El «derecho a la opacidad» y la literatura mundial

Abstract

This study proposes a critique of the current definitions of the concept of world literature. Most of these posit world literature as an undifferentiated circuit of readers that relies on the circulation of literature outside their sites of origin. According to these definitions, world literature constitutes an industry that simply partakes of the commodification of difference. Citing Édouard Glissant’s defense of the «right to opacity» and Derek Walcott’s experience of opacity as a reader and translator of Patrick Chamoiseau’s writing, I demonstrate how opacity, extracted from Walcott’s approach to a literary work written in a «standard» language, affirms the local and the particular in ways that elude translation and absorption into the circulation and circuits of world literature today.