Claiming Space: Locations and Orientations in World Literatures(Cosmopolitan-Vernacular Dynamics in World Literatures)

This open access book explores literary works and practices – always existing in the dynamic relation between locations and orientations – in a series of carefully designed case studies. Explicitly expressed or implied, manifesting itself sometimes as dislocation and disorientation, the claiming of space by any symbolic means necessary is revealed as a constant effect of literary endeavors. In dialogue with geopolitics of culture, sociology and anthropology, attention to literary locations and orientations brings spatial particularity into the study of world literatures. These case studies demonstrate that four key terms (cosmopolitan, vernacular, location, orientation) can frame analyses of very different types of literary acts and texts in the contemporary period, allowing for distinctions that are not captured within the grids of other conceptual pairs like centre-periphery, local-global, postcolonial-metropolitan, North-South. With this framing, expressive practices in a wide range of regions – including Europe, Africa, the Middle East and the Pacific – are analysed in ways that bring out how spatiality is at stake in the cosmopolitan-vernacular dynamic. The eBook editions of this book are available open access under a CC BY-NC-ND 3.0 licence on bloomsburycollections.com.

Table of Contents:
Notes on Contributors Acknowledgements Series Introduction – The Cosmopolitan-Vernacular Dynamic: Conjunctions of World Literature Stefan Helgesson (Stockholm University, Sweden), Christina Kullberg (Uppsala University, Sweden), Paul Tenngart (Lund University, Sweden) and Helena Wulff (Stockholm University, Sweden) Introduction – Land, Language, Literature: Cosmopolitan and Vernacular Claims to Place Bo G. Ekelund (Stockholm University, Sweden) 1. One World Literature with Chinua Achebe and Flora Nwapa Paula Uimonen (Stockholm University, Sweden) 2. The Locations and Orientations of South African Literature: From Sol Plaatje to Peter Abrahams Ashleigh Harris (Uppsala University, Sweden) 3. Dislocation in Ahmad Saadawi's Frankenstein in Baghdad and Hassan Blasim's The Madman of Freedom Square Tasnim Qutait (Uppsala University, Sweden) 4. Locating the Literature of Hawai'i Sally Anderson Boström (Uppsala University, Sweden) 5. Sites of Solidarity and Circuits of Second World Reading: Ralph de Boissière's Crown Jewel and the Locations of the Proletarian Novel Bo G. Ekelund (Stockholm University, Sweden) 6. Core: Ecologies of Muslim-American Writing Adnan Mahmutovic (Stockholm University, Sweden) 7. Locations, Orientations and Multiple Temporalities in the Contemporary, 'Global' Latin American Novel Jobst Welge (Leipzig University, Germany) 8. Ambiguous Arrival: Emotions and Dislocations in the Migrant Encounter with Sweden Helena Wulff (Stockholm University, Sweden) Afterword – At Home in the World Deborah Reed-Danahay (University at Buffalo, SUNY, USA) Index

About the Author :
Bo G. Ekelund is Professor of English at Stockholm University, Sweden. He has published articles on a variety of literary topics from a sociological perspective, in Poetics, Novel, Ariel, The International Fiction Review, and other journals. Adnan Mahmutovic is Associate Professor of English at Stockholm University, Sweden. His publications include Ways of Being Free: Authenticity and Community in Selected Works by Rushdie, Ondaatje, and Okri (2012) and Visions of the Future in Comics: International Perspectives (co-editor with Francesco Alesio Ursini and Frank Bramlett, 2017). Helena Wulff is Professor Emerita of Social Anthropology at Stockholm University, Sweden. Her research is in the anthropology of literature and writing. Among her publications are The Anthropologist as Writer: Genres and Contexts in the Twenty-First Century (2017) and Rhythms of Writing: An Anthropology of Irish Literature (Bloomsbury, 2019).

Review :
This dazzling collection of essays about world literature brings the vernacular into dialogue with the cosmopolitan. The value of this aim is now beyond dispute, what this book delivers is an account of how to do it. Claiming Space opens new perspectives on the complex terrain of world literatures, mapping the intersections of space, place and literary production in revelatory ways. The volume brings textured and insightful case studies into conversation with a lively, subtle and distinctive theoretical sensibility. A superb intervention into the ongoing debates around world literature. The essays in this important edited collection significantly advance geocultural and geopolitical understandings of world literature, making a vital contribution to the field.