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This article explores “literature sickness”, a term coined by the contemporary Iranian-American writer Azareen Van der Vliet Oloomi and developed, I suggest, in her novel Call Me Zebra (2018). In doing so, it aims to offer not only an account of this novel, but to consider the radical potential of the condition Van der Vliet Oloomi outlines. This potential lies in the challenge to the dualism of reality and representation posed by literature sickness, an idea I develop comparatively via Call Me Zebra and the reflections on exile and, specifically, world literature in the work of Edward Said and Erich Auerbach. To develop these ideas further, I explore key concepts relating to the politics of world literature – exile, marginalization, and dissent. I focus on the work of Pascale Casanova to show how the concept of literature sickness that I develop in my readings of the novel relates to current debates in world literature theory. I position Call Me Zebra within a wider critical debate in order to argue that this novel offers a distinctive response to the Kantian dualism evoked in much contemporary world literature theory, one that I unpack using Gilles Deleuze and Bruno Latour. Deleuze’s philosophy of literature is central to my reading of Call Me Zebra, as it has distinct parallels with Zebra’s own theoretical musings. I use Deleuze to illustrate how, in the novel, Zebra’s exile gives her an especial perspective on oppression and marginalization, revealing literature’s capacity for imagining new futures and ways of belonging, and making Call Me Zebra a paradigmatic text of literature sickness and its radical potential. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article considers the challenge posed by Gayatri Spivak to rethink world literature along postcolonial lines as an ethical encounter with alterity. Read in this way, Spivak participates in a reframing of world literature that retains the critical gains made by postcolonial theory and suggests that the work of world literary analysis ought not necessarily be de/prescriptive (classifying and ordering) but might involve a contestation of the power relations that structure the world. In developing this argument, I draw on four further perspectives: Pascale Casanova's problematic assertion of literary singularity inThe World Republic of Letters; Fredric Jameson's theorization of “third world literature” as counterpoint to Casanova's limiting understanding of national literature; Gilles Deleuze, who offers a way to rethink world literature in a process of becoming; and Édouard Glissant, whose work proposes a “relational” vision of difference that, like that of Spivak, demands an ethical, imaginative response to literature as literature. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article focuses on the disparate culture experienced by the Caribbean population and creates discussions on creolization. It states that creolization is rooted in the New World and distinct from hybridity's problematic associations with Victorian theories of inter-racial mixing. It also explores the critical application of the term through writings of creolization's contemporary theorists and exposes its processes to reveal its relevance to European philosophies of immanence. It suggests that the link to creolization theory is vital and postcolonial identities are produced through creolization.