Literatures of the World--Panelist Francesca Orsini Presents Her Paper

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2013-06-24
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Orsini, Francesca
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The invention of folk literature/loksahitya by Francesca Orsini (SOAS, London) One of the tasks that world literature requires is to pluralise our assumptions about what literature is, and to widen its remit. Oral-performative genres feature significantly in our understandings of Indian literary history (whether devotional song-poems, Barahmasas/ “12-months songs” by all kinds of poets, including Urdu poets, tales, etc.). They stand at the beginnings of the process of “vernacularization” of Indian regional literary cultures between the second half of first and second millenniums CE, but also acted in dynamics of literary circulation, both across languages and scripts and also across oral and literate realms. The study of the production and circulation of these oral-performative genres has generated its own philological method (J.S. Hawley, K.S. Bryant, C.L. Novetzke et al.). Yet while some of the earliest colonial scholars of Indian vernacular languages and literatures (like George Grierson) recorded and studied a great number of these forms, they classified them as “folklore” rather than literature. Similarly Indian literary activists collected folk songs and sayings with verve, but viewed them as loksahitya, the expression of a timeless (and casteless) “folk”. The situation now is that oral-performative forms are studied largely by ethnographers (Ann Gold, Susan Wadley, Kirin Narayan) rather than as part of literature (exceptions like Stuart Blackburn and Rich Freeman and Narayana Rao notwithstanding). This paper will trace this development and ask how, with the pluralising of literature that comes with world literature, the process can be reversed, and what now counts as loksahitya can be viewed as part of sahitya or literature.
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Francesca Orsini, Literatures of the World, world literature, India, North India, world literature courses, Asian literatures, African literatures, world literature theory, oral performances in India, theater and music in India, investigating what literature is, history of literature, folk literature, orature, oral performance, literary performances in the vernacular, Hindawi, Hindavi, Hindi, Urdu, vernacular, Sufi, Muslim, Persian, translation, vernacular manuscripts, song transcriptions, social protests, Benares, Gujarat, philological method, collective authorship, multilingual literary history, Sanskrit, orality of performance, politics of the archive, intermediary genres, transcription, "Song of the Twelve Seasons", seasonal songs and the oral repertoire, Wajid Ali Shah, Last king of Oudh, tales, songs, technology of print and its relationship orature, colonial scholars and administrators, folklore and linguistic specimens, Sadhana Naithani, folklore in India, folklore in Africa, colonial administrators as publishers, George Abraham Pearson, linguistic survey of India, history of Hindi literature, literature and folklore, rural oral world and urban intellectualism, rural versus urban,  perceived frailty of performance and orality, danger of oral transmission, cooptation of folk forms, commercialization of oral forms and folk forms, Maila Anchal, Phaneshwar Nath Renu, Phaṇīśvaranātha Reṇu, “The Soiled Border”, Rajasthani writers, Intizar Husain, Pakistan, Buddhist Jataka tales, Jātakas, Jatakas, “Basti”, South Asia, how contemporary writers draw on oral forms, appropriation of oral artists, making space for oral artists in contemporary literature, oral epics, oral composition, A.K. Ramanujan
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