Abstract
Exploring the links among accelerating patterns of migration, homogenizing forces of globalization, and transnational sites of creativity, this essay highlights the contributions that francophone voices from islands of the global South have made to the diversification of the knowledge economy. We discuss the critical effectiveness of literature as an agent of cultural change, focusing on minor writers who reach wide audiences by negotiating new pathways into the literary marketplace. The Comoran Soeuf Elbadawi, the Malagasy Jean-Luc Raharimanana, the Mauritians Ananda Devi and Shenaz Patel, and the Tahitian Chantal Spitz instigate literary dialogues that underscore ways of reimagining our world and redefining world literature. The issues they raise reveal the enduring relevance of literary studies and its interpretive approaches to a full appreciation of human diversity, which cannot be captured by purely quantitative methods.
Highlights
EMMANUEL BRUNO JEAN-FRANÇOIS is the Marian Trygve Freed Early Career Professor in the Department of French and Francophone Studies and an assistant professor of French and francophone studies and comparative literature at Penn State University, University Park. He is the author of Poétiques de la vio lence et récits francophones contempo rains, forthcoming from Brill in 2017
His current and second book project focuses on contemporary Indian Ocean literary and cultural studies
Statistics are curated to it research purposes, and the ever-narrower definitions of truth emerging from this strictly quantitative information overload make the teaching of critical approaches to literature a Sisyphean challenge
Summary
Françoise, and Emmanuel Bruno Jean-François. 2016. “Literary Routes: Migration, Islands, and the Creative Economy.” PMLA 131 [5] (October): 1222–1238. doi:10.1632/ pmla.2016.131.5.1222. The geographic implications of writers’ migration pathways from peripheral to central locations and back, coupled with their quest for publication and distinction in the West, have given rise to new questions about the extrinsic factors that drive artistic and literary achievement, from the changing dynamics of the book market and digital publishing to the “rise of the creative class,” a situational phenomenon with distinct regional advantages in the increasingly diversiied knowledge economy He fact remains that the current visibility of postcolonial literature produced and disseminated by Western centers of knowledge is sufficient neither to disrupt power disparities nor to destabilize the universalist deinitions of literature tied to and reinforced by the tastemakers and gatekeepers who control the conditions of evaluation and production of that literature..
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