World Literature Decentered: Beyond the “West” through Turkey, Mexico and Bengal is a first its kind, in that it looks critically at the controversial concept of World Literature from a platform that brings multiple “peripheries” alongside each other. It is an avant-garde attempt to discuss World Literature because for the first time, distant corners at the peripheries of the Western center, such as Turkey, Mexico and Bengal, are brought together. In this sense, it is a very important contribution to the attempts at expansion in World Literature studies. For Turkish audiences, the selection of literature from Mexico and Bengal might be surprising in such a dialogue, because literary histories of Turkey and comparative studies in Turkey often make reference to Western European (primarily French and English) literatures to encompass aspects of Turkish literature within the center–periphery scheme. However, for those who remember references to the visionaries of the Mexican revolution in Ahmet Hamdi Tanpınar’s Huzur or Halide Edip Adıvar’s trip to India years before the partition of Bengal, such a platform connecting Turkey to Mexico and Bengal as a starting point for a global literary conversation is not surprising at all.

The book comprises six chapters, each of which takes a specific keyword—ghost, hotel, femicide, myth, melancholy, and the Orient—as its explicit focus to look back through the lens of the local literatures of Turkey, Mexico and Bengal. Ian Almond successfully builds his attempts for decentralization on the criticism of the patronizing influences of Eurocentric World Literature theories. He does not refer to his Turkish-Mexican-Bengali platform with Fredric Jameson’s infamous label “Third-World Literatures”; rather, he keeps a keen eye on the differences between those literatures in as much as he attempts to decipher their shared features. Around the selected keywords, he carries out a very interesting comparative reading of these three national literatures. The first chapter takes ghost stories at its explicit focus and analyses the state of being haunted by history. Rabindranath Tagore and Bibhutibhushan Banerji, Carlos Fuentes and Juan Rulfo, and Peyami Safa and Ahmet Hamdi Tanpınar are considered side by side here.

The second chapter delves into hotel narratives. Almond discusses how hotels indicate precarity and alienation in modern literature, and the ways in which they also serve as a microcosm of the nation. Authors dealt with include Mani Mukherjee Sankar, Yusuf Atılgan, and Guillermo Fadanelli. Almond analyzes how hotels as spaces produce hegemony, melancholy, and misogyny. The explicit focus of the third chapter on femicide gives Almond the opportunity to carry out a gendered reading of the “subaltern class”, following texts by Rosario Castellanos, Mahasweta Devi, and İnci Aral. Almond also touches on the military counter-insurgency operations in all three countries to discuss the religious, social, and political structures surrounding women, and elaborates on the commodification of women in patriarchal cultures.

The fourth chapter focuses on myths and their retelling, and brings multiple writers into dialogue with each other: Mexican writers such as Alfonso Reyes, playwright Carballido, and poet Gilberto Owen; Bengali writers such as Sri Aurobindo, Nirendranath Chakraborty, and Amit Chaudhuri; and Turkish writers such as Nazlı Eray, Murathan Mungan, and Nihal Atsız. Differences between the retellings of myths in Mexican, Bengali, and Turkish literatures, Almond concludes, bring to the surface the challenges faced by the whole book as “patterns in three enormous bodies in literature” always arrive with a “concrete wall of the culturally/regionally/specific” (p. 129).

Despite the challenge caused by this concrete wall, the exercise continues with the fifth chapter on melancholy in which Almond discusses the feeling of loss that comes with the dissolution of imperial power, adding that “a certain strand of melancholy in global fiction after 1980” (p. 174) can be linked to neoliberalism. In this chapter, works by Nirad Chaudhuri, Amitav Gosh, Ahmet Hamdi Tanpınar, Orhan Pamuk, Alvaró Enrique, and Octavio Paz are analyzed. The sixth and the final chapter is built around the keyword the “Orient” and after a brief glance at the works of theorists including Aamir Mufti, Pascale Casanova, and Edward Said, Almond turns to the Orientalist images in the literatures of Mexico, Turkey, and Bengal, which are used as “a denationalizing tool” (p. 201) in works of writers such as Octavio Paz, Nirad Chaudhuri, and Orhan Pamuk. The book comes to an end with a conclusory chapter titled “The Ten Percenters” in which Almond underlines that the ways in which scholars discuss Eurocentrism are also derived from the West (p. 215). He reminds us, quoting directly from some advocates of this idea (p. 219), that a radical democratization of World Literature is the next “chivalric” battle waiting to be discovered by literary scholars.

