Institutions

Abstract

This chapter deals with literature as a product of institutionalization: translators, publishers, literary critics, academics, and institutions that support literature influence whether and where a literary work is read. If we examine the institutions that promote the creation of world literature, this takes us directly into the center of one of the most fundamental controversies in the cultural studies of our time: the intense debate about the idea of world literature is closely associated with questions about global networks in a polycentric world. Most of the leading positions on world literature have been inscribed into contemporary discourses on the workings and symptoms of the crises of the current surge in globalization, which shapes the institutional, economic, and cultural hegemony of the global North over the global South. Nevertheless, the institutions that carry out the canonization of world literature are still located in Europe and the United States. This chapter considers, with reference to various Latin American authors and works, the question of how outdated center-periphery dynamics can be replaced without hiding this highly specific, historically evolved mooring in the Western world. The examples show that Latin American authors and processes of institutionalization, as well as new perspectives, point to a contemporary mapping of world literature beyond the established dynamics of canonization.