English Studies in Africa

The Global South as World Literature

Introduction  

This special issue invites scholarly contributions that reconfigure the category of “world literature” through the epistemic, aesthetic, and political lens of the Global South. Moving beyond Eurocentric frameworks that treat “world literature” as a diffusionist extension of the Western canon or as a market-driven aggregation of translated texts, we propose a critical recentering: the Global South is not merely in world literature; it is world literature, a dynamic, plural, and insurgent formation that produces, reworks, contests, and transcends the very terms of literary universality.

The Global South is the most capacious of categories stretching from Africa to Latin America and the Caribbean, across South and Southeast Asia, the Middle East, and Oceania. It is very much a coequal of the West: a diverse continuum with its own internal interactive dynamics as well as contrapuntal hermeneutics. As the multilayered Tamil diasporic constellations across India, Sri Lanka, Malaysia, and Singapore powerfully demonstrate, even regionally bounded terms like “South Asia” are neither unified nor unifying, revealing instead the productive tensions, migrations, and epistemic pluralities that define the Global South as practice, not just as place. It’s very much a coequal of the West, a diverse continuum.

We understand the Global South not as a fixed geography, but as a relational, historical, and counter-hegemonic position forged through shared legacies of colonial subjugation, anti-imperial resistance, structural inequality, and South–South solidarity. Its literary expressions do not merely “respond to” the Euro-American canon; they draw from it, adapt it, revise it, and subvert it, generating autonomous aesthetic logics, narrative forms, and modes of address that reconstitute what “the world” means, and, crucially, who is authorized to speak for it, from it, and against its exclusions.

This special issue embraces that complexity. It does not seek to represent the Global South, but to think with it, through it, and alongside its most urgent literary and critical voices.

Conceptual Anchors  

- Contrapuntalism serves as a key methodological and interpretive framework for this issue. Drawing on Edward Said’s foundational articulation in Culture and Imperialism, contrapuntal reading insists on the inseparability of imperial metropole and colonized periphery, refusing linear, hierarchical, or siloed literary histories in favour of overlapping, dialogic, and often antagonistic textual relationships. We encourage submissions that deploy contrapuntalism not only to trace colonial entanglements, but also to illuminate South–South literary dialogues, transregional solidarities, and non-imperial circuits of influence.

- World Literature as Practice, Not Category: We engage critically with the contested status of “world literature” acknowledging Franco Moretti’s influential, system-oriented approach as a vital reference point, while also inviting interventions that challenge its methodological assumptions, particularly its tendency to abstract literary forms from political economy, lived resistance, or epistemic sovereignty. This issue seeks work that treats world literature as a practice of world-making, one rooted in translation as negotiation, genre as contestation, and canon as struggle.

- Beyond Area Studies: While grounded in rigorous textual and contextual analysis, this issue resists disciplinary confinement to “African literature,” “Latin American literature”, or other area-based categories. We welcome contributions that foreground transversal connections, south-south literary migrations, decolonial rewritings of European forms, and indigenous, creole, or diasporic literary epistemologies that exceed national or continental boundaries.

Suggested Topics Include (but are not limited to):  

• Contrapuntal readings analyze canonical and non-canonical texts across Global South regions to challenge Eurocentric literary hierarchies.
• Revisionist approaches reinterpret Western canons (e.g., Shakespeare, Greek tragedy, Modernism) from Global South perspectives, exposing colonial assumptions and centering marginalized voices.
• Global South intellectual traditions reshape Western classics and world literary heritage through critical reframing and decolonial interventions.
• Literary adaptations transform Euro-American genres (e.g., novel, epic) in Southern contexts through localization, translation, and subversive appropriation.
• Literary institutions—publishers, festivals, universities—actively construct Southern literary canons and cultural markets.
• Orality and non-alphabetic literacies constitute foundational elements of Global South world literature, prioritizing performance over textual authority.
• South-South dialogues foster transregional theater collaborations and literary exchanges, decentralizing performance traditions from colonial frameworks.
• Planetary crises—climate justice, migration, debt—are interrogated through Southern literary engagements with systemic inequality.
• Critical theory re-engages Southern thinkers (Said, Spivak, Ngũgĩ, Ahmad, Cheah) to generate new decolonial frameworks.