Handbook of Anglophone World Literatures 9783110580846, 9783110583182, 9783110580945, 2020936393

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Handbook of Anglophone World Literatures

Handbooks of English and American Studies

Edited by Martin Middeke, Gabriele Rippl, Hubert Zapf Advisory Board Derek Attridge, Elisabeth Bronfen, Ursula K. Heise, Verena Lobsien, Laura Marcus, J. Hillis Miller, Martin Puchner, Oliver Scheiding

Volume 13

Handbook of Anglophone World Literatures Edited by Stefan Helgesson, Birgit Neumann and Gabriele Rippl

ISBN 978-3-11-058084-6 e-ISBN (PDF) 978-3-11-058318-2 e-ISBN (EPUB)978-3-11-058094-5 Library of Congress Control Number: 2020936393 Bibliographic information published by the Deutsche Nationalbibliothek The Deutsche Nationalbibliothek lists this publication in the Deutsche Nationalbibliografie; detailed bibliographic data are available on the Internet at http://dnb.dnb.de. © 2020 Walter de Gruyter GmbH, Berlin/Boston Typesetting: Integra Software Services Pvt. Ltd. Printing and binding: CPI books GmbH, Leck www.degruyter.com

Editors’ Preface This De Gruyter handbook series has been designed to offer students and researchers a compact means of orientation in their study of Anglophone literary texts. Each volume – involving a particular historical or theoretical focus – introduces readers to current concepts and methodologies, as well as academic debates by combining theory with text analysis and contextual anchoring. It is this bridging between abstract survey and concrete analysis which is the central aim and defining feature of this series, bringing together general literary history and concrete interpretation, theory and text. At a time when students of English and American literary studies have to deal with an overwhelming amount of highly specialized research literature, as well as cope with the demands of the new BA and MA programs, such a handbook series is indispensable. Nevertheless, this series is not exclusively targeted to the needs of BA and MA students, but also caters to the requirements of scholars who wish to keep up with the current state of various fields within their discipline. Individual volumes in the De Gruyter Handbook series will typically provide: – knowledge of relevant literary periods, genres, and historical developments; – knowledge of representative authors and works of those periods; – knowledge of cultural and historical contexts; – knowledge about the adaptation of literary texts through other media; – knowledge of relevant literary and cultural theories; – examples of how historical and theoretical information weaves fruitfully into interpretations of literary texts. Internationally renowned colleagues have agreed to collaborate on this series and take on the editorship of individual volumes. Thanks to the expertise of the volume editors responsible for the concept and structure of their volumes, as well as for the selection of suitable authors, HEAS not only summarizes the current state of knowledge in the field of Anglophone literary and cultural studies, but also offers new insights and recent research results on the most current topics, thus launching new academic debates. We would like to thank all colleagues collaborating in this project as well as Dr. Ulrike Krauss at De Gruyter without whose unflagging support this series would not have taken off. Martin Middeke Gabriele Rippl Hubert Zapf July 2020

https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110583182-202

VI 

 Editors’ Preface

Already published VOL 1 VOL 2 VOL 3 VOL 4

Gabriele Rippl (ed.): Handbook of Intermediality Hubert Zapf (ed.): Handbook of Ecocriticism and Cultural Ecology Julia Straub (ed.): Handbook of Transatlantic North American Studies Timo Müller (ed.): Handbook of the American Novel of the Twentieth and Twenty-First Centuries VOL 5 Christoph Reinfandt (ed.) Handbook of the English Novel of the Twentieth and Twenty-First Centuries VOL 6 Ralf Haekel (ed.): Handbook of British Romanticism VOL 7 Christine Gerhardt (ed.): Handbook of the American Novel of the Nineteenth Century VOL 9 Martin Middeke and Monika Pietrzak-Franger (eds.): Handbook of the English Novel, 1830–1900 VOL 10 Ingo Berensmeyer (ed.): Handbook of English Renaissance Literature

Forthcoming volumes Barbara Schaff (ed.): Handbook of British Travel Writing Ralf Schneider and Jane Potter (eds.): Handbook of British Literature and Culture of the First World War Sebastian Domsch, Dan Hassler-Forest and Dirk Vanderbeke (eds.): Handbook of Comics and Graphic Narratives Erik Redling and Oliver Scheiding (eds.): Handbook of the American Short Story Philipp Löffler, Clemens Spahr and Jan Stievermann (eds.): Handbook of American Romanticism Sabine Sielke (ed.): Handbook of American Poetry Katrin Berndt and Alessa Johns (eds.): Handbook of the British Novel in the Long Eighteenth Century

Contents Editors’ Preface 

 V

Stefan Helgesson, Birgit Neumann and Gabriele Rippl

0

Introduction 

 1

Part I: Historical Approaches – Genealogies of  World Literatures Reingard Nethersole

1

The Beginnings of the Concept (Goethe, Marx, Said) – Readings from a Postcolonial Perspective   15

Theo D’haen

2

Re-Reading Classical Approaches from a Postcolonial Perspective: Pascale Casanova, Franco Moretti, David Damrosch   31

Rosinka Chaudhuri

3

Macaulay’s Magic Hat: The Colonial Education System and the Canon of World Literature   41

Carrol Clarkson

4

The King’s English and the Mother Tongue 

Neil Lazarus

5

Rethinking English Studies 

 53

 67

Part II: Concepts and Methods of Anglophone World Literatures Pheng Cheah

6

Global Literature, World Literature and Worlding Literature: Some Conceptual Differences   85

Bruce Robbins

7

Barbarians: Cosmopolitanism Beyond the Center-Periphery Model 

Claudia Egerer

8

Anglophone World Literatures and World Ecologies (Environmental Humanities)   119

Birgit Neumann

9

Anglophone World Literatures and Transcultural Memory 

 133

 103

VIII 

 Contents

Susan Bassnett

10

Anglophone World Literatures and Translation  

Jan Steyn

11

Comparative Literature 

 161

Justine McConnell

12

Genres of Anglophone World Literatures 

 175

Uhuru Portia Phalafala

13

Decolonizing World Literature through Orality 

Gabriele Rippl

14

 149

Intermediality and Remediation  

 193

 209

Part III: Sociological Approaches – Distribution, Reception and Translation of Anglophone World Literature Sibylle Baumbach

15

Marketing Anglophone World Literatures 

 229

Peter Hitchcock

16

Canons and Canonicity in Anglophone Literature 

Vilashini Cooppan

17

Teaching Anglophone World Literature 

 245

 263

Mads Rosendahl Thomsen

18

Anglophone World Literatures, the Internet and the Digital Humanities 

Part IV: Literary Worlds – Locations and Orientations Eva Ulrike Pirker

19

Britain 

Joakim Wrethed

20

Ireland 

David Watson

21

USA 

 291

 313

 333

 275

Contents 

Katja Sarkowsky

22

Canada 

 355

Meg Samuelson

23

The Oceans 

 375

Sarah Phillips Casteel

24

The Caribbean 

 395

Stefan Helgesson

25

Southern Africa 

 415

Harry Garuba and Christopher E.W. Ouma

26

West Africa 

 433

Godwin Siundu

27

East Africa 

 451

Ragini Tharoor Srinivasan

28

South Asia 

 471

Kwok-kan Tam

29

Southeast Asia (Hong Kong and Singapore) 

Nicole Moore

30

Australia 

 511

Andrew Dean

31

New Zealand Literature and the World 

Name Index  Subject Index 

 549  567

List of Contributors 

 579

 531

 489

 IX

Stefan Helgesson, Birgit Neumann and Gabriele Rippl

0 Introduction

English is not the world’s largest language – at least not when measured by the number of first-language speakers. Mandarin Chinese, with roughly a billion native speakers, is more than twice as large as English; Spanish, the mother tongue of almost half a billion, has about 100 million more speakers. The global influence of a language has, however, more to do with its second-language (L2) status. As the world’s leading L2, dominant within publishing, research, business, audiovisual media, the internet and so on, English currently enjoys – some would say suffers under – an historically unprecedented position as the hyper-central language of our global present. Socio-linguists today tend to speak of the “English Language Complex” (Meshtrie and Bhatt 2008; see also Mauranen and Vetchinnikova 2020) as a way to conceptualise the curious phenomenon of a language that is ‘owned’ on a global level more by its vastly dispersed L2 speakers than its L1 speakers, who are concentrated to less than ten countries. Consequently, this also means that English, in its actual use, interacts with other languages more frequently and intensively than any comparable language complex. Widely but thinly distributed cosmopolitan languages are nothing new in history. Among a learned class, high-prestige languages such as Sanskrit and Latin had for many centuries, and long before air travel, an astonishingly wide territorial reach. Even so, the colonial imposition of European languages across continents and oceans introduced a new chapter in inter-lingual relations. These were not classical languages, bearers of ancient cultural prestige or sacred religious authority. Instead, Spanish, Portuguese, Dutch, French and English were successful vernaculars undergoing processes of standardisation and literarisation (cf. Pollock 2006) just as the various colonial enterprises took off in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. The tight connection between these languages and state power, and subsequently, when fuelled by print-capitalism, to the imaginary of the modern nation-state (cf. Anderson 1983), would eventually lead to the organisation of literary studies and literary publishing that remains the default model even today: to each nation its literature and philology. Ironically, however, this process also entailed a linguistic excess, or deterritorialisation. Some scholars would argue that this spreading of Spanish, French, English, and so on, beyond the nation and on the back of colonial violence preceded the institutional formation of national languages, but the empirical evidence invites in fact divergent interpretations. Early “defences” of national vernaculars such as Joachim du Bellay’s La Deffence et Illustration de la Langue Francoyse (1549) and Sir Philip Sidney’s An Apology for Poetry (1581) may have coincided with the earliest stirrings of French and English transoceanic colonialism but were really concerned to curry favour in the court by challenging the age-old prestige of Greek and Latin. By the nineteenth century the picture had changed dramatically: ‘English  literature’ was https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110583182-001

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 Stefan Helgesson, Birgit Neumann and Gabriele Rippl

tested and prototyped as a formal programme of learning not just in the British Isles but on the outskirts of empire, notably in India (cf. Viswanathan 1990), as a ‘peaceful’ means of perpetuating English values. The centres of English learning – Oxford and Cambridge – would in fact be among the last to establish departments or faculties of English (Cambridge as late as 1919). In this light, one might well argue that ‘English literature’ was international before it turned national. ‘Anglophone literature’ is commonly used to refer to postcolonial literature written in English. However, the term is sometimes also used in a more inclusive way, meaning simply ‘literature written in English’. Vinay Dharwadker explains that by the end of the twentieth century, ‘Anglophone literature’ had come “to identify an array of writing in English in different locations and under different circumstances, without limiting itself to authorship by Anglophone individuals in the original sense”; the term has come to “signify the entire spectrum of texts in English around the globe, past and present” (2016, 48). But Aamir Mufti is right in reminding us of the many exclusions and immobilities created by English. While the global circulation of English as both a “literary vernacular” (2016, 11) and the language of capitalism has given rise to diversified, locally inflected literary traditions, Anglophony also reproduces the inequalities of the colonial past by rigidly regulating the mobility of local literatures across the globe.

1 Anglophone World Literatures Understanding ‘English’ today – regardless of the name’s unstable reference – requires in other words a keen sense for its historical enfoldedness with colonialism as well as with the rise of the most successful postcolony ever, the United States. French or Spanish could, hypothetically, just as well have been in this hyper-central global position, but the outcome of the Napoleonic wars and the two world wars, the hegemony of American capitalism and, not least, the growth of the globalised entertainment industry have all tilted the tables in favour of English. Even if one’s ideological desire is directed towards the neglected and the oppressed, or towards minor languages and their literatures, this impact of English on our contemporary world cannot be evaded through an act of volition. The “burden of English”, as Gayatri Spivak once phrased it (2012, 35), is one that must be shouldered, not least by those of us who work with the language professionally. This Handbook of Anglophone World Literatures – the first of its kind – needs therefore to be understood in this spirit: not as a normative but as a descriptive and exploratory intervention; as a provisional guide, at this particular historical juncture, to the proliferating worlds of literature in English across the planet. Rather than understanding Anglophone world literatures as a given set of texts, the handbook pays critical attention to the various and at times conflicting forces – linguistic, economic, institutional, medial and literary

0 Introduction 

 3

in nature – that make it possible to subsume heterogenous literary works under the label of ‘Anglophone world literatures’. This handbook appears in the wake of successive reconfigurations (or reconsiderations) of literary studies, several of which have precisely been attempts to come to grips with the status of English today and its colonial legacy. Although postcolonial studies has a complex genealogy that far exceeds both English and literature, its rapid institutional rise in the 1980s and 1990s was above all a critical response to the history and after-effects of British imperialism as a cultural matrix. At the theoretical end, works such as Edward Said’s Orientalism (1978), Homi Bhabha’s The Location of Culture (1994) and Gayatri Spivak’s essay “Can the Subaltern Speak?” (1988; definitive version in Spivak 1999) laid the groundwork for synthesising and more pedagogically oriented studies such as The Empire Writes Back (Ashcroft, Griffiths and Tiffin 1989) and Elleke Boehmer’s Colonial and Postcolonial Literature (1995). These works, among numerous others, inspired critical readings of the British canon as well as the introduction of Caribbean, African, South Asian and ‘Black Atlantic’ literature on the syllabus and research agenda of the English department. As one academic response to decolonisation (including its discontents), postcolonial studies enjoyed a remarkable institutional career at western universities in this period, and English departments were at the very heart of this development. This career, however, has also raised concerns about its complicity with western academic hegemony and the unevenness between academic communities worldwide. According to some critics (see, e.g. Appiah 1993, 14; Gikandi 2011), the institutionalisation of postcolonial studies consolidated rather than redressed existing asymmetries between the West and the Global South. It bears noting that many aspects of this criticism resonate in contemporary debates about the rise of world literature, which according to some is intricately connected with western, highly normative notions of literature and the dominance of European and North American literary markets (cf. Mufti 2016). Strikingly, ‘world literature’ formed part of both Said’s and Bhabha’s postcolonial agendas. Said cultivated a life-long dialogue with the work of the German comparative scholar Erich Auerbach, and together with Maire Said he translated Auerbach’s signal essay “Philology and Weltliteratur” (Auerbach 1969). In Bhabha’s The Location of Culture, world literature surfaces on the early pages as “an emergent, prefigurative category that is concerned with a form of cultural dissensus and alterity, where non-consensual forms of affiliation may be established on the grounds of historical trauma” (1994, 12) – in a nutshell, the literature of migration. He explicitly stresses that in the postcolonial world, the “transnational histories of migrants, the colonised, or political refugees – these border and frontier conditions may be the terrains of world literature” (1994, 12). Even so, when world literature was reactivated as a critical category in a big way around the turn of the millennium, this happened largely at a remove both from English studies and the postcolonial field. The three standard references in this regard are the interventions by Pascale Casanova (1999), Franco Moretti (2000) and David Damrosch (2003).

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 Stefan Helgesson, Birgit Neumann and Gabriele Rippl

The short-hand explanation of the resurgent interest in world literature at this time is the post-1989 phase of globalisation and the related flow of people, data, money and commodities across the globe. But if postcolonialism attempted to understand “historical trauma” – to use Bhabha’s phrase – through literature, Casanova, Moretti and Damrosch foregrounded the pathways and transformations of literature itself as a global phenomenon. There is no need here and now to rehearse their arguments (see, for instance, Helgesson and Vermeulen 2016; Neumann and Rippl 2017), but one might just mention Casanova’s Bourdieusian notion of the world republic of letters, in which the main stake was the consolidation of literature as an autonomous and transnational aesthetic domain – of literature itself, in other words, as a “world” (Casanova 2005). While these by now canonical works have been immensely helpful in introducing new concepts and methodologies for the study of world literature – ranging from ‘gains in translation’ to ‘distant reading’ –, they have also, perhaps unwittingly, contributed to implementing a somewhat uncritical, eurocentric understanding of world literature. Though both Moretti and Casanova theorise an uneven world literary system, the ensuing reception of their works has altogether paid little attention to their emphasis on the conjunction of power and literature. There have been a number of intellectual skirmishes between postcolonialism and world literature (some of them summarised in Boehmer 2014; Helgesson 2014), often revolving around charges from postcolonially oriented scholars of the “hugely encompassing but strangely timid” (Mufti 2010, 465) nature of the world literature debate. In a similar vein, Boehmer fears that the increasing convergence of world and postcolonial literature might propel the “eventual trivialization” of postcolonial studies that has been committed to interrogating the relations between literature and power and to retrieving marginalised voices (Boehmer 2014, 299). This debate is reflected also in various chapters in this handbook. Something shifted, however, in the 2010s. Not only was there a deepening of world literature’s methodological repertoire through works such Eric Hayot’s On Literary Worlds (2012), Alexander Beecroft’s An Ecology of World Literature (2015), the Warwick Research Collective’s (WReC) Combined and Uneven Development (2015), Pheng Cheah’s What Is a World? (2016) and Debjani Ganguly’s This Thing Called the World (2016), but also the emergence of what might be called critical world literature studies. The latter could be exemplified by Aamir Mufti’s Forget English! (2016) and Joseph Slaughter’s “World Literature as Property” (2014), but also by Stefan Helgesson and Pieter Vermeulen’s volume Institutions of World Literature (2016). Different emphases and methodologies notwithstanding, these critical approaches to world literary studies consistently draw attention to the various inequalities, silences and blind spots that the theory and practice of world literature produce (cf. Helgesson and Thomsen 2020, 4). Uncovering the historical entanglement of world literature with colonialism, critical world literature studies highlights the extent to which different facets of Euro-American dominance continue to shape the world literary sphere and construe what Mufti calls “a plane of equivalence, a set of categorical grids and networks that seek, first of all, to render legible as

0 Introduction 

 5

literature a vast and heterogenous range of practices of writing from across the world and across millennia” (2016, 11). Even on the ‘critical’ side of the world literature debates, however, there has been a surprising silence on the matter of gender. In her review of the books by the WReC and Aamir Mufti, Gloria Fisk notes that Mufti “omits feminist thought with near entirety and refers with only the greatest brevity to writers and critics who are women” and that “WReC does only marginally better” (2017, 166–167). Looking across a broader selection of scholarship in the field, Katarina Leppänen confirms that there has been a “near total” lack of attention to feminism and an apparent refusal – with a few rare exceptions – to use gender as an analytical category to understand patterns of canonisation and translation (2018, 93). This handbook will not, alas, rectify that particular shortcoming. Several chapters do, however, integrate gender categories in their arguments and point in that way towards further work that needs be done as the field continues to evolve. With an eye to the current pre-eminence of world literature studies in the academy and public sphere, and given the range of critical debates that follows in its wake, it therefore seems more important than ever to engage in self-reflexive ways with frequently implicit notions of ‘literature’, perpetuated by both theories and practices of world literature. These notions are rarely neutral; rather, they serve as historically variable operative terms which come with a number of normative and culture-specific implications, constructing rather than merely describing specific phenomena and object of analyses. Such a critical and self-reflexive turn in world literature studies may also foster a more nuanced and culture-sensitive understanding of the term ‘world literature’ and its many translations, near-synonyms and conceptual repercussions across different languages, places and scientific communities. ‘World literature’, Weltliteratur, Literaturen der Welt, littérature-monde, la littérature mondiale, literatura mundial, literaturas del mundo, världslitteratur, etc. do not only indicate that the field is a genuinely international one. Rather, they carry highly specific connotations and frequently serve as ‘mini-theories’ (Mieke Bal 2002). As such, they remind us of the culture-specific and at times even national inflections of the research field (see, e.g., Lamping and Tihanov 2019), which might, after all, be less worldly than its name suggests. To trace the travels, transfers and transformations of these terms across and between (academic) cultures and to shed light on their different conceptual emphases and methodological assumptions might be one way to reveal the partiality of knowledge and to dispel the implicit “Eurochronology” (Appadurai 1996, 30; Prendergast 2004, 6) of literary history in general and world literature studies in particular. Such an interrogation can also attune us to our own presuppositions and claims whenever we say ‘world literature’ (cf. Neumann 2018), showing that ‘the world’ of world literature is far from being “studiously neutral” (Hitchcock 2010, 5). In this exceptionally wide-ranging development of world literature, in which English-language literature by no means is always in focus (see e.g. Al-Musawi 2014; Beecroft 2015; Orsini 2015; Hawas 2018; Helgesson et al. 2018), one can discern two

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 Stefan Helgesson, Birgit Neumann and Gabriele Rippl

possible scenarios that are not necessarily mutually contradictory. One is the longterm reorganisation of the academic study of literature, no longer shaped by the constraints of methodological nationalism and eurocentrism; the other is the waning of ‘literature’ as a central concern in society and hence of the humanities (cf. EvenZohar, Feijó and Monegal 2019), but with world literature as one of its academic sanctuaries. Predictions are not the task of this handbook, however. Nor can it possibly take on the full gamut of world literature studies today. Its purpose, although geographically expansive, is more limited. Taken as a whole, its constellation of chapters provides an account of the intersection of the “English language complex” and literary production as viewed through current world literature methodologies. These methodologies are multiple and pluralised – ranging from translation studies, linguistics, genre theory and digital studies to comparativism, memory studies, and ecocriticism, etc. Jointly, they indicate the density and complexity of the field, indicating that there is no single and privileged vantage point from which to fathom world literatures. In keeping with these methodologies, both “circulation” (Damrosch 2003) and the “world-making” (Neumann and Rippl 2017) capacity of texts are kept in view. This also serves to explain the title’s insistence on the plural: world literatures. Beyond the established understanding of world literatures as a more or less flexible canon of globally circulating texts, which are typically appropriated in locally specific ways by multiple readerships (cf. Berman 2009, 169), the handbook pays critical attention to the world-making capacities of literature (cf. Cheah 2016). These genuinely literary forces frequently exceed the global commodity circuits, in which the writing and reading of literature are embedded. As open, inherently pluralised and poietic configurations, world literatures are reducible neither “to the materiality of the actual world we inhabit” (Ganguly 2016, 69) nor to their material trajectories spanning different places and periods. Among the plethora of literary strategies of ‘worlding’ the exploration of the interconnections, tensions and conflicts between the local and the global seems to be a recurring element of many Anglophone world literatures, which respond to histories of globalisation, colonialism, migration and translocation. This concern not only materialises in the topical modelling of transcultural imaginaries and the intertwining of the local with the global. It also materialises in the literariness, i.e. the formal repertoire of many world literatures, which thrives on crosscultural exchange, relationality and connectivity and which points beyond the established centre-periphery model (cf. Neumann and Rippl 2017, 3). A number of scholars, including Wai Chee Dimock (2006), Jahan Ramazani (2009), Susan Stanford Friedman (2006), Caroline Levine (2015) and Florian Mussgnug (2018), have illustrated that literary genres, rhetorical figures and aesthetic forms circulate, spread and travel across cultures and periods, connecting seemingly distinct literatures from different parts of the world. Ramazani’s (2009, 20) claim that almost any literary text points beyond its local context of production and is shaped by transcultural poetic energies therefore has particular relevance for Anglophone world literatures.

0 Introduction 

 7

Aesthetic transculturation and mixing do not preclude the emergence of local creative traditions. Far from producing global sameness, the circulation of literary forms often brings forth locally situated modes of expression: travelling forms are inflected by local creative traditions and even transcultural poetics remain responsive to specific concerns, producing a complex cosmopolitan-vernacular dynamics (cf. Helgesson et al. 2018). The circulation and distribution of world literatures therefore rarely flattens into the kind of “oneworldedness” that Emily Apter bemoans in her study Against World Literature (2013, 83). Rather, locally entrenched Anglophone literary cultures adapt the global language to purposes that do not just conform with (or react against) metropolitan values. As many of the chapters assembled in this handbook indicate, the critical attention to globally systemic aspects of circulation, publication and distribution also offers a means to expose cultural difference and specific, locally embedded poetic traditions.

2 Structure of the Handbook Accordingly, this Handbook of Anglophone World Literatures charts the rich and burgeoning field of world literatures in English, which, due to a centuries-long history of exchange, entanglement and transfer, have increasingly become globalised, diasporic and post-national. It is precisely these processes of exchange that call for a reassessment of Anglophone literatures as instances of world literature at this point in time. While world literature has become a central concept of literary theory, methodology and practice, yielding salient research results and bringing forth an array of publications, up to date there are hardly any studies that offer both a systematic overview of the variety of theoretical approaches to world literature and close readings of selected texts. The Handbook of Anglophone World Literatures seeks to fill this lacuna. Part I of the handbook, “Historical Approaches – Genealogies of World Literatures”, navigates different definitions and usages of the term ‘world literature’ from a historical point of view. Drawing on this genealogy of scholarship, Part II, “Concepts and Methods of Anglophone World Literatures”, presents a range of critical approaches to world literature, considering both theoretical and methodological issues in world literary studies. This part also introduces and vets the handbook’s new conceptualisation of world literature in English as ‘Anglophone world literatures’. Its focus is on the relationship of world literatures to neighbouring fields such as post-colonialism, translation studies, memory studies and environmental humanities, while also exploring how Anglophone world literatures reorganise English literary studies and comparative literature. Part III, “Sociological Approaches – Distribution, Reception and Translation of Anglophone World Literature”, charts sociological approaches to Anglophone world literatures, considering their commodification, distribution, translation and canonization on the international book market. It also offers an overview of the distribution

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 Stefan Helgesson, Birgit Neumann and Gabriele Rippl

and translation of Anglophone world literatures and examines their relationship with other cultural media. Finally, Part IV, “Literary Worlds – Locations and Orientations”, is dedicated to the geographies of Anglophone world literatures and will provide sample interpretations of world literary texts – narrative, drama, poetry – written in English. Rather than referring to a fixed canon of great works, world literatures’ capacity to bring new worlds and alternative worldly spaces into being is key. This shift of focus makes it possible to reveal entanglements and relations between ‘canonical’ and ‘noncanonical’ world literary texts and thus to do justice to the many non-eurocentric literary genealogies. With an eye to the overall aims of the series, the Handbook of Anglophone World Literatures sets out to introduce students and scholars of English and North American literature, African literature, Caribbean literature, South Asian literature, Australian literature and literary theory alike to a vast and exciting field of research. Since this field has gained increasing importance in recent years, the handbook has been designed as a compact means of orientation in the study of Anglophone literary texts. It familiarises its users with influential theoretical concepts such as world literature, world-making, post-/ colonialism, transculturality, cosmopolitanism, translation, gender, cultural memory, intermediality, genre, world ecology, digital humanities and many others – concepts that will be discussed in connection with literary examples and other cultural products. Hence the contributions span both theoretical approaches past and present, concrete analysis and historical contextualisation of literary texts from different centuries and various Anglophone literary cultures. ***** This handbook would not have materialised without the unflagging commitment of our team members Newsha Natascha Beiza, Michael Boog, Camille Gray, Miriam Hinz, Yvonne Liebermann and Jonathan Sampson Sarfin, the generous and indispensable advice of Dr. Ulrike Krauss and Katja Lehming at De Gruyter, and the support of all contributors – a big thank you goes to them all of them. Special thanks go to our families who have been incredibly patient with us over the last two years.

3 Bibliography 3.1 Works Cited Al-Musawi, Muhsin. “The Republic of Letters: Arab Modernity?” The Cambridge Journal of Postcolonial Literary Inquiry 1.2 (2014): 265–280. Anderson, Benedict. Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism. London: Verso, 1983.

0 Introduction 

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Appadurai, Arjun. Modernity at Large: Cultural Dimensions of Globalization. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1996. Appiah, Kwame Anthony. In My Father’s House: Africa in the Philosophy of Culture. New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993. Apter, Emily. Against World Literature: On the Politics of Untranslatability. London: Verso, 2013. Ashcroft, Bill, Gareth Griffins, and Helen Tiffin. The Empire Writes Back: Theory and Practice in Post-Colonial Literatures. London: Routledge, 1989. Auerbach, Erich. “Philology and Weltliteratur.” Trans. Edward and Maire Said. The Centennial Review 13.1 (1969): 1–17. Bal, Mieke. Travelling Concepts in the Humanities: A Rough Guide. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2002. Beecroft, Alexander. An Ecology of World Literature. London: Verso, 2015. Berman, Jessica. “Imagining World Literature: Modernism and Comparative Literature.” Disciplining Modernism. Ed. Pamela Caughie. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009. 53–70. Bhabha, Homi K. The Location of Culture. London and New York: Routledge, 1994. Boehmer, Elleke. “The World and the Postcolonial.” European Review 22.2 (2014): 299–308. Casanova, Pascale. The World Republic of Letters. Cambridge, MA and London: Harvard University Press, 2004 [1999]. Cheah, Pheng. What Is a World? On Postcolonial Literature as World Literature. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2016. Damrosch, David. What Is World Literature? Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2003. Dharwadker, Vinay. “Anglophone World Literature.” The Encyclopedia of Postcolonial Studies, vol. 1: A–E. Ed. Sangeeta Ray and Henry Schwarz. Oxford: Wiley Blackwell, 2016. 48–56. Dimock, Wai Chee. Through Other Continents: American Literature Across Deep Time. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2006. Even-Zohar, Itamar, Elias J. Torres Feijó, and Antonio Monegal. “The End of Literature; or What Purposes Does It Continue to Serve?” Poetics Today 40.1 (2019): 7–31. Fisk, Gloria. “After the Debate Over World Literature.” Contemporary Literature 58.1 (2017): 157–169. Friedman, Susan S. “World Modernism, World Literature, and Comparaticity.” The Oxford Handbook of Global Modernisms. Ed. Mark Wollaeger and Matt Eatough. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012. 499–525. Ganguly, Debjani. This Thing Called the World: The Contemporary Novel As Global Form. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2016. Gikandi, Simon. “Theory after Postcolonial Theory: Rethinking the Work of Mimesis.” Theory after “Theory”. Ed. Jane Elliott and Derek Attridge. London: Routledge, 2011. 163–178. Hawas, May, ed. The Routledge Companion to World Literature and World History. Oxon: Routledge, 2018. Hayot, Eric. On Literary Worlds. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012. Helgesson, Stefan. “Postcolonialism and World Literature: Rethinking the Boundaries.” Interventions 16.4 (2014): 483–500. Helgesson, Stefan, and Pieter Vermeulen, eds. Institutions of World Literature: Writing, Translation, Markets. New York: Routledge, 2016. Helgesson, Stefan, Annika Mörte Alling, Yvonne Lindqvist, and Helena Wulff, eds. World Literatures: Exploring the Cosmopolitan-Vernacular Exchange. Stockholm: Stockholm University Press, 2018. Helgesson, Stefan, and Mads Rosendahl Thomsen. Literature and the World. Oxon and New York: Routledge, 2020.

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Hitchcock, Peter. The Long Space. Transnationalism and Postcolonial Form. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2010. Lamping, Diether, and Galin Tihanov, eds. Vergleichende Weltliteraturen / Comparative World Literatures: DFG-Symposion 2018. Berlin: J. B. Metzler, 2019. Leppänen, Katarina. “Reflections on Gender and Small Languages in World Literature Scholarship: Methods of Inclusions and Exclusions.” World Literatures: Exploring the CosmopolitanVernacular Exchange. Ed Stefan Helgesson, Annika Mörte Alling, Yvonne Lindqvist, and Helena Wulff. Stockholm: Stockholm University Press, 2018. 89–99. Levine, Caroline. Forms. Whole, Rhythm, Hierarchy, Network. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2015. Mauranen, Anna, and Svetlana Vetchinnikova, eds. Language Change: The Impact of English as a Lingua Franca. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2020. Mesthrie, Rajend, and Rakesh M. Bhatt. World Englishes: The Study of New Linguistic Varieties. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008. Moretti, Franco. “Conjunctures on World Literature.” New Left Review 1 (2000): 55–67. Mufti, Aamir R. “Orientalism and the Institution of World Literatures.” Critical Inquiry 36 (2010): 458–493. Mufti, Aamir R. Forget English! Orientalisms and World Literatures. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2016. Mussnugg, Florian. “Planetary Figurations: Intensive Genre in World Literature.” Modern Languages Open 1.22 (2018): 1–12. Neumann, Birgit, and Gabriele Rippl. “Rethinking Anglophone World Literatures – an Introduction.” Special issue Anglophone World Literatures. Anglia 135.1 (2017): 1–20. Neumann, Birgit. “Vernacular Cosmopolitanism in Anglophone World Literatures – Comparative Histories of Literary Worlding.” Special issue Global Perspectives on European Literary Histories. Arcadia 53.2 (2018): 239–257. Orsini, Francesca. “The Multilingual Local in World Literature.” Comparative Literature 67.4 (2015): 345–374. Pollock, Sheldon. The Language of the Gods in the World of Men: Sanskrit, Culture, and Power in Premodern India. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2006. Prendergast, Christopher. “The World Republic of Letters.” Debating World Literature. By Prendergast. London: Verso, 2004. 1–25. Ramazani, Jahan. A Transnational Poetics. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009. Said, Edward W. Orientalism. New York: Pantheon Books, 1978. Slaughter, Joseph. “World Literature as Property.” Alif 34 (2014): 39–73. Spivak, Gayatri C. A Critique of Postcolonial Reason: Toward a History of the Vanishing Present. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999. Spivak, Gayatri C. An Aesthetic Education in the Era of Globalization. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2012. Viswanathan, Gauri. Masks of Conquest: Literary Study and British Rule in India. London: Faber and Faber, 1990. Warwick Research Collective, The University of Warwick. Combined and Uneven Development: Towards a New Theory of World-Literature. Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2015.

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3.2 Further Reading Brouillette, Sarah. Postcolonial Writers in the Global Literary Marketplace. Houndmills and Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007. Burton, Antoinette, and Isabel Hofmeyr. Ten Books that Shaped the British Empire: Creating an Imperial Commons. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2014. English, James F. The Economy of Prestige: Prizes, Awards, and the Circulation of Cultural Value. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2009. Helgesson, Stefan, and Christina Kullberg. “Translingual Events. World Literature and the Making of Language.” Journal of World Literature 3.2 (2018): 136–152. Hofmeyr, Isabel. The Portable Bunyan: A Transnational History of the Pilgrim’s Progress. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2004. King, Bruce. The Internationalization of English Literature, 1948–2000. The Oxford English Literary History, vol. 13. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004. Mukherjee, Ankhi. What is a Classic? Postcolonial Rewriting and Invention of the Canon. Palo Alto: Stanford University Press, 2014. Melas, Natalie. All the Difference in the World: Postcoloniality and the Ends of Comparison. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2006. Srinivasan, Ragini T. “Introduction: South Asia from Postcolonial to World Anglophone.” Special issue From Postcolonial to World Anglophone: South Asia as Test Case. Interventions 20.3 (2018): 309–316. Thomsen, Mads Rosendahl. Mapping World Literature: International Canonization and Transnational Literatures. London: Continuum, 2008. Vadde, Aarthi. Chimeras of Form: Modernist Internationalism Beyond Europe, 1914–2016. New York: Columbia University Press, 2016.

Part I: Historical Approaches – Genealogies of  World Literatures

Reingard Nethersole

1 The Beginnings of the Concept (Goethe, Marx, Said) – Readings from a Postcolonial Perspective Abstract: When Goethe popularized the essentially eighteenth-century cosmopolitan idea of world literature, Europe was still regarded as center of the universe. But post-Napoleonic era wars of national liberation fostered growing nationalistic sentiment in the nineteenth century while at the same time technological advances enabled speedier and easier transportation across borders, that enhanced commerce and communication. Inspired by industrial development, Goethe and Marx propagated world-wide cultural and economic expansion overcoming local narrow-mindedness. And by embracing Auerbach’s philologically inflected and historically sensitive criticism, Said transformed our ways of thinking about literary voices from the former colonial empires, completely changing our ideas on how texts and images circulate, migrate and mutate in global interdependence. Key Terms: Ansatzpunkt [point of departure], contrapuntal, philology, translation, Verkehr [traffic/commerce/communication/intercourse], wechselseitig [reciprocal, mutual, two-way], Weltliteratur

1 Definition For Goethe, the topos Weltliteratur signifies a structure of reciprocity, wechselseitige Annäherung [mutual adaptation and integration], of largely literary texts that, without effacing their individuality and historical concreteness, travel across state borders. The cultural, and often linguistic, differences of texts selected from sundry ages and regions are negotiated in forms of translation, appropriation and adaptation. The goal is “gaining knowledge of the mutual relations of all to all” (Goethe, Werke I, 42.2, 505, translated and qtd. in Birus 2000; in the following I shall utilize the Birus translations unless otherwise indicated). The ‘world,’ however, was for J.W. Goethe, but also for Karl Marx and Erich Auerbach, largely dominated by Europe. It was only with Edward Said’s embrace of the topos that the Eurocentric perspective changed significantly to include formerly colonized voices from around the globe. Its lineage, from Goethe (1749–1832) to Marx (1818–1883), Auerbach (1892–1957) and Said (1935–2003), coalesces at the point of contact with a foreign other, but in its actual encounter foregrounds different issues of aesthetic, social and economic concerns. Importantly, all four exponents bring a distinctive outsider eye to their engagement with the topos. Thus Jonathan Arac notes perceptively, albeit only in reference to https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110583182-002

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Said: “the world of world literature requires a vividly concrete sense of geography and an acknowledgement both of large-scale relationships of political power and also of human-scale circumstances of individual lives” (2012, 119). Even Goethe, much traveled celebrity author and minister of state, in the 1820s felt estranged from small town Weimar, the cultural vector he himself had created in his youth. Meanwhile, journalist and political philosopher Marx had forcibly been exiled, first in Brussels and later in London; Auerbach, the Jewish scholar of Romance Philology, had to find refuge from Nazi persecution first in Istanbul (cf. Mufti 2012; Porter 2013; Said 2004a) and later in the United States, where the scholarly environment was not conducive to philological criticism. Said witnessed the end of colonialism and the dawn of globalization (cf. Mufti 1998; Lindenberger 2004; Arac 2012), an experience that for him, as Palestinian Protestant Arab exiled in North America, meant coming to terms with the Arab-Israeli conflict. In Said’s opinion, applicable to all four proponents, a life of exile is the manifestation of a “life led outside habitual order” (2004a, 186); its ‘estrangement’ effect allows a scholar to secure a certain critical distance from which it becomes possible to reimagine both home and the foreign culture without either falling for narrow-minded patriotism or identity politics.

1.1 Goethe and Marx Weltliteratur envisaged by Goethe and Marx is literature circulated across nationstate borders in an international market place of ideas beyond time and space. Marx and Engels had no difficulty corroborating Goethe’s much quoted 1827 assertion: “National literature has not much meaning today: the epoch of world literature is at hand, and everyone must strive to hasten its approach” (Eckermann 1966, 153). In their Communist Manifesto published in German in London in 1848, Marx echoes the master’s assessment twenty years later by proclaiming in a similar vein: In place of the old wants, satisfied by the productions of the country, we find new wants, requiring for their satisfaction the products of distant lands and climes. In place of the old local and national seclusion and self-sufficiency we have intercourse in every direction, universal interdependence of nations. And as in material, so also in intellectual production. The intellectual creations of individual nations become common property. National one-sidedness and narrowmindedness become more and more impossible, and from the numerous national and local literatures there arises a world literature. (Marx and Engels 1994, 417)

Marx, like Goethe before him, underlines its shared “cosmopolitan character” (qtd. in Prawer 1976, 144), due to increased Verkehr [traffic, intercourse, communication] between nations. However, Weltliteratur, Goethe emphasizes, supersedes the kind of Weltpoesie [world poetry] Herder had extolled. Although, in conversation with his assistant Eckermann, on 31 January 1827, he acknowledges “poetry is a common heritage of mankind, and that it manifests itself at all places and times in hundreds

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and thousands of individuals. One of them writes a little better than another and floats on the surface a little longer than the other, that is all” (Eckermann 1966, 153). And even though Goethe recognizes how “the ever expanding” popular literature “pleases the masses,” something “we are already witnessing in all zones and regions” (Goethe, Werke I, 42.2, 1987, 502–503), he greets it ambiguously. Nevertheless, the aesthetically accomplished and exemplary work (“etwas Musterhaftem,” Eckermann 1987, 198) of the past remain for Goethe and Marx the measure of good literature, just as for Auerbach and Said. Thus, Goethe and Marx still prefer the timeless poetic achievements of the ‘ancients,’ the classical Greek and Roman authors, to contemporary writing like that of the German Romantics; Marx often critiques ‘modern’ writers for not sufficiently displaying social struggles in a historically valid, well-rounded realist manner.

1.2 Auerbach Auerbach does not mention the term ‘world literature’ in his Mimesis, the much quoted magisterial study of Stiltrennung [stylistic separation] in respect of narrative representation of everyday life in its encounters with particular historical worlds displayed in European literature from Homer and the Bible to Virginia Woolf. However, Said celebrates it as a book that is “by far the largest in scope and ambition out of all the other important critical works of the past half century” (2004a, 12). In this “monumental work of literary intelligence” (Said 1983, 5), the polyglot Auerbach assembles a body of writing drawn from different European linguistic universes and key literary periods in order to demonstrate Goethe’s topos in ‘action’. As Said notes, “Auerbach’s Weltliteratur must be understood ‘not as a selective collection of world classics or great books […] but rather as a concert of all literature produced by man about man’” (qtd. in Arac 2012, 118). Auerbach himself states in the “autumnal, reflective” (Said 1983, 7) essay entitled “Philology and Weltliteratur”, written in honor of the Goethe scholar Fritz Strich in 1952: “‘World literature’ refers not simply to what is common and human [das Gemeinsame und Menschliche] as such, but rather to this as the mutual fertilisation of the manifold. It presupposes the felix culpa of mankind’s division into a whole host of cultures” (1967, 305). This remark resonates strongly with Goethe, who had stressed the need of gaining knowledge of “the peculiarities of each nation to then see past them and establish a relationship with the nation; for the characteristics of a nation are like its language and its coins; they facilitate dealings with it, in fact they make such dealings possible in the first place” (Goethe, Werke I, 41.2, 1987, 306). However, where Auerbach regards the diversity of national cultures as merely positive precondition for the formation of a common world literature, Goethe’s commercially tinged rhetoric not only precipitates Marx’s language but anticipates also the modern antagonism among different nation-states that can easily be rephrased as competition between producers and traders of cultural capital (Bourdieu 1984), something

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Pascale Casanova foregrounds in her 1999 Republique mondiale des lettres that, in its English translation The World Republic of Letters (2004), was met with fierce criticism (↗0 Introduction; ↗2 Re-Reading Classical Approaches).

1.3 Said

Auerbach’s life and work function as role model for Said; he is of “a like mind” (Said 2004a, 12). And it is Said’s critical handling of the topos fed by deep reverence for Auerbach and romanistische Philology [Romance Studies] that inspires his methodology of “secular criticism” (Said 1983, 1–30). Said assumed the “mantle” of Auerbach, claims Aamir Mufti, who sees evidence in “scattered references to Auerbach and his works throughout Said’s major critical writings from Beginnings onwards-to the tradition of German romance scholarship of which he was a representative” (1998, 97). Herbert Lindenberger concurs, specifically drawing attention to Said’s early “co-translation of ‘Philologie der Weltliteratur’ in 1969 to the introduction he wrote for an edition of Mimesis published in 2003 to celebrate the fiftieth anniversary of the book’s English translation” (2004, 47). Said adheres initially to Auerbach’s imagining of Goethean world literature in terms of a “concert of all literatures and ideas” (1983, 228). But, as Arac explains, “in his later work he developed [in his critical thinking] models that emphasized the plurality of ‘counterpoint’ rather than the unison of ‘concert’” (2012, 118). A contrapuntal view reframes Goethe’s topos grounded in Said’s insight that “Europe no longer commands the world” (Said 1993, 58). From that standpoint, Said shifts the geography and changes the cast of writers, undercutting any hitherto accepted ontological and normative definitions of world literature. Hence, he introduces perspectival change, arguing “[w]e need to see that the contemporary global setting – overlapping territories, intertwined histories – was already prefigured and inscribed in the coincidences and convergences among geography, culture, and history” (1993, 56). For “‘world literature’ to have any meaning at all”, Arac (2012, 124) repeats Said’s assertion from the final chapter of Culture and Imperialism: we need to accept “the actual configuration of literary experiences, overlapping with one another and independent, despite national boundaries and coercively legislated national autonomies” so as to transfigure “history and geography […] in new maps […] in new types of connections” (Said 1993, 317, qtd. in Arac 2012, 124). These speak to the experiences of exile, border crossings, and “charting new territories” (Said 1993, 317) as norm in a late industrial, neo-imperialist age.

2 Historical Aspects The communicative success of the topos ‘world literature’ is premised largely on the role Comparative Literature played in its various different articulations and applications.

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For Said (cf. 1993, 56; 2004a, 18), Goethe’s term resides at the heart of the discipline, albeit usually as label for a corpus of ‘great books.’ It needed Said’s extensive, multifocused interpretive work to return historical and situational substance to a topos narrowly perceived as progress-narrative unfolding within an ever more comprehensive communication network (Goethe, Marx), a well-worn conceptual configuration that had drained it of all critical meaning. Besides, Goethe’s hope, shared by Auerbach, to overcome bellicosity after the Wars of Liberation post-1815 and World War II post-1945, respectively, had not materialized. “[A] welcoming, hospitable attitude of humanistic knowledge designed to realign warring cultures in a relationship of mutuality and reciprocity” (Said 2004a, 17) appeared elusive and misplaced. In short, fundamentally progressive bourgeois Enlightenment ideas of “how,” in Marx’s words, “one generation after another learnt to develop further the material wealth, capital, and forces of production it had inherited” (Prawer 1976, 141) were not working towards progressive realizations of shared human understanding in a more humane world. Moreover, Auerbach feared that life within the circumference of an increasingly uniformly organized “earth” would engender a homogenous, single culture, and in a relatively short time only a few literary languages would remain ‘alive’ [als lebend übrigbleiben] (Auerbach 1967, 301). The effect of such linguistic hegemony would simultaneously realize and destroy the notion of Weltliteratur; for him, literature was present everywhere but everywhere it was threatened also by technical and corporate commercial interests.

2.1 Revisions Auerbach’s apocalyptic vision might not be solely responsible for motivating the host of revisions of world literature and its history put forward with some urgency in recent years. Nevertheless, all attempt to inspire fresh interest in the topos, something arguably stirred by the onset of cultural globalization mediated today by transnational marketing and worldwide digital communication. Damrosch (2008), Kadir (2004), Lindenberger (2004), Pizer (2000) and others too numerous to mention here address this issue. The latest title, Hansong Dan and Ewa Wojno-Owczarska’s “Introduction: Global Crises and Twenty-First-Century World Literature” (2018) speaks for itself. By following the evolution of “world literature as a transnational phenomenon”, Pizer claims “[t]ransnationalism in the cultural sphere implies the collapse of discrete, self-contained, national traditions, a collapse brought on mainly by the globalization of the literary marketplace, and thus signifies multiculturalism on a universal scale” (2000, 214). In contrast, Lindenberger sees it as his task “to explore the ways that Auerbach’s work has been appropriated by Said and others whose affinities to Auerbach would not be readily apparent to those of us familiar with his writings since the time of their publication” (2004, 45). But it is Said’s critical application of the topos that finally mitigates unreflected Eurocentrism in the interrogation of culture’s entanglement with colonial and postcolonial imperialism. Thus Vilashini Cooppan

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can view “Auerbach as a postcolonialist avant la lettre,” and “create a line from Goethe to globalization, with Auerbach a key player at a crucial moment along the way” (Lindenberger 2004, 54).

2.2 Social and Technological Change Said’s recalibration of the topos makes revisiting the archive of world literature indispensable because he is the critic largely responsible for Auerbach’s current popularity, evident in the 2013 publication of hitherto untranslated essays (see Porter 2013). More importantly, concerns arising from ‘globalization’ pressure another look at Goethe’s and Marx’s well-worn ideas on technological ‘progress’ undergirding the emergence of world literature. Goethe enthusiastically embraces the ‘velociferic’ character of intellectual and material production and the accelerated tempo with which goods are exchanged across (nation)-state borders, undoubtedly due in part to von Stein’s recent Prussian custom reforms. The seventy-nine year old Goethe, for instance, ever attentive to change, enthuses to Carlyle in August 1828 about the “Eilpost”, speedy mail delivery (n.pag.) after having praised earlier in June the way “Germans” occupy themselves “with foreign Literature. By mail-coaches and steam-packets, as well as by daily, weekly-and monthly periodical”, all of which “ease Verkehr [transportation, commerce and communication]”, (Goethe to Carlyle). In the previous year Goethe had articulated to Eckermann (1966, 154–155) his fascination with engineering projects like the Panama-, the Rhein-Main-Donau- and the Suez-Canal, all of which “make him want to hold out for another fifty years or so for the sake of them” (Carlyle and Goethe 1887, n.pag.). Goethe’s language resonates with Marx’s, who links changed Verkehrsmittel und Verkehrsverhälnisse [means and relations of ‘traffic’, circulation, communication] with emerging socio-economic (communist) transnationalism. Despite attacking the bourgeoisie for the “exploitation of the world-market”, Marx in the Communist Manifesto nevertheless credits it, to “the great chagrin of Reactionists”, with “having drawn from under the feet of industry the national ground on which it stood” by constantly “revolutionizing the instruments of production, and thereby the relations of production, and with them the whole relations of society”, including the facilitation of communication that “draws all, even the most barbarian nations into civilization” (Marx and Engels 1994, 418). Such ‘center – margin’ rhetoric, typical of the Eurocentric master narrative, required a transformative reimagining in Said’s theoretical critical work, like The Text, the World, and the Critic (1983) and Culture and Imperialism (1993). They precipitate, beyond Orientalism (1979), an application of the topos to a global, in Bhabha’s words, “more complex cultural situation where ‘previously unrecognized spiritual and intellectual needs’ [Goethe] emerge from the imposition of ‘foreign’ ideas, cultural representations, and structures of power” (he quotes Goethe from 1830; Bhabha 1994, 212).

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2.3 Goethe’s Significance Goethe did not coin the term Weltliteratur (Weitz 1987), although he was the first, in Casanova’s words, “to intuit the direct link between the appearance of a Weltliteratur and the emergence of a new economy founded on the specific struggles of international literary relations: a ‘market where all nations offer their wares’ and ‘a general intellectual trade’” (2004, 83). The term had been mentioned before by the Enlightenment authors Martin Wieland and August Wilhelm Schlözer. Djelal Kadir even credits “Montesquieu’s ironically translocal and self-consciously transcultural Lettres Persanes of 1721” (2004, 3) for speaking from within the structure of world literature. This is not at all surprising when considering eighteenth-century borderless Enlightenment culture and its concept of universalism was obscured by rabid nationalism in wake of the French Revolution and the ensuing Napoleonic wars. Goethe was essentially a product of a threshold culture mediating Enlightenment cosmopolitan values and early nineteenth-century technological and economic change engendered by the Industrial Revolution. His famous observation concerning “world literature is in process of formation,” made in a letter of January 1827 (qtd. in Strich 1949, 349) derived from Goethe’s life experience over more than half a century, and could easily have been prompted by the “englische Springflut,” (Goethe in a letter to his friend Sreckfuss on 27 January, 1827, Werke IV, 42, 1987, 28), the surge of English literary production that took German-speaking countries by storm. Goethe expounded upon the neologism numerous times in conversations with his assistant Eckermann and in various verbal and written exchanges with friends; Strich’s “Appendix” (1949, 349–351) lists twenty-one occurrences of Weltliteratur in Goethe’s oeuvre, extended and contextualized by Birus. However, the master figure recognized as global literary authority by, among others, Rabindranath Tagore (Tiwari 2012, 41) did not specify a particular semantics. Hence advocates of world literature unsupported by any clear set of ideas continue to wrestle with succinct definitions, something amply evidenced by the emerging global field of world literature studies spawned in North America by David Damrosch (↗2 Re-Reading Classical Approaches) and fiercely contested by Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak (Damrosch 2011) and Emily Apter (2013). However, crucial for the elderly Goethe is the desire for enhanced understanding and communication between peoples of many tongues and cultures, something he rehearses in protracted epistolary conversations with his young Scottish friend, Thomas Carlyle, an exchange offering illuminating insight. Carlyle promptly responds by introducing the concept “Welt Literatur” to England (Strich 1949, 280). In return, Goethe surmises in his draft introduction to Carlyle’s Life of Schiller: “But if this kind of world literature – as is inevitable from the ever-quickening speed of intercourse – should shortly come into being, we must expect from it nothing more and nothing else than what it can and does perform” (qtd. in Strich 1949, 351). Such performance consists, for instance, Goethe writes to Carlyle in 1830, in “a general world literature – for all nations to learn their relationships

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each to the other; and each is bound to find in the other something attractive and something repellent, something worthy of emulation and something to be avoided” (qtd. in Strich 1949, 351). How this mutual, at times consensual and, at other times, objectionable, give and take manifests itself aesthetically, for instance, with respect to Anglophone literary texts, is outlined in Strich’s Goethe and World Literature. Strich’s chapter 5, “The Stimulus of English Literature” (1949, 83–101), details the extent of the ‘benefits’ the revered author of Werther (1774), admirer of William Shakespeare, poet and translator of James Macpherson, Samuel Richardson, and Laurence Sterne, received from England, whereas Goethe’s impact on British literature, particularly on Sir Walter Scott is reflected extensively in Chapter 15 (1949, 247–284). Such mutual ‘benefits’ derived from ‘intercourse’ between foreign language-literature writers and between writers and their public operated in the early nineteenth century by way of correspondence and personal visits – in his later years Goethe’s house in Weimar, to the delight of his daughter-in-law was inundated with young literati from Britain, Coleridge and Thackeray among them. Of equal importance for furthering spiritual/cultural commerce and disseminating knowledge of the foreign other were newspapers and journals. Besides the French Globe, Goethe regularly read the Anglo-Scottish periodicals Edinburgh Review, Foreign Review, Foreign Quarterly Review and Blackwood’s Magazine; not to mention his own critical and reviewing enterprise in Ueber Kunst und Altherthum, the journal he edited since 1816. In the 1820s, it became a major medium of exchange between Europe’s national literatures and introduced to the German reading public Byron, Carlyle and Manzoni, among others (Tgahrt et al. 1982, 437). Even more vital for Goethe were texts in translations from languages like Sanskrit and Persian he did not master as he did English, French and Italian, besides Latin and Ancient Greek. It is in this context that Said, in his book Orientalism (1979), first mentions Goethe rather lightly, while referring to his appropriation of the medieval Persian poet “Hafiz” (Said 1979, 168). In contrast, Bhabha praises Goethe “as an Orientalist who read Shakuntala at seventeen years of age” (1994, 11). Translation (↗10 Anglophone World Literature and Translation) in connection with the topos cannot be underestimated because it secures the spread and furthers the growth of world literature as is strikingly demonstrated, for instance, when connecting Bhabha’s example with Casanova’s reference to V.S. Naipaul who, “as a child in distant Trinidad, had learned ‘what Goethe had said about Shakūntalā, the Sanskrit play that Sir William Jones had translated [into English] in 1789’” (Casanova 2004, 212; ↗2 Re-Reading Classical Approaches).

3 Theoretical and Conceptual Aspects The theoretical itinerary of the world literature topos is best accessed through the lexicon developed by these four very different writers. Thus Goethe conceptualizes

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world literature experientially in terms of economic exchange and ‘enrichment’ transposed onto a cultural plane; Marx somewhat alters Goethe’s Hegelian-infused epistemology by supplanting idealist, so-called bourgeois, capitalist conceptions of cultural progression with historic-materialist ones because he and Engels wanted to foreground material reality as the referent, albeit by emphasizing socio-economic determinates which they saw as undergirding all cultural production. Philologist Auerbach and postcolonial theoretician Said address texts from diverse cultural and critical traditions with methodologies of reading. Processes of translation, appropriation and adaption tacitly articulated in key terms like wechselseitig [reciprocal] and the vexing German Verkehr [circulation], that encapsulate much of Goethe’s world literature musings bring into conversation diverse fields like culture, commerce and sociability. Auerbach’s philological concerns underwrote Ansatzpunkt [point of departure], while Said bestows upon literary studies the notion of contrapuntal reading, all concepts of considerable and lasting transnational critical import.

3.1 Verkehr [traffic/circulation/commerce/communication/ intercourse]: Goethe The amount of traction gained through the circulation of texts in both the original and the target language across a global expanse by way of translation demonstrates the veracity of world literature – the illuminating exhibition catalogue Weltliteratur (Tgahrt et al. 1982) proves the immense reach of the burgeoning field of translation in the eighteenth century (↗10 Anglophone World Literature and Translation). Goethe had an ample share in it but exponentially improved efficiency of circulation and hence literary communication and intercourse is best illustrated with, for instance, (1)  Lord Byron’s role in European literature, (2) Walter Scott’s ‘medievalism,’ borrowed  from his having translated Goethe’s youthful drama Götz von Berlichingen, a love for the gothic tale subsequently replayed across Europe in a wave of historical novels. Even for Marx, according to his daughter Elanor, Scott was “an author to whom [he] again and again returned, whom he admired and knew as well as he did Balzac and Fielding” (Prawer 1976, 386); (3) Thomas de Quincey’s numerous skillful translations of German fiction; and (4) Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s propagation of German Romantic theory in respect of poetry as independent organic growth rather than mechanical construction. Coleridge’s import of ideas and Carlyle’s effect upon Victorian literature might arguably be regarded as early instantiations of what Said was to call “travelling theory” (1983, 226–247). Detective fiction inaugurated by Edgar Allan Poe is another early nineteenth-century example of how ‘trafficking’ – to use Goethe’s and Marx’s term Verkehr, usually translated as ‘circulation’ – can prompt invention of new genres (↗12 Genres of Anglophone World Literatures). British novelists propagated in imperialist educational institutions helped shape emerging narrative production in the former colonies, where today globally recognized writers like

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V. S. Naipaul and Salman Rushdie fuse them with their own cultural storytelling traditions before disseminating resultant hybrid forms back across a ‘center – periphery’ divide. Goethe’s West-östlicher Divan, his 1819 collection of lyrical poems inspired by the Persian poet Hafez (Hafiz in Said 1979, 168), models such conscious manipulation of poetic codes leading to creative invention. In order to connect the ‘orient’ to the ‘occident,’ Goethe “‘orientalized’ himself by entering the land of the poet, where he discovered a relationship between poet and political life” (Fink 1982, 321), thus demonstrating affiliations between author, poem and contemporary setting (provincial Weimar after the defeat of Napoleon and rising German patriotism), covertly speaking in the text. In extensive “Notes and Queries,” Goethe comments on Persian historical figures, events, terms and places and explains the process of literary-cultural appropriation for the purpose of making the foreign other attractive and comprehensible to the reading public (Fink, 1982, proffers insightful reconstruction of the poetic anthology’s composition while at the same time exploring what Goethe considered to be a gift the Orient donated to Europe). The Divan serves as textual monument of wechselseitige Bereicherung, reciprocal enrichment facilitated by cultural exchange. Thus, when Goethe speaks in an 1827 letter with reference to Weltliteratur of “longterm prospects for human and worldly situations” (Tgahrt et al. 1982, 415), he seems prophetically aware of how insurgent acts of cultural translation innovate and interrupt discursive performances. Moreover, Goethe suggests, encounters with other literatures help “to renew one’s own literature” by way of “aesthetic fertilization” (Tgahrt et al. 1982, 415). But these are not merely confined to revolutionary stylistic transformation of literary conventions; ‘foreign’ literature in the original and especially in translation also supplements dominant poetics. Even if one “could query the Unzulänglichkeit [insufficiency] of translation” as such, the “translator,” Goethe claims in a letter to Carlyle on July 20, 1827 with reference to the Koran, functions as the “prophet of his people” (Tgahrt et al. 1982, 9). In addition, Goethe considers the degree to which already-worked Stoff (subject matter, thematic, motifs) is adopted by another writer significant for the ‘business’ of foreign literary dissemination; the circulation of the Faust Stoff is a case in point. Likewise is the intertextual presence in a language literature other than the original evidence of adoption, for instance, in Henry James’ Ambassadors (1903) the character, Olive Chancellor, repeatedly speaks about ‘renunciation’ in Goethe’s Faustian terms (see Brooks 170).

3.2 Marx and Commercial Transaction Marx finds in Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe the Stoff for illustrating the bourgeoisie’s exploitation of labor that will eventually lead to a denuding of the aura of all that the bourgeoisie had hitherto considered valuable (cf. Prawer 1976, 273, 416). More concerned with the history of the relation between literature and social life as a whole, the exceptionally well-read Marx considers aesthetics as secondary to national and

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transnational Verkehr between people and goods (cf. Prawer 1976, 258). The global spread of capitalism, he fears, will lead to the demise of creative writing because alienated workers have neither means nor education and leisure to engage with literature of any kind. Moreover, the bourgeois, portent of what Bourdieu (2005) was to call homo economicus, attempts to maximize utility as a consumer and economic profit as a producer. Thus, for Marx even poetry had become a commodity in the “modern world and subject to its economic laws” (Prawer 1976, 142). As Prawer highlights, Marx “makes the important point that literature, however ethereally interpreted, is in the nineteenth-century society itself an item of commercial transaction. Due to increasing industrialization of literary production even early nineteenth-century writers and translators are already concerned with the ‘sale of their commodity [Absatz ihrer Ware]’” (1976, 142). Of this Goethe, but also the British Romantics, for instance Quincey (who had tried to make a living from translation of, among others, Goethe), were acutely aware of this commercialization at the dawn of an epoch that, according to Marx, made “the poet” just like “the man of science,” a “paid wage labourer”; “even poetry, then is a commodity in the modern world and subject to its economic laws” (qtd. with reference to The Communist Manifesto by Prawer 1976, 142). Marx’s assessment of culture and literary life demonstrates the influence of Hegel’s (Idealist) historical dialectics, albeit after its ‘Marxist’ transformation into Materialist Dialectics. The latter determines Marx’s view on literature epitomized in the way in which, in Prawer’s words, Marx “demonstrates again and again, his refusal to see literature apart from its context in life and history, and his concern to ‘place’ works and periods by means of judicious collocation: ‘To understand a historical epoch we must step beyond its limits, and compare it with other historical epochs’” (1976, 258); a perspective that was to influence textual analyses in the late twentieth century.

3.3 Philology and Ansatzpunkt [point of departure]: Auerbach Said’s consummate interest in Auerbach’s work encourages Anglophone American critics to shine a spotlight on the analytical usefulness of ‘philology.’ In the German scholarly tradition derived from Hegel and German Romanticism, the term functions, at first, merely as label for disciplines such as Classical Philology (Latin and Greek) or Romance Philology, with the latter bundling together literary analyses of “language families” (Said 1993, 52) like French, Italian and Spanish. Secondly, philology describes a wissenschaftliche [scientific] methodology common to the Humanities prior to the theoretical turn in the 1970s when critical reflection on method jettisoned the approach. An archival accumulation or collection of human knowledge based on a study of major swath of human (high-cultural) verbal activity in the Indo-Germanic linguistic universe had become untenable, even questionable. However, Said’s attempt to salvage aspects of Auerbach’s deep, historically informed expository reading of single texts from disparate oeuvres across a vast

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spectrum of temporal and geographical space has to be seen as a critique of structuralism’s and deconstruction’s formalist, a-historical analyses, all of which erase the dialectical relationship between self and the other. With the help of the concept Ansatzpunkt [point of departure], it might nevertheless become possible to revisit philology and make sense of diverse phenomena and epistemologies as Auerbach exemplified in Mimesis. In his essay “Philologie der Weltliteratur”, Auerbach explains how he needed to find a Handhabung [handle] for treating such an enormous amount of disparate material by way of excavating concrete and tightly circumscribed semantic Teilphänomene [partial phenomena] derived from rhetorical tradition, especially from past usage of topoi such as relations between social life and its specific representation. The Ansatzpunkt can be a rhetorical trope, a syntactic turn [syntaktische Wendung], the interpretation of one sentence, or a set of remarks made at a given time and in a given place – any of these can serve as an entry [Ansatz] to an act of textual comparison. Once chosen, such an analytical point of departure must be capable of radiating outward [muss Strahlkraft besitzen] so as to encompass, in ever-widening circles, a lasting synthesis of contrary literary-textual incidents by which interpretation is able to secure (in Hegelian fashion) veracity of its unifying undertaking. In short, analytical concentration as Ansatzpunkt foregrounds subjective, but historically informed, critical selection of materials from a body of texts. In subsequent processes of deep (semantic-rhetorical) reading, insights are not so much compounded in ‘themes’ or overarching master narratives than in fractal expositions of specific human relations and interactions, always actualized under particular historical conditions. Said utilized Auerbach’s methodological ‘point of departure’ intertwined with Vico’s ideas on certum [certainty] to arrive at Orientalism as an ensemble of particular knowledge, structures of attitude and reference. All these combine to expose coeval political, material and discursive interests at work that the West had directed at exercising power over a foreign other perceived as desirable albeit inferior (for the importance of Vico see Said’s own multiple utterances in 1983, 7; 2004a, 13, 15, 22; 2004b, 11 etc., and also among others Mufti 1998, 97 and Lindenberger 2004, 47).

3.4 Contrapuntal In Culture and Imperialism, Said fuses the notion of Ansatzpunkt with Gramsci’s (neo-Marxist) conceptualization of cultural hegemony whereby metropolitan culture dominates the peripheries. For the purpose of illustrating the question of “sustained business of the empire itself” (1993, 60), Said employs an “important point – a very Gramscian one – [asking] how the national British, French, [and] American cultures maintained hegemony over the peripheries. How within them was consent gained and continuously consolidated for the distant rule of native peoples and territories?” (1993, 59). Said replies with a method amalgamating Gramsci’s model of oppositional criticism with Auerbach’s deep historical reading that enables textual – cultural interpretation

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he names after the musicological term: ‘contrapuntal’. Contrapuntal reading, according to Lindenberger, distinguishes “between the surface elements of a text and the political unconscious to which the text, whether or not through its author’s conscious intentions, gives voice” (2004, 50). In Said’s words: As we look back at the cultural archive, we begin to reread it not univocally but contrapuntally, with a simultaneous awareness both of the metropolitan history that is narrated and of those other histories against which (and together with which) the dominating discourse acts. In the counterpoint of Western classical music, various themes play off one another, with only a provisional privilege being given to any particular one; yet in the resulting polyphony there is concert and order, an organized interplay that derives from the themes, not from a rigorous melodic or formal principle outside the work. (Said 1993, 59–60)

By utilizing polyphonic imaginings and contrapuntal readings, Culture and Imperialism famously illuminates the often-contentious interplay between ‘old classics’ from Shakespeare to Conrad and contemporary New World writings from Africa and the Caribbean. Said thus enables formerly silenced voices to be heard independently by taking recourse to Auerbach’s philologically inflected German scholarship (2004a, 18) and Marx’s association of world literature with capitalism’s relentless geographical expansion and incorporation of local singularities into the global fold. For Kenyan writer and public intellectual Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o, for instance, the “German poet and dramatist Goethe” remains a touchstone because he represents “no patriotic art and science” (2012, 44). Moreover, his world literature poses a challenge to “the organization of literature in our times” (2012, 7). Inspired by the idea of world literature that for Ngũgĩ released literary studies from the narrow confines of British imperial traditions, he sees the topos as a call “for a reordering of the process of knowing and specifically for placing the new synthesis of African, Caribbean, African-American literature and the kindred literature of Asia and Latin America at a center of a new order of knowing, and then European Literature being brought in at the edges, however centered in its own places. In short, it called for centering the post-colonial in the world of knowing” (43).

4 Bibliography 4.1 Works Cited Apter, Emily. Against World Literature. On the Politics of Untranslatability. London: Verso, 2013. Arac, Jonathan. “Edward W. Said: The Worldliness of World Literature.” The Routledge Companion to World Literature. Ed. Theo D’haen, David Damrosch, and Djelal Kadir. London and New York: Routledge, 2012. 117–125. Auerbach, Erich. “Philologie der Weltliteratur.” Gesammelte Aufsätze zur romanischen Philologie. Ed. Matthias Bormuth and Martin Vialon. Bern: Francke, 1967. 301–310.

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Bhabha, Homi K. The Location of Culture. London and New York: Routledge, 1994. Birus, Hendrik. “The Goethean Concept of World Literature and Comparative Literature.” CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture 2.4 (2000). https://doi.org/10.7771/1481-4374.1090 (15 June 2018). Bourdieu, Pierre. Distinction. A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste. Trans. Richard Nice. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1984. Bourdieu, Pierre. The Social Structures of the Economy. Cambridge and Malden: Polity, 2005. Brooks, Peter. The Melodramatic Imagination. New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1995 [1976]. Carlyle, Thomas, and Johann W. Goethe. Correspondence between Goethe and Carlyle. Ed. Charles E. Norton. London and New York: Macmillan and Co, 1887. Casanova, Pascale. The World Republic of Letters. Trans. Malcolm B. DeBevoise. London and Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2004 [1999]. Damrosch, David. “Toward a History of World Literature.” New Literary History 39.3 (2008): 481–495. Damrosch, David, and Gayatri C. Spivak. “Comparative Literature/World Literature: A Discussion with Gayatri C. Spivak and David Damrosch.” Comparative Literature Studies 48.4 (2011): 455–485. Dan, Hansong, and Ewa Wojno-Owczarska. “Introduction: Global Crises and Twenty-First-Century World Literature.” Comparative Literature Studies 55.2 (2018): 245–261. Eckermann, Johann P. Gespräche mit Goethe in den letzten Jahren seines Lebens. Ed. Regine Otto and Peter Wersig. Berlin: Aufbau, 1987. Fink, Karl J. “Goethe’s West Östlicher Divan: Orientalism Restructured.” International Journal of Middle East Studies 14.3 (1982): 315–328. Goethe, Johann W. von. Werke [Sophien edition]. Weimar: Böhlau, 1887–1919. Munich: deutscher taschenbuch verlag, 1987. Kadir, Djelal. “To World, to Globalize – Comparative Literature’s Crossroads.” Comparative Literature Studies 41.1 (2004): 1–9. Lindenberger, Herbert. “Appropriating Auerbach: From Said to Postcolonialism.” Stanford University Journal of Commonwealth and Postcolonial Studies 11.1–2 (2004): 46–55. Marx, Karl, and Friedrich Engels. “Manifesto of the Communist Party.” 1848. Trans. Samuel Moore. Great Books of the Western World. Ed. Mortimer J. Adler. Chicago: Encyclopaedia Britannica, 1994. 413–434. Mufti, Aamir R. “Auerbach in Istanbul: Edward Said, Secular Criticism, and the Question of Minority Culture.” Critical Inquiry 25 (1998): 95–125. Mufti, Aamir R. “Erich Auerbach and the Death and Life of World Literature.” The Routledge Companion to World Literature. Ed. Theo D’haen, David Damrosch, and Djelal Kadir. London and New York: Routledge, 2012. 71–80. Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o. Globalectics: Theory and the Politics of Knowing. New York: Columbia University Press, 2012. Pizer, John. “Goethe’s ‘World Literature’ Paradigm and Contemporary Cultural Globalization.” Comparative Literature 52.3 (2000): 213–227. Porter, James I. “Introduction.” Time, History, and Literature. Selected Essays of Erich Auerbach. Ed. James I. Porter. Trans. Jane O. Newman. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2013. xi–xlv. Prawer, Siegbert. Karl Marx and World Literature. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1978 [1976]. Said, Edward W. Orientalism. New York: Vintage Books, 1979. Said, Edward W. The World, the Text, and the Critic. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1983. Said, Edward W. Culture and Imperialism. London: Vintage, 1993. Said, Edward W. “Auerbach, Critic of the Earthly World.” boundary 2 31.2 (2004a): 11–34. Said, Edward W. Humanism and Democratic Criticism. New York: Columbia University Press, 2004b.

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Strich, Fritz. Goethe and World Literature. Trans. C.A.M. Sym. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1949 [1946]. Tgahrt, Reinhart, Ingrid Belke, Victoria Fuchs, Huguette Herrmann, Irina Renz, and Dieter Sulzer, eds. Weltliteratur. Die Lust am Übersetzen im Jahrhundert Goethes. Eine Ausstellung des Deutschen Literaturarchivs im Schiller-Nationalmuseum Marbach am Neckar. Munich: Koesel, 1982. Tiwari, Bhavya. “Rabindranath Tagore’s Comparative World Literature.” The Routledge Companion to World Literature. Ed. Theo D’haen, David Damrosch, and Djelal Kadir. London and New York: Routledge, 2012. 41–48. Weitz, Hans-Joachim. “‘Weltliteratur’ zuerst bei Wieland.” Arcadia 22 (1987): 206–208.

4.2 Further Reading Auerbach, Erich. Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Western Literature. Trans. Willard R. Trask, with a new introduction by Edward W. Said. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2003 [1953]. Auerbach, Erich. “Philology and Weltliteratur.” 1952. Trans. Maire Said and Edward W. Said. The Centennial Review 13.1 (1969): 1–17. Biewer, Frank. “Karl Marx (1818–1883) und Friedrich Engels (1820–1895).” Klassiker der Soziologie der Künste. Ed. Christian Steuerwald. Wiesbaden: Springer Fachmedien, 2017. 21–44. Cheah, Pheng. What Is a World? On Postcolonial Literature as World Literature. Durham: Duke University Press, 2016. D’haen, Theo, David Damrosch, and Djelal Kadir, eds. The Routledge Companion to World Literature. London and New York: Routledge, 2012. “Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1749–1832) on Weltliteratur.” Compiled by Alok Yadav, George Mason University, 2009. http://mason.gmu.edu/~ayadav/ (14 Apr. 2018).

Theo D’haen

2 Re-Reading Classical Approaches from a Postcolonial Perspective: Pascale Casanova, Franco Moretti, David Damrosch Abstract: Traditionally, Postcolonial and World Literature Studies have been at loggerheads, with most of the animosity coming from the postcolonial side. In fact, such enmity is unnecessary, as world literature studies, as propagated in the founding texts of its more recent reincarnation, not only leaves plenty of room also for postcolonial approaches but may even offer useful instruments for postcolonial readings. Key Terms: World literature, postcolonialism, translation, Anglophone literature

1 Postcolonial Literature and The Run-Up to Contemporary World Literature Studies La République mondiale des lettres (1999), translated as The World Republic of Letters (2004), “Conjectures on World Literature” (2000), and What is World Literature? (2003), the works that consecrated Pascale Casanova, Franco Moretti and David Damrosch as the godparents of contemporary world literature studies, followed closely upon the decade in which postcolonialism arguably had set the agenda in literary studies, especially so in Anglo-American academe and more generally in English literature studies worldwide. In fact, two prominent critics and theoreticians had already somewhat earlier explicitly linked postcolonialism and world literature. In 1994 Homi Bhabha, in the introduction to his essays collected in The Location of Culture, saw the emergence of a new “geopolitical space,” characterized by “new modes of cultural identification and political affect that form around issues of sexuality, race, feminism, the lifeworld of refugees or migrants, or the deathly social destiny of AIDS,” in which “the Western metropolis must confront its postcolonial history, told by its influx of postwar migrants and refugees, as an indigenous or native narrative internal to its national identity” (1994, 6). “Where, once, the transmission of national traditions was the major theme of world literature,” he said, “perhaps we can now suggest that transnational histories of migrants, the colonized, or political refugees – these border and frontier conditions – may be the terrains of world literature” (1994, 12). Even earlier, in 1986, Fredric Jameson had started off his “Third-World Literature in the Era of Multinational Capitalism” with “in these last years of the century, the old question of a properly world literature reasserts itself” before going on to say that “today the reinvention of cultural studies in the United States demands the reinvention, in a https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110583182-003

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new situation, of what Goethe long ago theorized as ‘world literature’,” and to then assert that “any conception of world literature necessarily demands some specific engagement with the question of third-world literature […]” (Jameson 2000, 318). For Jameson this led to his much-contested notion that all what he in those days before the fall of the Berlin Wall, when the world ceased to be divided into First and other Worlds, still called Third-World literature served the identitarian ambitions of newly emerging nations, the same nations whose literatures we would soon after label postcolonial. In spite of Bhabha’s and Jameson’s injunctions, Casanova, Moretti and Damrosch are not explicitly concerned with postcolonial literature as such. When they refer to authors and works we would categorize as postcolonial – including Anglophone ones – they do so from a general theoretical perspective, seeing these authors and literature(s) as obeying a set of rules, or responding to a set of conditions, that are not unique to them but that they share with other categories. Casanova and Moretti adopt a systemic perspective, trying to account for power relations obtaining between the various literatures of the world. Casanova’s time frame stretches back to Early Modernity. Moretti sticks mostly to the nineteenth century and to the novel. Damrosch proposes a sort of rule-of-thumb method for defining what qualifies a literary work as world literature and for how to read it as such.

2 Casanova In order to “describe the world republic of letters, which is to say the genesis and structure of international literary space” (Casanova 2004, 351), Casanova starts from a Bourdieusian position that sees the field of literature as for the first time autonomizing itself – that is to say: to independently establish its own rules, standards, and ways of functioning – in France in the sixteenth century, with the publication of Joachim Du Bellay’s The Defense and Illustration of the French Language in 1549. As such, and because of French linguistic and cultural hegemony from – roughly – the middle of the sixteenth to – roughly again – the middle of the twentieth century, the French literary system, centered upon Paris, becomes the arbiter also of what passes from other literatures into world literature. The clearing process involves being reviewed, translated, and distributed in the French literary system and thus being made available to the world – initially Europe but gradually the globe – beyond the work’s language and culture of origin. Mutatis mutandis, the role French literature plays for the entire world is played on a more restricted scale by all other securely ensconced national literatures vis-à-vis their outliers, that is to say authors and works from beyond the pale. Literary space, then, on all levels, is not a level playing field, but is marked by inequality. As Casanova puts it:

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Ever since 1549, when The Defense and Illustration of the French Language first appeared, mechanisms that paradoxically can only be described as both historical and transhistorical have operated on the world of letters. One observes consequences of domination that are everywhere the same, that are exerted in every place and every period in identical fashion, and that furnish universal (or almost universal) insights for understanding literary texts. […] The consequences of occupying a dominated and peripheral position are so powerful that it becomes possible to bring together writers who appear to have nothing in common. (Casanova 2004, 176)

This approach leads Casanova to group together “Franz Kafka and Kateb Yacine,” “C.F. Ramuz and writers in the French West Indies today,” or “former colonials or simply provincials” (2004, 176). All are in the same position of literary outliers. For writers in such position, two strategies offer themselves to fight their way to recognition and into the center of the literary system they aspire to join: “assimilation, or integration within a dominant literary space through a dilution or erasing of original differences” and “differentiation, which is to say the assertion of difference.” Just a little earlier she had referred to “British critics who oppose V.S. Naipaul to Salman Rushdie, setting Naipaul’s determination to assimilate the values of a literary center against Rushdie’s stance of open resistance to literary neoimperialism” (Casanova 2004, 178). From Casanova’s point of view, it is precisely the adoption of either of these strategies that joins Naipaul and Rushdie as typical representatives of writers occupying a dominated position. That they happen to be what we would call ‘postcolonial Anglophone writers’ in this view is mere coincidence. Interestingly, Casanova’s remark that differentiation happens “typically on the basis of a claim to national identity” (2004, 179) in the case of postcolonial authors, and particularly Rushdie, brings her close to Jameson’s position cited earlier, especially if we recall that Jameson also links Third-World literature to magical realism. Throughout The World Republic of Letters Casanova often refers to postcolonial authors, including Anglophone ones, a term she herself uses. She elaborates on Naipaul as an example of assimilation in a subchapter devoted to him (Casanova 2004, 209–212), and the sub-chapter “the postcolonial novel” (Casanova 2004, 119–125) mostly concentrates on Anglophone authors, even if reference is also made there to Lusophone and Francophone writers, in both cases clearly writers from beyond Portugal and France. Irish literature, and especially Joyce and Yeats, frequently are mentioned, usually in the context of small nations and their literatures, but of course they are now often discussed in a postcolonial context as well. In other words, if one recognizes what Casanova is doing from a methodological point of view, and looks further than her somewhat biased infatuation with Paris as the center of her world republic of letters, something for which she has been heavily criticized and sometimes summarily dismissed, her book has a whole range of interesting things to say about Anglophone literature and how it functions with respect to the literary center or, increasingly, centers of the English-language world, and thus implicitly also of the literary world at large in which English has taken the relieve of French as the dominant language. Invariably, though, it does so with an eye to the wider theoretical setting.

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3 Moretti Moretti, in “Conjectures on World Literature,” followed by other essays collected in Distant Reading (2013) elaborating on the ideas expressed in that first groundbreaking article as well as in earlier publications such as Modern Epic: The World System from Goethe to García Márquez (1996) and Atlas of the European Novel, 1800– 1900 (1998), and in Graphs, Maps, Trees: Abstract Models for Literary History (2005), maps models or laws from the natural, and especially the biological sciences, but also from world-systems theory as developed by the economic historian Immanuel Wallerstein (1974, 1980, 1989), upon the spread of the novel from what he sees as the core of the literary system during Modernity, that is to say France and Britain, to the rest of the world. Two things Moretti posited in that first article need highlighting. One is his claim that world literature in its fullest extension defeats all attempts to master it in the sense of actually reading a sufficient number of works to say something sensible about it. Therefore, instead of ‘close reading’ actual literary works he advocates ‘distant reading,’ scouring what specialists in various national literatures have said for similarities or correspondences between them. This practice, with an eye to what Casanova would have called “the international literary space” of the novel, allows Moretti to espy as law that when the modern novel – roughly as of the middle of the eighteenth century but particularly as of the nineteenth century – spreads beyond its French-British core territory, it gives rise to a “compromise” between foreign form and local materials, or, “simplifying somewhat: foreign plot; local characters, and then: local narrative voice” (Moretti 2013, 57). On both points mentioned Moretti was severely attacked, as well as on his daring to conjecture a generalized “world literary system” on the basis of the sole genre of the novel, and in later articles and books he modified his views somewhat, without however abandoning the gist of his initial insights. In “Evolution, World Systems, Weltliteratur” (2006) he changes his original three-partite formula to “a plot from the core, and a style from the periphery” (Moretti 2013, 132). He now also discerns “two distinct world literatures: one that precedes the eighteenth century – and one that follows it”: The ‘first’ Weltliteratur is a mosaic of separate, ‘local’ cultures; it is characterized by strong internal diversity; and is best explained by (some version of) evolutionary theory. The ‘second’ Weltliteratur (which I would prefer to call world literary system) is unified by the international literary market; it shows a growing, and at times stunning amount of sameness; its main mechanism of change is convergence; and it is best explained by (some version of) world-systems analysis. (Moretti 2013, 134–135)

This a leads Moretti to the following conclusion: A generation ago, the literature of the past used to be the only ‘great’ literature; today, the only ‘relevant’ literature is that of the present. In a sense, everything has changed. In another, nothing has, because both positions are profoundly normative ones, much more concerned with value judgments than with actual knowledge. (Moretti 2013, 135)

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If we try to translate all this into something applicable to the Anglophone world novel – Moretti himself never goes into issues of postcolonialism, and if he mentions what we would call Anglophone postcolonial novelists such as Naipaul or Rushdie, it is only in passing, and in Modern Epic, and not in his later essays on world literature; Joyce does figure more prominently – we may speculate the following: Moretti’s combination of plot from the core and local style, or local characters and local narrative voice, would seem to make sense for many Anglophone postcolonial novels, if only we think of the numerous re-writes of ‘classical’ English novels with colonial overtones. Salient examples would include Jean Rhys’s Wide Sargasso Sea and J.M. Coetzee’s Foe, but instances abound. His conclusion about the only ‘relevant’ literature today being that of the present, and his remark that this is a normative position, also would seem to be borne out by recent moves such as in Pheng Cheah’s What is a World? On Postcolonial Literature as World Literature (2016; ↗6 Global Literature, World Literature and Worlding Literature). For Cheah, using novels by Michelle Cliff, Amitav Ghosh and Nuruddin Farah as examples, postcolonial novels “generate alternative cartographies that enable a postcolonial people or a collective group to foster relations of solidarity and build a shared world in which self-determination is achieved” (Cheah 2016, 17).

4 Damrosch Damrosch’s formulation in What Is World Literature? that world literature encompasses “all literary works that circulate beyond their culture of origin, either in translation or in their original language” (Damrosch 2003, 4) now is probably the most generally accepted definition of what world literature is. As this definition allows for the possibility that “in its most expansive sense, world literature could include any work that has ever reached beyond its home base,” Damrosch adds that “[Claudio] Guillén’s cautionary focus [in the latter’s 1993 The Challenge of Comparative Literature] on actual readers makes good sense: a work only has an effective life as world literature whenever, and wherever, it is actively present within a literary system beyond that of its original culture” (Damrosch 2003, 4). One way to achieve such active presence is to include a work in an anthology to be used in a college or university setting. This is precisely what Damrosch does with the 2004 six-volume Longman Anthology of World Literature, for which he served as general editor. In a way, this was a continuation, though raised to a more systematic level, of what had already been going on as of 1995 in the various editions of the Norton Anthology of World Literature, rebaptized from the Norton Anthology of World Masterpieces, which for some forty years had concentrated almost exclusively on Western literature, under the editorship of Sarah Lawall. The Longman Anthology, along with or followed by other world literature anthologies, such as the Norton Anthology in its more recent avatars under the general editorship

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of Martin Puchner, discards any idea of American, or Euro-American, exceptionalism or cultural superiority, and instead aims to impress its target audience – primarily US students – with the contiguity of the world’s literatures. The latter include what we now call postcolonial literatures, in English as in other languages, but they are not particularly emphasized or promoted in these anthologies. Still, we could say that the expansive inclusion of the world’s literatures beyond the Euro-American ‘West’ has itself only been made possible by the postcolonial tide making room for this, and thus in a roundabout way responds to Bhabha’s injunction to make postcolonial history into a narrative internal to – in this case US – national identity. However, Gayatri Spivak, a leading postcolonial critic, in Death of a Discipline (2003) condemned such anthologies, using English translations throughout, as appropriating the world’s literatures in the service of global Americanization. Translation is also essential to Damrosch’s conception of world literature in What Is World Literature? Goethe himself, though fluent in a number of languages, was not averse to reading literature in translation – in fact, his initial thoughts on Weltliteratur, as noted by Johann Eckermann, were prompted by his reading of a Chinese novel in translation (↗1 The Beginnings of the Concept). An earlier comparatist, Albert Guérard, in his Preface to World Literature (1940), even called translation “the indispensable instrument” (1940, 17–29). “Orthodox” comparative literature scholars, though, have always spurned the use of translation. As for national literature scholars, for them too only the study of a literary work in the original can yield sufficient depth and insight. Damrosch boldly rejects these notions, and instead asserts that world literature is “writing that gains in translation” (Damrosch 2003, 281). This gain is twofold: the work’s readership is enhanced, and new possible meanings accrete to it (↗10 Anglophone World Literatures and Translation). These new meanings arise from the two other characteristics, next to its gaining in translation, Damrosch ascribes to world literature: that it “is an elliptical refraction of national literatures,” and that it “is not a set canon of texts but a mode of reading: a form of detached engagement with the world beyond our own place and time” (Damrosch 2003, 281). He clarifies: “world literature […] is a double refraction, one that can be described through the figure of the ellipse, with the source and host cultures providing the two foci that generate the elliptical space within which a work of literature lives as world literature, connected to both cultures, circumscribed by neither alone” (Damrosch 2003, 283). The constant shifting between the two foci in the ellipse – that of the reader’s time and place and that of the text’s – leads to a “detached engagement” on the part of the reader with “worlds beyond [her] own place and time” (Damrosch 2003, 281). This approach enables a scholar of world literature to tackle the most diverse works – in time and space – without being a specialist in the literature concerned or proficient in the work’s original language. From a US pedagogical perspective, where most students have no foreign language, this is a tremendous advantage. Another advantage is that it allows for at least a modicum of the kind of close

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reading that US students would be familiar with and that is almost a staple of US literature teaching. Elliptical reading thus also facilitates reading postcolonial works that in geographical and cultural terms may be far removed from the reader’s place, time, and cultural surroundings (↗9 Anglophone World Literatures and Transcultural Memory).

5 Anglophone Postcolonial Literature For Damrosch it makes no difference into which language beyond its language and culture of origin a work is translated for it to be reckoned to have become part of world literature, nor is he preoccupied with rankings or canons (↗16 Canons and Canonicity in Anglophone Literature). Still, there is no denying that in the contemporary era, because of English being the world lingua franca, a work’s being translated into English opens it up to a much wider potential readership across linguistic borders than translation into any other language. Of course, any work written in English by this very fact alone stands a better chance to make the world literature grade than a work in almost any other language, just as in the days to which Casanova refers the same held true for a work in French. These works do not need translation to circulate beyond the borders of their own culture (↗4 The King’s English and the Mother Tongue). Thus, Anglophone postcolonial works of literature are in a much more favorable position to relatively quickly gain entrance to world literature than those in lesser known languages and smaller literatures. In fact, that the postcolonial for the longest time has been identified almost exclusively as Anglophone plays into this perception. In its most extreme form this leads to another version of hegemony where Anglophone literatures around the world are promoted to be the only world literature, and the very idea of any other kind of world literature is dismissed. What used to be called the periphery thus becomes the new center – albeit a dispersed one. A salient example in this regard is Postcolonial Writing in the Era of World Literature: Texts, Territories, Globalizations, whose author, Baidik Bhattacharya, starts off by suggesting that “world literature as a paradigm to account for the globalized realities of literature is dead; the only body of writing that can claim to reconfigure the legacies of this nineteenth-century dream, and can sustain such a claim historically, is Anglophone writing” (2018, 8). Earlier postcolonialists fostered a suspicious, if not downright hostile attitude toward world literature, an attitude perhaps best summarized in two articles, by Robert Young and Elleke Boehmer, that specifically address the relationship of postcolonial literature to world literature. Young, in “World Literature and Postcolonialism,” after having briefly mentioned Moretti and then reviewed Goethe’s, Casanova’s, and Damrosch’s concepts of world literature, is careful to separate postcolonial literature from world literature on the grounds of the measure of engagement, resulting from pressures exerted upon them (or not), the works constituting them show. Young concludes:

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If world literature consists of literary works that successfully circulate internationally beyond the confines of their own borders by typically wearing their own original context ‘rather lightly’ [Damrosch 2003, 139], any work of postcolonial literature will always be riven by its own context, since it will be the literature of a culture forcibly internationalized by the impact of foreign cultures and languages from beyond, which were imposed without choice (Young 2012, 221).

Boehmer, in “The World and the Postcolonial,” and referring back to Young in his article strictly separating world literature and postcolonial literature, notes that in institutional and pedagogic terms the growth of interest in world literary perspectives does appear to be producing some convergence of the field. It may even point to a gradual marginalization – thinking of worst case scenarios, perhaps an eventual trivialization – of a branch of literary study, the postcolonial, that has conventionally committed itself to intensive interrogation and a self-reflexive commitment to margins at once structural and epistemological (Boehmer 2014, 299).

After discussing various ways in which world literature and postcolonial literary studies might intersect, she concludes: It may not be inevitable that a convergence of world and postcolonial betrays the core task of postcolonial studies, which is to make invisible exploitation visible, especially as it manifests in texts, and to allow knowledge from below to count. In the face of the powerful trend towards ‘world’ over ‘postcolonial’, this is an expectation or at least a hope that deserves vigilant critical attention and vigorous (re-)articulation at every available opportunity (Boehmer 2014, 307).

With Cheah and Bhattacharya the trend Boehmer talks about is reversed, and postcolonial literature is re-articulated as world literature, the major partner in what remains a tenuous relationship nevertheless.

6 Conclusion One can see why prominent and convinced postcolonialists such as Young and Boehmer would be suspicious of world literature. They see it as threatening the very rationale of postcolonial studies in defusing the latter’s oppositional stance toward the former colonial and present neo-colonial or neo-imperialist centers. For a postcolonialist who, like Spivak, is moreover a convinced comparative literature scholar, the heresy of translation only adds injury to insult. Still, an unbiased reading of the founding works of contemporary world literature studies shows that they leave sufficient room to accommodate postcolonial readings, and may even furnish some instruments for effectively doing so. As such, they also may prove useful for reading Anglophone works of literature.

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7 Bibliography 7.1 Works Cited Bhabha, Homi K. The Location of Culture. London and New York: Routledge, 1994. Bhattacharya, Baidik. Postcolonial Writing in the Era of World Literature: Texts, Territories, Globalizations. New Delhi: Routledge India, 2018. Boehmer, Elleke. “The World and the Postcolonial.” European Review 22.2 (2014): 299–308. Casanova, Pascale. The World Republic of Letters. Trans. Malcolm B. DeBevoise. London and Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2004 [1999]. Cheah, Pheng. What Is a World? On Postcolonial Literature as World Literature. Durham: Duke University Press, 2016. Damrosch, David. What Is World Literature? Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2003. Guérard, Albert. Preface to World Literature. New York: Henry Holt and Company, 1940. Jameson, Fredric. “Third-World Literature in the Era of Multinational Capitalism.” The Jameson Reader. Ed. Michael Hardt and Kathi Weeks. Oxford: Blackwell, 2000. 315–339. Moretti, Franco. Modern Epic: The World System from Goethe to García Márquez. London: Verso, 1996. Moretti, Franco. Atlas of the European Novel, 1800–1900. London: Verso, 1998. Moretti, Franco. Graphs, Maps, Trees: Abstract Models for Literary History. London: Verso, 2005. Moretti, Franco. Distant Reading. London: Verso, 2013. Spivak, Gayatri. Death of a Discipline. New York: Columbia University Press, 2003. Wallerstein, Immanuel. The Modern World-System I, II, III. London: Academic Press, 1974, 1980, 1989. Young, Robert J.C. “World Literature and Postcolonialism.” The Routledge Companion to World Literature, Ed. Theo D’haen, David Damrosch, and Djelal Kadir. London and New York: Routledge, 2012. 213–222.

7.2 Further Reading Bassnett, Susan, ed. Translation and World Literature. London and New York: Routledge, 2019. Damrosch, David, David L. Pike, et al., eds. The Longman Anthology of World Literature. New York: Longman, 2004. D’haen, Theo. The Routledge Concise History of World Literature. London and New York: Routledge, 2012. Ganguly, Debjani. This Thing Called the World: The Contemporary Novel as Global Form. Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2016. Helgesson, Stefan and Pieter Vermeulen, eds. Institutions of World Literature. London and New York: Routledge, 2016. Mufti, Aamir R. Forget English: Orientalisms and World Literatures. Cambridge, MA and London: Harvard University Press, 2016. Mack, Maynard, Bernard M. W. Knox, et al., eds. The Norton Anthology of World Masterpieces. New York: W.W. Norton & Co, 1979.

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Lawall, Sarah, Maynard Mack, et al., eds. The Norton Anthology of World Literature. 2nd ed. New York: W. W. Norton & Co, 2003. Puchner, Martin, Suzanne Conklin Akbari, et al., eds. The Norton Anthology of World Literature. New York: W.W. Norton & Co, 2009. Puchner, Martin, Suzanne Conklin Akbari, et al., eds. The Norton Anthology of World Literature. 3rd ed. New York: W.W. Norton & Co, 2012.

Rosinka Chaudhuri

3 Macaulay’s Magic Hat: The Colonial Education System and the Canon of World Literature Abstract: The role of English in the colonies has been understood largely as the impact of government policy imposed from above. In India, Macaulay’s Minute of 1835 has been universally blamed for the implementation of an alien language upon an indigenous population. The colonial Indian desire for English literature, however, was a conflicted impulse that was deeply imbricated also in the creation of India’s powerful modern regional languages; in each of these languages, a movement towards the consumption and creation of world literature mediated through English manifested itself creatively and critically from the nineteenth century onward. Key Terms: Modernity, postcolonial studies, world literature, Macaulay, Bengal

1 The Foucauldian Imperative Ruminations on the nature of the colonial education system to date still quite largely take recourse to the Foucauldian imperative of discourse creation within a power/ knowledge nexus. The most alarming manifestation of this in studies of the Indian colonial scene (in fact, in almost anything to do with British India) is the continued and consistent recourse taken to Macaulay’s infamous Minute of 1835, which is said to have spawned “a class of interpreters Indian in blood and colour but English in taste, opinions, morals and intellect” (1965 [1835], 117) much like a rabbit (or class of rabbits) pulled out of a magic hat. This was (and remains) a point of view not just prominent in postcolonial scholarship but also internalised by intellectuals across the board, especially by Indians themselves. Contrary to the evidence in both the historical and cultural spheres, which shows the forging of a powerful creativity often out of English/European literary and cultural materials in Indian modernity, postcolonial Indian intellectuals in denial have struggled with the notion of ‘a derivative discourse’, succumbing to a cultural cringe caused by the potentially embarrassing reality of taking part in the creation of a modernity inalienably linked to the coloniser’s cultural practices. Commenting on Partha Chatterjee’s definition of the ‘colonial modern’, a term that taints the Indian modern with the whiff of colonial compliance, Amit Chaudhuri pointed out:

https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110583182-004

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Probably one of the principal reasons that the word ‘modern’ is problematic for Indians, that modernity remains, in South Asia, an unofficial and potentially embarrassing reality in spite of being a hegemonic and foundational one, is its filial involvement with the ‘colonial’. For many South Asian historians today […] the very terms, ‘early modern’ and ‘colonial modern’, are inflected with a nostalgia for what never did happen, or what might have – an indigenous, homegrown modernity, in whose narrative the problematic moment of colonialism never occurred…. The secret, utopian longing, in India, for another, ‘purer’ modernity possibly explains why we fail to engage completely with the implications and radical achievements of this one. (Chaudhuri 2008, 105)

This “secret utopian longing” for “another ‘purer’ modernity”, “an indigenous, homegrown modernity, in whose narrative the problematic moment of colonialism never occurred”, is exactly what animates, for instance, well-known Left intellectual Samar Sen’s description of the Bengali cultural inheritance in a line in a poem addressed to his fellow countrymen: “We are Bengali; we have a Mir Jafari past, we are the fruit / Of Macaulay’s poison-tree” (Sen 2008 [1942], 319, my translation). Mir Jafar was the general who betrayed the last independent Nawab of Bengal, Sirajuddaula, to the British General Clive in 1757 at the Battle of Plassey, enabling Clive to conquer Bengal and thus India – the class of rabbits pulled out of Macaulay’s hat are here conceptualised as the poison fruit of Macaulay’s poison tree, a class of betrayers in the context of Indian history and modernity. Yet, both historically and conceptually, such an understanding of the role played by this particular 1835 amendment to government policy in British India has been vulnerable from the start. Historically speaking, it is easy enough to show that Indians themselves had demanded and attended innumerable schools since the late eighteenth century that gave them an opportunity to learn English. Dissatisfied with these private schools, they then pressurised the government itself to facilitate an English education for their sons; as the Chief Justice Sir Edward Hyde East recorded: “many of the leading Hindus were desirous of forming an establishment for the education of their children in a liberal manner as practised by Europeans of condition” (1933 [1816], 164–168). At a meeting in May 1816, a group of Calcutta citizens debated with the Chief Justice on their ambitions and requirements: When they were told that the Government was advised to suspend any declaration in favour of their undertaking, from tender regard to their peculiar opinions, which a classical education after the English manner might tread upon, they answered very shrewdly, by stating their surprise that they had any objection to a liberal education, that if they found anything in the course of it which they could not reconcile to their religious opinions, they were not bound to receive it; but still they should wish to be informed of everything that the English gentlemen learnt, and they would take that which they found good and liked best. (Parliamentary Papers, 1852–1853; emphasis added)

Calcutta already had many private schools catering to the demand for the ‘language’ – a demand predicated on the base desire for profit, no doubt. However, it was precisely ‘for the education of their children in a liberal manner’ and “to be informed of everything that the English gentlemen learnt” that the Bengalis wrestled with the authorities to

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bring into existence and build with their own money the Hindu College – the first institute for higher education in the British Empire – in 1817, almost two decades before Macaulay’s infamous Minute. (The Hindu College was not an exception, it should be noted, as this period saw Indian initiative in the establishment of many other private schools dispensing a similar education established by wealthy Indians or ‘non-official’ Europeans in Calcutta at this time.) Conceptually too, the dangers of ascribing agency (or instrumentality) almost completely to British policy and opinion in the matter of colonial education denies the complexities of the colonial situation in more ways than one, distorting the picture irrevocably. While it might be entirely tenable, like Said, to study Orientalism and maintain that it had nothing to do with the Orient that was out there, or to say, like his pupil Gauri Viswanathan, that “[h]ow the native actually responds is so removed from the colonizer’s representational system, his understanding of the meaning of events, that it enters into the realm of another history” (1990, 12), it still remains that if we focus on British ideological intention alone then we ignore the field of operation and Indian agency in the matter completely. The colonial education system was not constituted of colonial educational policy alone, but involved a far more diverse and disparate group of players, without whom the entire picture cannot be comprehended. Approaching the subject of the colonial education system from the Indian side, then, and assuming that it was jointly constituted by British policy makers, missionaries, non-official British educationists such as David Drummond or David Hare, as well as by Indians often fund-rolling many of the educational initiatives of this period, one is forced to acknowledge, as Aijaz Ahmad said some time ago in In Theory, that “the history of sedimentations which constitutes the Indian cultural formation includes much besides colonialism per se”(1994, 172). As he pointed out then, postcolonial theory, under Saidian influence, focuses on ‘Colonial Discourse Analysis’ alone, and when that happens, we are faced with the conundrum that “if we are constituted by colonialism, then the only discourse that really matters is the discourse of the colonialist” (172). Although not addressing Viswanathan’s account of colonial educational policy in India directly, Ahmad’s argument in relation to Orientalism, that it is impossible to examine “the history of Western textualities about the non-West quite in isolation from how these textualities might have been received, accepted, modified, challenged overthrown or reproduced by the intelligentsias of the colonized countries” (172) is equally applicable (still) to not just studies of the colonial educational system as a whole (always reduced only to the Macaulay moment), but to our understanding of India’s multiple modernities themselves.

2 Reconfiguring Colonial Education in India Studies of the role of English in the colonial education system of British India fall roughly into a fairly predictable pattern of opposing camps, represented by the

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pre-Saidian thesis of the now discredited David Kopf, who emphasised the role of British Orientalists in creating an Indian national consciousness through a renaissance of the arts and sciences in Bengal on the one hand, to the opposed camp supporting the Saidian argument of Gauri Viswanathan, focusing on the relationship between the institutionalisation of English in India and the exercise of colonial power; the construction of the curriculum and the operations of domination and control. Holding absolute sway during the high noon of postcolonial studies after its publication in 1990, Viswanathan’s thesis and the general approach it flags have not, it needs to be said, become less relevant with the passage of time. The operation of power in the circuits of publishing that determine academic curricula in ‘developing countries’ may have become global in its sweep in the neoliberal era, but the relationship of control and domination with regard to intellectual hegemonies persists in similar ways, even if methodologies of implementation may have changed in the present day. No less than the celebratory tones of David Kopf, however, Viswanathan’s condemnation of ‘British educational ideology’ and English literature’s role in it is onesided for its spotlight upon the instrumentality of the colonial agenda alone in her reading of the colonial scene (1990, 93). If Kopf is to be condemned by Viswanathan for his “tacit valorization of British educational policies” when he credits British Orientalism for setting in motion “the dynamics of Indian modernization” (93), then Viswanathan herself is also accountable for the attribution to the British of the transformation of English literature in India into only “an instrument for ensuring industriousness, efficiency, trustworthiness, and compliance in native subjects” (93). Almost exactly echoing Macaulay’s phrasing in the “class of interpreters” comment, she too sees that British policy would be instrumental in creating a class of men moulded by their colonial masters into compliant models of efficiency, industry, and trustworthiness. (In Left circles in post-independence India the term they would have used for such collaborators would be ‘comprador’.) With regard to her opinion, that “it is entirely possible to study the ideology of British education quite independently of an account of how Indians actually received, reacted to, imbibed, manipulated, reinterpreted, or resisted the ideological content of British literary education”, the salient point remains that it is still the study of “the ideological content” of British rule alone that remains of interest (Viswanathan 1990, 11). Adding to what Ahmad said in the quote above then, if the colonised are constituted by colonialism alone, exclusive of any agency or volition or independent response, “then the only discourse that really matters is the discourse of the colonialist” (172). If we were to assume that colonial education reconfigured the conception of literature along British and European lines in India, following which this Anglophone legacy was in turn reshaped by Indians, we would be returning to the old model of ‘impact’ and ‘influence’ upon a colonised population that then produced a discourse of imitation and mimicry. What world literature studies allows us to do instead, however, is to historicise the development of the modern notion of ‘literature’ worldwide, and to discover thereby that ‘literature’ as a category was not much older in

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France than in Bengal. Speaking of the establishment of ‘Literature’ in the French context, Roland Barthes writes that after the demise of the classical and romantic periods in France came the moment of the birth of ‘Literature’: [A]s soon as the writer ceased to be a witness to the universal, to become the incarnation of a tragic awareness (around 1850), his first gesture was to choose the commitment of his form, either by adopting or rejecting the writing of his past. Classical writing therefore disintegrated, and the whole of Literature, from Flaubert to the present day, became the problematics of language. This was precisely the time when Literature (the word having come into being shortly before) was finally established as an object. (Barthes 1977 [1953], 3)

If Literature as craft, or literature with a capital L, as Barthes put it, is the process of the poet “adopting or rejecting the writing of his past” then, as I have shown in my book on the creation of a modern literary sphere in Bengal, for instance, there too that process had begun exactly around 1850, regardless that in the context of the Indian writer, the reading of the scene has been contaminated by the advent of colonialism (cf. Chaudhuri 2013). Bengal too saw the disintegration of classical writing such that “the whole of Literature” from 1850 onward turned to “the problematics of language”. This process was defined, for Barthes, in the relationship the modern poets crafted of reconciliation with or aversion to objectified Form: The whole nineteenth century witnessed the progress of this dramatic phenomenon of concretion. In Chateaubriand it is still only a trace. […] Flaubert – to take only the typical stages of this process – finally established Literature as an object, through promoting literary labour to the status of a value; form became the end-product of craftsmanship, like a piece of pottery or a jewel (one must understand that craftsmanship was here made manifest, that is, it was for the first time imposed on the reader as a spectacle). (Barthes 1977 [1953], 4–5)

In Bengal in this period, it is the poet Michael Madhusudan Datta who was the singular architect of refashioning form to build a Literature for Bengal that was commensurate with the desires of a modern world. Reshaping the literary language and forms he inherited with violence, Madhusudan’s whole effort was exerted towards the destruction of structures of the past, and in that effort Form stood resplendent as the tool of creative action, transmuting the texture of literary Bengali forever. Whether it was in the larger than life image he projected of the poet as craftsman, his introduction of blank verse, the creation of the Bengali sonnet, his revolutionary and startling use of punctuation, or in the breaking up traditional metrical schemes in favour of direct and dramatic address, Madhusudan stood unaided in this period in his loneliness of style. Above all, Madhusudan understood himself to be a world-poet participating in world literature. His canon was not just inherited from the tales of the Ramayana, it was crafted out of the materials at hand and at his disposal, the literature of the world as it lay at his doorstep in colonial Calcutta. Giving equal valence to Kalidasa and to Virgil, he emphasised again and again, in pronouncements now famous in the

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history of Bengali literature, his wish to create literary works sculpted from his inheritance, like Borges in Argentina, of the entire European tradition. In an extraordinary passage in an early essay written in English he said: I have heard the pastoral pipe of the Mantuan Swain … I have listened to the melodies of gay Flaccus … I have heard of bloody Pharsalia, and learned to love Epicurus … I am no stranger to the eloquence of fiery Demosthenes … of calm Cicero … to Livy … to sententious Thucydides … I have heard the melodious voice of him who sang … of Rama like a Kokila: I have wept over the fatal war of the implacable Courava and the heroic Pandava: I have grieved over the suffering of her [Sakuntala] who wore and lost the fatal ring: I have wandered with Hafiz on the banks of Rocnabad and the rose-bowers of Mosellay: I have moralized with Saddi , and seen Roustom shedding tears … … but give me the literature, the language of the Anglo-Saxon! Banish Peto, banish Bardolph, banish Poins: but for sweet Jack Falstaff, kind Jack Falstaff, banish him not thy Harry’s company; banish plump Jack and banish all the world! I say, give me the language, the beautiful language of the Anglo-Saxon! (Datta 1993 [1854], 639)

A remarkable indication of the sort of literary mind that came into existence in Calcutta by the mid-nineteenth century, to say that such a creative genius was simply the product of a colonial education in English imposed from above by Macaulay would be to fall far short of the truth. Yet later literary historians and writers have either celebrated him for his turn from English to Bengali poetry as representative of the nationalist impulse, or dismissed him for too much ‘Western influence’ on his work. Michael’s affiliations in world literature show him to be, rather, an offshoot of the cosmopolitanism of a city that engendered a worldliness produced by a consumption of regenerated Indian literatures as well as world literatures in translation.

3 Constructing a Canon If there was a canon being put into place in colonial Calcutta in the early nineteenth century, then that canon was not of Bengali/Indian literature alone. The teachers at Fort William College had been printing Indian texts in Indian languages in Calcutta from 1800 onward with the help of Indian interlocutors, and in the reverse direction the School Book Society too had been presenting the British canon to Indian students in text book publications that were the first of their kind. In another first and perhaps singular instance, when D.L. Richardson published A Selection of British Poets in 1840 as a textbook reader for students in India, he added at the end of his anthology a selection of Indian poets writing in English from Calcutta – Derozio, Kasiprasad Ghosh, the Dutts – including his near contemporaries in Calcutta within the canon; a rare moment of inclusion in an otherwise divided colonial sphere. Wordsworth would not be taught alongside Derozio again in India until after Indian independence when

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Indian Boards of Education began to insert Indian poetry written in English alongside the British in school English Readers. Curiously, when the Bengali canon began first to be constructed in Calcutta in the early nineteenth century, it was in the English language. When Kasiprasad Ghosh wrote ‘On Bengali Writers’ in 1831 for the India Gazette, he was constructing a canon for the Bengali reader in much the same way that the Bengali poet Iswar Gupta subsequently constructed a canon when he collected the fast-vanishing materials of his immediate predecessors and published them first in his Bengali newspaper, the Sambad Prabhakar, and then in book form (Kabijibanī) in 1855. From mid-century onward, both languages began to be used to collate and define the canon and give it shape and substance. The leading writer of late nineteenth-century Bengal, Bankimchandra Chattopadhyay’s two influential English essays (“A Popular Literature for Bengal”, 1870; “Bengali Literature”, 1871) were brief critical essays-cum-histories which were of no mean significance to the newly educated classes reading them (both started out as review essays). This was a time when the canon was being invented and put into place side by side with the first important modern works making their way into the public sphere. Thus in “Bengali Literature”, Bankim starts with medieval poets Mukundaram and Vidyapati, but very quickly comes to “the present writers in Bengali”, reviewing not only the work of immediate predecessors such as Madhusudan or Kaliprasanna Singha, but also, straight-faced, the works of a “Babu Bankim Chandra Chatarji” [sic] the author of works such as “Kapal Kundala”, summarising his own work at great length in this article that was first published anonymously in the Calcutta Review. The fluid, excitable and nebulous nature of the circumstances of the birth of modern Bengali literature becomes apparent from such instances, and although the story of the evolution of the language would not be complete for another fifty years, by which time both a firm conception of a ‘high cultural’ Bengali and a demarcated space occupied by the academic professional would take over, the importance of this formative period lies exactly in the unresolved nature of many of the most important categories of analysis as these evolved over time. If, in the early period, the emphasis had been on a world literary inheritance, with Madhusudan and Bankimchandra both emphasising the creative gains of a Western literary inheritance, by the turn of the nineteenth century, as the high nationalist Victorian period solidified into place in the Bengali public sphere, a far more conservative and xenophobic conception of literary inheritance was put into place by nationalists. Madhusudan’s allegiances to all of European literature are legendary, but fewer realise that Bankimchandra too was a prominent exponent of the Anglicist school, having displayed no qualms in remarking, in 1870, on the “pleasure” with which he turned to the “Anglicist” school of Bengali writers after having dealt with the Sanskrit school, whose writings, he felt, were full of “tautology and bombast” (Chattopadhyay 1998 [1873], 109). A decade later, Haraprasad Sastri remarked that the astonishing and exponential growth of Bengali literature from Madhusudan’s

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Tilottomasambav onward was made possible by a situation more exciting than that of the European renaissance, for in Bengal it was not only classical Greek literature that was regained, but all of the hidden treasures of the East and West…. For in our country today has arrived the literature of England, France, Germany, Italy, that of the ancient Hindus and Buddhists… and none are better equipped than Young Bengal to take advantage of this variety of literatures for new creations (qtd. in Chakravorty 2004, 35).

Meanwhile, Bengali books that attempted to collate, preserve and re-present a canon inclusive of medieval and early modern texts and poets to the Bengali reading public had started from Iswar Gupta’s own series of the lives and works of preceding poets published serially in the Sambad Prabhakar from 1855–1859. Subsequently, a great number of books on the subject of Bengali literature and language had all continued in the same line in a variety of highly lauded publications. Following in the footsteps of essayists such as Akshaychandra Sarkar, it was literary historian Dineshchandra Sen who began, towards the end of the century, to denounce ‘foreign influence’ wherever he had found it in Bengali literature the most vehemently, whether in the Persian inflections of eighteenth-century literature or even more so in the vile predilection of the newly educated classes of Bengal for English literature at the expense of their own inheritance. Such grumblings were not unique to him alone, but occasionally informed the criticism of writers stretching from Bankimchandra to Rabindranath Tagore as they eclectically searched for something they could call their own in their tradition, but Dineshchandra was decrying ‘foreign influence’ certainly the most consistently, the most vehemently, and crucially, the most authoritatively, from within the context of his establishment in the academy, joining the Bengali department at Calcutta University as a Reader in 1909 and remaining associated with the university until 1932. When Dineshchandra published the History of Bengali Language and Literature (1911), in a remarkable section called “A New Ideal in the Country”, he held forth on what he called “the descent” of Bengali culture from the lofty ideals of Hindu spiritualism to the materialist culture of European civilisation. Taking unproblematically for granted some essential category he defined as “the Bengali race”, he maintained that “the literature of the Bengali race” might be comparatively small in scope, “but within its own narrow limits, it is deeper and purer than one could expect from a literature covering a wider range” (Sen 1911, 741). Erratic punctuation and breathless hyphenation attend the long and convoluted passage that followed: From the home to the world – it was a descent from the Himalayas to the plains…. from the great example of Bhisma and Rama – cherished in the heart of every Hindu – the loftiest like the loftiest peak of the Himalayas, – to the stories of Duval’s assiduity in learning, and Sir Philiph [sic] Sydney’s offering his cup of water to the dying soldier; – from the pursuit and acquisition of Yoga to the knowledge of Geographical catechism, – to be able to point out Popocatapetl [sic] on a map of the globe, – from the celestial songs of Radha and Krishna, which, while gratifying all our yearnings for the loftiest of human love, have kept a door constantly open heavenwards, – to

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the stories of Paul and Virginia or of Aeneas and Dido, – the descent is as great as one from the Himalayas to the plains. (Sen 1911, 741–742)

“From the home to the world” – Dineshchandra is accurate in his understanding that the nineteenth-century Bengali cultural sphere was essentially an amalgam of the East and West and rooted in ‘the world’, but his perception of it is as a “descent” from lofty Hindu spirituality to the materialism of the Western world came from a feeling of degradation that was an essential component of the nationalist thought of the time. Consequently, there was a striving to carve out an impossible separate sphere of communal achievement and valour by constituting a domain comprising a past inheritance that was untainted by colonial rule (whether Muslim or British); that would, in Aurobindo Ghosh’s words at the time, “found a new and victorious art, literature, science and philosophy which will not be European but Indian” (1996, 404). Yet practitioners of culture, however much they strained, like Dineshchandra Sen did, to imagine a ‘pure’ spiritual past still materially flourished in the cross-breeding engendered by colonial rule in an unavoidable cosmopolitanism of contact. Dineshchandra affirms, against the grain of the cosmopolitan culture that he himself inhabits, that culture takes root in unmediated identity – in as much as we speak one native language, we belong to a specific cultural world of one self, one culture, one language, opting for a “fixed relation of force with one group, or one state” in surrender to “the temptation of ‘Unity-Identity’” (Blanchot 1993, 125). At this moment around 1900, when in any major world metropolis, ethnographic selffashioning allowed the self to be culturally constituted as one might choose, as Conrad, for instance, chose to be an English writer, or a century before in Calcutta, the Portuguese Antony Firingi had chosen to be a Bengali singer-songwriter, Dineshchandra Sen sees, instead, that the individual is bound up in one culture alone. Such a reading of culture is inalienably tied up with, of course, a robust invocation of nationalist purpose. It is worth noting, therefore, in the context of world literature, that the categorical construction of the domain of ‘Literature’ had been undertaken the world over in the era of nation formation. If, extending what Benedict Anderson has shown with regard to the novel and newspaper in the era of print capitalism and its role in imagining the nation, we can turn the lens around toward the construction of the very category of the ‘literary’ the world over in this period, it might be possible to show that what happened in colonial Calcutta, and by extension in colonial India, was not so different in time and scale from similar developments elsewhere. Rather than understand the formation of literary canons and conventions in colonial India as the consequence of the colonial, Macaulayan imposition of the English language from above, it may be possible then to conceptualise the birth of world literature as the result of the unavoidable pressures of modernity and colonial contact. Undoubtedly, Goethe’s conversations with Eckermann about world literature were facilitated by publications enabled by British and French colonial

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conquest – engendering an understanding of world literary production such as had not existed in the century before – existing side by side with the reconstruction of the ancient canons of Germany or India in a synchronic development across many parts of the world. What has not been acknowledged so far, however, is that this parallel stream of world and nation coming together to constitute both world literature and national literatures in Europe was similar to developments in India in the nineteenth century, notwithstanding the fact that it was, in part, the violence of colonial imposition that brought these currents to the subcontinent’s shores. The welcoming of the world into literary formation by a great writer like Madhusudan stood parallel to the rejection of the world in the construction of a pure literary past by a nationalist literary historian such as Dineshchandra – the allegiance to world literature having always existed in some tension with overpowering nationalist sentimentality about the mother tongue and its autochthonous productions.

4 Conclusion The problematic notions of territoriality that mark any examination in India of a writer’s sources had, by the time of the bi-lingual Kannada poet, A.K. Ramanujan, been displaced from the arena of vernacular literature to that of Indian writing in English; the defence however, sounds remarkably similar right up to the present day. Ramanujan defended the Indian writer’s multi-cultural provenance by asserting: “After the nineteenth century, no significant Indian writer lacks any of the three traditions: the regional mother tongue, the pan-Indian (Sanskritic […] Perso-Arabic […]), and the Western (mostly English). Poetic, not necessarily scholarly, assimilation of all these three resources in various individual ways seems indispensable” (qtd. in Seely 2004, 539). Even late into the twentieth century, Ramanujan’s position was a defence in the face of critics in the same nativist/nationalist lineage as Dineshchandra; only the partly understandable worry of literary critics in an era of national struggle against colonialism had now been displaced into an attack more particularly on the global provenance of Indian writing in English. Thus Vikram Chandra, accused by Meenakshi Mukherjee of selling Indianness to the West, a commonplace charge in India since the 1990s, retorts that “this anxiety about the anxiety of Indianness”, was one that he constantly heard, “in conversations, in critical texts, in reviews” (2000, n.pag.). And Indians who wrote in English were one of the prime locations for this rhetoric to test itself, to make its declarations of power and belonging, to announce its possession of certain territories and its right to delineate lines of control. In his justification, Chandra then goes to Borges’s seminal essay, “The Argentine Writer and Tradition” (1970 [1951]), concluding that what the exhaustively cosmopolitan and erudite Borges is arguing for in this essay is for the “freedom of

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artists to choose their tropes from wherever they see fit” (Chandra 2000, n.pag.). Borges, as is well known, had asserted (very much in the spirit of Michael Madhusudan, as I have said above): What is Argentine tradition? I believe that this question poses no problem and can easily be answered. I believe that our tradition is the whole of Western culture, and I also believe that we have a right to this tradition, a greater right than that which the inhabitants of one Western nation or another may have. (Borges 1951, 218)

The Indian appropriation of the canon of world literature has a similar relationship to Borges’s in the relationship modern Indian writers have had with the European canon since at least 1850. An appropriation of the scene of the implementation of colonial education policy to suit their own ends in the nineteenth century (to take that which they found good and liked best) resulted in a refashioning of the regional languages of India (including English) into powerful modern literatures that were emblematic of the larger career of the modern in India. Incorporating, from the start, a mix of heterogeneous influences, and unapologetic about its graft of a variety of cultural inheritances, including its own rich classical and folk and popular traditions, modern Indian writing entered the world literature canon a while ago. The question remains – how many have any awareness of this entry?

5 Bibliography 5.1 Works Cited Ahmad, Aijaz. In Theory: Classes, Nations, Literatures. Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1994. Ball, Upendra Nath. Rammohun Roy: A Study of His Life, Works and Thoughts. Calcutta: U. Ray and Sons, 1933. Blanchot, Maurice. The Infinite Conversation. Trans. Susan Hanson. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993. Barthes, Roland. Writing Degree Zero. Trans. Annette Lavers and Colin Smith. New York: Hill and Wang, 1977. Borges, Jorge Luis. “The Argentine Writer and Tradition.” 1951. Labyrinths. By Borges. Trans. James E. Irby. London: Penguin, 1970. Chandra, Vikram. “The Cult of Authenticity.” Boston Review: A Political and Literary Forum. Feb. 2000. http://bostonreview.net/vikram-chandra-the-cult-of-authenticity (14 Oct. 2019). Chattopadhyay, Bankimchandra. “A Popular Literature for Bengal.” 1870. Bankim Rachanavali, vol. 3. Calcutta: Sahitya Sansad, 1998. 97–103. Chattopadhyay, Bankimchandra. “Bengali Literature.” 1873. Bankim Rachanavali, vol. 3. Calcutta: Sahitya Sansad, 1998. 103–124. Chakravorty, Swapan. Bangalir Ingreji Sahitya Charcha. Calcutta: Anustup, 2004. Chaudhuri, Amit. Clearing A Space: Reflections on India, Literature and Culture. Ranikhet: Black Kite, 2008.

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Chaudhuri, Rosinka. The Literary Thing: History, Poetry, and the Making of a Modern Cultural Sphere. Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2013. Datta, Michael Madhusudan. “The Anglo-Saxon and the Hindu.” 1854. Madhusudan Rachanabali. Calcutta: Sahitya Samsad, 1993. 630–635. Ghosh, Aurobindo. “The Awakening Soul of India.” 1909. On Nationalism. 2nd ed. Pondicherry: Sri Aurobindo Ashram, 1996. 403–407. Great Britain, Parliamentary Papers, 1852–1853, Evidence of William Wilberforce Bird. Kopf, David. British Orientalism and the Bengal Renaissance: The Dynamics of Indian Modernization, 1773–1835. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1969. Macaulay, Thomas B. “Minute on Indian Education.” 1835. Bureau of Education: Selections from Educational Records, Part I (1781–1839). Ed. H. Sharp. Delhi: National Archives of India, 1965. 107–117. Sen, Dineshchandra. Bangla Bhasha O Sahitya. Calcutta: Calcutta University Press, 1896. Sen, Dineshchandra. History of Bengali Language and Literature. Calcutta: Calcutta University Press, 1911. Sen, Dineshchandra. Gharer Katha O Jugsahitya. Calcutta: Saraswatkunja, 2010 [1922]. Sen, Samar. “Pancham Bāhini” [“Fifth Column”]. 1942. Trans. Rosinka Chaudhuri. Memory’s Gold: Writings on Calcutta. Ed. Amit Chaudhuri. New Delhi: Penguin, 2008. 319–320. Viswanathan, Gauri. Masks of Conquest: Literary Study and British Rule in India. London: Faber and Faber, 1990.

5.2 Further Reading Benjamin, Walter. Selected Writings, vol. 2: 1927–1934. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999. Bose, Buddhadeva. “Sanskrita kavita o ‘Meghduta.’” Kalidaser Meghduta. Calcutta: M.C. Sarkar and Sons, 1975 [1957]. Chaudhuri, Amit. Origins of Dislike. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018. Das, Sisir Kumar. A History of Indian Literature: 1800–1910: Western Impact, Indian Response. Delhi: Sahitya Akademi, 2005. Kaviraj, Sudipta. “The Two Histories of Literary Culture in Bengal.” Literary Cultures in History Reconstruction from South Asia. Ed. Sheldon Pollock. Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2007. 503–566. McDonald, Peter D. Artefacts of Writing: Ideas of the State and Communities of Letters from Matthew Arnold to Xu Bing. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018. Mehrotra, Arvind Krishna. Partial Recall: Essays on Literature and Literary History. Ranikhet: Permanent Black, 2011.

Carrol Clarkson

4 The King’s English and the Mother Tongue Abstract: This chapter addresses topical concerns about English as a dominant language in world literature. As a way of focusing the discussion, it pays close attention to the prefatory material of a selection of monolingual English dictionaries, which offer insights about English and its transnational encounters, contacts, and conflicts with other languages and cultures. What threat does English as a world language pose to freedom of expression and to the diversity of human thought? What potential is there for a distinctive literature of resistance and transformation when this literature is written in English, in a former British colony? The chapter explores these questions by revisiting debates from the 1960s about African literature, and then moves on to consider ways in which a few contemporary novels and critical texts in the field of world literature use the dictionary as a theme, or as a formal literary-critical device for thinking through questions such as the relation between language, identity, and political transition. Key Terms: English, language, dictionary, colonisation, monolingualism

1 Introduction In 1604 Robert Cawdrey compiled and published the first monolingual English dictionary. The title page announces the book with some fanfare: it is a “Table Alphabeticall” conteyning and teaching the true writing, and vnderstanding of hard vsuall English wordes, borrowed from the Hebrew, Greeke, Latine, or French & c. With the interpretation thereof by plaine English words, gathered for the benefit & helpe of Ladies, Gentlewomen, or any other vnskilfull persons. (Cawdrey 2015, 37; emphasis in the original)

This elaborate title page captures our attention, not least because of Cawdrey’s designation of his intended readership, which may strike contemporary readers as patronising in its pronouncement that women need “plaine English words” to help them to understand the meanings of the difficult ones – especially in Scriptures and Sermons. Yet Cawdrey seems genuinely concerned to diversify and strengthen interlocutory agencies, making it possible for women and other less privileged groups to take up competent and credible positions as speaking subjects. The dynamics of the interlocutory forces at work when women take up positions as speaking subjects invites a separate essay of its own (see Clarkson 2018); of interest for the purposes of this https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110583182-005

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chapter, however, is that the “hard vsuall English wordes” refer quite specifically to loan words from other languages: even the very first ‘monolingual’ English dictionary is paradoxically occasioned by the recognition that the language is inherently multilingual. This chapter addresses concerns about the dominant role of English in world literature, and as a way of shedding light on aspects of current debates, it pays close attention to the prefatory material of a selection of English dictionaries, including Robert Cawdrey’s Table Alphabeticall (1604), Samuel Johnson’s A Dictionary of the English Language: An Anthology (1755), Noah Webster’s American Dictionary of the English Language (1828), and the Dictionary of Untranslatables: A Philosophical Lexicon (2014), edited by Emily Apter, Jacques Lezra, and Michael Wood. The Dictionary of Untranslatables in its turn is a translation of Barbara Cassin’s Vocabulaire européen: Dictionnaire des intraduisibles, first published in 2004. Monolingual English dictionaries seem to epitomize all the entanglements of English in its “contact zones.” Mary Louise Pratt inaugurates “contact zone” as a critical concept, and goes on to explain: “I use this term to refer to social spaces where cultures meet, clash, and grapple with each other, often in contexts of highly asymmetrical relations of power” (1991, 34). The headwords in a dictionary relay a history of shifting margins of exposure to other cultures and languages, of political clashes and asymmetries, of colonial arrogations of power and its aftershocks. Dictionarymakers, in different ways, draw attention to these contact zones in their prefaces and introductions, so that it is possible to pick out a sociolinguistic narrative long before sociolinguistics itself became an established scholarly field in its own right. Since Johnson’s project of 1755, English dictionaries typically use examples from literature and other writings to illustrate standard definitions of words. The relations – and the tensions – between meaning and use, prescription and description, normative and innovative uses of language are thus epitomized in the dictionary, making it an invaluable resource in an enquiry about the language of literature. In brief then: this chapter does things with dictionaries to highlight central concerns about English in the field of “World Literature” – a field that itself is contested, at least in part thanks to the prevalence of English.

2 Monolingualism and the English Dictionary Jacques Derrida can certainly be credited for bringing the problem of monolingualism into philosophical focus. “I only have one language; it is not mine,” says the interlocutor in Derrida’s Monolingualism of the Other, “I would not be myself outside it. It constitutes me […] Yet it will never be mine […] And, truth to tell, it never was” (1998, 1–2). J.M. Coetzee, reflecting on Derrida’s text in a letter to Paul Auster, writes:

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English may not after all be the property of the English of England, but it is certainly not my property. Language is always the language of the other. Wandering into language is always a trespass. And how much worse if you are good enough at English to hear in every phrase that falls from your pen the echo of earlier usages, reminders of who owned the phrase before you! (Coetzee 2013, 67)

Monolingualism in all its complexity is at the core of Yasemin Yildiz’s Beyond the Mother Tongue: The Postmonolingual Condition (2012). Monolingualism, for Yildiz, is not only an object of study; she makes the compelling argument that monolingualism has become a paradigm for thinking, a “structuring principle” that orchestrates the functioning of social life. The “monolingual paradigm” generates conceptions of self, it forms disciplines and institutions, and defines the contour of “imagined collectives such as cultures and nations” (Yildiz 2012, 2). Thanks to globalisation, migration, and challenges to the concept of the nation-state, multilingualism is regaining visibility, but always against the backdrop of this monolingual paradigm; hence Yildiz’s use of the term ‘postmonolingual’ (rather than ‘multilingual’), which enables her to take due cognizance of historical and contextual repercussions of the monolingual paradigm. Yildiz offers a sustained analysis, but Robert Cawdrey, at the outset of the seventeenth century, already broaches unsettling questions about the very notion of ‘monolingualism’ with the publication of his dictionary. Thanks to their unprecedented contact with foreign languages in the early years of British imperialism, native English speakers need assistance with the mother tongue. Cawdrey, and Johnson after him, express a certain anxiety about the inherently multilingual quality of English: you speak other languages without intending to, when you speak ‘English’ and it is no simple matter to draw a sharp line between ‘other’ languages, and your own. To put it another way, the monolingualism – or “true writing” of English as Cawdrey would have it – is an aftereffect of its multilingualism. The Table Alphabeticall was not intended as a specialist glossary of foreign words; it is a list of the hard usual English words from other languages. Nevertheless, Cawdrey seems rather outraged by these words’ foreignness, even as he admits them into the field of ordinary English. In an introductory section “To the Reader,” Cawdrey writes: Some men seek so far for outlandish English, that they forget altogether their mothers language, so that if some of their mothers were aliue, they were not able to tell, or vnderstand what they say, and yet these fine English Clearks, will say they speak in their mother tongue; but one might well charge them, for counterfeyting the Kings English. Also, some far-iournied gentlemen, at their returne home, like as they loue to go in forraine apparrell, so they will pouder their talke with ouer-sea language. He that cometh lately out of France will talk French English, and neuer blush at the matter. Another chops in with English Italianated, and applyeth the Italian phrase to our English speaking […]. (Cawdrey 2015, 41)

Native English speakers in Cawdrey’s account scandalously flit off to foreign parts, bringing back outlandish words into the home language, speaking in tongues that

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even their mothers do not understand. Hence, paradoxically, the need for a ‘monolingual’ dictionary – but in the process of compiling the lexicon, the parameters of that language have been troubled; it is no longer even certain that ‘the King’s English’ and the ‘mother tongue’ are commensurate. More than two hundred years after Cawdrey’s Table, Noah Webster set about compiling An American Dictionary of the English Language – (published in 1828). After writing through two letters of the alphabet, Webster came to a halt. “I found myself embarrassed, at every step,” he writes, “for want of a knowledge of the origin of words.” He embarks upon “a diligent comparison of words” himself, consulting dictionaries “in about twenty languages” (2010, iii). It is clear that, at the very least, the early monolingual English lexicographers were very much aware that English owes its provenance to a multilingual world. As Aamir Mufti would put it, English never has been out of “hearing range” of other languages (Mufti 2016, 160). Even in contemporary standard English handbooks, the question of foreign words in English proliferates uncertainty about the “home” language, inviting thoughts about borders and liminal zones, and even touching on questions about the complicities and responsibilities of its speakers. The 2013 Style Guide for the Modern Humanities Research Association alerts its readers: “There is great inconsistency between dictionaries (and sometimes within the same dictionary) as to the use of accents and other diacritics in words borrowed from other languages” (Richardson et al. 2013, 20). The instructions proceed with confidence as the reader is assured that “Two cases are, however, clear.” The fog soon settles on the first case, though: When a word or, more often, an expression is still felt to be foreign (and an objective decision is not always possible), all diacritics should be retained. (Richardson et al. 2013, 20; emphasis added)

The phrase “felt to be foreign” is set against “regular English usage” in a later instruction: We recommend that […] diacritics should be dropped in the case of words that have passed into regular English usage. (Richardson et al. 2013, 21)

Taken together these two prescriptions make assumptions about the reader, who is now tacitly complicit in a shared understanding of what feels foreign, of drawing a linguistic line between us and them, the foreigners and regulars.

