Speaker: Ignacio M. Sanchez Prado, Washington University in St. Louis

Most approaches to the idea of “world literature” are based on two ideas: a diffusionist approach that highlights the influence of central traditions onto peripheries and the circulation of peripheral texts in the center, and an idealist approach that contrasts the world as constructed by the capitalist market with alternative cosmopolitanisms. This presentation argues polemically against both approaches that world literature is actually a decentralized set of material practices of writing, editing, circulation and readership and that both approaches err in establishing centers of gravity to read world literature. Using the idea of a “national world literature” and the examples of Mexican fiction from the 1960s to 2000s, and the ideas set forward in Sánchez Prado’s recent book Strategic Occidentalism, the paper will argue for a study of world literature “from below” that uses sociologies of literature as base method and is attentive to the way in which the world is contingently constructed in the imaginaries of concrete literary fields.

Ignacio M. Sánchez Prado is Professor of Spanish, Latin American Studies and Film and Media Studies. He is the author of six books, most recently Strategic Occidentalism. On Mexican Fiction, The Neoliberal Book Market and the Question of World Literature (Northwestern University Press, 2018) and the editor of thirteen scholarly collections, including A History of Mexican Literature (With J.R. Ruisánchez and A. Nogar, Cambridge University Press, 2016), Mexican Literature in Theory (Bloomsbury 2018) and Pierre Bourdieu in Hispanic Literature and Culture (Palgrave 2018). He has published over one hundred scholarly articles on questions of Mexican literature and cinema, cultural studies and Latin American theory.