Big Nations’ Literature and Small Nations’ Sociology

This paper explores literary
authors as cultural brokers in
the context of world literature.
Vignettes from literary
events illustrate that what is
today understood as world
literature is fiction from Third
World countries translated
into English, written largely
by migrant writers for the
consumption of metropolitan
readers who sample them as
ethnographies of unknown
places. Authors feature on the
stage of world literature as
representatives of their “culture
as a whole”. The only way for
them to be consecrated through
translation into English is
to write a sociology of their
“culture”, sustaining that
culture’s fixed, backward, and
romanticised images through
thick descriptions of its ethnos.