3 Dr Johnson in Johannesburg, 1993 In a letter sent to Lord Chesterfield in 1747, Dr Samuel Johnson sets out his proposal – his “Plan” – for a dictionary of the English language. The “chief intent,” as stated in the proposal, is to “preserve the purity” of the language (2005, 4). Almost immediately,

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though, Johnson is obliged to admit that this “purity” is a myth. The English language has never been “in a state of uniformity and perfection”; instead it is a compound “thrown together” (2005, 11), arriving “under the direction of chance” (2005, 21). It is in a state of “wild exuberance, resigned to the tyranny of time and fashion, and exposed to the corruptions of ignorance and the caprices of innovation” (2005, 21). If Johnson’s overarching aim is to “fix the English language” (2005, 8), this comes with the rather grudging admission that imperfections and foreign loan words have fallen into such common use that they will have to be included in his dictionary: native speakers of English will expect to find them. In both the proposal, and the preface (which was published together with the dictionary in 1755), we sense an ever stronger undertow: Johnson’s ideals of purity and fixity are exposed as unrealistic, and his own heightened anxiety about the state of the English language reads as a cross-current of imperialist fluster. In justifying his admission of words he considers “alien” (2005, 5), Johnson speaks of “the consequence of long intermixture and frequent use,” the vexations of “assimilation” and “naturalization;” the burden of “the acquisition of a kind of property among us.” Of the litany of irregularities, defects, anomalies, improprieties, capriciously pronounced vowels, Johnson has this to say: they are not errours in orthography, but spots of barbarity impressed so deep in the English language, that criticism can never wash them away; these therefore, must be permitted to remain untouched. (Johnson 2005, 23)

Johnson insistently speaks of “our language” (emphasis added; cf. 2005, 4, 5, 9, 10, 11, 12, 21, and so on), as if there is no question of whose language it is. Despite his explicit intentions to consolidate and stabilise the English language, as if it were a fixable, discrete, and containable object, Johnson repeatedly invites thoughts about the speakers of the language and the contact zones in which they find themselves: foreign words in English tell of travelers, explorers, imperialists, and colonisers. English “has received additions from very distant regions,” Johnson writes in his proposal, “so that in search of the progenitors of our speech, we may wander from the tropic to the frozen zone, and find some in the vallies of Palestine and some upon the rocks of Norway” (2005, 10). In the concluding paragraphs of the proposal, Johnson compares himself to Caesar, and his aspirations for his dictionary take on the cast of a colonial siege: though I should not complete the conquest, I shall at least discover the coast, civilize parts of the inhabitants, and make it easy for some other adventurer to proceed farther, to reduce them wholly to subjection, and settle them under laws. (Johnson 2005, 19)

It is as if Johnson sets up his dictionary to become a bridgehead in the field of language. The impact of a certain English linguistic imperialism has become one of the preoccupations in current world literature debates, and even though Dr Johnson is not explicitly mentioned in these debates, his work – and that of other monolingual

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English dictionary-makers – cuts to the quick of current debates: I am thinking specifically of books by Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o, Gauri Viswanathan, Yasemin Yildiz, and Aamir Mufti. South African novelist Ivan Vladislavić (↗5 Rethinking English Studies, ↗25 Southern Africa) is keenly aware of the uncomfortable ambiguities in Johnson’s dictionary, where talk of the words themselves shades over into thoughts about their speakers. His novel, The Restless Supermarket (2001), is set in Johannesburg in 1993, that is to say, the year before South Africa’s first democratic elections. The protagonist, Aubrey Tearle, like Johnson before him, takes it upon himself to fix the English language – but in South Africa’s time of political and legal transition. Vladislavić plays on Johnson’s inevitable slippage between language and use, and through the fictional character of Aubrey Tearle, we reread Johnson with a heightened sense of the dangerous political impact of an Anglo-centred xenophobia. Aubrey Tearle is a retired proofreader of telephone directories, but if he had had his way – or a better start in life – as Tearle himself puts it, he would have been a proofreader of dictionaries. “All change is of itself an evil” writes Johnson in his proposal to Lord Chesterfield in 1747 (Johnson 2005, 7); “Changing with the times is not for us. Staying the same is our forte” says the Aubrey Tearle of The Restless Supermarket in the South Africa of the 1990s, “changing with the times won’t save us” (Vladislavić 2001, 9). Tearle does not tolerate any deviation from his own sense of settlement and entitlement, and Vladislavić, through shifts in narrative register (sometimes even within the same sentence) shows that this intolerance is linguistic as much as it is xenophobic. “Every error matters,” (says Tearle), not least because admitting even one into respectable company opens the door to countless others. Everyone welcome! the cry goes up, and the portals are flung wide. Only by striving for perfection, and regretting every failure to achieve it, can the hordes be kept at bay. (Vladislavić 2001, 96)

At one point Tearle explicitly states that he is “with Dr Johnson” when it comes to referring to examples of use – and he is obliged to admit that language is “changing all the time.” Nevertheless, he is a stickler (“we must have standards of correctness. What would be the point of having dictionaries at all if that were not the case?”, Vladislavić 2001, 238), and any departure from the received “standard” of the overriding colonial language in South Africa reminds him of the contingency and transience of his own position of cultural and political dominance in a South Africa moving towards democracy. Even though Aubrey Tearle is aware of the tension between langue and parole – the tension between the supposedly stable structure of language and the vagaries of its everyday use – it is clear that he clings to ideas of correctness as if language were a Saussurean synchronic system. One of the innovations of Dr Johnson’s dictionary was its reliance on literary examples of use to clarify the definitions of words. Johnson admitted that English syntax is “too inconstant to be reduced to rules, and can be only learned by the dis-

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tinct consideration of particular words as they are used by the best authors” (Johnson 2005, 12). But instead of simply ratifying received practices, literary examples widen the fault line between normative and creative uses of language; the dictionary vacillates between prescription and description, and Johnson finds himself citing – but then censuring – even the most celebrated writers of his day for their supposedly deviant use of English. In his preface Johnson writes: The words which our authours have introduced by their knowledge of foreign languages, or ignorance of their own, by vanity or wantonness, by compliance with fashion, or lust of innovation, I have registred as they occurred, though commonly only to censure them, and warn others against the folly of naturalizing useless foreigners to the injury of the natives. (Johnson 2005, 27)

Johnson’s own turn of phrase wilfully conflates words and their users, to the extent that his way of engaging with “the best authors” touches a nerve. In his original proposal for the dictionary, Johnson notes that some words in his lexicon are marked as “impure and barbarous” (2005, 16); he laments that they “occur too frequently, even in the best writers” and must be eradicated since they contribute to the “depravation of the language” (2005, 17). In turning to examples of literary use in the compilation of his dictionary, Johnson thus also played a foundational role in establishing the idea of an English literary canon, framing perceptions of who “the best authors” are, and prescribing what kind of language counts as literary (see especially Johnson 2005, 17–18). Johnson can certainly be censured for his linguistic bombast but he is not completely oblivious to his own misguided hubris. Towards the end of the preface he acknowledges that neither reason nor experience could justify the expectations set out in his proposal. In a society stratified by class, where “one part of the community is sustained and accommodated by the labour of another” linguistic variation and change is inevitable, and “only in an insular society with no time for arts would the language remain fixed” (2005, 38–9). In brief then: even a cursory glance at some of the early monolingual English dictionaries means it is hardly surprising that the question of English as the dominant language of world literature should be ground for discussion.

4 African Literature and the English Language In his preface to the American Dictionary of the English Language (1828) Noah Webster cites Dr Johnson as saying that “the chief glory of a nation arises from its authors” (Webster 2010, v), but this is a misquotation: Johnson had written “The chief glory of every people arises from its authours,” before going on to speculate whether he would add anything to the appreciation of English literature through his own writings (Johnson 2005, 40). Webster’s version of Johnson’s claim, with its shift from “people” to “nation” may not seem different or interesting enough to warrant further

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discussion. Yet for both Johnson and Webster English is at once a home language and a national language, and many of the complex aesthetic and political decisions confronting world writers in English today would not have occurred to them. Aamir Mufti is attentive to the paradoxes. If English has become “supranational” and cedes authenticity to other languages and a diverse range of Englishes, at the same time, and particularly in colonial contexts, there is the ubiquitous persistence of nation-thinking, which naturalizes the historically contingent contemporary situation into a landscape of people in possession of their “own” languages and literary traditions. (Mufti 2016, 149)

Colonial acts of arrogation are thus at once registered, and papered over by the reach of English. Further, even when other languages and varieties of English are acknowledged, Mufti goes on to say, these “acts of multiplication cannot quite dispel the suspicion that the language continues to be conceived of as a single organism” (Mufti 2016, 149); the world has become an Anglosphere, and the maintenance of English as the supposedly neutral lingua franca in a multilingual postcolony perpetuates and suspends the political scene of its own history there. Similarly, “World Literature” discourse runs the risk of becoming a domain of “oneworldedness” (see Apter 2006 and 2013), of resorting to what Mufti calls “one-world talk” (Mufti 2016, 10), as processes of assimilation into English obliterate linguistic and literary diversity. In the multilingual postcolony where the official national language does not coincide with the mother tongues of its citizens and poets, the idea of a national literature itself is up for question. An even further assumption, embedded in the term “national literature” itself, is that a literary tradition by definition, is a written, rather than an oral tradition. Leading contemporary authors address these complexities in compassionate, creative, and thought-provoking ways. Chinua Achebe (↗26 West Africa) acknowledges the benefits of writing in a world language (cf. Achebe 1977, 97), yet his reflections are inward looking too: “Is it right that a man should abandon his mother-tongue for someone else’s?” he asks, “[i]t looks like a dreadful betrayal and produces a guilty feeling.” Even so, he goes on to say, “for me there is no other choice” (Achebe 1997, 102). South African writer Es’kia Mphahlele (↗25 Southern Africa) comments on the use of English and French in African literature: even in countries that have gained independence from colonial rule, he says, “these two languages are still a unifying force” (Mphahlele, qtd. in Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o 1986, 7). Nevertheless, the language of the coloniser does not settle into unqualified acceptance, and it is fair to say that heated debates about English as the language of African literature played an incipient role in the emergence of postcolonial discourse itself: the very first African Writer’s conference took place at Makerere University College in Uganda in 1962, under the title, “Conference of African Writers of English Expression.” The conference was attended by eminent writers including Wole Soyinka, Chinua Achebe, Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o, Obi Wali, Es’kia Mphahlele and others. Achebe addresses the problem of English as the language of African literature with soul-searching – and humorous – ambivalence:

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My answer to the question Can an African ever learn English well enough to be able to use it effectively in creative writing? is certainly yes. If on the other hand you ask Can he ever learn to use it like a native speaker? I should say, I hope not. It is neither necessary nor desirable for him to be able to do so. The price a world language must be prepared to pay is submission to many different kinds of use. (Achebe 1977, 100)

Nigerian writer, Amos Tutuola (↗26 West Africa), author of The Palm-Wine Drinkard (1952), was not at the conference, but the controversial reception of Tutuola’s novel – the first African novel to be published in English, outside of Africa – was surely on Achebe’s mind when he made his assertion about the English submitting their language to different kinds of use. Unlike Achebe, Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o eventually came to the conclusion that he did have a choice about the language of his novels, and in his “Statement” just before the introduction of Decolonising the Mind (published several years after the conference – in 1986) he announces that this book is to be the last of his writings in English; after its publication he would write in Gikũyũ and Kiswahili. The first novel Ngũgĩ wrote in Gikũyũ (in prison, in the late 1970s) is Caitaani Mũtharabainĩ (Devil on the Cross); the novel has been translated into English, Norwegian, Swedish, and German, but it is the Kiswahili translation, Shetani Msalabani, that matters to Ngũgĩ most. In it he sees the foundation of a “genuinely African novel” because of the dialogue it creates between two African languages (Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o 1986, 84). African novels written in English, for Ngũgĩ, are at best a hybrid Afro-European form, and it is when he reflects upon his own childhood experiences of English at school that the poignancy of his decision to write in Gikũyũ becomes more acute. English at school took Ngũgĩ and his friends to other worlds and other selves; but the experience was one of “spiritual subjugation” (1986, 9) and alienation rather than one of positive expansion. Thought, for the colonial child, “took the visible form of a foreign language” Ngũgĩ writes (1986, 17), as the immediate world of family, community, and storytelling on the one hand, and the abstract world of education and literature on the other, were irrevocably riven apart by the English written word. Writing alienates the mother tongue, undermining a space of self-articulation. Adam Phillips – writer, literary scholar, and child psychotherapist – highlights the significance of finding suitable modes of self-expression. He is interested in what people do with their histories; what they can make of what they are given. The finding, and the failure to find, good-enough forms for oneself, and the things one values. In other words, in the possibility of translation: of moving oneself within, and among, a variety of languages. From one’s so-called mother-tongue, and beyond. (Phillips 2000, 127)

Linguistic sites of self-discovery and self-expression play a decisive role in a child’s experience of being in the world; national language policies, not least when it comes to literacy and literature in education, generate fields in which children learn to imagine themselves in relation to others. For Ngũgĩ the colonial impact of English in

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Africa could hardly cut more deeply in his accounts of himself, his Gikũyũ cultural heritage, and his practice as a writer.

5 Language, Literature, and the Dictionary as genre of Political Resistance In an interview with John Higgins in South Africa in 2001, Edward Said offers a compelling statement about the importance of literature and critical literacy in an emergent democracy: that is to say, about the importance of a kind of writing and reading that goes beyond standard dictionary definitions, the received idea: “Whatever I’ve done politically has been entirely dependent on the ability to read critically,” he says, “to be able to understand the uses to which language can be put” (Said 2013, 214). He refers to the “truly vast range of possibilities that language has,” adding that the only place you can get a sense of this range, and feeling for these possibilities, is through the study of literature […] Writing is not only about describing the world, and writing about it realistically, and reporting it […] It’s also about really pushing at the limits of perception and articulation in such a way as to mobilise and marshal the critical faculties to an extreme degree. And if you lose that pressure in writing, you lose everything. (Said 2013, 214)

If dictionaries have historically been intended to ‘fix’ the language, and literature has the capacity to engage critically with it, opening new modes of saying – and hence of seeing and understanding differently – what possibility is there then, for operating within this tension to create a radical dictionary as a literary genre in its own right? Xiaolu Guo’s 2007 novel, A Concise Chinese-English Dictionary for Lovers, experiments with this idea: each chapter is presented as if under a dictionary headword, provoking reflection on the fissures and coincidences between dictionary definitions of words on the one hand – words such as ‘alien,’ ‘hostel,’ ‘guest,’ ‘free world,’ and ‘home’ – and on the other hand, the subjective experience of a multilingual first-person narrator alert to the contingencies and contradictions of the language she is learning to speak. The first chapter is titled “Alien:” “alien adj foreign; repugnant (to); from another world n foreigner; being from another world” (2007, 9). Zhuang, the firstperson narrator (or “Z” as she calls herself, to accommodate a Western inability to pronounce her name), wryly comments as she arrives in Heathrow airport: “English they totally another species” (2007, 10). Barbara Cassin’s philosophical project, Vocabulaire européen des philosophies: Dictionnaire des intraduisibles, is a major radical dictionary that unflinchingly mobilises the literary-critical faculties Edward Said highlights. The dictionary is translated and recreated in English by Emily Apter and others as the Dictionary of Untranslatables: A Philosophical Lexicon. It presents the reader with headwords or themes followed by extended explanations, and in some cases, essays with bibliographies. The

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explanations link the leading concept or term to cognate words across several languages; etymologies unfold as a translinguistic history of ideas, and the book becomes a reflection of and on the movement of people, the politics of translation, the relation between language and thought, and the genre of the dictionary itself. The explanations highlight conceptual contact zones – and fault lines – across different histories, languages, and nationalities. In so doing, this project embodies the paradoxes of “World Literature” debates: Emily Apter explains how the philosophical challenge of the “untranslatable” would provide the impetus for her own seminal work, Against World Literature: On the Politics of Untranslatability (2013). The headwords in the Dictionary of Untranslatables are drawn from more than a dozen languages, including French, German, Greek, Hebrew, Latin, Portuguese, Russian. Entries include words such as “Aesthetics,” “Agency,” “Belief,” “Dasein,” “Dichtung,” “Goût,” “Logos,” “Pravda,” “Saudade,” “Stato,” “Truth.” Headwords refer the reader to related terms in other languages. The dictionary also has entries on particular languages. The title of the entry for English reads, “The English Language, or The Genius of the Ordinary” (Cassin 2014, 257). Emily Apter, in translating and compiling the English edition of Cassin’s Vocabulaire Européen des Philosophies, is acutely aware that the dictionary does not represent “countries and languages cartographically zoned outside of Europe” even as she raises the question of whether it makes sense to draw “conventional distinctions between European and non-European languages” (Apter 2014, ix). Nevertheless, she expresses the hope that the English version of the Dictionary of Untranslatables will inspire new editions, extending the linguistic range. Johnson’s proposal and preface for his English dictionary of 1755 come across as prescriptive and censorious in tone: drawing, rather than crossing the line when it comes to the admissible expression of thought in English. The Dictionary of Untranslatables is an experiment that troubles linguistic borderlands. It sets out from the difficulty of translating philosophical terms from one language to another, where the terms themselves, and the semantic fields in which they are set to work, are incommensurate. But these ‘untranslatables’ are not simply ossified counters in one language game with no matching piece in the adjacent one. Instead, the untranslatable terms activate dynamic conceptual forcefields around them, interpolating neologisms, mistranslations, and linguistic affordances for alternative modes of thinking. The Dictionary of Untranslatables stresses not the uses to which language should be put, but the uses to which it is, and could be put, once one listens out for the interferences from other languages. In Barbara Cassin’s terms, the dictionary is an exploration of “what a thought can do in what a language can do” (2014, xviii): the dictionary itself becomes a way of doing philosophy – a way of springing creative linguistic resources and contiguities, rather than defining concepts within monologically formalized ruts. The Dictionary of Untranslatables plays up contingent histories, shifts in contexts and perceptions, semantic dissonances – and it is this concern with the “Realpolitik of language conflict” that leads Apter to place the “agglomerative rubric” of the term

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“World Literature” under semantic, philosophical, and political pressure in her book, Against World Literature (2013, 43, 40). In the process of translating Cassin’s French text into an English version, Apter writes: “Another extremely thorny issue concerned how to revise entries to reflect an Anglophone orientation without resorting to rank Anglocentricity” (2014, xii). Her challenge in making an English dictionary – but a dictionary alive to multilingual contexts, to linguistic hierarchies and their ambits of political power – resonates with the concerns of Tutuola, Ngũgĩ, Viswanathan, Mufti, Yildiz, Vladislavić, Guo, and many other writers and thinkers at the vortex of discussions about ‘English’ and ‘World Literature.’

6 Conclusion In his preface to the Dictionary of 1755, Dr Johnson writes: The great pest of speech is frequency of translation. No book was ever turned from one language into another, without imparting something of its native idiom; this is the most mischievous and comprehensive innovation; single words may enter by thousands […]. (2005, 39–40)

He goes on to call for a stop to “the licence of the translatours, whose idleness and ignorance, if it be suffered to proceed, will reduce us to babble a dialect of France” (2005, 39–40). The stereotype Johnson sets out here could hardly be further in spirit from that of the compilers and translators of the Dictionary of Untranslatables. Nevertheless (and for a moment setting aside Johnson’s rabid Anglocentricism) what all these dictionary-makers recognise is the operative relation between a language and its speakers; “languages [speak] people, or at the very least [speak] through them” in J.M. Coetzee’s terms (1992, 53), and “[w]riting writes us” (1992, 18). To speak English is to be constituted as English-speaking subject; the subject is not untouched by the verb “to speak” or “to write”; the space of writing is the space of the writing subject. At the same time, as Cawdrey, Johnson, and Webster recognised, the language is inherently multilingual. To write in English then, is simultaneously to perpetuate the violence of its assimilations (as Ngũgĩ would painfully spell out), and to be constituted by its foreignness. The mixed reception of novels such as Tutuola’s Yoruba-English The Palm-Wine Drinkard, and Guo’s The Concise Chinese-English Dictionary for Lovers is testament to at least a certain strand of resistance to non-standard literary uses of English, even today, but it is novels like these that attune readers of English to the historical and political contingencies and contiguities of the languages they hear and overhear, and that invent new and singular forms of being in language, forms that have not (yet) been recorded in the dictionary.

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7 Bibliography 7.1 Works Cited Achebe, Chinua. “The African Writer and the English Language.” Morning Yet on Creation Day. London: Heinemann, 1977. 91–103. Apter, Emily. Against World Literature: On the Politics of Untranslatability. London and New York: Verso, 2013. Apter, Emily. “Preface.” Dictionary of Untranslatables: A Philosophical Lexicon. Ed. Barbara Cassin. Trans. Steven Rendall, Christian Hubert, Jeffrey Mehlman, Nathaneal Stein, and Michael Syrotinski. Trans. eds. Emily Apter, Jacques Lezra, and Michael Wood. Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2014 [2004]. vii–xvi. Apter, Emily. “On Oneworldedness: Or Paranoia as a World System.” American Literary History 18.2 (2006): 365–389. Cassin, Barbara, ed. Dictionary of Untranslatables: A Philosophical Lexicon. Trans. Steven Rendall, Christian Hubert, Jeffrey Mehlman, Nathaneal Stein, and Michael Syrotinski. Trans. eds. Emily Apter, Jacques Lezra, and Michael Wood. Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2014 [2004]. Cawdrey, Robert. The First English Dictionary 1604: Robert Cawdrey’s Table Alphabetical. Oxford: Bodleian Library, 2015. Clarkson, Carrol. “Coetzee’s Womanizing.” Australian Literary Studies 33.1 (2018): 1–19. Coetzee, J.M. Doubling the Point: Essays and Interviews. Ed. David Attwell. Cambridge, MA and London: Harvard University Press, 1992. Coetzee, J.M., and Paul Auster. Here and Now: Letters 2008–2011. London: Faber and Faber and Harvill Secker, 2013. Derrida, Jacques. Monolingualism of the Other or The Prosthesis of Origin. Trans. Patrick Mensah. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1998. Guo, Xiaolu. A Concise Chinese-English Dictionary for Lovers. London: Penguin, 2007. Johnson, Samuel. A Dictionary of the English Language: An Anthology. Ed. David Crystal. London: Penguin, 2005. Mufti, Aamir R. Forget English! Orientalisms and World Literatures. Cambridge, MA and London: Harvard University Press, 2016. Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o. Decolonising the Mind: The Politics of Language in African Literature. Oxford: James Currey; Nairobi: East African Educational Publishers; Portsmouth: Heinemann, 1986. Phillips, Adam. “On Translating a Person.” Promises, Promises: Essays on Literature and Psychoanalysis. By Phillips. London: Faber and Faber, 2000. 125–147. Pratt, Mary L. “Arts of the Contact Zone.” Profession (1991): 33–40. Richardson, Brian et al., eds. MHRA Style Guide. 3rd ed. London: Modern Humanities Research Association, 2013. Said, Edward. “Criticism and Democracy.” Academic Freedom in a Democratic South Africa: Essays and Interviews on Higher Education and the Humanities. Ed. John Higgins. Johannesburg: Wits University Press, 2013. 209–225. Viswanathan, Gauri. Masks of Conquest: Literary Study and British Rule in India. New York: Columbia University Press, 2015. Vladislavić, Ivan. The Restless Supermarket. Cape Town: David Philip, 2001.

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Webster, Noah. Webster’s 1828 American Dictionary of the English Language. Compact ed. West Valley City: Waking Lion Press, 2010. Yildiz, Yasemin. Beyond the Mother Tongue: The Postmonolingual Condition. New York: Fordham University Press, 2012.

7.2 Further Reading Bakhtin, Mikhail. The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays. Ed. Michael Holquist. Trans. Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1981. Boshoff, Willem. Artist’s website. www.willemboshoff.com. Calvert, Louis-Jean. Towards an Ecology of World Languages. Trans. Andrew Brown. Cambridge: Polity Press, 2006. Cheah, Pheng. What is a World? On Postcolonial Literature as World Literature. Durham: Duke University Press, 2016. Clarkson, Carrol. Drawing the Line: Toward an Aesthetics of Transitional Justice. New York: Fordham University Press, 2014. Helgesson, Stefan, and Christina Kullberg. “Translingual Events: World Literature and the Making of Language.” Journal of World Literature 3 (2018): 136–152. Helgesson, Stefan, and Pieter Vermeulen, eds. Institutions of World Literature: Writing, Markets, Translation. New York: Routledge, 2015. Kristeva, Julia. “The System and the Speaking Subject.” The Kristeva Reader. Ed. Toril Moi. Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1986. 24–33. Neumann, Birgit, and Gabriele Rippl. “Anglophone World Literatures: Introduction.” Special Issue Anglophone World Literatures. Anglia 135.1 (2017): 1–20. Young, Robert. “That Which is Casually Called a Language.” PMLA 131.5 (2016): 1207–1221.

Neil Lazarus

5 Rethinking English Studies Abstract: This essay attempts to tease out some of the tensions inherent in the idea of ‘Anglophone world literatures’, paying attention to each of the term’s three words and reflecting on the possible terms of their relationship. It then turns to a consideration of some of the challenges posed and opportunities presented, to the disciplinary formation of English Studies by the re-emergence of ‘world literature’ as an arena of academic specialisation. Key Terms: Anglophone, world-literature, world-system, globalisation, translation/ translatability

1 Introduction The title assigned to this chapter is “Anglophone World Literatures: Rethinking English Studies”. The terminology of this title is knotty and complicated. It already points, without anything else having been said, to matters of significant contention in the contemporary discussion of world literature. Two issues in particular will be considered. First, an attempt will be made to tease out some of the tensions inherent in the very idea of Anglophone world literatures, paying attention to each of the three words in this formulation and reflecting on the possible terms of their relationship. There is, for instance, an evident disconnect between the delimited conceptual space of Anglophone, on the one hand, and the more total – global, or perhaps globalised? – thought-figure of world, on the other. How are we to conceive of the relationship between these two concepts? Is Anglophone to world as a particular (even if a privileged particular, one with disproportionate power and prestige) is to a universal? How are we to interpret the global hegemony of the English language today? Is it the case, as Nasia Anam has recently asked, that “the spread of the English language threatens to erase global linguistic diversity” (2018, 326)? Or is it rather that “in important moments of transformative language politics the role of the English language, and by extension Anglophone literature, can counter-intuitively serve to facilitate linguistic diversity” (326). And what then is the epistemological status of the word world in the formula, world literature? This is a matter to which such contributors to the contemporary discussion as Debjani Ganguly (2016) and Pheng Cheah (2016) have given their attention, but not often very plausibly or compellingly. The chapter will engage with these and related questions before turning to consider the challenges posed (and opportunities presented) to English Studies by the re-emergence of world literature as an arena of specialisation. https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110583182-006

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2 “Anglophone World Literatures” In a recent article, Akshya Saxena makes a spirited case for the idea of “the World Anglophone”. She is drawn, she says, to the ambitious scope, the necessary heterogeneity and contact, the synchronicity, and the everydayness that the World Anglophone invokes. […] Locating English and its speakers in the world offers an opportunity to trace their relations with precisely the multilingual literary and media cultures that the hegemony of metropolitan literary English threatens to subsume. […] The term “World Anglophone” forces us to reckon with the English language in a way that English literary studies, especially in the United States, have seldom prioritized. (Saxena 2018, 317–318)

World Anglophone; Anglophone world literatures: the project enjoined upon us by these terms is surely consequential. And yet it remains a hard sell. One has only to run the term, Anglophone world literatures, around in one’s head for a moment to begin to get a sense of the relative intractability of some of its difficulties.

2.1 A “World Literary System (of Inter-related Literatures)” A good place to start might be with the pluralisation: why literatures? The answer has to be that what is imagined here is a combination or an assemblage of different bodies of writing, each of which has a prior epistemological, and indeed existential, status as a literature: so “Anglophone world literatures” names all the literatures in the world that have been composed in English (by Scots, New Zealanders, Singaporeans, Indians, Nigerians…). These literatures are seen, on this understanding, to have a prior and primary existence as national literatures; they have in common that they are English-language literatures, and therefore that they share a history – even if their relations to that history are not by any means unitary. The witticism attributed to George Bernard Shaw, that the British and American peoples are divided by a common language, is widely quoted; where the social space implicated by world (as distinct from Anglo-American) Anglophony is concerned, it would not so much be the language that divides as it unites, but the entire history – intricate and often bloody – of connection and conflict that has brought writers to English, or brought English to writers (or, less neutrally, imposed English on writers). The understanding of Anglophone world literatures as a cumulation of discrete singular literatures, is, however, in direct contradiction with understandings that posit world literature in systemic terms. Franco Moretti, from whom the title of the sub-heading above is derived (2000, 56), and Pascale Casanova notably point to the sheer impossibility of one’s ever being able to make anything credible out of the idea of world literature if one also tries to hold onto the supposition that the individual national or individual language-based literary corpuses of institutionalised literary scholarship can continue to serve as the fundamental units of one’s analysis. “[T]he

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sheer enormity of the task makes it clear that world literature cannot be literature, bigger; what we are already doing just more of it”, Moretti writes (2000, 55); while Casanova insists that, in raising the question of world literature, “it is not enough to geographically enlarge the corpus of works needing to be studied, or to import economic theories of globalization into the literary universe – still less to try to provide an impossibly exhaustive enumeration of the whole of world literary production, It is necessary instead to change our ordinary way of looking at literary phenomena” (2005, xi). It might sound at first as though Moretti’s and Casanova’s objections to the idea of world literature as “literature, bigger” were merely logistical – “sheer enormity”, “impossibly exhaustive”. But underlying their objections is a conviction as to the conceptual primacy of system over part – such that one simply cannot proceed from part to system by additive means. The key point here is made by Carlos Antonio Aguirre Rojas, in a discussion of world-systems theory: “[O]ne of the most original and controversial proposals of world-systems analysis”, Rojas writes, refers to defining the specific unit of analysis that we should use to frame our research. Here, in open disagreement with practically all prior political scientists, Immanuel Wallerstein affirms that this unit of analysis cannot, and should not, be anything less than the world-system considered in its totality – that is to say, in its vastest geographical dimension, which has been, during the last five centuries, either semiglobal or, in later years, strictly global. This means that according to world-systems analysis, it is an important methodological error to consider the nationstate as our analytical frame or as our global unit of analysis. (Rojas 2016, ix)

Just as, in dialectical theory, the category of totality precedes and overdetermines the individual elements which it organises into a whole, so too the notion of world in world literature (or, better, world-literature, with a hyphen) is not a mere aggregate of its constituent elements: it is a system rather than any kind of combinatory. (It might be worth noting that while Wallerstein’s usage of the categories of world and totality is geospatially inflected, for such dialecticians in the Marxist tradition as Georg Lukács, cf. 1971, and Karl Korsch, cf. 1970, this is not usually the case.) There is – if readers will pardon the pun – a world of difference between theorists who seek to conceptualise world-literature in systemic terms, and those who, supposing (wrongly, in my opinion) that dialectical or world-systems theories are insensitive to difference, refuse the language of totality, capitalist world-system, singular modernity, etc., preferring the pluralised terms, literatures, worlds, modernities, geographies, etc. It would seem that theorists of the latter persuasion have no objection to the general idea of world-systems – as developed, for instance, in the work of historians of the Annales School (for instance, Fernand Braudel 1995, and Jacques Le Goff 1990) – for their writing is full of references to the “Indian Ocean world” and the “Arab world”, to “significant geographies” in South Asia and “literary contact nebulae” in East Asia (cf. Hofmeyr 2012; Orsini 2015; Thornber 2009). The geopolitical arenas specified by these terms are often very large: the “Indian Ocean world”, for instance, is held to

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span the vast swathe of land and sea from Surabaya and Jakarta in the east, the entire south Asian coastline from Chennai to Karachi, the Arabian Sea all the way up the Gulf of Oman and the Gulf of Aden, and the east African littoral from Djibouti in the north, through Mogadishu, Mombasa, Dar de Salaam and Zanzibar, down to Beira, Maputo and Durban in the south, and including Madagascar (reference is often made here to such historians and social scientists as Edward A. Alpers, cf. 2014, Philippe Beaujard, cf. 2005, Sugata Bose and Kris Manjapra, cf. 2010, K.N. Chaudhuri, cf. 1990, and Michael Pearson cf. 2007; 2014). The literary theorists who like to speak not of a “literary world-system” but of “the numerous, often fractured, and non-overlapping worlds of literature” (CCLPS, n.pag.) will happily concede that this huge domain is or has been a “world” – a bounded but relatively free-standing social universe whose functioning is more or less integrated. They are fully aware of divisions, differences, patterns of unevenness, within and between various sectors and sections of this hemispheric world-system, but they do not imagine that it is beyond them to specify these, without thereby being required to cease referring meaningfully and significantly to the “Indian Ocean world” as a world. It is only where the “capitalist world-system” enters the discussion, one of the indices of whose historical unprecedentedness consists precisely in the fact that it is a world-system that is also, uniquely and for the first time, a global system, that they seem to get cold feet. Suddenly, it begins to seem to them that when one uses the word “world” and talks about this world as a “system”, one is being reductionist, and has lost the ability to grasp difference, heterogeneity, articulation, coevality, unevenness. There is no space here to debate the opposition between these militant if selective particularists and world-system theorists further. Suffice it to suggest that if what is at issue is very obviously methodological, it might be ideological also.

2.2 Globalisation But it is not only the idea of literatures in the formula, “Anglophone world literatures”, that will provoke disagreement. The very juxtaposition of world and Anglophone will ring false to some readers. After all, some of the most influential contributors to the contemporary discussion have argued that the promotion of the world literature project by scholars in English Studies already signifies that the idea of world literature has been hollowed out. Articulated most notably by scholars working in Comparative Literature, who of course have their own disciplinary axes to grind in this matter, this argument typically rests on two related claims. The first of these is that insofar as world literature is approached only through works written in English or read in English translation, it serves as a mask for cultural imperialism: world literature is viewed as the stalking horse for a oneworldist Anglophone unilateralism. English and world are then seen to tend, when left to themselves, in opposite directions, such that where the latter is nevertheless linked to the former, it is imagined as being tethered

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to it, and to have lost in the process the universalism inherent in its concept. The second claim is that what is selected for inclusion under the contemporary rubric of world literature has been pre-fabricated to cater to the ideological and cultural dispositions of an elite global readership, whose interests extend to cultural difference in much the same way as the interests of sophisticated metropolitan foodies extend to world cuisines. Thus a widely-cited recent editorial in the modish American cultural magazine, n+1, tells us that World Literature, in the form […] now canonized by the academy, has become an empty vessel for the occasional self-gratification of the global elite, who otherwise mostly ignore it […] Today’s World Literature might better be called Global Literature. World calls up aspirations to true universality – “We are the world!” – while global, through no fault of its own, evokes phenomena like global capitalism and global warming the good and bad effects of which are by no means universally felt (“World Lite” 2013, n.pag.).

We have here two complementary claims, both of which converge on the idea that in its currently predominant form, world literature is an enterprise to be thought in baleful analogy with Coca-colonisation – a blatantly ideological projection, a giant theatre of dreams in which an elite readership sees its own cultural tastes and predilections reflected back to it, as though independently, from afar. The “basic narrative” of the sceptical repudiation of what the n+1 editors then propose to call “world lite” is, as Sarah Brouillette puts it in her compelling critique, that [t]he label world literature […] signals now little more than a predictable set of moderately “different” works. These works are said to be written in such a way that they are ideal for transport from peripheral to core locations, or, when a less one-way flow is evident, they are said to be produced and consumed by the taste-making elite who inhabit the world’s networked cultural capitals. (Brouillette 2017, n.pag.)

Of course, if we refer the notions of world and globe only to the problematic of globalization, and understood the latter only as the process through which modes of life across the globe are Americanised, it is not to be wondered at that the idea of the world Anglophone should be viewed with suspicion. It is not only progressive scholars who are disinclined to believe (as Fredric Jameson puts it in a deliciously wry formulation) that “all history has been moving towards American culture as its apotheosis” (2010, 443). The n+1 editors describe globalisation in stark terms as a social logic or tendency that produces structural unevenness even as it also enforces integration; and they go on to propose that what we therefore need to do is to specify exactly how globalisation bears upon and shapes cultural production and reception today. But in advancing their critique, they rather give the impression that today’s ‘global elite’ has a lock on the very idea of world. They sacrifice scholarly precision for rhetorical effect, repeating in the process the gesture of such swing-from-the-hip critics of postcolonial studies as Aijaz Ahmad (1992) and Vivek Chibber (2013), who sought, mutatis mutandis, to reject as reactionary and to dismiss as vacuous the entire field of

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postcolonial studies, but who in the process cut so many corners and ignored so many counter-examples and inconvenient counter-truths that they ended up producing reductive accounts that were both tendentious and unconvincing (see the critiques of Ahmad and Chibber in Lazarus 1993 and 2016, respectively). In the case of Emily Apter, who writes similarly “against world literature” (2013), an additional problem is that, insofar as her critique is produced in synthesis with her defence of the ideas of untranslatability and incommensurability, its would-be criticality is undermined by a zealously minoritarian cultural avant-gardism. Brouillette’s exposure of the abstraction of Apter’s arguments is also decisive here: Apter’s philosophical arguments about the status of the translation as anti-capitalist deowned property do not jibe with basic features of the material organization of the publishing industry and the intellectual-property regime on which it depends […] [I]n Against World Literature the lack of engagement with material realities of the production of culture is actually a problem for the analysis. There are features of the organisation of the World Literature industry that invalidate her arguments about the anticapitalist implications of our recognition of the untranslatable. (Brouillette 2015, 203)

2.3 From “Translation” to “Translatability” The idea of the World Anglophone brings the question of translation squarely into the frame, since what is referenced by the term is not only literature that has been written in English but also literature that has been translated into English. Here there is a need, very obviously, for work carried out in the spirit of the critique of political economy, that comes at the problem of the world Anglophone by looking, empirically and in detail, at what is entailed by the status of English as the globally hegemonic language. This is not finally a question of what does or does not get translated, or indeed of whether translation between different languages and cultures is even possible. It is more significantly a matter of the steadily advancing marginalisation of literature itself within the wider fields of cultural production; of the contemporary restructuring of intellectual labour (material and immaterial) within the cultural industries; of the challenges that are posed to domestic literary production in cultures and societies throughout the world that find themselves incorporated willy-nilly into a US-centred Anglophone cultural economy; and so on (cf. Brennan 2009; Brouillette 2013; Casanova 2013; de Swaan 1993; Griswold 2008; Hemmungs Wirtén 2004; Sapiro 2003). However, some contributors to the current debate will reject the very idea of the world Anglophone outright, sight-unseen, because it suggests that it is possible to grasp the concept of world literature on the basis of, and through means of, translation – and this they do not believe or accept. Their argument is that the full lexical and cultural significance of any given literary work is only transmissible to readers who encounter it in its original language (cf. Apter 2013, Harrison 2014). Here it is necessary, by way of combating the fetishism of language that is so ingrained a feature

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of Comparative Literature in its currently institutionalised form, to offer the strongest defence possible of translation. Michael Beard presents one necessary aspect of this defence very deftly, as follows: There are still academics suspicious of translations on the premise that an important book must be read in the original language. I hear this more often than I’d like to. It’s hard to reply to because it sounds stupidly right until you think about it: if we limit ourselves to the languages in which we specialize we would be pretty dull scholars. For that matter the writers whose books we teach have themselves been engaged, importantly, with translated works. The Persian translation of Gabriel García Márquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude (Sad sâl- e tanhâ’î) was an important text for Iranian writers. Readers of Shahrnush Parsipur’s Women without Men would find it useful to know what Márquez sounds like in Persian. When Pamuk describes the aesthetics of city life, one of his pivot points is a 1934 essay by the great Japanese writer Junishiro Tanizaki, “In Praise of Darkness.” Specialists in Pamuk’s language won’t understand Pamuk without being aware of his own experience with translation. (Beard 2012, 558–559)

Translation is not merely a matter of linguistic transfer. In fact, all reading might be understood as a translational exercise: in the process of reading, meaning travels from abstract potentiality to concrete experience, or, put differently, is invented in the space between text and reader. All literary works are, by definition, radically contextual: in reading and, more elaborately, analysing them, we are obliged to reconstruct their initial situations. This is an intricate intellectual exercise – intricate, that is to say, and difficult, but by no means impossible – that calls for fine-grained and comprehensive specification: literary, historical, literary-historical, sociological, philosophical, ideological, linguistic, etc. Language is involved here, obviously, but it would be absurd to argue that language was the only thing involved, or even the most important. As Raymond Williams put it some thirty years ago, “[y]ou cannot understand an intellectual or artistic project without also understanding its formation” (1989, 151–152). The key for Williams was to understand any given literary work as ongoing social activity – to discover or retrieve the set of social relations and practices, collectively engaged and not always documented – of which any particular social formation is made, and from which its range of intellectual and artistic projects arises. The radical implication here is that every work is not only a social product, but the textual precipitate of a much wider, and frequently hidden, range of activity. In order to make sense of a given work, we must look to its formation; to understand the formation, we must look to its process. Consider, for example, the Old English poem, “The Wanderer”, which begins as follows: Oft him anhaᵹa are ᵹebideð Metudes miltse, þeah þe he modceariᵹ… (Sedgefield 1922, 28).

To have these words translated into modern English is not remotely to be put in a position from which their meaning can be understood. How, for instance, is one to explain the mood of this poem – the wanderer’s longing, his sorrow, his feeling that

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he cannot unburden himself of his grief to anyone? If it is true that language is the means of expression of the wanderer’s feelings in the poem (as it is in any literary work), it is nevertheless also true that analysis must proceed well beyond language, to something approaching idiolect, on the one side (since what matters is not what language a writer writes in but the singular use that a writer makes of his or her particular language); while on the other side, analysis must work to recover or reconstruct habitus, history, location, biography, ideology, all of which require skills and methods quite different from the formal ability to read a text in the language in which it was originally composed. It is obviously not the case that it is enough to know French to be able to work with Jean Racine, Marguerite Duras or Frantz Fanon. The inverse also applies: it is not the case that not to know French is not to be able to work with them. As Michael Allan (2007) has pointed out in a suggestive commentary on “the problem of address in world literature”, translation (between languages, but more often between situations) often serves as the means of production/means of recovery (which of these will matter more will depend on your assumptions about textual ontology) of meanings that are strictly invisible to or inaccessible by readers who come to the texts in question from the national-cultural inside, as it were. Allan begins his essay by focusing on Fanon’s 1959 essay “Sur la culture nationale” (and on Jean-Paul Sartre’s preface to Les Damnés de la terre, in which the essay was subsequently published). “How might we, in turn, read Fanon’s text as readers outside of the particular historical moment of the text’s articulated project?” (2007, 3), he asks. His investigation leads him to challenge “the prevailing assumption that national readers better understand the address of a national text that speaks from and within a culturally intelligible frame” (3). Critics who voice this dominant assumption, he argues, tend to skirt the full potential of the nonnational reader or, perhaps more precisely, the reader who is not addressed explicitly by a literary work. More important, however, this reader is at the heart of what gets termed world literature – that most delicate field within which reading and addressing never quite align. And it is this nonnational reader who, intentionally or not, pulls national literature apart at its seams, taking the urgency of a historical situation and reading it otherwise. (Allan 2007, 3)

“Translation is the key mechanism, dynamic and metaphor in the theory and practice of world literature”, Ruth Bush has written, in a discussion of the status of African texts in the wider contexts of Francophonie and the world Anglophone (2012, 512). Externally – that is to say, where translation is thought about as a specific form of cultural practice – it seems obvious to Bush that “[w]hat is still required is sustained engagement with specifically sociological tools and methods” (513). Here she cites Gisèle Sapiro and Johan Heilbron: Transcending a merely inter-textual problematic that is centred on the relation between an original and its translation leads to a series of specifically sociological questions about the stakes and

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functions of translations, their agencies and agents, the space in which they are situated and the constraints, both political and economic, that circumscribe them. (Sapiro and Heilbron 2007, 95 qtd. in Bush 2012, 513)

But the critical practitioner also needs to look beyond language internally – that is, where questions of literary meaning are concerned. Think, for example, of what the reader of the following passage, from Ivan Vladislavić’s Portrait with Keys, is obliged to learn, to interpret, to make familiar, in order to approach an understanding of what he or she is reading. And this despite the fact that, for the Anglophone reader, no formal translation (as between languages), is required: A stoep in Good Hope Street. The deep-blue garden walls hold a precise measure of the twilight still. The smell of grass is quenching after a summer day, the dusk lays a cool hand on the back of your neck. We are talking, my friends and I, with our bare feet propped on the wall of the stoep, our cane chairs creaking. We have been talking and laughing for hours, putting our predicaments in their place, finding ways to keep our balance in a tide of change. We could fetch fresh beer glasses from the door of the fridge, but these warm ones, stickily finger-printed and smelling of yeast, suit this satiated conversation better. We speak the same language. This is our climate. We have grown up in this air, this light, and we grasp it on the skin, where it grasps us. We know this earth, this grass, this polished red stone with the soles of our feet. We will never be ourselves anywhere else. Happier, perhaps, healthier, less burdened, more secure. But we will never be closer to who we are than this. (Vladislavić 2007, 98)

I believe that I have felt the feeling described in this passage. I grew up in South Africa myself, at much the same time as Vladislavić, and in somewhat similar circumstances. What is at issue in the passage is not only a matter of setting – a warm summer evening, animated conversation between friends and intimates, twilight stealing over the walls of a middle or lower-middle class home, bare feet placed against the cool walls of a verandah, chair tilted far backwards for balance – but, more significantly, of affect. What is conveyed through but not in the language is something like a structure of feeling: that through this casual placing of your bare feet against the wall of the stoep, you suddenly experience yourself as grounded, at home. The placing of the feet is both a gesture of belonging and an index of interpellation; it is an ordinary act, but also one which is very deeply scripted, socially, along lines of race, class, sex, gender, nation, generation. So if I understand what Vladislavić is getting at here, is it because his text is to me “a national text that speaks from and within a culturally intelligible frame”? “We speak the same language”, the author writes, and it is obvious that he is not talking about English, or even South-African-English, but of wider forms of social inscription, at least as intimate and deeply scored as language. The same thing might then be said about Denis Hirson’s I Remember King Kong (The Boxer), whose every fragment begins with the words, “I remember…”. What is remembered in these fragments is sometimes idiosyncratic and ungeneralisable: “I remember that when I hear students say they were swotting I thought of flies” (2007, 35); sometimes reflective of a white

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South African child’s upbringing in Johannesburg in the 1950s: “I remember maids sitting on the back lawn with their legs straight out in front of them polishing the silverware with Silvo” (90); and sometimes culturally unspecific, such that it could have come from anywhere in the “globalised” world: “I remember the attraction of sleek, low-cut Adidas football boots” (59). The fragments then come together in the work overall to give a portrait, not only of the narrator’s childhood, but of the everyday life of white English South Africans in the apartheid era more generally. The suggestion is that what is required of analysis here, as in all reading contexts, is translation. But then translation of a particular kind, something closer to what Antonio Gramsci called translatability (1995, 450–464) than what is conventionally understood by the word translation (cf. esp. 450–464; Shapiro and Lazarus 2018). Gramsci, who was trained as a linguist, never lingered long on the idea of translation as the encoding of meaning into a new language. Translatability was what interested him, and for him it was a political activity that involved pirating, modularisation, appropriation, refunctioning – not in the restricted and technical sense in which those operations are commonly understood in translation studies, but as in the movement from theory to practice. A very clear example is provided by Nigel Gibson (2008), who refers to Steve Biko as the foremost translator of Frantz Fanon’s thought in Africa (cf. also Batchelor 2017; Ertürk and Serin 2016). Those interested in translatability need to consider what it is that might make a text not only intelligible to, but capable of speaking inside the heads of audiences in another culture, another time and place. This is the search for experiential rather than linguistic equivalents. Works have translatability only when different groups have “a ‘basically’ identical cultural expression, even if its language is historically different”, Gramsci wrote (1995, 307). Gramsci’s concept of translatability downplays the emphases on aesthetic genius and the uniqueness and incommensurability of literary language, which have been – and remain – central to the prevailing forms of comparativism in literary scholarship. It also obviates anxiety that the transportation of cultural forms or paradigmatic discourses from one language to another either devalues the source language or appears as a degraded copy in the target language. What the Gramscian concept seeks to highlight are the conditions that have to be in place for effective transposition or transference – from one particular semio-ideological system to another – to take place. What is at issue here is not a “translation zone” (Apter 2006), but a social cartography of translatability. The geography of translatability is the cultural topography of the capitalist world-system, its geoculture. We recall that the rationale for Gramsci’s speculations lay in his understanding that events in Lenin’s Russia – no matter how significant might be their prestige for Marxist theory – could neither parthogenetically create revolution in Italy, nor be taken as a fixed template there. The ratios of the interaction between countryside and city in the two nations might have been comparable, but they were different, not least insofar as Italy had a much broader industrialised North, constituting a greater fraction of the entire country, than was the case with Russia. In these circumstances, what Gramsci thought was required was

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the translation, not of Balzac into Italian, nor even of Marx’s writing into Italian, but of Marxist theory – structured by its unique combination of French politics, German philosophy and British economics – into Italian conditions, in the interests of making it usable by Italian people. A turn from translation studies, cemented by philological concerns, to translatability studies, grounded in the history of social relations, might in these terms provide a new perspective on literary history and enable worldliterature to take shape not as a body of works, nor even, ultimately, as a world-literary system, but as a political project.

2.4 “World” If the ‘default’ understanding of world literature as simply a basket containing all of the literatures in the world is clearly unsustainable, many of the alternative formulations have not been much better. David Damrosch’s definition has been influential, but it is very obviously dematerialising. In the absence of any attention to the idea of world, Damrosch tends to conceive of world literature in idealist terms as the corpus of literary works that (for any number of reasons) “circulate beyond their culture of origin, either in translation or in their original language” (2003, 4). The term then refers to works that have been read – not necessarily widely, but elsewhere than where they were composed. “A work enters into world literature by a double process”, Damrosch writes: “first, by being read as literature; second, by circulating out into a broader world beyond its linguistic and cultural point of origin” (6). This understanding fails notably to trouble established assumptions as to the indispensability of cultural insiderism; and, notwithstanding Damrosch’s ostensible ecumenism about translation and literary comparativism, it also leaves him suggesting that the epistemological gains of a narrowly focused “specialisation” cannot really be matched by a more widely focused (let alone a systemic) “generalisation”, which is always inclined to generate “broad, but often reductive, overviews” (2003, 26; see also 111, 287–88). Pheng Cheah’s recent attempt to develop “a normative theory of world literature” seems at first blush to have something more substantial to offer, but then loses focus the further it proceeds. Cheah wants to produce “an account of world literature that does not merely describe and analyze how literary works circulate around the world or are produced with a global market in mind but that seeks to understand the normative forces that literature can exert in the world, the ethicopolitical horizon it opens up for the existing world” (2016, 5). But the textual readings he presents in What Is a World?, though sometimes illuminating, are in no paradigmatic sense different from the readings offered of exactly the same texts by the very critics he has been concerned to distance himself from in his disparagement of theories that come at the question of world literature through the concepts of globalisation or transnationalism. If we are going to speak of ‘world literature’ in systemic terms, then it becomes necessary for us to specify what we mean by the term ‘world’ much more concretely than Cheah does

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in his book, in the course of which ‘world’ finds itself being eclipsed ever more definitively by a Heideggerian notion of ‘worlding’. By contrast, in Combined and Uneven Development: Towards a New Theory of World-Literature, the Warwick Research Collective (WReC) sought to define what we called world-literature (with the hyphen) precisely as the literature of the world-system (2015, 8).

3 World Literature and English Studies In considering the opportunities that the renewed discussion of world literature might present to English Studies, it is immediately important to sound a cautionary note: literary studies in the university today are under considerable pressure. Across the sector, and across the world, there are calls to truncate and remodel literary studies, to fold them into schools of communications or ‘creative arts’, even to scrap them altogether. In the context of this existential threat to the discipline, discussion of the challenges posed by the idea of world literature assumes shape as a small part of a much larger set of problems. We recall Williams’s suggestion – with reference to an earlier “crisis” of literary studies – that “at the most important level we are not talking only about courses and syllabuses. We are talking also, and primarily […] about an intense crisis of culture and society: a crisis diversely defined and diversely met but in any case much more than an academic problem” (1991, 226). “When the perspective really alters, the work can be done anywhere, accepting and confronting its difficulties with the established authorities”, Williams added, noting that, in Britain at least, the new initiatives were being forged “on the periphery of the old systems; in some of the new universities, in several polytechnics, in the Open University and in many practical initiatives beyond the settled institutions” (226). So, too, today: the work can, in principle, be done anywhere, under the departmental or disciplinary rubrics of ‘English’, ‘literature’, ‘cultural studies’, even ‘history’ or ‘sociology’ (I myself was trained in the ‘sociology of literature’). What is required, above all, is an openness to the idea that the received approaches to ‘literature’ as an object of knowledge – the received protocols of reading, analysis and evaluation  – might not be appropriate to the new problematic; new approaches and protocols might need to be developed. We are drawn back to Moretti: “The question is not really what we should do – the question is how […] world literature is not an object, it’s a problem, and a problem that asks for a new critical method” (2000, 54–55). The new work is more likely to find a hospitable base within English Studies than elsewhere. Notwithstanding the blandishments of scholars like Emily Apter, Gayatri Spivak and Jonathan Culler, who tell us that Comparative Literature has always implicitly had the idea of planetarity as its thought-horizon, my own sense is that ‘comp lit.’ has rather been constitutively Eurocentric, and remains so (to be sure, there are many outstanding scholars who work, against the grain, in Comparative Literature departments).

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Comparativists are critical of ‘national’ literature departments; but, whatever might be said about ‘French’ or ‘German’ (or ‘Russian’ or ‘Chinese’) as sub-disciplinary formations, ‘English Studies’ hasn’t been national in the ways described in these criticisms for a very long time already. The English in ‘English Studies’ certainly does not name the country – England (nor does it name Britain). And if it identifies the language, it is obliged to do so in full awareness that the British nation-state is decentred where ‘English’ is concerned. ‘English’ and England; England and Britain; Britain and the United States; the British colonial world; the commonwealth; world Englishes; the colonial origins of English literary studies: it isn’t, of course, as though this uncoupling of language from nation (-state), this “decentring” of nation (-state) within the language, is unique to English. Lusfofonia has not been headquartered in Portugal for more than 150 years already; the Hispanosphere is not centred in Spain; and if many countries claim Arabic as their national language, in none of them is Arabic understood as being the bearer of that one country’s nationhood only. We must grasp such uncouplings/decentrings as theoretical lodestars. The centre of gravity of ‘English’ has long since migrated from England/Britain: to the United States (in the context of ‘the American century’); to Africa and the Indian sub-continent, where the number of people who speak and write in English dwarfs the number who use the language on British soil; and to many other locations besides. In these terms, to work in ‘English studies’ today is already to work on the problem of ‘world literature’. There is no contradiction between the idea of the ‘world Anglophone’ and the idea of the world literary system.

4 Bibliography 4.1 Works Cited Ahmad, Aijaz. In Theory: Classes, Nations, Literatures. London: Verso, 1992. Allan, Michael. “Reading with One Eye, Speaking with One Tongue: On the Problem of Address in World Literature.” Comparative Literature Studies 44.1–2 (2007): 1–19. Alpers, Edward A. The Indian Ocean in World History. New York: Oxford University Press, 2014. Anam, Nasia. “Bangladeshi Anglophone Literature: Rerouting the Hegemony of Global English.” Interventions 20.3 (2018): 325–334. Apter, Emily. The Translation Zone: A New Comparative Literature. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2006. Apter, Emily. Against World Literature: On the Politics of Untranslatability. London: Verso, 2013. Batchelor, Kathryn. “Introduction: Histoire Croisée, Microhistory and Translation History.” Translating Frantz Fanon Across Continents and Languages. Ed. Kathryn Batchelor and Sue-Ann Harding. London: Routledge, 2017. 1–16. Beard, Michael. “Tell Me Something I Don’t Know.” Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and the Middle East 32.3 (2012): 555–562. Beaujard, Philippe. “The Indian Ocean in Eurasian and African World-Systems before the Sixteenth Century.” Journal of World History 16.4 (2005): 411–465.

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Bose, Sugata, and Kris Manjapra, eds. Cosmopolitan Thought Zones: South Asia and the Global Circulation of Ideas. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010. Braudel, Fernand. The Mediterranean and the Mediterranean World in the Age of Philip II, 2 vols. Trans. Siân Reynolds. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995 [1949]. Brennan, Timothy. “Intellectual Labor.” South Atlantic Quarterly 108.2 (2009): 395–415. Brouillette, Sarah. “Academic Labor, the Aesthetics of Management, and the Promise of Autonomous Work.” Nonsite.org 9 (2013). http://nonsite.org/article/academic-labor-the-aesthetics-ofmanagement (11 Sept. 2019). Brouillette, Sarah. “Wither Production?” Historical Materialism 23.4 (2015): 197–209. Brouillette, Sarah. “On Some Recent Worrying over World Literature’s Commodity Status.” Multilingual Locals and Significant Geographies, SOAS University of London, 14th July 2017. http://mulosige.soas.ac.uk/world-literature-recent-worrying/ (11 Sept. 2019). Bush, Ruth. “Le Monde s’effondre? Translating Anglophone African Literature in the World Republic of Letters.” Journal of Postcolonial Writing 48.5 (2012): 512–525. Casanova, Pascale. The World Republic of Letters. Trans. Malcolm B. DeBevoise. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2005 [1999]. Casanova, Pascale. “What Is a Dominant Language? Giacomo Leopardi: Theoretician of Linguistic Inequality.” Trans. Marlon Jones. New Literary History 44.3 (2013): 379–399. CCLPS (Centre for Cultural, Literary and Postcolonial Studies). “Multilingual Locals and Significant Geographies”. https://www.soas.ac.uk/cclps/research/multilingual-locals-and-significant-geographies/ (11 Sept. 2019). Chaudhuri, Kirti N. Asia before Europe: Economy and Civilisation of the Indian Ocean from the Rise of Islam to 1750. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990. Cheah, Pheng. What Is a World? On Postcolonial Literature as World Literature. Durham: Duke University Press, 2016. Chibber, Vivek. Postcolonial Theory and the Specter of Capital. London: Verso, 2013. Damrosch, David. What Is World Literature? Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2003. De Swaan, Abram. “The Emergent World Language System: An Introduction.” International Political Science Review 14.3 (1993): 219–226. Ertürk, Nergis, and Özge Serin. “Marxism, Communism, and Translation: An Introduction.” boundary 2 43.3 (2016): 1–26. Ganguly, Debjani. This Thing Called the World: The Contemporary Novel as Global Form. Durham: Duke University Press, 2016. Gibson, Nigel C. “Upright and Free: Fanon in South Africa, from Biko to the Shackdwellers’ Movement (Abahlali baseMjondolo).” Social Identities 14.6 (2008): 683–715. Gramsci, Antonio. Further Selections from the Prison Notebooks. Ed. and Trans. Derek Boothman. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1995. Griswold, Wendy. Regionalism and the Reading Class. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008. Harrison, Nicholas. “World Literature: What Gets Lost in Translation?” Journal of Commonwealth Literature 49.3 (2014): 411–426. Heilbron, Johan, and Gisèle Sapiro. “Outline for a Sociology of Translation: Current Issues and Future Prospects”. Constructing a Sociology of Translation. Ed. Michaela Wolf and Alexandra Fukari. Amsterdam and Philadelphia: John Benjamins Publishing Company, 2007. 93–107. Hemmungs Wirtén, Eva. No Trespassing: Authorship, Intellectual Property Rights, and the Boundaries of Globalization. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2004. Hirson, Denis. I Remember King Kong (The Boxer). Auckland Park, South Africa: Jacana Media, 2007 [2004]. Hofmeyr, Isabel. “The Complicating Sea: The Indian Ocean as Method.” Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and the Middle East 32.3 (2012): 584–590.

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Jameson, Fredric. “Globalization as a Philosophical Issue.” Valences of the Dialectic. By Jameson. London: Verso, 2010. 435–455. Korsch, Karl. Marxism and Philosophy. Trans. Fred Halliday. London: New Left Books, 1970 [1923]. Lazarus, Neil. “Postcolonialism and the Dilemma of Nationalism: Aijaz Ahmad’s Critique of Third-Worldism.” Diaspora: A Journal of Transnational Studies 2.3 (1993): 373–400. Lazarus, Neil. “Vivek Chibber and the Spectre of Postcolonial Theory.” Race & Class 57.3 (2016): 88–106. Le Goff, Jacques, ed. The Medieval World. Trans. Lydia G. Cochrane. London: Collins and Brown, 1990. Lukács, Georg. History and Class Consciousness: Studies in Marxist Dialectics. Trans. Rodney Livingstone. London: Merlin Press, 1971 [1923]. Moretti, Franco. “Conjectures on World Literature.” New Left Review 1 (2000): 54–68. Orsini, Francesca. “The Multilingual Local in World Literature.” Comparative Literature 67.4 (2015): 345–374. Pearson, Michael. “East Africa and the Indian Ocean World.” Metahistory: History Questioning History. Ed. Charles Borges and Michael Pearson. Lisbon: Nova Vega, 2007. 485–495. Pearson, Michael. “Oceanic History.” A Companion to Global Historical Thought. Ed. Parsenjit Duara, Viren Murthy, and Andrew Sartori. London: Wiley-Blackwell, 2014. 337–350. Rojas, Carlos Antonio Aguirre. “Introduction: Immanuel Wallerstein and the Critical ‘World-Systems Analysis’ Perspective.” Uncertain Worlds: World-Systems in Changing Times. By Immanuel Wallerstein, Charles C. Lemert and Carlos Antonio Aguirre Rojas. Oxford: Routledge, 2016. vii–xxxv. Sapiro, Gisèle. “The Literary Field between the State and the Market.” Poetics 31:5–6 (2003): 441–461. Saxena, Akshya. “A Worldly Anglophony: Empire and Englishes.” Interventions 20.3 (2018): 317–324. Sedgefield, Walter J. An Anglo-Saxon Verse-Book. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1922. Shapiro, Stephen, and Neil Lazarus. “Translatability, Combined Unevenness and World Literature in Antonio Gramsci.” Mediations: Journal of the Marxist Literary Group 32.1 (2018): 1–36. Thornber, Karen L. Empire of Texts in Motion: Chinese, Korean, and Taiwanese Transculturations of Japanese Literature. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2009. Vladislavić, Ivan. Portrait with Keys: The City of Johannesburg Unlocked. London: Portobello Books, 2007. Warwick Research Collective (WREC). Combined and Uneven Development: Towards a New Theory of World-Literature. Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2015. Williams, Raymond. “The Future of Cultural Studies.” The Politics of Modernism: Against the New Conformists. By Williams. London: Verso, 1989. 151–162. Williams, Raymond. “Beyond Cambridge English.” Writing in Society. By Williams. London: Verso, 1991. 212–226. “World Lite: What is Global Literature?” Editorial. n+1 17 (Fall 2013). https://nplusonemag.com/ issue-17/the-intellectual-situation/world-lite/ (11 Sept. 2019).

4.2 Further Reading Allan, Michael. In the Shadow of World Literature: Sites of Reading in Colonial Egypt. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2016. Beckman, Ericka. Capital Fictions: The Literature of Latin America’s Export Age. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2013.

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Brouillette, Sarah, Mathias Niges, and Emilio Sauri, eds. Literature and the Global Contemporary. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2017. Bush, Ruth. Publishing Africa in French: Literary Institutions and Decolonization 1945–1967. Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2016. Calvet, Louis-Jean. Towards an Ecology of World Languages. Trans. Andrew Brown. Oxford: Polity, 2006. Cleary, Joe. “Realism after Modernism and the Literary World System.” Modern Language Quarterly 73.3 (2012): 255–268. Deckard, Sharae, and Stephen Shapiro, eds. World Literature, Neoliberalism, and the Culture of Discontent. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2019. Denning, Michael. Culture in the Age of Three Worlds. London: Verso, 2004. Jameson, Fredric. “World Literature.” Holberg International Memorial Prize Lecture, 2008. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Key1dnyAyYU (11 Sept. 2019). Lazarus, Neil. The Postcolonial Unconscious. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011. Lazarus, Neil, and Sorcha Gunne, eds. Special issue The World-Literary System and the Atlantic. Atlantic Studies 16.1 (2019).

Part II: Concepts and Methods of Anglophone World Literatures

Pheng Cheah

6 Global Literature, World Literature and Worlding Literature: Some Conceptual Differences Abstract: This chapter distinguishes between global literature, the study of literary works in global circulation that has become the dominant approach in world literature studies, and two different normative approaches, world literature proper, whose origin is conventionally attributed to Goethe, and worlding literature, which is based on the phenomenological concept of world. It argues that the last approach has the greatest analytical purchase for the study of postcolonial world literature.1 Key Terms: Global literature, world literature, worlding literature, normative conception of world literature, national limitations, translation

1 Introduction This chapter takes issue with the banalization of world literature in the past decade in literary studies. By this, I mean the axiomatic equation of the world with human intercourse that stretches across global space, where market exchange is the paradigm of human relations. When the study of world literature proceeds on this basis, world literature is emptied of the deep normative horizon it had in earlier formulations that drew their inspiration from Johann Wolfgang von Goethe’s classical account. It is no longer world literature but merely global literature. Extant normative accounts of world literature are, however, grounded in an inadequate conception of the world. Because they define the world through the anthropologistic frame of the self-actualization of universal humanity through historical progress, they presuppose a Eurocentric, modern, secular subject of humanity. They envision a world that cannot hospitably admit cultures that have not been completely disenchanted or purged of magic, worlds in which spirits dwell with human beings. A fuller normative account of world literature appropriate to late capitalist globalization should take its bearings from the phenomenological idea of worlding. I call this worlding literature. This chapter enjoins us not to take the world for granted and then construct world literature as an object and a field of study based on an unexamined concept of the world as a container to be populated by, or filled with, literary works. Instead, we

1 This chapter draws substantially from Cheah, Pheng. “Worlding Literature: Living With Tiger Spirits.” Diacritics 45.2 (2017): 86–114. https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110583182-007

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should reconstitute world literature on the basis of an inquiry into the ontological meaning of world. Simply put, if the world is not in the original instance a spatial container but the process of worlding, an inquiry into what constitutes world literature should first broach the question of the fundamental affinity between literature and world. In other words, what is worldly about literature? This would be the starting point from which to explore how literature as worlding participates in worldly affairs that are the domain of the natural and social sciences.

2 The Banalization of World Literature: Global Literature Judging by the number of books with ‘world literature’ in their titles, the past decade has been productive for the field of world literature. In fact, whatever advances have been made in the field, contemporary theories of world literature have not substantially challenged its nineteenth-century paradigm for the simple reason that they have taken at face value Goethe’s unelaborated conception of the world as an object, indeed, the largest possible object, constituted by human interaction and intercourse. In dominant theories of world literature, world literature refers to the field of literary exchanges that span across the globe. World literary intercourse is made up of processes of the creative human imagination and the social and political forces at work in the production of literary works. However, unlike proponents of world literature in the first half of the twentieth century such as Georg Brandes (1899), Fritz Strich (2013 [1930]), and Erich Auerbach (1969), contemporary accounts of world literature have detached the project from its universal, humanistic, normative horizon. The chapter provides a schematic outline of the five limbs of the normative conception of world literature (cf. Cheah 2016). First, this conception is spiritualist: it subscribes to a spiritual idea of universal humanity, where humanity is an ideal project to be achieved through collective spiritual endeavor in the Hegelian sense of Geist. Second, as a branch of the arts, literature is a privileged means for expressing the human spirit in a permanent, sensuous form. Thus, Goethe notes in a conversation with Johann Peter Eckermann in 1827 that “poetry is the universal possession of mankind [das Gemeingut der Menschheit], revealing itself everywhere, and at all times, in hundreds and hundreds of men. One makes it a little better than another, and swims on the surface a little longer than another – that is all” (Goethe and Eckermann 1984, 133; 1982, 198). Third, world literature is the concrete, objective field for the actualization of humanity because it disseminates and constructively elaborates on the human ideal through intellectual exchange and intercourse that crosses national boundaries. The world is here understood in spatiogeographical terms, namely, as an object of the largest possible spatial extension. Fourth, world literary exchange is a form of cosmopolitanism by virtue of the fact that it undermines the parochialism of national aesthetic conventions and taste at the

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subjective level of consciousness. This view is exemplified by Goethe’s call to look beyond national literatures: I therefore like to look about me in foreign nations, and advise everyone to do the same. National literature is now a term that does not signify much [nicht viel sagen]; the epoch of world literature is at hand, and everyone must strive to hasten its approach. (Goethe and Eckermann 1984, 133; Eckermann 1982, 198)

Accordingly, world literature is characterized by the transcendence of national limitations. Translation has a central role here. For Goethe, translation furthers “the prevailing, predominant and universal World-literature” [der vor- und obwaltenden allgemeinen Weltliteratur], because the relation of the original to the translation exemplifies international intercourse (1887, 42, 37–38). Accordingly, studying translation facilitates greater sociality among nations. Fifth, the project of world literature and its end of revealing humanity can only be achieved through historical progress. The higher ideals of humanity are clouded by the backwardness of the masses. Uncultivated popular taste delights only in what is immediately pleasing and is uninterested in what is intellectual and serious (Goethe 1973, 10; 1999, 866). Hence, world literature is necessarily connected to a teleology of world history. Fritz Strich points to the temporal character of world literature in his distinction between world dissemination and world duration. There is a yet deeper concept of world literature that comprises not just a spatial but also a temporal dimension. World literature is precisely that literature that has not been forgotten and that has not sunk below the horizon, even if once it may have enjoyed the widest dissemination and influence. Next to dissemination throughout the world this concept then also considers duration in the world, and next to supranational importance lasting validity. (Strich 2013 [1930], 41)

Because it expresses humanity, world literature is by definition literature that is eternal. It is literature that must endure beyond its own time. The normative conception of world literature thus posits a relationship between world, literature, and humanity in which global literary exchange discloses a higher spiritual world wherein humanity’s timeless ideals are expressed in a sensuous form. As Georg Brandes succinctly notes, “[w]hen Goethe coined the term world literature, humanism and the spirit of world citizenship were still ideas universally entertained” (2013 [1899], 27). World literature is part of the process of humanity’s self-actualization. It is a phenomenal shape through which we recognize our own humanity and become truly human. In summary, the normative conception of world literature defines worldliness as spiritual human intercourse and regards commercial exchange as the paradigm of human relations. The contemporary revival of world literature banalizes this normative project. Recent theories of world literature (David Damrosch, Franco Moretti, and Pascale Casanova) have detached world literature from its original normative context. By equating literature’s worldliness with the global circulation and production of literary works, they have retained the spatial conception of the world as a geographical

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whole that transcends national boundaries, but they have completely disregarded the world’s temporal dimension (cf. Cheah 2016, Ch. 1). This leads to a flattening-out of world literature’s horizonal character. The banalization of world literature primarily draws on Goethe’s reliance on the market metaphor to characterize world literary intercourse and Karl Marx’s literalization of this metaphor in his immanent critique of world literature as an epiphenomenon of the world market (Marx and Engels 1973, 71). But these arguments are based on an overemphasis on one aspect of Goethe’s comments and a tendentious misinterpretation of Marx. When Goethe said that world literature was coming into being, he had in mind the constitution of a spiritual formation that would actualize the ideal of humanity. Just because some literary works are produced globally for circulation in a global marketplace does not automatically make them world literature in the normative sense unless one also says that a McDonald’s hamburger, which has been ‘translated’ into different shapes to cater to global consumers, such as a teriyaki burger, a curry burger, or my favorite recent example in celebration of Singapore’s 2017 National Day, a nasi lemak burger, is similarly worldly (see Fig. 1).

Fig. 1: McDonald’s Singapore Nasi Lemak Burger

There are global food consumer forms or types, ‘genres’ if you will, that originate in Western markets, such as the burger, the McFlurry, or the pie, that are given vernacular content or flavor to appeal to local markets. Global consumer forms – literary, cultural, or culinary – are made to be translated. Their imperial telos is the facile cosmopolitanism of glocalization. In the Singapore case, the vernacularization involves Malay influences: the burger is given a nasi lemak flavor, a coconut milk infused rice served with spicy condiments such as sambal; the McFlurry is made to mimic a local

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coconut milk based dessert, chendol; and the pie has a coconut milk cream filling. The global form extends its empire by remaining recognizable even as it changes its shape to increase its market-share across national borders. By conflating the world with the world market of the capitalist mode of production and attributing a minimal normative force to the overcoming of national-territorial barriers by global commodity exchange, these arguments elide the fact that, in Marx’s view, the world market is the human world in its most alienated shape and a truly human world – a world where humanity can continually actualize itself, namely, a universal society of associated producers who can rationally regulate their metabolism with nature through self-determined collective action – can only be established by destroying the world market (Marx 1981, 358–359). In short, recent theories of world literature have emptied Goethe’s and Marx’s thought of their normative dimension and reduced the world to the globe, an object made by globalization. Hence, they are actually concerned not with world literature but with global literature. Three detrimental consequences follow from this tendentious substitution of global literature for world literature. First, because the concept world is left unexamined, contemporary institutions of world literature – that is, literary works published and marketed under that rubric for the purposes of education and popular consumption, works of criticism, academic or otherwise, that debate and constitute the canon of world literature, and transnational literary prize committees that adjudicate on literary value – begin with the assumption that what Goethe called ‘world literature’ has come into being. Because dominant debates about world literature dogmatically presuppose a late eighteenth- or early nineteenth-century conception of the world that has been emptied of normative significance, their activities consist only in tinkering with the canon of world literature in terms of what should be excluded and included, what counts and does not count as world literature in a given historical conjuncture, for example, the role of translation and the violence done to the untranslatable in literature; the repressive and exclusionary operations of Orientalism in the constitution of a patently Eurocentric world literature that is written in European languages, primarily English, or the power relations involved in the formation of readers and writers that can engage in world literary intercourse (cf. Mufti 2016; Allan 2016). Contemporary debates about world literature seek a world of maximum inclusiveness. But this already dogmatically reduces the world to the largest possible spatial whole in which hierarchical divisions – such as those between languages and cultures – are abolished and all can receive equal representation. Second, because critics often have very little sense of what world means, confusion inevitably arises when it is used as an adjective to qualify ‘literature.’ Little wonder then, that world literature is such a poorly defined field of study: does it consist of great works with an eternal validity or is it simply literature that circulates widely and has market value, that is, the best literary commodities of a given epoch? Third, because worldliness is understood as entailing circulatory movement that transgresses national borders, the world-making power that normative theories

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attribute to world literature as a means for actualizing humanity and humanizing the existing world is lost. The definition of world in terms of motility is especially tendentious when it claims support from Marx’s thought (cf. Damrosch 2003). It misses the basic point that what Marx regarded as important about globalization is not merely movement across spatial borders but the metaphorical circulation of blood that constitutes the mobility of a living organism that now encompasses the entire material world. In Marx’s vision of socialism, the world becomes humanized precisely because productive activity appropriates and remakes the world as part of the organism of humanity such that the world’s becoming is coextensive with humanity’s self-actualization.

3 Literature’s Force in Contemporary Globalization: Worlding Literature I do not propose reviving the spiritualist account of world literature from the earlier half of the twentieth century because it has major shortcomings despite its emphasis on literature’s world-constituting power. First, the world it envisions and its privileged examples of world literature are clearly Eurocentric. In this, the spiritualist account of world literature is implicitly animated by the spirit of Goethe’s comment that the beauty of humanity can only be seen in Greek archetypes: “in our search for models, we should always return to the Greeks of antiquity in whose works beautiful man is exhibited [dargestellt]” (Goethe and Eckermann 1984, 133; Eckermann 1982, 198). Second, the participants in world literary intercourse are an elite intellectual clerisy trained in the exegetical and analytical methods of European criticism. But third, and most important, spiritualist accounts have never convincingly responded to the challenge posed by Marxist materialism. They cannot account for the role of material forces in the making of worlds, the relations of power and exploitation that structure the world of capitalist globalization where postcolonial peoples are placed in positions of economic and cultural inequality. I am proposing an alternative normative theory of world literature that is not merely an analysis of existing institutions of world literature. The latter subscribes to an unexamined conception of the world as market exchange across the globe and thus defines the world in terms of spatio-geographical extension. The analysis of world literature in the banalized sense of global literary intercourse is reducible to the desire to include all parties involved in the production and consumption of literature  – writers, readers, etc. – as equal subjects of exchange. Robert Young has noted that existing paradigms of world literature are incompatible with postcolonial literature. World literature, he suggests, is primarily concerned with the disinterested study of literature in its global circulation and the diversity of literary cultures whereas postcolonial literature adopts an ethico-political stance and seeks to have a causal impact on the world. Hence, “[p]ostcolonial literature remains a literature

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concerned with the world, a world which that literature seeks to change by telling the stories that it shares with its readers” (Young 2012, 217). The inadequacy of existing paradigms of world literature stems from their failure to examine the idea of world and their detachment of world literature from its normative frame (cf. Cheah 2016). If we regard the world as a normative temporal category and understand world literature in a normative sense, then postcolonial literature is an exemplary case of world literature in its most robust meaning precisely because it seeks to change the unequal power relations of the existing world so that postcolonial peoples can emerge as part of a new world of a truly plural humanity. However, we need to rethink literature’s worldliness beyond human intercourse because the world of capitalist globalization is no longer the world that Marx envisioned, much less the world that Goethe had in mind. Technologies of biopower, like those of capital, are concerned with the calculative regulation of the time of human life. But they penetrate human life more radically and thoroughly than the reification of consciousness by the commodity form. Instead of being merely concerned with the formation of consciousness or the psychical contours of practical action, they are directed at enhancing the physical and intellectual capacities of bodies and populations. The issue here is not merely that the ideal humanity that world literature – in its cosmopolitan vocation – hoped to actualize is merely an abstract ideological epiphenomenon of the capitalist world market. The very ability of rational human intercourse, including the material intercourse of socialized humanity qua association of producers to overcome the limitations of the existing world and to actualize humanity by remaking the degraded world in its own image, is put into doubt. Consequently, world literature’s normative force as a modality of cosmopolitan intercourse is also thrown into question. Salvaging a normative conception of world literature involves reattaching literature to the unequal world of contemporary capitalist globalization and rethinking its capacity for world-making from the ground up. Martin Heidegger’s idea of worlding is invaluable for two reasons. First, worlding is a principle of hope immanent to the circuits of globalization. Second, the emergence of postcolonial peoples requires the constellation of Euro-American secular modernity with ways of living in the postcolonial South where spirits play an important role and non-human life forms are not merely raw materials to be subjugated by humanity. With appropriate qualifications, Heidegger’s ontological conception of the world can aid in articulating a ground in which plural humanity can subsist and act in concert to contest the world of capitalist globalization. There are decisive modulations in Heidegger’s concept of world, which run through his entire corpus. In his writings of the late 1920s, he characterizes the world as a network of meaningful relations that is centered on human Dasein and disclosed by our understanding of the environing world [Umwelt]. By the mid-1930s, Heidegger is increasingly interested in the non-human world and he sees the world as being in a twofold relation with the earth. His interpretations of the poetry of Rainer Maria Rilke

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and Friedrich Hölderlin in the 1930s and 1940s focus on nature as a generative ground akin to the Greek physis that is not reducible to the objective domain of the natural sciences. In the late 1940s and 1950s, this develops into a more complex understanding of the world as part of a fourfold: the original unity that gathers or holds together the earth, which gives rise to mineral forms and non-human life-forms, sky, the world of mortal human life [die Sterblichen], and “the divinities” [die Göttlichen] (Heidegger 1977a, 327–328). We conventionally view the world as a container for the totality of objects and subjects. It is thus the largest possible spatial extensivity, and we can determine it through geometrical and cartographical coordinates. However, objects and subjects can only appear to us if they are already part of a network of references and relations. For Heidegger (1996b), the world is this referential network of meaningfulness that precedes the rational human subject and brings us into relation with other beings. It is that openness that lets us encounter and be together with other beings. In a radically finite world where we cannot know whether being comes from an absolute creator, what holds the world together is simply the continuing movement of temporalization. Indeed, temporalization is the original movement of opening: it connects past, present, and future by opening them up to each other. Without this opening, there would not be time. The sheer persistence of time is thus the opening that gives rise to the openness that is world. We exist and are in a world because time comes. On this basis, Heidegger reinscribes world, Welt, as a verb, welten, and associates this with a ‘force’ of prevailing, walten, which, in his writings of the late 1920s, is characterized by freeing or releasing. “Freedom alone can let a world prevail and let it world for Dasein [kann dem Dasein eine Welt walten und welten lassen]. World never is, but worlds [Welt ist nie, sondern weltet]” (Heidegger 1998, 126; 1976a, 164). We can regard worlding catachrestically as a normative force. In contrast to the spiritualist conception of world literature, the world is not constituted by the universalizing process of intercourse that enables human subjects to transcend the one-sided and particular by taking all perspectives into account. Heidegger calls this the vulgar conception of the world. Strictly speaking, worlding is a non-human force. For although worldliness is structural to human Dasein as that being that can understand temporalization such that Dasein is always with-world and world-forming, worlding is not a ‘power’ that stems from our reason and, hence, not a force that we can consciously deploy. Indeed, it is not a force in the sense of an efficient material cause. As the sheer propulsion that opens a world, worlding is prior to subjects and objects, ‘below’ or ‘before’ all beings. Hence, worlding can neither be reduced to natural forces nor to the normative imperatives of rational action. In contrast to Marx’s famous Thesis Eleven, the imperative is not to change the objective world but to transform our humanity to bring us back to our Dasein so that we can prepare for the prevailing of the world and take up the full possibilities of existence. Yet, worlding has everything to do with normativity: it is the original ground from which human norms and values spring. It gives rise to the total

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context of meaningfulness that lets us encounter other beings and binds us to them as part of a world. Without this access, we could not prescribe ends onto objects or participate in intersubjective intercourse. Hence, there must be a quiet obligation to let the world prevail. As Françoise Dastur notes, Heidegger’s early concept of world is based on the human experience of the environing world (1999, 129). He says nothing of nature as such, which merely appears as the background of useful things. From the 1930s onward, Heidegger shows a greater appreciation for non-human nature as the support of human existence. More importantly, he offers a more developed argument that poetry has an original connection to worlding. Heidegger’s greater concern for non-human nature in his understanding of the world is important for two reasons. First, it points to an original unity in which human and non-human beings – including other living beings and non-living or inanimate beings – are gathered together and brought into relation prior to their actualization or formation as individual beings. This original unity, which shows itself in the openness of beings to each other, is designated ‘the open.’ Second, the thought of the open involves a trenchant critique of the anthropologistic idea of intentional consciousness. Because the open is prior to human subjectivity, its disclosure leads to a derangement of consciousness. In his exegeses of Hölderlin and Rilke, Heidegger draws on the Greek idea of physis to develop an account of creative, generous nature as the original ground of all beings. Nature, which Hölderlin describes as “the ‘all-creative [Allerschaffende]’ and the ‘all-living [Allebendige]’” is that which gives presence to all individual beings by bringing them into the open (Heidegger 2000a, 79; 1981, 57). It is the ground of all actuality: “[A]s the wonderfully all-present she has already bestowed on everything real [Wirklichen] the clearing [Lichtung] in the open where everything real [Wirkliches] is first capable of appearing. Nature is prior to all actuality [Wirklichen] and all action [Wirken], even prior to the gods” (Heidegger 2000a, 81; 1981, 59). Nature in this sense exceeds the familiar conceptual distinctions between nature and art, spirit or history. It does not refer to a particular realm of being but instead to the very being of beings. Heidegger notes that in Rilke’s use of the term, nature is the ground for history and art [Kunst] and for nature in the narrower sense. In the word Nature […] the echo still lingers of the earlier word φύσις, which is also equated with ζωή, translated by us as life [Leben]. In early thought, the essence of life is not represented biologically [biologisch vorgestellt] but rather as φύσις, the emergent, that which arises [das Aufgehende]. […] Here, Nature, life indicate being in the sense of beings in their entirety [des Seienden im Ganzen]. (Heidegger 2002, 208; 1977b, 279)

Despite being characterized as a wholeness that is all-present and gives presence to actual beings, nature is not an absolute being such as God because it is not itself a present being. It does not present itself as an actual being but instead withdraws and hides itself in these beings. Hence, it can only be intimated as the

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openness that gives any being access to other beings. This openness enables beings to encounter each other and brings all beings into connection, thereby revealing the open as the original and immediate ground of all possible connections. But the original ground of accessibility and encounter is not itself accessible or encounterable without mediation. Any individual actuality [geeinzelte Wirkliche] in all its connections is possible only if before all else nature grants the open [das Offene gewährt], within which immortals and mortals and all things are able to encounter each other. The open mediates the connections between all actual things [Wirklichen]. […] The open itself, however, though it first gives the region for all belonging-to and -with each other [Zu- und Miteinander], does not arise from any mediation. The open itself is the immediate. Nothing mediated, be it a god or man, is ever capable of directly attaining the immediate [das Unmittelbare unmittelbar zu erreichen]. (Heidegger 2000a, 83; 1981, 61)

In his reading of Rilke, Heidegger explicitly names the process of opening worlding and emphasizes the radical risk involved. The coming-into-being of all finite beings is a releasing from Being that puts them at risk. They are no longer sheltered but let loose or cast off. But because their release [entlassen] to sheer existence still relates them to Being, they are not abandoned. They are not delivered directly unto annihilation because they are instead of being nothing. When each and every being comes into being, it is gathered into a center such that it is amidst beings in their entirety. The world is this openness to all beings into which we are propelled. Better yet, worlding is that propulsion. Heidegger’s account of the world as the open involves a trenchant critique of the anthropocentric idea of intentional consciousness. The human being has an ambivalent relation to the open because we have a consciousness that posits and positions the world as the entirety of objects through the constructions of representation [Vorstellung]. Hence, we close off the openness that is the world by reducing it to the sum of objects that stand against the human subject. As Heidegger puts it, [t]he athwartness of objects that oppose him. [Das gegenstehende Gegenüber] does not permit man to be directly in the open [Offenen]. It excludes man from the world, in a certain sense, and places him before the world, where what is meant by “world” is beings in their entirety. In contrast, it is the open itself that has the quality of world; the open as the entirety of unopposingness, unobjectiveness [das Ganze des Ungegenständlichen]. (Heidegger 2002, 213; 1977b, 284)

We turn away from the world and obscure its opening process by placing it before us as objectivity so that we can remake the objectified world according to the anthropocentric ends imposed by our will. Thus, “in manifold production [Herstellen], the world is brought to a stop [zum Stehen] and into position [in den Stand]. The open becomes an object and is diverted toward the human creature. It is man who, athwart the world as an object, turns out to be and displays himself as the one who deliberately asserts all this production” (Heidegger 2002, 215–216; 1977b, 288). Our era is one of desolation because we have turned away from the world.

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Insofar as the world is directly inaccessible to subjective consciousness and, indeed, any actualized being, its intimation is necessarily experienced as a destabilization, even a radical ungrounding of experience. Indeed, Heidegger emphasizes the world’s inexplicability. Because it is nothing other than the ongoing process of worlding, it cannot be grasped by consciousness in terms of causes and grounds. The world presences by worlding [Welt west, indem sie weltet]. That means: the world’s worlding cannot be explained by anything else nor can it be fathomed through anything else [aus anderem ergründbar]. […] [T]he inexplicable and unfathomable [Unbegründbare] character of the world’s worlding lies in this, that causes and grounds [Gründe] remain unsuitable for the world’s worlding. […] The human will to explain just does not reach to the simpleness of the simple onefold of worlding. (Heidegger 1971, 177; 2000b, 181)

In a passing remark elsewhere, Heidegger speaks disparagingly of the mere cosmopolitanism of Goethe in comparison to ‘the world-historical thinking’ of Hölderlin’s poetry. By this, he means that world literature as a modality of humanity’s attempt to remake the objective world as a spiritual world according to our normative ends closes off the original openness of the world and makes us worldless. For Heidegger, poetry has a privileged connection to the world. It has the power to reveal the whole [das Heile] and intimate the holy [das Heilige] because it is a creative process that does not originate from human subjectivity. In its purest form, poetizing puts into play “relations that do not have their ground in the ‘subjectivity’ of human beings” (Heidegger 1996a, 165; 1984, 203). Hence, poetry points to the sheer power of worlding that opens and gives rise to an existing world (Heidegger 2002, 202; 1977b, 271). This power of prevailing is not the purposive causality of human action or intercourse. It is infrastructural, the latter’s ontological condition of possibility. I will call literature that intimates at the prevailing of world worlding literature to distinguish it from world literature or literary intercourse that constitutes the world as a spiritual object. What then is the connection between postcolonial literature and worlding? In my recent book, What Is a World? I argue that the emergence of postcolonial peoples in contemporary globalization must draw on the force of worlding. Because capitalist globalization needs time, the sheer opening of worlding, which is grounded in the coming of time that escapes capitalist calculations, is a real power that can resist and subvert the latter’s destruction of the world. But we can also approach the worlding force of postcolonial literature from the perspective of the co-existence or being-with of different beings, including peoples: what can the study of literature about “foreign” modes of human life teach us about how we can exist amidst other modes of life, both human and non-human, without hierarchical subordination? I have used the awkward locution modes of human life in order to deliberately avoid using culture. Because worlding brings beings in their entirety into relation, it is the ground for including all peoples. This gathering and holding-together, however, exceeds

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the conventional ethic of tolerance central to spiritualist world literature. In the latter, we include other modes of human life by calling them cultures. We think of cultures as collective subjects and seek to understand, tolerate, appreciate, and respect diversity according to the model of intersubjective communication. But in the global marketplace of late capitalism, such tolerance is often repressive and easily morphs into the tokenization and commodification of cultural difference for cosmopolitan consumption. This outcome is structural to the communicative model. A worldless subject is the a priori of intersubjective intercourse. Intercourse, which involves the construction of bridges among subjects, is based on the axiom that subjects are disconnected and sealed off from each other in the original instance. The transcending work of reason then opens subjects up to each other. The most obvious example of this is respect for ‘religious faith’ within the framework of what is rational according to the calculative measure of Western secular reason. Repressive tolerance follows from the subordination of faith to reason. Religious traditions are then viewed as archaic relics of premodern societies, to be conserved in the interests of cultural diversity in the same way that extinct animal species must be protected. Jürgen Habermas’s account of a self-reflexive post-secularist consciousness is an improvement over the ethic of tolerance because it suggests that religious faith has a rational core that gives it intrinsic justification (2008, 143). However, it does not solve the problem because by characterizing religion as a rational consciousness, belief remains a subordinate element in the framework of cognitive reason. But what about belief that cannot be reduced to rational consciousness? Belief of this sort pervades and animates private and public life in many postcolonial societies and therefore should not be dismissed or tolerated as elements of a backward culture. The idea of worlding opens up productive avenues of thought for the study of world literature because it suggests a stance of sheer being-with-other modes of life that is prior to emergence of the rational subject. By virtue of its ontological priority, the world is what holds us together before we appear as subjects that stand against each other and need to be reconciled through reason. Worlding is the ontological condition of the possibility of world literature. It enables us to tell stories to each other, to translate languages, and engage in cosmopolitan literary intercourse. Worlding leads to a different approach to linguistic alterity and its stylistic and formal implications in the study of world literatures. The translation of literatures into a hegemonic language such as English is necessary because we are part of the same world and, therefore, necessarily amidst others. Translation can transform the existing world made by capitalist globalization by facilitating the emergence of excluded peoples. However, when being-in-common and communicability are actualized by linguistic translation as existing community and communication, the structural contamination and violence of translation will also restrict the emergence of marginalized peoples. More importantly, worlding holds together different modes of human existence without the hierarchizing regulation of reason that divides the modern from the traditional. It also

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holds together human and non-human modes of life without privileging the former over the latter. Worlding literature discloses this original togetherness in its thematic content and formal performance. My account of postcolonial worlding literature is a bastardization of Heidegger’s thought for two reasons. First, Heidegger’s thought is irreducibly marked by Eurocentrism. For him, German and Greek languages have “a special inner kinship” to thinking (Heidegger 2010 [1966], 62; 1976b, 217). Moreover, his association with National Socialism and the anti-Semitism of the recently published Black Notebooks, where he describes the Jewish people as worldless [weltlos], a phrase he had earlier reserved for inanimate beings such as stones, raise extremely serious concerns. Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari suggest that Heidegger’s politics is a consequence of his reterritorialization of the creativity of thought on “the wrong people, earth, and blood. For the race summoned forth by art or philosophy is not the one that claims to be pure but rather an oppressed, bastard, lower, anarchical, nomadic, and irremediably minor race” (1994, 109). Second, despite his critique of human intentional consciousness and the fact that the open brings together human and non-human beings, Heidegger’s thought is marked by a residual anthropologism that resurfaces in his repeated suggestion that human beings have a special relation to the open. Because animals cannot perceive the open, they are without access to logos in their ontological constitution. To “see” the open, thus understood, is the distinction of human beings. The animal is animal precisely on account of its not seeing the open, as understood in this way, which is also why it is unable to say the “is” or being [das Sein], that is, is altogether unable to say. The animal is αλογον – without the word. (Heidegger 1996a, 91; 1984, 113)

We cannot maintain this privileging of human beings when encountering modes of life where human and non-human beings exist together without hierarchy, such as those found in postcolonial Asia and Africa.

4 Conclusion I conclude with brief remarks about what constitutes an example of Anglophone postcolonial worlding literature. Global literature effaces worldliness by reducing world literature to the product of circulation in abstract space. Worlding literature broaches the question of the world understood in the fundamental sense of habitation that is ontologically prior to relations among subjects and objects in space. These relations of being-with-others are the ontological condition of the possibility of the Goetheaninspired normative project of world literature because the circulation of literary works through human intercourse presupposes our access to other human beings that is afforded by our propulsion into a world.

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In postcolonial worlding literature, such relations often involve non-human forces. The centrality of tiger spirits and the forest deity, Bon Bibi, to the plot and action of Amitav Ghosh’s The Hungry Tide (2005), a novel about the precariousness of subaltern life in the Sundarbans, is a case in point. Open to all in the generosity of her protection regardless of religious faith, Bon Bibi personifies openness itself. She is a divine figure for worldliness as such because she brings all the inhabitants of the forest into relation and unites them into a meaningful whole. She binds together human beings and animals, especially tigers, in relations of equality, kinship, and community with regard to the sharing of food and forest resources. Ghosh’s novel seeks to reworld the subaltern world of the Sundarbans that is being destroyed by global capital flows for wildlife preservation and eco-tourism by communicating to the wider world subaltern cultural practices and stories such as the Bon Bibi legend that enable subalterns to make sense of and survive within their harsh environment. This makes it an apposite example of normative world literary intercourse: it brings to public attention stories that have been dismissed by Western secular capitalist modernity as the vestiges of traditional superstition that should be eradicated. But since these stories are originally shaped by the linguistic flows of the region – Bengali, Arabic, and Hindi – and the novel is written in English for an Anglophone readership, the novel must point against its grain to an alterity that is ex-centric to what it can communicate in English. This alterity is dramatized by the novel’s action in various ways: the Bon Bibi legend, which is sung as a chant by Fokir, the central subaltern character, is relayed to Piya, a South Asian American cosmopolitan environmentalist who does not understand Bengali, in English translation; Nirmal’s diary, which provides a record of the subaltern world and which was written in Bengali, is lost in a cyclone storm and its contents have to be reconstructed in English. Because interlinguistic transparency is impossible, something is always lost in translational communication. However, because we are always already with others in a shared world, languages are porous and translation is necessary and inevitable. This is the aporia of Anglophone postcolonial world literature. This worldly habitation is the ground for the emergence of new beings and the ethical transformation of the existing world through the reconfiguration of relations among individual and collective subjects. In Tash Aw’s Five Star Billionaire, a novel about the new Chinese diaspora that pursues the Chinese Dream of hyperdeveloping post-socialist China, what gives shelter from the restless leveling forces of global capitalist homogeneous empty time is an original worldliness. Gary, a singer from a small rural Malaysian town, is frustrated in his quest for superstardom in the mainland market and descends into alcoholism and addiction to internet porn. He finds redemption by reinventing himself as a grassroots singer who sings in his Hokkien mother tongue, a Southern Chinese language spoken by Malaysian Chinese diaspora from that region. When he sings a Hokkien song at a public concert, his mainland audience does not understand him and he is transported back to the peaceful solitude of his childhood. “Singing in his mother tongue reminds him of the quiet loneliness

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of his childhood – of the long hours sitting on the porch of his village house watching the rain falling, hoping it would end […]. He feels […] that he is completely alone, but it is a solitude that feels calm, as it did many years before, when he was small” (2013, 435). No geographical borders are mentioned: simply lakes, forests, winds, the sea, and the sound of rain. This is not the high romantic argument of the mind of man recognizing itself in nature. These things are simply what is there. Being there gives solace and repose not because it is an objective natural home to which subjects can return but because it is the very substrate of existence. It holds us together and will always remain in spite of what we do, thereby giving us possibilities to envision worldly intercourse otherwise.

5 Bibliography 5.1 Works Cited Allan, Michael. In the Shadow of World Literature: Sites of Reading in Colonial Egypt. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2016. Auerbach, Erich. “Philology and Weltliteratur.” 1952. Trans. Marie Said and Edward W. Said. The Centennial Review 13.1 (1969): 1–17. Aw, Tash. Five Star Billionaire. London: Fourth Estate, 2013. Brandes, Georg. “World Literature.” 1899. Trans. William Banks. World Literature: A Reader. Ed. Theo D’haen, César Domínguez, and Mads Rosendahl Thomsen. New York: Routledge, 2013. 23–27. Cheah, Pheng. What Is a World? On Postcolonial Literature as World Literature. Durham: Duke University Press, 2016. Damrosch, David. What is World Literature? Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2003. Dastur, Françoise. “Heidegger’s Freiburg Version of the Origin of the Work of Art.” Heidegger toward the Turn: Essays on the Work of the 1930s. Ed. James Risser. Albany: State University of New York Press, 1999. 119–142. Deleuze, Gilles, and Félix Guattari. What Is Philosophy? Trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Graham Burchell. New York: Columbia University Press, 1994. Eckermann, Johann P. Gespräche mit Goethe in den letzten Jahren seines Lebens. Berlin and Weimar: Aufbau, 1982. Ghosh, Amitav. The Hungry Tide. Boston: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2005. Goethe, Johann W. von. “Aus dem Faszikel zu Carlyles Leben Schillers.” Sämtliche Werke, vol. 22: Ästhetische Schriften 1824–1832: Über Kunst und Altertum V–VI. Ed. Anne Bohnenkamp. Frankfurt am Main: Deutscher Klassiker Verlag, 1999. 866–867. Goethe, Johann W. von. Correspondence Between Goethe and Carlyle. Ed. Charles Eliot Norton. London: Macmillan, 1887. Goethe, Johann W. von. “Some Passages Pertaining to the Concept of World Literature.” Comparative Literature: The Early Years: An Anthology of Essays. Ed. Hans-Joachim Schulz and Phillip H. Rhein. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1973. 5–11. Goethe, Johann W. von, and Johann P. Eckermann. Conversations with Eckermann 1823–1832. Trans. John Oxenford. San Francisco: North Point Press, 1984.

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Habermas, Jürgen. “Religion in the Public Sphere: Cognitive Presuppositions for the ‘Public Use of Reason’ by Religious and Secular Citizens.” Between Naturalism and Religion: Philosophical Essays. By Habermas. Trans. Ciaran Cronin. London: Polity, 2008. 114–147. Heidegger, Martin. “The Thing.” Poetry, Language, Thought. By Heidegger. Trans. Albert Hofstader. New York: Harper and Row, 1971. 163–180. Heidegger, Martin. “Vom Wesen des Grundes.” Gesamtausgabe, vol. 9: Wegmarken. Ed. FriedrichWilhelm von Herrmann. Frankfurt am Main: Vittorio Klostermann, 1976a. 123–175. Heidegger, Martin. “‘Nur noch ein Gott kann uns retten:’ Spiegel-Gespräch mit Martin Heidegger am 23. September 1966.” Der Spiegel 23 (1976b): 193–219. Heidegger, Martin. “Building Dwelling Thinking.” Basic Writings. Trans. and ed. David Farrell Krell. New York: Harper and Row, 1977a. 323–339. Heidegger, Martin. “Wozu Dichter?” Gesamtausgabe, vol. 5: Holzwege. Ed. Friedrich-Wilhelm von Herrmann. Frankfurt am Main: Vittorio Klostermann, 1977b. 248–295. Heidegger, Martin. “Wie wenn am Feiertage…” Gesamtausgabe, vol. 4: Erläuterungen zu Hölderlins Dichtung. Ed. Friedrich-Wilhelm von Herrmann. Frankfurt am Main: Vittorio Klostermann, 1981. 49–77. Heidegger, Martin. Gesamtausgabe, vol. 53: Hölderlins Hymne “Der Ister.” Ed. Walter Biemel. Frankfurt am Main: Vittorio Klostermann, 1984. Heidegger, Martin. Hölderlin’s Hymn “The Ister.” Trans. William McNeill and Julia Davis. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1996a. Heidegger, Martin. Being and Time. Trans. Joan Stambaugh. Albany: State University of New York Press, 1996b. Heidegger, Martin. “On the Essence of Ground.” Pathmarks. By Heidegger. Trans. and ed. William McNeill. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998. 97–135. Heidegger, Martin. “As When on a Holiday…” Elucidations of Hölderlin’s Poetry. By Heidegger. Trans. Keith Hoeller. Amherst: Humanity Books, 2000a. 67–99. Heidegger, Martin. “Das Ding.” Gesamtausgabe, vol. 7: Vorträge und Aufsätze. Ed. Friedrich-Wilhelm von Herrmann. Frankfurt am Main: Vittorio Klostermann, 2000b. 163–186. Heidegger, Martin. “Why Poets?” Off the Beaten Track. By Heidegger. Trans. and ed. Julian Young and Kenneth Haynes. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002. 200–241. Heidegger, Martin. “‘Only a God Can Save Us:’ The Spiegel Interview” [1966]. Trans. William J. Richardson. Heidegger: The Man and the Thinker. Ed. Thomas Sheehan. New Brunswick: Transaction Press, 2010. 45–67. Marx, Karl, and Friedrich Engels. “Manifesto of the Communist Party.” Political Writings, vol. 1: The Revolutions of 1848. Ed. David Fernbach. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1973. 62–98. Marx, Karl. Capital: A Critique of Political Economy, vol. 3. Trans. David Fernbach. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1981. Mufti, Aamir R. Forget English! Orientalisms and World Literatures. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2016. Strich, Fritz. “World Literature and Comparative Literary History.” 1930. Trans. Theo D’haen. World Literature: A Reader. Ed. Theo D’haen, César Domínguez, and Mads Rosendahl Thomsen. New York: Routledge, 2013. 36–49. Young, Robert J.C. “World Literature and Postcolonialism.” The Routledge Companion to World Literature. Ed. Theo D’haen, David Damrosch, and Djelal Kadir. New York: Routledge, 2012. 213–222.

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5.2 Further Reading Aw, Tash. Map of the Invisible World. New York: Spiegel and Grau, 2010. Cheah, Pheng. “Worlding Literature: Living With Tiger Spirits.” Diacritics 45.2 (2017): 86–114. Cheah, Pheng, and David Damrosch. “What is a World (Literature)? A Conversation.” Journal of World Literature 4 (2019): 305–329. Farah, Nuruddin. Gifts. New York: Penguin, 2000. Glissant, Édouard. Poetics of Relation. Trans. Betsy Wing. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1997. Glissant, Édouard. Traité du tout-monde. Paris: Gallimard, 1997. Kurniawan, Eka. Beauty is a Wound. Trans. Annie Tucker. New York: New Directions, 2015. Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o. Globalectics: Theory and the Politics of Knowing. New York: Columbia University Press, 2014.

Bruce Robbins

7 Barbarians: Cosmopolitanism Beyond the Center-Periphery Model Abstract: Deep time, a salient and in some ways indispensable feature of the emergent formation of world literature, is presented as virtuously anti-Eurocentric and independent of the center-periphery model. But it has disadvantages – among them, a shallowness of ethics in proportion to the new depth of its history. Inequality of power at the global scale persists, of course, and requires a more nuanced history. This essay argues that the world history world literature needs must include some version of the center-periphery paradigm as well as some version of the unfashionable term ‘progress.’ Otherwise, how to account for the common sense that at present the ‘barbarian’ is acknowledged to be a construct, not an essential identity? The ‘new’ cosmopolitanism cannot entirely forsake the normative dimension of the ‘old’ cosmopolitanism. Key Terms: Deep time, barbarism, cosmopolitanism, center-periphery, David Mitchell, progress

1 Are There Still Barbarians? A post-apocalyptic sequence from David Mitchell’s novel Cloud Atlas (2004) re-stages, in a far-distant future, that familiar scene from early American Westerns where hooting Indians on horseback gallop in circles around a lonely wooden stockade on the prairie and blue-coated soldiers plummet from the ramparts, pierced by arrows. Within there is screaming and confusion. Civilization is in danger from barbarism. Mitchell does not identify the arrow-shooting attackers racially. Their name is the Kona; the setting is Hawaii, not the American West. Their weaponry is no giveaway. Crossbows could belong to any one of various historical collectivities, European or Asian. It is perhaps unsurprising that, so far into the planet’s future, what we see before us can no longer be attributed to European settler colonialism, whose violence in places like Hawaii and the American West explains the reciprocal violence by its victims in scenes like the besieged stockade on the prairie. The surprise is that Mitchell offers no explanation at all. Despite the advantages of historical hindsight, which would have much to say about the whys and wherefores of violence at the frontier, Mitchell does nothing to understand or humanize the perpetrators. Like the Indians in the least enlightened of cowboy-and-Indian narratives, his Kona slaughter and enslave without compunction or even apparent motive. What we see before us are pure, inscrutable Others. They are the antithesis of what their victims call civilization. In other words, they are what https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110583182-008

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used to be called barbarians. It comes as a bit of a shock to realize that in Mitchell’s otherwise very sophisticated text, one can no longer rely on the by now seemingly common-sensical idea that the barbarians “were a kind of solution” (Cavafy 1972, 7), to quote Cavafy’s “Waiting for the Barbarians.” Or, as we might also say, that the ‘barbarian’ is an ideological construct, a refusal of further analytic thought. For Mitchell, the barbarian is not a construct. Barbarians really are barbarians. From one perspective, then, Mitchell’s deep history could be described more precisely as superficial, flattened-out history. To put an event or a text into historical context is usually understood to entail some degree of analytic explanation. One result of such explanation is that the given text or event will not be evaluated simply or fully by the ethical standards of the present. The assumption is that other times had other ethical standards. The ancient Israelites were commanded by their god to commit what would now be called ethnic cleansing. The ancient Greeks did not object to slavery or to the capture and exchange of women as booty. Neither group had any objection to the violent subjugation of foreigners. It is difficult to read the texts of those times and places, like the Bible and the Iliad, without recognizing that our knowledge of those other standards should have at least some impact on how the object under scrutiny will be appraised – how much and what sort of an impact remaining legitimate and, in fact, urgent questions. Mitchell does not seem to share this recognition or feel he has to take on the difficulties it brings with it. Historical context in this morally operative sense, which is now more likely than not to force its way into new American Westerns, has completely disappeared from Cloud Atlas. While time in the novel is much deeper than usual in various ways, including its linguistic dimension – you have to learn to decipher “Such bar’bric buggahs are them painted Konas, bros” (Mitchell 2004, 299) – Mitchell’s time is morally shallow.

2 Deep Time, Shallow Ethics In this moral shallowness, Cloud Atlas seems representative – not completely, but interestingly – of the still emergent or perhaps now fully emerged project of world literature. Early statements by Franco Moretti (2000), Pascale Casanova (2004), and David Damrosch (2003) were more or less indifferent to the old-fashioned practice of moral judgment, and understandably so, given that the field’s main inspiration lay elsewhere – in the expansion of the literary map to include non-European materials that might or might not be influenced by or responding to Europe and, on that expanded map, in the excitement generated by the new intertextual relations that demanded to be named and explored and the research methods that needed to be developed for them. It was perhaps inevitable that literature, viewed from a greater distance, would come to seem liberated from any and all contexts – liberated from context as such. For some would-be practitioners, it seems natural that one of the

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field’s attractions would be renewed enjoyment of a literary autonomy that some had come to feel was too constrained by criticism’s historicist-contextualist paradigm, local as well as global, a paradigm that (for example, in the center-periphery model) made some moral and political judgment seem inevitable. A sense of cheery liberation from the weight of an over-moralized and overpoliticized context can be detected well before the founding statements of world literature. It is already manifest in an early and influential post mortem for the center-periphery model, Arjun Appadurai’s “Disjuncture and Difference in the Global Cultural Economy,” first published in 1990. If the global cultural economy “cannot any longer be understood in terms of existing center-periphery models,” Appadurai wrote, the reason is the disjuncture “between economy, culture, and politics” (1996, 32, 33). In order to grasp the consequences of this disjuncture, Appadurai takes the metaphor of landscape and fractures it into what he calls ‘scapes,’ each of them distinct and relatively autonomous: ethnoscapes, technoscapes, mediascapes, financescapes, and ideoscapes. “These landscapes,” Appadurai goes on, “are the building blocks of what (extending Benedict Anderson) I would like to call imagined worlds” (33). Imagined worlds, and not just imagined communities, in that they describe how different local or national communities imagine their connections to other such communities. And yet worlds, plural, without the oneness or unity at the level of the planet that Anderson assumed to exist at the level of the nation. Appadurai’s ‘scapes,’ like the terms epichoric, panchoric, cosmopolitan, vernacular, national, and global in Alexander Beecroft (2015), are useful structuring contexts. But the multiplicity of the terms suggests that both authors reject or marginalize the hypothesis of a single landscape or meta-structure whose power-saturated relations determine how the various contexts might be linked to each other. In this scenario, ethics drops out. Appadurai’s rejection of the core-periphery model allowed him to discover and display the significance of cultural flows that ran from one so-called periphery to another, bypassing the supposed center or global North entirely. It was a huge contribution to play up these South-South connections, as well as to show how often what looks like homogenization (a power-laden flow from the core outward to the periphery) might be better described as indigenization, a process by which the periphery, receiving cultural flows from the core and yet also, core-like, actively exercising its own power, re-signifies and, in effect, re-makes what it receives. And yet Appadurai’s key concept of disjuncture, which sought, and won, for the imagination, wherever it operated, a certain autonomy from other social determinants, left no room for the important question of how autonomous culture actually is or is not from, say, finance or military and political power. It is not as if we always know that in advance. A world divided into ‘scapes’ cannot simultaneously be seen as a single landscape, which is to say a landscape where the materialities and inequalities of ethnicity, technology, and finance would be re-combined into a single reductive and therefore morally operative picture, a picture which, precisely because it does simplify, makes visible the injustices that arguably structure the world and the terrain on which moral and

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political choices (for example, about the planetary dilemma of climate change) have to be made. This entity, hypothetical but also (for better or worse) a historical fact, is what I am calling a moral landscape. It is historical because the division of the world into core and periphery, of course, was just such a landscape. If that landscape is no longer useful or, indeed, positively misleading, like the Three Worlds theory that preceded it – and this is perhaps not entirely certain, given the continuing plausibility of world-systems theory – then the follow-up question becomes, first, whether it should be replaced – that is, whether we are better off without any such simplifying and comprehensive world-picture – and then, if it will be replaced, what the replacement or replacements might be. This chapter will take only very tentative steps toward an eventual answer to these questions.

3 Cosmopolitanism in Time The cosmopolitan impulse with which we are most familiar is geographical, an expansion in space that attempts (with whatever degree of success) to de-center Europe and achieve greater equality of representation at a planetary scale. As I have argued elsewhere, this geographical cosmopolitanism, which is self-evidently desirable, also entails a temporal cosmopolitanism which has been harder to see, and therefore requires a further moral adjustment beyond and apart from the welcoming of non-European voices (see Robbins 2016; some of this section has been adapted from that essay). World literature seems relatively comfortable in this new, suddenly enlarged time frame. Indeed, as suggested above, it sometimes seems to revel in the disabling or attenuation of moral and political critique that follows, perhaps inevitably, when European colonialism becomes marginal within a much larger or deeper world cultural history. The autonomy that Appadurai secured for culture by disjoining his ‘scapes’ is equally prized, of course, by scholars of literature in general and by scholars of world literature in particular. Backing up so as to achieve a broader perspective in time as well as space seems calculated to give this constituency what it already wanted. Consider Beecroft’s 2008 essay “World Literature without a Hyphen: Towards a Typology of Literary Systems.” Beecroft sweeps away the moral landscape of postcolonial studies, which for some decades had given planetary injustice its most visible form, at least for literary critics. As Beecroft correctly observes, it would be provincial in the extreme to consider cultures which go back thousands of years, like those of India and China, before either had any substantive contact with Europe, from the viewpoint of a politicized planetary division between European core and non-European periphery or a primal injury inflicted by the former upon the latter. All that happened, to the extent that it did, after 1500. It is a hypothesis about Western modernity. If Beecroft’s point can be generalized – a question that has actually not

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been posed – then the literatures outside Europe that the field of world literature now makes its business to incorporate into programs of pedagogy and research cannot be taken as somehow pre-fitted for the moral and political judgments, predictable or not, heretofore attached to texts fashioned in the wake of Europe’s world domination. In effect, then, the global balance of power drops out as default position. Beecroft goes on to list some languages that have been powerful without the backing of a powerful country of origin: Chinese in Japan, Persian in the Mughal and Ottoman courts, and Greek in the eastern Mediterranean, which “likewise has little to do with imperial power” (2008, 95). The implication is that yes, there were empires, but the fact that literature was written in empires did not matter to the literature. It is as if only the nation worked, as a context, to invest its values in the literature produced within it – as if the fact of literature coming into existence within an empire somehow had a weaker effect and did not make it, say, a vehicle for imperial values. This hypothesis seems both questionable in itself and symptomatic of a fake historicization – fake in the sense that (although Beecroft is clear that not all literature before 1500 was produced in empires) its effect is to insinuate that pre- or non-modern literature is autonomous and that literature produced in the modern nation-state is the exception, reflecting as it does its national context and demanding to be evaluated accordingly. In the dimension of time, modernity draws the same line that the core-periphery model draws in space. In retaining a special status for the modern nation-state, Beecroft arguably refuses or at least neglects to erase the line between modern and pre-modern (more on this below). Others, however, have shown no such reluctance. The fact that the term modernity has become controversial, for Bruno Latour and his followers, for example, is one sign that the new moral landscape designers are hard at work, though there is reason to hesitate before recommending approval of their designs. What would happen to moral and political judgment if we were to decide to do without modernity? One answer to that question comes from Wai Chee Dimock’s influential Through Other Continents: American Literature across Deep Time (2006). The first page of the book juxtaposes the destruction of the Iraqi National Library as well as the Islamic library in the Religious Ministry in April of 2003, both of which had been left unprotected by the conquering American forces, with the destruction of the Baghdad archives by the conquering Mongols in 1258, led by Genghis Khan’s grandson Hulugu. “Modern Iraqis,” Dimock commented, “see the actions of the United States as yet another installment of that long-running saga” (2006, 2). This continuity “made no sense to the Marines,” Dimock goes on (2006, 2). “The year 1258 was long ago and far away. It is separated by 745 years from 2003. The United States has nothing to do with it” (2006, 2). Dimock’s outrage against the American invasion of Iraq is, of course, welcome. And yet it is arguably not as well aimed as it might be. As in Cloud Atlas, history as explanation has dropped out. Dimock makes no effort to understand either the American or the Mongol invasion of Iraq. It is as if the obvious, unquestionable barbarism of the first invasion somehow removed all pressure to explain the

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barbarism of its American re-incarnation. Like Mitchell, Dimock is content to point the finger at barbarians, wherever and whenever she thinks she can find them. She too appears to assume that barbarism is inexplicable, a manifestation of an eternal propensity to cruelty, an eternal human nature. For her too, barbarians simply are barbarians. Here the problem is that moral judgment is too easy. In the presence of atrocity, it is always tempting to lay down the tools of historical analysis and simply deplore or weep, or both at once. And yet critics do not have this luxury. In putting the events of the present into significant relation with the events of the past, they are obliged to do some hard thinking – about the events, and also about the paradigms within which we evaluate them. Dimock’s denunciation of the forgetfulness of American presentism assumes that, once remembered, historical events exist simultaneously in the present, like great literature for T.S. Eliot. But this makes history as a process disappear. Without it, one might say that, appearances to the contrary, Dimock cannot in fact condemn the American invasion as severely as it deserves to be condemned. When she says that Americans over-estimate the 745 years that have passed between 1258 and 2003 and should learn from the Iraqis that 745 years of linear time do not really count, she is neglecting one sense in which the 745 years of linear time clearly do count. At the time of the Mongol invasion, it seems likely – I await the verdict of intellectual historians on this point – that no moral norm existed which would have defined invasion and conquest of someone else’s territory as a violation. On the contrary, conquest was held to bestow the right to territorial possession (as Benjamin Netanyahu is now claiming in the case of Israel’s occupation of the Golan Heights, recently affirmed by U.S. President Donald J. Trump). Conquest conferred legitimate possession not just when the Europeans arrived in the New World but also within Europe, where the sacking and pillaging and raping that accompanied conquest were, of course, already routine. One thing that happened during those 745 years that Dimock assumes to be effectively empty is the rise of moral norms that did define invasion and conquest as violations, however difficult to punish or prevent. Those norms may not have been much respected in practice, but their emergence is nevertheless a cultural, moral, and political fact of some significance. The Americans could and should have known better. History had made the relevant knowledge available to them. One might conclude, therefore, that the Americans are much guiltier than the Mongols. How to attribute historical blame for atrocity is probably not the question that any of us are most concerned to answer at the present time; it is not what present action most urgently requires. Yet it is not irrelevant to those of us professionally concerned with humanity’s moral history. And nuance in attributing blame would of course be forfeited if one were to obey Dimock’s imperative to remember the Mongol barbarians the way she says the Iraqis do – vividly, as if the sack of Baghdad had happened yesterday. And there are more important disadvantages to ignoring the usual assumption that the passage of time may have made some positive difference, even in the establishing of modern nation-states. Celebrating that which comes

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before (and after) the modern nation-state, as Dimock does, more or less guarantees neglect of the historical rise of those moral norms mentioned above, which cannot be understood without some appreciation of what distinguished the modern nationstate from pre-modern empires, based as empires were on the functional necessity of violent territorial conquest and ongoing coercion. It suggests that politics, which is still mainly defined by the nation-state, is a waste of time. It suggests that the reader’s time would be better invested in reading literature (because literature is not so defined) than in otherwise trying to change the world within which literature is (or more likely is not) read. Dimock’s choice of temporal scale – ‘thousands of years’ – also certifies the neglect and sometimes the explicit disapproval of other aspects of modernity, such as democracy and secularism, which might be useful in future appraisals of American military adventures and their evangelical supporters. Even students of the novel, who are usually suspicious of ahistorical universals, are now becoming accustomed to a temporal frame which has been enlarged so dramatically that a certain kind of secular history no longer seems to apply. One notable instance of this enlargement appears in Margaret Doody’s The True Story of the Novel (1996). Doody breaks the identification between the novel and secular modernity and reads the novel in terms of religious ritual. She justifies this Christian-mythic-feminist reading in part on the grounds that, following in the footsteps of Herodotus the “barbarian-lover” (1996, 480), it does higher justice to Europe’s Others. It is as if she were saying: I am the true cosmopolitan, for it is I, not the secularists, who speak for the largest constituency of humans, past and present. The world is and has been filled with believers. The real worldliness is therefore otherworldliness. A re-legitimation of religion is surely not the intention hidden behind all efforts to enlarge the temporal frame of literary scholarship. But this is a possible and perhaps even a probable effect of re-weighting the materials of world literature so that the center is farther back in time, before even the possibility of secularism had emerged. At any rate, those who encourage a return to religion or who take an entirely critical, rejectionist stance toward modernity (often the same people) will now have an easier task arranging syllabi so as to make their case and importing into it the respect for blood-based hierarchy, natural subordination, and other anti-democratic values supposed to result from world literature’s spatio-temporal democratization at the planetary scale. They will have changed the moral landscape in significant ways.

4 Beyond the Orientalist Paradigm Edward Said’s premise in his 1978 classic Orientalism was the existence of “an ontological and epistemological distinction” between Orient and Occident, or the West and the rest (1978, 2). More precisely, it was “the idea of European identity as a superior one in comparison with all the non-European peoples and cultures” (1978, 7).

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Said named a primal, unique, and ongoing injury inflicted by Europe on the rest of the world, an injury which was part of Europe’s historical self-constitution while it also continued to impose various constraints on the development and expression of non-European peoples and cultures. It hardly needs to be said that Said’s proposition has been richly productive for scholarship. And as the direct urgency of the colonial moment has faded (with exceptions like Palestine), the moral landscape it laid out has been sustained by fresh outbursts of racism and xenophobia in Europe and elsewhere. Still, critiques like Beecroft’s, combining with the simple passage of time and, for that matter, with Said’s own reconsideration of his argument’s effects for the reading of literature, have shaken this core-periphery paradigm, like others, and given momentum to those trying to think beyond it. The most useful summary of what Said’s binary landscape omits is to be found in Robert Young’s Postcolonialism: An Historical Introduction, originally published in 2001 and re-issued in an anniversary edition in 2016. “Partly because of the dominance of attention given to colonial discourse,” Young writes, “and the degree to which the notion of a discourse, certainly in Said’s formulation in Orientalism (1978), does not really allow for antithetical ideologies, there is a tendency to produce a level of ideological uniformity that is a travesty of the historical record” (2016, 74). Trying to set the record straight, Young gives his Part II the title “European Anti-Colonialism” and begins it with a section on “Las Casas to Bentham.” Las Casas by now is well known and frequently taught. It is less generally known that as early as 1793, Bentham gave a speech in Paris called “Emancipate Your Colonies!” (Young 2016, 85). A renewed canon needs both Las Casas and Bentham, and all those like them. Even if these figures (and Burke on India, Multatuli on Java, and Tolstoy on the Caucasus) turn out to be a small metropolitan minority, dwarfed by a mainstream opinion that had little if any objection to Europe’s killing and conquering of supposed barbarians, scholars adding to and deepening our knowledge of the exceptions would, first of all, be doing something very like what literary scholars have traditionally done with writers classified as great, who were always a minority. This would not require much, if any, departure from existing critical habits. As cultural historians rather than mere commentators on the canon, moreover, such scholars would also be filling in the oft-neglected history leading up to the commonsense knowledge frequently posited above as ‘ours,’ in the metropolis and outside it: that the ‘barbarian’ is really just a construct, and that those who are so labeled deserve historical understanding as much as anyone else. This is valuable work. After all, does one not want and need to know how this became common sense, even if David Mitchell ignores it? Should one pretend it is not there or treat it as an impenetrable mystery? Without it, the moral history of humanity is missing something essential. Humility can be carried too far. One effect of Young’s revision, whether deliberate or not, is to raise the colonizing core in the moral scale, arriving at something closer to balance with the colonized. The impulse to achieve a greater moral levelling between core and periphery can

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perhaps also be discerned, as suggested above, behind temporal cosmopolitanism. If imperial conquest was more the rule than the exception outside as well as inside Europe, as might appear from an enlarged temporal perspective that looks impartially at events before and after 1500, then modern European imperialism is, of course, not exonerated, but it is no longer unique in its bloodthirstiness or greed. The same result might also follow from setting free, as it were, world literature’s attention to cultures that had previously been misrepresented, excluded, or marginalized – that is, setting those cultures free from the abstraction of an ascribed but silent victimhood and examining their behavior toward their own neighbors or subordinates. All cultures must be listened to. But when you listen, what do you hear? For most of them, most of the time, Europe was not what they were speaking about. And when they were, were they less prone to caricature those not like themselves than Europeans were to caricature them? Did the Persians think in less stereotypical terms of the Greeks than the Greeks thought of the Persians? When these cultures speak for themselves, there is no guarantee that they will sound any more secular, or humanist, or in any way admirable to modern ears in what they say about the West, or about each other, than the West has sounded when it talked about them. Would it be astonishing to find, mixed into possible admiration for technological prowess and so on, appreciable amounts of essentialism, more or less poisonous misrepresentation, or what would have to be called racism? The charge of orientalism in reverse, or “occidentalism” – a symmetrical stereotyping of the West by the rest – has not been slow to arise. Once upon a time, it may have seemed sufficient to answer that orientalism was different because of the greater power it wielded. But turning from a culture’s content to its power would not end the debate, especially if earlier periods and other, non-European empires are permissible topics, as they have increasingly become, within the same now planetary conversation. Does anyone believe that there exists such a thing as an empire without the coercive exercise of power?

5 Voices of the ‘Barbarians’ Today This magnification of time-scale coupled with a diluting or relativizing of European colonial blame can also be traced back to another, entirely distinct logic: the emergence of indigenous peoples as a political actor on the international stage. In an earlier essay on time-scale in the humanities and human rights (Robbins 2005), I cited the Algerian-French writer Assia Djebar. In her history of the French conquest of Algeria in the nineteenth century, Fantasia: An Algerian Cavalcade (1993), Djebar chose to forget the earlier conquest of the Berbers many centuries earlier by the Arabs. That earlier conquest would have been a distraction, as would the conquest of the Arabs by the Ottomans in 1510. On the other hand, Djebar did not entirely forget them. The Ottoman conquest is mentioned in the “Chronology” that stands just outside the

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text – in fact it is the first date mentioned. And the Berbers are alluded to when Djebar talks about writing her book “in a foreign language, not in either of the native tongues of my native country – the Berber of the Dahra mountains or the Arabic of the town where I was born” (204). There were good reasons for Djebar’s almost complete forgetting of these earlier acts of conquest: they would unavoidably relativize the European conquest, and it was the European conquest that made the most urgent political demands on her, especially since the actions and sufferings of the women who fought against the French occupation very largely remained unmemorialized. And yet there were also good reasons for remembering the conquest of the Berbers by the Arabs. The reasons are present and political: indigenous peoples of North Africa have now mobilized in political movements demanding self-determination or linguistic and cultural equality. The Berbers or Amazigh have brought their second-class status in a predominantly Arab culture before the UN Permanent Forum on Indigenous Issues. The international mobilization of indigenous peoples has reinvigorated the term colonialism, extending into the present a colonial moment that was arguably in danger of closing. In so doing, however, the new indigenous politics has also stretched the concept in one way that, though obvious, needs to be underlined. If a (European) conquest that happened in the nineteenth century now appears in the same temporal frame with a (non-European) conquest that happened in the seventh and eighth centuries, then those accused of being colonizers can no longer be exclusively Europeans. That could not conceivably be the case for a movement that includes not just the Ojibwa of the United States and the Māori of New Zealand but also the Berbers of Algeria and Morocco, the Masai of Kenya and Tanzania, and the Chakma people in the Chittigong Hill Tracts of Bangladesh, among many others. It seems unlikely that colonialism will ever count again as an exclusively European phenomenon. At the United Nations, some states have argued that colonialism is only colonialism if it involved the crossing of water in a boat. Conquest by land would not then be colonialism at all. Unsurprisingly, this so-called “salt water” or “blue water” (Robbins 2015) hypothesis has been strongly urged by China, which posits that it possesses no indigenous peoples. But it has not gotten a lot of traction even in Asia. This position would, of course, deny the convergence between America’s westward expansion in the nineteenth century and Russia’s symmetrical eastward expansion, each resulting in the conquest of many local populations. The effort to maintain the unique guilt of Europe would force us to declare that European Russia was not a colonial power. This absurdity would sacrifice the indigenous status of the peoples of the Caucasus and Siberia along with all the indigenous peoples of Asia who are currently striving to protect themselves against the majorities around them. That would be a large sacrifice. This brings us back to Mitchell and Cloud Atlas. In a sense, Cloud Atlas begins with the conquest of an indigenous people – but the conquest of one indigenous people, the Moriori, by another indigenous people, the Māori. There are extenuating circumstances: the Europeans are at least seriously complicit in this slaughter and near-extermination on New Zealand’s Chatham Islands. But the most pointed blame

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for the violence falls on the Māori, who are themselves, of course, better known as victims of European colonization, not as colonizers. Mitchell is emphatic: here, as in the ‘barbarians at the gates’ scene this chapter started with, Europeans have no monopoly on barbarism. There is nothing you need to understand about the conquering Māori, there is nothing you can understand about them. At the novel’s beginning, as at its center, the barbarians again really are barbarians. It seems possible that Mitchell’s version of the conquest of the Moriori is factually untrue. Other sources on Chatham Islands history suggest that in terms of warlikeness the Moriori were not initially much different from the Māori (cf. King and Morrison 1990). One hypothesis is that once they were conquered, they created a myth of their eternally peace-loving nature as a back-formation to help justify their subordination. Why should Mitchell clutch on to so implausible a myth? Only, I would suggest, because he can see no other way out of the Nietzschean paradigm of endless, repetitive robbery and slaughter, Europe’s version being unique only in the moral hypocrisy with which it covers itself. That is, as Dr. Goose puts it in his genealogy of morals: “Why tinker with the plain truth that we hurry the darker races to their graves in order to take their land & its riches? Wolves don’t sit in their caves, concocting crapulous theories of race to justify devouring a flock of sheep!” (Mitchell 2004, 490). It is as if the pull of the Nietzschean slogan “the Weak are Meat the Strong do Eat” (508) is so overwhelming for Mitchell that no purchase on the ethical seems possible short of a kind of desperate absurdity: primal pacifism. The preferable alternative, it seems to me, would be to re-explore the territory of developmental narrative, linear or multi-linear, and even ‘moral progress.’ What we need is pacifism seen not as prior condition, the positing of a paradise always about to be violated, but as a historical product – as indeed it is. This is the kind of moral progress that we choose to ignore when we simply agree that, at the present time, the word ‘barbarian’ belongs between scare quotes. Nietzsche is a fascinatingly unsettling presence in Cloud Atlas. Nietzsche’s rejection of secular ethics (as a hypocritical outgrowth of Christian slave worship) seems to inspire the novel’s villains, but Nietzsche’s concept of eternal recurrence seems to inspire the form of the novel itself, which mocks the faith in progress. Here Mitchell himself seems to be a closet Nietzschean. The moral shallowness of Cloud Atlas allows for no difference or development from period to period; in every period, the moral dilemmas are more or less identical. In going morally fractal in this way, the novel arguably regresses from our contemporary moral common sense – most obviously, from our achieved disbelief that the world can be divided between civilization, on the one hand, and barbarism on the other. The achievement of this disbelief, if you agree that the disbelief exists and is indeed an achievement, would have to count as moral progress, uncomfortable as we may be with those two words. If we believe that it is better not to believe in barbarians and that these days we do not, whoever ‘we’ might be, then we do believe, however reluctantly, in something like moral progress. Mitchell, it seems, does not.

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In Mitchell’s defense, you could say that the novel contains plenty of pious sentiments deconstructing the civilization/barbarism binary in favor of the idea that there is good and evil in all of us. The novel’s official moral, delivered on the last page, is that, faced with slavery or one of its equivalents, as you will certainly be, you should become an abolitionist. In that sense, Mitchell sees progress as possible: moral action would not be worth undertaking if moral actions did not have historical consequences. Therefore, actions must have historical consequences. And in the individual chapters, moral actions do have consequences, at least on the local scale. There is also the transcendent inspiration of cultural artifacts and examples that are preserved and transmitted. But how much does this piety weigh against all the reluctant impiety? The Nietzscheanism, explicit in the villain Dr. Goose, is very persuasively articulated as well by the composer of the “Cloud Atlas Sestet,” Frobisher, who is not such an obvious evil doer. More importantly, as noted, it is backed up by the novel’s repetitiveness, which shows us barbarism returning anew, unchastened, in every period. Unlike Nietzsche, Mitchell clearly disapproves of the barbarian, but all these returns of barbarism suggest his unwillingness to take a decisive distance from Nietzsche’s critique of morals and moral progress, let alone come up with a creative refashioning of both for our time that will match his literary inventiveness.

