This conference explores the promise and challenges of South-South comparativism. By critically examining the histories, repertoires, and methods of South-South exchange, the conference aims to assess how this paradigm reconfigures the geographies of comparison, as well as its epistemological and political grounds. Our approach seeks to move beyond traditional binaries of center and periphery, to encompass cross-regional dialogues across Asia, Africa, the Caribbean, Latin America, and the Middle East, as well as comparisons within regions and traditions.
What determines which regions, texts, or traditions are brought into dialogue, and how do these choices shape the narratives and frameworks we produce? Participants are encouraged to explore the modalities of producing and interrelating literatures/literary approaches that have emerged and are still emerging within the Global South as alternatives to the theories and practices of comparative literature in Euro-America, which have for a long time dominated literary notions and sensibilities as well as the practices of reading, contextualizing, and theorizing.
The two-day conference will be divided into a workshop and four panels. The workshop will discuss the legacies of Afro-Asianism, while the panels will turn attention to other South-South exchanges and solidarities as well as the archives, repertoires, and methodology of South-South comparison.
Supported by:
Alexander-von-Humboldt-Stiftung, Austrian Academy of Sciences, Dahlem Humanities Center, Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft, Einstein-Stitung (alphabetical order)
02.07.2025 - 03.07.2025
More information here
@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