This article employs the Bosnian notion of “inat,” often translated as spite, to perform auto(bio)psy of my writing about refugee lives in Sweden. Methodologically speaking, I begin with an assertion that the hybrid form of auto(bio)psy, a method that entangles creative and critical reflection, helps capture what it means to live with the traumas of war, especially in the face of genocide denial and genocide triumphalism. The value of such a reflection that is neither entirely academic nor entirely artistic, neither a court testimony nor data gathered by a disinterested scholar, lies in the possibility of accessing truths that are as material and as emotional as they can be and hopefully, help us better understand uprooted families from 1990s Bosnia and beyond. Following Wendy Pearlman, I argue for the value of emotional sensibility for more profound scientific discoveries. Furthermore, I argue for the need to reconsider the form-content question in the scholarly understanding and analyses of displacement.

Tayeb Salih’s world-literary classic Mawsim al-hijra ilā al-shimāl (1966) has served World Literature as the preeminent text of postcolonialism, touching on issues of identity, nationality, culture, hybridity, literature, language, gender, sexuality, historiography, and migration. It has been less understood as a product of translation. This paper looks at Denys Johnson-Davies’ English translation Season of Migration to The North (1969) and the dialogue it produces with Salih’s Arabic text. The paper argues that Arabic cannot be read as the novel’s “original” language and English as secondary. Rather, both English and Arabic are the co-originary languages of the novel, and this play within and across languages embeds Salih’s dramatization of the restless migration between variegated dichotomies that the work explores.

Coming from the perspective of World Literature Studies, this essay views Ms. Marvel series as post-9/11 Muslim-American work whose iconography is deeply transnational. Situated in what Alexander Beecroft termed national literary ecology, Ms. Marvel contains strong features of what the anthropologist Ulf Hannerz called ‘transnational connections.’ Ms. Marvel is built, at its core, around the problematic of superhero iconography in relation to the gender and ethno-religious identity, in particular reductive stereotypes of Muslim identity in the post-9/11 USA. I argue that Ms. Marvel’s transnational character arises from a dynamic oscillation between a location in the American literary ecology and an orientation to globalised form of Islamic culture. The comic hybridises American superhero iconography with the ethos of her Islamic heritage and as such creates a rich transnational image-text that vies for a place in the developing ecology of global literature.

The specific character of “multilingualism” in this auto-analysis is defined by an oscillation between “no-lingualism” and multilingual movements of a transnational writer. I argue that my own writing in English does not merely stem from the fact of my knowing and working in different languages – English, Swedish and Bosnian – but also from specific geographical locations that in themselves contain certain multilingual and translingual movements and histories of languages and national literatures (including Russian, Arabic, and Turkish). Beyond the obvious features like code-switching, which are visually most conspicuous and therefore typically used as indicators of multilingual writing, the intent is to show how historical movements and places shape the main language of my writing (English), as well the style, rhythms, character, and structures. The general core of creativity is proposed to lie more in the continuous osmosis than the deliberate hybridizing of languages and literatures.

This book explores literary works and practices – always existing in the dynamic relation between locations and orientations – in a series of carefully designed case studies. Explicitly expressed or implied, manifesting itself sometimes as dislocation and disorientation, the claiming of space by any symbolic means necessary is revealed as a constant effect of literary endeavors. In dialogue with geopolitics of culture, sociology and anthropology, attention to literary locations and orientations brings spatial particularity into the study of world literatures.

These case studies demonstrate that four key terms (cosmopolitan, vernacular, location, orientation) can frame analyses of very different types of literary acts and texts in the contemporary period, allowing for distinctions that are not captured within the grids of other conceptual pairs like centre-periphery, local-global, postcolonial-metropolitan, North-South. With this framing, expressive practices in a wide range of regions – including Europe, Africa, the Middle East and the Pacific – are analysed in ways that bring out how spatiality is at stake in the cosmopolitan-vernacular dynamic.