyword(s):  
Cultural Studies ◽  
World Literature ◽  
The West ◽  
Political Debates ◽  
Political Implications ◽  
The World ◽  
Critical Attention ◽  
David Damrosch ◽  
Location Point

With the rise of the American world literature movement, questions surrounding the politics of comparative practice have become an object of critical attention. Taking China, Japan and the West as examples, the substantially different ideas of what comparison ought to do – as exhibited in comparative literary and cultural studies in each location – point to three distinct notions of the possible interactions between a given nation and the rest of the world. These contrasting ideas can be used to reread political debates over concrete juridical matters, thereby highlighting possible resolutions. This work follows the calls of Ming Xie and David Damrosch for a contextualization of different comparative practices around the globe.

Boatmen, Wastrels, and Demons: Figures of Literature

CounterText ◽  
2018 ◽  
Vol 4 (1) ◽  
pp. 30-56 ◽  
Author(s):  
Simona Sawhney
Keyword(s):  
Social Studies ◽  
World Literature ◽  
Literary Texts ◽  
Sanskrit Text ◽  
Modern Democracy ◽  
Political Debates ◽  
The World ◽  
National Literatures

Engaging some of the questions opened by Ranjan Ghosh's and J. Hillis Miller's book Thinking Literature Across Continents (2016), this essay begins by returning to Aijaz Ahmad's earlier invocation of World Literature as a project that, like the proletariat itself, must stand in an antithetical relation to the capitalism that produced it. It asks: is there an essential link between a certain idea of literature and a figure of the world? If we try to broach this link through Derrida's enigmatic and repeated reflections on the secret – a secret ‘shared’ by both literature and democracy – how would we grasp Derrida's insistence on the ‘Latinity’ of literature? The groundlessness of reading that we confront most vividly in our encounter with fictional texts is both intensified, and in a way, clarified, by new readings and questions posed by the emergence of new reading publics. The essay contends that rather than being taught as representatives of national literatures, literary texts in ‘World Literature’ courses should be read as sites where serious historical and political debates are staged – debates which, while being local, are the bearers of universal significance. Such readings can only take place if World Literature strengthens its connections with the disciplines Miller calls, in the book, Social Studies. Paying particular attention to the Hindi writer Premchand's last story ‘Kafan’, and a brief section from the Sanskrit text the Natyashastra, it argues that struggles over representation, over the staging of minoritised figures, are integral to fiction and precede the thinking of modern democracy.

Pelvic schwannoma

GYNECOLOGY ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 22 (5) ◽  
pp. 84-86
Author(s):  
Sergei P. Sinchikhin ◽  
Sarkis G. Magakyan ◽  
Oganes G. Magakyan
Keyword(s):  
Auditory Nerve ◽  
World Literature ◽  
Morphological Study ◽  
Clinical Observation ◽  
Nerve Trunk ◽  
Practical Case ◽  
Surgical Volume ◽  
The World ◽  
Brain And Spinal Cord ◽  
The Brain

Relevance.A neoplasm originated from the myelonic sheath of the nerve trunk is called neurinoma or neurilemmoma, neurinoma, schwannoglioma, schwannoma. This tumor can cause compression and dysfunction of adjacent tissues and organs. The most common are the auditory nerve neurinomas (1 case per 100 000 population per year), the brain and spinal cord neurinomas are rare. In the world literature, there is no information on the occurrences of this tumor in the pelvic region. Description.Presented below is a clinical observation of a 30-year-old patient who was scheduled for myomectomy. During laparoscopy, an unusual tumor of the small pelvis was found and radically removed. A morphological study allowed to identify the remote neoplasm as a neuroma. Conclusion.The presented practical case shows that any tumor can hide under a clinical mask of another disease. The qualification of the doctor performing laparoscopic myomectomy should be sufficient to carry out, if necessary, another surgical volume.

Twenty-First-Century Fiction

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Berthold Schoene
Keyword(s):  
World Literature ◽  
Power Relations ◽  
First Century ◽  
Wealth Accumulation ◽  
Essential Component ◽  
Imperial Power ◽  
The World ◽  
Twenty First Century ◽  
Globalized World ◽  
Global Relations

This chapter looks at how the contemporary British and Irish novel is becoming part of a new globalized world literature, which imagines the world as it manifests itself both within (‘glocally’) and outside nationalist demarcations. At its weakest, often against its own best intentions, this new cosmopolitan writing cannot but simply reinscribe the old imperial power relations. Or, it provides an essential component of the West’s ideological superstructure for globalization’s neoliberal business of rampant upward wealth accumulation. At its best, however, this newly emergent genre promotes a cosmopolitan ethics of justice, resistance. It also promotes dissent while working hard to expose and deconstruct the extant hegemonies and engaging in a radical imaginative recasting of global relations.

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