Jibanananda Das (1899–1954) is widely revered as the preeminent poet of post-Tagore Bengali literature. His oeuvre is unremittingly autobiographical, narrating desultory journeys into a vulnerable yet stoic, companionless life. The poem that the paper analyses is one of his most well known. Two streaks of narrative run parallel in the poem: the protagonist’s act of suicide without any apparent reason and the ceaseless brutality of nature as a way of life. The poem has occasioned a large body of critical literature. As against the prevalent interpretation of the poem, which privileges self-consciousness and a dialectical scheme of interpretation, we set off a Foucauldian, archeo-genealogical reading. In our reading, the poem is a theater of many voices constituting a matrix of language, which, strictly speaking, is a nonlanguage—articulations that perfectly fold back against one another to implicate in a tautological bind the originary meaninglessness of living and of life’s constitutive cruelty. Here negation is uncontainable and illimitable, always spilling over, always open to possibilities of being otherwise, its trail running in negating—almost inevitably—negation itself and thus gesturing an aleatory renewal of a space for the political.

This article examines postcolonial representations of the jungle and the desert, focusing on two novels in particular: Étienne Goyémidé’s Le silence de la forêt (1984) and Tahar Djaout’s L’invention du désert (1987). Postcolonial literary representations of these “extreme” landscapes are layered with allusions and almost always engage in an intertextual conversation with the colonial genres that influenced readers’ conception of these spaces. The specificity of jungle and desert serves in contemporary postcolonial literature as a foil to homogenizing forces of both the past and the present, as seen in the stylistic techniques authors employ to depict these spaces. These stylistic techniques often work in two seemingly opposing directions: they “naturalize” landscapes that are often portrayed as inhuman and contrast them to the “unnatural” structures of colonial and postcolonial society, while at the same time embodying and claiming the distortion or disorientation inherent in those landscapes. These complex, multifaceted, geographically rooted descriptions, which incorporate and react to a variety of historical and cultural factors, take what I call an ecosystem approach, rather than continuing to rely on a false nature/culture division.

This article explores Hélène Cixous’s and Jacques Derrida’s explicit revisiting of their Algerian memories, especially in their later work (mainly Reveries of the Wild Woman and Monolingualism of the Other). These texts offer a specifically deconstructive response to the colonial project in Algeria, attempting to think non-appropriative relations to otherness and processes of identification that exceed a self/other binary. Investigating the colonial principle that manifested itself in Algeria from the vantage point of their Judeo-Franco-Maghrebian situatedness, they derive from this position not accounts of cultural particularity, but analyses of (and alternatives to) colonial practices of identification: analyzing colonial and identity politics as harmful to a fundamental relationality to otherness and affirming a “spectral” zone without belonging that nonetheless carves out a life with, toward, and of the other, on the others’ sides, relational without being oblivious of antagonisms and violence.

This article assesses the African American dancer and intellectual Katherine Dunham’s vision and legacy for a performative history of the Black Atlantic by examining two of her early choreographic works, L’Agya and Little Black Sambo. From little-known archival materials and her published writings, I reconstruct the genesis of these works in her fieldwork in the French Caribbean as well as in the phantasm of the Plantation. Through the emotional relationships between Africa, “Africa,” and African diasporic expressive life that emerge, I excavate a hidden history for the modern subject as formed through not only the displacements generated by colonialism and slavery, but also unexpected new regimes of pleasure that were their historical consequences. The resulting imaginative and kinetic expressions that conflate colonial and postcolonial temporalities enable me to posit the limits and possibilities of “trans(post)colonial collaborations” within Dunham’s repertoire as well as for the horizon of the present.

Although most all contemporary studies of China and Africa focus on current economic or foreign policy concerns, this article provides a preliminary mapping of Africa-China cultural exchanges during the Cold War. Growing out of the Africa-Asia Conference of Bandung, Indonesia, in 1955, the Afro-Asian Writers Bureau forged third world solidarities via an alternative conception of postcolonialism based on the transnationalism of global South cultural struggle. By analyzing the cultural exchanges of the bureau, and in particular their definition of world literature, this article seeks to move beyond postcolonial scholarship that focuses exclusively on a vertical relationship between the colonizer and colonized. In so doing, it both reinterprets the Cold War from outside of an American and Soviet dichotomy and provides a critical cultural historicization to China’s current, and often controversial, presence in Africa.

