New Books In Literary Studies

Pieter Vanhove’s World Literature After Empire: Rethinking Universality in the Long Cold War (2021), engages with the idea of ‘world’ as it manifests in literary and philosophical studies. Taking an interdisciplinary and multilingual approach, Vanhove centers his discussion on literature and the arts, while drawing an important historical tableau of the Cold War that highlights the ways in which decolonization processes facilitated a multiplicity of ways to think of the ‘world’. His book engages at length with debates on world literature, postcolonial thought, and translation. In order to show the complex political and cultural tapestry of the Cold War, Vanhove engages in case studies on China and the Afro-Asian Writer’s Bureau, Alberto Moravia and PEN International, Antonio Gramsci and Pier Paolo Pasolini, Jean-Paul Sartre and Patrice Lulumba, André Malraux, and Huang Yong Ping. In so doing, the Vanhove demonstrates how artists during the Cold War engaged in cultural discourse that was anti-imperialist, and