Writing from the Margin: Indian Francophone writing and concepts of World Literature.

• Applicant: Dr. Khadija Benthami, Ph.D.
• Subject Area: General and Comparative Literature and Cultural Studies
• Term: since 2026
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 574631478

My research aims to bring attention to a corpus of Indian Francophone literary texts, often overlooked in the literary landscape. This project will rethink concepts of World Literature through the prism of the Indian Francophone corpus composed by two contemporary Indian Francophone writers: Ari Gautier and Shumona Sinha. Their literary narratives provide a compelling lens for a critical reading of the concepts of World Literature, which often advocates a borderless circulation of literary works, which underline the persistent inequalities and geopolitical hierarchies conditioning literary circulation. My project explores the margin, or rather the metaphor of the margin in Indian Francophone literature, as a theoretical paradigm to reread and rethink the dynamics of power and identity in the global literary field. The selected Indian Francophone literary production, a crossroads of several languages, cultures, and mythologies, constitutes a hybrid intersection where linguistic and geographical borders are always in motion. However, it often retains the status of marginal literature, illustrating what Dehoux designates as a literature of the periphery, bringing forward this dichotomy and categorization of center/periphery (Dehoux, 2018). I examine, then, how this literature tries not only to find a place within the literary landscape founded on its socio-cultural and aesthetic criteria, such as linguistic hybridity, diasporic position, or postcolonial memory, as an alternative to what is imposed by discourses on World Literature. It enables a critical approach to read and rethink the main paradigms of World Literature grounded on the logic of circulation, translation, and visibility. My main objective therefore, is to interrogate World Literature theories by drawing attention to an understudied corpus within the literary field, which offers a unique perspective on its significance for the study and conceptualisation of this field.

• DFG Programme: WBP Position