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Adnan MahmutovicProfessor

About me

Adnan Mahmutović has a PhD in English Literature from Stockholm University and MFA in Creative Writing, City University of Hong Kong. He has lectured at the Department of English, Stockholm University, since 2007 and acted as the fiction editor at Two Thirds North, a journal of transnational writing, since 2010.

His major academic work includes: Ways of Being Free (Rodopi, 2012), Craft of Editing (Routlege, 2018), Future in Comics (MacFarland 2017), and Claiming Space (Bloomsbury 2021).

His major creative works includes: Thinner than a Hair (Cinnamon Press 2010), How to Fare Well and Stay Fair (Salt Publishing 2012), At the Feet of Mothers (Cinnamon Press 2020).

He frequently reviews for scholarly journals in literary studies and creative writing. Below is the list of major publications. Besides these he has published scholarly articles in books and journals such as Studies in the Novel, Writing in Practice, Transnational Literature, Mosaic, ImageTexT Interdisciplinary Comics Studies, American Studies in Scandinavia, Short Fiction in Theory and Practice, The Journal of Postcolonial Cultures and Societies, The Journal of Contemporary Literature, The Coleridge Bulletin,

His stories and creative non-fiction appear widely in the UK and US magazines, and his essay “Comics, War and Ordinary Miracles” has been adapted for BBC Radio.

He is a recipient of many awards for fiction and has served a judge on a number of literary prizes, including Neustadt Prize for Literature.

Publications

A selection from Stockholm University publication database

  • Claiming Space: Locations and Orientations in World Literatures

    2021. .

    Book (ed)

    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.

    Read more about Claiming Space

  • Publication, Circulation and the Vernacular: Dimensions of World Literary Unevenness

    2019. Christian Claesson, Stefan Helgesson, Adnan Mahmutovic. Interventions 22 (3), 301-309

    Article

    This introduction positions the essays in this special issue in relation to Pascale Casanova’s model of inequality and value in the world republic of letters. Arguing that the vernacular has been an overlooked or underelaborated concept in subsequent world literary theorizations, the essay then proceeds to discuss the shifting value and nature of the vernacular – a concept that only has meaning if it is understood relationally. Both the vernacular and world literature are therefore utilized as heuristic tools, enabling dialogues across entrenched linguistic, cultural and theoretical boundaries. Hence, the unorthodox combination of South African, North American, Indian, Swedish, Russian, Mozambican and Latin American perspectives presented here.

    Read more about Publication, Circulation and the Vernacular

  • Visions of the Future in Comics

    2017. .

    Book (ed)

    Across generations and genres, comics have imagined different views of the future, from unattainable utopias to worrisome dystopias. These presaging narratives can be read as reflections of their authors' (and readers') hopes, fears and beliefs about the present. This collection of new essays explores the creative processes in comics production that bring plausible futures to the page. The contributors investigate portrayals in different stylistic traditions-manga, bande desinees-from a variety of theoretical perspectives. The disparate yet coherent picture that emerges documents the elaborate storylines and complex universes comics creators have been crafting for decades.

    Read more about Visions of the Future in Comics

  • Ways of Being Free

    2010. Adnan Mahmutovic.

    Thesis (Doc)

    Iconized migrant writers such as Michael Ondaatje, Salman Rushdie and Ben Okri use their fictional worlds to articulate the ways in which existential “nervous conditions,” caused by violent postcolonial history, drive individuals to rework the critical notions of freedom, authenticity and community. This existential thread in their works has been largely ignored or left undeveloped in literary criticism. Although Rushdie has argued that they primarily write back to the imperial centre(s), in their signature novels, The English Patient, Midnight’s Children and The Famished Road, these writers also respond to their conflicting cultural and ethnic heritages. They dramatize characters in traumatic struggles with individual and communal identity, belonging and affiliation. As a way of coping with their identity crises, most characters succumb to the political rhetoric of communalism and evince desires for preservation of their original ethnic and cultural identities. At the same time, the traumatic political and cultural climates induce the central characters to experiment with their singular ways of being free and authentic. To begin with, in response to old and new forces of orthodoxy, these characters are driven to estrangement and a powerful desire for self-sufficiency. Yet, since this individualist desire clashes with their need for communal sharing, they enact a form of creative destruction of their inherited identities, their singular selfhood and communal identity. They give rise to new forms of bonding that transcend ethnic, racial, cultural, geographical and political parameters. They experience a certain plurality of singular selfhood and participate in forms of “inoperative” communities which elicit bonds without ties and coexistence without the necessity of a common work and essence.

    Read more about Ways of Being Free

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