Hosam Aboul-Ela's work examines the point of connection between the literary and the social through the historicization of critical theory. He is the author of Other South: Faulkner, Coloniality, and the Mariátegui Tradition (U of Pittsburgh P, 2007) as well as Domestications: American Empire, Literary Culture, and the Postcolonial Lens (Northwestern, 2018). He has also translated Voices by Soleiman Fayyad
Re-Orienting Modernism: Mapping East-East Exchanges Between Arabic and Persian Poetry In this talk, Levi Thompson will argue for a new direction in comparative literary studies by analysing close formal and thematic links between Arabic and Persian modernist poetry. Through re-mapping the history of modern poetic development, he argues for a re-orientation of modernist studies
A Case of Exploding Markets: Latin American and South Asian Literary “Booms” in a Comparative Perspective Roanne Kantor at the Jaipur Literary Festival Dr. Roanne Kantor is an assistant professor in the Department of English at Stanford University. She received her Ph.D. in Comparative Literature at University of Texas, Austin and
Claire Ducournau is a tenured Associate Professor in Literature at Paul-Valéry – Montpellier 3 University, and a member of the RIRRA21 research center. Her work centers on francophone African writing, publishing and media. She is particularly interested in how sociological research methods and close textual analysis can be combined to explore African literature in
Orature plays a determinant role in literary expression around the world, but unwritten verbal arts have been explicitly excluded from definitions of world literature. Watch the recording from the roundtable on Contemporary Oral African Traditions to learn more about orature's place in world literature.
In this podcast, Dr Vayu Naidu discusses the MULOSIGE project with Professor Francesca Orsini, Itzea Goikolea-Amiano and Jack Clift. As part of the Being Human festival, Dr Vayu Naidu gives a storytelling workshop at the N4 Library and discusses how multiple languages, improvisation and music can create fascinating new paths for stories and literature to travel across the world.
Tambimuttu and Sivanandan: Cold-War America and International Socialism Dr Ruvani Ranasinha (Kings College London) considers and contrasts the political positions and self-fashioning adopted during the careers of two mid-century Sri Lankan writers. Ranasinha recounts Tambimuttu’s self-stereotyping of the sensual Orient, first with his move to the UK in 1938, and later in terms
Laetitia Zecchini discusses the politics of literary translation and publication, particularly surrounding the journal Quest funded by the International Council for Cultural Freedom, itself backed by the CIA. She examined the editor Nissim Ezekiel’s own positions and motivations, noting that for him Quest’s purpose was the create the conditions in which the magazine would provide the freedom to debate, argue, and hold different theoretical positions, creating a space of cultural independence which could in turn realise political independence.
Professor Francesca Orsini (SOAS), examines the production and re-production of short stories in Hindi literary magazines in the 1950s, offering a case study of the Hindi magazine Kahani (Short Story, 1954). She argues that world literature can only be envisioned and produced through local views, rather than under one overarching banner of what constitutes “world literature.” Her talk highlights the medium of the magazine as a site of non-state literary activism that placed readers and young writers at the center, the preference for the story as opposed to the novel, and the multilingual knowledge that animated reading practices, even when publication occurred in a single language (Hindi).
In this podcast Dr Anna Bernard (King's College London) examines internationalist world literature by returning to a previous moment in world literary history: a selection of English-language poetry anthologies that were circulated within the anti-apartheid and Palestine solidarity movements in Britain in the 1970s and early 1980s.
