WORLD LITERATURE AND THE POLITICS OF THE MINORITY

World Literature and the Politics of the Minority is a collection of essays which concern themselves with the discursive topography of world literature. Challenging the current West-centered monochronic vision of world literature, the authors of these essays join their efforts in marking a literary space in which the polychronic literatures of ‘minor’ countries and peoples can be heard, uncaged from the epistemological frame of the West’s Other.
In this book concepts such as ‘the majority’ and ‘the minority’ are reviewed in the global frame of capitalist world economic system, and the ethics of the new minority is explored. The ‘minority’ voices of the so-called ‘major’ countries of world literature, such as India’s Dalit tribal writing, China’s reception of William Shakespeare, and Japan’s conscientious engagement voice will be refreshing enough to rethink the Orientalism. At the same time, the rarely heard voices of Egypt’s literature of diaspora, the United Arab Emirates’s post-oil era imagination, and South Korea’s literary activism will attract a new interest in the postcolonial conditions of ‘minority’ countries.
The book invites the reader to take note of the digital interface system and the consequential nomadic mode of existence rapidly spreading all over the world. Encouraging the reader to re-view ‘the minority’ not as a fixed position but as a new transmutable space of ‘Becoming,’ it provides a chance to meditate on the role of a new digital generation of humanists challenging the capitalist world economy system.

Jihee Han is Associate Professor of English at Gyeongsang National University, the Republic of Korea. Her major research interests include modern British and American poetry, modern Korean literature and culture, comparative world literature, and girls’ studies. Currently, she is working on the cultural history of girlhood in Korea and is compiling the handbook of modern Korean poets.