In an exercise of comparative analysis that attends to a variety of literary, cultural, and geographical contexts, this seminar explores new disciplinary horizons that emerge from the friction between the categories “world literature” and “Global South.” 

Separately, these two categories are by no means settled, and further exploration is needed that elucidates both the production of literary representations of the world and the modulations of the Global South as political and aesthetic imaginary. Work by a range of scholars, from Emily Apter and Pheng Cheah to Aamir Mufti to Alexander Beecroft, among so many others, and more imminently the forthcoming Worlds of Comparative Literature: The ACLA State of the Discipline Report, demonstrate that world literary studies continues to thrive. Likewise, the Global South is now an established field of study in literary and cultural terms, as exemplified by the work of scholars such as Alfred López, Dilip Menon, Pashmina Murthy, Elleke Boehmer, and many others, while new interdisciplinary developments in the field continue to push its boundaries. Thought together, new forms of planetary reflection must be articulated, especially at a time when political, cultural, and economic spasms are incessantly visited on the world. These spasms are bound to generate new theoretical and analytical horizons. The fact that these two concepts operate in different disciplinary fields of influence, too, presents us with a particularly productive line of inquiry. This is especially the case when, on the one hand, world literature is more than literature from the Global South, and, on the other, Global South literature refers to a qualified understanding of the world.

Bringing these two analytical discourses head-to-head generates important ways for rethinking literary production from the global peripheries. This is not, however, a matter of finding the better paradigm of the two. Instead, this seminar seeks to elucidate the paradigms, conceptual apparatuses, and heuristic programs that have not yet been articulated in the study of world literature from a Global South perspective. Papers that focus on a specific theme and are theoretically informed are particularly welcome. The seminar will also seek to represent a range of geographical foci while approaching its task from a historically inflected perspective.