Challenging traditional Western-centric views of world literature, this edited collection expands the definition of literature beyond the book market, including alternative forms of textual circulation that thrive in the Global South.

World Literatures from Below argues that current literary critical frameworks privilege Western formats and print culture while neglecting subaltern forms of textuality by asking questions such as: What shape does literature take outside the global book market? What kinds of textualities emerge among the subaltern classes and marginalized geographies of the Global South? How do they circulate? What imaginaries do they evoke, and what localities do they connect?

The volume's authors read against and beyond the colonial literacy patterns that often presuppose a definition of literature that rarely accounts for the oral, indigenous, clandestine, digital, or pirated forms of circulation that are key vehicles of dissemination in the Global South. Their essays reflect on genres and modes of writing produced at the margins of the literary marketplace, while also constructing a critical and theoretical apparatus “from below”: one that is situated, multilingual, and counter-hegemonic. In doing so, they expand the very notions of world literature and theory, foregrounding forms of scholarship and criticism exercised from within the South and attentive to its material, linguistic, and epistemic specificities.

By centering unconventional channels such as song lyrics, cookbooks, walls, and digital platforms, World Literatures from Below reconceptualizes the very grounds on which literary value and worldliness are constructed. In doing so, it opens new critical pathways for mapping the relational geographies, infrastructures, and solidarities that sustain literary and theoretical production from below.

Estefanía Bournot is APART-GSK Fellow of the Austrian Academy of Sciences, where she leads the research project “Forgotten Routes across the Atlantic: Cultural Transfers between Africa and Latin America (1960-1990).” She is the author of Giros topográficos: (re)escrituras del espacio en la narrativa latinoamericana del s.XXI (2022), and numerous articles and book chapters on Latin American and West African art and literature.

Jorge J. Locane is Professor of Literature and Culture in the Spanish-Speaking World at the University of Oslo, Norway. His publications include The Routledge Companion to 21st-Century Latin American Poetry (2025) and De la literatura latinoamericana a la literatura (latinoamericana) mundial: Condiciones materiales, procesos y actores (2019).

Rubén Almendros is Postdoctoral Research Fellow in the Institute of Chinese Literature and Philosophy at Academia Sinica, Taiwan.