The Sovereign is HE who Translates: An Interview with Emily Apter
I was reared as a world literature reader ( laughs). My parents were the children of immigrants and belonged to the intellectual left in New York. My father worked on decolonization in Africa and we spent time in Uganda. I remember reading Tagore and Achebe when I was very young, alongside Chinese folk tales and the epic of Gilgamesh. In my early twenties I lived in Senegal and Algeria and was steeped in extra-hexagonal French literature and political thought. So if I have reservations about world literature it’s not because I’m in favor of re-provincializing reading. It’s that I prefer a model of “world literatures in languages” over and against the institutional model of “World Lit” that one finds increasingly in the United States.
Krishnan Unni.P and Mantra Mukim interview Emily Apter.