@Image by Malala Andrialavidrazana, Figures 1908, Mezhedunarodnye piti soobshcheniya (International communications), 2018

Decolonising the World Republic of Letters:

Translation, Circulation, and Intellectual Networks across the Global South

International Conference

Taking the twenty-fifth anniversary of the publication of Pascale Casanova’s field-defining La République mondiale des lettres (The World Republic of Letters, 1999) as its point of departure, this conference seeks to decentralize the praxis of cultural reading and literary critique that the notion of Paris as the world capital of literature represents. Drawing inspiration from a host of decolonial projects that seek to renegotiate the terms in which we understand the world—a process that Walter Mignolo terms “epistemic delinking”—we seek to examine trans-peripheral and counter-hegemonic cultural infrastructures that flourished despite, in resistance to, and in the aftermath of colonial domination. This project is historical, but also oriented toward the present and, crucially, dedicated to rethinking the epistemic assumptions that undergird the study of literature and associated forms of cultural production in the present. 

Time and place: May 23, 2024 – May 24, 2024, Fondation Maison des sciences de l'homme (FMSH) - 54 Bd Raspail, 75006 Paris, France

Online Streaming: https://uio.zoom.us/j/67840710142 / Meeting ID: 678 4071 0142

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