Abstract Tagurabong, a quiet agrarian town in a Pacific-facing island in the southern Philippines, is a recurring site of mythmaking in Merlie Alunan’s Susumaton (2017) which anthologizes oral narratives from Leyte. As a narrative commonplace, Tagurabong is a rural place where anachronistic technologies, tricksters, and mystical objects emerge. This essay proposes to examine this anachronism by “facing Tagurabong”, a critical gesture which values oral narratives as integral for understanding the encroachment of techno-modernity in the Philippine pastoral life. To face Tagurabong is to confront the uneven temporality and rhythm of development in the Global South where opposing binaries like the West versus the rest, urban versus rural, or archaic versus modern coexist. Rural imagination transcends realism and moves into fantasy to generate an oracular vision of the future: techno-capitalism, gentrification, and climate change which ultimately threaten the tropical agrarian life. I finally situate Susumaton at the crossroads of magical realism and irrealist writing to show the place of Waray oral narratives in world literature.
Abstract This paper reads The Swan Book (2013) as a world literary text to distill how it offers a localized meaning of climate change. Against the grain of the common tendency amongst contemporary literary critics to adopt a decolonial approach and establish how Indigenous literatures subvert, challenge or estrange non-Indigenous genre and critical approaches, this paper engages Indigenous ways of knowing alongside contemporary ontological theories to demonstrate The Swan Book ’s pertinence on a planetary scale. Through a dialogical critical lens I show how it suggests reimagining and fostering relationalities and relations of coexistence on all levels, starting from below. The Swan Book ’s response to the ecological crisis illustrates how localized meanings coexist with more general, global ones.
Abstract Elif Shafak’s novel The Island of Missing Trees (2021) engages with the recent political history of Cyprus through a tragic love story that foregrounds questions of roots, identity, nationality, and immigration. While the novel has often been read in relation to human trauma and displacement caused by the political unrest of the 1970s, it also draws attention to the impact of political conflict on the island’s ecological life. Shafak presents trauma not only as a human experience but also as a more-than-human condition embodied by a fig tree that is displaced from Cyprus and forced to adapt to an unfamiliar climate in London. This paper reads the fig tree as a storied matter through which political violence, displacement, and environmental disruption are inscribed and communicated across human and nonhuman worlds.
Abstract This paper aims to counterpoint the diverse fluvial scenarios juxtaposed in the video installation A Gente Rio / We River (2016) by Colombian artist Carolina Caycedo and in “Adeus a Sete Quedas” (1982) by Brazilian poet Carlos Drummond de Andrade. To this end, I combine a reading of their multiple references and of the visual decisions made to approach the ambivalence of different mindsets at work in places characterized by dam constructions. Drawing from the conception of the river as a line, which informs its instrumental use as a source of energy and as a natural border, I argue that this ratio only works in theory and I articulate the main ways in which it always fails: when it is seen through its ecological and intertextual connections, when the infrastructure stops working properly, when reservoirs flood their course, and when the river entities are considered from the spiritual perspective of indigenous rituals.
Abstract This essay analyzes three contemporary novels from India to ask how we might rethink global and planetary approaches to literary comparison. Environmental world literature is more than a corpus of globally circulating ecological narratives. I suggest a mode of reading and a model of comparison that foregrounds how environmental meaning takes shape in the multilingual literary ecologies and linguistic proximity of languages in the Indian subcontinent. While recalibrating models of scale and circulation, the essay also considers what happens to texts in translation and the epistemic displacements that are embedded in literary form as it mediates between local and global frames of environmental knowledge.
Abstract This article examines the relationship between world literature and human rights through a reading of Kamila Shamsie’s Home Fire (2017) and Best of Friends (2022). Building on scholarship on the human rights novel, it argues that Shamsie’s recent fiction registers how access to both rights and literary visibility is structured by citizenship and class. Through its depiction of borders, bureaucratic discretion, and asymmetrical mobility, Home Fire exposes the uneven distribution of recognition under contemporary regimes of sovereignty. Best of Friends extends this inquiry by foregrounding elite global networks and the classed infrastructures that shape belonging. By drawing attention to questions of citizenship and human rights in real-life cases such as Shamima Begum’s, Shamsie prompts an interrogation of whose lives are considered grievable while also framing social class as a protective category that intensifies inequalities. Attending to materialist critiques of world literature, the article argues that the field’s engagement with human rights cannot be disentangled from the conditions of its own production and reception.
