Global South Literary Studies

Global South Literature in and out of South Asia

The special issue “Global South Literature in and out of South Asia” will investigate how non-South Asian writers and communities, who are themselves marginalized within global hierarchies of race, nation, and empire, have imagined the Indian subcontinent in literary ways. These perspectives—African, African American, and Latino travelers, Sino–South Asian migrants, Jewish-Indian novelists, and Afghan refugees transiting through India, Pakistan, and Bangladesh—offer a strikingly different set of representational possibilities from those typically found in Western, South Asian elite, or Euro-American geopolitical archives of the region.

We ask a simple question to center a complex intervention: What happens when the subcontinent is viewed through Global South imaginaries that are neither white, Western, nor indigenously South Asian? We anticipate drawing a constantly shifting picture of South Asia where various minoritized groups negotiate travel, belonging, estrangement, solidarity, friction, and even their privilege. Their depictions neither reproduce the civilizational hierarchies of the Western imperial imaginary nor expand into romanticized solidarities among the oppressed; instead, they expose the tensions, stereotypes, affinities, histories, and the persistence of Orientalism and the Western gaze that shape encounters across the Global South. South Asia is thus a Global South formation where other Global South communities craft their own literary worlds.

In this special issue, “Global South Literature in and out of South Asia,” our contributors might examine, for example, how Chinese migrants in Calcutta, Karachi, or Colombo articulate hybrid and often precarious forms of identity; how Black travelers and soldiers—such as those in Burma and India during World War II—navigate anti-Blackness alongside colonial missions; how Jewish-Indian writers reconstruct histories that are simultaneously Indian, Jewish, and transnational; how Afghan refugees imagine South Asia as both haven and hardship; or how Latin writers like Octavio Paz use India as dreamscape and travelogue.

The volatile geopolitical and ecological landscape of the subcontinent necessitates foregrounding its importance to the rest of the world, not just to Europe and North America. This special issue will offer the journal an innovative set of essays that intertwine literary studies, diaspora studies, postcolonial theory, and Global South studies. Crucially, our essays, with their focus on South Asia as the subject of a new type of cultural internationalism, will show how literature can forge new paths for South-South solidarities and new ways of understanding the unique friction that emerges from these encounters.

The theoretical aim of our special issue is to center South Asia in South-South and South-East conversations, in which other writers engage with the Indian subcontinent. By moving the situatedness of South Asia from a North–South axis to South–South and South-East axes, our contributors ask how racialized and colonized groups in the Indian subcontinent perceive one another, what representational patterns they inherit from Euro-American discourse, and how new postcolonial identities emerge from these encounters. Can the interactions of various peripheral communities in the Indian subcontinent generate new forms of alliance that do not derive from European frameworks? What unexpected solidarities, antagonisms, and imaginative crossings more fully describe twenty-first-century Global South Asia in particular and the Global South in general?

Scholars working across Africa–Asia relations, Sino–South Asian histories, Jewish diasporas in India, Afghan refugee studies, South–South travel writing, and associated South-South disciplines are invited to submit abstracts on literary texts, including memoirs, travelogues, novels, poetry, and drama.