The emergence of the modern nation-state and the contested and uneven path of modernization generated a crisis of representation, giving rise to an extraordinary range of forms of narrativity throughout the Global South. Some writers depict this crisis-ridden era through nationalist narratives, while others frame it through allegories of ruin, exile, myth, apocalypse, fragmentation, oil, religion, the collapse of empires, or failed modernization. In his controversial essay "Third World Literature in the Era of Multinational Capitalism", Fredric Jameson argues that Third World literature must “necessarily” be national allegory, as in the Third World, the strict divisions between the libidinal-personal and the political-collective have not solidified. Aijaz Ahmad in “Jameson's Rhetoric of Otherness and the National Allegory” reveals the problematic character of categories such as the Third World and the national allegory as master codes to explain "all" literary production. 

Instead of asking whether Global South literature is or is not national allegory, this seminar asks how writers have navigated the shifting landscape of modernization and the turbulent formation and evolution of the nation-state through a diverse repertoire of narrative strategies and symbolic forms. If Jameson's national allegory pinpoints one recurring strategy, what other allegorical modes arise from the heterogeneous experiences of colonization, partition, occupation, decolonization, oil extraction, ecological disaster, imperial collapse, migration, or religious tensions? As many of these nation-states brought together multiple linguistic, ethnic, and religious communities, what is the political significance of the narrative strategies through which writers have responded to the emergence of the nation-state and nationalism? How do these writers go beyond Jameson's binary opposition of postmodernism and nationalism as the so-called cultures of the “first” and “third” world? What is the political significance of narrative strategies such as the recurring narrative of modernity as Fall? Going beyond Jameson’s “necessary” nationalist ideology, how do the writers of the Global South respond to what Ahmad calls “the multiplicities of intersecting conflicts based upon class, gender, nation, race, region, and so on,” and what narrative forms do they invent to capture this complex intersection? What other forms of collectivity beyond the category of the nation have these writers imagined? By mediating Jameson's proposal through Ahmad, this seminar aims to show how "the national allegory" is one among many narrative strategies in the vast repertoire of allegorical responses through which writers have represented promises, contradictions, and failures of the modern nation-state and the modernization process. We welcome papers that examine the literary, cinematic, and artistic representations of modernity, modernization, and the nation-state across the Global South.