Toward a dynamic defi nition of world literature
M. G. Vassanji’s mosaic of change
Keywords:
World Literature, M. G. Vassanji, Goethe, Kant, CanadaAbstract
The present paper looks at one of the most widely discussed cases of a writer who comes from the in-between of the colonial relations in Africa, M. G. Vassanji, who is of Asian origin but born and raised in East Africa and educated in the USA to become a Canadian citizen, from the perspective of the current debate on world literature. Although the works of Vassanji devoted to Africa, such as his 2013 novel The Magic of Saida and his 2014 memoir And Home Was Kariakoo: A Memoir of East Africa, have been discussed by a number of critics (cf. Gurav Desai’s Commerce with the Universe: Africa, India, and the Afrasian Imagination, CUP, 2013), the present paper engages the creation of Vassanji’s imaginary Africa as part of what David Damrosch in his book What is World Literature calls “an understanding of world literature as an elliptical refraction of national literature” (2018: 283). Thus the image of Africa is interpreted in the present paper as partaking of both fields, that of the national/ethnic and the global/world creating in that way loci that are both specific and universal, liminal and cross-overs of cultures and identities.
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