World-making: Genres, Crafts and Languages

By adopting and adapting the term "world-making" (Valdés, Kadir, Hayot, Cheah, Neumann), sub-group 3 investigates how the world acquires density and meaning through literary practice. Rather than different scales of reading, the focus here is on different modes of writing, publication and reception. A premise here is that the world can never be seen or experienced in its entirety. Instead, documentary modernism, translingual writing, travelogues, experiments in constructing readerships through "little magazines" in (post)colonial contexts all provide instances of how the world is actively and partially imagined - not just in terms of extension, but equally through temporal entanglement and formal experimentation. An innovative feature of these projects is that they thematise the specificity of languages and media (including scripts) as critical elements of world-making along cosmopolitan or vernacular lines. The projects address, inter alia, Russian cosmopolitans, western travel writers, the modernist literary imaginary of Istanbul, Indian popular culture and literary journals in twentieth-century South Africa, Zimbabwe and Mozambique.