World Literature: Contemporary Postcolonial and Post-Imperial Literatures

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The concept of world literature was mooted by the German writer and philosopher Goethe in the aftermath of the Napoleonic re-mapping of Europe. He had suggested that world literature could arise from the disruption of cultural continuities through terrible wars engaged upon by combative nations. Considered thus world literature could become the agent through which cultures come to terms with complex constructs of the self and the other. World literature could transcend national projections of selfhood and otherness and move into transnational spaces where also the old hierarchies of centre and margins, the empowered and powerless could be replaced by the open terrains of world discourse. The essays in the present volume have been written by European and Indian scholars and academics and are inclusive of as many linguistic groups as possible. The majority of the essays in this volume were presented at a conference organized by the department of English, University of Mumbai, in collaboration with the Max Mueller Bhavan, Mumbai, to mark the 250th Birth Anniversary of Johann Von Goethe, but some were specially commissioned. They have been organised under the heads of theme papers and postcolonial/post-imperial literatures. The latter category includes Anglophone, Francophone and Portuguese postcolonial/post-imperial literatures as well as exilic and post-war literatures in Germany. The collection opens with an exclusive, wide-ranging interview with the postcolonial theorist Homi K. Bhabha. In this interview Bhabha has expounded on postcoloniality, minorities and the notion of world literature. This comprehensive anthology will thus enable scholars and researchers in the area to access multilingual post-imperial and postcolonial literatures in a single space.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR Nilufer E. Bharucha

Nilufer E. Bharucha is a Professor of English at the University of Bombay. Her areas of specialization are Postcolonial Literatures and Theories, the Literature of the Raj and Contemporary British Fiction and Translation. She has also published some short stories besides several academic articles. Bharucha has co-edited Indian English Fiction 1980-1990: An Assessment; Postcolonial Perspectives on the Raj and its Literature and Mapping Cultural Spaces: Postcolonial Indian Literature in English. A British Council Scholar at the University of Manchester in 1981-82 and a Commonwealth Academic Staff Fellow at the Queen Mary College, University of London in 1994-95, she has lectured and presented papers at several institutes and universities in Europe. Professor Bharucha has been a Visiting Professor at the Otto-Von-Guericke University, Magdeburg and the University of Cologne in Germany, the University of Barcelona, Spain and the University of Avignon, France, as well as a DAAD (German Academic Exchange Service) Visiting Professor at the University of Siegen, Germany. She is also on the Global Faculty of the Fairleigh Dickinson University, USA.