(Re)Staging the Postcolonial in the World: The Jaipur Literature Festival and the Pakistani Novel

2019 ◽  
Vol 71 (4) ◽  
pp. 333-356
Author(s):  
Sushil Sivaram
Keyword(s):  
South Asian ◽  
Literary History ◽  
World Literature ◽  
Salman Rushdie ◽  
Postcolonial Literature ◽  
Indian Literature ◽  
Literary Identity ◽  
The World ◽  
Competitive Model ◽  
Asian Context

Abstract This article reasons that the Jaipur Literature Festival between 2008 and 2011 attempted to institute via polemics, judgment, and celebration the category of the Pakistani novel in India by importing an alterity industry. By failing to contextualize alterity in a South Asian context, the festival reinforced a national, linguistic, and religious division between India and Pakistan. It produced a category like “Moonlight’s Children” as an “other” to an imagined Indian literature that is confused with a post–Salman Rushdie postcolonial and global anglophone canon. However, this analysis of the discourse produced at the festival by the discussants and the audience shows that a coconstituted South Asian literary history was consistently placed against a regionally competitive model. Importing alterity to produce an Indian or Pakistani literary identity was undermined by an attitude of disavowal toward the literary object and received categories like the global anglophone, postcolonial literature, and world literature. The author argues that this is not postcolonial resistance; rather, it is a trepidation to arrive at a conclusion, because to conclude is also to value, evaluate, and declare the existence of the “other” phantasmagoric literary identity and history.

The Center of the World

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
June Howard
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Literary History ◽  
World Literature ◽  
The United States ◽  
Local Color ◽  
American Literary History ◽  
The World ◽  
Literary Regionalism ◽  
Multiple Media ◽  
The One

The Center of the World: Regional Writing and the Puzzles of Place-Time is a study of literary regionalism. It focuses on but is not limited to fiction in the United States, also considering the place of the genre in world literature. It argues that regional writing shapes ways of imagining not only the neighborhood, the province, and nation, but also the world. It argues that thinking about place always entails imagining time. It demonstrates the importance of the figure of the schoolteacher and the one-room schoolhouse in local color writing and subsequent place-focused writing. These representations embody the contested relation between localities and the knowledge they produce, and books that carry metropolitan and cosmopolitan learning, in modernity. The book undertakes analysis of how concepts work across disciplines and in everyday discourse, coordinating that work with proposals for revising American literary history and close readings of particular authors’ work. Works from the nineteenth, twentieth, and twenty-first centuries are discussed, and the book’s analysis of the form is extended into multiple media.

scholarly journals Practices, Constructions and Deconstructions of “World Literature” and “Indian Literature” from the PEN All-India Centre to Arvind Krishna Mehrotra

2019 ◽  
Vol 4 (1) ◽  
pp. 82-106 ◽  
Author(s):  
Laetitia Zecchini
Keyword(s):  
World Literature ◽  
Indian Literature ◽  
Informal Network ◽  
The World ◽  
The 1960S

Abstract This essay explores two different ways by which ideas and “problems” of the “world,” “India,” “Indian literature,” and “world literature” were experienced, discussed, translated, imagined and remade in specific spaces like Bombay or journals such as The Indian PEN. I focus on one relatively formalized organization, the PEN All-India Centre, which was founded in Bombay in 1933 as the Indian branch of International PEN, and on a contemporary poet, Arvind Krishna Mehrotra, and the informal network of writers and artists close to him. Through the widely different agendas, practices, concerns, contexts and forms of writer collectivization which I outline in this essay, the PEN All-India Centre in the 1940s and 1950s, and the Bombay poets of the 1960s did try to eat the corners of the world and of world literature away. They aimed to break on the world stage, reclaimed an “India” that included what was non-Indian, and put forward, through translation and a cut-and-paste “collation” of the world and world literature, an idea of internationalism and interconnectedness where provincialism was the enemy. By discussing the situated, critical, and imaginative processes of reworlding that were at stake, and the struggles they gave rise to in the case of the PEN All-India Centre, I explore how these writers also put forward defiant practices of cosmopolitanism that reallocated the Eastern and the Western, the peripheral and the significant.

