For several years now, James Baldwin’s life, portrait, and work have enjoyed a central place in the public eye. Although social and audiovisual media have made significant contributions to Baldwin’s return to the cultural and political limelight, the circulation of his published writings remains a vital part of the author’s ubiquity. Moreover, since Baldwin’s omnipresence in bookstores transcends an American or even Anglophone context, this international and multilingual circulation contributes to Baldwin’s world literary standing, as befits the self-described “transatlantic commuter.” This article moves beyond the customary approach to Baldwin’s published success by tracing presently circulating European translations of his work. The article examines the historical developments in Baldwin’s European circulation-through-translation from the time of his death (1987) up until the present, including brief discussions of the French, Italian, and West German translations from the 1960s onward. Of special interest are the pioneering and dominant roles that French and Italian publishers have played since the late 1990s, and the acceleration in circulation that took place across the continent in the wake of the films I Am Not Your Negro and If Beale Street Could Talk. The article concludes with a few remarks on the translation strategies of several key publishers in France, Italy, Germany, and Romania.
This collection brings together for the first time literary studies of British colonies in nineteenth-century Australia, New Zealand, South Africa, South America, Southeast Asia, and the Pacific Islands. Drawing on hemispheric studies, Indigenous studies, and southern theory to decentre British and other European metropoles, the collection offers a latitudinal challenge to national paradigms and traditional literary periodisations and canons by proposing a new literary history of the region that is predicated less on metropolitan turning points and more on southern cultural perspectives in multiple regional centres from Cape Town to Dunedin. With a focus on southern orientations, southern audiences, and southern modes of addressivity, Worlding the south foregrounds marginal, minor, and neglected writers and texts across a hemispheric complex of southern oceans and terrains. Drawing on an ontological tradition that tests the dominance of networked theories of globalisation, the collection also asks how we can better understand the dialectical relationship between the ‘real’ world in which a literary text or art object exists and the symbolic or conceptual world it shows or creates. By examining the literary processes of ‘worlding’, it demonstrates how art objects make legible homogenising imperial and colonial narratives, inequalities of linguistic power, textual and material violence, and literary and cultural resistance. With contributions from leading scholars in nineteenth-century literary and cultural studies, the collection revises literary histories of the ‘British world’ by arguing for the distinctiveness of settler colonialism in the southern hemisphere, and by incorporating Indigenous, diasporic, settler, and other southern perspectives.
Leo Duclassen ( 2012 ) “ European Migration History ,” in Routledge International Handbook of Migration Studies. Steven J. Gold and Stephanie J. Nawyn , eds. New York : Routledge , pp. 52–63 . Eisner , Martin ( 2020 ) “ Vernacularization and World Literature: The Language of Women in the World of God ,” in A Companion to World Literature. Ken
such enabling, form-giving forms, especially where they become officially sanctioned and embedded, has the effect of disrupting, at times profitably, the coercive common destiny or shared cultural tradition that is invoked. Perhaps the most influential, though also the most contested-against advocate of narrative as a ‘process of [national] form-giving’, of writing plot into history, is Fredric Jameson, in particular as he expresses his ideas in the widely cited, controversial essay ‘Third-world literature in the era of multinational capitalism’.32 Although Jameson is one
this knowledge implies, one way or the other – so as to aggregate cultural production, to describe its poiēsis and agents, and to frame its reading?’ 54 Our proposal is not a rejection of the insights enabled by the methodologies of critical global thinking, world-systems theory, and/or world literature, but rather their fusion with a more explicit focus on the ontological dimensions of worlding so as to better appreciate the world-making capabilities of aesthetic objects. 55 To ignore the temporal and spatial constructions of a text’s own world and its
rejects it as myth. 16 In considering what she describes as the ‘embodiments of Australia in world literature’, Vilashini Cooppan lingers on the figure of the ‘antipodean foot’ (which she terms a ‘species of continental fetishism’) best represented in the Osma Beatus map of 1086 ( Figure 2.1 ), where the mythological figure of a Skiapod shields itself from the red-hot southern sun. 17 ‘A proxy substitute’ for the southern continent, the antipodean foot evokes a corporeal inversion that promotes ‘displacement and disavowal’: ‘the order of the austral map’ is ‘that it
through the Mediterranean vacillated between one shore and the other (“l’un lito e l’altro” in Inferno 26.103), so too does Virgil's explanation rely on a formal equivalency that has the path of the sun pass by Jerusalem on the south and the mountain of Purgatory on the north. As shores relate, so do hemispheres. We might look at this alternation between intensely local references to Italian geography and the planetary, celestial perspective that emerges in this astronomical consideration through the lens of world literature. Neil Lazarus argues
). Warwick Research Collective ( 2015 ) Combined and Uneven Development: Towards a New Theory of World Literature . Liverpool : Liverpool University Press . Weiss , H. ( 2015 ) ‘ Financialization and its discontents: Israelis negotiating pensions ’. American Anthropologist 117 ( 3 ): 506–518 . Notes 1
World literatures for schoolteachers, lobbied for such texts to be accepted by British Schools Examination Boards, and published the journal Wasafiri , which still continues. In the Caribbean, Kenneth Ramchand and Gordon Rohlehr, both CAM activists, introduced Caribbean literature into the UWI syllabuses at Mona and St Augustine, Trinidad, and encouraged its teaching in local secondary schools. In
empirical world, as well as the worlds of fiction and make-believe, literature came almost entirely unstuck. Joe Cleary has contended that the collapse of the European imperial world brought about the collapse of the Anglo-French literary world system. Until the First World War, Paris and London were the un contested centres of world literature; bourgeois realism and the advent of the novel were considered the supreme achievements of world literature. According to this view, the ‘breakup of the old London- and Paris-centred literary world-system’ sparked a concomitant