Hostname: page-component-84b7d79bbc-g78kv Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-07-30T14:25:09.171Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false

The World and the Postcolonial

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  13 May 2014

Elleke Boehmer*
Affiliation:
University of Oxford, St Cross Building, Manor Road, Oxford OX1 3UQ, UK. E-mail: elleke.boehmer@ell.ox.ac.uk,

Abstract

This article examines the increasing competition in the academic market between conventional terms such as postcolonial and anglophone literature and their cognates, and the newly current term world literature. Even in postcolonial studies circles, world literature is increasingly taken to refer not only to ‘the best ever written’, as before, but to literature produced within and in response to a globalizing world. The paper explores the different valences of this shift, and the tensions and contradictions it has generated within the wider anglophone literary field.

Type
Focus: Nihilism
Copyright
Copyright © Academia Europaea 2014 

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

1.Young, R. J. C. (2011) World literature and postcolonialism. In: T. D’haen, D. Damrosch and D. Kadir (eds), The Routledge Companion to World Literature (New York: Routledge), pp. 213222.Google Scholar
2.Gupta, S. (2009) Globalization and Literature (Cambridge: Polity).Google Scholar
3.Said, E. (2001) Globalizing Literary Study. PMLA, 116(1), pp. 6468.Google Scholar
4.Wilson, J., Sandru, C. and Lawson Welsh, S. (eds) (2010) Rerouting the Postcolonial (London: Routledge).Google Scholar
5.Loomba, A., Kaul, S., Bunzl, M., Burton, A. and Esty, J. (eds) (2005) Postcolonial Studies and Beyond (Durham, NC: Duke University Press).Google Scholar
6.New Literary History (2012) The State of Postcolonial Studies. New Literary History, 43(1) and (2).Google Scholar
7.Spivak, G. (2003) Death of a Discipline (New York: Columbia University Press).Google Scholar
8.Damrosch, D. (2003) What is World Literature? (Princeton: Princeton University Press).Google Scholar
9.Emery, M. L. (2007) Modernism, the Visual and Caribbean Literature (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press).Google Scholar
10.Bahri, D. (2003) Native Intelligence: Aesthetics, Politics and Postcolonial Literature (Minneapolis: Minnesota University Press).Google Scholar
11.Boehmer, E. (2010) A postcolonial aesthetic: repeating upon the present. In: J. Wilson et al. (eds) Rerouting the Postcolonial (London: Routledge), pp. 170181.Google Scholar
12.Su, J. J. (2011) Amitav Ghosh and the aesthetic turn in postcolonial studies. Journal of Modern Literature, 34(3), pp. 6586.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
13.Young, R. J. C. (1998) Ideologies of the postcolonial. Interventions: International Journal of Postcolonial Studies, 1(1), pp. 48.Google Scholar
14.Casanova, P. (2004 [1999]) The World Republic of Letters. Translated by M. B. Debevoise (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press).Google Scholar
15.Wollaeger, M. (ed.) (2012) Global Modernisms (Oxford: Oxford University Press).Google Scholar
16.Thomas, N. (1994) Colonialismʼs Culture: Anthropology. Travel, and Government (Cambridge: Polity).Google Scholar
17.Boehmer, E. (2002) Empire, the National and the Postcolonial: Resistance in Interaction (Oxford: Oxford University Press).Google Scholar
18.B. Parry (2004) Postcolonial Studies: A Materialist Critique (London and New York: Routledge).Google Scholar
19.Chaudhuri, A. (2009) Clearing A Space: Essays on Literature, India and Modernity (Oxford: Peter Lang).Google Scholar
20.D’haen, T. (2012) The Routledge Concise History of World Literature (London and New York: Routledge).Google Scholar
21.D’haen, T., Damrosch, D. and Kadir, D. (eds) (2011) The Routledge Companion to World Literature (New York: Routledge).CrossRefGoogle Scholar
22.Gandhi, L. (2006) Affective Communities: Anticolonial Thought Fin-de-Siècle Radicalism and the Politics of Friendship (Durham, NC: Duke University Press).Google Scholar
23.Jameson, F. (1990) Modernism and imperialism. Nationalism, Colonialism and Literature (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press).Google Scholar
24.Moretti, F. (2000) Conjectures on world literature. New Left Review, 2nd series, 1, pp. 5468.Google Scholar
25.Moretti, F. (2003) More conjectures. New Left Review, 2nd series, 20, 7382.Google Scholar
26.Ramazani, J. (2009) A Transnational Poetics (Chicago: Chicago University Press).Google Scholar