The Tongue-Tied Imagination

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Tobias Warner
Keyword(s):  
World Literature ◽  
Mariama Ba ◽  
Ousmane Sembene ◽  
Dead End ◽  
Intractable Problems ◽  
Neoliberal Development ◽  
Postcolonial Literatures ◽  
Boubacar Boris Diop ◽  
Language Question ◽  
Prevailing View

Should a writer work in former colonial language, or in a vernacular? The language question was once one of the great, intractable problems that haunted postcolonial literatures in the twentieth century, but it has since acquired a reputation for being a dead end of narrow nationalism. Instead of asking whether language matters, The Tongue-Tied Imagination explores how the language question itself came to matter. Focusing on the case of Senegal, this book studies the intersection of French and Wolof. Drawing on extensive archival research and an under-studied corpus of novels, poetry, and films in both languages, the chapters follow the emergence of a politics of language from colonization into the early independence decades and through to the era of neoliberal development. Chapters explore the works of well-known francophone authors such as Léopold Senghor, Ousmane Sembène, Mariama Bâ, and Boubacar Boris Diop alongside the more overlooked vernacular artists with whom they are in dialogue. Pushing back against a prevailing view of postcolonial language debates as a terrain of nativism, this book argues for the language question as a struggle over the nature and limits of literature itself. Language debates tend to pull in two directions: first, they produce literary commensurability by suturing vernacular traditions into the normative patterns of world literature; but second, they create space to imagine how literary culture might be configured otherwise. Drawing on these insights, this book models both a new understanding of translation and a different approach to literary comparison.

Out of Time: Decolonization and the Future of World Literature

2019 ◽  
pp. 233-242
Author(s):  
Tobias Warner
Keyword(s):  
World Literature ◽  
Comparative Method ◽  
The Future ◽  
Boubacar Boris Diop ◽  
Language Question

This epilogue restages the book’s central arguments on the language question, translation, and literary comparison through a reading of Aimé Césaire’s 1966 play Une saison au Congo[A Season in the Congo] and its recent Wolof translation by Boubacar Boris Diop. The focus is on the nature of a separation between audience and address in Césaire’s play and on how this nature changes across the work’s different versions and circumstances. Through this reading, the epilogue models what a comparative method attuned to the variability of literature might resemble.This in turn sets the stage for a conclusion that reflects on the challenge decolonization continues to pose to world literature.

How Mariama Bâ Became World Literature: Translation and the Legibility of Feminist Critique

2019 ◽  
pp. 181-202
Author(s):  
Tobias Warner
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
World Literature ◽  
Literary Culture ◽  
The Self ◽  
Feminist Critique ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Mariama Ba ◽  
Postcolonial Literatures ◽  
Work First ◽  
So Long A Letter

How did Mariama Bâ’s 1979 novel Une si longue lettre[So Long a Letter] become one of the most widely read, taught, and translated African texts of the twentieth century? This chapter examines how prize committees, translators, editors, and critics all shaped how the Senegalese author’s work became recognizable to a global audience. Bâ’s success came to be bound up with two interpretations of her work: first, that her novel was a broadside against the institution of polygamy in Senegal; and, second, that it was a celebration of the self-fashioning powers of literary culture. This chapter rejects both these accounts, arguing instead that these ways of framing the novel reveal the terms through which postcolonial literatures become legible as world literature. The conversion of Lettreinto world literature is contrasted with its vernacular appropriation by the contemporary Wolof novelist Maam Yunus Dieng, who translates and rewrites this iconic text.