6 Conclusion Mitchell’s position seems to be, roughly, that of human rights discourse: in order to judge each alleged violation on its merits, one must refuse to contextualize it, for to contextualize it would risk letting the perpetrators off the hook by entering into their motives and circumstances, what the other side had perhaps done to provoke them, and so on. No partisanship, no politics, no historical context, then. No moral landscape, with its irregularities that must be recognized and negotiated. Just the act itself, abstracted from everything, in isolation. Yet the development of the human rights consensus, such as it now exists, is of course itself a historical phenomenon, and one that could well be charted in some relation to the history of world literature. After its (disputed) origins in Western Europe (and alternative origins in Southern Europe, as in the Las Casas line), it had to win the adherence of representatives of the newly independent states in the mid-twentieth century, something that could happen only if it shed many of its European trappings. The result remains imperfect, in theory and even more in practice. But it has its achievements, like the Universal Declaration of the Rights of Indigenous Peoples in 2007. And each achievement has meant a change in the paradigm; each has allowed historical context to exert some pressure on moral judgment. Each has meant some new landscaping, inequality and injustice made visible in a new way – some of these ways, but not all, move away from the

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center-periphery paradigm. Any account of world literature that refuses to align itself in any way or to any degree with those achievements, thereby acknowledging something like moral progress at the scale of humanity, would have reason to question its moral seriousness as a collective enterprise. “Every document of civilization is at the same time a document of barbarism” (Benjamin 1969, 256). Walter Benjamin’s famous line did not reject either the idea of barbarism or the idea of civilization; it merely rejected the latter’s complacent idea of itself as utterly distinct from the former. But the naming of civilization and barbarism is the easy part. The hard part is understanding them, which, of course, also means understanding (as Mitchell does not try to do) the way each is entangled in the other. The tension between historical understanding and ethical judgment may be ineradicable, but different negotiations between the two are possible, and there is a high cost for giving up on the project of negotiating between them: history as one vast scene of slaughter, a single immense act of violence laid out over the centuries in endless diachronic variations, from which one can only recoil into the reading of a good book. Over the past twenty-five or thirty years, the ‘old’ cosmopolitanism, which was normative, singular and universalizing – singular in the sense that there can be only one cosmopolitanism, just as there is only one ‘humanity as a whole’ that deserves your ultimate loyalty – has been gradually, if only partially, displaced or supplemented in Western theory by a ‘new’ cosmopolitanism, understood as plural and descriptive. According to the new understanding, cosmopolitanism can be defined as any one of many possible modes of life, thought, and sensibility that are produced when commitments and loyalties are multiple and overlapping, no one of them necessarily trumping the others. Cosmopolitanism is something that is happening all the time – as often as people find themselves in some sort of diaspora, loyal in some degree both to the values of the society they come from and to the values of the society where they live. There are at least as many cosmopolitanisms as there are diasporas. The first aim of scholars must be to discover and describe them. For this reason, the emergence of the ‘new’ cosmopolitanisms has seemed, on the whole, a happy story. The American historian David Hollinger, who first distinguished between ‘old’ and ‘new’ (2008) cosmopolitanisms, applauded the blossoming of a multitude of cosmopolitanisms, almost all of them modified by adjectives that insist on the paradox of cosmopolitanism as located in a particular time, place, constituency, situation: rooted cosmopolitanism, discrepant cosmopolitanism, vernacular cosmopolitanism, and “actually existing cosmopolitanism” (2008, 237) (the parallel with the emergence of ‘world literature’ is striking). Saddling cosmopolitanism with these modifiers implies that cosmopolitanism did not emerge from such supposed universals as nature, reason, secularism, and humanity, or, for that matter, authorities like colonialism, God, and the free market. Cosmopolitanisms in the plural call for plural sources and plural histories. The setting and source of these histories will not always be Europe. Experiences of multiple and divided loyalty, which are characteristic of collective migration or diaspora, can be found all over. Cosmopolitanism

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has proved so useful as an umbrella term in part because it insists that processes of migration and diaspora must be firmly marked on our maps of the world. To say this, however, is not to settle the moral and political issues that this chapter has tried to put in relief. Sociologists and ethnographers who have been drawn to the concept in its new plural guise generally continue to use it as a term of praise. They tend to want to claim for their diverse, hybrid, diasporic subjects the same honor that the singular, normative, philosophical concept was held to confer – the honor of being able to take a distance from the values of their place of origin. Yet in the new context, this honor can no longer be taken for granted. As it is pluralized and democratized, becoming a larger part of the status quo, cosmopolitanism can less comfortably serve as a criterion by which the status quo is judged. If the status quo is nationalist, say, then cosmopolitans may be nationalists as well. A less flattering designation for the same phenomenon might be “long-distance nationalism.” The political theorist Benedict Anderson has an essay entitled “Long-Distance Nationalism” (1998) which discusses the unfortunate tendency of certain diasporic communities to be more, not less, racist and xenophobic in their political allegiances back home. Among his examples are support for the destruction of the Babri Mosque in Ayodhya by Hindus in Vancouver; Irish-Americans funding the bombing campaign of the IRA in Northern Ireland and Jewish-Americans who have taken even more uncompromising stances vis-à-vis the Palestinians than Jews residing in Israel. But if communities in diaspora can become more xenophobic rather than less xenophobic, do we still want to describe them as cosmopolitan? In any particular instance, it would seem that cosmopolitanism’s positive value or claim to honor must be argued for and shown, not taken for granted. Otherwise moral judgment has simply been disabled. The reissue of Robert Young’s Postcolonialism suggests another way in which the key concepts that make up the global landscape have, and have not, shifted. In the 15 years since the book first came out, Young has modified his history and his definitions of the colonial and the postcolonial. Sensitive to the rise of the international indigenous movement, Young puts welcome emphasis on the phenomenon by which victims can become victimizers, the colonized can already be or subsequently become colonizers in their turn. In this sense, he dissolves the core-periphery binary. And yet, in another sense, he retains that binary, and indeed seems to be going to great lengths to do so. In his historical account, the nation-state is the villain. Why? Because (the assertion seems questionable, but worth debating) by its nature it is territorially expansive – expansive, violent, and coercive in precisely the way that empires were once thought to be. And since it is Western modernity – that is, the core – that has imposed the nation-state on the world, it is still imperialism that defines the map. Nothing really has changed, globally speaking. The core-periphery binary persists. Even those of us who believe that the nation-state remains the most significant site of political contestation available to us, rather than the unique source of evil in the world, will not want to dispute the inequality of global power or the demands it makes on our critical practice.

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7 Bibliography 7.1 Works Cited Anderson, Benedict. “Long-Distance Nationalism.” The Spectre of Comparisons: Nationalism, Southeast Asia and the World. By Anderson. London and New York: Verso, 1998. 58–76. Appadurai, Arjun. “Disjuncture and Difference in the Global Cultural Economy.” 1990. Modernity at Large: Cultural Dimensions of Globalization. By Appadurai. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1996. 27–47. Beecroft, Alexander. “World Literature Without a Hyphen: Towards a Typology of Literary Systems.” New Left Review 54 (2008): 87–100. Beecroft, Alexander. An Ecology of World Literature: From Antiquity to the Present Day. London and New York: Verso, 2015. Benjamin, Walter. Illuminations. Trans. Harry Zohn. Ed. Hannah Arendt. New York: Schocken, 1969. Cavafy, C.P. Selected Poems by C.P. Cavafy. Trans. Edmund Keeley and Philip Sherrard. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1972. Casanova, Pascale. The World Republic of Letters. Trans. Malcolm B. DeBevoise. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2004 [1999]. Damrosch, David. What is World Literature? Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2003. Dimock, Wai Chee. Through Other Continents: American Literature across Deep Time. Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2006. Djebar, Assia. Fantasia: An Algerian Cavalcade. Trans. Dorothy S. Blair. London: Quartet, 1993 [1985]. Doody, Margaret Anne. The True Story of the Novel. New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1996. Hollinger, David A. “Not Universalists, Not Pluralists: The New Cosmopolitans Find Their Own Way.” 2001. Constellations 8.2 (2008): 236–248. King, Michael, and Robin Morrison. A Land Apart: The Chatham Islands of New Zealand. Auckland: Random Century, 1990. Mitchell, David. Cloud Atlas. New York: Random House, 2004. Moretti, Franco. “Conjectures on World Literature.” New Left Review 1 (2000): 54–68. Robbins, Bruce. “Temporizing: Time and Politics in the Humanities and Human Rights.” boundary 2  32:1 (2005): 191–208. Robbins, Bruce. “Blue Water: A Thesis.” Review of International American Studies 8.1 (2015): 47–66. Robbins, Bruce. “Prolegomena to a Cosmopolitanism in Deep Time.” Interventions 18.2 (2016): 1–15. Said, Edward W. Orientalism. New York: Random House, 1978. Young, Robert J.C. Postcolonialism: An Historical Introduction. Chichester and Malden: Wiley-Blackwell, 2016 [2001].

7.2 Further Reading Moyn, Samuel. Not Enough: Human Rights in an Unequal World. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2018. Palumbo-Liu, David, Bruce Robbins, and Nirvana Tanoukhi, eds. Immanuel Wallerstein and the Problem of the World: System, Scale, Culture. Durham: Duke University Press, 2011. Wallerstein, Immanuel. World Systems Analysis: An Introduction. Durham: Duke University Press, 2004.

Claudia Egerer

8 Anglophone World Literatures and World Ecologies (Environmental Humanities) Abstract: Anglophone world literatures are challenged by and participate in the formation of the environmental humanities, marked by collaborations across disciplines and the development of new methodologies. Informed by new materialism, posthumanism, and multispecies studies, writers, poets, and literary scholars seek to redefine the task of literature and literary studies from within the environmental humanities. At a time when literature’s core concerns, “questions of meaning, value, ethics, justice and the politics of knowledge production” (Rose et al. 2012, 2) cut across cultural, national, linguistic, and species boundaries under pressure of anthropogenic climate change, the worlding of literature seeks to contribute to solutions. In storying these anthropogenic anxieties and hazards that affect human and nonhuman ecologies on a planetary scale, literature translates the phenomenon of climate change, and its immense sea of data, into the microcosm of human experience and understanding. Key Terms: Environmental humanities, entanglements, unsettling the human/ities, multispecies worlds, Anthropocene anxieties

1 The Environmental Turn “The theory I advocate aims to disrupt this deep historical dualism by resituating humans in ecological terms at the same time as it resituates non-humans in ethical and cultural terms” (Plumwood 2004, 53). Plumwood’s statement may serve as an epigraph for this chapter. In an age of renewed interest in world literature, it bears remembering that literature is, and has always been, as Wai Chee Dimock asserts, a “continuum [which] extends across space and time, messing up territorial sovereignty and numerical chronology” (2001, 174). It is literature’s propensity to stray, pillage, and rearrange its spoils that is its defining feature. Hence “authors centuries and thousands of miles apart can turn out to be inseparable” (Dimock 2001, 174). Dimock illustrates this with an event now eighty-six years in the past (May 1934), the story of Osip Mandelstam, who, awaiting his arrest for reciting a satirical poem on Stalin, carried a copy of Dante’s Divine Comedy (1472) with him at all times. He was subsequently taken into custody and sentenced to four years of exile. The pocketed Dante did not save Mandelstam’s life (he died in Siberia), but the fact that the medieval poem was still around after hundreds of years, in the Soviet Union, leads Dimock to observe that its “very existence gave Mandelstam a different reference point, dimensions of https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110583182-009

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space and time not reducible to the arm of the Soviet government” (2001, 174). In Mandelstam’s words, space and time can be seen as “a kind of fan” (qtd. in Dimock 2001, 175), one that can be folded up, “putting Italy in the immediate vicinity of Russia and making strange bedfellows out of the fourteenth and the twentieth centuries” (Dimock 2001, 175). Seen in this light, thousands of years and thousands of miles can “sometimes register as near simultaneity; ten years and ten miles can sometimes pose an unpassable gulf”– an ancient truth strongly articulated by Anglophone world literatures which, increasingly, are written not just from some ‘where’ but from a multiplicity of geographical and linguistic locations (Dimock 2001, 174). This little preamble is as good a reminder as any that literature has always been what Derek Attridge identifies as “a peculiar institution which sheds light on institutionality, as a site of resistance to the philosophical tradition of conceptual thought” characterized by “a series of singular (but repeatable) acts that demand singular (but responsible) responses” (1992, 25). A peculiar institution, one might add, that cannot be limited to either geographical or theoretical locations and, as Dimock’s example illustrates, cannot be confined within national boundaries, especially when these limits are enforced. Today, world literature is recognized as deeply entangled in the world and the worlding of that world, and, as this handbook argues, best understood in terms of world literatures. Definitions could never only be literary but would have to take into consideration the ways in which world literatures are subject to “a multifaceted and culturally fraught process of ascribing literary, cultural, pedagogical and economic value to specific literary texts” (Neumann and Rippl 2017, 2). Focusing on world literature’s temporal dimension as constitutive of its “active power of world making,” Pheng Cheah draws attention to its double capacity as both “a site of processes of worlding and as an agent that participates and intervenes in these processes” (2014, 302). It follows that world literatures are written in many languages but here we are concerned mainly with Anglophone world literatures, literatures written in English. Anglophone literatures, informed by a history of colonial and postcolonial writing, straddle the divide between what used to be center and periphery of the colonial world, and as such contribute to the cross-pollination beyond an AngloAmerican imagination and across national boundaries to include indigenous perspectives (Buell et al. 2014, 420–422). Other vulnerabilities bind these various histories together if we remember that literatures, like civilizations, have emerged near water, rivers in particular, and have been exposed to climatic conditions affecting human societies and their literatures for millennia. A recent example is the environmental turn in literature and literary studies we are witnessing now. Alerted by increasing evidence of human culpability in environmental degradation, the twenty-first century has seen the emergence of a new type of literature on a global scale, climate fiction or cli-fi, with focus on the impact of climate change on human and nonhuman life, calling long-established conceptions of the human and her relations to the rest of the living into question. Climate fiction is written from a local context characterized by a wide-ranging global relevance.

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Examples that come to mind are Australian Mireille Juchau’s The World without Us (2015), Australian of the Waanyi nation Alexis Wright’s Carpenteria (2006) and The Swan Book (2013), Nigerian-American Nnedi Okorafor’s Who Fears Death (2010), South African Karen Jayes’ For the Mercy of Water (2012), American Barbara Kingsolver’s Flight Behaviour (2012), Argentinian-Swedish Hernan Diaz’ In the Distance (2017), German Frank Schätzing’s The Swarm (2006), Norwegian Maja Lunde’s The History of Bees (2015) and Blue (2017), Finnish Emmi Itäranta’s Memory of Water (2012), to name but a few. The list is growing daily and if we want to cast a wider net, we see that these novels increasingly exceed definitions of climate fiction by situating themselves in terms of what we might call Anthropocene literature, literatures writing about living in the Anthropocene, aware of their immersion in its entangled human-nonhuman worlds. A novel that probes multispecies relationality as a strategy of worlding is Juchau’s The World without Us, where bees and humans are intimately embedded in each other’s life worlds in what Thom van Dooren identifies as living in “a lively world in which being is always becoming, becoming is always becoming-with” (2, 2016). Consequently, these literatures engage concerns such as probing human responsibilities of living in a more-than-human, multispecies world, and the ethical re-orientation this calls for from a multitude of theoretical and philosophical positions. By the same token, a number of approaches from within the humanities challenge “how humanities scholars conduct research, how they relate to the natural and social sciences and perhaps most importantly, how they conceive of their roles in a time of accelerating global environmental change” (Bergthaller et al. 2014, 262). The authors of the seminal article “Thinking through the Environment, Unsettling the Humanities” (Rose et al. 2012) that launched the journal Environmental Humanities in 2012 discuss what such a response might look like. Under the rubric of the environmental humanities, “questions of meaning, value, ethics, justice and the politics of knowledge production” are brought “into environmental domains” to “articulate a ‘thicker’ notion of humanity,” placing participants in “lively ecologies of meaning and value, entangled within rich patterns of cultural and historical diversity that shape who we are and the ways in which we are able to ‘become with’ others” (Rose et al. 2012, 2). Literary scholars have been at the forefront of exploring these concerns together with scholars from inherently interdisciplinary fields like geography, anthropology, gender studies, and the digital humanities. Hence the formation of the environmental humanities is greatly influenced by postcolonial and feminist studies and by scholars who “critiqued the limited focus of earlier environmental histories and the literary canon of ‘nature writing’” (Emmett and Nye 2017, 4). A considerable number of scholars write out of the former colonies, with Australia in the vanguard. New publications that have sprung up during the last decade or so include the international, open access journal Environmental Humanities, launched in Australia but now published by Duke University Press, the American digital, peer-reviewed Resilience: A Journal of the Environmental Humanities and the UK based Green Letters: Studies in Ecocriticism. The journals bring together the most influential scholars in the field, and the first

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issues in particular read like a who’s who in the environmental humanities, demonstrating the interdisciplinary and global range of the field. Working in an interdisciplinary area requires a rethinking and often an adaptation of methodologies. One of the defining features of the study of literature is its commitment to practices of close reading, invested in the ‘slow scholarship’ that enables us be surprised by the familiar, trust in our intuition, engage in what John Keats called “negative capability” (Keats 1899, 277). It is this capability “of being in uncertainties, mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact and reason” (Keats 1899, 277) that characterizes slow scholarship, open to what Hans-Ulrich Gumbrecht identifies as “risky thinking,” one not hampered by moral certainties nor shying away from complexities (Gumbrecht 2018). All the above are qualities sorely needed in times of global warming, climate change, loss of biodiversity, pollution of air and sea and the increasing acidification and plastification of our waters and soils. In times of “accelerating everything” we need to slow down in order to take in the complexities, to see and think differently, for, as Greg Garrard observes, “slow down, and the landscape changes: tempting byways appear; curiosity is given a chance to supplant urgent strategy” (Garrard 2010, n.pag). This ability to slow down is one of the strengths of the humanities, as the authors of “Mapping Common Ground: Ecocriticism, Environmental History, and the Environmental Humanities” point out (Bergthaller et al. 2014). The humanities, with their “emphasis on reflection and interpretation” are “slow to progress – perhaps even incompatible with the very idea of ‘progress,’” a slow scholarship which provides a much-needed antidote to our times in the grip of fast-moving media and social media (Bergthaller et al. 2014, 265). Moreover, living in times of accelerating media hype, we risk overlooking a lethal kind of violence, the kind so unspectacular it defies standard perceptions of violence, one that “occurs gradually and out of sight, a violence of delayed destruction that is dispersed across time and space,” to cite Rob Nixon’s definition of “slow violence” (2011, 219). This reverberates with Jacques Derrida’s claim in A Taste for the Secret that all violence begins in and with language, as “there is no natural violence, an earthquake is not violent, it is only violent insofar as it damages human interests” (Derrida and Ferraris 2001, 92). Hence Nixon’s slow violence shares its domain with the linguistic violence that “does not let the other be what he is, does not leave room for the other” (Derrida and Ferraris 2001, 92). In this regard, attention to slow violence has made it into climate fiction as one of the strategies of worlding that characterizes much of the genre. A novel that comes to mind is Jayes’ For the Mercy of Water (2012) which turns on the uncanny entrapment that ties authorities and the disempowered, victims and perpetrators, human and nonhuman, in murky ecologies of violence. Slow violence, defined by its interlinkages with “the environmentalism of the poor” rooted in ecological disasters, Nixon’s phrase quickly gained currency as a conceptual metaphor influencing discussions about the transnational nature of environmental resistance in the Global South (Islam and Islam 2015, 3). As literary and scientific narratives of environmental degradation share common concerns, the emergence and rapid growth of the interdisciplinary field of the

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environmental humanities provides a much-needed meeting place where different theories are brought into conversation with one another and this confluence embodies a “wide ranging response to the environmental challenges of our time” which is marked by “a growing willingness to engage with the environment from within the humanities and social sciences” (Rose et al. 2012, 1). The title of their paper, “Thinking through the Environment, Unsettling the Humanities,” is well-chosen as what we are experiencing at this moment in time is precisely the unsettling of assumptions governing the humanities in a number of ways. As one of the major theoretical and conceptual distinctions between the humanities and the environmental humanities consists in their disagreement over the centrality of human agency, much focus is on efforts of unmooring the human from her privileged place outside and in control of nature. One example of this unmooring move is Donna Haraway’s neologism naturecultures, which neatly sidesteps the familiar oppositions of nature/culture, body/mind, material/semiotic, stressing the mutual entanglements of these concepts, immersed as they are in constantly changing realities (Haraway 2008, 25). Haraway, a trained biologist working from the intersection between science, culture, and politics, argues that successful naturecultures emerge out of cross-species conversations and depend on relational categories invoking earlier indigenous ontologies, instead of clearly defined ones, thus undoing the binary mindset that has steered the modern Western episteme for so long. This questioning of discrete categories is echoed by Dipesh Chakrabarty’s seminal paper “The Climate of History: Four Theses” which argues that “the anthropogenic explanations of climate change spell the collapse of age-old humanist distinction between natural history and human history” (Chakrabarty 2009, 201). The geological impact of humanity’s over-exploitation of resources on a planetary scale that propelled us into the Anthropocene also denotes the end of two distinct forms of historical consciousness: the one, historical time, understood through the interpretation of historians, the other, deep time, comprehended through the perspective of natural science, can no longer be understood separately, but are seen now as two perspectives that bleed into one another with far-reaching consequences on a cultural, scientific, and political scale. Since the anthropocentric mind-set that permeated much of post-Enlightenment thought typically overlooked the nonhuman constraints humans always were subject to, this is an insight that global warming with the ensuing climate crisis is now forcing upon us.

2 Interventions: Thinking Differently A novelist who enters the climate debate and uses the form of the novel to story the implications of climate change par excellence is Margaret Atwood, whose much-lauded MaddAddam Trilogy (Oryx and Crake 2003, The Year of the Flood 2009, MaddAddam 2013) falls within the category of climate fiction or cli-fi. But Atwood participates in

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the public debate in more ways than one; her treatise “It’s not climate change – It’s everything change” first posted online on July 27, 2015, is one of the most forceful and persuasive contributions to the climate debate to date. Enlisting the literary imagination to drive home the urgency of our predicament, Atwood’s text employs the trope of the lobster placed in a pot of cold water, brought slowly to the boil, so that the lobster does not feel the danger until it is too late (2015, 36). Humanity is this lobster, following the ‘in the long run we’re all dead’ logic instead of seeing the writing on the wall. She opens with three scenarios of what might happen in a future without oil. Picture One is her most optimistic scenario, where a combination of timely action, replacing fossil fuels with natural energy and smart technology allows us to more or less go on living in the lifestyle we are used to. There is even “foolproof nuclear power” and any accidents would not be “all bad news,” Atwood informs us, tongue-in-cheek, “because instant wildlife refuges are created as Nature invades those high-radiation zones where Man now fears to tread” (2015, 4). Picture Two presents us with a darker post-oil world where everything stops, food runs out, the “me first” mentality rules and democratically-elected authorities are replaced by “thugs, street gangs, and war lords” and “the war of all against all” sets in (2015, 7). An extreme picture, but one that will make us realize that “the present world population of six and a half billion people is not only dependent on oil, but created by it” (2015, 9). Picture Three is made up of a mix of countries, where the oil-poor ones take precautions for a future without oil because they must and the oil-rich ones react by ensconcing their countries in “virtual fortresses […] preserving resources for themselves” (2015, 11). Conclusion? “If we don’t start aiming for Picture One, we’ll end up with some version of Picture Two” (2015, 15). Atwood closes her piece by quoting from Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa’s 1963 novel, The Leopard: “For everything to stay the same, everything has to change,” encouraging us to think this change, now (2015, 42). Her treatise is itself an example of how world literature actively engages in the worlding of the world, both in terms of an intervention – act now! – and in the ways in which it relies on the powers of the imagination to summon up the responses for that intervention. Indian novelist and trained anthropologist Amitav Ghosh adds his voice to the chorus of writers who point to the ways in which our insistence on human exceptionalism is to blame for our failure to see our own culpability in the destruction of our world, so that “this era, which so congratulates itself on its self-awareness” instead will be remembered as “the time of the Great Derangement” (Ghosh 2016, 11). His book by the same title explores in detail his thesis “that the Anthropocene has forced us to recognize that there are other, fully aware eyes looking over our shoulders” from a literary perspective (2016, 65–66). If we understand that the climate crisis is “also a crisis of culture, and thus of the imagination” then the question would be what the modern novel has to say about it (2016, 9). Not much, according to Ghosh, who dismisses much of Western literature as ill-suited to story the challenges of living in an age marked by improbability, by the uncanny. Uncanny because there is, in the midst of climate-induced uncertainty and strangeness, this “sense of recognition” of the

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deep entanglements of human and nonhuman lives sharing what “we had thought to be most distinctively our own: the capacities of will, thought, and consciousness” (Ghosh 2016, 30–31). Ghosh locates the forgetting of this age-old awareness of nonhuman agency – one that has permeated cultural narratives since the beginning of time – in modernity’s obsession with what Bruno Latour calls “partitioning,” the construction of an imaginary chasm between Nature and Culture (Latour 1993). Reminding us that this partitioning move was never uncontroversial and violently disputed by poets “from Hölderlin and Rilke to such modern-day figures as Gary Snyder and W. S. Merwin,” Ghosh ends on a hopeful note (2016, 69). Contemporary literature faces and must accept the challenge to overcome artificial divisions, he argues, as it falls to the novelists to put an end to our not-so-splendid isolation, to rediscover our kinship with the rest of the living “this vision, at once new and ancient, will find expression in a transformed and renewed art and literature” (2016, 162). In a similar vein, Australian philosopher and ecofeminist Val Plumwood points out that anthropocentrism damages both humans and nonhumans in a multitude of ways. We can see that it results in “a failure to understand our embeddedness in and dependency on nature, that it distorts our perceptions and enframings in ways that make us insensitive to limits, dependencies and interconnections of a non-human kind” (2009, 116). What we need is to “re-imagine the world in richer terms” to engage in dialogue with nonhuman forms of life (2009, 127). Writers, she argues, are among the best equipped to help us with this task of thinking differently, and, crossing disciplinary borders, she turns to poet and Guardian country diarist Paul Evans to flesh out her claim. His insistence “to depict nature in the active voice, the domain of agency” so that we can hear “sound as voice” is also a powerful reminder of the worlding capacities of literature (Plumwood 2009, 126): The path has a mind of its own but a body shared by hundreds. It is a way through the woods, a way made by the five-toes, the four-toes, the cloven hooves and a few big clodhoppers like mine. This is a path with a memory, a remembrance of passings, and it offers itself to the future for those who recognize a way worth taking. A raven rasps its rapid cries into a strong, south-westerly wind, which rakes through treetops of ash, small-leaved lime, beech and oak. In holly thickets the wind stirs goldcrests and they sing like jingling pockets of change. Old hulks of crashed elm speak of an older wood. (qtd. in Plumwood 2009, 126) The first sentence opens with the agency of the path and its enmeshment with other non-human agencies, a technique that is carried through the prose passage, cannily enlisting the power of the poetic to touch and move us. For Plumwood, the beauty of this passage resides in its openness “to experiences of nature as powerful, agentic and creative, making space in our culture for an animating sensibility and vocabulary” (Plumwood 2009, 126). It offers a powerful reminder of literature’s ability to make us

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see and think the ordinary and the everyday in novel ways by creating worlds normally closed to us but which poetry allows us to enter at will.

3 Worlding Planetary Entanglements Scientists have made use of literary devices earlier to make their point, and in the following we will briefly look at two events from the 1960s that impacted our understanding of our own species and its relationship with the natural world in unforeseen ways, and, taken together, led to a critical rethinking of humanity’s place in the order of things. The first was the publication of Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring in 1962 in which she makes the argument that the insecticides used to control “pests,” mainly DDT, not only are useless because insects develop immunity to the toxins and come back in greater numbers than before, but are subjecting “enormous numbers of people to contact with these poisons, without their consent and often without their knowledge” (Carson 1962, 12). While trained as a biologist, hers is a lyrical voice and her opening gambit of “there was once a town in the heart of America” where manmade toxins silence the birds and spread disease among man and beast, is so effective because it couches her thesis in the literary narrative of fiction and fairy tale (Carson 1962, 1). Throughout her text, she draws on literary tropes and, in the same vein, she prefaces her text with an epigraph from Keats, inspiring the title of her book: “The sedge is wither’d from the lake, /And no birds sing,” adding E.B White’s lines “we would stand a better chance of survival if we accommodated ourselves to this planet and viewed it appreciatively instead of skeptically and dictatorially” (Carson 1962, epigraphs). In a move to give weight to the urgency that underlies her book, Carson dedicates Silent Spring to Albert Schweitzer, citing his “Man has lost the capacity to foresee and to forestall. He will end by destroying the earth.” Throughout, Silent Spring anticipates the mixing of methodologies characteristic of the environmental humanities and far more than alerting the public to the dangers of DDT which finally resulted in the ban on the chemical and led to the establishment of the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), Carson’s book also marks the starting-point of the environmental movement The other event is the first moon landing in July 1969, eclipsed only by what has been dubbed “The Blue Marble,” a photograph of Earth taken by the Apollo 17 crew on their way to the moon on December 7, 1972. One of the most widely spread images of Earth, it was the first time we were able to see the whole planet. It was an emotional moment and astronauts waxed lyrical at the sight, as the response from scientist Millie Hughes-Milford’s 1991 flight illustrates, quoted here in full: When you look down on the planet and realize how small it is, it’s really very interesting – you have emotions you didn’t think you were going to have. My name is not “Moonbeam,” but when you look at the planet and realize it’s the only place you can see that has life on it, you start

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feeling very protective toward it. It’s like a delicate crystal ball, and it looks alive. The first time I looked at it, I thought it was alive. When I’m looking at living cells in a microscope, they have a glow to them that dead cells don’t. And the whole planet had that iridescence of life about it. It moved me. (Reichhardt 2012 n.pag.)

Seeing our planet from space was a revelation, a mark of the unsurpassed supremacy of human engineering and ingenuity, seemingly confirming conceptions of human exceptionalism, at the same time as its hanging alone in the emptiness of space exposed the frailty of our home and the ways in which we are defined by it and biologically and emotionally entangled in the life it gives rise to. Moreover, the emotionality of Hughes-Milford’s response mirrors Cheah’s claim that our affective relationship to the Earth means that “the world transcends mere geography” (2014, 318) because “the globe is not a world” (2014, 319). Each in its different way, Carson’s Silent Spring and the Blue Marble photograph drive home Earth’s isolation in the vastness of space and the vulnerability we share with life on the planet. And, as Carson’s book so aptly demonstrates, toxins created for pest control and deemed “harmless to humans” and their pets, are dangerous to all life as life on Earth is more alike than different (Carson 1962, 89). More than half a decade later, Carson’s cautionary tale seems more relevant than ever; we may have acted on the dangers of DDT, yet we continue to develop and spread new pesticides that damage humans and the environment, often with long-term consequences beyond our ken. Scientists and governmental bodies do their best to keep the general public informed and updated on the current state of climate change and the measures needed to bend the curve. Created in 1988, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) issues climate updates on a regular basis, updates which have made it into the public consciousness. For instance, the special report Global Warming of 1.5 °C, released on 6 October 2018, warns of the dangers of surpassing a 1.5° Celsius rise from pre-industrial levels in average global temperatures. The report states that: “Warming greater than the global average has already been experienced in many regions and seasons, with higher average warming over land than over the ocean (high confidence)” (IPPC 51). This involves “20–40% of the global human population live in regions that, by the decade 2006–2015, had already experienced warming of more than 1.5° C above pre-industrial in at least one season” (IPPC 51). Projections reveal the severity of the crisis – with the mitigation pledges made under the Paris Agreement in 2016, the 1.5 target would appear to be out of reach, with a figure of 3° C by 2100 more likely, with disastrous effects on planetary life, including our own. This dark scenario is confirmed by a recent study measuring the biomass distribution led by Ron Milo at the Weizmann Institute of Science in Israel. The results are discouraging: in terms of mammals, 60 percent of the Earth’s biomass consist of livestock (mainly cattle and pigs), 36 percent of humans, and only 4 percent of wildlife. When we look at birds, 70 percent are farmed poultry with only 30 percent wild

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species. Alarmingly, these data reveal the disproportionate impact humans have on planetary life – with approximately 7.6 billion people, humans make up a mere 0.01 percent of life on Earth, yet are responsible for an accelerating climate crisis with loss of biodiversity at a rate the planet has never witnessed before (Yinon M. Bar-On 2018, 6506–6511). Yet it seems as if a large number of people resist factual information. As evidence of anthropogenic climate change amasses rapidly, climate change is polarized into climate crisis or climate hoax in the public eye, and it is obvious that the STEM disciplines (science, technology, engineering, and mathematics) need input from the humanities and social sciences to address the ecological crisis in full. Especially since “what have traditionally been termed ‘environmental issues’ have been shown to be inescapably entangled with human ways of being in the world, and broader questions of politics and social justice” (Rose et al. 2012, 2). The illustration and imagining of human ways of being in the world have always been the forte of literature and literary studies, which means that they have valuable contributions to make to collaborations across disciplinary lines. As discussed above, close reading and slow scholarship form part of the methodologies literary studies add to the mix, and when one turns to the sciences, the environmental humanities adopt the practice of multi-authored papers, rare in the humanities, but enriching the new field where multi-authored texts are becoming the norm. An obvious explanation is the multi-disciplinary nature of the research papers, reflecting an on-going dialogue. Another is the conviction that the very move of delimiting the text to one single position runs counter to a field invested in taking the entanglements of different ways of life seriously. In his closing chapter of Flight Ways, “Epilogue: A Call for Stories” (2014, 145–147), Thom van Dooren reminds us of these science/humanities entanglements, of the ways in which science allows us to better understand nonhuman ways of life and of the value the humanities bring to the table. As definitions go, van Dooren’s touches on the core of what characterizes environmental humanities thinking, “a thinking that inhabits complex multispecies worlds without the aid (and impediment) of simplistic divisions between the human and the nonhuman, the cultural and the natural” (2014, 147). “We are,” he continues, “inevitably drawn into a set of complex responsibilities for what has come to pass and what may yet still be possible” (van Dooren 2014, 147). Typically, the lines between human and nonhuman sharing our planet are best envisaged by the complex entanglements where each is understood as gifted “with its own unique ways of inhabiting richly storied worlds” (van Dooren 2014, 147). The responsibilities of inhabiting multispecies worlds call for literary responses as literature is the space where “richly storied worlds” take shape and are tested against other storied worlds, creating ever new levels of complexity as not least Margaret Atwood’s MaddAddam trilogy testifies to. Yet another example of disciplinary entanglements is illustrated by the awareness of enmeshment of histories and relationships, of co-constitutions and co-becomings in a more-than-human world. Van Dooren, Kirksey, and Münster name multispecies

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studies as one strand shaping the environmental humanities, pointing to the practice of “passionate immersion” as one method to achieve “attentive interactions with diverse life ways,” that is, learning to pay “attention to how [human and nonhuman] craft shared lives and worlds” (van Dooren et al. 2016, 6). Moreover, their interest in engaging the multispecies worlds around us, in new ways of worlding, opens up for epistemological, theoretical, methodological and not least ethical ways of rethinking species boundaries. The practice of attentive interaction involves experimenting with different ways of imagining and approaching more-than-human worlds around us, more often than not involving collaborations across disciplines and academic conventions. One example they mention is Cary Wolfe and Maria Whiteman’s “play with the conventions of academic scholarship, drawing us into the life-worlds and landscapes of mountain pine beetles through poetry, image, and sound” (van Dooren et al. 2016, 7). Wolfe and Whiteman’s installation Mountain Pine Beetle focuses the devastation of entire pine forests by the mountain pine beetle, starting in 2000 and gaining momentum in 2002, a devastation driven by that little insect in symbiosis with a blue stain fungus, Grosmannia clavigera, and climate change. Engaging with these dying ponderosas, Wolfe and Whiteman note how what initially engaged them “aesthetically, emotionally, viscerally, it was like nothing we had ever seen” at closer inspection took on another dimension as “site of inscription, a set of traces to be deciphered,” constituting “the graphic materialization and registration of factors and forces at scales both above and beneath the domesticating world of the human who looks at nature and composes a landscape” (Wolfe and Whiteman 2016, 147). As such, this affective and poetic response to a dying landscape translates into something far bigger, what we might recognize as “a posthumanist (though not antihuman) response to ecology” (Wolfe and Whiteman 2016, 147). The turn to posthumanism that structures the Wolfe-Whiteman reading forms part of the growing interest in philosophical and theoretical approaches that question traditional distinctions into animate and inanimate matter under the heading of new materialism, forwarded by theorists such as feminist philosopher Rosi Braidotti’s “post-anthropocentrism” (2018), feminist philosopher Karen Barad’s “agential realism” (2007), political theorist Jane Bennet’s “vital materiality”(2010), and literary scholar Stacy Alaimo’s “trans-corporality” (2010). The restructuring of knowledge this involves necessitates a revisiting of the doxa of humanism, beginning with an unlearning of the being-human humanism teaches us, by resituating the human within the environment and by formulating a new relational ontology, marked by “a radical open relatingness of the world worlding itself” (Barad 46), a move where “becoming is always becoming with – in a contact zone where the outcome, where who is in the world, is at stake” (Haraway 2008, 244). “Becoming-with,” Kate Wright observes, “is a form of worlding which opens up the frames of what registers to us and so what matters to us,” so that we experience our own entanglement with the environment not just as abstract knowledge but through the “affective capacities of our own bodies and the bodies of the more-than-human-world” (Wright 2014, 279).

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4 Coda Being sensitive to and taking seriously that which “matters to us” and paying attention to the “affective capacities of our own bodies and the bodies of the morethan-human world” form an inherent part of the world-making moves that characterize world literatures in dialogue with the environmental humanities. Engaging affective faculties is a powerful way of worlding, and a necessity if we want to break the resistance to scientific evidence of anthropogenic climate change, indeed, climate crisis, and rapid loss of biodiversity, which risks falling on deaf ears, something collaborations across disciplinary lines engendering new theories and methodologies seek to remedy but cannot fix unless people’s feelings are engaged. We seem to resist facts but appear to have a harder time turning a blind eye on our feelings, which puts pressure on literature, fiction and poetry, because the tools of their trade, tropes and imagery, hit a nerve that elicits affective responses beyond language. Moreover, literature’s worlding moves, while deeply entrenched in their times, also serve as connectives to other times and other beings, resisting hegemonic tendencies of globalization. This is in line with Derrida’s thinking, who opposes the globe of globalization with world [monde], arguing that the world is “neither the earth nor the universe nor the cosmos” but instead “dense with social and religious meanings […] lacking the geometric totality imparted by ‘globe’ or ‘global’” (Li 2007, 141–142). Hence mondialisation [worldwide-ization] is not simply a translation of globalization but, as Cheah notes, mondialisation is best understood as “the becoming-world of the world” where ‘world’ signifies “an ongoing dynamic process of becoming, something that is continually being made and remade, because it possesses a historical-temporal dimension” (2014, 319). It is precisely this becoming-world of the world that world literatures as literatures in the world engage in when scholars, writers, and poets use their craft to explore novel ways of worlding by bringing together human and nonhuman into a more-than-human universe both within and beyond the grasp of language, as the activity of worlding always also appeals to our pre-linguistic emotions, a vulnerability humans share with the rest of the living.

5 Bibliography 5.1 Works Cited Alaimo, Stacy. Bodily Natures: Science, Environment, and the Material Self. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2010. Attridge, Derek. “Introduction: Derrida and the Questioning of Literature.” Acts of Literature. By Jacques Derrida. Ed. Derek Attridge. New York: Routledge, 1992. 1–27. Atwood, Margaret. “It’s Not Climate Change, It’s Everything Change.” https://medium.com/matter/ it-s-not-climate-change-it-s-everything-change-8fd9aa671804 (5 Jan. 2017).

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Barad, Karen. “Nature’s Queer Performativity,” Women, Gender, and Research 1.2 (2012): 25–53. Barad, Karen. Meeting the Universe Halfway: Quantum Physics and the Entanglement of Matter and Meaning. Durham: Duke University Press, 2007. Bennet, Jane. Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things. Durham: Duke University Press, 2010. Bergthaller, Hannes, Agnes Limmer-Kneitz, Adeline Johns-Putra, and Kate Rigby. “Mapping Common Ground: Ecocriticism, Environmental History, and the Environmental Humanities.” Environmental Humanities 5 (2014): 261–276. Braidotti, Rosie. “A Theoretical Framework for the Critical Posthumanities.” Theory, Culture & Society 36.6 (2018): 31–61. Buell, Lawrence, Ursula K. Heise, and Karen Thornber. “Literature and Environment.” The Annual Review of Environment and Resources 36 (2011): 417–440. https://www.annualreviews.org/doi/ abs/10.1146/annurev-environ-111109-144855 (20 Mar. 2014). Carson, Rachel. Silent Spring. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2002 [1962]. Chakrabarty, Dipesh. “The Climate of History: Four Theses.” Critical Inquiry 35.2 (2009): 197–222. Cheah, Pheng. “World against Globe: Toward a Normative Conception of World Literature.” New Literary History 45.3 (2014): 303–329. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, IPCC. “Special Report: Global Warming of 1.5°C.” 2018. https://www.ipcc.ch/sr15/ (21 May 2019). Derrida, Jacques, and Maurizio Ferraris. A Taste for the Secret. Trans. Giacomo Donis. Ed. Giacomo Donis and David Webb. Cambridge: Polity Press, 2001. Dimock, Wai Chee. “Literature for the Planet.” PMLA 116.1 (2001): 173–189. Emmet, Robert S., and David E. Nye, eds. The Environmental Humanities: A Critical Introduction. Cambridge: MIT Press, 2017. Evans, Paul. “Down Memory Lane.” Guardian Weekly (24 Nov. 2006): 22. Garrard, Greg. “A Novel Idea: Slow Reading.” Times Higher Education. (17 June 2010). https://www. timeshighereducation.com/news/a-novel-idea-slow-reading/412075.article (14 May 2018). Ghosh, Amitav. The Great Derangement: Climate Change and the Unthinkable. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2016. Gumbrecht, Hans-Ulrich. “Precarious Thinking: Jan Assmann, Aleida Assmann and the World of a German Generation.” Peace Prize of the German Book Trade: 2018 Laudatory Speech. https://www.friedenspreis-des-deutschen-buchhandels.de/1245415/ (3 July, 2019). Haraway, J. Donna. When Species Meet. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2008. Haraway, J. Donna. The Companion Species Manifesto: Dogs, People, and Significant Otherness. Chicago: Prickly Paradigm Press, 2003. Islam, Md Saidul, and Md Nazrul Islam. “‘Environmentalism of the Poor:’ The Tipaimukh Dam, Ecological Disasters and Environmental Resistance Beyond Borders.” Bandung: Journal of the Global South 3.27 (2015): 2–27. https://doi.org/10.1186/s40728-016-0030-5 (5 May 2018). Juchau, Mireille. The World without Us. London: Bloomsbury, 2015. Keats, John. The Complete Poetical Works and Letters of John Keats. Boston: Houghton, Mifflin and Company, 1899. Kingsolver, Barbara. Flight Behaviour. New York: HarperCollins, 2012. Latour, Bruno. We Have Never Been Modern. Trans. Catherine Porter. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1993. Li, Victor. “Elliptical Interruptions: Or, Why Derrida Prefers Mondialisation to Globalization.” CR: The New Centennial Review 7.2 (2007): 141–154. Neumann, Birgit, and Gabriele Rippl. “Anglophone World Literatures: Introduction.” Special issue Anglophone World Literatures. Anglia 135.1 (2017): 1–20. Nixon, Rob. Slow Violence and the Environmentalism of the Poor. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2011.

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Plumwood, Val. “Nature in the Active Voice.” Australian Humanities Review. 64 (2009): 113–129. http://australianhumanitiesreview.org/2009/05/01/nature-in-the-active-voice/ (15 May 2015). Plumwood, Val. “Gender, Eco-Feminism and the Environment.” Controversies on Environmental Sociology. Ed. Robert White. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004. 43–60. Reichhardt, Tony. “The Overview Effect.” Airspacemag.com. (7 Dec. 2012). https://www. airspacemag.com/daily-planet/the-overview-effect-155952845/ (3 June 2019). Rose, Deborah Bird, Thom van Dooren, Matthew Chrulew, Stuart Cook, Matthew Kearnes, and Emily O’Gorman. “Thinking through the Environment, Unsettling the Humanities.” Environmental Humanities 1 (2012): 1–5. Van Dooren, Thom. Flight Ways: Life and Loss at the Edge of Extinction. New York: Columbia University Press, 2014. Van Dooren, Thom, Eben Kirksey, and Ursula Münster. “Multispecies Studies: Cultivating Arts of Attentiveness.” Environmental Humanities. 8.1 (2016): 1–23. Wolfe, Cary, and Maria Whiteman. “Landscape and Inscription.” Environmental Humanities 8.1 (2016): 143–148. Wright, Kate. “Becoming-with.” Environmental Humanities 5.1 (2014): 277–281. Yinon M. Bar-On, Rob Phillips, and Ron Milo. “The Biomass Distribution on Earth.” PNAS 115.25 (2018): 6506–6511.

5.2 Further Reading Alaimo, Stacy, and Susan Hekman, eds. Material Feminisms. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2008. Braidotti, Rosie. The Posthuman. Cambridge: Polity Press, 2013. Buell, Lawrence. The Future of Environmental Criticism: Environmental Crisis and Literary Imagination. Malden: Blackwell, 2005. Garrard, Greg. Ecocriticism. 2nd ed. London: Routledge, 2012. Heise Ursula K. “Paradigms – Comparative Literature and The Environmental Humanities.” ACLA State of the Discipline Report 2014–2015. https://stateofthediscipline.acla.org/entry/ comparative-literature-and-environmental-humanities#_edn4 (9 July 2018). Morton, Timothy. Humankind: Solidarity with Non-Human People. London: Verso, 2017. Stengers, Isabelle. In Catastrophic Times: Resisting the Coming Barbarism. Lüneburg: Open Humanities Press, 2015 [2009]. Wolfe, Cary. What is Posthumanism? Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2009.

Birgit Neumann

9 Anglophone World Literatures and Transcultural Memory Abstract: The chapter explores the manifold links between world literatures and transcultural memory, two fields of research that share a number of concerns and premises, but which have thus far not converged. Firstly, it analyses world literature and transcultural memory as circulatory phenomena; secondly, it examines the role of intertextuality and intermediality in remembering world literatures’ transcultural heritage; and thirdly, it explores how world literatures represent transcultural memories. The approach remains attuned to both the agency of literature and its enmeshment in global market dynamics. Key Terms: Transcultural memory, circulation, translation, intertextuality, intermediality, worldmaking

1 Literatures and Memories ‘on the Move’ World literature and memory meet on their travels across and beyond cultural borders. Both are constantly on the move and must remain mobile to secure their ongoing relevance in the public sphere. Ann Rigney compares cultural memories to swimmers who have “to keep moving even just to stay afloat” (2010, 347). In a similar vein, David Damrosch defines world literature as literature which “circulat[es] out into a broader world beyond its linguistic and cultural point of origin” (2003, 6). Both world literature and cultural memory cannot plausibly be conceived of without accounting for their circulations, including the historical conditions, institutions and agents that make circulation possible in the first place. If we understand world literature in Damrosch’s terms, then mobility is constitutive of any kind of world literature: World literature is all about movement and once literary texts fail to travel, they forfeit their status as world literature. This, it seems, is different for cultural memory, which needs qualifiers to emphasise its mobile nature: ‘travelling memories’ (cf. Erll 2011), ‘memory on the move’ (cf. Bond et al. 2017), ‘transnational memory’ (cf. De Cesari and Rigney 2014), ‘cosmopolitan memory’ (cf. Levy and Sznaider 2005), ‘global memory’ (cf. Assmann and Conrad 2010), ‘glocal memory’ (cf. Neumann 2020) as well as ‘transcultural memory’ (cf. Bond and Rapson 2014; Crownshaw 2014) are some of the terms that mark a broader “shift from ‘sites’ to ‘dynamics’ within memory studies” (Rigney 2010, 346). Though these terms come with a number of different assumptions and priorities, they all oppose the idea that memory is a stable product, tied to a specific place and connected to the identitarian needs of seemingly homogenous groups. https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110583182-010

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What they suggest instead is that memory is “a fluid and flexible affair” (Bond et al. 2017, 1), which travels across the world, across historical epochs and across media (cf. Erll 2011, 11). Memories form part of a multifaceted network of cultures, institutions, social agents and media in which they acquire their meaning and which they conversely help produce. In a narrower sense, the concept of transcultural memory foregrounds the links that memories establish between cultures, while remaining attuned to the changes, frictions and discontinuities ensuing from locally distinct appropriations (cf. Bond and Rapson 2014, 2). While memory has always been circulated and adapted across cultures, the increase in mobility, migration and exchange as well as the rise of new digital media has surely intensified this process. There are indeed many intersections between world literatures and (transcultural) memories and yet, thus far, these two paradigms have not been brought together in any systematic way. This is all the more surprising since the consideration of world literature through the lens of transcultural memory – and vice versa – can advance more nuanced understandings of both concepts. We can differentiate three key levels of analysis that help structure the complex relations between world literature and transcultural memory: Firstly, world literature is a circulatory phenomenon, which, when read across boundaries, may give rise to transcultural memories (transcultural memories of world literature); secondly, world literature is a poetically dense configuration which, by means of intertextuality, remembers its own, transcultural past (world literature as literature’s transcultural memory); and thirdly, world literature offers a site for representing transcultural memories (transcultural memories in world literature). While the first level primarily concerns the material circuits of world literature, the second and third levels are more attuned to literary specificities, opening concepts of the world to multiple possibilities of imaginative worldmaking.

2 Transcultural Memories of World Literatures World literature is a travelling concept, which, in its long and multilayered history, has been defined in a number of different ways and these differences make for some of the concept’s strengths as well as its weaknesses. The most prominent line of research, which can be traced, with various changes and shifts, from Johann Wolfgang von Goethe to Pascale Casanova (2004) and David Damrosch (2003), conceives world literature as a set of travelling texts and emphasises its potential to resonate with different contexts. In one way or another, these approaches tie world literature to processes of globalisation, enabled and enhanced by a neoliberal economy, and place this kind of literature within the global flow of commodities. Casanova, in her Bourdieu-inspired model, understands circulation within the world literary space as a rather one-dimensional process, in which the west imposes its standards on the so-called periphery. Although there are some ‘peripheral’ writers who manage to change aesthetic standards – and

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they are Casanova’s true heroes –, they generally have only the choice between assimilation and opposition to western literary models (cf. 2004, 178). In turn, Damrosch acknowledges that circulation goes hand in hand with creative adaptation and change, emphatically asserting that world literature “gains in translation” (2003, 281). These gains are new meanings, even new leases of life, that texts obtain once they travel into different cultures, and consequently, for him, the study of world literature concerns the ways in which literature is appropriated beyond the boundaries of what he considers its “home” (Damrosch 2006, 3). How, Damrosch asks, do world literary texts come to matter “abroad” (2003, 6) and how do the travels out into the world imbue them with alternative meanings? The approaches provide a number of clues regarding the relations between world literature and transcultural memory. Literary texts, as a number of scholars in the field of memory studies have illustrated (cf. Erll 2010; Rigney 2010), frequently serve as media of cultural memory, all the more so if they form part of the literary canon. As media of memory, they may significantly shape the collective imagination about specific historical periods, experiences, people and events and bear on modes of collective identification. William Shakespeare’s plays, James Joyce’s Ulysses (1922) and Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart (1958), to name but a few Anglophone texts, provide powerful reference points for understanding specific past events and periods. The affordances or ‘singularities’ of literature considerably add to the mnemonic appeal of literary texts: The focus on particular characters, the concern with “experientiality” (Fludernik 1996), poetic licenses, formal complexity and aesthetic innovation, conducive to generating empathy, alienation or startlement, render literary texts particularly memorable. “Stories”, according to Rigney, “stick” (2010, 347). They stick not because they “‘stick to the facts’” (347), but because they shed light on those – concrete, embodied and affective – aspects of historical experiences that frequently remain unexplored in history’s grand narratives. Though all the aforementioned texts once originated in a distinct – though not necessarily national – context and have formed part of the cultural memory of a specific community, they have, with different speeds and with the help of various literary agents, left their cultural origin and travelled into new memory cultures. Once these texts are embedded into other cultures and come to structure the historical imaginary of disparate collectivities across the world, they propel the emergence of transcultural memories. From this vantage point, then, the transcultural memory of literature designates those texts that, through processes of cultural and sometimes also linguistic translation, unfold a mnemonic potential across and beyond cultural, spatial and temporal boundaries – however different and contested this potential might be. The kind of transcultural memory that the travelling of world literatures creates does not entail a process of increasing homogenisation, the “one-worldedness” (Apter 2013, 86) that Emily Apter forebodingly invokes in her study Against World Literature. Circulation, as Moretti and Damrosch remind us, yields transformations, instabilities and innovations; it unleashes the semantic surplus of literature and calls into

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question the notion of a text as a closed entity: Through translation “works of world literature take on a new life” (Damrosch 2003, 24), Damrosch notes. The translation of Shakespeare’s plays to the Indian colony, to give just one example, has inevitably multiplied their meanings and cultural functions, aptly evidenced by the fact that, after World War I, some nationalists decried them on the grounds of their imperial overtones, while others claimed their critical potential “as a stick with which to beat the Empire” (cf. Trivedi 1993, 19). Homi Bhabha’s concept of the “Third Space of Enunciation” (1994, 37) highlights how meaning and reference are unstable and open to the disjunctive temporalities of cultural appropriation. “The meaning and symbols of culture”, Bhabha stresses, “have no primordial unity or fixity; […] even the same signs can be appropriated, translated, rehistoricized, and read anew” (37). Reading across cultural boundaries, Wai Chee Dimock suggests in her essay “Literature for the Planet” (2001), ‘denationalises’ literature and multiplies its meaning. To be sure, such readings come at the risk of decontextualising literature (↗7 Cosmopolitanism beyond the Center-Periphery Model), and the question of how to read remains as pressing as ever. Yet, contexts never provide stable frameworks that could unequivocally disambiguate literature’s complexity. Indeed, transcultural elements saturate so-called local and original contexts, which means that referentiality is never a given but only one possibility among others. As world literatures enter new – literary, cultural, economic and political – fields and are interpreted according to local priorities, they may also change their mnemonic function: While Shakespeare’s plays are remembered as expressions of national grandeur in some cultures, they serve as reminders of the coercive pedagogy of the colonial educational system to others. Precisely because local appropriation is a creative process, models that emphasise rivalry and competition (cf. Casanova 2004 [1999]) between locally diverse literatures are inadequate for analysing the links between world literature and transcultural memory. Though it would be wrong to gloss over the inequalities and losses effected by globalising circuits, patterns of appropriation reveal that the circulation of world literature does not per force neutralise the mnemonic power of locally available texts. Michael Rothberg’s concept of ‘multidirectional memory’ draws attention to the fact that the import of memories and literary texts into different cultures “is subject to ongoing negotiation, cross-referencing and borrowing” (2009, 3) and may therefore even vitalise rather than displace alternative memories. Rothberg shows that the global remembrance of the Holocaust has made possible the articulation of other histories of victimisation and that memories of traumatic events frequently entangle locally and spatially distinct communities. He stresses the role of literature in enabling multidirectional and transcultural forms of memory, illustrating how literary explorations of the Holocaust had a purchase on the articulation of histories of slavery and racism across the globe. That is to say that travelling texts can be actualised in different ways and are typically open to new connections with existing memories, literary texts, norms and social practices from the receiving culture. According to this logic, memories underwriting group identities are replaced by a transcultural

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dynamic of memory that has the potential to create non-identitarian forms of community and polycentric modes of solidarity (cf. Rothberg 2009, 5). Peter Hitchcock rightly draws attention to “the noncoincidence between literary institutions and the literary” (2010, 2). Differences in the meaning and mnemonic potential of specific texts emerge not only from literature’s polyvalence, the linguistic fabric of texts themselves and the singularity of reading acts. Rather, as implied by Rothberg’s understanding of multidirectional memory, they also result from contextual circumstances and differential positionings of the texts in a larger cultural field, which structures reception processes and makes circulating texts available for localised agendas. Commentaries, reviews, literary prizes, anthologies, memorial practices, but also, and more and more so, rewritings, remakes and remediations (↗14 Intermediality and Remediation), – i.e. the translation of texts into new media  – “represent important means of keeping earlier narratives […] memorable according to the norms of the new group” (Rigney 2010, 351). Jointly, these texts and media create an ecology which produces dense connective structures in which the signifying and commemorative potential of world literary texts is processed and negotiated, again and again. What is therefore needed are relational approaches to world literature and transcultural memory that allow illumination of the different agents, institutions, media and practices from which literatures derive their lives – and their mnemonic power – in specific contexts. Sociological approaches to translation (see e.g. Heilbron and Sapiro 2007), including polysystem theory (Even-Zohar 2005), offer points of departure for such models (↗10 Anglophone World literature and Translation), though it is clear that they need to be expanded to place literature within “pluri-medial” networks (Erll 2010, 390). Edwin Gentzler’s post-translation analysis is a major step towards such an inclusive model for it is cognizant of the broader field, constituted by media, agents and practices, in which world literature is caught up and from which it obtains its relevance: I suggest that scholars in the future analyze both the initial reception of the translated text and the post-translation repercussions generated in the receiving culture over subsequent years. […] Post-translation studies examines those conditions, socio-political and linguistic, that create an environment in which […] writing can flourish. (Gentzler 2017, 3)

Mobility is intricately tied to immobility and Aamir Mufti, in Forget English!, insistently reminds us that “the cultural sphere now generally identified as world literature […] has in fact been from the beginning a regime of enforced mobility and therefore of immobility as well” (2016, 9). The travel of world literature and cultural memory therefore begs questions concerning the inequalities that structure transcultural relations. Though Rothberg is right in refusing a “zero-sum” approach to collective memories as a “struggle over scarce resources” (2009, 3), it would be wrong to ignore the uneven conditions under which some literary texts dash out into the world, while others remain virtually immobile. In a similar vein, scholars in the field of transcultural and transnational memory draw attention to the hierarchies that affect commemorative

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practices on a global scale. Despite celebrations of mobility and transgression, for some memories, borders remain insurmountable: “[M]emory, like all cultural and social practices, operates within the closed horizons of global capital, and it cannot but be affected and animated by the constraints and the compulsions this closure imposes” (Bond et al. 2017, 6). A number of recent studies in the field of world literary studies have analysed the various factors that help or hinder texts in travelling to specific places at specific times, drawing attention to the role of English as a global and literary vernacular (cf. Mufti 2016), to the dominance of publishing houses situated in the Global North (cf. Huggan 2001; Brouillette 2007) and to the ensuing hegemony of western models of literature. These studies highlight that the allocation of world literary value is contingent on political and economic power relations, i.e. what Moretti calls the “asymmetry in international power” (2000, 56). Sharae Deckard notes that all literature is produced within “the capitalist world-system, dialectically related to economic and political relations without exactly mirroring them” (2014, 2). Sarah Brouillette goes a step further by stressing that the very “participation in the literary economy is a mark of privilege” (2015, 98). Literature is both subject to the logic of the neoliberal market and considerably profits from it. Its complicity with global economic networks inevitably affects its potential to shape cultural memories on a transcultural scale, and it is obvious that western institutions and discourses dominate the global memoryscape with their notions of mnemonic worth. Such inequalities raise a number of politically resonant questions concerning the transformation of localised texts into travelling world literatures, including the frames that render specific memories visible (cf. Butler 2009), and the paths of related “memories from the local to the global” (Assmann and Conrad 2010, 6). But answers to these questions probably produce predictable results, revealing once again the coercive effects of western hegemony within the world literary sphere. A more constructive engagement with global asymmetries might inquire into the latencies within world literature and excavate those texts, literary practices and forms that co-exist next to, beyond and beneath the canonical, travelling texts. Which alternative, possibly non-Eurocentric memories might such texts evoke?

3 World Literature as Literature’s Transcultural Memory In her seminal study Memory and Literature (1997), Renate Lachmann argues that literature is culture’s memory and that the mechanism through which literature remembers the past is intertextuality. Intertextuality, according to Lachmann (30), establishes exchange and contact, on both the level of content and form, between disparate texts. It yields a multilayered and dynamic mnemonic space in which textualised pasts are remembered, rewritten and changed according to present needs. “Intertextuality”,

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Lachmann argues, “demonstrates the process by which a culture, where ‘culture’ is a book culture, continually rewrites and retranscribes itself, constantly redefining itself through signs. Every concrete text, as a sketched-out memory space, connotes the macrospace of memory” (2010, 301). From this vantage point, intertextuality is a transformative act that remembers texts of the past, while simultaneously updating them by linking them to other texts, re-interpreting them and thus securing their ongoing relevance in the present. Conversely, the text emerges as a transcultural knotting and recrossing of all kinds of literature, which constitute distinct practices of cultural remembrance. Lachmann’s approach to memory, literature and culture presupposes that literary texts can be tied to specific cultures, which are conceptualised as rather stable containers, closed and self-contained entities. Such a homogenising understanding of cultures has lost its epistemic plausibility in our contemporary globalised world and with an eye to century-long histories of cultural exchange, exile and migration it is even questionable that it could ever claim plausibility. Still, Lachmann explicitly accounts for the fact that writers not only draw on texts of their ‘own culture’ but also on texts “belonging to […] another culture”, “refer[ring] to them in various ways” (2010, 301). From this vantage point, intertextuality provides a way of bringing texts of different cultures – or, to be more precise, of different literary cultures – into interaction and of establishing new, hitherto unexplored connections between them. In light of these connections and textual paths across cultures, one might well claim that intertextuality is not only the literary means by which a culture remembers its past. Rather, intertextuality is also frequently a form of evoking texts and creative practices originating from different kinds of spaces and times. In this process, intertextual references transform literary texts into a site for remembering literature’s transcultural past – however incomplete and contested this past might be. The extent to which literature draws on circulating texts from multiple periods and cultures, across historical, cultural and linguistic borders, is well-documented and it is clear that intertextuality constitutes an engine for the development of literature as well as the emergence of new genres and literary forms. In his introduction to Gérard Genette’s study of intertextuality in Palimpsests, Gerald Prince claims that literature is always “in the second degree” and that “any writing is rewriting” (1997, ix). While intertextuality is probably constitutive of all literature, it takes on specific resonance for Anglophone world literatures, where this border-crossing device frequently becomes a means of remembering and interrogating canonical colonial texts. After all, the practices of ‘rewriting’ and ‘writing back to the centre’ entail a specific mode of intertextuality and can be considered “the most elaborated intertextual form” (Moraru 2005, 261). Famous in this respect are Jean Rhys’s critical engagement with Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre (1847) in Wide Sargasso Sea (1966), J.M. Coetzee’s negotiation of Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe (1719) and Roxana (1724) in Foe (1986), Marina Warner’s narrative recasting of Shakespeare’s The Tempest (1610–11) in Indigo (1992), Hari Kunzru’s dismantling of Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness (1899) and

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Rudyard Kipling’s Kim (1901) in his novel The Impressionist (2003) as well as Preti Taneja’s reworking of King Lear (1605) in We That Are Young (2017). These texts not only retell canonical works from formerly marginalised and silenced perspectives, but also critically interrogate the ideological agenda of the canon, bringing to the fore the normative implications of its worldmaking. Coetzee’s Foe, for instance, problematises the socio-political conditions under which stories can be told and, by foregrounding the silences and gaps inherent in both Robinson Crusoe and Foe, energetically undoes the link between authorship and authority. According to Mukherjee, Coetzee’s postcolonial text “ends with a spectacular undoing of the historical preexistence of Robinson Crusoe as well as the possibility of Foe” (2014, 127), indicating that memory – just as the “postcolonial condition” – “is processual” and “never stops realizing itself” (2008, 127). These forms of intertextual rewritings are also ways of re-membering; they are literary means of reconsidering past texts as well as the memories they induce from a present point of view and of opening them to cultural difference and new modes of sociality. As they read and write the colonial canon contrapuntally, they “interpret together experiences that are discrepant” (Said 1993, 32) and produce new knowledge about the past, which constitutes a struggle over possible futures. According to Rigney, “[t]he result is a critical form of cultural remembrance that is arguably distinct to artistic practices whereby writers exploit the monumentality and malleability of earlier works in order to reflect critically on those earlier accounts and the memory they have shaped” (2010, 352). But, contrary to Rigney’s claim, rewritings cannot be reduced to literary manifestations of counter-memories. They are as much counter-hegemonic as they are affiliative and connective, producing the kind of unstable links which Bhabha sees as constitutive of the performativity of translation (cf. 1994, 227). Rewritings, just as intertextuality, raise questions about the often-bemoaned belatedness of postcolonial literatures. “We are always after”, notes Gayatri Spivak, “after the empire of reason, our claims to it always short of adequate” (1990, 228). Harold Bloom’s framing of intertextuality as an “anxiety of influence” (1973) as well as the conventionalised term ‘pretext’ also presuppose a temporal gap. In western theory, the distinction between before and after has frequently been cast as an opposition between a (creative) original and a secondary, merely derivative translation. The broader notion of the “colony as a translation” (Bassnett 2014, 50) ideologically underpins this opposition. Against this background, scholars in the field of postcolonial and translation studies stress the need to reconceive translation and to bring to the fore the interdependency between the original and the translation. Walter Benjamin’s concept of translation as survival, i.e. a creative practice that secures the afterlife and ongoing relevance of the original, provides a starting point for such an endeavour. The creative power of translations is also highlighted by André Lefevere, who, in Translation, Rewriting and the Manipulation of Literary Fame (1992), considers translation as a form of rewriting, which also challenges us into new understandings of the original. Gentzler is therefore right in noting that “translation is a multidirectional

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activity” that “go[es] back” (2017, 22) to change the original itself. The creativity of translation shows that the distinction between original and translation is gradual and porous at best. It replaces the notion of the belated intertextual text with a model of reciprocal interaction and change. According to Dimock, rewritings and canon revisions instigate “a global process of extension, elaboration, and randomization” that “lets loose the force of the unsynchronized” (2001, 178, 185). From this vantage point, postcolonial rewritings are not secondary, derivative activities but creative responses to a specific source text (which is itself a translated text): They function as acts of renewal that signify the openness, instability and plurality, but also incompleteness of any literary text. In this ongoing process of remembering, the canonical status of the text is both confirmed and challenged: It is confirmed because previous literary conventions and textual elements are recalled; it is challenged because literary conventions are relocated in different contexts and confronted with cultural difference. As rewritings intermingle non-synchronous texts, they bring to the fore the mnemonic latencies inherent in the source text, inviting readers to seek out marginalised histories and neglected meanings. Such acts of border-crossing fusion undo the authority of colonial texts within self-privileging ideologies and frequently make them available for more open, transcultural forms of remembrance. But even if intertextuality does not amount to full-blown rewritings, it is a key strategy in Anglophone world literature and a constitutive mode of its worldmaking. Such an understanding of world literature implies a shift of focus from the extratextual level of circulation to intratextual ways of worlding or worldmaking – a shift that Pheng Cheah’s study What is A World? (2016) energetically performs. According to Cheah, the concern of world literary studies with circulation ignores the “normative dimension of worldliness” (7) and glosses over the specificities of literature (↗6 Global Literature, World Literature and Worlding Literature). For Cheah, this normative dimension largely resides in world literature’s power to model alternative temporalities that resist the unifying temporal regime of capitalist globalisation. To do justice to the normative dimension, he suggests paying greater attention to the worldmaking capacities of world literature and its distinctive agency. According to Cheah, world literature has the potential ‘to world’, meaning that it can open up alternative worlds that cannot be understood in terms of a global market, spatial expansion and universalising teleology. It is in the context of literature’s worldmaking capacities that the shift from world literature to world literatures becomes most urgent since it acknowledges the plurality of creative practices, which exceed the unifying thrust of the book market (↗0 Introduction). As I have expounded elsewhere (cf. Neumann 2018; 2020), Anglophone world literatures – think of Walcott’s narrative poems Omeros (1990) and Tiepolo’s Hound (2000), Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children (1981), Kiran Desai’s The Inheritance of Loss (2006), Nuruddin Farah’s Hiding in Plain Sight (2014) or Zadie Smith’s Swing Time (2016) – strongly respond to the histories of colonialism, transfer and exchange across and beyond the Anglophone world. They are committed to exploring

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transcultural connections and are frequently shaped by a contradictory pull between the local and the global, between situated knowledge and transcultural itineraries, exploring how they intermingle, grapple and clash with one another. Proceeding from concepts of the world that emphasise its underlying histories of exchange, discrepant connections and irreducible alterities, one might define world literatures as imaginative configurations of transcultural contact and transfer, particularly in the form of migration (cf. Bhabha 1994). Importantly, the interest in worldly connectivity not only materialises in the content of much Anglophone world literatures, but also in their form. Anglophone world literatures are made up of forms that travel between cultures and that give expression to experiences of mixing, without glossing over the transformative force of locality. As such, they constitute a polycentric network of exchange and intertextual dialogue (cf. Schulze-Engler 2007), in which literary forms are continuously processed and inflected with local meaning. From this formalist and multi-directional perspective, circulation, exchange and translation are not secondary activities following the original production (cf. Friedman 2012, 503). Rather, they are an enabling force and a primary condition that underlies the poetics of world literatures. Intertextuality offers a particularly potent device to span the distance between different literary cultures and model interconnections between an array of literary texts, understood as one form of cultural remembrance. Derek Walcott’s Omeros (1990), for example, thrives on intertextual references to texts linked to a range of cultures: to the Homeric classic, Virgil, the Bible, Dante, William Shakespeare, James Joyce, Virginia Woolf, West African oral epics and many of Walcott’s own texts. By binding fragments from these texts into mutually transformative patterns and probing new connections between them, Omeros emerges as a polyphonic meeting point for the textual memories of distinct times and cultures. The result is a pluralised poetics that – just like the “small bust” (14) showing Homer / Omeros – literally breaks notions of wholeness and homogeneity to make possible new forms of transcultural remembrance, which exceed the givens of any prior configuration (cf. Neumann 2013). Lachmann’s exploration of the interfaces between memory and literature are explicitly tied to textualised pasts and book cultures. But, as noted above, literary texts do not only refer to previous texts – be it in subversive, affirmative or satirical ways; rather they may also evoke a multiplicity of other media, which fulfil commemorative functions in specific cultures, such as music, paintings, architecture, films, digital media, etc. To do justice to specificities of both cultural memory and literature, it is therefore necessary to expand Lachmann’s claim: Intermediality is literature’s means to remember ‘mediated pasts’ and to reflect critically upon the memories that are produced and circulated in and through specific media. After all, intermediality in literature is literally a form of the in-between (cf. Peach 1998, 16), which brings different media into interaction and, cutting across seemingly fixed boundaries, denotes the material, semiotic and conceptual space that emerges through the always-present gap between different media. In this interstitial space,

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exchange, transfer and translation become possible, while material, formal and social specificities of media are made visible. Importantly, in Anglophone world literatures, intermediality not only forges connections between different media but also between diverse cultures, their media ecologies and the memories they create (cf. Neumann 2015; Rippl 2015). David Dabydeen’s novel A Harlot’s Progress (1999), for instance, critically remembers William Hogarth’s eponymous graphic prints, which, in eighteenth-century Britain, were instrumental in forging prevalent notions of black people, Jews and prostitutes, and his poem “Turner” (1994) enters into an intermedial dialogue with William Turner’s iconic masterpiece Slavers Throwing overboard the Dead and Dying (1840) to excavate memories of slavery that the painting sublimates (cf. Neumann and Rippl 2020). One way to assess these literary forms of remembering across the uneven terrain of diverse memory cultures is to ask how the hybridised aesthetics gives rise to new, previously ignored histories and enables fresh modes of transcultural sociality.

4 Transcultural Memories in Anglophone World Literature – Acts of Worldmaking Worldmaking understood as the imaginative modelling of particular, locally situated and populated worlds, is characteristic of all literature (cf. Goodman 1995 [1978]). Yet, as suggested above, Anglophone world literature engages with the world in special ways. As an aesthetic “configuration […] of the world’s becoming” (Barad 2007, 91), it is committed to transcultural exchange rather than national imaginaries. It cultivates traces of the particular, unruly and singular, while also figuring the world as a shared, though uneven space, in which new forms of conviviality might become possible. One literary figuration through which acts of worldmaking take shape in contemporary Anglophone world literature is the modelling of transcultural memories, of memories that are at once grittily local and proximate with the global (cf. Neumann 2020). Amitav Ghosh’s The Shadow Lines (1988), Anita Desai’s Baumgartner’s Bombay (1988), Taiye Selasi’s Ghana Must Go (2013), Teju Cole’s Open City (2011), Derek Walcott’s Tiepolo’s Hound (2000), Zadie Smith’s White Teeth (2000), Mohsin Hamid’s The Reluctant Fundamentalist (2007) and Yvonne A. Owuor’s Dust (2014) are cases in point: They represent, in the realm of fiction, memories that straddle several cultures and bring to the fore hitherto barely noticed connections between seemingly different histories. Though world literatures’ engagements with the past often gravitate towards genocide and war (cf. Thomsen 2008), disaster and catastrophe are by no means the only sites where the potentials and limits of transcultural memory are gauged. Rather, representations of international art movements, the circulation of the arts, libraries as well as various forms of migration also frequently spur transcultural memories. Moreover, transcultural memories frequently

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emerge from the movements of migrants, who import memories of their homeland into new cultural contexts. Importantly, these literary modellings do only rarely give rise to the kind of “new cosmopolitan memory” that Daniel Levy and Natan Sznaider celebrate for its capacity to transcend “ethnic and national boundaries” and to provide “the cultural foundation of global human rights dynamics” (2005, 4). Rather, transcultural memory in contemporary Anglophone world literature is a minor kind of memory that acknowledges the persistence of identitarian categories, while pointing to “the difficult necessity of thinking beyond them” (Boxall 2013, 178). Transcultural memory binds the global and the local into loops of relation, without effacing localised histories and minoritarian identities “under the all-flattening sign of an undifferentiated globality” (Ramazani 2009, 13). Admittedly disjunctive and amorphous, it ramifies across places, cultures and periods and interlinks seemingly unconnected histories, locales and people in frequently unpredictable ways. As transcultural memories only acquire meaning in localised contexts, they point towards “the tension between cultural homogenization and cultural heterogenization” (Appadurai 1996, 32) throughout an uneven world. World literatures do important cultural work because in foregrounding mnemonic relationality they gesture towards new forms of solidarity, while simultaneously highlighting the fragility of such bonds. Teju Cole’s Open City (2011), for example, is committed to remembering repressed histories across the boundaries of different cultures, creating previously ignored links between the Iraq war, the Native American genocide, the transatlantic slave trade and European histories of colonial exploitation. The novel’s politics of remembering is pitched in a minor key for the historical narrative is articulated by an ethically unreliable narrator who represses the memory of his own transgression (cf. Neumann and Kappel 2019). To acknowledge the mnemonic work done by novels does not mean that they are more ‘world’ than ‘literature’ (cf. English 2005). Literary configurations of transcultural memories materialise in a number of literary forms, which make it possible to think about the world in terms of its relationality and connectivity, with all the violent effects such relations might have. Much Anglophone world literature thrives on interactions of different forms, styles, genres, voices and stories that move well beyond the counter-narratives of much postcolonial fiction (cf. Schulze-Engler 2007). It is shaped by a transcultural poetics that fuses different creative traditions, textual patterns and “nation-straddling” energies of poetic imagination to give form to travelling memories that resist the kind of de-contextualization characteristic of global capitalism (cf. Ramazani 2009, 70): The representation of entangled spaces, multilayered landscapes, multiperspectivity, generic hybridity, “creolized idioms and vernacularized forms” (12) are some of the devices that narratives mobilise to stage transcultural memories. Sprawling, spreading, migrating and cross-referencing, these devices bind multiple memories into mutually transformative patterns to reveal plurality and difference within cultures.

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5 Conclusion One might end the chapter on an optimistic note hailing world literatures’ potential to afford new, more open and pluralistic visions of memory and enable the imagination of transcultural forms of solidarity. But one might equally interpret the engagement with transcultural memories as one of those “highly visible tropes immediately recognizable as ‘literary’”, as Parks (2010, n.pag.) argues with an eye to the market dynamic of world literatures. But no matter how one decides on this issue, what is safe to say is that “single-system world literature theory has had its day” and that it is essential to consider “the overlapping, intersecting, and contradictory forces” (Helgesson 2015, 253) that make literature ‘world literature’. The suggested relations between world literature and transcultural memory provide starting points for such a multi-dimensional approach that remains attuned to both the distinct agency of literature and its enmeshment in global market dynamics, while also acknowledging the purchase of reading practices.

6 Bibliography 6.1 Works Cited Apter, Emily. Against World Literature: On the Politics of Untranslatability. London: Verso, 2013. Appadurai, Arjun. Modernity at Large: Cultural Dimensions of Globalization. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1996. Assmann, Aleida, and Sebastian Conrad, eds. Memory in a Global Age: Discourses, Practices and Trajectories. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010. Barad, Karen. Meeting the Universe Halfway: Quantum Physics and the Entanglement of Matter and Meaning. Durham: Duke University Press, 2007. Bassnett, Susan. Translation. London and New York: Routledge, 2014. Bhabha, Homi K. Location of Culture. London and New York: Routledge, 1994. Bhabha, Homi K. “Spectral Sovereignty, Vernacular Cosmopolitans, and Cosmopolitan Memories.” Cosmopolitanisms. Ed. Bruce Robbins and Paulo Lemos Horta. New York: New York University Press, 2017. 141–152. Bloom, Harold. The Anxiety of Influence. New York: Oxford University Press, 1973. Bond, Lucy, and Jessica Rapson. The Transcultural Turn: Interrogating Memory Between and Beyond Borders. Berlin: De Gruyter, 2014. Bond, Lucy, Stef Craps, and Pieter Vermeulen. “Introduction.” Memory Unbound: Tracing the Dynamics of Memory Studies. Ed. Lucy Bond, Stef Craps, and Pieter Vermeulen. New York: Berghahn Books, 2017. 1–26. Boxall, Peter. Twenty-First-Century Fiction: A Critical Introduction. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013. Brouillette, Sarah. Postcolonial Writers in the Global Literary Marketplace. Houndmills and Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007.

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Brouillette, Sarah. “World Literature and Market Dynamics.” Institutions of World Literature: Writing, Translation, Markets. Ed. Stefan Helgesson and Pieter Vermeulen. London and New York: Routledge, 2015. 93–106. Butler, Judith. Frames of War: When Is Life Grievable? London and New York: Verso, 2009. Casanova, Pascale. The World Republic of Letters. Trans. Malcolm B. DeBevoise. London and Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2004 [1999]. Cheah, Pheng. What is a World? On Postcolonial Literature as World Literature. Durham: Duke University Press, 2016. Crownshaw, Richard, ed. Transcultural Memory. London: Routledge, 2014. Damrosch, David. What is World Literature? Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2003. Damrosch, David. “World Literature in a Postcanonical, Hypercanonical Age.” Comparative Literature in an Age of Globalization. Ed. Haun Saussy. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2006. 43–53. De Cesari, Chiara, and Ann Rigney, eds. Transnational Memory: Circulation, Articulation, Scales. Berlin: De Gruyter, 2014. Deckard, Sharae. “Mapping the World-Ecology: Conjectures on World-Ecological Literature.” 2014. Academia.edu. https://www.academia.edu/2083255/Mapping_the_WorldEcology_Conjectures_on_World-Ecological_Literature (17 Apr. 2019). Dimock, Wai Chee. “Literature for the Planet.” PMLA 116.1 (2001): 173–188. English, James F. The Economy of Prestige: Prizes, Awards, and the Circulation of Cultural Value. Cambridge, MA and London: Harvard University Press, 2005. Erll, Astrid. “Literature, Film, and the Mediality of Cultural Memory.” A Companion to Cultural Memory Studies. Ed. Astrid Erll and Ansgar Nünning in collaboration with Sara B. Young. Berlin and New York: De Gruyter, 2010. 389–398. Erll, Astrid. “Travelling Memory.” Parallax 17.4 (2011): 4–18. Even-Zohar, Itamar. “Polysystem Theory (Revised).” Papers in Culture Research. Ed. Itamar Even-Zohar. Tel Aviv: Unit of Culture Research, Tel Aviv University, 2005. 40–50. Fludernik, Monika. Towards a ‘Natural’ Narratology. London: Routledge, 1996. Friedman, Susan Stanford. “World Modernism, World Literature, and Comparaticity.” The Oxford Handbook of Global Modernisms. Ed. Mark Wollaeger and Matt Eatough. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012. 499–525. Gentzler, Edwin. Translation and Rewriting in the Age of Post-Translation Studies. London: Routledge, 2017. Goodman, Nelson. Ways of Worldmaking. Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing, 1995 [1978]. Heilbron, Johan, and Gisèle Sapiro. “Outline for a Sociology of Translation: Current Issues and Future Prospects.” Constructing a Sociology of Translation. Ed. Michaela Wolf and Alexandra Fukari. Amsterdam: John Benjamins, 2007. 93–107. Helgesson, Stefan. “Tayeb Salih, Sol Plaatje, and the Trajectories of World Literature.” Cambridge Journal of Postcolonial Literary Inquiry 2.2 (2015): 253–60. Hitchcock, Peter. The Long Space. Transnationalism and Postcolonial Form. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2010. Huggan, Graham. The Postcolonial Exotic: Marketing the Margins. London and New York: Routledge, 2001. Lachmann, Renate. Memory and Literature: Intertextuality on Russian Modernism. Trans. Roy Sellars and Anthony Wall. Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press, 1997 [1990]. Lachmann, Renate. “Mnemonic and Intertextual Aspects of Literature.” A Companion to Cultural Memory Studies. Ed. Astrid Erll and Ansgar Nünning in collaboration with Sara B. Young. Berlin and New York: De Gruyter, 2010. 301–310. Lefevere, André. Translation, Rewriting and the Manipulation of Literary Fame. London and New York: Routledge, 1992.

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Levy, Daniel, and Natan Sznaider. The Holocaust and Memory in the Global Age. Philadelphia: Temply University Press, 2005. Moraru, Christian. “Intertextuality.” Routledge Encyclopaedia of Narrative Theory. Ed. David Herman, Manfred Jahn, and Marie-Laure Ryan. London: Routledge, 2005. 256–261. Mufti, Aamir R. Forget English! Orientalisms and World Literatures. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2016. Mukherjee, Ankhi. “The Death of the Novel and Two Postcolonial Writers.” Modern Language Quarterly 69.4 (2008): 533–556. Mukherjee, Ankhi. What Is a Classic? Postcolonial Rewriting and Invention of the Canon. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2014. Neumann, Birgit. “Monumentalism and Monuments in Postcolonial Literatures: Disremembering Tradition.” Special issue Monumentalism in Anglophone Cultures. Anglia 131.2–3. (2013): 262–281. Neumann, Birgit. “Intermedial Negotiations: Postcolonial Literatures.” Intermediality: Literatures – Image – Sound – Music. Ed. Gabriele Rippl. Berlin and New York: De Gruyter, 2015. 512–529. Neumann, Birgit. “Vernacular Cosmopolitanism in Anglophone World Literatures – Comparative Histories of Literary Worlding.” Special issue Global Perspectives on European Literary Histories. Arcadia 53.2 (2018): 239–257. Neumann, Birgit, and Yvonne Kappel. “Music and Latency in Teju Cole’s Open City: Presences of the Past.” ARIEL 50.1 (2019): 31–62. Neumann, Birgit. “Anglophone World Literature and Glocal Memories: Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s Half of a Yellow Sun and Kiran Desai’s The Inheritance of Loss.” New Approaches to the 21st-century Anglophone Novel. Ed. Sibylle Baumbach and Birgit Neumann. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2020. 217–236. Neumann, Birgit, and Gabriele Rippl. Verbal-Visual Configurations in Anglophone Literatures. London: Routledge, 2020. Parks, Tim. “The Dull New Global Novel.” NYR Blog 9 Feb. 2010. http://www.nybooks.com/ daily/2010/02/09/the-dull-new-global-novel (29 Mar. 2019). Peach, Joachim. “Intermedialität: Mediales Differenzial und transformative Figurationen.” Intermedialität: Theorie und Praxis eines interdisziplinären Forschungsgebiets. Ed. Jörg Helbig. Berlin: Erich Schmidt Verlag, 1998. 14–30. Prince, Gerald. “Foreword.” Palimpsests: Literature in the Second Degree. By Gérard Genette. Trans. Channa Newman and Claude Doubinsky. Lincoln and London: University of Nebraska Press, 1997 [1992]. ix–xi. Ramazani, Jahan. A Transnational Poetics. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009. Rigney, Ann. “The Dynamics of Remembrance: Texts Between Monumentality and Morphing.” A Companion to Cultural Memory Studies. Ed. Astrid Erll and Ansgar Nünning in collaboration with Sara B. Young. Berlin and New York: De Gruyter, 2010. 345–356. Rippl, Gabriele, ed. Intermediality: Literatures – Image – Sound – Music. Berlin and New York: De Gruyter, 2015. Rothberg, Michael. Multidirectional Memory: Remembering the Holocaust in the Age of Decolonization. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2009. Said, Edward W. Culture and Imperialism. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1993. Schulze-Engler, Frank. “Theoretical Perspectives: From Postcolonialism to Transcultural World Literature.” English Literatures across the Globe: A Companion. Ed. Lars Eckstein. Paderborn: Fink, 2007. 20–32. Spivak, Gayatri C. “Poststructuralism, Marginality, Postcoloniality, and Value.” Literary Theory Today. Ed. Peter Collier and Helga Geyer-Ryan. London: Polity Press, 1990. 219–244.

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Thomsen, Mads Rosendahl. Mapping World Literature: International Canonization and Transnational Literatures. London: Continuum, 2008. Trivedi, Harish. Colonial Transactions: English Literature and India. Kolkata: Papyrus, 1993. Walcott, Derek. Omeros. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1990.

6.2 Further Reading Boehmer, Elleke. Postcolonial Poetics: 21st-century Critical Readings. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2018. Butt, Nadia. Transcultural Memory and Globalised Modernity in Contemporary Indo-English Novels. Berlin and Boston: De Gruyter, 2015. Ganguly, Debjani. This Thing Called the World: The Contemporary Novel As Global Form. Durham, CA: Duke University Press, 2016. Moretti, Franco. “Conjectures on World Literature.” New Left Review 1 (2000): 55–67. Warwick Research Collective (WREC). Combined and Uneven Development: Towards a New Theory of World-Literature. Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2015.

Susan Bassnett

10 Anglophone World Literatures and Translation Abstract: This chapter considers the lack of and resistance to translations in the Anglophone world, suggesting that this is due not only to the hegemony of English as a global language but also to long-standing nationalist tendencies in English literary studies. Hope for the future of translation seems to be coming from outside the academy, from non-professional readers with a predilection for translated detective fiction or romantic fiction and from writers working in more than one language. Key Terms: Translation, non-professional readers, self-translation, language and power

1 English and Translation Future historians may well point to the twentieth century as one of the most destructive of all time: two world wars, countless numbers of civilians killed in global conflicts, damage to the ecological system of the planet and the extinction of numerous species of flora and fauna. But they will also note the astonishing technological advances that have given us today, in the twenty-first century, sophisticated global communication systems, and they may also draw attention to the growing importance of translation as millions of people move around the planet. Despite the significance of translation in a world where people are increasingly plurilingual, future historians may note the slowness with which it began to be taken seriously in the English-speaking world. Academic disciplines such as literary studies, globalisation studies and cultural studies tended to ignore translation. For example, in the introductory essay to her co-edited book, Globalization, Political Violence and Translation, the Catalan sociologist Esperanza Bielsa notes that translation has been neglected in discussions about globalisation, despite the fact that it is “key to understanding current processes of cultural globalisation, which are characterised by inequality and asymmetry” (2009, 14). This is a view echoed by the Irish translation scholar Michael Cronin in his recent book, Eco-Translation (2017), where he argues that there can be no connectivity without translation, pointing out that although information can be delivered around the globe in seconds in the digital age, if the languages are different they are meaningless without translation. The study of world literature and how it circulates is inevitably bound up with translation. As David Damrosch has suggested, world literature is “writing that gains in translation” (2003, 288), by which he means that it is through translation that works can be read in languages other than the original and can consequently acquire https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110583182-011

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new layers of meaning. As texts travel across linguistic and cultural frontiers, so do interpretations of those texts, resulting in what Damrosch has called a heightening of the creative interaction between texts and readers. Damrosch’s call for translation to be seen as fundamental to the study of world literature is particularly apposite in the Anglophone world where translation has only just started to receive the attention it deserves (↗2 Re-Reading Classical Approaches). Since the 1990s, the scientific study of translation has been increasing, albeit in small ways. In addition to academic programmes that train translators and interpreters, there has also been a proliferation of research in the field now known as Translation Studies, which came into being in the late 1970s. A great deal of this research is published in English, and here we have a paradox: despite the global presence of English-speaking translation studies scholars, such as Lawrence Venuti, Michael Cronin, Susan Bassnett, Edwin Gentzler or Mona Baker, the fact remains that translation is still seen as marginal, and very little is actually translated into English. The percentage of translations published in countries such as Germany, Italy or Sweden is much higher than the percentage of translations into English, which remains at a mere 3% of the total book market. Yet if we look at the list of most translated authors produced by the Index Translationum, we find that four out of the top five are English writers. Heading the list, as the most translated writer of all, is Agatha Christie; then comes the French Jules Verne, followed by William Shakespeare, Enid Blyton and Barbara Cartland. Detective fiction, romantic fiction and children’s writing are all genres that attract huge audiences; Agatha Christie’s novels, for example, have sold more than two billion copies around the world. It is obvious, then, that there is a sharp contrast between the number of texts being translated into English and the number of texts written in English being translated into other languages. There is also a contrast between the amount of scholarship on translation being written and published in English and the low numbers of actual translations. And if we look at the winners of the Nobel Prize for Literature, we again find anomalies: there have been 29 winners from different countries who wrote in English, compared to 14 who wrote in French, 13 in German, 11 in Spanish and only one winner in 12 different languages including Arabic, Turkish and Portuguese, all languages spoken by millions of people. What this shows is that through the twentieth century English gradually acquired higher status and became, in the aftermath of the Second World War, the global lingua franca, displacing French as the language of diplomacy and German as the language of science. Today, English is probably the most powerful language on the planet, and the sheer dominance of English has, inevitably, implications for translation (↗4 The King’s English and the Mother Tongue). One of the founding fathers of Translation Studies, Itamar Even-Zohar, proposed that an important line of research in the emergent discipline was to explore patterns in the translation and reception of texts across literary systems. His system approach, which derived from the work of the Russian Formalists, was broad enough

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to encourage investigation of the cultural factors at play when texts are transposed from one environment into another. In what has come to be seen as a seminal essay, “The Position of Translated Literature within the Literary Polysystem”, Even-Zohar argued that translation could be a major force for literary innovation, noting that when new literary models are emerging, translation is likely to become one of the means of elaborating the new repertoire. He suggested (2000, 193–194) that there were three basic conditions for the innovatory role of translation: (a) when a polysystem has not yet been crystallised, that is to say, when a literature is ‘young’, in the process of being established; (b) when a literature is either ‘peripheral’ (within a large group of correlated literatures) or ‘weak’ or both; and (c) when there are turning points, crises or literary vacuums in a literature. I have argued elsewhere that this terminology is unfortunate, to say the least, but the basic premise is an interesting one, since Even-Zohar was inviting further research into the changing history of translations in different cultures (Bassnett and Lefevere 1998, 127). For example, if we consider English literature it is apparent that there have been periods of great translation activity in the past. From the earliest years, when the vernacular was becoming established as a written language, translation played a major role. In Anglo-Saxon England, translations of religious texts were circulating from the seventh century, while translations increased after the Norman Conquest of 1066 to the extent that Chaucer (c. 1343–1400) was known among his contemporaries as grand traducteur. Both the English and Scottish Renaissance saw widespread translation from classical and contemporary European languages. This is the period when forms such as the sonnet and ottava rima entered the English literary system, which would then be developed in new ways from their Italian origins. Using Even-Zohar’s terminology, English literature was still ‘young’, the vernacular still in the process of establishing itself as a serious alternative to Latin in religious, literary and scientific discourses, and translation was, therefore, a vital activity.

2 Changing Patterns of English Translation By the eighteenth century, the commercial dimension of translation had become significant, due to the spread of publishing houses and an increasingly literate population of readers and theatre-goers. Translations of (mainly French) plays fed the demand for theatre, a process that continued for decades, while prominent literary figures such as John Dryden and Alexander Pope produced powerful translations from Greek and Latin. However, by the nineteenth century a fissure had started to appear. Terry Hale says, in his essay on readers and publishers of translations in Britain in the nineteenth century, that the picture had become decidedly contradictory. Mainstream publishing houses issued very little translated fiction and there were few translations in middle-class literary periodicals:

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By contrast, several of the more popular journals, notably the Family Herald and the London Journal were largely dependent on translation at various moments round about the mid-century. At the same time, Eugene Sue’s Les Mystères de Paris attracted the attention of six different British publishers simultaneously. Later in the century, translation also appealed to some of the newer publishing houses, especially those producing ‘railway literature’ (i.e. books to be consumed on long railways journals). Notable amongst the latter is the firm of Vizetelly and Co. in the 1880s. Towards the end of the century several publishers of pornography likewise tended to specialize in translation. In general, then, the market for translation appears to have been quite uneven. (Hale 2006, 34–35)

Hale’s point is that the class stratification of the reading public in Britain by the mid-nineteenth century led to a split regarding translations. A more elite reading public opted for works originally written in English, and a broader, working class reading public was willing to buy foreign crime, mystery and detective fiction, romantic fiction, adventure stories (Jules Verne became enormously popular in English and, as noted above, ranks second in the list of most translated world authors) and other popular literary forms. Translated children’s literature, notably the stories of Hans Christian Andersen and the Brothers Grimm, also reached a large audience; Carlo Collodi’s Adventures of Pinocchio (1883) began its journey to become the second most translated book in history, after the Bible, according to the internet list produced in 2013 by Eric Opeza, using data from the Index Translationum. The class divide that Hale discerns in nineteenth-century England with regard to the acceptance of translations is probably still valid today, notably if we consider the popularity of writers such as the Norwegian Jo Nesbø or the Swedish Stieg Larsson. Such writers depend for their popularity on what André Lefevere labelled “nonprofessional readers” (2017, 2). In his Translation, Rewriting and the Manipulation of Literary Fame, first published in 1992, Lefevere defines non-professional readers as people who actually buy and read books, as opposed to academics and literary critics: It is my contention that the process resulting in the acceptance or rejection, canonization or non-canonization of literary works is dominated not by vague, but by very concrete factors that are relatively easy to discern as soon as one decides to look for them, that is as soon as one eschews interpretation as the core of literary studies and begins to address issues such as power, ideology, institution, and manipulation. (Lefevere 2017, 2)

He goes on to note that ‘high’ literature is increasingly read only in educational settings, that is, in schools and universities, and does not constitute the preferred reading matter of the non-professional reader. For it is the non-professional reader who buys the books that make the best-selling lists and who drives up the sales figures into millions. Lefevere was trying to make a case for broadening literary studies (hence addressing what he called professional readers within the academy) to include the study of forms of rewriting, translations, anthologies, literary histories, reviews, editions, film and television adaptations, abridgements and plot summaries in reference works or magazines (↗9 Anglophone World Literatures and Transcultural Memory).

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3 The Hegemony of the Great Tradition It could be argued, following Even-Zohar’s proposition, that the growth of literature in English in the twentieth century – and that growth has resulted in literatures in a variety of diverse Englishes – means that translation is not seen as necessary for its development. In the early twentieth century, translation fuelled the literary experiments of writers such as Ezra Pound, and the haiku entered the Anglophone literary system, but by the mid-century English literary studies were in thrall to the ideas of F.R. Leavis, whose book, The Great Tradition (1948) would dominate English criticism for several decades (↗1 Canons and Canonicity in Anglophone Literature). Leavis’s emphasis was on the Englishness of English literature, hence writers whose work showed influences from outside, notably through translation, were pushed to the margins. Terry Eagleton brilliantly summarises the new English canon proposed by Leavis in the pages of his journal Scrutiny: With breathtaking boldness, Scrutiny redrew the map of English literature in ways from which criticism has never quite recovered. The main thoroughfares on this map ran through Chaucer, Shakespeare, Jonson, the Jacobeans and Metaphysicals, Bunyan, Pope, Samuel Johnson, Blake, Worsdworth, Keats, Austen, George Eliot, Hopkins, Henry James, Joseph Conrad, T.S. Eliot and D.H. Lawrence. This was ‘English literature’: Spenser, Dryden, Restoration drama, Defoe, Fielding, Richardson, Sterne, Shelley, Byron, Tennyson, Browning, most of the Victorian novelists, Joyce, Woolf and most writers after D.H. Lawrence constituted a network of ‘B’ roads interspersed with a good few cul-de-sacs. Dickens was first out and then in; ‘English’ included two and a half women, counting Emily Brontë as a marginal case; almost all of its authors were conservatives. (Eagleton 1983, 33)

The power of the Great Tradition over the study of English literature cannot be underestimated, nor can the repercussions for the study of comparative literature and translation be ignored (↗11 Comparative Literature). Eagleton sees the belief in Leavis’s ideas as fundamentally elitist, deriving from petty-bourgeois social values. The task of criticism was to “safeguard the robust vitality of Shakespearean English from the Daily Herald, and from ill-starred languages such as French” (Eagleton 1983, 37). In such a climate, translation was barely tolerated, let alone seen as a force for innovation and creativity. Small wonder then, that as Translation Studies began to develop, it took on a contestatory role in the English-speaking world, alongside Media Studies, Cultural Studies, Women and Gender Studies and Postcolonial Studies, all of which challenged, albeit in different ways, the English literature establishment.

4 Post-colonial Challenges In 1968, the Kenyan writer and academic, Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o produced a paper for the Arts Faculty Board of the University of Nairobi, entitled “On the Abolition of the English Department”. This was a call for the establishment of a Department of

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African Literature and Languages, where it would be compulsory to know not only English, but French and Swahili as well. English, he argued, should not be seen as the sole language of instruction, nor should English literature take precedence over other African literatures. Students would also study the oral tradition which would be multi-disciplinary, to enable familiarity with “art forms different in kind and historical development from Western literary forms” (Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o 1995, 441). He further developed this idea in his book Decolonising the Mind (1986), in which he gives an autobiographical account of how his mother tongue, Gikuyu, was not only superseded by English once he started school, but actively discouraged. Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o argues passionately for greater understanding of the links between language and culture, challenging the view that saw African languages as associated with backwardness, primitivism and under-development. To challenge the hegemonic power of English, he announced that he would use Gikuyu as the language of his writing, as part of what he hoped would be a revolutionary process that would restore power to people oppressed by imperialist structures and attitudes. Decolonisation must also entail a linguistic dimension, since language carries culture, values and the relationship of a people to the world they inhabit. Commenting on his ideas in their book The Empire Writes Back, Bill Ashcroft, Gareth Griffiths and Helen Tiffin point out that he was “concerned with the sociological implications of the use of English in terms of the control of production, distribution and readership which this implies as well as with any formal idea of the language as the ‘bearer’ of culture” (1989, 130). Other writers would follow Ngũgĩ’s example, notable the Irish poet Nuala Ní Dhomhnaill, who for some time also resisted being translated into English, the coloniser’s language. In 2009, in another autobiographical piece, an essay entitled “My Life Between Languages”, Ngũgĩ reflects on the decision to break with English and to start writing in Gikuyu. He describes what he terms the ‘sadness’ of losing his ‘original text’ in Gikuyu when he felt compelled to write in English. That original text, he claims, ceased to exist, but returning to write in Gikuyu became a kind of liberation, releasing him from being, as he explains, dependent on translating himself into English. Later in life he came to see that he was able to work across and between his two principal languages, turning his Gikuyu works into English, becoming in effect a self-translator and learning from the translation process about his own writing: quite often I found myself having to translate a draft I had thought was complete, only to find, in the process of translation, that there the original was inadequate. The muse would possess me again and I would go to the Gikuyu original, write more drafts, which I later subjected to yet another translation into English. (Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o 2009, 20)

Half a century after his rejection of English, Ngũgĩ is now able to move between languages, acknowledging his bilingualism and using his ability to translate creatively. The cause he championed, to decolonise the study of English, to broaden notions of what constitutes literatures in English and to recognise the intensely politicised use of English around the world can be said to have broadly had a degree of success

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(↗3  The Colonial Education System). Importantly, he has a great deal to say about how he has come to see translation as a creative process.

5 Translation and Class Conflict One of the most important poets and translators in Britain today is Tony Harrison, who, like Ngũgĩ, uses his own life story as a strategy to open discussion about language and translation. In 1988, as President of the Classical Association, he gave the Presidential Address, entitled “Facing up to the Muses”, where he recounts how he was born into an uneducated working-class family in Leeds, how he won a scholarship to Leeds Grammar School and began to study classical languages: And it seemed to me then that the greatest gift I could acquire for myself was the gift of articulation, the treasure of eloquence, the power over words, the power of words. I had a hunger, an appetite for all modes of articulations for English and for other languages and even in those very early days, though the teaching was often horrendous, for Latin and Greek and above all a hunger for that supreme form of articulation, the highest eloquence, poetry. (Harrison 1991a, 437)

He recounts how he felt impelled, once he began translating ancient Greek theatre, to reclaim working class speech, pointing out that since both Latin and Greek are ‘dead’ languages, he could have no qualms in using regional dialect speech and colloquialisms in his English translations. Referring to criticism of his use of Northern dialect in his version of the Oresteia for the National Theatre, he provocatively said that there was no reason why a Greek chorus should sound like “well-bred ladies from Cheltenham in white nighties” (Harrison 1991a, 437). Commenting on Harrison’s weaponisation of regional English, Terry Eagleton notes that “[n]o modern English poet has shown more finely how the sign is a terrain of struggle where opposing accents intersect, how in a class-divided society language is cultural warfare and every nuance a political valuation” (1991, 349). Harrison’s sonnet sequence, The School of Eloquence (1978) develops his concerns with language, class and education, while the gap between his written and spoken English remains a constant theme in his poetry and translations. His choice to work with classical languages and then to translate for the theatre (his translations are also from French and Early Middle English, in addition to Greek and Latin) gave him an opportunity to experiment with non-standard language, to move beyond the convention of Received Pronunciation that has dominated both the media and the theatre in Britain until relatively recently. His fundamental premise is that the written and spoken versions of English should not be seen as antagonistic if the speaker diverges from the standard form of the language and, like Ngũgĩ, he places great value on the oral tradition. In the preface to his translation of The Misanthrope, he sets out his ideas about translation, seeing translation as a way of breaking the obsession with linguistic fixity:

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The original is fluid, the translation a static moment in that fluidity. Translations are not built to survive though their original survives through translation’s many flowerings and decays. The Illusion of pedantry is that text is fixed. It cannot be fixed once and for all. The translation is fixed, but reinvigorates its original by its decay. (Harrison 1991b, 146)

This is an immensely enabling view of translation as a process that challenges the belief that a text is immutably fixed in time. Harrison also points out that translation does not only take place between different languages, it also happens within one language, and the spoken form of a language will always be more flexible and responsive to innovation. Both Harrison and Ngũgĩ recognise that there is always a power dimension to language and consequently to translation. Northern working-class English and Gikuyu have been utilised by both writers to challenge the hegemony of standard English, and translation has been a valuable tool for each of them, in different ways.

6 Translation and Change Lawrence Venuti (2013), one of the leading American translation studies scholars, has been critical of what he sees as a lack of reflection in the English-speaking world about what translation actually is and what it can do. Both Harrison and Ngũgĩ have clearly articulated their thoughts about translation and about the relationship between translation and their other writing. Both have expressed a political agenda and both have recognised that talking about language necessarily involves thinking in terms of power structures, since there are inequalities between languages and within the same language. Venuti complains that all too often translations are formulated to fit in with the conventions of the target culture, and this risk was pointed out by Even-Zohar in his essay when he suggested that, in certain cases, translation could be a major factor of conservatism. Translations that follow outdated norms will introduce nothing new into the target system, and creating ‘fluent’ translations that erase any sense of foreignness from a text similarly does not lead to innovation. Madhu H. Kaza, the editor of a collection of translations and thoughts about translation, Kitchen Table Translation (2017), points out that while in many parts of the world, notably in post-colonial contexts, translation is recognised as inherently political, this is not the case in the United States, and we can extend this to the English-speaking world more generally. Kaza calls for the discussion about translation to be widened, so as to include questions about how works are chosen to be translated, what a translation that emphasises foreignness might offer and how it might be received, whether fluency in translation results in a very superficial interest in difference, and whether translation can “perform subtle acts of critical resistance by introducing texts into the English language that speak from marginalized voices and values” (2017, 14).

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The great Irish writer Seamus Heaney answered some of those questions in his lecture on “The Impact of Translation”, published in the collection entitled The Government of the Tongue (1988). He opens the lecture with a reading of the poem “Incantation” by Czeslaw Milosz, translated by Robert Pinsky, then goes on to a brief analysis of the poem itself and its context. He argues that translations such as this are changing English poetry, forcing poets to look outwards, to look to Eastern Europe and “to concede that the locus of greatness is shifting away from their language” (Heaney 1988, 38). The names of Tsvetaeva, Akhmatova, Mandelstam, Pasternak, Esenin, Gumilev and Mayakovsky have become what he calls heroic names, not only because of their poetry but because of the way they lived their lives and spoke out about tyranny. They have come to the notice of English readers through translation, and Heaney says that this has resulted in recognition of a new kind of poetry, one that has displaced many contemporaries writing in English from “an old at-homeness with their mother tongue and its hitherto world-defining poetic heritage” (1986, 40). He goes even further, declaring contemporary English poetry to be insular and eccentric, something that can be explained by looking at how England’s island status, its off-centre European positioning, its history of non-defeat and non-invasion since 1066, these enviable (and as far as the English are concerned) normative conditions have ensured a protracted life within the English psyche for the assumption that a possible and desirable congruence exists between domestic and imagined reality (Heaney 1988, 41). The translation of Eastern European poets is important because their writing brings messages of another reality, “messages from those holding their own much, much, much further down the road not taken by us” (Heaney 1988, 440). Heaney is here challenging what he sees as English parochialism, one might say the poetic equivalent of Leavis’s Great Tradition, arguing that it is only through the translation of radically different poets that English poetry can move on from its ‘old at-homeness’.

7 Where Next for English Translation? Heaney’s focus was on poetry, but in terms of prose it could be argued that the arrival on the literary scene of Latin American writers such as Gabriel García Márquez, Carlos Fuentes, Mario Vargas Llosa and others in the 1960s and 1970s also had an impact on Anglophone writers, particularly with regard to the spread of magical realism. The Latin American boom which started in the United States and then was taken up in the UK was fed by translation, though as has been the case with so many other nonEnglish-language novelists, translations were first made into French and other European languages, then only later into English once a market had been established. The impact of such writing, particularly on post-colonial writers such as Salman Rushdie, Arundhati Roy, Ben Okri and Toni Morrison has been immense, though it

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has never really been recognised. However, there was resistance to magical realist fiction, as evidenced by the article written by Anthony Burgess in The Observer in May 1985, where he dismissed the new Latin American writing as a freakshow and lamented the possibility of such writing starting to lay down rules. At the start of this essay it was pointed out that there is a big gap between the number of texts translated out of English and the number translated into English. It was also pointed out that the texts which reach the greatest number of readers are various forms of popular fiction, notably, in recent years, detective fiction, often written in minority languages. But the small percentage of translations into English suggests that there is still a widespread lack of interest in literatures coming from outside the English-speaking world. Of course, there are exceptions, and one could point to the success of Haruki Murakami, for example, or more recently, Elena Ferrante and Karl Ove Knausgård, whose work has been well-received. However, the best-seller lists remain dominated by writers who work in English, not all reviewers of translated works bother to include the name of the translator and there is very little interest in translation generally. This can be partly explained by the dominance of English as a world language, partly in the United Kingdom by the huge decline in foreign language learning in British schools (a drop of over 200,000 children taking GCSEs in a foreign language since the abolition of compulsory foreign language study in secondary schools by the last Labour government), but also by a trend that can be seen as running back through the twentieth century, which Heaney terms the ‘old at-homeness’ with the mother tongue and with the English tradition. So writers like Zadie Smith are hailed as innovators, which to some extent she is, but more for her subject matter than for her writing, which can be lodged comfortably within the confines of the old great tradition. Translation always involves change; through translation a text written in one language becomes something other, in a new language, and as that text arrives in its translated context it may bring with it something different, something new, something that disturbs the smoothness of the receiving culture. It is perhaps this that underlies the reluctance of the English-speaking world to engage more fully with translation, convinced as it appears to be with the pre-eminence of English and of writing in English. Reflecting on the way his life and his writing have moved between English and Gikuyu, Ngũgĩ remarks that “[l]ooking back, I have always lived in translation” (2009, 18). This is an important statement, since it calls to mind the way in which increasingly millions of people also live in translation. Ngũgĩ has chosen the path of translating himself; we can find a growing number of writers today who are also writing in more than one language, such as the Puerto Rican Rosario Ferre, the Canadian Nancy Huston and the Japanese-German Yoko Tawada, all of whom not only write in two languages but speak about the differences they experience as they move between languages. The future will see more and more bilinguals and plurilinguals moving

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across and between languages, and hopefully the Anglocentric reluctance to take translation seriously will start to dissolve.

8 Bibliography 8.1 Works Cited Ashcroft, Bill, Gareth Griffiths, and Helen Tiffin. The Empire Writes Back: Theory and Practice in Post-Colonial Literatures. London and New York: Routledge, 1989. Bassnett, Susan, and André Lefevere. Constructing Cultures: Essays on Literary Translation. Clevedon: Multilingual Matters, 1998. Bielsa, Esperanza. “Globalization, Political Violence and Translation: an Introduction.” Globalization, Political Violence and Translation. Ed. Esperanza Bielsa and Christopher Hughes. London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009. 1–24. Cronin, Michael. Eco-Translation: Translation and Ecology in the Age of the Anthropocene. London and New York: Routledge, 2017. Damrosch, David. What is World Literature? Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2003. Eagleton, Terry. Literary Theory: An Introduction. London: Blackwell, 1983. Eagleton, Terry. “Antagonisms: v.” Tony Harrison. Ed. Neil Astley. Newcastle-upon-Tyne: Bloodaxe, 1991. 348–350. Even-Zohar, Itamar. “The Position of Translated Literature within the Literary Polysystem.” The Translation Studies Reader. Ed. Lawrence Venuti. London and New York: Routledge, 2000. 193–197. Hale, Terry. “Readers and Publishers of Translations in Britain.” The Oxford History of Literary Translation in English, vol. 4: 1790–1900. Ed. Peter France and Kenneth Haynes. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006. 34–47. Harrison, Tony. “Facing up to the Muses.” Tony Harrison. Ed. Neil Astley. Bloodaxe Critical Anthologies, Newcastle-upon-Tyne: Bloodaxe, 1991a. 429–454. Harrison, Tony. “Preface to ‘The Misanthrope’.” Tony Harrison. Ed. Neil Astley. Newcastle-upon-Tyne: Bloodaxe, 1991b. 133–153. Heaney, Seamus. “The Impact of Translation.” The Government of the Tongue. By Heaney. London: Faber, 1988. Index Translationum Unesco Bibliography of Translations. http://databases.unesco.org/xtrans/ xtra-form.shtml. (19 Mar. 2019). Kaza, Madhu H., ed. Kitchen Table Translation. Pittsburgh: Blue Sketch Press, 2017. Lefevere, André. Translation, Rewriting and the Manipulation of Literary Fame. London and New York: Routledge, 2017 [1992]. Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o. Decolonising the Mind: The Politics of Language in African Literature. London: James Currey, 1981. Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o. “On the Abolition of the English Department.” The Post-Colonial Studies Reader. Ed. Bill Ashcroft, Gareth Griffiths, and Helen Tiffin. London and New York: Routledge, 1995. 438–442. Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o. “My Life In- Between Languages.” Translation Studies 2.1 (2009): 17–21. Venuti, Lawrence. Translation Changes Everything: Theory and Practice. London and New York: Routledge, 2013.

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8.2 Further Reading Bassnett, Susan. “Postcolonial Worlds and Translation.” Anglia 135.1 (2017): 21–34. Bassnett, Susan. Translation. London and New York: Routledge, 2014. Bassnett, Susan, ed. Translation and World Literature. London and New York: Routledge, 2018.  Bellos, David. Is That a Fish in Your Ear? Translation and the Meaning of Everything. London: Penguin, 2011. Berman, Sandra, and Catherine Porter, eds. A Companion to Translation Studies. London: Wiley Blackwell, 2014. Cronin, Michael. Translation and Globalization. London and New York: Routledge, 2003.  Gentzler, Edwin. Translation and Rewriting in the Age of Post-Translation Studies. London and New York: Routledge, 2017. Venuti, Lawrence. Contra Instrumentalism: A Translation Polemic. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2019.

Jan Steyn

11 Comparative Literature Abstract: Comparative Literature can be instructive to Anglophone World Literatures as it emerges as a field of study. The relationship between Comparative Literature and the new world literature studies has been complex, with Comparative Literature on the one hand hosting and instigating the burgeoning inquiry into the circulation and ontopoetic worldliness of literary works and, on the other hand, providing a check against the world literature industry that often relies on Anglophone hegemony by asserting the need for expert linguistic and cultural knowledge and the irreducibility and singular local-ness of certain works and concepts. Anglophone World Literatures could learn from this caution against the dominance of English, could benefit from Comparative Literature’s experience as a discipline in perpetual existential crisis, and could be inspired by the comparative method to expand what scholars do with Anglophone texts. Key Terms: Comparative literature, translation, Anglophone literature

1 Introduction At the 2019 Venice Biennale, curated by Ralph Rugoff under the title May You Live in Interesting Times, in the main curated exhibition of the Arsenale – as opposed to the Giardini or one of the many nation-state ‘pavilions’ – is a small group of works by the Bahaman multimedia artist Tavares Strachan. Among these, mounted against the far wall from the entrance, is Walcott (Hidden Histories) (2018), a work described by its accompanying plaque as consisting of “limestone, neon, transformers, books, pigment, enamel, vinyl and graphite mounted on custom metal shelf”. The first part of the work to catch the eye, almost blindingly, is a white neon sign in cursive lettering spelling out “Walcott”. There is a gap in the middle of the word, separating “Wal” from “cott”. As you draw closer, you can see a miniature bookshelf in the middle of the word. On it: The Poetry of Derek Walcott 1948–2013 by Derek Walcott, selected by Glyn Maxwell (2014); Nobody’s Nation: Reading Derek Walcott by Paul Breslin (2001); Epic of the Dispossessed: Derek Walcott’s Omeros (1993) and Critical Perspectives on Derek Walcott by Robert D. Hamner (1997); a special issue of South Atlantic Quarterly edited by Gregson Davis called The Poetics of Derek Walcott: Intertextual Perspectives (1997); and Derek Walcott’s collection of essays, What the Twilight Says (1999). The relationship between the proper name in yellow – Walcott, the Nobel laureate and great man of letters – and the works in the bookshelf – an arrangement of Walcott’s own texts and critical texts about Walcott, all in physical form, their materiality https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110583182-012

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confirmed by earmarks and price stickers – is well worth contemplating. And, as you begin to think about it, as your eyes begin to adjust to the neon light, you realize that behind the cursive neon there is another layer of lettering engraved in block capitals into the limestone in the backdrop that reads, “NIETZSCHE”, or, with the gap, “NIETZ” and “SCHE”. What is the relationship between these two writers who have achieved the level of canonicity required for them to be recognized by their last names alone – Nietzsche and Walcott? How do we think these writers, or rather these proper names of writers, together, or palimpsestically? What obtains as a relevant connection between these two great interpreters of the Greek classics? How important is Nietzsche for Walcott’s oeuvre? Or how might we re-evaluate the great Anglophone writer in light of his German predecessor? What are the topics – Time? Tragedy? Writing? The Epic? – that these two writers mutually illuminate, yielding complimentary insights that are richer for being received together? What does a multimedia artwork say about a literary oeuvre, and what does the literature say back? How does Strachan’s identity as an artist from the Bahamas who works primarily in the United States inform his relation to Walcott, that most famous of Caribbean artists? What reference, if any, is being made to Derek Walcott’s painting? Or to the way in which Walcott’s work combines visual and verbal forms? These are questions typical of a comparatist. This will not be an essay about contemporary art. But Strachan’s artwork is a perfect example of a situation where someone working on Anglophone world literatures might benefit from a comparative perspective. In what follows, an outline will be given of what such a comparative perspective entails, of how it has been developed first and foremost in the discipline of Comparative Literature, and how this discipline can either compliment or clash with Anglophone World Literatures. Along the way, reference will be made to instances where comparing Anglophone literary works to other pieces (non-Anglophone or non-literary) may be productive. In the case of a learned and allusion-riddled corpus such as that of Derek Walcott, of course, a comparative framework is called for without artworks such as Tavares Strachan’s coming into it (↗24 The Caribbean). This chapter will end by contemplating such literary works, works that are inherently comparative in that they actively call for comparative reading.

2 World Literature and Comparative Literature World literature has been a topic in Comparative Literature since its early nineteenthcentury origins and yet is perhaps the single biggest growth area (or problem area) in the discipline today. Over the past quarter of a century at least, Comparative Literature has become increasingly global in its ambit, and many of the innovations, crises and resistances in the field have resulted from this turn away from its once unapologetic (if not entirely oblivious) Eurocentric bias. Natalie Melas has pointed out that this is not so much a turn as a re-turn for Comparative Literature, which in its early positivist

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manifestations in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries placed an emphasis on the method of comparison and sought to practice this method comprehensively – in parallel to cognate comparative disciplines such as comparative anatomy, or comparative legal studies – taking the entirety of the world’s literatures as its proper object (cf. Melas 2006). The more recent multicultural and global turns in the discipline, captured in the titles of the 1993 and 2006 reports of the American Comparative Literature Association respectively –  Comparative Literature in an Age of Multiculturalism and Comparative Literature in an Era of Globalization – have lacked this totalizing ambition (although this has not, of course, prevented prominent comparatists from undertaking breathtakingly broad and exciting comparative studies. See for example Beecroft 2015 and Friedman 2015). But these turns have effected a renewed interest in the nature (and method) of comparison as well as an expansion in the linguistic, geographic, formal, intermedial and historical scope of possible comparison. The new global trend in Comparative Literature comes after decades during which the discipline refused its global(ist) origins. Sandra Bermann identifies two obstacles to a Comparative Literature expanding its remit beyond inter-European national literary comparisons in the mid-twentieth century: The first [obstacle] was linguistic: comparative literature required professors and students to read texts in the original languages, not in translation. An expectation deriving from the philological training of many early comparatists, it gained in importance during the mid-century rise of “close reading” and the New Criticism in the USA. Such language requirements posed major problems for a world literature curriculum necessarily dependent on translations, particularly for texts from beyond Europe. […] A second obstacle was methodological: as long as texts were European, they could presumably be studied with theoretical tools drawn from the heritage of European philosophy, theory, and literary criticism. Though interests often ran to a broader range of texts, and some departments brought East Asian literatures together with the European, concern about theoretical difficulties limited this exploration. (Bermann 2011, 171)

There has been a subsequent boom in world literature studies, especially over the past three decades, that has been largely produced by comparatists, albeit ones of radically different stripes. This boom reflects a move in the discipline of Comparative Literature to study phenomena in places and languages other than the usual (Euro-American) ones, and while both the ‘linguistic’ and ‘methodological’ obstacles cited by Bermann have been constant refrains even as these obstacles have been overcome or creatively circumvented, today’s comparative literature is thoroughly global and methodologically speaking, thoroughly hybrid. As Ursula Heise writes in her introduction to the 2017 ACLA State of the Discipline Report, “neither literary studies in general nor comparative literature in particular can today be described as anything other than a diverse constellation of theoretical and analytical approaches to questions of languages, literatures, and media” (2017, 2). This is why now is an opportune moment to reflect on what Comparative Literature (or comparative studies more broadly) can offer to Anglophone World Literatures, a field that in its pluralized name indicates the study not of a fixed Anglophone canon but of “open, inherently

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pluralised texts that are both shaped by and modelled on processes of circulation, translation and exchange” (Neumann and Rippl 2017, 3) – a field, in other words, that is thoroughly comparative in its conception.

3 Anglophone Literatures Taking a step back, however, it is perhaps not immediately clear how literature can be thoroughly worldly and yet limited to a single language – ‘Anglophone’ – at the same time. What does it mean and can it mean for a literature modelled on translation to focus only on English, the world’s dominant language? And what is the relationship between world literature studies as conceived by (or even critiqued by) comparatists, on the one hand, and world literatures (in the plural) that are Anglophone, on the other? ‘World literature’ floats ambiguously between designating: 1) a field of study, perhaps even a discipline, with methods, central questions, and an academic community committed to its progress, and 2) a set of literary texts, which might be conceived broadly, such as the set of all literature ever produced in the world, or more narrowly, such as literature that finds a readership in a language or culture other than the one of its origin. If world literature is taken in this latter sense, as a set of texts rather than a field of study, then defining ‘Anglophone World Literatures’ seems simple enough: decide which works count as world literature in general, then subtract all of those that are not written in some form of English. This still leaves the problem of the plural – ‘literatures’. Are these literatures posited as countable, like nations or languages? Or is the plurality more fundamental, encompassing overlapping and non-exclusive modalities of literature alongside the more familiar national or regional categories? If world literature is taken in the former sense, as a field of study rather than a set of texts, the question of its Anglophone application becomes even trickier. Does the ‘Anglophone’ simply allow for an institutional attachment to English departments, and if it is merely an adjective of convenience, is it really important for the literatures in question to be produced in English in the first place? Are works translated into English, or multilingual works with an Anglophone component, or works that take place in geographical areas where English is spoken suitable objects of study for a field of Anglophone World Literatures? Or is the fact of English – its special status as global language, its imperial connotations, its global reach – precisely what gives coherence to this field? In considering questions and debates such as these, a perspective from Comparative Literature, an interdisciplinary comparative perspective thus, can be quite useful for several reasons, including the simple fact that Comparative Literature has been a field perpetually ‘in crisis’ since its first university chairs were appointed and departments founded in the early twentieth century. By contrast, while the concept of world literature is an old one, it is only over the past two decades that it has been revived and posited as a potential scholarly field. The shape and viability of this emerging field

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remains to be determined. There is no doubt that world literature is a set of debates, a theoretical problem for literary studies, a subject in high schools and universities, a hot topic in academic publishing and in literary publishing, a corpus of texts, sometimes a canon, or a set of propositions about a canon, a brand, and an arena where global, or inter-national, or transnational, or cosmopolitan issues can be tested, ostensibly always while discussing literature. But none of this amounts to the status of an established field or discipline, despite the fact that as an academic topic it has been revived by literary scholars, many of them comparatists, not least the oft-cited trinity of Pascale Casanova, Franco Moretti, and David Damrosch (↗2 Re-Reading Classical Approaches). During the initial forays of the late 1990s and early 2000s, ‘world literature’ was taken up as a banner for the study of diverse phenomena including: 1) international literary systems and circulation, which is how the Anglophone reception of Casanova (2004) repurposed her literary historical and sociological argument about the ‘world republic of letters’, 2) cosmopolitan humanism (cf. Damrosch 2003), and 3) the vast corpus that constitutes the ‘great unread’ alongside the ‘distant reading’ tools that may be used to grasp them (cf. Moretti 2005 and 2013). Each of these exciting directions has proved stimulating and productive. They were soon supplemented and/or contested by scholars using world literature as an occasion to insist on the disputability of world literary canons (↗3 The Colonial Education System); the untranslatable singularity of languages and cultures; the value of expertise, language-learning, and rigorous field-work as opposed to reading all texts in translation; the global inequality and the unevenness that can too easily be forgotten when all of the world is posited to partake in one literature; or the normative and onto-poetic dimensions of world-ing that can occur in (some) world literature. Over the course of these arguments, which have often served as proxy conflicts for older debates situated intellectually and institutionally elsewhere, the emerging field of world literature has grown rich and complex, its many participants speaking from different points of concern and expertise. But the fundamental questions have been about world literature itself: What is world literature? What could it be and what should it be? This fundamental questioning of the nature of the discipline itself is very familiar to those acquainted with the history of Comparative Literature. In her excellent study of the discipline, Comparative Literature: A Study of the Discipline, Susan Bassnett cites instances of the discipline being questioned by its most illustrious practitioners, from Benedetto Croce in 1902 arguing it is a “non-subject” that ought to be discarded in favour of “literary history” (Bassnett 1993, 3), to René Wellek railing in 1959 against the positivist French school of Comparative Literature who limited its practice to only the study of sources and influences (Bassnett 1993, 30). Bassnett herself, writing in 1993, sees the field, at least as it is practiced in the West, to be in a new moment of crisis: Falling student numbers, the uneasiness of many comparatists that is revealed in defensive papers or a reluctance to engage in definition of what exactly their subject consists of, the apparent continuation of the old idea of comparative literature as binary study, i.e. as the study

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of two authors or texts from two different systems (though the problem of how to define different systems is a complex one and unresolved), all these factors reinforce the picture of a subject that has lost its way, even as courses in literary theory and postcolonial theory proliferate and publishers’ catalogues lists books in these areas under separate headings. (Bassnett 1993, 9)

Of course, the proliferation of literary theory and postcolonial theory within disciplines other than Comparative Literature could just as easily be seen a sign of the discipline’s success as of its failure. This is, in fact, in the wake of the 2004 ACLA State of the Discipline Report by Haun Saussy, the line taken by Jonathan Culler in 2006 when he argues that Comparative Literature has served as the natural home for literary theory because it had to be attentive to general questions such as the appropriate unit of literary analysis – “genres? periods? themes?” (2006, 85) – that emerged from anywhere, not just from within the “cultural spheres” (2006, 85) associated with specific national literature departments; he goes on to argue that the fact that national literature departments have come to embrace literary theory signals that “comparative literature has triumphed” even though “institutionally, comparatists do not feel at all triumphant” (2006, 85). In this sense, what Bassnett sees as either a distraction or a failure for Comparative Literature – on the one hand, the fact that Comparative Literature has come to theorize endlessly without concrete reference to a subject that is being theorized, on the other hand, the fact that the most exciting ‘theory’ is (in the early 1990s) to be found in other disciplines, specifically post-colonialism and Translation Studies (↗10 Anglophone World Literatures and Translation) – Culler sees as Comparative Literature’s success leading to its own redundancy. In her introduction to the 2017 publication of the latest ACLA State of the Discipline Report, Futures of Comparative Literature, Ursula Heise confirms that Comparative Literature no longer has a special claim to innovations in literary theory; in fact, in the most important interdisciplinary areas that have come to characterize new work in the discipline, such as her own special field, ecocriticism, or newly burgeoning areas such as the medical humanities, Comparative Literature has “arrived belatedly” (2017, 6). But by 2017 this shift in the status of Comparative Literature – once the institutional home to highly productive intellectual refugees who set the trend for thinking in the humanities, now a discipline that follows trends and plays catch up – is seen less as a crisis than an opportunity for comparatists to lend their own special gloss to emergent areas of inquiry.

4 Linguistic and Cultural Expertise vs. Reading in Translation and the Global Anglophone Redundancy and belatedness is not, however, where the discourse of crisis that surrounds Comparative Literature ends. In 2003, Gayatri Spivak published Death of a Discipline, based on her Wellek lectures of 2000, calling for a new comparative literature,

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one that would not be determined by the ‘global’ market but would rather respond to ‘planetary’ imperatives. Spivak’s book maps a path forward for comparative literature, one that would respond to the demand for global coverage not by producing slick American-edited anthologies, but by a deeper investment in language learning and area expertise, aligning Comparative Literature with the old Area Studies disciplines. Nevertheless, this book signals a crisis in the ‘old’ Comparative Literature and, as the title indicates, is far from certain that the discipline can be revived; in her acknowledgements, Spivak writes, “I hope the book will be read as the last gasp of a dying discipline” (2003, xii) – a grim hope at best. In the subtitle to her 2006 book, The Translation Zone, Emily Apter, too, announces “A New Comparative Literature”, in this case one that would be rooted in translation and its difficulties. The hope is that this new Comparative Literature, embracing its translational status, would break the “isomorphic fit between the name of a nation and the name of a language” (Apter 2006, 243) – this is comparison in movement, in translation, with no literary equivalent to the ‘national pavilions’ in Venice. The idea is not simply a discipline that addresses the literary in general, but one which “would acknowledge the jockeying for power and respect in the field of language” (2006, 244). This ‘new comparative literature’ emphasizes the value of expertise – the same values of language skills and deep cultural study that Spivak hopes to reaffirm in her call for a (theoretically and ethically aware) re-embrace of Area Studies – a value that is thrown into crisis by a global market for domesticating translations and the neat packaging of cultures as commodities, often with the name of a nation and the name of a language used as an effective branding mechanism, that is the face of world literature in its worst guise, the kind of world literature that Apter declares herself in the title of a later book to be ‘against’ (cf. Apter 2013). Both world literature and Comparative Literature take Goethe’s cosmopolitan literary concerns and his announcement of the age of Weltliteratur as a foundational moment; both aim to broaden the frame of reference of literary scholarship beyond a narrowly national one; and both have a project that is simultaneously descriptive and cosmopoetic, or world-making. Works of world literature, as scholars such as Eric Hayot (2016) and Pheng Cheah (2016) have recently reminded us, are creative acts that fashion worlds – a fundamental literary truth that is too easily forgotten when our scholarly interests are exclusively preoccupied with the international circulation of literary texts. The comparison of literary works, as sometimes occurs in the field of Comparative Literature and in other fields of comparative studies, is also a creative, poetic act. It produces links, foregrounds similarities and differences, and hybridizes hitherto-localized aesthetic values. While comparative studies and world literature scholarship may sometimes be institutionally housed in different parts of the academy, intellectually they have much in common. There are scholarly disagreements, of course, when defenders of world literature studies take aim at the Eurocentric history of ‘the old Comp Lit’ in order to better make the case for ‘the new World Lit’, or when comparatists signal the danger inherent to a turn to world literature

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that would result in less specialist training, less language learning, and less attention to local and regional singularities. But these debates are productive ones about the future of trans-local literary study; all parties have a stake in avoiding the worst mistakes. Often, the moment when debate threatens to turn into an indissoluble quarrel is the moment when the term ‘Anglophone’ is introduced. Comparative Literature has progressively enlarged its remit since its inception as a field of study, now going beyond the literary, allowing work in digital humanities, in intermediality, or in ecocriticism, for instance. But as a discipline, Comparative Literature has been resolutely committed to encouraging expertise in multiple languages: a mission that has only become more urgent in the face of the dominance of English as a world language. Pascale Casanova in her slim recent volume, La langue mondiale: Traduction et domination (2015), makes a historical case for the claim that there is always one language that is most prestigious on the world stage and that currently this language is English. Interestingly, translations and instances of multilingualism or diglossia, which we might imagine to be markers of resistance to linguistic hegemony, turn out to be, in her reading, the fundamental mechanisms driving the domination of English over other languages. From this perspective, a world literature in English, even one that incorporates or otherwise gestures to other languages, and even one that appears in translation, is not necessarily worth celebrating because the very same outward-looking palliatives for the inward-looking cultural arrogance of English speakers – translation, multilingualism, and content from all over the globe – are precisely what sustain Anglophone dominance. Comparative Literature, classically conceived, asks for languages to be studied and for literatures to be compared in the original – an ideal that can be critiqued for the fact that most of the languages studied and compared tend to be European (though this critique is becoming less and less relevant as departments of Comparative Literature become increasingly global in the range of languages and literatures they study), but which cannot be critiqued for bolstering the hegemony of English or hastening the disappearance of minor languages. To put it positively: Comparative Literature, despite its new (or newly affirmed) global ambitions, remains committed to language study, and despite the fact that its “expanding receptiveness to minority literature in English translation inclines comparative literature in the direction of world literature”, it remains the “study of literature in the original whenever possible is likely” that will continue to distinguish Comparative Literature (Finney 2017, 21). Framing Comparative Literature as the ‘study of literature’ may seem to exclude intermedial or transmedial comparison, a growing practice everywhere, and one that in German-speaking countries even has a subfield called ‘Medienkomparatistik’. Clearly, the ‘Literature’ in ‘Comparative Literature’ must today be understood in its broadest possible sense, including many non-literary and even non-narrative arts. But it is striking that even in programs emphasizing extraliterary subfields, the study of languages (and concomitant study of cultures) remains a valuable component of graduate training in Comparative Literature the world over.

