From Goethe’s Weltliteratur to contemporary debates on decoloniality and the global South, world literature has often relied—implicitly or explicitly—on the organizing principle of the nation-state. However, in his Imagined Communities (1983), Benedict Anderson argues that nations are by nature constructions; they are, in his words, “an imagined political community – and imagined as both inherently limited and sovereign” (6). Since the publication of that text, much ink has been spilled on the constructedness of nations, and yet, the nation remains one of the most pervasive rubrics for discussing culture. Departments are named after nations (e.g. German Studies, Japanese Studies), classes take on national and temporal titles (19th-century British literature, Renaissance Italian literature), and even the Nobel Prize committee links winners to their national origins. 

This seminar invites scholars to challenge the centrality of “nation” in the production, circulation, and study of world literature. The very idea of “nation” has long been contested: by exilic, migrant, diaspora, and stateless writers; by multilingual and Indigenous traditions; and by transnational networks of circulation that complicate literary belonging. How does the nation function as a literary container and a political construct? Who defines what constitutes “national” literature, and who is excluded from it? What alternatives—diasporas, hybridity, oceans, languages, class, race, region, empires, ecologies—might displace it? How can we imagine a world literature that is not merely a collection of national canons?

We have defined three interconnected perspectives as a basis for discussion: 

Challenging the Nation from Within

How do ethnic minorities, diasporic and immigrant communities, regional and local writers disrupt the coherence of the national narrative? How does hybridity—linguistic, cultural, or formal—destabilize the homogenizing impulse of nationalism? What does ‘nationalism’ means to them?

Challenging the Nation from Without

How do literary texts engage with or resist international markets, translation economies, and the frameworks of world literature? How does global circulation reframe national literatures, and to what extent does world literature reproduce or undo nationalist logics?

Reimagining the Nation through Literary Figures and Narratives

Which authors have historically defined the contours of national literature, and how have they constructed or contested narratives of nationalism? How do literary texts challenge imperial histories, and how are national identities reconfigured in postcolonial and post–Cold War contexts? Individual authors may reveal more as they defy national limitations by writing in multiple languages (Samuel Becket, Vladimir Nabokov, Milan Kundera, Jhumpa Lahiri, Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o, etc.), in creoles, etc.   

Please submit a 250-word proposal by October 2nd.