Cannons and Rubber boats: Oriana Fallaci and the 'Clash of Civilizations'

Written in October 2001 as a 'gut reaction' to the attack on the Twin Towers, and published first as a long article in the daily Corriere della Sera and then in book form (in its original shape, twice as long as the article) in December 2001, Oriana Fallaci's pamphlet La rabbia e l'orgoglio ('Anger and pride') was in its twenty-sixth edition when I bought it in September 2004. Its follow-up, La forza della ragione ('The force of reason'), has already sold 800,000 copies since its publication in 2004. Oriana Fallaci has emerged after 9/11 as the strongest and most vocal Italian representative of the 'clash of civilizations' theory. This essay analyses the constitutive elements of her discourse (Italian nationalism, values instead of history and politics, and violent speech conflating Islam, terrorism and immigrants) and tries to understand its appeal and the sources of its authority in Fallaci's career, in order to outline the specific Italian version of the clash of civilizations theory

The Social History of a Genre: Kathas across Languages in Early Modern North India

Tales are ubiquitous in the literary culture of pre-modern North India, as elsewhere, and they come in all shapes, languages and inflections. For this reason, tracking them allows us to travel into and across most of the milieux of this multilingual literary culture. But precisely because of their ubiquity, when we move from the micro level of individual texts to the macro level of literary culture and historical processes, it becomes difficult to say anything more than ‘they were there, they circulated, they usually retold the same stories in new ways or mixed familiar elements to produce new narratives’. Yet if we pay precise attention to their articulation and re-articulation of cultural and social imaginaries, the particular linguistic textures and aesthetic emphasis, material form and evidence of patronage, the shifting extent of circulation and popularity, we can use the longuedurée history of the katha genre to illuminate the historical dynamics of cultural and aesthetic change in the region in ways that intersect, connect and question macro-historical narratives of dynastic and epochal change. </jats:p

Dil Maange more: Cultural contexts of Hinglish in contemporary India

After over a century of language nationalism and almost as long a period of intense competition and mutual contempt, in post-liberalisation and post-low caste assertion India the boundaries between English and Hindi have recently become more porous, and the hold of both “pure Hindi” and “British/pure English” has become much more limited. English is of course still the language of greater opportunities in local and global terms, and increasingly so, but as low-caste politicization and literacy widen the sphere of Hindi, and the “new middle class” remains resolutely bilingual in its everyday and entertainment practices, the relation between English and Hindi has become more a relationship of parallel expansion, though still perceived in public discourse as a zero-sum game

Chapter Significant Geographies in The Shadow Lines

Approaches to world literature often think through binaries of local/global, major/minor, provincial/cosmopolitan, taking them as given positions on a single world map. To an extent, this is true of Amitav Ghosh’s prize-winning essay “The testimony of my grandfather’s bookcase” (1998), which reflects on his grandfather’s collection of world literature books to think about the relationship between his grandfather’s provincial location in Calcutta and the world. Yet in The Shadow Lines Ghosh takes a much more complex and interesting approach to space, the world, perception and narration. In the novel’s complex narration, space, time, and self always appeared mirrored through other people, times, and spaces. Places also acquire reality and meaning only after they are first narrated and imagined, often several times, and before they are experienced directly. This is a stance that has deep existential but also epistemological implications that go beyond “simply” critiquing colonial and national border-making. This essay explores how (and which) spaces become “significant” in the novel, and how the novel’s approach to space can be productive for thinking about world literature

Multilingual locals and significant geographies: For a ground-up and located approach to world literature

‘World literature’ has been much theorized and re-theorized in recent years as comparative literature for the globalized age. As it moves out of the Euro-American ‘core’ of earlier comparative literature, it embraces those of us who work on Asian, Middle Eastern and African literatures, spurring us on to participate in this broader conversation and engage more directly and explicitly with the categories and models that underpin world literature.1 Yet its theoretical approaches based on world-system theory, diffusion and circulation, its geographical meta-categories such as ‘world’ and ‘global’, and its linear and teleological historical narratives that inevitably begin with Goethe all seem to imprison non-Western literatures in categories, timelines and explanations that do not fit, rather than genuinely interrogate them

Multilingual locals and textual circulation before colonialism

Against the nationalist production of monolingual literary histories, this introduction to the special section “Multilingual Locals” urges literary and intellectual historians to “place languages back into dialogue.” Colonialism did not always affect, let alone silence, cultural actors, but it did introduce a language ideology that associated one language to one community, and vice versa. Comparing the precolonial and the colonial period entails looking at multilingual systems, whose internal hierarchies and regional/transnational power dynamics evolved in time, but without reducing the plurality of languages involved. The essay suggests different ways in which we can place languages back into dialogue. One is looking at multilingual traces within a given text; another approach moves beyond the text to explore how multilingual canons and curricula were embodied in individuals or coexisted within the same social space. A third approach is an analysis of circuits and circulation. Finally, multilingualism can be turned into the plural as a study of comparative multilingualisms. Through these and other approaches, we can trace how colonial languages reorganized multilingual language systems but were far from replacing them, contrary to the stated objectives of monolingual nationalist ideologies