Across the Global South, language remains a key site where power is enacted, identities are negotiated, and resistance is articulated. From colonial histories to the present resurgence of far-right politics, linguistic hierarchies have been mobilized to enforce cultural homogeneity, erase minority voices, and consolidate nationalist ideologies. This seminar invites papers that examine how literary, cinematic, and cultural texts respond to these dynamics, and how they generate alternative imaginaries of language—as hybridity, as resistance, and as world-making practice.

The weaponization of language is not merely a relic of colonial history but a pressing reality today. In contexts such as recent conflicts over the status of Bengali in India, far-right movements seek to subsume regional languages under monolingual nationalist agendas, provoking cultural mobilizations and raising alarms about authoritarian control. Similar struggles over language, translation, and identity reverberate worldwide, from debates about Indigenous languages in Latin America to script politics in North Africa and the marginalization of creole languages in the Caribbean.

In this context, we must ask ourselves the following question: 
    •    How do cultural texts confront policies of linguistic homogenization enforced by nationalist regimes?
    •    What new comparative insights emerge when we link these struggles across different geographies and histories?
    •    How might Global South perspectives on linguistic politics challenge the Eurocentric foundations of Comparative Literature itself?

With these in mind, we welcome papers for this seminar which include but are not limited to the following topics: 
    •    Minor languages and literary resistance under far-right or authoritarian contexts
    •    Translation as a site of power, mediation, and counter-discourse
    •    Script and orthography as terrains of ideological struggle
    •    Digital media and the algorithmic amplification or subversion of linguistic nationalism
    •    Creole and hybrid languages as anti-hegemonic cultural formations
    •    Poetics of multilingualism, code-switching, and minoritized speech in literature
    •    Comparative case studies that bring multiple Global South geographies into dialogue

By centering language politics within Global South contexts, this seminar also intervenes in the ongoing decolonial turn in Comparative Literature. It invites participants to rethink the discipline’s historical hierarchies of language and to imagine comparative practices grounded in multipolar, decolonial epistemologies. The seminar will foster sustained dialogue on how language, as both an instrument of oppression and a medium of resistance, reshapes our understanding of literature, politics, and comparison itself.