Feminism as World Literature

Robin Truth Goodman is Professor of English at Florida State University, USA. Her published works include Gender Commodity: Marketing Feminist Identities and the Promise of Security (Bloomsbury, 2022), Understanding Adorno, Understanding Modernism (Bloomsbury, 2020), The Bloomsbury Handbook of 21st Century Feminist Theory (2019), Promissory Notes: On the Literary Conditions of Debt (2018), Gender for the Warfare State: Literature of Women in Combat (2016), and Literature and the Development of Feminist Theory (2015).

The contributors of Feminism as World Literature highlight the transformative potential of feminist methodologies in the field of World Literature. By rejecting the supplementary condition of feminist studies in relation to World Literature, the contributors illuminate the powerful renegotiations and transfigurations that feminist studies can perform in relation to this field. Through the reassessment of traditional literary canons and heuristic paradigms, the contributors confront the hierarchies and binaries that underpin literary studies, redefining not only World Literature scholarship but also highlighting the power of feminist reconceptualizations to imagine worlds beyond these paradigms.

• List of FiguresAcknowledgmentsIntroduction: Is a Feminist World Literature Possible?Robin Truth Goodman, Florida State University, USAPart I Genres1. “There Are in Persia Many Subjects Not Accessible to Female Inquiry”: Eurocentric and Cross-Cultural Feminist Nomadism in Lady Mary Sheil’s Glimpses of Life and Manners in Persia (1856)Marie Ostby, Connecticut College, USA2. Changing the World of Feminist DemodystopiasCaren Irr, Brandeis University, USA3. The Speculative Mode in Feminist World LiteratureDebjani Ganguly, University of Virginia, USA4. Poet/Guerreras: Hip-Hop and World LiteratureDebra A. Castillo, Cornell University, USA5. Surface Matters: Female Allegories and the Gendering of Continents from Waldseemüller to OrteliusKatharina N. Piechocki, Harvard University, USAPart II Strategies6. Bonds of Labor: Mahasweta Devi, Feminism, LeninismKeya Ganguly, University of Minnesota Twin Cities, USA7. The Worlds That Women CollectLisa Ryoko Wakamiya, Florida State University, USA8. Practicing Transnational Feminist Recovery TodayJessica Berman, University of Maryland Baltimore County, USA9. Woman as Anti-Suicide Bomb: Women Trapped between Past and FutureMieke Bal, University of Amsterdam, The Netherlands10. Translating Hidden Economies: Toward a Decolonial-Feminist Worlding of LiteratureLaura Doyle, University of Massachusetts Amherst, USA11. The Elusive Postcolonial: Women Writers in/and the African DiasporaHortense J. Spillers, Vanderbilt University, USAPart III Themes12. Intertwining Feminisms, Environmentalisms, and World Literature in Ruth Ozeki’s A Tale for the Time BeingKaren Thornber, Harvard University, USA13. Troubling the Human, Worlding Gender in Maryse Condé’s The Wondrous and Tragic Life of Ivan and IvanaNicole Simek, Whitman College, USA14. Dissident Feminist Subjects and Spaces in Arundhati Roy’s The Ministry of Utmost HappinessSarah Afzal, Florida State University, USA15. Maghrebi Women’s Literature and Film: The "Ecritures féminines" of Unsubmissive VoicesValérie K. Orlando, University of Maryland, USA16. Toward a New Theory of Feminist World Literature, in FilmRobin Truth Goodman, Florida State University, USA17. Passivity and Nomadism in the Literature of Luisa ValenzuelaSofia Iaffa, Stockholm University, SwedenNotes on ContributorsIndex