RECENTERING THE CLASSIC: COMPARATIVE WORLD LITERATURE FROM AFRICA, LATIN AMERICA, AND ASIA

Abstract

This article rethinks the literary classic through a comparative reading of six major texts from Africa, Latin America, and Asia: Wole Soyinka’s Death and the King’s Horseman, Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o’s Petals of Blood, Gabriel García Márquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude, Jorge Luis Borges’s The Aleph, Arundhati Roy’s The God of Small Things, and Murasaki Shikibu’s The Tale of Genji. It argues that these works should not be treated as regional supplements to an already established canon, but as texts that reshape the meaning of literary greatness itself. Through comparative analysis, the article shows that their durability lies in the way they transform ritual, memory, political violence, intimacy, and historical pressure into enduring literary forms. The African texts reveal ritual crisis and postcolonial betrayal as powerful modes of tragic and political knowledge. The Latin American texts explore totality, repetition, and infinity through mythic and experimental narration. The Asian texts show how emotional interiority, domestic fragility, and caste-marked experience become major forms of ethical reflection. The essay concludes that the classic is best understood through renewable interpretive life, formal density, and transregional resonance rather than inherited prestige alone. It also proposes a more inclusive critical approach to reading world literature today.