Alif 20 Reviews

As one of the first non-European journals to critically address the category of Weltliteratur bilingually from the perspective of the Global South, this special issue of Alif addresses this problem theoretically and empirically. The critical conversation about the problem of the category of Weltliteratur is not only extended beyond the European and North American sphere that has largely dominated and framed the discussion of Weltliteratur, but is juxtaposed formally in a way that permits us to understand that there are other “world literatures” that allow us to reexamine the contending theories, practices, and underlying assumptions of Weltliteratur. Essays in this volume emphasize in different ways the inherent tension between postcolonial studies and “world criticism,” and to that extent open up new realms for the discovery of new knowledges, new epistemes, modes of conversation, and communication.

The articles in Alif 37 address the intersection of literature and journalism, in a wide variety of Arabophone, Francophone, Anglophone, and Latin American contexts, analyzing the literary in relation to an array of journalistic genres and forums, including the interview, investigative journalism, the questionnaire, the blogosphere, creative non-fiction and reportage, literary websites, cultural periodicals, the autobiographical essay, and writers’ opinion articles. Complemented by the testimonies of two journalist–littérateurs and an interview with an artist–poet–art critic, the studies present fresh aspects of Arab literary modernity, littérature engagée, the politics of reception and translation in cultural journalism, canon-formation in relation to journalism, the journalistic delineation of a literary generation’s profile, gender and censorship of creative writers, and revolution and civil strife.