World Literature: Networks of Circulation

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Conference Rationale

How would it be possible to situate world literature in a cultural field of overlapping networks of circulation in such a way as to transcend boundaries delineated by the binary of the ‘national’ and ‘international’ pervasive in theories of world literature and world republic of letters? In what ways may the modes of circulation be complicated so as to accommodate multiple modes of circulation not defined by the one-way traffic from the national to the West, or the proliferation of the novel, or the hegemony of the modern? What if we were to bring together a variety of ‘modes of circulation’ together, as well as the systems that support them, and think of how locating ‘world literature’ within these overlapping networks—including across literary genres and artistic media—may refine modes of reading?

This conference is the second in the CCLPS Approaches to World Literature series.

Registration

This conference is free and open to anyone with an interest in the subject. If you wish to attend, please email Wen-chin Ouyang ( wo@soas.ac.uk ) to register.

Contact

• Wen-chin Ouyang , wo@soas.ac.uk Conference Organiser
• Karima Laachir , kl19@soas.ac.uk CCLPS Chair
• Francesca Orsini , fo@soas.ac.uk

Organised by the Centre for Cultural, Literary and Postcolonial Studies (CCLPS)

Co-sponsored by the British Comparative Literature Association (BCLA)

Programme

Thursday 13 December 2012

Friday 14 December 2012

Saturday 15 December 2012

Paper Abstracts

Import/export: notes on China's literary relations to Europe

Mads Rosendahl Thomsen

Chinese literary culture has led a tumultous life in the past seventy years with highly different relations to the world outside through the period. The recent rise of China economically has not been matched by a similar cultural influence, yet there are some very distinctive tendencies in the way Chinese literature makes it mark abroad and how Western works and genres plays a role in China. The paper will consider the role of diaspora writing, of traumatic literature as exports and, based on the study of Shuyu Kong, of imports of both modernist Western works and commercialized genres. At the end of the paper, the question of cultural comfort zones and the limits of strangeness will be addressed.

Literary networks – virtual, spatial, or material?

Stefan Helgesson

Drawing on examples from African and trans-Atlantic literary history, this paper will reflect critically on the presuppositions of network thinking in world literature studies. As Nirvana Tanoukhi has observed, world literature theory places a heavy premium on the metaphor of distance. This is, however, a deeply paradoxical operation, as it tends to conflate actual, geographical distance with more elusive and even flawed notions of cultural distance that need not be spatial at all. If we take this observation to the extreme, it would appear that the only distance that matters in literary networks is the roughly 40 centimetres between one’s eyes and the printed page. But this, too, is untenable, since it ignores linguistic difference and disregards the exceptionally uneven material preconditions of literary cultures across the world.

What this paper will suggest, then, is that “literature” as such constitutes the network, if we accept that literature is both a mediated, material phenomenon, and a notion, a common cause towards which an individual, by assuming the “author-function”, may aspire. Access to this network is relatively conditional on one’s social and geographical position, but the contribution of writers such as Olive Schreiner (South Africa), Langston Hughes (USA), Leopold Senghor (Senegal), Mário Pinto de Andrade (Angola) and others is that as they access the network they also modify it. This resonates with Pascale Casanova’s notion of literary space, but the examples in question force a reconsideration of her dual emphasis on national literatures and centralised international consecration. The network, on such an understanding, is rather polycentric and dynamic, adaptable to different historical circumstances.

The Structure of World Literature

Michael Emmerich, UCSB

This paper will address the theme of “networks of circulation” directly, proposing a model for thinking about the structure of world literature that attempts to reconcile and modify the approaches of David Damrosch, on the one hand, and Franco Moretti and Pascale Casanova, on the other. I will argue that rather than consider world literature as a single unified system (Moretti’s “world literary system,” Casanova’s “world literary space”) we should view it as an ever shifting configuration of plural “world literary systems” or “world literary spaces” with fuzzy and overlapping borders, each of which is “worldly” only from a particular perspective. I will suggest, as well, that the extent to which a text circulates is less important to its position in a world literary system, or in world literature, that the extent to which discourse about its circulation circulates.

