The New World Lit Lab is… a necessity. An urgency. A thrust into new ways of writing and new ways of thinking writing. New ways of circulating and noting and observing and scripting. The New World Lit Lab… is here. Has been here, sure, but the LAB, the ongoing explorations and invitations, is going to come into more focus. The NWLL is provocative sure, but it is welcoming, inclusive. The NWLL has a position, a stance, many stances of course, and a certain approach to engagement with others, with the Other, with different writing modalities. The NWLL wants to challenge and to be challenged.
The Lab of the New World Lit extends and expands the project of the world literature that’s been at the heart of my writings by providing a space for new manifestations, for exchanges and conversations, for other writers’ research and practice, for others’ curations and coordination of extended explorations.
And let it be said: that the work of the NWLL happens in a rhizomatic network, disseminated and distributed, posted and published and printed or public-ed in an assortment of ways on all sorts of platforms and in different arenas. Outside the confines of this simple website (!), of course. That said, the public-ed-ation, on January 1, 2022, is a symbolic launch–somewhere between its already in-progress endeavors, and an uncertain yet beauteous future–the OFFICIAL DATE OF THE PUBLICED-ATION of the NWLL. All that has come before, and all that might come after. January 1, 2022, is the date that shall go down as the official MARK of the New World Lit Lab’s not-quite-birth-but-public-reveal.
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The manifestoes of the New World Lit Lab are always in motion. Fluid and nimble, they are meant to provide new possibilities in thinking about a new world lit, and literature for and in a new world. They are at times disseminated in lectures, at others in courses and workshops, and still others in conversations, interviews and confabs. They pertain to the many domains of investigation and inquiry, one that by definition never ends, and one that by definition also finds its most authentic articulation (its most accurate unfolding) IN LITERARY WORKS proper.
Indeed, a speculative essay describing analytically, and in a metalinguistic mode, what unfolds and what constitutes world literature is not our thing. Rather, this new world lit can be generated through the experience of the actual literary creation itself. And thus, any analytical articulation describing this new world lit (including any manifesto) can only be temporary, and incomplete—and evolving as new elements and components are discovered—knowing that the very form and the language of the analytical piece used to describe the tenets of the works undermine those very tenets. The Lab allows an expanding and welcoming environment for continuing elaboration of thoughts and debates.
So,Yes: The launch of a new era! A grand emancipation—again, that is our declaration! A new world lit founded on a genuinely plurilingual literature. A polyglottic literature. Emancipation ongoing. Emancipation forever en route.
O plurilingual world/A new world lit is launched/Salvation is close at hand /Ooooooo Oooooo/Salvation is close at hand…
We are onto a new world lit. Beginnings, only, perhaps—but we are onto the NEW, WORLD, LIT! A new world lit launched through the adoption of a plurilingual framework… And a Lab that allows the plethora of investigations to continue.
The new wave of world lit.
The next wave of world lit.
And thus a New World Lit Lab.
The manifestoes of the New World Lit Lab are elaborated most definitively in the two volumes LÏTTÉRÃMÛNDÌ I and LÏTTÉRÃMÛNDÌ II (Prolégomènes à une nouvelle littérature mondiale) (Paris: 2022, Éditions Caractères) along with parts of PolyGlossoPhilia Bacchanale (forthcoming, UpSet Press, 2023). Below is a synthesized version of a recreated manifesto/text of The New World Lit Lab.
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