Hay Festival Dhaka
One and Equal?
Photo: Prabir Das
When you visit a bookstore in the UK or the US, you will find a section on women's literature, maybe one on African-American literature and then there's a section on 'world literature.' Over time, the so-called world literature has come to refer to literary works from all over the world, except literature from Western Europe and the United States. Does this mean that Western literature is 'the' literature while everything else is just the other? By terming literature from other countries as 'world literature', are we yet stuck to colonial notions of seeing the West as the occident and the rest of the world as the orient?
Indian essayist and novelist Pankaj Mishra and author and translator of Chinese and Latin American literature, Eliot Weinberger, attempted to answer questions such as these at a session titled Is There A World Literature?' at the Dhaka Hay Festival. Moderated by Bangladeshi author and publisher of the daily Dhaka Tribune, K Anis Ahmed, this insightful session focused on the 'emergence' of world literature as a fore that at once contradicts as well as complements the normative Western literary canon.
Referring to Morrison's, a supermarket chain in the UK which until recently had an aisle devoted to what they called 'foreign foods,' Ahmed asked whether world literature is actually the 'foreign food' of the literary arena.
“I was born and brought up in New York, and was in contact with people originating from different countries practicing their cutures in the city. I never felt connected with the American tradition but rather felt more comfortable with the tradition of writers who happen to come from all over the world. There are more writers writing in English from South Asia than from any other part of the world, including the English speaking ones. The literary arena of the 21st century belonged to South Asia. Likewise, most of the English writing comes from Latin America. Even though the dominant literary culture still exists in New York and London, over the last couple of years, Delhi too has become the epicentre of literary accomplishments,” said Weinberger.
Pankaj Mishra, Eliot Weinberger and Anis Ahmed discuss the meaning of world literature at the Hay Festival. Photo: Prabir Das
Mishra and Weinberger also explained what world literature means from an Asian perspective, using the example of China to explain the significance of literature as a part of an intellectual distinctiveness in Asia.
“In terms of literature, it is a bit more complicated with countries like China, for instance, which is very unlike Latin America. However, literature in China was part of a long project to build a cultural identity. Post-1979, literature became a much more vigorous, newer, post-modern form of entertainment in China,” said Mishra.
Eliot explained the history of literary censorship in China which nationalised the publishing industry, centralised the book distribution system, and brought writers under institutional control through the Writers Union.
“Before 1949, there was a generation of Chinese modernist poets. However, after coming to power, the Communist gradually implemented a strict censorship with Mao's 'Yan'an Talks' as the guiding force. All these writers were suppressed and their works were not allowed to be published. However, poets and writers with perfect communist credentials were allowed to be translated and these were largely Western writers. Many of the Chinese writers could not publish their own works but they could translate other writers' works and get them published. The new generation of the late 1970s didn't know anything about previous Chinese modernist writers but they could read all these European poets and start writing subjective, surrealist poems that went against the socialist rule. This was a revolution in Chinese literature. There was a raising social consciousness that allowed these poets to become the rockstars of the era,” explained Weinberger.
The discussion took an interesting turn when Ahmed asked whether there truly is a literature outside the Western tradition anymore. Citing the example of the Bangla language, Ahmed stated that the Bangla that we speak and write was invented during the colonial times in Kolkata in the mid-19th century. He further went on to say that the form of the novel is also not really indigenous to the Bengali culture but taken from the foundational structure that come from the Western novelistic tradition.
Pankaj Mishra pointed out that the novel was actually a mirror for the bourgeoisie that was adopted by the middle class of other societies. “The primary history of many societies did not have the novel as the main literary form; that was almost always reserved for poetry. This was also the case for South Asia. Only recently has novels replaced all other literary forms as the dominant form of literature and poetry suffered,” he adds.
Weinberger, however, says that much of the literary canon followed by the West today was actually established by non-Western writers. American poetry, for example was inexpiable from their discovery of classical Chinese poetry, he said, adding that the Haiku mania started in the 1920s in the United States.
“As a writer from America, I am quite unclear as to whether I'm influenced by the Japanese or the American poets. So that becomes much more complicated as it becomes less clear about who is the West that we are talking about in terms of poetry,” Weinberger elucidates.
There's no denying that our world is largely ethnocentric where credibility and superiority are words reserved for products coming out of the West. The colonial hangover persists even now in our part of the world where we largely remain enchanted by the 'mighty' Hesperian culture. However, as Mishra and Weinberger explained, the very meaning of 'world literature' is rapidly changing. It might not be long before we are able to be more inclusive when talking about literature from around the world rather than resort to tired dichotomies to separate the West from the rest of the world.
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