TY - JOUR A1 - Adamik, Verena T1 - Making worlds from literature BT - W.E.B. Du Bois’s The Quest of the Silver Fleece and Dark Princess JF - Thesis eleven : critical theory and historical sociology N2 - While W.E.B. Du Bois’s first novel, The Quest of the Silver Fleece (1911), is set squarely in the USA, his second work of fiction, Dark Princess: A Romance (1928), abandons this national framework, depicting the treatment of African Americans in the USA as embedded into an international system of economic exploitation based on racial categories. Ultimately, the political visions offered in the novels differ starkly, but both employ a Western literary canon – so-called ‘classics’ from Greek, German, English, French, and US American literature. With this, Du Bois attempts to create a new space for African Americans in the world (literature) of the 20th century. Weary of the traditions of this ‘world literature’, the novels complicate and begin to decenter the canon that they draw on. This reading traces what I interpret as subtle signs of frustration over the limits set by the literature that underlies Dark Princess, while its predecessor had been more optimistic in its appropriation of Eurocentric fiction for its propagandist aims. KW - African American literature KW - Eurocentrism KW - genre KW - intertextuality KW - race Y1 - 2021 U6 - https://doi.org/https://doi.org/10.1177/0725513621993308 SN - 0725-5136 SN - 1461-7455 VL - 162 IS - 1 SP - 105 EP - 120 PB - Sage CY - London ER - TY - JOUR A1 - Gasser, Lucy T1 - Towards Eurasia BT - remapping Europe as ‘upstart peripheral to an ongoing operation’ JF - Postcolonial Studies N2 - In order to heed the call in world literature studies to work against disciplinary Eurocentrism by refiguring both what constitutes world literature and how this is read, in this article I propose world literature as an archive of world-making practices and as an impulse for the articulation of alternative methodological approaches. This takes world literature from the postcolonial South as, following Pheng Cheah, instantiating a modality of world literature in which the need for imagining worlds with alternative centres to those determined by coloniality is particularly acute. A response to this is facilitated and illustrated by a reading of Bengali poet Rabindranath Tagore’s Letters from Russia (1930), and South African writer/activist Alex La Guma’s A Soviet Journey (1978). By drawing forward connections between the postcolonial South and the former Soviet Union, this complicates traditional colonial arrangements of the colonial ‘centre’ as cradle of civilisation and culture, as well as postcolonial scholarship’s cumulative fetishisation of ‘Europe’, by allowing a reshuffling of the co-ordinates determining ‘centres’ and ‘peripheries’ and a more nuanced grasp of ‘Europe’ simultaneously. These imaginative journeys destabilise ‘Europe’ as closed category and call forth Eurasia as a more appropriate categorical–cartographical framework for thinking this space and the connections and (hi)story-telling it stages and fosters. KW - Eurasia KW - Europe KW - Eurocentrism KW - Soviet Union KW - world literature Y1 - 2019 U6 - https://doi.org/10.1080/13688790.2019.1608798 SN - 1368-8790 SN - 1466-1888 VL - 22 IS - 2 SP - 188 EP - 202 PB - Routledge, Taylor & Francis Group CY - Abingdon ER -