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To put the same point negatively: Comparative Literature remains opposed to a version of world literature that, according to Graham Huggan citing Jonathan Arac, is steeped in the “imperialism of English [and] the diminishment of language-based criticism in favour of a monolingual master scheme” (Huggan 2011, 491). Seen in this light, Comparative Literature, especially in Anglophone countries, has served as a bulwark against the reduction of all literary studies into literary studies in English. As Gayatri Spivak points out, especially in the case of literature, translation into English yields a new flattening global dialect: In the act of wholesale translation into English there can be a betrayal of the democratic ideal into the law of the strongest. This happens when all the literature of the Third World gets translated into a sort of with-it translatese, so that literature by a woman in Palestine begins to resemble, in the feel of its prose, something by a man in Taiwan. (Spivak 2000, 399–400)

Spivak consequently calls for translators to attend to a kind of untranslatability, or rhetoricity of the original, in order to avoid this kind of homogenizing practice of translation. Barbara Cassin is equally clear that her philosophical embrace of untranslatables is meant to resist the “universalist angelism” that is imputed to “All-English” or “Globish” by an Anglophone tradition of analytic, or ordinary – English – language philosophy (2010, 23). Neither Spivak nor Cassin want to prohibit translation into English entirely, but they do want to resist and arrest the erasure of concepts, contexts, practices, and meanings that occur when the source text is ‘domesticated’ to fit the ‘more prestigious’ target language. This attention to the (perhaps unfortunately named) ‘untranslatability’ – be it singularity or located-ness – of texts in principle extends to Anglophone world literatures. As Aamir Mufti warns, the pluralization of terms like “World Englishes” or “Anglophone literatures” in fact “cannot dispel the suspicion that the language continues to be conceived of as a single organism, with its origins on a little island in the North Sea, whose subsequent history in the world can be charted as a continuous evolution or unfolding” (2016, 149). In attending to the discontinuities between Englishes, to the ways they are neither ‘translatable’ (not literally or practically, as any translator will tell you, but philosophically in Cassin’s Derridean/Benjaminian sense of that word) nor assimilable to a single centrifugal history radiating out from Europe, Anglophone world literatures must appear discretely and comparatively.

5 An Invitation to Compare One of the key reasons that the comparative approach continues to be pertinent is that certain literary works themselves deploy a comparative framework and invite comparative analysis. The works of Derek Walcott discussed above are among these. So are any works taking part in a trans-national literary genre or movement, or

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even any works that allude to other works outside their own (national or linguistic) ‘literature’. A compelling argument might be made, in fact, that all Literature (capital L) is by its very nature inter-textual and inherently comparative. In an essay entitled “Comparison Literature” (2009), Rebecca Walkowitz, however, points to a narrower emergent category of intrinsically comparative literary works. These works have become especially prevalent in what she calls the age of born-translated literature, a time when literary works anticipate their trans-lingual circulation in their content and form. Anticipating their reception in and relations to any number of contexts alien to that of their point of origin, these works are built for comparison. Walkowitz’s prime example of comparison literature is J.M. Coetzee’s Diary of a Bad Year – a novel that evokes its own global context with some of its sections ostensibly intended (within the narrative frame) to be published in a German edition collecting political opinions by prominent writers. In the first chapter of the book that follows the article, Born Translated (2015), Walkowitz discusses another Coetzee novel, Summertime (2009), which is a pseudo-biography of the writer “John Coetzee” (who bears remarkable, though not exact, similarity to the author, J.M. Coetzee) – a book that invites comparison in at least as many ways as does Diary of a Bad Year (2007). Walkowitz largely uses the Coetzee texts to forward her thesis about a new, or newly prominent, kind of inherently comparative literature that is produced in English but treats translation thematically and engages with other language traditions, finding in the Coetzee novels an example of this form: comparison or born-translated literature. But by positing this type of text, she opens up the possibility of a broader set of questions that could be asked about their relation to comparison and comparative literature. Coetzee, after all, is himself a polyglot, a literary translator, and a teacher of world literary texts in a comparative framework (cf. Steyn 2019). Could we not ask texts of Anglophone World Literatures how they position themselves against other world literary texts, how they reflect and produce a constellation of such texts, how they render the world in which those texts are located in contradistinction to renderings of the world by other such texts, for example? Pursuing this line of questioning, we might find that it would be a rare work of literature, Anglophone or otherwise, that is not in itself, fundamentally comparative. Nevertheless, I would like to end this chapter by simply listing four such works in the ever-shifting, ever-contested canons of Anglophone World Literatures where the invitation to compare is perhaps more pronounced than in most. In 2009, the British novelist and essayist Geoff Dyer published Jeff in Venice, Death in Varanasi. In the first half of that novel, Dyer’s alter ego, Jeff, frantically chases after sex, fleeting intimacy and the most exciting new artworks at the Venice Biennale; in the second, an unnamed protagonist, who may or may not be Jeff, remains at rest in Varanasi, India, contemplating death, ritual and his limited access to local epistemologies. The two parts of this book conjoin Venice and Varanasi, contemporary art and ancient theater, Eros and Thanatos, inhuman acceleration and superhuman duration. The novel leaves the reader questioning whether Venice and Varanasi,

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which display the same epiphenomena of global capitalism (airports, hotels, fashion brands, fast-food chains), but which also display the brutal inequalities of global development, could actually be contemporaries, sharing the same world stage at the same time. “The Reading” is a remarkable short story by the South-African writer Ivan Vladislavić that appears in his 2015 collection 101 Detectives about a public reading in Europe of a literary memoir written by an African author. The memoir, entitled Sugar, takes place in a war-torn Acholi-speaking area, possibly Northern Uganda and South Sudan. It tells the story of the author’s abduction by armed militia, her time as a hostage, and, at its core, the death of her sister Anya. The venue for the reading of this memoir is a German (or perhaps Austrian or Swiss) Literaturhaus – a kind of non-profit public literary institution consisting of an open, hyper-visible space with large windows so as to look out on and be looked into from the public square outside. Part of the story recounts part of the African memoir, which was composed, but never published, in Acholi, then ‘translated’ by the author into English, and is here read in German by the German translator (though, of course, we receive all the versions in a silent English gloss). The rest of the story gives a close third person account of the impressions and associative thoughts of the multilingual and multinational audience at the reading, providing a miniature allegory for the spaces where world literatures are proclaimed and promoted. James Kelman’s Translated Accounts is a pseudo-translation: an original fiction that pretends to be a translated text. It presents itself as 54 accounts about an unnamed region, by “three, four or more anonymous individuals” that have been gathered and then “transcribed and/or translated into English, not always by persons native to the tongue” (Kelman 2002, ix). The result is a disturbing cacophony that will not let its reader forget that, despite its affective power, Translated Accounts is not based on any real war or disaster but remains thoroughly fictional, its subject scrupulously opaque. Not taking place in any specific war zone, Kelman’s novel asks us to imagine the comparative space between them all. Claire of the Sea Light (2013) is a collection of interrelated short stories by the Haitian-American author, Edwidge Danticat. The stories in Claire of the Sea Light describe a cast of characters in Port-au-Prince, Haiti, each somehow connected to the story of the title character Claire Limyè Lanmè Faustin. The book is written in English but events and dialogues taking place in French or Kreyòl subtend it. The collection’s title, for example, is (a rather cumbersome) English translation of a (to my ear a far more melodious) Kreyòl name. Proper names, the element of grammar that is often held to be untranslatable by definition, can undergo translation in Danticat’s fiction, or at least some of them can, because these names function semantically as much as they do indexically. The title story, the first in the collection, tells of Claire’s father, Nozias Faustin, convincing a fabric vendor to foster his seven-year-old daughter while he searches for employment elsewhere and of Claire’s subsequent disappearance. The story is punctuated, however, with scenes from previous years illuminating

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Nozias’s decision. These interruptions include a series of fragments depicting events on Claire’s sixth, fifth, fourth, and third birthdays, as well as a scene before her birth when Claire’s mother decided on Claire’s name while out night fishing on Nozias’ sloop, watching “the flickering lights from the Anthère lighthouse” over the dark water (Danticat 2013, 35). A machine built for reparative reading, Claire of the Sea Light asks the reader to reconstruct the fragments of this story and, at a larger scale, to unify the stories in the collection, and to do so in English, but always in the knowledge of the fact that these are fragments of a non-Anglophone never-written ‘original’. And so this is my provocation: dare to compare; occupy the position of the comma that hinges literature, European world literary institutions, or trauma literature more broadly; read Kelman’s Accounts alongside real accounts, from diverse places, composed in diverse languages, confronting the problems of translation and the strange aesthetic and affective by-products of ‘translationese’ directly; read Danticat alongside Haitian authors working in French and Kreyòl; or do similarly comparative work prompted by other works in Anglophone World Literatures – there are many to choose from.

6 Conclusion This chapter has focused on Comparative Literature, and especially on the way that the discipline has been framed and practiced in Anglophone countries, as a possible counterfoil to and model for the emergent field of Anglophone World Literatures. Many of the observations here also apply to other formations of Comparative Literature and even to Comparative Studies more broadly (the reader is encouraged to consider how other fields centered on comparative methods – including fields such as Anthropology or Comparative Media Studies – could shed light on the burgeoning study of World Literature in general and the critical formation of Anglophone World Literatures in particular). Comparative Literature has been shown to be in tension with the tendency in certain versions of world literary studies to occlude linguistic diversity and bolster Anglophone dominance – a tendency of which Anglophone World Literatures will have to be especially wary. Comparative Literature, as a discipline in perpetual crisis, one which has skirted close to a Eurocentric imperialism and has corrected course, a discipline which regularly questions and re-evaluates its own premises, provides a model for Anglophone World Literatures. Finally, it was argued that the inherently de-centring practice of the comparative method serves as an invitation to scholars of Anglophone World Literatures to contextualize and relativize their objects of study, producing exciting new work that puts Anglophone texts in relation to creative work from other language traditions.

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7 Bibliography 7.1 Works Cited Apter, Emily. The Translation Zone: A New Comparative Literature. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2006. Apter, Emily. Against World Literature: On the Politics of Untranslatability. London: Verso, 2013. Bassnett, Susan. Comparative Literature: A Critical Introduction. London: Blackwell, 1993. Beecroft, Alexander. An Ecology of World Literature: From Antiquity to the Present Day. London: Verso, 2015. Bermann, Sandra. “World Literature and Comparative Literature.” The Routledge Companion to World Literature. Ed. Theo D’Haen, David Damrosch, and Djelal Kadir. London: Routledge, 2011. 169–179. Breslin, Paul. Nobody’s Nation: Reading Derek Walcott. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001. Casanova, Pascale. The World Republic of Letters. Trans. Malcolm B. DeBevoise. Cambridge, MA and London: Harvard University Press, 2004 [1999]. Casanova, Pascale. La langue mondiale: Traduction et domination. Paris: Seuil, 2015. Cassin, Barbara. “Philosophising in Languages.” Nottingham French Studies 49.2 (2010): 17–28. Cheah, Pheng. What is a World? On Postcolonial Literature as World Literature. Durham: Duke University Press, 2016. Culler, Jonathan. “Whither Comparative Literature?” Comparative Critical Studies 3.1–2 (2006): 85–97. Damrosch, David. What is World Literature? Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2003. Danticat, Edwidge. Claire of the Sea Light. New York: Knopf, 2013. Davis, N. Gregson, ed. Special issue The Poetics of Derek Walcott: Intertextual Perspectives. South Atlantic Quarterly 96.2 (1997). Dyer, Geoff. Jeff in Venice, Death in Varanasi. London: Vintage, 2009. Finney, Gail. “The Reign of the Amoeba.” Futures of Comparative Literature. Ed. Ursula K. Heise. London: Routledge, 2017. 19–23. Friedman, Susan Stanford. Planetary Modernisms: Provocations on Modernity Across Time. New York: Columbia University Press, 2015. Hamner, Robert D. Critical Perspectives on Derek Walcott. Pueblo: Passeggiata Press, 1993. Hamner, Robert D. Epic of the Dispossessed: Derek Walcott’s Omeros. Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1997. Hayot, Eric. On Literary Worlds. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016. Heise, Ursula K. “Introduction.” Futures of Comparative Literature. Ed. Ursula K. Heise. London: Routledge, 2017. 1–8. Huggan, Graham. “The Problem with World Literature.” A Companion to Comparative Literature. Ed. Ali Behdad and Dominic Thomas. Hoboken: Wiley-Blackwell, 2011. 490–506. Kelman, James. Translated Accounts: A Novel. New York: Anchor Books, 2002. Melas, Natalie. All the Difference in the World: Postcoloniality and the Ends of Comparison. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2006. Moretti, Franco. Graphs, Maps, Trees: Abstract Models for Literary History. London: Verso, 2005. Moretti, Franco. Distant Reading. London: Verso, 2013. Mufti, Aamir R. Forget English! Orientalisms and World Literatures. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2016. Neumann, Birgit, and Gabriele Rippl. “Anglophone World Literatures: Introduction.” Special Issue Anglophone World Literatures. Anglia 135.1 (2017): 1–20.

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Spivak, Gayatri C. “The Politics of Translation.” The Translation Studies Reader. Ed. Lawrence Venuti. New York: Routledge, 2000. 397–416. Spivak, Gayatri C. Death of a Discipline. New York: Columbia University Press, 2005. Steyn, Jan. “Coetzee and Translation.” The Cambridge Companion to J.M. Coetzee. Ed. Jared Zimbler. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, forthcoming. Walcott, Derek. What the Twilight Says. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1999. Walcott, Derek. The Poetry of Derek Walcott. Ed. Glyn Maxwell. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2014. Walkowitz, Rebecca L. “Comparison Literature.” New Literary History 40.3 (2009): 567–582. Walkowitz, Rebecca L. Born Translated: The Contemporary Novel in an Age of World Literature. New York: Columbia University Press, 2015.

7.2 Further Reading Damrosch, David, Natalie Melas, and Mbongiseni Buthelezi, eds. The Princeton Sourcebook in Comparative Literature. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2009. Bassnett, Susan. Comparative Literature: A Critical Introduction. London: Blackwell, 1993. Domínguez, César, Haun Saussy, and Darío Villanueva. Introducing Comparative Literature: New Trends and Applications. London: Routledge, 2015.  Morgan, Ben, Mohamed-Salah Omri, and Matthew Reynolds. “Comparative Criticism: Histories and Methods.” Comparative Critical Studies 12.2 (June 2015): 147–159. Bernheimer, Charles, ed. Comparative Literature in the Age of Multiculturalism. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1994. Heise, Ursula K., ed. Futures of Comparative Literature. London: Routledge, 2017. Saussy, Haun, ed. Comparative Literature in an Age of Globalization. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2006.

Justine McConnell

12 Genres of Anglophone World Literatures Abstract: Despite Croce’s warning that it is a mistake to classify works by genre, there is still a place for such considerations. Genre offers a way to break free from the segmentation imposed by categorisations of period and place, as Dimock has argued, even if one might note that the dominance of the novel has imposed a new kind of segmentation. Genre is a problem only if one expects creative artists to conform to these literary categories, but an exploration of world literatures illuminates the ways writers have merged different genres to produce new forms, while simultaneously using it to resist generic expectations derived from European literature. This is illustrated by examining four Anglophone texts of different genres which engage with Homeric epic in order to explore contemporary issues of identity and homecoming: Ralph Ellison’s novel, Invisible Man; Derek Walcott’s poem, Omeros; Junot Díaz’s short story, “Aguantando”; and Suzan-Lori Parks’ play, Father Comes Home from the Wars. Key Terms: Genre, epic, classical reception, omni-local, transcultural

1 Definitions and Theoretical Concepts The concept of literary genres has frequently been traced back to ancient Greece and the work of Aristotle in particular, notwithstanding Gérard Genette’s (1979) corrective inclusion of Plato within this genealogy. It is not only genre’s roots in the works of philosophers whose place within ‘the Western canon’ is all-but-unquestioned that causes it to be regarded with scepticism especially when applied to the field of world literatures, it is also the fact that, ringing in our ears, is Benedetto Croce’s old warning that to classify works by genre is “the greatest triumph of the intellectualist error” (1909, 35). So, is there a place for the consideration of genre when examining Anglophone world literatures, and if so, what insights can it yield? Croce’s concern about genre does not lead him to dismiss it altogether. He acknowledges that generic distinctions can be a useful shorthand “if it be only with a view to be[ing] understood, and to draw[ing] attention to certain groups of works” (1909, 38). The problem arises if we expect a creative work to obey the criteria of specific genres, whether that be epic, tragedy, lyric, or any others. As Croce observes, and as René Wellek endorses, artists have “always disregarded these laws of the kinds” (Croce 1909, 37; cf. Wellek 1970). Wellek identifies artists’ lack of concern for genre distinctions as a particularly twentieth-century phenomenon (1970, 225), yet it might be more revealing to ask whether borders between genres were ever as impermeable https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110583182-013

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as the influential work of neoclassicists led us to believe. In their 1797 essay, “On Epic and Dramatic Poetry”, Goethe and Schiller identify essential differences between epic and drama: most crucially, they say, the past-ness of epic contrasts with the presentness of drama (1845 [1797], 379). This idea of a sharp division between the two proved enormously influential not only in the neoclassical period, but into the twentieth century, as exemplified by Mikhail Bakhtin’s distinction between the “absolutely completed and finished generic form” of epic in contrast to the “unfinalizability” of the novel (1981, 15). Goethe and Schiller’s distinction, however, stems from something close to a misreading of Aristotle. For despite Aristotle’s belief that literature is composed in a particular genre “according to the poets’ own characters” (Poetics 1448b, 24–26; trans. Halliwell 1987, 34), which imposes clear distinctions between “more dignified” and “lighter” forms, it is clear that for Aristotle there is significant overlap between tragedy and epic, both being “more dignified” genres. Tragedy, in the Poetics, is declared to possess ‘epic’ qualities: “epic’s attributes all belong to tragedy as well, though not all of tragedy’s are shared by epic” (Poetics 1449b, 18–20; trans. Halliwell 1987, 36). This was even noted by Schiller in his correspondence with Goethe earlier that same year, when he remarked that Aristotle is acquainted only with the generic-poetic laws of the Epopee, which it has in common with tragedy, and not with the specific ones, through which it is opposed to tragedy; thence also he felt authorized to say, that the Epopee is contained in tragedy[.] (Schiller and Goethe 1845, 247)

Holding fast to neoclassical views of genre, Schiller argued that genres should not mix; instead, the arts should venture towards a unity with each other without any form “giving up its specific advantages” (qtd. and discussed in Wellek 1981, 251). That Aristotle’s vision of tragedy and epic was less severely demarcated is clear not only from the way that he begins his discussion of epic by likening it to tragedy (Poetics 1459a, 17–21; trans. Halliwell 1987), or from his assertion that “tragedy possesses all epic’s attributes” with music and spectacle included in addition (Poetics 1462a, 14–17; trans. Halliwell 1987, 64), but also because in analysing the necessity of unity within tragedy and considering how it might be achieved, his examples are all drawn from epic (Poetics 1451a, 16–35; trans. Halliwell 1987). Akin to the neoclassical idea, based on a partial reading of Aristotle, of the dramatic ‘three unities’, so too Aristotle’s ideas on genre were interpreted in this period in a way that extrapolated from the extant text of the Poetics under the guise of a straightforward reading. This is not to say that ancient literary critics did not have a firm idea of genres: Aristotle may have ventured furthest towards a decoupling of genre from metre because of his interest in the poem’s ethos, but the categorisations of genre remain broadly in place for him (cf. Farrell 2003, 385–386). This does not, however, prevent him from regarding Homer’s epics as “tragic poetry” on account of their “seriousness” and “nobility” (Poetics 1448b; Farrell 2003, 385). It is this overlapping which came to be overlooked and which allowed the imposition of such a firm demarcation between epic and tragedy. The reception of Aristotle, then, imposes

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sharper borders between genres than Aristotle’s Poetics itself does, and certainly more than the creative works of classical antiquity demonstrate to be the case. Likewise, the categorisation of Aristotle as an exclusively European thinker disregards the historical reality of ancient Greece in the fourth century BCE; a reality that came to be refashioned (for insidious ideological reasons) in the nineteenth century with the development of what Martin Bernal (1987) termed the ‘Aryan Model’. The denial of Afroasiatic influences on ancient Greece prevailed well into the latter third of the twentieth century, despite African and African diaspora scholars such as Cheikh Anta Diop and George G.M. James publishing works to which Bernal’s more publicised text owes much (cf. Diop 1974; James 1954). Indeed, in the far-right appropriation of Classics in the contemporary era,1 one might say that the Aryan Model has never fully gone away. But the Aryan Model is a false one; the reality of ancient Greece was far less monolithic (cf. Burkert 1992; West 1997). Examining details of Aristotle’s life shows that, although the world the ancient Greeks were aware of was smaller than our contemporary global reality, interaction across borders was a characteristic feature. Aristotle himself was from the north of classical Greece, spent several years in Athens studying at Plato’s Academy, later moved to Asia Minor, and from there, was employed by Philip II of Macedon to be tutor to his son, Alexander the Great. This was a more transcultural society than is sometimes acknowledged. Aristotle encouraged Alexander in his conquest of the east, doing so in ethnocentric terms that might not have been strikingly out of place in the colonial discourses of Europe from the fifteenth into the twentieth century (e.g. Aristotle fr. 658). He cannot be rehabilitated as a figure untinged by the Eurocentrism that has accrued to his reception, but it would be a mistake to neglect the African and Asiatic influences on him, just as the influence of Mesopotamia on Greek epic cannot be ignored. For Bakhtin, one of the distinctive features of the novel is its heteroglossia; contrasting it with epic, he acknowledges the polyglot world from which Greek epic grew, but regards the genre as deliberately monoglossic: “creative consciousness was realized in closed, pure languages (although in actual fact they were mixed)” (1981, 12). His evidence for these ‘closed, pure languages’ is slight, and may be more closely related to the sense of ‘pastness’ noted by Goethe and Schiller than to the voices at work within the epics. While suggesting that even in the modern day little can be added to Aristotle’s discussion of “these already completed genres” because they have maintained the form into which they ossified long ago (Bakhtin 1981, 8), Bakhtin overlooks Aristotle’s own discussion of heteroglossia in epic (Poetics 1457b–1459; trans. Halliwell 1987). For Aristotle, a heteroglossia born out of the use of “ἡ τοῖς ξενικοῖς κεχρημένη” [unfamiliar language] and “ξενικὸν γλῶτταν” [foreign words] results

1 For further details, see Vassar College’s Pharos project (http://pages.vassar.edu/pharos/), which documents appropriations of Graeco-Roman antiquity by hate groups.

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in a “βαρβαρισμóς” [barbaric style] (Poetics 1458a21–22; trans. Halliwell 1987), but these are, as Wai Chee Dimock has highlighted, “necessary barbarisms” (2006, 93). Epic did not, contra Bakhtin, attempt to hide its own polyglossia; thus the first of Bakhtin’s features distinguishing the novel from other genres is brought into question if the “multi-languaged consciousness” which gives the novel its “stylistic threedimensionality” has always been present in epic too (1981, 11).

2 Classical Reception and Anglophone World Literatures If movement across borders is an important part of world literatures, as David Damrosch (2003; ↗2 Re-Reading Classical Approaches) asserts, ancient Greek literature should be seen as a participant in this, both crossing borders itself and receiving work that has crossed geographic boundaries. Yet the reception of ancient Greece has positioned it so firmly within the Western canon that, regardless of the historical reality, ancient Greek literature and the works of philosophers such as Aristotle have become part of a colonial apparatus which makes them contentious when looking at world literatures (↗3 The Colonial Education System). Aristotle et al. become part of the problem because they are hailed as the measuring-stick against which everything else is judged (cf. Friedman 2013, 501); no matter how diverse and wide-ranging were the influences at play within their work, they have come to be used as a tool to laud the West and denigrate the rest. Is there, nonetheless, a place for ideas of genre in the study of Anglophone world literatures? Dimock has compellingly argued that genre offers a way to break free from the segmentation imposed by traditional categorisations of period and place (2006, 85). The dominance of the novel in scholarship on Anglophone world literatures has imposed a new kind of segmentation, but it is one that can be overcome by more, rather than less, attention to genre. An understanding of genre enables us to see how writers have very deliberately overlapped different genres with each other in Anglophone world literatures to produce something new, or have resisted generic expectations derived from ‘the West’ (along the lines of a postcolonial model of ‘writing back’), or have shown that European formulations of genre do not necessarily fit a context that is neither anchored in nor concerned with Eurocentric contexts. Thus, even when generic classifications have been derived from European literature and its tenets, an awareness of the deliberate fuzziness of genres and the proliferation of new forms in the modern day should prevent genre analysis falling into the trap Mariano Siskind identifies: that of de-politicising, de-culturating world literatures (2011, 354). To explore how this has worked in practice, I will do what may at first seem counter-intuitive: start from the genre and one of the texts that stands at the core of the Western canon: Homer’s epic, the Odyssey. Examining four late-twentieth and

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early-twenty-first century Anglophone texts from the African diaspora, all of which engage with the idea of identity and homecoming specifically through the tropes of the Odyssey, we see that each plays with and adapts not only plot features (some of which can be found in epics from around the world, thereby accentuating that the key here is the genre of epic), but epic conventions themselves. Rather than examining these works through the lens of Helen Tiffin’s ‘canonical counter-discourse’ (1987), the focus will be on the worlds created which are not in thrall (resistant or not) to the Western canon. These are works that explore the “unhomely”, in Homi Bhabha’s sense, relating “the traumatic ambivalences of a personal, psychic history to the wider disjunctions of political existence” (2004, 15). By engaging with the Odyssey, all the texts in their different ways show not just an altered Homeric homecoming trope, but a new articulation of homecoming as it is conceived in the worlds of these texts, worlds in which “unhomeliness” is not “homelessness”, but rather a relocation of both home and world (Bhabha 2004, 13). The classical engagement of these works is “omni-local”, to cite Emily Greenwood’s articulation of the necessary move away from a false claim of classical texts’ “universality” towards a perception of each work’s equal relation to another within a global, transhistorical network of artworks (2013, 357–359). What becomes clear in the comparison of these four is that they are united just as much by their exploration of contemporary racial discourse, the legacies of enforced diaspora, and the creation of new identities as they are by their engagement with epic, and that these themes are as central to the works as their Odyssean resonances are. The conception of diaspora articulated by Stuart Hall can be seen in the choice of these four modern texts, a conception that is “defined, not by essence or purity, but by the recognition of a necessary heterogeneity and diversity” (Hall 1990, 235). Only one of these Anglophone works remains, though debatably, epic. Yet the others use features of epic to create their new genres, if genres can be seen to be constantly re-thought and re-defined afresh, as Siskind suggests (2011, 354). Applying fractal geometry to literature, Dimock argues for the recognition of epic’s “survival as a spilled-over phenomenon” in the modern era (2006, 96). This is not a case of the epic genre being passed on or inherited wholesale; rather, epic is one node in the constantly shifting constellation of forms that world literatures create. The four works are, in order of pronounced proximity to the genre of ancient Greek epic, Derek Walcott’s poem, Omeros (1990); Junot Díaz’s short story collection, Drown (1996); Suzan-Lori Parks’ play, Father Comes Home from the Wars, Parts 1, 2, and 3 (2015); and Ralph Ellison’s novel, Invisible Man (1952). While the novel has dominated scholarship on Anglophone literature, this selection of texts underlines the benefits of exploring literature across genres. Each of these works engages with Homer’s Odyssey both narratively and on the level of genre, entering into a dialogue with epic conventions that wrests them from the Eurocentric sphere into which they have often been cast. The distance from both epic convention and the Homeric plot varies, as does the extent to which this engagement is overt or camouflaged, but in

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each case it would be a mistake to presume that epic and the Odyssey provide a more important key to the work than its more local concerns. Equally it would be wrong to think that all ‘epic’ features in these works are responses to classical epic, rather than recognising these forms as neither derived solely from Europe nor as being in any sense particularly European. These four works, by writers from the Caribbean and the United States, are united by their shared concern with enforced diaspora, slavery, and its legacy in contemporary racial discrimination. But it would have been equally possible to examine literature from other Anglophone regions and to observe a similar kind of merging and interrogation of genre. Even maintaining a connection with ancient Greek epic, one could explore, for example, the way Salman Rushdie engages with the Odyssey alongside the Ramayana in his 2005 novel, Shalimar the Clown, or Australian writer David Malouf re-envisions Homer’s Iliad in Ransom (2009), or Njabulo Ndebele recasts the Odyssey in South Africa in The Cry of Winnie Mandela (2003). The ways in which each of these writers negotiates genre, classical antiquity, and contemporary concerns varies, but there is a common thread running through each that comes to the fore in their innovative use of generic forms. A great deal of work has been done in the field of classical reception studies on the afterlife of Odysseus and the Odyssey (see especially Stanford 1954 and Hall 2008). The following discussion is informed by the theoretical approaches of that subset of classical studies, which is as interested in the illumination of the ancient works by the modern as it is in that of the modern by the ancient. Nonetheless, however much one looks at global responses to the literature of ancient Greece and Rome, it is hard to deny a Eurocentric bias in the discipline (and even the name) of Classics. Approaching this work from a perspective of world literatures not underwritten by a dynamic of core and periphery (↗7 Cosmopolitanism beyond the Center-Periphery Model), but rather perceiving the classical elements as individual fragments brought together on an equal basis with influences from other times and places to create a new whole which, collage-like, is different than the sum of its parts, strives to decolonise the work of what was formerly referred to as ‘the classical tradition’ and to unseat classical antiquity from the privileged position it has occupied.

2.1 Derek Walcott Derek Walcott’s 1990 poem, Omeros, confronts these issues when it asks, “Why not see Helen / as the sun saw her, with no Homeric shadow” (Walcott 1990, 271). The sentence pulls the reader up short: in a poem written in a Dantean “rough-textured terza rima” (Walcott, qtd. in Sampietro 1992, n.pag.), peopled with characters named Achille, Hector, Philoctete, and Helen, and itself entitled Omeros, surely we were not wrong to read the poem with Homer in mind? Helen Kaufmann (2006) has written engagingly about the way that this moment serves as a salutary reminder

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to decolonise our own reading; to become aware of the Eurocentric appropriation we have been enacting if, when we hear of a fight between the St. Lucian fisherman Achille and Hector, we focus on the way it reflects the ancient battle between the Greek Achilles and Trojan Hector. That Omeros is in dialogue with Homer’s epics, as well as with those by Virgil and Dante, is undeniable, but a stance too dominated by the traditions of European literature might lead one to overlook the other strands at play within the poem. The figure of Seven Seas / Omeros within the poem exemplifies the integration of multiple strands of influence into one, with none dominating the rest. Thus, within Walcott’s poem, Omeros is the bard who composed the Odyssey, he is the West African griot Achille meets on his hallucinatory journey ‘back to Africa’, he is Seven Seas hanging out at Ma Kilman’s bar, and his name, too, is born not only from the Greek rendition of ‘Homer’, but in recognition of Dunstan St. Omer, artist and friend of Walcott’s, who designed the St Lucian flag. On the level of plot, Omeros makes many allusions to the Homeric poems; on the generic level, this is no less true. Like the epics with which it engages, Omeros’ scope is capacious both temporally and spatially; like Virgil’s and Dante’s, the poem is constructed as a poem for the nation, telling St Lucia’s history as well as its present. Its metre and its length immediately suggest epic, but unlike classical epic, its time is now. Contrary to Goethe and Schiller’s categorisation, Walcott’s poem demonstrates that the ‘pastness’ of epic has more to do with the history of Europe than with an innate quality of epic. Omeros does not distance itself from the present for the very same reason that the Odyssey does: in the Homeric epics, we often hear that the men of that time are stronger than those of today, more heroic than any Homer’s audience could imagine in their own time of the seventh century BCE. The age of heroes, the epics tell us, has now passed. But for Walcott, this is the very reason why Omeros is set in the present: Achille, Philoctete, Helen, and all the other characters of the poem are the everyday people of Gros Islet, and their modern heroism is recognised. Likewise, there is no invocation of the Muse in Walcott because this is not a tale to be told by a higher power; instead Walcott himself claims the role: “I sang of quiet Achille” (1990, 320), correcting the Iliad’s opening line “Sing, O goddess, the anger of Achilles” both in its attribution of inspiration and in Achille’s defining characteristic (now quiet, rather than raging). Walcott’s frustration with Eurocentric categorisations of genre is clear in his response to the question of whether or not Omeros is epic: I do not think of it as an epic. Certainly not in the sense of epic design. Where are the battles? There are a few, I suppose. But ‘epic’ makes people think of great wars and warriors. That isn’t the Homer I was thinking of; I was thinking of Homer the poet of the seven seas. (Walcott qtd. in Bruckner 1990, 13)

Walcott rejects Homer’s identity as a distinctly Greek bard here, instead conceiving of him as a global, transcultural storyteller, a ‘poet of the seven seas’. As well as the idiomatic sense of ‘the seven seas’ referring to any large number of different seas,

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and the joking reference to the brand of vitamins, Walcott may also here allude to the Sumerian hymns, composed in Mesopotamia around 2300 BCE, in which they are first mentioned. Walcott is staking a claim for a conception of Homer that is both transhistorical and transcultural, as we see embodied within the poem both in the multiple bardic figures it depicts and in the status the work itself occupies as a modern Caribbean epic (↗16 Canons and Canonicity in Anglophone Literature; ↗24 The Caribbean).

2.2 Junot Díaz Junot Díaz’s approach to epic is rather different. Having structured his first collection of short stories, Drown (1996), loosely around the Odyssey, he removed the most explicit of these allusions before publication: Drown is a reverse Odyssey, always organized it that way. The story of a father’s absence told from Telemakos’ point of view. There were many more references in the first drafts (to Cyclops, to the cattle of the Sun) but they were so obvious I had to get rid of them. (Díaz, in email correspondence with myself – 15 March 2009)

The phrase ‘so obvious’ is striking, indicating the problematic nature of engagement with the Western canon which, if too explicit, has tempted critics into reading the work as only an engagement with European literature. Walcott protested that for Omeros to be merely a re-writing of Homer would imply that the Caribbean was a “second-rate Aegean” (1997, 232); Díaz attempts to avoid such reductive, misguided readings by eliminating the explicit intertextual references. Yet, to observe Díaz’s engagement with classical epic need not, necessarily, result in a reductive or Eurocentric reading, particularly when one recalls that in moments of his later work, The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao (2007), Díaz is in dialogue with Aimé Césaire, Ralph Ellison, and Derek Walcott who have also riffed on and adapted Homeric epic (cf. McConnell 2013, 1–2, 35–37); these transnational connections are as central to Díaz’s work as the ancient epic is. The history of European colonialism, slavery, and diaspora scattered ideas as well as people; if it were ever true that Graeco-Roman epic was distinctly European (and the transcultural reality of the ancient Mediterranean belies this), Europe’s imperial expansion in the latter half of the second millennium, ensured that that is no longer the case. Literature of the African diaspora has, as Henry Louis Gates, Jr. observes, “complex double formal antecedents, the Western and the black” (1988, xxiv). The intertextual engagement with the Odyssey by a writer such as Díaz may be less a mode of ‘writing back’ than of reassembly, as both Walcott (1992) and Gates (1988, xxiv) have termed it. Díaz’s work, like that of Walcott, Parks, and Ellison too, can be seen to Signify upon the Odyssey, to “repeat with a difference” (Gates 1988, xxii) the classical epic. This Signifyin(g) is borne out of the black vernacular tradition, the exploration of which is, for Gates, “an

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ideal way to confound a Eurocentric bias” (1988, xx). One need not shy away from analysing engagements with a Eurocentric tradition when considering Anglophone world literature so long as these are not asserted as more valuable or illuminating than the other strands of intertextuality and creativity within the work. Junot Díaz’s short story “Aguantando” forms part of his first collection. In the way the stories inter-relate, peopled by a cast of characters who criss-cross the collection, Drown can be read as a short-story cycle, following Forrest Ingram’s definition of the genre as one in which “the reader’s experience of each [story] is modified by his experience of the others” (Ingram 1971, 13). Díaz extends this even further, with Drown’s Yunior traversing his wider oeuvre, and featuring in both his novel, The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, and his second short-story collection, This is How You Lose Her (2012). That short-story cycles share affinities with epic traditions has been noted since Ingram traced the roots of the genre back to works including Homer’s Odyssey, Ovid’s Metamorphoses, Giovanni Boccaccio’s Decameron, and the Arabian A Thousand and One Nights (Ingram 1971, 13; 17). Orality is important here, in the roots of both epic and short-story cycles, the latter of which could be regarded as a liminal genre, poised between the oral and the written, the novel and shorter narratives (↗13 Decolonizing World Literature through Orality). Rocío Davis regards the short-story cycle as a “hybrid form” (1997, 3), which makes it particularly fitting to reflect the complexities of identity. As Stuart Hall has argued, The New World […] has to be understood as the place of many, continuous displacements: of the original pre-Columbian inhabitants, the Arawaks, Caribs and Amerindians, permanently displaced from their homelands and decimated; of other peoples displaced in different ways from Africa, Asia, and Europe; the displacements of slavery, colonisation, and conquest. (Hall 1990, 234)

Davis suggests that the fact that writers have “appropriated the short-story cycle as a metaphor for the fragmentation and multiplicity of ethnic lives is itself an articulation of the between-culture position and the complex process towards self-identification” (1997, 22). When this is considered in tandem with the links between short-story cycles and oral traditions, a connection made explicit by Edwidge Danticat’s 1996 collection, Krik? Krak!, the potency of the genre is brought to the fore. As a short-story cycle, Drown retains epic’s interest in storytelling and orality. However, Díaz adapts the epic form for his own purposes: by fragmenting the often-imperialistic epic into smaller tales and reuniting these into the new, cohesive structure of the story cycle, the form of Díaz’s work reflects the rupturing of the lives and identities of so many in the African diaspora as a result of slavery and colonialism, as well as the ways that Caribbean peoples have rebuilt their sense of identity and nationhood in the wake of historical horrors. Díaz engages with the genre of epic, but does so in a way that reflects his collection’s concerns with identity, diaspora, and oppression. This engagement with epic is, as in the case of Walcott’s Omeros and the works of Parks and Ellison to which

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we will turn in a moment, not only on the level of genre but also of narrative. The ‘reverse Odyssey’ of Drown is particularly prominent in “Aguantando”, where the father’s return echoes Odysseus’ return to Ithaca in a number of respects, each of which is recast to reflect the son’s Telemachean perspective. Thus, the famous recognition scene of Odysseus by Eurycleia, brought about when she sees the scar of the wound he suffered while hunting as a boy, is here inverted: the father traces the son’s wounds, reminding us that in this story it is those left behind at home who have suffered (cf. McConnell 2020).

2.3 Suzan-Lori Parks Suzan-Lori Parks’ Father Comes Home from the Wars, Parts 1, 2, and 3 (2015) also narratively engages with the Odyssey in its tale of a man returning from war, its concern with the fidelity of the wife who stayed at home, and the double-standard applied to male and female behaviour within a relationship. In Parks’ case, this double-standard is scrutinized rather than overlooked as it seems to be in the Homeric tale. That Parks’ play will be a wry take on the Odyssey is signalled in the opening scene when we learn the name of the protagonist’s dog: Odd-See. It is not only an Odyssean dog that flags up this reception, many of the characters’ names cast sidelong glances at the Homeric epic: the protagonist, Hero, a slave compelled to fight for his master on the Confederate side, returns from war having renamed himself Ulysses after the Union leader, Ulysses S. Grant, but also reflecting the Roman version of Odysseus’ name. Homer appears in the play too, not as a bardic figure, but as a fellow slave betrayed by Hero, and Hero’s lover is Penny (cf. Macintosh and McConnell 2020, 125–129). The narrative intertextual strands are both playful and compelling, and those on the level of genre are no less so. Even the inclusion of Homer as a character defies epic convention. Aristotle asserted that “the poet himself should speak as little as possible, since when he does so he is not engaging in mimesis” (Poetics 1460a, 7–8; trans. Halliwell 1987, 59) and this is one of the elements that Goethe and Schiller reiterated in their 1797 essay. The physical embodiment of the bard would, Goethe and Schiller felt, detract from the divine inspiration of the Muses, which should reach the audience as directly as possible (1845, 382). But Parks – in keeping with other contemporary playwrights, such as Walcott (The Odyssey: A Stage Version, 1993) and Lisa Petersen and Denis O’Hare (An Iliad, 2015) – is not interested in the elevation to a divine plane; instead, her play is one in which the previously unvoiced characters of classical epic have a chance to speak. Rather than focusing on powerful leaders as epics from Homer’s Iliad to Virgil’s Aeneid, from The Epic of Sundiata to Luís de Camões’ The Lusiads have done, Parks’ play tells the story of a group of slaves living through the American Civil War. Gore Vidal’s remark that, “[w]hat the Trojan War was to the Greeks, the Civil War is to us” (1988, n.pag.) is seen to be no less true here: both contributed to a people’s vision of themselves. Yet

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Parks’ play demonstrates that the analogy exists as much as a result of the slaveholding societies in each as in anything more heroic; she foregrounds, as we will see Ralph Ellison earlier did with Invisible Man, the centrality of African American people within the American nation. Father Comes Home from the Wars finally tells the stories of the slaves, present in the world of the Homeric epics too but persistently overlooked, denigrated, or – as in the case of the Odyssey’s Eumaeus and Eurycleia – shown to be exceptions to the rule of how slaves are imagined to think and behave. If narratives of civil war are retold as foundational tales to explain a nation’s history, as we see in the Aeneid, the Lusiads, and the Sundiata, Parks’ play offers a tale of people who have been marginalised in narratives of this history of the United States, that of those African American people enslaved until the end of the Civil War and the period of Reconstruction. Father Comes Home from the Wars is, generically, drama; narratively, it has epic elements drawn from Homer, and genre-wise, it includes one of the most recognizable epic traces that persisted through Greek tragedy: the messenger speech. It is the dog, Odd-See, who returns and tells those who remained at home about the war and Hero’s role in it. As a dramatic device, the messenger speech underlines tragedy’s roots in epic; the messenger assumes a role similar to that of the epic poet at this moment in the drama and is thereby endowed with an authority that is further enhanced by narrating events they have witnessed with their own eyes. The narration of these events, which will only reach the audience in the retelling rather than by enactment, constitute moments within the drama which veer close to the form of epic. In addition, Parks includes a chorus within her play of “Less than Desirable Slaves”, which is another playful glance towards the Greek dramatic form via one of the elements which has proved notoriously hard to ‘translate’ onto the modern stage. Yet this is not to suggest that Parks is in thrall to established dramatic conventions; indeed, she is well-known for what she terms her “slightly unconventional theatrical elements”: distinctive “Rests” and “Spells” to indicate what should happen in the silences between characters on stage (Parks 2015, n.pag.). Since her 2001 Pulitzer Prize-winning play, Topdog/Underdog, Parks has reflected on the figures of American history as akin to those of Greek mythology: Lincoln is the closest thing we have to a mythic figure. In days of great Greek drama, they had Apollo and Medea and Oedipus – these larger-than-life figures that walked the earth and spoke – and they turned them into plays. Shakespeare had kings and queens that he fashioned into his stories. Lincoln, to me, is one of those. (Parks interviewed by Shenk 2002).

Just as Topdog/Underdog applied the names of two giants of American history to two African-American brothers, so too in Father Comes Home from the Wars, Parks compels her audience to hold the ancient resonances in tension with the scenes played out on stage and so to question whether the names and titles imposed on us can ever be defied. This theme is not only threaded throughout the foundations of the play, but is also emphatically embodied when Hero renames himself Ulysses. Has he

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stepped closer to the embodiment of the hero of the Union side in the Civil War, or has he stepped away from his American roots towards those of Greek mythology; or, as Parks’ play seems to suggest, might he have done both simultaneously?

2.4 Ralph Ellison Finally, we turn to Ralph Ellison’s 1952 novel, Invisible Man, which also engages with the Odyssey on the level of plot (cf. Rankine 2006; McConnell 2013). Ellison has sometimes been seen as declaring his prioritisation of Greek myth over African American folklore when he explained, I knew the trickster Ulysses just as early as I knew the wily rabbit of Negro American lore, and I could easily imagine myself a pint-sized Ulysses but hardly a rabbit, no matter how human and resourceful or Negro…. My point is that the Negro American writer is also an heir of the human experience which is literature, and this might well be more important to him than his living folk tradition. (Ellison 1995, 58)

It is, however, equally possible to read this not as hierarchy but as a signpost to Eurocentric readers that classical mythology is as much the inheritance of African American people as it is of Europeans, white Americans, or anyone else (cf. Rankine 2006,  138). Invisible Man bears out this non-hierarchical view of the two, with the folkloric Brer Rabbit and equally folkloric (though also epic) episode of Odysseus and the Cyclops Polyphemus, merging together at certain moments (e.g. Ellison 2002, 176–190). When it comes to his later, unfinished novel, Juneteenth, the syncretisation of the two myths is comically rendered when Choc Charlie declares to Donelson, “‘don’t nobody name of Polly mess with Brer Rabbit, male or female’”, only to be corrected, “‘That’s his name, […] Polly-fee-mess’” (Ellison 1999, 324). Narratively, then, Ellison engages with the folklore of the ancient Greeks and of African Americans simultaneously, merging the two in a way which, collage-like, retains the separate outlines of each even while together they create a new whole. Indeed, Ellison used the metaphor of collage when thinking about the United States as a nation: “we are a collage of a Nation, and a Nation that is ever shifting about” (Ellison 1988, 419). These words were spoken by Ellison at a memorial service for the artist Romare Bearden, famous for his collages including his Odysseus Series (1977) which, like the other modern works already discussed, also engages with the Homeric epic and ‘repeats [it] with a difference’. Collage not only personifies diversity in a society (the different origins and forms of all the pieces coming together to make a unified whole), but it incorporates the history of diaspora within its form because the fragmentary nature of the collage recalls the enforced fragmentation (geographic, familial, psychological) of diaspora. As Elizabeth Alexander has explained, prompted by her reflections on Bearden, “[c]ollage constructs wholes from fragments in a continual, referential dialogue between the seemingly disparate shards of various pasts and the current

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moment of the work itself” (2007, 36). This is what we see in Ellison’s Ulyssean Brer Rabbit, or Brer Rabbit-esque Ulysses, with the disparate folkloric ‘shards’ being woven together. This act of “collaging”, of “weaving together”, is the construction of an identity; the collage can be a “model to describe the presentation of self-identities in African-American literature and culture” (Alexander 2007, 35). That this is so may give one more hint to the enduring appeal of classical epic, particularly for those reflecting on the ruptures caused by slavery and colonialism, and the reassembly required in their wake. There has been much debate over the way that the Homeric epics, the Iliad and the Odyssey, were composed, but few would now disagree that they were transmitted by what were known as ‘rhapsodes’. The etymology of the Greek word ‘rhapsode’, coming from rhapsõidein, meaning ‘to sew together’, describes the way these performance poets composed their works, stitching together stories from a range of oral sources. Like Homer and the rhapsodes, Bearden ‘stitches together’ fragments from different sources, layering them over each other, improvising from his own imagination, and applying his creative genius to form a unique and innovative whole. What Bearden physically did with papers, paints, and glue, Ellison, Parks, Díaz, and Walcott, do with their words and imaginations. No wonder, then, that the genres of the works thus composed are likewise a collage: epic forms united with short fiction, drama and the novel, woven together to create a new whole that no longer aims to fit, nor do they fit, into one single generic category. Invisible Man and its protagonist exemplify Bakhtin’s idea of ‘unfinalizability’, not least in the novel’s uncertain ending (in particular, the question of whether or not Invisible Man will emerge from his subterranean home). This is unsurprising given the pronounced influence of Dostoevsky’s Notes from Underground (1864) on the prologue and epilogue of Ellison’s novel, combined with the fact that Bakhtin developed his idea of ‘unfinalizability’ from his reading of Dostoevsky (cf. Bakhtin 1973). Yet the epic nature of Ellison’s novel goes beyond the plot and the Odyssean allusions: Invisible Man is itself epic in its establishment of itself as a tale for and of the nation. If Ellison’s closing line, “Who knows but that, on the lower frequencies, I speak for you?” (2002, 439) seemed to deny the specificity of the novel’s racial concerns and drew a negative response from African-American critics when it was published (e.g. Killens 1952), one must also remember that Ellison was adamant that no American culture existed without having been influenced by African Americans, as his essay, “What America Would Be Like Without Blacks” (1970) argues. Invisible Man is a national text just as much as Virgil’s story of Aeneas is; but unlike the Aeneid which, by its setting in the distance past is able to fast-forward in time to the founding of Rome and even to the contemporary period of Augustus’ reign, Invisible Man stops, ‘unfinished’, with the future uncertain. Such a break midway through the action is, in fact, exactly what we see in the epics of Homer and Virgil, but they – unlike Ellison’s novel – can rely on the audience being able to “complete” the story by their knowledge of the mythic

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tradition, and by the “flashforward” which episodes such as the ekphrasis of Achilles’ shield has afforded the audience (Iliad 18.478–608).

3 New Conceptions of Genre The answer to the question of whether Invisible Man qualifies as epic cannot be singular. It can only be ‘yes, but also…’. This is the flipside, denied by Bakhtin, of his idea that the novel, unlike other genres, can incorporate a range of genres into itself without losing its own status as a novel. The fact that a similar process has already been seen to take place in the poetry of Walcott, the short fiction of Díaz, and the drama of Parks, highlights the fallibility of Bakhtin’s sharp distinctions between epic and the novel. What an exploration of genre in Anglophone world literatures demonstrates is that the boundaries between genres, never as fixed as Aristotle has often been thought to claim, have become integrally permeable in the modern world. This is a development already identified by Croce at the start of the twentieth century, but when it comes to consideration of Anglophone world literatures, this permeability may be seen to take a more conscious and thoroughgoing form. The linguistic commonality between Anglophone world literatures signifies a shared history via the imperial activities of Britain. No Anglophone nation has escaped the imperialistic attention of Great Britain at some stage in their history, and in many cases this involved a shared history not only of colonialism, but of enforced diaspora. The permeability of genre, then, is not so much a question of “disregarding” genres’ boundaries (Croce 1909, 37) as of deliberately piecing them together in unexpected ways to create a new collage of genre that reflects the history of fragmentation and reassembly of Anglophone nations. Homi Bhabha suggested that the “transnational histories of migrants, the colonized, or political refugees – these border and frontier conditions – may be the terrains of world literature” (2004, 17). The new worlds created by these “border and frontier conditions” are formulating new genres too. Drawing not only from the genres canonised by Aristotle and his neoclassical proponents, but also from forms of narrative developed in different parts of the globe, these writers are not so much disregarding generic convention as putting it to new use alongside other forms, and thereby creating a new conception of genre. Wellek was right when he declared that “boundaries are being constantly transgressed, genres combined or fused”, but it need not follow that the concept should be “called into doubt” as a result (1970, 225). Rather, the traces of the old genres in the new forms should be seen as just one layer in the complex creation of these works: like the scraps of paper and material that Romare Bearden combined, painted, and glued to create his collages, they take their place as fragments reassembled in new ways, alongside new materials, in the creation of world literatures.

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4 Bibliography 4.1 Works Cited Alexander, Elizabeth. “The Genius of Romare Bearden.” Power and Possibility: Essays, Reviews, and Interviews. By Alexander. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2007. 33–44. Aristotle. The Poetics of Aristotle: Translation and Commentary. Trans. Stephen Halliwell. London: Duckworth, 1987. Bakhtin, Mikhail. Problems of Dostoevsky’s Poetics. Trans. R.W. Rotsel. Ann Arbor: Ardis, 1973. Bakhtin, Mikhail. The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays. Ed. Michael Holquist. Trans. Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1981. Bhabha, Homi K. The Location of Culture. Abingdon: Routledge, 2004 [1994]. Bruckner, D.J.R. “A Poem in Homage to an Unwanted Man.” The New York Times (9 Oct. 1990): 13. Burkert, Walter. The Orientalizing Revolution: Near Eastern Influence on Greek Culture in the Early Archaic Age. Trans. Margaret E. Pinder and Walter Burkert. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1992 [1984]. Croce, Benedetto. Aesthetic: As Science of Expression and General Linguistic. Trans. Douglas Ainslie. London: Macmillan, 1909. Damrosch, David. What is World Literature? Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2003. Davis, Rocío G. “Identity in Community in Ethnic Short Story Cycles: Amy Tan’s The Joy Luck Club, Louise Erdrich’s Love Medicine, Gloria Naylor’s The Women of Brewster Place.” Ethnicity and the American Short Story. Ed. Julie Brown. New York: Garland, 1997. 3–23. Díaz, Junot. Drown. London: Faber and Faber, 1996. Dimock, Wai Chee. “Genre as World System: Epic and Novel on Four Continents.” Narrative 14.1 (2006): 85–101. Diop, Cheikh Anta. The African Origin of Civilization: Myth or Reality. Trans. Mercer Cook. New York and Westport: Lawrence Hill, 1974. Ellison, Ralph. “What America Would Be Like Without Blacks.” Time (6 April 1970): 56–61. Ellison, Ralph. Shadow and Act. New York: Vintage International, 1995. Ellison, Ralph. Juneteenth. Ed. John F. Callahan. New York: Random House, 1999. Ellison, Ralph. Invisible Man. New York: Random House, 2002. Farrell, Joseph. “Classical Genre in Theory and Practice.” New Literary History 34.2 (Summer 2003): 383–408. Friedman, Susan Stanford. “World Modernisms, World Literature, and Comparativity.” The Oxford Handbook of Global Modernisms. Ed. Marc Wollaeger and Matt Eatough. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012. 499–526. Gates Jr., Henry Louis. The Signifying Monkey: A Theory of African-American Literary Criticism. New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988. Genette, Gérard. Introduction à l’architexte. Paris: Editions de Seuil, 1979. Goethe, Johann W. von, and Friedrich Schiller. “On Epic and Dramatic Poetry.” Correspondence between Schiller and Goethe from 1794 to 1805, vol. 1. Trans. George H. Calvert. New York and London: Wiley & Putnam, 1845 [1797]. 379–392. Greenwood, Emily. “Afterword: Omni-Local Classical Receptions.” Classical Receptions Journal 5.3 (2013): 354–361. Hall, Edith. The Return of Ulysses: A Cultural History of Homer’s Odyssey. London and New York: I. B. Tauris, 2008.

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Hall, Stuart. “Cultural Identity and Diaspora.” Identity, Community, Culture, Difference. Ed. Jonathan Rutherford. London: Lawrence & Wishart, 1990. 222–237. Homer. The Iliad. Trans. Samuel Butler. Mineola: Dover Publications, 1999. Ingram, Forrest L. Representative Short Story Cycles of the Twentieth Century. The Hague: Mouton & Co., 1971. James, George G.M. Stolen Legacy: The Greeks Were Not the Authors of Greek Philosophy, But the People of North Africa, Commonly Called the Egyptians. New York: Philosophical Library, 1954. Killens, John O. “Review of Invisible Man.” Freedom (June 1952): 7. Macintosh, Fiona, and Justine McConnell. Performing Epic or Telling Tales. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2020. McConnell, Justine. Black Odysseys: The Homeric Odyssey in the African Diaspora since 1939. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013. McConnell, Justine. “Myth and the Fantastic in the Work of Junot Díaz.” Classicisms in the Black Atlantic. Ed. Ian Moyer, Adam Lecznar, and Heidi Morse. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2020. 240–264. Parks, Suzan-Lori. Father Comes Home from the Wars, Parts 1, 2, and 3. New York: Theatre Communications Group, 2015. Petersen, Lisa, and Denis O’Hare. An Iliad. New York: Dramatists Play Service, 2013. Rankine, Patrice D. Ulysses in Black: Ralph Ellison, Classicism, and African American Literature. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2006. Sampietro, Luigi. “Derek Walcott on Omeros: An Interview.” Caribana 3 (1993): 31–44. http://users. unimi.it/caribana/OnOmeros.html (2 Jan. 2019). Schiller, Friedrich, and Johann W. von Goethe. Correspondence between Schiller and Goethe from 1794–1805. Trans. George H. Calvert. New York and London: Wiley & Putnam, 1845. Shenk, Joshua Wolf. “Beyond a Black-and-White Lincoln.” New York Times (7 April 2002). https://www.nytimes.com/2002/04/07/theater/theater-beyonda-black-and-white-lincoln.html (2 Jan. 2019). Siskind, Mariano. “The Genres of World Literature: The Case of Magical Realism.” The Routledge Companion to World Literature. Ed. Theo D’haen, David Damrosch, and Djelal Kadir. Abingdon: Routledge, 2011. Stanford, William B. The Ulysses Theme: A Study in the Adaptability of a Traditional Hero. Oxford: Blackwell, 1954. Tiffin, Helen. “Post-Colonial Literatures and Counter-Discourse.” Kunapipi 9.3 (1987): 17–33. Vidal, Gore. “Gore Vidal’s Lincoln? An Exchange.” The New York Review of Books (28 April 1988). https://www.nybooks.com/articles/1988/04/28/gore-vidals-lincoln-an-exchange/ (2 Jan. 2019). Walcott, Derek. Omeros. New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1990. Walcott, Derek. The Odyssey: A Stage Version. London: Faber and Faber, 1993. Walcott, Derek. “Reflections on Omeros.” South Atlantic Quarterly 96.2 (Spring 1997): 229–246. Wellek, René. “Genre Theory, the Lyric, and Erlebnis.” Discriminations: Further Concepts of Criticism. By Wellek. New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1970. 225–252. West, Martin L. The East Face of Helicon: West Asiatic Elements in Greek Poetry and Myth. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997.

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4.2 Further Reading Beecroft, Alexander. An Ecology of World Literature: From Antiquity to the Present Day. London and New York: Verso, 2015. Genette, Gérard. Palimpsests: Literature in the Second Degree. Trans. Channa Newman and Claude Dubinsky. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1997. Greenwood, Emily. Afro-Greeks: Dialogues between Anglophone Caribbean Literature and Classics in the Twentieth Century. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010. Halliwell, Stephen. Aristotle’s Poetics. 2nd ed. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998. Ramazani, Jahan. The Hybrid Muse: Postcolonial Poetry in English. Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 2001.

Uhuru Portia Phalafala

13 Decolonizing World Literature through Orality Abstract: A singular lens of knowledge production and circulation inaugurated through the medium of print nullified oral cultures and indigenous knowledges. This chapter focuses therefore on orality and its potential to expand our theorization of world literature, grounded on temporality. It brings to light various forms of orality in the black world, and how they shaped an interweaving practice of oral and written texts that became influential in the making of countercultures to modernity. It centres oratory and verbal practices of their cultural lineage to broaden the scope of world literature – yesteryear’s forms of the epic, praise poetry, song, and theatre are interwoven with contemporary forms of rap, slam, spoken word, and experimental performance, setting stages ablaze, as well as finding new circuits of production and dissemination through digital technology. Addressing the constant omission of orality in discourses of world literature is by virtue attending to ongoing epistemicide, and decolonising the field. Key Terms: Temporality, decolonisation, translation, orature, epistemicide, corporeality, ecology of orality

1 Colonization through Temporality The historicisation of orality and world literature in this chapter is grounded on temporality. The advent of English language and literatures in the British colonies inaugurated themselves through a mechanism of what Rolando Vazquez calls “translation as erasure”, where translation brings to view the “epistemic borders where a politics of visibility is at play between erasure and visibility, disdain and recognition” (2011, 29). Here, what lies outside the British frame of intelligibility and parameters of legibility is erased by instituting a culturally alien epistemic territory. Underpinned by Manicheanism, the colonial project as arbiter for what constitutes civilised, modern, and educated are in line with the teleology of progress which formulated an ‘other’ against which to measure its self-narrative of ‘worldly’. So while the English language itself is a vernacular of the culture they ferried to colonies, its project of expansion inaugurated itself by forcing newness onto the world. The languages they encountered in their expansion, in their view, belonged to an obsolete and outmoded past, ossified in pre-historic time marked by settlers’ arrival. Reducing the world to a single temporal structure, any reading of what is world literary, political, economic, social, and cultural production that follows this causality reproduces the onto-epistemological violence of the original colonial sin. Liz Gunner observes this in theories of world https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110583182-014

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literature, where she contends the “insistence on a progression of modes in the West ensures no contemporary place for orality, and indeed no acceptance of its place as living literary art” (2018, 117). This colonial variable of epistemic expansion is contingent on using the map as territory. The territory of the native people was erased through instituting a new map that inscribed space, time, knowledge, language, and value systems derived from Britain onto the colonial domain. A singular lens of knowledge production and circulation inaugurated through the medium of the printing press nullified the oral cultures and indigenous knowledges. However, they continued to be produced because the oral is and has always been integral to human life. They in fact became central to the recuperative and reparative project of postcolonial writers who approached their writing as ‘righting’ – a decolonial praxis of correcting colonial narratives to overcome what Chimamanda Adichie calls ‘the danger of a single story’ (2014). Indigenous knowledge became central as cultural archives and memorial points of reference, and were transformed into published written texts which found new routes of circulation and expression, that in turn broadened the spectrum of world literatures. Gunner identifies paucity in the domain of world literature insofar as it only recognizes a number of literary ecologies, sans orality. Here there exists fixed ideas of a normative centre: “a Western centre of literary influence and one dominated by the genre of the novel” (2018, 116). The boundless other forms of oral works that exist away from the centre, fixed by power relations, are often relegated to the temporal zone of ‘tradition’, which is to say, they represent a fixed positionality in a precolonial, premodern time. She pushes us to “find a way of arriving at a possible model where orality remains, or becomes, a site of the literary within world literature” (2018, 116). This chapter heeds this call by exploring modalities of oral cultures in both literary and oral circuits, through the genres of novels, the epic, spoken word, reggae, theatre, and performance. It follows a cosmopolitan vernacular trajectory where the boundaries of the cultural universe seeded in orality reshape “a larger world than the nation or local community and culture” (Helgesson 2018, 8), while that universe is also inversely transformed by encounters with cultures of imperial expansion. Stefan Helgesson contends, If English and its literary tradition on the one hand has been associated with the cosmopolitan legacy of imperial coercion in Africa, it has also provided a repertoire of forms as well as material networks which have fed into the cultivation of local literatures. If we look at the domain of literary translation, it is just as evidently involved in complex negotiations of cosmopolitan and vernacular trajectories: the outward and inward movements, of foreignisation and domestication, of sociolects and dialects, of major and minor languages. (Helgesson 2018, 9)

When a vernacular becomes cosmopolitan it forsakes all claims to singularity and purity, and when English and its literary tradition becomes cosmopolitan, it is constantly shaped by vernaculars it encounters. This undermines its universality and totalising hegemony. Here, when we attend to orality, the role of the body, voice, movement, ritual, and performance in knowledge production, we address the

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deficiencies of discursive representations which fetishize scriptural economy. To be clear, discursive representation is a practice of imposing sameness elsewhere, using the map as territory, with attendant technologies such as the printing press, regarded as modern. Examples of orality in English language literatures from the black world in this chapter insists on specificities of its own traditions, cultures, philosophies, cosmologies, and interrelational subjectivities unbound by History’s teleological frame of progress: “the proletarian revolution is a progressive force that intervenes in the existing world, reinscribing it through alternative discursive constructions in order to actualize a higher world” (Cheah 2016, 9). The alternative discursive practices in this chapter are black radical traditions where ‘radical’ is located in resistance against the unworlding of the world, and ‘black’ attends to the geography which we will limit these discussions to, Africa and its diaspora. That geography is rich in oratures and verbal arts that must be read as inflections of modernity, and constitutive of the many literary ecologies (cf. Beecroft 2015; Gunner 2018) of world literature active within an ‘ecology of temporalities’ (cf. Santos 2006) or heterotemporality (cf. Chakrabarty 2000). Two monumental events in popular oral cultures push us to move beyond conservative understandings of what constitutes literatures of the world: the creation of the Nasir Jones Hip Hop Archive and annual fellowship programme at America’s most august educational institution Harvard University, and the winning of the Pulitzer Prize in music by rapper Kendrick Lamar, the first hip hop act to win in that category previously dominated by classical music and jazz. The movement of rap – rhythm and poetry – from periphery to centre broadens the category of poetry and the study of oratures. To advocate for orality as composite of literary ecologies, this chapter investigates a range of orature in which yesteryear’s forms of the epic, praise poetry, song, and theatre are interwoven with contemporary forms of rap, slam, spoken word, and experimental performance, setting stages ablaze, as well as finding new circuits of production and dissemination through digital technology. These modalities of translation and circulation decentre that of the novel form in productive ways. The case studies here demonstrate that orality should not only exist within world literature to cure elitist postcolonial school of thoughts that reproduce epistemicide, but is also key in the decolonial imperative of epistemic justice.

2 Gender and the Vernacular The institutionalising of History through hierarchical dichotomies and categorical logic was also a gendered project, as has been observed by decolonial scholars such as Maria Lugones (2010). Setting up a dichotomous logic between human and non-human, master/slave, and coloniser/colonised homogenised the non-human colonized into one black mass: to see black women is to exceed “categorical” logic, as Lugones (2010, 742) contends. Colonised women fell outside of the horizon of

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visibility of the coloniser, but also of the colonised man in his embattled emergence from the zone of non-being. Therefore, locked outside the possibilities of both History’s progressive march forward and the proletarian revolution – both androcentric and heteropatriarchal – the colonised woman herself exists and operates within different temporality. However, as the cases of Solomon Plaatje, Mazisi Kunene, and Keorapetse Kgositsile will show in this chapter, matriarchal members of their families imparted a decolonial archive that have fostered an Africanist and collectivist approach to their anti-colonial politics. Through a radical tradition operative within heterotemporal ecologies, the three writers entangle the matriarchive (matrilineal decolonial archive) in their ongoing becoming, asserting an intra-active radical black subjectivity commensurate with that of the womenfolk. The matrilineal inheritance enriched the oeuvres of these figures of black modernity, whose heroic epics, proverbs, historical novels, and poetry went on to transform their African diaspora interlocutors. The oral knowledges of the matriarchive reveals the tenacity of pluriversality against Anglophone epistemic hegemony, through deep time and disparate space. It will become clear how the matriarchive, characterised by orality and performance underpinned by exclusion from modernity’s linear progress narrative (cf. Wright 2015), was pushed to the periphery. Its recovery destabilises and broadens our understanding of world literatures. An early example of the colonized woman accessing modern subjectivity through a different temporality than that of her black male other, is that of the Xhosa imbongi [praise poet] Nontsizi Mgqwetho. When the traditional politics of the Xhosa public court denied her the opportunity to function as a praise poet because it was considered the province of men, Mgqwetho adopted the burgeoning tradition of black newspapers as her platform of performance. Between 1920 and 1929 she had published close to a hundred praise poems in the Johannesburg-based weekly newspaper Umteteli waBantu, making her the first and only female poet to produce a body of written work in isiXhosa (cf. Opland 2007). Her work entailed criticism of the chief and other leaders, as is the tradition of the imbongi, and contributed to the corpus of political commentary that Umteteli became known for. In fact, this signal genre and form was considered the precursor of our modern journalism. The 1920s were a hotbed for dynamic debates about the future of black South Africans, due to the passing of the Native Affairs Act in 1920, and once again this was dominated by men, especially, as Isabel Hofmeyr writes, those active in political formation such as the Congress movement and the professionals. Mgqwetho’s voice in this milieu must be understood as rebellious – she stages politics and practice of refusal (cf. Campt 2019), where her insistence on inclusivity helps us rethink what constitutes politics and activism. She was unfazed by the overwhelmingly male environment and, instead of viewing it as an organic instantiation of Xhosa traditional politics, rather embraced her urban identity and transformed the oral to print press, lending it different circulation and reading publics. While other Xhosa poets such as S.E.K. Mqhayi were celebrated throughout the twentieth century, Mgqwetho’s body of work has only received wide acclaim in the twenty-first century. With the exception of the

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editor and translator of her work, Jeff Opland, no scholarly research has been done on Mgqwetho’s work in the twentieth century.

3 Epic as Hallmark of Oral Traditions Mazisi Kunene, philosopher par excellence and advocate of the indigenous language as carriers of contesting worldviews to that of the Europhone, has on numerous occasions cited matrilineally transmitted histories as the basis of his impressive epics. His unwavering commitment to writing within the traditional literary forms of the epic in isiZulu, and translating those forms into European languages, paying careful attention to how they carry across linguistic and cultural boundaries, received approbation from Aimé Césaire. We read Césaire’s decision to invite Kunene to write the introduction to the 1969 first English translation of Notebook of a Return to the Native Land as a pursuit to authorise that text’s African philosophies and cosmologies through Kunene’s endorsement. Kunene’s Emperor Shaka the Great (1979) is a corrective against the portrayal of Shaka Zulu as a tyrannical bloodthirsty savage disinvented by historians such as George Theal, that Kunene saw as attempts to vilify Shaka’s triumphs and legacy. Kunene writes an epic in poetic form, in which he uses a “more historical” account which counts on his “great great grandmother who lives a long time and told many stories about that period” (Wilkinson 1992, 37), as source. He adds, in his interview with Jane Wilkinson, that “when Shaka’s nephew was king she was still a young girl and she knew many things” (1992, 37). In the preface of his Anthem of the Decades (1981) Kunene writes, The conception and creation of Anthem of the Decades was deeply influenced by my greatgrandmother, Maqandeyana of the Ntuli family. She was one of the greatest oral historians and narrator of legends I have ever met. “Knowledge is of the ancestors”, she once said. The meaning of her words did not sink in at first. I only began to understand when she commenced her teaching covering not only the ideas of the origin of life, the authority of man on earth, and medicine, but also the nature of words and their secret meanings. (Kunene 1981, ix)

Anthem of the Decades is an instantiation of the narrative of creation which reveals the pluriversal nature of the world and the various conceptions of the evolution of humans by different cultures. It decentres the Adam and Eve history of creation by focusing on the Southern African one as couched in the stories of interpreters and transmitters of history: the matrilineal members of the community. In this excerpt Kunene situates her as a philosopher, historian, healer and linguist. Of paramount importance is the pivotal role women played as purveyors of oral history and legends, which exceeds colonial scriptural economy and undermines the teleology of progress where men are the main actors in history and its recording. Kunene’s cultural imperative was greatly admired by Aimé Césaire. Ntongela Masilela argues that the mutual admiration between Césaire and Kunene “was that

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they gave each other what the other was searching for or confirmed what the other had been hypothesizing” (Okoro 2015, 9). He contends that the reason Kunene was enthused to write the introduction to Césaire’s 1969 edition of Notebook for a Return to the Native Land “was that on encountering this modern epic it was confirmed to [Kunene] that it was still possible to write in this generic form which he had inherited from the great Zulu nineteenth century poets, Magolwane and Mshongweni” (Okoro 2015, 9). Further, as Masilela postulates, when Césaire was composing Return to My Native Land in the mid-1930s, “Césaire was searching for an African philosophical system”, but, as Masilela argues, “Senghor was not in a position to introduce Césaire to African religious philosophies because by rejecting African languages in preference for the French language, he had unknowingly and, perhaps unintentionally, decamped himself from African cosmological systems” (Okoro 2015, 9). When Césaire encountered the epic vision of Kunene, Masilela argues, “he felt he had at last encountered or imbibed African philosophies or cosmologies from the source itself” (Okoro 2015, 9). And thus Kunene scripted a stunning essay of Césaire’s epic. Kunene was untiring in his position on the language question. He believed that English as a linguistic system of representation inevitably carried its own metaphysics as did isiZulu, and thus through writing in English one would be imposing a metaphysics of elsewhere onto another, thus enriching English and devaluing isiZulu. Kunene’s work did not only strengthen pan-African ties, but also Afro-Asian solidarity. He published his essay, “Magolwane – the Greatest Zulu Poet”, in the Lotus: Afro-Asian Writing anthology of January-March 1970. In it he brings to bear upon the trilingual (English, Arabic, French) journal’s reading publics the history of Zulu prior to the accession of Shaka, and to Magolwane Jiyane’s revolutionary epic poetry. How did this history translate to the Arabic world? Translations to Arabic are unique because Arabic, unlike French, offers possibilities to theorise South-South relationships away from the colonial metropole. Kunene’s philosophical musings articulated an “Afromodernity” (Comaroff and Comaroff 2015, 16) which, as one vernacular of modernity, was translated in Lotus into Arabic, entering another vernacular with its own “signs and practices, dispositions and discourses, aesthetics values and indigenous ways of knowing” (Comaroff and Comaroff 2015, 16) and bringing them into relation. His synthesis of social conflict between individuals with national interests and how they translate into Magolwane’s epic and heroic poetry, and in turn resonate with Arabic worlds, highlights the historical relationship between poetry and politics, and potentially reveals resonances with Arab-modernity and its deep history of poetic expression. This platform for making South-South comparisons is what informed Alex La Guma’s statement, in his review of short stories published in Lotus, that “what we have started to do is provide a valuable service, not only to students of Afro-Asian literature […] but to bringing the literature of our continents into the arena of world literature” (qtd. in Halim 2012, 572). The platform of Lotus offered an intervention in the genealogy of world literature by “providing an alternative history

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rooted in the experience of decolonisation, namely, in a ‘third world literature’” (Yoon 2015, 241) undergirded by particular national histories. Kunene’s piece, presented in multilingual versions in Lotus, could be understood to coalesce Afromodernity and Arabmodernity to articulate alternative modernities.

4 Moving the Centre – Decentring the Universal In defining the black radical imagination that shapes freedom dreams within black social movements, Robin Kelley cites “the great poet” Keorapetse Kgositsile: “when the clouds clear / we shall know the color of the sky” (2003, 11). He elucidates, “when movements have been unable to clear the clouds, it has been poets […] who have succeeded in imagining the color of the sky” (2003, 11). This radical imagination is key, as it dares to “see the future in the present”, “to take us to another place, envision a different way of seeing, perhaps a different way of feeling” (2003, 9, 11). He calls that imagination – the ability to envision the colour of the sky while the clouds are overcast – ‘poetic knowledge’ (2003). In ruminating over the black radical imagination and looking towards the poetics of Kgositsile to structure its meaning, Kelley unwittingly cited a Setswana saying – fa maru a apoga / re tla itse mmala wa loapi – translated by Kgositsile into English in his poem “When the Clouds Clear” from his 1990 eponymous collection. That Tswana maxim is signalled as being culled from deep cultural memory by Kgositsile in the poem, through prefixing it with the line, ‘the ancients say’. Elsewhere Kgositsile identifies this ‘ancient’ as his mother: “these are the words / of an ancient dancer of steel / the children of a person / share the head of a locust” (Kgositsile 1971, 23). He invokes his mother’s wisdom through her totem, ‘dancer of steel’, which is ‘mmina-tshipi’. What she says, ‘the children of a person share the head of a locust’, is a Tswana proverb, ‘bana ba motho ba kgaogelana hlogo ya tsie’. The proverb proffers that siblings share everything, including as small a hunt as a head of a locust. In the black diaspora Kgositsile extends this wisdom to foster pan-African solidarity: the struggle against white supremacy is shared by all from different inflections of blackness. Few important things about this transoceanic and trans-temporal relationship are surfaced. The Tswana proverbs in translation function within a temporal, linguistic, political, and cultural frameworks. With regards to the temporal, the proverbs, culled out of an indigenous knowledge system, were ostensibly delegitimised by a new border of time. They belong to the realm of the ahistorical dark continent, to the grunts of the uncivilised and unintelligible man, without a culture, reasoning or poetic language. However, the proverbs are able to speak from this prehistoric past to the future of social movements in the black world. Secondly, these proverbs explode the forward march of linear time, discontinuous and divisive. The map determined space as separate, but the territory of black resistance is brought into locution by an

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indigenous language that enacts radical modes of feeling, relationality, and solidarity, across oceans. Here the practice of translation comes to represent permeability, transformability, fluidity, and constant movement, as opposed to foreclosure and erasure. It extends an invite to a ‘poetics of Relation’ (Glissant 1997), which Kelley honours. Carried across to an Anglophonic linguistic system, the proverbs are marked by sediments of the culture from which they originate. The Tswana saying ‘when the clouds clear we shall know the colour of the sky’ is underpinned by a worldview that values observation of natural phenomena, that acknowledges the agential nature of the living world and cosmos, that steeps human agency in commensuration with the living earth – an intra-action as opposed to interaction (cf. Barad 2007). In effect the proverbs, even when in the English language, point to an interdiscursive practice through their affective dimensions – an interrelational subjectivity missing in the English culture and language. Orality in this context can be a vehicle for a different spatio-temporality, worldview and value system. The colonised come from different temporalities and find revolutionary tools in heterotemporal zones. In his/her revolutionary writing s/ he guards against colonial time and its attempt to disconnects generational inheritances, transmitted histories, continuous passage of the past in the present, and political subjectivities enabled by constitutive agency between him/her and the earth/land. Two novels interchangeably credited as the first African novel by a black author in English are prime examples of this: Solomon Plaatje’s Mhudi (1930), and Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart (1958). The two corrective accounts of history seek to destabilize and challenge the view of the African native, that, as Achebe tasked the novelist to act as teacher, “their past with all its imperfections was not one long night of savagery in which the first Europeans, acting on God’s behalf, delivered them” (1958, 45). Plaatje explains in the Preface of his historical novel that the objectives of Mhudi are “to interpret to the reading public, one phase of the back of the Native mind”, as well as to raise funds “to collect and print Sechuana folk-tales, which, with the spread of European ideas, are fast being forgotten. It is thus hoped to arrest this process by cultivating a love for art and literature in the Vernacular” (1975, 17). Written in two different milieus, the difference between the two novels are acute – that “Plaatje’s politics were openly aligned with imperialism’s civilizational model” (Green 2008, 328), while Achebe, writing some fifty years later, challenged colonial narratives of Africans as an ahistorical black mass without a discernible culture. The similarities are productive: both use oratory and verbal practices of their cultural lineage to broaden the scope of world literature through illuminating various ecologies of orality and temporality interwoven with print cultures at various points in literary history. Plaatje attributes the writing of his novel to oral sources and historical information passed on from matrilineal members of his family. In his biography written by Brian Willan we are informed of Plaatje’s cultural sensibilities:

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Plaatje’s mother was one of several women at Pniel who told him of family and tribal traditions, and from whom he learned Setswana, his first language. “The best Sechuana speakers known to me”, he observed later in life, “owe their knowledge to the teachings of grandmother, or a mother, just as myself … am indebted to the teachings of my mother and two aunts.” Among these “teachings” was a fund of fables and proverbs, highly valued as repositories of the inherited wisdom of their people and passed on from generation to generation. […] “Au Magritte”, or “Granny Masweamotho”, Plaatje’s grandmother (on his father’s side), left a deep impression, and it was from her that he derived “complete information” about the details of his own ancestry. (Willan 2018, 15–16)

From these oral narrations Plaatje’s Mhudi – the first modern novel to be written in English on the African continent – was written, a classic that continues to attract the attention of literature students, knowledgeable literary scholars and critics alike. Plaatje offered, “my mother is a direct descendant of a grandson of Tau from the house of his youngest and dearest wife, Mhudi” (Couzens 1987, 55), from which we deduce that Mhudi must have been his great-great-grandmother. Further, his founding of Koranta ea Becoana, Tsala ea Becoana and Tsala ea Batho, which “constituted between then the most extensive and most varied archive of written Setswana in existence” (Willan 2018, 474); and his publication of the books Sechuana Proverbs and A Sechuana Reader while living in England, were operative within the dynamic of the matriarchive. Plaatje’s view of European civilisation as a threat to Setswana language urged him closer to the hearth with an attuned ear and responsibility, that this prised his eyes open to the larger implications of that civilizing mission upon his people. The passing of the Native Land Act in 1913 consolidated the unholy trinity: it attacked the natives’ history through a silencing of its custodians, silenced their tongues by replacing it with their own, and you displaced them from the land which shapes their traditions, customs, and culture. His Native Life in South Africa (1916) was an urgent address to the natal (the demise of oral traditions and the institution of a scriptural economy of knowledge), mother tongue (indigenous languages), and motherland where the umbilical cord is buried. In his canonical novel Things Fall Apart (1958), Achebe indigenizes the English language and the western tradition of the novel through Igbo oral traditions. Proverbs, songs, praise poetry and ceremonial practices weave the novel into not only a revivalist document but also one that guards against the unworlding of the rich and variegated world of the Igbo and Africans, by colonial modernity. He opens up a world foreclosed by colonial representation of Africans through the act of mindful translation, in which the proverbs in the novel signify and enlivens the Igbo world without ‘losing’ a non-Igbo reader. That is, through his use of standard English language he performs an “illusion of proximity” (Irele 2001, 123) by throwing the similarities, more than the otherness of the culture, in sharp relief. The presentation of a highly developed judiciary system, the embodiment of ancestral presence in the mask ceremonies, the use of the Igbo communal voice, and Igbo expectation of its members to create a balance between male and female principles within themselves (cf. Shea 2008, 76)

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explode History’s teleology and linear time with a world where multiple voices, forces and temporalities are operative within a continuous network with living earth, living past, and living memory. The proverbs which couch worldviews and philosophies of the Igbo become universalised, decentring Euromodernity and showing it up as one of many vernaculars of modernity that, in its self-aggrandising and hegemonic posturing, has narrowed its view and overdetermined its influence as universal. Through the use of orature and performative arts Things Fall Apart (1958) shows that the universal can be claimed from any cultural position but can never be owned. This was pivotal in dislodging the fixed position of Anglophone literatures as centred in Britain and emanating outward, but also in showing the porousness of print and writing in and out of which Igbo oral traditions keep flowing. This troubles English with a big E and its claims to singularity through introducing multiple englishes with localised inflections.

5 Black Bodies on Strike – Song and Dance as Philo-Praxis We are also aware that the era of Enlightenment and its enchantment with Reason bore grave consequences for the environment. Indigenous societies in Southern Africa have high regard, even reverence, for the environment in which they live, and have developed language, oratory arts, folksongs, and performances to honour their living earth. In the rural countryside where a large percentage of native populations was relegated, everything is designed to correlate with those movements, from the circular shape of the compound in which the family and the village live, to the huts and kraals that the humans and livestock inhabit: these were all round to emulate and imitate the cycles of nature and the cosmos, which humans sought to insert themselves into symbiosis with their eternity. Thus in African spiritual practices churches are abandoned for natural sites. The architecture of daily objects and manner of speech are all to appease correlation between the existence of the short, internal cycle of human, and the elaborate, cosmic creative cycles of life. Here the body, voice, movement, ritual and performance were also a site of expressing this principle, and in turn expressing solidarity with other humans. The circular figure is a central shape to an indigenous societal order. To symbolise communal unity everybody arranged themselves in a circle, including during the judicial meetings under the trees, to rites of passage ceremonies, and dance. The domba dance of the vaVenda, for instance, originates in great Zimbabwe and historically in the Mapungubwe Kingdom is undertaken by women who interlock their bodies in a circular movement with their arms clasping the next body, setting themselves into locomotion like a snake. The dance, also known as the python dance, is in honour of the python god, goddess of the river, a highly revered totem that represents fertility and continuity. Through this dance,

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ancestral presence is evoked the rains rituals that will ensure the fecundity of the community through the blessing of good rains. Drumming and fire are central to these ceremonies; these, the fire and the drums, are always constructed in a circular formation, as is the singing that accompanies the dancing, which follow a call-andresponse or unified harmonics. These principles transformed into, and informed anti-colonial and anti-apartheid liberation movements. What distinguishes black radical traditions from the south of the continent is the song, dance, and antiphonic practice that was central to any and all expressions of collective resistance to the dominant culture of white supremacy. When any protest was staged black solidarity was fortified by song, and trusted orators would further galvanize the spirit to confront the enemy through call-andresponse: AMANDLA!, to which the crowd responds, AWETHU! The call MAYIBUYE, will get back the response, iAFRIKA! Raised fists as political performance of solidarity is a way of using corporeality as material of protest. Further, the toyi toyi dance that has come to characterise South African protest was taught to uMkhonto we Sizwe soldiers in exile, by the soldiers of the Zimbabwe People’s Revolutionary Army. The toyi toyi dance performed a charged and enchanting ritual of transcendence, and, read as political philo-praxis, can be seen to charge the body with a spirit that propels it to dance, sing and run towards enemy bullets. These practices emerge from a history of the body in relation to the community, the natural world, and the cosmos: and expression of the eternity principle. The enemy bullet will never kill the spirit of resistance because in principle the spirit does not die. We can begin to think of the colonisation of time as simultaneously the colonisation of the mind, but also of the body. The body as subjected to colonial erasure is paramount in thinking through the erasure of indigenous corporeality (genocide and ontological negation) – a site of performance or oral traditions, and thus another archive of indigenous knowledge systems. Everyday perception of time, what constitutes the now, and how we think of the relationship between the past, present and future renders our quotidian experience of temporality shot through with the dynamics of settler colonialism. Further, settler common sense or non-indigenous perception shaped by histories of settler occupation, land expropriation, wage system, and judicial system institutionalized a denial of indigenous self-governance at personal, communal, and national levels. The imposition of these foreign frameworks inculcated ways of thinking about, feeling and experiencing time that disrupted rituals and ceremonies which bridged the living with the ancestral realm; where dance expressed unity, solidarity and transcendence, and land and the cosmos were entangled with the material body through the buried umbilical cord; where the presence of their ancestors’ living memory were fortified and continued through oral traditions. What is erased through silencing as a colonial tool of control and domination is not only praise poetry, song, dance, storytelling and indigenous language, but rituals of human transition, sacred maps, sacred sites, communality, and other realms of existence outside our logic of being. The perception of humans as part of a larger

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unknowable composite world were erased, hence we find ourselves during this stage of colonial modernity dealing with a crisis of crushing individualism. When Toni Morrison’s Song of Solomon (1977) did “woke work” (Sharpe 2017, 17) by tracing the heritage of African Americans through the trope of naming and the geographical mapping of their history through songs and oral cultures re-membered by the women in the novel, we also re-call the practice of praise songs in Southern Africa that sings against colonial cartography and are the memory of the land. Magoleng wa Selepe rejects apartheid’s bureaucracy and ontological erasure by singing herself into being through the poem’s persona, Nomgqibelo Mnqhibisa – “I am from Chief Daluxolo Velayigodle of emaMpodweni / and my name is Nomgqibelo Ncamisile Mnqhibisa” – and her praise poem sounds simultaneously like music and trash to the burly apartheid official (Selepe 1979, 7). Indeed, the colonial system is a schizophrenic one. Desire and repudiation function at the interzone of contact with the native and transform into a basis for violence of all forms. The bureaucrat ultimately records her name as Maria. In Song of Solomon the family name ‘Dead’ is inherited from a similar encounter with a drunken Yankee soldier, who, when recording the ex-slave Jake Solomon’s name after emancipation, mishears and misnames him Macon Dead. This is a crucial critique of colonial records and archives which is today coming under scrutiny by decolonial thinkers. When the lives of !Orolõas or Krotoa (Jan van Riebeeck’s Khoi translator in the Cape), Sarah Baartman (Khoi woman kidnapped into western human zoos), and Imoinda: Or She Who Will Lose Her Name (2008), a rewriting of Aphra Behn’s Oroonoko: or, The Royal Slave (1688) through the eyes of the titular female slave, are reimagined into being by black feminist writers Toni Stuart, Lebogang Mashile, and Joan Anim-Addo through the principle site of their bodies, they seek to address those challenges of excavating our history through the archive of the body, voice, movement, ritual, and land which were misappropriated. Stuart’s ‘Krotoa-Eva’s Suite’ is a cape jazz poem in three movements, while Mashile’s Venus vs Modernity is a 2019 theatre production. Imoinda the libretto was adapted into the opera Imoinda: A Story of Love and Slavery (2019), a work that centres black singers, not seen since George Gershwin’s Porgy and Bess. The libretto has a strong spoken word presence, with music by Odaline de la Martinez that is influenced by Afro-Cuban culture. In their works the corporeal and oratory function to breathe life, agency, and purpose into these historical female figures flattened or erased by history using their primary site of shame, sexual warfare, and trauma: the body. In studying their historical subjects and summoning their guidance, that is, in appeasing and channelling them, they perform rituals of remembrance and wage protests with their bodies that ‘say her name’, demanding a re-ordering of history. #SayHerName is a social movement that seeks to raise awareness for black female victims of police brutality and anti-black violence in the United States of America. I see the work of these black feminist writers, poets, and activists as continuous and in conversation. Their innovative work ruptures historical vertical organisation of colonial power in which black women are at the bottom, and a hori-

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zontal one where the black nation is brought into independence by androcentric heteropatriarchs, essentially erasing black women’s role therein (cf. Wright 2004; Pinto 2013). They sing these women’s name into history, repudiating the same schizophrenia that characterized the colonial one in this postcolonial and decolonial moment. The turn of the twenty-first century marked a moment of rupture and transition in South Africa. It heralded the first signs of a dying euphoria after the hard-won democracy, and disenchantment with the rainbow nation birthed by the Convention for a Democratic South Africa (CODESA) negotiations after the release of political prisoners. A movement of spoken word poets sprouted all over the country, taking the baton from the Black Consciousness Movement and Staffrider poets of the interregnum period. Here yesteryear’s oral forms of the epic, praise poetry, song, and theatre, were interweaved with contemporary forms of rap and slam, setting stages ablaze, as well as finding new circuits of production and dissemination through digital technology. The links between this new wave of spoken word poets and the highly optimistic and utopian poetic waxing of president Thabo Mbeki are salient. His “I Am an African” (1996) speech in the form of poetry harked the days of orality where the poets embodied the dreams and aspiration of the community, directing him/herself as the custodian of that vision. Thus, Mbeki positioned himself in the post-Mandela dispensation. A new African renaissance was upon us, and the movement of poets, which I will refer to as the ‘back to black’ movement, adorned themselves with their beads, dashikis, dreadlocks, afros, and other paraphernalia than carried emblems of anti-colonial images and rhetoric. The youth station Y-FM was founded around this time, and organically became the mouthpiece of this movement through programmes such as ‘Kamakazi Heat’ by Rude Boy Paul and Unathi Nkayi (2002–2008). The programme opened with a spoken word charge by Caribbean poet Mutabaruka, in his “Dis Poem” (1996), which ended with a politic of anticipation that speak to the unfinished project of revolution – “this poem is to be continued in your mind…”. This was an invitation to an open-ended antiphonic conversation across the ocean, across continents, and within the logic of pan-Africanism and black solidarity. In the poem Mutabaruka positions himself as interlocutors with the old griots of the Yoruba, Ashante, with the revolutionary spirit of the Mau Mau, and with the spirit of the high priests of the Rastafarian sect of Nyabinghi. He calls for UHURU – liberation – in Namibia, Soweto, Afrika, primarily using oratory styles and forms that invoke the deep history preceding both colonialism and trans-Atlantic slave trade while conflating this time with all- time rupturing in the NOW-time. He speaks to time undefined, time redefined, and time refigured by black bodies on strike, waging protest against colonial unworlding of the black world. He refutes politics of emergence and newness by citing these historical sites and the old griots. Spoken word poetry today is located in this deep history which allows for continuity between Africa and its diaspora. Any criticism of the one imitating the other is a myopic reading which reproduces imperialist diffusionist notions of cultural dissemination from North to South. It is rather a call and response that continues

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to flourish as it is nourished by deep roots that survived conditions. It another cycle in the bigger circle of continuous orbits in history, lamenting unfinished resistance against white supremacy and western imperialism with unified voices on the continent and its diaspora. This chapter has focused on orality and its potential to expand our theorisation of world literature, grounded on temporality. It brought to light various forms of orality in the black world, and mapped their transformation from oral to written texts that became influential in the making of countercultures to modernity. By centring corporeality in discourses of oratory practices the chapter illuminated how a singular linear progressive narrative rendered colonised women’s access to colonial modernity as belated, and their use of the body, movement, voice, and ritual demands a re-ordering of history, pushing us to expand world literature into ecologies. This re-ordering also thrives in the antiphonic oratory and musical practices of the black diaspora such as reggae and spoken word poetry, while destabilizing formal circuitries of dissemination that nurtured the popularity of the novel form.1

6 Bibliography 6.1 Works Cited Achebe, Chinua. Things Fall Apart. London: Heinemann, 1958. Adichie, Chimamanda. “The Danger of a Single Story.” TED Talks (March 2014). https://www.ted.com/talks/chimamanda_adichie_the_danger_of_a_single_story?language= en (12 Nov. 2019). Anim-Addo, Joan. Imoinda: Or She Who Will Lose Her Name. London: Mango Publishing, 2008. Barad, Karen. Meeting the Universe Halfway: Quantum Physics and the Entanglement of Matter and Meaning. Durham: Duke University Press, 2007. Beecroft, Alexander. An Ecology of World Literature: From Antiquity to the Present Day. London: Verso, 2015. Campt, Tina. “Black Visuality and the Practice of Refusal.” Women & Performance: A Journal of Feminist Theory 29.1 (2019): 79–87. Césaire, Aimé. Notebook of a Return to the Native Land. London: Penguin Books, 1969. Chakrabarty, Dipesh. Provincializing Europe: Postcolonial Thought and Historical Difference. New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 2000. Cheah, Pheng. What is a World? On Postcolonial Literature as World Literature. Durham: Duke University Press, 2016. Comaroff, Jean, and John Comaroff. Theory from the South: or, How Euro-America is Evolving Toward Africa. New York: Routledge, 2012. Couzens, Tim. “Sol T. Plaatje and the First South African Epic.” English in Africa 14.1 (1987): 41–65.

1 This work is based on the research supported in part by the National Research Foundation of South Africa (Grant Numbers: 112169).

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Glissant, Édouard. Poetics of Relation. Trans. Betsy Wing. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1997. Green, Michael. “Translating the Nation: From Plaatje to Mpe.” Journal of Southern African Studies 34.2 (2008): 325–342. Gunner, Liz. “Ecologies of Orality.” The Cambridge Companion to World Literature. Ed. Ben Etherington and Jarad Zimbler. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018. 116–129. Halim, Hala. “Lotus, the Afro-Asian Nexus, and Global South Comparatism.” Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and the Middle East 32.3 (2012): 563–583. Helgesson, Stefan. “General Introduction: The Cosmopolitan and Vernacular in Interaction.” World Literatures: Exploring the Cosmopolitan-Vernacular Exchange. Ed. Stefan Helgesson, Annika Mörte Alling, Yvonne Lindqvist and Helena Wulff. Stockholm: Stockholm University Press, 2018. 1–11. Irele, Abiola. The African Imagination: Literature in Africa and the Black Diaspora. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001. Kelley, Robin D.G. Freedom Dreams: The Black Radical Imagination. Boston: Beacon Press, 2002. Kgositsile, Keorapetse. My Name is Afrika. New York: Doubleday & Co., 1971. Kgositsile, Keorapetse. When the Clouds Clear. Johannesburg: Congress of South African Writers, 1990. Kunene, Mazisi. Anthem of the Decades. London: Heinemann African Writers Series, 1981. Kunene, Mazisi. Emperor Shaka the Great. London: Heinemann African Writers Series, 1979. Lugones, Maria. “Toward a Decolonial Feminism.” Hypatia 25.4 (2010): 742–759. Mashile, Lebogang. Venus vs Modernity. Dir. Koleka Putuma and Pamela Nomvete. Johannesburg: The Market Theatre, 2019. https://markettheatre.co.za/productions/venus-vs-modernity/ (29 Jan. 2020). Mbeki, Thabo. “I Am an African [1996]” SABC Digital News (25 May 2017). https://www.youtube. com/watch?v=nVhMVQH2r2U (19 Jan. 2020). Morrison, Toni. Song of Solomon. New York: Alfred Knopf, 1977. Mutabaruka. “Dis Poem.” The Ultimate Collection. Isleworth: Greensleeves Records, 1996. Okoro, Dike. “An Interview with Ntongela Masilela (by Dike Okoro).” New Perspectives on Mazisi Kunene. Milwaukee: Cissus World Press, 2015. 7–133. Opland, Jeff, ed. The Nation’s Bounty: The Xhosa Poetry of Nontsizi Mgqwetho. Johannesburg: Wits University Press, 2007. Pinto, Samantha. Difficult Diasporas: The Transnational Feminist Aesthetic of the Black Atlantic. New York: New York University Press, 2013. Plaatje, Solomon. Mhudi: An Epic of South African Native Life a Hundred Years Ago. Lovedale: Lovedale Press, 1930. Santos, Boaventura Sousa. The Rise of the Global Left: The World Social Forum. London: Zed Books Ltd., 2006. Selepe, Magoleng wa. “My Name.” Staffrider 2.1 (March 1979): 7. https://www.sahistory.org.za/ archive/staffrider-vol2-no1-march-1979 (19 Jan. 2020). Sharpe, Christina. In the Wake: On Blackness and Being. Durham: Duke University Press, 2016. Shea, George. A Reader’s Guide to Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart. Berkeley Heights: Enslow Publishers, 2008. Stuart, Toni. “Krotoa-Eva’s Suite.” (8 March 2019). https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KtPKtabUte0 (25 July 2019). Vazquez, Rolando. “Translation as Erasure: Thoughts on Modernity’s Epistemic Violence.” Journal of Historical Sociology 24.1 (2011): 27–44.

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Wilkinson, Jane. Talking with African Writers: Interview with Poets, Playwrights and Novelists. London: James Currey, 1992. Willan, Brian. Life of Solomon Tshekisho Plaatje. Johannesburg: Jacana, 2018. Wright, Michelle. Physics of Blackness: Beyond the Middle Passage Epistemology. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2015. Yoon, Duncan. “‘Our Forces Have Redoubled:’ World Literature, Postcolonialism, and the Afro-Asian Writers’ Bureau.” Cambridge Journal of Postcolonial Literary Inquiry 2.2 (Sept. 2015): 233–252.

6.2 Further Reading Adejunmobi, Morawedun. Vernacular Palaver: Imaginations of the Local and Non-Native Languages in West Africa. Clevedon: Multilingual Matters, 2004. Barber, Karin. The Anthropology of Texts, Persons and Publics. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007. Gunner, Liz. Radio Soundings: South Africa and the Black Modern. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2019. Mphande, Lupenga. “Ngoni Praise Poetry and the Nguni Diaspora.” Research in African Literatures 24.4 (1993): 99–122. Vazquez, Rolando. “Translation as Erasure: Thoughts on Modernity’s Epistemic Violence.” Journal of Historical Sociology 24.1 (2011): 27–44. Phalafala, Uhuru P. “My Name is Afrika: Keorapetse Kgositsile in the ‘Black World.’” Moving Spaces: Creolisation and Mobility in Africa, the Atlantic and Indian Ocean. Ed. Marina Berthet, Fernando Rosa, and Shaun Viljoen. Leiden: Brill, 2019. 161–179.

Gabriele Rippl

14 Intermediality and Remediation Abstract: In the last twenty years, intermediality and related concepts such as remediation and transmedia have become exceptionally productive in a range of disciplines within the humanities. Although intertextuality and the analysis of text-text relationships have played an important role in postcolonial literary studies, comparative literature and world literature studies, intermediality, remediation and transmedia have not yet received the scholarly attention they deserve within these fields. This chapter introduces intermedial concepts and discusses them against the backdrop of Anglophone world literatures – thus bringing world literature research and intermediality studies into closer contact. While definitions of world literature are usually based on the paradigm of mobility and translatability, the term ‘world literatures’ puts the focus instead on the world-making capacities of literary texts. The productivity of intermediality and related concepts in the field of Anglophone world literatures will be demonstrated with the help of word-image configurations from different cultural and medial contexts. Key Terms: Intermediality, remediation, transmedia, transmediality, ekphrasis, media borders, canon, mediaverse, (new) media ecology

1 Definitions This chapter introduces the interrelated concepts intermediality, transmediality, intermedial reference/ekphrasis as well as remediation, adaptation, and transmedia  – concepts which have become exceptionally productive in the humanities in the last twenty years. The popularity and increasing importance of intermediality studies and other related fields can thus be attributed to the fact that in our digital age many works of art, cultural artifacts, literary texts and other cultural configurations either combine and juxtapose different media, genres and styles or refer to other media in a plethora of ways. Intermedial literary texts, to give an example, transgress their own medial boundary in many creative ways by including pictures and illustrations or by referring to absent (static and moving, analogue and digital) pictures, by imitating filmic modes or by mimicking musical structures and themes. In the face of the sheer number of Anglophone literary texts which explore intermedial interfaces, it has become evident that media and art forms cannot be analyzed in isolation and instead have to be discussed against the backdrop of their medial networks. Scholarship considers intermediality to be an umbrella term, while each related intermedial concept highlights different and specific forms of exchanges between https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110583182-015

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media. The distinctions between these concepts are, however, not clear-cut. Adaptation research, for instance, is mainly interested in questions of media transfer; remediation studies are concerned with the absorption of media by other media, in particular in connection with new digital media; transmediality scholarship analyzes storytelling in different media; and transmedia storytelling is about how media contents spread simultaneously across a range of different media platforms. In postcolonial literary studies, comparative literature and world literature studies, however, these much-debated concepts have not yet received the scholarly attention they deserve. This chapter will first introduce some widely accepted definitions of central intermedial concepts while simultaneously showcasing the insufficient attention paid to power relations. In a next step the concepts’ productivity for analyses of what this handbook terms ‘Anglophone world literatures’ are discussed. Going beyond definitions of world literature that focus exclusively on mobility and translatability, this chapter stresses Anglophone world literatures’ intermedial modes of alternative world-making.

1.1 Intermediality In common use, ‘intermediality’ refers to the relationships between media and hence to a broad range of cultural phenomena which involve exchanges between media. As such, the term is central for the analysis of numerous artforms, literary texts and media (cf. Rippl 2015a and b). Against the backdrop of medial contexts and border crossings, the concept of intermediality allows a reading of cultural products from systematic and historical perspectives. For a recapitulation of the concept’s history, Dick Higgins, a British artist who belonged to artistic movements of the 1960s such as Happening and Fluxus must be mentioned as a central figure. In his pioneering article titled “Intermedia” (1966), Higgins condemned the idea of ‘monomedia’ and favored more holistic intermedial approaches and art forms. He and his network of artists believed in intermedial activities’ potential to break up habitualized forms of perception and to support utopian holistic impulses for the reunification of individuals in a classless society (cf. Schröter 2012). Higgins stated that ‘intermedium’ is the “uncharted land that lies between” different media and their formal fusions (Higgins 1984, 22; Higgins and Higgins 2001, 50, 53), a term he had come across in Samuel Taylor Coleridge (Higgins and Higgins 2001, 52) who used it in an 1812 lecture on Edmund Spenser to explain functions of allegory (cf. Friedman 2005, 51; Müller 2009,  31). However, it was Aage Hansen-Löve, a scholar of Russian literature, who introduced the term ‘Intermedialität’ into scholarly discourse in a 1983 article: he applied it to word-image relations such as modern Russian pattern poems, where both media, i.e. writing and iconic forms, are co-present. Since then, the concept of intermediality has been expanded considerably and serves as an umbrella term which covers a broad variety of exchanges and border crossings between media. Strikingly successful in German-speaking academic debates in literature and film departments since the

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later 1980s (cf. Wolf 1999; Paech 1998), intermediality has now gained international recognition in various disciplines. The term ‘intermediality’ is charged with several problems inherited from the debates around the term ‘medium,’ which is notoriously ambiguous and means different things to different scholars and in different disciplines (Rippl 2012). ‘Medium’ is often exclusively used in discussions of technical channels/media such as the typewriter, film, television for transmitting and storing information, but this is not the only use: the term also covers non-technical media such as spoken language, writing, painting, the human body, bronze, oil, watercolor, and even fabrics (cf. Rippl 2015, 6–7; Ryan 2004, 15–16). Despite this, some widely accepted definitions of intermediality, as well as typologies of intermedial configurations, have been developed. Studied synchronically, intermedial phenomena can be subdivided into specific forms of intermediality; a diachronic perspective investigates the history of the media together with their intersections and collaborations. Major theoreticians of intermediality such as Werner Wolf and Irina O. Rajewsky have charted the vast field of intermedial relations, even if categorizing phenomena can always only be of heuristic value. According to narratologist Wolf, intermediality applies in its broadest sense to any transgression of boundaries between media and is thus concerned with ‘heteromedial’ relations between different semiotic entities. Intermediality, he maintains, deals with media as conventionally distinct means of communicating cultural content. To speak of ‘specific media forms’ highlights the fact that medial distinctness is a convention and does not imply that ‘medium’ is understood in an essentializing way (Wolf 1999, 37). According to Rajewsky, the current debate reveals two basic understandings of intermediality: “a broader and a narrower one, which are not in themselves homogeneous. The first concentrates on intermediality as a fundamental condition or category while the second approaches intermediality as a critical category for the concrete analysis of specific individual media products or configurations” (2005, 47). Intermediality in the latter (narrower) sense encompasses three subcategories useful for the discussion of intermedial configurations encountered in literary texts: 1) media combination – also called multi-media, pluri-media or mixed media (cf. Wolf 2005, 253–255): this includes opera, film, theatre, radio, plays, performances, illuminated manuscripts, comics, computer installations, etc. In this subcategory, intermediality is a concept “based on the combination of at least two medial forms of articulation” (Rajewsky 2005, 52); 2) medial transposition such as film adaptations or novelizations where content or formal features from one medium are transferred to another. This category is production-oriented: the intermedial quality “has to do with the way in which a media product comes into being, i.e. with the transformation of a given media product (a text, a film, etc.) or of its substratum into another medium” (Rajewsky 2005, 51); 3) intermedial references, for instance, references in a literary text to a piece of music (the so-called ‘musicalization of fiction’, cf. Wolf 1999); the imitation and evocation of filmic techniques such as dissolves, zoom shots, montage editing, etc.; descriptive modes in literature which evoke visual effects or refer to specific visual

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works of art, so-called ‘ekphrasis.’ Intermedial references contribute to the overall signification, but they involve “by definition just one medium” (Rajewsky 2005, 53). It is important to note that the mere allusion to another medium or medium-product does not justify the label ‘intermedial.’ Only such media-products which evoke or imitate formal and structural features of another medium through the use of their own media-specific means qualify under these stringent criteria (‘as if’ character and illusion-forming quality of intermedial references; they create the illusion of another medium’s specific practices, cf. Rajewsky 2005, 54–55; cf. also Wolf 2005, 254). In accordance with W.J.T. Mitchell, who claims that there is no such thing as a ‘pure’ medium (“all arts are ‘composite’ arts (both text and image); all media are mixed media”, 1994, 94–95), this chapter is based on the insight that all media and art forms are interconnected and that intermedial qualities always characterize cultural phenomena. It is true that “new aspects and problems have emerged especially with respect to electronic and digital media” which have boosted “different views on medial border-crossings and hybridization” and have led to “a heightened awareness of the materiality and mediality of artistic practices and of cultural practices in general” (Rajewsky 2005, 44), but neither intermedial configurations and medial border blurring nor transcultural exchanges and connectivities are novel by any means. Precisely because intermedial artifacts and phenomena aim at dissolving and transcending media borders, rigid and essentializing conceptions of the latter, i.e. media purism, have to be deposed in favor of an understanding of media as relational constellations and culture-specific incidences. In the face of the sheer number of Anglophone world literary texts which participate in intermedial interfaces, it goes without saying that media and art forms cannot be analyzed in isolation – they must be discussed against the backdrop of their networks, their “arch-intermediality” (Herzogenrath 2012, 4). Summaries of the state of the art in intermediality studies as presented here sound fairly objective. However, such an allegedly neutral discussion of the networks of medial interconnections and the collaboration of media glosses over the fact that cultural production is closely linked to the unevenly distributed geo-political and socio-cultural power constellations of our contemporary world.

1.2 Remediation – Transmedia – Transmediality Intermediality studies are characterized by divergent terminology which underlines different angles from which closely related intermedial phenomena are discussed. Scholars from new media studies such as Jay David Bolter and Richard Grusin, for instance, follow a media comparative approach to intermedial configurations: with respect to new digital media, they have introduced a much-debated term, ‘remediation,’ which can be understood as a metaphor of ‘media ecology,’ and which helps to analyze how media relate to each other and how they affect human communication

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and environments (cf. McLuhan 1964). Remediation is “the mediation of mediation: Each act of mediation depends on other acts of mediation. Media are continually commenting on, reproducing, and replacing each other, and this process is integral to media. Media need each other to function as media at all” (Bolter and Grusin 2000, 55). A medium “is that which remediates. It is that which appropriates the techniques, forms, and social significance of other media and attempts to rival or refashion them in the name of the real” (2000, 65): [New] visual technologies, such as computer graphics and the World Wide Web […] are doing exactly what their predecessors have done: presenting themselves as refashioned and improved versions of other media. Digital media can best be understood through the ways in which they honor, rival, and revise linear-perspective painting, photography, film, television, and print. No medium today, and certainly no single media event, seems to do its cultural work in isolation from other media, any more than it works in isolation from other social and economic forces. What is new about new media comes from the particular ways in which they refashion older media and the ways in which older media refashion themselves to answer the challenges of new media. (Bolter and Grusin 2000, 14–15)

Bolter and Grusin claim that in current (digital) media “all mediation is remediation” (2000, 55). They understand remediation as a particular kind of intermedial relationship based on processes of medial refashioning and define it as “the formal logic by which new media refashion prior media forms” (2000, 273). Although remediation is a subcategory of intermediality in the broad sense, Rajewsky has rightly pointed out that it is “hardly reconcilable with conceptions of intermedial subcategories like medial transformation, media combination, or medial references” because remediation “necessarily implies a tendency to level out significant differences both between the individual phenomena in question and between different media with their respective materiality; differences that come to the fore as soon as detailed analyses of specific medial configurations, their respective meaning-constitutional strategies, and their overall signification are at stake” (2005, 64). While Bolter and Grusin describe the representation of one medium within another as remediation and argue that “remediation is a defining characteristic of the new digital media” (2000, 45), they consider it to be a basic trait of all medial practices. And, indeed, a well-known and ubiquitous intermedial category such as adaptation, which is characterized by endless intertextual and intermedial citation (cf. Murray 2012), can easily be aligned with remediation, especially when something is adapted to a different medium. Many media lend themselves to adaptation, be it the movie screen, television, DVDs, the internet, comic books or graphic novels. As adaptations are such a ubiquitous cultural phenomenon “in our postmodern age of cultural recycling” (Hutcheon 2006, 3), they are no longer considered as aesthetically derivative, and hence inferior secondary versions of popular culture, but as “creative and an interpretive act[s] of appropriation/salvaging” (2006, 8). An adaptation, “like the work it adapts, is always framed in a context – a time and a place, a society and a culture […] [,] it does not exist in a vacuum” but is “context-dependent” (2006, 142) – in the case of

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transcultural adaptations new temporal and spatial, historical and cultural contexts are crucial. Filmic adaptations of literary texts, as for instance Gurinder Chadha’s Bollywood movie Bride & Prejudice (2004), adapts and reconfigures Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice (1813) transculturally, i.e. in a new racial and gender-specific context (cf. Straumann 2015, 253). ‘Transmedia’ is the concept which media analyst Henry Jenkins coined in response to the enhanced globalization generated by the digital age. The term refers to the new digital media which allow for a planetary circulation of stories, i.e. the convergence of media content. For Jenkins, convergence culture implies “the flow of content across multiple media platforms, the cooperation between multiple media industries, and the migratory behavior of media audiences” (2006, 2). He defines transmedia stories as “[s]tories that unfold across multiple media platforms” (2006, 334). Transmedia storytelling is based on “a more integrated approach to franchise development than models based on urtexts and ancillary products” (2006, 334). While according to Jenkins, media differentiation occurred during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, today we are encountering the convergence of media in the form of digital code and computer processing, which render investigations into individual media anachronistic. As has become clear, Jenkins uses the term ‘transmedia’ not to refer to a switching from one medium to another while telling the same story: he is more interested in how one narrative simultaneously spreads over a field of several media. The new media product – the one that, according to him, merits the term ‘transmedia’ – can be observed in those cases where the ‘travels’ across media are planned and laid out from the start. Although detailed and insightful in many ways, Jenkins’ analysis of what he calls transmedia storytelling is based on one example – the Wachowski brothers’ The Matrix (1999). Jenkins shows that they envisaged collaborations with video game designers and comic book authors from the beginning, in order to create a highly complex story world where elements of the plot could encompass all resulting media products and not just the movies. Other examples are Marvel movies such as Thor (2011) and the Harry Potter universe, where films and memorabilia are planned and hit the market at the same time. Jenkins’ main focus is on such franchising strategies of cultural products with its many instances of media fusion in our highly mediatized world characterized by global media capitalism. Transmedia highlights the circulation of media content across different media systems, favoring an integrated approach to franchise products which ignores older models based on categories like ‘the original’ or ‘the source text/ urtext’ and later (supposedly aesthetically less valid) derivative and derived texts. The main difference between Jenkins’ ‘transmedia storytelling’ and what postclassical narratology names ‘transmedial narrative’ lies in the angle from which these different scholars approach storytelling. Marie-Laure Ryan (2004) and Werner Wolf (2011), representatives of postclassical narratology, are interested in developing a transmedial approach to storytelling that is based on the insight that narrativity is a cognitive macro-frame to be activated in different media. In a second

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step, they investigate the narrative potential of different media, i.e. the limits and affordances inherent to specific media. While Jenkins’ main focus is on the franchising strategies of cultural products in our digital world; ‘transmediality’ sensu Ryan and Wolf is the term used to analyze phenomena that appear across a variety of different media, e.g. fictionality, rhythmicity, seriality, motifs, thematic variations and narrativity (for inter- or transmedial storytelling, cf. Ryan 2004; Hoppeler, Etter, and Rippl 2009; Grishakova and Ryan 2010; Wolf 2011; Rippl and Etter 2013; Elleström 2019). Our discussion of these much-debated concepts illustrates that research on the role of literature and other cultural products such as films, TV series, and video games, together with the cultural work they do, has neglected important aspects of today’s media universes. Future intermediality research will need to appraise cultural products in a cultural field characterized not only by media interfaces, medial specificities and transmedial characteristics but also by the asymmetrical power relations that produce and control the contemporary “competitive mediaverse” (Tabbi and Wutz 1997, 8) and media interfaces (see Neumann and Rippl 2020).

2 Intermediality and Anglophone World Literatures With the unevenly distributed geo-political and socio-cultural power constellations of our world in mind, intermediality scholarship needs to analyze how meaning is generated within the global “new media ecology” (Tabbi and Wutz 1997, 2), and here the role of “English as global literary vernacular” (Mufti 2016, 11) cannot be ignored. When one turns to “literatures written in English,” it becomes immediately clear that they “have increasingly become globalized, postnational, diasporic and transnational” (Neumann and Rippl 2017a, 13; Jay 2001, 33; cf. Jay 2010). The immense influence that international publishing houses and global literary markets, media corporations and film-distribution networks have can hardly be overstated. While India’s Bollywood and Nigeria’s Nollywood are major players in many countries of the world, media corporations and film-distribution networks situated in the Anglophone centers of the global North, which adhere to socio-economic reasoning that reinforces Anglocentrism, seem to be even more influential (Brouillette 2007 and 2016; cf. also Huggan 2001; Helgesson and Vermeulen 2016). Media corporations such as Netflix, Amazon, Google, and Hulu have become the global players of the neo-liberal, late capitalist markets of the twenty-first century, using algorithms and meticulously devised AI-marketing strategies (↗15 Marketing Anglophone World Literatures) to both create and promote their cultural products. Leading publishing houses, such as Penguin Random House in the former colonial center London, exemplified this in the twentieth century, or, more recently, publishing houses such the Hachette Book Group in New York City (↗15 Marketing Anglophone World

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Literatures) also attest to the unevenly distributed cultural power, symbolic capital and cultural prestige. Against the backdrop of this overview of contemporary research, it seems obvious that bringing the fields of intermediality studies and Anglophone world literatures closer together is a fruitful undertaking. By locating intermedial configurations within the broader context of postcolonial studies and global media cultures, the crucial role of media as agents of emerging, global inequalities can be studied: “in representations and negotiations of differences, asymmetric media flows, media policies or forms of media access, consumption and appropriation” (Merten and Krämer 2016, 10). Literary texts that foster intermedial constellations by employing an intermedial poetics based on semiotic and material in-between-ness lend themselves particularly well to a critical examination of the inequalities and hierarchies that exist in and structure our complex networks of transcultural exchanges. They have the potential to open up new possibilities for creative adaptation and new meaning making processes. In the ever-expanding field of intermediality studies, as well as in postcolonial, transcultural, and Anglophone world literatures, aspects like word-image intersections, ekphrasis, and visual culture have mainly been neglected, even if they have elicited some interest from postcolonial researchers (cf. Kortenaar 1997; Döring 2002; Emery 2007; Meyer 2009; Mendes 2012; Neumann and Rippl 2020). In a pioneering article, Birgit Neumann (2015) explored the multifaceted role of intermedial configurations in postcolonial literatures and tested the applicability of the concept of intermediality to postcolonial literatures. Since intermediality touches upon notions of hierarchy, superiority and legitimacy in the field of cultural representation, a discussion of the politics of symbolic forms in postcolonial literatures cannot be avoided. As Neumann states, “intermediality is one of the most promising and invigorating research areas within postcolonial studies today. And yet, despite the prominence of intermedial constellations in postcolonial literatures, to date there have been only few attempts to systematically introduce the concept into the field” (2015, 512). Since Anglophone world literatures – just like postcolonial literature (the two labels identify complementary and to some extent overlapping approaches, cf. Helgesson 2014; Bhattacharya 2018) – are often concerned with renegotiating imperial legacies, neocolonial tendencies, and the consequent predominance of Eurocentric epistemologies. As such, the concept of intermediality, by opening up a space of semiotic and material in-between-ness, can intervene in the social fabric of existing medial configurations. Intermediality can thus rework them in a way that allows readers to experience, see or imagine the world differently. By unsettling common epistemologies, which typically perpetuate notions of cultural purity, the intermedial strategies of literary texts and other artforms “bring to the fore the heterogeneity and plurality of meaning-making and, in a wider sense, reflect the essential impurity and […] hybridity of all cultural formations” because “intermediality poses a constant challenge to notions of homogeneity, unity and sameness” (Neumann 2015, 514).

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Intermedial configurations in Anglophone world literatures do not only foster connections between different media, they also connect different cultures with other specific mediaverses. However, since intermediality with its related concepts have been developed in connection with Western works of art and media products, it is necessary to vet these concepts and gauge their usefulness for Anglophone (and nonAnglophone) world literatures. Since Johann Wolfgang von Goethe first conceived world literature, it has often been defined with reference to its mobile character: its tendency to travel across linguistic and cultural boundaries, i.e. its transcultural and translational potential (cf. Casanova 2004; Damrosch 2003; ↗1 The Beginnings of the Concept). However, dynamic movement and circulation might not be considered the sole or main defining features of world literature. Indeed, intermediality, remediation and adaptation, transmedia and transmediality, share with Anglophone world literatures circulatory processes which are enabled by the networks, institutions and agents that characterize our globalized world. These are based on neo-corporate late capitalism and a neo-liberal economy with an interconnected and unrestricted flow of commodities that subordinate literary texts and authors “to the logic of an international market that demands the production of easily digestible and evermore standardised literary products” (Neumann and Rippl 2017a, 1; cf. also Apter 2013; Damrosch 2009; Walkowitz 2015). However, discussions on how to conceptualize the ‘world’ and how to understand ‘world-making’ (cf. Cheah 2016; Hayot 2012) cannot be reduced to the socio-economic factors that shape our global markets; instead, analyses of the specificity of literary texts and their agential potential of world-making should be given more weight (↗6 Global Literature, World Literature and Worlding Literature): after all, the manifold imagined worlds literature presents help to question conventional notions of ‘the world,’ opening these conventional notions of the world to alternative and experiential configurations of “new worldly spaces, alternative [non-Euro-centric] geographies, contact zones and transitory spaces that, thriving on both transcultural entanglements and local difference, may offer readers new visions of the world” (Neumann and Rippl 2017a, 9). As such, a critical endorsement of “the world-making potentialities of literature” initiates “a shift from world literature (Weltliteratur) to world literatures” – the latter understood not as “a canon of globally circulating works but as open, inherently pluralised texts” which may “disrupt, challenge and trouble the homogenising and quantifying logic of the market of which they [are] inevitably part” (2017a, 3, 9). By the same token, any act of rewriting, adaptation, remediation or intermedial circulation has the potential to disrupt the cultural value system and hence the canon. Such acts can function as acts of commemoration which reinforce the canonical processes across cultures (Thomsen 2008 and 2017). They can, however, also question and transform ‘the original.’ William Shakespeare is a case in point: The Tragedy of Hamlet, Prince of Denmark (First Quarto 1603) and its protagonist have become highly mobile and have turned into universally recognized cultural icons. Comparable to other global cultural icons, such as Leonardo da Vinci’s Mona Lisa (1503), Hamlet is

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part of the complex exchange of people, goods, images and texts in this age of globalization, traversing space and time with a previously unknown ease and speed (cf. Cresswell 2006; Greenblatt 2010a). The fact that Shakespeare adapted Hamlet from earlier stories (François de Belleforest’s sixteenth-century Histoires Tragiques, which in itself is an adaptation of Saxo’s twelfth-century historical work, the chronicles of Danish history) has not impeded its status as a core text of the Western canon. On the contrary, this transitive intertextual quality has, one may argue, helped to foster the play’s immense cultural mobility, cosmopolitan appeal and its intermedial travelling. Intertextuality and intermediality are basic forms of cultural exchange. Hence, when we look at European, North American and, indeed, global literature, it is strikingly conspicuous that both intertextual references to and intermedial adaptations of Hamlet are manifold and multifaceted (cf. Rippl 2016). Significantly, the nomadic quality of Hamlet/Hamlet, its/his geographic/topological as well as cultural and medial border crossing is compatible with identity politics and a rooted sense of local culture linked to place (cf. Greenblatt 2010b, 252–253; Cresswell 2006, 25–56). The lively engagement with Shakespeare’s works away from the motherland, as noticeable in England’s early transatlantic colonies, illustrates this and helps to understand the complex processes of adaptation across a broad spectrum of post-/colonial spaces, societies and media. In post-/colonial spaces, the processes of adaptation very often develop from fidelity and an initial reverence to tension-filled and subversive appropriations, and thence to playful adaptations. Thus, the transplantation of Shakespeare’s works enables a re-visioning, a deviation from the intended meaning, a critical assessment of political and cultural identity issues such as colonialism, nationalism, ethnicity, gender and class – to name but a few (cf. Loomba and Orkin 1998, 2). For postcolonial and world literature writers, the subversive rewriting of canonical English plays allows for an ideological critique through mimicry and repetition with difference, thus producing parodies of the ‘colonial original’ and opening new imaginary spaces for cultural and political identities (see Mukherjee 2014). Shakespeare’s tragedies, The Tempest or Macbeth for instance, have not only been rewritten in the colonies, they have also been remediated and turned into films centuries later: Akira Kurosawa, a towering figure of Japanese cinema and proponent of the cinematic intercultural exchange between the west and postwar Japan, was one such adapter. His movie Throne of Blood (1957) mixes Shakespeare’s Renaissance tragedy with Japanese Noh theater. Kurosawa activates Shakespeare’s Macbeth in the global cultural memory (↗9 Anglophone World Literatures and Transcultural Memory) by creating a unique cross-cultural filmic artwork, cementing Macbeth’s canonical status across cultures while transforming the canonical and homogenous by adding the local and heterogeneous. Margaret Atwood’s dystopian novel The Handmaid’s Tale (1985) is also a prime example of both Anglophone world literatures and their potential to create worlds that differ from the world we know; it demonstrates world literatures’ capacities of ‘worlding’ (cf. Cheah 2016) or world-making, i.e. their specific agency. The intermedial circulation of Atwood’s novel began in 1990

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when Volker Schlöndorff adapted it for the silver screen (featuring Natasha Richardson, Faye Dunaway and Robert Duvall); this was followed by a celebrated television series (produced by Hulu, the US-based streaming service) and a 2019 graphic novel by the Canadian illustrator Renee Nault. These ongoing intermedial translations of the ‘original’ Anglophone world literary texts across media borders keep Anglophone world literature alive and continually refresh the canon and cultural memory. Traveling into different historical, cultural and medial contexts imbues ‘the originals’ with new, locally inflected meaning, engendering unpredictable connections and associations across cultures, people and periods – in short: they create new worlds. In this process, they become instruments of both difference and connectivity, demonstrating the creativity of adaptation and remediation practices which open up new, local and subcultural reception contexts. Simultaneously, they draw attention to the power of international media corporations and publishing houses that fund the remediation processes through new media and influence the global distribution of the product. Still, based on mobility between media, processes of reception are always open and instable, both entrenching the canonization of the original and permitting an intermedial dialogue and renewal.

3 Intermedial Word-Image Configurations: Anglophone World Literatures and Ekphrasis Questions of intermediality and the relationship between words and images (as discussed in the Western world) reach back to the time of ancient Greece and Rome. In his Ars poetica, Horace (65–68 BCE) referred to an influential formula ascribed to Simonides of Ceos (late 6th century BCE), ut pictura poesis [as in painting so in poetry]. This formula retained its influence in early modern Europe thought, when painting and poetry were referred to as ‘sister arts’ (cf. Hagstrum 1958) – a term that foregrounds structural similarities between word and image. However, the term ‘sister arts’ hides the fact that the different art forms were increasingly understood as competitive. The story of medial purification and the idea of separating the arts arose in the Renaissance, when Leonardo da Vinci (1452–1519) and others engaged in the paragone, the competition between the arts, by lifting the visual arts from their status as crafts to independent art forms which surpass poetry (cf. Rippl 2005; Klarer 2001). In the eighteenth century, Gotthold Ephraim Lessing, in his essay Laocoön: An Essay on the Limits of Painting and Poetry (1766), compared painting and poetry. He separated images and words as two radically different and independent modes of representation: Whereas words follow the rules of arbitrariness, successivity and time, images adhere to the laws of simultaneity and space. In later centuries intermedial relationships were conceived of in a variety of ways, some deviating from

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Lessing’s view, others supporting it. However, no matter how the relationship has been conceived, words have always been measured against pictures and vice versa. This attests to the flexible and ever-changing positions of art forms and media within medial networks. Knowledge of these earlier beliefs helps to contextualize the new insights intermediality studies offers for the study of Anglophone world literatures (↗24 The Caribbean). Intermedial literary word-image relationships can be subdivided into three main categories: first, typographical experiments, where text and image are present simultaneously and form a unit, as is the case in so-called pattern/figure poems or technopaignia, a genre which dates back to antiquity. George Herbert’s “Easter-Wings” (1633) is a good example because it combines language’s discursive character with iconic simultaneity, intensifying meaning of the words by iconic arrangement. Second, word and image are present simultaneously in a work, but as medially separate parts. Graphic novels are examples of this word-image interaction, e.g. Sarnath Banerjee’s Corridor (2008) or Gautam Bhatia’s Lie: A Traditional Tale of Modern India (2010), as are illustrated literary texts, such as David Dabydeen’s Turner (1994) or his A Harlot’s Progress (1999). Third, a very productive type of word-image relationships in literary texts is ekphrasis. Here only text is present in its medial form, and the second medium, the image, is evoked via verbal description (and is not materially present) – as for instance in Homer’s description of Achilles’s shield in Book 18 of the Iliad. Ekphrasis is a mode of writing which has recently been the subject of vibrant debate within several disciplines of the humanities. The original Greek means ‘to speak out’ or ‘to show clearly and completely’; the OED records ‘ekphrasis’ as first used in English in 1715. According to James A.W. Heffernan’s widely accepted definition, ekphrasis is “the verbal representation of visual representation” (1993, 3; see also Rippl 2005 and 2019). There is a surprising number of contemporary Anglophone world literary poetry collections, such as Derek Walcott’s Tiepolo’s Hound (2000), which are replete with ekphrastic passages. Salman Rushdie, Teju Cole, and NoViolet Bulawayo are among the writers whose novelistic oeuvres are characterized by ekphrastic modes of writing. Indian-British novelist Rushdie is famous for his intermedial aesthetics, the negotiation of historic and contemporary medial landscapes, imaginative world-making, and heightened transcultural exchanges that combine locally situated and particular worlds with the global. In his novels Midnight’s Children (1981), The Moor’s Last Sigh (1995) and The Enchantress of Florence (2008), he creates entangled histories, traveling images and alternative visions of both the world and the Indian secular nation-state through the complex mobilization of ekphrasis’ transformational potential (cf. Neumann and Rippl 2020), its world-making potential. Rushdie’s translation of ekphrasis into postcolonial Indian contexts attests to the transcultural mobility of ekphrasis: by using it as a means of re-visioning European works of visual art and activating Indian art in the collective memory of the nation, he underscores intermediality’s importance as commemorative practice. Via ekphrastic descriptions,

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Rushdie’s novels offer alternative, pluralistic versions and trans-figurative countervisions of the ‘world,’ of how to conceive of community and the secular democratic nation-state. His ekphrases disclose the values, belief systems and assumptions that undergird traditional hegemonic concepts of the world and dissect regimes of representation and (social and political) power. Against the background of today’s debate on Afropolitanism (cf. Selasi 2013 [2005]; Wasihun 2016), two additional contemporary Anglophone novels lend themselves to a discussion of world literatures and intermediality. Like Rushdie, Zimbabwean writer NoViolet Bulawayo mobilizes ekphrasis in her novel We Need New Names (2013) to question the socio-political conditions that regulate media access and the global circulation of images. She foregrounds the close, but often precarious, ties between subjectivity, materiality and mediality in globalized media landscapes. With all their historical weight, Bulawayo’s ekphrases and verbal-visual configurations reflect critically on the institutionalized mechanisms that regulate the global circulation of images via powerful media corporations and shed light on the uneven conditions of subject formation and im/mobility in the digital age. Bulawayo’s intermedial aesthetics is an adequate means to investigate both unstable African postcolonial politics and the role of Western mass media in world-making by producing reductive, highly stereotypical representations of Africa. In addition to images of documentary TV pictures and pornographic films, Bulawayo’s ekphrases also represent African batik painting and masks. These ekphrases invite readers to think about Western systems of cultural value, symbolic capital and notions of the ‘world:’ her ekphrases question hidden ideological agendas such as the role of mass media in producing visualities that legitimize Western hegemony (cf. Neumann and Rippl 2020). Another proponent of contemporary Afropolitan narrative fiction is the AmericanNigerian writer and photographer Teju Cole, whose Every Day Is for the Thief (2007/2014) and Open City (2011) are excellent examples of how contemporary Anglophone world literatures engage with today’s media cultures. These works, with their rich intermedial word-image configurations, are preoccupied with visuality, practices of seeing and dense networks of intertextual and intermedial references to art forms. They explore forms and effects of contemporary digital media while simultaneously engaging with violence, trauma, memory, diaspora and travel. Their intermedial aesthetics engages readers in meta-representational reflections on the socio-formative impact of visuality. While Every Day Is for the Thief contains a number of black-andwhite photographs that depict seemingly random vignettes of life in Lagos, Open City is rife with ekphrastic passages which contemplate the changing nature of writing in the digital age (cf. Behluli and Rippl 2017). Both Bulawayo and Cole create open, non-Eurocentric worlds in motion (cf. Neumann and Rippl 2017b) – worlds that are conflicting and consequently serve as invitations to imagine plural, enmeshed worlds characterized by openness and polycentricity, locally situated practices and experiences, and global networks.

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4 Conclusion As elaborated above, the discussed examples from Anglophone world literatures engage with the world by focusing on transcultural entanglements and exchanges, by showing the particular and the world at large and by representing the myriad ways it relates and connects while remaining an uneven place. Their worlding involves intermedial literary configurations based on interactions between different media, semiotic systems, poetic traditions, multiple settings, transcultural characters, multiple perspectives, generic transgressions, etc. The analyses of intermedial Anglophone world literary works and configurations with the help of intermediality studies, and interrelated theoretical concepts such as remediation, adaptation, transmedia, transmediality and ekphrasis, yield rich results. They invite readers to imagine worlds beyond global neo-capitalism – even if Anglophone world literatures will never be able to entirely escape their enmeshment with global market dynamics.

5 Bibliography 5.1 Works Cited Apter, Emily. Against World Literature: On the Politics of Untranslatability. London: Verso, 2013. Behluli, Sofie, and Gabriele Rippl. “Ekphrasis in the Digital Age.” Antikanon: Digitalität und literarische Netz-Werke 2 (2017): 131–176. Bhattacharya, Baidik. Postcolonial Writing in the Era of World Literature: Texts, Territories, Globalizations. London and New York: Routledge, 2018. Bolter, Jay David, and Richard Grusin. Remediation: Understanding New Media. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2000 [1999]. Brouillette, Sarah. Postcolonial Writers in the Global Literary Market Place. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007. Brouillette, Sarah. “World Literatures and Market Dynamics.” Institutions of World Literature: Writing, Translation, Markets. Ed. Stefan Helgesson and Pieter Vermeulen. London and New York: Routledge, 2016. 93–106. Casanova, Pascale. The World Republic of Letters. Trans. Malcolm B. DeBevoise. London and Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2004 [1999]. Cheah, Pheng. What is a World? On Postcolonial Literature as World Literature. Durham: Duke University Press, 2016. Cresswell, Tim. On the Move. Mobility in the Modern Western World. New York and London: Routledge, 2006. Damrosch, David. What is World Literature? Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2003. Damrosch, David. How to Read World Literature. Chichester: Wiley-Blackwell, 2009. Döring, Tobias. Caribbean-English Passages: Intertextuality in a Postcolonial Tradition. London: Routledge, 2002. Elleström, Lars. Transmedial Narration: Narratives and Stories in Different Media. London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2019.

