"In recent months, Ahdaf Soueif and Alaa al-Aswany, among other Egyptian authors, have been found on the barricades of Cairo. Such a close and perilous involvement of writers in national upheavals may surprise many contemporary readers in the west, who are accustomed to think of novelists as diffident explorers of the inner life – people very rarely persuaded to engage with public events. Literature today seems to emerge from an apolitical and borderless cosmopolis. Even the mildly adversarial idea of the "postcolonial" that emerged in the 1980s, when authors from Britain's former colonial possessions appeared to be "writing back" to the imperial centre, has been blunted. The announcement this month that the Man Booker, a literary prize made distinctive by its Indian, South African, Irish, Scottish and Australian winners, will henceforth be open to American novels is one more sign of the steady erasure of national and historical specificity/"
"In many ways, the postcolonial literatures of Asia and Africa came to be conflated with the output of what the philosopher Kwame Anthony Appiah has called a "
comprador intelligentsia": "a relatively small, Western-style, Western-trained group of writers and thinkers who mediate the trade in cultural commodities of world capitalism at the periphery". Their easy accessibility in the western metropolis, and eager credentialing by its publishers and academics, explains why the category of "world literature", while facilitating much unmemorable writing, has excluded the many literatures of Asia and Africa that are not translated into European languages or exported to the west."
"Large economic and demographic shifts since the 1980s have brought a new generation of writers to the fore, besides spurring the rapid growth of such genres as mystery, science fiction and – in India, at least – "mythological thriller". A growing Indian readership today sustains much outstanding and un-exportable writing in English as well as indigenous languages. Readings, writing workshops and panel discussions in Pakistan, Bangladesh and Nigeria draw immense crowds – of aspiring writers and serious readers as well as celebrity-spotters. One upshot of this flaring of energy and ambition in places long considered hopeless or stagnant is that the globalised Asian and African intelligentsia, once programmed to boost the west's most flattering self-images, is now politically more recalcitrant and internally diverse."
- Pankaj Mishra, writing in FT.
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- Ikhide
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