As Homi Bhabha wrote in the late 1990s, the nation is a problem of narration. Considering the narration of national identities partly tied to their flags, this essay aims to analyze the character of permanent updating of the Brazilian national flag, in order to understand to what extent the appropriation of its forms contributes to the release of signs and operators that, supposedly, are able to narrate the imagined communities beyond their official iconography.

Beatriz Sarlo (1942-2024) and Leyla Perrone-Moisés (1934), in Argentina and Brazil, occupied the most prominent roles in the literary criticism of their countries for more than 50 years. Both intellectuals had similar trajectories, initially standing out in cultural journalism before later taking up positions as professors at the University of Buenos Aires and the University of São Paulo.

They also shared the same intellectual mentor: Roland Barthes. Not only did both write books dedicated to Barthes (Writings on Roland Barthes by Beatriz Sarlo and With Roland Barthes by Leyla Perrone-Moisés), but they also helped edit his works and contributed to his critical reception in both countries.

Through this relationship with their mentor, I aim to show how their trajectories intersect and diverge, highlighting the particularities of the "Argentine Barthes" and the "Brazilian Barthes," as well as the literary criticism produced in both countries.

In the introduction to the volume Crossings and Contaminations: Studies in Comparative Litterature (2009), Eduardo Coutinho talks about the significant changes and shifts in the perspective that had guided traditional comparativism until then. According to the critic, the aura that surrounded the literary object was questioned and other types of literary and aesthetic expressions that had previously been excluded from comparative studies began to be taken into account. The result is a re-evaluation of the prevailing binary scheme in order to consider the inclusion of "alternative forms of expression and recognise their differences".

The discussion of literature and other forms of aesthetic expression is one of those fields where "crossings and contaminations" can be observed from the angle of comparativism. The institutional manifestation of this discussion on the interrelationships between the arts, initially dealt with in the so-called Interart Studies, has led to the formation of transdisciplinary discourses whose developments can be identified in reflections on intermediality, its definition and foundations, its theoretical scope and its practices, which are as varied as the creative power of artists is infinite. These approaches open up perspectives for investigating heterogeneous products marked by the confluence of media, materials, languages and signs, by the interaction between them and, above all, investigate how they produce meaning.

These objects are often beyond what is conventionally called Literature, or rather, they emphasise the proteiform nature of Literature itself. It's no surprise, then, that contemporary criticism, especially from the Global South, has increasingly turned its attention to these aesthetic and literary practices, henceforth referred to as "writings of the present" or "post-autonomous", in the terms of Josefina Ludmer (2007); productions that belong to the "expanded field" of Literature, an expression that takes up the one used by Rosalind Krauss to deal with sculpture (1979); or that are characterised by non-specificity and non-belonging, in the terms of Florencia Garramuño (2014). Therefore, the aim of this communication is to assess the contribution of theories from the so-called Global South, such as those mentioned above, to the critical discussion of literature in its relationship with the arts and the media.

Le travail a pour but d’analyser, dans une perspective comparatiste, quatre œuvres littéraires dont le leitmotiv est les manifestations multitudinaires qui ont récemment émergé comme une forme de résistance aux processus d’exclusion sociale en cours dans le monde globalisé.

Nous considérons que toutes les insurrections abordées dans les récits sélectionnés – le Printemps arabe (Tunisie), les Journées de juin 2013 (Brésil), le Mouvement des Gilets Jaunes (France) et l’Estallido Social (Chili) – s’inscrivent dans les luttes anti-hégémoniques menées par le Sud global, une catégorie comprise ici non pas comme une opposition au Nord global, puisque, comme le souligne le sociologue Boaventura de Souza Santos, elle relève davantage d’un territoire épistémique que d’un territoire géographique.

Le corpus est composé des titres suivants : Par le feu, de Tahar Ben Jelloun ; Meia-noite e vinte, de Daniel Galera ; Leurs Enfants après eux, de Nicolas Mathieu ; et Despachos del fin del mundo, d'Alberto Fuguet.

Cette proposition vise à mettre en évidence le potentiel de la littérature pour favoriser, grâce à sa dimension affectivo-cognitive, un élargissement de nos connaissances sur les problèmes contemporains, contribuant ainsi à ouvrir des voies pour les affronter.

The work of Anglo-Indian writer Salman Rushdie is marked by the permeability of the boundary between humanity and animality, a technique clearly adapted from the Hindu pantheon, which consists of gods who share physical characteristics between humans and animals. The pages of the controversial The Satanic Verses, a novel published in 1988 that led to the author's condemnation by the Iranian administration of Ayatollah Khomeini, are populated by characters derived from this ancient narrative practice. In this novel, two ordinary men are suddenly transformed—one into an angel, the other into a demonic goat who finds himself in a hospital where all the patients have undergone some transformation positioning them at the crossroads between the animal and the human. Meanwhile, the most recent novel by Pakistani author Mohsin Hamid, The Last White Man, published in 2022, revolves around a different kind of transformation: the sudden change in the skin color of white citizens in the United States, leaving only one remaining individual with their original white skin. In both novels, we witness the nightmare of European colonial discourse materializing into a reality that even escapes the discursive-psychic negotiation of colonial stereotypes, which Homi Bhabha associates with the Freudian fetishistic scene. By presenting how Western metropolises find themselves invaded by animalized and racialized bodies, we seek to briefly reflect on the unsettling presence of the Global South in the streets of the All-Powerful North and how the transposition of this presence into contemporary global literature contributes to the consolidation of a World Republic of Global-South Letters. Furthermore, we will explore how this "Literature Without Borders" can be understood from a comparativist perspective.