Of Worlds in Contact: Transmodernity and Global Literary Histories
Due Date: 07-15-2022
Transmodernity has emerged, in recent times, as a stirring call for refocusing debates around decolonization practice, indigeneities and planetarities, and neoliberal developmentalism. The divergent polemics of the Spanish philosophers Rosa María Rodríguez Magda and Enrique Dussel have helped found a powerful counterdiscourse to what Walter Mignolo astutely called “the enduring enchantments of modernity” (2002), especially those at work in contemporary narratives of cross-cultural contact and exchange. Transmodernity helps us draw up historical frameworks of contact and multiplicity that do not rely—implicitly or explicitly—on the hierarchization of modernities as dominant, on the one hand, and derivative, on the other. By strategically disengaging from the center-periphery model, transmodernity foregrounds laterality, relationality, and adaptation as potential theorizations for how cultures and languages in contact emerge and function.
In this volume of essays, we invite scholars to explore a myriad of literary forms from around the globe that reposition historical traditions and foreground transmodernity as a valuable conceptual tool for rethinking literature and translation (as product and process) in and for the new century.
Topics for this volume may include
- narratives of contact and creolized modernities
- transversal temporalities
- linguistic polyglossia and heteroglossia
- translation, “the transmodern novel” (Mohan), and reading practice
- ecological and “productive universalisms” (Hofmeyr)
- oceanic, littoral, and archipelagic transmodernities
- the posthuman as transmodern
- traveling ideas and objects: itinerant accounts, memoirs, “postcard” narratives
- genre, history, and transmodernity
- trans*: nonbinary gender, sexuality, and transmodernity
- decolonial sexualities and transmodernity
- transmodernity and popular cultural networks
- oralities, “technoralities” (Adejunmobi), and transmodernity
- subalternities in contact
- rural and urban transmodern topographies
- planetarity and transmodernity studies
- transmodernity and re-historicizing working-class literature
We are looking for essays that will be between 7,000 and 8,000 words in length. Please submit a 500-word abstract of your proposed essay and a 100-word biography to transmodernitystudies@gmail.com by 15 July 2022.