Edward Said located exile in the "unhealable rift" between a self and its native place. This seminar transposes from the biographical to the institutional to examine exile as a structural condition of the literary field. We propose that the Global South text is exiled twice: once in the language of its writing, and once again in the terms of its reception. If writing in the colonial tongue is for Ngũgĩ a continued subjection and for Achebe a strategic appropriation, the first estrangement remains the writer's. The second exile is administered elsewhere, in the metropolitan apparatus that receives the text and rewrites it in its own terms of understanding.

Our object of study is therefore not the text but the reception of the text: the paratext, and especially Genette's epitext (reviews, blurbs, prize citations, syllabi), through which a work enters the world literary field and is rendered legible. Pierre Bourdieu noted that texts circulate stripped from their originating field and are re-read through the lens of the receiving one. In other terms, a novel written as literature is domesticated on arrival into testimony, or a "window onto" its nation. Aijaz Ahmad critiqued this "national allegory" and exposed the metropolitan reading protocol masquerading as a property of the texts that admits the Global South writer only as a native informant.

We read this apparatus as the afterlife of a colonial epistemic order in which conditions of legibility reproduce hierarchies of knowledge. Where postcolonial criticism attended to the text and the archive, the decolonial turn (Quijano, Mignolo)—not without friction with postcolonial criticism's own genealogy—shifts to the conditions of legibility itself. The question is who is granted epistemic authority, and whose knowledge is considered authoritative? The metropolitan epitext surfaces as an infrastructure that decides who can be heard, what should be considered, and in which way.

We welcome papers across periods, languages, and genres that take as their focus reception and the framings through which a text is made (il)legible to a distant audience. How does a work change meaning as it crosses institutional borders? What is gained, lost, invented or transformed in the process?

We are also interested in writers remade by their reception and in those who anticipate and shape it—as when Hassan Blasim's translated stories were announced as his "literary asylum" in English, his surrealism authenticated through kinship with Borges and Kafka rather than through his own Arabic literary context—and in those who perform legibility, or refuse it altogether, claiming Glissant's right to opacity. Above all, we ask what interpretive authority a text can retain or generate on the far side of its reception.