The Challenges of Writing a National Literary History in the Era of Transnationalism: Insights from a Peripheral Literary Space

Transilvania ◽  
2021 ◽  
pp. 14-21 ◽  
Author(s):  
Snejana Ung
Keyword(s):  
Literary Criticism ◽  
Literary History ◽  
World Literature ◽  
Literary Studies ◽  
Literary Historiography ◽  
The World ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Asymmetry ◽  
Romanian Literature ◽  
Literary System

It goes without saying that during the nineteenth and twentieth century literary historiography tries to define national identities. However, a methodological and paradigm shift occur at the beginning of the twenty-first century when, under the auspices of globalization and the emergence of world literature and transnational literary studies, literary historiography is re-thought as a collective and transnational project. Yet, the asymmetry of the world literary system affects literary historiography too. When it comes to this scholarly genre, the asymmetry is most visible in the fact that in the era of transnationalism, national histories are still written at the periphery. Given the aforementioned observation, this paper a) looks into the challenges of writing literary history in Romania in the age of world literature and transnational studies, and b) tries to explain why a national literary history is still needed and how it can change the way we think about Romanian literature. The starting point of this inquiry is represented by the publication of Mihai Iovănel’s Istoria literaturii române contemporane: 1990-2020 [History of Contemporary Romanian Literature: 1990-2020]. In the context of the ‘transnational turn’ in literary studies, the attempt to write relevant national histories in a peripheral literary space such as Romania is faced, in my view, with two major challenges: 1) the fact that transnationalism manifests itself differently at the periphery and 2) the tradition of Romanian literary criticism and history. The former refers to the fact that unlike central literatures, where transnationalism is shaped to a large extent by migrant writers (those who enter these literatures), in Romanian literature it comprises exiled or migrant writers (those who left Romania and not vice versa) and, to a lesser extent, the literatures written by ethnic minorities. A comparative approach can cast light on this difference. For example, while the thirteenth volume of The Oxford English Literary History is dedicated entirely to migrant and bicultural writers, transnational histories concerning the peripheries, such as History of the Literary Cultures of East-Central Europe, focus on multiple literary spaces and therefore have a different approach to dealing with transnationalism. The latter challenge is represented, as shown by Iovănel, by the long-lasting tradition of the “principle of aesthetic autonomism”, which persists even in post-communist Romania. In this regard, this paper aims to show that Iovănel’s History… overcomes the above-mentioned hindrances of literary criticism and succeeds in offering an image of Romanian literature not as confined to its national boundaries but as part of the world literary system. Along with other significant scholarly works on Romanian literature as and in world literature, this project is a significant step towards re-thinking Romanian literature as a “literature of the world” (Terian 2015).

World-Making Words, by Edith Eaton and Sui Sin Far

2018 ◽  
pp. 121-160
Author(s):  
June Howard
Keyword(s):  
North American ◽  
Literary History ◽  
World Literature ◽  
Sui Sin Far ◽  
American Literary History ◽  
The World ◽  
Literary Regionalism ◽  
Recent Addition ◽  
Edith Eaton

The fourth chapter of The Center of the World: Regional Writing and the Puzzles of Place-Time is titled “World-Making Words, by Edith Eaton and Sui Sin Far.” It considers the work of this doubly named author, a comparatively recent addition to the canon of literary regionalism. It offers a sketch of Eaton’s life and works, attending closely to recent research and discussing her place in North American literary history. It argues that the author’s success as “Sui Sin Far” depended on her connection to the global locality “Chinatown,” but also that she claims multiple national literatures and writes herself into a world literature beyond their horizons.