This article examines the depiction of the power of sex trafficking survivors in contemporary South Asian fiction, situating these narratives within broader debates in world literature and human rights. Current sex trafficking fiction often presents protagonists as victimised figures with little or no agency. Although the violence associated with trafficking affects these characters psychologically and physically, I argue that this does not preclude the existence of agency and interiority. I analyse the problem of agency in relation to three texts: Mahasweta Devi's short story `Douloti the Bountiful' (1995), Tariq Mehmood's novella Song of Gulzarina (2016), and Shobha Rao's novel Girls Burn Brighter (2018), which depict survivors from India, Pakistan, and Bangladesh. Drawing on trauma theory, feminist and postcolonial perspectives, and the ethics of representing human rights violations in literature, this article examines sexual violence and its effects on the voice and interiority of characters. It considers how voice, identity, and geographical relocation intersect to produce varying forms of agency among sex trafficking survivors in fiction. At points, these texts depict South Asian survivors exercising significant control or finding ways to resist, while at other moments they present them as more passive. I discuss the reasons behind this variation, including the exclusion of survivors' voices and the absence of narrative detail in trafficking fiction. This article critiques the stereotype of the `helpless victim' and highlights moments in which characters assert agency, navigate trauma, and maintain interiority despite structural constraints. The relevance of this research extends beyond literature, as these portrayals influence perceptions of real sex trafficking survivors. By situating these narratives within world literature and human rights frameworks, the analysis emphasises the importance of including survivor voices in fiction, challenging stereotypes of passive women of colour, and supporting more empathetic and informed approaches to rehabilitation and justice.
Abstract This article offers a new story of the Graeco-Babyloniaca, a corpus of clay tablets which feature cuneiform Sumerian and Akkadian texts on one side, transliterated into the Greek alphabet on the other. Stories traditionally told about the Graeco-Babyloniaca are invested in the pathos of ruin, focusing on defeat, decline, and obsolescence. This essay celebrates survival, finding in these texts indications of defiance, desire, and cultural renaissance. By situating the tablets in their historical context and placing them in dialogue with Damrosch’s theory of the “scriptworld,” this essay proposes that the corpus represents a genuinely innovative, if eventually abandoned, effort by Babylonian priestly elites to systematically adapt the newly cosmopolitan Greek alphabet to express the Babylonian languages. The goal was to preserve their own formerly cosmopolitan culture in the face of foreign occupation, rather than assimilate to that of their invaders, while retaining their traditional medium for such texts: clay.
Abstract This article reframes the public library’s locus in world literature by foregrounding the significance of the non-reader for the library movement. Its attention to the movement’s focus on the indigent who would remain outside literacy and literary culture, i.e., the non-reader, diverges in two significant ways from existing scholarship. First, it demonstrates that the library is best understood as a literary institution that coheres around the presumed and ongoing absence of readers, rather than as an institution committed to literacy. Second, it shows the inadequacy of understanding libraries through the existing concepts of world literature. Such a category was of limited significance for the public library movement that established these libraries, and it was used in conjunction with, rather than as a counterpoint to, authochthonous discourses about literary culture.
Abstract The article asks to what extent rights in their current institutional forms can alter the lives of those affected by patriarchy, discrimination and other infringements. The question does not only address the capacity or success of rights to bring about significant change, but also the extent to which rights ensnare those who rely on them in the very same relations of oppression they are seeking to escape. This article explores perspectives that draw on literature, literary gestures and poetics as alternatives to what rights discourses can offer. These include an array of works. First, this article examines a piece that engages with a court case brought against poet and activist Stella Nyanzi to demonstrate how her legal team’s reliance on rights did not result in her empowerment, though the legal defence was successful. Second, it looks at the writings of the Milan Women’s Bookstore Collective (1990), focusing on their explicit rejection of rights and search for literary mothers. Finally, it turns to Italian author, Elena Ferrante’s ‘poetics’ (Morelli 2021) in her stories about women and their experience of violence, ranging from the level of the everyday to the exceptional. The article reflects on what a critical engagement with human rights can gain from examples such as these with the caveat that none of the three approaches that rely on poetics or literature redeem law, rights or any other form of institutional response.
