World Literature and Dissent

205 Pages·2019·7.158 MB·English

by  Lorna Burns (editor), Katie Muth (editor)

WORLD LITERATURE AND DISSENT
World Literature and Dissent reconsiders the role of dissent in contemporary global
literature. Bringing together scholars of world and postcolonial literatures, the con-
tributors explore the aesthetics of resistance through concepts including the episte-
mology of ignorance, the rhetoric of innocence, the subversion of paying attention,
and the radical potential of everydayness.
Addressing a broad range of examples, from the Maghrebian humanist Ibn Khal-
du-ntoIndia’sFacebookpoets,andexaminingwriterssuchasLangstonHughes,Ben
Okri, Sara Uribe, and Merle Collins, this highly relevant book reframes the field of
world literature in relation to dissenting politics and aesthetics. It asks the urgent
question: how might critical practice cultivate radical thought, further social justice,
and value human expression?
LornaBurnsisLecturerinPostcolonialLiteraturesattheUniversityofStAndrews.
Katie Muth is Teaching Fellow in American Literature at Durham University.

WORLD LITERATURE
AND DISSENT
Edited by Lorna Burns and Katie Muth
Firstpublished2019
byRoutledge
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LibraryofCongressCataloging-in-PublicationData
Names:Muth,Katie,editor.|Burns,Lorna,editor.
Title:Worldliteratureanddissent/editedbyKatieMuthandLornaBurns.
Description:NewYork,NY:Routledge,2019.|Includesbibliographical
referencesandindex.
Identifiers:LCCN2019007869|ISBN9781138561854(hardback:alk.paper)|
ISBN9781138561861(pbk.:alk.paper)|ISBN9780203710302(ebook)
Subjects:LCSH:Socialconflictinliterature.|Dissentersinliterature.|
Postcolonialisminliterature.|Equalityinliterature.|Socialjustice
inliterature.|Aesthetics,Modern.|Literature,Modern–21st
century–Historyandcriticism.
Classification:LCCPN56.S65W6672019|DDC809/.933581–dc23
LCrecordavailableathttps://lccn.loc.gov/2019007869
ISBN:978-1-138-56185-4(hbk)
ISBN:978-1-138-56186-1(pbk)
ISBN:978-0-203-71030-2(ebk)
TypesetinBembo
byTaylor&FrancisBooks
CONTENTS
Acknowledgements vii
List of contributors viii
Introduction: World literature and dissent 1
Lorna Burns and Katie Muth
PARTI
Dissent (in theory) 13
1 Dissent in the reign of ignorance, or parsing the epistemology
of empire 15
Djelal Kadir
2 The problem of dissent 30
Katie Muth
3 Paying attention: Philosophy as dissenting therapy for the
information age 51
Dominic Smith
4 Rhetoric of innocence or literary dissent?: Franco Moretti,
world-systems theory and the case of magical realism 66
Lorna Burns
5 Khaldunia: The literary politics of radical Arabic humanism 85
Timothy Brennan
vi Contents
PARTII
Dissident literatures 101
6 Everyday dissent: Colonised lifeworlds in twentieth-century
poetry 103
Nick Lawrence
7 Facebook poet: Poetic dissent and social media in contemporary
India 120
Anindya Raychaudhuri
8 Writing the necropolitical: Notes around the idea of Mexican
anti-world literature 141
Ignacio M. Sánchez Prado
9 ‘Dreams of revolt’, the ‘revolt of nature’: World literature and
the ecology of revolution 161
Sharae Deckard
10 Negative enchantment 179
Mads Rosendahl Thomsen
Index 192
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
ThiscollectionhasitsrootsinasymposiumorganisedbytheeditorsattheUniversity
of St Andrews, 16–17 June 2016. We would like to warmly thank the School of
English for their generous financial support, which allowed us to bring together
scholarsfrom acrossEurope,the US and the UK,and tobegin toprobe the issue of
world literature and dissent. We would like to thank all participants and delegates
who contributed to that event, especially Anna Bernard, Timothy Brennan, Sharae
Deckard, David Farrier, Djelal Kadir, Oisín Keohane, Nick Lawrence, Dominic
Smith, Mads Rosendahl Thomsen, Galin Tihanov, and Robert Young.
We would like to extend our sincerest thanks to the editorial team at Routledge,
whose patience and enthusiasm for this project has been unwavering. To that
end, we would like to acknowledge the support of Polly Dodson and Zoë Meyer.
Finally,weextendoursincerestthankstoallwhohavecontributedessaystothisvolume.
“I,Too,”“ANewSong,”and“We,Too”fromTheCollectedPoemsofLangstonHughes
by Langston Hughes, edited by Arnold Rampersad with David Roessel, Associate
Editor.Copyright©1994bytheEstateofLangstonHughes.WhereprintedintheUS,
Canada,thePhilippinesandotherUSterritories,theseextractsareusedbypermissionof
Alfred A. Knopf, an imprint of the Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, a division of
Penguin Random House LLC. All rights reserved. Where printed in the UK and
Commonwealth,theseextractsarereprintedbypermissionofHaroldOberAssociates.
Every effort has been made to contact copyright holders for their permission to
reprint material in this book. The publisher would be grateful to hear from any
copyright holder who is not here acknowledged and will undertake to rectify any