Eurafrasiachronologies

2016 ◽  
Vol 1 (1) ◽  
pp. 17-28
Author(s):  
Alexander Beecroft
Keyword(s):  
Literary History ◽  
World Literature ◽  
Temporal Dimension ◽  
Old World ◽  
The World ◽  
History Of ◽  
Literary Histories ◽  
Literature Theory

Critical accounts of World Literature theory often speak of the dangers of “Eurochronology,” of the tendency to impose the narrative (and teleology) of the history of European cultures upon other regions of the world. This temporal dimension of Eurocentrism is of course to be avoided assiduously. At the same time, a synthetic reading of the literary histories of many of the larger cultures of premodern Eurasia suggests that there may in fact be room for a “Eurasiachronology,” or indeed a “Eurafrasiachronology,” which would identify parallels and connections across the entire so-called “Old World,” and offer a chronological basis for thinking about world literary history in a comparative way.

All or Nothing: Reading Franco Moretti Reading

2016 ◽  
Vol 24 (3) ◽  
pp. 185-205 ◽  
Author(s):  
Carolyn Lesjak
Keyword(s):  
Literary History ◽  
World Literature ◽  
Digital Technologies ◽  
Distant Reading ◽  
New Methods ◽  
The World ◽  
Dialectical Relationship ◽  
Bourgeois Culture ◽  
Fredric Jameson ◽  
The Relationship

Published in tandem in 2013, Franco Moretti’s two most recent books continue his on-going project to develop radical new methods of literary history and to propose new formulations and frameworks for understanding the relationship between form and history and form and ideology. Bringing together the series of essays through which he developed his concept of distant reading, his collection of the same name argues for a ‘falsifiable criticism’ grounded in the data now available through digital technologies and for the concept of a ‘world literature’ that it is the task of comparatists to theorise. His book on the bourgeois – characterised by Moretti as a project of an entirely different nature – finds in the minutiae of language the construction of a bourgeois culture in which the figure of the bourgeois himself ultimately disappears. Contra Moretti, the review contends that these books are deeply interrelated and that the limits of Moretti’s method are to be found specifically in the issues of scale raised by reading these two works in dialectical relationship to each other. In particular, while Moretti importantly forces us to confront in world literature what Fredric Jameson refers to as the ‘scandal of multiplicity’, his method is unable, in the end, to account for a reading of the world in literature in which both the empirical fact of a dead history and the allegorical possibility of another history already in the making can be found.

Jesus’ Encounter with a Woman at the Well: A South Asian Perspective

2018 ◽  
Vol 46 (4) ◽  
pp. 363-373
Author(s):  
Yousaf Sadiq
Keyword(s):  
South Asian ◽  
Gospel Of John ◽  
First Century ◽  
Eternal Life ◽  
Cultural Behavior ◽  
Saving Plan ◽  
The Bible ◽  
The World ◽  
Asian Context ◽  
And Gender

The water of life discourse in the Gospel of John 4 has been of great interest and theological importance to readers of the Bible. This, one of the best-known Bible passages, highlights profound and significant teaching for Christians, which includes but is not limited to: the promised Messiah; God’s saving plan for the world; sovereign grace; living water; eternal life; witnessing for Christ and worshipping God in Spirit and truth. In this article, an attempt has been made to read the encounter through South Asian eyes by placing the sociocultural aspects of the narrative into a present-day South Asian context. Moreover, some applications for Jesus’ counter-cultural behavior are discussed. The article particularly focuses on caste and gender complexities in order to bring out the value of the passage from a South Asian perspective in the twenty-first century.1

scholarly journals Transnational literary history? Dutch-speaking writers in Karel van het Reve’s ‘ventistic’ Geschiedenis van de Russische Literatuur [History of Russian Literature]

Werkwinkel ◽  
2016 ◽  
Vol 11 (2) ◽  
pp. 27-48
Author(s):  
Michel De Dobbeleer
Keyword(s):  
Comparative Literature ◽  
Literary History ◽  
World Literature ◽  
Russian Literature ◽  
Literary Historiography ◽  
The World ◽  
History Of

