The Locations of (World) Literature: Perspectives from Africa and South Asia

That location matters for critics, readers but also texts, as Arvind Krishna Mehrotra’s quote suggests, is a deceptively simple point. To some readers, location as context and standpoint reveals and deepens a text’s possibilities, to other readers it constricts and confines them. Indeed, the apparent paradox of locatedness and open-endedness is at the heart of manywriterly and critical reflections on location and literature, as is the idea that literature both inhabits and creates worlds. There is no escape from the location of perspective or point of view, be it one or many. This is all themore crucial in world literature, which attempts to view and connect literary phenomena on a very large scale. “For any given observer,” David Damrosch argued inWhat is World Literature?, “even a genuinely global perspective remains a perspective from somewhere, and global patterns of the circulation of world literature take shape in their localmanifestations” (27). Yet