Year: 2020
Type: article
Abstract: Part two of the special issue of World Literature and Postcolonial Studies comes out during extraordinary times.The world is fighting a global pandemic."I can't breathe" and "Black Lives Matter" are no longer expressions that are meaningful only in America.Rather, they have become calls to unite the world against bigotry, racism, and injustice.Meanwhile, Covid-19 has exposed racial, class, and economic inequalities all around the world.If in America, the global pandemic re-emphasized the failing healthcare system, in India it brought forth the biggest movement of people from urban centers to rural communities.Indeed, the migrant crisis in India could only be compared with the plight and tragedy of people during the 1947 partition, many of whom walked for thousands of miles to reach "home."Though the essays published in this special issue were selected before the global pandemic, the revisions and the preparation of the manuscript took place at a time when events were canceled, air and train travel was impossible, and countries were under lockdown.One cannot imagine bringing out this special issue, which has contributions of authors residing in different parts of the world, working on, to name a few, Korean, Australian, Maghrebi, Syrian, Welsh literatures, had the world not been connected through the circulatory network of the internet.Not surprisingly, then, the co-editors see the theme of circulation and movement running through the essays collected here.Often world literature is thought in simple terms as a literature in translation, circulating and leaping across national boundaries only in a handful of languages.Postcolonial literature, on the other hand, is usually assumed to be writing back to a colonial center and circulating in colonizer's languages.Yet both views shouldn't stray too far from actual realities on the ground.A study of literature in translation
Source: Journal of World Literature
Authors: Bhavya Tiwari, David Damrosch
Institutions: University of Houston, Harvard University
Language: English
Subfield: Literature and Literary Theory
Field: Arts and Humanities
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: bronze
OpenAlex ID: W3045441229