South-South Exchanges

This article addresses circulation and exchange in the Global South by examining the case of Biblioteca Ayacucho (1973), a transnational collection of over 500 books from several Latin American countries. Conceived as an “instrument for Latin American integration,” Ayachucho sought to connect the region by assembling and disseminating its diverse cultural and intellectual traditions. I discuss Ayacucho’s strategies of transnationalization which, in addition to book publishing, also relied on networks of intellectual collaboration and exchange. Focusing on its Brazilian titles, I argue that Ayacucho articulates a model of world literature that employs a contextually grounded yet transnationally based framework. By engaging Latin American specialists and relying on local scholarship, Ayacucho offers an inclusive model of world literature that allies both distant and close reading in the construction of a transnational literature. As such, it defies established assumptions about literary circulation and center-based conceptions of world literature.

Changing Climate and Reparatory Justice

In this chapter, the author draws on transnational literature on displacement by challenging its overemphasis on identities. In contrast, it argues for a deeper engagement of new mobility patterns and other routes that have emerged in localities often situated apart that have not been fully analysed together thus far. Further, an analysis of consequence of neoliberal policies through the use of civil society organisations (CSOs) versus a more effective use of the politics of decentralization contributes to increasing the understanding of both the mechanisms that reproduce (mis)management of resources and the constant marginalisation of constructive endogenous forces to address reparatory justice under the threat of climate change. From Abricots (Haiti) to Beirut (Lebanon), putting in dialogue regions that barely interact in the literature is intended to motivate future studies on the emerging connections between memory, long-distance civic engagement, South-South cooperation, and claims for restorative climate justice.

Transnational Identity in Indra Bahadur Rai’s Selected Short Stories

Are the people of Nepali origin who are born in India and live there transnational? This is a piercing question in transnational discourses in Nepal and India these days. But its answer is clear once we take the help of the concept of transnationalism: they are transnational Nepalis living in India. This reality is further clarified with the studies on Indra Bahadur Rai’s short stories. Almost all the characters in his stories are the people of Nepali origin living in Darjeeling. They are unhappy there and always behave like the temporary residents of the place. Most of his stories deal with the life of these people in relation with their search for the origin and related physical and psychological journeys. Even the images, symbols and settings used in the stories connect themselves with the idea of journey and the problems of settlements. This article deals with the same aspects of his collection of stories entitled Pratinidhi Kathaa [Representative Stories]. The stories are analyzed with the help of interpretive methodology and use of Steven Vertovec and Jenine Dahinden’s ideas of transnationalism. John McLeod, Rebecca L. Walkowitz, Roland Végső and Winfried Fluck’s ideas of transnational literature are used as the basic concepts in analysis.

Border Crossing and Transculturation in Tahir Shah’s The Caliph’s House

This article examines the construction of transcultural identity as it results from the process of border crossing in Tahir Shah’s The Caliph’s House: A Year in Casablanca (2007. London: Bantam Books). Whereas mobility is mostly characterized by the movement from north to south, The Caliph’s House describes an inverted motion from England to Casablanca in search for belonging. With his roots in Afganistan and historical ties with Morocco, Tahir Shah provides new narrative lines that delve into questions of alterity, mobility, and negotiating difference when crossing borders. With this in mind, I aim to show how alterity is refracted within the migrant’s identity. In so doing, I seek to clarify how this refraction helps in producing forms of selves that recognize all notions of silences and transform them metonymically into moments of conversation. With the help of Stephen Clingman’s theory on transnational literature, I will show that integration can be achieved successfully when difference is negotiated as part of the process of bordering.

‘Pens that confound the label of citizenship’: self-translations and literary identities

The linguistic and cultural identity of transnational writers who choose to write in an adopted language or to self-translate, has gained increasing interest among researchers over the last decade. Approaches to the topic have ranged from textual analyses of translingual narratives and language memoirs to more ontological investigations of the processes of identity-formation in transcultural frameworks. Acknowledging that there is no one-to-one correspondence between linguistic units and ethnic, social or cultural formations, this paper considers the relationship between the literary practices of contemporary translingual writers and the role of language both in the formation of personal identities and in the reconfiguration of constructions of national identity and literary belonging. Specifically, I examine how two contemporary women writers, Francesca Marciano and Jhumpa Lahiri, who each represent a remarkable case of self-conscious linguistic transformation, interrogate the traditional construct of a monolingual, mono-ethnic and mono-cultural national identity. I argue that their autofictions reflect the multilingual and transcultural reality of contemporary transnational literature and instantiate broader issues connected with the definition, categorisation and consequent evaluation of literary canons and literary citizenship.

Cosmopolitanism, Literary Nationalisms and Linguistic Activism

This article explores the relationship between cosmopolitanism and nationalism through the example of a transnational literature written in an African language, Pulaar, considered from a multi-located perspective. It seeks to understand to what extent a linguistically based transnational literary nationalism may be considered a form of “bottom-up cosmopolitanism” (Appadurai) that carries social aspirations. In the context of globalization, movements of linguistic revitalisation continue to grow and language has become a veritable tool for social action. This essay argues that, from a methodological standpoint, a more focused attention to the local and to translocal ties allows us to bring to light the connectivity of literature and its tendency to challenge institutionalized global literary geographies.

Reinventing Lives: A Conversation with Steven Carroll

Steven Carroll is the author of twelve novels, including two series; one based around his family background in Glenroy in suburban Melbourne, and the other inspired by T.S. Eliot’s Four Quartets. I have admired Steven’s work ever since I reviewed The Time We Have Taken, his 2007 Miles Franklin Award winning novel, for the very first issue of Transnational Literature. This was the third of the ‘Glenroy’ novels – there are now six in that series, the latest being The Year of the Beast (2019), based on the experiences of his grandmother in Melbourne in 1917.Recently, when catching up on some long-overdue reading, I picked up A World of Other People (2013), the second of the Eliot novels, to discover that, although it is never made explicit in the book, the heroine is a reinvented version of another of my favourite writers, Iris Murdoch. I immediately decided it was time to travel to Melbourne (on the Overland train, which Steven’s father used to drive) to interview him.We met in late January 2019 in bustling Lygon Street, Carlton, where it was too noisy to record our conversation. We found a quiet, shady table nearby on the Melbourne University campus and talked for an hour, till the heat drove us back to Lygon Street to continue chatting over a cup of tea.