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Podcast: Exchanges: A Cambridge UP Podcast
Episode: Baidik Bhattacharya, "Colonialism, World Literature, and the Making of the Modern Culture of Letters" (Cambridge UP, 2024)
Description: In a radical and ambitious reconceptualization of the field, Colonialism, World Literature, and the Making of the Modern Culture of Letters (Cambridge UP, 2024) argues that global literary culture since the eighteenth century was fundamentally shaped by colonial histories. By introducing the concept of ‘literary sovereignty’, the book argues that political sovereignty in colonial India went hand in hand with a massive project of textually understanding local cultures that colonial officials encountered. This in turn gave rise to paradigms such as those of comparison, fields of study such as literary history and most importantly – world literature. It offers a comprehensive account...