| The idea of",world literature", has served as a crucial thoughunderappreciated interlocutor for African diasporic writers, informing their involvement inprocesses of circulation, translation, and revision that have been identified as the hallmarks ofthe contemporary era of world literature. Yet in spite of their participation in world systemsbefore and after European hegemony, Africa and the African diaspora have been excluded from thenetworks and archives of world literature. In Sounding the Break, Jason Frydmanattempts to redress this exclusion by drawing on historiography, ethnography, and archival sourcesto show how writers such as W. E. B. Du Bois, Zora Neale Hurston, Alejo Carpentier, Derek Walcott,Maryse Cond and Toni Morrison have complicated both Eurocentric and Afrocentric categories ofliterary and cultural production. Through their engagement with and revision of the European worldliterature discourse, he contends, these writers conjure a deep history of",literary traffic", whoseexpressions are always already cosmopolitan, embedded in the long histories of cultural and economicexchange between Africa, Asia, and Europe. It is precisely the New World American location of thesewriters, Frydman concludes, that makes possible this revisionary perspective on the idea of (Old)World literature. |