Shakespeare's Monadic Playworld

Simon Palfrey

Where is life in a playworld? The thought-world that I think best answers to Shakespeare's creation is the Leibnizian monadology: a creation that neither sleeps nor dies, that is at every point full with life, and whose possibles are literally those of the thinkable (or indeed the unthinkable). Each monad is big with past and future, with a substance defined in terms of alteration and percipience, such that the very creation is structured like a language, much of it beyond the conscious awareness of its agents. Leibniz proposes a kind of dynamised individuality, both nested and detonated. So, nestedness is precisely constitutive of individuality; full individuals may at the same time function as subordinate constituents of greater individuals: to be alive, to truthfully observe life, is to concede levels of individuality. But any such node of life need not be a mini-person: it might be a fraction or counterpart of an identified subject; it might simply be an event, a glimpsed possible world, not fully claimed by any singular self-consciousness. We get at once worlds within worlds, such that each monad expresses everything: and a radical proliferation of potential subjectivity. And this is Shakespeare.

Slipping through the Net: the maxim as a wandering genre

Michael Beard

On the transit of literary forms: the case of the novel

Sandra Guardini T. Vasconcelos

In view of the dissemination of Cultural Studies, the demise of Comparative Literature as an academic area of investigation seemed to be unavoidable. Signs of its vitality, however, can be felt in some contemporary developments which seek to enlarge the comparatist’s scope by rethinking literature on a global scale. I refer to the recent work of Franco Moretti and Margaret Cohen and to the discussions about the effectiveness of a concept like that of Weltliteratur, reprieved by critics to interrogate possible new directions. From a different angle, Spivak proposes “literary transnationalism” as a way out for the renovation of the discipline. In the context of this debate, issues like nationalism, post-coloniality, or the relations between centre and periphery (re)emerge, and new attempts at dealing with the transit and circulation of literary forms beyond national frontiers are made.

If, on the one hand, many of the more recent proposals have placed their emphasis on the “cultural”, promoting the erasure of the specifically literary, they have also often evaded a more dialectical treatment of the problem which seems to me central to the discipline, that is, the very dynamic which defines the relation of a country like Brazil with those situated in the centre. The sense of time and place is essential for the critic who does not want be lured by fantasies like the free importation or circulation whether of goods, of people or of literary texts. Therefore, having in mind the comparative stance that Brazilian critic Antonio Candido argues to be essential to criticism in a country “characterised by the intense crossing over of cultures”, it seems indispensable to reaffirm the need to be attentive to the movement between general and particular, or universal and local, as much as to the socio-historical conditions which preside over the transit of ideas and literary forms.

Networks of Circulation: the Case of the Borgesian Wisdom Tales.

Dominique Jullien

Jorge Luis Borges, from his earliest writings, is drawn to what transcends the national. “Our patrimony is the universe”, he unambiguously claims, in a strong statement against literary nationalism (“The Argentine Writer and Tradition”): Argentines should feel entitled to all themes, stories, images and traditions. Not only Borges claims the right to a cosmopolitan inspiration (as the great historical and geographical diversity of his narrative contexts illustrates), but he also demonstrates a sustained interest in the modes of transmission of traditions, tropes, and stories. His essays put forth a Goethean transmission model, according to which literary forms are derived from a small number of ubiquitous archetypes, a view close to Russian Formalists’ morphological approach to folktales. As a case study, I propose to focus on Borges’s wisdom tales, in particular the variations on the “Ascetic & King” dialogues. The tales, which are set variously in Celtic, Indian, Chinese, Arabic contexts, thematize the essential Borgesian ideal of circulation across cultural borders. Aesthetically, they exemplify the ideal of transcending the national (offering a Kafkaesque rewriting of the Buddha stories, for instance); philosophically, they pursue the erasure of authorial individuality, debunking the Romantic myth of the Author; generically, they prioritize oral circulation and oral or semi-oral genres (folk tales, wisdom literature, poetry), relying strongly on memory and brevity.

Lao She, Tang Tales and Modernist literary narrative

Anne Witchard

That Lao She was influenced by his London reading of Dickens and Conrad, James Joyce and D.H. Lawrence has been acknowledged, but the dialogue in his fiction with his indigenous predecessors, with Tang love stories, Ming epic and late-Qing narrative modes such as farce, melodrama, exposé fiction, and scientific fantasies, as well as Peking Opera and folk traditions has only recently begun to be explored. Lao She’s refusal to jettison all aspects of traditional Chinese culture would distinguish him from his May Fourth peers. His modernism would be formulated in its own Chinese terms rather than those of Western mimicry. I will discuss reciprocal influences between Modernist literary experiment in 1920s London during the years Lao She spent here (teaching at SOS) and traditional Chinese narrative form and how these combine in his novel Er Ma.

