Multilingual Locals and Significant Geographies: For a Ground-up and Located Approach to World Literature

Abstract

‘World literature’ has been much theorized and re-theorized in recent years as comparative literature for the globalized age. As it moves out of the Euro-American ‘core’ of earlier comparative literature, it embraces those of us who work on Asian, Middle Eastern and African literatures, spurring us on to participate in this broader conversation and engage more directly and explicitly with the categories and models that underpin world literature.1 Yet its theoretical approaches based on world-system theory, diffusion and circulation, its geographical meta-categories such as ‘world’ and ‘global’, and its linear and teleological historical narratives that inevitably begin with Goethe all seem to imprison non-Western literatures in categories, timelines and explanations that do not fit, rather than genuinely interrogate them.