Jay Wright’s Errant Texts and the Idea of World Literature

ABSTRACT This article offers an analytical framework that places debates in postcolonial literature and transnational literature in dialogue. The juxtaposition of concepts from both renders legible the existence of what the author refers to as world literature’s errant texts. These errant texts, ’Gbenga Adeoba suggests, travel in a different form than current concepts of world literature allow and demonstrate world-making sensibilities. In the way they enact (re)worlding, world literature’s errant texts contest a marginalizing impulse and foreground polycentric alliances and aesthetic maps that assert relationality. The article proposes the poetry of Jay Wright as exemplary of such errantry and considers the multicultural and relational aspect of his poetics as his contribution to the contemporary conversation on world literature.