Since the 2000s, a revised understanding of Goethe’s concept of World literature has shaken the study of comparative literature. As Theo D-haen summarizes in his volume The History of World Literature (2024), „No other approach to literary studies has known as spectacular a success in the new millennium as that which goes by the name of ‘world literature’”. In this scholarly field, we are experiencing an expansion to a global perspective (focusing on Asia and Africa), the idea of the masterpiece and the canon has been abandoned, and more attention is paid to translations and to the socio-economic conditions of the literary market. Briefly, the end of Eurocentrism was proclaimed. But what consequences does this movement have for research and scholarship in European literatures, and what perspectives does it open up?

On the one hand, I would like to focus on the increasing importance of literatures in languages other than the traditionally important ones such as English, French, German, and Spanish. On the other hand, I would like to open up the perspective of networking European literatures with non-European literatures. Thus, I will focus on Central European literatures (post-colonial aspect exemplified on the remarkable number of Nobel Prize winners from this region, in particular Olga Tokarczuk, Wisława Szymborska, Elfriede Jelinek, Herta Müller) and on writers such as Mohamed Mbougar Sarr and Fiston Mwanza Mujila writing in and creatively transforming the language of the former colonizer, and thus gaining world-wide recognition (post-colonial aspect & aspect of the international literary market).

Literature written by authors “no longer European, not yet African”: this was J. M. Coetzee’s definition of “white writing” in his study of the Cape in South Africa and its literary history (1988). For European-language writers – and not only “white” writers – in the southern hemisphere, a residual connection with or even dependence on Europe has been a foundational condition. In the 19th and much of the 20th centuries, this connection prevailed in a world largely dominated by European powers, at first in a direct political sense, later through economic and cultural means. The literary orientation towards Europe remained powerful and problematic for African and Latin American authors, not least when it was resisted and negated. Even today, publishing and reception infrastructures in Europe remain strong, but the cultural prestige of Europe has waned in an age of greater pluralism and literary self-confidence in the ”global South”. Rather than speak of “European-language” literatures of the South in English, French, Spanish and Portuguese, we should perhaps think of them as operating in “post-European languages”.

All of this has implications for how we account historically for modernisms in the southern hemisphere. With the Mozambican-Portuguese poet Rui Knopfli as my example, this paper will discuss how his high-modernist project – with its dual commitment to sothern Africa and an imagined Europe – reads differently today than it did in the 1960s. “My Paris is Johannesburg”, a line from one of his most famous poems, speaks with precision to his ambivalent positioning. To say that “My Paris is Johannesburg” superimposes the poet’s imagined geography – a Eurocentric orientation towards the cultural capital of Paris – onto his lived geography, putting the value of both geographies, and hence of a European vs. an Africa-based modernism, at stake in this formulation. Yet, there is a further complication: both city names express a sense of distance and yearning, given Knopfli’s own location (until 1974) in Mozambique. Johannesburg, in other words, is also presented here as a centre, which tends to regard its regional neighbours as peripheries. In addition, Knopfli’s language of poetry was Portuguese, which connects him not just to Portugal, but to the cultural imaginary of Brazil. The modernist project of Knopfli was in other words not binary, and this is what enables a renewed “southern” reading of his work. In this way, I intend to situate Knopfli in a post-European world-literary framework in which Euro-American modernism no longer operates as the exclusive aesthetic-historical point of reference.

Various ‘post(s)-’ can be attributed to the phenomenon, materiality, and interpretation of the post-European world, specifically in relation to its literary production and circulation. I propose the term postdiasporic dispersion as a theoretical model apt to approach the post-European condition. A part of my wider project of developing a theory of postdiasporic sociocultural dispersion, this model explains some major features of the literary production in various media in European languages in a post-European world, toward a better understanding of the global literary landscape.

I started the project from the question how to probe the experiences and roles of (post)war migrants at the individual level and apply it to multiscalar identity wars in postnational settings. As new cycles of violence are being justified by referring to the memory of past ones, it’s crucial to study the memories of collective violence with mechanisms to move past such legacies. Since the destructive dynamic of communism’s aftermath in the 1990s Yugoslav wars is renewed in catastrophic warfare elsewhere in/around Europe, I reconsider how the people who disconnected from ethnic groups and narratives managed to memorize those events creatively, to demonstrate that new paths have opened, beyond violent ethnonational discourses/imagery. Comparing the cultural productions of authors and artists who moved as of 1990s from Croatia and from Bosnia-Herzegovina to Austria, Germany, the Netherlands, France, and integrating into that nomadic philosophy, I propose a new model of postdiasporic diffusion and a dispersion theory. I describe dispersion as both moving and knowledge-production, with the transforming role of memory and its political materialization. Such theorization explains how individuals move on from ethnic traumas and rework the critical points of collective memorabilities.

Even if the concept of postdiaspora emerged recently, up to now dispersion has not been differentiated clearly from diaspora (group or origin related). I will take up this point in the Panel, focusing on an emerging, interactive global–local dynamic, where migrants in postdiasporic dispersion tend to localize and the accommodating societies tend to globalize the common and new societal and cultural concerns, so also political and linguistic concerns. On the basis of my fieldwork, literary and artistic production, I suggest a theoretical vocabulary that captures both sides of the postdiasporic situation: refugees/exiles and hosts. I will exemplify creative interventions in the aftermath of ethnic rifts, an affirmative-affective relatability bolstering integrative practices, and indicate the applicability of this model to new dispersions shaping world societies, heritage, economy. This involves game-changing cognitive tools for refugees to detach from pain, restructure their memory and affect, and for policy-makers to revalue refugees as culture carriers, avoiding the stereotype of powerless victims.

This paper sets out to explore the question of what it means to write in European languages in a post-European world. In particular, it will examine the reasons that lead to the adoption of a language other than the native tongue, and to what extent political and historical crises contribute to this process. Additionally, it will consider the impact that oeuvres belonging to small literatures can have. To address these questions, the paper will examine narratives belonging to life writing, which recount quotidian events as experienced by two women writers within a dictatorial regime. One of these authors is Iranian (Azar Nafisi), and following the exile from her country, she adopted English as her literary language. The other is Georgian (Zaira Arsenishvili), and it is from Georgia, still under Soviet regime at the time, that she writes about the Stalinist purges. The objective of this study is to examine how these two perspectives, of women witnesses writing from an 'I' and the form adopted (life writing), reveal questions linked to writing. In the context that has been stated, the following questions will be examined: what does 'post-European' mean in the present, specifically in terms of an "encounter with that which is culturally superior"? (Chow 2004: 299) How does the comparative paradigm "Europe and its Others", alternating with that of "Post-European Culture and the West" (Chow 2004: 305), function in relation to small literatures, notably Georgian?