Lucy Gasser - East and South: Mapping Other Europes

What is Europe in academic discourse?

While Europe tends to be used as shorthand, often interchangeably with the West, neither the West nor Europe are homogeneous spaces. Though postcolonial studies have long been debunking Eurocentrism in its multiple guises, there is still work to do in fully comprehending how its imaginations and discursive legacies conceive the figure of Europe, as not all who live on European soil are understood as equally European.

This volume explores this immediate need to rethink the axis of postcolonial cultural productions; to disarticulate Eurocentrism; to recognise Europe as a more diverse, plural, and fluid space; to draw forward cultural exchanges and dialogues within the global South. Through analyses of literary texts from East-Central Europe and beyond, this volume sheds light on alternative literary cartographies the multiplicity of Europes and being European which exist both as they are viewed from the different geographies of the global South and within the continent itself.

Covering a wide spatial and temporal terrain in postcolonial and European cultural productions, this volume will be of great interest to scholars and researchers of literature and literary criticism, cultural studies, postcolonial studies, global South studies, and European studies.

Lucy Gasser is Lecturer in Anglophone Literatures and Cultures at the University of Potsdam, Germany.

Russell West-Pavlov (Universitt Tbingen, Germany); Molly Brown (University of Pretoria, South Africa); Guadalupe Valencia Garca (Universidad Nacional Autnoma de Mxico, Mexico City, Mexico); Philip Mead (University of Melbourne, Australia); Dilip Menon (University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg, South Africa); Sudesh Mishra (University of the South Pacific, Suva, Fiji); Sunita Reddy (Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi, India); Fernando Resende (Universidade Federal Fluminense, Niteri/Rio de Janeiro, Brazil); Jing Zhao (Xian Jiaotong-Liverpool University, Suzhou, China)

How might we theorize, think, articulate and critically/creatively inhabit the multiple and overlapping Souths of todays world? How do we enable these Souths to speak to each other, question each other, in ways that complement and expand the work upon which they are already embarked with each other? It is becoming increasingly clear that in order to better understand and contribute to the multiple processes and ways of becoming-Souths, a radically transdisciplinary approach to the study and analysis of, critical interventions in, and dialogues within and between Souths needs to be implemented. Intersectional thinking at the crossroads of race and ethnicity, class and labour, gender and corporeality, not to mention climate change and ecological destruction, demands a combination of perspectives and methodologies to deal adequately with complex planetary dilemmas. This series offers a hospitable forum for innovative intellectual inquiry that seeks to break out of extant disciplinary frameworks so as to address new questions emerging from contemporary Souths. Facilitating cross-border exchanges and polyglot negotiations between the most disparate fields of intellectual and scientific inquiry, thereby resisting the disciplining effect of enclave-thinking, the series aims to contribute to the transformation of knowledge production and associated practices across multiple Souths.

As a gesture of international solidarity, the editors of the series TRANSDISCIPLINARY SOUTHS donate the editors royalties to the charitable organization PRO ASYL e.V. in Frankfurt am Main. PRO ASYL supports the cause of asylum seekers by providing public advocacy and legal advice.

Hospitalities

Transitions and Transgressions, North and South

Edited by Merle A. Williams

East and South

Mapping Other Europes

Lucy Gasser

For more information about this series, please visit: www.routledge.com/Transdisciplinary-Souths/book-series/TRDS

First published 2022

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2022 Lucy Gasser

The right of Lucy Gasser to be identified as author of this work has been asserted by her in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

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ISBN: 978-0-367-72225-8 (hbk)

ISBN: 978-0-367-77271-0 (pbk)

ISBN: 978-1-003-17055-6 (ebk)

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This project was made possible by the incredibly privileged position I occupy. I owe a huge debt of gratitude to the German Research Foundationsupported Research Training Group