World Literature has emerged as a vital field in twentieth-first century critical and comparative literary studies, one that reflects on the place and function of literatures in our global era. Straddling the established fields of English and Comparative literatures, area studies, postcolonial studies and globalization studies, world literature urges new approaches across a comparative, multi-scalar, translational and inter-cultural space-time continuum; a continuum that poses a serious challenge to a one-world and totalizing model of literary production in our capitalist era. In this regard, both the ‘oceanic’ and the global south have emerged as powerful analytical frames. Oceans straddle traditional boundaries of nations, races, languages, literatures and cultures. The millennial-long history of the Indian Ocean, in particular, encompasses scales of contact that radically transform our grasp of the history of global capitalism entwining Euro-American and Afro-Asian worlds. This talk will focus on the resonance of Indian Ocean worlds to imagining the Global South as a cartographic frame in the post-Cold War era, and argue that the idea of world literature is unthinkable without this longue durée perspective.

Debjani Ganguly is Professor of English and Director of the Institute of the Humanities and Global Cultures at the University of Virginia. She works in the areas of world literature, postcolonial studies, the global Anglophone novel, Indian caste and dalit studies, Indian Ocean literary worlds, war and human rights, and technologies of violence. Her books include This Thing Called the World: The Contemporary Novel as Global Form (Duke 2016), Caste, Colonialism and Counter-Modernity (Routledge 2005), Edward Said: The Legacy of a Public Intellectual (ed. 2007) and Rethinking Gandhi and Nonviolent Relationality (ed.2007). She is currently working on two projects: a two-volume Cambridge History of World Literature (forthcoming 2020), and a monograph provisionally called Catastrophic Form: Drones, Toxins, Climate. Debjani is the General Editor of a new CUP book series, Cambridge Studies in World Literature and serves on the advisory boards of the Harvard Institute for World Literature (IWL), the International Comparative Literature Association (ICLA), the Consortium of Humanities Centers and Institutes (CHCI), and the Academy of Global Humanities and Critical Theory (University of the Bologna). She has held visiting positions & fellowships at the University of Chicago (2010), University of Oxford (2012), University of Cambridge (2013), and University of Wisconsin Madison (2015).

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