Abstract This special issue of the Journal of World Literature explores the fraught and generative intersections between world literature and human rights at a moment of acute global crisis. The introduction opens with the invocation of Multatuli’s Max Havelaar (1860) as an exemplary instance of literature’s capacity to intervene in debates about human rights, situating it alongside Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin (1852), a book referenced in Max Havelaar itself. The life of both works – as well as the fact that the Dutch work was referencing its American counterpart that had been released only a few years earlier – underscores literature’s historical role in bringing an end to systems of forced labor. Drawing on Costas Douzinas’s distinction between subjective and institutional perspectives on human rights, the introduction traces the parallel development of literary institutions – from PEN International to UNESCO , which granted PEN special consultative status in 1948 – as custodians of expressive freedom within the world republic of letters. It then turns to the structural inequalities that govern both the world literary marketplace and the international human rights framework, arguing that both fields are shaped by what Steven Aschheim calls the “political economy of empathy,” in which moral concern tends to follow lines of cultural proximity and geopolitical power. Drawing on theorists including Megan Boler, Debjani Ganguly, Tim Gauthier, Ann Kaplan, and H.G. Toth, the introduction distinguishes passive from active empathy, proposing that world literature’s ethical potential lies in the transformative, reflexive encounter with difference, what Boler calls “testimonial reading,” rather than in mere sentimental identification. A sustained reading of J.M. Coetzee’s Disgrace (1999) anchors a Lacanian analysis of the gap between the utopian phantasy of constitutional human rights and the dystopian material realities that literature (and specifically South African world literature) has long registered with unsettling clarity. Through Lucy Lurie’s agonizing negotiation of property rights, bodily integrity, and what Antjie Krog calls a “small peace” ( klein vrede ), the introduction proposes what it terms a law of literature: a differential mediation between legal fiction and lived reality that gestures towards alternative modes of coexistence beyond the failing promises of liberal human rights discourse. The issue brings together essays on Alexis Wright, Kamila Shamsie, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Mahasweta Devi, Elena Ferrante, amongst others, and an interview with Antjie Krog, collectively mapping the possibilities and limits of literary expression as a site of ethical contestation in the twenty-first century.
Abstract This article charts the relationship between “indigeneity” and “mobility,” assessing its salience for contemporary World Literature. The argument positions, and critically interrogates, Waanyi writer Alexis Wright’s 2013 novel The Swan Book as a “worldly” Indigenous text. Through three nested analytical tropes – “mobile bodies,” “multispecies Dreamings,” and “moving worlds” – the analysis reveals the precariousness of categories through which the novel has been received, viewing it through the lens of a cautionary poetics. By foregrounding the transcultural figure of the swan, the article underscores the novel’s multispecies perspective, in which ecological actors are enmeshed with the human across disparate spatiotemporal scales. Further complicated by Wright’s stake in World Literature, such a planetary perspective rests, it is argued, on the novel’s wager upon the multiple timeframes of Indigenous Country against imprisoning settler-colonial logics: Risking its own circulation as World Literature, the novel reckons with worlds other than those sanctioned by the Australian nation-state.
Abstract This essay examines the productive tensions between human rights and postcolonialism by turning to three civil war novels: Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s Half of a Yellow Sun , Michael Ondaatje’s Anil’s Ghost , and Aminatta Forna’s The Memory of Love . Each text brings together a recurring set of characters: a metropolitan outsider, a bicultural mediator, and an underclass figure. These trios, in turn, generate narrative products – a book (Adichie), a sculpture (Ondaatje), and an oral tale (Forna) – that offer new frameworks for narrating violence and redress. By exploring what comes of these trios’ generative entanglements with each other, the novels also model how scholars of world and postcolonial literature might develop both critical and constructive accounts of human rights.