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Emery, Mary Lou. Modernism, the Visual, and Caribbean Literature. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007. Friedman, Ken. “Intermedia: Four Histories, Three Directions, Two Futures.” Intermedia: Enacting the Liminal. Ed. Hans Breder and Klaus-Peter Busse. Dortmund: University of Dortmund, 2005. 51–62. Greenblatt, Stephen. “Theatrical Mobility.” Cultural Mobility. A Manifesto. Ed. Stephen Greenblatt. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010a. 75–95. Greenblatt, Stephen. “A Mobility Studies Manifesto.” Cultural Mobility. A Manifesto. Ed. Stephen Greenblatt. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010b. 250–253. Grishakova, Marina, and Marie-Laure Ryan, eds. Intermediality and Storytelling. Berlin and New York: De Gruyter, 2010. Hagstrum, Jean H. The Sister Arts: The Tradition of Literary Pictorialism and English Poetry from Dryden to Gray. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1958. Hansen-Löve, Aage A. “Intermedialität und Intertextualität: Probleme der Korrelation von Wort- und Bildkunst – am Beispiel der russischen Moderne.” Dialog der Texte: Hamburger Kolloquium zur Intertextualität. Ed. Wolf Schmid and Wolf-Dieter Stempel. Vienna: Gesellschaft zur Förderung slawistischer Studien, 1983. 291–360. Hayot, Eric. On Literary Worlds. New York: Oxford University Press, 2012. Heffernan, James A.W. Museum of Word: The Poetics of Ekphrasis from Homer to Ashbery. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993. Helgesson, Stefan. “Postcolonialism and World Literature: Rethinking the Boundaries.” Interventions 16.4 (2014): 483–500. Helgesson, Stefan, and Pieter Vermeulen, eds. Institutions of World Literature: Writing, Translation, Markets. London and New York: Routledge, 2016. Herzogenrath, Bernd. “Travels in Intermedia[lity]: An Introduction.” ReBlurring the Boundaries. Ed. Bernd Herzogenrath. Hanover: Dartmouth College Press, 2012. 1–14. Higgins, Dick. Horizons: The Poetics and Theory of the Intermedia. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1984. Higgins, Dick, and Hannah Higgins. “Intermedia.” Leonardo 34.1 (2001): 49–54. Hoppeler, Stephanie, Lukas Etter, and Gabriele Rippl. “Intermedialität in Comics: Neil Gaimans The Sandman.” Comics: Zur Geschichte und Theorie eines populärkulturellen Mediums. Ed. Stephan Ditschke, Katerina Kroucheva, and Daniel Stein. Bielefeld: transcript, 2009. 53–79. Huggan, Graham. The Postcolonial Exotic. Marketing the Margins. London and New York: Routledge, 2001. Hutcheon, Linda. A Theory of Adaptation. New York: Routledge, 2006. Jay, Paul. “Beyond Discipline? Globalization and the Future of English.” PMLA 116.1 (2001): 32–47. Jay, Paul. Global Matters: The Transnational Turn in Literary Studies. Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 2010.  Jenkins, Henry. Convergence Culture: Where Old and New Media Collide. New York: New York University Press, 2006. Klarer, Mario. Ekphrasis: Bildbeschreibung als Repräsentationstheorie bei Spenser, Sidney, Lyly und Shakespeare. Tübingen: Niemeyer, 2001. Kortenaar, Neil ten. “Postcolonial Ekphrasis: Salman Rushdie Gives the Finger Back to the Empire.” Contemporary Literature 38.2 (1997): 232–259. Lessing, Gotthold Ephraim. Laocoön: An Essay on the Limits of Painting and Poetry. Trans. E.A. McCormick. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1984. Loomba, Ania, and Martin Orkin, eds. Post-Colonial Shakespeares. New York: Routledge, 1998. McLuhan, Marshall. Understanding Media. New York: Mentor, 1964. Mendes, Ana C., ed. Salman Rushdie and Visual Culture. New York and London: Routledge, 2012.

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Merten, Kai, and Lucia Krämer. “Introduction.” Post-Colonial Studies Meets Media Studies: A Critical Encounter. Ed. Kai Merten and Lucia Krämer. Bielefeld: transcript, 2016. 7–24. Meyer, Michael, ed. Word & Image in Colonial and Postcolonial Literatures and Cultures. Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2009. Mitchell, W.J.T. Picture Theory. Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1994. Müller, Jürgen E. “Intermedialität als poetologisches und medientheoretisches Konzept.” Intermedialität: Theorie und Praxis eines interdisziplinären Forschungsgebiets. Ed. Jürg Helbig. London: Turnshare, 2009. 31–40. Moretti, Franco. “Conjunctures on World Literature.” New Left Review 1 (2000): 55–67. Mufti, Aamir R. Forget English! Orientalisms and World Literatures. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2016. Mukherjee, Ankhi. What Is a Classic? Postcolonial Rewriting and Invention of the Canon. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2014. Murray, Simone. The Adaptation Industry: The Cultural Economy of Contemporary Literary Adaptation. New York and London: Routledge, 2012. Neumann, Birgit. “Intermedial Negotiations: Postcolonial Literatures.” Handbook of Intermediality. Ed. Gabriele Rippl. Berlin and Boston: De Gruyter, 2015. 512–529. Neumann, Birgit, and Gabriele Rippl. “Anglophone World Literatures: Introduction.” Special issue Anglophone World Literatures. Anglia 135.1 (2017a): 1–20. Neumann, Birgit, and Gabriele Rippl. “‘Celebrating Afropolitan Identities?’ Contemporary African World Literatures in English.” Special issue Anglophone World Literatures. Anglia 135.1 (2017b): 159–185. Neumann, Birgit, and Gabriele Rippl. Verbal-Visual Configurations in Postcolonial Literature: Intermedial Aesthetics. London: Routledge, 2020. Paech, Joachim. “Intermedialität: Mediales Differenzial und transformative Figurationen.” Intermedialität: Theorie und Praxis eines interdisziplinären Forschungsgebiets. Ed. Jörg Helbig. Berlin: Erich Schmidt Verlag, 1998. 14–30. Rajewsky, Irina O. “Intermediality, Intertextuality, and Remediation: A Literary Perspective on Intermediality.” Intermédialités 6 (2005): 43–64. Rajewsky, Irina O. “Border Talks: The Problematic Status of Media Borders in the Current Debate about Intermediality.” Media Borders, Multimodality and Intermediality. Ed. Lars Elleström. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010. 51–68. Rippl, Gabriele. Beschreibungskunst: Zur intermedialen Poetik angloamerikanischer Ikontexte (1880–2000). Munich: Fink, 2005. Rippl, Gabriele. “Film and Media Studies.” English and American Studies. Theory and Practice. Ed. Martin Middeke, Timo Müller, Christina Wald, and Hubert Zapf. Stuttgart and Weimar: Metzler, 2012. 314–332. Rippl, Gabriele, and Lukas Etter. “Intermediality, Transmediality, and Graphic Narrative.” From Comic Strips to Graphic Novels. Contributions to the Theory and History of Graphic Narrative. Ed. Daniel Stein and Jan-Noël Thon. Berlin and Boston: De Gruyter, 2013. 191–217. Rippl, Gabriele. “Introduction.” Handbook of Intermediality. Ed. Gabriele Rippl. Berlin and Boston: De Gruyter 2015. 1–31. Rippl, Gabriele. “Hamlet’s Mobility: The Reception of Shakespeare’s Tragedy in US-American and Canadian Narrative Fiction.” Shakespeare and Space. Theatrical Explorations of the Spatial Paradigm. Ed. Ina Habermann and Michelle Witen. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016. 229–255. Rippl, Gabriele. “The Cultural Work of Ekphrasis in Contemporary Anglophone Novels.” Poetics Today 39.2 (2018): 265–285.

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Rippl, Gabriele. “Ekphrasis.” The Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Literature. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2019. doi: http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/acrefore/9780190201098.013.1057. Ryan, Marie-Laure. “Introduction.” Narrative across Media. The Languages of Storytelling. Ed. Marie-Laure Ryan. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2004. 1–40. Schröter, Jens. “Four Models of Intermediality.” ReBlurring the Boundaries. Ed. Bernd Herzogenrath. Hanover: Dartmouth College Press, 2012. 15–36. Selasi, Taiye. “Bye-bye Barbar.” Callaloo 36.3 (2013 [2005]): 528–530. Straumann, Barbara. “Adaptation – Remediation – Transmediality.” Handbook of Intermediality. Ed. Gabriele Rippl. Berlin and Boston: De Gruyter, 2015. 249–267. Tabbi, Joseph, and Michael Wutz. “Introduction.” Reading Matters: Narrative in the New Media Ecology. Ed. Joseph Tabbi and Michael Wutz. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1997. 1–25. Thomsen, Mads Rosendahl. Mapping World Literature: International Canonization and Transnational Literatures. London: Continuum, 2008. Thomsen, Mads Rosendahl. “Changing Spaces: Canonization of Anglophone World Literature.” Special issue Anglophone World Literatures. Anglia 135.1 (2017): 51–66. Walkowitz, Rebecca L. Born Translated: The Contemporary Novel in an Age of World Literature. New York: Columbia University Press, 2015. Wasihun, Betiel. “Afropolitan Writing.” Handbook of Transatlantic Studies. Ed. Julia Straub. Berlin and Boston: De Gruyter, 2016. 391–410. Wolf, Werner. The Musicalization of Fiction: A Study in the Theory and History of Intermediality. Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1999. Wolf, Werner. “Intermediality.” Routledge Encyclopedia of Narrative Theory. Ed. David Herman, Manfred Jahn, and Marie-Laure Ryan. London: Routledge, 2005. 252–256. Wolf, Werner. “Narratology and Media(lity): The Transmedial Expansion of a Literary Discipline and Possible Consequences.” Current Trends in Narratology. Ed. Greta Olson. Berlin: De Gruyter, 2011. 146–180.

5.2 Further Reading Elleström, Lars. “Introduction.” Media Borders, Multimodality and Intermediality. Ed. Lars Elleström. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010a. 1–8. Elleström, Lars. “The Modalities of Media: A Model for Understanding Intermedial Relations.” Media Borders, Multimodality and Intermediality. Ed. Lars Elleström. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010b. 11–48. Louvel, Liliane. Poetics of the Iconotext. Introd. Karen Jacobs; trans. Laurence Petit. Farnham: Ashgate, 2011. Ryan, Marie-Laure, ed. Narrative Across Media. The Languages of Storytelling. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2004. Ryan, Marie-Laure, and Jan-Noël Thon, eds. Storyworlds across Media: Toward a Media-Conscious Narratology. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2014.

Part III: Sociological Approaches – Distribution, Reception and Translation of Anglophone World Literature

Sibylle Baumbach

15 Marketing Anglophone World Literatures Abstract: From the nineteenth century onwards, world literature has been closely connected to socio-economic reasoning, which has shaped (and continues to shape) how it is disseminated, received, and produced. Based on first marketing considerations by writers in the nineteenth century, this chapter outlines the importance of ‘glocal’ Anglophone literary markets and explores key developments and challenges in marketing Anglophone world literatures. In addition to investigating the seminal roles played by publishers, literary agents, and retailers, it discusses the impact of literary prizes, such as the Booker Prize, in the attention economy as well as growing trends of self-marketing, self-publishing, and the role of small online platforms in promoting national literatures and disseminating the works of both established and upcoming writers. Key Terms: Marketing, publication industry, Booker Prize, self-publishing, glocality

1 A Tale of Two Markets: The Glocality of World Literatures Samuel Langhorne Clemens knew the tricks to marketing world literature perfectly well. At least that is what the preface to The Gilded Age: A Tale of Today (1873), co-written by Clemens, alias Mark Twain, and Charles Dudley Warner, seems to suggest. Attuning their readers to a novel which is set during an age of unprecedented industrial and technological growth, which marked the beginning of “the consumer revolution” (Applbaum 2004, 173), they disclose the rationale behind the design of the narrative: Our quotations are set in a vast number of tongues; this is done for the reason that very few foreign nations among whom the book will circulate can read in any language but their own; whereas we do not write for a particular class or sect or nation, but to take in the whole world. […] One word more. This is – what it pretends to be a joint production, in the conception of the story, the exposition of the characters, and in its literal composition. There is scarcely a chapter that does not bear the marks of the two writers of the book. (Twain 1996 [1873], v)

The pronounced self-fashioning of the work as a multinational, polyvocal, and universal novel, which meets the requirements of the global literary market, however, turns out to be mere pretence (cf. Morris 2011). Though the epigraphs are multilingual, the novel was clearly written for an English-speaking readership, more precisely – considering its critique of fictitious capital circulated by Wall Street investors – for the https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110583182-016

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American market. And yet, the preface points to the effects of global trade structures on individual writers and national book industries, while ironically acknowledging the need for self-marketing as well as the dominance of the English language in this endeavour – aspects that point to key concerns regarding the marketing of Anglophone world literatures, i.e. literatures that emerge from Anglophone centres of publishing, while marketed as ‘world literatures’. Due to the lack of international copyright (which was not introduced until 1891), the nineteenth-century American book market was dominated by pirated or cheaply obtained European works and imported Canadian imprints, which were promoted at the expense of American writers who feared a decline in national literature. The tension between the local, the national, and the global points to a dilemma that is also ingrained in the notion of ‘Anglophone world literatures’. As indicated by Twain’s and Warner’s preface, the market for world literatures, though geared towards transnationalism, is ultimately either rooted in the negotiation between the local and the global, or doomed to commercial failure. This is also suggested in J.M. Coetzee’s Elizabeth Costello (2003), a novel that could be classified as ‘Anglophone world literature’, which also reflects upon the marketing of world literatures. As the protagonist remarks, besides “[t]he English Novel”, which “is written in the first place by English people for English people” (Coetzee 2003, 51), Anglophone literatures are tailored to an international market. Consequently, writers are cut off from their roots and their national heritage, as in the case of the African novel: [T]he African novel is not written by Africans for Africans. African novelists may write about Africa, about African experiences, but they seem to me to be glancing over their shoulder all the time they write, at the foreigners who will read them. Whether they like it or not, they have accepted the role of interpreter, interpreting Africa to their readers. (Coetzee 2003, 51)

According to Elizabeth Costello, the increasing demand for global literatures jeopardizes authenticity in favour of marketing considerations for it forces novelists to anticipate and satisfy the needs and desires of a specific (Western) readership. The African writer Emmanuel Egudu, however, is encouraged to revise this strategy and follow the model of Australian literature, proposed by Costello: [W]e in Australia have been through similar trials and have come out at the other end. We finally got out of the habit of writing for strangers when a proper Australian readership grew to maturity, something that happened in the 1960s. A readership, not a writership – that already existed. We got out of the habit of writing for strangers when our market, our Australian market, decided that it could afford to support a home-grown literature. This is the lesson we can offer. This is what Africa could learn from us. (Coetzee 2003, 51–52)

This rise of local publishing Costello refers to was supported by increased government funding for the arts, which enabled a period of independence from “the longstanding dominance of British publishers in the Australian book market” (Bode 2012, 58). Even though government funding receded in the 1990s and the pressures of the global

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economy opened up the market again to multinational publishers, Australian literatures continue to thrive (cf. Bode 2012, 58–60). Reminding readers of the advantages of fostering a distinctly Australian market, based on national sentiments which enabled Australian literature to flourish, Coetzee underscores what the marketing of Anglophone literatures should refrain from, i.e. promoting literatures that are deliberately composed for an international market and occupied with “strategic Occidentalism” (Prado 2018). Instead, it should embrace plurality by fostering national literatures and – not driving but following – literary production. In this respect, Anglophone world literature markets should strive to be ‘glocal’, insofar as they are essentially “home-grown” (Coetzee 2003, 52), to recognize the global and the local as interdependent, and to acknowledge the impact of the local on global politics and processes (cf. Neumann 2020). As a consequence, the marketing of world literatures should concentrate on globally distributing literatures produced in local contexts (cf. Steiner 2012, 323) while responding to local demands and preserving “something untranslatable”, which could foster “mondialisation” (Nancy 2004, 28; see Neumann/Rippl 2017). Above all, world literature is a collaborative endeavour (↗1 The Beginnings of the Concept and ↗2 Re-Reading Classical Approaches), driven first and foremost by marketing considerations. ‘World literature’ was born both as “an aspiration and a market-based reality” (Puchner 2017, n.pag.), promoted by “a human network of sorts that spans across the globe and is possible only through literature, which is in turn facilitated by trade and commerce” (Xavier 2016, 26).

2 The Publication Industry and Self-Marketing “There is no denying that world literature is a market, one in which local and national literatures can meet and transform each other. World literature depends, above all, on circulation” (Puchner 2017, n.pag.). And yet, as Ann Steiner has indicated, “there is no such thing as a truly international book trade” (2012, 317). Instead, the global book market is governed by (Western) metropoles, which hold “[t]he huge power of being able to say what is literary and what is not” (Casanova 2004, 21–23) and which shape literary markets by determining the ‘value’ of a specific work and its tradability. These trading processes are guided by “rivalry, struggle, and inequality” (2004, 4) – tensions that need to be negotiated on the national and global level, between small and big publishers, local and international readerships, but which are often ‘solved’ by globally recognized, large publishing corporations, including Penguin Random House and the Hachette Group (cf. Arts Council 2017, 21). During the past 15 years, the book-marketing industry has changed from a product-oriented to a market-oriented approach. While before, the search for markets happened after the product was created, the publishing industry today identifies

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market segments to tailor (and alter) their products to meet specific customers’ demands: “Marketing is about offering: the right people; the right product, the right price; the right promotional approach; the right way; at the right time; in the right place” (Baverstock 2015, 9). Which is ‘the right product’, ‘the right price’, and the ‘right time’ and ‘place’ is predominantly decided by publishers, who are the unrecognized legislators of the literary market. They accept or reject manuscripts, assess the marketability of a work, and determine which books will be produced and which will be translated, thereby creating “hegemonic force fields” (Pizer 2012, 9), which set language trends and thus support the proliferation of ‘Anglophone world literatures’. Furthermore, publishing companies increasingly invest in marketing activities: “Thirty years ago some firms had only Publishing Departments – and no formal marketing responsibilities […]. [T]oday they are largely run by marketers” (Baverstock 2015, 6). As indicated in the opening of this chapter not only publishing houses, but also authors have long recognized the growing need for (self-)marketing. Today, writers increasingly (have to) engage literary agents to gain and maintain access to the literary market. These agents assess the potential ‘value’ of specific works, based on criteria such as “authenticity”, “uniqueness of voice”, and “intricacy of plot” (“The Agent: How to Pitch Your Book” n.d., n.pag.), and negotiate and sell publishing rights to individual companies. It is the agents, therefore, that ultimately enable the travelling of literatures and shape the literary market. Their rising number points to the increasingly competitive and rapidly “developing culture of marketing” (Squires 2007, 25) in fiction publication. Therefore, the pressure, especially on new authors, to become engaged in (self-) marketing activities has increased dramatically. As a consequence, writers’ handbooks on how to get published and how to hook an agent, such as the Writers’ and Artists’ Yearbook, are thriving. Once a work has been accepted by an agent and eventually also found a publisher, marketing activities will be coordinated by professional marketers. Further down the trade chain, bibliomigrancy, i.e. “the physical or virtual movement of books” (Mani 2017, 38), is enabled by retailers and large bookshops, which are responsible for promoting specific works by putting them on display, organizing public readings, or creating bestseller lists, based on their sales numbers. With the digital turn, however, the marketing pace for literary works has changed. Reviews published in newspapers and magazines are rivalled by criticism on Twitter, Facebook, or digital review platforms, such as GoodReads, which enable immediate responses and reactions. As a result, “[s]ales and marketing have been in the vanguard, maximizing the use of streaming services, hybrids directed straight at customers, social media, YouTube, and a wide range of websites” (Steiner 2018, 120–121). Writers, therefore, often turn to social media and private websites to promote their work. The effects of the flourishing digital marketplace on world literatures continue to be profound. Grown into a key agent in ‘worlding’ literature, the internet has further facilitated the ‘travelling’ of books. As suggested by Venkat Mani, world literature in

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the digital age has become both “cosmochronic and cosmotopic” (2012, 293), which adds a new level to bibliomigrancy. Today, an estimated 75% of all adult books, both fiction and non-fiction, and around 50% of all children’s books are sold online (cf. Writers’ and Artists’ Yearbook 2019, n.pag.). Heavyweights, such as Amazon, but also smaller online retailers, have entered the book market with a vengeance. While the former work with algorithms and meticulously devised AI-marketing strategies, designed to respond to individual customers’ demands, and are almost unrivalled in catapulting titles from no-names to must-reads, smaller retailers become increasingly important for disseminating Anglophone world literatures, especially as many of them support glocal markets. One example is the African Books Collective (ABC), which emerged from a self-help initiative promoting African literatures overseas. The collective, which was founded jointly by 19 African publishers and includes 154 independent African publishers in 24 countries to date, is a non-profit organisation, supported by fundraising activities. With a small office in Oxford and an online retail service, it serves as a “worldwide marketing and distribution outlet for books from Africa” (African Books Collective n.d., n.pag.). Its aim is threefold: (1) “to provide the most comprehensive selection of relevant material to customers worldwide in the form they require”, both in print or print-on-demand and as ebooks; (2) “to achieve ABC’s cultural aims whilst operating in a wholly commercial space”; and (3) “to grow the market for African books worldwide” (African Books Collective n.d., n.pag.). In addition to propelling African literatures abroad, ABC strives to increase book sales across the African continent and support indigenous publishers, which are often overshadowed by misguided aid or corruption (cf. Alfredsson 2017). The digital market not only offers new opportunities for publishers, but also aids authors in countering established “hegemonic force fields” (Pizer 2012, 9) in the Anglophone world. As publishers invest more money in marketing activities, they tend to spend less on remunerating writers and thus drive wages down. Since 2013, the median income of writers in the UK has plummeted by a third, amounting to around 3.000 GBP per year, while UK publishers’ profits continue to rise (cf. Kean 2018, n.pag.). As best-selling authors, such as Philip Pullman, Antony Beevor, and Sally Gardner, have pointed out, this exploitation has led to a decline in professional writers, “threatening the diversity and quality of literary culture” (Kean 2018, n.pag.), which not only affects the British literary market, but also the market of Anglophone world literatures, which is largely governed by Western marketing machines. One way to bypass the traditional publishing industry, enter into the Anglophone market directly, and receive a fair share of the profit gained by one’s work, is selfpublishing. This is not a novel development of the digital age: Numerous renowned authors have distributed their works in this way, some even started their own presses, including Jane Austen, Virginia Woolf, and Derek Walcott (cf. Patterson 2012). While the exact number of self-published books cannot be determined (partly due to the fact that many of them lack an ISBN-number), with the rise of online literary markets, self-publishing has become a trend.

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The great success of self-published books today is confirmed by works such as Still Alice (2007) by Lisa Genova, which, published with iUniverse’s print-on-demand service, was translated in over 30 languages and sold over 2.6 million copies, or Ashwin Sanghi’s The Rozabal Line (2007), which made Sanghi one of the best-selling English fiction authors in India (cf. Alphonso 2018, n.pag.). Having offered the manuscript to many literary agents and publishers (100 in total), Sanghi self-published and self-marketed his work under the Anglicized anagram Shawn Haigins and the novel immediately became a success. The Immortals of Meluha (2010) by Indian author Amish Tripathi, the first book of The Shiva Trilogy, was also self-published (although with an agent’s assistance) before turning into a bestseller, a success matched by the following two parts of the trilogy. In self- or indie publishing, writers are not only responsible for copy-editing their works but also devise their own marketing and publication strategy by promoting their works on social media, requesting reviews by book bloggers, or submitting their books to literary awards. In turn, they receive the lion’s share of sales income. Amazon, for instance, pays royalties of around 70% of the overall profit of selfpublishing books (compared to 8–10% standard-royalty paid in the traditional publishing industry), which means that writers can control the pricing of their works and sell their books more cheaply. This might result in smaller sales numbers, but an increase of royalties compared to contracting a book with traditional publishers. However, the fact that the growing trend of self-publishing is greatly afforded by and ultimately contingent on big online retailers – Amazon currently holds a “42% share of all adult fiction sales” in self-publishing (cf. Writers’ and Artists’ Yearbook 2019, n.pag.) – might create new hegemonic force fields, which could potentially curtail the opportunities gained by this novel mode of publishing and distributing Anglophone world literatures. Nonetheless, independent and self-publishing might be the way forward for Anglophone world literatures in that they not only offer easier access to the global market (see also Vermeulen and Hurkens 2019), but also fairer payments, which would foster diversity within literary culture – a diversity which Philip Pullman and other writers saw dwindling due to writers’ exploitation by the big publishing companies. However, self-publishing still has ground to gain in its general esteem. With the more or less open access to the self-publishing market, there is no assessment before books are published. This lack of preselection, often mistaken as quality control, might discourage readers from buying self-published books. Furthermore, the number of newly published indie books is simply overwhelming. As a consequence, readers – often unconsciously – tend to rely on “the traditional publishing market, the reputation of specific publishers, and the forms of commodity production and reward the book market supports, to provide a signal of quality that precedes any literary critical or academic assessment” (Bode 2012, 101). The digital age, however, also offers new opportunities for this kind of assessment. Online literary magazines, such as Brittle Paper, founded by Nigerian writer

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and scholar Ainehi Edoro, can help build glocal literary markets by publishing fiction, poetry, and essays both from more established and still unknown writers online and by offering critical reviews and assessments of recent works. Brittle Paper is not only committed to “build[ing] a vibrant African literary scene”, but also caters its content “for a younger, taste-driven audience” (Brittle Paper, n.pag.), both supporting and marketing African literatures as world literatures. These activities, though often notoriously underfunded, offer alternative modes of assessment, which help counter the dominant role of literary prizes and tend to subvert “the economics of cultural prestige” (English 2005, 4). The latter, however, continues to shape the perception, dissemination, and reception of Anglophone world literatures in the growing attention economy, an economy where value is determined by the (unpaid) attention paid to a specific object (cf. Davenport and Beck 2001) and which also regulates the literary market.

3 Prestige and Attention Economies in Anglophone Literary Markets Besides monitory gain, marketing efforts are increasingly geared towards building authors’ reputation as well as towards binding intellectual and cognitive capital. For promoting Anglophone world literatures, literary prizes are indispensable when they are prominent enough to ensure visibility for the award-winning work and its author. To draw the public’s attention, the lead-up to the awards, including intense media coverage of the nominees, long- and short-lists, and the publicity gained through award ceremonies, is often governed by an elaborate marketing machine which does not only involve publishers, literary agents, and authors but also journalists, academics, literary critics, and the interested public. The prizes most associated with the aim of promoting Anglophone world literatures are undoubtedly the Booker Prize, described on its webpage as “the leading literary award in the English speaking world” (“About”, n.pag.), and the International Booker Prize. Whereas the former is awarded to “the best novel of the year written in English and published in the UK or Ireland” (“The Booker Prize”, n.pag.), the latter is bestowed onto a work that has been translated into English and was published in the UK or Ireland. Though more global, the attention attracted by the International Booker Prize does not come close to the media and marketing hype connected with the Booker whose cultural capital and prestige exceeds its sister-prize by far. Not surprisingly, therefore, the 2019-winner of the Man Booker International, Celestial Bodies (2018) by Omani novelist Jokha Alharthi, though internationally praised, received only a fraction of the attention paid to Booker-prize winners, such as Anna Burns’ Milkman (2018), Marlon James’ A Brief History of Seven Killings (2015), Aravind Adiga’s The White Tiger (2008), or the 2019-award shared by Margaret Atwood’s The Testaments

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and Bernardine Evaristo’s Girl, Woman, Other (2019). Part of the marketing success of the Booker lies in the elaborate selection process, which moves from a longlist (announced in July) to a shortlist (announced in September) to a gala dinner at Royal Albert Hall (in mid-October) when the winner is announced, closely accompanied by intensive media coverage, which “generates suspense while maximizing commercial appeal” (Huggan 2001, 118). The stickers ‘Short-Listed for the Booker Prize’ or ‘Booker Prize Winner’ added to book covers during the selection process and after the announcement of the winner serve as seals of quality, indicating “the particular combination of economic and cultural capital that […] also generates substantial journalistic capital” (Squires 2016, 75). Similar to other prizes, including the Nobel Prize which was suspended in 2018 due to allegations of sexual assault and unfair practices, the Booker hovers between idealism and corruption. The several scandals surrounding it, however, have secured the prize’s increased public attention. It is one of the curiosities of marketing that critics become the unwilling accomplices of marketers: “there’s nothing like a little criticism to fan the marketing flames. […] Critique, censure, and controversy are the 3Cs of effective marketing communications in our mass-mediated world” (Brown 2005, 59). The most memorable controversy was sparked by the Booker’s roots in colonial exploitation. In his Booker-prize-acceptance speech in 1971, John Berger openly denounced the Booker McConnell company, which founded the prize, as “a colonialist enterprise built on the backs of black plantation workers in Guyana” (English 2005, 203). Consequently, the prize’s self-fashioning as a patron of postcolonial literatures has often been regarded as highly problematic, especially as critics repeatedly noted a tendency towards “an Anglocentric discourse of benevolent paternalism” (Huggan 2001, 111). This critique abated with the ‘decolonisation’ of the Booker in 2014 when the award was broadened to all Anglophone novels published in the UK and Ireland and no longer excluded authors born outside of Britain, the Republic of Ireland, the Commonwealth, Pakistan, and Bangladesh. Due to its focus on Commonwealth literatures, the Booker was repeatedly associated with promoting ‘the postcolonial exotic’ (Huggan 2001). Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children (1981), which won the award in the year of its publication and was deemed the ‘best of the Booker’ in 2008, was regarded as a key example of “strategically self-conscious exoticism”, which was expressed in “a stylishly hybridised literary/cultural text” (Huggan 2001, 116). Rushdie’s success and the persistent desire for ‘the postcolonial exotic’ amongst Anglophone readers sparked new market- and award-driven writing. Both Arundhati Roy’s The God of Small Things (1997) and Aravind Adiga’s The White Tiger (2008), for instance, seemed to cater to the tastes of Western readers by following the same strategic exoticism that paved the road to success for Rushdie (cf. Huggan 2001). As it is indisputable that commercial considerations also guide authors in their writing, in the Darwinian, neoliberal book market, the fittest are the ones most able to cater to the demands of their target readers while drawing on literary styles that have been favoured by consumers.

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The profound impact of strategic marketing is particularly prominent in recent Southern Asian writing. Ironically, many of these novels reveal an acute awareness of capitalism and neoliberalism that govern the global (book) market (cf. Brouillette 2014, 95) and addresses the economic forces that also govern the distribution of Anglophone literatures. Adiga’s The White Tiger (2008), for instance, depicts the social and economic rise of the entrepreneur Balram from the “India of Darkness” to the “India of Light” (Adiga 2008, 14), which is inspired by the American dream and neoliberal tendencies in India’s ‘tiger economy’, but enabled through ruthless corruption. Balram seems to play the neoliberal capitalist system, but in the end, he becomes part of that very system. The novel, therefore, ultimately works against the wide-spread assumption that Anglophone world literatures might challenge or even subvert the logic of the capitalist world literary market, based on its “immanent resources for resisting capitalist globalization” (Cheah 2016, 11). Instead, Adiga’s narrative seems to give a voice to an ‘India of Darkness’ and ultimately adheres to the unwritten rules of Western capitalist book markets, reinforcing – like Balram – the system that it attempts to destabilize. As Ana Christina Mendes notes, referring to Adiga’s novels, but also to further politically-oriented works, such as Mohsin Hamid’s How to Get Filthy Rich in Rising Asia (2013) and Deepti Kapoor’s A Bad Character (2014), “[t]hough contemporary South Asian social realist literary works stand as nodes of resistance to the structural inequalities of the capitalist world-system and its enforced translation into other systems in postcolonial contexts, they are usually commercially successful in the West and as such are an integral feature of the expansion of economic neoliberalism” (Mendes 2016, 227). The fact that many of the celebrated South Asian authors were educated in the West and often attended private universities underlines the prevailing dominance of the West in the production of Anglophone world literatures. Adiga’s novel furthermore exposes the increasing significance of consumers’ attention in assessing the economic and cultural value of a specific work (cf. Baumbach 2019). While Balram does not succeed in alerting the Chinese Premier to his story (the Premier to whom he addresses his narrative never responds), he fashions himself as a key figure of attention, which secures him prestige and fortune and makes him a key player in the tiger economy of a new, neoliberal India. At the same time, The White Tiger (2008) stresses the need for self-marketing as part of its narrative – a strategy which is critically reflected upon by the use of an unreliable narrator, but which foregrounds the culture of prestige and the attention economy which drive marketing activities connected to Anglophone world literatures. Literary prizes such as the Booker are not only indicators of public taste and guarantors of successful commercialization. As the list of Booker prize-winning Anglophone writers, including Salman Rushdie (in 1981), J.M. Coetzee (1983/1999), Kazuo Ishiguro (1989), Ben Okri (1991), Michael Ondaatje (1992), and Arundhati Roy (1997), suggests, they also secure canonization (Todd 1996; ↗16 Canons and Canonicity in Anglophone Literature) and therefore long-lasting prestige. Though there is no recipe for the Booker – a point highlighted ironically in St Aubyn’s Lost for Words where the

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analogous Elysian Prize is awarded to a cookbook (cf. Baumbach 2018) – writers might tailor their narratives to the expectations of the prize jury. This is confirmed by the dominant topics shared by many shortlisted and winning novels, which tend to focus on aspects of history and identity, individual and cultural memory (↗9 Anglophone World Literature and Transcultural Memory; cf. Neumann 2019), and narratives of belonging – issues that seem characteristic of Anglophone world literatures. Some of these aspects are further emphasized once novels are processed by the global marketing machine. As noted by Elizabeth Webby, on entering the Anglophone world literary market, books – or rather their covers – often undergo quite a radical makeover. In its first Australian edition, Peter Carey’s award-winning True History of the Kelly Gang (2000), a story about Australian bushranger Ned Kelly, was issued with a plain cream cover and a “light-brown imitation-leather spine”, “designed to look like a nineteenth-century book”, presenting the novel “as a combination of aesthetic object and historical artefact” (Webby 2016, 67–68) that complies with the narrative. The British publishers Faber and Faber, however, placed a photograph of Ned Kelly on the cover, which encourages a historical reading of the novel as true history in juxtaposition to the narrative. The novel’s reduction to a ‘true’ history propelled by the altered cover further cements the cultural hegemony of the West, which determines which histories are ‘true’, reliable, and also consumable. What is even more astonishing is Webby’s observation that the alteration of novels’ covers often signals to an attempt to streamline potentially best-selling fiction by concealing the writers’ country of origin. Carey’s novel and Tim Winton’s Dirt Music (2001), which was shortlisted for the Booker and won the 2002 Miles Franklin Award, the most prestigious literary prize in Australia, provide salient examples. The cover alterations of the novels led Webby to claim that “[i]ndeed, it would seem that publishers have even attempted to conceal the fact that Winton’s and Carey’s novels are set in Australia, perhaps because quality fiction is not usually associated with Australia in the way that crocodiles and the outback are” (2016, 64). Entering the global market comes at a cost in that it might alienate and distract narratives from their local contexts rather than fostering a ‘glocal’ marketing and reading culture, which acknowledges the origins of these novels while supporting their travelling across the Anglophone world (cf. Apter 2013).

4 Conclusion: How to Market Anglophone World Literatures While Sarah Brouillette claimed that “participation in the literary economy is a mark of privilege” (2015, 98), in a world increasingly pressured to engage in global capitalist economies, it is a mark of privilege to return to, recognize, and promote local literary markets. As suggested in Coetzee’s Elizabeth Costello, it is in these markets

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that ‘authentic’ novels arise, which might eventually be recognized as Anglophone world literatures, but essentially resist the external economic pressures and “regime of enforced mobility” (Mufti 2016, 9), prompted by the Western market. Paradoxically, some world-leading online retailers only use the rubric world literature as an umbrella term. On Amazon, for instance, no literary works are listed under this rubric. Instead, it embraces all national literatures and thus implicitly acknowledges the glocality of Anglophone world literatures, which might be marketed globally but are rooted in specific local, regional, and national cultures. Even though the Anglophone literary market is heavily regulated by large publishing houses, (online) retailers, literary agents, and prize cultures, which – sometimes in competition, sometimes (when it comes to promoting prize-winning novels) in collaboration – develop marketing strategies to draw readers’ attention to their products, writers, and winners respectively, the book market is unpredictable. It is impossible to determine which book will grow into a bestseller. As suggested by John Thompson, “much about this dynamic […] could be regarded as illogical, irrational and inefficient, not to mention wasteful” (2010, 294). This is confirmed by the fact that even writers who expressed a profound distaste for marketing, such as Chilean novelist Roberto Bolaño, are caught up, often posthumously, in the Anglophone world literature marketing machine (cf. Zavala 2017, 79). The most unpredictable factor in marketing, however, are readers. Especially in the digital era, profit- and prestige-driven marketing processes are often overruled by “real readers’ books” (Wagner 2017, 105): “[t]he books in England that have become huge, from Sebastian Faulks’ Birdsong, to Harry Potter, to David Nicholls’ One Day (2009) – none of those are books that have had marketing campaigns behind them” (Wagner 2017, 105), at least not at the outset of their success stories when sales were driven solely by readers’ demand. J.K. Rowling’s Harry Potter novels (1997–2007), for instance, stormed the bestseller lists across several countries in a considerably short period. Whether these works will stand the test of time remains to be seen, but the hype surrounding them was, at least to begin with, not tied to specific marketing strategies. The media marketing machine, which included the film industry that turned the books into popular movies, as well as the memorabilia that further boosted sales of the Harry Potter brand, began to operate only after Rowling’s novels had already reached a broad readership. Furthermore, it is largely governed by Rowling herself, which again highlights the importance of self-marketing activities. In addition to self-promotion on social media, “the Rowling machine” (Jordison 2011, n.pag.) launched Pottermore.com, which turns fans into “devotee[s]” (Jordison 2011, n.pag.), eager to sponge up any snippets from the wizarding world provided on the website. Anglophone world literature is not a brand. At least not yet. It could develop into one, but only if it affirms that it is not customer-led. As Stephen Brown, who has investigated the enormous success of the Harry Potter brand, has suggested, “great brands […] appear when it suits them. […] They invite us to participate, partake, experience, enjoy. But they won’t do as they’re told. […] [T]hey aren’t customer-centric

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[but] concept-centric” (2005, 74). Furthermore, brands have to retain something unfathomable: “great brands are a puzzle. They are inexplicable, enigmatic, mysterious. They reveal their secrets slowly” (2005, 74). And finally, “great brands are storied. They attract tales and taletellers” (2005, 75). Branding Anglophone world literatures, therefore, can only happen from within – through ‘the sea of stories’ (Rushdie 1990) told on a regional, national, and essentially glocal level at which they should be matched with marketing activities which acknowledge the diversity and glocality of Anglophone world literatures while enabling their travelling without covering up their origin. The challenge will be to support the mondialisation of Anglophone literatures by novel marketing strategies that aim “to take in the whole world” (Twain 1996 [1873], v) while preserving a sense of the untranslatable.

5 Bibliography 5.1 Works Cited “About.” The Booker Prizes (n.d.). https://thebookerprizes.com/fiction/about (20 Jan. 2020). African Books Collective (n.d.). www.africanbookscollective.com (20 Jan. 2020). Alfredsson, Henrik. “Her Mission: to Bring African Books to a Global Audience.” The Nordic Africa Institute (07 June 2017). https://nai.uu.se/news/articles/2017/06/07/144445/index.xml (05 Oct. 2019). Alphonso, Brianne. “11 Books that Prove there’s Nothing Wrong with Self-Publishing.” Electric Literature (3 Aug. 2018). https://electricliterature.com/11-books-that-prove-theres-nothingwrong-with-self-publishing/ (12 Dec. 2019). Applbaum, Kalman. The Marketing Era: From Professional Practice to Global Provisioning. New York and London: Routledge, 2004. Apter, Emily. Against World Literature: On the Politics of Untranslatability. London: Verso, 2013. Arts Council England. Literature in the 21st Century: Understanding Models of Support for Literary Fiction. London: Canelo, 2017. Baumbach, Sibylle. “The Economy of Attention and the Novel.” New Approaches to the 21st-Century Anglophone Novel. Ed. Sibylle Baumbach and Birgit Neumann. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2019. 39–58. Baumbach, Sibylle. “The Booker Prize as a Harbinger of Literary Trends and an Object of Satire: Debates about Literary Prizes in Journalism and Edward St Aubyn’s Lost for Words.” The British Novel in the Twenty-First Century: Cultural Concepts – Literary Developments – Model Interpretations. Ed. Vera Nünning and Ansgar Nünning. Trier: WVT, 2018. 53–70. Baverstock, Alison. How to Market Books. Abingdon and New York: Routledge, 2015. Bode, Katherine. Reading by Numbers: Recalibrating the Literary Field. London: Anthem Press, 2012. Brittle Paper. https://brittlepaper.com/about/ (08 Dec. 2019). Brouillette, Sarah. Literature and the Creative Economy. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2014. Brouillette, Sarah. “World Literature and Market Dynamics.” Institutions of World Literature: Writing, Translation, Markets. Ed. Stefan Helgesson and Pieter Vermeulen. New York: Routledge, 2015. 93–108.

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Brown, Stephen. Wizard! Harry Potter’s Brand Magic. London: Cyan, 2005. Casanova, Pascale. The World Republic of Letters. Trans. Malcolm B. DeBevoise. Cambridge, MA and London: Harvard University Press, 2004 [1999]. Cheah, Pheng. What is a World? On Postcolonial Literature as World Literature. Durham: Duke University Press, 2016. Coetzee, J.M. Elizabeth Costello. Eight Lessons. London: Secker & Warburg, 2003. Davenport, Thomas, and John Beck. The Attention Economy: Understanding the New Currency of Business. Brighton, MA: Harvard Business School Press, 2001. English, James F. The Economy of Prestige: Prizes, Awards, and the Circulation of Cultural Value. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2005. Huggan, Graham. The Postcolonial Exotic: Marketing the Margins. London: Routledge, 2001. Jordison, Sam. “Pottermore gives away JK Rowling’s Marketing Genius.” The Guardian (23 June 2011). https://www.theguardian.com/books/booksblog/2011/jun/23/pottermore-jk-rowlingmarketing-genius-harry-potter (12 Dec. 2019). Kean, Danuta. “Publishers are Paying Writers a Pittance, Say Bestselling Authors.” The Guardian (27 June 2018). https://www.theguardian.com/books/2018/jun/27/publishers-pay-writerspittance-philip-pullman-antony-beevor-sally-gardner (20 Jan. 2019). Mani, B. Venkat. “Bibliomigrancy: Book Series and the Making of World Literature.” The Routledge Companion to World Literature. Ed. Theo D’haen, David Damrosch, and Djelal Kadir. London and New York: Routledge, 2012. 283–296. Mani, B. Venkat. Recoding World Literature: Libraries, Print Culture, and Germany’s Pact with Books. New York: Fordham University Press, 2017. Mendes, Ana C. “The Marketing of Postcolonial Literature.” Postcolonial Studies Meets Media Studies: A Critical Encounter. Ed. Kai Merten and Lucia Krämer. Bielefeld: transcript, 2016. 215–231. Morris, Christopher D. “Hermeneutic Delusion in Mark Twain and Charles Dudley Warner’s The Gilded Age.” Nineteenth-Century Literature 66.2 (2011): 219–243. Mufti, Aamir R. Forget English! Orientalisms and World Literatures. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2016. Nancy, Jean-Luc. The Creation of the World or Globalization. Trans. Francois Raffoul and David Pettigrew. New York: State University of New York Press, 2004. Neumann, Birgit. “Anglophone World Literature and Glocal Memories: Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s Half of a Yellow Sun and Kiran Desai’s The Inheritance of Loss.” New Approaches to the 21st-Century Anglophone Novel. Ed. Sibylle Baumbach and Birgit Neumann. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2019. 217–236. Neumann, Birgit, and Gabriele Rippl. “Anglophone World Literatures: Introduction.” Special issue Anglophone World Literatures. Anglia 135.1 (2017): 1–20. Patterson, Christina. “How the Great Authors Published Themselves.” The Independent (18 Aug. 2012). https://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/books/features /how-the-great-writers-published-themselves-8053570.html (20 Jan. 2020). Pizer, John. “Johann Wolfgang von Goethe: Origins and Relevance of Weltliteratur.” The Routledge Companion to World Literature. Ed. Theo D’haen, David Damrosch, and Djelal Kadir. London and New York: Routledge, 2012. 3–11. Prado, Ignacio M. Sanchez. Strategic Occidentalism: On Mexican Fiction, the Neoliberal Book Market, and the Question of World Literature. Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 2018. Puchner, Martin. “Readers of the World Unite.” Aeon (20 Sept. 2017). https://aeon.co/essays/ world-literature-is-both-a-market-reality-and-a-global-ideal (12 Dec. 2019). Rushdie, Salman. Haroun and the Sea of Stories. London: Granta, 1990.

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Squires, Claire. Marketing Literature: The Making of Contemporary Writing in Britain. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007. Squires, Claire. “Book Marketing and the Booker Price.” Judging a Book by Its Cover: Fans, Publishers, Designers, and the Marketing of Fiction. Ed. Nicole Matthews and Nickianne Moody. Abingdon and New York: Routledge, 2016. 71–82. Steiner, Ann. “The Global Book: Micropublishing, Conglomerate Production, and Digital Market Structures.” Publishing Research Quarterly 34 (2018): 118–132. Steiner, Ann. “World Literature and the Book Market.” The Routledge Companion to World Literature. Ed. Theo D’haen, David Damrosch, and Djelal Kadir. London and New York: Routledge, 2012. 316–324. “The Agent: How to Pitch Your Book.” Penguin (n.d.). https://www.penguin.co.uk/articles/company/ blogs/the-agent–how-to-pitch-your-book-/ (14 May 2020). “The Booker Prize.” The Booker Prizes (n.d.). https://thebookerprizes.com/ (20 Jan. 2020). Thompson, John B. Merchants of Culture: The Publishing Business in the Twenty-First Century. Cambridge: Polity, 2010. Todd, Richard. Consuming Fictions: The Booker Prize and Fiction in Britain Today. London: Bloomsbury, 1996. Twain, Mark, and Charles Dudley Warner. The Gilded Age: A Tale of Today. Ed. Shelley Fisher Fishkin. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1996 [1873]. Vermeulen, Pieter, and Amélie Hurkens. “The Americanization of World Literature? American Independent Publishing and World Literary Vernacular.” Interventions 22.3 (2019): 1–18. Wagner, Erica. “Literary Reviews: Past, Present, Future.” The Literary Market in the UK. Ed. Amrei K. Nensel and Christoph Reinfandt. Tübingen: Eberhard Karls University, 2017. 101–108. Webby, Elizabeth. “Literary Prizes, Production Values and Cover Images.” Judging a Book by Its Cover: Fans, Publishers, Designers, and the Marketing of Fiction. Ed. Nicole Matthews and Nickianne Moody. Abingdon and New York: Routledge, 2016. 63–70. Writers’ and Artists’ Yearbook 2019. London: Bloomsbury, 2018. Xavier, Subha. The Migrant Text: Making and Marketing a Global French Literature. Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2016. Zavala, Oswaldo. “The Repolitization of the Latin American Shore: Roberto Bolaño and the Dispersion of ‘World Literature.’” Roberto Bolaño as World Literature. Ed. Nicholas Birns and Juan E. De Castro. New York: Bloomsbury, 2017. 79–101.

5.2 Further Reading Davis, Caroline. Creating Postcolonial Literature: African Writers and British Publishers. London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013. Delany, Paul. Literature, Money and the Market: From Trollope to Amis. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2002. Erickson, Lee. The Economy of Literary Form: English Literature and the Industrialization of Publishing, 1800–1850. Baltimore: The John Hopkins University Press, 1996. Helgason, Jon, Sara Kärrholm, and Ann Steiner, eds. Hype: Bestsellers and Literary Culture. Lund: Nordic Academic Press, 2014. Koegler, Caroline. Critical Branding: Postcolonial Studies and the Market. New York: Routledge, 2018. Walkowitz, Rebecca. Born Translated. The Contemporary Novel in an Age of World Literature. New York: Columbia University Press, 2015.

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Young, Robert J.C. “World Literature and Postcolonialism.” The Routledge Companion to World Literature. Ed. Theo D’haen, David Damrosch, and Djelal Kadir. London and New York: Routledge, 2012. 213–222. Zell, Hans. M. “Publishing in Africa: The Crisis and the Challenge.” A History of Twentieth-Century African Literatures. Ed. Oyekan Owomoyela. Lincoln and London: University of Nebraska Press, 1993. 369–388.

Peter Hitchcock

16 Canons and Canonicity in Anglophone Literature Abstract: This essay explores what happens when ideas of Anglophone Literature are mediated by concepts of canon and canonicity, historically key vectors of cultural authority and power. As such, the notion of canon is deployed as a symptom of cultural and political change. Invoking prominent examples of canon discourse (Bloom, Kermode, Guillory, Gates Jr.), this contribution advances the argument that understanding formations of canon is also, whatever else it is, a means to read the conditions of the socio-cultural at any one moment in history. In addition, the polemic wonders aloud about the very possibility of an Anglophone canon in the present, one that is also a measure of a specific legitimation crisis in the circulation of the Anglophone in the world system as such. Key Terms: Canonicity, abstraction, cultural capital, world literature, social change, translation

1 Introduction To mediate ‘canon’ in terms of Anglophone World Literatures simultaneously conjures debate not just on the emergence of the very concept of canon but, not surprisingly, on a whole history of the Anglophone in the making of its worldliness for which once rigorous notions, like cultural imperialism, do not necessarily capture the complex relations in play. If separating English from Anglophone represents a valid if vexed option, English in the world is never less than incendiary, and cannot unproblematically connote either the ‘best that has been thought and said’ in some Arnoldian fashion, or the world in which English is putatively precipitate. Rather than pass off ‘Anglophone World Literatures’ as relatively benign, a sort of kinder, gentler Harold Bloom construction for the twenty-first century, the introduction of canons and canonicity plunges us once more into the logic of power and cultural authority. Canons, after all, cannot adjudicate themselves but rather at once announce that conditions of literary value are at stake, as well as the social relations that might best serve as their guardians. Surely, canons are the product of shared agreement, that the idea of the centrality of certain texts over others is a culmination of collective prerogatives and discernment, and that no canon is an artifact of individual preference or of arbitrary assignment? The point is not to scare readers from the canon discussion that will follow but is to say that canons are part of a broader conversation, some of which appears in other sections of this book, about the possibilities through which literature https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110583182-017

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can be written and read. All of these terms, ‘Anglophone,’ ‘World,’ ‘Literatures,’ and ‘Canon,’ are pressure points on the literary, both negatively in their functions as exclusions, and positively in drawing attention to the wonder of the literary in specific formations, to the gainsay of taking literature seriously in its profusions and categorical identities. Far from settling debates, the determination of a canon intensifies their import and a canon may serve to signify both the brilliance of individual works and the difficult dialectic of culture and society at any one moment in its history. Without doubt any invocation of an Anglophone World Literatures canon is meant to write back and to question canons of yore and is more than umbilically tied to the interruption of and intervention by the postcolonial and the decolonial in contemporary critical thought. Over the last quarter century, the category of World Literature has been rejuvenated and problematized by these concerns (a point elaborated below). The world may be far from decolonized but literature and literary critique have attempted to advance that process in productive ways and have deepened how the aesthetic may be experienced and communicated. The question of the literary Anglophone in such a conjunction is not meant to soften the political implications of decolonization, even if the term can be deployed to precisely that effect. A discussion of canonicity permits extensive reflection on the cultural power of Anglophone World Literatures and its constitutive limits for literary study per se. Rather than think of an absolute break between old and new canons, the following will use canon as a symptom of cultural and political change that involves much more than up to date curricula and cosmopolitan book lists. Indeed, while critiques of the dominance of the Anglophonic are long standing, attention to its contours of canon help to explain how this genealogy is mediated and sustained.

2 The Bloom of Canon Re-reading Harold Bloom on the Western canon is a pertinent reminder of the complex matters in play when an otherwise innocent question, ‘what should I read?,’ is answered by the great and appreciable weight of literary tradition. The outline of Bloom’s approach is logical enough: given the brevity of life we have to make reading choices, so a canon is a way of organizing them that maximizes one’s exposure to writing of great quality (this could be read as a variation on what Damrosch terms a ‘hypercanon’, cf. 2006). Canon is a bundle of values, with metrics of selection and justification not always evident in the addition of a qualifier to the category. Bloom is of the ‘great writing is perfectly useless’ school of thought which means only that the quality of writing speaks for itself without, shall we say, sociological sutures. Individual preference, a fanatic’s aestheticism, is to be lauded over societal decree since the latter seems to litigate learning by utility. For Bloom, the canon is composed of the “art of memory” (1994, 37), and the truth of such art is settled by literary criticism, “an

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elitist phenomenon” (1994, 17), not a list or a course requirement. Teaching this means “searching for the few who have the capacity to become highly individual readers and writers” (1994, 17). If you are incapable of grasping this aesthetic then the canon is essentially an empty integer, a reference point or a content marker, not a gateway of higher learning (it should be noted that Bloom, while focusing on a couple of dozen writers, contends in a flourish that the Western canon is Dante and Shakespeare (cf. Bloom 1994, 486) which, like F.R. Leavis’s ‘great tradition’ of four novelists, is not short on quality but a little harsh on the rest of literary history). One can say there is a canon of such critics (e.g. Helen Vendler), in whom an obvious joy and skill in aesthetic encounters appears inexorably linked to elitism and a tendency for arrogant assertion over more demonstrative illumination. Literary criticism of this kind continues to exist, but the same social forces that have challenged Eurocentrism have worked to undermine the epistemological conditions of club room canonicity. The antinomies of the Western canon remain, however, even if its avatars are diminished in number and influence. This means both that the literary quality in such a canon inestimably survives the spokespeople who often merely stated it, and that perhaps the principle of velvet rope entrance persists in any canon, even those framed by unimpeachable democratic zest. Put another way, could the new in canon be the ability to obfuscate what was suspicious in the old? The ‘dead white European males’ have never been more dead, but how does one frame the logic of choice when the number of texts available has increased but the reader’s life has remained so stubbornly short and brutish? One can easily beat back Bloom on the basis of the sociological relevance of the literary and an openness to the full purity of poetry beyond his studied if not unproblematically defensible selection, yet a canon has a ratio of exclusion, and its outside is immediately a ground for its displacement. A canon without criteria is contradictio ad absurdum, and the introduction of adjudication cannot proceed as if it is not taking place. The point here is not that all canons are freighted by ideologies of exclusion and specific, if sympathetic categories of preference. The emphasis, rather, is that the propositional characteristics of Anglophone World Literatures are never less than reflexive, but are nevertheless overdetermined by the conditions of canon that are their very possibility.

3 The Pleasure of Canon Frank Kermode’s Tanner lectures on “Pleasure and Change” (2004) offer a sanguine bridge from Bloom’s absolute affinity to aesthetics as aesthetics and a world in which aesthetics seems to tremble from tautology. Chance is the third term in Kermode’s assessment and one reason to mention his approach is that it helps to assess whether a canon of Anglophone World Literatures has one (a chance, that is). Kermode invokes Jan Mukarovsky on the literary work both providing pleasure as well as the new. How

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literature might preserve its newness with its pleasure is key, although sometimes this is mistaken for newness being a pleasure in itself (‘canon today, gone tomorrow’). Since pleasure, like beauty, may be in the eyes of the beholder, the reader, this can be interpreted as a formalist version of Bloom’s preferences (for the text and its reader). Lurking within this paradigm is not just a distinction with Barthesian jouissance (which Kermode does mention) but one with the Kantian sublime, which can hardly be said to construct a canon in its own image, except perhaps in terms of paradoxical unrepresentability. After a cogent reading of William Wordsworth, Kermode opines, “it goes without saying that the literature I have referred to is canonical literature” (2004, 31), which would not constitute a proof were it not for the centrality of pleasure in the critique. He does admit that the reasons for such judgement may be false or self-serving but that the cause is just. ‘Change’ in Kermode’s approach acknowledges that some works deemed canonical may fall away in different historical contexts, each with their narratological demands, and this would seem to mitigate canonicity as only this or only that (a major ground for contention in religion, the seedbed of the very idea of canon). Indeed, when Kermode discusses prejudice, a type of discernment yet one of unreasonable assignation, one registers both an opening to canon formation but also a hesitation about its constitutive logic, since one can hardly be innocent to the effects of prejudicial harm beyond the rarified air of a theory of hermeneutics. The question of prejudice in canons does not settle the import of ideological critique, yet it does underline that even the most articulate touchstones of cultural history are subject to conditions of emergence. In the formal responses to Kermode’s lectures John Guillory (cf. Kermode 2004) notes a neutralization of pleasure via the socially acceptable. This is a reminder about the politics of reading, one which Anglophone World Literatures appears to announce in its very title, yet it is worth considering the extent to which the category comports with Guillory’s broader analysis of cultural capital. Guillory’s basic tack in his response to Kermode is to chide instances of authoritarian cultural criticism, either for their reduction of the literary to poetry, or for their inflation of the cultural to the popular or the mass. Cultural capital at this level rests in the authority of the critic much more than the self-evident aspirational affiliation offered by the individual text. As Guillory notes, this form of canon command is of more modest import in the present, although the relative quaintness today of the literary critic as an arbiter of taste (a purveyor of ‘distinction,’ as Pierre Bourdieu (1984) puts it) does not signal the withering of authoritarianism in general, whose populist formations are very much the stuff of neoliberal socialization and are endemic to the very globalization in which Anglophone World Literatures is precipitate. Guillory’s point is about an alarming continuity in canon confirmation between imperious men of letters and the radically inclusive cohort that has displaced them. Canon, we might proffer, is not simply the fool’s gold of political perspicacity but a determinant in the logic of cultural exchange, a capital idea in a world of capitalist relations. The path from Addison to Adichie can be traced in a number of ways and, while one might

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emphasize an aesthetics of transformation, the moribund sign, ‘this way canon lies,’ seems to subvert every instance of pleasure that might otherwise justify the selection (indicated in the misrepresentations of writer and reader in the exchanges of Oprah Winfrey and Jonathan Franzen that Guillory invokes, cf. Kermode 2004, 70). To answer the elisions in Kermode’s adherence to canon, Guillory (cf. Kermode 2004) adds a delicious dimension, abstraction, which cancels through some of the predicaments of cultural assessment in provocative fashion. Canon is certainly an abstraction on the real of literary engagement, for it seeks to rationalize discernment in a panoply of immeasurable measure, as if one could pinpoint consistently when pleasure becomes dismay across time, language and the inchoate intimations of desire. On one level, Guillory is acknowledging the difficult reflexivity in Kermode’s proposals – specifically the idea that higher pleasure is what canon does, so those texts that engage or produce this at any one moment immanently compose the contours of canon. More importantly, however, Guillory wants to uncouple this pleasure principle from the monumentalization of literary works and to cast aesthetic pleasure into the maelstrom of human experience for which literature itself is not necessarily the preeminent medium. Politically, one might prefer the libertarian optics of horizontalism, but there is something in Guillory’s conscious uncoupling that betrays the level of abstraction at work. What if, for instance, the abstract universals of the canon were themselves elements of determinate abstraction, in the way that Karl Marx understands the complex interanimation of capital and labor? The point would not be about abstract equivalence or substitution, as if cultural capital is simply capital tout court, but it would be about how to read the conditions of canon formation as a concrete manifestation of abstract living. Canon formation is a socially necessary abstraction for the real of aesthetic value. Literary works do not simply perform the substance of this abstraction and can survive their canons but they cannot in themselves elect to stand outside their material history, which manifests the abstraction in which they are mediated. One can reject the idea that the aesthetic is an escape from all that perfunctory happenstance, yet even this appreciable refusal enacts the substance of abstraction that is its ground.

4 The Loosening of Canon Changes in how a canon is constituted are significant and, however hyperbolic canon wars become, they are no less pertinent than the terms advanced by Bloom in defense of the Western canon. Henry Louis Gates Jr.’s contribution to this debate, Loose Canons, registers a turning point for literary history in history, when the dismantling of abhorrent apartheid in South Africa and the collapse of actually existing socialism saw a concomitant emergence of neo-nationalism and border-defying neoliberalism. As Gates points out, and as mentioned above, change was indicated

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earlier in the massive decolonization movements of the twentieth century and in the social activism that often accompanied such resistance in imperial centers. Multiculturalism, which often appeared as somewhat more arid state policy, agitated canon constitution in substantial ways, both progressively in acknowledging the depth of literary resources, and more controversially in stirring a kind of reactive if often disguised nationalism. Attacking multiculturalism, Gates notes, is hopeless because it is already embedded: “Mixing and hybridity are the rule, not the exception” (1992, xvi). From this perspective, defense of a Western canon may be lauded for appreciating Shakespeare and Dante but practically, whatever was ‘Western’ in that invention no longer sanctions their sole and somewhat lonely inclusion. Gates says ‘yes’ to the influence of the Western literary tradition but ‘no’ emphatically to its monopoly on literary excellence. Again, the argument is not for the baleful decision between old fustian canons and new shiny ‘woke’ ones but about the social function of canonicity in how literature is identified and thought. We might restrict this to curricula and shoring up the forlorn foundations of literature departments in the contemporary academy, but the invocation of abstraction offers a broader understanding of the nature of material force, even if literature must necessarily occupy a problematic space within its shifting contours. Gates’s ‘middle way’ polemics are collegial but pointed, and in some ways the quarter century since his intervention has proved the basic supposition that there is no return to some primordial English or Englishness in English Departments. His chapter, “Canon Confidential” (1992, 3–15) is hilarious, the canon wars retold as a ‘Sam Slade’ caper (Bloom is featured as a suspect in the killing of T.S. Eliot!). The idea is to take a popular cultural form to reveal the whole great works conspiracy. Some of the critics mentioned are part of history rather than the conversation, but the general thrust is sound: the defense of standards, norms, principles and the like cannot in themselves substantiate the texts chosen to perform their work, even if some form of consensus around them might be deemed desirable. The old canon is old not because the texts are but because the grounds of value have shifted so that such works must live their presence differently. Does this represent a decline, a derogation of higher learning and its civilizing mission? To the extent that civilization was too narrowly defined and demonstrably connected to a project not beyond occupation and genocide, words like decline and declining are warranted. Gates’s angle is to consider the machinery of canon – that a lot of people have to be in on it: the publishers (with their backlists), specific book series, the agents, the publicists, the reviewers, the teachers, the grad students, even the teachers’ union leader. The literary canon is described as ‘the organization’ to which Slade comments, “Who would’ve thought it? Literary immortality a protection racket” (1992, 11). He is told there is no immortality, twenty, maybe forty years, but after that, who knows – perhaps a call back after another fifty years. He witnesses thousands of books being pulped, the works of those out of canon luck and a pointed reminder to literary critics of their own half-lives. Slade, who has been paid by a certain ‘Estelle’ to expose the conspiracy, discovers that one of his

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poems is to be featured in a Norton anthology. “It’s going to be deconstructed, reconstructed, and historicized in PMLA. And there’s going to be a couple of questions about it on the New York Regents Exam in English” (1992, 14). Because he is now in on the game, Slade feels powerless to criticize it, at which point Estelle is revealed to be … Thomas Pynchon! Pynchon wanted to be out of the canon, and now Slade is in it. It’s a tough job, Slade concludes, but someone has to do it. For all of his light-hearted touch, Gates does address several of the difficulties of the canon. Much of this remains a vital conversation that is presumably discussed in other parts of this volume. Revenue streams and streams of consciousness have maddeningly mixed in literary history for some time so few will be surprised that monetizing the Anglophone may not be outside its aesthetic reach. Whatever the anthological imperative and the conspiracy theory in its formation, the canon is now taken not so much as a confirmation of the ‘is’ of aesthetic essence and a transhistorical value, but rather as symptomatic of the conditions of appreciation in terms of necessary literature. However, many touchstones, in Matthew Arnold’s parlance (2015), might have been arrayed, there is now a greater understanding of the worlding and worldliness in which they are enmeshed. Yes, this includes the sociological (and therefore the danger of not seeing what is pure in literature as a result) but one would like to think that the becoming of the literary is always a becoming otherwise in its apprehension, and that the struggle over pertinent qualifiers in a canon’s representation (‘Anglophone,’ ‘World’) is simultaneously a wrestle with the angels of aesthetics – those that demand from canons more than they can possibly contain. Seen in this light, a Western literary canon should not be immediately dismissed but read through the terms of its history, literary and otherwise. Texts are read and re-read over centuries and, as Bloom points out, this hinges both on authorial abilities and on a continuing capacity to rearticulate them. Rather than interpret such a dynamic as managed only by literary critics, an Anglophone World Literatures canon is a distillation of multiple modes of the literary and of its apprehension. It is far from being the sublation of Bloom’s instructive preferences but it is inexorably entangled with the super canon of literary organization: world literature itself. On the face of it, world literature as canon is a brilliant compromise between the parochialism and bleached classicism of the traditional canon, and the philological plenitude of languages and literatures at a world scale. One is not swallowed whole by the other, because world literature is screened by global comparatism. This means for the most part that the primary language in representing the canon decides on what that world literature can be. All sorts of literature then get canonized in translation which is just like the Western canon (mostly already in translation) but with notable and extensive competition. While an idea of world literature is long standing, and not altogether Goethe’s invention, the institutional and other pressures on the identity of literary study has given it new life in recent decades. World literature as canon is a provocative conceit because, after all, who would argue against canon exclusivity if world was the limiting term? In practice, of course, ‘world’ is no less surreptitious

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than the ‘organization’ because it would seem to obviate choice in actually making it. There is no space here to recount the detailed paths of world literature’s reemergence (different and sometimes incommensurate conceptualizations arising among critics like Damrosch, Moretti, Casanova and others with chapters in this very volume) but they all lead through the ‘loosening’ of the canon already noted in Gates. This can both make canon anthologies longer (six volumes for Damrosch, for instance) or, by using the multi- of multiculturalism to multiply canon, produce a plethora of canons that indicate a specialization within the literary rather than an essence in literature per se. Anglophone World Literatures may thus be seen as a canon among canons, but its genealogy is intimately tied to the world of world literature and this requires further comment.

5 World Literature and Social Change When Marx and Engels famously invoke world literature in the Communist Manifesto it is to herald it as a culmination of liberation on a world scale, that literature becomes commensurate with the world as part of a transformation of socio-economic worldliness, one that overcomes the constraints of the literary by nations, states and classes. Rather than world literature being an expression of hegemony it is interpreted as properly the product of counter-hegemony. It is not just a philosophical dispensation on the character of private worldliness, or a finely tuned Weltanschauung; it is, rather, literature’s freedom in a world constituted by liberation as such. The circulation of the literary meets the world in a new constellation, new grounds for interaction and debate, and these will inform a literature freed from what used to be necessity. To be sure, this is a utopian characterization, and is no less problematic in its own way than carving a canon with the fine tools of Enlightenment principles in general. Nevertheless, there is a sense that the becoming of world literature in this articulation has not entirely disappeared from the power dynamics identified in radical theory and this is one reason why the limits of world literature in the present also contain the possibilities of canon in a new key. Again, this understanding is almost coterminous with the category of world literature itself. In the nineteenth century the Irish critic Hutcheson Macaulay Posnett (self-professed inventor of the term ‘comparative literature’) offered world literature as “the severance of literature from defined social groups – the universalizing of literature” (2014, 43). Such a definition represents a freedom of necessity from social particularity which, even if it continues to signal the problems of world, universal and literature invoked so far (the grounds are decidedly idealist in a Bloomian fashion), nevertheless indicates a shaking free not altogether divorced from the vision of Marx and Engels. What Posnett’s contribution (much like Rabindranath Tagore’s a few decades later) underlines is the relay between worlding and humanism when world

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literature assumes global pretentions. If humanism is supposed to ‘solve’ the antinomies of difference built into the world as concept, competing visions of humanism appear to reproduce them. The critique of orientalism articulated by Edward Said (1978) is a defense of humanism as worldliness opposed to a humanism bent on rationalizing ethnic or racial hierarchies in its cause. This is a way to integrate and interrogate literature on a world scale, unless humanism itself is read as a limit case, not just from some theological emphasis, but as an ideological filter seen as sufficient to its object. Said is often read as a founder of postcolonial studies (a very reluctant one to be sure) and, among the many ways his intervention is salient, his critique of a certain institutionalization of knowledge, including questions of canon, prepare the way for rethought constellations in education. To some extent, the new world (literature) order is an inadvertent by-product, but from a decolonial perspective many of the theoretical frameworks for world literature are but a compromise with the mythical matrix of old. Indeed, while Dipesh Chakrabarty (2000), for instance, contributes a strong polemic for provincializing Europe and decentering such essence on postcolonial grounds, world literature may recuperate and extend such attachments within the innocence of ‘world’ as a horizon. In fact, David Damrosch (2003) weaves crucial qualifiers into his influential rendering of world literature, noting both that such literature circulates beyond its culture of origin either in the language of that culture or in translation, and that world literature as such is always acknowledged from a local perspective. Lurking beneath these points is precisely the question of cultural power that decolonization also confronts. Thus, while local purview might shape world literature, specific locales are more determinate than others. It is noticeable, for instance, that before the sea-change remarked upon by Gates, vibrant discussions about world literature were not uncommon in the socialist bloc, reflecting both the challenge remarked upon in the Communist Manifesto and a kind of popular front aesthetics of cultural exchange. As Katerina Clark (2011) has explained, local can mean political exigency, so that world literature could be invoked to forestall the challenge of fascism in Western Europe, while the aesthetic, including Bloom’s interpretation, could also be read to counter adherence to the mere accumulation of things and money. For a brief period, the Soviet ‘Library of World Literature’ was a canon of aesthetic reference (in translation) that dared to suggest worldliness was internationalist and collaborative in a way that necessarily enlarged anti-fascism and anti-capitalism (the socialist worlding of world literature in China [PRC] would require a different argument, especially around the emphasis that appeared at the end of the Cultural Revolution). World literature could also mean questioning the limits of socialist realism at the time, although Stalinism generally stifled that possibility and a version of canon conformity ensued. The point here is not just that it supports Damrosch’s stress on locality but that internationalism necessarily questioned Western European prerogatives even if decolonization was not characterized as being at stake (in contrast to histories of the period now, especially with regard to the Soviets, and eventually to Soviet satellites during the Cold War).

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6 Translation While the concept of ‘world’ in world literature has been problematized elsewhere (cf. Hitchcock 2010, 2013), the pivotal factor here is translation. If canons are bundles of power relations, geopolitical, geo-economic, geo-aesthetic, geo-social, the language medium is never happenstance or a hiccup in the holism of the world system. For all the nuance that Pascale Casanova brings to her Wallerstein-inspired world systems critique of world literature, centers of language are folded into the relative autonomy of the world literature arrayed. Despite acknowledging the predicament of the postcolonial writer, Casanova (2004) seems more interested in moving the Greenwich Meridian a few degrees east (to Paris) rather than defamiliarizing the politics of language in that move. Simply put, the production of a world literature, even a comparatively modest attempt like that of the Soviet Union, requires a massive and persistent translation machine to fathom significantly the difference of culture on a world scale, but one that in its enthusiastic attention to target languages cannot help but homogenize and reduce the worldliness at stake (because dependent on specific linguistic resources over others, even if foreignized). For philological comparatists and their heirs, like Damrosch, translation relations are a complex concatenation of possibility and impasse in rendering the world of world literature. What is the status of language learning in a world of language conversion which, like commerce, has its reserve currency? This is one of the reasons Emily Apter titles her contribution Against World Literature, but even with her strong critique of the politics of translation the accompanying theorization is doggedly Francocentric or Gallocentric and once again the barometer of world literature moves East, but not very far. Apter’s use of Barbara Cassin’s edited volume, Dictionary of Untranslatables: A Philosophical Lexicon, would appear to raise the stakes in cultural exchange by marking the constitutive gaps in the relay of concepts globally, of which world literature is necessarily a part. Most of the time, however, the impasse is actually one of mistranslation rather than untranslatability and, whereas the latter offers all kinds of theoretical prospects (Derridean, to be sure), the former is more about the rigors of language training and workable methodologies. Translation theorists, like Susan Bassnett (2013) and Lawrence Venuti (2013), may differ substantially on how translations materialize but at the very least they recognize the centrality and professionalism of the process and that translation (or lack thereof) undoes a good deal of the globality in world literature. Even if world literature has offered a lifeline to some comparative literature programs in the West over the last quarter century, language training has maintained close ties with major European languages, both inhibiting understanding of cultural difference within Europe and sharply curtailing any possibility of a greater world literature in that endeavor. It is not that world literature can only depend upon the kind of philological expertise in the reader exemplified by a polymath of language like Erich Auerbach, but that the shape shifting of canon seems to press for more rather than less language study on

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a world scale. If the stark paradox of untranslatability is that it is translatable, then a concomitant impasse exists in world literature, for which world can only be translated into something that it is not. What could possibly come close to world literature while minimizing these structural antinomies of translation?

7 Anglophone World Literatures Anglophone World Literatures is at once a mark of critical distance from the dubious particularisms or false universalism of the ‘world literature is more than enough’ strategy and a ‘Great Works are set in stone’ aestheticism. The ‘s’ in Anglophone World Literatures of course, is a nod to the multi- of multiculturalism, one that in this case multiplies both world, anglophone, and literature, separately and together. Just as the multiplication in Damrosch’s world literature against the Western canon required many more volumes over Bloom’s tome, so the innocent ‘s’ of Anglophone World Literatures potentially necessitates whole libraries of representation, and how can this not be a good thing? If literature undeniably makes worlds then an awful lot of them can be shuffled beneath the banner of Anglophone World Literatures. The answer to Sartre’s question ‘What is literature?’ (1966) often hinges on another, ‘What isn’t?’. Could thinking the negative help one to fathom the ‘is’ of Anglophone World Literatures in its otherwise daunting multiplicity, and subsequently to pose canon as the counter to its profligate ‘s’? Would one want to do that, since it runs the risk of re-introducing exclusion over and above the impetus of democratic discernment? If the old canon refers less to a list of specific works than it does to a process of disciplinary distinction, then the new canon under the sign of Anglophone World Literatures maintains that interest in an (almost) impossible tension with canonicity itself. Such a canon readily acknowledges the power of literary imagination to exceed the world(s) to which it refers while attempting to indicate the extensive parameters that such a category somehow encompasses. The tension, therefore, gives us the formulation, ‘this canon which is not one.’ I do not see this as a random reference to Luce Irigaray’s crucial polemic, This Sex which is Not One (1985), but as a reminder that her demystification of ‘sex’ in the Western philosophical tradition is part of the epistemological challenge that would now give us a canon that cannot be one if it is open beyond enclosure. It can no longer be the ‘obliging prop’ for Western aesthetic categories that pretend the circulation of the literary on a world scale is always and everywhere unalloyed exchange. As with Irigaray’s critique, the point is not simply to remark on inequality or unevenness but to question the logic of exchange itself. There are limits to the parallel, and necessarily so, but in such catachresis we nevertheless glimpse something of the power of the imaginary as multiple and diffuse. Whereas the difficulty in Irigaray is often the preservation of phallogocentrism in its displacement

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and a concomitant lingering of heteronormativity, the impasse in Anglophone World Literatures is whether one should continue to entertain the category of canon at all. Here we should qualify rather than quantify plurality. Since there are canons (cf. Gates 1984; Lauter 1991; Csicsila 2004), adding an ‘s’ to literature is neither surprising nor disabling. If one resists deploying it as a pure measure of literary works, i.e. their number, then the multiplicity at stake may curve more towards a qualitative change in literary worldliness. On the one hand, this positively addresses the knotted nature of Anglophone writing in different spaces and places and ponders how such literature might disrupt the more deleterious aspects of its genealogical possibility by creating worlds other to the ones that globalization itself might favor. On the other hand, even polycentrism and cultural variation are not beyond niche-marketing and the commodification of the Other. One can play the system to alternative effect, as Rebecca Walkowitz details in Born Translated (2015), but this may cede too much to the logic of circulation at work and does not in itself undermine the Anglocentrism of Eurocentrism merely by being Anglophone elsewhere. Perhaps, then, in thinking a canon that is not one, we can take up such elements of contamination in the very concept, a certain inexorability in canon formation when the literary is at stake, to concretize the negative dialectics in Anglophone World Literatures. This would not dismiss it, but place more pressure on the politics of reading and writing it entails. In many respects, the impress of canon here replays a familiar division between those who practice literary criticism and those who favor theoretical investigation. When postcolonial theory dared to question the confluence of power and exclusion in the study of literature, the challenge included various modes of canon confrontation (to be fair, theory too was not beyond being subject to this intervention, as Spivak’s “Can the Subaltern Speak?”, cf. Morris 2010, makes abundantly clear). It is not new to suggest the liberalizing of the canon into a new World Literature was a way to diffuse the pointed political critique of culture and imperialism (and that regrettably is not some distant and sublated past, especially with regard to systemic racism and the combined and uneven development of the world system). More recent moves to emphasize surface reading over ‘suspicious reading’ are notable both for their admirable respect for the pleasures of the text and for further distancing the politics of critique. Rita Felski’s The Limits of Critique (2015) describes the politics of reading in critique as “digging down” (2015, 53), and includes the example of Fredric Jameson’s dialectical analysis (which is subsequently dug up and largely discarded). The line is not between canon and non-canonical but rather about the effects of theory on the possibility of canon. Felski comments: That the shake-up of the canon in recent decades and the influx of new voices and visions has altered our perceptions of what literature is and does is indisputable. Yet it hardly follows that such changes are best captured in the idiom of critique – rather than inspiration, invention, solace, recognition, reparation, or passion. (Felski 2015, 17 – a redux of Kermode noted earlier)

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With the business as usual dimensions of World Literature interrogated in the last quarter century, could the splintering of canons provide a less controversial way to preserve the interpretive instincts of Felski’s call? To go that route would preempt in advance the negative dialectic of a canon alive to its own impossibility. It is true that, as Mads Rosendahl Thomsen has pointed out, a counter-canon like postcolonial literature can, and has, become absorbed and reconfigured within world literature, and indeed as more postcolonial writing has itself challenged what has been made canonical in its representation. The transformation from world literature as Western literature to world literature as (also) postcolonial literature is an involution rather than an evolution of canon. Ankhi Mukherjee (2014) has argued less controversially that postcolonialism’s pressure on the canon inspires a renewable cosmopolitanism. Whenever we unpack our library, in the manner Homi Bhabha (1994) describes by referencing Walter Benjamin, canon can become organic and life-affirming, a measure, however contingent, of our being in the world and its determining substance. Mukherjee’s articulation, however, maintains a critical function in such cosmopolitan consciousness: “Canons are normative, evaluative, and self-perpetuating: they also possess dialectical resources for forgings of identity that lead through the pain and shame of acculturation and deracination, as with Rushdie and Coetzee, to timeless and talismanic forms of power” (2014, 7–8). The keyword here is not one that would perturb Felski (‘normative’ perhaps), but ‘forgings,’ a word of both making and making falsely that captures the precise ambivalence of any canonizing project. Even if we restrict this making to the ‘world-making’ of the literary text, its situatedness over time cannot guarantee the world it makes, which may itself become false in new contexts or before different identities. Mukherjee usefully weaves postcolonial concerns into her sense of the Anglophone by emphasizing that the English at stake is always already translated in its colonial and postcolonial genealogies. It is an ‘othering of English’ in which ‘decolonizing (the) English’ (Hitchcock 2001) is globally mediated rather being geographically fixed in spaces claimed by imperial design. In a further distancing of political import, Thomsen (2017) suggests a canon may be discerned via a data-driven approach, a methodology that can indeed reveal patterns of canonization and associated literary phenomena, as seen in Franco Moretti et al.’s Literary Lab experiments, and in the extensive data-chunking of Alexander Beecroft (although Moretti’s approach to data is far from being apolitical). To the extent that digital activity is a massively important research resource, what can be gleaned from Wikipedia, Amazon, Google and the like, can coordinate an Anglophone World Literatures canon of a sort. True, as Thomsen points out, graphs do not in themselves prove much but do at least provide a contrast to intuitions or summary predilections. The data are instructive and show, for instance, that some postcolonial writers (like Rushdie) are being read more than others (Ngugi, for example). Of course, numbers are not everything, as Thomsen acknowledges (2017), and what makes the canon has already excluded most of extant Anglophone writing. Certainly, if Anglophone World

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Literatures feature specific writers then the figure of the migrant commands its own data set. Cosmopolitan, often multi-lingual, and able to speak the space between cultures, the migrant writer can take English as a vernacular of literary creation and sees any perceived privilege as an opportunity for both filiation and disavowal. This may exclude the politics of postcoloniality, but the potential exists to write this into and across how a canon of Anglophone World Literatures is compiled and communicated. At the very least this would continue the work of decolonization by other means in the sense that part of what unsettles the distinctiveness of such a canon is the aura of unfinished business in disarticulating a specific imperial Englishness in history. The argument above has emphasized that the logic of canon has changed and is changing (and the data to some extent confirm this), so how might this inflect the Anglophone World Literatures at the heart of this project?

8 Conclusion If the re-articulation of world literature in the past quarter century is eerily symptomatic of, rather than simply an exception to, globalization and the free market (in literature) of neoliberalism, then the effulgence of Anglophone World Literatures may yet trouble the canon commodification that has ensued. Here are two caveats to this hope, one which concerns how canons are now conceived, and another which refers to the institutionalization of the Anglophone. Neither are grounds to reject Anglophone World Literatures but nevertheless they inform the Pharmakon (poison/cure) of its canon credentials. First, whether old or new, a world literature canon of any kind is worldly in both its production and reception. Pheng Cheah’s argument (2016) about the normative claims of the literary in the world may have more philosophical force than social confirmation, but at least he takes seriously that literature is not a passive reference point for critical or market rationality. The problem, however, is a form of compressed canonicity in which the half-life of a canon has been foreshortened by the speed of social mediation and a version of credential consciousness in academe and certain corresponding class fractions. Part of this is understandable because literature is vast and every specialization within it should not be outside claiming its canon. Turnover within a canon today, however, seems less important than the proliferation of canons and a shelf-life presentism tuned only to the now. There is a dialectical inversion between schools of literary thought and literature itself. Critical approaches come and go, New Criticism, Deconstruction, New Historicism and the like, but literary objects seemed to live by a different temporal scale and were less sensitive to the whims of methodology. Individual works of literature find it harder to maintain their canonicity now both because of the sheer number of texts that could be included and because critical paradigms do not hinge as much on the longue durée of texts themselves. While one cannot yet talk in terms of nano-canons or flash

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canons, the challenge to authoritative canons has been undermined to a degree by its own success. Now that the game is up on the protection racket Gates lampoons, the defense of canon is principally in the proliferation of canons. To be sure, this is not a free for all and reflects important sustained activism and thought around social exclusion across the production of knowledge. Yet defending canons seems less important than making them, especially with so many appropriate texts available. The capaciousness of an Anglophone World Literatures canon (as evidenced by discussions in this very volume) would seem to be its chief advantage in challenging the gatekeepers of yore. To those who say that ‘more’ is a publishing company’s favorite number, the response should be to interrogate the boundary logic of an otherwise open canon. A brief look at how such a canon gets taught reveals a pertinent ambivalence in its openness, as if to prove that academic inertia itself is enough to stall the formidable desire for the new and the now in course content. Some courses in ‘Global Anglophone’ read as postcolonial, and especially with regard to British imperialism, but this re-branding has a tendency to absorb rather than recontextualize the theoretical debates accompanying such a focus. One department’s ‘Anglophone Literature group’ forwards a profile that is basically business as usual and touts researchers in the fields of eighteenth, nineteenth, and twentieth-century British literature, and in nineteenth, twentieth, and twenty-first century American literature. For every literature department that recognizes the transcultural extent of English language and literature in a globalized world, there are others who hesitate enough only to change the label rather than the logic of what this integration might mean. Aamir Mufti (2015) critically questions the European one-worldism of literary study in Forget English!, yet it is easy to spot departments where his objections are duly noted but the paradigm maintains an obstinate presence. Is this also the reality of canon discussion? If, as Gates has stated, “a well-marked anthology functions in the academy to create a tradition, as well as to define and preserve it” (1984, 31) then the canon of Anglophone World Literatures is before us as some specter bounding from the future (like the function of the frightful hobgoblin in the Manifesto noted above). Just as postcolonial literature was read in the 1990s to expand and contradict conventional canons of English literature (including those that favored a nod to Commonwealth writing), so Anglophone World Literatures might be said to broaden the gamut of world literature in English while being somewhat more modest about its correspondence with the world in that conjuncture. What is most refreshing about the category is that it takes seriously the institutional power that permitted such an area of study in the first place. True, its propositional faith in the literature may blind it to the double bind of critique and complicity, but even this risk can prompt deeper debate about the contours of literary exchange. If one argues that an Anglophone World Literatures canon may not in fact be one, it is not a studied disavowal but precisely a reminder about the pitfalls of canon formation. In the current peripeteia of canon perhaps, it is enough to grant each one its ‘fifteen seconds,’ yet the stakes

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are different with Anglophone literature because of the historical lineaments that have composed it. An appropriate legitimation crisis is, therefore, as much a focus of interest as the laudable book lists drawn up to attend the canon. To consider literature in this way is not to demean it, but may be seen as a form of worldliness in which literature finds another degree of critical embeddedness in who we are and what we might like to be.

9 Bibliography 9.1 Works Cited Apter, Emily. Against World Literature: On the Politics of Untranslatability. London: Verso, 2013. Arnold, Matthew. Culture and Anarchy and Other Selected Prose. New York: Penguin, 2015. Bassnett, Susan. Translation. New York: Routledge, 2013. Beecroft, Alexander. An Ecology of World Literature: From Antiquity to the Present Day. London: Verso, 2015. Bhabha, Homi K. The Location of Culture. London: Routledge, 1994. Bloom, Harold. The Western Canon: The Books and School of the Ages. New York: Harcourt Brace, 1994. Bourdieu, Pierre. Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste. Trans. Richard Nice. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1984. Casanova, Pascale. The World Republic of Letters. Trans. Malcolm B. DeBevoise. Cambridge, MA and London: Harvard University Press, 2004 [1999]. Cassin, Barbara, ed. Dictionary of Untranslatables: A Philosophical Lexicon. Trans. Steven Rendall, Christian Hubert, Jeffrey Mehlman, Nathaneal Stein, and Michael Syrotinski. Trans. eds. Emily Apter, Jacques Lezra, and Michael Wood. Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2014 [2004]. Chakrabarty, Dipesh. Provincializing Europe: Postcolonial Thought and Historical Difference. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000. Cheah, Pheng. What is a World? On Postcolonial Literature as World Literature. Durham: Duke University Press, 2016. Clark, Katerina. Moscow, the Fourth Rome. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2011. Csicsila, Joseph. Canons by Consensus: Critical Trends and American Literature Anthologies. Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2004. Damrosch, David. “World Literature in a Postcanonical, Hypercanonical Age.” Comparative Literature in an Age of Globalization. Ed. Haun Saussy. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2006. 43–53. Damrosch, David. What is World Literature? Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2003. Felski, Rita. The Limits of Critique. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2015. Gates Jr., Henry Louis. Loose Canons. New York: Oxford University Press, 1984. Hitchcock, Peter. “Decolonizing (the) English.” South Atlantic Quarterly 100.3 (2001): 749–771. Hitchcock, Peter. “The World, The Literary, and the Political.” Cultural Autonomy: Frictions and Connections. Ed. Petra Rethmann, Imre Szeman, and William D. Coleman. Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press, 2010. 86–110.

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Hitchcock, Peter. “Defining the World.” Literary Materialisms. Ed. Mathias Nilges and Emilio Sauri. New York: Palgrave, 2013. 125–144. Irigaray, Luce. This Sex Which Is Not One. Trans. Catherine Porter and Carolyn Burke. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1985. Kermode, Frank. Pleasure and Change: The Aesthetics of Canon. New York: Oxford University Press, 2004. Lauter, Paul. Canons and Contexts. New York: Oxford University Press, 1991. Marx, Karl, and Friedrich Engels. The Communist Manifesto. New York: Verso, 2012 [1848]. Moretti, Franco, et al. “Canon/Archive: Large-Scale Dynamics in the Literary Field.” Pamphlets of the Standford Literary Lab 11 (2016): 1–13. https://litlab.stanford.edu/LiteraryLabPamphlet11.pdf (18 Oct. 2018). Morris, Rosalind. Can the Subaltern Speak? Reflections on the History of an Idea. New York: Columbia University Press, 2010. Mufti, Aamir R. Forget English! Orientalisms and World Literatures. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2015. Mukarovsky, Jan. Aesthetic Function, Norm and Value as Social Facts. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan, 1970. Mukherjee, Ankhi. What is a Classic? Postcolonial Rewriting and Invention of the Canon. Palo Alto: Stanford University Press, 2014. Posnett, Hutcheson Macaulay. “What Is World Literature?” World Literature in Theory. Ed. David Damrosch. Chichester: Wiley, 2014. 42–46. Said, Edward W. Orientalism. London: Routledge, 1978. Sartre, Jean-Paul. What Is Literature? Trans. Bernard Frechtman. New York: Washington Square Press, 1966. Thomsen, Mads Rosendahl. Mapping World Literature: International Canonization and Transnational Literatures. London: Continuum, 2008. Thomsen, Mads Rosendahl. “Changing Spaces: Canonization of Anglophone World Literature.” Anglia 135.1 (2017): 51–66. Venuti, Lawrence. Translation Changes Everything: Theory and Practice. New York: Routledge, 2013. Walkowitz, Rebecca. Born Translated: The Contemporary Novel in an Age of World Literature. New York: Columbia University Press, 2015.

9.2 Further Reading Allen, Nicola, and David Simmon, eds. Reassessing the Twentieth-Century Canon: From Joseph Conrad to Zadie Smith. London: Palgrave, 2014. Baraka, Amiri. “Cultural Revolution and The Literary Canon.” Callaloo 14.1 (1991): 150–156. Bona, Mary Jo, and Irma Maini, eds. Multiethnic Literature and Canon Debates. Albany: State University of New York Press, 2006. Buchenau, Barbara, Virginia Richter, and Marijke Denger. Post-Empire Imaginaries? Anglophone Literature, History, and the Demise of Empires. Leiden: Brill, 2015. Guillory, John. Cultural Capital: The Problem of Literary Canon Formation. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993. Judy, Ronald A.T. (Dis)Forming the American Canon: African-Arabic Slave Narratives and the Vernacular. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993. Khotimsky, Maria. “World Literature, Soviet Style: A Forgotten Episode in the History of the Idea.” Ab Imperio 3 (2013): 110–154.

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Kolbas, E. Dean. Critical Theory and the Literary Canon. Boulder: Westview Press, 2001. Kramnick, Jonathan Brody. Making the English Canon: Print-Capitalism and the Cultural Past, 1700–1770. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998. Madsen, Deborah L., ed. Post-Colonial Literatures: Expanding the Canon. London: Pluto Press, 1990. Morrissey, Lee. Debating the Canon: A Reader from Addison to Nafisi. London: Palgrave, 2005. Palumbo-Liu, David, ed. The Ethnic Canon: Histories, Institutions, and Interventions. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1995. Thieme, John. Postcolonial Con-texts: Writing Back to the Canon. London: Bloomsbury, 2002.

Vilashini Cooppan

17 Teaching Anglophone World Literature Abstract: This examination of the critical lexicon of world anglophone contextualizes the term in relation to commonwealth literature, world literature, and such theorists of the postcolonial global as Stuart Hall, with an emphasis on deriving reading practices. While it references a number of canonical world anglophone novelists, the essay seeks primarily to historicize and theorize the language politics of this corpus in relation to the ongoing asymmetries of colonial power. Drawing on emblematic writers’ statements, Emily Apter’s model of untranslatability, and the Francophone Caribbean writer Édouard Glissant’s model of poetic language, the essay explores language as the site of both commonality and difference. Key Terms: World, global, commonwealth, relational, difference

1 Introduction: World Literature and World Anglophone Is the world in world literature the same as the world in world anglophone? The former is both a field and a method. As field, world literature surveys what Johann Wolfgang von Goethe long ago imagined as a global network of literary texts that simultaneously express and transcend their national spirit. As method, world literature emphasizes such concepts as (1) intertextual traffic and transformation (cf. Damrosch 2003; Moretti 2000; 2003; 2013; Casanova 2004 [1999]), resonance (cf. Dimock 2001; 2006), haunting (cf. Cooppan 2001; 2004; 2005) and networked nonlinearity (cf. Cooppan 2012), all of which describe how one text distinct in space, time, language, and culture echoes another; (2) the decisive torqueing of the world in relation to the colonial-imperial world system (cf. Wallerstein 1974; Robbins 1998; Cheah 2003; 2016; Tanoukhi 2008; 2011); and (3) the inheritance of a classical philological tradition of polylingualism and translation (cf. Helgesson and Vermeulen 2015; Bassnett 2018; ↗1 The Beginnings of the Concept; ↗2 Re-Reading Classical Approaches; ↗10 Anglophone World Literatures and Translation; ↗6 Global Literature, World Literature and Worlding Literature; ↗7 Cosmopolitanism beyond the Center-Periphery Model). The emerging field of world anglophone brings world literature’s conceptual frameworks and critical problematics to the prior formation of commonwealth literature, extending the latter’s grudging awareness of anti- and post-colonial writing into a robustly decolonial reading practice. World anglophone foregrounds the place of particular imaginaries – linguistic, regional, geopolitical, historical – in any concept of world and worlding. This interplay between the particular and the general, the small and https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110583182-018

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the large, the text and its context, the home and the world (to recall a 1919 novel auto-translated from Bengali to English by that early apostle of world anglophone literature, Rabindranath Tagore) underscores the decisively relational character of the term world. It is with that relationality that this essay is most profoundly concerned, both as a theoretical affiliation and a tactical strategy. Before turning to the method, consider the madness often ascribed to the terms world and anglophone. Both terms are freighted with imputations of an imperializing spread that hegemonizes and homogenizes, “filling-in” some vast expanse like the “large shining map, marked with all the colours of a rainbow” that Joseph Conrad’s Marlow sees in the offices of the Belgian Company (2006, 10). In such scopic economies, world and anglophone are arrogant projections of unity radiating out from a metropolitan center, fictive totalities veiling uneven, asymmetrical, and shifting terrains of difference. Consider instead the possibility that world and anglophone are chimeras, strange hybrids of noun and adjective, terms that designate something that is and that something’s peculiar orientation, style, approach to something else. World literature, in this sense, is not merely a Goethean catalogue of especially representative national texts that traverse the globe, but a vast canvas of literature subjected to the work of worlding, that is, to being read through patterns of connection, histories of conjuncture, uncanny repetitions, and tactical reinscriptions. Just because the deep matrix of such a world is relational, it does not mean that prior and ongoing vectors of asymmetrical power – particularly colonial and imperial power – are not part of this world. Well over a decade ago, Stuart Hall mapped this relational world by redefining yet another fraught term, the global. Hall’s global, like world literature’s world, is neither “universal” nor “nation- or society-specific” but instead refers to a process in which “lateral and transverse cross-relations […] supplement and simultaneously dis-place the center-periphery, and the global/ local reciprocally re-organise and re-shape one another” (1996, 246). In this understanding of the global, what matters are hybridity, syncretism, multidimensional temporalities, the double inscriptions of colonial and metropolitan times, the two-way cultural traffic characteristic of the contact zones of the cities of the ‘colonised’ long before they have become the characteristic tropes of the cities of the ‘colonising’, the forms of translation and transculturation which have characterised the ‘colonial relation’ from its earliest stages, the disavowals and in-betweenness, the here-and-theres, [that] mark the aporias and re-doublings whose interstices colonial discourses have always negotiated. (Hall 1996, 246)

Read through this simultaneous inscription, the global activates exactly the kind of relational thinking necessary to teaching world anglophone literature. The term anglophone, like global and world, names a conceptual whole even as it pulls it apart, preferring the multiple cross hatchings of difference over any imputations of singularity and totality. This essay provides a road map to the relational economies of world anglophone. From an initial reflection on critical nomenclature, it proceeds to a consideration of language, specifically but not exclusively of

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English. Close reading of the handful of world anglophone novelists referenced here is beyond the essay’s scope, as is a comprehensive index to this emergent canon. Also, large-scale historical formations and transformations have had to be accelerated and simplified. The essay’s central concern is to extend world anglophone literature beyond a generalized postcolonial ‘writing back’ and to nuance its heteroglossic speaking in myriad ‘english’ tongues so as to reveal the deep philosophical structure of a field attuned to relationality, difference, and various practices of comparison. What looms largest throughout is language, the category that perhaps more than any other constitutes world anglophone as field, imaginary, and method.

2 Teaching the Colonizers’ Language: English Is Many Englishes World literature’s world is not necessarily that hegemonic monolingual metropolitanism which Jonathan Arac has pithily called AngloGlobalism (2002, 35), nor the creeping hegemony of the novel form as the world genre that Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak and Haun Saussy have criticized, alongside world literature’s ‘datafication’ of literature and its privileging of maps of flows over the work of languages (cf. Spivak 2004, 108; Saussy 2006, 23). English is many Englishes, and the novel is many recombinant instances of core generic DNA. If the story of their spread conjures a Conradian filling-in of the globe, it equally asks to be narrated as a dynamic exchange, a network of flows and lateral connections, of connectivities and disjunctures, all operating within the relational mesh of language, nation, and culture and in the still-flickering shadow of colonial and imperialist circuitry. One central task of teaching the world anglophone novel is to conjure that past into the present, indeed, to make the axis of time as decisive as the compass of space. For postcolonial studies, a version of temporal nonlinearity has long been necessary. Empire is not over. Like Faulkner’s past, it is not even past. Old imperial world-systems are encrypted into their successors, like the Kenya so devastatingly portrayed by Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o in his 1982 novel Devil on the Cross, auto-translated from Gikuyu, which Ngũgĩ famously adopted after years of writing in English. Kenya is one of many postcolonial nation-states still haunted, as Pheng Cheah argues, by the vampiric forces of global finance capital and structural adjustment policies (2003), and so still condemned, in Neil Lazarus’s phrase, “to retain their peripheral status” (2004, 37). Former commonwealth nations remain unequal, both amongst themselves (India is not Sierra Leone; Canada and Australia are not Guyana), and in their relationship to the once monarchic center of Britain. Such inequalities were too hastily brushed away by Bill Ashcroft, Gareth Griffiths, and Helen Tiffin in The Empire Writes Back: Theory and Practice in Postcolonial Literature (1989), which retooled the prior category of

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commonwealth literature into an early model of world anglophone writing. Despite its evening out of asymmetrical differences, the volume remains notable for its careful taxonomy of linguistic variation, anticolonial genres of resistance, and postcolonial hybrid poetics. In 1991 Salman Rushdie decreed in an essay by the same title, “Commonwealth Literature Does Not Exist.” This curious chimeric invention struck Rushdie as “the very oddest of beasts […] a school of literature whose supposed members deny vehemently that they belong to it” (1991, 61). At the 1983 Commonwealth Writers Conference, Rushdie reports, some nations were in (India, Australia, New Zealand, Kenya, Nigeria, Jamaica, Canada), others were not (South Africa, Pakistan, Ireland, the United States), and absent yet presiding, like God over Creation, was “English literature, the great sacred thing itself” (1991, 62). The category of commonwealth literature understood itself to apply not to all countries with a history of colonialism but rather to selected ones, including white settler colonies. Embedded within the category was an ethos of cross-border transfer reminiscent of Goethe’s ‘Weltliteratur.’ A. Norman Jeffares, addressing the first conference of commonwealth literature at the University of Leeds in 1961, claimed that the commonwealth writer “wants ultimately to be judged not because he gives us a picture of life in a particular place, in a particular situation, but by the universal, lasting quality of his writings, judged by neither local nor yet national standards. Good writing is something which transcends borders, whether local or national, whether of the mind or of the spirit” (1965, xviii). This version of commonwealth as world expresses what we might call canonical centripetality – the mapping and clocking of the ‘rest’ in relation to some centered ‘best,’ itself the purveyor of valuations based on a universal humanism. In Rushdie’s 1983 assessment, commonwealth literature was “an exclusive ghetto” that transformed literature in English into “something far narrower, something topographical, nationalistic, possibly even racially segregationist,” even as its very existence attested to an aesthetic of riotous mixture that all but slayed the commonwealth beast (1991, 62). In Rushdie’s gleeful conclusion, “those peoples who were once colonized by the language are now rapidly remaking it, domesticating it, becoming more and more relaxed about the way they use it – assisted by the English language’s enormous flexibility and size, they are carving out large territories for themselves within its frontiers” (1991, 63). Writers of earlier moments made this case too, as in the preface to Raja Rao’s Indian novel Kanthapura (1938), which stated the dilemma that “one has to convey in a language that is not one’s own the spirit that is one’s own” (1967 [1938], 3), or the Nigerian novelist Chinua Achebe’s warning a couple decades later, “let no one be fooled by the fact that we write in English for we intend to do unheard of things with it” (1975, 7). Achebe’s meticulous lacing of a colonial English idiom with Igbo orality is not Rushdie’s irreverent and madcap English, informed by a keen ear for the long history of Anglo-English’s Hobson-Jobson lexicon of oddities. Nor is either of those the Trinidadian V.S. Naipaul’s Conradian English, at once sepulchral in its chilled precision, occasionally animated by flashes of local idiom, and hauntingly ghosted by

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the long history of imperial usage that aspired to create in language what the Greenwich observatory did in time, namely a measurable standard. English, spoken as a first language by 400 million people, is now a global language whose rich variety and organic adaptability is as germane to its history as is its imperial handmaiden service. The term global anglophone inherits both commonwealth’s ideological-mythological complex of a community composed around an all-powerful center, and the actually lived conditions of centrifugal dispersal that have always undone commonwealth as category. If the former recalls the homogenizing and hegemonizing gridding of the world into ‘English’ and ‘other’ zones, the latter unleashes the disruptive multiplicity that a chimera presents to extant taxonomies of singular being. World anglophone is just such a chimera. With the passage from commonwealth’s ‘this, not that’ to world anglophone’s ‘all this, and that’ comes a methodological reorientation from adjudicating belonging (who’s in, who’s out) to soliciting and keeping open an encounter with difference.

3 Worlding: Teaching Global Anglophone Literature One of world anglophone’s pedagogical interventions is to bring students into an encounter with alterity that does not domesticate difference through parallelism and eschatological fulfillment (Rushdie as the Indian Joyce, Naipaul as the Trinidadian Conrad), but instead maps a world striated by perpetual cross-hatchings and cross-pollinations and marked by multiple differences and distinctions. Such a world is of course the result of imperial power, with its carving up of the globe into zones of belonging and its deeply nationalist sense-making. But such a world is also clearly indebted to an understanding of the global not as a universalizing spread that empire initiates, but rather, to recall Hall, as a particularizing and connecting process that postimperial cultures co-create. Lateral flows in multiple directions, linkages across differences, and the creation of new and mixed forms of expression all suggest the ways in which commonwealth geontologies have led to postcolonial doings, to recall Achebe’s verb. These doings render English unEnglish, like Caliban’s rich and strange tongue. They also transform the narrative genres, forms, and modes which, as much as English, are fodder to world anglophone’s canon. Rao’s self-avowed task to express in “a language that is not one’s own” (1967, 3) results in Kanthapura’s expression of the rhythms of village India through a synthesis of European-style folk realism and novelistic bildungsroman, traces of oral storytelling, and residues of Hindu myth. Add to this G.V. Desani’s animated jigsaw of Shakespeare’s English, Babu English, and imperial club talk in the midcentury madcap modernism of All About H. Hatterr (1948), and the postcolonial demotic of Rushdie’s postmodern Bombay, London, and New York, and we have a sense of how students can see generational, modal, and generic shifts through a close engagement

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with varieties of English. What emerges is a grasp of a global language’s multiple local inflections, infractions, and imbrications. The shape of such understanding looks more like a woven history than a single line of filiation or descent. Through such cross-hatched reading, the category of world anglophone allows us to trace not only the break between empire and its aftermath but also a long history of relational interpenetration between dominant and insurgent languages, aesthetics, and forms. Even as we celebrate the energy of what Rushdie calls mongrel newness (a newness quite old, as Rao, Desani, and others attest), some caution is required. World anglophone should not, by some terminological sleight of hand, subsume empire as an historical and ongoing fact into the globally connected, locally inflected present. Beyond the specter of empire’s violence sinking beneath the sea, like Prospero’s drowned book, there is the danger that the branching diversity of world anglophone fiction will somehow be read back into the British metropole, which again becomes its central node and founding origin. Troubling too is the specter of analogical lateralization, in which one thing is assimilated to another, so that distinct historical experiences of slavery, colonization, indenture, and apartheid, or multiple historical eras of empire, anticolonialism, decolonization, new nationalism, neocolonialism, civil war, state terror, and global migration all become interchangeable in some larger notion of the unending trauma of postcoloniality. To teach world anglophone literature as a language-based category of imperial derivation without the intricacy of these specifications is to miss the chance, so central to the pedagogical work of worlding, to show students that comparative methodology entails both connection and distinction. As an ontological category for pedagogical strategy, world anglophone can reshape the comparativist lexicon of such foundational concepts as world, global, genre, and language. Like the postcolonial study of empire, literary genre offers an object of analysis in perpetual motion, an object that arrives into the present towing along its past and future. Operating through processes of interaction, selection, and recombination, and holding past historical expressions in each present iteration, the concept of genre, like the field of language, provides a networkable unit for worlded analysis (cf. Cooppan 2012). Whether one focuses on the novel, as the present essay does, or on lyric, drama, epic, speculative and science fiction, a generic unit reveals change over time, thanks to the simultaneous inheritance, transmission, and rescrambling of distinct formulas, codes, and expectations. Teachers of the world anglophone novel might situate a series of novels in a history of multiple linguistic and generic doings, say the passage from the late imperial anxieties in Conrad’s modernist chiaroscuro and E.M. Forster’s mannered melancholy, to the anticolonial cut’n’mix of standard English, Jamaican creole, and South Asian languages surfacing in Sam Selvon’s mid-century coming-to-London novels, to the contrast between Naipaul’s rendering of Trinidadian creole in A House for Mr. Biswas (1961) and his redux of period English in An Enigma of Arrival (1987), to Rushdie’s riotous, promiscuously mixed idiom in The Satanic Verses (1988) and Zadie Smith’s northwest London multicultural demotic

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in White Teeth (2000), then continuing on to Amitav Ghosh’s polyglot cross-currents of nineteenth-century imperial English, Malay Lascari, Hindustani, and French in The Ibis Trilogy (2008, 2011, 2015), and ending with such soundings of the street talk and musical sensorium of Afro-Caribbean, Asian, and white English youth as Gautam Malkani’s Londonstani (2006), and, most recently, Guy Gunaratne’s In Our Mad and Furious City (2018). The long arc of this history, unfolding within the space of a once colonial, now postcolonial city, gives substance to Achebe’s and Rushdie’s calls for an English made ‘new’ by all who take it up. As Achebe puts it, “the price a world language must be prepared to pay is submission to many different kinds of use” (1994, 433.) New uses do not, however, cancel out old debts. Perhaps the price of using the term ‘world anglophone’ is a commitment to keep bringing back empire’s formations to the story of postcolonialism’s transformations. Just as crucial is a willingness to let world modify anglophone, allowing the transverse relational networks of global interconnection and the multiple histories of local difference, uneven development, and regional affinity beneath those networks to striate the community of Englishspeaking and English-writing nations. Such a rhizomatic world is far from a totality. This is readily visible in Ghosh’s Ibis Trilogy, with its palimpsestic layering of the history of British imperialism in the era of the Opium Wars, the transition from the slave trade to indenture, and the raw material of language. Language is the novel’s most striking protagonist, a “motley tongue, spoken nowhere but on the water, whose words were as varied as the port’s traffic, an anarchic medley of Portuguese calaluzes and Keral patimars, Arab booms and Bengal paunchways, Malay proas and Tamil catamarans, Hindusthani pulwars and English snows” (2008, 96). Beyond this indexing of polyglot life under empire, Ghosh’s novels allow students to grasp, within the medium of English, the phenomenon of what Emily Apter calls ‘untranslatability’. This “effect of the non-carryover (of meaning) that carries over nonetheless (on the back of grammar)” is produced by “words that assign new meanings to old terms, neologisms, names for ideas that are continually re-translated or mistranslated, translations that are obviously incommensurate” and more (Apter 2013, 35). With an ear tuned to untranslatability, readers of Ghosh can see how language’s “plurilingual composition embodies histories of language travel that do not necessarily reproduce imperial trajectories” (Apter 2013, 42). Apter’s reader’s map for “a translational model” pinpoints phenomena to be encountered (not filled-in like Conrad’s imperial map): “small worlds of idiom and creative idiolect that ford the divide, often imposed on postcolonial writers, between those deferring to the experimental modernity of the West (stream of consciousness, wordplay) and those adhering to a colonial realism informed by local custom and tradition, and the romance of political aspirations to national self-determination” (2013, 43). It is as an encounter with these “small worlds” that one could teach Achebe’s Igbo-rich and proverb-laced Things Fall Apart (1958), in the shadow of the handful of words attributed to Africans in Heart of Darkness (1899) (“Catch ’im, […] Eat ’im!”; “Mistah Kurtz – he dead”, Conrad 2006, 42, 69) or the doubled sacred and profane geometries and migrant babel of Rushdie’s

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Ellowen Deeowen and Jahiliia, or the rippling linguistic cross-currents of Ghosh’s Indian Ocean trilogy. There is world enough in the anglophone novel: enough linguistic diversity and differentiation, enough modal multiplicity, enough generic transformation, enough nation making and transnational linking, enough formal sedimentation of colonial and postcolonial history, to fuel dozens of courses. And yet, if world anglophone is truly to be world-scale, the histories of other languages, other empires, other postcolonial communities of belonging must also be brought into the classroom orbit.

4 Global Anglophone and Francophone Theory The rich tradition of Francophone theory can help formulate pedagogical approaches to the categories of language, genre, and history through which we have so far considered world anglophone reading practices. For example, the Martinican writer Édouard Glissant distinguishes natural poetics, in which the expression a people yearns for “is not opposed to itself either at the level of what it wishes to express or at the level of the language that it puts into practice,” from forced poetics, where “a need for expression confronts an inability to achieve expression” (1992, 120). For Creole to transition from forced poetics to natural poetics, to ascend from the clandestine status of “a secret code” veiling meaning from the master, Creole must evolve more conventional syntax (Glissant 1992, 127). However, Creole for Glissant remains perpetually caught in between states, whether the poles of privation and possibility or those of inchoate orality and written standardization. Creole is both a kind of “verbal delirium […] improvisations, drumbeats, acceleration, dense repetitions, slurred syllables, meaning the opposite of what is said, allegory and hidden meanings,” and, on the other hand, a written language that is “becoming more French in its daily use,” effectively disappearing from the horizon of its own becoming (Glissant 1992, 129, 121). Beyond the constitutive doubleness that points to the ongoing legacies of colonial power and the long shadow of the plantation system, Creole also serves as a linguistic repository for fleshly bodies. Creole carries “the alienated body of the slave […] deprived, in an attempt at complete dispossession, of speech” (Glissant 1992,  122). If writing requires immobility, orality is “inseparable from the movement of the body” – squatting to palaver, feet tapping to music, limbs moving to dance, gesture and posture animating what is said (1992, 122). Orality finds its most elemental bodily expression and its deepest conspiratorial camouflage in the scream, a mark of what cannot be said under the conditions of Western-colonial language. “No one could translate the meaning of what seemed to be nothing but a shout. It was taken to be nothing but the call of a wild animal. This is how the dispossessed man organized his speech by weaving it into the apparently meaningless texture of extreme noise” (1992, 124). This version of untranslatability marks out the indelible place of

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historical violence beneath the language politics of postcolonial societies. It is something which the study of dominant language global literatures, both Anglophone and Francophone, must continually bring forward. Glissant’s scream is a necessary element in this inquiry. Not only does it point to a zone of historical trauma and loss, the expression of which fuels linguistic creation, but it also gives us a figure for tracking that scream into subsequent poetics, not exactly something said but a way of saying, a bodily language, the flesh of the word as the scar of the past. This attention to embodied language at the horizon of historical violence is a crucial element to keep alive within the classroom, as much as the larger geopolitical flows and postimperial asymmetries that comprise the world-systems of global English and world anglophone. How can students be brought to the grasp of embodied language’s capacity to say and not say? Part of the answer has to do with the selection of texts, to be sure. But even more significant is how those texts are read. Close attention to language at the level of word, figure, and syntax can surface the politics of language, as too can the tracking of an untranslatability that exists not only across languages but also within them, at the limit point where traumatic violence at once freezes expression and unleashes a repetitive, reiterative flow. It is in the shadow of such an idea of language, cross-hatched by Glissant’s reading of post-plantation Creole, that one might reapproach Ken Saro-Wiwa’s Nigerian novel Sozaboy (1985), taking its subtitular status as “A Novel in Rotten English” as the mark of a cultural-linguistic crossroad. The colonial-imperial system’s long shadow of subjection, and the energies of a world-scale Creole continuum that gives voice to newness. Rotten English, writes Saro-Wiwa, is “a mixture of Nigerian pidgin English, broken English and occasional flashes of good, even idiomatic English […] disordered and disorderly […] it borrows words, patterns and images freely from the mother-tongue and finds expression in a very limited English vocabulary” (“Preface,” 1996). Describing the coming of a postcolonial civil war that seems to be the Biafran one but is never named as such, the novel makes language carry history in all its messiness. So, although everyone was happy at first, after some time, everything begin to spoil small by small and they were saying that trouble have started […]. Radio begin dey hala as ‘e never hala before. Big big grammar. Long long words. Every time. Before before, the grammar was not plenty and everybody was happy. But now grammar begin to plenty and people were not happy. As grammar plenty, na so trouble plenty. (Saro-Wiwa 1996, 3)

In this repetitive intensification of grammar’s indicative force, language reveals an abstract imperial formation and its transformation into the nation form. Language spans history. The course of Saro-Wiwa’s tragic tale also fleshes out that national form with the speaking body, all desires and wounds and flights. In this, it recalls Glissant’s typology of the scream (though postcolonial civil war is not plantation slavery’s legacy). Our reading of Saro-Wiwa can deepen as a result of that critical detour. We might even thus begin to find practical examples of what Glissant imagines as “a kind

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of revenge by oral languages over written ones, in the context of a global civilization of the nonwritten” (1992, 126). This global nonwritten is the product of cross-cultural contacts and processes; it is a vision of the world as a polyglot mix in which languages function not as “conceptual structures” but “imaginative strategies,” “languages that dazzle or shimmer instead of simply ‘reflecting’” (Glissant 1992, 126). Embedded here is a deeper discussion of the work that language does within a particular linguistic world, what Glissant subsequently terms opacity. In contrast to the ideal of transparency through which “Western humanity reflected the world in its own image,” opacity is found “at the bottom of the mirror, a whole alluvium deposited by populations, silt that is fertile but, in actual fact, indistinct and unexplored even today, denied or insulted more often than not, and with an insistent presence that we are incapable of not experiencing” (Glissant 1997, 111). To point, as Glissant does, to the ways in which postcolonial language draws attention to itself, makes its own meaning, creates a distinct and resistant reality at odds with the “leveling effect” (1997, 112) of linguistic imperiums like Anglo-American or belle-lettristic French, is to reveal language not merely as imperial vehicle or postcolonial tactic but as a creative, aesthetic, organic process. Insofar as language constantly reveals “the irreducible opacity of the text” and “the always evolving opacity of the author or a reader” (1997, 115), language is a portal through which writers and readers, teachers and students, come up against the limitations of complete knowledge. Read thus, the world in world anglophone is not the imperializing, unifying, homogenizing force often denounced by critics of world-scale paradigms but rather a process, a positioning, and a practice of knowing difference, differently. Read through Glissant’s theory of poetic language, Apter’s theory of untranslatability, Rushdie’s deconstruction of commonwealth literature, multiple writerly voicings of linguistic decolonization, and the larger apparatus of world literature theory, world anglophone offers a site for thought that resists territorializing possession in the style of Conrad’s map. World anglophone might be better described in its ongoing encounter with the question that puzzles Baal, the Jahiliian poet in The Satanic Verses (1988): “How did one map a country that blew into a new form every day?” (Rushdie 1988, 382). Like Baal’s poetic “chimeras of form, lionheaded, goat-bodied serpentailed impossibilities whose shapes felt obliged to change the moment they were set” (1988, 370), world anglophone maps not one country but many and not just mother tongues but other tongues, in ways that are never set in stone. To track this living, morphing form is to render world anglophone as chimeric category, relational process, reading practice, and perpetual/perceptual compass always pointing us to difference.

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5 Bibliography 5.1 Works Cited Achebe, Chinua. Things Fall Apart. New York: Penguin Books, 1994. Achebe, Chinua. “Colonialist Criticism.” Morning Yet on Creation Day. By Achebe. London: Heinemann: 1975. 3–24. Achebe, Chinua. “The African Writer and the English Language.” Colonial Discourse and Post-Colonial Theory: A Reader. Ed. Patrick Williams and Laura Chrisman. New York: Columbia University Press, 1994. 428–434. Apter, Emily. Against World Literature: On the Politics of Untranslatability. New York: Verso, 2013. Arac, Jonathan. “Anglo-Globalism?” New Left Review 12 (2002): 35–45. Ashcroft, Bill, Gareth Griffiths, and Helen Tiffin. The Empire Writes Back: Theory and Practice in Post-Colonial Literatures. New York: Routledge, 1989. Bassnett, Susan, ed. Translation and World Literature. New York: Routledge, 2018. Casanova, Pascale. The World Republic of Letters. Trans. Malcolm B. DeBevoise. Cambridge, MA and London: Harvard University Press, 2004 [1999]. Cheah, Pheng. Spectral Nationality: Passages of Freedom from Kant to Postcolonial Literatures of Liberation. New York: Columbia University Press, 2003. Cheah, Pheng. What is a World? On Postcolonial Literature as World Literature. Durham: Duke University Press, 2016. Conrad, Joseph. Heart of Darkness. New York: Norton Critical Editions, 2006. Cooppan, Vilashini. “World Literature and Global Theory: Comparative Literature for the New Millennium.” Symploke 9 (2001): 15–43. Cooppan, Vilashini. “Ghosts in the Disciplinary Machine: The Uncanny Life of World Literature.” Comparative Literature Studies 41 (2004): 10–36. Cooppan, Vilashini. “Hauntologies of Form: Race, Writing, and the Literary World-System.” Gramma: Journal of Theory and Criticism 13 (2005): 71–87. Cooppan, Vilashini. Worlds Within: National Narratives and Global Connections in Postcolonial Writing. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2009. Cooppan, Vilashini. “World Literature Between History and Theory.” The Routledge Companion to World Literature. Ed. Theo D’Haen and David Damrosch. New York: Routledge, 2012. 194–203. Damrosch, David. What is World Literature? Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2003. Desani, Govindas V. All about H. Hatterr. New York: Penguin, 1982. Dimock, Wai Chee. “Literature for the Planet.” PMLA 116.1 (2001): 173–188. Dimock, Wai Chee. Through Other Continents: American Literature Across Deep Time. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2006. Glissant, Édouard. Caribbean Discourse. Trans. J. Michael Dash. Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1992. Glissant, Édouard. Poetics of Relation. Trans. Betsy Wing. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1997. Gunaratne, Guy. In Our Mad and Furious City. London: Tinder Press, 2018. Hall, Stuart. “When Was the Postcolonial? Thinking at the Limit.” The Postcolonial Condition: Divided Skies, Common Horizons. Ed. Iain Chambers and Lidia Curti. New York: Routledge, 1996. 242–260. Helgesson, Stefan, and Pieter Vermeulen. Institutions of World Literature: Writing, Translation, Markets. New York: Routledge, 2015.

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Jeffares, Norman A. Commonwealth Literature: Unity and Diversity in a Common Culture. Ed. John Press. London: Heinemann, 1965. Lazarus, Neil. “The Global Dispensation Since 1945.” The Cambridge Companion to Postcolonial Literary Studies. Ed. Neil Lazarus. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004. 19–40. Malkani, Gautam. Londonstani. New York: Penguin, 2006. Moretti, Franco. “Conjectures on World Literature.” New Left Review 1 (2000): 55–67. Moretti, Franco. “More Conjectures.” New Left Review 20 (2003): 73–81. Moretti, Franco. Distant Reading. New York: Verso, 2013. Naipaul, V.S. A House for Mr. Biswas. New York: Vintage International, 2001. Naipaul, V.S. The Enigma of Arrival. New York: Vintage International, 1988. Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o. Devil on the Cross. Trans. Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o. London: Heinemann, 1987. Rao, Raja. Kanthapura. New York: Black Cat Hill, 1967 [1938]. Robbins, Bruce, and Pheng Cheah. Cosmopolitics: Thinking and Feeling Beyond the Nation. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1998. Rushdie, Salman. The Satanic Verses. New York: Random House, 1988. Rushdie, Salman. “‘Commonwealth Literature’ Does Not Exist.” Imaginary Homelands. By Rushdie. London: Granta, 1991. 61–70. Saussy, Haun. “Exquisite Cadavers Stitched from Fresh Nightmares: Of Memes, Hives, and Selfish Genes.” Comparative Literature in an Age of Globalization. Ed. Haun Saussy. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2006. 3–42. Saro-Wiwa, Ken. Sozaboy. New York: Longman African Writers, 1996 [1985]. Smith, Zadie. White Teeth. New York: Vintage International, 2000. Spivak, Gayatri C. Death of a Discipline. New York: Columbia University Press, 2003. Strich, Fritz. Goethe and World Literature. Trans. C.A.M Sym. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1949 [1946]. Tagore, Rabindranath. The Home and the World. Trans. Surendranath Tagore and Rabindranath Tagore. London: Penguin Books, 2005. Tanoukhi, Nirvana. “The Scale of World Literature.” New Left Review 39.3–4 (2008): 599–617. Tanoukhi, Nirvana, Bruce Robbins, and David Damrosch. Immanuel Wallerstein and the Problem of the World: System, Scale, Culture. Durham: Duke University Press, 2011. Wallerstein, Immanuel. The Modern World-System: Capitalist Agriculture and the Origins of the European World-Economy in the Sixteenth Century. New York: Academic Press, 1974.

5.2 Further Reading Special issue Forms of the Global Anglophone. Post 45 Contemporaries (Feb. 2019). http://post45. research.yale.edu/2019/02/introduction-forms-of-the-global-anglophone/ (12 Aug. 2019). Walkowitz, Rebecca. Born Translated: The Contemporary Novel in an Age of World Literature. New York: Columbia University Press, 2017. Special issue From Postcolonial to World Anglophone: South Asia as Test Case. Interventions 20.3 (2018).

Mads Rosendahl Thomsen

18 Anglophone World Literatures, the Internet and the Digital Humanities Abstract: Digitization and the Internet have influenced literature and world literature studies in numerous ways, from how literature is written, distributed and read, to how it can be studied. This article deals first with the changes in access to texts that are particularly important in a global perspective. Second, it addresses new methods for studying the international circulation of literature and the increasingly well-established ways of working with larger corpora that enables new comparative approaches. Finally, the article asks how the new digital media ecology becomes a part of a globally shared context and why the promise of a new way of writing for digital media has not yet had significant impact on literary culture. Key Terms: Digital humanities, literary sociology, accessibility, literature and new media, translation, the Internet

1 Two Decades of Change Few people had heard of the Internet in the early 1990s, but now it already feels somewhat taken for granted. Nevertheless, this dramatic increase in the ability to communicate and share information will undoubtedly come to be seen as an important threshold in the history of humanity. The fact that the richest person in the world today, Amazon’s founder Jeff Bezos, started out with an online bookstore, could be seen as both uplifting for bookish people, in terms of what moves the world, and disconcerting, considering the new concentrations of dominance in the global marketplace that have followed. By selling an extremely diverse group of products, Amazon has changed a number of industries, not least brick and mortar bookstores (cf. Spector 2000). Some have perished, others have changed and flourished, but it is certainly not the same world it once was. With the digital revolution, scholarship has been given new opportunities: easier access to texts, the ability to edit texts more easily and digital approaches to the study of literature, for instance. In fact, the Internet has made the world more Anglophone, because the need for a common language of communication reinforces the already dominant position of English. This goes beyond literature, but literature has certainly been influenced by the entire process (cf. Casanova 2015, 123).

https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110583182-019

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After briefly outlining how access to texts has changed and influenced our perspectives on world literature, this chapter will comment on three ways in which digital approaches to studying literature have already made their mark. The emphasis will be on their use in Anglophone world literature studies in terms of understanding circulation and impact, content in large corpora, and literary style. The last sections discuss the extent to which digital media provide a new shared context for writers and readers around the world, and reflect on why a breakthrough in literature that takes advantage of new modes of using mixed media, such as interactive graphic novels, has not yet had a significant impact on literary culture at large.

2 Access One mundane but in many respects astonishing aspect of the digital age is that access to literature has changed completely. Books that were once hard to find can now be downloaded or ordered much more easily. The printed book is still doing well, despite frequent reports of its imminent demise (cf. Cain 2017), but the Internet has made it possible to acquire texts in a number of ways. Obviously, not everyone is connected to the Internet, but almost half the world’s population is, and this proportion is growing steadily, just as literacy has doubled in the past half-century. The Internet has made huge quantities of literature immediately accessible through a number of platforms, and a significant amount of literature is now freely available. On an optimistic note, this could be seen as the final push towards universal accessibility of literature, a trend that successive changes in the publishing industry have produced over centuries. The world has changed significantly: centuries ago, books were once expensive commodities for the educated and privileged. Then the appearance of industrial print, paperbacks and public libraries made them affordable and accessible. Today, texts are often available for free within our connected world. It could seem like a utopia for literature when the price of a book can be zero, and yet it is still possible to sell more copies of more books than ever before. Another important aspect of access concerns the forums for literary criticism and opinions that have arisen with the Internet. Whereas public opinion on a book used to be reserved for newspaper critics, perhaps a few letters to the editor and some articles in journals with a small circulation, there are now numerous ways in which readers can communicate their opinions. Amazon, and its forum Goodreads, allows millions of people to publish reviews and ratings, and some works have thousands of people commenting on them. Blogs, newspapers, social media and other channels contribute to a vast system of circulating opinions that can be accessed by everybody, thanks to the marginal cost of publishing another text online. This has not killed newspaper criticism or academic journals, but has added a vast layer to the previously more centralized conversation on literature and has given everybody the opportunity to have a voice. It has also enabled people to engage with readers from other countries

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more easily. Instead of having their views filtered through national media, they can be an integrated part of an international ecology. However, this exists only in principle since nationally-based literary communities and media still carry more cultural capital and prestige and provide the framing for many discussions. Advances in machine translation have also expanded access to literature. Translations of literary works (↗10 Anglophone World Literatures and Translation) may be one of the last domains where humans will find themselves superior to machines, and the machine translations produced today are not yet fit to be published, but the gap between what a human and a machine can produce is closing surprisingly fast. This process will enable readers to become acquainted with works in languages that they cannot read; and translations could also be produced by humans and machines jointly, thus lowering the cost of translations and perhaps (who knows?) producing better translations. The political dimension of access is another important aspect, as the digital revolution has enabled people across the world to circumvent censorship and gain access to books and information in general that would otherwise be difficult to obtain (cf. Roberts et al. 2011). New techniques of surveillance make such circumvention dangerous, but the possibility of hiding books on a flash drive or reading them through an encrypted connection means that forbidden texts can still have an impact despite the difficult circumstances applying to their distribution. With literature becoming available in all kinds of formats, and often at a lower price, there is also the question of how writers can make a living. Books still sell, and the bestseller is not dead, but very few writers produce books which are really successful in this respect. Ironically or logically, depending on how one sees it, the presence of the writer has become an even greater commodity – being one of the ways in which many writers gain an income (↗15 Marketing Anglophone World Literatures). It is not unusual for poets to reach a number of readers vastly in excess of the number who buy their books, and it is telling that literary festivals have been booming in recent years. The digital age thus provides a new balance between absence and presence in the literary circuit. Most of the changes are certainly positive – the democratisation of a critical voice, the ease and price of getting hold of texts, the ability to access other languages and the sidestepping of censorship – but there are also new risks: texts produced by media strongholds, the centralization of resources, and (most of all) a stagnation or decrease in writers’ incomes. Nevertheless, the infrastructure of world literature, in terms accessibility to texts, public debate and criticism, has been vastly improved in the age of digitization.

3 Methods The use of digital methods in the humanities is growing, but this is still an immature field and is indeed eschewed by parts of the scholarly community (cf. Jockers 2013;

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Piper 2018). Such methods assume many different shapes and forms: from the very modest use of statistics that few would regard as involving the digital humanities, to large projects that seek to digitize cultural heritage and gain new insights into corpora that are not readable in practice for any individual or group of scholars. Anglophone studies have an advantage in this field owing to the sheer size and number of institutions that are interested in working with computational methods (cf. Underwood 2016; Bode 2018). Many methods for analysing texts depend on language-specific resources, so there is a noticeable gravitation towards English, which also tends to exclude other languages. A scholar that can work across two or more languages is not facing any particular methodological problems in a non-digital approach; whereas a computational project involving several languages is often stranded owing to the lack of digital resources and methods for comparing reliably. Digital scholarship is also a field that involves many technical issues that may not be of interest to literary scholars. Solving optical character recognition problems is surely not what attracted most people to literary studies, but scholars definitely appreciate the fact that someone has performed this task. One important aspect of the digital humanities is that it creates new organisational forms. Whereas publications by individual researchers and authors used to be the norm, digital scholarship brings with it a reliance on technical expertise, cooperation with scholars from adjacent fields such as linguistics, and more co-authored works. In the case of world literature studies, this may also change people’s attitude towards cooperation, and several scholars have called for a change from writing individual papers to writing edited collections, including David Damrosch in What Is World Literature? (2003, 286). As in all fields, there will be good and bad work done in this area. However, it might be worth considering how we would answer the kind of question that future generations might pose: “So, you digitized most literature in a couple of decades. Did that give rise to any development of methods or new research questions?” The following section discusses three areas of digital literary studies that can further our understanding of circulation, content, narration and style.

3.1 Circulation The use of digital methods to study literary circulation is one of the low-hanging fruits of the digital humanities. This is primarily because there are new resources to gain better answers to old questions of impact and influence, and because the methodologically complex questions of using machines to analyse texts themselves is not relevant to understand circulation. It is also easy to make the argument that if data is available indicating which texts are being read, commented on and taught most frequently, then these texts should be included in literary studies rather than basing such choices on vague notions about what readers value. This is not least the case

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when it comes to literature on a global scale, where it is easy to underestimate or overestimate the impact of certain works. In his 1998 book Atlas of the European Novel 1800–1900, Franco Moretti based his research into library collections and circulation on manually calculated numbers from far fewer sources than those that are available now. His book, like many others, would have been researched and written differently if digital resources had been available. First of all, translations since 1980 can be compiled through UNESCO’s Index Translationum (http://www.unesco.org/xtrans/bsstatexp.aspx). While far from perfect, this database is a very good source of both quantitative investigations into language hierarchies, or the areas that a certain country pays attention to, and detailed information on the specific volumes that have been produced by a specific author (↗10 Anglophone World Literatures and Translation). Not surprisingly, the dominance of English as a source language is exceptional, with more than five times as many translations as French and German. However, when it comes to translations, English is only the fourth most active language, trailing German, French and Spanish. The relative self-containment of the Anglophone literary world is not just a myth. It is also possible to obtain data regarding other languages that have contributed to world literature in English: for instance, more Swedish and Danish works of fiction (1,247 and 855 respectively) have been translated into English than Chinese and Arabic works of fiction (801 and 691 respectively). These figures are taken from Index Translationum and provide an interesting comment on cultural capital (given the magnitude of Chinese and Arabic in the world). To supplement Index Translationum, library holdings such as WorldCat help to provide an image of literary activity, categorized with respect to language and location, although this is only true in the parts of the world that have achieved a good level of digitisation and are not limited by censorship. Some of these statistics could have been compiled earlier, but in practice it would have been too challenging a task without computers. In addition, there are entirely new resources for studying literary activity that emerged with the Internet. The most important of these are websites such as Goodreads, where readers write their opinions and rank works. Fansites on Facebook and online reviews are also part of the new public sphere of literature, new off-shoots of which are constantly spawning. Obviously, it can be difficult to provide an overview of this, particularly if the many comment sections of newspaper and magazines are included. There can be numerous uses for these resources, two of the most basic being observing hierarchies of authors or hierarchies within authorships and understanding the preferences of various groups of people. The geographical distribution of search activity (trends.google.com) is also helpful for generating insights, despite all the uncertainties surrounding the statistics regarding where authors have an impact and how their impact has changed over time. The map below shows how searches (ran on 5 October 2018) for the Nobel laureate Doris Lessing are distributed relative to the search volume around the world.

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Fig. 1: Search on trends.google.com for “Doris Lessing” (5 Oct. 2018).

It is not surprising that Lessing’s close ties to Zimbabwe show up here, nor that the country that offered her the Nobel Prize also has an interest in her. What is more interesting is that she is not ‘just’ a writer with an Anglophone presence. Russian and Latin American interest is on par with that of the USA and Australia. In the perspective of global literature studies, such tools are the best way to find out whether prominent authors should be considered primarily as central figures of one nation, of Anglophone world literatures, or of world literature as a whole. The examples mentioned here cannot, by any means, be regarded as an exact science, but they are much more useful than mere guesses and vague intuitions. There is still a lot of work to do in order to find good standards for comparing different sources and explaining which domain of the real world of books they address specifically; but in terms of providing more solid documentation of interest and impact, these sources are indispensable.

