Contents: Preface. Theme Papers: 1. Homi K. Bhabha on postcoloniality, minorities and world literatures/Interviewed by Nilufer E. Bharucha and Sridhar Rajeswaran. 2. Johann Wolfgang Goethe and world literature/Makarand Paranjape. 3. Literary texts between cultures: An excursion into postcolonial mappings/Doris Bachmann-Medick. 4. Re-defining nation spaces: A movement from Chronos to Topos: liberating "marginalised or suppressed or forgotten histories"/Sridhar Rajeswaran. Literatures in a postcolonial/Post-imperial world: 5. Writing across borders: A historical grounding of Indian literature in English/Nilufer E. Bharucha. 6. Salman Rushdie's Midnight's children: the epic of the broken (post) modern world, beginnings or endings?/Madelena Gonzales. 7. The city as mindscape? The Indian immigrant writer in the U.S.A./Somdatta Mandal. 8. Weaving the visions: Goethe and contemporary Canadian literature/Coomi S. Vevaina. 9. 'Islands' and 'continents' in West Indian fiction in English: A postcolonial reading/Viney Kirpal. 10. Celtic twilight and global dawn/R. Ananthan. 11. The struggle for memory, soul and reason: modern world literature and the voice of Black Africa/Thomas Metscher. 12. From the barrel of the pen: The African novel in English as a genre of commitment/Mala Pandurang. 13. Maori and Pakeha literature in New Zealand: an overview/Janet Wilson and Anna Smith. 14. Australian studies in India: an overview/Santosh K. Sareen. 15. Australian aboriginal woman writes..../K. Suneetha Rani. 16. The thematics of hybridity and alienation in the Black African francophone novel/Mangala Sirdeshpande. 17. Coolitude in Francophone Mauritian literature: An overview/Ashish Bisoondinath. 18. Maghrebian French literature: growth and trajectories/El Mostafa Chadli. 19. Literatures in Portuguese colonial Goa/Anand Patil. 20. Changing times and paradigms: Poetical creation according to Joao Cabral de Melo Neto (1920-1999)/Dilip Luando. 21. The home and the world: Cross-cultural experiences and German literature after 1945/Rainer Lotz. 22. German exilic literature of the Nazi period: world literature?/Dirk Wiemann. Notes on contribution.
"The concept of world literature was mooted by the German writer and philosopher Goethe in the aftermath of the Napoleonic re-mapping of Europe. He had suggested that world literature could arise from the disruption of cultural continuities through terrible wars engaged upon by combative nations. Considered thus world literature could become the agent through which cultures come to terms with complex constructs of the self and the other. World literature could transcend national projections of selfhood and otherness and move into transnational spaces where also the old hierarchies of centre and margins, the empowered and powerless could be replaced by the open terrains of world discourse. The essays in the present volume have been written by European and Indian scholars and academics and are inclusive of as many linguistic groups as possible. The majority of the essays in this volume were presented at a conference organized by the department of English, University of Mumbai, in collaboration with the Max Mueller Bhavan, Mumbai, to mark the 250th Birth Anniversary of Johann Von Goethe, but some were specially commissioned. They have been organised under the heads of theme papers and postcolonial/post-imperial literatures. The latter category includes Anglophone, Francophone and Portuguese postcolonial/post-imperial literatures as well as exilic and post-war literatures in Germany. The collection opens with an exclusive, wide-ranging interview with the postcolonial theorist Homi K. Bhabha. In this interview Bhabha has expounded on postcoloniality, minorities and the notion of world literature. This comprehensive anthology will thus enable scholars and researchers in the area to access multilingual post-imperial and postcolonial literatures in a single space." (jacket)
