Details

Autor(en) / Beteiligte

• Hawas, May

Titel

4 Circumnavigating the Canon: Amitav Ghosh’s Antique Land and the Long Tenth Century

Ist Teil von

• Politicising World Literature, 2019, p.138-179

Auflage

1

Ort / Verlag

Routledge

Erscheinungsjahr

2019

Link zum Volltext

Quelle

Alma/SFX Local Collection

Beschreibungen/Notizen

• This chapter draws on world history to examine how Amitav Ghosh’s In an Antique Land (1992) constructs a “secular” literary history for travelogues produced in the Afro-Eurasian world from the tenth to the thirteenth centuries. The chapter excavates Ghosh’s Arabic historical sources to examine the circulation of texts across the markets of the Islamicate world. This “everyday nation”, that is, the large number of undocumented real people who have not necessarily represented the nation state – and whom, of course, the nation state has not necessarily spoken for either – manifest in intermediate relations that operate across political borders during time of conflict. Such intermediate relations can be traced in the travel writing of the time. Moving back and forth across centuries through the organising lens of Ghosh’s work, the chapter describes how this kind of travel writing from below circulated in the flourishing town centres of the region to form a popular read/recited “canon” of belles-lettres for a “sub-elite” common reader. Such travelogues helped construct the ecumenical concept of Islamicate centres and hinterlands for their multilingual and multireligious readers, but also reassert today the importance of the free movement of peoples and the necessity of reading each other even, or perhaps especially, during times of conflict and violence. Amitav Ghosh’s In an Antique Land: History in the Guise of a Traveller’s Tale is a creatively written account of his anthropological fieldwork in the Nile Delta. In tandem with his own narrative Ghosh recounts the stories of travellers who covered similar routes in older times. Ghosh thus offers a chronological description of history that operates over the longue durée, specifically one that ranges across some ten centuries in India and Egypt. Yet Antique Land, perhaps in ways that he may not have intended, also points to a conception of world literary history in which Arabic and the various languages and pidgins surrounding it become part of a world literary heritage, culminating in the fifteenth-century, capitalist world system dominated by Europe. The phrase “elliptical refraction” is, of course, David Damrosch’s, who has famously used it to describe the movement of literary texts that are read outside of their local communities and gain different interpretations from one culture to another.