Introduction: East/West—What’s at Stake?

Abstract

Although “East” and “West” are neither new nor under-studied concepts in the humanities, there is a need to pay attention to the academic and political dynamics that can emanate from non-metropolitan or alternative sites of knowledge production from an interest in what Walter Mignolo calls “the enduring enchantment of oppositions”. Relocating the locus of the debate “eastwards,” to locally-bound scholarship and contexts of critical analyses that are also responsive to and engage with metropolitan articulations and knowledge practices, serves to break down the persistence of the overwrought distinctions between “East” and “West”. It also brings to light theoretical and methodological positions, concerns, and emphases from the post-colony. This chapter urges us to give close attention to some of the key junctures at which “East/West” helps us articulate issues of world phenomena in culture, identity, and literature not in terms of clear-cut unities or differences, but as “crossings”, in the light of the dividing yet permeable space of the solidus in its formulation.