Globalising the West

Abstract

Abstract Literary actors in Western countries have long ignored authors who came as immigrants or are members of ethnic minorities. This article discusses the upscaling of these authors in the West since the 1960s as an international process related to other processes of globalisation, namely the recognition of non-Western writers and the emergence of transnational literary fields. Moreover, it compares the effects of this process in the British and German literary fields. In Britain, the upscaling of immigrants is intertwined with the recognition of post-colonial writing in English worldwide as well as with the emergence of a transnational literary field in English. In Germany, by contrast, there were no direct links between the growing recognition of peripheralized authors, the growing connectivity between several literary fields operating in German, and the upscaling of immigrants. This explains why it took immigrants so much longer to gain recognition in Germany than it did in Britain.