3.2 Content The idea of ‘distant reading’ often has a negative connotation within digital humanities, implying that close reading, or proper reading, should be abandoned. This need not be the case, however, and it is worth remembering that the original motivation for promoting the idea of distant reading was that some kinds of knowledge cannot be obtained through close reading (cf. Moretti 2013, 48). After all, no one would ask

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a dozen readers what they have read and then draw conclusions about what counts as a literary canon, ideas of genre traits, predominant themes, ways of building plots or other issues on the basis of such a very small sample. Collective work has helped to produce such knowledge, but digital methods are now opening doors that have the potential to enable the study of world literature much more broadly than is the case now. Rather than precluding close reading, distant reading brings to the fore an epistemological question: How do we know what we know? For instance, what is our knowledge of genres (↗12 Genres of Anglophone World Literatures) based on? Scholars make general claims all the time, but are they qualified to do so? The difficulty of analysing large corpora of texts is how to hone in on interesting variables and then operationalize them. Counting word frequencies is easy, but rarely produces noteworthy results. However, the analysis becomes more interesting when other dimensions are added. David McClure (2017) has looked at the position of certain words, as well as their frequency, in 27,000 novels. By normalising the position of these words, he is able to produce a very simple, yet revealing, impression of how certain words are used in fiction. For instance, ‘usually’ occurs often at the beginning of a novel but is rare at the end. In contrast, ‘never’ is rarely used at the beginning, evenly used throughout and used much more frequently towards the end. Due to the simplicity of this model, McClure’s investigation would also be easy to perform on Anglophone literatures from across the world to show differences and similarities in corpora that are much too large to read. An important study by Ted Underwood, David Bamman and Sabrina Lee, “The Transformation of Gender in English-Language Fiction” (2018), analyses how the role of gender has changed over the centuries in British and American fiction. What is particularly interesting about this study is that it contradicts our intutions. As there are more female writers and a disproportionate amount of female readers, not to mention that it has been over a century since discussions about gender equality began on a large scale, the best guess one could make is that female characters have been allotted more space and more words. Surprisingly, the article shows that this is not the case. Instead, there has been a decrease in the space that female voices take up in fiction: […] certain aspects of fictive gender are surprisingly stable, especially when we back out to look at the behavior of authors. Men remain – on average, as a group – remarkably resistant to giving women more than a third of the character-space in their stories. And whatever happened to blur the boundaries of gender as we move into the twentieth century, it doesn’t seem to have been associated with greater emphasis on women as characters. On the contrary, their prominence declines across the same period. (Underwood et al. 2018, 23)

Such a conclusion could only be reached, in practice, by formalising an inquiry and applying it to thousands of books. Underwood, Bamman and Lee deploy a series of different approaches to determine who is given space in novels, and they rely primarily on machine-based recognition due to the size of the corpus. They note that

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machine-based recognition is not perfect, but that it is still good enough to show trends in a vast number of books. The techniques for using machine-assisted analysis for large text corpora are steadily becoming more and more useful. Topic modelling is a way of mining texts that relies on co-occurrences of words in trying to make sense of a text by instructing the computer to come up with a specific number of topics that can then be interpreted. This can be useful for a single text, but it becomes more interesting across large corpora because it becomes possible to identify the incidence of certain themes with an acceptable precision. In Enumerations, Andrew Piper has shown how the occurrence of a theme such as “life/death” across more than a century can provide a much more accurate, and thought-provoking, picture of an essential theme in literature than it is possible to achieve through one’s own reading (2018, 82). In many respects, comparative studies of content in Anglophone world literatures should be viable. For one thing, the language barrier is not a complicating factor (in the same way it is in world literature studies) and there are proven methods for comparing the vocabularies of large corpora (↗11 Comparative Literature). Whether or not such comparative projects will prove sustainable has more to do with formulating the right research question and securing funding than with the viability of the methodology. The initial questions would obviously be interesting: what are the focal points of the novel in different literatures? Do the topics change over time? And how different is internationally-circulated literature from literature which is not circulated in this way? In A World of Fiction: Digital Collections and the New Literary History, Katherine Bode has dealt with such questions based on a large Australian newspaper corpora, building models that can predict with some certainty whether a text is Australian, American or British (2018, 172). Reverse engineering of the results by testing a predictive model is a valuable tool for identifying anonymous texts, but building a model should also be seen as a form of literary analysis. Bode works on a historical corpus and it would be interesting to see whether the increased awareness of transcultural identities makes it more difficult to predict the cultural home of contemporary writers. When it comes to Anglophone world literature, the potential for looking into the geography of literary works has changed dramatically. The project titled “Textual Geographies” (txtgeo.net), led by Matthew Wilkens, has geotagged billions of locations in millions of books in English, Spanish, German and Chinese, producing a highly accessible interface that enables scholars to make their own inquiries into the locations that are mentioned in both fiction and non-fiction. Some of the results of this project are not surprising: the conclusion that major cities attract a lot of attention exemplifies this. However, the project adds nuance to other issues that are already well-studied. For example, Evans and Wilkens (2018) show that expatriates describe London’s social geography far more simply than British writers, to whom the city appears very different. Or that interest in Scandinavian literature increased throughout the late nineteenth century but then declined, increasing significantly once more only after the Second World War. It is also important to note that such findings do

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not refer to the circulation of books, but rather to their content, making it possible to reconstruct the international outlook at a given time and how it evolved thereafter.

3.3 Narration and Style There are many ways to model literary works, and one key question when it comes to Anglophone world literature is whether it is possible to make models that are context independent. If so, it would be possible to compare a wealth of different literatures written in English. The significance of gender, as studied by Underwood, Bamman and Lee, could be extended to other Anglophone literatures using the same methodology. There are also other possibilities, such as looking for basic stylistic traits that are hard to grasp without a formalized model. In “Toward a Computational Archaeology of Fictional Space” (2018), Dennis Tenen has shown that it is possible to identify the frequency with which objects occur in fiction, an approach that is illustrated both on the level of single works (showing that Arthur Conan Doyle’s fiction is not laden with objects, unlike George Eliot’s), and in terms of large corpora in which the density of objects can be measured. Tenen’s study has not been extended to a broad geographical range of works, but methodologically it would certainly be possible to analyse corpora in this way. An even more abstract approach to literature can be found in Qiyue Hu et al.’s 2019 work on sentiment analysis and coherence in narrative works. Drawing on sentiment scores developed by linguists, they model the predictability of the development of a novel and obtain a measure of the complexity of the narrative. They have a theory that “the optimal narrative manages the reader’s experience and motivation by neither being completely coherent […] nor incoherent […], but somewhere in between” (Hu et al. 2019, 8). While this may seem reductive, it also provides an interesting insight into the similarities of emplotment in culturally heterogeneous literature corporas, as well as being a way of studying the difference between canonical and non-canonical literature (for instance), where canonical texts tend to be located in a sweetspot between unpredictability and order (↗16 Canons and Canonicity in Anglophone Literature).

3.4 Challenges There are quite a few challenges facing digital approaches to literary studies. Gaining access to copyright texts is one obvious obstacle to which no proper solution has yet been found. One result of the lack of access to copyrighted work has been an increase in awareness of old literature generated, somewhat paradoxically, by the combination of new technology and the need for accessible corpora. The field of the digital humanities is maturing: more and more methods are being tested and an increasing

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number of scholars are being trained to work with computer scientists to produce results that can be integrated into more traditional literary analyses. The problem of assembling a corpus while respecting the boundaries of copyright will probably be solved at some point (for instance, by establishing sandbox environments under the aegis of research institutions). However, digital approaches have also been criticized for doing little more than stating the obvious, offering conclusions that are intuitive and unremarkable. Studies such as those carried out by Piper, Tenen, Wilkens, Jockers, and Underwood, Bamman and Lee, show that a new generation of scholars are working within the traditional paradigms of literary scholarship but are able to ask new questions that could not have been answered before. With their interests in topics, objects, spaces, narratives and gender, they provide models that could be expanded to other literatures and create a variety of perspectives on the differences between Anglophone literatures.

4 Technology as a Shared Context Some authors, such as Don DeLillo, adopted the Internet very early and gave it a prominent role in their work. His Underworld (1997) was inspired by the juxtaposition of two headlines in the New York Times in 1951: one announcing that the Soviet Union had tested a nuclear bomb, and one announcing (in the same typeface) that the Giants had won the World Cup in baseball. DeLillo has later said that he was fascinated by the fact that these two events were presented in a symmetrical layout as if they were equally important, which, in some respects, they may have been to many people (cf. Cooke 2016). The novel ends with a search in a new medium, the Internet, for a word that is not given straightaway, but leads to a Proustian tour de force over a page: “a word that spreads a longing through the raw sprawl of the city and out across the dreaming bourns and orchards of the solitary hills./ Peace.” (1997, 827) Shortly before this, the narrator wonders whether cyberspace is a thing in the world or whether it is the other way around (1997, 826). The Cold War is represented as both a historical period and as an ending era; a new media ecology marks a transition to a new world. In his later novel Cosmopolis (2003), DeLillo juxtaposes the hyperconnected life of an ultrarich financier and the non-digital existence of his barber, which again highlights the difference between a tangible world and worlds of symbols. Looking back at his early works, such as Ratner’s Star (1976) and The Names (1982), it is obvious that being connected was always an important theme and that the Internet helped to bring a sense of this connectedness into the world (↗6 Global Literature, World Literature and Worlding Literature). While it is easy to observe that there is now a new powerful medium connecting the world and that this transition has happened very fast, it is less easy to predict what effect this will have on literature. With billions of people using smartphones,

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tablets and computers as their primary way of obtaining information, communicating, doing business, etc., will this shared experience of using the same symbolic and very immersive tools be felt in fiction? Will it be easier to identify with characters that use the same devices, which exude modernity, globalisation and newness rather than local traditions? And how will literature respond? Can a realist novel avoid mentioning the Internet and the screens that we use to interact? Will this make the world seem more unified? Many more questions could be asked about the results of the digital revolution and how it will affect literature. With world literature, questions of the universal often follow, and it can be argued that the interplay of the strange and the familiar is one of the most potent dynamics in world literature, although often with an emphasis on the strange, on what makes worlds different from one another. However, candidates for phenomena that unite the world are numerous. The difference between life and death is easy to comprehend on a biological level. Metaphysics and religion are found throughout the world; even though metaphysics and religion assume many different forms, the idea itself is an underlying phenomenon to which people can relate. Animals play a big role in world literature, probably because of their complicated existence as beings outside culture that are, despite this, mythologized and given cultural significance. Is the digital revolution on the same scale, uniting the world? Probably, but the speed at which it is developing means that it could also very quickly come to be seen as backwards, perhaps with some nostalgia of a time with less powerful devices and obsolete ways of accessing the digital realm. Even so, the coming online of the world of information is a significant moment in literary history. DeLillo’s Underworld would have been quite different had it been finished just a few years earlier, when cyberspace was not the monolithic thing we know today.

5 Mixed Media! New Writing? While the Internet and the digitized world can be singled out as themes or topoi that exert some influence on literature, it is harder to see a major impact on literary form as a result of the new media ecology. The novel has become an increasingly dominant genre in the past century, relegating poetry and drama to inferior positions in both academia and culture in general. This dominance may not last forever, but how might this positioning change? Will a shift towards a new, dominant genre be inspired by forms developed in digital media? The answer is not straightforward, and what follows will therefore be relatively speculative. One likely usurper of the novel is non-fiction: many readers prefer biographies and historical non-fiction, as the sales of these genres show (cf. Rowe 2018). However, these figures are nothing new, and simply touting the commercial success of non-fiction doesn’t really end the debate about cultural dominance. Furthermore,

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enthroning non-fiction as the dominant cultural form forecloses upon what could be an important frame for investigating human existence in an artistic form. What is more interesting than sales figures is whether ways of writing will emerge that make better use of the new digital ecosystem, mixing texts, images, videos and sound more effortlessly than ever before. Electronic literature has been around for a while and involves a thriving community of dedicated writers and readers (↗14 Intermediality and Remediation), but it also involves writing or making literature that remains outside the mainstream. Is the time not yet ripe for this literature? Is it possible that readers want a story that is engaging without relying on a text that tries – to put it a little unfairly – to spice itself up? Two decades ago, hypertext was seen as a mode of writing that would take advantage of new media, such as Michael Joyce’s Afternoon: A Story (1987), to engage the reader and set the text free. A text must not be read from a to b, should not necessarily be read in its entirety or original order and could be used for new modes of narration, that of being a co-creator. This would be a dream come true, according to Jorge Luis Borges’ beloved short story “The Garden of Forking Paths” (1941), where the vision of a hypertext novel was described decades before the technology existed that could accommodate it. Some avant-garde writers experimented with the genre on paper, and the principles for hypertext were laid out by Ted Nelson in the 1960s, but with all due respect to the writers who wrote in this format, it has never taken off among a wider audience. Perhaps readers do not want choice, perhaps they prefer to be seduced by, and to surrender to, a narrative. Just as the time was not ripe in Borges’ story for a new type of novel, it appears that this is still not the case for the culture at large. Although hypertext literature has not taken off, fan fiction, more traditional in its form, but just as dependent on the Internet, has become a thriving genre. Building on the desire to have more stories with beloved characters, readers become writers and publish their own spin-offs on their favourite stories, with great variety in quality. Some even develop into published works, most famously E.L. James’ Fifty Shades of Grey (2011), which began as Twilight fan fiction, or S.J. Hooks’ Absolute Beginners (2017), which also stemmed from the Twilight universe. These books may not push literature to new heights, but they are still valuable, engaging readers and building a different kind of literary community. Even so, one has to wonder if there is fiction that could take advantage of digital media and be important to a transnational readership. Perhaps W.G. Sebald’s and Aleksandar Hemon’s use of photography in Austerlitz (2001) and The Lazarus Project (2008) or the even older tradition of illustrated novels could be developed into something even more persuasive and artistically integrated. The success of the graphic novel is the realization of such a potential, although the writing is positioned quite differently in this genre. It may be a difficult task for authors to pursue that course, but it is also somewhat heartening that there is no real shortcut to upgrading the experience of literature, at least not one that has caught on yet.

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6 Conclusion Digitisation and the Internet are Janus-faced creatures in relation to literature. They could kill the physical book, make literary fiction obsolete, and rewire generations of young people to new, faster habits of ingesting media that would leave literary works out. In academia, digital approaches to literary studies could change the focus on criticism and drag scholars away from the texts themselves and towards abstract patterns of word frequencies and plots. But the other side of the coin is that digitisation and the Internet can also provide better access to texts, generate a larger community of critical voices and provide opportunities to ask bold questions that previously were either ignored, because it would be futile to try to answer them (e.g. the geographical distribution of interest in a nation’s literature), or because the necessary methods had not been developed (e.g. measurements of narrative coherence across thousands of novels). In terms of Anglophone world literature studies, it is hard to underestimate what the past decades have meant: the strengthening of the position of English as an effect of globalisation has been further bolstered by the Internet as the primary platform of communication. In the digital humanities, the critical mass and wealth of resources in software, databases and other sources that exist in English also strengthens Anglophone studies, but as the article has argued, there are numerous reasons to be optimistic for a more diverse inclusion of languages.

7 Bibliography 7.1 Works Cited Bode, Katherine. A World of Fiction: Digital Collections and the Future of Literary History. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2018. Borges, Jorge L. Ficciones. New York: Grove Press, 1962. Cain, Sian. “Ebook Sales Continue to Fall as Younger Generations Drive Appetite for Print.” The Guardian (14 March 2018). https://www.theguardian.com/books/2017/mar/14/ebook-salescontinue-to-fall-nielsen-survey-uk-book-sales (16 Jan. 2020). Casanova, Pascale. La langue mondiale: Traduction et domination. Paris: Seuil, 2015.  Cooke, Tim. “Don DeLillo on Underworld: ‘There Was No Escape.’” The Guardian (10 June 2016). https://www.theguardian.com/books/2016/jun/10/don-delillo-on-underworld-there-wasno-escape (15 Jan. 2020). Damrosch, David. What Is World Literature? Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2003.  DeLillo, Don. Underworld. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1997. Evans, Elizabeth F., and Matthew Wilkens. “Nation, Ethnicity, and the Geography of British Fiction, 1880–1940.” Journal of Cultural Analytics (13 July 2018). https://culturalanalytics.org/ article/11037-nation-ethnicity-and-the-geography-of-british-fiction-1880–1940 (15 Jan. 2020). Hemon, Aleksandar. The Lazarus Project. London: Picador, 2008.

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Jockers, Matthew. Macroanalysis: Digital Methods and Literary History. Champaign: University of Illinois Press, 2013. McClure, David. “Distributions of Words Across Narrative Time in 27,266 Novels.” DClure (18 Oct. 2018). http://dclure.org/labs/distributions-of-words-27k-novels/ (15 Jan. 2020). Moretti, Franco. Distant Reading. London: Verso, 2013. Hu, Qiyue, Bin Liu, Mads R. Thomsen, Jianbo Gao, and Kristoffer Nielbo. “Dynamic Evolution of Sentiments in Never Let Me Go: Insights from Multifractal Theory and Its Implications for Literary Analysis.” HAL (2019). https://hal.archives-ouvertes.fr/hal-02143896/document (15 Jan. 2020). Piper, Andrew. Enumerations: Data and Literary Study. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2018. Rowe, Adam. “Traditional Publishers Are Selling Way More Non-Fiction Than Fiction.” Forbes 30 (30 Aug. 2018). https://www.forbes.com/sites/adamrowe1/2018/08/30/traditionalpublishers-are-selling-way-more-non-fiction-than-fiction/#4747336856d0 (15 Jan. 2020). Roberts, Hal, Zuckerman, Ethan, and John Palfrey. 2011 Circumvention Tool Evaluation. Cambridge, MA: Berkman Center for Internet & Society, 2011. Sebald, W.G. Austerlitz. New York: Random House, 2001. Spector, Robert. Amazon.com: Get Big Fast; Inside the Revolutionary Business Model that Changed the World. London: Random House Business, 2000. Tenen, Dennis. “Toward a Computational Archaeology of Fictional Space.” New Literary History 49.1 (2018): 119–148.  Underwood, Ted, David Bamman, and Sabrina Lee. “The Transformation of Gender in EnglishLanguage Fiction.” Journal of Cultural Analytics (13 Feb. 2018). http://culturalanalytics. org/2018/02/the-transformation-of-gender-in-english-language-fiction/ (18 Oct. 2018).

7.2 Further Reading Archer, Jodie, and Matthew L. Jockers. The Bestseller Code: Anatomy of the Blockbuster Novel. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2016. Hammond, Adam. Literature in the Digital Age: An Introduction. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2016. Hube, Christoph, Frank Fischer, et al. “World Literature According to Wikipedia: Introduction to a DBpedia-Based Framework.” arXiv (4 Jan. 2017). https://arxiv.org/abs/1701.00991 (18 Oct. 2018). Allison, Sarah, and Marissa Gemma, et al. “Canon/Archive: Large-Scale Dynamics in the Literary Field.” Pamphlets of the Standford Literary Lab 11 (2016): 1–13. https://litlab.stanford.edu/ LiteraryLabPamphlet11.pdf (18 Oct. 2018).

Part IV: Literary Worlds – Locations and Orientations

Eva Ulrike Pirker

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Abstract: The chapter explores the contested location of British literatures in relation to Anglophone world literatures. It argues that although unifying concepts of Britishness have long been destabilised, both in the social realm and the literary world, some aspects of these concepts persist and continue to shape the cultural imaginary. Literary writers have repeatedly drawn attention to Britain’s transnational entanglements and to the diversity of British experiences, while also engaging with highly particular British locations and locales. The fragility of the concept of the nation transpires throughout the history of Britain’s literature written in English. It has gathered particular momentum from the second half of the twentieth century onwards, in which Britain, and British literature, too, have become noticeably multi-ethnic. This chapter repeatedly draws on Zadie Smith’s Swing Time (2016), a novel which paradigmatically engages several concepts of world literature at once. Key Terms: British literature, multi-ethnic Britain, Zadie Smith, Swing Time, worldmaking

1 The Location of ‘British’ Literature: An Inventory The prologue to Zadie Smith’s novel Swing Time (2016) begins indoors, in an anonymous, temporarily rented apartment in the North London district of St. John’s Wood. The protagonist has been cut off from the world after a scandal, and her first contact after several days is with the doorman in the lobby. Not only the setting, but also the time is fixed with precision: it is 12:36:23 on 25 October 2008, and yet, the transitoriness of the moment is acutely perceptible. A mixture of certainty and vagueness also characterises Smith’s nameless protagonist, a Londoner born-and-bred, who in these opening pages has “been out of England long enough that many simple colloquial British phrases now sounded exotic to me” (Smith 2016, 2). The scene’s local and termporal situatedness, its conflation of Englishness, Britishness and an insider-turned-outsider perspective, and its simultaneous invocation of different, larger worlds indeed invite being deliberated together in a reflection on British approaches to (the) world(s of) literature, for there are analogies between the worlds of Smith’s meandering protagonist and the recent situation of Britain and its literary scenes, which are marked by new tendencies of diversification and by (re-)negotiations of national and regional, cultural and aesthetic affiliations. In few contexts may a reconsideration of the term ‘world literature’ as a practice that challenges a compartmentalisation into national spaces with matching samples https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110583182-020

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of formal and generic conventions (cf. Levine 2015; Siskind 2011) and that at the same time is expansive, constitutes or ‘makes worlds’ (cf. e.g. Rorty 1989, and more recently Cheah 2016 or Neumann and Rippl 2017; ↗6 Global Literature, World Literature and Worlding Literature) rather than a literature that has achieved a certain status in the world through circulation (cf. Casanova 2004; Damrosch 2003; Moretti 2000) be as required as it is for the diversified body of literature coming from British contexts. This ‘body’ of literature amply challenges ideas of a “homogenous culture […] untroubled by history” (Smith 2018, 35–36), which do not reflect the experiences of most people living in Britain, and of British spaces as homogenous and unified. The aesthetic worlds emerging from the pages of the novelist Sara Hall, who originates in the Lake District, the Yorkshire poet Simon Armitage, the Scottish novelist A.L. Kennedy, the Ulster poet Derek Mahon, the Sussex-born playwright David Hare or the London poets Dorothea Smartt and Kate Tempest, to name but a few living and active scribes, could not be more different. Their particularity, manifest in their unique approaches to the material of the English language, to forms and genres, as well as in the construction of imaginative spacetime, character, voice, imagery, is often perceptibly informed by traces of their respective regional background and life experience. And yet, in keeping with a tradition of outward-orientation that has marked the literatures of Britain from their Anglo-Saxon beginnings (cf. Pirker 2007, 39), they make a point of transcending their individual horizons of experience. The very act of reaching out from a limited, individual perspective and the challenge of engaging with the ‘other’, is, as Derek Attridge maintains in keeping with Jacques Derrida, the essence of the literary ‘event’ (2004, 24). Also in the view of a philosopher considering literature in the world from a pragmatist angle, literary writing has the potential to augment “sensibility to […] other, unfamiliar worlds” (Rorty 1989, 141). Carried further, literary writing is always an act of transculturation (cf. Ortiz 1995, 95), although in the British (and generally Western) context, the latter notion is often applied to a limited range of writers: those with a perceptible ‘minority-ethnic’ horizon, a story of migration that lurks in their biography. ‘Classifying’ writers according to such criteria does not generally lead to compelling insights and in fact often blocks a serious engagement with the worlds their texts create. And yet, it would be a mistake to blank out facets of a writer’s experience and context which add levels of signification to their texts. What does it mean, then, to be writing from Britain and what kind of category is Britishness today? What Britain today is decidedly not is the ‘Britannia’ that should ‘rule’, as the seventeenth-century poem by James Thomson that was to have a long history as patriotic song requested. Although to this day sung at institutionalised events such as the Last Night of the Proms (the closing night after the famous annual season of concerts at the Royal Albert Hall), its datedness as celebration of Empire has become acutely felt, and diverse ways have been found to avoid it, ironically subvert it, or make it less imposing. The song notably did not fare in the opening ceremony of the London Olympic Games in 2012, planned and executed by film director Danny Boyle (Trainspotting, 1996; Slumdog Millionaire, 2008). In that opening event some perceived

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essentials of Britishness were included: snippets of Shakespeare, William Blake’s “Jerusalem” (1804), the smoking chimneys of industrialisation, Rowan Atkinson, East Enders, James Bond and the Queen; and yet, also the themes of slavery, imperialism and the Windrush story were embedded in the general narrative of celebration that displayed two ideas very clearly: Modern, multi-ethnic Britain is a worldly space in which transculturation is actually ‘happening’; it is a space in which colonialism and racism are responsibly considered, but can essentially be contained in the past. A tongue-in-cheek attitude towards the charged material of history was noticeable, as is frequently the case in the Last Night of the Proms, where the ‘hero’ of Trafalgar is often impersonated in a humorous way. However, even if these ghosts from the past are considered with irony, their presence and potential to invoke an easily translatable idea of Britishness speaks eloquently of their continuing impact. The televised, (re)invented tradition of the Last Night of the Proms is only one arena in which myths of “permanence”, “constancy” (Cannadine 2008, 317) and unity have been transported into the twenty-first century, as has a lingering colonial nostalgia (cf. Gilroy 2004; Huggan 2001; Loh 2013; Ponzanesi 2014).

1.1 Writing (‘Great’) Britain The shadowy presence of imperial nostalgia may well linger for another generation or two (or even more) before entering the inevitable realm of pastness itself (cf. Lorcin 2018), and will also continue to inform critical literary engagements. Postmillennial works such as Maggie Gee’s The White Family (2002) or My Cleaner (2005), Patrick Neate’s City of Tiny Lights (2006) or Jerusalem (2009), and Caryl Phillips’s In the Falling Snow (2009) or The Lost Child (2015) satirically or matter-of-factly appraise the persistent legacies of a past that continues to resound across present-day Britain: Domains of privilege are contrasted with a lack of access to resources, and institutional racism, xenophobia, classism and fantasies of superiority barely veiled by a patronising middle-class hypocrisy are negotiated in their works. These features, although pinned to specific British situations and places, may result from past imperial attitudes, but are not singularly British ‘characteristics’. The universally appealing and translatable questions of truth, justice and freedom make these works ‘world literature’ in a more traditional sense; their negotiation of these universal questions within the particular (British) contexts they imagine or document make them world literature in the other sense of a literature that creates worlds. The Britains projected in literary works are remarkably diverse and particular: Monica Ali, for instance, has moved from conjuring up a Bangladeshi lifeworld in East London in Brick Lane (2003) to a negotiation of a multi-ethnic and multi-lingual society featuring, among others, European economic migrants as recent arrivals in In the Kitchen (2010). Whereas Ali’s novel (with its echoes of Arnold Wesker’s 1957 play The Kitchen) uses the microcosm of the ‘Imperial Hotel’ to bring together multiple characters with different backgrounds and life experiences, John Lanchester’s novel Capital (2012) projects

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a street in a newly gentrified South London as such a contact zone. In Ali’s novel, old Britain is symbolised by the decaying hotel. In Lanchester’s Capital, the concept of an ‘old Britain’ dies along with Petunia Howe, the only resident of Pepys Road who was born in the house she inhabits. What unites all the above-named ‘British’ writers is the material they work with: the English language. Then again, this is hardly a distinguishing criterion for their Britishness, for what, indeed, is the language of Britain (↗4 The King’s English and the Mother Tongue)? Even if we accept that, despite the rise of bi- or multilingualism and the recent growth of Celtic languages as a result of devolution and EU policies of regionalism, English is still a unifying parameter across England, Northern Ireland, Scotland and Wales, between the North and the South, between old inhabitants and newcomers, we certainly need to ask: How unified are the Englishes of these regions and the people inhabiting them? What is more, considering the rise of world Englishes over the past century and a half, English can hardly be seen as a unifying, exclusive parameter that would support the notion of a British literary canon. Indeed, when we read literatures originating in the diverse British or overseas Anglophone regions, are we not in most cases reading ‘born translated’ literatures (cf. Walkowitz 2015) that have to an overwhelming degree smoothened out and standardised local inflections, variations and sounds of the diverse Englishes? Unlike in Leila Aboulela’s Minaret whose Sudanese narrator-protagonist reveals that the conversations rendered are not actually taking place in English (cf. Aboulela 2005, 139, 163), we are not habitually informed as readers about hidden translational and standardising processes that may be at work in a majority of literatures written and published in English. It is wherever local, regional hints are retained, be it in the mimicry of an Oxbridge and public school diction, in Cockney or Spouse inflections, or in a dash of Cornish or Black British (i.e. metropolitan variants of Jamaican creole) or Punjabi, that we can find a sense of a particular Britishness at work. Some writers who work entirely in particular variants are internationally noted, e.g. Liz Berry who exclusively uses the low-prestige dialect of the Black Country in her poetry. Perhaps the longest-standing attributor of ‘Britishness’ as a unifying label of some significance for the world of literature has been the publishing industry and its attached ‘economies of prestige’ (cf. English 2005; ↗15 Marketing Anglophone World Literatures). Its dealings in territorial rights and editions typically leads to foreign publishers’ emphasising homogenising attributes that are ‘read’ as British; reviewing organs abroad readily advertise certain authors as ‘Brits’; and some authors, especially those living abroad, identify as ‘Brits’ themselves, even if their stories are more particular, complex, regionally or bi-culturally shaped. Charlotte Williams, for instance, who has worked on questions of belonging and exclusion within British contexts, today lives in Australia and describes her perceived ‘Britishness’ as a marker of distinction that outweighs gendered and racialised projections, although her life experience in Britain was marked by a sense of never quite fitting into any box as the child of Guyanese and Welsh parents (Williams, personal exchange 2018). Like the poet Hannah Lowe (e.g. Chick, 2013) more recently,

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Williams complicates both homogenising views of national affiliation and the Windrush story of a particular moment of migration (cf. Williams 2002, 107–108). And yet, abroad, Britishness seems to be a comprehensive category: In a recent American radio interview, the writer Caryl Phillips, who throughout his career has gone out of his way to highlight his experience of “unbelonging”, identifies as “a Brit” (qtd. in Lopate 2018). This shows that there is a concept of Britishness in the world that can be activated and made productive in processes of identification and the establishment of a specific position of enunciation. Both outside and within literary worlds, it is a signifying projection that habitually generates a variety of reactions, affirmative or critical. This ‘conceptual space’ is part and parcel of the hegemonic order that writers, and in many cases their imagined worlds, are subjected to, or subject themselves to, that they may seek to escape or control.

1.2 Britain in the World Although the particular ‘imagined community’ (cf. Anderson 1983) of Britain is based on contested premises, it has become imbued with new significance as the consequences of the Brexit vote of 2016 are looming large. A “hard-won union of three hundred years’ standing” has come under threat, as Smith (2018, 23) contends. To her, the “utter recklessness” with which the centuries-old union was thrown “into hazard” appeared to be “a larger crime […] than the severing of the [merely] decades-long European pact that actually prompted it all” (Smith 2018, 23). Although Smith’s comment hints at the EU-membership, it inadvertently feeds the widespread myth of a Britain whose relations with the continent are exceptional. These relations have been charged in different ways at different historical periods, and the need to insist on an idea of Britishness has been particularly perceptible at those times in which antagonistic forces outside Britain could be clearly defined, as in the case of revolutionary France or the two world wars. Apart from these instances, Britain has rarely been de facto ‘insular’ in its history. The monarchy has from its beginnings had close (if at times troubled) alliances to the aristocratic houses of the continent. The gradual receding of the monarchs’ powers after the English Civil War coincided with the rise of the European trading empires. By the end of the eighteenth century, Britain would redefine its place in the world in a comparative and competitive opposition to other European nations as the centre of a world-spanning association of dominions. The legacies of both, European aristocratic and overseas colonial contacts, live on today in the British monarchy and in the postcolonial ‘Commonwealth of Nations’, and both are stabilising forces and factors for any conceptualisation of Britishness, regardless of whether they are applauded or criticised. The persistently dominant place of the British royals in the media and a host of popular and mass cultural outlets signals their importance in any cultural imaginary of Britishness. Even the literary scene has been affected: it is difficult to find, today, a writer of some standing who has not been royally decorated, and when OBEs or MBEs

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are rejected, media attention is guaranteed, continuing the cycle of signification (cf. Glanville 2018). Whether the machineries of representation surrounding the British monarchy are taken seriously or with a pinch of salt, it is clear that they are well-oiled, translatable worldwide and do not require explanations. Britain’s monarchy may be a space of desire at times in which everything else is ordered and organised by supranational forces that are felt but not easily identified, let alone challenged – in Britain and the world. Beyond this, Britain finds itself in a complex web of alliances between Europe, the USA and the Commonwealth, and it is predominantly via these external connections that Britain, as a political entity, is rendered meaningful. A case in point for the continuing significance attributed to the Commonwealth is the membership of The Gambia (cf. Smith 2016, 331), where sections of Smith’s Swing Time are set: Having left the Commonwealth in 2013 under the dictatorship of Yahya Jammeh, who declared the Commonwealth a neo-colonial institution, the nation applied to re-join under the recent presidency of Adama Barrow. In light of the Brexit vote, the return of The Gambia ‘to the family’ was particularly welcomed (“The Gambia Rejoins the Commonwealth” 2018, n.pag.). Whether the Commonwealth displays neo-colonial tendencies or fares as a ‘better’ form of association in times in which economic imperialism overrides national political directives remains to be (re)assessed. In either case, the Commonwealth contributes to fixing Britain as a continuously meaningful actant in the world. A search of literary histories and curricula that use ‘British’ as an umbrella term quickly reveals that these typically have their origin or location outside the UK (e.g. Sinha and Ghosh 2011) and are looking in on Britain – just like Smith’s outsider-protagonist who only becomes aware of markers of Britishness on her return. After a few days in London, however, the people Smith’s protagonist encounters have a variety of ties to Britain: Lamin, a Senegalese who “was always coming to” Birmingham (Smith 2016, 450); her mother, a local politician whose London constituency served people from all over the world (2016, 393) and who on her deathbed dreams of Jamaica (2016, 447); or Fern, a Brazilian economist who works globally, and only occasionally in London. Among the Brits in the novel that ‘stay put’ is the protagonist’s childhood friend Tracey, for whom London has become a place of multiple struggles. The life experiences meeting in Smith’s London in the frame narrative of Swing Time seem to have little in common beyond their being linked by the protagonist’s ‘world’. And if we look beyond Swing Time and Smith’s oeuvre, studying the ways in which other writers reference British worlds, we are faced with as many literary Britains as with authors writing them.

1.3 Multiple Forms The multitude of experienced and created worlds can also be traced in forms. Indeed, just as the “social situation” of Victorian Britain demanded “multiple tempos” and forms of representation (Levine 2015, 79), the “global cacophony of the early twenty-first century”, too, requires a wide range of imaginative approaches (Mufti

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2016, 5). Whereas Victorian Britain was under the spell of the still relatively recent literary form of the novel, this form, which dominated throughout the twentieth century, is today challenged from several sides: firstly, by a rise to prominence of other narrative forms: nonfictional narratives such as life writing, the artistic essay and other documentary and quasi-documentary forms, e.g. Olivia Laing’s The Trip to Echo Spring (2013); secondly, by other narrative media, e.g. the television series which has now become as readily consumable as any novel through streaming services, and series emerging from Britain, engaging with Britain and popular narratives of Britishness fare prominently in the respective places; thirdly, the novel is challenged by hybrid forms: the awarding of the 2018 Ted Hughes Poetry Prize to the multimedia artist Jay Bernard or the Booker Prize shortlisting of the poet Robin Robertson for his intermedially operating poetic work The Long Take (2018) speak of a wider appreciation of works that transcend genre boundaries; and eventually, the novel’s status is qualified by a new importance of orature that, due to digital recording and circulation is no longer limited to specific performative situations and audiences. The rise of these forms, which pose significant challenges to the novel, is not specifically rooted in particular local aesthetic traditions, but responds to an aesthetics formed by global information, communication and entertainment channels. In many of those recently emerging works that make their mark across a specific region, we nevertheless find simultaneous negotiations of specific locales and global spaces and their mutual entanglements. Even in poems concerned with landscape and nature (which seem to be shaped by, or shaping, specific locales) like Alice Oswald’s Dart (2010) a global consciousness makes its marks on the voices of nonhuman agents, in this case an English river. And in contrast to the novel whose rise and development has been linked to post-enlightenment (humanist) explorations of subjectivity and the human psyche, recent literatures display the return of non-human agents and voices equally considered subjects of importance (↗8 Anglophone World Literatures and World Ecologies). Against the backdrop of these developments, Smith’s novel Swing Time comes in a surprisingly conventional form. Yet it is a ‘self-conscious’ novel in that it displays an awareness of its generic performance and of the moment and situation in which it has entered the world of literature. Like other literatures of the world today, it oscillates between diverse spacetime projections, between a West African locale and the Western metropoles of New York and London. At the same time, like many other works by Smith, it engages with a highly particular, and yet continually changing, British – and London – setting.

2 Writing a Plural Britain Looking back at the extraordinary success of her first novel White Teeth (2000) Smith notes that she is frequently reminded, wherever she goes, that “to have been raised

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[…], with, say, Pakistani Muslims in the house next door, Indian Hindus downstairs, and Latvian Jews across the street, is thought of, by others, as evidence of a specific social experiment, now discredited” (Smith 2018, 35–36). Hence, when writing about her London in White Teeth, she was unaware that she was “‘championing [a] multiculturalism’” that was “on trial” in the view of others, “simply by depicting it, or by describing it as anything other than incipient tragedy” (Smith 2018, 36). By yet others, Smith has been accused – like Hanif Kureishi and the makers of the film East Is East (1999) prior to her – of unduly reducing some of her characters to types in her early fiction (cf. Walters 2008, 137). With NW (2012), The Embassy of Cambodia (2013) and Swing Time (2016), she has notably embarked on a programmatic rendering of complex, multidimensional characters, especially women, and the literary worlds created by Smith in theses novels were characterised by an increased problematisation of social divides and their impact on individuals. Swing Time, in particular, offers multiple instances of historical revision (cf. Scafe 2019) and creates a world of experience still not habitually rendered in Western literary canons, in which Whiteness has been the default category of identification for too long. “When I read Madame Bovary I thought I, too, am Madame Bovary”, Smith explains in an interview: That’s the experience of minority readers all the time, this identification across supposed boundaries. What I am trying to do is encourage people in the other direction. So if somebody is reading Swing Time and they’re reading about a little black girl in London, I don’t want that identification to be at a distance […]. I want them to identify the way I did, wholly, body and soul, no matter what they happen to look like, no matter what their particular background. (Smith in Martin 2018, 00:11:54–00:12:30)

Not only does Smith appear to share Richard Rorty’s confidence in the potential of literature to create moments of identification across horizons of experience (cf. Rorty 1989, 141), she also places her story about a ‘little black girl in London’ side by side with ‘classics’ of a traditional and widely sanctioned world literary canon. At the same time it deserves to be remembered that Smith’s revisionist agenda is not exceptional or new. With it, she inscribes herself into a tradition of Black and Asian writing in Britain, which is increasingly understood as forming a ‘canon’ in its own right (cf. Nasta and Stein 2020).

2.1 “London Is the Place for Me” This tradition has its own mythic moments. Little did Aldwyn Roberts a.k.a. Lord Kitchener know, when he disembarked from the SS Empire Windrush on 23 June 1948, that his song “London Is the Place for Me” (2011 [1948]) which he composed for the occasion, would go down in history as encapsulating the hopes of an entire generation. Even less did he and his fellow arrivants know that the Windrush would

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become a symbol for the experiences of that generation, their disappointed hopes and their struggle – and also a stand-in for its literary output. Kitchener, famed calypsonian and regular contributor to BBC radio programmes, became part of a loose web of artists and writers who recorded and imaginatively worked through the experiences of the Windrush generation, among them the artist Denis Williams, the writers George Lamming, Samuel Selvon, V.S. Naipaul, and E.R. Braithwaite. The poet Edward Kamau Brathwaite, who only spent a relatively short time in England, became instrumental in founding the Caribbean Artists Movement while in London. Most of these writers moved on to other places in the diaspora or back to the Caribbean, a diasporic space itself (↗24 The Caribbean). Whereas the fate of most people moving to Britain as part of the Windrush generation – as well as that of the increasing number of migrants from the partition-stricken Indian subcontinent and East Africa – was to survive in an often openly racist environment (cf. Sivanandan 1985, 2), the “Booker people” (Williams 2002, 107), i.e. the writers and intellectuals among the migrants, were more mobile. Hence, the literary oeuvre of the writers of the Windrush generation cannot be understood within one national context, and theirs is per se a literature of mobility, a transnational literature. Their treatment as fixity in overviews of ‘Black and Asian Literature’ is therefore reductive. Beyond this, it deflects attention from earlier literary activities of such writers as C.L.R. James or Jean Rhys who lived in Britain and wrote significant literary works during the interwar years, or later-born artists and writers such as the filmmaker Horace Ové (from Trinidad), or the novelist Mike Phillips (from Guayana). The transcultural sensibility of these migrant writers should not suggest that they refrained from concrete engagements with the British spaces they experienced – on the contrary: it may be precisely this sensibility which allowed them to become acute observers of processes of exclusion and marginalisation. Selvon and Lamming wrote their first novels in the immediate aftermath of the ‘British Nationality Act’, which was passed in reaction to the arrival of the Windrush migrants and ruled that British Commonwealth citizens were no longer ‘British subjects’. It is ironic that the writers claimed as Black British writers of the first generation were those who wrote back to the nation’s denial of its overseas’ subjects. The self-assertive ending of Selvon’s The Lonely Londoners provides us with a comparative glimpse across the channel, to France, where “all kinds of fellars writing books what turning to be best-sellers. […] One day you sweating in the factory and the next day all the newspapers have your name and photo, saying how you are a new literary giant” (2009, 142). That Paris, at the time when Selvon was writing his novel, was still the uncontested ‘meridian’ of world literature (cf. Casanova 2004, 87) also manifested itself in the Sorbonne’s 1956 famous ‘Black Writers and Artists Congress’, which featured Richard Wright, Alioune Diop, Léopold Senghor and Aimé Césaire. Less openly advertised, but equally present in Britain, Black writers and artists recorded and articulated the widely felt sense of marginalisation and exclusion in their novels, their music and art, and also in the public sphere, e.g. in the Notting Hill Carnival, which was founded in reaction

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to the Notting Hill riots and anti-immigrant hostility more generally. In hindsight, these works and activities can be understood as articulations of resistance – not only directed at the lack of opportunities for inclusion, but also at the lack of recognition of ‘other’ worlds with which Britain, as a nation, had become irrevocably entangled. That this legacy continues to be underaddressed is amply shown in the present-day debates about the acknowledgment of, and reparations for, acts of colonial exploitation, all above the transatlantic slave trade, in which Britain had assumed a leading role in many respects. These debates have been fuelled by a literary tradition now subsumed under the label ‘neo slave narrative’ (e.g. Caryl Phillips’s Cambridge, 1991; Fred D’Aguiar’s The Longest Memory, 1994, and Feeding the Ghosts, 1997; Bernadine Evaristo’s Lara, 1997; and Andrea Levy’s The Long Song, 2010, to name only a few examples) and historically revisionist fiction more generally that continues to posit a corrective to the nation’s – and Western – memory politics (↗9 Anglophone World Literatures and Transcultural Memory).

2.2 “Inglan Is a Bitch” While the migrant writers and artists of the 1950s had horizons of experience outside Britain, a new generation of British-born artists, filmmakers and writers emerged on the platform in the 1970s, 1980s and early 1990s, taking a decisive stance in the charged debates about race relations and multiculturalism of the 1970s and the Thatcher years. Linton Kwesi Johnson’s dub poetry, which declared “Inglan” to be “a bitch” and exposed institutional racism and police violence, was heard across concert halls worldwide (Johnson 1980). Plays by the young Caryl Phillips and Hanif Kureishi, films by the collectives Sankofa and Black Audio Film Collective and such landmark novels as Andrea Levy’s Every Light in the House Burnin’ (1994), Diran Adebayo’s Some Kind of Black (1996) or Meera Syal’s Anita and Me (1996) thematise their generation’s concrete demands of belonging and birthright. These works have been noted beyond Britain, but they are also notable in the context of the present book for their articulation of their claims vis-à-vis the the national space, culture and politics which could be made accountable for these claims. Hanif Kureishi’s The Buddha of Suburbia (1990), which Zadie Smith describes as a “key text” in her own reading biography (2018, 236–247), set the scene in particular ways with its famous opening lines that introduce “Karim Amir, […] an Englishman born and bred”, although “considered to be a funny kind of Englishman, a new breed, as it were, having emerged from two old histories” and yet “going somewhere” (Kureishi 1990, 3). These lines demanded a reconceptualisation of the long-perpetuated myth not only of a unified, insular, White understanding of Britishness, but in fact of the dominant aspect at the core of that myth, i.e. Englishness. In fact, they continue to make their demand to this day. Several aspects of The Buddha of Suburbia reverberate throughout Smith’s oeuvre and especially Swing Time. Kureishi charts the racism, postimperial orientalist

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phatasies and the self-serving cultural politics of the 1980s, in which his protagonist Karim Amir comes of age. It is in this context, in which one of the strands of Swing Time, too, is situated. Smith’s more than sixty chapters ‘swing’ back and forth on a timeline between the early 1980s and the first decade of the new millennium, between what Paul Gilroy has termed a ‘social democratic’ and a ‘neoliberal’ context (cf. Gilroy 2013). We learn about the protagonist’s process of coming of age: her upbringing in the 1980s, her extended rebellion, throughout her school and university years, against the expectations of her ambitious, politically activist mother; the culmination of this rebellion in the protagonist’s act of ‘selling her soul’ by accepting work as the personal assistant for the internationally celebrated pop star Aimee; and her ultimate reconciliation with her dying mother after her break with the world of glamour. As in Kureishi’s The Buddha of Suburbia, this protagonist’s self-search and development is strongly marked by finding a way of being in the world that is distinct from her mother’s choices and values. However, her mother’s presence in her life is replaced by the equally imposing Aimee, who personifies the neoliberal myth of the self-made woman in charge of her own happiness and that of others. Again, the protagonist has to define her own path by emancipating herself from Aimee, but this act of emancipation is more violent – a humiliation (cf. Smith 2016, 1) –than the emancipation from her mother, catapulting her out of the comfortable, yet delusional celebrity-bubble in which she has spent a considerable phase of her life, and back into a localised London setting marked by the reality of very concrete social constraints.

2.3 “Heal the World” The shift in the societal situation of the decades Swing Time charts has been prompted by a ‘liberated’ global economic culture of competitiveness unleashed in the early 1990s, which was expressly embraced by British politics and in fact throughout the British Isles. Read against this backdrop, the exact time and date pinned down in the prologue (25 October 2008, about half past twelve) may invite us to read the story of ‘humiliation’ it presents as a projection: The moment in which the narrative sets in, after the ‘crash’, is also the moment immediately following the global financial crisis that has shaken Britain badly, and whose impact has been felt in the years that followed. As for Smith’s protagonist, for Britain, too, class became a perceptible category once more, virtually overnight, and like the bubble that has burst for the protagonist, a bubble has equally burst in Britain and worldwide: the illusion that Western societies were spaces of possibility for everyone regardless of their origin, given that they ‘functioned’ properly and worked hard and passionate enough, and that their example could be passed on globally, and ‘heal the world’, to use the words of yet another international pop icon (cf. Jackson 1991). The figure in Swing Time that most immediately represents this ideology is Aimee, a personification of ‘globalness’, evident in the way she speaks, for she no longer

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has “an Australian accent, […] it was global: it was New York and Paris and Moscow and L.A. and London combined. Of course now lots of people speak in this way but Aimee’s version was the first time I heard it” (Smith 2016, 95). Aimee is an example of the kind-parent model of the plutocrat (cf. Littler 2017, 129), who believes that change can only be effected by “people like herself, of financial means and global reach” (Smith 2016, 125). Since Aimee and her entourage are portrayed in a satirical way, we may be inclined to read the protagonist’s turning against her as an overdue, brave act, and implied in this a criticism of a “logic” according to which wealth equals morality, for “the more money a person had, the more goodness – or potential goodness – a person possessed” (2016, 125). As the urge to do “something, anything […] causing a chaotic rupture in a system that more usually steamrolls all in its path” may have been a key motif for disenfranchised Brexit-voters whose choice may well serve to “finally and openly reveal a deep fracture in British society that has been thirty years in the making” (Smith 2018, 25, 27), the urge to do ‘something, anything’ is stronger in the protagonist than her wish to preserve her protected space. When the still young Karim Amir returns to London at the end of Kureishi’s novel, he embraces his future with the resolution to “live more deeply” (1990, 284), and the city that initially seemed vast has surrendered itself to him in a peculiar way, becoming a miniature: “And so I sat in the centre of this old city that I loved, which itself sat at the bottom of a tiny island” (1990, 284). When Smith’s protagonist returns to London in the prologue which opens in ultimas res, it is not so much her perception of the city which has changed, but the city itself, and the conditions of living in London. Global corporate culture (or cultural ‘corporations’ such as Aimee) has taken over and dictates ways of being individual – and convivial – in the world. In times in which slogans such as ‘be the change you want to see’ are part of a global meritocracy, it has become more difficult to pin down and challenge persisting structures of exclusion. Despite the resistance to machineries of exclusion already articulated in the writing of the first, and especially the second generation of postwar migrant writers, Smith still voices the acute need for the revision of a world literary canon in which these machineries of exclusion are still perceptibly at work. How many times, her Swing Times seems to throw at us, do the stories of ‘little black girl[s] in London’ have to be told to resonate more profoundly across the world of literature, so that they are no longer exceptional – or ‘minority’ or ‘ethnic’ – stories?

3 Literary Worldmaking in Swing Time Swing Time’s politics of space can be seen as reflecting back on the situatedness of literary writers and literary acts of positioning (cf. Helgesson 2014). The most challenging aspect is its strategic engagement with ‘others’. Swing Time references several

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generic ‘kinds’. It can, for instance, be read as a novel of formation, responding to a tradition shaped specifically by the Black and Asian writers of the ‘second generation’ named above. But unlike Karim Amir’s (and most other protagonists’) process of coming of age, this protagonist’s process of formation spans decades and remains open. Upon her mother’s death and the scandalous quitting of her job, she is free to reconsider and has “an idea, new to me, that there might be something else […] between my mother’s idea of salvation and nothing at all” (Smith 2016, 453). The ‘subject’/‘object’ of ‘salvation’ is Tracey, the protagonist’s childhood friend, and to some degree doppelganger, corrective and perhaps even alter ego. Smith’s Tracey holds up a mirror to the protagonist, first in companionship, then in judgment, and her power over the protagonist “goes beyond words. […] I was her only witness […] – whatever she was doing, I knew it was a form of judgment upon me. I was her sister: I had a sacred duty towards her. Even if only she and I knew it […]” (2016, 448). Tracey’s choices represent paths not taken by the protagonist, either because they are not presented as an option or because she is less certain about her aims: Volunteering as young women in Miss Isabel’s dance class it becomes clear that Tracey, now successful at the academy, “was the dream we’d both had, a decade before” (2016, 265). Tracey ambitiously pursues her singular aim of becoming a professional dancer, but finds her path blocked by pregnancy and the mercilessly competitive world of the stage. By contrast, the protagonist takes opportunities as they present themselves half-heartedly and ends up with a seemingly exciting, but ultimately unfree life as Aimee’s personal assistant. We encounter similar doubling constructions for instance in Andrea Levy’s Never Far from Nowhere (1996) or Mike Phillips’s A Shadow of Myself (2001) and also in Smith’s previous works, but there are aspects of the protagonist and Tracey that may specifically remind us of Tony and Adrian in Julian Barnes’s The Sense of an Ending (2011), which like Swing Time centres on the friendship between two differently disposed individuals. Like Tracey, Tony’s gifted friend Adrian stumbles across worldly limitations and human inadequacies, and takes things gravely, whereas Tony, like Smith’s protagonist, is less extraordinary and settles for what is least complicated; faced with the (tragic) fall of their respective friends, Smith’s and Barnes’s narrator-protagonists are forced to assess their own lives, and their own roles in their friends’ development. Both Adrian’s suicide and Tracey’s imposing survival (her ‘sense of justice’ leads her to serially harass individuals and institutions with messages) present facts that will not go away, that their friends – and the world – “have to ‘do something’ about” (Smith 2016, 451). That Tracey could be read as the protagonist’s alter ego is suggested by the fact that the ‘I’ remains nameless and that their opposing paths in life seem determined in different ways by forces beyond their own free will. The first encounter between them takes place on a Saturday in 1982, when their mothers sign them up for Miss Isabel’s dance lesson in the local church community centre. They notice one another “for obvious reasons”, because their “shade of brown was exactly the same”

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(Smith 2016, 9). Tracey’s plaits, however, sport “satin yellow bows”, a “phenomenon unknown” to the protagonist’s mother. Whereas Tracey is her white mother’s “most striking accessory”: I was an accessory only in the sense that in my very plainness I signified admirable maternal restraint, it being considered bad taste – in the circles to which my mother aspired – to dress your daughter like a little whore. But Tracey was unashamedly her mother’s aspiration and avatar, her only joy, in those thrilling yellow bows […]. (Smith 2016, 9–10)

Throughout the first section of the novel, we learn about the different lives that the two girls lead due to the familial constellation into which they have been born: The protagonist’s loving and caring working-class father cannot live up to his wife’s standards; Tracey’s father is largely absent, in and out of jail, unpredictable when around, and yet allegedly a dancer, and thus a figure of fascination to the protagonist, to whom “a dancer was a man from nowhere, without parents or siblings, without a nation or people, without obligations of any kind, and this was exactly the quality I loved” (Smith 2016, 24). To the protagonist, Tracey’s home, the fast food and television habits are spaces of desire, but she cannot become Tracey and must do with the ‘constraints’ of her own experience. Whereas the protagonist is an open book to us, there is no directive on how to read Tracey. Like the protagonist, we cannot inhabit Tracey’s mind. And like the anonymous messages she writes to the protagonist after their lives have drifted apart and things have gone badly for her (“Now everyone knows who you really are”, 2016, 5, 438–439), Tracey remains the ‘other’ whose experience remains inaccessible, even to Smith who through her protagonist documents her own necessarily limited ability of imagining Tracey’s world (cf. Pirker forthcoming). For its concern with class and racialised ascriptions, but also for its enacted, minute realism, Swing Time can be read as a social novel, and this aspect makes it symptomatic of the post-crisis literature emerging from Britain, among which we find such novels as Lanchester’s Capital (2012, on the gentrification evident in the microcosm of a street in London), Alan Hollinghurst’s The Stranger’s Child (2011, a diachronic exploration of class through a twentieth-century family saga) or Barnes’s above-mentioned The Sense of an Ending (2011, in which Tony becomes obsessed with the condescension of his ex-girlfriend’s family). Smith herself has written revealingly about the changing implications of class in her essays, and specifically about the unspoken rules of interaction, or rather the lack thereof, across class boundaries. Whereas playdates between children from the “council flat” and the “nice flat on the right side of Willesden” were possible in her own childhood, even if “[n]ot without tension”, bridging that tension seems to have become impossible more recently (Smith 2018, 28). In Swing Time, where Smith’s narrator is our only vehicle into Tracey’s world, it is precisely this tension that marks her – and our – ability to fully imagine her experience beyond stereotypical conceptions.

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3.1 Constructing a World through Narration The world conjured up in Swing Time provides us with a panoramic sense of a wide range of spaces, social milieus and characters, which are paraded before us in changing situations, predicaments and moods. The one fixture in the novel is indeed the narrative instance. Apart from the narrator-protagonist’s strictly limited view, other views are only rarely communicated through dialogues and direct quotations from the emails or letters of others. The homodiegetic narration of Swing Time is consistent and almost epic in its scope, and since it opens with the confession of a ‘humiliation’, we have no reason to doubt its sincerity and reliability. At a closer glance, however, the narrator is exploring herself while narrating, not as obsessively as Barnes’s Tony (2011, e.g. 11, 52, 59), but occasionally and overtly, as in the following passage, in which the narrator continuously corrects herself and comments on her memory: I say ‘our mothers’, but […] mine was different. […] I trailed behind her as she […] [gave] impromptu lectures about […] the desperate need for teachers of colour – which I think was the first time I heard the new euphemism ‘of colour.’ […] How I remember her doing that […]! […] I do remember one occasion of shame, […] I was watching a Fred and Ginger routine […] with Tracey, over and over. Tracey had an ambition to one day recreate that whole routine herself – this seems to me now like looking at the Sistine Chapel and hoping to recreate it on your bedroom ceiling. (Smith 2016, 42; emphasis added)

These revelations show the narrator-protagonist simultaneously controlling and being controlled by the plot she is rendering, as an interlocutor in shifting positions rather than someone who lays claims to a specific identitarian position (cf. Bhabha 2015). The narrator’s limitations are also explored on a different level: Readers may take issue with the stereotypical portrayal of the African country in which Aimee invests so substantially and to which the protagonist is sent in order to observe the progress of a girls’ school project on location. Unlike the streets and districts in London, the country is not named; the descriptions remain clichéd, and we are forced to limit our understanding of the space to whatever is conveyed to us by the narrator. Again, knowledge in this novel is radically limited to the narrator’s only gradually expanding views. Although this is most acutely perceptible in the depictions of the West African setting, the constant negotiation between narrated world and narrator occurs, in fact, throughout the novel, in the places as well as the microcosms described in the novel, e.g. the housing estate where the protagonist and Tracey have grown up, or the world of the stage. Numerous British novelists have used the stage as microcosm: Caryl Phillips’s Dancing in the Dark (2005) or Esther Freud’s Lucky Break (2012) come to mind, but also, again, Kureishi’s The Buddha of Suburbia (1990), in which Karim Amir, whose dream it is to become an actor, is subjected to the orientalist, political and sexual projections of a series of directors he encounters, frequently stumbling in his attempts to

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make these projections work for him in his process of “going somewhere” (1990, 3). In Swing Time, we encounter similar situations. Here, however, the stage is more than a microcosm or a plotline; it is part of an intermedial act of worldmaking that centers on the realm of dance (cf. Pirker, forthcoming).

3.2 Literary Worldmaking and Dance Dance makes its way into Swing Time on several levels and in a variety of ways, often in ekphrastic passages on films, stage productions and other performances. The most programmatic manifestation can be found in the title, which, among other things, is an intermedial reference to the eponymous, classic film musical (dir. George Stevens, USA, 1936) starring Fred Astaire and Ginger Roberts (cf. also Smith 2016, 3–5). Like Smith’s novel in 2016, the musical film responded to the then recent economic crisis. The protagonists struggle in their desperate attempts at pursuing happiness in an environment marked by a social divide, and the propagated path to achievement is to ‘Pick Yourself Up’, which is also embraced by Aimee (cf. e.g. 2016, 113). These parallels remain latent in Swing Time, because to the protagonist the plot of this and other musical films “were only roads leading to the dance. The story was the price you paid for the rhythm” (2016, 24). This literally provokes the question: What is the significance of dance? Dance, when understood as an aesthetic practice, is systemically analogous to literature, but its repertoire is radically different. Its presence in Swing Time can only be referential, “enriching” as a “disseminating play with signification” (Marcsek-Fuchs 2015, 260; ↗14 Intermediality and Remediation) in the sense that it points to a different world of signification. Read metaphorically, the references to dance can be interpreted as self-referential comments on the practice of literary writing: The protagonist’s idealised notion of the ‘dancer’ as a person ‘out of nowhere, with no obligations’ can be transmitted to any other artist persona, including the literary writer who has an obligation to their craft alone. At the same time, the ideal of the ‘pure’ artist is continuously challenged on the metaphorical level by contextualising, corrective revisions and concretisations: Of Fred Astaire (Smith 2016, 4–5), of the fictional Aimee, of the forgotten black dancer Jeni LeGon (cf. Scafe 2019); and of the narrator-protagonist herself, whose namelessness is contrasted not only with the definitive claim “Now everyone knows who you really are” (Smith 2016, 5, 438–439), but also, more importantly, with her own, expansive version of herself, which challenges any attempt at seeing her as a persona ‘out of nowhere’. Beyond providing an analogous referential system to that of literature dance enters the lifeworlds of characters in the novel. Not only is it studied both in theory and practice, it also has the power to affect: In a film lecture about the “Bojangles of Harlem” scene of Swing Time (1936) the protagonist is bored by the critic’s argument, but when the scene is played, her feet “in sympathy with the music, tapped […] I felt

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a wonderful lightness in my body, a ridiculous happiness, it seemed to come from nowhere” (Smith 2016, 3–4). Observing Tracey in a minor chorus role in Showboat in 2005, she “felt my feet moving beneath me […]. I wished I was up there with her. […] I was so jealous I cried” (2016, 362); in West Africa, she encounters the “greatest dancer” she “ever saw”, the “kankurang”, a wildly swaying orange shape […] whatever was coming towards us was dancing to […] [b]eats so fast, so complex, that you had to think about them – or see them expressed through the body of a dancer – to understand what you were hearing. […] I thought: here is the joy I’ve been looking for all my life […] and [the] general euphoria […] radiated from the figure […] through Lamin, through me, through everyone I could see. (Smith 2016, 163, 165)

Dance, however, not only affects and controls, it is an imaginative, ‘camp’ practice of resistance, as Smith outlines in yet another essay. “Camp”, she writes, is the nuclear option of the disenfranchised. When you take everything from the slave […] you then leave only the body […]. And one of the things the disenfranchised slave did with his body was the shimsham, that fabulous dance of a walk, as camp as anyone on the earth. Camp is our flagrant and delicious survival in the face of and despite the fact. (Smith 2018, 182–183)

Seen in this way, campness is an affirmation of a subjective mind and experience that will not be subdued, regardless of the worldly limitations encountered, showing that “there can be defiance in […] being seen in all your glory, and within the terms of your own self-conception” (Smith 2018, 186). In Swing Time, such a camp attitude is most powerfully evoked in the closing image of Tracey on the balcony of her estate flat, “in a dressing gown and slippers, her hands in the air, turning, turning, her children around her, everybody dancing” (Smith 2016, 452) – in the face of and despite her apparent failure and fall. Whatever our interpretation of Tracey’s development, it is important that her fate, by the end of the novel, is not sealed. In the final image of the narrator virtually looking up at Tracey Smith captures a moment of surprise. With moments such as these, Smith’s novel fulfils an essential criterion of literary worldmaking by coming up with descriptions that provide interventions into expected or habitual ways of seeing the world, to borrow, again, from Rorty. Describing Tracey’s world as “anything other than incipient tragedy” (Smith 2018, 36) indeed posits a challenge to well-oiled British and Western cultural narratives of class. According to Rorty, every new description of the world discovers individuals and groups that have hitherto been neglected and that by way of those descriptions enter our awareness (1989). But what happens after we have closed a book and enter our own social worlds? Smith’s literary approach in Swing Time challenges the notion of literature as separate, contingent world. By forcing an open ending upon us, by referencing another world of signification, but also by showing us a narrator who is affected, Smith invites us to do the same: to suspend our disbelief not only during the consumption of a fictional narrative that we can then leave behind, but to carry it

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into our worlds of experience and with it an openness to be affected by, although not necessarily knowledgeable about, the world of others.

4 Concluding Observations The literatures emerging from Britain in recent years display multiple approaches to (British) worlds and a great variety of worldmaking strategies in and across media, forms and genres. They show the juxtapositions, entanglements and conditions of particular (British, often London) locales within a ‘globalised’ world and its imagined heterotopias that are still informed by national or imperial myths, but no longer controlled by national interests. So why draw exhaustively on Zadie Smith’s Swing Time? As a writer who has acquired ‘world literary status’ in the traditional, circulationoriented sense, she indeed belongs to those authors who show a certain compatibility with Casanova’s ‘meridian’ of world literature (2004, 87) – now best described as a system of valorisation executed on the terms of literary institutions in the global northwest. However, Smith’s work also fills the concept of a writer who creates worlds that can be read as challenging projections, in the sense of both expanding her readers’ social horizons and simultaneously problematising the limitations of any projected literary world. Swing Time is a widely circulated text that transports particular impressions of Britain and a particular British perspective on the world to readers worldwide. Although it can be ‘consumed’ as a page-turner, it deserves to be re-read with care not only for its minute dissection of the millennial, neoliberalist mythologies and their universalist claims, but also for its selfconscious engagement with literature’s affective (worldmaking) potential. What is more, as literary act of positioning and act of literary positioning, it partakes in a paradigmatic way in ongoing conceptualisations of world literature (cf. Helgesson 2014). There are of course countless writers whose works are tackling similar challenges, and who find other, sometimes radical forms to negotiate persisting structures of exclusion in the world of literature and beyond. In an article published in the Guardian in the summer of 1996, which announced successful second-generation migrant writers as “The New Brits on the Block” (Jaggi 1996, 31), Maya Jaggi bemoaned the notion that Black and Asian writers were treated by reviewers and the literary establishment as if they had emerged out of nowhere, although her headline reinforced precisely this notion. What was new was the force with which these writers articulated claims of belonging that still resonate. Today, established writers such as Jackie Kay are regularly asked to do such things as select “Britain’s 10 Best BAME Writers” for the same newspaper (Kay 2019). Although Kay has embraced the opportunity conscientiously to showcase writers who offer formally and thematically compelling work and are not all – as yet – widely known, the commission shows that the moment in which the stories of the ‘little black girl[s] in London’, Manchester, Glasgow or Cardiff will

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have entered the wider world literary consciousness will only arrive once that consciousness has become less dominantly White and the ‘meridians’ of World Literature more effectively diffused.

5 Bibliography 5.1 Works Cited Aboulela, Leila. Minaret. London: Bloomsbury, 2005. Anderson, Benedict. Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism. London: Verso, 1983. Attridge, Derek. The Singularity of Literature. London: Routledge, 2004. Barnes, Julien. The Sense of an Ending. London: Vintage, 2011. Bhabha, Homi K. “The Beginning of Their Real Enunciation: Stuart Hall and the Work of Culture.” Critical Inquiry 42.1 (2015): 1–30. Cannadine, David. “The ‘Last Night of the Proms’ in Historical Perspective.” Historical Research 81.212 (2008): 315–349. https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.1111/j.14682281.2008.00466.x (27 May 2019). Casanova, Pascale. The World Republic of Letters. Trans. Malcolm B. DeBevoise. Cambridge, MA and London: Harvard University Press, 2004 [1999]. Cheah, Pheng. What Is a World? Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2016. Damrosch, David. What Is World Literature? Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2003. English, James F. The Economy of Prestige. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2005. Gilroy, Paul. After Empire: Melancholia and Convivial Culture. London: Routledge, 2004. Gilroy, Paul. “1981 and 2011: From Social Democratic to Neoliberal Rioting.” The South Atlantic Quarterly 112.3 (2013): 550–558. Glanville, Jo. “‘Knighthood? No thanks, Ma’am:’ Why Royal Recognition for Writing Is Not Always an Honour.” The Guardian (5 Jan. 2018). https://www.theguardian.com/books/booksblog/2018/ jan/05/knighthood-no-thanks-why-royal-recognition-for-writing-is-not-always-an-honour (26 Jan. 2019). Huggan, Graham. The Postcolonial Exotic: Marketing the Margins. London: Routledge, 2001. Jackson, Michael. “Heal the World.” Dangerous. By Jackson. New York: Epic Records, 1991. Jaggi, Maya. “The New Brits on the Block.” The Guardian (13 July 1996): 31. Johnson, Linton Kwesi. “Inglan Is a Bitch.” Bass Culture. By Johnson. New York: Island Records, 1980. Kay, Jackie. “Jackie Kay Selects Britain’s 10 Best BAME Writers.” The Guardian (5 Oct. 2019). https://www.theguardian.com/books/2019/oct/05/jackie-kay-selects-britains-10-bestbame-writers (23 Jan. 2020). Kureishi, Hanif. The Buddha of Suburbia. London: Faber and Faber, 1990. Levine, Caroline. Forms: Whole, Rhythm, Hierarchy, Network. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2015. Littler, Jo. Against Meritocracy: Culture, Power and Myths of Mobility. New York: Routledge, 2017. Loh, Lucienne. The Postcolonial Country in Contemporary Literature. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013. Lorcin, Patricia M.E. “The Nostalgias for Empire.” History and Theory 57.2 (2018): 269–285.

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“London 2012: Opening Ceremony – Reviews.” The Observer (29 July 2012). https://www. theguardian.com/sport/2012/jul/29/london-2012-opening-ceremony-reviews (26 Jan. 2019). Lopate, Leonard. “Leonard Lopate at Large: Caryl Phillips.” Robin Hood Radio on Demand (14 Nov. 2018). https://robinhoodradioondemand.com/podcast/leonard-lopate-at-large-caryl-phillips/ (26 Jan. 2019). Lord Kitchener. “London Is the Place for Me.” 1948. London Is the Place for Me: Various Artists. London: Honest Jon’s Records, 2011. Marcsek-Fuchs, Maria. Dance and British Literature: An Intermedial Encounter (Theory – Typology – Case Studies). Leiden: Brill and Rodopi, 2015. Martin, Courtney. “A Conversation Between Authors Zadie Smith, Yaa Gyasi, and Courtney Martin.” Obama Foundation (19 Nov. 2018). https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S4g-_hir2AE (26 Jan. 2019). Moretti, Franco. “Conjectures on World Literature.” New Left Review 1 (2000): 54–68. Mufti, Aamir R. Forget English! Orientalisms and World Literatures. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2016. Nasta, Susheila, and Mark Stein, eds. The Cambridge History of Black and Asian British Writing. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2020. Neumann, Birgit, and Gabriele Rippl. “Anglophone World Literature: Introduction.” Special issue Anglophone World Literatures. Anglia 135.1 (2017): 1–20. Ortiz, Fernando. Cuban Counterpoint, Tobacco and Sugar. Trans. Harriet de Oníz. Durham and London: Duke University Press, 1995. Pirker, Eva Ulrike. “Britain.” English Literatures Across the Globe: A Companion. Ed. Lars Eckstein. Paderborn: Fink, 2007. 33–60. Pirker, Eva Ulrike. “Approaching Space: Zadie Smith’s North London Fiction.” Journal of Postcolonial Writing 52.1 (2016): 64–76. Pirker, Eva Ulrike. “Intermedial Ways of Worldmaking in Zadie Smith’s Swing Time.” [forthcoming]. Ponzanesi, Sandra. The Postcolonial Cultural Industry: Icons, Markets, Mythologies. Houndmills and Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014. Rorty, Richard. Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989. Scafe, Suzanne. “Gendered, Post-Diasporic Mobilities and the Politics of Blackness in Zadie Smith’s Swing Time (2016).” Caribbean Review of Gender Studies 13 (2019): 1–27. Selvon, Samuel. The Lonely Londoners. London: Longman, 2009 [1956]. Siskind, Mariano. “The Genres of World Literature: The Case of Magical Realism.” The Routledge Companion to World Literature. Ed. Theo D’Haen, David Damrosch, and Djelal Kadir. New York: Routledge, 2011. 345–55. Sivanandan, Ambalavaner. “RAT and the Degradation of Black Struggle.” Race & Class 26.1 (1985): 1–33. Sinha, P.K., and Jagdish K. Ghosh. History of British Literature. New Delhi: Commonwealth Publishers, 2011. Smith, Zadie. Swing Time. London: Hamish Hamilton, 2016. Smith, Zadie. Feel Free. London: Hamish Hamilton, 2018. “The Gambia Rejoins the Commonwealth.” The Commonwealth (8 Feb. 2018). http://thecommonwealth.org/media/news/gambia-rejoins-commonwealth (26 Jan. 2019). Walkowitz, Rebecca. Born Translated: The Contemporary Novel in an Age of World Literature. New York: Columbia University Press, 2015. Walters, Tracey L. “Still Mammies and Hos: Stereotypical Images of Black Women in Zadie Smith’s Novels.” Zadie Smith: Critical Essays. Ed. Tracey Walters. New York: Peter Lang, 2008. 123–139. Williams, Charlotte. Sugar and Slate. Aberystwyth: Planet, 2002.

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5.2 Further Reading King, Bruce. The Oxford English Literary History, vol. 13: The Internationalization of English Literature. Ed. Jonathan Bate. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004. Special issue Our Small Universe: Focus on Languages of the United Kingdom. Modern Poetry in Translation 1 (2019). Ramazani, Jahan. “The Twentieth and Twenty-First Centuries.” The Norton Anthology of English Literature. 10th ed. Ed. Stephen Greenblatt. New York and London: Norton, 2018. 1015–1045. Stein, Mark. Black British Novels of Transformation. Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 2004.

Joakim Wrethed

20 Ireland

Abstract: Irish literature can be said to have a complex relation to the concept of world literature. On the one hand, the region has a great number of writers who have established themselves as strong world literature authors. Indeed, Joyce constitutes a paradigmatic example. On the other hand, this fact is partly due to them writing in English, which is the language of the coloniser. It is argued that this state of affairs has provoked a set of strategies exemplified by the authors Yeats, Joyce, Beckett and Banville, who all have successfully entered the world literature realm. Furthermore, it is claimed that the world of letters is a highly competitive field, which as any other field inevitably contains ‘strong’ and ‘weak’ contenders, as well as elements of inclusion and exclusion. This chapter itself illustrates this point by its own barring of other authors and types of literature from Ireland. However, it perceives positive potential in the new technologies for the general spread of world literature. This notion rests on a Deleuzean idea of absolute immanence (and immanence as transcendence). Key Terms: Ireland, loss, locality, phenomenology, transcendental immanence

1 Ireland and Canonised Irish Literature in the World To engage with literature inevitably implies to take on an ontological riddle regardless of what our initial intentions with our commitment may have been. ‘World literature’ is a concept constantly at work, always in motion; otherwise, it would soon have exhausted its powers. Exactly how to map out its conceptual terrain is clearly a Sisyphus project, which as a phenomenon perchance uncovers its true core meaning and thereby its raison d’être. Surely, it is crucial to regard it as something dynamic rather than static. Franco Moretti has summarised the issue in a similar way: “The point is that there is no other justification for the study of world literature […] but this: to be a thorn in the side, a permanent intellectual challenge to national literatures – especially the local literature” (2014, 166). The concept must be vibrant to perpetually be able to challenge. Theo D’haen goes through analogous aspects of world literature in Chapter 2 in this volume by referring to some of the central cartographers of the discourse: Casanova, Damrosch and Moretti (↗2 Re-Reading Classical Approaches). Two things that D’haen further develops in his chapter have significance when we approach Irish literature as world literature. First, we have the postcolonial dimension that as a political force cannot be ignored in our chosen context. Second, the importance of the English language in relation to the phenomenon in focus cannot be disregarded either. These constituents are of course intricately intertwined within Irish literature generally, producing theoretical and methodological challenges on https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110583182-021

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various levels. However, in relation to world literature the issues become even more enhanced and acute. Turning to Irish world literature without acknowledging the pioneering work of the Irish nineteenth-century scholar Hutcheson Macaulay Posnett would indeed be odd. In 1886, Posnett determined a line of demarcation that will follow the discourse in one form or another all the way into our own time: Between the world-religions of Israel and Islâm and the world-cultures of Alexandria and Rome there are, no doubt, very wide differences. Yet, though the former reach universality through social bonds of creed and the latter reach universality through the unsocial idea of personal culture, the outcome of both is to rise above old restrictions of place and time, and to render possible a literature which, whether based on Moses or Homer, may best be termed a “worldliterature”. (Posnett 2014 [1886], 43; emphasis added)

Close to Moretti’s formulation in spirit, Posnett argues that the ‘restrictions of place and time’ need to be confronted. Perhaps sensing that the local can contain the universal and vice versa, the Irish scholar points to the vitalising force of the thorn in the side. However, as we shall see, that thorn can appear in different shapes and come from diverse directions. Irish world literature highlights this tension in very concentrated forms. Irish writers concretely live through the ambivalence towards the colonial burden of England, which exists so closely geographically, historically and also purely linguistically: “The Irish writer has always been confronted with a choice. This is the dilemma of whether to write for the native audience – a risky, often thankless task – or to produce texts for consumption in Britain and North America” (Kiberd 1996, 136). The colonial nuisance – which, to complicate things even further, is concomitantly a potential asset – must paradoxically be held at bay, while also being exploited as a means to reach out into the wider world, in order to avoid perpetuating a cultural locality that the ‘world’ would never know about or share in the first place. This primarily constitutes the linguistic aspect. Irish is spoken daily by some 70 000 people (below 1 percent of the population), while “Ireland is the country with both the highest percentage of English speakers and the highest percentage of people who regard English as their first language” (O’Sullivan 2018, 24). In spite of that, however, English is still the second official language of Ireland, which reveals a national ambiguity on that topic. (A detailed summary of the decline of Gaelic is included in Pascale Casanova’s The World Republic of Letters, cf. 2004, 308). The spectre of Gaelic looms large, while English keeps growing as the world’s lingua franca (around 1.5 billion speakers globally), clearing paths out into the world of cosmopolitan life – and a huge potential book market at that. One can already on this linguistic level sense the primordial distance(s) that many Irish authors have been anguished by – but also utilised as an almost elemental energy – constantly feeding into their creative writing. As D’haen concludes: “Anglophone postcolonial works of literature are in a much more favourable position to relatively quickly gain entrance to world literature than those in lesser known languages and smaller literatures” (↗2 Re-Reading Classical

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Approaches, 37). If world literature has as its task to be a thorn in the side of local literatures, the Irish author may have the experience of being tormented by the spikes of the complicated postcolonial identity and to constantly be haunted by the spectre of Irish parole (that in practice has become a distant langue for the vast majority of Irishmen and women). Perhaps oftentimes the compromise has been to speak Irish culture through the mouth of English. An act that truly has both its gains and losses, hence the enhancement of the paradoxicality already embedded in the concept of world literature. It is the intention here to trace tensions between world literature and a select set of canonised Irish authors: Yeats, Joyce, Beckett and Banville. While upholding the problematising factors of colonialism and postcolonialism, this chapter will – through phenomenologically motivated close reading – outline author strategies that negotiate Irishness and more universally oriented moves that have placed at least a branch of Irish literature firmly in the field of world literature. Before going into close readings of excerpts pertinent for the purpose, it is necessary to more precisely map out the position we need to take in relation to the sphere of world literature. The selection of authors is based on the fact that they all clearly reveal a set of specifically Irish concerns (albeit dealing with them differently): the preoccupation with loss, the strategies of responding to colonial power, exile (geographical and intellectual), the linguistic background, and partly with the conundrum of the power of Irish literature.

2 The Phenomenological Aspects of World Literature As David Damrosch states, the enormous mass of works that could be labelled ‘world literature’ “can breed a kind of scholarly panic” (2013, 199). If we further follow Damrosch’s line of reasoning, we can quickly clarify that an initial and preliminary definition of world literature may stipulate that “[a] work enters into world literature by a double process: first, by being read as literature; second by circulating out into a broader world beyond its linguistic and cultural point of origin” (2013, 200). By simply adopting that notion, we would have a huge number of works at our hands, even if we limit ourselves to works of Irish origin written in English. However, if we choose a phenomenological approach to our material, then literature does not really ‘exist’ until it has been thoroughly read. Literature is born in the meeting between the reader and the text. To analytically include at least parts of that reading, the number of texts would have to be narrowed down for practical reasons. Damrosch indeed suggests that our attitude be primarily phenomenological: As it moves into the sphere of world literature, far from inevitably suffering a loss of authenticity or essence, a work can gain in many ways. To follow this process, it is necessary to look closely at the transformations a work undergoes in particular circumstances, which is why this book highlights the issues of circulation and translation and focuses on detailed case studies throughout.

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To understand the workings of world literature, we need more a phenomenology than an ontology of the work of art: a literary work manifests differently abroad than it does at home. (Damrosch 2013, 200)

The aim here is to treat select passages of the Irish authors already mentioned and let these readings comment on an array of issues, such as locality vs. globalisation, Irish culture vs. English language (and culture), author identity negotiation, postcolonial perspectives on Irish writing as world literature (gains and losses), world literature reading as a specific form of reading, etc. There will be no comprehensive map of Irish world literature, but there will be a tentative outline of what might be typically Irish as regards its specific colonial background. Another backdrop is the fact that Irish literature has given us four Nobel Prize laureates (Shaw, Yeats, Beckett, Heaney) and on top of that giants such as Wilde and Joyce, who perhaps reach beyond the Nobel Prize altogether. In any case, there can be no doubt that Irish literature holds a strong and important position in world literature, and we shall below ponder the question ‘why’ through phenomenological analysis. The dictum is not that less is sometimes more, but that less is always more. Damrosch functions as the methodological guide here too: “[W]orld literature is not an immense body of material that must somehow, impossibly, be mastered; it is a mode of reading that can be experienced intensively with a few works just as effectively as it can be explored extensively with a large number” (2013, 205). Thus, the phenomenological approach in the context of Irish world literature is adequate in at least two ways. First, its methodology resembles an ideal world literature reader as an intellectual nomad with an open mind towards different forms of otherness. Since literature comes into being in the immediate meeting between reader and text, we can imagine literature without extensive and elaborate world literature maps, but certainly, the reverse does not hold true. The actual reading of the work determines its coordinates and without the hermeneutical process, there would be no theoretical positions either. Second, this intellectual nomadism fits at least the Irish writers chosen for the in-depth analysis below. This also partly applies bio-geographically in the authors’ lives, which constitutes another theme running through the investigation. A shorthand for the phenomenology relevant here would be Gilles Deleuze’s notion of pure immanence. By implementing that thinking we can see world literature as constitutive of a particular transcendental field, which Deleuze defines thus: “It appears […] as a pure stream of a-subjective consciousness, a prereflexive impersonal consciousness, a qualitative duration of consciousness without a self” (2004, 178). Immanence can thus be construed as the absolute pre-temporal stream of experience (similar to Bergson’s la durée) that underlies the reading experience. Such immanence is not altogether dissimilar in different geographical regions or cultures. However, the perceived string of whatever kind may differ in terms of tone or style depending on cultural location. Through this, we understand that the reader-self is adaptable and thereby open to the transcendental field of world

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literature, of course still with inescapable dissonances of locality aspects and translation difficulties – cultural as well as linguistic ones – accompanying the phenomenological reader. Pure immanence allows literature to manifest itself as such but within different contexts. There will always be a core affectivity that makes manifest at least parts of the literary piece, even though other contextual constituents may be disregarded or overlooked. It should be noted exactly what we mean by this. In his article “Globalization and World Literature” (2011), J. Hillis Miller very clearly illustrates the opposite of what we will pursue here. In a discussion of Yeats’s semi-sonnet “The Cold Heaven” (1916), Miller imagines giving a potential translator of the poem into Chinese some advice and he begins the enumeration with the phrase: “Here are some things it might be good to know when trying to understand ‘The Cold Heaven’” (2011, 256; emphasis added). Of course, a translator needs extensive knowledge of the object of translation, but the level that is of interest in the following is affective and it would allow for cultural apprehension more on the level of hybridity. Generally, the flows of culture – especially with the speed of our modern technology – must contain a great deal of ‘translations’ of that type. It is not a ‘complete’ understanding, not the ‘expert’s’ understanding. Not the coloniser teaching the colonised.

2.1 Yeats: “[I]n the Deep Heart’s Core” William Butler Yeats is a distinctly complex poet. He displays many of the predicaments the world literature concept seems to conjure up. Obviously, much of his work has been transferred into the realm of world literature and has been – and still is – circulated globally. The paradox that is perhaps most prominent is that the author who actively worked hard on trying to construct an Irish literary identity, that is, something very local and national, in the same stroke managed to create something that was partly to become its opposite. The Dublin City Libraries collection contains translations of Yeats’s works into at least 200 languages. In his creative art, Yeats is evidently a recycler and hybridiser since he actively blends “Irish and English traditions, and eventually draws into this potent intercultural mix East and South Asian cultural resources, including Japanese Noh theatre and Indian meditative practices” (Greenblatt 2018, 210). It is as if the energy of the will to contribute to a nationalist literature spills over into the aesthetic objects, but that these objects are too powerful to be entirely kept inside any local tradition. The plays and poems – regardless of what the central themes are – bounce back out into the world again. We shall examine the emblematic poem “The Lake Isle of Innisfree” (1890) more closely. I will arise and go now, and go to Innisfree, And a small cabin build there, of clay and wattles made: Nine bean-rows will I have there, a hive for the honey-bee, And live alone in the bee-loud glade.

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And I shall have some peace there, for peace comes dropping slow, Dropping from the veils of the morning to where the cricket sings; There midnight’s all a glimmer, and noon a purple glow, And evening full of the linnet’s wings. I will arise and go now, for always night and day I hear lake water lapping with low sounds by the shore; While I stand on the roadway, or on the pavements grey, I hear it in the deep heart’s core. (Yeats 2018 [1890], 215)

Being one of the poet’s most popular poems, it very neatly illustrates the world literature dilemmas that I would like to highlight. Obviously promoting The Irish Revival, the poem utilises the Romantic trope of the nostalgic return to the native land. Ireland represents naturalness, closeness to nature, tranquillity and peace. Since the poem is written in London, Yeats exploits the distance in such a way that it dresses a common – perhaps even universal – phenomenon in geographically specific robes. The ambiguity manifests itself even on the word-level. “Innisfree” is an Anglicisation of the Irish Inis Fraoch. ‘Fraoch’ means ‘heather’ and ‘inis’ means ‘island’ as a noun, but as a verb it also means ‘to tell’. We do not need to go down the deconstructive path fully here, but instead note that ‘heather’ would immediately connect to a potential reader’s nature setting – vast coniferous forests with the ground covered by blazoning lilac-reddish heather – thus conjuring an affectivity comparable to what Yeats must have been after, even though the reader might never have set foot on Innisfree, in fact, might never have set foot on Irish soil at all. What the additional meaning of ‘inis’ as ‘tell’ does for a reader who knows Irish, one could only speculate about. However, the main point is that the Anglicisation has been used in the poem and that the three quatrains of mostly iambic rhythm are written in English from a position of a metropolitan capital (London). The distance is utilised or even exploited – depending on how harsh one would like to be – since the local is outfitted in overwhelmingly ‘universal’ affectivity. The experience has its epicentre in “the deep heart’s core”, the heart becoming something like the soul or affectivity itself, making moods and feelings possible. Affectivity does not have a specific nationality and a flag. The perceptions are very concretely visual or auditory and they enhance the overall rhetorical aim stating that things would be better at home. The use of English most certainly affected the poem’s quick spread and subsequently its enormous popularity. Furthermore, the idea of the little cabin as a sanctuary – sheltering the subject from harsh (urban) reality – is built on the North American model of Thoreau’s Walden that Yeats had read (cf. Bizot 2019). In addition, Shawn Normandin draws attention to the “bean-rows” in Yeats’s poem that clearly link up with Thoreau’s thinking in an ambiguous way. For Thoreau, to grow beans meant to grow wisdom, but they were not grown for food, since he knew about the Pythagoreans’ ban on eating beans. Normandin suggests that this mirrors Yeats’s own ambiguities and split identity: “The simple word bean condenses the struggle of a poet caught between London and Sligo, and

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suffering from homesickness […]” (2015, 27). Kiberd comments on formal influences as a deliberate use of texts that had been intentionally subdued by the academic norm: “Yeats’s ‘The Lake Isle of Innisfree’, as an early example, took its long running line from Whitman, and its underlying idea from Thoreau’s Walden” (1996, 272). Thus, something that aims at being a homage to the local and all the positive connotations it exudes, is always already world literature and it also quickly returns into that realm. One could say that Yeats’s achievement in this particular poem displays a sort of ‘have the cake and eat it’ phenomenon that we shall see more of below. The culture/locality specificity easily combines with a broader affectivity (homesickness, nostalgia for childhood domains etc.). The environment is also an island, signalling insularity and a limited space that potentially could be very private. Ironically, this promotion of Irishness clad in the linguistic robe of English received high acclaim in England (cf. McDonald 1999, 216). Even towards the end of his career, Yeats was still writing about a glorious return to the homeland, which in reality never fully happened. The poetic energy is extracted out of a sense of loss. This dilemma can be stretched out to include several other Irish authors. Michael O’Sullivan has commented on this Yeatsian trait that becomes stronger when the poet grows older: [Yeats] is also now distancing himself from a wholly nationalist group of writers and in navigating his own split-identity, is thrown back towards a re-examination of the Anglo-Irish writers whose roots he also shares and who found new ways to write of Ireland from a distance – either through racial othering (Swift) or as Chinese immigrant (Goldsmith). The “turn” in Yeats’s thinking is a direct result of what one might call an expat’s dilemma; the homeland is romanticised or caught freeze-frame (Joyce’s Dublin of 1904 in Ulysses). This drives a longing for return only for the reality “back home” to make them seek the distance once again, a distance through which they can live out that brand of Irishness they have become accustomed to and been told they can only inhabit. The idealisation of life in Ireland through roots alone and through whatever “aristocratic objects” one purchases to make manifest that ideal are revealed to be as visionary as the claims one made for returning that were based on a dream of entitlement as shaky and ill-founded as aristocratic privilege. (O’Sullivan 2018, 125)

Yeats actually bought Lady Gregory’s castle Thoor Ballylee (County Galway) but he never lived there permanently. He hired living in London and spent much time on the continent towards the end of his life (cf. O’Sullivan 2018, 109). In all, this illustrates how strong affective force fields can be transformed into world literature, which then obviously can live its own life independent of the original locality that in some way or another gave birth to it. As Damrosch suggests, such literature possesses the richness to manifest itself differently in spatio-temporally diverse reading contexts (cf. 2013, 200). Strictly politically speaking, Yeats was of course very well aware of all of the existing positions. He seems to have settled for a compromise that was designed to fight a two-front war. As stated by Kiberd: “Yeats made it perfectly clear that his Irish revival was a revolt against a provincialism of mind which can sometimes inhere in imitative nationalism, sometimes in complacent imperialism, but which always seeks to

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reproduce itself in facsimile wherever it is found” (1996, 161). Yeats realised that Irish culture, history and traditions were most effectively spread through Hiberno-English texts. This becomes even more conspicuous in another example that Kiberd finds in the writing of Douglas Hyde. His collection Abhráin Ghrá Chúige Chonnacht: Love Songs of Connacht was published as a dual-language edition with Irish on one side, complemented by Hyde’s translation into Hiberno-English dialect on the other side: “It soon became clear, however, that the main appeal of this book to Yeats and his young contemporaries lay in Hyde’s own translations, and especially those translations written in prose rather than verse. The very success of the book caused the defeat of its initial purpose, for, along with popularising Irish literature, it made the creation of a national literature in English seem all the more feasible” (Kiberd 1996, 155). Instead of solely promoting provincialism, it opened up for a form of cosmopolitanism. Pascale Casanova points to the same cul de sac for Irish authors: “The marginality and artificiality of the literary use of Gaelic made translation necessary, with the result that writers who chose it found themselves in a paradoxical position from the first: either to write in the Irish language and remain unknown, without a real audience; or to be translated into English and so repudiate the linguistic and cultural rupture with the authority of London that writing in Gaelic represented” (2004, 309). In addition, Irish literature’s more and more secure position within world literature makes an important strand of this field’s inherent mode of reading very noticeable. As mentioned, the English language is both a curse and a blessing in being the language of the coloniser and concomitantly the quickest road into the sphere of globally spread literature. This cosmopolitan aspect will be further elaborated on in the subsection that follows.

2.2 Joyce: “He Spat a Red Bank Oyster” In certain ways James Joyce incarnates many of the components that make up Irish world literature: “[O]utcast from Ireland, scornful of Britain, and uneasy about the humanism of a Europe to which he could never fully surrender, he became instead a nomad, a world author” (Kiberd 1996, 327). What in particular gives Joyce a specific contemporary lustre are the labels ‘nomad’ and ‘world author’. Already in the beginning of the twentieth century, he foreshadows the core traits of a number of prominent late twentieth and twenty-first century writers – especially in the category of postcolonial writing, which arguably in many respects overlaps with what we would consider calling world literature, even though it is of course possible to point out areas of literary production that would be covered by world literature but which would fall outside the scope of the postcolonial radar (cf. Helgesson 2014, 488). Another feature that is significant is that Britain constitutes the colonial leviathan that Irish authors sometimes feel they have to leap over, in order to time and again land in the midst of Europe’s continental tradition of science, literature and philosophy (cf. Beckett and Banville – in Joyce and Beckett’s cases, it meant a geographical re-positioning, in

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Banville’s case it is of course more of an intellectual orientation). However, strictly regarded from the viewpoint of an available prestige economy – la république mondiale des lettres and monetary economy, albeit not immediately in Joyce’s “inveterate impecuniosity” (O’Sullivan 2018, 3) – Joyce made precisely the right move. In addition, writing in English facilitated his avoidance of a number of potential obstacles. It is oftentimes good to be eccentric, but definitely much better to be unconventional in a reasonably accessible way. Joyce seems to have been born a world literature author – regardless of how we assess the outcome of his authorship – still, the slightly disturbing question about exactly why remains to be answered. It is indeed a prominent peculiarity that Joyce chooses to set Ulysses in Dublin. Why being obsessed with an Ireland that spit him out? Joyce himself is supposed to have uttered: “For myself, I always write about Dublin, because if I can get to the heart of Dublin I can get to the heart of all the cities of the world. In the particular is contained the universal” (qtd. in Power 1949, 64–65). The reasons for leaving Ireland were several: he needed work but was also strongly critical of Irish society’s traditionalism, religiosity and narrow-minded patriotism. These circumstances provoked Joyce to write the most astonishing literary depiction of Dublin of all times. Yet again do we witness a piece of work that uses an enormous amount of specificity and local eccentricism, while at the same time constructing viable world literature components – that is, aspects that do not need much local knowledge in order to be interpreted. We also see how that locality – from the establishment of the literary work’s first building blocks – is built on the ground of myth or earlier works that have a broader scope than the local. In Ulysses (1992 [1922]), it is the scaffolding of Homer’s Odyssey and in Yeats’s Innisfree poem, American Romanticism and Transcendentalism. According to Kiberd, Joyce manages to create a work that “offers a challenge more difficult than that held out by any sacred text, yet it refuses to become a sacred text itself” (1996, 354). It is, however, quite feasible to conceive it as if Joyce presents the novel as a substitute for religious experience. That dimension manifests most clearly as experience revealed by means of phenomenological scrutiny and as world literature. Local specificity has shifted over into the general affectivity of the transcendental force field. It touches the reader without the reader being able to touch it. Whether this is to be labelled sacred or not, I leave as an open question. To emphasise and substantiate some of the points made, we shall close read a passage from Ulysses. Bloom’s interaction with the nationalist citizen reveals something similar to Yeats’s two-front war on a destructive type of nationalism, which posing as the opposite of imperialism actually is constructed in a similar way. Bloom was talking and talking with John Wyse and he quite excited with his dunducketymudcoloured mug on him and his old plumeyes rolling about. – Persecution, says he, all the history of the world is full of it. Perpetuating national hatred among nations. – But do you know what a nation means? says John Wyse.

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Yes, says Bloom. What is it? says John Wyse. A nation? says Bloom. A nation is the same people living in the same place. By God, then, says Ned, laughing, if that’s so I’m a nation for I’m living in the same place for the past five years. So of course everyone had the laugh at Bloom and says he, trying to muck out of it: Or also living in different places. That covers my case, says Joe. What is your nation if I may ask? says the citizen. Ireland, says Bloom. I was born here. Ireland. The citizen said nothing only cleared the spit out of his gullet and, gob, he spat a Red bank oyster out of him right in the corner. After you with the push, Joe, says he, taking out his handkerchief to swab himself dry. Here you are, citizen, says Joe. Take that in your right hand and repeat after me the following words. The muchtreasured and intricately embroidered ancient Irish facecloth attributed to Solomon of Droma and Manus Tomaltach og MacDonogh, authors of the Book of Ballymote, was then carefully produced and called forth prolonged admiration. No need to dwell on the legendary beauty of the cornerpieces, the acme of art […] (Joyce 1992 [1922], 429–430)

The definition of a nation is rather problematic, but yet somehow true. Here the emphasis is much in line with Benedict Anderson’s definition of it as an imagined community with an extraordinary propensity for self-sacrifice that might as well have an outlet in the form of violence, which in the scene is manifested as pent-up aggression (cf. Anderson 2016 [1983], 144). From an Irish perspective, the nation definition encapsulates the Irish population on Ireland as well as the diaspora (in its absence from the initial definition or as ‘living in other places’). Joyce has stored much of the despicable characteristics of a monomaniacal nationalist in the citizen. The racism at work has been thoroughly analysed by Rebecca L. Walkowitz: The citizen’s mute response at the end of the scene displays, through verbal silence and physical gesture, his conviction that living in a place, even from birth, is not sufficient proof of belonging: the citizen believes that the Irish nation includes only people of Celtic origin whose parents and parents’ parents spoke Gaelic and who participated in ancient Gaelic traditions for many centuries; for him, the nation is defined as people who participate, and whose ancestors participated, in an unchanging, homogeneous culture rooted in the ancient past. (Walkowitz 2006, 75)

This is obviously inherent to racism’s cognition: The fact of the matter is that nationalism thinks in terms of historical destinies, while racism dreams of eternal contaminations, transmitted from the origins of time through an endless

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sequence of loathsome copulations: outside history. Niggers are, thanks to the invisible tar-brush, forever niggers; Jews, the seed of Abraham, forever Jews, no matter what passports they carry or what languages they speak and read. (Anderson 2016 [1983], 149)

Through this Dublin pub version of the encounter with the blinkered cyclops, Joyce makes quite clear that a bigoted nationalism could amount to the same thing as the abuse of power from a colonial master. A third position is arguably “the acme of art” – which in our context would encompass the world literature reader – since it contains the essential level of reflection and meta-cognition (Joyce 1992 [1922], 430). The central point is that a reader can get rid of the Odyssey foundation as well as peel off the varnish of Irish local levels and still read it as a form of bullying of an inferior person (or a person in an inferior situation), who on top of that incarnates a minority category, since Bloom is Jewish. The poorly veiled question is: Are you as a Jew allowed to be also Irish? Do you expect to be included? All of that also contrasts with the mention of the Book of Ballymote, which among other things contains “genealogies of selected Irish families, histories and legends of early Irish kings” (Gifford and Seidman 2008 [1974], 361). In addition to all these aspects of identity, Joyce explores and exploits distances and a sense of loss. He uses his artistic rhetoric in an attempt at creating his own Ireland. The components that he adds all pull the narrative towards world literature domains. A pertinent artistic acme in the passage constitutes the affective apex and the maximised level of the ‘high’ and ‘low’ entrelacs (tracery, fabric, textile, tapestry). As the citizen spits his ‘gob’ in the corner, Joyce makes it into a “Red bank oyster” (Joyce 1992 [1922], 430). It is all in unison, the abject and the anciently erotic birth or re-birth out of the sea (water). Simultaneously locally specific and ‘universal’, it speaks in context and out of context and opens up the transcendental field of absolute immanence. The centrality of the mouth that spits and potentially imbibes, translates the local into something worldly-transcendental. Declan Kiberd detects something comparable in his general understanding of Joyce’s project of writing Ulysses: Joyce, therefore, adopted an attitude of lofty condescension to the European realist novel. He sought a method which could treat of the superstitions of a pre-modern community, which existed alongside and within a society already developed beyond the confining outlines of the nation-state. He did this in the conviction that the religious sensibility can sometimes survive more honestly outside of church structures and official dogma: for him art could be the third principle which, mediating between the material and sacred worlds, offered that new thing, “a secular definition of transcendence”. (Kiberd 1996, 340; quote within quote: Rushdie 1992, 420)

In Ulysses, Joyce highlights the different aspects of world literature and somehow makes them work synergetically or symbiotically towards a world literary expression. The energetic prose is immensely detailed, but it does not stifle more general semantic levels of prose fiction. His own split identity probably draws energy from the geographical distance between the author and Dublin, since a Dublin of the mind is sufficiently malleable and maybe therefore adequately real.

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There is obviously a sense of paradox embedded here too that needs mentioning. Agata Szczeszak-Brewer has analysed Ulysses in terms of a pilgrimage that is a teleology without telos. The inexistence of a centre is allegedly due to “[f]ragmentation and deracination in Ireland torn by sectarian violence and colonial struggle”, which in all, renders a situation where “the already difficult task of finding the true centre virtually impossible” (Szczeszak-Brewer 2007, 361). Lifted to the level of Joyce as an author within a certain historical context, again a sense of loss or a lack, an absence, fuels the writing. Bluntly put, Joyce utilises the lack of a centre as a way into the absolute centre of world literature (understood in the Casanovian sense). The constitutive absence that Szczeszak-Brewer draws attention to is simultaneously constitutive of the access to a very real centre on the literary scene. Perhaps it is also true as Enkyung Chun has suggested that Joyce wrote the world literature piece par excellence with Finnegan’s Wake. As a postmodern deconstruction of British English, it incarnates the ultimate postcolonial revolt (cf. Chun 2015, 72). However, in throwing English overboard, it becomes practically unreadable and the novel is currently most certainly solely read and studied by specialists. Thus, it becomes central world literature on a Casanovian map of prestige, but peripheral in the vaster world of world literature readers. The escape from provincialism and imperialist power begets scholarly provincialism and allegedly a new form of imperialism on the world literature map.

2.3 Beckett: “A Late Evening in the Future” Samuel Beckett is in many respects similar to Joyce. Not quite at home in Ireland, presumably not at home either in the Irish or in the English language, he of course went to the metropolitan capital of letters, Paris, and eventually began writing in French. An act equally rebellious as lucrative in terms of artistic and intellectual prestige capital. Ireland’s historical and colonial background is to some extent summarised in Neary’s dashing of his head against Cuchulain’s buttocks in the General Post Office in Murphy (Beckett 1994 [1938], 42). The legend – and the potential heroic figure on which to build nationalist narratives – is brought down to a level of sly slapstick humour. Overall, there is also a strong movement – since it follows the progression within the authorship towards minimalism – in the direction of the generic rather than the specific. In that respect, the path into world literature is wide open. As Casanova asserts, Joyce paved the way for Beckett in that “he managed to establish an autonomous, purely literary pole, thus helping to obtain recognition for the whole of Irish literature by liberating it to some extent from political domination” (2004, 315). Beckett utilises and expands this area. Thus, seen as strategic movements within and between literary spaces, world literature is in Beckett’s case produced as an outcome of the escape from the local constraints and the ‘wrong’ kind of imperialism (London, England).

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This, however, does not entail a complete purging of certain aspects of Irishness. As literary politics, Beckett uses autonomy as the weapon against unsolicited constraints placed on him as an Irish author. Metaphorically, one can claim that Beckett finds or invents yet another version of the extracting-energy-out-of-loss phenomenon. The ideal of such literature is to create a double-layered narrativity, in which the culturally specific is not central, but definitely not ‘eliminated’ either. In his work within the drama genre – in the midst of the movement towards a more and more minimalist expression – we find laid in safekeeping the exquisite memory of a lost love that reaches affective levels almost conjuring up notions of the sacred (albeit with a smudged surface à la Beckett, since the memory is presented in at least two different versions). Krapp’s Last Tape (1958) may of course be primarily read as a philosophical discourse on the topic of memory and the burgeoning use of prosthesis technology, but there is undoubtedly a precious pearl hidden here too. Krapp listening to one of his old spools: [KRAPP] Be again on Croghan on a Sunday morning, in the haze, with the bitch, stop and listen to the bells. (Pause.) And so on. (Pause.) All that old misery. (Pause.) Once wasn’t enough for you. (Pause.) Lie down across her. Long pause. He suddenly bends over machine, switches off, wrenches off tape, throws it away, puts on the other, winds it forward to the passage he wants, switches on, listens staring front. TAPE   gooseberries, she said. I said again I thought it was hopeless and no good going on, and she agreed, without opening her eyes. (Pause.) I asked her to look at me and after a few moments–(pause)–after a few moments she did, but the eyes just slits, because of the glare. I bent over her to get them in the shadow and they opened. (Pause. Low.) Let me in. (Pause.) We drifted in among the flags and stuck. The way they went down, sighing, before the stem! (Pause.) I lay down across her with my face in her breasts and my hand on her. We lay there without moving. But under us all moved, and moved us, gently, up and down, and from side to side. Pause. Krapp’s lips move. No sound. Past midnight. Never knew such silence. The earth might be uninhabited. (Beckett 2009 [1958], 27–28) This introverted and lonely man is seemingly looking for his lost love among semi-lost memories in the form of the recordings that only Krapp himself knows the archival order of, if such a mnemonic catalogue even exists. The frequent pauses marking the irregular cadences remind us of the gaps, the lost moments, the silences – not only insignificant but also missing signs to mark insignificance, lacking inscriptions – which

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arguably are absences that somehow weave together any real life. This phenomenon is similar or even the same as what Deleuze draws attention to as the “transcendental field” or “plane of immanence” (2004, 180). Krapp’s obsession could be due to the fact that the event in itself does not ‘belong’ to him. It is self-sufficient in its virtuality and it has something of this non-realised tint over it: “The event considered as non-actualized (indefinite) is lacking in nothing” (2004, 180). The somehow unfulfilled moment exists as unfulfilled ‘eternally’ on the tapes. The female partner’s eyes keeping Krapp and the light out, the sudden shadow seemingly revealing something of what resides in the darkness. Apparently, it is in the dark and silence that the complete and full meeting can appear, but the moment is fleeting, if not for the tape, forever lost in the starker darkness of the past, the never-to-be-again black hole of ultimate loss. Even so, here, close to a dramatised existentialist crisis crops up “Croghan”. This is a very specific geographic location in the midlands of Ireland in County Offaly (↗24 The Caribbean, in terms of assertion of locality). Typically, the play is according to stage directions set in the future, which means that ‘presence’ is avoided (cf. Beckett 2009 [1958], 9). As a stage direction it is useless since how is the performance supposed to do anything with that type of instruction? Such a temporal (non)point can only be conveyed in text to a reader, unless it is somehow spoken or shown to the audience in the actual on-stage performance. In a strongly Beckettian vein, a play about memory and temporality lacks a ‘stable’ present from which the protagonist (and audience) can receive and interpret the events and memories. Similar to Joyce’s Ulysses – and as we shall see also in Banville’s Doctor Copernicus – at the centre of everything there is nothing (a loss). A fundamental epistemological uncertainty is established. Given that Krapp also listens to tapes that sometimes deal with fixed events from different temporal positions, the reader/audience is further drawn into the veils of uncertainty. Therefore, the specificity of ‘Croghan’ is crucial. In a similar way that Beckett would not participate in the creation of anything blatantly provincial/nationalist, potentially he would find it equally disturbing with something too neatly ‘universal’. The discord is needed. Such ontological dissonance opens up the possibility of a local connection that again situates the energy of loss in an Irish author’s text. In Beckett, we can sense the irredeemable force of a form of connectedness that still is a variety of brokenness. If we contrast this sense with a contemporary author like John Banville, we get a slightly different scenario. As Peter Boxall has suggested in a comparative analysis of Beckett and Banville: “Where Beckett’s engagement with Ireland was with a post-war nation state engaged in a difficult pseudo-colonial relationship with Britain, Banville’s Ireland is a state in the process of incorporation into a new, arguably postnationalist Europe” (2019, 44). Nevertheless, the rift is inevitably there and Banville too extracts vitality out of similar tensions. The lost memory in Beckett’s play is in addition the semi-atavistic energy of a lost Ireland – a ‘Croghan’ that stubbornly will not disappear. Thus, world literature’s thorn in the side of local literatures is reversible into the provincial thorn in the side of world literature, here energising Beckett’s

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short drama piece. It is clearly made manifest that the transcending immanence benefits from the quirkiness of the local touch. Even though the geographical reference may be ignored, without much being lost, it offers a possible textual dimension. The immediately accessible fear of globalism and the spread of world literature – perhaps first and foremost literature in English translation – is made manifest as an anxiety of the loss of local and smaller culture idiosyncrasies. However, regarding this minor sample of Irish literary text, it is perhaps easier to presume that the local has enough power to resist the waves of cultural conformity that potentially a world-wide spread of literature would bring.

2.4 Banville: “At the Centre of All There Is Nothing” It is beyond doubt that a part of the literary production always has involved and at all times will comprise some form of competitive element whichever way we look at it. The notion of such an elitist dimension is relevant when we now turn to John Banville. This aspect of literary production can be succinctly summarised in Matthew Arnold’s thoughts on cultural progression and refinement: “Perfection, as culture conceives it, is not possible while the individual remains isolated: the individual is obliged, under pain of being stunted and enfeebled in his own development if he disobeys, to carry others along with him in his march towards perfection” (2011 [1869], 13). In such a march, Banville – or any writer with similar ambitions – needs to have pedigrees of writers that have come close to the sought impeccability. Thus, it is rational to pursue inspiration among the high qualitative writing in the accumulated body of works. Adding the fact that Banville has been dubbed a master of the English language (Hiberno-English to be correct), we sense that the access to the world literature arena ought to be wide open. Banville has never really beaten around the bush regarding the fact that he early on looked towards a mainly European literary canon and philosophical tradition, or perhaps more broadly speaking, towards a world literary canon. Declan Kiberd makes note of the same thing: “John Banville has always been wary of attempts to fit his work into any Irish literary tradition. He has preferred to consider the artist as a humble egomaniac, manufacturing a purely personal world out of the fragments of European culture” (2018, 161). Neither has he ever beaten around the bush about being Irish. These components have fed more into scholarly discussions or points of contention than having been something Banville himself has been pondering to any greater extent. As Banvillean literary, philosophical and artistic precursors and influences can be mentioned: Henry James, Wallace Stevens, Heinrich von Kleist, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Rainer Maria Rilke, Maurice Blanchot, Vladimir Nabokov, Hugo von Hofmannsthal, Jacques Lacan, Paul de Man, Martin Heidegger, Sigmund Freud, Friedrich Nietzsche, etc., and the list could be made much longer (cf. Butler et al. 2019). However, Irish literary influences may also be listed: Elizabeth Bowen,

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Yeats, Joyce and Beckett. Joseph McMinn comments on the possible tension between the European and the Irish: As part of his construction of a literary persona, a man of letters who has risen above the supposed insularity of Irish writing, à la Joyce or Beckett, Banville has regularly dismissed any Irish influence on his work. In this simplistic and wilful opposition of the national and international, the modern and the traditional, the aesthetic and the ideological, he has been followed by several critics, notably Imhof. In the last few years, however, this mask of indifference has been exchanged for a more generous and tolerant regard for the Irish presence in his work, and the corresponding sophistication of Irish realism in writers such as John MacGahern. (McMinn 1999, 166)

Regardless of these background factors, Banville is clearly a contemporary Irish world literature writer, with a strong position within la république mondiale des lettres. As Kersti Tarien Powell has suggested, Banville is the surviving son of Joyce and Beckett, probably leaning more towards the Beckettian sense of sounds: “Banville’s narrators chose to ‘go on’, as the abysses of meaning and silence are unfathomable, they have to be vanquished on the surface of the page and filled with the narrating voice” (2005, 211). Thus, in Banville too we detect the trope of grappling with emptiness and existential meaninglessness. In his case we also encounter the issue in terms of philosophical generality and Irish specificity. In the introduction to Representations of Loss in Irish Literature, Deirdre Flynn and Eugene O’Brien discuss the phenomenon of loss and a general sense of nothingness. In their discussion, they typically tend to oscillate between what is more philosophically or theoretically oriented and what may be seen as unambiguously Irish: Writing in Limited Inc., [Derrida] would go on to clarify this [‘there is nothing outside the text’] by explaining that it was the interaction of text with context that was the engine that produced meaning: ‘there is nothing outside context’…This developed position suggests that all meaning is socially created, and that there is a context within which every utterance, in every discourse, needs to be located. The same is true of loss and death. (Flynn and O’Brien 2018, 6)

To be compared with: Therefore, our next question is why Irish literature, in particular, should be so focused on loss, both as a metaphor for death, and also in terms of losing that which is of value. One possible reason is that in Irish history, loss is a permeating and consistent trope. The famine saw the loss of millions through starvation, and millions more lost to the country through emigration, a trend that continues to this day, and was especially strong during the economic crash which followed the Celtic Tiger. (Flynn and O’Brien 2018, 8)

In the choice between these two poles, Banville has opted mostly for the former one. For instance, in his Doctor Copernicus (1976), he constantly engages in a discussion with scientists, philosophers and authors, which would undoubtedly be labelled canonised thinkers, forwarding ‘the best that has been said and thought’ in the Arnoldian sense. This is mostly revealed in the discussion between Rheticus and

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Copernicus, who anachronistically quote later thinkers. Copernicus starts and then they take turns. “If at the foundation of all there lay only a wildly seething power which, writhing with obscure passions, produced everything that is great and everything that is insignificant, if a bottomless void never satiated lay hidden beneath all, what then would life be but despair?” I said: “I hold it true that pure thought can grasp reality, as the ancients dreamed.” He said: “Science aims at constructing a world which shall be symbolic of the world of commonplace experience.” I said: “If you would know the reality of nature, you must destroy the appearance, and the farther you go beyond the appearance, the nearer you will be to the essence.” He said: “It is of the highest significance that the outer world represents something independent of us and absolute with which we are confronted.” I said: “The death of one god is the death of all.” (Banville 1999 [1976], 208)

If we start from the top, we have here Søren Kierkegaard, Albert Einstein, Sir Arthur Eddington, Max Planck and Wallace Stevens. This makes manifest a chronotope that inevitably is quintessentially world literature, since a sixteenth-century conversation is clad in a chorus of anachronistic voices. In a literary ontology, this is just ‘natural’. These features have also been used to convey the Irish sense of loss, but here in a completely different context. As these narratives can move from the sense of loss as specificity in a moment with a lover on board a boat, or a bigoted citizen spitting in the corner of a pub, or an Irishman dreaming of a country house in the native land, we can easily move to the vast astronomical world, in which an epistemological loss obviously hinges on the same affectivity as the previously mentioned ones do. The differentiation between various types of loss, illustrated by Flynn and O’Brien above, does not really have to be made. Absolute immanence allows for parallel co-existence. In all, this suggests a chronotope that shows literature at its full potential: Literature as world literature. The ‘peculiarity’ with Banville in our context here is that he for the most part has stayed in Dublin and is therefore not part of the Irish diaspora. A comparison of Joyce and Banville bears witness to the power of literature in terms of imagination and invention. Potentially, the loss and absence of something makes it even more vivid and powerful. Literature is among other things about precisely that. As Copernicus comes towards the end of his life and his felt epistemological failure, he has a vision of a terrifying bird that stamps “the burning seal upon his brow”: Word! O word! Thou word that I lack!

(Banville 1999 [1976], 229)

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3 Conclusion Regarding the small sample of writers we have gone through, we have the opportunity to sense some of Ireland’s particular circumstances in terms of its literature’s position in relation to the concept of ‘world literature’. Its complicated relation and geographical nearness to England as a colonial power has provoked different strategies among these authors. Beckett and Joyce propelled towards France, the ‘real’ centre of literary power, at least at the time. Banville remaining in Ireland – intellectually turning towards a Western canon for inspiration – but also ‘naturally’ combining this stimulation with an Irish literary heritage. Yeats sitting in London longing for Ireland, but strongly contributing to the treasure of world literature. The (un)fortunate access to the English language, which has produced anguish, but also great literary works. Or maybe the authors are all principally what Casanova calls “grand strategists of the economy peculiar to literature” (2004, 10). Be that as it may, it is nevertheless clear that another great loss or lack is produced by this chapter itself, namely the vast literary absence it creates. No woman writer, only one contemporary writer, who by now is coming towards the end of his career. Why not Emma Donoghue, Eavan Boland or Anne Enright? What about the young and energetic writer generation? Why not Pádraig Ó Cíobháin? In addition, the whole chapter is essentially Eurocentric. Is that world literature? Since the literary space is a violent space and because of “the violent nature of literary competition” (Casanova 2004, 9), similar types (or perchance other types) of exclusions will always occur. Even so, in the context of the possibilities modern information technology offers, literature will migrate faster and faster. As regards the selected Irish writers’ strong positions within the field of world literature, it remains an enigma why the blatant and recurring preoccupation with loss and lack of centre seems to be a force that centralises the authors’ in the field of literary production. In the context of this chapter’s argument, all authors dealt with somehow come out as merchants of loss and there seems to exist a global market for that. As regards a more general remark on the existence and raison d’être of Irish literature as world literature, we would have to reach for more general and generalisable arguments. One of Damrosch’s central criteria for world literary texts applies to everything dealt with here. If these texts do not clearly gain from translation, they definitely do not lose in translation. Damrosch formulates the criterion in the following way: Literary language is thus language that either gains or loses in translation, in contrast to nonliterary language, which typically does neither. The balance of credit and loss remains a distinguishing mark of national versus world literature: literature stays within its national or regional tradition when it usually loses in translation, whereas works become world literature when they gain on balance in translation […]. (Damrosch 2013, 203)

A pertinent example can be made by looking more closely at Joyce’s Ulysses in terms of its cultural translation in one instance brought up by Casanova. Henry Roth, a

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Jewish immigrant growing up in Harlem, remembers how Ulysses changed his view on literature: “Roth understood at once that Joyce’s novel could provide him with a unique means for attaining literary modernity – for transforming his wretched everyday life into literary gold” (2004, 334). This is the type of illustration that is difficult to analyse and explain in terms of literary quality. Nevertheless, it in itself seems to fully justify its translation and spread around the globe.

4 Bibliography 4.1 Works Cited Anderson, Benedict R. Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism. Revised ed. London: Verso, 2016 [1983]. Arnold, Matthew. Culture and Anarchy: An Essay in Political and Social Criticism. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011. Banville, John. Doctor Copernicus. London: Picador, 1999 [1976]. Beckett, Samuel. “Krapp’s Last Tape: A Play in One Act.” 1958. Krapp’s Last Tape and Other Dramatic Pieces. New York: Grove Press, 2009. 9–28. Beckett, Samuel. Murphy. New York: Grove Press, 1994 [1938]. Bizot, Richard. “The Lake Isle of Innisfree by William Butler Yeats.” 1890. Salem Press Encyclopedia of Literature, EBSCOhost. search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db= ers&AN=119624852&site=eds-live&scope=site (19 Aug. 2019). Boxall, Peter. “Unknown Unity: Ireland and Europe in Beckett and Banville.” John Banville and His Precursors. Ed. Stephen Butler, Michael Springer, and Pietra Palazzolo. London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2019. 34–50. Butler, Stephen, Michael Springer, and Pietra Palazzolo, eds. John Banville and His Precursors. London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2019. Casanova, Pascale. The World Republic of Letters. Trans. Malcolm B. DeBevoise. Cambridge, MA and London: Harvard University Press, 2004 [1999]. Chun, Eunkyung. “Finnegans Wake: A Postmodern Vision of World Literature.” Journal of Irish Studies 30 (2015): 71–76. Damrosch, David. “What Is World Literature?” 2003. World Literature: A Reader. Ed. Theo D’haen, César Domínguez, and Mads R. Thomsen. London: Routledge, 2013. 198–206. Deleuze, Gilles. “Immanence: A Life.” The Postmodernism Reader: Foundational Texts. Ed. Michael Drolet. London: Routledge, 2004. 178–180. Flynn, Deirdre, and Eugene O’Brien, eds. Representations of Loss in Irish Literature. Cham: Springer, 2018. Gifford, Don, and Robert J. Seidman. Ulysses Annotated: Notes for James Joyce’s Ulysses. 2nd ed. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2008 [1974]. Greenblatt, Stephen, ed. The Norton Anthology of English Literature, vol. F: The Twentieth and Twenty-First Centuries. 10th ed. New York: W.W. Norton, 2018. Helgesson, Stefan. “Postcolonialism and World Literature.” Interventions 4 (2014): 483–500. Joyce, James. Ulysses. London: Penguin, 2006 [1922]. Kiberd, Declan. After Ireland: Writing the Nation from Beckett to the Present. 1st Harvard University Press ed. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2018.

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Kiberd, Declan. Inventing Ireland: The Literature of a Modern Nation. London: Vintage, 1996 [1995]. McDonald, Peter D. “A Poem for All Seasons: Yeats, Meaning, and the Publishing History of ‘The Lake Isle of Innisfree’ in the 1890s.” The Yearbook of English Studies 29 (1999): 202–230. McMinn, Joseph. The Supreme Fictions of John Banville. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1999. Miller, J. Hillis. “Globalization and World Literature.” Neohelicon: Acta Comparationis Litterarum Universarum 2 (2011): 251–265. Moretti, Franco. “Conjectures on World Literature.” 2000. World Literature in Theory. Ed. David Damrosch. Chichester: Wiley-Blackwell, 2014. 159–171. Normandin, Shawn. “Yeats, ‘The Lake Isle of Innisfree,’ and the Wisdom of Beans.” Explicator 73.1 (2015): 25–28. O’Sullivan, Michael. Irish Expatriatism, Language and Literature: The Problem of English. Cham: Springer, 2018. Posnett, Hutcheson M. “What Is World Literature?” 1886. World Literature in Theory. Ed. David Damrosch. Chichester: Wiley-Blackwell, 2014. 42–46. Powell, Kersti T. “‘Not a Son but a Survivor’: Beckett… Joyce… Banville.” The Yearbook of English Studies 35 (2005): 199–211. Power, Arthur. From the Old Waterford House. London: Mellifont Press, 1949. Rushdie, Salman. Imaginary Homelands: Essays and Criticism 1981–1991. London: Granta, in association with Penguin, 1992 [1991]. Szczeszak-Brewer, Agata. “Teleology without a Telos? Constitutive Absence in Joyce’s Pilgrimage.” Mobilities 2.3 (2007): 347–362. Walkowitz, Rebecca L. Cosmopolitan Style: Modernism Beyond the Nation. New York: Columbia University Press, 2006. Yeats, William B. “The Lake Isle of Innisfree.” 1890. The Norton Anthology of English Literature, vol. F: The Twentieth and Twenty-First Centuries. Ed. Stephen Greenblatt. 10th ed. New York: W.W. Norton, 2018. 215.

4.2 Further Reading Brannigan, John. Race in Modern Irish Literature and Culture. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2009. de Brún, Fionntán. Revivalism and Modern Irish Literature: The Anxiety of Transmission and the Dynamics of Renewal. Cork: Cork University Press, 2019. O’Rourke Murphy, Maureen, and James MacKillop. An Irish Literature Reader: Poetry, Prose, Drama. Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 2006 [1987]. Regan, Stephen, ed. Irish Writing: An Anthology of Irish Literature in English 1789–1939. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004. Wright, Julia M. A Companion to Irish Literature. Chichester: Wiley-Blackwell, 2010.

David Watson

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Abstract: This chapter sums up the various ways whereby American literature can be understood as world literature. It begins by exploring current attempts to position American literature in the world, arguing that this move is prompted both by developments in contemporary American literature, and by the turn toward the transnational in American studies, which has reframed American literary history as the history of its interconnections with the world outside of the United States. It argues that to understand the worlding of American literature, we need to attend to the literary strategies, genres and forms whereby literary texts articulate transnational networks, as well as the transnational public spheres through which people and texts circulate, and the influence of the United States as an imperial and economic power. Finally, it suggests that it has become necessary to recalibrate the relation between theoretical accounts of American and world literature, two fields that have rarely been in dialogue. Such a recalibration would counter a tendency within transnational American studies to imagine American literature as a macrocosm of the globe, and would prompt the field of world literature to engage with its own entanglements with the United States and its institutions. Key Terms: American literature, transnational American studies, the public sphere, imperialism, the world-system, worlding, scale, genre

1 Locations: American Literature in the World (2017) Perhaps no single anthology could condense the numerous, often-conflicting ways whereby American literature is entangled with the world outside of the jurisdictional borders of the United States. While avoiding claims to comprehensiveness, American Literature in the World: An Anthology from Anne Bradstreet to Octavia Butler (Dimock et. al. 2017) is a suggestive example of how we might begin to go about such an endeavor. It showcases how interconnectedness operates as a key feature of American literature. Organized according to five headings – “War;” “Food;” “Work, Play, Travel;” “Religions;” and “Human and Nonhuman interfaces” – it reveals how American literature encounters the rest of the world, is shaped by the global circulation of culture, people, and power, and integrates with complex geographies including that of the Caribbean, the American hemisphere, the Transatlantic, and the Transpacific. The expansive networks suggested by the anthology are temporal as well as spatial. The first entry, Anne Bradstreet’s “Semiramis” (1650), takes the reader to the NeoAssyrian Empire of 811–806 BC, while the concluding excerpt from Octavia Butler’s Dawn (1987) takes place in outer space 250 years after nuclear war had left the earth https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110583182-022

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uninhabitable. Encompassing classic American authors such as Herman Melville and Frederick Douglass as well as lesser known figures like William Apes and Muriel Rukeyser, contemporary authors including Leslie Marmon Silko and Dave Eggers, and genre fiction from Raymond Chandler and Philip K. Dick, among others, the anthology makes a powerful case for understanding American literature as “inherently world literature” (Hutzler 2017, n.pag.). Unlike previous anthologies, American Literature in the World does not seek to illustrate the worldliness of American literature solely through expanding its archive, but also by inviting readers to encounter works from famous and lesser known authors within a framework emphasizing their worldly character. Anthologies such as The Multilingual Anthology of American World Literature (Shell and Sollors 2000) and The Literatures of Colonial America (Castillo and Schweitzer 2001) have added to American literary history works written in languages ranging from Arabic and Spanish to Swedish and Yiddish, and texts from across the colonial Atlantic world including New Spain, New France, New Netherlands, and the Middle Atlantic region. American Literature in the World duplicates these strategies that were intended to respond to an emerging worldly perspective within American studies. For instance, the translated excerpt from Álvar Núñez Cabeza de Vaca’s La relación (1542), which details eight years of travel across what is now the US Southwest, points toward the multilingual archive of colonial American literature consisting of texts from the 13 founding colonies of the United States, as well as from colonial settlements by an array of imperial powers across the hemisphere. The inclusion of the Creole author Victor Séjour’s “The Mulatto” (1837) indicates a different pathway that traverses complex histories of multilingualism and translation. The first work of fiction by an African-American author, it was originally published in French as “Le Mulâtre” in the Paris abolitionist journal Revue des Colonies in 1837. An English translation appeared in 1997. Texts such as La relación and “The Mulatto” are important to a project intending to reposition American literature as world literature. But expanding the archive in this way contributes to the overall goal of illustrating that, as the editors put it, “American literature has always been energized by input from the rest of the world” (Dimock et.al. 2017, 2). Such a claim is indicative of the ambitions of the anthology, to reformat American literary history as the history of its interconnections with the world outside of the United States. The motivations for such an endeavor are obvious. Thirty years on from Maxine Hong Kingston’s injunction that American authors “need to write the global novel” (1989, 37), it is clear that this imperative has become an indelible feature of the literary landscape. Contemporary authors are increasingly attuned to how cultural formations, political struggles and allegiances, market forces, technology, geopolitics, human mobility, and nonhuman agents and processes constellate worlds asymmetrical to that of the nation-state. Some of these authors – Susan Choi, Edwidge Danticat, Junot Díaz, Oscar Hijuelos, Jhumpa Lahiri, Chang-Rae Lee, and Gary Shteyngart, to name a few – are first or second-generation migrants, while others such as Dave Eggers, Jonathan Franzen, Rachel Kushner, and Atticus Lish are not. Some authors

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have acquired a curious type of dual literary citizenship as well reminiscent of Vladimir Nabokov’s status as both a Russian and American novelist. Chris Abani, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Ha Jin, Valeria Luiselli, and Joseph O’Neill, for instance, are often aggregated with authors born in the United States. What is clear also is that within the current conjuncture literary value equals worldliness in many ways. Prestige accrues increasingly more to “the best-established figures of world literature” than “to their more nationally ‘representative’ peers” (English 2005, 305). Consider the eight winners of the American Pulitzer Prize for Fiction since 2010 (no award was given in 2012). Jennifer Egan’s multi-stranded narrative A Visit from the Goon Squad (2010) is filled with tourists and expatriates. Adam Johnson’s The Orphan Master’s Son (2012) and Anthony Doerr’s All the Light We Cannot See (2014) are set in North Korea and occupied France during World War II. Donna Tart’s The Goldfinch (2013) sources its title from a Dutch Golden Age painting and is preoccupied with international criminal networks, while Andrew Sean Greer’s Less (2017) offers a satirical account of a world literary tour. Viet Thanh Nguyen’s The Sympathizer (2015) is a story of the Vietnam War and the multi-directional transnational mobilities it incites, while Colson Whitehead’s counterfactual The Underground Railroad (2016) situates slavery in the United States within the nineteenth-century Atlantic world-system. Most recently, Richard Powers’ The Overstory (2018) explores questions of environmental damage in a narrative concerned with scales smaller and larger than that of the nation. In these novels war, crime, slavery, human mobility, art and literature, and environmental destruction are the threads weaving American narratives into the world outside the United States. Is their worldliness part of the reason for their acclaim? Concomitantly, is situating American literature in the world also a way of arguing for its value? The second rationale for an anthology such as American Literature in the World relates not to contemporary literature but to developments within the field of American studies, a disciplinary formation to which all but one of its editors belong. Whether for or against, few would dispute that it has become commonplace to declare a transnational turn in American studies. During the last three decades, this turn has reconfigured the field by muting its nationalist orientation and by drawing attention to multi-directional flows, the conjunctures they produce, and contact zones and geographies internal as well as external to the territorial United States. Subsuming and incorporating earlier anti-imperial and multicultural phases in American studies (cf. Pease 2015, 51), transnational American studies takes as its overt rationale to reconceive its field of study as irreducible to the coordinates of the nation-state. Accordingly, in her 2004 presidential address to the American Studies Association, Shelley Fisher Fishkin suggested that the key question facing the field were what American studies would look like if “the transnational rather than the national were at its center” (2005, 21). Critical works on canonical and lesser known authors have begun to provide an answer to Fishkin’s question. So, for instance, the Harlem Renaissance poet Langston

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Hughes is understood as articulating a poetics of diaspora enabling of a “critique of globalization” (Edwards 2007, 705) as well as engaging in transnational modernist dialogues with the Martinican poet Aimé Césaire and the Haitian poet and novelist Jacques Roumain (cf. Patterson 2008). Examples of Hughes’ non-fiction from the Spanish Civil War are included in American Literature in the World, while Steven S. Lee (2015, 119–148) focuses on his 1932 visit to the Soviet Union. Vera M. Kutzinski (2012) examines how Latin American translations of his poems were appropriated by different political agendas, and Gayle Rogers (2018, 167–198) situates Spanish translations of his work within a Harlem-Havana-Madrid modernist matrix. The Mexican-American writer Américo Paredes, who documented the culture and politics of the US-Mexico borderlands, is a less well-known figure than Hughes. His most famous work, George Washington Gomez: A Mexican-Texan Novel (1990) was composed in the 1930s but not published until 1990 when Paredes became the focus of a LatinX Studies project of literary recovery. Yet Paredes is the central figure in Ramón Saldívar’s critical biographical study The Borderlands of Culture: Américo Paredes and the Transnational Imaginary (2006), in which Saldívar reads Paredes’ life and work as exemplifying the politics and aesthetics of transnational modernism. Paredes, for Saldívar, exemplifies a transnational imaginary in which the relation between North and South America is central, and within which borderlands culture and its subaltern modernity provide an alternative to normative conceptions of citizenship, the nation, and modernity. As indicated by the examples of Hughes and Paredes, transnational American studies has attempted to clarify what it entails to locate American literature in the world, and, indeed, has provided an invaluable resource for reframing this literature as world literature. Susan Gillman and Kirsten Silva Gruesz (2011) argue, in fact, that it may be more appropriate to talk about the worlding (↗6 Global Literature, World Literature and Worlding Literature) of American literature, rather than to resort to terms such as comparison or the transnational. For them, to read American literature in a worlded way entails repositioning the nation as “one point on the spatial scale of American literary studies along with locality, region, nation, hemisphere, climatic zone, trade zone, and so on” (Gillman and Gruesz 2011, 229). It also necessitates moving between temporal scales, de-linking temporality from nationhood, and paying attention to different periodizations, longer temporalities, and problems around coevalness within the world-system. Finally, the worlding of American literature asks for an exploration of how texts circulate, move between languages, are adapted, and are differently instantiated in the world (↗14 Intermediality and Remediation). The issues identified by Gillman and Gruesz have preoccupied a series of essay collections, arguably American studies’ privileged mode for advancing itself, the titles of which signal the various ways whereby the field has imagined the worlding of its subject matter. Collections such as Cultures of United States Imperialism (Kaplan and Pease 1994), Post-Nationalist American Studies (Rowe 2000), Shades of the Planet: American Literature as World Literature (Buell and Dimock 2007), and

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Globalizing American Studies (Edwards and Gaonkar 2010) have turned to histories of United States imperialism, cosmopolitan and post-national formations, the world literary field, and neoliberal globalization to re-imagine the coordinates of American literature (↗7 Cosmopolitanism beyond the Center-Periphery Model). Other collections including Hemispheric American Studies (Levander and Levine 2007), Transpacific Studies: Framing an Emerging Field (Hoskins and Nguyen 2015), and Archipelagic American Studies (Roberts and Stephens 2017) relocate American literature within the larger Americas, the Pacific Rim, and a constellation of oceanic flows and island chains (↗23 The Oceans). Winfried Fluck has argued that one way of parsing this burgeoning field is to distinguish between two variants of it, aesthetic and political transnationalism (2011, 367). Aesthetic transnationalism may be understood to carry an affective promise: the worlding of American literature is presented as an enriching, energizing, heady experience for the field and critic. Political transnationalism, in contrast, understands disidentification with the nation-state as an act of dissent resistant to national identity formation, and its technologies of racialization, as well as enabling the production of newly-emancipated identities. Furthermore, such a disidentification facilitates transnational solidarities with groups, struggles, and political movements outside of the United States. Whether operating in an aesthetic or political mode, transnational American studies reveals a United States that is neither an unequivocal entity nor a particularly coherent object of analysis. As Alyosha Goldstein suggests, the “United States encompasses a historically variable and uneven constellation of state and local governments, indigenous nations, unincorporated territories, free associated commonwealths, protectorates, federally administrated public lands, military bases, export processing zones, colonias, and anomalies such as the District of Columbia” (2014, 1). As a geopolitical entity it also relates to the world outside its borders in different ways. How it articulates with the rest of the globe has been shaped by histories of inter-imperial rivalry, settler colonialism, overseas occupation, debt imperialism, neoliberal globalization, and the expansion of its military-security complex. But, in a set of complicated reciprocities, this relation has also been modulated by diasporas and migration, the circulation of expropriated labor, the dispossession of indigenous populations, and resistances to assertions of authority by the United States. It is worth pondering whether the central problematic of transnational American studies is not, in fact, how to navigate the tensions between a worlding of the United States and its culture taking place in the name of an emancipatory politics and a history steeped in settler colonialism, imperial ambition, and the deterritorialization of world markets. As Donald Pease has argued the transnational, like worlding or the global, is compatible with the interests of world markets and empires, as well as “antiglobalization activists, nongovernmental organizations (ngos), environmentalists, social movements, migrant laborers, refugees, and stateless peoples” (2015, 40). Unsurprisingly, Susan Gillman, Kirsten Silva Gruesz, and Rob Wilson caution

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that a worlding of American literature needs to be wary of “any neo-colonialist or appropriative en-framing” (2004, 265) reproducing the domineering and extractive processes of imperialism and capitalism. In other words, transnational American studies should pay attention to its own potential entanglement with the ways the nation-state articulates itself internationally. In what follows, this chapter explores a variant of the problem posed by Shelley Fisher Fishkin regarding the field of American studies, focusing on what American literature looks like from the vantage point of the transnational. Part of the answer, it suggests, has to do with how this literature has engaged with the tensions between the various ways the United States relates to the rest of the world.

