نقد زبان و ادبیات خارجی

نقد زبان و ادبیات خارجی

Literary Sovereignty in the Age of Generative AI: A Postcolonial Theory of Narrative Authority

نوع مقاله : مقاله علمی پژوهشی

نویسندگان
1 Department of English langue, Faculty of Foreign Languages, University of Biskra, Algeria
2 Department of English, Faculty of Languages and Letters. University of El Oued- Algeria
چکیده
This article introduces literary sovereignty as a theoretical construct for understanding how generative artificial intelligence reshapes postcolonial concepts of authorship, narrative authority, and textual legitimacy. Scholars have examined the disruption AI poses to authorship, and postcolonial critics have long theorized narrative authority, yet the intersection of the two remains undertheorized. Literary sovereignty is defined here as the capacity of a literary tradition to determine the epistemic and formal conditions under which its narratives are produced, authorized, and circulated - conditions increasingly shaped by large language models trained overwhelmingly on Anglo-American textual corpora. Through close readings of Mohsin Hamid’s Exit West (2017) and Namwali Serpell’s The Old Drift (2019), read alongside Sasha Stiles’s AI-collaborative poetry, the article argues that contemporary postcolonial fiction resists and reconfigures the epistemic asymmetries built into generative systems through three formal strategies: narrative opacity, strategic citation, and productive error. The argument proceeds in three movements: first, distinguishing literary sovereignty from authorship, institutional authority, and intellectual property; second, tracing how these strategies operate as anti-extractive textual practices; third, proposing the postcolonial novel as a form of critical infrastructure for reimagining narrative legitimacy in an algorithmically mediated literary field. The article contributes a framework that is responsive to present digital conditions while remaining grounded in the material history of colonial textual extraction.
کلیدواژه‌ها
موضوعات

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