The research agendas of he team included: for North India, multilingual works, book history, and the circulation of literature in magazines in Hindi, English, and Urdu (Orsini); the “lyricisation” of poetry in Urdu and the circulation of Urdu and Persian poetry in English and in the West, the lyric as a global genre (Burney); and historical consciousness and “reading together” historical fiction in Hindi and Urdu (Clift). For the Maghreb: “reading together” Francophone and Arabophone literature in Morocco (Laachir); the “multilingual local” of Spanish Morocco and its “significant geographies” (Goikolea-Amiano); and Sufi genres and “significant geographies” in and beyond the Maghreb (Blalack). For the Horn of Africa: “significant geographies” and Ethiopian intellectual history (Marzagora); and “reading together” and multilingual “traces” in Oromo and Amharic novels (Kebede).
A regular reading group and visits by “critical friends” (51 in total!) greatly increased our horizons and enabled cross-area conversations on concepts and methods, and the discovery of areas of convergence (colonial education policy & literary tastes; nation-state linguistic policies and censorship; the circulation of lyric poetry; women’s tracts; Cold War internationalisms; contemporary orature and the circulation of chapbooks, etc.). Our website
http://mulosige.soas.ac.uk(odnośnik otworzy się w nowym oknie) has become a repository of short essays, translations, podcasts and resources (course syllabi and reading lists) to enhance the visibility of texts and genres from our regions, particularly in the teaching of world literature.
We organized nine workshops and conferences (four at SOAS, two in partner countries in Delhi and Addis Ababa, two in other EU country in Paris and Naples) which explored: Multilingual locals and significant geographies before colonialism (SOAS, June 2016), The idea of “location” in/for world literature (Paris, June 2017), The West-Eastern Lyric (SOAS/Kent, November 2017), Comparative colonialisms (Delhi, December 2017), Comparative Perspectives on Gender in the Literatures of the Horn of Africa, the Arab World and India (SOAS, March 2018), The Form of Ideology and the Ideology of Form (SOAS/PPC, Jan 2019); Reading Together (Naples, April 2019), Oral Traditions and World Literature (Addis Ababa, December 2019), and New Keywords and New Directions in World Literature (with Queen Mary University of London, online, March 2021); three have resulted in special issues of journals, two in edited Open Access volumes. We also organised an online literary festival in collaboration with the Museum of London (Multilingual London, 28 Nov 2020) and outreach activities at N4 Library in Islington, London.
Team members have also experimented with joint publications (Laachir, Marzagora and Orsini: “Significant geographies” for Journal of World Literature and “Multilingual locals and significant geographies” for Modern Languages Open; Marzagora and Kebede: “Literary networks in the Horn of Africa: Oromo and Amharic intellectual histories” for Handbook of African literature).
The project website (
http://mulosige.soas.ac.uk/(odnośnik otworzy się w nowym oknie)) includes review of books and translations relevant, as well collaborative course outlines which encourage collaboration with teachers of world literature courses and has been one of our premier avenues of dissemination and impact.
