View article

The relation of world literature to postcolonialism remains virtually unmarked territory. There has been little direct exchange between these two separately demarcated domains of literary study. Why is this so? The reason must lie in the fact that their respective positions with relation to literature remain largely incompatible and disjunctive. What do they have in common, and what keeps them apart? The two share a fundamental perspective on literary studies that at first sight ought to put them in dialogue with each other: both seek to move the study of literary texts beyond the confines of the classic boundaries of European literature. In this context, world literature has a much longer history, going back to Goethe’s use of the term Weltliteratur in 1827, while postcolonialism, and the idea of postcolonial literature, are generally reckoned to have begun as critical concepts with the publication of Edward Said’s Orientalism in …