errors or omissions in future editions of this book.
CONTRIBUTORS
Timothy Brennan is Professor of Comparative Literature, Cultural Studies, and
English at the University of Minnesota. He is the author of Borrowed Light: Vico,
Hegel and the Colonies (Stanford University Press 2014), Secular Devotion: Afro-Latin
MusicandImperialJazz(Verso2008),WarsofPosition:TheCulturalPoliticsofLeftand
Right (Columbia UniversityPress 2006), Empire inDifferent Colors (Revolver 2007),
At Home in the World: Cosmopolitanism Now (Harvard University Press 1997), and
Salman Rushdie and the Third World: Myths of the Nation (Macmillan 1989).
Lorna Burns is Lecturer in Postcolonial Literatures in the School of English at the
University of St Andrews. Her most recent monograph is Postcolonialism After World
Literature: Relation, Equality, Dissent (Bloomsbury 2019), and she is the author of
Contemporary Caribbean Writing and Deleuze: Literature Between Postcolonialism and Post-
continentalPhilosophy (Continuum2012). Sheisco-editorofPostcolonialLiteraturesand
Deleuze(Palgrave2012),andaspecialissueoftheJournalofPostcolonialWritingonthe
author Wilson Harris. Her work on world literature, postcolonialism, and con-
tinental philosophy has appeared in Angelaki, Deleuze Studies, Journal of Postcolonial
Writing, Textual Practice, and a number of edited collections.
Sharae Deckard is Lecturer in World Literature atUniversity College Dublin. Her
monograph Paradise Discourse, Imperialism and Globalization was published by Routle-
dge in2010, and she is a co-author with the Warwick Research Collective of Com-
bined and Uneven Development: Towards a New Theory of World-Literature (Liverpool
UniversityPress2015).Shehaspublishedmultiplearticlesonpostcolonialecocriticism
and world-ecology in Green Letters, Moving Worlds, Interventions, and various edited
collections.
Listofcontributors ix
Djelal Kadir is Edwin Erle Sparks Professor Emeritus of Comparative Literature
at Pennsylvania State University and a founding president of the International
American Studies Association. His books include Columbus and the Ends of the
Earth (University of California Press 1992), The Other Writing: Postcolonial Essays
inLatinAmerica’sWritingCulture(PurdueUniversityPress1993),andMemosFrom
the Besieged City: Lifelines for Cultural Sustainability (Stanford University Press
2011). He is co-editor with Theo D’Haen and David Damrosch of The Routledge
Companion to World Literature (Routledge 2012), and with David Damrosch et al.
of the Longman Anthology of World Literature (Pearson 2004).
Nick Lawrence is Associate Professor in the Department of English and
Comparative Literary Studies at the University of Warwick. His research focu-
ses on American literature and culture from the nineteenth century to the
present, especially within an international context; Hawthorne and Whitman;
and Marxism. He is co-author with the Warwick Research Collective of
Combined and Uneven Development: Towards a New Theory of World-Literature
(Liverpool University Press 2015).
Katie Muth is Teaching Fellow in American Literature at Durham University.
Her research interests include Cold War studies, African American literatures,
world literatures, and digital humanities. She is currently completing a mono-
graph, Day Jobs: Postwar American Fiction and Work, and has published on French
theory in American experimentalism, Thomas Pynchon’s technical writing and
other nonfiction, midcentury television, and digital methods in literary analysis.
Anindya Raychaudhuri is a Lecturer in English at the School of English,
University of St Andrews. His primary research interest is in the cultural
representation and collective memory of war and conflict. He is also interested
in postcolonial and diasporic identities and cultures. He edited The Spanish Civil
War: Exhuming a Buried Past (University of Wales Press 2013) and is the
author of Homemaking: Postcolonial Nostalgia and the Construction of a South Asian
Diaspora (Rowman & Littlefield 2018) and Narrating South Asian Partition: Oral
History, Literature, Cinema (Oxford University Press 2019). In 2016, he was named
one of the BBC/Arts and Humanities Research Council New Generation
Thinkers.
Ignacio M. Sánchez-Prado is Jarvis Thurston and Mona Van Duyn Professor of
the Humanities at Washington University in St Louis. He is the author of El canon
y sus formas: La reinvención de Harold Bloom y sus lecturas hispanoamericanas (Gobierno
delEstadodePuebla2002),Poesíaparanada(Educal2005),Nacionesintelectuales.Las
fundaciones de la modernidad literaria mexicana (1917–1959) (Purdue University Press
2009), Intermitencias americanistas. Estudios y ensayos escogidos (2004–2010) (Uni-
versidad Nacional Autónoma de México 2012), Screening Neoliberalism. Mexican
Cinema 1988–2012 (Vanderbilt University Press 2014), and Strategic Occidentalism.