The first paper, “Reading New Worlds: Urdu Magazines, World Literature and Colonial Modernity,” delineates the folds within which world literature and colonial modernity are historically enclasped across South Asia. It broadens the idea that world literature entered the colony through the novel by emphasizing the reach and affordability of late colonial Urdu-language magazines. The paper shows how these magazines became the foremost carrier of colonial modernity by way of translations of select European thinkers such as Charles Darwin, Daniel Defoe, and Edward Gibbon. Such production became the primary medium through which precolonial Urdu adab—rooted in social practices of reading, writing, and exchange—was regrafted into the world literary canon with a linear and homogenous past, reified language, and nationalized traditions. Addressing this transformation, the paper traces previous work on the connection between the emergence of nationalism and magazines, and illuminates the latter’s role in ushering the transition of colonized states into nationally imagined spaces in the Global South.
The second paper, “Halide Edib’s India and Turkish Nation-Building,” explores South–South connections in the writings of Ottoman/Turkish author Halide Edib (1884 –1964). While playing an active role in the Turkish War of Independence, Edib also lectured widely in the United States and France and toured India, where she delivered several talks as a guest of the Indian National Congress in the 1930s. The paper argues that India served as a particular model for Edib’s to formulate a contested Turkish identity in her fictional and non-fictional work. Accounts of Turkish nationalism and identity formation after the Empire’s fall either focus on the minorities against which a distinctly Turkish identity were articulated or read nation-building as a response to ideological and military pressures from Europe. The paper intervenes in these debates by introducing the “imagined” domain of India as blueprint for the young nation and identifies it as a crucial referent in the process of Turkish nation-building at the beginning of the twentieth century.
The third paper, “Archipelagic Thought and World Literature,” examines the archipelago as a way of thinking through the layered histories of dispossession and forced labor as articulated in literature from the planetary peripheries. The paper adopts Dilip Menon’s reading of Edouard Glissant’s concept of “archipelagic thought,” which Menon positions in a fundamental relationship with power by claiming that “archipelagic thinking ... sits alongside the empire, nation, and transnational.” While Glissant and others have conceptualized the archipelago as a form of resistance against colonial force, it can also be conceived of as a figure for the disguised continuity of power across imperial, national, and transnational borderlines. The paper does so by tracing the archipelago as a heuristic for understanding power in Behrouz Boochani’s autobiography No Friend but the Mountains (2018), in which the Iranian Kurdish author recounts his imprisonment by the Australian government on Manus Island after being intercepted on his way to Christmas Island in search of refuge.
The final paper, “Rooted and Rootless: Primitive Sensibility and the South in Modern Chinese Literature,” argues that a primitive sensibility found in certain modern Chinese texts can help us reconfigure the theoretical premises of world literature. To do so, it offers a contrastive analysis of the work of contemporary authors Han Shaogong and Gao Xingjian. Primitive sensibility—an aesthetic attunement to myth, ritual, and landscape—serves as a means for these writers to negotiate the relationship between aboriginal cultural memory and modern subjectivity. Han Shaogong’s work revives folk traditions, oral histories, and local cosmologies, grounding literary and national identity in cultural continuity. Gao Xingjian mobilizes local myths and landscapes while refusing fixed identity, foregrounding rootlessness, individual consciousness, and cosmopolitan detachment. Such a juxtaposition of rootedness and rootlessness opens up an avenue for world literary studies to examine the continuities between universality and aboriginal heritage while emphasizing the value of local memory, aesthetic experience, and imaginative exploration as sources of globally resonant literary modernity.