The Poetics and Politics of Writer-Activism in the Global South: Between Local Engagement and World-Making Solidarities

International Conference at The University of Mohamed V, Faculty of Letters and Human Sciences; Rabat, Morocco, 16-17 April 2020

Co-organised by SOAS, University of London ERC MULISOGE project.

Read the conference description in French and Arabic (forthcoming).

Conference Description

For decades, writers in the Global South have found themselves due to historical circumstances at the forefront of social and political movements of activism that have galvanised their writings. Their literary and non-literary writings have often become a site of contestation through which social, economic and political conflicts are played out. Some writers have pursued their ‘causes’ in isolation. Others have either openly aligned themselves with existing movements of social and political justice related to equality, freedom of speech and belief, minority rights and women’s rights. Yet other writers have instigated new movements, such as the recent rise in environmental literary activism that draws attention to the poor and dispossessed who are at the receiving end of environmental disasters. These versatile writers are, in the words of Rob Nixon (2013: 6), “enraged by injustices they wish to see redressed, injustices they believe they can help expose, silences they can help dismantle through testimonial protest, rhetorical inventiveness, and counterhistories in the face of formidable odds.”  This does not mean that their literature crudely “reflects” the “reality” from which it emerges. In fact, it pays to consider how form and aesthetics carry meanings and may themselves be considered a kind of activism. This writing may not be overtly political but its poetics is. It is mediated through locally rooted poetics, though it often acquires a transnational reach or refracts transnational connections.

This conference aims to explore comparatively how contemporary writer-activism articulates its poetics and politics in three diverse regions of the Global South: the Maghreb, the Horn of Africa and North India. These regions share similar histories of resistance to colonialism, linguistic polarization and, in some cases, State top down mono-culturalism, as well as resistance to exclusivist nationalist ideologies. Writer-activists from these regions have also aligned themselves with various movements of transnational solidarity such as Afro-Asian, Tricontinental, pan-African and pan-Arabic networks and alliances. The conference explores how they have used diverse literary genres and forms, inspired by their particular visions of activism and marked by poetics of solidarity that are both local and transnational. It once again critically revisits the question of literature’s role—its ever-changing aesthetics of expression and communication—in shaping modes of social and political practice and intervention, creating powerful imaginaries, and transmitting cultural memories (Ngugi, Harlow, Slaughter, Nixon, Laachir &Talajooy, Pannewick et al .).  

The conference, therefore, engages with discussions on World Literature beyond the dominant centre-periphery paradigm which tends to obscure relations between writers of the Global South. The South-South comparative perspective through the lens of writer-activism allows alternative definitions of World Literature that bring into focus genres other than the novel, and other aesthetics and modes of literary circulations, and alliances and networks that are not mediated by Europe or the US.  The conference then suggests South-South Comparison as an important site for alternative approaches to the study of World Literature.

Some of the questions that we want to address include, but need not be limited to:

  • How can one define the question of agency and mobilisation through aesthetics and writing? Does the writer ‘bear the social authority of witness’ (Nixon), and in what forms and ways?

  • How do writers frame their role as intellectuals?

  • How do writers-activists oscillate between the local and the global; between the personal/biographical and the historical; between community-bound and world-making?

  • How do writers mobilise the memory of social and political protests?

  • Which world figures in their writings?

  • What kind of world literature do they inspire? Can one refer to a worldly poetics of dissidence?

  • Which solidarities and networks do they build or mobilise? What are the real and imagined significant geographies of their activism?

  • How do writers-activists move between fictional and non-fictional forms of activism and writing? Between grassroots and elitist activism?

  • How do they translate the self in relation to the community and/or the nation?

  • How do they locate themselves in transnational networks of solidarities?

  • What happens when a writer becomes a spokesperson for a social or a political movement? What are the limitations of her/his representational aesthetics and politics?

  • What role does the multilingualism embodied in them or present in the space they work in play in their activism and their vision? Can one speak of a multilingual aesthetics, and does it play a role in questioning linguistic boundaries and spaces?

  • How do writers-activists resist or not State’s co-optation? How do they overcome censorship and persecution under authoritarian regimes or exclusivist nationalist politics?

Please contact Dr Karima Laachir ( for more information.