A crucial theoretical question in world literature studies concerns the dual trajectories of extroversion and introversion, and how they relate to or even are predicated on each other. By discussing the examples of Tayeb Salih and, in particular, Sol Plaatje, this article tries to demonstrate that although the current turn toward more “introverted” literary studies can be seen as justifiably critical of single-system modes of world literature theory, an attentiveness to the combined and contradictory trajectories of extroversion and introversion will enable a more situated and localized form of world literature studies that nonetheless evades the risk of reifying national or linguistic provenance. This also requires a stronger conception of reception history not as a transparent vessel for the literary object, but as an active agent in rendering specific texts or authorships readable as introverted or extroverted.

This essay examines the movement of Arab national and cultural revival known as nahdah (meaning renaissance or awakening) as a speech act and a performance involving a nuhūd (rising) and an uncertain practice of civilization (tamaddun) that seek to bring about a culture of knowledge. Contesting its treatment as a homogeneous project of modernity that rose and fell and as a historical period with clear epistemic breaks, it argues that nahdah civilizational practices could not be reduced to notions of civilization associated with Orientalism as system of othering and cultural superiority. This approach frees up nahdah texts from the dominant narrative of rise and decline, and from their intertextual and ideological dependency on European modernity as a model to be borrowed or resisted.

The debate over the impact of British colonialism and “colonial modernity” in India has hinged around questions of epistemic and aesthetic rupture. Whether in modern poetry, art, music, in practically every language and region intellectuals struggled with the artistic traditions they had inherited and condemned them as decadent and artificial. But this is only part of the story. If we widen the lens a little and consider print culture and orature more broadly, then vibrant regional print and performance cultures in a variety of Indian languages, and the publishing of earlier knowledge and aesthetic traditions belie the notion that English made India into a province of Europe, peripheral to London as the center of world literature. Yet nothing of this new fervor of journals, associations, literary debates, of new genres or theater and popular publishing, transpires in Anglo-Indian and English journals of the period, whose occlusion of the Indian-language stories produced ignorance, distaste, indifference—those “technologies of recognition” (Shu-Mei Shih) that produce “the West” as the agent of recognition and “the rest” as the object of recognition, in representation.

In responding to Muhsin al-Musawi’s two-part essay on the Arabic Republic of Letters, this essay proposes a rethinking of the world systems model in global literary studies in terms of a polysystems framework. Rather than trying to fit literary worlds—ancient, premodern, modern—within a single Euro-chronological frame culminating in a world capitalist systems model—where the non-European worlds appear as invariably inferior—it is worthwhile to see them as several polysystems with variable valences within a heterotemporal planetary literary space. This approach offers a comparative reading of the emergence of three language worlds—Sanskrit, Persian, and Arabic—and urges us to rethink the totality of the world literary space as a diachronic field that generates overlapping, multiscalar, comparative histories of literary polysystems.

My argument in the two-part essay focuses on the dilemma of nahḍah as an unfinished mission; a transition as Țāhā Ḥusayn calls it. I join many scholars who are trying to see through its problematic nature, but I see it also in relation to the immediate past with which it has maintained an uneasy relationship. The recent premodern or medieval past, I argue, could have been read and approached differently to build up a better link with the masses that the nahḍah intellectual bypasses or disparages. The past as a significant period of constellations and knowledge construction could have helped the search for new paths that could also accommodate European knowledge. Other models, alluded to by my insightful respondents and interlocutors, confirm the validity of this proposal, despite the fact that the medieval Islamic republic of letters—as a blanket term for multidimensional efforts—offers more venues in knowledge construction that challenge Casanova’s one single model.

This essay places Wole Soyinka’s Death and the King’s Horseman in various comparative contexts. These include the comparison with Achebe’s Things Fall Apart and Arrow of God, literary tragedy, and world literature. Setting out the difficulties in teaching African and minority literatures in the Euro-American classroom, the essay details the means by which such problems are negotiated and the ways in which the text is brought alive as a dramatic text that speaks to various themes and ideas.