Abstract In his Geschiedenis van de Russische literatuur [History of Russian Literature, 1985] the famous Dutch Slavist and essayist Karel van het Reve, links Russian writers, such as Gavriil Derzhavin and Aleksei Pisemskii to Dutch and Flemish ones, such as Vondel and Willem Elsschot. Further on, in the chapter on Lev Tolstoi, Multatuli’s Max Havelaar is cited, although it is clear from the start that none of these Dutch-speaking authors could have had any influence on the Russian writers to whom Van het Reve devotes his colourful chapters. In this article I explore the ‘transnational’ potential of Van het Reve’s self-willed literary-historiographical approach. It turns out that Van het Reve mentions most of these Dutch-speaking authors rather to indicate - directly or indirectly - that he (dis)likes them, than to contribute to the achievements of comparative literature. Both in his choice of authors and his way of practicing literary historiography Van het Reve manifests himself as a proponent of the vent (cf. the well-known vorm of vent or manner or man discussion). Nevertheless, some of his observations could be considered as transnational constellations (in the world-literature sense of the term).

Language Endangerment in South Asia

Patan Pragya ◽  
2019 ◽  
Vol 5 (1) ◽  
pp. 63-74
Author(s):  
Gokarna Prasad Gyanwali
Keyword(s):  
South Asian ◽  
Population Data ◽  
Cultural Knowledge ◽  
Minority Languages ◽  
Language Endangerment ◽  
The World ◽  
Critical Issues ◽  
Asian Context ◽  
And Function ◽  
Further Development

Language endangerment is the very critical issues of 21st century because the extinction of each language results in the irrecoverable loss of unique expression of the human experience and the culture of the world. Every time a language dies, we have less evidence for understanding patterns in the structure and function of human languages, human prehistory and the maintenance of the world’s diverse ecosystems. Language is thus essential for the ability to express cultural knowledge, the preservation and further development of the culture. In the world, 500 languages are spoken by less than 100 peoples and 96% of the worlds languages are spoken only 4% of the world’s population. Data shows that all most all the minority languages of world are in endangered and critical situation and not becoming to the culture transmitter. This paper will explain the process, stages, paradigms, as well as the language endangerment in global and in South Asian context.

scholarly journals Reconsidering Islam in a South Asian Context

2010 ◽  
Vol 27 (3) ◽  
pp. 120-122
Author(s):  
Francis Robinson
Keyword(s):  
South Asian ◽  
Public Utility ◽  
Customary Law ◽  
Additional Source ◽  
Making Sense ◽  
Islamic Tradition ◽  
The World ◽  
Western Scholarship ◽  
The Rich ◽  
Asian Context

This is an ambitious book, as M. Reza Pirbhai attempts to lift our understandingof Islam in South Asia, or indeed of Islam anywhere, both out ofthe essentializing straitjacket in which western Orientalist scholarship hasplaced it and out of a similar straitjacket in which many modern Muslims,often influenced by western scholarship, have also placed it. He is concernedto demonstrate that what he calls “doctrinal Islam” ismultidisciplinary and variable within disciplines. Theology includes conceptsof immanent monism, transcendental monism, monotheism andabsolute transcendentalism. Jurisprudence is rooted in four Sunni and twoShi`a schools, most accepting concepts of independent reasoning andconsensus, some extending to notions of public utility, equity and the virtualinclusion of customary law as an additional source of the shari`a.Mysticism ranges from concepts included in theology and jurisprudenceto the addition of anti-nomian and latitudinarian doctrines…. (pp. 337-38)The rich possibilities of the Islamic tradition are set before us – indeed,the potential for there to be many “Islams.” In making sense of these possibilities,he brings forward two particular worldviews: the “Sober Path”and the “Intoxicated Way.” The former divides the world into “Muslim”and “non-Muslim” and has its distinctive forms of hospitality and hostilityto the resources it finds in any locality. The latter also contains a range ofapproaches, some intersecting with the sober path and others leading on toantinomian or latitudinarian ground. What is crucial, he insists, is that allremain equally valid expressions of doctrinal Islam, provided that no valuejudgment is made about what is orthodox Islam ...

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