The Locations of (World) Literature: Perspectives from Africa and South Asia
The aim of the conference is to look at the ways in which modern and contemporary South Asian and African writers who produce their work from specific locales consider their place in the world, in world literature, in the wider geographical regions (Africa, South Asia, etc.) or national literary histories in which their work is often read or identified with. How do these writers work through, use, challenge or re-invent the macro categories (region, nation, sub-continent, continent, world), with which literary histories are written and literary cartographies constituted ? What is the relevance of these geographical categories, and how are they often reallocated or realigned ? What worlds do these literatures simultaneously inhabit and create?
By postulating the plurality of the literary geographies/cartographies to which many South Asian and African writers belong, we postulate that these situated practices are also worldly, and always already connected to wider “significant geographies”, whether real or imagined.
We mean to analyze the ways by which ideas or representations of what it is to be an “Indian”, “South Asian” or an “African” writer correspond to or contradict the writers’ own practices and representations ; study the unpredictable networks (linguistic, imaginary, literary, etc.) and connections that writers and works of literature invent ; reconsider the doxa on world literature today, with its binaries (centre/periphery, local/ global, etc.) and hierarchies ; invite papers on literatures that are generally disconnected from each other (anglophone vs. francophone literatures ; the so-called “vernacular” or regional languages of South Asia and Africa vs. literatures in French or in English, etc.)
Ecole Normale Supérieure
45 rue d’Ulm, Salle Dussane
* Monday June 19th
Chair: Claire Joubert (Paris 8)
9h 30: Introduction by Francesca Orsini and Laetitia Zecchini
9h 45 – 10h 45:
World visions
Xavier Garnier (Paris 3 / THALIM) “World Visions in Swahili Literature”
Francesca Orsini (SOAS, University of London) “World Literature, Indian views”
11h – 12h:
Travelling literatures
Soofia Siddique (Freie Universität Berlin) “Worlds of Advice: Going Places with Nazir Ahmad”
Fatima Burney (SOAS, University of London) “Oriental Bards and the Figuration of Wandering in ‘World Literature’: Receptions of Hafez and Persianate Poetics”
Chair: Claire Gallien (Université Paul Valéry Montpellier III)
14h-15h:
Refractions, connections
Karin Barber (University of Birmingham) “Print Culture and the Representation of India in early twentieth-century Lagos”
Sara Marzagora (SOAS, University of London) “Amharic Literature, Ethiopian History and the global; Käbbädä Mikael’s worldscapes (1950s-1960s)”
15h 30 – 17h
Worlding: debates, writing, translation
Mourad Yelles (INALCO-LACNAD) “Littérature-Monde: Alger contre-enquête”
Tristan Leperlier (EHESS) “Nationalisation and Worldisation of Algerian Literature: Timimoum of Rachid Boudjedra”
Amatoritsero Ede (MISR, Makerere University, Uganda) “The Untranslatibility of African Language Literature”
* Tuesday June 20th
Chair: Xavier Garnier (Sorbonne Nouvelle Paris 3)
Reshaping cartographies through literature
9h 30 – 10: 30
Karima Laachir (SOAS, University of London) “Whose Significant Geography? History from Below in A Lahbibi’s The Journeys of ‘Abdi (2013)”
Elara Bertho (Paris 3) “Cartography of Eroticism: Reshaping geographic categories”
11h – 12h: Communities: beyond geographical assignations?
Peter D. McDonald (Oxford University) “Thinking the Unthinkable: Everintermutuomergent Communities of Letters”
Laetitia Zecchini (CNRS/THALIM)“Practices, constructions and deconstructions of ‘world literature’ and ‘Indian literature’: Two Illustrations”
Chair: Catherine Servan-Schreiber (CEIAS-EHESS)
14h - 15h: Networks: Very local and/or very transnational
Clarissa Vierke (University of Bayreuth) “Utterly Local? On the Position of Swahili Popular Poetry in Dar es Salaam”
Mélanie Bourlet (INALCO) “Transnational Literary Networks and Local Dynamics: The Case of Pulaar Literature”
15h 30-16h 30: General discussion