Towards a radical world literature: Experimental writing in a globalizing world

Abstract

Avant-garde and experimental writings have been associated with a wide range of political perspectives and agendas, including emancipatory struggles for social justice, “progressive” ideologies, militant actions, repressive regimes, and allegedly apolitical forms of creative expression. This special issue focuses on a radical strand of experimental world literature, one that participates critically and creatively in the ongoing struggle for affirmative social transformation in a globalizing world. This kind of radical literary experiment is indebted, at least in part, to the revolutionary ideas and practices of the nineteenth-century avant-garde, which inaugurated and inspired “a range of social postures and strategies for artists by which they could differentiate themselves from current social and cultural structures while also intervening in them” (Orton and Pollock 142).