The World of World Literatures: Practices, Pedagogies, and Possibilities
Description
In recent decades, 'World Literature' has been revitalized, emerging as a field of critical exploration and debate, and has become an academic discipline and subject of contestation. In this context, Spivak’s Death of a Discipline marks a key methodological shift: “There are, of course, many institutional obstacles… institutional fear on both sides. Disciplinary fear” (19). Spivak advocates for dismantling colonial epistemologies in “Area Studies/Comparative Literature” (15), emphasizing an ethical connection with the subaltern. She states, “What we are witnessing in the postcolonial and globalizing world is a return of the demographic, rather than the territorial” (15), referencing French, Portuguese, and Spanish influences in Africa and Latin America, questioning British colonial impacts that erased indigenous languages, thus illustrating the “irony of globalization” (16). As a result, the questions that appear are: What is “world” in World Literature? Does it offer a vision for a more equitable and interconnected world? Or does it reinforce existing inequalities or foster a sense of shared planetary belonging?
This seminar challenges the assumptions of 'World Literature' within a critical cultural and philosophical framework, extending critiques by Moretti and Damrosch; Cheah also urges us to move beyond viewing the world as a spatial object of globalization. Furthermore, we can build on models that engage with Édouard Glissant’s call for a "poetics of relation" and "right to opacity," or Casanova’s mapping of the unequal in the World Republic of Letters. This involves rethinking canonical models by focusing on processes driven by displacement, migration, and multilingual circulation, echoing Tagore’s idea of Vishwa Sahitya and Goethe's Weltliteratur.
Grounded in these theoretical explorations, this seminar seeks to transcend established frameworks by examining 'World Literature' through translation, minor and oral traditions, endangered scripts and non-alphabetic systems, ecology, regional philosophies, socio-economic connections, and archipelagic imaginaries. By bridging disciplinary and geopolitical boundaries, we aim to develop approaches to understand 'World Literature' as a dynamic and multifaceted field of literary creation, distribution, and resistance, incorporating theories, case studies, historical analysis, and creative works, including films, documentaries, and other visual and literary expressions.
Abstracts are not limited to the following topics:
Post/decolonial and World Literature: State, Ecology, and Multiculturalism
Translatability and Untranslatability: Decolonizing Translation
Methodology and Pedagogies of Alterity to engage the world
Contribution of Reflective Traditions in Language, Thought, and Action
The “Other” and Identity Politics in World Literature
Global Cinema, Oral and performance-based literary traditions
Contact: [email protected] and [email protected]
Schedule
Papers
Speaker Bio
Anas Abu Samhan is a Palestinian writer, translator, and researcher from Gaza. He works as Research and Administrative Coordinator at the Arab Center for Research and Policy Studies, as part of the foundational team of the Encyclopedia Arabica project. Author of Room 13 and Other Stories, he has translated works including David Damrosch’s What Is World Literature?, Khushwant Singh’s Train to Pakistan, and Brian Williams’ The Philosophy of Coffee.
Speaker Bio
Meezan Eglen is currently a Course Director and Doctoral Candidate in the Faculty of Education at York University. She comes to her doctoral students after decades of international teaching and materials development in the field of applied linguistics. Locations include Northeast Asia, the UK, the Levant, and the Arab Gulf. Interests include ethical philosophy, deconstruction, and literature in translation.
Speaker Bio
Laura Gerday holds a PhD degree in English linguistics and literary studies and is a member of the Centre for Teaching and Research in Postcolonial Studies (CEREP) at the University of Liège, Belgium. In November 2024, she publicly defended her thesis, entitled "Where Does the 'Postcolonial' Stand in Twenty-First-Century 'Global' English Linguistics and Anglophone Literary Studies? An Analysis of the Concepts of Variety (of English) and World (Literature)".
Speaker Bio
Duncan McColl Chesney is a Professor of Comparative Literature in the Department of Foreign Languages and Literatures of National Taiwan University in Taipei. He has a PhD in Comparative Literature from Yale University and has published articles on Proust, Faulkner, Joyce, Beckett, Kafka, Coetzee, Saramago, Handke, and Ngugi Wa Thiong'o and Christine Brooke-Rose. He is currently working on a book project on Faulkner and World Literature.
Papers
Speaker Bio
Wei Zhao is currently a graduate student in East Asian Studies at Yale University. His research interests include critical translation and area studies, modern East Asian and European literature and culture, postcolonial criticism and a transnational reception of "critical theories" .
Speaker Bio
Abdelrahman Abuabed is a writer and researcher in adab humanities specializing in comparative literatures in Arabic, Persian, Hebrew and English, and focusing his interests on epistemology and the literary and aesthetic theory. His publications include “Place, Time, and the Other in ‘Life Writings’,” “Brother-Sister Psychic Duality in Folktales,” and “Al-Jāḥiẓ’s Kitāb al-Ḥayawān: Between Signification and the Inference of Wisdom.”
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Speaker Bio
David Rozotto is Associate Professor at the University of Waterloo, Canada. He specializes in Central American narrative and has mobilized the results of his research through academic journals and symposia. He has published two monographs, three collective volumes and two book-length translations. He is currently working on a collective volume on (post)conflict Central American cultural productions and an anthology of the post-conflict Central American short story.
Speaker Bio
Wari Gálvez Rivas is a Peruvian scholar, creative writer, and filmmaker. He holds a Master degree in Hispanic American Literature from the Pontifical Catholic University of Peru PUCP and he’s currently a Ph.D. candidate at University of South of Carolina. His fields of research are Anglophone African literature, Francophone African literature, English literature, French literature, Spanish and Latin American literatures.
Speaker Bio
Dr Rajni Mujral works as Assistant Professor in the Department of Literature and Languages, School of Liberal Arts and Social Sciences, SRM University AP, India. Her doctoral research is on Mikhail Bakhtin in the literary context. She has been a participant of various interdisciplinary research programs and has received national and international fellowships. She has published on Salman Rushdie, storytelling and Carnival/grotesque and disability.
Speaker Bio
Arunav Das is a PhD scholar and a GTA in the Department of English at the University of South Carolina, Columbia. He completed his Master of Arts in World Literature at Nalanda University as an ICCR scholar. His areas of interest include world and postcolonial literature, film studies, poetry, history, cultural studies, philosophy, and literary criticism. Besides his academic career, he is an independent filmmaker. Currently working on two documentary projects in India and Bangladesh.
Papers
Speaker Bio
Amrita Ghosh is pursuing English at Visva-Bharati University, Santiniketan. Her research interests include gender studies, Dalit literature, queer theory, and Indian literary traditions. She has presented papers at Sister Nivedita University and the EPHAM conference. Her current research explores how Bhakti traditions in Bengal encode gender fluidity and subversive theologies, contributing to broader conversations on queer and trans religiosities in South Asia.
Speaker Bio
Ankit Jaiswal is a Research Scholar at the Department of English, Chaudhary Charan Singh University (CCS University), Meerut, Uttar Pradesh, India. Currently working as Assistant Professor(Guest)-Department of English, Deen Dayal Upadhyaya College, University of Delhi. His areas of interest include Diaspora Studies, Postcolonial Studies, and World Literature
Speaker Bio
K.J. Carlson (she/her) is a poet, visual artist, and independent scholar currently working at Yale University in New Haven, USA. Her recent work juxtaposes individual consciousness with global injustices. Having an MA from the New School for Social Research in New York, NY, she has lived, worked and studied internationally in Cyprus, Turkey, and India. Her work has been featured in International Union of Anthropological and Ethnological Sciences and the New York Review of Books.