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More books from India in Indian languages circulated in Europe in the nineteenth century than now – partly thanks to the efforts of book importers like Trübner & Co. Trübner's monthly American & Oriental Literary Record (1865–) shows pages and pages of imported Sanskrit books, but also books in Hindi, Hindustani, Bengali, Marathi, Telugu, Gujarati, Arabic, Persian, and so on. Trübner also imported Peruvian, Argentinian, Brazilian, Yucatanese and other books from Latin America. Yet this impressive circulation and presence of books did not translate into their recognition as world literature. Voluminous compendia like John Macy's The Story of World Literature (1927) cover "Asian Literature" in merely thirteen pages (out of five hundred), and fail to mention any modern Indian writer apart from Rabindranath Tagore, damning him with faint praise. Why was this material presence and circulation of books in non-European languages in Britain and other parts of Europe matched by their absence as modern literary texts from the imagination of world literature? This essay examines the "technologies of recognition" (Shih) that made modern Indian literatures virtually invisible though materially present in Europe, and the conditions of visibility that occasionally allowed them to be seen. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This special issue collects a series of essays that reimagine the positioning of translation as theory and practice in diverse postcolonial contexts. A rethinking of translation as a linguistic transaction which always necessarily involves a negotiation between cultures has been at the core of postcolonial theory almost since its inception. Much of the discussion of translation in relation to imperial formations has centred around the notion that translation between languages involves unequal power relations. English or French, as (post)imperial languages, are seen as inherently dominant in the postcolonial literary landscape. Thus translation is used as a powerful metaphor to evoke the complex economies of cultural exchange that take place under the sign of empire. These essays broaden the scope of postcolonial translation to include postcolonial multilingual contexts that necessitate constant translation and self-translation within their boundaries, though not always to one's benefit. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Written in October 2001 as a ‘gut reaction’ to the attack on the Twin Towers, and published first as a long article in the daily Corriere della Sera and then in book form (in its original shape, twice as long as the article) in December 2001, Oriana Fallaci's pamphlet La rabbia e l'orgoglio (‘Anger and pride’) was in its twenty-sixth edition when I bought it in September 2004. Its follow-up, La forza della ragione (‘The force of reason’), has already sold 800,000 copies since its publication in 2004. Oriana Fallaci has emerged after 9/11 as the strongest and most vocal Italian representative of the ‘clash of civilizations’ theory. This essay analyses the constitutive elements of her discourse (Italian nationalism, values instead of history and politics, and violent speech conflating Islam, terrorism and immigrants) and tries to understand its appeal and the sources of its authority in Fallaci's career, in order to outline the specific Italian version of the clash of civilizations theory. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This essay explores the rise of global anglophone as a methodological rubric, and the place of English in global literary studies. My exposition pivots around a set of interwoven claims. While contemporary globalization has led to increasing linguistic homogenization, the rise of global anglophone does not herald the end of postcolonialism nor is it a force bent on erasing the cultural and linguistic diversity of literatures of the world. Rather, its valence can be generatively explored in the context of recent debates about the provenance of comparative and world literatures, and the emergence of multilingual transregional literary enclaves that are smaller than the globe and larger than a nation. Wariness about the moral economy of the angloglobalism can often be in tension with contemporary processes of anglophone transculturation. Further, the rise of global anglophone is inseparable from current debates in translation studies and the emergence of English as a global vernacular and a target language. Lastly, the global dominance of English appears less threatening when visualized through a comparative historical lens that illuminates the role of other world languages. As scholarship on premodern and early modern cultures indicates, linguistic cosmopolitanism and vernacular expressivity have not typically existed as antinomian forces in literary history. