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The intersection of (postcolonial) literature, refugees and asylum, whether one wishes to emphasise continuity or rupture with earlier models and concepts, or to affirm or contest its critical utility, remains a rich and a politically timely site for debate for literary criticism. This monographic issue of Il Tolomeo contributes to this conversation by exploring examples of refugee/asylum literature across various historical and geographical contexts and literary traditions, and through different theoretical and methodological perspectives, including (and expanding the scope of) postcolonial ones.

Florian, S. (2019). Caribbean Counterpoint: The Aesthetics of Salt in Lasana Sekou. Philipsburg, St. Martin: House of Nehesi, 176 pp.

Through a reading of Amitav Ghosh’s 2004 novel The Hungry Tide, the article proposes a preliminary attempt to combine anthropology with world literature, a concept that has recently attracted significant attention from the fields of postcolonial studies and comparative literature alike. Firstly, I argue that world literature is best seen as a number of overlapping and/or divergent projects, and that it thrives if tackled through a plurality of approaches. Secondly, I suggest one possible approach to world literature, employing John Comaroff’s definition of anthropology as a discipline characterised by a few closely interrelated epistemic operations that qualify ethnographic fieldwork. Lastly, I map Comaroff’s epistemic operations onto The Hungry Tide to unpack the levels of anthropological sophistication of this novel. I advocate the revised concept of ethnographic novel that results from this reading – the idea of a novel of the ethnographic encounter – as a useful point of departure for a project of world literature.