On Global English and the Transmutation of Postcolonial Studies into “Literature in English”

1999 ◽  
Vol 8 (1) ◽  
pp. 51-80
Author(s):  
Rita Raley
Keyword(s):  
World Literature ◽  
Postcolonial Studies ◽  
The Other ◽  
Cultural Imperialism ◽  
Diaspora Studies ◽  
Contemporary Culture ◽  
Global English ◽  
The World ◽  
The One ◽  
Language Question

What does it signify to speak of a World Literature in English? In what ways might diaspora studies and transnationalism be linked to the contemporary phenomenon of global English, with a mode of comprehending the world that holds English at its center? What can diaspora studies and transnationalism learn from the “language question” frequently raised in discussions of both cultural imperialism and postcolonial writing? What can they learn from the question of globalism now so ubiquitous in contemporary criticism? How does the Literature in English concept relate, on the one hand, to Edouard Glissant's outline of the “liberation” that results from compromising major languages with Creoles (250), and, on the other, to Fredric Jameson's implicit yearning for a philosophical universal linguistic standard not circumvented by linguistic heteroglossia (16-7)? These questions outline the conceptual terrain of this article, in which I read the discursive transmutation of the discipline of Postcolonial Studies into “Literature in English” as both symptom and cause of the emerging visibility of global English as a recognizable disciplinary configuration situated on the line between contemporary culture and the academy. Over the course of this article, I chart this discursive transmutation and its necessary preconditions—the critical investiture in the “global,” the renewed attention to dialects, the abstraction of the “postcolonial”—as a way of articulating profound reservations about the “new universalisms,” of which Literature in English is a primary instance.

scholarly journals MODERN PRINCIPLES OF COMPARATIVE LITERATURE

2021 ◽  
pp. 37-51
Keyword(s):  
World Literature ◽  
Critical Assessment ◽  
National Literature ◽  
Practical Skills ◽  
Critical Studies ◽  
Dead End ◽  
Relationship Of ◽  
The Relationship ◽  
Methodology Of Science ◽  
Cultural Features

The article deals with the analysis of modern scientific approaches to critical studies. The current importance of the science of literature critical studies has been analyzed from different perspectives. The author tries to justify in which issues of literature the perspective of this field is more important. There are also the peculiarities of the methodology of science, the main scientific directions and ideas about the name of the discipline. Special emphasis was placed on national comparative studies. It is well known that literature critical studies as an independent branch of science emerged in the second half of the nineteenth century. The uniqueness of this field is that it determines the place and contribution of national literatures to world civilization by comparing them with each other. There are relatively little-studied areas of literature critical studies in our country. Some foreign experts are trying to prove that the head of the discipline has stuck in a dead end having no perspectives. Comparison in the broadest sense is the process of perceiving the commonalities and differences of life events. However, the function of this discipline is not limited to finding the properties in X and in Y. In fact, what is the importance of literature critical studies as a science today? The article is devoted to a critical assessment of this issue from different perspectives. The peculiarities of the formation of the discipline are also analyzed. It is claimed that the task of the article is to teach students to use theoretical knowledge, practical skills, modern comparative methods and techniques, to distinguish between national and cultural features of the studied literature, to understand the relationship of national literature with world literature and to draw conclusions based on the analysis.

How Mariama Bâ Became World Literature: Translation and the Legibility of Feminist Critique

PMLA ◽  
2016 ◽  
Vol 131 (5) ◽  
pp. 1239-1255
Author(s):  
Tobias Warner
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
World Literature ◽  
Literary Culture ◽  
Spoken Language ◽  
Legal Framework ◽  
Feminist Critique ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Mariama Ba ◽  
English Edition ◽  
The Way

How did Mariama Bâ‘s 1979 novel Une si longue lettre (So Long a Letter) become one of the most widely read, taught, and translated African texts of the twentieth century? This essay traces how the Senegalese author's work became recognizable to a global audience as an attack on polygamy and a celebration of literary culture. I explore the flaws in these two conceptions of the novel, and I recover aspects of the text that were obscured along the way—especially the novel's critique of efforts to reform the legal framework of marriage in Senegal. I also compare striking shifts that occur in two key translations: the English edition that helped catalyze Bâ‘s success and a more recent translation into Wolof, the most widely spoken language in Senegal. By reading Letter back through these translations, I reposition it as a text that highlights its distance from an audience and transforms this distance into an animating contradiction.

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