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This essay surveys two largely disregarded bilingual (Arabic–Spanish) literary journals from late-colonial northern Morocco: Al-Motamid (1947–1956) and Ketama (1953–1959). I trace the process which led to the consolidation of the centrality of contemporary Arabic poetry in both journals, the practices and the actors which enabled it. As such, the essay is concerned not only with the project of (re)writing Moroccan Arabic literary history, but also the larger literary history connecting the Maghreb and the Mashreq, as well as Europe and Spanish and Arab diasporas in the Mahjar (North and South America). The essay also complicates understandings of local colonised culture and literature as necessarily subaltern and of literary translation moving from the literary "centre" to the "periphery," allowing us instead to grasp the ways in which the Moroccan and Arab authors influenced the Spaniards. I argue the collaboration of the former, first in Al-Motamid and later in Ketama, was decisive for the increasingly bilingual and Arabic orientation that the journals adopted. In fact, one of the main goals of both journals became making modern Arabic literature available in Spanish. The Moroccan and other Arab writers also enabled the reorientation of some Spanish orientalists towards contemporary Arabic literary production. The journals made visible and enabled the circulation of contemporary Arabic poetry between the Mashreq, the Maghreb and the Mahjar literary worlds; of contemporary poetry between Arabic, Spanish, and other European languages. Although their location was the seemingly provincial Moroccan Spanish Protectorate, these journals became small but significant world literary nodes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This essay explores some of the effects recent developments have had on my earlier notions in The Postcolonial Exotic (2001). I will refer to two postcolonial writers, both of Sikh-Punjabi origin, who have come to prominence recently: the British-based poet Daljit Nagra and the Canadian-based poet Rupi Kaur. Both writers, Kaur especially, owe their popularity in large part to the skilful management of their self-image on social media. Both have attained a form of minor celebrity that they also comment on in their writing, whether this is articulated through an ironic politics of cultural branding (Nagra) or a self-empowering form of strategic exoticism that plays to an international (mainly female) audience while also reaching out to a more specific readership (transnational women of colour) with whose shared experiences of separation and suffering it identifies, and whose intersectional connections to histories of exploitation and marginalization it seeks collectively to represent (Kaur). Both writers are controversial, still one of the defining markers of celebrity; and both are clearly aware of, and indeed have sought to profit from, the mixed reception of their work. Both are attuned, finally, to the country-specific debates that surrounded the late twentieth-century incorporation of "multicultural" and/or "diasporic" writers into a postcolonial canon. More recently, similar debates have informed the emergence of world literature as a locally inflected global project. This exercise also tends to assume the translatability of the one into the other, and the easy digestibility of both cultural knowledge and literary form. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This essay argues that the Cultural Cold War is one of the indispensable backgrounds against which the story of modernisms in India must be reconsidered. Using a wealth of unpublished or forgotten documents, it throws light on the ways by which the Cold War shaped the publishing, critical and literary scene in India in the 1950s–1970s, when both blocs were engaged in "pressing the fight" and devising or funding a vast arsenal of "cultural weapons", such as book programmes, translations and magazines. This background helps to shed light on the "new cultural conversations", the transnational and translational traffics that were taking place at the time; why and how certain texts and little magazines travelled. By examining in particular the role of two institutions, the ICCF (Indian Committee for Cultural Freedom) and USIS (United States Information Services), as well as pivotal modernist figures such as Nissim Ezekiel, and the editorial stances and choices of English-language journals such as Quest and damn you, the aim is to illuminate some of the "travelling literatures", the affiliations, rebellions and negotiations which nurtured modernisms in India. "What filters through that curtain is only fit for the international shit-pot" provocatively wrote Adil Jussawalla in 1972, while criticizing the "dreadful dilution" of the literature disseminated by USIS. Many Indian writers also "used" the Cold War (and the worldliness it gave rise to), struggled for the means of political, cultural and literary independence, and defined themselves against the bi-polarization of the world. Bypassing official circuits and dictates, they strove to clear alternative spaces for themselves, to invent their own signature of modernism and define in their own terms the many meanings and forms of "freedom". [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This essay considers the recent move in English