Overlapping regional hegemonies in the literary system of the Horn of Africa

Sara Marzagora

The Horn of Africa provides a relevant case study when it comes to world literature theories: literary output in European languages is almost close to zero, resulting in a relatively autonomous literary system lying outside of any Western “literary centre”. Even when European literary forms such as the novel are employed, the use of African languages makes it clear that the authors have in mind a local readership. The social function performed by the novel remains decidedly tied to the structure of the Ethiopian state: writers are often politicians themselves, and literature is often used as a fictional exemplification of wider socio-political arguments over the management of the Ethiopian state. The novels are thus intensely didactic, with each character embodying a certain type/value /ideal. This idealization struck some critics as ‘pre-modern’ – yet, it is only outside of such theleological view that the social meaning and artistic value of the novels become apparent. More importantly, the Ethiopian context imposes a careful reconsideration of the very same concept of the ‘modern’, whether literary or not – and the paper shall situate Ethiopian literary theory within the broader context of Ethiopian philosophical reflections around modernity and tradition.

The literary system of the Horn of Africa defies being homogeneously labelled as part of a literary periphery. On the contrary, it is a multi-layered system – or, better, a concentric system, with regional hegemonies. Amharic, the most spoken language in the highlands region of Ethiopia and the traditional language of Abyssinian ruling elite, acts as the hegemonic drive of the area. Successive Ethiopian regimes have promoted in the country an assimilationist policy of “Amharization”, imposing Amharic as the only language of education and public life. As an effect, both in Ethiopia and Eritrea literary outputs in languages other than Amharic have been obscured; their development curbed. The primacy of Amharic over other regional languages has been reinforced by established literary scholars – both within Ethiopia and in Europe. I will discuss, in particular, the history of the marginalization of Oromo literature on one side, and Tigrinya literature on the other. Amharic acts as a local “centre”, against whose domination Oromo and Tigrinya traditions react.

The overlapping systems of local “centres” and “peripheries” are further complicated when looking at an essential component of the literatures of the Horn of Africa: oral literatures. With extremely low levels of literacy, oral literature constituted the majority of literary production in the Horn. The paper shall analyse the web of power relations linking Ethiopian literary genres, thus attempting to broaden the narrow focus on the novel typical of world literature theories.

Khoury’s Minority Consciousness: Myth and Memory in Orthodox Cultural Identity’

Alyn D. Hine

Eastern Orthodox Christianity has a long established history of both religious worship and cultural expression in the Arab world. Today, Orthodox Christians of a number of different denominations remain a significant minority both in Lebanon’s demographic make-up, and also in the Levant as a whole. Expressions of their cultural identity have undergone radical changes and adaptations, as their minority status has often necessitated allying themselves with larger social and political movements in the region in order to make their voices heard and to maintain their existence as a cohesive community. Often, their developments in cultural identity have seen them deny the self-defining moniker of the national, and to reject Western hegemony in favour of Arab identities, in order to reinforce network patterns that stretch across political boundaries.

This paper looks closely at the Orthodox question through two particular texts, Yalo (2002) and Ka-Anna na'imah (2007), of one of Lebanon’s and the Arab world’s most distinctive and appraised voices: Elias Khoury. The study shall look at the question of to what extent a minority cultural identity can be forged through the creation of singular characters and through what processes Khoury’s novels translate into a cultural dialogue with other religious communities. It shall also consider the role of myth and memory in the creation of a minority religious community’s cultural identity, while trying to decipher whether the Orthodox expression relies upon religious parameters alone or if the myth and memory form part of some greater distinct ethnic fabric. Through the multi-faceted construction of an Arab Orthodox identity, the paper considers to what extent Khoury is negating the use of the nation to label his literary characters, and using his Orthodox identity to establish community links that transcend both the national and the international, while also cementing the importance of tradition and myth against the dominance of the modern.

World literature and its critical cross-roads: conceptual borders and the majāz of theory?”

Sarah D. Epstein

In “White Mythology: Metaphor in the Text of Philosophy”, Derrida examines the “symbolic economy” of the concept of figurative language itself. As he deftly demonstrates, even the terms of philosophical debate about concepts such as metaphor are, themselves, unavoidably metaphorical. The language of theory itself always constitutes a symbolic economy. This insight is central to the practice of deconstructive criticism.

