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