2 Literary Strategies of World-Making: The Worlding of American Literature If the editors of American Literature in the World are correct in arguing that a worldly type of “interconnectedness is a key feature of American literature” (Dimock et.al. 2017, 3), then any account of this literature’s relation to the world outside of the United States is bound to be partial. Without claiming exhaustiveness, this section is organized around three nodes important for making sense of how the worlding of American literature has occurred. It begins by considering the affordances of different literary strategies, genres, and forms for constituting a type of transnational poetics. Subsequently, it turns to different constructions of what we may describe as a transnational public sphere as it is created and shaped by the circulation of people, languages, and texts across and through various geographies. In doing so, it turns also to the question of what I term here the international – the international rivalries, struggles, relations, and markets within which the United States has acted as a global power. With this, the chapter also returns to the question of how the worlding of American literature relates to the imperial history of the nation.

2.1 Writing the Transnational Literary strategies are at the forefront of Jahan Ramazani’s account of the transnational poetics of, among others, American modernist poetry. According to him, modernists such as Gertrude Stein, T.S. Eliot, H.D., Ezra Pound, and Claude McKay “translated their frequent geographic and transcultural alienation into a poetics of bricolage and translocation, dissonance and defamiliarization” (Ramazani 2006, 333). This is the same transnational poetics he discovers in subsequent authors such as Kamau Brathwaite and Linton Kwesi Johnson. Ramazani implicitly frames the formal strategies of American modernist poetry as symptomatic of the expatriations

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and dislocations of its practitioners. Moreover, he revises our understanding of many of the formal strategies associated with modernism – translocation, bricolage, dissonance, defamiliarization – and which have often underwritten accounts of its autonomy. These techniques are repurposed as the signature effects of the worlding of the works of these poets. One approach to what Ramazani describes as a transnational poetics might consist of reading American literature with an ear attuned to varieties of English and multilingual undercurrents (↗4 The King’s English and the Mother Tongue). Gayatri Spivak has called for “lingual memory” and “the irreducibility of idiom” (2009, 613) to become central objects of inquiry in the study of world literature. Such an approach can be discerned in Gavin Jones’ (1999) account of the so-called cult of the vernacular in late nineteenth-century American literature, Joshua L. Miller’s (2011) work on multilingual modernists such as Henry Roth and Carlos Bolusan, as well as Evelyn NiengMing Ch’ien’s (2005) exploration of questions concerning global English and multilingualism in works by Maxine Hong Kingston and Junot Díaz. Going back further one encounters such seminal works as Henry Louis Gates’ Signifying Monkey: A Theory of African-American Literary Criticism (1988), in which he focuses on the fertile tensions between black vernacular and standard English discourse. In these works, language and idiom provide clues to histories of migration, diaspora, and slavery, as well as to imperial expansion projects that pushed the boundaries of the United States outward. Reading for a type of transnational poetics in American literature often calls as well for the interpretation of how literature articulates spatial and temporal scales asymmetrical to the nation. Paul Giles, for instance, argues that American literature should be understood as engaging with its culture from a “comparative angle of vision” (2002, 1) by juxtaposing it to that of other countries within the Atlantic world. Relocating American literature within a transatlantic sphere, Giles suggests that by telescoping together geographically-distant spaces in their work, authors such as Frederick Douglass, Henry James, Robert Frost, Sylvia Plath, and Thomas Pynchon should be understood as sharing in a transatlantic imaginary that re-imagines the “nation’s unconscious assumptions, boundaries, and proscribed areas” (2002, 3) from a willfully “estranged perspective” (2002, 5). Wai Chee Dimock gambles likewise that if a different framework for American literature were to be offered, one deprivileging the nation-state, a different image of this literature would appear: “What would happen if we go beyond 1776 and 1620, if we trace threads of relation to the world that antedate these allegedly founding moments? What would American literature look like then, restored to the longue durée, a scale enlargement along the temporal axis that also enlarges its spatial compass?” (2006, 4) Dimock wagers that if a work of literature is reinscribed within a different temporal framework – Fernand Braudel’s longue durée – the work of, for instance, the New England Transcendentalist Ralph Waldo Emerson might appear closer in nature to that of the fourteenth-century Persian poet Hafiz than to his contemporary Henry David Thoreau’s Walden (1854), which, in turn, might be threaded together with the Bhagavad Gita, the composite Sanskrit scrip-

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ture, parts of which date from 400 BCE. This transnational, or perhaps rather transtemporal, approach foregrounds the estranging effects produced by a modulation and outwards expansion of the scales whereby we locate American literature. Critical frameworks grappling with expanded temporal and spatial scales provide a valuable heuristic for engaging with such works as Herman Melville’s verse epic Clarel: A Poem and Pilgrimage in the Holy Land (1876), an eighteen-thousand-line poem written mostly in irregularly rhyming iambic tetrameter. The poem recounts how pilgrims of different nationalities return to the origin of their Judeo-Christian belief system within the territory of the Ottoman Turks and other Muslims. The encounter connects America, Europe, and the Middle East into a syncretic transnational matrix in which various belief systems are woven together to illustrate their “intersympathy” (1991, 1.6.207). This interaction between people and religions contrasts the poem’s account of the “Dark Ages of Democracy” (1991, 4.21.139) – a reference to the American Civil War and the Mexican-American war – and its critique of colonization and imperialism in their American, French, English, and Russian iterations. In a key passage in the poem, Melville offers a striking comparison between Europe and the United States: They felt how far beyond the scope Of elder Europe’s saddest thought Might be the New World’s sudden brought In youth to share old age’s pains – To feel the arrest of hope’s advance, And squandered last inheritance; And cry – “To Terminus build fanes! Columbus ended earth’s romance: No New World to mankind remains! (Melville 1991, 4.21.151–159)

The undoing of the “New World,” the United States, occurs through its transatlantic identification with “elder Europe” – an identification that also implies that it shares in the long history of Europe, as is already implicitly suggested by the references to Columbus and the Roman god Terminus. What the poem makes clear is that by relocating the United States within the enlarged scale, Melville is inserting it within a history of empire and ruin, and thereby de-exceptionalizing the nation. Part of what enables Melville’s narrative poem to perform this work is its length, which introduces into the epic a temporal and narrative dimension facilitating its panoramic account of historical and religious detail. The genre of the epic, as Dimock has argued, is “spurred by cultural contact” (2006, 83) and encounters with the foreign. It is clear, then, that genre plays an important role in understanding the worlding of American literature (↗12 Genres of Anglophone World Literatures). June Howard (2018) argues, for instance, that the regional work of writers like Sarah Orne Jewett, Ernest Gaines, Edith Eaton/Sui Sin Far performs the role of mediating between the global and the local for the reader, with the school playing an important role in this process. Antonio Barrenechea (2016), in contrast, nominates the

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encyclopedic novel, including Melville’s Moby-Dick (1851) and Leslie Marmon Silko’s Almanac of the Dead (1991), as the genre best suited for capturing the interdependent hemispheric Americas. Focusing on the contemporary, Caren Irr’s (2013) synoptic discussion of more than 125 US novels tracks the resurgence of the genre of the American political novel in the twenty-first century and its transformation into the geopolitical novel. For her the geopolitical novel includes such micro-genres as the ‘Peace Corps’ and ‘digital migrant’ novels, and writers contributing toward the genre include Susan Choi, Dave Eggers, Hari Kunzru, Dinaw Mengestu, and Gary Shteyngart. As the names of her micro-genres suggest, Irr locates the political energy of the contemporary US novel in its engagement with geopolitical turbulence. In this fiction the world abroad raises political questions, and often serves as a laboratory and challenge for different forms of liberalism – the political stance with which Irr associates most contemporary authors. Irr’s account of a re-emerging genre also doubles as a periodizing narrative, through which she tracks the worlding of the American novel. In this she is joined by Christian Moraru (2011), who argues that the post-Cold War era has witnessed the rise of a new cultural paradigm, the cosmodern, which takes as its defining feature a relational globally-deployed imaginary increasingly attentive to structures of co-presence or to relation itself. Writing on a diverse array of authors – Suki Kim, Jumpha Lahiri, and John Updike, for instance – Moraru makes a compelling argument for understanding a significant subset of contemporary American literature in this fashion. But this focus on relationality should not obscure that the generic frameworks within which American literature captures the world abroad are often the war or spy novel, and the thriller. Popular authors such as Chris Kyle and Tom Clancy, as well as writers of prize-winning fiction including Ha Jin, Denis Johnson, Viet Than Nguyen, Kevin Powers, and Bob Shacochis have imagined the world outside the United States as a theatre of military operations, or a sphere for covert actions by the national security state. In fact, it may be that wars and clandestine operations have played a major role in influencing the ways whereby American literatures en-frame the globe since, at least, the end of the Second World War. Bestselling works by Eugene Burdick and William Lederer, Richard Condon, Clive Cussler, Robert Ludlum, James Michener, and Herman Wouk have transformed violence and danger abroad into thrilling spectacles. Wars, combat, and war zones fill the pages of works by acclaimed novelists such as John Caputo, John Hawkes, Joseph Heller, John Hershey, James Jones, Norman Mailer, Tim O’Brien, and Kurt Vonnegut. At the same time, the national security state and its covert activities regularly feature in works by Don DeLillo, Joan Didion, Norman Mailer, Robert Stone and John A. Williams, and provide postmodernist and experimental writers like John Barth, William Burroughs, and Thomas Pynchon with the material whereby to articulate paranoid and interconnected worlds. This body of work, seemingly dominated by male authors, resonates with, yet often critiques, the postwar emergence of the United States as a global power, and finds in covert activities a model for imagining global interconnectedness.

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It may be that the literary form best suited to capturing a sense of global interconnectedness, whether relational or paranoid and conspiratorial, is that of the network within which an open-ended number of nodes are connected to one another. After all, as Caroline Levine writes, “studies of migration and diaspora, transnational trade routes, contact zones, and traveling cultures have focused on the network’s capacity to trouble or crack open bounded totalities” (2015, 117). The open form of the network can then be usefully set off against the bounded form of the nation-state or the local. Today, the network form is perhaps inextricably connected to the digital, which prompts media theorist Patrick Jagoda to turn to novels such as Neal Stephenson’s Cryptonymicon (1999) to trace the emergence of a network aesthetic that “signals both the ongoing effects and the decline of US hegemony in the late twentieth century” (2016, 34). But networks are not irreducibly digital in nature. Nancy Armstrong and Leonard Tennenhouse (2018) argue that the novels of the early Republic differ from the English form of the novel (associated by them with Jane Austen) because it disaggregates individuals from property, and relinks “the scattered elements of the population in a continuous social network” (2018, 119). Following on, the novelistic tradition inaugurated by Charles Brockden Brown, Hannah Webster Foster, and Leonora Sansay did not imagine a readership belonging to a bounded national community, but to “international networks that once linked the colonies to Europe” (Armstrong and Tennenhouse 2018, 2). Articulating and circulating within open-ended networks of peoples, communities, and print infrastructure, the first US novels assumed and presupposed a literary and communal form antithetical to that of the bounded nation-state.

2.2 Transnational and Imperial Orientations This section explores two interrelated ways of understanding the transnational geography inhabited by American literature, first as a transnational public sphere and subsequently as an imperial formation. In her rigorous interrogation of the concept of the transnational public sphere, the democratic theorist Nancy Fraser describes this sphere as a set of “discursive arenas that overflow the bounds of both nations and states” (2007, 7). Increasingly important today, but with a history stretching back to the seventeenth-century founding of the interstate system, this sphere is characterized by its inclusion of dispersed and border-crossing participants as well as of discourses irreducible to the national community, its interests, and narratives. It is multi-lingual and constituted by various media, rather than solely a national literature. Finally, while the traditional civic public sphere, as theorized by Jürgen Habermas, took the sovereign state as its addressee, its transnational version raises questions concerning its own political efficacy, which it must ground in the principle that “what turns a collection of people into fellow members of a public is not shared citizenship, but their co-imbrication in a common set of structures and/or institutions that affect their lives” (Fraser 2007, 22).

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The contours of what Fraser describes as a transnational public sphere is visible in numerous accounts of American literary history. We can detect it in Ralph Bauer’s insistence that the exploration of the literatures and cultures of the early colonial Americas should focus on the “relations among and similarities between the literatures and cultures of the New World” (2010, 218), relations produced by their shared imbrication in processes of colonialism and transculturation, as well as comparable experiences of racial and cultural diversity. Turning to the twentieth century, it serves as a useful heuristic for understanding various modernist cosmopolitan networks, whether that of the so-called lost generation of Ernest Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald, and Gertrude Stein, among others, or that of Harlem Renaissance writers such as Claude McKay and Nella Larsen. Arguably, these cosmopolitan communities came about less as a result of privilege and more as the outcome of a “creative opposition” (Berman 2017, 110) to imperialism and formations of community privileging the nation-state. As these accounts indicate, the early colonial Americas and US literary modernism necessitate the imagining of transnational networks within which peoples and texts circulate and are entangled with one another. It might be, however, that it is nineteenth-century American literature that has been re-imagined most extensively as a discursive arena inhabiting a transnational public sphere. Two often-overlapping approaches have shaped this revisionary account. The first draws attention to the input and output channels networking American literature and the rest of the world, while the second identifies alternative nineteenth-century public spheres to the one conventionally associated with American literature. A rich vein of scholarship has tracked how American literary culture has been reshaped by the circulation of works from outside of the United States. For instance, Jeffrey Einboden (2016) traces the influences of Islam on Washington Irving, Lydia Maria Child, and Ralph Waldo Emerson, while Meredith McGill (2007) investigates the impact of the rampant copying of foreign works within the United States on Edgar Allan Poe and Nathaniel Hawthorne. Uncle Tom Mania (Meer 2005), and Einboden’s Nineteenth-Century US Literature in Middle Eastern Languages (2013) explore the international dissemination of American literature during the nineteenth century and after (↗10 Anglophone World Literatures and Translation). Working with an expanded time frame, Yogita Goyal (2019a) investigates the reverberations of the nineteenth-century slave narrative in, for instance, contemporary black diaspora literature. In these accounts, nineteenth-century American literature is repositioned within a transnational public sphere constituted by the circulation, reception, and translations of texts across the borders of the United States. Anna Brickhouse (2004) and Kirsten Silva Gruesz (2002) have drawn attention as well to an array of alternative or “competing public spheres” (Brickhouse 2004, 26) operative at a hemispheric scale, which would include Hispanophone-exile literary communities and US-based, Spanish-language periodicals, and which sometimes impact on what is conventionally understood as nineteenth-century American literature, and oftentimes present alternatives to the dominant literary culture.

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The works of critics of nineteenth-century American literature may be understood, in part, as drawing attention to a print public spheres constituted by the circulation and modification of texts as well as the various infrastructures enabling these motions. This project should, however, not be understood as a disavowal of questions around the politics of transnational public spheres during the period and later on. For instance, Ifeoma Kiddoe Nwankwo (2005) identifies a nascent black cosmopolitanism linking African Americans, West Indians, and Latin Americans in a complex negotiation of identity articulated against histories of slavery, genocide, and counterrevolutionary activities. To explore this cosmopolitan configuration, Nwankwo reads across writing by Frederick Douglass and David Walker, as well as the Cuban poet Plácido and the freed West Indian slave Mary Prince. Similarly seeking to identify an alternative configuration to the nation, José David Saldívar (2011) reactivates and expands José Martí’s 1890 invention of South Western Hemispheric sphere in “Nuestra América” (“Our America”) by folding America into the global South. In doing so, he situates the “long colonial encounter” (2011, xiii) at the center of American studies and imagines a transnational collective emerging from the co-imbrication of various populations in histories of colonialism, slavery, and imperial domination. In effect, interventions such as those by Nwankwo and Saldívar provincialize the United States by substituting for it a transnational array of people, literatures, and histories, a public sphere to which it appears peripheral. This gesture is tempered, somewhat, by the fact that critics such as Nwankwo and Saldívar simultaneously reveal the United States as an imperial power, acting with force and impunity inside and outside of its territorial borders. In doing so they draw attention to what we have termed the question of the international – how the United States articulates itself internationally and inhabits the world of international relations and markets. It is evidently no longer the case that imperialism is an absent category in the study of American culture (Kaplan 1993, 11). Critical explorations of doctrines of manifest destiny, territorial expansion and genocide, slavery and segregation, as well as accounts of settler colonialism, regimes of security, war, and incarceration (cf. Goyal 2017a, 53) have readdressed this absence. Numerous studies have furthermore underwritten the importance of these histories and formations to the understanding of American literature. Amy Kaplan’s The Anarchy of Empire in the Making of U.S. Culture (2002), David Kazanjian’s The Colonizing Trick: National Culture and Imperial Citizenship in Early America (2003), and Gretchen Murphy’s Hemispheric Imaginings: The Monroe Doctrine and Narratives of US Empire (2005), to name a few titles, have all drawn attention to the imbrications between US imperialism and culture. At the same time such critics as Jodi Kim (2010) and Laura Lomas (2009) have reoriented attention to transpacific and hemispheric forms of resistance to US imperialism and its racializing technologies. Closely allied with such accounts of the discursive technologies and actions of the imperial state are works that suture together American literature and the history of the capitalist world-system. Looking forward to the work of the Warwick Research Collective

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on how world literature inhabits a combined and unevenly developed world-system, Stephen Shapiro, a member of the collective, reads works by Benjamin Franklin and Charles Brockden Brown as articulations from the American semi-periphery responding to a “global reconfiguration in the Atlantic political economy in the wake of the French Revolution” (Shapiro 2008, 4). Michelle Burnham (2014; 2019), likewise situates seventeenth-century New England literature and culture as well as the emergence of the genre of the novel within the early-modern world-system and circuits of transoceanic global commerce. Turning to the present, Leerom Medovoi proposes that contemporary American fiction registers a transitional moment within the capitalist world-system inaugurated by a “terminal crisis” (2016, 99) in American global power. Perhaps the most thorough and bracing exploration of United States imperialism and its position within a global economy occurs not in critical works but in Thomas Pynchon’s classic postmodernist novel, Gravity’s Rainbow (1973). Nuclear terror, permanent racialized war, the necropolitics of colonialism and empire, and transnational capital all figure within the novel as ways of imagining a globe increasingly oriented around the United States. The United States has “learned empire from its old metropolis” (1995, 722), and the transnational “System” it shares in – extractive capitalism – continually removes from the world “vast quantities of energy to keep its own tiny desperate fraction showing a profit” (1995, 412). And by alluding to Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the novel serves as a reminder that a particular kind of worlding occurs when the world is transformed into a target for weapons of mass destruction. Narrating the entry into the post-World War II period, when the US military, political, and eventually economic apparatus emerged as hegemonic, Gravity’s Rainbow presents the reader with multiple interconnections between the United States and the world outside its borders, all of them inimical to life. Laura Doyle (2008) identifies in the history of transnational English-language literature a recurring freedom plot that associates freedom with whiteness and transatlantic crossings. This plot, according to her, internalizes yet disavows along racial lines the middle passage experience of slavery, and is ultimately the same plot authors such as Nella Larsen and Pauline Hopkins return to in their fiction. In numerous ways this entanglement of the freedom plot with racialized histories and slavery is suggestive of the imbrications between, on the one hand, accounts of the transnational associating it with an emancipatory disidentification with the nation-state and, on the other, Thomas Pynchon’s mapping of the position of the United States in relation to the world abroad. For instance, Viet Thanh Nguyen and Janet Hoskins note that the transpacific has variously been theorized as a contact zone producing opportunities for “collaborations, alliances, and friendships between subjugated, minoritized, and marginalized peoples” as well as a site of “conquest, colonialism, and conflict” (2014, 3). Operating both as a transnational sphere, and a site for imperial warfare and resource extraction, the complex real and discursive arena of the transpacific oscillates between the various and contradictory ways whereby the United States, as well as its literature and culture, relates to the rest of the world.

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It may very well be the case that accounts of this oscillation permeate American literature. For instance, cosmopolitan characters and transnational allegiances of various kinds proliferate in Henry James’ late novels. Yet, in novels such as The Ambassadors (1903) the transnational and cosmopolitan are repeatedly subordinated to the commercial and other interests of the United States (cf. Berman 2017, 111). In more recent fiction, often focusing on wars and crises in the global South, a similar vacillation and eventual subordination of transnational possibilities to the mode of relation prescribed by the nation-state become visible. In Robert Stone’s A Flag for Sunrise (1981), Don DeLillo’s The Names (1982), William Gaddis’ Carpenter’s Gothic (1985), and Bob Shacochis’s The Woman Who Lost Her Soul (2013) transnational relations of a more benevolent kind are routed and disrupted by American covert operations, by betrayals of transnational solidarities, as well as by acts of violence serving the country’s international interests. It may be that novels such as these serve as a laboratory to explore transnational possibilities and to test them out against the interventions of the United States in the international arena. If so, the direction in which these narratives veer find an appropriate summary in a passage from Denis Johnson’s Vietnam war novel, Tree of Smoke (2007) narrating the different, yet always American, subject positions inhabited by a “young American man who alternately thought of himself as the Quiet American and the Ugly American, and who wished to be neither, who wanted instead to be the wise American, or the Good American, but who eventually came to witness himself as the Real American and finally as simply the Fucking American” (2007, 603). Novels such as Tree of Smoke are narratives of disappointment, disillusioned with the limitations they discover inhering within their engagement with the world outside of the United States, they often find that it is the United States itself that prescribes and restricts the modes of being in the world available to them.

3 Theoretical Perspectives: World Literature and Transnational American Studies Much of this chapter has turned toward transnational American studies to learn how to understand American literature as a variant of Anglophone world literature. But doing so raises questions concerning the relation between American and world literary studies. Anna Brickhouse has noted that there is a relative lack of “scholars of United States, Latin American, and Latino/a literary history” (2016, 1379) in world literary debates. This can be explained as a confluence of disciplinary histories and intellectual orientations. Transnational American studies emerged as a result of a shift within the field imaginary of American studies, while contemporary world literary studies takes as its origin debates with comparative literature and postcolonial studies. In addition, as Ursula Heise argues, two approaches are discernible within the study of

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world literature. On the one hand, she notes a search for “overarching models and methods that account for a wide variety of literary forms and genres across cultures” (2013, 637). Less totalizing, on the other hand, are attempts to explore “the formation, loss, or displacement of local identities; the ambiguous role of national identities and what might transcend them; and the cultural and political functioning of hybridity, borders, and diasporas” (Heise 2013, 637). Attuned more to the latter approach than the former, transnational American studies may very well fit in more comfortably with some debates within the field of world literature than with others. There may be additional reasons for the uncomfortable relations between the fields. Several contributors to the recent The Cambridge Companion to Transnational American Literature (Goyal 2017b) expressed discomfort regarding world literary studies. Wai Chee Dimock suspects Pascale Casanova’s “world republic of letters” of operating as a critical “panopticon,” of being “centralized and hierarchical” (2017a, 37), which would suggest it reproduces the conventional canon rather than provide openings for unconsecrated authors and fiction. Russ Castronovo joins in this hesitation pondering whether “transnational commerce is not the same as transnational aesthetics” (2017, 78). For him, world literature names the cultural expression of a globalized, neoliberal economy. Implicitly, Dimock and Castronovo fault world literary studies for not attending to questions regarding the opening of the literary canon and the imbrications of literature and the global economy, both concerns important to American studies. Writing from the other side of the divide, Emily Apter (2013) implicitly turns Castronovo’s caution against American literature and argues that it articulates an “oneworldedness” similar to that of “economic neo-imperialism,” and is suggestive of a monolingual “non-comparative model of comparative literature” (2013, 54). Relatedly, when Pheng Cheah narrates his teaching experiences at Berkeley, he notes some American students rejected the novels of writers such as Michelle Cliff, Amitav Ghosh, and Nuruddin Farah as “worthless garbage” (2016, 15), an aesthetic judgment he understands as being informed by a “culture of imperialism” (2016, 15). Apter and Cheah position American literature and readers against world literature and its audience, while faulting the former for their foreclosure and dismissal of difference. Though more congenial to the field, Jahan Ramazani worries that transnational American studies risks “representing one nation’s literature as a self-sufficient macrocosm that effectively internalizes and thus effaces all others” (2006, 345). It may indeed be necessary to question whether the field operates in an appropriative mode when it had no problem in the 1990s with integrating “Francophone and Hispanic literature in translation, as well as a full complement of Caribbean ‘diaspora’ women writers” (Goudie 2016, 129; ↗24 The Caribbean). Despite the tensions between American and world literary studies, they should perhaps have more to say to one another. For instance, it is arguably the case that transnational American studies would be served well in attending to debates within world literature relating to questions concerning comparison and comparability (↗11

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Comparative Literature). Yogita Goyal argues that drawing analogies between race and caste invariably raises exactly such questions: In contrast to many of the assumptions of transnational American studies, simply opening up the borders of US literature and looking outside does not always challenge the logic of empire or the defensive essentialisms of race and nation. Rather it is only when the historical specificity of a particular formation (racial or caste-based) is acknowledged, can we start making a comparative study. This does not then mean that we should proceed as if the two have nothing to do with each other. The histories and identities of race and caste are intertwined, but they do not make available any simple paradigm of relation. (Goyal 2019b, 66)

In arguing for renewed attention to questions concerning comparison, Goyal is bending transnational American studies toward the questions concerning difference, the untranslatable, the singular, and the inassimilable – the issues Apter would like to make central to a comparative literature project. World literary studies, in contrast, may very well take greater cognizance of the role of American institutions in shaping world literature. It is not only that many theorists within the field are located within US universities. Michelle Cliff, Amitav Ghosh, and Nuruddin Farah – three authors included in Cheah’s list of writers disliked by his students – all have had residencies and academic appointments in the United States. In fact, as Mark McGurl notes, numerous postcolonial writers and thinkers “have seen fit to take up residence in the North American imperium” (2009, 373), while the American creative writing program has become globalized, shaping international writing in numerous ways. David Damrosch may be correct in pointing out that Comparative Literature departments and world literary studies in the United States have developed without the participants paying much attention to the national literary tradition, and relegating to “relative invisibility” (2009, 13) the American standpoint of contributors. An engagement with transnational American studies and American literature would counteract this easy transcendence of the nation and its international presence. We may very well ponder what world literary studies would look like if it were to take seriously its entanglements with US institutions, and beyond that, how it operates within a global arena often susceptible to US interests and deployments of power. We may also then wonder what transnational American studies would look like were it to be more attentive to questions concerning comparison raised within world literary debates, and to the limitations of imagining American literature as the world, rather than as being located within the world. Ultimately, however, to relegate the American literature to what Damrosch calls “relative invisibility” within world literary debates has deeper consequences than the questions it raises concerning critical work. It consigns a literature and a literary history deeply entangled with the world outside the territorial boundaries of the United States to the margins of debates concerning world literature. This, in itself, may very well be a price worth paying for making room for comparatively smaller or lesser well-known literatures. But this relative invisibility also renders comparatively

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indistinct this literature’s tense relation to histories of settler colonialism, imperialism, and neoliberal globalization, as well as to how American power continues to articulate itself internationally. World literary debates attuned to questions of imperialism and capitalism, and to their contemporary formations, cannot avoid a reckoning with the position of the United States within the global arena. American literature, and transnational American studies too, offers a pathway toward such a reckoning.

4 Bibliography 4.1 Works Cited Apter, Emily. Against World Literature: On the Politics of Untranslatability. New York: Verso Books, 2014. Armstrong, Nancy, and Leonard Tennenhouse. Novels in the Time of Democratic Writing: The American Example. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2018. Barrenechea, Antonio. America Unbound: Encyclopedic Literature and Hemispheric Studies. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2016. Bauer, Ralph. “Early American Literature and American Literary History at the ‘Hemispheric Turn.’” American Literary History 22.2 (2010): 250–265. Bauer, Ralph. The Cultural Geography of Colonial American Literatures: Empire, Travel, Modernity. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003. Berman, Jessica. “Transnational Modernisms.” The Cambridge Companion to Transnational American Literature. Ed. Yogita Goyal. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017. 107–121. Brickhouse, Anna. “Unsettling World Literature.” PMLA 131.5 (2016): 1361–1371. Brickhouse, Anna. Transamerican Literary Relations and the Nineteenth-Century Public Sphere. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004. Buell, Lawrence, and Wai Chee Dimock, eds. Shades of the Planet: American Literature as World Literature. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2007. Burnham, Michelle. Transoceanic America: Risk, Writing, and Revolution in the Global Pacific. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2019. Burnham, Michelle. Folded Selves: Colonial New England Writing in the World System. Hanover: Dartmouth College Press, 2007. Castillo, Susan, and Ivy Schweitzer, eds. The Literatures of Colonial America. Malden: Blackwell Publishers, 2001. Castronovo, Russ. “Transnational Aesthetics.” The Cambridge Companion to Transnational American Literature. Ed. Yogita Goyal. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017. 72–88. Ch’ien, Evelyn N. Weird English. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2009. Cheah, Pheng. What Is a World? On Postcolonial Literature as World Literature. Durham: Duke University Press, 2015. Damrosch, David. “How American is World Literature?” The Comparatist 33 (2009): 13–19. DeLillo, Don. The Names. London: Vintage, 1989. Dimock, Wai Chee. “American Literature, World Literature.” The Cambridge Companion to Transnational American Literature. Ed. Yogita Goyal. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017a. 37–52.

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Dimock, Wai Chee. Through Other Continents: American Literature across Deep Time. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2006. Dimock, Wai Chee, Jordan Brower, Edgar Garcia, Kyle Hutzler, and Nick Rinehart, eds. American Literature in the World: An Anthology from Anne Bradstreet to Octavia Butler. New York: Columbia University Press, 2017. Doerr, Anthony. All the Light We Cannot See. New York: Scribner, 2014. Doyle, Laura. Freedom’s Empire: Race and the Rise of the Novel in Atlantic Modernity, 1640–1940. Durham: Duke University Press, 2008. Edwards, Brent H. “Langston Hughes and the Futures of Diaspora.” American Literary History 19.3 (2007): 689–711. Edwards, Brian T., and Dilip P. Gaonkar, eds. Globalizing American Studies. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2010. Egan, Jennifer. A Visit from the Goon Squad. New York: Anchor Books, 2010. Einboden, Jeffrey. The Islamic Lineage of American Literary Culture: Muslim Sources from the Revolution to Reconstruction. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016. Einboden, Jeffrey. Nineteenth-Century US Literature in Middle Eastern Languages. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2013. English, James F. The Economy of Prestige: Prizes, Awards, and the Circulation of Cultural Value. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2009. Fishkin, Shelley F. “Crossroads of Cultures: The Transnational Turn in American Studies – Presidential Address to the American Studies Association, November 12, 2004.” American Quarterly 57.1 (2005): 17–57. Fluck, Winfried. “A New Beginning? Transnationalisms.” New Literary History 42.3 (2011): 365–384. Fraser, Nancy. “Transnationalizing the Public Sphere: On the Legitimacy and Efficacy of Public Opinion in a Post-Westphalian World.” Theory, Culture & Society 24.4 (2007): 7–30. Gaddis, William. Carpenter’s Gothic. London: Penguin, 1999. Gates Jr., Henry Louis. The Signifying Monkey: A Theory of African-American Literary Criticism. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014. Greer, Andrew S. Less. New York: Back Bay Book, 2017. Giles, Paul. Virtual Americas: Transnational Fictions and the Transatlantic Imaginary. Durham: Duke University Press, 2002. Gillman, Susan, and Kirsten S. Gruesz. “Worlding America: The Hemispheric Text‐Network.” A Companion to American Literary Studies. Ed. Caroline F. Levander and Robert S. Levine, 2011. 228–247. Gillman, Susan, Kirsten S. Gruesz, and Rob Wilson. “Worlding American Studies.” Comparative American Studies: An International Journal 2.3 (2004): 259–270. Goldstein, Alyosha, ed. Formations of United States Colonialism. Durham: Duke University Press, 2014. Goudie, Sean X. “The Caribbean Turn in C19 American Literary Studies.” Turns of Event: NineteenthCentury American Literary Studies in Motion. Ed. Hester Blum. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2016. 127–150. Goyal, Yogita. “The Transnational Turn and Postcolonial Studies.” The Cambridge Companion to Transnational American Literature. Ed. Yogita Goyal. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017a. 53–71. Goyal, Yogita, ed. The Cambridge Companion to Transnational American Literature. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017b. Goyal, Yogita. Runaway Genres: The Global Afterlives of Slavery. New York: New York University Press, 2019a. Goyal, Yogita. “On Transnational Analogy: Thinking Race and Caste with W.E.B Du Bois and Rabindranath Tagore.” Atlantic Studies 16.1 (2019b): 54–71.

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Gruesz, Kirsten Silva. Ambassadors of Culture: The Transamerican Origins of Latino Writing. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2002. Heise, Ursula K. “Globality, Difference, and the International Turn in Ecocriticism.” PMLA 128.3 (2013): 636–643. Hoskins, Janet A., and Viet T. Nguyen, eds. Transpacific Studies: Framing an Emerging Field. Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press, 2014. Howard, June. The Center of the World: Regional Writing and the Puzzles of Place-Time. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018. Hutzler, Kyle. “An American world literature for the Trump era.” Huffpost.com (30 Jan. 2017). https://www.huffpost.com/entry/an-american-world-literature-for-the-trumpera_b_5887c1e5e4b04251e621f9d4 (15 Jun. 2019). Irr, Caren. Toward the Geopolitical Novel: U.S. Fiction in the Twenty-First Century. New York: Columbia University Press, 2013. Jagoda, Patrick. Network Aesthetics. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2016. James, Henry. The Ambassadors. New York: Modern Library, 2011. Johnson, Adam. The Orphan Master’s Son. New York: Random House, 2012. Johnson, Denis. Tree of Smoke. London: Picador, 2007. Jones, Gavin. Strange Talk: The Politics of Dialect Literature in Gilded Age America. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999. Kaplan, Amy. The Anarchy of Empire in the Making of U.S. Culture. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2002. Kaplan, Amy, and Donald E. Pease, eds. Cultures of United States Imperialism. Durham: Duke University Press, 1993. Kaplan, Amy. “Left Alone with America: The Absence of Empire in the Study of American Culture.” Cultures of United States Imperialism. Ed. Amy Kaplan and Donald E. Pease. Durham: Duke University Press, 1993. 3–21. Kazanjian, David. The Colonizing Trick: National Culture and Imperial Citizenship in Early America. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2003. Kim, Jodi. Ends of Empire: Asian American Critique and Cold War Compositions. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2010. Kingston, Maxine H. “The Novel’s Next Step.” Mother Jones (December 1989): 37–41. Kutzinski, Vera M. The Worlds of Langston Hughes: Modernism and Translation in the Americas. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2012. Lee, Steven S. The Ethnic Avant-Garde: Minority Cultures and World Revolution. New York: Columbia University Press, 2015. Levander, Caroline F., and Robert S. Levine, eds. Hemispheric American Studies. New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2007. Levine, Caroline. Forms: Whole, Rhythm, Hierarchy, Network. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2015. Lomas, Laura. Translating Empire: José Martí, Migrant Latino Subjects, and American Modernities. Durham: Duke University Press, 2009. McGill, Meredith L. American Literature and the Culture of Reprinting, 1834–1853. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2007. McGurl, Mark. The Program Era. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2009. Medovoi, Leerom. “Reperiodizing the Postmodern: Textualizing the World System Before and After 9/11.” Postmodern/Postwar and After: Rethinking American Literature. Ed. Jason Gladstone, Andrew Hoberek, and Daniel Worden. Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 2016. 93–110. Meer, Sarah. Uncle Tom Mania: Slavery, Minstrelsy, and Transatlantic Culture in the 1850s. Athens, GA: University of Georgia Press, 2005.

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Melville, Herman. The Writings of Herman Melville, vol. 12: Clarel: A Poem and Pilgrimage in the Holy Land. Ed. Harrison Hayford, Alma A. MacDougall, Hershel Parker, and G. Thomas Tanselle. Evanston: Northwestern University Press and The Newberry Library, 1991. Miller, Joshua L. Accented America: The Cultural Politics of Multilingual Modernism. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011. Moraru, Christian. Cosmodernism: American Narrative, Late Globalization, and the New Cultural Imaginary. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2011. Murphy, Gretchen. Hemispheric Imaginings: The Monroe Doctrine and Narratives of US Empire. Durham: Duke University Press, 2005. Nguyen, Viet T. The Sympathizer. New York: Grove Press, 2015. Nwankwo, Ifeoma K. Black Cosmopolitanism: Racial Consciousness and Transnational Identity in the Nineteenth-Century Americas. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2005. Patterson, Anita. Race, American Literature and Transnational Modernisms. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008. Pease, Donald E., and Yuan Shu, eds. American Studies as Transnational Practice: Turning toward the Transpacific. Hanover: Dartmouth College Press, 2016. Powers, Richard. The Overstory. New York: Norton, 2018. Pynchon, Thomas. Gravity’s Rainbow. London: Vintage, 1995. Ramazani, Jahan. “A Transnational Poetics.” American Literary History 18.2 (2006): 332–359. Roberts, Brian R., and Michelle A. Stephens, eds. Archipelagic American Studies. Durham: Duke University Press, 2017. Rogers, Gayle. Incomparable Empires: Modernism and the Translation of Spanish and American Literature. New York: Columbia University Press, 2016. Rowe, John C., ed. Post-Nationalist American Studies. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000. Saldívar, José D. Trans-Americanity: Subaltern Modernities, Global Coloniality, and the Cultures of Greater Mexico. Durham: Duke University Press, 2011. Saldívar, Ramón. The Borderlands of Culture: Américo Paredes and the Transnational Imaginary. Durham: Duke University Press, 2010. Shacochis, Bob. The Woman Who Lost Her Soul. New York: Atlantic Monthly Press, 2013. Shapiro, Stephen. The Culture and Commerce of the Early American Novel: Reading the Atlantic World-System. University Park: Penn State Press, 2008. Shell, Marc, and Werner Sollors, eds. The Multilingual Anthology of American literature: A Reader of Original Texts with English Translations. New York: New York University Press, 2000. Sollors, Werner, ed. Multilingual America: Transnationalism, Ethnicity, and the Languages of American Literature. New York: New York University Press, 1998. Spivak, Gayatri C. “Rethinking Comparativism.” New Literary History 40.3 (2009): 609–626. Stone, Robert. A Flag for Sunrise. London: Vintage, 1992. Tart, Donna. The Goldfinch. New York: Back Bay Book, 2015. Whitehead, Colson. The Underground Railroad. New York: Anchor Books, 2016.

4.2 Further Reading Baldwin, Kate A. Beyond the Color Line and the Iron Curtain: Reading Encounters between Black and Red, 1922–1963. Durham: Duke University Press, 2002. Castillo, Susan. Performing America: Colonial Encounters in New World Writing, 1500–1786. London: Routledge, 2005.

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Chuh, Kandace, and Karen Shimakawa, eds. Orientations: Mapping Studies in the Asian Diaspora. Durham: Duke University Press, 2001. Edwards, Brent H. The Practice of Diaspora: Literature, Translation and the Rise of Black Internationalism. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2003. Edwards, Brian T. After the American Century: The Ends of U.S. Culture in the Middle East. New York: Columbia University Press, 2015. Giles, Paul. The Global Remapping of American Literature. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2011. Goudie, Sean. Creole America: The West Indies and the Formation of Literature and Culture in the New Republic. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2006. Grewal, Inderpal. Transnational America: Feminisms, Diasporas, Neoliberalisms. Durham: Duke University Press, 2005. Huhndorf, Shari. Mapping the Americas: The Transnational Politics of Contemporary Native Culture. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2009. Rowe, John C. Literary Culture and U.S. Imperialism: from the Revolution to World War II. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000.

Katja Sarkowsky

22 Canada

Abstract: Anglophone literatures in Canada constitute world literatures in different ways: they do so with regard to their global distribution, their increasing canonization, and their capacity of world-making. This contribution focuses on the last aspect. Its argument is two-fold: Contemporary Canadian literatures in English engage in processes of literary world-making by deploying strategies that are tentatively labeled ‘evocative,’ ‘narrative,’ and ‘performative,’ with affinities but not limited to specific genres. These processes of world-making engage intensely with notions of space and place; contemporary Canadian literatures in English are characterized by a strong focus on location and the connection between locations and by an oscillation between a focus on the Canadian nation – even if understood as constituted by transnational movement – and attempts of world-making beyond the nation. Key Terms: World-making, worlding, place/space, transnationality

1 Anglophone Canadian Literature as World Literature: Locations Literature in Canada is a world literature in all of the senses that are currently discussed under that heading: it is a literature that widely circulates beyond its frameworks of origin, in its language of production as well as in translation (cf. Damrosch 2003, 4); it is a literature strongly represented in an internationalized canon of ‘great works’ (if literary prizes can be counted as an indication of such representation); it is characterized by explicit and implicit interactions with a range of literary traditions and conventions across national borders and cultural delineations; it is part of what Pascale Casanova has called the “world literary space” (2004, 108), and – from its very inception, for reasons of publishing infrastructure (or lack thereof) and size of addressed audience – its orientation has been towards non-Canadian markets, historically speaking British and American, and in the past decades clearly ‘global’ markets. Canada’s Anglophone literatures and their orientation toward and making of worlds, are shaped by very specific historical, cultural, and linguistic circumstances, some of which they share with other settler societies, and all of which contribute to their unique oscillation between multiple points of reference – the local, the national, the transnational, and even the global. Canada’s emergence as a nation-state out of the competition of French and British colonialisms, the eventual dominance of the https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110583182-023

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latter over the former, and the ensuing dual linguistic and political structure of the Canadian polity have had an impact on political as well as on cultural debates and manifestations. The complicated relationship of Canada to Great Britain – with the step-by-step process of decolonization shared with other settler colonies such as Australia and Aotearoa/New Zealand an important factor – and the United States had important ramifications for the development of Canadian literatures in English. Much of early Canadian writing in English was published in the UK (such as Susanna Moodie’s Roughing It in the Bush, published 1852 in London and 1871 in Toronto), while there nevertheless was – particularly after Confederation in 1867 – a strong drive towards establishing and consolidating a ‘national tradition.’ The so-called Confederation Poets in the late 1880s sought to do so by combining established verse form with a ‘Canadian’ subject matter, while the Montreal group of poets in the 1920s rebelled against what they perceived as a Victorian-induced narrow literary nationalism by linking their own work explicitly to the internationalist orientation of poetic modernism. The complex linguistic constellations in Canada, with English and French as the two official languages since the passing of the Official Languages Act in 1969, the development of national literatures in both languages, and the competing presence and increasing literary prominence of allophone literatures and story traditions in Canada does not allow for a neat narrative of one national literary tradition (cf. Nischik 2008, 3). Particularly since the 1980s, there has been a steadily growing literary prominence of writers belonging to immigrant, diasporic, or other minoritized groups that have linked their work in both subject matter and form to literary and cultural traditions outside Canada, thus transforming them into ‘Canadian’ literature, but at the same time calling into question the meaning of ‘Canadianness’ and the kind of world (or worlds) it refers to. These seemingly disparate examples have in common that they all point to an oscillation of Canadian Anglophone literature between various spatial and symbolic frames of reference. So while the development of Canadian literatures in English could with some justification be outlined as moving from national consolidation via increasing diversification towards transnationalization, such an outline would entail misleading simplifications. These processes overlapped rather than subsequently followed one another; consequently, what was meant by Canadian ‘nationhood’ and, in consequence, nationalist conceptions, at any given time varied significantly. If in the time period after Confederation, between 1867 and the First World War, the “prevalent idea of nationalism declared a fundamental belief in cultural uniformity” and “nationalist sentiment was Anglo-centric, male-dominated, and justified by appeals to God and National Law” (New 2001, 79), concepts of Canadian nationhood in the early twenty-first century (if not always necessarily in political practice) are shaped by a multicultural self-image and a strong emphasis of diversity and the programmatic inclusion of a wide range of lifeworlds. Connected to this conceptual diversification of Canadian lifeworlds has been an increasing attention to the impact of transnationalization and transculturation on

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the Canadian literary imagination. In their introduction to Crosstalk: Canadian and Global Imaginaries in Dialogue, Diana Brydon and Marta Dvořák understand Canadian imaginaries as “the organizing structures of societal understanding within a nationstate” that shift “in response to globalizing pressure” (2012, 1–2) and in exchange with perspective on Canada from outside the nation-state. In their literary manifestations these imaginaries, while originating within the nation-state and responding to its specific historical and contemporary constellations, bring forth worlds in which Canadian spaces emerge out of complex interactions between local conditions, regional specificity, national metaphoricity, and transnational processes, most obviously of migration and economic exchange, but also of processes of transculturation, adaption, cross-referencing, and appropriation. While this has been an important aspect of Canadian writing since its inception as a national literature, such processes have been particularly prominent since the 1970s and 1980s when the increasing presence of minoritized writers triggered processes of accelerated diversification in literature as well as in imagining Canada, and when literary texts to unprecedented degrees explored such multiple points of reference within, without, across, and against the nation-state. As Smaro Kamboureli highlights in her introduction to Critical Collaborations, “at a time when ‘mainstream’ literature can include texts that range from chick lit to nature writing, from indigenous literature to diasporic voices, we can no longer speak of CanLit as a singular construct; operating more as a historical sign of Canadian literature’s formation, CanLit has now become CanLits” (2014, 4). The texts that constitute ‘CanLits’ do so, as will be illustrated in the next section, not only by referencing a wider range of potential lifeworlds, but also by a variety of literary strategies of “worlding” (Cheah 2017, 87) and “world-making” (Neumann and Rippl 2017, 3), which explore, reflect, and construct possible worlds that potentially allow to imagine ‘otherwise,’ and, by so doing, also serve as critical reflections on any normative conception of a or the ‘world.’

2 Imaginative World Making: Central Topics, Concerns and Literary Strategies in Contemporary Anglophone Literature in Canada Anglophone literatures in Canada are worlding literatures (↗6 Global Literature, World Literature and Worlding Literature) in the sense of their imaginative construction of ‘worlds’ that emerge out of a complex intertwining of local and translocal spaces, “imaginative worlds-in-the-becoming” (Neumann and Rippl 2017, 9). While they are not necessarily overtly political or inherently subversive, these worlds can be politically and morally challenging exercises in their very process of imagining contemporary, past, future, or entirely fictional worlds. Not surprisingly, the fields where

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such challenges are most obvious include historical writing and utopian literatures, particularly in its dystopian variant. Wayne Johnston’s The Colony of Unrequited Dreams (1998) not only retraces the history of Newfoundland as a Canadian province through the eyes of one of the protagonists of this process, but it also problematizes the very process of ‘writing history’ in line with what Linda Hutcheon has so prominently called ‘historiographic metafiction’ (Hutcheon 1988). Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale (1985) and The Testaments (2019) combine the construction of a theocratic dystopia that reduces women to their reproductive capacities with a critical investigation of historiography; some of her most recent dystopian novels – the MaddAddam trilogy (2003, 2009, 2013) and The Heart Goes Last (2015) – pick up on issues of environmental destruction and the corporatization of society. And harking back to the historical trauma of residential schooling, Cherie Dimaline’s The Marrow Thieves (2017) projects a world in the near future in which indigenous peoples are hunted for their bone marrow and their ability to dream. Even though dystopias tend to move ever so much closer to the present in their time frame – highlighting the immediate threat presented by dystopian lifeworlds in their characteristic destruction of the environment and implementation to social orders marked by both anarchic violence and perfected surveillance as being almost or already upon us – they are not the only genre that explore competing presents and futures. In its multiplicity of local references and life possibilities, literature constitutively diversifies the present and its relation to the past. Alistair MacLeod’s short stories are an example of such diversification; when his protagonist of “Island” on an island just off Cape Breton sees “the grey shape of tir mòr, the mainland, more than two miles away,” the reader is made to realize that the “mainland was itself another large island although most people did not think of it that way” (MacLeod 2000, 370). If this passage stresses ‘distance’ from the ‘mainland’ (which itself is an island related to a mainland), the complex relations between different worlds within ‘Canada’ emerge as crucial part of MacLeod’s imaginative world-making. And in Places Far From Ellesmere: A Geografictione (1990), Aritha van Herk combines her autobiographical reconstructions of Alberta’s rural and urban spaces with a narrative present of both exploring Canada’s third-largest island and reading Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina. The text thus creates shifting narrative overlays, producing a life story that locates its interweaving past and present firmly in reimagined geographical space as well as an investigation of gender and literature that harks back to nineteenth-century Russia. Van Herk’s narrative worlding is thus the production of imaginary geographical and strongly intertextual spaces linked by autobiographical reflection. Minoritized literatures in particular have presented worlds that challenge any notion of ‘a’ shared present by highlighting the importance of positionality of individuals and groups not only in social lifeworlds but also in “the organizing structures of societal understanding within a nation-state” (Brydon and Dvořák 2012, 1–2). The divers black lifeworlds in Canada narrated by Dionne Brand in Another Place, Not Here (1996), by George Elliott Clarke in George & Rue (2005), and by David Chariandy

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in Brother (2017) or the juxtaposition of indigenous and Anglo-Canadian worlds presented in Lee Maracle’s Ravensong (1993) and Celia’s Song (2014) do more than insist on the different lives led within Canada: they highlight the co-presence, occasional intertwining, and often violent clashing of worlds. And last but not least, diasporic literatures inextricably intertwine Canadian worlds with locations elsewhere, combining the imagination of community with world-making across borders. While this may but does not automatically translate into what Gayatri Spivak has called a “planetarity” that includes human and non-human domains (cf. 2003, 72–73), it creates diverse lifeworlds in Canada that exceed and transnationalize the nation-state, if they do not even create worlds entirely located in real or fictional ‘elsewheres,’ such as Rohinton Mistry’s A Fine Balance (1995), Michael Ondaatje’s Anil’s Ghost (2000), Esi Edugyan’s Half-Blood Blues (2011), or Lawrence Hill’s The Illegal (2016). But the process of transnational worlding is not limited to unique, innovative, or transcultural plot lines or settings. It also includes the specific emplotment, both conventional and formally innovative; the reference to e.g. non-European literary and/ or story-telling traditions and conventions and the hybridization of mythologies; or the choice of metaphor and image to frame and interpret experience. Such elements, in turn, are generated in the context of genre-affinitive modes of world-making that I would like to provisionally label ‘narrative,’ ‘evocative,’ and ‘performative.’ Neither is genre-specific – there is narrative poetry, and prose texts can clearly be evocative in their use of metaphor, for example – but I suggest that the narrative mode is most prominently displayed in the short story and the novel, the evocative mode in poetry, and the performative mode in drama, and for the purpose of illustration, this will be the focus in the following analyses of Alice Munro’s short story “What Do You Want to Know For?” (2006), Esi Edugyan’s novel The Second Life of Samuel Tyne (2004), Daniel David Moses’s play Brébeuf’s Ghost (1996), and Fred Wah’s poetry in Waiting for Saskatchewan (1985).

2.1 Alice Munro: “What Do You Want to Know For?” (2006) Alice Munro’s (b. 1931) work clearly fits into all the categories developed in the various concepts of world literature: translated into numerous languages and globally circulated, it received the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2013, Munro being the first (or, as some insist, the second after Canadian-born Saul Bellow) Canadian writer thus honored. Her 2006 collection The View from Castle Rock has been read as a series of loosely connected and autobiographically inflected short stories that iterate the narrator’s family history from her ancestor’s life in the Scottish Highland’s via her own youth in rural Ontario to her intertwined meditation of place, history, memory, and death. The collection’s final story “What Do You Want to Know For?” even begins with a reference to death: “I saw the crypt before my husband did” (Munro 2006, 314). Immediately, though, the crypt becomes narratively embedded in the landscape

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“a  large, unnatural mount blanketed with grass,” even alive through simile, “like a big woolly animal – like some giant wombat, lolling around in the prehistoric landscape” (Munro 2006, 314). The kind of connection established in this passage between the crypt – a human-made construction for the dead – and the land that appears to have claimed, even absorbed it, appears to programmatically indicate the short story’s narrative process of world-making, its weaving of seemingly disparate elements into a story about layers of cultural and individual memory. The “prehistoric landscape” into which the crypt – dead-alive – seems to be integrated gestures toward the temporal scope the reader might expect, the layering of what Shelly Hulan in her reading of the story has called the “strata of time and event” (2014, 260), and it might be added that the ‘strata’ are indeed as spatial as the metaphor suggests. The short story places its plot in a very specific landscape, but this landscape in turn is inscribed by the passing of time. As Pheng Cheah has argued, ‘world’ “is originally a temporal category. Before the world can appear as an object, it must first be. A world only is and we are only worldly beings if there is already time” (2016, 2). ‘Time’ is not standardized or homogenous, however, and the heterogeneity of time as a world-making force becomes manifest in Munro’s short story as crucially connected to the land. Here, ‘time’ is geological, or, as the narrator puts it, the “landscape here is a record of ancient events” (Munro 2006, 315). Long passages in the story are devoted to the ways in which Huron County maps indicate the different layers and types of moraines; but rather than mapping space, these maps capture time, event, form, and effect: The purple tails are end moraines, they show where the ice halted on its long retreat, putting down a ridge of rubble at its edge. The vivid green strokes are eskers, and they are the easiest of all features to recognize, when you’re looking through the car window. Miniature mountain ranges, dragons’ backs – they show the route of the rivers that tunnelled under the ice. (Munro 2006, 317)

There is a triple translation process at work in this passage: geology is translated into the survey map; the map allows for the visual identification of the landscape, which, in turn, is translated into metonym – a narrativization of the landscape of simultaneous geological time of ongoing production and personal time of moving through and perceiving the landscape. But the short story’s temporal structure is even more complex, for ‘time’ is geological and personal as well as historical: Munro’s narrator imagines the spatial and temporal layers of European settlement and indigenous displacement and connects them to the long-term perspective of the land’s slowly changeable geological structure on the one hand and to her vulnerable physical body on the other. The processes of world-making that the short story engages in hinges on a number of narrative elements and connections: for one, the story alternates between the search for the crypt and the research the narrator engages in to find it on the one hand and the agonizing wait for the results of a biopsy on the other; it thus seems to suggest a direct connection between

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her investigation into the past – the geological past as well as the historical past of European settlement – and her facing the inevitability of her own mortality. The long-term perspective of geological world-emergence, we might say, the comparative short span of a human life, and the even shorter time of the personal ‘events’ of the story, are carefully related to one another by marked time: “a year after,” “three weeks or so before,” “ten days to be put in,” or “two weeks ahead.” The latter refers to the time the narrator has to wait for the results of a medical examination to determine whether the lump found in her breast is malign: “I said that two weeks seemed like quite a while to wait. At this stage of the game, the doctor said, two weeks was immaterial” (Munro 2006, 320). Time is material here, though, if in a different way; it is literally embodied and manifests the uncertainty of the future. About half way through the story, the narrator and her husband find the crypt again, and the cemetery where it is located triggers a search that will lead her – following the hints she can find from one place to another across the county – both into the settlement past of the county and her family’s more immediate past: one of the people she talks to turns out to have worked for her father. The story thus eventually zooms in from the broad scopes of geological and historical times to the immediacy of place and moment. He laughs and reaches across the table to shake my hand. “Well now. I can see it in you. Bob Laidlaw’s girl. ’Round the eyes. That’s a long time ago. A long time ago.” […] I agree with him, and then we both say that it is a small world. We say this, as people usually do, with a sense of wonder and refreshment. (People who are not going to be comforted by this discovery usually avoid making it.) We explore the connection as far as it will go, and soon find that there is not much more to be got out of it. But we are both happy. (Munro 2006, 329)

Happiness is generated by the recognition of a younger self and by the connection of that self to others. Given where in the collection this story – and this particular passage within the story – is placed, this connection is not simply there, it is made in an act of self-reflective interpretation that is both diegetic and extradiegetic. Thereby, the individual life appears to gain meaning not only from the larger perspective in which it is placed in its limited temporality, but also from the process of meaning-making itself. The framing of the story through the narrator’s autodiegetic perspective is another element of the process of narrative world-making: while opening a large tableau of spatial and temporal references, particularly when read in the context of the short story collection of which this one is a part, it also carefully limits the world to one that is both imagined and interpreted by a particular individual in her struggle with fear of death.

2.2 Esi Edugyan: The Second Life of Samuel Tyne (2004) If the dynamics of narrative world-making in Munro’s short story thrive on the tension between different kinds of time and their inscription into place, Esi Edugyan’s (b. 1978)

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novel The Second Life of Samuel Tyne redefines the Canadian prairie that is usually (and inaccurately) coded as ‘white’ as a black diasporic space across time. Edugyan’s work circles around transnational black history and questions of belonging and citizenship, and this focus is already clearly discernible in this debut. The novel begins in 1968 when the Tyne family – Samuel, Maud, and their Canadian-born twins – moves from Calgary to the fictional town of Aster. Samuel and Maud are immigrants from what was at their time of emigration still called the Gold Coast, now Ghana; each has made the long journey for reasons of economic betterment, but also to escape (Maud) or fulfill (Samuel) complicated family obligations. The novel’s beginning casts the characters in an “age of atrocities” (Edugyan 2013, 1) as well as of private crisis, a situation in which the marriage is marked by tensions beyond the individuals’ control: “Their marriage, plagued by the usual upsets of conjugal life, suffered added tensions, for across the sea, their tribes had been deeply scornful of each other for centuries” (Edugyan 2013, 2). From the beginning, the Tynes are implicated in a transnational space: the ‘new world’ of Canada, far from being removed from the struggles of the old world of the ‘Gold Coast’/Ghana, continues to be shaped by such tensions as well as by its own, chief among them racism and a clear-cut understanding of who can and cannot fully belong. If the novel’s title suggests a new beginning for the protagonist, a civil servant who most of all enjoys to repair broken things in his free time, the promise of a ‘second life’ proves to be treacherous. The Tynes relocate to Aster because Samuel has inherited his uncle Jacob’s house; he makes the decision to move without consultation, and Maud is anything but pleased to leave Calgary for a house in decay in a prairie small town. But Aster is not any town, as it turns out; rather, modeled after historical Amber Valley (cf. Vernon 2008, 206), it is one of the former black pioneer towns, settled by African Americans fleeing post-reconstruction racism and segregation in the first decade of the twentieth century. But the novel not only places the family in such a historically black space that calls into question the fiction of Canada’s constitutive whiteness (cf. Clarke 1997; Walcott 2003): it also gives them another Ghanaian-Canadian for a neighbor, Akosua Porter, who has more recently immigrated, and her husband, the last of the Oklahoman pioneers in Aster, and a man himself marked like a place: “as a man, he was a bag of mixed maps. His voice had a strange texture, as though every place he ever traveled to, no matter how short the trip or how remotely in his past, had left an imprint on his speech” (Edugyan 2013, 129). By bringing together three different black migration movements to Aster, the novel both contributes to what Karina Vernon has called a ‘black prairie archive’ (cf. 2008) in Canada and links small-town Alberta to larger contexts of the black diaspora; Aster thus serves to rewrite national space while at the same time redefining the transnational space of the ‘black Atlantic’ (cf. Gilroy 1993; Siemerling 2015). But the world that emerges is one of conflicting notions of culture and allegiance. While Maud had sought assimilation, refusing to speak her mother tongue Fante, Akosua critically reminds Samuel and Maud of their Ghanaian heritage, language, and family obligations: if for the Tynes migration

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meant separating themselves from their past and uneasily living with its traces, Akosua’s is a consciousness of cultural continuity. However, while such character placement and their space-making everyday practices (cf. de Certeau 1988) marks Aster defiantly as a place with both a black past and a black present, it also presents a world of struggle against the racist assumptions of the majority population. Frank and Eudora Ray, an Anglo-Canadian couple, who welcome the Tynes to Astor and to their house, nevertheless promote the worst of stereotypes: “Fact is, newcomers weigh hard on our system. And I don’t mean you – you two are model. But look at someone like Porter. No steady job, a wife who doesn’t work, and look at his brood. She’s barely off the boat before she pops out ten kids” (Edugyan 2013, 141–142). Samuel and Maud being ‘model’ immigrants in the Franks’ eyes has clear limits when it comes to what kind of success they see as possible for them. When Samuel opens his repair shop, Ray supports him as long as it is just that. Once Samuel begins to think about inventing a computer, however, Ray reminds him of his ‘place’: You’re a smart, smart man – you’ve done so well for yourself it puts lesser men to shame. You’re a real example. But there are limits. I say this as your elder, as your friend.” […] Samuel said, “Is it because I’m an average man or because I’m an average black man that you give me such advice? (Edugyan 2013, 201)

The Tynes’ struggles are depicted mostly with Samuel or Maud as focalizers. Theirs is a struggle for a citizenship that will allow them to eventually belong. Maud’s strategy is cultural assimilation and the denial of her connections to Ghana; Samuel’s is economic independence and the possibility to live out his full intellectual and creative potential. Samuel’s attempt to fulfill his dream of being an inventor eventually fails; his store is vandalized, leaving the family in financial ruin. His economic struggles are narrated as closely intertwined with the family relationships’ deterioration. The focus of the narrative increasingly shifts to the twins, Chloe and Yvette, who have developed their own language, act alarmingly unpredictable to the point of destructiveness, and, at the pressure of the community of Aster (with Ray and Eudora as its spokespersons), are eventually committed to an institution. The twins have generated much attention and puzzlement in the reception of the novel; for a number of critics, they present an embodiment of a social constellation the Tynes find themselves in, “mark[ing] the degree of trauma that results from the (dis)location of African diasporic families in the Americas, permanently estranged from space and place, history and memory” (Davis 2007, 42). Indeed, the twins’ institutionalization appears to sever Maud and Samuel from any further attempt to make a home in Aster, even though they stay. The novel’s epilogue, set years later, recalls Alberta’s economic boom in the 1970s and the bitter irony of Calgary’s rise as a center of computer development; it also surveys the demographic diversification which does not offer the Tynes a perspective of belonging, either:

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West Indians, Vietnamese, Koreans, Africans; the variety of faces even in Aster amazed Samuel. […] Instead of making friends with the newcomers, Samuel and Maud felt no affinity whatsoever with them. Their reasons for arriving had been so different, their payment for staying so out of touch with the clean hope of greenhorns, that they kept to themselves. (Edugyan 2013, 271)

The ending of the novel sees Maud die of grief; Samuel buries her realizing that “their citizenship had been finalized; their flesh, his kin, cold in the ground, were now inseverable from Alberta” (Edugyan 2013, 275). Samuel has cast his lot with Alberta and with Canada; early on in the novel it has become clear that neither he nor Maud had given thought to a potential return to Ghana. But when he buries his wife, he resorts to rituals demanded of him by his ancestors’ tradition. As Winfried Siemerling has highlighted, this acknowledgement of his roots is crucial: “one sense of belonging seems only possible because he is at peace with the other” (Siemerling 2015, 334). It is this simultaneity of belongings and the converse inscriptions of space as layered that characterizes this novel’s imaginative world-making.

2.3 Fred Wah: Waiting for Saskatchewan (1985) Fred Wah (b. 1939) is one of the best-known Canadian poets. A co-founder of the experimental poetry journal TISH in the 1960s, his poetry has been decisively influenced by the modernists associated with the ‘Black Mountain School;’ in the 1980s, Wah – who is of Chinese, Scottish-Irish, and Swedish origin – increasingly turned to an explicit exploration of questions of family history, subjectivity, and race (cf. Yu 2015, 17). “Wah’s poetry disentangles from modernist ambitions of representing a ‘grand collage’ of ‘old stories’ based on a cultures-of-the-world unity” in favor of an improvisational approach to language as grounded in physicality, as not only a producing ‘meaning’ but as producing ‘world’ in a very physical sense (cf. Cabri 2009, x). In his 1985 award-winning poetry collection Waiting for Saskatchewan, Wah explores family relations, notions of origin, and particularly the relation to his father (which would be at the center of his celebrated ‘biotext’ Diamond Grill twelve years later). “Are origins magnetic lines across and ocean / migrations of genetic spume or holes, dark / mysteries within which I carry further into the World / through blond and blue-eyed progeny father’s fathers / clan name Wah from Canton” (Wah 1985, 5) he asks in a short poem consisting of a single sentence in eight lines, only to follow with nine poems that are centrally about or directed at his father, and about the origins wondered about in the cited poem. In the title poem of the collection, Wah evokes a world in which individual and family place memories intertwine and initially seem to project a sense of nostalgic longing for return. However, while clearly drawing on a diasporic mode that gestures towards “the origins grandparents countries places converged / europe asia railroads carpenters nailed grain elevators” (1985, 3), the place evoked most strongly is

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Saskatchewan, Swift Current more precisely, and the longed-for return is not that of the speaker to this place but his waiting for it – a reversal of the reader’s expectation that insists that the place is both remembered and imagined. The entire poem is one long, incomplete sentence, evoking the place remembered as a convergence of different elements, train tracks, houses, cafés, combined in a seemingly random flow of association. The speaker is emotionally ambivalent, “[…] these places these strips / laid beyond horizon for eyesight the city so I won’t have to go / near it as origin town flatness appears later in my stomach why / why on earth would they land in such as place” (Wah 1985, 3). At the same time, the place is one of completion when the speaker ends with the lines “I want it back, wait in this snowblown winter night / for that latitude of itself its own largess / my body to get complete / it still owes me, it does” (Wah 1985, 3). The poem’s dynamics emerge out of its directedness of memory and desire towards a place and the speaker’s insistence on ‘waiting’ for that place. The distance is both geographical and temporal (remembered and waited for, past and future) and it is upheld at the end of the poem: ‘waiting’ after all suggests an incalculable deferral of fulfillment, and the poem implies that precisely this deferral that mirrors the subject’s completion. While the poem “Waiting for Saskatchewan” time and again evokes the smalltown locality of the prairies as an intersection of different immigrant lifeworlds, it formally resonates with the modernist aesthetics of the Black Mountain modernists. The collection Waiting for Saskatchewan additionally integrates Japanese poetic forms, in particular the utanikki, “a poetic diary of mixed prose and poetry” as Wah explains in the prefatory note to the book (1985, n.pag.), and the related form of haibun, a short prose poem, also often with an autobiographical focus (cf. Ross 2002, 169). Both forms are ‘hybrid’ from the perspective of Western genre classifications, combining poetry and prose as well as observation with autobiographical and autofictional reflection. The second section of the book is a poetic travel diary that covers the speaker’s journey to Japan and China; each ‘entry’ is divided in a diary-like prose passage set in italics and a thematically related poetic passage arranged underneath it. The section is entitled “Grasp the Sparrow’s Tail,” referring to a move in tai chi that the speaker remembers his father performing (cf. Wah 1985, 44), and complexly interweaves references to Chinese and Japanese forms with an exploration of the relationship to his late father and his own hybrid identity construction. In one section set in Canton, place of his grandfather’s origin, the speaker recalls explaining to his fellow travellers the origin of his name. Addressing his father, he says, “You were part Chinese I tell them. / They look at me. I’m pulling their leg. / So I’m Chinese too and that’s why my name is Wah. / They don’t believe me, that’s okay. / When you’re not ‘pure’ you just make it up” (Wah 1985, 43). Neither is the subject ‘pure’ nor the text; formally adapting a Japanese genre in turn adapted from China (cf. Miner 1968, 39), the references in the text include Canadian and American modernist writers as well as Japanese and Chinese literature and thereby create a transcultural textual space to frame the hybrid poetic subject. Timothy Yu has convincingly argued that the collection presents a

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“node” of transnational confluences from China, Japan, and the United States, and he suggests that “Waiting for Saskatchewan posits Asian Canadian experience as a ‘language world,’ one in which the form of Asian Canadian expression is paramount” (Yu 2015, 17). The centrality of self-reflexive language and the construction of a “language world” across cultural, ethnic, and linguistic borders are explicitly addressed in the entry for “Aug 2.” This ‘entry’ combines references to the Canadian avant-garde poet b.p. nichols – whose life-long poetic project The Martyrology presents a poetic investigation into language – and to the tenth-century Japanese The Tosa Diary with a consideration of English and Japanese syntax in the diary-passage, “this syntax, have to reverse the English to fit, like” (Wah 1985, 35). This is one of the few entries where the prose passage blends directly into the poetic passage; what follows is a poem that seeks to express Japanese syntax in English: “Tokyo / windy is / wind out in the ryokan courtyard / all night noise in the tree is” (Wah 1985, 35). The ‘Japanezation’ of English seems to suggest a Japanese form, too, but this is misleading, for the resulting poem does not conform to any of the classical genres. Instead, the language world as well as the diegetic worlds evoked here are, like the form, like the cultural interweaving at the content level, hybrid and suggestive of connections that link Canada to Asia and that bring forth a dynamic notion of ‘Asian Canadianness’ as well as questions any notion of stable and clear-cut cultural (or national) identity.

2.4 Daniel David Moses: Brébeuf’s Ghost (1996) Among the texts discussed in this contribution, Daniel David Moses’ (b. 1952) play Brébeuf’s Ghost is probably the most radical in its world-making agenda: on the one hand, it projects the encounter between indigenous peoples and the French (traders as well as Jesuit missionaries) in the 1640s from an indigenous perspective and thereby contributes to a critical reinvestigation of history; on the other hand, it presents this encounter through the lens of an indigenous (in this case Ojibwa) epistemology. Thus, even though Moses’ play is a historical drama, its focus is only secondarily on time. More prominently, its performative world-making, by consequently privileging an indigenous perspective, highlights a very specific interpretation of the encounter and of the world in terms of Ojibway spirituality and meaning-making frameworks. The three acts of Brébeuf’s Ghost are set in October 1649, April 1650, and June 1650 respectively and take place in what is now central Ontario. It begins briefly after the Iroquois had tortured and killed the Jesuit missionary Jean de Brébeuf and focuses on a small group of Ojibwa in their attempt to escape the warring Iroquois – set on establishing unchallenged dominance over the fur trade – and survive the bitter winter and the constant threat of starvation. They are accompanied by Jesuit Father Noel and joined by another young Jesuit Pierre traumatized by what he has witnessed as well as by a French trader. The severe hunger the group suffers finds a powerful manifestation in their growing realization that they are hunted not only by the Iroquois but

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also a by a cannibal spirit. In fact, the spirit – the ghost of Father Brébeuf – appears already in the play’s first scene and becomes the ‘embodiment’ of looming destruction. Paradoxically, in each appearance throughout the play, the ‘ghost’ decays further, thus simultaneously evoking the imagery of both zombie and windigo, the latter a powerful cannibal spirit of Ojibwa mythological story worlds, whose hunger is not quenched but intensified by devouring human flesh. It is, of course, not without significance that all of the Jesuit characters in the play eventually turn into cannibals. Rob Appleford has argued “that the missionary brand of Catholicism, with its twinned emphasis on ritual cannibalism of Christ’s body and blood and its need to harvest souls, makes the Jesuit a particularly receptive candidate for Windigo possession” (2005, 160). When an Ojibwa convert tries to convince Father Noel that Pierre might have turned into a cannibal, his insistence that “Christians don’t believe in cannibals” (Moses 2000, 53) is one of the many darkly satiric twists of the play. The presentation of the Jesuits as cannibals is not only a particular interpretation of the encounters between Catholic missionaries and indigenous peoples in the past. In combination with the Father Noel abducting the infant North Star at the end of Act Two, it can – at least from today’s perspective – easily be read as an early example of an indigenous text addressing the forced removal of indigenous children to denominationally-run residential schools and the sexual abuse of indigenous children in those schools (the last of which, incidentally, closed in 1996). Many of the texts of the following two decades, most prominently Cree author Tomson Highway’s novel Kiss of the Fur Queen published two years after Moses’ play way first staged, use the windigo as a metaphor (or even metonym) for abusive priests. One of the characteristics of what has been called ‘windigo psychosis’ or ‘windigo complex’ (cf. Appleford 2005) is that it is a highly contagious and incurable sickness. By the end of the play, his relatives see the abducted baby North Star as having turned cannibal and kill him, and the spirit of Father Noel sets out to follow the decimated Ojibwa family. This focus on the future and the future generation as still haunted by the Jesuit as a cannibal spirit points to the destructive effects of Christian missions in particular and colonial policies in general on indigenous communities for generations to come. World-making in Brébeuf’s Ghost therefore complexly interweaves the performative recollection of the past and its impact on the interpretation of the present with a fundamental epistemological challenge to the hegemonic terms of such interpretation. The play seems to present the windigo as a metaphor of greed and devouring destruction, but I suggest that the drama’s epistemological challenge to the (nonindigenous) viewer/reader lies in its unwavering adherence to the perspective of the indigenous characters who realize with increasing horror that the cannibal spirit has already entered the group and threatens to destroy it from within. Some of the decisive scenes do not happen on stage, but are narrated by the characters; in absence of an extradiegetic level, their interpretation of the events is challenged only by each other within a framework that, while increasingly characterized by internal strife, does not question the existence of the cannibal spirit. Nevertheless, the characters

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are increasingly delusional from hunger, and the printed text of the play enables a distancing perspective by way of the stage directions. When the Flood Woman enters the stage “carrying the better part of a large, frozen, and peculiar-looking sturgeon” (Moses 2000, 84), the phrasing simultaneously signals the subjective perspective of the starving character and allows the reader to distance him- or themselves from that perspective: the reader suspects what the character seeks to repress, namely, that the ‘fish’ may indeed be human flesh, namely the remains of the Mohawk warrior killed in Act One (cf. Appleford 2005, 160–161). So while the play privileges the indigenous characters’ epistemological frameworks throughout, not everything presented is plausibly explainable through it; here, Flood Woman’s hunger makes her delusional, and her subjective misconception will cost her her life. The fact that there is not one homogenous indigenous perspective but several indigenous characters’ interpretations of their world (cf. Ross 2002, 168) adds to the complexity of the play’s world-making effect. When the young Ojibwa warrior Thunder Voice begins to challenge traditional structures of spiritual authority and leadership (Moses 2000, 22), he is a rebellious youth testing his strength and standing, but he also expresses mounting anxieties within a community threatened by forces beyond their control. And Thistle, a woman who by the beginning of the play is a Christian convert renamed ‘Martha,’ represents the clash between two religious worldviews or even ‘worlds’ (Ojibwa and Christian) most directly. She initially balances her Christian faith with a taken-for-granted adherence to some elements and views of Ojibwa culture. Her individual syncretism does not hold, however. When the men capture a Mohawk warrior suspected of raping her daughter, she rejects her baptismal name and defends the practice of the Mohawk’s torture both against her daughter (who confesses that she voluntarily slept with the enemy warrior) and the Jesuit priest: FATHER: They have to stop hurting that poor man. THISTLE: That man’s Iroquois. FATHER: They have to pray for forgiveness. You shall not kill. We’re God’s lambs, Martha. You shall not kill. Black Star and Bear must stop singing their witchcraft songs. […] THISTLE: Why did your god let that Iroquois hurt my daughter? (Moses 2000, 60)

By the end of the play, in light of the destruction of her family that she has witnessed and the misconduct of the Catholic priest, she replies to the question whether she isn’t a Christian anymore: “I never was. Not really” (Moses 2000, 117). The play thus effectually explores complex processes of transculturation the results of which are unpredictable and that do not work only one way: by the end of the play, Samuel, the French trader who had joined the group and is a vocal critic of the Jesuit’s conversion attempts, presents himself as a ‘child’ in the Ojibwa world who now has to learn how to be a ‘man’ on their terms (cf. Moses 2000, 121). Throughout this bleak play – aptly subtitled “a tale of horrors” – there nevertheless emerges a dynamic and constantly shifting

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historical constellation that displays obvious connections to the contentious issues of the mid-1990s regarding indigenous lifeworlds, rights, and questions of reconciliation. As these textual examples show, Canadian literary texts engage with and construct different kinds of worlds, and they do so by a range of formal means that contribute to their narrative, evocative, and performative world-making through a shifting emphasis from emplotment and narrative, readerly association, and the role of the body. Not incidentally, all of the texts discussed here also link Canadian lifeworlds to frameworks of experience, knowledge production, and identity construction that stand in a complex relation to ‘Canada’ as a national space. Munro’s short story, Edugyan’s novel, and Wah’s poetry narrate and evoke worlds beyond Canada, and by differing degrees that explore the implications they (and their interweaving with Canadian lifeworlds) have on Canada. Moses’ play performs yet another process of world-making by imagining indigenous-European contact in a pre-Canadian historical setting and by staging this contact through the encounter of conflicting epistemologies and frameworks of interpretation; such staging prompts the reader/viewer not only to imagine another world, but also to imagine the world they see differently.

3 Reception and Theoretical Perspectives: The Nation and Beyond? In the past two decades, the study of Anglophone Canadian literature as a world literature has been characterized by increasing attention to its transnationalization and globalization and to the impact of diasporic writing on conceptions of ‘CanLit.’ In 2005, the first of by now four TransCanada conferences took place in Vancouver, resulting in the collection of essays Trans.Can.Lit (2007) that led the way towards an ongoing reconsideration of Canadian literature as a node of transnational influences and confluences and thus as manifestations of imaginative world-making that bring together not only various places of reference for such world-making but also various conceptual and literary frameworks; its agenda was nothing less than a “major rethinking of the assumptions that had governed the field of CanLit Studies” and to rejuvenate the discipline (cf. Kamboureli 2007, xiii). Lily Cho’s (2007) important work of diasporic writing in Canada and questions of citizenship contextualize the latter in increasingly transnational networks of association and community building, while David Chariandy (2011) critically explores the implications of the tension between diaspora and nation for black belonging in/to Canada. And Winfried Siemerling’s The Black Atlantic Reconsidered (2015) revisits Paul Gilroy’s groundbreaking eponymous concept to argue for both an incorporation of black Canadian writing into the transnational framework of the black Atlantic and reflect upon the conceptual shifts such incorporation would entail for the concept itself.

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These approaches have a strong focus on space and the redefinition of Canadian spaces in common. However, while the direction of criticism explicitly emphasizes transnationalization processes regarding the form, content, and circulation of Anglophone Canadian literature, it nevertheless, as Robert Zacharias has argued, continues to critically revisit the nation; the transnational or post-national turn, rather than an attempt to transcend the national framework, is more appropriately conceptualized as a “transnational return” to the nation and as such a “complex extension of English-Canadian criticism’s habitual ‘worrying’ of the nation” (2016, 103) and its longstanding engagement with literary nationalism that takes leave of both the defiant celebration of the nation of the thematic approaches of the 1970s and of its programmatic transcendence in the context of globalization. Zacharias thus takes up Diana Brydon’s early insight in her contribution to Trans.Can.Lit (2007) where she programmatically points to the need to rethink Canadian literature beyond older forms of nationalism and internationalism, and toward multiscaled visions of place – local, regional, national, and global – each imbricated within the other. Writers and critics are rethinking relations of place, space, and non-place in ways that complicate understandings of where and how the nation fits. They are not transcending the nation but resituating it. (Brydon 2007, 14–15)

And, referring to Gayatri Spivak’s specific use of ‘worlding’ as “a way of inscribing [the margins] as colonized and of inscribing imperialist discourse upon those locations” (Sugars 2010, 45–46), Cynthia Sugars even more emphatically regards ‘worlding’ as potentially “render[ing] the national location irrelevant” (2010, 47), thus disregarding the specificity of place. Indeed, the “topocentrism” of Canadian literary criticism (Surette, qtd. in Zacharias 2016, 104) can be identified in the texts discussed in the previous section as well; as the basis of their imaginary world-making, they all engage with places and spaces that are shaped by Canadian constellations while simultaneously questioning, redefining, and rewriting them. When related to concepts of world literature that highlight the inequality of world literary space, ‘Canadian literature’ appears to move steadily towards a more central position – noticed with an uneasy mix of national pride and skepticism as to the long-standing measure of Canadian literature’s success by its international perception – while at the same time this world scale inequality is mirrored within Canada along regional and ethnic lines: important as it is, the increasing presence of writers of color and diversified imaginative world-making does not automatically correspond to the discursive parity of marginalized social lifeworlds. However, while the attention to national frameworks continues to be a dominant strand in the study of Anglophone Canadian literatures in Canada, Edugyan’s novel and Wah’s poetry, but particularly Moses’ play also indicate a directedness of some of Canada’s Anglophone literatures towards frameworks of world-making that exceed national (or more precisely: nation-state) frameworks – not necessarily spatially but epistemologically by calling into question taken-for-granted categories of

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shared knowledge and self-understanding. The close interlink between critics’ turn to diasporic writing and concepts of diaspora in the study of Anglophone literatures in Canada and their increasing attention to indigeneity can be seen an indicator for yet another shift in Canadian literary criticism. While the critical engagement with indigeneity clearly presents an engagement with Canadian settler colonialism and its implications for national self-conceptions and processes of decolonization, it also highlights the necessity of paying attention to epistemological frameworks that pose a challenge to a dominant understanding of modernity and, by extension, to imaginative world-making in a modern frame. While not only indigenous writers and scholars pose such challenges, they are, in the Canadian debate, increasingly prominent. Stō:ló writer and educator Lee Maracle, for instance, challenges the centrality of the modern nation-state in her novels as well as her critical essays. Storytelling – both written and oral – is not just imaginative world-making but may assert the existence of co-existing and overlapping worlds not dominated, but co-inhabited by humanity; such worlds pose, to put it with Cheah, a challenge to both secular (cf. 2017, 87) and to progressive time. While such notions always tended to be questioned in experimental writing (in Canada and elsewhere) that breaks up linear narrative structures, the challenge here, as critics increasingly note, is less of a formal nature (even though it can be that, too) than it is epistemological. This is effectually, as Brydon has argued, a question of ‘scalability’ or rather of its critical investigation and transcendence. Brydon sees many manifestations of the literary category of world literature subscribe to what she calls a “nested model of scales” (2016, 31) and she asks, “how we understand the scale of world literature and within it, the place of decolonializing experimentation. How much space does the category of world literature allow for diversity?” (2016, 30) ‘Diversity’ does not only encompass the potential diversity of imagined worlds, but also the diversity of conceptions on which such imagining rests and to which it harks back. While often centrally concerned with Anglophone Canadian literature, Brydon’s own approach clearly counters Zacharias’ identification of the transnational turn as a return to national space in her concern with decolonizing writing strategies across the Anglophone world in conversation with one another as part of a “current shift in thinking away from human-centered worlds towards emergent post-human and non-anthropocentric imaginaries” (Brydon 2016, 34). Harking back to Gayatri Spivak’s concept of the “planetary,” Brydon’s understanding of Canadian Anglophone literature as world literature is certainly closer to Cheah’s notion of worlding as a temporal category than to a focus on “conventional scalar relations of local and global” (Brydon 2016, 36) via national space or by circumventing it. Current approaches to Anglophone Canadian literatures thus appear to oscillate between two poles. On the one hand, there remains a strong focus on the nation as part of a transnational network of spatial references and aesthetic exchange with crucial implications on how that nation can be critically evaluated and imagined (as a literary and cultural as well as a social and economic space). On the other hand, there are attempts to reposition literary world-making as potential challenges to ways

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of thinking and imagining that transcend individual nation-states. These two strands each attribute a different function to ‘Canada,’ either as the framework to which literary activity and its study will eventually circle back, or as a complex socio-cultural constellation affected by and affecting literary world-making by way of its complex and ever-shifting dynamics.

4 Bibliography 4.1 Works Cited Appleford, Rob. “Daniel David Moses: Ghostwriter with a Vengeance.” Aboriginal Drama and Theatre. Ed. Rob Appleford. Toronto: Playwrights Canada Press, 2005. 150–165. Brydon, Diana. “Experimental Writing and Reading Across Borders in Decolonizing Contexts.” Ariel 47.1–2 (2016): 27–58. Brydon, Diana. “Metamorphoses of a Discipline: Rethinking Canadian Literature Within Institutional Contexts.” Trans.Can.Lit: Resituating the Study of Canadian Literature. Ed. Smaro Kamboureli and Roy Miki. Waterloo: Wilfrid Laurier University Press, 2007. 1–16. Brydon, Diana, and Marta Dvořák. “Introduction: Negotiating Meaning in Changing Times.” Crosstalk: Canadian and Global Imaginaries in Dialogue. Ed. Diana Brydon and Marta Dvořák. Waterloo: Wilfrid Laurier University Press, 2012. 1–19. Cabri, Louis. “Introduction.” The False Laws of Narrative: The Poetry of Fred Wah. Ed. Louis Cabri. Waterloo: Wilfrid Laurier University Press, 2009. ix–xxiii. Casanova, Pascale. The World Republic of Letters. Trans. Malcolm B. DeBevoise. Cambridge, MA and London: Harvard University Press, 2004 [1999]. De Certeau, Michel. The Practice of Everyday Life. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988. Chariandy, David. “Black Canadas and the Question of Diasporic Citizenship.” Narratives of Citizenship: Indigenous and Diasporic Peoples Unsettle the Nation-State. Ed. Aloys Fleischmann, Nancy van Styvendale, and Cody McCarroll. Edmonton: University of Alberta Press, 2011. 323–346. Cheah, Pheng. “Worlding Literature: Living with Tiger Spirits.” Diacritics 45.2 (2017): 86–114. Cheah, Pheng. What Is a World? On Postcolonial Literature as World Literature. Durham: Duke University Press, 2016. Cho, Lily. “Diasporic Citizenship: Contradictions and Possibilities for Canadian Literature.” Trans. Can.Lit: Resituating the Study of Canadian Literature. Ed. Smaro Kamboureli and Roy Miki. Ottawa: Wilfrid Laurier Press, 2007. 93–109. Clarke, George E. “White Like Canada.” Transition 73 (1997): 98–109. Damrosch, David. What Is World Literature? Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2003. Davis, Andrea. “Black Canadian Literature as Diaspora Transgression: The Second Life of Samuel Tyne.” Topia 17 (2007): 31–49. Edugyan, Esi. The Second Life of Samuel Tyne. London: Serpent’s Tail, 2013 [2004]. Gilroy, Paul. The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness. London and New York: Verso, 1993. Hulan, Shelley. “Yours to Recover: Mount Burial in Alice Munro’s ‘What Do You Want to Know For?’” Canadian Literature and Cultural Memory. Ed. Cynthia Sugars and Eleanor Ty. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014. 260–273.

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Hutcheon, Linda. A Poetics of Postmodernism: History, Theory, Fiction. London: Routledge, 1988. Kamboureli, Smaro. “Introduction.” Critical Collaborations: Indigeneity, Diaspora, and Ecology in Canadian Literary Studies. Ed. Smaro Kamboureli and Christl Verduyn.Waterloo: Wilfrid Laurier University Press, 2014. 1–26. Kamboureli, Smaro. “Preface.” Trans.Can.Lit: Resituating the Study of Canadian Literature. Ed. Smaro Kamboureli and Roy Miki. Waterloo: Wilfrid Laurier University Press, 2007. vii–xv. Miner, Earl. “The Traditions and Forms of the Japanese Poetic Diary.” Pacific Coast Philology 3 (1968): 38–48. Moses, Daniel D. Brébeuf’s Ghost: A Tale of Horror in Three Acts. Toronto: Exile Editions, 2000 [1996]. Munro, Alice. “What Do You Want to Know For?” The View from Castle Rock: Stories. London: Vintage Books, 2006. 314–337. Neumann, Birgit, and Gabriele Rippl. “Anglophone World Literatures: Introduction.” Special issue Anglophone World Literatures. Anglia 135.1 (2017): 1–20. New, William H. A History of Canadian Literature. 2nd ed. Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2001. Nischik, Reingard M. “Introduction: Writing a History of Literature in Canada.” History of Literature in Canada: English-Canadian and French-Canadian. Ed. Reingard M. Nischik. Rochester: Camden House, 2008. 1–24. Ross, Bruce. “North American Versions of Haibun and Postmodern American Culture.” Postmodernity and Cross-Culturalism. Ed. Yoshinobu Hakutani. Madison: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 2002. 168–200. Siemerling, Winfried. The Black Atlantic Reconsidered. Waterloo: Wilfried Laurier University Press, 2015. Spivak, Gayatri C. Death of a Discipline. New York: Columbia University Press, 2003. Sugars, Cynthia. “Worlding the (Postcolonial) Nation: Canada’s Americas.” Canada and Its Americas: Transnational Navigations. Ed. Winfried Siemerling and Sarah Casteels. Montreal: McGillQueen’s University Press, 2010. 31–47. Van Herk, Aritha. Places Far From Ellesmere: A Geografictione. Red Deer: Red Deer College Press, 1990. Vernon, Karina. “The Black Prairies: History, Subjectivity, Writing.” Dissertation Manuscript submitted to the University of Victoria, 2008. Wah, Fred. Waiting for Saskatchewan. Winnipeg: Turnstone Press, 1985. Walcott, Rinaldo. Black Like Who? Writing. Black. Canada. Toronto: Insomniac Press, 2003. Yu, Timothy. “Waiting for Asian Canada: Fred Wah’s Transnational Aesthetics.” Canadian Literature 227 (2015): 17–36. Zacharias, Robert. “The Transnational Return: Tracing the Spatial Politics of CanLit.” Studies in Canadian Literature 41.1 (2016): 102–124.

4.2 Further Reading Justice, Daniel H. Why Indigenous Literatures Matter. Waterloo: Wilfrid Laurier University Press, 2018. Rimstead, Roxanne, and Domenico A. Beneventi, eds. Contested Spaces, Counter-Narratives, and Culture from Below in Canada and Québec. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2019. Siemerling, Winfried. The New North American Studies: Culture, Writing, and the Politics of Re/Cognition. New York: Routledge, 2005. Sugars, Cynthia, ed. The Oxford Handbook of Canadian Literature. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015. Ty, Eleanor. Unfastened: Globality and Asian North American Narratives. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2010.

Meg Samuelson

23 The Oceans Abstract: The oceanic turn offers an elaboration of and corrective to various theories of world literature. Oceans constitute the inaugural global space and chime with models of world literature as a circulatory system, but they also trouble such definitions with apprehension of unfathomable depths. Readings that track the southern-going ships of imperial and global expansion and extraction register the production of the world-system without re-centring the Euro-Atlantic literary marketplace. Rather than locating the postcolonial or the indigenous as peripheral or exotic, they attend to literatures immersed in zones of interfusion and which harbour world-making practices of connection, cosmopolitanism and hospitality. Oceanic literatures are also uniquely situated to move between the scales of the local and the planetary and are alive to multispecies relations in ways that expand and thicken conceptions of the world. Key Terms: Imperialism, globalisation, the south, postcolonial, black Atlantic, Indian Ocean, Oceania, blue planet

1 Introduction: World Literature at Sea World literature would be like the sea or the ocean into which all streams from all corners of the globe would flow. (Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o 2012, 55)

World literary and oceanic studies have much in common. The “new thalassology” aims to “dissolve artificial distinctions among supposedly coherent and ostensibly distinct regions (e.g. Europe, Africa, Asia, etc.) by drawing attention to systematic and long-term interactions conducted across bodies of water” (Vink 2007, 58); and, world literature has been influentially defined as “a mode of circulation” (Damrosch 2003, 5; ↗2 Re-Reading Classical Approaches). Emphasising mobility and exchange, both debunk “the myth of continents” (cf. Lewis and Wigen 1997) and repudiate “methodological nationalism” (cf. Wimmer and Shiller 2003). Theories of world literature are, however, notoriously centred on the Euro-Atlantic region even as they articulate fluidity and commerce. Franco Moretti, for instance, models “world literature” on the “one, and unequal” structure of world-systems theory (2000, 54). This model registers the ways in which global procedures of extraction and accumulation inform literary production and reception, but it locates postcolonial and indigenous literatures as peripheral in ways that deny their “world-making activity” (Cheah 2016, 2; ↗6 Global Literature, World Literature and Worlding Literature). Focusing on what is described in Moby-Dick as “the watery part of the world” (Melville 1988 [1851], 1) offers https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110583182-024

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a corrective: if over two-thirds of the planet is covered by oceans and seas, nearly two-thirds of these bodies of water are in the southern hemisphere. Introducing an oceanic turn into world literary studies thus involves tracking what Joseph Conrad calls “[s]outhern-going ships” (2016 [1897], n.pag.) as well as attending to literatures of the geographic, global and postcolonial south that seek to reimagine worlds devastated by these vehicles of imperial and capitalist extension and extraction (see Samuelson and Lavery 2019). In the suggestive simile quoted in the epigraph, Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o evokes the “centrifugal movement” (Cohen 2010, 11) of the oceans to convey a decentred understanding of world literature as a zone of interfusion. This leads him to contend that postcolonial texts are quintessentially world literary because they are “a product of different streams and influences from different points of the globe” (Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o 2014, 49). Pheng Cheah similarly claims postcolonial writing as “an important modality of world literature” (2016, 12). Instead of “equating the world with the global market” – as do David Damrosch, Moretti and others – Cheah defines “world” as a “form of relating, belonging or being-with”, and “world literature” as literature that “makes a world” (2016, 4, 43, 12). Because “capitalist globalization incorporates peoples outside the European world-system by violently destroying their worlds” (Cheah 2016, 12), he argues, the imperative to re-make world is most keenly felt in the postcolonial south. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, in turn, “propose[s] the planet to overwrite the globe” and as alternative to the “arrogance” of what she calls “world lit. in translation” (2003, 72–73), which would serve up an easily-digestible buffet of exotic worlds for consumption in the north. The planet, in contrast, “is in the species of alterity” and is a figure “for inscribing collective responsibility as right” – a practice that Spivak suggests “is perhaps best imagined from the precapitalist cultures of the planet” (2003, 72, 102, 101). This chapter considers these permutations of world literature through the figures of the terraqueous globe, oceanic worlds and the blue planet.

2 Terraqueous Globe The figure of the globe casts the earth as something that can be grasped. This idea of the world begins to take shape after the European voyages of exploration and circumnavigation. “For the first time in history”, notes Carl Schmitt, “man could take the whole, physical globe like a ball into his hand” (1997 [1954], 45). The Eurocentric global order that emerged in the early modern period was, he argues, founded on “the new distribution of our planet” between “land and sea” (Schmitt 1997 [1954], 46): the former is subject to individual, corporate or state ownership while the latter is constructed as a void over which these claims are projected. This juridical distinction was drawn by Hugo Grotius (1916 [1633]), who advocated for the “freedom of the seas” on behalf of the Dutch East India Company, and it was subsequently “realized through

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the exercise of [British] naval power” (Connery 2001, 182). Constituted as the inaugural global space, “the oceans became highways of European expansion” (Mentz 2009, 3), and Britain established its world dominance – thus ensuring the global hegemony of English as a literary language – by fashioning itself as ‘an empire of the seas’ (cf. Armitage 2004). The plays of William Shakespeare are the most successful cultural export of this maritime empire and have been used to shore up the dominance of English in the world-literary sphere. As Steve Mentz shows, Shakespeare himself increasingly turned to the oceans to plumb the emergent world order, most notably in his last production, The Tempest (1611), which reflects on the relationship between art and power and ranks prominently among the canonical works taken up by postcolonial writers in the twentieth century. The drama opens with a royal ship tossed about on an apparently “ungovernable sea” (Mentz 2009, 11) before revealing the mage behind the “wild waters” (Shakespeare 2011 [1611], 1.2.2): the storm has been conjured by Prospero as part of a plot to recover his dukedom. Mastery of the oceans is thus linked to political sovereignty. This informs the play’s allusions to the nascent seaborne empire of Shakespeare’s time. Though the action is geographically located in the Mediterranean, The Tempest responds also to other transoceanic worlds that were being drawn into the Anglosphere by English fleets. It was first performed shortly after the Virginia Company had been established by charter of Shakespeare’s patron, King James I, and reports from that fledgling colony provided source material for the play, including accounts of the wreck of the Sea Venture off the coast of Bermuda in 1609. The character Caliban – like the Caribbean archipelago itself – appears to have derived his name from the indigenous Carib population, and his complaint – “This island’s mine by Sycorax my mother / Which thou tak’st from me” (Shakespeare 2011 [1611], 1.2.333–334) – anticipates those echoing from the various shores of Britain’s maritime empire. His enforced servitude and the description of him as a “strange fish” (Shakespeare 2011 [1611], 2.2.27) have seen him interpreted also as representing the enslaved Africans shipped to England’s New World plantations. When Prospero refers to “this great globe itself” (Shakespeare 2011 [1611], 4.1.53), he not only puns on Shakespeare’s theatre in London but also expresses an early modern awareness of a recently-expanded sphere that England was beginning to appropriate and exploit. One reason why The Tempest has proven to be such a generative cultural text for later writers is that it begins to chart the implications of Britain’s expansion across the surface of the sea. But it also registers the three-dimensional magnitude of the ocean when it fathoms its depths, from which it plucks the neologism “sea-change” to name a profound transformation (Shakespeare 2011 [1611], 1.2.401). The term speaks to the new consciousness of Shakespeare’s time, and of how this world-view sought to reorganise the regions into which it was projecting by harnessing sea power. At the same time, it points to the estranging nature of the ocean itself, intimating that, though it may be sounded, the sea eludes comprehension and repulses mastery. This insight is often repressed in the literature of the seaborne

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empire during the expansionist centuries, but it resurfaces in writing that seeks to trouble the substitution of globe for world. It is telling that the hero of what is often identified as the founding novel of the English realist tradition – Daniel Defoe’s The Life and Strange Surprising Adventures of Robinson Crusoe of York, Mariner (1719) – is able to enact the drama of European colonisation in miniature by avoiding his shipmates’ plight of “being swallowed up by the sea” (Defoe 2007 [1719], 10). Transforming the island on which he has been cast away from wasteland to serviceable colony, Crusoe becomes “the founder of a new world, which he rules and reclaims for Christianity and England” (Said 1993, 83). The backstory to his sojourn on the island includes maritime ventures to trade in African slaves and a lucrative plantation in Brazil, along with his own capture and enslavement by Barbary pirates. Legitimising mercantile imperialism while raising the spectre of Arab slavers and Caribbean cannibals, the novel begins to sound the note that rings out in James Thomson’s patriotic poem, “Rule, Britannia!”, with its assurance that the island-nation will command “every shore it circles”, and its “cities shall with commerce shine”, due to the commanding nautical prowess celebrated in the rousing refrain: “Rule, Britannia, rule the waves; / Britons never will be slaves” (1740, n.pag.). Edward W. Said notes that by the time Herman Charles Melville composed Moby Dick, or the Whale (1851) the United States had entered “the competition for imperial domination” and that it did so also by seeking “sovereignty over water” (2002, 363). Moby-Dick has been variously appraised as the “Great American novel” (cf. Buell 2008), a “modern epic” whose “geographical frame of reference is […] the worldsystem as a whole” (Moretti 1994, 50) and “the grandest conception that has ever been made to see the modern world” and to peer into the future of “industrial civilization” (James 1985 [1953], 25, 51). The story, enthuses Said, “spill[s] over national, aesthetic and historical boundaries with massive force”: Moby-Dick is “about […] the whole world” (2002, 358, 369). This encompassing reach is well-served by its thematic focus on one of the “the world-wandering whale ships”: “the circumnavigating Pequod” (Melville 1988 [1851], 52, 340). By the mid-nineteenth century, whaling had become “an extractive industry of global scope” (Buell 2001, 205), as evidenced in the extracts prefacing Ishmael’s account of going to sea and by his reference to “the unwearied activity with which of late [whales] have been hunted over all four oceans” (Melville 1988 [1851], 341). Melville situates whalers as the link in the chain between mercantile-imperial capitalism and its emergent industrial and global forms. Ishmael reports that “the whaleship has been the pioneer in ferreting out the remotest and least known parts of the earth”, opening “once savage harbors” to “American and European men-of-war” and “clear[ing] the way for the missionary and the merchant” (Melville 1988 [1851], 97–98). When a whale is captured, the multinational crew of sailors and harpooners metamorphise into “modern industrial workers” and the Pequod into a “factory” (James 1985 [1953], 50). The oil and spermaceti produced in this factory will fuel “the tapers,

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lamps, and candles that burn round the globe”, while its profits are funnelled back to New England, whose “brave houses and flowery gardens”, Ishmael tells us, were effectively “harpooned and dragged up hither from the bottom of the sea” (Melville 1988 [1851], 184, 29). Hence his declaration: “two thirds of this terraqueous globe are the Nantucketer’s” (1988 [1851], 56). The American whalers’ code provides Melville with an apt vocabulary for this historical process: it deems everything either a “Fast-Fish” – already hooked like “Russian serfs and Republican slaves” – or a “Loose-Fish” – and thus “fair game for anybody who can soonest catch it”, such as “America in 1492 [or…] India to England”; “What is the great globe itself”, he asks finally, “but a Loose-Fish?” (Melville 1988 [1851], 345–355). And yet, as borne out by the plot of this narrative that itself overspills the novel form, the “masterless ocean overruns the globe” (1988 [1851], 248). Rereading Melville after the rise of oceanic studies, Hester Blum submits that “[a] critical stance emerging from the perspective of the sea should be mindful of registering the volumes of what its geophysical properties render inaccessible” (2014, 30). MobyDick notably enjoins readers to “[c]onsider the subtleness of the sea; how its most dreaded creatures glide under water, unapparent for the most part, and treacherously hidden beneath the loveliest tints of azure” (Melville 1988 [1851], 248). Pip, the black cabin boy, is twice immersed in these depths; “his uncanny return”, argues Gesa Mackenthun (2004, 187), “haunts the Pequod” with a reminder of the African captives thrown overboard during the transatlantic trade that undergirds the nation-state and the world-system that are in turn represented by the Pequod. Melville’s subsequent novella about a slave mutiny, “Benito Cereno” (1855), credits its leader with harbouring a “hive of subtlety” (2001 [1855], 102), thus associating the aquatic underneath with insurrection against the global system extended across its surface. The Atlantic slave trade also casts a pall over Conrad’s (1897) Narcissus after it rounds the Cape on a return run from Bombay, but his nautical oeuvre is instead oriented towards the Indian Ocean. “Youth” (1898) relates Marlow’s first voyage East on a ship bound for Bangkok with a freight of coal. Though he experiences it as “the endeavour, the test, the trial of life” (Conrad 2010 [1898], 18), the voyage is in fact a disaster: the Judea first springs a leak, and then its cargo combusts; after the ship explodes, Marlow arrives in Java as “commander of a small boat” (2010 [1898], 30). The apparently bathetic conclusion to his yearning for one of the boy’s own adventures that pepper imperial narratives is, however, elevated by Marlow’s description of the ocean beneath the smouldering ship. He likens it to a “precious stone, extending on all sides, all round to the horizon – as if the whole terrestrial globe had been one jewel, one colossal sapphire, a single gem fashioned into a planet” (2010 [1898], 23). This glittering image alludes to the crowning jewel of the Raj and recalls Melville’s characterisation of the ‘globe itself’ as a ‘Loose-Fish’. Marlow’s description of Java, which is presented generically as the ‘mysterious East’, is moreover redolent of what Said terms ‘Orientalism’: “a tradition of thought, imagery and vocabulary” that constructs the East as the “contrasting image” of the West and which provides “a Western

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style for dominating, restructuring, and having authority over the Orient” and a means of “identifying ‘us’ Europeans as against all ‘those’ non-Europeans” (1979, 5, 2, 3, 7). The idea of ‘us’ that Marlow constructs across the trilogy he narrates is based on what he presents as England’s now exclusive claim on the seas, having succeeded the “ancient navigators” of the Indian Ocean, and which is said to invest English sailors with “the right stuff” (Conrad 2010 [1898], 38, 27). But when the “silent” East finally speaks in “Youth” it is in “a Western voice” (Conrad 2010 [1898], 37): the curse issued from a steamer that has mistaken Marlow’s lifeboat for a local craft. The “mysterious East” (2010 [1898], 36) is not after all an exotic externality; it has already been incorporated into empire, pre-empting Marlow’s complaint in Heart of Darkness (1899) that enticingly blank spaces on the map have been filled with global designs. Conrad registers the shift from mercantile empire to administered globe in the industrialisation of the ocean and routinisation of shipping. It is symbolic that the Judea is an “old [sailing] ship at the end of her laborious days” (2010 [1898], 34), and that her cargo of coal brings her to ruin. In The Mirror of the Sea (1906), Conrad disparages steam shipping – which had recently eclipsed sail – as an “industry” antithetical to the “fine art” of sailing: it “has not the artistic quality of a single-handed struggle with something much greater than yourself […] but simply the skilled use of a captured force, merely another step forward upon the way of universal conquest” (1924 [1906], 27–31). “A modern fleet of ships”, he concludes, “does not so much make use of the sea as exploit a highway” (1924 [1906], 73). Ambivalent about empire, Conrad is unequivocally critical of the globalised world it was beginning to spawn. The retrospective narration of “Youth” frames his nostalgia for the “craft” (Cohen 2010, 10) that knit the ‘brotherhood of the sea’ (cf. Conrad 1897). The gendering of this idealised maritime community is notable. As Marlow declares to a similar audience on board the Nellie in Heart of Darkness, “[t]hey – the women I mean – are out of it – should be out of it” (2017 [1899], 55). In the seaborne empire that Conrad underwrites, men’s role is to explore and conquer, and women’s to maintain the imperial home and render the outposts of empire habitable. Virginia Woolf addresses this separation of spheres as she jousts with the Victorian ideal of ‘the Angel of the House’. Though she never pens a sea-novel per se, she turns repeatedly to the ocean, starting with her inaugural The Voyage Out (1915). In To the Lighthouse, Mr Ramsay echoes Marlow in imagining the sea as a space in which men “labour and sweat […]; pitting muscle and brain against the waves and the wind”, while women “keep house, and sit beside sleeping children indoors” (Woolf 1994 [1927], 123). From his military-imperial perspective, he prepares for the jaunt across the bay with a “firm military tread” like “a leader making ready for an expedition” (1994 [1927], 116), maintaining that “the depths” contain “only water” (1994 [1927], 153) over which sailors may prevail. But his daughter, Cam, peers into “that underworld” (1994 [1927], 136) and perceives an active and transfiguring force rather than one quelled to support imperial exploits. Woolf’s retort to the kind of freedom promised by Britannia’s reign over the waves is delivered as Mr Ramsay’s expedition reaches its own

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bathetic conclusion and Cam sees “waves rolling and gambolling and slapping the rocks as if they were wild creatures who were perfectly free” (1994 [1927], 153). This retort to the maritime empire is deepened in The Waves (1931). One character is employed by a shipping company that dispatches vessels “to the remotest parts of the globe”, “roll[ing] the dark before [them], spreading commerce where there was chaos” (Woolf 1992 [1931], 129, 128). Presenting a proleptic figure of globalisation, he declares: “We have laced the world together with our ships. The globe is strung with our lines” (1992 [1931], 152). But the interludes that structure the narrative – which are set on a shore pounded by waves likened to “turbaned warriors […] with poisoned assegais” or “the thud of a great beast stamping” – erode the notion “that life is a solid substance, shaped like a globe, which we turn about in our fingers” (1992 [1931], 54, 113, 192), and refer instead to the depths intimated in the recurring image of a fin cutting through water. As in Melville’s oeuvre, the oceanic properties of ‘the terraqueous globe’ offer Woolf a critical symbolic vocabulary. So too for J.M. Coetzee who, as a white South African, also writes both within and against empire. This positioning is evident in Foe, which offers a postcolonial riposte to Robinson Crusoe while recognising its indebtedness to the novelistic tradition that Defoe helps found. Bracketing the feminist theme examined through the conceit of the female castaway – as well as in allusions to Woolf, The Tempest and Defoe’s Roxana – the major focal point for Coetzee’s revision to Defoe’s plot is Friday, who is recast from Carib to African and is mute. His unfathomable silence shows up how Robinson Crusoe’s Man Friday is taught English “to make him useful, handy, and helpful” (Defoe 2007 [1719], 177). In the final sequence of Foe, an extradiegetic narrator slips overboard into what is said to be “the home of Friday” (Coetzee 1986, 157). Seeking to plumb this enigmatic figure, the narrator finds that “this is not a place of words”; what instead issues from Friday’s opened mouth is “a slow stream, without breath, without interruption” that “runs northward and southward to the ends of the earth” (1986, 157). While the “business of the world” (1986, 24) is conducted over its surface by merchantmen and slavers, “the masterless ocean” once again “overruns the globe” (Melville 1988 [1851], 248). Coetzee returns to what might be deemed the question of Friday’s voice in Elizabeth Costello (2003) when a Nigerian writer, Emmanuel Egudu, is appointed to deliver a lecture on “The Novel in Africa” on a cruise ship in the Southern Ocean. The SS Northern Lights presents a microcosm of the global marketplace in which Egudu is obliged to peddle himself as the ‘postcolonial exotic’ (cf. Huggan 2001) in order to remain in circulation and in which system “it has been allotted to Africa to be the home of poverty” (Coetzee 2003, 41). As this southern-going ship ploughs towards what he identifies as “one of the remoter corners of the globe”, Egudu quotes Paul Zumthor on how “Europe has spread across the world […] ravag[ing] life forms, animals, plants, habitats, languages” (2003, 42, 45). When the Northern Lights docks at Macquarie Island, readers are reminded of the nineteenth-century penguin-oil industry, and thus of how the consuming histories of the global imperium have illuminated the

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north and continue to fuel this pleasure cruise through southern waters and southern literatures. Thrown into relief against the Southern Ocean, these unidirectional consumption practices are contrasted to those of the “tiny beings” beneath the surface whose lives consist of “eating and being eaten” (Coetzee 2003, 49) in what Melville describes as “the universal cannibalism of the sea” (1988 [1851], 248).

3 Oceanic Worlds Much postcolonial and decolonial literature is concerned with recomposing disrupted and even shattered worlds in the wake of southern-going ships. It is worldly in the normative sense that Cheah proposes: rather than accruing worldliness simply by virtue of its “circulation in a global market”, it performs a profound act of “remaking the world” (2016, 25, 6). Derek Walcott articulates this project in his Nobel Lecture, “The Antilles: Fragments of Epic Memory” when he speaks of reassembling the shards of “cracked heirlooms” (1992, n.pag.); the Caribbean poet, he proposes, is a kind of Crusoe, salvaging the “shipwreck of fragments” from slavers and imperial vessels and crafting them into new worlds (↗24 The Caribbean). This is a writing that traces the contours and sounds the depths of what Paul Gilroy has influentially defined as the “black Atlantic” – a “transcultural, international formation” structured by “ships in motion across the spaces between Europe, America, Africa and the Caribbean” (1993, 4). In Kamau Brathwaite’s resonant formulation: “The unity is submarine / breathing air, our problem is how to study the fragments/whole” (1975, qtd. in Breslin 2001, 301). In “The Sea is History”, Walcott opens the “grey vault” of the ocean to expose “[b]one soldered by coral to bone” – these are the sea-changed remains of “the packed cries, the shit, the moaning” from the “Exodus” (1986 [1979], 364) through the Middle Passage between Africa and the Americas. It is from these fathoms that Walcott draws the creole voice of “The Schooner Flight”, which declares that “I have Dutch, nigger, and English in me, / and either I’m nobody, or I’m a nation”, before concluding: “Shabine sang to you from the depths of the sea” (1986 [1979], 345–361). When Achille, the fisherman-hero of Walcott’s later epic Omeros, sails into the Atlantic – “this great design / of the triangular trade” – he remembers “the nameless bones of all his brothers / drowned in the crossing” (1990, 130, 128). Seeking to repair the breach, Achille journeys back to Africa, and into his ancestral past, in search of “his name and his soul”; but he finds that “[e]verything was forgotten” and is unable to prevent the dreadful history from playing out when the village is raided by slavers (1990, 137, 154). And yet, he concludes of those taken: “they crossed, they survived. There is the epical splendour” (1990, 149). There is no returning to roots, but new worlds are made in this poetry which glues together fragments of African orature, Caribbean creole, Dantean rhyme schemes and Homeric themes.

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Brathwaite crafts a different poetics of survival out of what he calls “nation language”, which takes its metre from the roar of the hurricane and is “an English which is like a howl, or a shout or a machine-gun or a wind or a wave” (1984, 13). When he alludes to The Tempest in the poem “Caliban”, included in The Arrivants: A New World Trilogy (Brathwaite 1973, 193–195), it is to identify what has been carried across rather than to dwell in the abyss. The middle section presents Caliban performing the ‘limbo’ dance that is itself a survival from the limbo of the Middle Passage: it mimics the dances that slaves were forced to perform on deck in order to keep them physically fit for the plantations that awaited them and through which they surreptitiously carried over African cultural practices with which to recreate their shattered worlds. Also reconstructing the crossing from “One Continent/To Another” in the opening poem of I Is a Long Memoried Woman (2010 [1983]), Grace Nichols conceives the image of the ‘middle passage womb’ to convey both its pain and its pregnant potential. The collection recollects the fractured subjects of this passage while performing the regenerative poetics expressed in its epilogue: I have crossed an ocean I have lost my tongue from the root of the old one a new one has sprung

(Nichols 1990 [1983], 87)

Articulating the ‘black Atlantic’ in novelist form, Caryl Phillips’s Crossing the River maps the “shameful intercourse” (1993, 1) between three continents while revising the commercial triangle into a web of relations. The fragmentary narratives of three “children” are embraced by a prologue and epilogue in which an African father confesses to having “jettisoned” them “where the tributary stumbles and swims out in all directions to meet the sea” (Phillips 1993, 1). The rupture is irreversible: “There are no paths in water. No signposts. There is no return” (1993, 2). But though “[b]roken off, like limbs from a tree”, they “carry within [their] bodies the seeds of new trees. Sinking […] roots into difficult soil” (1993, 1–2). Each of their stories concludes in a lonely death, but the novel harmonises their voices into “the many-tongued chorus of the common memory” (1993, 235). This is the “Atlantic Sound”, to quote the title of the travelogue in which Phillips (2000) traverses the points of the triangular trade, grappling with the legacy of slavery and remaking worlds in the state of dislocation that it delivered. Whereas these Atlantic worlds are forged under the brutal conditions of the triangular trade, the Indian Ocean has a long history of convivial commerce. The “deep structure” of this world is provided by reliable monsoon winds that enabled regular traffic across it while imposing layovers on its shores (Pearson 2003, 13). The nature of human circulation in this ocean fostered practices of hospitality and engendered cosmopolitan orientations that writers from postcolonial nation-states have salvaged as alternatives to the contemporary world order. The most celebrated retrieval is Amitav Ghosh’s In an Antique Land (1992), which collects remnants of a twelfth-century

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merchant from the three continents adjoining the Indian Ocean. Ghosh’s “History in the Guise of a Traveler’s Tale” (as it is subtitled in the US edition) pieces together a “world of accommodations” and sets it in counterpoint to the militarised borders of a purportedly globalised present that was hammered into shape after the bombastic arrival of the European mercantile empires replaced dialogue with the “force of arms” (1992, 286, 237). In Sea of Poppies (2008), he returns to this ocean after it had ostensibly been reduced to a “British lake”, showing how, as Sugata Bose puts it, “[t]he peoples of the Indian Ocean [continued to make] their own history [in the age of global empire], albeit not without having to contend with economic exploitation and political oppression” (2006, 273). The novel is the first instalment of a trilogy centred on the schooner Ibis, a Baltimore slaver refitted to transport opium. While waiting for China to be made to appreciate “the benefits of Free Trade” by the British navy, the Ibis is commissioned to deliver Indian “coolies” to Mauritius (Ghosh 2008, 132, 134). Its assignments indicate the extent to which the Indian Ocean had been incorporated into the Euro-Atlantic world-system by the nineteenth century. But the Ibis is also a vessel of translation and transformation, carrying across and recomposing fragments of the old world. Its lascar crew imports modes of sociality and seafaring practices evolved on native craft, while the Hindu prohibition on crossing the “Black Water”, or “kala-pani”, is revised into a liberating loosening of caste restrictions: passengers conveyed into indentured plantation labour may be conscripted by the imperial-global economy, but are also able to create a new community as “children of the ship” as they cross the “alchemy of open water” (2008, 328, 390). Abdulrazak Gurnah’s fiction also reappraises “[r]elics” (2002, 1) from a more fluid world since divided into discrete nation-states. Many of his novels have a contrapuntal structure, moving between the East African coast and England, on the one hand, and an age of unregulated sea-travel and the contemporary bordered states of the United Republic of Tanzania and the United Kingdom, on the other. Through these juxtapositions, he pays tribute to the cosmopolitan orientation of Indian Ocean cultures. But because he does so from the perspective of the African shore, Gurnah presents a more ambivalent view than Ghosh. This is evident in Paradise (1994), which tracks a caravan into the interior and recalls the Arab trade in African slaves. Rather than solidifying these categories, however, Gurnah’s oeuvre shows them to have been muddied through centuries of commerce. The Indian Ocean, as Isabel Hofmeyr puts it, “complicates binaries, moving us away from the simplicities of the resistant local and the dominating global” (2010, 722). In By the Sea, Gurnah writes of a coastal society spun on the loom of the monsoons that delivered “traders from Arabia, the Gulf, India and Sind, and the Horn of Africa” (2002, 14). Elsewhere, he relates how, as a child in Zanzibar, he heard stories “about China, Persia, and Syria”: “these places existed in our imaginary world, because the sea routes made us part of the wider world” (Chambers 2011, 129). By the Sea charts this ‘wider world’ in stories that transport readers from Zanzibar to Muscat,

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Bahrain and Bangkok, and then shows it being constrained by the self-styled “Ruler of the Waves”, whose pernicious legacy includes maps that reduce it to “something that could be possessed” and in which “geography became biology” (2002, 23, 35). Yet, as in Sea of Poppies, the Indian Ocean continues to model more accommodating forms of worldliness. This is emphasised when a character experiences an oceanic hospitality on the coast that reminds him that he is “part of something generous and noble” after a world-shrinking colonial education had convinced him of his “puniness” (2002, 175). The imperial belittlement of Pacific worlds as “islands in a far sea” is similarly overturned with reference to deep histories of maritime connection in Epeli Hau’ofa’s designation of Oceania as “Our Sea of Islands” (1993). Whereas the former “stresses the smallness and remoteness of the islands”, the latter renders them in “the totality of their relationships” and harbours histories of “world enlargement” recorded in oral accounts of how “peoples and cultures moved and mingled, unhindered by boundaries of the kind erected much later by imperial powers” (Hau’ofa 2008 [1993], 31–33). Contemporary writing from the Pacific recalls these histories, elaborating “a transoceanic imaginary that highlights vast kinship networks and the agency of the first indigenous settlers” (DeLoughrey 2007, 96). For instance, the anthology Whetu Moana (cf. Wendt et al. 2003), or “Ocean of Stars”, gathers poems from Oceania into a framework that references the Polynesian navigators who began settling the islands from around 1,500 BCE. Included are entries from Robert Sullivan’s Star Waka (1999), a collection composed like an ancestral canoe or “waka”: “members of the crew change, the rhythm and the view changes – it is subject to the laws of nature” (Sullivan 1999, n.pag.). Crafted as vessels of connection across space and time, these poems reconstitute an oceanic world and transport it into the future. The emblem of the canoe is symbolically central in writing that emerges during the Māori renaissance (↗31 New Zealand/Aotearoa), illustrating how Pacific histories provide a touchstone in efforts to enlarge and reanimate a world diminished under settler colonialism. In the anniversary edition of Pounamu Pounamu (2012 [1972]), which was the first collection of stories published by a Māori author, Witi Ihimaera quotes his father’s encouragement: “Your ancestors didn’t paddle their canoes all that way across the ocean and settle in Aotearoa just to see you strand them in the second millennium! Strike out for the horizon! Paddle on!” (2012 [1972], n.pag.). This image of writing-as-paddling informs Patricia Grace’s story “Parade” (1975), which asserts that the “job” of “show[ing] others who we are” (Grace 1991, 64) is not the performance of an exotic spectacle but an act of world-making that returns to the ancestral canoes in order to carry the Māori story forward. Finally, Keri Hulme’s The Bone People (1983) – which won the Pegasus Prize for Māori writing and was the first New Zealand novel to receive the Booker Prize – dredges up the remains of “one of the far travelled salt sea ships” in the pivotal chapter “The Kaumatua and The Broken Man” (1986, 366). The canoe itself is “in pieces”, but it still protects the deity it transported and with which the characters – both Māori and the “tide-washed child” of a wrecked heroine-smuggling ship – may

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begin to dream the “possible new world, the impossible new world” (1986, 6, 369, 377). While not offering passage back to an intact Māori state, the canoe presents an alternative vessel for imagining the postcolonial nation to that of the ship “named Endeavour”, which “sets its sails forever rigid” on the state currency in commemoration of Captain Cook’s landing, and which comes into view when Kerewin Holmes tenders a coin to ward off dreams in the opening bar scene (1986, 11). Breakage and renewal are also thematised in Ihimaera’s allusions to the origin story of “Paikea, riding a whale across the sea to Aotearoa” (2012 [1972], n.pag.) in both “The Whale” and in his later novel The Whale Rider (1987). In the early story, published in Pounamu Pounamu, an old man introduces his granddaughter to her genealogy in the hope of “lead[ing] her back to his world” or enabling her to “take it to the city with her”, but she is adamant that “[t]he world isn’t Maori any more” and the story ends with him lamenting a beached whale that represents Māori culture stranded on the shores of the settler state (2012 [1972], n.pag.). The Whale Rider revises this conclusion in a redemptive denouement in which the girl Kahu fulfils Paikea’s legacy by conducting a herd of stranded whales back to “the deep ocean” (Ihimaera 2008 [1987], n.pag.). Prefaced by the “epic voyage” of the ancestors, the narrative alternates between the focalisation of whales and narration by Kahu’s uncle, who travels through urban Australia to a settler plantation in Papua New Guinea, “[growing] into an understanding of [himself] as Maori” (2008 [1987], n.pag.). His odyssey registers the world-breaking appropriation of indigenous lands and labour while expressing an enlivening “connection with the Pacific” (Somerville 2012, 63) that the novel extends to kinship relations with its marine creatures.

4 Blue Planet The underwater event that brings The Whale Rider to crisis is a nuclear explosion in the Tuamotu Archipelago: it is after they flee the “bright light” and “giant tidal soundwaves” tearing through their migratory circuit that the whales beach themselves (Ihimaera 2008 [1987], n.pag.). Though the focal herd is successfully returned to the deep, another “two hundred members of [this] vanishing species” do not survive the devastating intrusion (2008 [1987], n.pag.). The testing of nuclear bombs in the Pacific, and the extinction of marine species across the world ocean, is underwritten by the construction of the sea as a “limitless” void (Grotius 1916 [1633], 28) during the making of the capitalist imperium. This construction has consumed social worlds around the globe and is also imperilling life on a planetary scale. As oceanographer Sylvia Earle points out in The World is Blue: “Everyone, everywhere is inextricably connected to and utterly dependent upon the existence of the sea”, which regulates

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climate, absorbs carbon dioxide, “embraces 97 percent of the biosphere and contains by far the greatest abundance and diversity of life” on the planet (2009, 11, 112). The Whale Rider conveys the insight that the marine biome is vital to worldmaking. Through the focalisation of sounding whales, it presents a scintillating environment of cosmic proportions: Illuminated jellyfish exploded silvered starbursts through the dark depths. Far below, a river of phosphorescence lent lambent light to the abyss like a moonlit tide. The ocean was alive with noises: dolphin chatter, krill hiss, squid thresh, shark swirl, shrimp click and, ever present, the strong swelling chords of the sea’s constant rise and fall. (Ihimaera 2008 [1987], n.pag.)

The earth-encompassing ocean, which ebbs and floods in concert with the planet’s rotational orbit, provides the novel with a medium through which to connect apparently isolated activities in one place with prodigious effects “on the other side of the world”, such that an explosion in the mid-Pacific is shown to cause the beaching of whale at its southern extremity (2008 [1987], n.pag.). Amitav Ghosh (2016) and Rob Nixon have both identified the challenge of how to “plot and give figurative shape” to “formless threats whose fatal repercussions”, which Nixon terms “slow violence”, are dispersed across space and time” (2011, 2). The “earth of the Anthropocene”, as Ghosh elaborates, is “a world of insistent, inescapable continuities, animated by forces that are […] inconceivably vast” and which “defy the boundedness of ‘place’” (2016, 62). It is precisely such planetary apprehensions that the oceanic settings of The Whale Rider articulate. That it does so through an epic vision is apposite. Ghosh argues that the modern novel, which has banished “improbability” and is constructed out of discontinuous settings, is poorly suited to rendering environmental derangement on a planetary scale, in contrast to epics, which “bring multiple universes into conjunction” and draw “connections” between particular settings and “the world beyond” (2016, 59). The fisherman-hero of Walcott’s oceanic epic is notably able to observe the local effects of global climate change in the Caribbean Sea: He had never seen such strange weather; the surprise of a tempestuous January that churned the foreshore brown with remarkable, bursting seas convinced him that “somewhere people interfering with the course of nature”

(Walcott 1990, 299)

This allusion to the opening scenes of The Tempest, in which Prospero’s magic offers a proleptic figure of an anthropocenic storm, redirects Ariel’s neologism to the radical transformation that is now besetting the oceans themselves. The “[f]athoms” where Ariel located the “sea change” of flesh into “something rich and strange” (Shakespeare 2011 [1611], 1.2.397–402), and in which Achille “has seen the marlin buckle and leap”, are now “sand / clean at the bottom”; all that remains are the last vestiges

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of collapsed shrimp populations “curled / like exhausted Caribs in the deep silver mines” (Walcott 1990, 300). Walcott’s concatenating imagery establishes a relay of exploitation between the imperial silver mines and the genocide suffered by the indigenous Caribs, the transatlantic slave ships that delivered Africans in bondage to colonial plantations, the new invasion of “hotels and marinas, / the ice-packed shrimps of pink tourists” and the offshore trawlers that are “dredging the banks the way others had mined / the archipelago for silver. New silver was / the catch threshing the cavernous hold […] / their refrigerated scales packed tightly as coins” (Walcott 1990, 300–301). Giving voice to an artisanal fisherman, Walcott draws environmental and social justice concerns into accord. As Achille surveys the devastation, he expresses what has elsewhere been called the “environmentalism of the poor” (cf. Nixon 2011): was he the only fisherman left in the world using the old ways, who believed his work was prayer, who caught only enough, since the sea had to live because it was life? (Walcott 1990, 301)

As does The Whale Rider, Omeros pointedly turns from nostalgic pasts to address the present and future. But the understanding that the “world is blue” (Earle 2009), and thus of the reciprocal responsibilities of fisherpersons and the ocean, is a legacy of the ‘old ways’ that it seeks to carry forward – like the sea itself that, in the final words of the epic, “was still going on” (Walcott 1990, 325). The novel People of the Whale (2008) by Chickasaw writer Linda Hogan similarly seeks to transport practices of human-marine interdependency across time and space. The plot centres on the fictional A’atsika tribe on the west coast of America and is loosely based on the contentious whale hunt executed by members of the Makah tribe in 1999. As Hogan depicts it, a group of men, including Vietnam veterans, decide to reactivate traditional whale hunts as a way of recovering from the genocidal invasion of America and their own participation in its imperial wars. Whale-hunting, as one puts it, “will bring us back to ourselves” (Hogan 2008, 69). This appeal to tradition is, however, shown to be corrupted by global interests: a deal has been struck to sell the meat to Japanese businessmen, which will in turn “open a whale market so Norway could sell their vats of stored oil” (Hogan 2008, 69). Through the central woman character, Ruth, the novel opposes the hunt, arguing that it will reduce whales from revered ancestors to disposable commodities. In the ‘old ways’ that the novel cherishes, whales were not hunted with helicopters and guns but were instead invited into mutual world-making: “You will be part human. We’ll be part whale”, is the undertaking that hunters would make as they coaxed a whale towards their canoes. Rather than a demonstration of power, there was an expression of humility: “Oh whale, take pity on us. We are broken. We are weak. We are small. We are hungry mere humans” (Hogan 2008, 69, 23, 78). Hogan emphasises that this is a relation based on compassion – in the sense of ‘co-suffering’ – and

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empathy, which conveys the sense that “I am the world and the world is me” (Harrison 2011, 175). It is this oceanic conception of ‘world’ that the novel advances. Instead of positioning whales as a means of healing the tribe, People of the Whale points to how the A’atsika and whales are intertwined in a shared world that has been frayed by global resource extraction and settler colonialism: the “white whalers” who delivered the “deadly influenza” that decimated the tribe – along with “the massacre by the Americans seeking gold in the hills” – have also “nearly brought the whales to extinction” (Hogan 2008, 102, 106). As does The Whale Rider, the novel shows that re-making world in the wake of these ravages depends on mutual relations of “care” in which whales are received as kin (Hogan 2008, 284). Similarly to Ihimaera’s Kahu, the character Thomas has been chosen by “the ancients […] to open a pathway into the future” for the A’atsika “way of being in the world” (2008, 267, 69). Recalling Spivak’s suggestion that “planetarity […] is perhaps best imagined from the precapitalist cultures of the planet” (2003, 101), Hogan uses this phrase to denote “tradition”, explaining that, “[i]t has to do with respect for the world, and giving back, and living in a certain way where you do the least damage” (Harrison 2011, 168). People of the Whale elaborates this “way of being in the world” through two images of the blue planet. The first is when the hydrosphere responds to the violation of the whale hunt. Drought follows, and “the ocean tides slowed and then the winds of the world decided not to blow […] [and] the moon no longer pulls water back and forth with its love and will” until the sea withdraws completely, “turning its back on them” (Hogan 2008, 124, 126). The derangement is planetary in reach: the ebbing tide is answered by “flooding on small islands on the other side of the ocean, as if the earth has tilted somehow, been thrown off course” (2008, 128). Thomas realises that “the ocean is mourning after so much had been taken from it” – not only the whale, but also “the death of reefs […], the dead zones” (2008, 136). As Joni Adamson notes, the novel urges humans to “rediscover and move to protect not individual charismatic megafauna but an entire cosmos” (2012, 43). This is conveyed in the second image, in which Thomas comes to appreciate that the whale he had helped kill was “beautiful in its way, gray barnacles on it, sea lice, as if it supported an entire planet”; “[w]hen they killed it, he thinks perhaps they killed a planet in its universe of water” (Hogan 2008, 112, 267). His recognition of ‘planetarity’ is shown to awaken a sense of responsibility that encompasses the marine environment and the ‘people of the whale’, as well as peoples and places on the other side of the planet. It is mirrored in the novel’s plot, which reaches across the ocean to embrace Vietnam and foster enlivening relations after the world-breaking war. The figure of the blue planet that the novel articulates is thus distinguished from the ‘one world’ fashioned by globalisation, which smooths out difference in order to better grasp and consume the earth. The planetary vision advanced by People of the Whale is, in contrast, distinguished by the textured nature of the local settings that the sea is shown to connect, and by an insistence that these localities are each in their own right universes composed of intricate multispecies interdependencies.