Abstract Human Rights, World Literature, and World Citizenship: From Charles Dickens to Alexis Wright interrogates the structural tension between the universalist ambitions of human rights discourse and their chronic subordination to the municipal jurisdictions of sovereign nation-states. Tracing this contradiction from its Enlightenment origins through the contemporary moment, the article contends that imaginative literature constitutes a distinct and irreplaceable epistemological space for reconceiving personhood beyond the reductive categories of juridical definition. Through sustained close readings of Charles Dickens, Peter Carey, and the Indigenous Australian novelist Alexis Wright, it demonstrates how the novel form uniquely dramatizes both the systemic failures of cosmopolitan citizenship and the utopian possibilities that persist within and against those failures. Situating its argument within the field of world literature, the article proposes that the formal encounter between individual subjectivity and collective belonging – staged repeatedly across these geographically and historically disparate texts – renders visible the contested and often precarious relationships among rights, sovereignty, and political membership. The article ultimately advances the claim that narrative imagination is not merely supplementary to legal and political thought, but remains constitutively indispensable to any genuinely inclusive vision of global community.
This article investigates an emerging genre in contemporary literature - the global anglophone novel of human rights. These are novels with a largely realistic aesthetic portraying rights abuses within living memory, circulating in English, often functioning as an intervention in public memory. They engage discourses with trans-national implications - migration and statelessness, terrorism, labor abuse by multinationals, foreign intervention in domestic conflict or gross violations of humanitarian norms. Falke begins by accepting James Dawes's 2018 description of American human rights novels, but argues for the genre as a distinctly global form. The article analyzes two novels - Kamila Shamsie's Burnt Shadows (2009) and Sharon Bala's The Boat People (2018) - as emblematic of the genre as they employ intergenerational plots, migration stories, and multi-perspective narration to highlight the interrelatedness of violence, poverty and displacement.
Having witnessed the end-point of eugenics in the violent, state-sanctioned genocide of Nazi Germany, it is impossible to discuss racial categories today without the knowledge that racialization is a dehumanising process that can lead to devastating consequences. Yet in spite of a willingness to acknowledge that race is a social construction, it often continues to be treated in everyday life as a real categorical difference. This article explores the modern dynamic between whiteness and racialization, highlighting a relationship between the studied objectivity of the scientific gaze and the supposed neutrality or non-racialised identity of whiteness. The way in which race functions as a technology of control becomes evident through the analysis of two key novels: Passing (1929) by Harlem Renaissance writer Nella Larsen and The White Girl (2019) by Australian First Nations author Tony Birch. With their depiction of racial passing, both novels challenge received ideas about race and skin colour, exposing the face as an important site where the sumptuary codes of race play out. This article considers the racial masks that people wear and the relational implications of ancestry on people’s faces.
Quotations are an essential part of what has been described as the circulatory character of world literature. As soon as a passage from a book is quoted, “that line will be quoted east and west”, as Emerson says. (Emerson 100) The present essay attempts to construct a poetics of quotation based on the notion that quotations have a dialogical character manifesting itself in a process of cultural interchange, which is here called conversation. The analytical part of the essay investigates diverse manifestations of quotations from Confucius to Einstein, the polyphony of voices circling round quotations in narrative and dramatic texts, the popularization of quotation in modern genres and media from light fiction to cartoons and science fiction, the relation between quotation and meme and the phenomenon that authors of world literature quote other authors of world literature.
This article investigates how James Baldwin utilizes the practice of face reading as a narrative drive in If Beale Street Could Talk (1974). Analyzing instances in which characters read one another’s faces, I show how the novel employs certain “cultural scripts” that predetermine how faces are read. The text spotlights an extensive history of practices in physiognomy and criminology that have found their way into racial profiling. I argue that the novel exposes and rejects face reading, thus reframing how faciality operates in the dominant discourses of literary modernism. The novel employs ambiguity in face readings, ultimately underscoring the right to facial opacity.
This paper explores a still-too US -European centered valuation system and assess how it determines the literary value of specific novels in a way that there is a risk that the contemporary novel is only being defined by the capitalist world-system and by key institutions from Europe and the Western world. To this end, we take the global novel debate as a point of departure to examine what are the conditions that make broader recognition possible and to what extent the global-novel canon truly addresses cultural diversity. Considering two Latin American novelists, Samanta Schweblin and Ariana Harwicz, this paper decentralizes this debate and arises insights regarding 1) the debates of the global novel in a broad context and beyond Anglo-American academia; 2) the valuation dynamics of the global literary field; 3) tranmigrancy and hybridization as key features of global novelists; 4) the global novel and the translation of women Latin American writers in the literary marketplace, with a specific focus on the cases of Schweblin and Harwicz.
