Decolonisation and the Literary Field

From the current moment in which calls to decolonize literary studies prevail, we look back to the eras of political decolonization, and the changes they catalysed in literary cultures and communities around the world. We invite papers that consider how sociological approaches to literature, especially those approaches informed by the work of Pierre Bourdieu, have and can continue to contribute to our understanding of such changes, however incomplete and ongoing. How, we also ask, might such scholarship contribute to a decolonial literary studies, and what do calls to decolonize literary studies mean for sociological approaches to the subject?

The dynamics of the literary field described by Bourdieu emerged from his analysis of the French literary field, thus establishing the national as the frame for a literary sociology. But sociological approaches to postcolonial and world literature inspired by Bourdieu have moved beyond the nation as frame, and sharpened our ability to analyse the worldliness of the literary system (Casanova 2004, Boschetti 2012, Sapiro 2016). Such scholarship sheds light on the global circuits of transmission and translation and scales of value that exert force on national literary fields, especially those peripheral fields that were subject to colonial power and then complex forms of decolonization (Huggan 2001, Helgesson 2009, Ducournau 2015, Helgesson and Vermeulen 2015, Bush 2016, Dalleo 2016, Sievers and Levitt 2020). But analysis at the level of world literature also runs the risk of reinscribing global hierarchies of value, obscuring the varied dynamics of national and regional fields (and other sub- or supra-national conceptions of the field), or under-estimating the force that local decolonizing dynamics and debates have exerted globally.

Our seminar aims to create a discussion around sociological approaches to literature and decolonization specifically. Papers should focus on national or regional literary fields, or other sub- or supra-national conceptions of the field, and might consider their local and/or transnational dynamics. This is not a retreat into the national or the local, but an effort to better calibrate our methodologies to different scales in relation to debates around decolonization. We especially encourage papers from those working on the cultural shifts wrought by political decolonization, and its effects on the aesthetic, linguistic, institutional, educational, infrastructural or state-driven composition of the literary field; scholarship at the fringes of the literary field, e.g. the intersection between print and other media, including oral forms; and reflections on the archives that inspire, sustain and frustrate such scholarship. But we also welcome papers that bring such approaches to bear on the current demand to decolonize literary studies, a demand that is similarly articulated from and addressed to interwoven transnational and local spaces.