World Literature, Non-Synchronism, and the Politics of Time (New Comparisons in World Literature)

Drawing on a Marxist concept of world literature, this book is a study of the manipulations of time in contemporary anglophone fiction from Africa and South Asia. Through critical work and literary reading, this research explores the times other than the present that seem to haunt an era of capitalist globalisation: nostalgic feelings about bygone ideals of identity and community, appeals to Golden Ages, returns of the repressed and anxious anticipations of global extinction and catastrophe. The term non-synchronism explored in this book captures these dislocations of the present, while offering a critical lens to grasp the politics of time of an era marked by the continuing expansion of capitalist modernity. Most importantly, non-synchronism is a dialectical paradigm charged with antagonistic political valences. The literary analysis presented in the volume hence connects the literary manipulation of time to discourses on extinction, accumulation, nostalgia, modernity and survival in global politics and literature.