In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

  • Intra-active Transculturality*
  • Ranjan Ghosh

Do not so much as imagine that I will show you the way to a world literature. Each of us must make his way forward according to his own means and abilities. All I have wanted to say is that just as the world is not merely the sum of your ploughed field, plus my ploughed field, plus his ploughed field—because to know the world that way is only to know it with a yokel-like parochialism—similarly world literature is not merely the sum of your writings, plus my writings, plus his writings. We generally see literature in this limited, provincial manner. To free oneself of that regional narrowness and to resolve to see the universal being in world literature, to apprehend such totality in every writer’s work, and to see its interconnectedness with every man’s attempt at self-expression—that is the objective we need to pledge ourselves to.

(Tagore, “Visva-Sahitya” 223; italics mine)

Literature is nowadays often said to be at once global and local. This, by extension, also means that, after all, there is nothing either local or global about literature. Djelal Kadir’s sensible proposal to associate the lexis “world” with “no particular or necessarily predictable referent” means that the development of world literature programs is neither logical nor inevitable:

This discovery makes it unavoidable for us to have to explain the phenomenon we are referring to as the predicate object or as the predicative [End Page 1198] process of our worlding actions—which world, at what time, in what location, through which language, and with what intentions. World, in other words, can never be taken as a given since it is invariably the constructed outcome of our particular performative interventions. And, by extension, the literature it conditions becomes a particular literature whose specificity is a derivative of the instance of the phenomenon “world” we define as predicative referent of our action in the verb to world.

(5)

The acts of “worlding” are deeply performative and transfigurative. Such acts “(in)fusionise”1 that is, they fold the “inside” of our experiences (by which I mean one’s own local contexts, the specificity of native tradition, the train of inheritance of a thought in a particular culture and knowledge system) into the “outside” (the epistemic and cultural contexts of different traditions and knowledge worlds). The revelations of the “inside” and the “outside” do not come together in a two-way course in which either the local reaches for the global or the global tries to find connection with the local. Although we cannot ignore the strict divisions between the inside (we may for clearer understanding call it local) and the outside (global), the acts of “worlding” demonstrate that connections, the scale enlargements, are not built in a unitotal pattern. Worldling promotes “planetary time” which Wai Chee Dimock argues as “supranational time” that “goes backward (a recursive loop in the past), and it goes forward (a projective arc into the future)” (“Planetary Time” 489). This promises a “more”, the unexpected web of meaning, which I have termed as the “more than global.” On the surface, local and global have their usual separateness and rupture; but, in what I argue as “more than global”, such ruptures often become a kind of provocation to question the promise and latency of a dialogue between the two. Diffractive refigurings produce the “more than global” phenomenon that acknowledges how globality becomes the “enclosure in the undifferentiated sphere [End Page 1199] of a unitotality” and is suppressive, as Jean-Luc Nancy points out, of “all world-forming of the world” (The Creation of the World or Globalization 28, 50). Literature cuts “together-apart” leaving the local-global in new temporalities—”spacetimematterings” (Barad, “Diffracting Diffraction” 168). Doing literature then is a phenomenon which is ethicised through “agentially intra-acting components” (Barad, “Posthumanist Performativity” 815). Its boundaries of ethics are not created through the influence of pre-existing relations; rather, they are created through agential intra-actions, “relata-within-phenomena” (815) which result in an “interdeterminacy” that is not fully linguistic. So “more than global” is inscribed in what I call “intra-active transculturality” which is...

pdf

Share