This seminar is a reflection on what it means to talk about a ‘world’ in literature that is not simply co-extensive with an ever-expanding sense of our connection with the rest of globe due to accelerated information flows; nor merely a category responding to the normative frame of a postcolonial consciousness that urges consideration of literatures from parts of the world not designated as the putative ‘West’. No doubt these are significant conditions of possibility for the re-emergence of ‘world literature’ as an idea suited to our globalized times. But to limit ourselves to thinking the world purely as ‘extension’ – territorial, infrastructural and cultural - works to the detriment of a literary and aesthetic understanding that is far more attuned to the actual work of language, form and genre in creating these worlds. World literature seen in terms of pure extension quickly falls prey to neo-materialist, anti-aestheticist critiques of complicity with global imperial networks, more so when it circulates in world languages such as English. Drawing on my current work on the World Novel post-1989, I suggest alternative ways of thinking the ‘world’ in literature that open up the category to semantic plenitude and that help us read contemporary world novels not as a singular artifact that affirms the globalizedworld as fictive universality, but as a genre that opens up many worlds which variously converse with, interrogate, interrupt and even inter forgotten histories of the world made in the image of contemporary global capital.

 

Debjani Ganguly directs the Humanities Research Centre at the Australian National University. She is also the Convener of EResearch projects and programs at ANU’s Digital Humanities Hub. She works in the areas of postcolonial literary and historical studies, and world literature in the era of globalization. Her books include, Caste, Colonialism and Countermodernity, Routledge, 2005, Edward Said: The Legacy of a Public Intellectual (ed.), Melbourne University Press, 2007, and Rethinking Gandhi and Nonviolent Relationality: Global Perspectives (ed.), Routledge, 2007. She is currently completing a monograph for Duke University Press entitled, World-Making: The Novel After 1989. Her other areas of research and publication include language worlds in South Asia, dalit life narratives, South Asian diasporic fiction, cultural histories of mixed race, and the globalization of Bollywood as creative industry. Debjani is an elected Fellow of the Royal Asiatic Society of UK and Ireland, Chair of the Freilich Foundation Board, member on the international advisory Boards of the Consortium of Humanities Centers and Institutes (CHCI, Duke University) and CLARINS (Common Language Resources and Technology Infrastructure), Utrecht University. She also serves on the steering council of Project Bamboo, a cyberinfrastructure project in the Humanities led by the University of California, Berkeley