USA Africa Dialogue Series - Approaches to World Literature: Questions of Critical Methods Beyond Eurocentrism

Approaches to World Literature: Questions of Critical Methods Beyond Eurocentrism

Approaches to World Literature: Questions of Critical Methods Beyond Eurocentrism

Approaches to World Literature: Questions of Critical Method and Agency of the Non-European

Date: 10 June 2011Time: All Day

Finishes: 11 June 2011Time: All Day

Venue: Russell Square: College Buildings

Type of Event: Workshop

Series: CCLPS Research Workshop

Workshop Rationale

In current debates on "world literature", diffusionist and economicist models have so far held sway (Damrosch, Moretti, Casanova). Based on understandings of time and geographical space derived from Wallerstein's theory of "world-system", these models view time and history as singular and linear, as in classic theories of modernity, and space as divided between metropolitan centres and peripheries, and use vocabularies of import and export, exchange and accumulation. As a result, literatures in Asian and African languages are deemed "local", "peripheral", "poor" or "underdeveloped". They are literatures that "have not made it" onto the world stage, their distance from the "world reader" a function of their own parochialism.  And even if some of these critics (Moretti, Casanova) have "denounced" the world literary system as it is as "one and unequal" so as to "empower" "marginal" literatures, the models they use are so Eurocentric and poor in history and geography that they are of little use to us.

The way we view world literature has a lot to do with the way we view the world. We believe that at SOAS we can use our expertise and sensibility to non-Eurocentric views of the world to put forward non-Eurocentric views of world literature that account for the multiple layers and networks of production and circulation of the literary worlds we are familiar with.

This workshop will explore the viability of current critical work and propositions related to the definition and study of 'World Literature'.  The thematics laid out for critical investigation have for their focus questions of the agency of the non-European as articulated and put forth in major current theories of world literature and the new comparative literature. The workshop will constitute the first in a series of revisionist workshops undertaken by members of the recently established SOAS Centre for Cultural, Literary and Postcolonial Studies (CCLPS), and ranging over the literatures of Asia, Africa and The Middle East. The workshops will aim to investigate systematically and in-depth the viability of existent critical methodologies related to the study of non-European traditions, their underpinning critical and theoretical assumptions, relevant issues of interdisciplinarity and the ultimate need for textual analytic modalities that would complement and enrich methods commonly borrowed from the social sciences. These workshops will also form the genesis of a series of envisioned publication series. For each workshop one or two leading critics and/or theorists, whose work will form the focus of the critical investigations by CCLPS members, will be invited.

Contact:  

• Francesca Orsini, fo@soas.ac.uk
• Karima Laachir, kl19@soas.ac.uk
• Ayman El-Desouky, ad48@soas.ac.uk

Research questions:

• How can the field of world literature be opened towards more pluralistic understandings of literature, cultures and nations?
• How can we bridge the gap between the local and the global in world literature?
• How can we read African and Asian literatures without homogenizing or marginalizing them?
• How can we read the multiple layers of production and circulation of African and Asian literatures?
• How far does the geographical model of world systems, with centres and peripheries, work for literature? Do we need other, multiple geographical maps?
• And what about models of literary time? Casanova works around notions of earliness and lateness that presuppose a single time-line. What other models of time can be more sensitive and useful to our purpose?

Proposed partiticipants:

• Rey Chow (Andrew Mellon Professor in the Humanities, Brown University)
• Karin Barber (Centre of West African Studies, University of Birmingham)
• Wail Hassan (Assistant Professor of Comparative & World Literature, University of Illinois)
• S. Shankar (Associate Professor of English, University of Hawaii at Manoa)
• Sascha Ebeling (Assistant Professor of Tamil Literature, University of Chicago)
• Shital Pravinchandra (Assistant Professor of English, Yale University) The South Asian short story and world literature
• Margaret Hillenbrand (Lecturer in Chinese, University of Oxford)
• Christina Phillips (Lecturer in Arabic literature, University of Exeter)
• Stephen Quirke (Professor in Egyptology, UCL)
• Ayman El-Desouky (Lecturer in Arabic and Comparative Literature, SOAS)
• Karima Laachir (Lecturer in Literary and Cultural Studies, SOAS)
• Rossella Ferrari (Lecturer in Modern Chinese Culture and Language, SOAS)
• Grace Koh (Lecturer in Korean Literature, SOAS)
• Mpalive Hangson-Msiska (Reader in English and the Humanities, Birckbeck College)
• Francesca Orsini (Reader in the Literatures of North India, SOAS) More than one world: layered geographies of literature

Organiser: Centre for Cultural, Literary and Postcolonial Studies (CCLPS)

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