Introduction: When the Impossible Knocks
By Abolfazl Ahangari
In his introduction to World Literature for the Wretched of the Earth (2020), J. Daniel Elam remarks that the epilogue to Frantz Fanon’s The…
World Literature for the Wretched of the Earth: Anticolonial Aesthetics, Postcolonial Politics
In World Literature for the Wretched of the Earth (Fordham UP, 2020), J. Daniel Elam recovers a genealogy of anticolonial thought that advocates collective inexpertise, unknowing, and unrecognizability. Essays in this forum are authored by Abolfazl Ahangari, Omid Azadibougar, Drishadwati Bargi, J. Daniel Elam, Ramsey McGlazer, Dilip M. Menon, and Ajay Skaria.
Essays
Comrades in Discontinuity: The Makers of the Other World Literature
By Omid Azadibougar
World Literature has been conceived in terms of translation and textual mobility and its allure is a utopia of literary inclusion where everything worth…
Reading for the Future
By Dilip Menon
Reading is, more often than not, an act that does not attend to consequence. It is an inconsequential act, not in the sense of…
Readers of the Impossible Present
By Drishadwati Bargi
Despite falling into disrepute, due to the two infamous totalitarianisms of the century, recovery of a utopianism without a utopia or a utopian impulse…
The Politics of the Impossible
By Skaria Ajay
It does not seem an exaggeration to say that we are in the midst of a re-evaluation of the egalitarian political thinkers and actors…
Impossible Professions
By Ramsey McGlazer
There is a phrase I overuse. It’s “master class.” Too often, I’ll trot it out to praise a friend’s essay in progress or to…
What Do You Do After Revolution?
By J. Daniel Elam
In April 1959, the University of Wisconsin-Madison hosted one of the first conferences on world literature after World War II, though it was hardly…