Call for papers

For a world where many worlds fit: Literatures of the Global South

Maryllu de Oliveira Caixeta, PhD (org.)

Submissions until April 30, 2025

The current global crisis (anti-political, ecocidal, and xenophobic) has been discussed by theories that have adopted the perspective of the Global South, starting in the 1970s, when the damages of modern capitalism, increasingly identified with colonial and colonialist history, began to reveal themselves in unprecedented proportions. In line with the emergence, in recent decades, of a set of theories interested in adopting perspectives from the Global South, literary studies have highlighted how the dynamics of their field decisively contributed to the maintenance and dissemination of knowledge, ideologies, aesthetics, and concepts tied to sexist and racist institutions. Hierarchical, discriminatory, extractivist stances, rooted in supposedly universal canonical models, which, however, reveal themselves to be provincial and regional, highlight a "cult value" that replicates those of a few centers in the Global North. In the peripheries of capitalism, literary studies are produced in Westernized universities, whose sexist and racist epistemology cannot be uncovered solely by color markers, for in addition to these, there are ethnic identity markers (religious, linguistic, cultural, regional) that are more difficult to pinpoint due to the distances between worlds and mutual ignorance.

These issues have resonated in debates within peripheral literary fields, thanks to a set of contemporary theoretical dispositions that reject the naturalization of epistemic traditions that need to be revised. Some have proposed a broad critical revision of modernity, while others insist on the need to include a discussion of the contributions of colonial and colonialist history in shaping canonical models adopted by Southern epistemologies, limited by blind spots, insufficiencies, resignations, or violent pragmatism.
Gradually, there is an increased recognition and ways of formulating understandings of epistemic racism and sexism in organic literate traditions within Westernized universities and their literatures, restricted to the domains of printed works published in national languages inherited from the colonizer. Meanwhile, long processes of modernization continue with the progressive erasure of multilingual cultures, massacred, ontologically denied, or marginalized by the nation-state. The questioning of the assimilation and naturalization of these assumptions appears in theoretical-critical studies of literatures from the South, which highlight how their national traditions have divided and hierarchized the worlds. 

Let us look at some examples of these traditional and naturalized divisions, which are being revised:

• The tendency of Brazilian literature to illustrate the form of the national subject and the evolutionary sense of the history of modernization.

• The crisis of compiling history of Brazilian literature, when the expectation of a Westernizing, modernizing evolution reached its historical limit in the 1970s.

• The place of the exotic occupied by globally projecting writers from the Global South, who handle discourses of indifferentiation of large regions such as Africa, Latin America, and Asia.

• The persistence of the division between national styles from centers, potentially universal in their parity with the Eurocentric perspective of the contemporary, and regional styles, where the nature of their link to regionalism, rusticity, and primitivism is debated (considering all the impregnated anachronism that this division entails).

• The political re-signification of Comparative Literature, beyond aligning the literatures of the South with the canons of the North, thus redirecting focus to South-South exchanges.

• Epistemological mappings of the history of formation, evolution, and exhaustion of modern Brazilian literature.

• Revisions of colonial literatures.

• Re-elaborations of the defining milestones of modernity, revealing it as a colonial and colonialist era, which even the boldest independence struggles did not fully overcome.

The fólio Journal invites you to submit your contributions and perspectives on one or more of these issues and their associated developments.