关键词: 世界文学, 全球南方, 关系诗学, 格利桑, 自主知识体系, 文明互鉴

Abstract: Contemporary world literature studies face a paradox of expansion: the more they strive to incorporate Southern and marginalized literatures, the more they consolidate the very system that requires expansion—for expansion presupposes a territory to be enlarged, and territory presupposes a center that draws the boundaries. Damrosch’s “circulation” model presupposes “the world” as a spatial container; its key concepts—“refraction,” “gaining in translation,” and “detached engagement”—all implicitly take the Northern academy as their frame of reference. While the “Global South” carries critical potential, Santos’s “epistemological pluralism” still requires a position of “recognizer,” and Mignolo’s “ecologies of knowledges” remains tethered to the center-periphery binary. Glissant’s Poetics of Relation in his Tout-Monde framework displaces the question itself through three interrelated propositions—“relation prior to essence,” “the right to opacity,” and “trembling”—shifting the inquiry from “what is world literature” to “how does world literature happen.” Central to this displacement is Glissant’s concept of créolisation, whose radical unpredictability overturns the linear logic of “circulation”; his distinction between a “totality of quantity” and a “totalizing totality,” which exposes the essence of Damrosch’s expansionist logic; and his claim to “write in the presence of all the world’s languages,” which grounds opacity as a concrete linguistic practice. This theoretical turn offers new paths for the construction of an autonomous knowledge system in Chinese comparative literature: drawing on the dialectic of “seeking common ground while reserving differences” from the Bandung Spirit, it opens methodological paths including South-South circulation studies, cross-linguistic opacity criticism, and archipelagic comparative horizons, thereby redefining “mutual learning among civilizations” (wenming hujian) as an intrinsic method and goal of world literature studies—one that pursues not the force by which literature circulates more widely, but the puissance generated in relation and shared by all participants.

Key words: world literature, Global South, poetics of relation, Glissant, Independent Knowledge System, mutual learning among civilizations