ABSTRACT
This final chapter uses the idea of death as an analytical framework to interrogate the claim that it is the death of the postcolonial paradigm that has given rise to the latest debates on world literature. In order to evaluate such a claim, I argue in this chapter, we need to contextualize this argument about death as the necessary culmination of any idea or concept, and we also need to re-examine the connection between this narrative and imperial histories. Hence, this chapter shows that contrary to their claims, many of the present votaries of world literature draw their theoretical resources from narratives closely associated with the idea of an organic nation and not from any of the arguments associated with a supranational world. In view of this incongruity, it is much more interesting to see that what is dead now is the nineteenth-century idea of world literature, and what becomes really useful is the banal and ordinary trajectories of the idea in contemporary Anglophone writing.