literary studies from the postcolonial towards the World Anglophone as more an intellectual incitement and less a deficient renomination for scholars of South Asia. It suggests that the critical project of postcolonial studies - one of surfacing histories and forms of empire in the globalization of capital - is not eclipsed in the face of the World Anglophone. In fact, the idea of a worldly Anglophony places a productive emphasis on the material and the mundane, and on the sounds and speakers of English. As a potential mode of inquiry (and not a set of texts), the World Anglophone makes it possible to trace connections with precisely the multilingual media cultures that the hegemony of a literary English threatens to subsume. As such, this move calls upon the many lives and registers of English that make the Anglophone, and clears space for more comparative work (between media, languages and, indeed, between English and englishes) that is vital to give postcolonial studies a fresh lease on life. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This essay deals with the semantic and semiotic field of dil (heart) in Hindi film songs. Dil, as one of the most recurring motifs in Hindi film songs, provides a layered and dynamic view into the way self and non-self are both constituted by and reflected in language. As a trope, dil draws from poetic traditions and metaphors of Persian and Urdu, frequently overlain by other conventions and idioms of love in South Asia. Besides locating the unspoken and spoken conventions of dil, we also underscore specific psychoanalytic meanings of “self” and argue that dil is the site both of desire and denial; an alternative but culturally acceptable possibility of romance and a transferred epithet under watchful eyes. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This essay argues that when reading Amitav Ghosh's Anglophone novel The Calcutta Chromosome we should be attentive to the genre of the non-Anglophone short story in South Asia. Doing so offers the reader insights into the current limitations of postcolonial studies, as well as a vision for what avenues the field might pursue in the future. Postcolonial studies has come under frequent attack for the excessive attention it bestows upon the novel, a gesture which in turn generates readings linking the novel to questions of nationhood and modernity. Taking this critique as its point of departure, this essay deliberately engages the Indian short stories that Ghosh references in his novel. The short story is a genre whose specific literary qualities are all too often neglected by subsuming them under the blanket term ‘prose’. This essay shows that attention to the short story is crucial not only because of the important role it plays in South Asian literary history, but also because it allows, indeed requires, the postcolonial literary critic to ask of it an entirely different series of questions than those that would be appropriate for the novel. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This essay investigates the sexual cultures of contemporary Hindi-language ‘detective’ novels by focusing on the writings of one of India's biggest-selling authors, Ved Prakash Sharma. Sharma's novels are usually available at railway stations and bus stands, as well as bookstalls in the poorer localities of north Indian cities. The essay suggests that the sexual motif in the novels sits alongside an unstated discourse of ‘Indian traditions’ – such as brahmcharya (celibacy) and ‘the stable Indian family’ – and that this discourse is established both through narratives within the novels, as well as techniques that lie outside them, such as the author's letter to readers that prefaces each novel. The silent presence of ‘Indian traditions’ forms the ground upon which engagements with consumerist modernity – marked by goods, technologies and transnational connections – is predicated. The pleasure and ‘efficaciousness’ of the novels lie in the constant relay of choices between the world of globalized consumerist modernity and ‘traditional’ morality. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

In translating Vikram Seth'sA Suitable Boyinto Hindi, Gopal Gandhi, who, as Harish Trivedi remarks, sees himself as the ‘rightful possessor’ of the story, emphasizes and dramatizes its Hindu-centricity. The authority to do so seems to be derived from the confidence that his translation rescued the story from being de-Indianized (and hence de-Hinduized?) by the English language. Hindi, on the other hand, is projected to be strictly Indian and Hindu, undisturbed by foreign conceptual infiltrations. Therefore, the concept of secularism (projected as a foreign import, with a cosmopolite elite appeal, but no grounding in popular ideology) is distanced from the Hindi/Hindu milieu. Through detailed textual analysis of the Hindi translation,Koi Accha-Sa Ladka, alongside Seth's novel, where I trace both the linguistic and ideological discrepancies between the texts, I argue that Gandhi's translation ultimately competes with Seth's vision of the story. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]