Overall, the book is a very successful critique of the one-dimensional, center-periphery mentality, which has been dominant in the field of World Literature studies since its inception. It lets the peripheries speak to each other, without reducing them to their common features. Literatures of Mexico, Bengal, and Turkey in this tripartite forum represent a relatively less explored part of the World Literature, which, with a radical dislocation of the Western center, will witness a revision of canons and eventually result in a greater diversity in the field of World Literature studies. Considering the lack of interest in non-Western literatures in Western literary theory and the need for a radical rethinking of the non-Western influence on the globe, this book is indeed a powerful intervention in the field of World Literature studies.

Almond legitimately criticizes the Western urge to give “90% of the world the status of a ‘minority’” (p. 4) and to populate literary anthologies and lists of “best writers” with white European men. There are certain reactions to such canons, and as Digital Humanities propagate, more and more data-driven exercises are carried out to measure the global impact of literary works. However, Almond reminds us, a superficial cosmopolitanism can sometimes take to the stage as a remedy, and this also needs to be critically acknowledged. A related problem, in this sense, is the superficial cosmopolitanism in the study of local literatures. That something is peripheral in the World Literature system hardly means that it is radically different. Similar mechanisms of centralization and “othering” are also in effect in the canons of the local literatures of Turkey, Mexico, and Bengal, which build their own hard-to-bypass territories within their national borders. In this sense, it is important to acknowledge that decentralization is an open-ended process and should not stop at national boundaries.

Almond’s acceptable criticism of Said for “talk[ing] significantly more about Camus, Kipling, and Conrad” than “Faiz Ahmed Faiz and Abdelrahman Munif” (p. 13) may likewise apply to him, because writers from Turkey who are evaluated in this book (such as İnci Aral, Nazlı Eray, Ahmet Hamdi Tanpınar, Yusuf Atılgan, Peyami Safa, Oğuz Atay, and Orhan Pamuk) also reflect a cursory diversity. They are top-notch secular writers of the Turkish literary canon, critics of Kemalism at times, but still to a great extent supporters of the Republican ideals, and there is also “a certain degree of Eurocentricism” (p. 17) in their works. Almond refers, for example, to Ahmet Hamdi Tanpınar’s devotion to French literature. He considers Yusuf Atılgan’s “critique of Kemalist project” as “a secular attack upon the secular” (p. 57). In other words, this book is a successful challenge to the West-centered World Literary canon, but it leaves a powerful question mark in terms of the challenge to be performed locally and against the national canons.

Almond is aware of this shortcoming in the focal interest of the book; that is why he says, in the Introduction, that he fights “one battle at a time” (p. 20). He discusses the problem of diversity in local literatures in the Methodology section of the book and, in the context of the literary panorama of Turkey, he refers to Kurdish writers who refuse to write in Turkish, bilingual authors who use both languages, and he also reminds us of the “slow but steady” (p. 18) call by literary critics and historians in Turkey on Armenian writers. In this section, there are also references to indigenous writers within Mexican literature, and Dalit and Muslim writers in Bengali literature to stress the diversity of the local literatures that are the target of this book. The added emphasis that “we have to collude with local hegemonies regionally” (p. 20) as well, issues an invitation to scholars worldwide to further the project of this book. In a valid final note, Almond says that “the politics of representation is often an inclusive project, not a revolutionary one” (p.220), which is a powerful reminder that skin-deep diversity in representation will simply not lead us to democratization, as it will inescapably end up being an affirmation of the status quo. World Literature Decentered: Beyond the “West” through Turkey, Mexico and Bengal makes it manifest that for this challenge to turn into a revolutionary project, an internalized mentality of collectivity is required all around the globe.