World literature canonization reflects imperial power rather than literary merit alone

Evidence

If intercultural literature after 9/11 is a dialogic critical experience—involving reader and writer and requiring some attention to the drivers behind the privileging of certain kinds of text—then we need to think again about the “world” in world literature: Whose world is being depicted? What worldview being reinforced? And so on. Djelal Kadir cautions us that literature is produced “by acts of management and negotiated processes of cultivation,” none of which is distinterested: “The re-emergent conjunction between the globalisation of the world from decidedly local and uncontestable sites of power … in ways that fit the pattern of imperial hegemony, on the one hand, and the upsurge of a discourse of/on world literature and globalisation[,] … on the other hand, is a coincidence that bears examination.” He advocates treating the term world in world literature as a verb: “To world, and to globalize … would then be imputable actions rather than anonymous phenomena. The virtue of imputability resides in the prospect of being able to trace responsibility and consequence.” Because literature is a form of situated cultural practice, “the compelling question becomes, [W]ho carries out its worlding and why?” — Peter Morey, Islamophobia and the Novel, 399

Categorization

• XREF: Directly feeds the hinge between scholarship and story — this gives the reader the Why question to apply to Hamid and Naqvi being canonized as ‘post-9/11’ literature.
• SEED: Angle: tracing who ‘worlds’ the Muslim novelists — which publishers, prizes, and review venues elevated these writers, and toward what worldview.
• DEFINE: ‘Worlding’ as imputable action rather than anonymous phenomenon is a precise critical term for attributing responsibility to canon choices.