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1 results

  • 21 - From Diasporic Tamil Literature to Global Tamil Literature

  • from Part III - Transregional Worlding
  • Edited by Debjani Ganguly, University of Virginia
  • Book:
    The Cambridge History of World Literature
    Published online:
    17 August 2021
    Print publication:
    09 September 2021, pp 393-408

  • Summary

    This chapter examines the unique case of the emergence of a new world literature (in the sense of a literary system operating on a global scale), a case that has so far been absent from discussions of world literature in the Anglo-American academy and beyond. This new world literature is the literature of ‘global Tamil’. Until about the last decade of the twentieth century, ‘Tamil literature’ was used to refer to literature produced by the Tamil people of India and Sri Lanka, as well as Tamil speakers in Singapore and Malaysia. Today, at the beginning of the twenty-first century, Tamil literature has transcended this earlier geography. The chapter traces the emergence of Tamil literature as a new world literature through two waves of migration of Tamils from South India and Sri Lanka to other parts of the globe, and it examines the writing generated by this movement of people and ideas.