WE are Dalit History

Life writings had time and again been used as source material for historical research both in the West and the various literary cultures of South Asia. Considering the absence and a deliberate, socially conditioned erasure of Dalit history from the mainstream narratives of Indian historiography, some scholars have introduced the notion of viewing Dalit life writings as exercises in history writing. This article explores several Dalit autobiographies as instances of engagement with the process of constructing history of Dalit communities in India. Starting from this premise, it undertakes a preliminary analysis of various narrative strategies employed in Hindi autobiographies by Dalit authors in the hope of revealing the nature of their engagements with India’s past and present. The study presented in this paper is based on four relevant examples of prose in Hindi—by Kausalya Baisantri, Sushila Takbhaure, Omprakash Valmiki, and Sheoraj Singh Bechain.

Running In (and Out) the Family Postcolonial Family Novels in Perspective

The genre of the family novel can be identified in many postcolonial literary cultures. Initially, it was often read as an example of “national allegory” (Jameson 1986), thus considering family narrative in a tight relationship with postcolonial nation-building, but this theoretical framework has been later criticised from different perspectives, ranging from post-national to feminist critiques. Furthermore, the genre of the postcolonial family novel has been refashioned due to the emergence of diasporic narratives, leading to the diffusion of the “postcolonial fictions of adoption” (McLeod 2006). Nowadays, the high competition in the global literary market – namely, with family novels and sagas in the US literary market – drives this genre towards highly individualised, as well as hybridised, outcomes. While focusing, in particular, on The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao by Junot Díaz and Lara ([1997] 2009) by Bernardine Evaristo, this survey of family novels across different literary traditions aims to show the intrinsic porosity, as well as the strenuous resistance, of the genre.

Nathalie Op de Beeck (red.), Literary Cultures and Twenty-First-Century Childhoods

Review/Recension

Women's fan writing and transformative works in eleventh-century Japan

This exploration of the literary cultures of eleventh-century Japan analyzes the ways in which the writing and reading practices of the period resemble those of modern transformative fan communities. Studying the defining fictional text of this era, The Tale of Genji by Murasaki Shikibu (ca. 1021), within the framework of fan studies demonstrates how existing so-called canonical material was transformed into a vehicle for female-centric reimaginings of dominant narratives. The circumstances of the work's authorship and its initial reception are examined via the author's own diary and The Sarashina Diary (ca. 1059), a memoir written by an early reader of the Genji, providing insight into both individual fan identity and the extensive female-led fan communities of the period.

“My Unwritten Novel”: The Long Poems of Gajanan Madhav Muktibodh between Genre and Form

The long poems of the Hindi poet Gajanan Madhav Muktibodh (1917–64) present a series of fantastic narratives, in which a nameless speaker journeys through a fantastic landscape. These works, often analyzed solely in terms of a supposed mythic, romantic structure, should be considered as a response to formal problems of the novel and the lyric in midcentury Hindi literature. Despite acknowledging these long poems as his most important contribution, literary critics display a marked discomfort with what they see as their excesses. Muktibodh’s writings, however, reflect his substantive consideration of the problems of narrative poetry. In Muktibodh’s most famous work, “Aṁdhere meṁ” (“In the Dark”), the long poem’s distinct formal structure is deployed to produce the disjointed paratactic narratives that typify Muktibodh’s work. Furthermore, this poetic structure is crucially influenced by free verse poetics in Marathi, making clear that any consideration of modern Hindi literature must take into account the complex interrelationships of literary cultures in South Asia. Thus, Muktibodh’s long poem prompts a reconsideration of the role of genre and form in our understanding of South Asian literary cultures and their engagements with the world.

Questioni di metodo: sulla differenza fra gerarchizzare e connettere

The crisis of Comparative Literature is a fact. Methodologically speaking, the trees of knowledge as hierarchical structures that made possible to understand universal literature as a balance of counterweights and mutual dependencies have collapsed. In the last thirty years, we are witnessing a change of epistemological paradigm. The construction of large self-sufficient cultures is giving way to a world based on communication and the ability to transmit knowledge. Weltliteratur is nothing more than a huge corpus of works that constantly interact and transform under the most diverse influences. These changes and their theoretical implications influenced notably the study and the relations between the literary cultures of the Iberian Peninsula.

Évolution du phénomène de traduction dans le domaine littéraire de langue bretonne

Arguing that the concept of littérature-monde conceals unequal relations between literary cultures, this article examines the socio-economic contexts of literary translation from and into Breton from the fifteenth to the twenty-first century. The value of translation across the corpus of 1025 texts lies primarily in creating intercultural relationships and promoting cultural diversity. Translation into Breton represents a vital defence of a language with dwindling speaker numbers: in the late 1970s it increases dramatically, with littérature de jeunesse spearheading a change in state policy allowing regional languages to be taught in schools. Yet translation can also reinforce an existing power imbalance, highlighting the central role played by French in the linguistic and literary construction of Breton society. Poetry, songs and contes translated from Breton often perpetuate stereotypes of a bardic, oral culture, while nationalist writers reject self-translation into French as capitulation before the dominant culture. Since the 1980s, many have chosen to bypass French by translating into languages such as Welsh, Scottish, Irish or Catalan, creating a network of minority literatures. Since the market for Breton translation is so small, however, such texts serve as valuable identity markers, a symbolic, affective force articulating a quest for socio-political legitimacy via literature.