Here I would like to examine the question of “networks of circulation” in relation to the concept of “majāz”, or “figuration”, defined by theorists such as al-Jurjāni and lexicographers such as Ibn Manẓur in relation to the verb “jāza”: “to cross, traverse, or goes beyond.”
Specifically, I would like to ask: What about the circulation of critical thought between one symbolic economy and another? By what standards would this conceptual exchange occur in the system of “world literature”? This paper considers the circulation of theory across such borders, as well as the terms of exchange-- such as the word “border” itself.

If majāz is, by definition, that which goes beyond its original place (in a discursive system) and crosses towards what is other, how might the majāz of theory itself enable us to begin envisioning new tropological networks of circulation?

Could deconstruction engage figuration in a new way, so as to begin crossing its own discursive boundaries? How might theory traverse the linguistic and historic specificities of its own tropological terrain toward other symbolic economies of critical thought?

Khayal : Towards re-imagining the role of circulation in ‘Modern’ Arabic literature

Maha Abdelmegeed

The history of ‘Modern’ Arabic literature(s) is usually narrated as a story of circulation; its history is the story of the diffusion of European genres from their homeland to the Arab world. To this end, ‘modern’ Arabic texts can be organized linearly from clumsy ones that hold the seeds of transformation (diffusion), to the ones where the transformation is complete. This story, however, is being rewritten by many scholars who are trying to bring forth new ways of probing and narrating the history of ‘Modern’ Arabic literature.

This research contributes to this endeavour by arguing that the ‘clumsiness’ of those ‘beginning of’ texts does not lie in the texts themselves, but in the theoretical boundaries within which these texts were seen. The distinction of fiction vs. social reform or non-fiction has been one of the most plaguing ones in categorizing those texts as ‘failures’. This paper argues that the problem in fact lies in the theoretical tool used, and that what we are in need of is the development of the notion of khayal to which these texts subscribed. Khayal here is not the opposite of waq‘(reality), rather, it bears a more complex relation to it than that dichotomous one. This paper puts ’Ibn ‘Arabi’s notion of Khayal as the vehicle of a journey beyond the appearances ‘exteriority’ a ‘higher’ level of deepness, in conversation with Francis Al-Marash Ghabat al-Haq, and Al-Tuwayrani’s Al-Nashr al-Zahri fi Rasa’il al-Nisr al-Dahri to get a glimpse of the notion of khayal these texts were working with.

This is not to argue that Khayal was used synonymously by ’Ibn ‘Arabi, Al-Marash, and Al-Tuwayrani. Rather, that we are devising here a network of ‘circulation’ and difference that can help us foster a methodological tool (Khayal) to shed light on these texts. This notion of khayal would complicate our current understanding of ‘circulation’ from Europe to the Arab world because it would also give an insight about the methodological and theoretical network within which (European) literature was read. It would also help define the relationship between Saḥafa (journalism) and literature beyond that of juxtaposition.

Nation in the absence of state: Palestinian fiction re-writing the nation-ness paradigm

Nora Parr

Living under the authority of other states, fragmented, fractured and occupied, Palestinians have had little control over formulations of any ‘official’ national identity. Moreover, they face the near impossibility of imagining a national community in the sense that Anderson described it, as a geographically "solid community moving up (or down) in history."

External texts created by media, other states, and social expectations have thus been left to impose diverse and at times competing totalizing narratives on Palestinian communities, narratives that have little to do with the experiences or personal desires of Palestinians themselves. Palestinian literature, and novels in particular, I suggest, work to write against these external formulations. Authors like Ibrahim Nasrallah, born in Jordan in 1954, use innovative literary devices to deconstruct the various labels or expectations, and in so doing re-write what it means to be part of a national community.
Looking at Nasrallah’s Balcony trilogy as a case study, the paper will trace first how texts that construct Palestinians are deconstructed as sites of authority, and then --inversing Kristeva’s theories on “text as system” --portray systems like “family,” “class” and “state,” as texts. Neither the media, nor institutions of state, class or family, he implies, have the authority to script or totalize a narrative for Palestinians. Turning the systems into texts, more importantly, brings them in as part of Nasrallah’s own narrative, taking them into account as part of what makes up the Palestinian reality.
The novels of the trilogy each weave in elements of the deconstructed totalizing texts, thereby creating an intertextual space. The process of creating the intertext, I suggest, is in fact the offering a new way of reading national identity, as an intertextual space that both adopts and breaks down totalizing systems and leaves room for the individual desires and dreams of the Palestinians who live them. Nasrallah’s texts thus offers to a world enmeshed in the nation-state system, a new way of understanding the imagination of national community.

