This MULOSIGE syllabus has been compiled by Francesca Orsini (SOAS, MULOSIGE), Karima Laachir (SOAS, MULOSIGE) and Sara Marzagora is entitled ‘Reading together’ Literary Texts in Multilingual Contexts’. Follow the link below to download the course.

This course attempts to break down the common practices of reading literary traditions in multilingual contexts offering case-studies from three multilingual contexts: Morocco, North India and the Horn of Africa. Dominant reading practices are based on binary oppositions between texts written in different languages in the same context placing them in independent literary traditions with the presupposition that they have no impact on each, thereby reifying each tradition.  These reading practices tend to produce selective single language literary histories (Arabophone or Francophone in Morocco, Hindu or Urdu in North India, Amharic or Oromo in Ethiopia), which in turn foreground communal, religious, and regional divisions that are more reflective of modern and contemporary divisions in these multilingual societies (Orsini 2012). The course offers a ‘reading together’ – or an entangled comparative reading of literary traditions in multilingual contexts, a reading that privileges the specificity of the literary traditions rather than language categorisation, and that considers these texts’ mutual historical, cultural, geographical, political, and aesthetic interweaving and implications as well as their co-constitution (Laachir 2016). The course offers case-studies from Morocco, North India and the Horn of Africa on how to ‘read together’ literary texts in these multilingual contexts.

Download the course here: Reading Together, Literary Texts in Multilingual Contexts