SOAS Research Online

Abstract

One of the problems with current theories of world literature is that the term “world” is insufficiently probed and theorized. As a category, “world” is too generic and suggests a continuity and seamlessness that are both deceptive and self-fulfilling. Easy invocations of “world” and “global” (novel, literary marketplace) replicate the blindspots that Sanjay Krishnan identified when he called the global an instituted perspective, with macro-theories drawing unproblematically on theories of globalization elaborated in the social sciences. Instead, in our comparative project Multilingual Locals and Significant Geographies we argue that to theorize world literature taking on board the complexities, layers and multiplicity of “literatures in the world” (as S. Shankar prefers to call it), we need a richer spatial imagination of the “world.” Here we propose the notion of “significant geographies” as the conceptual, imaginative, and real geographies that texts, authors, and language communities inhabit, produce, and reach out to.