Circulation of Stars

Piero Boitani

Contemplation of the stars is a primary impulse in the human being from the very beginning all over the world – Aristotle sees it as the product of primeval ad perennial ‘wonder’ which gives rise to what we would call science, philosophy, and poetry. Astronomy, astrology, and star art (painting, architecture, literature, and music) go hand in hand through millennia in all cultures of the planet (and all use catasterisms to explain certain phenomena). Some of these developments are independent of each other, i.e., they take place in one culture alone. Some, on the other hand, are the product of the ‘circulation of stars’. For instance, it is fairly clear that Greek and Roman astronomy travel to India (and perhaps to China) very early on. Likewise, in architecture Roman astronomical-astrological domes reach Constantinople, then spread from there to the Islamic world, and back from Constantinople to Ravenna and from Islam to Spain and England. Islamic astronomy, astrology, and art spread to India, China, and the West. Post-Copernican astronomy and star representation determine substantial changes in the ‘imaginaire’ of India as well as China and Japan.

Against the Dominance of Network: Counter-empires of Pashto Verse in World History

James Caron

The Worlding of a Lyric Poet: Contemporary Urdu Poetry and the English Novel

Amina Yaqin

Brazil in Britain: Coffee, Diplomacy, and Translation in the Case of Richard and Isabella Burton

Ross Forman

The World of Circulation: Considering 'Universality' and Literary Value in the Kuunmong

Sangjin Park

Translating Genre: Debates Surrounding the ‘Novel’ versus ‘Sosŏl’ (小說) in Korean Literary Studies

Kang Sangsoon

Through Western Eyes: North American Missionaries’ Readings of Korean Literature in the Early 20th Century

Kim Seung-u

New World Literature Beyond National and International Boundaries: Tasks and Masks of the Korean Publication Market for World Literature

Lee Seok-ho

Translation and adaptation in antiquity: A Hittite and Sumerian poem on the Sun-god

Christopher Metcalf

This paper presents evidence for what may be considered an example of World Literature in antiquity. Based on some new discoveries in Ancient Near Eastern studies, the paper will ask how and why certain literary texts came to develop a broader appeal among ancient readers, crossing boundaries of culture and language. The example under discussion is a Hittite hymn to the Sun-god from ancient Anatolia (1500 BC) that has recently been shown to derive from an older Sumerian model from ancient Mesopotamia.

Re-examining the National between Migrant Literature and World Literature

Rasha Chatta

In recent approaches to the field of what is homogenously designated as Migrant Literature, scholars seem to agree that one of many dominant practices in particular poses a critical and theoretical problem: the question of the national.

However, the national exchanges positionality between the field of Migrant Literature and the field of World Literature: in Migrant Literature, the national refers to the hegemonic, whereas in World Literature, the national refers to the periphery, as a way of categorizing other languages and literatures (Moretti and Casanova). Further, in Migrant Literature, the body of literature is produced in the centre and yet is paradoxically marginalized, hence highlighting questions of language and translation.

By examining what the national imaginary represents in both fields, can we think outside of geographical, geopolitical patterns?

The question of the language is a central issue between the two fields, because World Literature is circulated in translation.

I propose to explore the question of language and of the national within World Literature debates, through shared problematics with Migrant Literature, in order to begin to radicalize the conception of borders and hence of circulation (Damrosch and others).

I will examine the categories within each field through the case studies of Tayyeb Salih (as picked up by Said and Spivak) as an example of circulation within World Literature and Najat Al-Hachmi, the winner of the national Ramon Llull Catalan prize in 2008, on the side of Migrant Literature.

The Question of the Literary beyond Time, Space and Genres in a Dead Language: Ancient Egyptian Texts

Hany Rashwan

The Ancient Egyptian writing was believed to have been invented by the gods, and was held to be holy, divine, and sacred. The profession of the scribe was considered to be most honourable, and its rewards great, for no rank and no dignity were too high for the educated scribe. On the other hand, we know nothing about the real authors who wrote most of the Ancient Egyptian poems and stories or even the circumstances, religiously, politically, sociologically, which surrounded the writing process. Likewise, we have not received any Ancient Egyptian documents describing or defining the borders of the literary genres and even their own literary receptions, nor any documents explaining their critical literary thoughts, which could in turn help us gain a better understanding of their literary nature, or guide our modern literary techniques to restore its particular features, matching the Ancient Egyptian perspective. As a consequence, Ancient Egyptian language and its literature became a testing ground for western and modern literary and philosophical theories, despite the historical, geographical, cultural and linguistic differences between them.

