ABSTRACT
World literature challenges stateship when it passes spatial, temporal, and linguistic borders. This is literature’s worldly effect, its rippling and polyvalent disruption within the web of uneven relations among writers, books, and readers. The essays in this book take their inspiration from the revolutionary potential, asking how dissenting literatures circulate in a global context and how local conceptions of dissent might help us to reframe the study of world literature as a force for justice and equality. The politics of dissent by their account starts with throwing a white-hot light on the specific circumstances to reveal that which escapes codification in the present. World literature need not be global in the pejorative sense; it can also be internationalist. Instead of focusing on circulation, market systems, and cultural capital, the essays in the book ask how theorising world literature in light of dissenting politics and aesthetics might cultivate radical thought and support uncompromising resistance to the apparatuses of global inequality.
