World Literature in Kerala

Abstract

Highlighting the local dimension of world literature, this article attempts a re-narrativization of Malayalam literary history through the lens of world literature. It does so by locating four possible materializations or phases of world literature, each marked by a crucial social or political development in the state of Kerala: the British colonial intervention, anti-colonialist sentiment, the phenomenon of the Cold War, and the dissolution of the USSR that followed the Cold War. While employing each of these as discursive categories to shed light on their literary and cultural implications in shaping the idea of “world literature” at different junctures, this article also analyzes the various meanings that “world” and “literature” embodied in the state.