Digital Humanities and Archiving
The digital sphere is undoubtedly a vibrant platform of exchange for world literature. By compiling and comparing online resources, we hope to explore innovations and disruptions created in the digital sphere.
Although the ideal of a global “World Wide Web” is to some degree an aspirational horizon — many regions do not have the infrastructure to provide widespread internet connectivity — it provides unprecedented access to resources, as well as connecting scholars from around the globe. For example, we can note that the digital platform allows for the creation of digital archives like MULOSIGE! While literary texts in non-latin scripts have been neglected by many digital archives, this is starting to change with new scholarship on the digital lives of non-European languages and projects like al-kitaab flourishing online.
Visiting physical libraries and engaging in fieldwork research remains central to our engagement with World Literature, as many archives cannot be accessed through online platforms. However, we hope that MULOSIGE can offer a digital archive which will keep growing as we add to the non-euroncentric literary resources that are available online.
Beyond conflicts, crises and catastrophes: Afro-Pessimism in Western Media
Rachel Tabea Bossmeyer criticizes the afro-pessimism of mainstream Western Media and its ties to colonial literary productions.
What’s in a Meme?: Literature, Representation, and Renegotiation.
Jenny Carla Moran is a Postcolonial studies MA student
Celebrating Online African Literature with The Brittle Paper Literary Awards
'Brittle Paper' founder Dr. Ainehi Edoro talks to Sana Goyal about how recognizing and promoting African literature online can fill in gaps left by traditional literary outlets and their gatekeepers.
Al-hubb Al-mustaheel / L’amour impossible: Love in a Time of Artificial Wombs
Most Mauritanian fiction seems almost obsessively ethnographic but Moussa Ould Ibno breaks away from this trend and uses Science Fiction to comment on ethical questions of reproductive technology and love.
Bibliomigrancy: World Literature as a Pact with Books
Professor Venkat Mani (University of Wisconsin-Madison) politicise the idea of world literature. He argues that library and print and digital cultural histories assist in understanding world literature as historically conditioned, culturally determined, and politically charged, and focuses on the role of the state in the construction of world literature using Nazi Germany as a case study.