Towards Eurasia
- 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 cumulativeIn 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.…
Author details: | Lucy Gasser |
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URN: | urn:nbn:de:kobv:517-opus4-433585 |
DOI: | https://doi.org/10.25932/publishup-43358 |
ISSN: | 1866-8380 |
Title of parent work (German): | Postprints der Universität Potsdam Philosophische Reihe |
Subtitle (English): | remapping Europe as ‘upstart peripheral to an ongoing operation’ |
Publication series (Volume number): | Zweitveröffentlichungen der Universität Potsdam : Philosophische Reihe (164) |
Publication type: | Postprint |
Language: | English |
Date of first publication: | 2019/10/23 |
Publication year: | 2019 |
Publishing institution: | Universität Potsdam |
Release date: | 2019/10/23 |
Tag: | Eurasia; Europe; Soviet Union; eurocentrism; world literature |
Issue: | 164 |
Number of pages: | 16 |
First page: | 188 |
Last Page: | 202 |
Source: | Postcolonial Studies 22 (2019) 2, S. 188–202 DOI: 10.1080/13688790.2019.1608798 |
Organizational units: | Philosophische Fakultät |
Peer review: | Referiert |
Publishing method: | Open Access |
Grantor: | Taylor & Francis Open Access Agreement |
License (German): | CC-BY-NC-ND - Namensnennung, nicht kommerziell, keine Bearbeitungen 4.0 International |
External remark: | Bibliographieeintrag der Originalveröffentlichung/Quelle |