Towards a Radical World Literature: Experimental Writing in a Globalizing World

Abstract

Avant-garde and experimental writings have been associated with wide range of political perspectives and agendas, including emancipatory struggles for social justice, progressive ideologies, militant actions, repressive regimes, and allegedly apolitical forms of creative expression. This special issue focuses on radical strand of experimental literature, one that participates critically and creatively in ongoing struggle for affirmative social transformation in globalizing This kind of radical literary experiment is indebted, at least in part, revolutionary ideas and practices of nineteenth-century avant-garde, which inaugurated and inspired a range of social postures and strategies for artists by which they could differentiate themselves from current social and cultural structures while also intervening in them (Orton and Pollock 142). This spirit of avant-gardism (1) continued stimulate emancipatory agendas and fictions of twentieth century, including its anti-colonial, democratic, feminist/queer, and ecological movements. Such experiments have contributed radical imagination, understood as an ongoing and collective effort to think critically, reflexively and innovatively about social world (Haiven and Khasnabish 2). However, in our contemporary era of neoliberal capitalism and still-incomplete decolonization, we suggest that radical experimental writing now faces distinctive creative challenges as it seeks surpass known limits of globalization's own world-making experiments and inaugurate new forms of collective knowledge and coexistence. This special issue investigates how contemporary experimental literature mediates scales, locations, and practices of globalization's world-making activities through its radical interventions. To frame problem of experimental writing in globalizing world, this introduction calls for materialist literary critique of writing that tests new propositions about social transformation and articulates alternatives prevailing hegemonies and epistemologies. Specifically, we argue for world-making potential of textual experiment as it interrogates and rearticulates its position within literary field and long history of social transformation. We reject idea of an experimentalism that emanates from single Western European centre or proceeds linearly and argue instead for conjunctural approach aesthetic and political resistance. If twentieth century saw waning of certain modes of experimentation, we also find ample evidence of reawakening of experimental literatures in contemporary period, especially in writing that seeks renew and extend call for social justice globally. We propose that radical literary experiment interrogates its participation in long history of globalization and renders visible other critical and creative views of transformation, particularly through its challenges inequalities that structure prevailing global imaginary and literary field. In final part of this introduction, we discuss how contributors this collection address radical experiment as form of world-making that seeks re-envision worldly belonging and coexistence on planetary scale. Our approach experimental writing differs from that of The Oxford Dictionary of Literary Terms, which rather blandly defines literary experimentalism (2) as [t]he commitment exploring new concepts and representations of through methods that go beyond established conventions of literary tradition (Baldick 120). This definition may suffice within communities that share dominant construction of established literary conventions and universalist conception of what constitutes the world. But it does not account for particularities of experimental literatures that mediate heterogeneous perspectives, cultural traditions, and political possibilities of an unevenly developed world-system. …