Every European literary study confirms that Ancient Egyptian literary quality is unquestionable and that every literary text – covering a period of some 4,000 years – reveals genuine eloquence. However, the main focus of these studies concerned the linguistic and philological aspects of Ancient Egyptian literature, ignoring the semantics of the rhetorical features that formed its poetic language. There are very few studies concerned with this aspect of Egyptian literature, and their arguments are built on definitions of western rhetorical devices. Under these circumstances, the reading of Ancient Egyptian language and literature has become rooted in European literary and linguistic disciplines, and interpreted using their analytical tools – mainly for dialoguing with the European readers, rather than hearing from the ancient Egyptian language itself, which could be achieved by investigating and comparing its linguistic and literary features with other more kindred languages. So I would not be exaggerating if I say that it is even more disturbing to discover the host of complications that beset one as soon as a conceptual definition of many literary and grammatical terms is attempted by western studies, especially with regard to discovering and defining the Ancient Egyptian literary devices. As a concrete illustration of this, one may consider the European Metric studies which have applied different western metrical theories on the ancient Egyptian language and poetry, with very limited success.

This paper will use the close linguistic connection between the Arabic language and the Ancient Egyptian language, as part of the Afroasiatic phylum, in reading Ancient Egyptian literary rhetorical devices. Moreover, it will try to answer some questions related to the reading process, such as: How can comparative rhetoric tools give better understanding to ancient literary texts? Does knowledge of rhetorical tools affect our reception of the translations and the original texts? And how can our modern translations reflect Ancient Egyptian rhetorical tools to the modern reader?

The translation and production of revolutionary communist literature in Nepal

Mike Hutt

Between 1996 and 2006 the Nepal Communist Party (Maoist) conducted an armed rebellion against the Nepali state.  I will present some preliminary findings from my research on the consumption of revolutionary novels by Maoist cadres during  the early years of the conflict and their production of revolutionary memoirs in its aftermath.   Many of the works that inspired young insurgents were translations from Russian and Chinese.  I will explore how these came to be translated into Nepali, why they became popular, and what this tells us about the transmission of political ideologies across international boundaries.  I will then turn my attention to a selection of recently published Nepali Maoist memoirs and try to identify their defining features.

Variations on the Matter of France, chansons de geste across Borders

Peter Madsen

There is no lack of blood, cerebral substance or entrails in the texts that are among the earliest in the various vernacular literary traditions in Europe. The chansons de geste celebrate heroic warfare, most often in confrontations with so called ‘saracens’. Originating in ‘sweet France’ on one hand they presented historical fictions about larger parts of Europe (including in particular the Iberian and Italian peninsulas), on the other hand imitations and appropriations of the subject matter in other tongues became important elsewhere. Although ruthless slaughtering for various reasons, yet mostly in the name of God, remained an important part of the picture, there are important variations that illustrate ways in which aspects of this particular kind of literature with the Islamic world on its mind circulated in the European part of the Medieval world.

The Routes of Poetry in Multilingual Macau

Cosima Bruno

Much of the literature identified in anthologies or critical work as ‘Macau literature’ is written by authors who immigrate to Macau, or that were born in Macau but then lived, worked and travelled out of Macau, or that were born elsewhere but have occasionally passed through Macau and written about it. These works are written in Chinese, Portuguese, Macanese Creole or English, and are here considered together because all present an experience of dwelling and travelling that challenges common assumptions about local/national literature, as well as world literature.
Because Macau used to be a Portuguese colony, because its literature is historically and aesthetically marked by mobility and hybridity, and it has been repetitively harassed by the more centrally established European and Chinese literary forces, it represents an almost textbook case study for the definitions of postcolonial, transnational, or world literature.

I argue however that contemporary literature from Macau is written above the fixation of the inclusion/exclusion in/from the centre, and accounts for special networks of production and circulation that require a re-examination of the viability of current critical work on the definition and study of ‘world literature’. In support of my argument, I will present a number of examples that are expressions of Macau’s multiple linguistic formations, and of unique intersections with the native land, the transnational, the colonial, the postcolonial and the neo-colonial.

Organiser: Centre for Cultural, Literary and Postcolonial Studies (CCLPS)

Sponsor: British Comparative Literature Association (BCLA)