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Other epic renditions of the blue planet include Alexis Wright’s monumental novel Carpentaria (2006) and Kathy Jet˜ nil-Kijiner’s collection Iep J˜ altok: Poems from a Marshallese Daughter (2017). Carpentaria’s narrative extends “[f]rom time immemorial”, in which the “ancestral serpent” of Aboriginal Law “came down from the stars” (Wright 2006, 1) and created the Gulf country of northern Australia, to a present in which a “new war on their country” (2006, 378) has been declared by an alliance between the settler state and a multinational mining corporation. The numinous waters of the Gulf are fouled by “a grey painter’s palette of tankers exchanging mining equipment for mined ore” (2006, 388) and what one character describes as “roaming armadas of the world’s jetsam” (2006, 386). “Country people, old people” receive an encroaching cyclone as the return of “the great spiritual ancestors roaring out of the dusty, polluted sea” (2006, 401) to perform a cosmic cleansing. As it obliterates the town, a character is sucked out to sea with the floodwaters and dumped on a “floating island of rubbish” (2006, 493). His ‘island home’ represents in miniature the island-continent of Australia and even the trashed planet itself. The scale of Wright’s epic vision enables the novel to both locate responsibility for this violation in the global imperium and to look beyond it toward the recreation of the world as the “life marooned” on the “floating island of rubbish” regenerates “to vegetate the wreckage”, and the story comes on rest on frogs “singing the country afresh” (2006, 495, 519). Jet˜ nil-Kijiner’s collection also reaches from the creation stories of her matrilineal, voyaging ancestors through the ongoing history of imperial violence – in this case, fallout from American nuclear tests in the so-called “Pacific Proving Grounds” – to water “rising / flooding across our cemeteries / gushing over sea walls / and crashing against our homes” (2017, 66). Jet˜ nil-Kijiner famously mobilised “literature as a force of world-making” (Cheah 2016, 4) when she performed a poem addressed to her infant daughter at the 2014 Opening Ceremony of the United Nations Secretary-General’s Climate Summit, drawing international attention to the plight of small island nations facing the prospect of their worlds being erased. “Dear Matafele Peinam” summons a community of “hands reaching out / fists raising up” out of an oceanic world to halt the planet-imperilling practices of the global imperium: “we are / canoes blocking coal ships” (Jet˜ nil-Kijiner 2017, 71–72). Concentrated in this arresting image are key contributions that the oceanic turn offers to understandings of world literature. It tracks the southern-going ships that have constituted the globe through practices of extraction, consumption and emission while surfacing other modes of “being-with” (Cheah 2016, 43) that are informed by interfusion and interdependency and which are both deeply local and planetary in scope. Oceanic literatures, finally, do not only circulate in or represent the world; they also enact its sea-change into more enlivening forms.

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5 Bibliography 5.1 Works Cited Adamson, Joni. “Whale as Cosmos: Multi-species Ethnography and Contemporary Indigenous Cosmopolitics.” Revista Canaria de Estudios Ingleses 64 (2012): 9–45. Armitage, David. “The Empire of the Seas, 1576–1689.” The Ideological Origins of the British Empire. By Armitage. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004. 100–124. Blum, Hester. “Melville and Oceanic Studies.” The New Cambridge Companion to Herman Melville. Ed. Robert S. Levine. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2014. 22–36. Bose, Sugata. A Hundred Horizons: The Indian Ocean in the Age of Global Empire. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2006. Brathwaite, E. Kamau. The Arrivants: A New World Trilogy. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1973. Brathwaite, E. Kamau. History of the Voice. London: New Beacon, 1984. Breslin, Paul. Nobody’s Nation: Reading Derek Walcott. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001. Buell, Lawrence. Writing for an Endangered World: Literature, Culture, and Environment in the U.S. and Beyond. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2001. Buell, Lawrence. “The Unkillable Dream of the Great American Novel: Moby-Dick as Test Case.” American Literary History 20.1–2 (2008): 132–155. Chambers, Claire. “Interview with Abdulrazak Gurnah.” British Muslim Fictions: Interview with Contemporary Writers. By Chambers. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011. 114–133. Cheah, Pheng. What Is a World? On Postcolonial Literature as World Literature. Durham: Duke University Press, 2016. Coetzee, J.M. Foe. London: Penguin, 1986. Coetzee, J.M. Elizabeth Costello: Eight Lessons. London: Secker and Warburg, 2003. Cohen, Margaret. The Novel and the Sea. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2010. Connery, Christopher L. “Ideologies of Land and Sea: Alfred Thayer Mahan, Carl Schmitt, and the Shaping of Global Myth Elements.” boundary 2 28.2 (2001): 173–201. Conrad, Joseph. The Nigger of the ‘Narcissus.’ 1897. Project Gutenberg. https://www.gutenberg.org/ files/17731/17731-h/17731-h.htm (18 Dec. 2019). Conrad, Joseph. “Youth.” 1898. Cambridge Edition of the Works of Joseph Conrad: Youth, Heart of Darkness, The End of the Tether. Ed. Owen Knowles. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010. 258–269. Conrad, Joseph. Heart of Darkness. London: Penguin, 2017 [1899]. Conrad, Joseph. The Mirror of the Sea. New York: Doubleday, 1924 [1906]. Damrosch, David. What is World Literature? Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2003. Defoe, Daniel. Robinson Crusoe. Ed. Thomas Keymer. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007. DeLoughrey, Elizabeth M. Routes and Roots: Navigating Caribbean and Pacific Island Literatures. Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press, 2007. Earle, Sylvia A. The World is Blue: How Our Fate and the Ocean’s Are One. Washington: National Geographic, 2009. Ghosh, Amitav. In an Antique Land. London: Granta, 1992. Ghosh, Amitav. Sea of Poppies. London: John Murray, 2008. Ghosh, Amitav. The Great Derangement: Climate Change and the Unthinkable. Chicago: Chicago University Press, 2016. Gilroy, Paul. The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness. London: Verso, 1993. Grace, Patricia. “Parade.” 1975. Selected Stories. By Grace. Auckland: Penguin Books, 1991.

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Grotius, Hugo. The Freedom of the Seas; or, The Right which Belongs to the Dutch to Take Part in the East Indian Trade. Trans. Ralph van Deman Magoffin. Ed. James Brown Scott. New York: Oxford University Press, 1916 [1633]. Gurnah, Abdulrazak. Paradise. London: Bloomsbury, 2004 [1994]. Gurnah, Abdulrazak. By the Sea. London: Bloomsbury, 2002 [2001]. Harrison, Summer. “Sea Level: An Interview with Linda Hogan.” ISLE 18.1 (2011): 161–177. Hau’ofa, Epeli. “Our Sea of Islands.” 1993. We Are the Ocean: Selected Works. By Hau’ofa . Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press, 2008. Hofmeyr, Isabel. “Universalizing the Indian Ocean.” PMLA 125.3 (2010): 721–729. Hogan, Linda. People of the Whale. 2008. New York: W.W. Norton, 2009. Huggan, Graham. The Postcolonial Exotic: Marketing the Margins. London: Routledge, 2001. Hulme, Keri. The Bone People. New York: Penguin, 1986 [1983]. Ihimaera, Witi. Pounamu Pounamu. Auckland: Raupo Books, 2012 [1972]. Ihimaera, Witi. The Whale Rider. North Shore: Raupo Books, 2008 [1987]. James, C.L.R. Mariners, Renegades and Castaways: The Story of Herman Melville and the World We Live in. London: Allison & Busby, 1985 [1953]. Jet˜nil-Kijiner, Kathy. Iep J˜ altok: Poems from a Marshallese Daughter. Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 2017. Lewis, Martin W., and Karen E. Wigen. The Myth of Continents: A Critique of Metageography. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997. Mackenthun, Gesa. Fictions of the Black Atlantic in American Foundational Literature. London: Routledge, 2004. Melville, Herman C. Moby-Dick; or, The Whale. Ed. Tony Tanner. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988 [1851]. Melville, Herman C. “Benito Cereno.” 1855. Melville’s Short Novels. Ed. Dan McCall. New York: Norton, 2001. Mentz, Steve. At the Bottom of Shakespeare’s Ocean. London: Continuum, 2009. Moretti, Franco. Modern Epic: The World System from Goethe to García Márquez. Trans. Quintin Hoare. London: Verso, 1994. Moretti, Franco. “Conjectures on World Literature.” New Left Review 1 (2000): 54–68. Nichols, Grace. I Is a Long Memoried Woman. London: Karnak House, 1990 [1983]. Nixon, Rob. Slow Violence and the Environmentalism of the Poor. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2011. Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o. Globalectics: Theory and the Politics of Knowing. New York: Columbia University Press, 2012. Pearson, Michael. The Indian Ocean. London: Routledge, 2003. Phillips, Caryl. Crossing the River. New York: Vintage, 1993. Phillips, Caryl. The Atlantic Sound. London: Faber and Faber, 2000. Said, Edward W. Orientalism. New York: Vintage, 1979. Said, Edward W. “Introduction to Moby-Dick.” Reflections on Exile and Other Essays. By Said. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2002. 356–371. Said, Edward W. Culture and Imperialism. London: Chatto and Windus, 1993. Samuelson, Meg, and Charne Lavery. “The Oceanic South.” English Language Notes 57.1 (2019): 37–50. Schmitt, Karl. Land and Sea. Trans. Simona Draghici. Washington: Pluto Press, 1997 [1954]. Shakespeare, William. The Tempest. Ed. Virginia M. Vaughan and Alden T. Vaughan. London and New York: Bloomsbury, 2011 [1611]. Somerville, Alice Te Punga. Once Were Pacific: Māori Connections to Oceania. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2012.

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Spivak, Gayatri C. Death of a Discipline. New York: Columbia University Press, 2003. Sullivan, Robert. Star Waka. Auckland: Auckland University Press, 1999. Thomson, James. “Rule Britannia!” 1740. Poetry Foundation. https://www.poetryfoundation.org/ poems/45404/rule-britannia (18 Dec. 2019). Vink, Markus. “Indian Ocean Studies and the ‘New Thalassology.’” Journal of Global History 2 (2007): 41–62. Walcott, Derek. “The Antilles: Fragments of Epic Memory.” 1992. Nobel Prize Organization. https://www.nobelprize.org/prizes/literature/1992/walcott/lecture/ (18 Dec. 2019). Walcott, Derek. Collected Poems, 1948–1984. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1986. Walcott, Derek. Omeros. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1990. Wendt, Albert, Reina Whaitiri, and Robert Sullivan, eds. Whetu Moana: Contemporary Polynesian Poems in English. Auckland: Auckland University Press, 2003. Wimmer, Andreas, and Nina G. Schiller. “Methodological Nationalism, the Social Sciences, and the Study of Migration: An Essay in Historical Epistemology.” The International Migration Review. 37.2 (2003): 576–610. Woolf, Virginia. The Voyage Out. New York: Modern Library, 2000 [1915]. Woolf, Virginia. To the Lighthouse. Hertfordshire: Wordsworth Classics, 1994 [1927]. Woolf, Virginia. The Waves. London: Penguin, 1992 [1931]. Woolf, Virginia. “Professions for Women.” 1931. Project Gutenberg. http://gutenberg.net.au/ ebooks12/1203811h.html#ch-28 (18 Dec. 2019). Wright, Alexis. Carpentaria. Sydney: Giramondo, 2006.

5.2 Further Reading Armitage, David, Alison Bashford, and Sujit Sivasundaram, eds. Oceanic Histories. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017. Bystrom, Kerry, et al. “Oceanic Routes: An ACLA Forum.” Comparative Literature 69.1 (2017): 1–53. Cohen, Margaret, et al. “Theories and Methodologies: Oceanic Studies.” PMLA 125.3 (2010): 657–736. Mack, John. The Sea: A Cultural History. London: Reaktion, 2011. Steinberg, Philip E. The Social Construction of the Ocean. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001.

Sarah Phillips Casteel

24 The Caribbean Abstract: Caribbean literature and theory provide a key staging ground for a postcolonial reformulation of the world literature paradigm. From its beginnings, Caribbean literature has articulated a global vision even as it has developed literary tactics to assert the value of the local and what Édouard Glissant calls “the right to opacity.” Caribbean fiction and poetry challenge the Eurocentrism of dominant models of world literature by exposing the creolized condition of metropolitan as well as colonial culture. In so doing, they demonstrate literature’s capacity as an aesthetic medium to interrogate, disrupt and remake the world created by colonialism. Thus, Caribbean writing encourages us to attend not only to the ways in which literature registers globalizing processes but also to how it actively constructs new worlds that reflect critically on colonial and neo-colonial power structures. Key Terms: Caribbean, creolization, opacity, relation, globalization

1 Locations: “An Island Is a World” The recent revival of the field of world literature, which has claimed much of the disciplinary space previously occupied by postcolonial studies, brings with it certain risks. These include reinscribing a Eurocentric account of the development of literary genres, flattening out the specificities of local literary histories, and weakening the sense of historicity and contestation that the postcolonial studies framework signalled. Particularly troubling has been a diminished understanding of the specificity of literature as a set of aesthetic practices in favour of a sociological account of the circulation of literary texts. Accordingly, some scholars have begun to call for a rethinking of world literature that would historicize and provincialize this framework (cf. Frydman 2014) and that would move beyond a narrowly material and sociological interpretation to emphasize literature’s creative and affective dimensions as well as its capacity to actively intervene in the world (cf. Cheah 2016; Hayot 2012; Neumann and Rippl 2017; ↗6 Global Literature, World Literature and Worlding Literature). As this chapter will show, Caribbean literature and theory provide a key resource for such a rethinking. Reevaluating the world literature paradigm through a Caribbean lens, this chapter illustrates the value of a multi-sited approach that foregrounds local and regional perspectives. The Caribbean is in many respects an ideal site from which to reconceptualize the idea of world literature and reorient it towards an emphasis on the active – rather than merely reactive – role of literature in the era of globalization. Caribbean writers articulate a distinctive global vision that reflects the region’s history as globally https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110583182-025

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constituted and the status of the Atlantic slave trade and the plantation complex as forms of proto-globalization. Rooted in the experiences of the Middle Passage and indentureship that produced some of the earliest global commodities, Caribbean writing reminds us of the history of European colonial expansion that, as Aamir Mufti shows, provided the conditions for the emergence of the concept of world literature as “a single and world-extensive reality” (2016, 3). The forced migration, enslavement and decimation of colonized and Indigenous populations, who were brought into often violent contact with European colonists, resulted in the Caribbean becoming what Jamaican critic Stuart Hall describes as a “juncture-point where the many cultural tributaries meet, the ‘empty’ land (the European colonizers emptied it) where strangers from every other part of the globe collided” (1990, 234). In his theoretical writings, Martinican writer Édouard Glissant draws attention to the unique consciousness that this collision of cultures generated. In his words, the violent upheavals of Atlantic slavery and the ensuing processes of creolization produced not only “an encounter, a shock […], a métissage, but a new and original dimension allowing each person to be there and elsewhere, rooted and open, lost in the mountains and free beneath the sea, in harmony and in errantry” (Glissant 2000, 34). Accordingly, a hallmark of Caribbean writing is the global consciousness that it exhibits. Caribbean literature and theory make visible global connectivities, both historically and in the present. At the same time, they are distinguished by their assertion of locality, which they reconceptualize as constituted by the global. Just as islands are simultaneously insular and outward looking, so Caribbean writers maintain the integrity of the local even as they situate it as the product of a global network of relations. The title of Trinidadian writer Sam Selvon’s 1993 novel An Island Is a World, for example, signals both the Caribbean’s migratory sensibility and what Alison Donnell identifies as the Caribbean’s “equally privileged perspective on another major challenge and reward of occupying a glocal world – that of living together in difference” (2012, 54). The motif of the island as the world, which is reprised in a short story by Selvon’s compatriot Tiphanie Yanique (cf. 2010, 7, 13), suggests a reciprocal, rather than oppositional, relationship between the global and the local. In theoretical terms, this distinctive global vision is captured by Glissant’s formulation the “tout-monde” (1997, discussed below). Caribbean writers’ global and migratory vision can be traced back at least as far as pan-Africanism and Negritude, intellectual movements that the Guadeloupean novelist Maryse Condé identifies as “forms of globalization” (1998, 2). Thus, as Jason Frydman suggests, bringing a Caribbean and African diasporic perspective to bear on the world literature paradigm reveals its longue durée and transperipheral circuits. Still more significant for reevaluations of world literature, however, is the vivid way in which Caribbean writing foregrounds the world-making power of both colonial and postcolonial narrative. As Edmundo O’Gorman argued in The Invention of America (1961), early European explorers and chroniclers invented rather than discovered the so-called “New World,” onto which they imposed preexisiting images and assumptions that in turn came to shape life in the Americas. This process of invention is

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particularly pronounced in the Caribbean, which was continually reinterpreted by colonial discourse. Alternately imprinted with paradisal and dystopian tropes, the Caribbean became “an invented landscape” (Sheller 2003, 65). Moreover, as Antiguan writer Jamaica Kincaid shows so provocatively in A Small Place (1988), this pattern continues in contemporary tourist discourse that wilfully obscures evidence of social inequity in order to preserve the fantasy of the paradisal island. Caribbean writers’ attunement to their region’s invented, discursive status has empowered them to embrace the capacity of literature to reinvent even as they have grappled with the devastating material and cultural consequences of the European colonial vision of the Caribbean. Given the patterns of forced and voluntary migration that have shaped the history of the region, including its literary history, the idea of discrete national literatures has never applied all that well to the Caribbean. Instead as one critic observes, “Anglophone Caribbean literature characteristically complicates the notion of ‘point of origin’ and the conventional ‘from national to world literature’ narrative” (Rupp 2017, 146). Indeed, for Caribbean literature, worldliness is not a quality that is acquired subsequent to the work’s creation through circulation beyond its point of origin, as in David Damrosch’s model (cf. 2003, 4; ↗2 Re-Reading Classical Approaches), but rather is constitutive of the work. For as Hall asserts, as a result of its colonial history, the Caribbean became “the signifier of migration itself – of travelling, voyaging and return as fate, as destiny; of the Antillean as the prototype of the modern or postmodern New World nomad, continually moving between centre and periphery” (1990, 234). At the same time, the now standard theoretical view of the Caribbean as the paradigmatic instance of globalization risks emptying the region of its local specificity and reducing it to a metaphor. Mimi Sheller accordingly has questioned globalization theorists’ appropriation of the Caribbean concept of creolization in an act of “theoretical piracy” (2003, 195). Relatedly, Donnell cautions against privileging the diasporic, exilic perspective within Caribbean writing while neglecting the importance of locality and of locally produced writing (cf. 2006, Ch. 2).

2 Literary Strategies of World-Making 2.1 Circulating in the World Caribbean fiction and poetry support competing theoretical models of world literature. Through its thematic focus on the movement of populations, commodities and literature itself, Caribbean writing resonates with the circulation model advanced by Damrosch that emphasizes spatial extension and the material movement of literary texts in the world. Narratives of migration pervade Caribbean writing. To take a classic example, in Barbadian writer George Lamming’s novel The Emigrants (1954), a group

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of Caribbean emigrants makes the sea voyage to the Mother Country in the 1950s, where their idealized image of England is quickly deflated. For Lamming’s emigrants, “what mattered supremely was to be there, in England. […] for there beyond the water too large for his view was England rising from beneath her anonymous surface of grey to meet a sample of the men who are called her subjects and whose only certain knowledge said that to be in England was all that mattered” (1994, 107). The English immigration officials take a different view, however: “How could sane men leave the sun and the sea where it was summer all the way, abandon the natural relaxation that might almost be a kind of permanent lethargy, to gamble their last coin on a voyage to England. England of all places. The officials sunk their necks within the space of their collars. They could not understand what England meant to these men” (Lamming 1994, 108). This collision between the “idea of England” that Lamming’s emigrants absorb from their colonial upbringing (1992, 25) and the sobering reality that confronts them upon arriving in the Mother Country is one that is staged by many other Caribbean texts. Moreover, if Lamming’s generation made the theme of exile foundational to early postwar Caribbean writing, more recent works that address a range of other exilic settings, such as the wintery Canadian landscape of Trinidadian poet Dionne Brand’s Land to Light On (1997), have continued to situate questions of migration, exile, arrival and belonging at the centre of the literary tradition. Notably, however, these texts upend an understanding of world literature as accruing its worldliness and literary value through its circulation. Instead, because Caribbean locality is always already constituted by the global, processes of circulation are generative – and a constant feature – of these works. At the same time as thematizing the circulation of populations, Caribbean literature also foregrounds the circulation of literary texts. In particular, it traces the circulation of canonical European literature in colonial spaces, frequently referencing staples of the colonial curriculum such as Shakespeare, Dickens, Scott and Wordsworth. In novels such as Jamaican writer Michelle Cliff’s Abeng (1984), scenes of reading and recitation reveal how colonial educators used English literature to entrench social control. Yet these scenes also disclose the potential for the colonized schoolchild’s reception of the English book to deviate from the intended meaning. Thus, Cliff’s adolescent protagonist challenges her teachers’ and parents’ interpretation of Sir Walter Scott’s Ivanhoe (1819) as part of her larger questioning of the racist ideology that structures pre-independence Jamaican society. The colonial classroom similarly features in Jamaican poet Louise Bennett’s “Sammy Intres” (1942), which disruptively parodies the colonial pedagogy of memorization and recitation (cf. Neigh 2017, Ch. 3). Scenes of reading also figure in a second category of works that addresses the circulation of literary texts – in this case, the circulation of contemporary Caribbean literature within the global literary marketplace. The market success of ethnic and multicultural fiction has meant that Caribbean writers have come under increasing pressure from the forces of commodification. The publishing industry demands from

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Caribbean writers exoticism, sensuality and cultural authenticity. As Elena Machado Sáez has recently shown, some Caribbean diaspora authors respond to these pressures by staging the challenges of communication between author and reader in a globalized literary marketplace (↗15 Marketing Anglophone World Literatures). Drawing on the work of scholars of postcolonial print culture such as Graham Huggan (2001) and Sarah Brouillette (2007), Machado Saéz explores how second-generation Caribbean diaspora writers in the Global North negotiate tensions surrounding the market’s commodification of ethnicity by embedding within their fiction an awareness of the contexts of production, enunciation and reception that condition their texts. Writers such as David Chariandy and Monique Roffey address these market tensions “by symbolically encoding the interpretive dialogue between text and reader in terms of an (im)possible intimacy” (Machado Sáez 2015, 2). In Machado Sáez’s analysis, such writers develop a “market aesthetics” that enables them to negotiate productively between the pressures of the marketplace and an ethical imperative to alert the reader to the devastating legacies of colonialism. Responding to the reader’s “market lens” (Machado Sáez 2015, 1), they advance revisionary histories that counter the dehistoricizing and amnesiac bent of contemporary discourses of globalization.

2.2 Remaking the World Although Caribbean writing lends itself to the circulation model of world literature, it also validates an alternative model put forward by Pheng Cheah (↗6 Global Literature, World Literature and Worlding Literature) that emphasizes the agential and experiential dimensions of literature. Cheah conjoins the frameworks of postcolonial and world studies to encourage “a radical rethinking of world literature as literature that is an active power in the making of worlds” (2016, 2). Relatedly, Eric Hayot proposes that we redirect our attention to the “world-forming quality of the work” (2012, 25), to the aesthetic worlds that literary texts generate and that are “always a relation to and theory of the lived world” (2012, 44). For Hayot, these aesthetic worlds put forward an “approach” to the lived world, “a rearticulation, or even an active refusal of the worldnorms of their age” (2012, 43, 45). Cheah’s and Hayot’s emphasis on the world-creating function of literature reorients the world literature discussion towards an analysis of literature’s capacity to produce images of the world that contribute to its remaking. The world-making power of literature that Cheah and Hayot foreground is foundational to Caribbean poetics. In a passage from his Nobel Prize acceptance speech, the St. Lucian poet Derek Walcott suggests that the fundamental task of the Caribbean writer is to remake the world: Break a vase, and the love that reassembles the fragments is stronger than that love which took its symmetry for granted when it was whole. The glue that fits the pieces is the sealing of its original shape. It is such a love that reassembles our African and Asiatic fragments, the cracked

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heirlooms whose restoration shows its white scars. This gathering of broken pieces is the care and pain of the Antilles, and if the pieces are disparate, ill-fitting, they contain more pain than their original sculpture, those icons and sacred vessels taken for granted in their ancestral places. Antillean art is this restoration of our shattered histories, our shards of vocabulary, our archipelago becoming a synonym for pieces broken off from the original continent. And this is the exact process of the making of poetry, of what should be called not its “making” but its remaking, the fragmented memory, the armature that frames the god, even the rite that surrenders it to a final pyre […]. (Walcott 1998, 69)

In Walcott’s famous image of the broken vase, the radically fragmentary condition of Caribbean culture, which is mirrored by the archipelagic topography, presents both a challenge and an opportunity for the Caribbean writer. In the aftermath of the ruptures of the Middle Passage, the writer has no choice but to forge a new language, “assembling nouns from necessity” (Walcott 1998, 70). The value of creative invention as a tool for survival is underscored by the Edenic and Crusoenian metaphors that Walcott favours in his early writing and that resurface in the Nobel speech (cf. 1998, 70). In Walcott’s optimistic vision, the Caribbean writer is a second Adam who is empowered to create new worlds, to find new metaphors and new names for things even as he remains haunted by the devastation that has come before. Walcott’s vision of the task of the poet as one of remaking the world chimes with revisionary theorizations of world literature in which literature does not merely react to or passively record globalization but instead plays an active role in resisting cultural and economic neo-imperialisms. Displaying an acute awareness of the invented status of the Caribbean – the extent to which the region was reshaped by European colonial imaginative projections with devastating material consequences – Caribbean writers embrace their power to denaturalize and reinvent. We can identify five key modalities of world-making in Caribbean writing: the cartographic, the ecological, the historical revisionist/speculative, the intertextual and the creolizing. Examining literary texts according to their deployment of these modalities – rather than their degree of circulation or translation – enables us to attend to less widely known works that illustrate Caribbean writers’ specific strategies of world-making. Moreover, this approach also makes possible a generic focus on poetry, thereby correcting the almost exclusive emphasis on novels in discussions of world literature.

Cartography One of the central literary manoeuvres through which Caribbean writers remap the world created by European colonialism is by invoking literal maps. In his poem “Islands” from his trilogy The Arrivants (1973), Bajan writer Kamau Brathwaite rereads the map of the Antilles to uncover “history’s hot / lies” (1973, 204, ll. 2–3). “Looking through a map / of the islands,” Brathwaite’s speaker learns “how time / has trapped/ its humbled servants here” (1973, 204, ll. 16–19) and how “hope /

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splinters” (1973, 205, ll. 36–7). Brathwaite’s repositioning of the Eurocolonial map supports Cheah’s theoretical account of postcolonial world literatures as both cognitively remapping the world and as “generat[ing] alternative cartographies” (2016, 17). The alternative cartographies produced by Caribbean writers expose the contingency and ideological underpinnings of European colonial projections of worldliness and their calamitous historical aftermath. A particularly sustained and rich instance of the cartographic strategy is Jamaican writer Kei Miller’s poetry collection The Cartographer Tries to Map a Way to Zion (2014). Miller’s sequence of poems challenges the dominance of the Eurocolonial map by introducing alternative cartographies such as the speaker’s mother’s “atlas of dolls:” Unable to travel, my mother makes us promise to always bring back dolls as if glass eyes could bear sufficient witness to where she has not been, the what of the world she has not seen.

(Miller 2014, 64, ll. 1–5)

The mother’s dolls, which “stand regal on white doilies, waving / like queens from their high balconies” (2014, 64, ll. 8–9), ironize the grandeur of imperial monarchs while underscoring the mother’s own immobility. A second alternative atlas is introduced in The Cartographer through the periodic insertion of poems explaining the historical origins of idiosyncratic Jamaican place names such as Me-No-Sen-You-NoCome and Flog Man. These explanatory poems recover brutal histories of colonial violence that the conventional atlas obscures. Miller opens The Cartographer with an epigraph from his fellow Jamaican poet Louise Bennett’s poem “Independance” (1962). With characteristic humor and Creole diction, Bennett’s speaker “Miss Lou” reprimands the world map for rendering Jamaica as an insignificant “speck:” She hope dem caution worl-map Fi stop draw Jamaica small For de lickle speck cyaan show We independantness at all! Moresomever we must tell map dat We don’t like we position – Please kindly tek we out a sea An draw we in de ocean

(Bennett 1982, 129, ll. 17–24)

In The Cartographer, Miller extends the dialogue with the Eurocolonial map begun by Bennett through the sometimes tense exchange that he stages between the eponymous Cartographer and the Rastaman. While the Cartographer claims to be able to produce a dispassionate map of the island, the Rastaman challenges the empirical

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value and purported neutrality of the Cartographer’s “Babylon science,” favouring instead the “maps drawn by Jah’s large hands” (Miller 2014, 23, l. 2). Further unsettling the Cartographer’s scientific and colonialist enterprise, the unruly Jamaican landscape itself resists measurement. The collection’s third poem, “Establishing the Metre,” exposes the contingency of cartographic systems by dramatizing the act of mapping. At the same time, it introduces a crucial link between map-making and writing poetry, playing on the double meaning of metre as both a unit of cartographic measurement and as the unit through which we measure the rhythm of a line of verse: Between France and Spain they dared to stretch uncalibrated measuring tapes. And foot by weary foot, they found a rhythm the measure that exists in everything.

(Miller 2014, 11, ll. 7–10)

By exploiting the double resonance of terms such as metre, measure and scanning, Miller proposes poetry as an alternative form of charting the world. Thus, he reclaims the island from the colonizer’s cartographic gaze as well as from pictorial representations that render much of its history invisible. While some Caribbean texts invoke actual maps, cartography also figures in Caribbean writing in a less literal sense. Cliff’s novel Free Enterprise (1993), for example, remaps the global terrain of resistance movements, tracing the trajectories of African diaspora women’s defiance of slavery regimes in order to make linkages across national and regional borders. Cliff’s connective and interethnic vision of global solidarities is emblematized by the storytelling circle that forms among the inhabitants of a leper colony. At the colony, a Jamaican abolitionist joins a global cast of oppressed peoples, including a Hawaiian, a Tahitian, a poor white Kentuckian and a Jew from Suriname. Resituating the Caribbean within this global emancipatory frame, Cliff’s polyphonic novel connects disparate geographies and spaces of resistance. A key motif in Free Enterprise is J.M.W. Turner’s 1840 painting Slavers Throwing Overboard the Dead and Dying, which depicts shackled slaves drowning in the sea as a slave ship sails away from them in the distance. Slavers Throwing Overboard also provides the inspiration for Guyanese writer David Dabydeen’s long poem “Turner” (1994). In “Turner,” Dabydeen remaps the aquatic space of Turner’s canvas by reanimating the slave figure from the painting’s foreground: In loneliness and grief for that vast space That still carries my whisper to her ears, Vaster than the circumference of the sea That so swiftly drowned by early cries In its unending roar. There is no land In sight, no voice carries from that land, My mother does not answer, I cannot hear her Calling […]

(Dabydeen 1994, 22, ll. 17–24)

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Countering the painting’s reception history, which was dominated by aesthetic debates that marginalized its subject matter of slavery, Dabydeen reinterprets the sea as a space, not of aesthetic pleasure, but of traumatic history and the loss of memory. Similarly, the sea emerges as a haunted space in Tobagonian poet NourbeSe Philip’s experimental poem Zong! (2008), which addresses the legal case that is often misidentified as the subject of Turner’s painting. Philip’s poem reconfigures the text of a 1783 legal ruling regarding the loss of “property” that was incurred when the crew of the Zong threw 132 living African slaves overboard. The opening poem of Philip’s collection re-visualizes the watery terrain of the slave trade by situating the reader in the space of the Atlantic itself. In Zong! #1, the word water is broken apart and scattered across the page, encircling a void that suggests the profound losses of the Middle Passage (cf. Philip 2008, 3–4). Dabydeen’s and Philip’s poetic rechartings of the sea follow on Walcott’s wellknown poem “The Sea is History” (1979). For Walcott, the sea is not only a receptacle for the now illegible stories of drowned slaves; it also signals a crucial challenge to the idea of History itself. The poem opens with the European historian’s linear understanding of history as a progressive sequence of monumental achievements. The speaker, however, refuses to accede to this monumental narrative, turning to the submarine architecture to generate an alternative discourse. Responding to the historians’ provocation “but where is your Renaissance?” (Walcott 1992, 365, l. 33), the speaker responds: Sir, it is locked in them sea-sands Out there past the reef’s moiling shelf, Where the men-o-war floated down; Strop on these goggles, I’ll guide you there myself. It’s all subtle and submarine, Through colonnades of coral, Past the gothic windows of sea fans

(Walcott 1992 [1979], 365, ll. 34–40)

Remapped by Caribbean writers such as Walcott, the sea is not only a watery graveyard for drowned slaves but also a liberatory space that opens up alternative frameworks to progressivist narratives of history as well as a territorial logic of origins.

Ecology As “The Sea is History” illustrates, closely related to the cartographic strategy is a rereading of the natural world. As part of their cognitive remapping of the spaces generated by colonialism, Caribbean texts reinterpret nature and highlight its transformation under colonial rule. Reworking central tropes of colonial discourse such as the picturesque and the gothic, many Caribbean writers adopt what Chris Campbell

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and Michael Niblett term a “world-ecological perspective” (2016, 14) that understands environmental calamities as continuous with human ones such as the Middle Passage (↗8 Anglophone World Literatures and World Ecologies). In her address to the Western tourist in A Small Place, for example, Kincaid highlights the environmental consequences of tourism while making links with the slavery past: You must not wonder what exactly happened to the contents of your lavatory when you flushed it. You must not wonder where your bathwater went when you pulled out the stopper. You must not wonder what happened when you brushed your teeth. Oh, it might all end up in the water you are thinking of taking a swim in; the contents of your lavatory might, just might, graze gently against your ankle as you wade carefree in the water, for you see, in Antigua, there is no proper sewer-disposal system. But the Caribbean Sea is very big and the Atlantic Ocean is even bigger; it would amaze even you to know the number of black slaves this ocean has swallowed up. (Kincaid 1989, 13–14)

Attuning the reader to the ecological as well as ethical implications of tourism, Kincaid’s text supports Campbell and Niblett’s contention that in adopting an ecological perspective, Caribbean writing “not only represents material reality but also, in producing it as an object of perception and understanding, contributes to the remaking of that reality” (2016, 5). While colonial discourse designated the Caribbean as a space of nature rather than history, Caribbean writers understand nature and history as closely entangled. They revisit the landscapes of colonialism to expose the intimate relationship of nature and empire and to register histories that have been obscured by official records. In “Sugar Cane” (1983), Guyanese poet Grace Nichols engages the landscape of the plantation in order to reconstruct Caribbean women’s histories. Addressing the crop that primarily motivated colonial expansion in the Caribbean, “Sugar Cane” subverts colonial discourse’s feminization and eroticization of the land as a virginal space to be penetrated by the colonizer. Nichols’s poem can be read as responding to James Grainger’s The Sugar Cane (1764), in which, Dabydeen charges, “the barbaric [plantation] experience is wrapped in a napkin of poetic diction and converted into civilised expression” (1986, 46). Nichols’s rewriting works to uncover the brutal history of exploitation and sexual violence that Grainger’s poem elides, for sugarcane “isn’t what / he seem” (Nichols 1983, 32, ll. 3–4). Inverting colonial power dynamics, the poem uses personification and typographical effects to return agency to the female slaves upon whom the sugar cane’s survival depends: Growing up is an art he don’t have any control of it is us who groom and weed him

(Nichols 1983, 33, ll. 28–33)

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One might expect that the plantation’s opposite would be the garden. Yet the garden, too, is revealed by Caribbean women writers in particular as deeply embedded in the history of imperialism. In Jamaican writer Olive Senior’s poem “Brief Lives” (1994), the speaker reveals with macabre humour that “Gardening in the Tropics, you never know / what you’ll turn up. Quite often, bones” (1994, 83, ll. 1–2). In “Plants,” Senior reinforces the association of gardens with empire by playfully drawing attention to the imperialistic tendency of plants: […] Perhaps you’ve regarded, as beneath your notice, armies of mangrove on the march, roots in the air, clinging tendrils anchoring themselves everywhere? The world is full of shoots bent on conquest, invasive seedlings seeking wide open spaces, materiel gathered for explosive dispersal in capsules and seed cases.

(Senior 1994, 61, ll. 9–16)

Kincaid similarly associates the garden with colonial rule, remarking how the British practice of populating colonial botanical gardens exclusively with plants from other parts of the empire echoed the circulation of human populations under colonialism. Describing the botanical garden of her Antiguan childhood, Kincaid recalls that it “reinforced for me how powerful were the people who had conquered me; they could bring to me the botany of the world they owned” (1999, 120; cf. Casteel 2007, Ch. 4). Senior’s and Kincaid’s writing thus resituates the seemingly innocent space of the garden to expose ecological dimensions of the imperial project. In their work, the Caribbean garden emerges as a deeply local space that at the same time opens up onto the world. Just as islands are simultaneously insular and outward looking, the garden connotes both rootedness and global contact.

Historical Revisionism and Speculation Caribbean texts not only interrogate the coloniality of space but also advance alternative temporalities. If Walcott’s “The Sea is History” challenges linear narratives of history, his long poem Tiepolo’s Hound (2000) reorients dominant accounts of modernity by retrieving forgotten worlds. In particular, Tiepolo’s Hound recovers the neglected early biography of the St. Thomas-born Impressionist painter Camille Pissarro. Countering standard art historical narratives and challenging an understanding of cultural influence as flowing in a unidirectional fashion from centre to periphery, Walcott’s speaker asserts that Pissarro’s aesthetic sensibility stems directly from his Caribbean upbringing. Walcott’s Pissarro advises his friend Cézanne

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to change his dingy palette to colours brightened by his tutor’s tropical eyes, a different language for a different light, more crystalline, more broken like the sea on island afternoons, scorchingly bright and built in prisms. He should learn to see.

(Walcott 2000, 56)

Imaginatively reconstructing Pissarro’s nineteenth-century Jewish Caribbean upbringing, Walcott’s poem uncovers the Caribbean origins of European modernism and exposes the amnesiac tendencies of European art history (cf. Casteel 2016, Ch. 1). In contrast to binary models of world literature that trace the dissemination of cultural forms from centre to periphery, and that posit singular origins, Tiepolo’s Hound reveals the metropolitan centre (in this case, Paris) as only one node within a complex network of relationships that produce modernity. Thus, the poem challenges Eurochronology, which in Hayot’s definition “tell[s] a progressive history of aesthetic innovation in which the contributions of the non-West remain supplemental, or constitute thematic appendixes to form” (2012, 6; cf. Appadurai 1996; Prendergast 2004). From early in his career, Walcott sought to disrupt linear time through his rejection of a Bloomian model of literary influence in favour of simultaneity. Describing the “freshness” of his encounter with Greek epics, he remarks in an interview that “if you think of art merely in terms of chronology, you are going to be patronizing to certain cultures. But if you think of art as a simultaneity that is inevitable in terms of certain people, then Joyce is a contemporary of Homer” (Walcott 1997, 241). If Walcott disrupts Eurochronology by transporting us to an alternative nineteenth-century past, Jamaican writer Nalo Hopkinson’s speculative fiction does so by bringing the reader into the future. Inflecting science fiction with Caribbean mythology and Creole diction, Hopkinson’s distinctively Caribbean brand of sci fi offers a particularly vivid example of the world-making power of literature. A Caribbean projection of worldliness, Hopkinson’s novel Midnight Robber (2000) produces, not the ‘New World’ in figurative terms, but literally a new world: the planet of Toussaint on which Caribbean emigrants from Earth have settled. While their slave ancestors were forcibly displaced to the Americas, the Caribbean settlers of Toussaint “make this crossing as free people this time” (Hopkinson 2000, 21). Toussaint’s inhabitants celebrate their arrival on the new planet with a traditional Jonkanoo festival. Echoing the colonial-era Jonkanoo masquerade performers, who wore hats in the shape of sea ships to commemorate the Middle Passage, Toussaint’s revelers don rocket ship hats. Toussaint’s inhabitants continually reference ‘old-time’ ways such as Jonkanoo and stories such as that of the Jamaican Maroon leader Nanny. Images of this past life are stored in Toussaint’s ‘data banks’ and projected onto viewing screens to satisfy the curiosity of the young protagonist Tan-Tan. Thus while adopting a futuristic setting, Midnight Robber significantly references the

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past. The name of the new planet itself refers to a leader of the Haitian Revolution, Toussaint L’Ouverture. Midnight Robber constructs Toussaint as a shadow version of Earth much as in the novel, Toussaint is shadowed by the planet of New Half-Way Tree: You never wonder where them all does go, the drifters, the ragamuffins-them, the ones who think the world must be have something better for them, if them could only find which part it is? … Well master, the Nation Worlds does ship them all to New Half-Way Tree, the mirror planet of Toussaint. … You know how a thing and the shadow of that thing could be almost the same place together? You know the way a shadow is a dark version of the real thing, the dub side? Well, New Half-Way Tree is a dub version of Toussaint, hanging like a ripe maami apple in one fold of a dimension veil. (Hopkinson 2000, 2)

Over the course of the novel, the flaws of the ostensibly utopian society that has developed on Toussaint are revealed through comparison with New Half-Way Tree. While free of labour, Toussaint is dominated by the constant, oppressive presence of AI surveillance. Analogously, by projecting the “mirror planets” of Toussaint and New Half-Way Tree, Hopkinson’s novel comments critically on contemporary globalized conditions of labour and technology on Earth and envisions alternative possible social orders.

Intertextuality As several of the preceding examples attest, one of the central strategies through which Caribbean writers remake the world is intertextuality. If intertextuality is the mechanism through which literature remembers its own past (cf. Lachmann 1997; Erll 2011, 70), in Caribbean literature intertextuality becomes a means of remembering and interrogating colonial history and discourse. Intertextual strategies resituate the colonial text, exposing and critically reassessing the worldview that it embodies. A notable practitioner of intertextuality is the St. Kitts-born British writer Caryl Phillips. In his slavery novel Cambridge (1991), Phillips ventriloquizes the voice of a nineteenth-century British woman who journeys out to her father’s West Indian plantation on the eve of emancipation. Phillips juxtaposes Emily’s travel narrative (which echoes the writings of Lady Maria Nugent and others), with a slave narrative that is strongly reminiscent of Olaudah Equiano’s The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano, Or Gustavus Vassa (1789). Phillips’s pronounced pastiche of literary genres and ventriloquism of multiple voices unsettles mono-vocal narratives while hybridizing history and fiction. By juxtaposing two literary genres – the colonial travel diary and the slave narrative – Phillips not only remembers the colonial past but makes visible the discursive operations of colonialism. His rendering of Emily’s narrative, which exposes her racial and class prejudices, draws attention to the contradictions and blind spots of colonial discourse. Inhabiting not only the slave Cambridge’s voice but also that of the white female colonist, Phillips takes the

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reader inside the mentality of the colonizer. Notably, Phillips’s sympathetic portrayal of Emily’s predicament as a nineteenth-century woman who is subject to her father’s will illustrates that intertextuality in Caribbean literature is not always oppositional. While some Caribbean rewritings, such as Jean Rhys’s Wide Sargasso Sea (1966), are sharply contestatory, intertextuality can also be sympathetic or even affiliative, as in Walcott’s embrace of classical myth and the Old Masters of European art. Another key intertextual strategy employed by Caribbean writers is to incorporate oral forms that destabilize the authority of the written text. As Frydman observes, some models of world literature posit a hierarchical and developmental relationship between the oral and the written by charting a progressive movement in which the oral is converted into the textual (cf. 2014, 11). By contrast, Caribbean texts operate in the interstices between speech and writing, incorporating elements of oral culture as a means of subverting the worldview embedded in the novel form or conventional versification. Cliff’s novel Abeng, for example, establishes intertextual relationships not only with Scott and Dickens but also with oral forms such as calypsos and slave songs. Chapter Seven of Abeng is prefaced by a Jamaican work song in Creole. Within the chapter itself, the protagonist Claire observes a funeral procession: “The procession moved forward underneath a steady hum, which at first seemed of the same key and pitch, but soon differentiated into harmony, led by the high falsetto of a man, whose voice circled the hum and turned it into a mourning chant. The words of the chant were strange, unrecognizable” (Cliff 1995, 50). In contrast to the simplicity of the English hymn that follows, the African chant is complex and impenetrable to Claire. Her mother explains: “They are singing in an old language; it is an ancient song, which the slaves carried with them from Africa” (Cliff 1995, 50). Here, the inclusion of Creole songs and passages describing slave music signal an alternative worldview that coexists uneasily with the novel’s bildungsroman narrative. Finally, Caribbean writers also introduce intermedial configurations (↗14 Intermediality and Remediation; cf. Neumann and Rippl 2020). We saw with Dabydeen’s long poem “Turner” how black figures in European visual art can be resignified. Indeed, Dabydeen applies this ekphrastic method not only to the drowning slave figure in Turner’s Slaveship but also to Hogarth’s engravings, in particular to plate 2 of A Harlot’s Progress (1732), which depicts a turbanned slave boy. In her slavery novel The Long Song (2010), Jamaican British writer Andrea Levy similarly reinterprets a work of visual art, “Dido Elizabeth Belle and Lady Elizabeth Murray” (1779). Levy’s The Long Song not only alludes to this painting but contains a scene in which a Jamaican planter and his wife are painted together with their slave July. In the novel, the artist includes July to convey her owners’ status as well as to introduce an exotic element (echoing the turbanned figure of Dido Belle in the original painting). Yet July upstages her masters to become the focal point of the painting much as the novel itself repositions slavery as central, rather than peripheral, to British history. The dense networks of intertextuality that The Long Song and other Caribbean writing unfold convey the deeply intertwined and interdependent relationship of metropolitan and colonial culture.

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Creolization If the intertextual incorporation of orality effects a generic disruption of the novel form, a still more profound disruption of Eurocentric norms and perspectives is achieved through the transformation of the language of literature itself. Caribbean writers’ assertion of Creole as a valid literary language has been critical to their ability to defamiliarize the world constructed by colonialism and to preserve the particularity of the local. This strategy is so pervasive in Caribbean writing that Carolyn Cooper argues that “Anglophone Caribbean literature” is in fact a misnomer that obscures the multilingualism within Caribbean literary language. She proposes “creoleanglophone” as an alternative term that better addresses the linguistic range and complexity of Caribbean writing (2012, 155). The preeminent example of the use of Creole to defamiliarize metropolitan narratives and spaces is Selvon’s The Lonely Londoners (1956). While Selvon’s contemporary V.S. Naipaul maintains the normative convention of restricting the use of Creole to the dialogue in The Mystic Masseur (1957), Selvon makes a radical departure by employing Creole as the language of narration in his account of immigrant Caribbean life in London in the 1950s. In The Lonely Londoners, Selvon fashions a modified dialect that negotiates a balance between maintaining a Caribbean sensibility and ensuring accessibility to the non-Caribbean reader. Selvon’s fashioning of this language enables him to introduce the oral rhythms of Creole speech and calypso music and to convey his characters’ encounter with the metropole through their own very particular worldview. In a wonderful passage in which a recent arrival observes the unfamiliar effect of the cold on his breath, his fellow emigrant responds that in England, their language needs to be “melted” to be understood: “The only thing”, Galahad say when they was in the tube going to the Water, “is that when I talk smoke coming out of my mouth.” “Is so it is in this country”, Moses say. “Sometimes the words freeze and you have to melt it to hear the talk.” (Selvon 1956, 15)

The Caribbeanizing imagery that Selvon employs in The Lonely Londoners, such as the introduction of the tropical analogy of the “force-ripe orange” to describe the English sun (2006, 23), further grounds the novel in a Caribbean sensibility. Bennett similarly asserts the legitimacy of Creole as a literary language in poems such as “Colonisation in Reverse” (1949) in which Jamaican emigrants to the Mother Country “tun history upside dung!” (Bennett 1982, 117, l. 16). Like Selvon’s The Lonely Londoners, Bennett’s use of Creole in her presentation of the encounter with the metropole enables her to negotiate between the global and the local, to situate the Caribbean within a larger web of relations while maintaining a strong sense of local particularity. In her radio monologue “Jamaica Language,” Bennett recalls Creole’s origins as a language of subversion and subterfuge in the plantation society: “But we African ancestors pop we English forefahders-dem. Yes! Pop dem an disguise up

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de English Language fi projec fi-dem African Language in such a way dat we English forefahders-dem still couldn understan what we African ancestors-dem wasa talk bout when dem wasa talk to dem one annodder!” (1993, 2). Extending this tradition of linguistic resistance, the establishment of Creole as a literary language challenges normative representations and inscribes a Caribbean sensibility (on creolization discourse, cf. Shepherd and Richards 2002).

3 Theoretical Perspectives The influential formulations of worldliness that Caribbean cultural theorists have produced question some of the central premises of Eurocentric and binary models of world literature. Weltliteratur at its nineteenth century origins assumed the discrete character of cultural identities and traditions as well as a fixed relationship between culture and territory (cf. Mufti 2016, 78; ↗1 The Beginnings of the Concept). By contrast, Caribbean theorists challenge this territorially bounded understanding and the opposition of authentic vs. derivative cultures. Glissant, for example, asserts that the distinction between “atavistic” and “composite” societies is a false one. He observes that if one reaches far enough back into these apparently homogeneous cultures’ histories, one finds that they too have undergone creolizing processes (cf. Glissant 1997, 194–195). What is more, he proposes that “aujourd’hui, le monde entier s’archipélise et se créolise” [today, the whole world is archipelizing and creolizing itself] (Glissant 1997, 194, author’s translation). The seminal theorization of creolization is Brathwaite’s The Development of Creole Society in Jamaica (1971), which expanded the application of the term beyond its original linguistic meaning to identify a transformative process of intercultural exchange, indigenization and creative reinvention emerging from the plantation within unequal relations of power. More recently, Michaeline A. Crichlow’s Globalization and the Post-Creole Imagination (2009) extends the discussion of creolization beyond the plantation to suggest how earlier forms of creolization are being repurposed in response to globalization. She asks how creolized subjects are negotiating globalization and the attendant “challenges and opportunities of making themselves and their worlds” (Crichlow 2009, 20). In tandem with these insights into the unbounded and impure character of culture, in the 1990s Caribbean theorists reconceptualized identity as migratory and relational. Hall, in his influential essay “Cultural Identity and Diaspora” (1990), advances an understanding of cultural identity not as a fixed, transcendent essence, but as undergoing a continual process of transformation that is conditioned by historical and ideological forces. For Hall, Caribbean diaspora identity is grounded less in a common origin (Africa, India) than in a common historical experience (slavery, colonization). Glissant’s metaphor for this decentered understanding of identity is the rhizome, a botanical figure borrowed from Deleuze and Guattari that simultaneously

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signals a rejection of singular origins and a continuing connection to place (cf. Glissant 1997, 21–22). In The Black Atlantic (1993), Paul Gilroy similarly resists essentialist models of fixed origins. He argues that African diaspora cultures cannot be interpreted through national and ethnic paradigms but instead require a transnational, intercultural perspective that reveals how the West is deeply imbricated in colonial economies and notions of race. Thus while some world literature scholars such as Franco Moretti have tended to reinscribe a centre/periphery binary (cf. Moretti 2000; 2003), Caribbean theorists have long insisted on the fundamentally entangled character of metropolitan and colonial cultures. Preeminently, Glissant introduces a series of concepts that recast the relationship between metropole and periphery, and between the local and the global. Glissant’s “poetics of relation” addresses both the specifity of place and its connectedness to a larger global setting. Celia Britton provides a helpful gloss of Glissant’s idea of Relation: “‘Relation’ is in the first place a relation of equality with and respect for the Other as different from oneself. It applies to individuals but more especially to other cultures and other societies. It is nonhierarchial and nonreductive; that is, it does not try to impose a universal value system but respects the particular qualities of the community in question” (1999, 11). Reinforcing this emphasis on particularity, Glissant’s companion concept of the “tout-monde” offers a valuable alternative to models of world literature that flatten the specificity of individual contexts of literary production. Resisting the assimilation of diversity into sameness, Glissant’s tout-monde is not a homogeneous totality but instead preserves the integrity of the particular: La mondialisation, conçue come non-lieu, en effet mènerait à une dilution standardisée. Mais pour chacun de nous, la trace qui va de son lieu au monde et retour et aller encore et retour encore indique la seule permanence. Le monde en sa totalité accomplie ne peut pas être considéré comme raison suffisante, généralité enfantant sa propre généralisation. La trame du monde s’avive de toutes les particularités, quantifiées; de tous les lieux, reconnus. La totalité n’est pas ce qu’on dit être l’universel. Elle est la quantité finie et réalisée de l’infini détail du réel. Et qui, d’être au détail, n’est pas totalitaire. (Glissant 1997, 192) Globalization, understood as non-place, would in effect lead to a standardized dilution. But for each of us, the path that goes from one’s place to the world and returns and leaves again and returns represents the only permanence. The world in its accomplished totality cannot be considered a sufficient reason, a generality that generates its own generalization. The texture of the world rests in all of its particularities, quantified; in all the places, recognized. Totality is not what one calls the universal. It is the finite and extant quantity of the infinite detail of the real. And which, because of being distinguishable in its components, is not totalitarian. (author’s translation)

Thus, resisting the forces of homogenization, Glissant advances a global consciousness that succumbs neither to particularism on the one hand nor to abstraction on the other. Glissant’s critique of universalism unsettles the expectation that world literatures are readily accessible through anthologization and translation – what Emily Apter

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calls the “translatability assumption” (2013, 3). Challenging the “requirement for transparency” that lies at the base of Western thought (Glissant 2000, 190), Glissant instead proclaims “the right to opacity:” the ethical imperative to acknowledge the irreducible difference of the Other (1997, 29). In this regard, as Gerard Aching suggests, Glissant’s theories can help to ensure “that the challenges and opacities of difference remain central to acts of reading in and across the world” (2012, 46). As we have seen, the right to opacity is most explicitly asserted in Caribbean literature through the use of untranslated regional Creoles. If, as Bennett and others suggest, language itself became a site of resistance on the plantation, the literary use of Creole can analogously be understood as a tactic that resists the homogenizing prioritization of the English language in the academic study of world literature and in the global literary marketplace. Ultimately, then, the central contribution of Caribbean poetics to discussions of world literature is its assertion of the irreducibility of the local. Caribbean writers and theorists celebrate the value of “small places” thematically, formally and linguistically even as they situate these localities as fundamentally and constitutively enmeshed in global currents that have shaped the region from its colonial beginnings. In so doing, they demonstrate the power of literature as an aesthetic medium to generate worlds; confronted with a profoundly fragmented cultural inheritance, they draw on their creativity to mend the vase (in Walcott’s image), to remake the world. Read against Caribbean writers’ long tradition of reflecting on global relations, and the rich array of theoretical concepts and literary strategies of world-making that they have introduced, the world literature paradigm comes under significant pressure to pluralize itself and to adopt a less hierarchical, more multi-sited approach.

4 Bibliography 4.1 Works Cited Aching, Gerard. “The ‘Right to Opacity’ and World Literature.” 1616: Anuarios de Literatura Comparada 2 (2012): 33–47. Appadurai, Arjun. Modernity at Large: Cultural Dimensions of Globalization. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1996. Apter, Emily. Against World Literature: On the Politics of Untranslatability. London: Verso, 2013. Bennett, Louise. “Jamaica Language.” Aunty Roachy Seh. Kingston: Sangster’s, 1993. 1–3. Bennett, Louise. “Sammy Intres.” “Colonisation in Reverse.” “Independance.” Selected Poems. Ed. Mervin Morris. Kingston: Sangster’s, 1982. 7–8. 117–118. 129–30. Brand, Dionne. Land to Light On. Toronto: McLelland and Stewart, 1997. Brathwaite, E. Kamau. “Islands.” The Arrivants: A New World Trilogy. By Braithwaite. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992 [1967]. 204–205. Brathwaite, E. Kamau. The Development of Creole Society in Jamaica, 1770–1820. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1971.

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Britton, Celia. Édouard Glissant and Postcolonial Theory: Strategies of Language and Resistance. Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 1999. Brouillette, Sarah. Postcolonial Writers in the Global Literary Marketplace. New York: Palgrave, 2007. Campbell, Chris, and Michael Niblett. “Critical Environments: World-Ecology, World Literature, and the Caribbean.” The Caribbean: Aesthetics, World Ecology, Politics. Ed. Chris Campbell and Michael Niblett. Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2016. 1–15. Casteel, Sarah P. Calypso Jews: Jewishness in the Caribbean Literary Imagination. New York: Columbia University Press, 2016. Casteel, Sarah P. Second Arrivals: Landscape and Belonging in Contemporary Writing of the Americas. Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2007. Cheah, Pheng. What is a World? Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2016. Cliff, Michelle. Abeng. New York: Plume, 1995. Cliff, Michelle. Free Enterprise. New York: Plume, 1993. Condé, Maryse. “O Brave New World.” Research in African Literatures 29.3 (1998): 1–7. Cooper, Carolyn. “‘Disguise Up de English Language’: Turning Linguistic Tricks in Creole-Anglophone Caribbean Literature.” Teaching Anglophone Caribbean Literature. Ed. Supriya M. Nair. New York: Modern Language Association, 2012. 155–167. Crichlow, Michaeline A. Globalization and the Post-Creole Imagination. Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2009. Dabydeen, David. “On Writing Slave Song.” Commonwealth Essays and Studies 8.2 (1986): 46–50. Dabydeen, David. “Turner” (1994). Turner: New and Selected Poems. By Dabydeen. Leeds: Peepal Tree Press, 2010. 9–42. Damrosch, David. What is World Literature? Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2003. Donnell, Alison. “The Island and the World: Kinship, Friendship and Living Together in Selected Writings of Sam Selvon.” Journal of West Indian Literature 20.2 (2012): 54–69. Donnell, Alison. Twentieth-Century Caribbean Literature: Critical Moments in Anglophone Literary History. London and New York: Routledge, 2006. Erll, Astrid. Memory in Culture. Trans. Sara B. Young. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011. Frydman, Jason. Sounding the Break: African American and Caribbean Routes of World Literature. Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2014. Gilroy, Paul. The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness. London and New York: Verso Books, 1993. Glissant, Édouard. Poetics of Relation Trans. Betsy Wing. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2000. Glissant, Édouard. Traité du tout-monde. Paris: Gallimard, 1997. Hall, Stuart. “Cultural Identity and Diaspora.” Identity: Community, Culture, Difference. Ed. Jonathan Rutherford. London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1990. 222–237. Hayot, Eric. On Literary Worlds. New York: Oxford University Press, 2012. Hopkinson, Nalo. Midnight Robber. New York: Hachette, 2000. Huggan, Graham. The Postcolonial Exotic: Marketing the Margins. London: Routledge, 2001. Kincaid, Jamaica. A Small Place. New York: Plume, 1989. Kincaid, Jamaica. My Garden (Book). New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1999. Lachmann, Renate. Memory and Literature: Intertextuality in Russian Modernism. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997. Lamming, George. The Emigrants. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1994 [1954]. Lamming, George. The Pleasures of Exile. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1992 [1960]. Levy, Andrea. The Long Song. Toronto: Hamish Hamilton, 2011. Machado Sáez, Elena. Market Aesthetics: The Purchase of the Past in Caribbean Diasporic Fiction. Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2015. Miller, Kei. The Cartographer Tries to Map a Way to Zion. Manchester: Carcanet, 2014.

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Moretti, Franco. “Conjectures on World Literature.” New Left Review 1 (2000): 54–68. Moretti, Franco. “More Conjectures.” New Left Review 20 (2003): 73–81. Mufti, Aamir R. Forget English! Orientalisms and World Literatures. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2016. Neigh, Janet. Recalling Recitation in the Americas: Borderless Curriculum, Performance Poetry, and Reading. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2017. Nichols, Grace. “Sugar Cane.” I Is a Long Memoried Woman. By Nichols. London: Karnak House, 1983. 32–35. Neumann, Birgit, and Gabriele Rippl. “Anglophone World Literature: Introduction.” Anglia 135.1 (2017): 1–20. Neumann, Birgit, and Gabriele Rippl. Intermedial Aesthetics: Verbal-Visual Configurations in Postcolonial Literature. London: Routledge, 2020. O’Gorman, Edmundo. The Invention of America: An Inquiry into the Historical Nature of the New World and the Meaning of its History. Westport: Greenwood Press, 1961. Philip, M. NourbeSe. Zong! Middletown: Wesleyan University Press, 2008. Phillips, Caryl. Cambridge. New York: Vintage, 1993. Prendergast, Christopher. “The World Republic of Letters.” Debating World Literature. Ed. Christopher Prendergast. New York: Verso, 2004. 1–25. Rupp, Jan. “Caribbean Spaces and Anglophone World Literatures.” Anglia 135.1 (2017): 140–158. Selvon, Sam. An Island Is a World. Toronto: TSAR, 1993. Selvon, Sam. The Lonely Londoners. London: Penguin Books, 2006 [1956]. Senior, Olive. Gardening in the Tropics. Toronto: McLelland & Stewart, 1994. Sheller, Mimi. Consuming the Caribbean: From Arawaks to Zombies. New York: Routledge, 2003. Shepherd, Verene A., and Glen L. Richards. Questioning Creole: Creolisation Discourses in Caribbean Culture. Kingston: Ian Randle, 2002. Walcott, Derek. “The Antilles: Fragments of Epic Memory.” What the Twilight Says. By Walcott. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1998. 65–84. Walcott, Derek. “Reflections on Omeros.” The South Atlantic Quarterly 96.2 (Spring 1997): 229–246. Walcott, Derek. “The Sea is History.” Collected Poems: 1948–1984. By Walcott. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1992. 364–367. Walcott, Derek. Tiepolo’s Hound. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2000. Yanique, Tiphanie. “How to Escape from a Leper Colony.” How to Escape from a Leper Colony: A Novella and Stories. Minneapolis: Graywolf, 2010. 1–14.

4.2 Further Reading Alabi, Adetayo, ed. Special issue The Caribbean and Globalization. The Global South 4.2 (2010). Benítez Rojo, Antonio. The Repeating Island: The Caribbean and the Postmodern Perspective. Trans. James Maraniss. Durham: Duke University Press, 1992. Bongie, Chris. Islands and Exiles: The Creole Identities of Post/Colonial Literature. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1998. Glissant, Édouard. Caribbean Discourse. Trans. J. Michael Dash. Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1989. Prieto, Eric. “Édouard Glissant, Littérature-monde, and Tout-monde.” Small Axe 14.3 (2010): 111–120. Rahim, Jennifer, and Barbara Lalla, eds. Beyond Borders: Cross-Culturalism and the Caribbean Canon. Mona: University of the West Indies Press, 2009. Woolward, Keithley. “World Literature in French: A Caribbean Design?” Small Axe 14.3 (2010): 89–98.

Stefan Helgesson

25 Southern Africa Abstract: Adopting Leon de Kock’s notion of the ‘seam’ as a heuristic conceptmetaphor, this chapter looks at three periods of global attachments in southern African literature: firstly, the moment of British cultural hegemony in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, under which Olive Schreiner and Solomon T. Plaatje endured different forms of marginalisation; secondly, the post-Second World War period, with particular attention paid to the different transnational trajectories of Es’kia Mphahlele, Nadine Gordimer and Doris Lessing; finally, the moment of post-1994 globalisation and Afropolitanism, with Ivan Vladislavić’s short story “Propaganda by Monuments” (1996) and NoViolet Bulawayo’s debut novel We Need New Names (2013) as its main cases. Each moment, the chapter argues, presents historically distinct moments of world literary reception and production, ranging from peripherality in the imperial network to ‘global isolation’ under apartheid to uneven integration in contemporary globalisation. Key Terms: Southern Africa, South African literature, Zimbabwean literature, Olive Schreiner, Es’kia Mphahlele, Nadine Gordimer, Doris Lessing, NoViolet Bulawayo, Ivan Vladislavić

1 Born Global In a correspondence published in Granta in 2014, the two South African writers S.J. Naudé and Ivan Vladislavić discuss the ambiguities of literary belonging. Naudé was at the moment poised to launch the collection of short stories The Alphabet of Birds (2015), a translation (by Naudé himself) of his Afrikaans debut, Alfabet van die voëls (2011). The translation, Vladislavić points out, appears in two versions, one for the UK readership and another for sale in South Africa. Although the actual differences seem slight – what reads as “bakkie” in the South African edition is a “pickup truck” in the UK edition –, “the practice of tailoring books for particular markets” (Naudé and Vladislavić 2014, n.pag.) raises questions of high relevance to the imbrication of southern African literature with other literary circuits. Being written first in Afrikaans, Naudé’s work has, from the outset, limited reach. There are perhaps seven or eight million first-language speakers of Afrikaans in the world. As a language, despite its Dutch ancestry, it has been intimately tied to the territory known as South Africa. Accordingly, Afrikaans writers have had recourse to a stronger sense of national belonging than English-language writers, but this brings with it the risk of isolation. “Your position is complicated by the fact that your first language is a small one”, Vladislavić suggests to Naudé. “You were able to bring https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110583182-026

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the world home in Afrikaans, but if you are to go back out into the world, you need English. The shift to English is an index of social and political change in your book” (2014, n.pag.), a comment which encapsulates an entire history of anxieties over the relative merits of English and Afrikaans as literary languages. The interesting twist in Naudé’s case – who, much like his self-translating predecessor André Brink should be considered as both an Afrikaans and an Anglophone writer – is that the settings of his stories are often unabashedly cosmopolitan. “Mother’s Quartet”, to take one example, is set in Arizona, London, Dubai and Johannesburg, tracing in this way the diasporic dispersal of the siblings in the story (Naudé 2015, 212–259). Having himself lived much of his life away from South Africa, Naudé is of a piece with the moment of accelerated globalisation that began in South Africa with the democratic dispensation in 1994. Vladislavić, some twenty years older than Naudé, suspects therefore that “the question of locality is more interesting to my generation than yours” (2014, n.pag.). If there is an ‘inside’ and an ‘outside’ to the context from which Naudé and Vladislavić are speaking, its boundaries are clearly contingent upon a number of factors: language, book markets, generational experiences, political developments – and, as always in the South African case, racial positioning. Behind Vladislavić’s understated comment on locality lies the fraught history of apartheid and the struggle to overcome its divisions. The literary aspect of this struggle, long conceived of in national terms, reached an academic apotheosis with The Cambridge History of South African Literature (cf. Attridge and Attwell 2012), a volume which aimed at a comprehensive account of literature in all the languages of South Africa. But not only did this massive tome appear at a moment when the national category was increasingly being questioned (cf. Hofmeyr and Gunner 2005), it is also clear from the diverse content of the 39 chapters that no coherent South African literary-historical narrative will ever present itself – not even if we only look to those chapters (the vast majority) dealing with Anglophone literature. Considering southern African literature in English through a world literary lens, as this chapter sets out to do, means then to confront an unstable field of reference. English is both the dominant literary language in the region and, perhaps, the least coherent and unified. This becomes evident already when we consider the geographical framework of “southern Africa”. Stephen Gray (cf. 1979), Michael Chapman (cf. 1996), Stefan Helgesson (cf. 2009) and Dobrota Pucherová (cf. 2011) are among the few to have championed the southern African category. Occasionally, this includes the lusophone literatures of Mozambique and Angola, but South Africa and Zimbabwe are normally viewed as the core literary countries of the region, with Zambia, Malawi, Botswana and Namibia in supporting roles. In terms of volume and diversity, the printed literature of South Africa far outstrips the rest. Despite its fragmented nature, it seems that both Gray and Chapman adopt the regional umbrella precisely as a means to override this messiness of the particulars. The apparent firmness of geographical grounding in Gray’s case and the history of “harsh, modernising forces” in

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Chapman’s (1996, 1) are what provide anchorage to their accounts of settler narratives, oral traditions, early black writers, anticolonial poetry and so on. Famously adopting the archipelago as an organising metaphor, Gray argued in the 1970s that the “islands” of southern African literature in English were related to three “adjacent landmasses”: “the mainland of English literature, by language and historical circumstance; diminishingly, the British Commonwealth of literature; and increasingly, the continent of Africa which gives it its actual nourishment” (1979, 14). For the purposes of this chapter, the image helps to clarify that written literature in English in southern Africa was from the beginning ‘born global’. But the interesting question is how the modalities of globality have shifted over time. Four distinct periods of global attachments can be identified. The first is the scattered production of colonial writings in English in the early nineteenth century, remembered mainly through the evocative late-Romantic poetry of Thomas Pringle (1789–1834), a Scottish abolitionist who resided six years in the Cape. The second stretches from the late nineteenth century through to the 1940s, a period which saw an increase in local literary production in English, both by white and black writers, and incipient national conceptions of literature, both in South Africa and what was then South Rhodesia. The third period is defined, jointly, by the National Party’s apartheid rule in South Africa from 1948 to 1994 and the gathering strength of decolonisation in neighbouring countries. Finally, the fourth phase could (again very sweepingly) be defined as the contemporary period of accelerated globalisation – and it is within this historical moment that Vladislavić’s and Naudé’s conversation unfolds. In South Africa, the shift to a democratic dispensation and electoral victory of the ANC in 1994 is a decisive starting point for this phase, as the end of apartheid also entailed the full (re-)insertion of the country into the global capitalist system of “combined and uneven development” (cf. WReC 2015). But where is world literature in all this? Avoiding the one-sided receptionoriented view of world literature as a matter of how works circulate (cf. Damrosch 2003; Beecroft 2015), this chapter adopts instead a dynamic and dual conception of world literature as being both about production and reception (cf. Helgesson 2016), involving also the mobility, networking and poetics of individual authors. Literary works, even when in the absence of international consecration, can in this way nevertheless be profoundly ‘worldly’, producing singular aesthetic events within a crucible of local and translocal impulses and constraints. This connects with Pheng Cheah’s understanding – contra what he sees as the reduction of world literature to a market phenomenon – of literary “worlding” as a “force of opening that inheres in the giving and coming of time” played out “in a historically specific field of forces” (2014, 322, 326). Accordingly, the modes of worldliness studied here differ not just between texts but also between periods. It can be argued that the apartheid era produced a unique, and uniquely perverse, form of worldliness that was premised on South Africa’s (and, on a smaller scale, Rhodesia’s) drift from dominant post-1945 historical rhythms, which meant that the aggressive isolationism of white supremacist rule, shaped for a

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period southern African literature in and for the world – both in relation to the rest of Africa and the two sides of the Cold War conflict. The transnational reception of South African literature at this time was, in other words, to some extent determined by the political pariah status of the apartheid regime. Although this has residual effects even today, we are now in a better position to apprehend the world literary peculiarity of the apartheid era vis-à-vis other periods. Adopting Leon de Kock’s notion of the ‘seam’ as a heuristic concept-metaphor (explained below) the next sections of this chapter will look at three of these distinct periods: firstly, the moment of British cultural hegemony in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, under which Olive Schreiner and Solomon T. Plaatje endured different forms of marginalisation; secondly, the post-Second World War period, with particular attention paid to the different transnational trajectories of Es’kia Mphahlele, Nadine Gordimer and Doris Lessing; finally, the moment of post1994 globalisation and Afropolitanism, with Ivan Vladislavić’s short story “Propaganda by Monuments” (1996) and NoViolet Bulawayo’s debut novel We Need New Names (2013) as its main cases.

2 Writing along the Seams of Empire In his widely cited article “South Africa in the Global Imaginary”, Leon de Kock considered South African literature in English as being marked by a persistent “crisis of inscription” (2001, 276). This had been produced by an inevitable failure of Anglophone writing to signify adequately across cultural, racial and territorial divides in the context of violent conquest and dispossession. De Kock understood the seam to be “not only the site of difference”, which would be synonymous with Pratt’s “contact zone” (cf. 1992), but also “the representational suture, the attempt to close the gap and to bring the incommensurate into alignment by the substitution, in the place of difference, of a myth, a motif, a figure, or a trope” (De Kock 2001, 276). The advantage of such an approach, despite its time-worn poststructuralist vocabulary, is that it foregrounds the inevitable doubleness of writing as an autonomous and entangled practice – inseparable from but not reducible to the historical circumstances of its becoming. On such an understanding, moreover, the heuristic of the seam has the potential to register not just the racial and colonial drama of southern Africa, but also gender disparities, translingual disjunctions and unevenness of form (such as stylistic incongruities or the mixing of narrative modes). The representational implications of the seam are made astonishingly clear already in Olive Schreiner’s The Story of an African Farm (1883), normally read as the inaugural southern African novel in English. In her preface to the second edition, which was published under her pseudonym Ralph Iron, Olive Schreiner (1855–1920) boldly declared her aesthetic independence from British models:

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It has been suggested by a kind critic that he would better have liked the little book if it had been a history of wild adventure; of cattle driven into inaccessible “kranzes” by Bushmen; “of encounters with ravening lions, and hair-breadth escapes”. This could not be. Such works are best written in Piccadilly or in the Strand: there the gifts of the creative imagination untrammelled by contact with any fact, may spread their wings. But, should one sit down to paint the scenes among which he has grown, he will find that the facts creep in upon him. Those brilliant phases and shapes which the imagination sees in far-off lands are not for him to portray. Sadly he must squeeze the colour from his brush, and dip it into the grey pigments around him. He must paint what lies before him. (Schreiner 1975, 23–24)

Schreiner dismisses here the exoticising conceits of the imperial romance – of which the most famous instance would be H. Rider Haggard’s novels – on behalf of a realist poetics. But the shift in the final paragraph from writing to the metaphor of painting is revealing. This could be understood in De Kock’s terms as a “substitution, in the place of difference” (2001, 276): if the blunt colonial fact of the English language and its literature is implicated in the production of colonial difference, then it also stands in the way of dipping the brush “into the grey pigments” of the Cape colony. But this is precisely the language and cultural legacy that the autodidact Schreiner must use to shape The Story of an African Farm. Hence the novel’s unconventional – protomodernist to some  – combination of Dickensian satire, philosophical reflection, allegorical interludes and domestic tragedy to tell the story of its protagonists Lyndall and Waldo, fated to be crushed by the harsh conditions of the Victorian colony. Its generic and linguistic make-up was constitutively English, but Schreiner stitched together these elements along the seam in unprecedented ways. Its famous opening line – “The full African moon poured down its light from the blue sky into the wide, lonely plain” (1975 [1883], 29) – introduced a new, bleak view of the African landscape into the English language, and the sharpness of Lyndall’s feminism was all but inconceivable in the English novel at the time: “I am not in so great a hurry to put my neck beneath any man’s foot; and I do not greatly admire the crying of babies” (1975 [1883], 172). The seam, however, is all the more evident in its conditions of publication: the fact that we can register this radicalism today and claim the novel as a foundational text for South Africa is thanks not least to its publication in the imperial centre. Schreiner had brought the manuscript with her in 1881 on her first of many travels to Britain. After five rejections, it was eventually accepted by the London publisher Chapman & Hall. The sales, according to Richard Rive, “were beyond expectation, and there was a demand for the book in England and America” (1975, 9). Andrew van der Vlies confirms its “consistent popularity” in late nineteenth-century Britain and beyond – but less so in South Africa itself (2007, 38). Schreiner’s historically conditioned experience of reaching expanding readerships even from the margin of her colonial attachment was in other words also an experience of displacement and dispersal. This led her later in life to develop a conception of world literature (without using this particular term) that, unlike Goethe’s, had a southern hemispheric grounding and was far more

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elaborate than Marx and Engels’s (↗1 The Beginnings of the Concept). Since it is little known (but these days accessible on the internet), it is worth quoting this passage at some length: At the present day, though the use of a common literary tongue has ceased among us, the interchange of thought with its resulting unity is yet more complete. The printing-press, the electric telegraph which gives to language an almost omnipresent voice, and above all, the habit of translating from one language into another whatever may be of general interest, are more completely binding all nations throughout the world where a literary speech prevails, into one body […]. The picture or ideal of life, painted by the poet or writer of fiction, once clad in print travels round the globe, modifying the actions of men and women before the ink with which it was first written has well dried out; and the news that two workmen were shot at a strike in Hungary, committed to the telegraph wire, will, before night – and quicker than the feet of an old crone could have carried news from house to house in a village – have crossed from Europe to America and Australia, and before to-morrow half a million working men and women, separated from each other by oceans, will have cursed between their teeth. Probably to no man is the part played by literature in creating this unity in the civilized world so clear as to the writer himself, with whom it is often a matter not of intellectual interference [sic], but of ocular demonstration. What he has evolved in a sleepless night in London of Paris, or as he paced in the starlight under the Southern Cross, if he commit it to writing and confide it to the pages of some English review will, within two months, have passed from end to end of the globe: the Europeanized Japanese will be reading it in his garden at Tokio; the colonist will have received it with his weekly mail; it will be on the library tables of England and America. (Schreiner 1923, 94–95)

Published posthumously in Thoughts on South Africa, Schreiner offers here a prescient account (first written in the 1890s) of the “global village” (cf. McLuhan 1962) – as a way, incidentally, of describing the isolation of the Afrikaners from this global conversation. Somewhat akin to Goethe’s conception of a ‘spiritual’ rapprochement through world literature premised on commerce and the emergence of new forms of communication, Schreiner foregrounds technology, media and practice as the prerequisites for this unification of literary space: “[t]he printing-press, the electric telegraph […], and above all, the habit of translating” (94). At the same time, even this vision of a world community of readers is haunted by the colonial seam: Schreiner remains beholden to an imperial vocabulary both of progress and “the civilized world” to make her point, which entailed racialised and violent exclusions of entire swathes of humanity. In her posthumous and unfinished novel, From Man to Man, Schreiner would prove to be acutely aware of the global dimensions of this violence (cf. 2015 [1926], 150–187; Helgesson 2018), but it was one of her younger contemporaries, Solomon Plaatje (1876–1932), who bore the full brunt of it in his wide and varied literary practice. By now a figure of legendary stature as a founding father of modern South Africa (↗13 Decolonizing World Literature through Orality), Plaatje worked restlessly as a translator, editor, journalist, writer, activist, linguist and author of the first southern African novel in English by a black writer, Mhudi (published in 1930 but completed already in 1920). He was a founding member of the ANC (then the SANNC) and served as its first General Secretary. Besides struggling for the rights of Africans in South

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Africa, one of his consistent ambitions was to secure the recognition and viability of his first language Setswana as a modern literary language. This is where the world literary dimension of his activities comes into view. Not only did he translate Shakespeare into Setswana (cf. Schalkwyk and Lapula 2000; Seddon 2004) – he was also at one point active on the publishing scene in London. He contributed a short piece to the high-profile publication A Book of Homage to Shakespeare (1916; cf. Helgesson and Kullberg 2018) and, more importantly, published a slim volume called Sechuana Proverbs with Literal Translations and Their European Equivalents/Diane tsa Secoana le maele a sekgoa a a dumalanang naco (1916). Having gathered 732 Setswana proverbs, Plaatje presented them here alongside his own translations into English and proverbs in seven different European languages (plus English translations from Danish, Arabic, Hebrew and Portuguese) that he, in a comparative and anthropological spirit, saw as equivalent to the Setswana sayings. To take one example, “Se ipelele tsie e fofa” (proverb 620), is presented in the left-hand column, followed by the translation “Do not rejoice over flying locusts” in the middle column. The righthand column, finally, lists “Catch the bear before you talk of skinning it” and “Man muss die Aale nicht verkaufen ehe [sic] man sie gefangen hat” as equivalents (Plaatje 1916, 87), selections which require an act of transcultural and translingual interpretation to become fully legible. Sechuana Proverbs was not widely circulated. It received, apparently, just one review and was not by a long shot regarded at the time as a ‘world literary’ text. Although the reviewer A.W. in African Affairs is favourable and speaks of Plaatje as “the author […] more than a mere compiler” (1917, 183) of the book, it is seen as a contribution to anthropology and Setswana linguistics, not literature. Tragically, one must note that most of Plaatje’s many linguistic, literary and political initiatives were disrupted or skewed by the settler-colonial racist conditions of the Union of South Africa (cf. Willan 2019). And yet, the print artefact of Sechuana Proverbs performs a remarkable prospective world literary gesture of connecting languages and the microgenre of the proverb across colonial divides. The “representational suture” (De Kock 2001, 276) in this instance is, arguably, the notion of ‘equivalence’ itself. Placing the Setswana proverbs first in the order of reading, Plaatje claims an equivalence – of cultural value and poetic force – on behalf of Setswana orality as a response to its threatened status in settler-colonial modernity. This claim is also connected to a wider and vibrant process of literary vernacularisation in a number of southern African languages at the time (cf. Ngugi 2018) which occurred against the backdrop of English as a dominant cosmopolitan language. Plaatje’s choice to present English translations of the proverbs was of course completely overdetermined by the imperial network. This is also where the suture of ‘equivalence’ comes apart and lays bare instead the centre-periphery power relationships of the British Empire. Soberingly, more than a century later, English remains the point of access to Sechuana Proverbs for readers around the world as well as most readers in southern Africa.

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3 Tyrannies of Place In the early 1950s, as settler colonialism still prevailed in Rhodesia and the iron cage of apartheid was being set in place in South Africa, two different novels from southern Africa were enjoying considerable success among readerships in Europe and North America. These were Alan Paton’s Cry, the Beloved Country (1948) and Doris Lessing’s The Grass Is Singing (1950). To say that they were ‘from’ southern Africa belies however the intricacies of their composition and circulation. Paton, who would remain based in South Africa, started writing his novel in Norway, whereas Doris Lessing (1919–2013) wrote her novel in South Rhodesia, shortly before she moved to London. The Grass Is Singing can also be read as a pitiless farewell to a colonial society whose racism and parochialism the author despised, whereas the liberal-romantic register of Cry, the Beloved Country – for all its failings that generations of critics have pointed out (cf. Blair 2012, 482–483) – attempted to imagine a redemptive resolution to the escalating levels of racist oppression in South Africa. Having sold 15 million copies in 20 languages by 1988, it became one of the best-selling South African books ever (cf. Van der Vlies 2007, 72). Whatever their differences, both novels heralded a new era in transnationally mediated perceptions of southern Africa. If prior to the Second World War, the coeval spaces of the ‘West’ and the dominions and colonies of this West were connected also at the level of explicit ideology, the winning of the war in the name of democracy made it impossible for European colonial powers to maintain even the semblance of a justification for colonialism. In the words of Aimé Césaire in his Discourse on Colonialism (1950), Europe was “unable to justify itself either before the bar of ‘reason’ or before the bar of ‘conscience’” (2000, 31; “déférée à la barre de la ‘raison’ comme à la barre de la ‘conscience’, cette Europe-là est impuissante à se justifier”, 2004 [1950], 7). Lessing’s forceful narrative can be read as the settler version of this indictment. Telling the story of the murder of a white woman by an African man, the narrative voice in The Grass Is Singing presents an insider’s damning view of the utterly small-minded, patriarchal and racist white society of South Rhodesia. Read from a world literary angle, it is the relation between Lessing’s narrative mode and the setting that is of particular interest. The novel explicitly adopts southern Africa as its context. Referring to the region mostly as “South Africa”, its historical and geographical coordinates – such as king Lobengula and Mashonaland (cf. Lessing 1972, 14) – place the events in South Rhodesia. Even so, it invokes neighbouring areas such as “Portuguese Territory, Nyasaland, the Union of South Africa” (1972, 14) – all of them under white rule at the time – in a strikingly capacious manner. The novel’s world is a colonial world through and through, and the heterodiegetic narrator interprets this world for the benefit of readers supposedly on the outside: “[t]hus the district handled the Turners, in accordance with that esprit de corps which is the first rule of South African society”; “[w]hen old settlers say ‘One has to understand

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the country’, what they mean is, ‘You have to get used to our ideas about the native’” (1972, 20). But who are these readers on the outside? One obvious answer is that they belong to a geographically unspecified Anglophone literate class, capable of grasping the French term “esprit de corps” and appreciating the novel’s epigraph from T.S. Eliot’s 1922 long poem The Waste Land (from which the novel also culls its title). Rhetorically, Lessing projects her novel in this way into an imagined community of readers for whom southern Africa is a world apart – a world ripe for rejection and condemnation. At the same time, however, the narrator links this colonial world to a shared world. Not only does she insist on the Englishness of the colony, but also on the modular, conventional features of modernity: [T]here are thousands of people in Africa who could be lifted bodily out of their suburb and put into a town on the other side of the world and hardly notice the difference. The suburb is as invincible and fatal as factories, and even beautiful South Africa, whose soil looks outraged by those pretty little suburbs creeping over it like a disease, cannot escape. (Lessing 1972, 53–54)

In a flash, this paragraph inverts the inside-outside logic of The Grass Is Singing. Here it is the comfortably familiar world of the implied reader that is rendered uncanny – “a disease” – and exposes the metropole’s complicity with colonial society. Doris Lessing’s debut novel remains unparalleled as a diagnosis of white colonial pathology – replete with racism, misogyny and sexual neurosis. But such a description also stakes out its Manichean limitations: it subsumes the world of the colonised under a general and ominous sense of otherness. Although the murder of Mary Turner, on a generous reading, would seem to foreshadow the war of liberation – the Second Chimurenga – Moses remains a silent cipher of blackness. He is hardly meant to be read in a realistic register, but even as a symbol he belongs to a tradition that has more in common with Joseph Conrad’s problematic novel The Heart of Darkness than with later African writing. In terms of De Kock’s ‘seam’, it would therefore appear as though The Grass Is Singing is concerned just with one side of the stitching. Hence, as Doris Lessing’s point of entry to an astonishingly successful London-based career, the novel’s world literary stature was achieved at the cost of a residual attachment to colonial discourse. Nadine Gordimer – a Nobel laureate just like Lessing – affords in this regard a striking comparison. As with Schreiner, Lessing and others, her early successes as a South African writer depended on publication abroad, first in The New Yorker and then with publishing houses in London, New York, Berlin and Stockholm. (Her first novel The Lying Days (1953) appeared in 1955 in Swedish and in 1956 in German, whereas the first French translation of Gordimer was published only in 1979.) However, unlike Lessing, Gordimer would remain in southern Africa (in Johannesburg) throughout her long career. This is arguably one reason why the dynamic of the seam plays itself out with greater intensity in Gordimer’s work. Beginning, like Lessing, as a diagnostician of white settler society, her close engagement with black writers and artists, as well as

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with liberation movements in South Africa and elsewhere, would result in a changeable oeuvre with an increasingly thorough African grounding. This enabled her novels to move from the liberal sentiments of A World of Strangers (1956) to the subdued vision of a full-scale revolution in July’s People (1981), a trajectory which, famously, led Stephen Clingman (1986) to consider her work as engaging in Lukácsian fashion with “history from the inside”. Although a few of her more memorable works – such as The House Gun (1998) and No Time Like the Present (2012) – were written after 1994, it is as the central literary voice of the apartheid period she will most likely be remembered. As such a voice – as a writer frequently being assigned such a representative role internationally – the paradoxical construction of apartheid South Africa’s “global isolation” (cf. Jackson 2015) and its position as a distinct province in the world republic of letters becomes evident. Always writing from South Africa, Gordimer’s style typically tended towards “extroversion” (cf. Julien 2006). Even as she, on several occasions, was subject to apartheid censorship (which confirmed her local relevance), she tailored her style less for a national audience than for a generically “non-South African” readership. In July’s People, for example, she provides a long gloss on the term “bakkie” (Gordimer 1981, 5) which was quite superfluous to South African readers – but supposedly necessary for other readers, unless it was completely replaced, as happened in the UK edition of Naudé’s The Alphabet of Birds. A third major writer from this period, Es’kia (Ezekiel) Mphahlele (1919–2008), presents yet another mode of southern African worldliness. If Gordimer wrote from South Africa to the outside world, Mphahlele belonged to a distressingly large group of writers and artists who were compelled to go into exile and whose points of orientation shifted accordingly. Peter Abrahams, Bessie Head, Dennis Brutus, Nat Nakasa, Can Themba, Lewis Nkosi, Alex La Guma, Breyten Breytenbach, Keorapetse Kgositsile and Arthur Nortje are just some of authors for whom it became impossible to prevail under the increasingly hostile political conditions of South Africa. The exodus peaked in the 1960s, the ‘silent decade’ and darkest moment of apartheid, but the effects of these “restless itineraries” which paradoxically made apartheid “an apparatus of transnational cultural production” (Bethlehem 2018, 47, 50; cf. McDonald 2009) haunt southern African literature to this day. In the context of this diaspora, Mphahlele’s trajectory is particularly complicated. Having left South Africa for Nigeria in 1957, he landed smack in the middle of one of the most vibrant literary milieux in all of the African twentieth century: home to the Mbari Club in Ibadan and the legendary journal Black Orpheus, which launched in 1957 and Mphahlele would be closely involved with. Around this time, he completed his now-classic autobiography, Down Second Avenue (1959), which became his first international breakthrough. After some years in Nigeria, he would then spend periods in Paris, Kenya and the USA, always as an important driver in the ongoing developments in African literature (cf. Radithlalo 2012). His book of essays The Image of Africa (published in two rather different versions in 1962 and 1974), known among other

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things for its harsh rejection of négritude, was a key intervention in African literary debates. After nineteen years abroad, however, Mphahlele returned to South Africa in 1978. This was controversial: in 1978, shortly after the Soweto uprising in 1976, the apartheid government was entering its endgame and international calls for the isolation of South Africa were growing progressively stronger (cf. Dubow 2014). But for Mphahlele, it was a matter of personal survival. “Both as teacher and as writer”, as David Attwell phrases it, he had “arrived at the conclusion that he needed a community and a milieu to which he was viscerally attached” (2005, 133). On a number of occasions, Mphahlele would phrase his need for an authentic connection in terms of the “tyranny of place” – a non-negotiable compulsion to know whom he was talking to and what he was writing about. Since fiction demanded that he was “intimately familiar with particulars” he was compelled to “stay with the South African reality” (Mphahlele 1979, 40, 41). Even as his attachment to South Africa was by that time shaped dialectically in relation to numerous other attachments – to other places and communities, as well as to a richly diverse intellectual and literary legacy – the deracination of exile was in his view ultimately deleterious to literary creativity, forcing black South African writers to address “that vaguely defined or non-existent ‘world intelligence’” (Mphahlele 1979, 41). In this dramatic way, Mphahlele presents one of the most complex literary instances of apartheid’s “restlessness” (Bethlehem 2018, 47) by being both exceptionally transnational and inextricably tied to South Africa, under the aegis of an enforced racial belonging whose meaning would shift with every relocation. In that sense, he could also serve as a test case for a revitalised conception of world literature that does not sacrifice the local at the cost of the global, but rather grasps their entanglement as its condition of possibility (↗6 Global Literature, World Literature and Worlding Literature; ↗5 Re-Thinking English Studies). The global trail of Mphahlele’s writings across several decades cannot be contained within a national literary-historical narrative of South Africa – but by the same token, nor can it be accounted for without considering the “tyranny of place” (and tyranny of race) as its main driver. Understanding Mphahlele from a world literary angle would therefore require an engagement with the full gamut of political contexts and literary affinities that shaped his work, but without losing South Africa from view. The seam is in his case visible in this “fugitive” (Attwell 2005, 188) itinerary, which brings diasporic experiences with their multiple refractions of race to bear on the place to which he could never not belong. One of the most pointed moments in the apartheid era’s entanglement of local pressures and literary affiliations can be registered, finally, in a lecture held by J.M. Coetzee, subsequently the most globally successful South African writer ever. In “The Novel Today”, a brief talk delivered at the height of the State of Emergency in the 1980s, Coetzee defended the integrity of novelistic discourse vis-à-vis what he saw as the reductionist logic of political urgencies, or what he called “the colonization of the novel by the discourse of history” (1988a, 3). There was, he claimed, a dominant tendency in South Africa to read novels as “imaginative investigations of real

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historical forces and real historical circumstances” and hence to treat novels that do not perform this duty towards history as “lacking in seriousness” (1988a, 2). Coetzee, who had often been accused in South Africa in the 1980s of political quietism (most famously in a review by Nadine Gordimer, cf. 1984), was an interested party in this debate, but in hindsight it is clear how sharply political he is being here: his argument points to the fundamental capacity of the novel to undermine ideology. For its efficacy, however his argument relies heavily on a conception of the novel as an autonomous, cosmopolitan genre with a (European) history of its own – Aristotle, Cervantes and Kafka figure prominently as authorities underpinning his “fragile metalanguage” that at any moment risks being “flattened and translated” (Coetzee 1988a, 4) by the dominant mode of political discourse. This is where entanglement kicks in: even in its moment of global isolation, South African literature in English could never not be worldly.

4 “V.I. Lenin Bar & Grill Is Opening” The political scene in southern Africa shifted from the mid-1970s onwards. The revolutions in Mozambique and Angola in 1975 sent shockwaves through the South African regime, a scenario that was repeated with Zimbabwe’s independence in 1980. When South African democracy – after painful upheavals – was finally achieved in 1994, one decisive phase of political transformation in the region reached an end. This was followed by the more diffuse but no less dramatic impact of globalisation, which entailed a strengthening of mobile capital at the cost of weaker state power (in contexts where the state, to begin with, already had low legitimacy). In the words of Frenkel and MacKenzie, just as the ‘rainbow nation’ was finally free to become a united nation, it was exposed to a world in which instant global communication and purchasing are not merely possible, but increasingly the norm, and in which […] allegiances are often not local so much as transnational. (Frenkel and MacKenzie 2010, 3)

For South African and southern African literature alike, this shift resulted in a diversification of themes and modes. No longer overdetermined by either apartheid or anticolonialism, the new literary output has encompassed, in Frenkel and MacKenzie’s account, “diasporic South African writing […], proletarian disclosures, lyrical existential ruminations, memoir, satire, miracle narratives, and crime stories” (2010, 4). Especially the last genre in the list has proven to be successful in combining global market demand with local grounding, as not least Deon Meyer’s widely translated crime novels show. The ‘transnational allegiances’ shaping southern Africa are also front and centre in novels such as Isthiaq Shukri’s The Silent Minaret (2005) or Imraan Coovadia’s The Wedding (2001) and The Institute for Taxi Poetry (2012).

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As this entire chapter has demonstrated, however, it would be seriously misleading to consider the 1990s as the beginning of global attachments in southern African literature. The question to be asked, instead, is what new kinds of transnationalism and worldliness emerge in this more contemporary phase. In his short story “Propaganda by Monuments” (1996), Ivan Vladislavić offers one hilarious yet profoundly ambiguous version of post-1994 (or rather post-1989) globality. Revolving around an unlikely exchange of letters between the tavern owner Boniface Khumalo in the Gauteng area of South Africa and the Russian civil servant and translator Pavel Grekov, the story delves into the uncanny and paradoxical resonances between post-communism and post-apartheid (cf. Popescu 2003). Eager to revitalise his business in the period of South African transition – the story is set in 1992 – Khumalo latches onto the idea of purchasing a decommissioned Lenin statue from the ex-Soviet Union. In the letter that ends up on Grekov’s desk (presented in the story with Grekov’s annotations in square brackets), Khumalo explains the context: Apartheid is crumpling as you know. Recently you visited a New South Africa to espy trade opportunities. [Trade Missionary to S.A. – check with Grigoriev.] Here is one! I mean business! Fantastical benefits may amount to all of us. V.I. Lenin Bar & Grill is opening (1st May for publicity stunts) with unheard parties and festivities, free booze, braaid sheep [barbecued mutton], cows [beef], chipniks [prostitutes], members of the medias (TV 2 and 3, Mnet [!]), Lucky Dube [sweepstake?], Small Business Development Corporation (SDBC) [Grig?], wide-scale representatives from organizations (SACP, ANC, PAC, ACA, FAWU, MAWU, BAWU, etc. etc.). [Check] It will be a big splash [make a splash – attract much attention] for tourism and international relations. (Vladislavić 1996, 24)

Almost ominously humorous in its exploitation of solecisms and misunderstandings – “chipniks” are a snack, Lucky Dube is a singer – this passage, and “Propaganda by Monuments” as a whole, addresses the evacuation of meaning from language under the pressure of historical change. The signifiers both of Soviet communism and the anti-apartheid struggle are dislodged from their contexts and reshuffled under the auspices of post-communist and post-apartheid globalisation. Lenin is commodified as a sales gimmick; South African liberation movements and trade unions share space with an entrepreneurial organisation. The story is bracketed by scenes that mirror each other: first there is Grekov in Moscow witnessing the removal of a massive head of Lenin, and then there is Khumalo (with Grekov’s letter in his pocket) contemplating the monument to Strijdom – one of apartheid’s architects – in Pretoria, suddenly understanding “how, if not necessarily why, the impossible came to pass” (Vladislavić 1996, 38). Both scenes allegorise history as the dismantling of the signs of authority in two formerly opposed geopolitical poles of the Cold War. The drama of mistranslation that then drives the story becomes, in turn, a figure both of the confusion and open-endedness of political transformation – at the cusp of its usurpation by global capital. Written two decades later, the Zimbabwean-American writer NoViolet Bulawayo’s novel We Need New Names (2013; ↗14 Intermediality and Remediation) also exploits

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the rift between signifiers and their signifieds within asymmetrical transnational relations. Now, however, the “combined and uneven development” (cf. WReC 2015) of the post-1989 global order is a given and no longer just a potential outcome, as it was in Vladislavić’s story. Being ultimately a story about the protagonist Darling’s migration, the novel is divided between its first half, set in an unnamed but identifiable Zimbabwe at a time of mounting crisis under Robert Mugabe’s leadership, and the second, American part. The two halves are distinct also in a formal sense, with the first part voiced by a naivistic Darling-as-child and the second, still in Darling’s first-person voice, offering a more realistic and knowing account of America. Ashleigh Harris has called this structure “awkward”, “as a signal of how the changes in scale and composition entailed in writing Africa for the world put pressure on the existing literary forms and vocabularies so that a new, not yet articulate, literary form emerges” (2020, 52). A far more negative assessment was first articulated by the Nigerian writer Helon Habila (2013) and later reiterated by Silindiwe Sibanda, who dismisses the first half as “poverty porn” that utilises “portrayals of blackness that are consistent with white constructions thereof” (2018, 76–77; cf. Neumann and Rippl 2017; Ngugi 2018, 170–175). It is hard to square Sibanda’s claim that Bulawayo “denud[es] her characters of any vestiges of pride” (2018, 77) with what we actually read in the novel’s humorous and darkly ironic account of a childhood under duress, but both this assessment and Harris’s “awkwardness” need to be read in the context of We Need New Names’ success as a contemporary ‘Afropolitan’ novel in western circulation. As long as publishers in Europe and North America remain the most important conduit for African writers who ‘make it’ internationally, the image and position of ‘Africa’ in this global circuit will continue to be problematic despite (or perhaps precisely because of) the new prominence and proliferation of Anglophone African authors in the postmillennial era.

5 Conclusion Between Olive Schreiner’s need to defend her poetics of “grey pigments” and the controversies surrounding Bulawayo’s We Need New Names, southern African literature in English has undergone a breathtakingly drastic succession of historical transformations. From the extremely limited literary production in the 1880s and dearth of local publishing opportunities, the ensuing 140 years have witnessed the accumulation of a formidable body of writing and the consecration of three of its authors as Nobel laureates: Nadine Gordimer, J.M. Coetzee and Doris Lessing (who, despite her long life in London, chose to manifest her southern African connection in her Nobel lecture). Moreover, what began as settler literature, or “white writing” by authors “no longer European, not yet African” (Coetzee 1988b, 11) has become a literature which, for all its remaining unevenness, is authored from a wide social spectrum

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of entangled, local relations which cut across boundaries of race, class, gender and sexual orientation. In this long process of diversification, also its critical reception has undergone sea-changes in recent decades, all of which makes – as discussed at the beginning of this chapter – attempts at neatly contained accounts of southern African literature impossible. Having said so, both Schreiner’s The Story of an African Farm (first published in London) and the split reception of We Need New Names (first published in London and New York) point to how southern African Anglophone literature, across the centuries, has been conditioned by the gatekeeping authority of publishers and readers in the West – not least because the number of book readers, even today, remains relatively small in the region. This, in turn, has often meant that the distinctiveness of southern African literature has been shaped in relation to its geographically remote centres of publication and reception, a predicament acutely identified already in Schreiner’s account of the “global interchange of thought” (1923, 94). As Harris points out (cf. 2020, 53) the vernacular specificity of naming in We Need New Names – Darling, Fraction, Godknows – hovers therefore undecidably between verifiable authenticity and a generically defamiliarising exoticism, marketable according to the logic of “the postcolonial exotic” (cf. Huggan 2001). It would be a mistake to allow this to detract from the worlding potential of this literature, since publishing infrastructures will never fully determine the signifying potential of what actually is published. But contrary to Pheng Cheah’s somewhat idealistic understanding of the literary text as capable of asserting its autonomy from capitalist globalisation by fiat, reading southern African literature as a world literature requires a dual optic by which its worlding in an aesthetic and formal sense is conceived dialectically in relation to its material circumstances of production and circulation. The governing concept-metaphor used to grasp this doubleness has in this chapter been the ‘seam’: context and signification, poetics and production are in other words not possible to separate from one another in our approach to this literature. It is rather their constantly shifting mutual relationships – the meandering of the seam – that need to be accounted for. On such an understanding, southern African literature in English, from Schreiner and Plaatje to Mphahlele, Vladislavić and Bulawayo, provides a powerful lens through which to explore world literature.

6 Bibliography 6.1 Works Cited A.W. “[Review of] Sechuana Proverbs.” African Affairs 62 (1917): 183–184. Attridge, Derek, and David Attwell, eds. The Cambridge History of South African Literature. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012.

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Attwell, David. Rewriting Modernity: Studies in Black South African Literary History. Scottsville: UKZN Press, 2005. Beecroft, Alexander. An Ecology of World Literature. London: Verso, 2015. Bethlehem, Louise. “Restless Itineraries: Antiapartheid Expressive Culture and Transnational Historiography.” Social Text 36.3 (2018): 47–69. Blair, Peter. “The Liberal Tradition.” The Cambridge History of South African Literature. Ed. Derek Attridge and David Attwell. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012. 474–499. Bulawayo, NoViolet. We Need New Names. London: Chatto and Windus, 2013. Césaire, Aimé. Discours sur le colonialisme. Paris: Présence Africaine, 2004 [1950]. Césaire, Aimé. Discourse on Colonialism. Trans. Joan Pinkham. New York: Monthly Review Press, 2000. Chapman, Michael. Southern African Literatures. London: Longman, 1996. Cheah, Pheng. “World Against Globe: Toward a Normative Conception of World Literature.” New Literary History 45.3 (2014): 303–329. Clingman, Stephen. The Novels of Nadine Gordimer: History from the Inside. London: Allen and Unwin, 1986. Coetzee, J.M. “The Novel Today.” Upstream 6.1 (1988a): 2–5. Coetzee, J.M. White Writing: On the Culture of Letters in South Africa. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1988b. Damrosch, David. What Is World Literature? Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2003. De Kock, Leon. “South Africa in the Global Imaginary: An Introduction.” Poetics Today 22.2 (2001): 263–298. Dubow, Saul. Apartheid 1948–1994. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014. Frenkel, Ronit, and Craig MacKenzie. “Conceptualizing ‘Post-Transitional’ Literature in English.” English Studies in Africa 53.1 (2010): 1–10. Gordimer, Nadine. July’s People. London: Jonathan Cape, 1981. Gordimer, Nadine. “The Idea of Gardening.” The New York Review of Books (2 Feb. 1984): 3–6. Gray, Stephen. Southern African Literature: An Introduction. Cape Town: David Philip, 1979. Habila, Helon. “We Need New Names by NoViolet Bulawayo – Review.” The Guardian (20 June 2013). https://www.theguardian.com/books/2013/jun/20/need-new-names-bulawayo-review (27 Jan. 2020). Harris, Ashleigh. Afropolitanism and the Novel: De-Realizing Africa. Oxon: Routledge, 2020. Helgesson, Stefan. Transnationalism in Southern African Literature: Modernists, Realists, and the Inequality of Print Culture. New York: Routledge, 2009. Helgesson, Stefan. “How Writing Becomes (World) Literature: Singularity, the Universalizable, and the Implied Writer.” Institutions of World Literature: Writing, Translation, Markets. Ed. Stefan Helgesson and Pieter Vermeulen. New York: Routledge, 2016. 23–38. Helgesson, Stefan. “Radical Time in (Post)Colonial Narratives.” The Ethos of History: Time and Responsibility. Ed. Stefan Helgesson and Jayne Svenungsson. Oxford: Berghahn, 2018. 144–159. Helgesson, Stefan, and Christina Kullberg. “Translingual Events: World Literature and the Making of Language.” Journal of World Literature 3.2 (2018): 136–152. Hofmeyr, Isabel, and Liz Gunner. “Introduction: Transnationalism and African Literature.” Scrutiny2 10.2 (2005): 3–14. Huggan, Graham. The Postcolonial Exotic: Marketing the Margins. London: Routledge, 2001. Jackson, Jeanne-Marie. South African Literature’s Russian Soul: Narrative Forms of Global Isolation. London: Bloomsbury, 2015. Julien, Eileen. “The Extroverted African Novel.” The Novel, vol. 1: History, Geography, and Culture. Ed. Franco Moretti. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2006. 667–700.

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Lessing, Doris. The Grass Is Singing. London: Michael Joseph, 1972 [1950]. McDonald, Peter D. The Literature Police: Apartheid Censorship and Its Cultural Consequences. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009. McLuhan, Marshall. The Gutenberg Galaxy: The Making of Typographic Man. London: Routledge, 1962. Mphahlele, Es’kia. “Exile, the Tyranny of Place and the Literary Compromise.” Unisa English Studies 17.1 (1979): 37–44. Naudé, S.J. The Alphabet of Birds. London: And Other Stories, 2015. Naudé, S.J., and Ivan Vladislavić. “S.J. Naudé and Ivan Vladislavić in Conversation.” Granta Online Edition (12 December 2014). https://granta.com/in-conversation-naude-vladislavic/ (11 Jan. 2020). Neumann, Birgit, and Gabriele Rippl. “Celebrating Afropolitan Identities? Contemporary African World Literatures in English.” Special issue Anglophone World Literatures. Anglia 135.1 (2017): 159–185. Ngugi, Mukoma wa. The Rise of the African Novel: Politics of Language, Identity, and Ownership. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2018. Plaatje, Solomon T. Sechuana Proverbs with Literal Translations and Their European Equivalents/ Diane tsa Secoana le maele a sekgoa a a dumalanang naco. London: Kegan Paul, 1916. Popescu, Monica. “Translations: Lenin’s Stature, Post-Communism and Post-Apartheid.” The Yale Journal of Criticism 16.2 (2003): 406–423. Pratt, Mary L. Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and Transculturation. London: Routledge, 1992. Pucherová, Dobrota. The Ethics of Dissident Desire in Southern African Writing. Trier: Wissenschaftlicher Verlag, 2011. Raditlhalo, Tlhalo. “Writing in Exile.” The Cambridge History of South African Literature. Ed. Derek Attridge and David Attwell. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012. 410–428. Rive, Richard. “Introduction.” The Story of an African Farm. By Olive Schreiner. Johannesburg: Ad Donker, 1975. 7–20. Schalkwyk, David, and Lerothodi Lapula. “Solomon Plaatje, William Shakespeare, and the Translations of Culture.” Pretexts 9.1 (2000): 10–26. Schreiner, Olive. Thoughts on South Africa. London: Unwin, 1923. Schreiner, Olive. The Story of an African Farm. Johannesburg: Ad Donker, 1975 [1883]. Schreiner, Olive. From Man to Man, or Perhaps Only. Cape Town: UCT Press, 2015 [1926]. Seddon, Deborah. “Shakespeare’s Orality: Solomon Plaatje’s Setswana Translations.” English Studies in Africa 47.2 (2004): 77–95. Sibanda, Silindiwe. “Ways of Reading Blackness: Exploring Stereotyped Constructions of Blackness in NoViolet Bulawayo’s We Need New Names.” Journal of Literary Studies 34.3 (2018): 74–89. Van der Vlies, Andrew. South African Textual Cultures: White, Black, Read all Over. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2007. Vladislavić, Ivan. Propaganda by Monuments and Other Stories. Cape Town: David Philip, 1996. Warwick Research Collective (WReC). Combined and Uneven Development: Towards a New Theory of World-Literature. Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2015. Willan, Brian. Sol Plaatje: A Life of Solomon Tshekiso Plaatje, 1876–1932. Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2019.

6.2 Further Reading Barnard, Rita. Apartheid and Beyond: South African Writers and the Politics of Place. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006.

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Barnard, Rita, and Andrew van der Vlies, eds. South African Writing in Transition. London: Bloomsbury, 2019. De Kock, Leon. Losing the Plot: Crime, Reality and Fiction in Postapartheid Writing. Johannesburg: Wits University Press, 2016. Muchemwa, Kizita, and Robert Muponde, eds. Manning the Nation: Father Figures in Zimbabwean Literature and Society. Harare: Weaver Press, 2007. Muponde, Robert, and Ranka Primorac, eds. Versions of Zimbabwe: New Approaches to Literature and Culture. Harare: Weaver Press, 2005 Peterson, Bhekizizwe. Monarchs, Missionaries and African Intellectuals: African Theater and the Unmaking of Colonial Marginality. Trenton: Africa World Press, 2000. Samuelson, Meg. Remembering the Nation, Dismembering Women? Stories of the South African Transition. Scottsville: UKZN Press, 2007. Van der Vlies, Andrew, ed. Print, Text and Book Cultures in South Africa. Johannesburg: Wits University Press, 2012. Van der Vlies, Andrew. Present Imperfect: Contemporary South African Writing. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017. Van Wyk Smith, Malvern. Grounds of Contest: A Survey of South African Literature. Kenwyn: Jutalit, 1990.

Harry Garuba and Christopher E.W. Ouma

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Abstract: David Damrosch’s conception of world literature as “literary works that circulate beyond their culture of origin” (2003, 4) has become an influential perspective in thinking about world literature. However, this circulation model, a major conceptual approach to the question of world literature remains problematic in many respects, not least because of its presumption that “culture of origin” is a stable reference point. In addition to this is the fact that it also ignores the important factor of the writing/production of texts, especially in non-metropolitan contexts. Eileen Julien has argued (cf. 2006) that the novels that make up the canon of modern African literature are outwardly oriented, largely addressed to audiences beyond their “cultures of origin”, a view that has been taken up in connection with literatures in other, non-Anglophone parts of the world. Martin Kern, focusing mainly on Chinese poetry, suggests a useful addition to Damrosch’s circulation model: “World Literature is not only a mode of reading (ideally in Goethe’s productive intuition as reader), that is, reception; it is also a mode of creative composition. World Literature can be written” (Kern 2017/2018, 11; emphasis in original). Following upon Julien’s and Kern’s arguments, this chapter explores the discursive construction of West African literature as world literature; it argues that written into its constitution at the moment of its emergence is an unmistakable opening to a world beyond the nation-state and the African continent. Key Terms: West African literature, world literature, postcolonial theory, global discourses, Afropolitanism, environmentalism

1 Introduction: African Textuality and the World Before the publication of Christopher Okigbo’s collection of poems, his Heinemann publishers asked him to write an introduction to the volume to clarify the contexts and backgrounds that inform the poems. Though the sequence of poems had been published separately in small magazines and chapbooks, the publishers felt that the much discussed difficulties of the poems, with their many allusions and intertextual Harry Garuba, Poet and Professor of English and African Studies at UCT, passed away on Friday the 28th of February 2020. Before joining the University of Cape Town, Harry worked at the English Department, University of Ibadan, as well as the University of Zululand. Harry’s scholarly work has ranged from Black Studies, Postcolonialism and Modernism to the connections between African literature and World Literature. He served for many years as the Director of African studies at the University of Cape Town and more recently as the acting Dean of the Faculty of Humanities. https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110583182-027

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references, demanded an introductory statement to serve as a map and guide for readers. Okigbo obliged. Here is an excerpt from his introduction that focuses on the sub-section “Lament of the Silent Sisters” from the sequence entitled “Silences”: The “Silent Sisters” are, however, sometimes like the drowning Franciscan nuns of Hopkins’ The Wreck of the Deutschland, sometimes like the “Sirenes” of Debussy’s Nocturne – two dissonant dreams associated in the dominant motif “NO in thunder” (from one of Melville’s letters to Hawthorne). This motif is developed by a series of related airs from sources as diverse as Malcolm Cowley, Raja Ratnam, Stephane Mallarmé, Rabindranath Tagore, García Lorca and the yet unpublished Peter Thomas – airs which enable the “Silent Sisters” to evoke, quite often by calling wolf, consonant tunes in life and letters. Section I, for instance, erects an illusion, a storm-tossed ship at mid-sea. The image of drowning virgins, and the dream of ultimate martyrdom are, however, also present. The illusion is enlarged by the motif of carrion-comfort (from one of Hopkins’ poems). (Okigbo 1986, 8)

In this partial list of the range of resonances and echoes that this one poem evokes, Okigbo is signaling the multiple ways in which this lament inspired by the local context of the crisis in Western Nigeria in 1962 and the murder of the nationalist leader of the Congo, Patrice Lumumba, is cast on a world-wide plane that draws in a French composer, French, Spanish, American, Indian poets and writers. And, as if these were not enough, he tells us that “Labyrinths”, the title of the combined sequences that make up this collection of poems, “may suggest Minos’ legendary palace at Cnossus, but the double headed axe is as much a symbol of sovereignty in traditional Ibo society as in Crete. Besides, the long and tortuous passage to the shrine of the “long-juju” of the Aro Ibos may perhaps, best be described as a labyrinth” (1986, 9). Furthermore, he reiterates that the poet-protagonist of Labyrinths is “a personage however, much larger than Orpheus; one with a load of destiny on his head, rather like Gilgamesh, like Aeneas, like the hero of Herman Melville’s Moby-Dick, like the Fisher King of Eliot’s Waste Land; a personage for whom the progression through ‘Heavensgate’ through ‘Limits’ through ‘Distances’ is like telling the beads of a rosary; except that the beads are neither stone nor agate but globules of anguish strung together on memory” (Okigbo 1986, 10). It is easy to recognize the modernist allusiveness of these poems as well as their overwhelming intertextual thrust aimed at showing an awareness of literature and literary traditions in various parts of the world. And, indeed, critics have spent much time and effort itemizing and detailing the various sources of Okigbo’s endless echoes and intertextual references (cf. Anozie 1972; Nwoga 1984; Nwakanma 2010). However, what these quotations from the introduction to Labyrinths emphasize is that long before the current resurgence of ‘world literature’ as a field of disciplinary attention (↗2 Re-reading Classical Approaches from a Postcolonial Perspective; ↗5 Rethinking English Studies), and long before the recent, celebrated visibility of West African writers on the global stage, West African literature, as much of modern African literature, has almost always been motivated by an imperative to plot its texts on a world literary map and construct a form of worldliness in which the local is inserted into the global through the use of various strategies and techniques of enunciation. Okigbo’s

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introduction here is not simply a question of name-dropping but an attempt to map the global inspiration behind the poems and the world-wide reach of the references the poems evoke. It speaks to a strategic positioning that was not only adopted by modernist writers of the late colonial and early, postcolonial period, it was in fact at the root of the making of African letters. As Abiola Irele remarks in “Dimensions of African Discourse”: “The most striking aspect of African discourse is of course its character as a movement of contestation […]. The point that emerges from this aspect of African discourse is its strongly articulated sense of historical grievance” (2001, 68–69). It is therefore important to recognize from the onset that long before the emergence of modern West African literature, this region of the world was already a forest of textuality, so to speak, much of which had been cultivated as part of Eurocentric discourses on Africa. African writing was thus strategically positioned to intervene and reconfigure the dominant tropes within this pre-existent field of textuality. Following Edward Said’s articulation of it in his classic text Orientalism (1978), Africa was already an imaginative geography long before modern West African literature emerged. Describing the textual attitude, Said elaborates: Many travelers find themselves saying of an experience in a new country that it wasn’t what they expected, meaning that it wasn’t what a book said it would be. And, of course, many writers of travel books or guidebooks compose them in order to say that a country is like this, or better, that it is colorful, expensive, interesting, and so forth. The idea in either case is that people, places and experiences can always be described by a book, so much so that the book (or text) acquires a greater authority and use, even than the actuality it describes. (Said 1979, 93)

If we think of a textual territory as a place, an area or region of the world about which so much has been written and disseminated that the texts acquire priority and authority over the reality of the place itself, then Africa qualifies as one such places in the world. A high degree of textualization often makes it impossible to see the place objectively, without the lens of previous images and texts interfering with your perception of it. And much of this regime of textuality in Africa was defined by difference and othering, as V.Y. Mudimbe ably demonstrates in his book The Invention of Africa (1988). It is within this context that Irele’s observation that the most striking aspect of African discourse makes ample sense. The phenomenal success of recent West African writers on the literary capitals of Europe and North America may have created the impression that for West African literature, insertion on a world stage, began with these new writers and writing. Or, at least, that this new visibility is markedly different from what generated international recognition for an earlier generation of African writers, as this time around it has been consecrated within the prize-economy of prestige (cf. English 2005) and the multiple figure book contracts that West African writers have received, among others. The recent emergence of Afropolitanism as a conceptual enunciation of an African way of being in the world (Achille Mbembe, Taiye Selasi, Chizelona Aze, Amatoritsero

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Ede, etc.) and the emphasis on mobility, migration and diasporization which converges so neatly with the new circulation models of world literature, may have helped to consolidate this impression and made it more appealing. This appears to be the position adopted, for example, by James Hodapp, in his edited book Afropolitan Literature as World Literature (2020). While there is some market-merit to these arguments, this position needs to be placed in historical context and understood in relation to the practices of earlier writers who attempted to write world literature by deploying a variety of strategies for inserting themselves into a world literary map. From the strategic positioning adopted by these earlier writers, it is possible to trace a continuum of conversation that begins in the nineteenth century and runs right through to the writers of the new millennium. In this regard, it is also important to recall Simon Gikandi’s statement in “African Literature and the Colonial Factor” that: Modern African literature was produced in the crucible of colonialism. What this means, among other things, is that the men and women who founded the tradition of what we now call modern African writing were, without exception, products of the institutions that colonialism had introduced and developed on the continent, especially in the period beginning with the Berlin Conference of 1884–5 and decolonization in the late 1950s and early 1960s. (Gikandi 2000, 379)

And as products of the institutions that colonialism established on the continent, one of the circuits of value (cf. Garuba and Benge 2017) in which their works circulated, were read and evaluated as closely affiliated to the dominant discourses of modernity, colonialism and empire and the textual and disciplinary practices of missionary writing, travel writing and anthropology. Within this circuit of value, the question of strategic positioning was highly significant, as it was one of the ways in which West African writing tended to simultaneously inscribe and transcend its local context. By inserting their texts into already established discursive terrains, they acquired immediate intelligibility within various interpretive communities and, from this vantage point, they initiated their push for agency within these discourses. This dual approach is close to what Pascale Casanova implied in her argment about the ways in which ‘small’ literatures gain recognition in the world republic of letters. Two great families of strategies supply the foundation of all struggles within national literary spaces. On the one hand there is assimilation, or integration within a dominant literary space through a dilution or erasure of original differences; on the other, differentiation, which is to say the assertion of difference, typically on the basis of a claim to national identity. (Casanova 2004, 179)

For West African writers, however, the choice between the binary of assimilation or assertion of difference was not an appealing option. Rather, the chosen path was to be strategically positioned with the dominant discourse and from there initiate new agentive practices.

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Damrosch’s conception of world literature as “literary works that circulate beyond their culture of origin” (2003, 4) has become an influential perspective in thinking about world literature. However, this circulation model remains highly problematic in many respects, not least because of its presumption that “culture of origin” is a stable, easily determined reference point. In addition to this is the fact that it ignores the very important factor of the writing/production of texts, especially in non-metropolitan contexts. Eileen Julien (cf. 2006) has argued in “The Extroverted African Novel” that the novels that make up the canon of modern African literature are outwardly oriented, largely addressed to audiences beyond their “cultures of origin”. For her, this is not simply a question of travel and circulation and gaining in value as they move, but one of composition, a way of writing. Speaking of the African novel, she says: “What African readers and readers beyond Africa think of typically as the African novel is, I submit, a particular type of narrative characterized above all by its intertextuality with hegemonic and global discourses and its appeal beyond borders” (679; emphasis added). This is what she refers to as the quality of extroversion inherent in African writing: I submit, then, that “the African novel” is recognized as such precisely because it is characterized by extroversion and engagement with what is assumed to be European or global discourses: surrealism, primitivism, magical realism, the motifs of postcolonial theory (hybridity, exile, marginalization, dislocation) or areas of inquiry and theory integral to the social sciences such as Marxism, feminism, democratization and governance, the politics of the state and globalization. (Julien 2006, 685)

In short, Julien is elaborating on the many ways in which African writers tend to insert their works into global discourses at the moment of composition rather than circulation. It is also helpful to note that the global discourses she identifies range from the literary/aesthetic through the thematic and theoretical to the empirical and disciplinary. This argument about inscribing local texts on a global stage is one that has been taken up in connection with literatures and literary ecologies in other, nonAnglophone parts of the world. In “Ends and Beginnings of World Literature”, the Sinologist Martin Kern, focusing mainly on Chinese poetry, suggests a useful addition to Damrosch’s circulation model. After critiquing the ways in which certain forms of Chinese poetry have been rendered in English translation to read like Western nature poetry while they are decidedly not that, he adds: “I would like to suggest an addition: World Literature is not only a mode of reading (ideally in Goethe’s productive intuition as reader), that is, reception; it is also a mode of creative composition. World Literature can be written” (Kern 2017/2018, 11). Following upon Said’s notion of imaginative geographies, Gikandi’s claim about the colonial factor in the making of modern African literature, Irele’s enunciation of the contestatory dimension of African discourse and then Julien’s argument about the extroversion of African literary texts, this chapter would like to explore the idea that

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“World Literature can be written” by asking what strategies and techniques of composition West African writers deploy in their bid to write world literature. The argument has already been made, that written into its constitution at the moment of its emergence is an unmistakable opening to a world beyond the nation-state and the African continent. In exploring the discursive construction of West African literature as world literature, the chapter will be arguing that it all begins with a strategic positioning in relation to the world and that this positioning is then translated into a series of tactical engagements of the authors’ choosing. Julien’s itemization of the points of extroversion and engagement quoted above gives a rough and ready road map to follow in this regard.

2 Primitivism and Modernism The story of the publication of Amos Tutuola’s (↗4 The King’s English and the Mother Tongue) The Palm-Wine Drinkard by Faber and Faber in 1952 and the early reviews in the West has been told so often that it has become a moment of lore in West African literature. With only six years of formal education, this young West African writer had written a prose narrative in English that fitted perfectly well into the “savage slot” in discourses of primitivism. Tutuola was seen as a “genuine primitive” who had written a fantastic narrative in “young English” (Thomas 1952, 7) that was both entertaining and refreshing because it was seen as coming from a writer with neither intellectual ability nor pretense. Tutuola was lauded as a “natural story teller” and received highly complementary reviews in major publications such as The New York Times Review of Books (20 Sep. 1953), The New Yorker (6 Dec. 1953). Though West African critics and intellectuals were initially embarrassed by his work and the very “poor” English in which it was written, they later warmed up to him, emphasizing his style and his mastery of the strategies of oral narratives. This story is important because it showed that Tutuola had been able to gain attention by strategically positioning himself within a major terrain of western discourse – albeit unconsciously – and within that field of legibility, interpretive communities could be convened to take up the question of the nature of his intervention. And this was what Nigerian intellectuals and critics later did. More crucial, in this regard, for these intellectuals, was that the interest in his work was not simply anthropological, it was literary and aesthetic attention, a form of attention that had been cultivated in literature and art by modernism and primitivism. For West African writers, this opening within the domain of literature and art signaled that oral traditions could transcend the domains of folklore and anthropology and become medium and material for artistic expression in the genres of literary writing. The possibility of being seen and treated as ‘Literature’, with a capital L, was key for this emergent literary space, trying to cultivate a culture of letters in writing. A host of West African writers across the region took note and began to look to myth and ritual, oral narratives and indigenous traditions of verbal expression

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for material and inspiration. In poetry and drama, Christopher Okigbo, Wole Soyinka, J.P. Clark, Ola Rotimi, Femi Osofisan (Nigeria), Kofi Awoonor, Atukwei Okai, Kofi Anyidoho, Efua Sutherland (Ghana) – to use examples from two Anglophone countries – began more consciously to cultivate oral material as source and a constitutive element of a new modernist aesthetic. As argued elsewhere, after having positioned themselves within this discourse, they sought to transform it by inscribing within it a new politics of time. Using the image of the hologram rather than the palimpsest, Garuba described the nature of this intervention in this manner: Adopting the modernistic technique of the multi-layered poem or narrative, these writers basically re-wrote this idiom not only by the introduction of what, for the moment, we may call authentically African material at the level of content but also at the level of technique, they reworked it away from the disabling politics of time encoded in artistic modernism. As Johannes Fabian so convincingly argues in Time and the Other, in terms of the linear calibrations of modernist time, the Other was always located downstream, as it were, at the evolutionary beginnings, outside of the modern present. If the model of the modernist aesthetic was archaeological, invoking layers of a buried past, the aspiration of the modernist-nationalist poets was somewhat different; their model – to use a different image – was more like the hologram. Instead of depth, they emphasized angles of vision, ways of seeing. (Garuba 2005, 58)

We have already seen how Okigbo in his introductory remarks places classical mythology and a host of historical and modern artists and poets in conversation with present events in his country and the Congo, and his poems were to home in on this. Here is the first poem “The Passage” from the sequence “Heavensgate”: BEFORE you, mother idoto Naked I stand: Before your watery presence, A prodigal leaning on an oilbean, Lost in your legend. Under your power wait I on barefoot watchman for the watchword at Heavensgate; out of the depths my cry: give ear and hearken…

(Okigbo 1986, 3)

In this poem, the traditional ritual of dedicating a child to the village goddess, Idoto, by a stream which bears the same name, is rendered in a liturgical form that simultaneously evokes the Christian baptism, the psalms, the Bible, Shakespeare and so on. This not only speaks to the intertextuality mentioned earlier but, more importantly, the contemporaneousness of them all.

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More recently, speaking specifically of praise for Okigbo in relation to William Butler Yeats and the London literary establishment, Nathan Suhr-Sytsma speaks of the […] approbation of the Times Literary Supplement, when this bastion of literary gatekeeping reviewed W.B. Yeats, 1865–1995 as part of a flurry of Yeats centenary items, the reviewer singled out “a very fine commemorative poem by one of the most brilliant Western African poets now writing in English, Mr Christopher Okigbo.” Here, Okigbo appears not as a national or global writer, but as a transnational figure: a border-crossing “West African” networked into the London literary establishment through Commonwealth-sponsored academic and publishing circuits. (Suhr-Sytsma 2017, 6)

He continues: As so-called high modernism was being retroactively constituted by postwar intellectuals, postcolonial poets were re-animating formal strategies of interwar modernism, like those of “modernist bricolage” in new situations. (Suhr-Sytsma 2017, 8)

In addition to positioning themselves within the global discourse of modernism and rewriting its politics of time, they also adopted the modernist focus on and promotion of aesthetic autonomy. But they deployed it for other uses. According to Peter Kalliney: The prospect of aesthetic autonomy – in particular, the idea that a work of art exists, and circulates, without a specifically racialized character – would be used as a lever by late colonial and postcolonial writers to challenge racial segregation in the fields of cultural production. (Kalliney 2013, 6)

In short, while embracing the modernist aesthetic, they often redeployed it for their own purposes. Modernism provided them with a leg in, so to speak, but rather than choosing between assimilation and assertion of difference as Casanova suggests, they chose a more sophisticated path.

3 The Ethnographic Project, Postcolonial Theory and the Writing Back The recognition of the literary value of orality was highly bolstered by the success of Chinua Achebe’s novel Things Fall Apart (1958) and a whole ethnographic project was initiated in fiction to rewrite and reclaim African culture and traditions. The objective, as Achebe states it, was to foreground a major theme. In “The Role of the Writer in a New Nation”, he says: “This theme – put quite simply – is that Africa did not hear of culture for the first time from Europeans; that their societies were not mindless but frequently had a philosophy of great depth and value and beauty, that they had

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poetry, and, above all, they had dignity” (1989, 8). We should recall that before many modern African writers started writing, a dense textual tradition of the representation of African cultures and traditions as savage and barbaric had been established by colonial discourse (cf. Hammond and Jablow 1992, for instance). West African writers therefore felt a sense of historical responsibility to try to correct these representations. As Achebe again put it in his memorable essay “The Novelist as Teacher”: The writer cannot expect to be excused from the task of re-education and regeneration that must be done. In fact, he should march right in front […] I, for one, would not wish to be excused. I would be quite satisfied if my novels (especially the ones I set in the past) did no more than teach my readers that their past – with all its imperfections – was not one long night of savagery from which the first Europeans acting on God’s behalf delivered them. (Achebe 1989, 45)

When critics such as Simon Gikandi (2001) argue that Achebe invented modern African literature, they are in essence underscoring the epochal significance of this project. The premise upon which the claim is made is that the ethnographic project which Achebe championed in his fiction and his essays was so important and influential that it defined the parameters and criteria for the evaluation of African literature by placing orality and the recuperation of indigenous traditions at the heart of this literary tradition. The rediscovery and retrieval phase of African literature which it initiated and consolidated spread through to other parts of the continent. Again, in keeping with our claim about insertion into dominant global discourses, it is noteworthy to say that similar movements such as the indigenist movement in Latin America were also evolving in other parts of the world. It is also worth noting that Achebe and the more accompanied practitioners always injected new dimensions into this discourse. This is why there have been critiques of the work of the less accomplished imitators who have been accused of pandering to the Western obsession with the “anthropological exotic” (Huggan 2001, 34–57) and of simply engaging in “ornamentalism” (Julien 2006, 669). The sophistication that Achebe brought to his exploration of this theme is one of the reasons why his novels were also used to exemplify some of the major perspectives cultivated by the postcolonial theorists of the 1980s and onwards.

4 Postcolonial Theory and Its Motifs Though the ethnographical project of African fiction was really a way of ‘writing back’ to the centre, it was only with the rise of postcolonial theory and the consolidation of its major motifs that it was so explicitly named. It has always been recognized that Achebe was ‘writing back’ to canonical European texts such as Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness (1902) and that an episode like the road building scene in Arrow of God (1964) was a textual contestation of a similar scene in Joyce Cary’s Mister Johnson

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(1939). That they came to exemplify the ‘writing back’ focus of postcolonial theory when it emerged is not surprising. However, the social realism that had dominated the ethnographic tradition gave way to the “animist realism” (Garuba 2003, 270) of a novel like Ben Okri’s The Famished Road (1991) which, despite its deep immersion in the ethnographic project, was beginning to play with other forms of artistic representation and cultivate the postmodern and postcolonial poetics of instability, uncertainty, dislocation, hybridity and in-betweenness, exile and marginalization. If the earlier incarnation of the ethnographic project was grounded in a certain rootedness, Okri uses tradition – ironically – to stage a new aesthetic of instability and migrancy. This play on roots that cannot hold but are suspended between worlds and spheres of existence is one of the major achievements of Okri’s novel and it signals a move away from the solid essentialism that had characterized the social realist generation of West African writers and writing. The protagonist of Okri’s The Famished Road is an abiku, a spirit child suspended between the worlds of the living and the dead. Abiku – literally, born-to-die in Yoruba – derives from the experience, common in many Nigerian communities, of the repeated deaths of children born to the same mother in the first few months or years of their lives. This led to the belief that these were spirit children who migrated between the world of the living and that of the dead and various kinds of myths and rituals were developed to prevent them from dying and departing to join their colleagues in the world of the dead and returning again to torture the mother and the family. Two major Nigerian writers, Wole Soyinka and J.P. Clark, had written accomplished poems in the 1960s that dealt with the abiku phenomenon, both bearing the title “Abiku”. Soyinka’s dramatic monologue “Abiku” (1967) and Clark’s lyrical rendering of the pain of the mother are well known in Nigerian literary circles and were already prescribed texts in the secondary school curriculum by the 1970s. A commonly held traditional belief of this sort, bolstered by a previous history of literary exploration, provided a good matrix for Okri to explore the major motifs of instability, displacement and migrancy that postcolonial theory had brought to the fore. Tapping into traditional lore, adopting the magical/animist realist form of narration and exploring the issues surfaced in the global discourses of displacement and exile, The Famished Road won the Booker Prize for fiction in 1991. (An interesting afterword to this story is that this year, Ayobami Adebayo’s Stay with Me (2017), a novel that also explores the abiku theme won the 9Mobile Prize for Literature, formerly known as the Etisalat prize. In this later novel, however, the serial mortality of the children is clearly given a ‘scientific’ cause, it is attributed to the sickle cell disease and, in line with this empirical transparency, the narrative idiom adopted is social realist.) Ayobami’s re-figuration of this motif is, to be noted, different from her contemporary Helen Oyeyemi whose novel The Icarus Girl (2005) places the abiku in a migrant/diasporic context which invokes other bases of interpretation (cf. Ouma 2014). At about the same time as the publication of Okri’s novel, the Sierra Leonean writer Syl Cheney-Coker published The Last Harmattan of Alusine Dunbar (1990). This

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epic novel of Sierra Leone dealing with transatlantic slavery, freedom, migration, return and resettlement – I believe – has not received the amount of critical attention it deserves. However, speaking of global literary movements and idioms, it is arguable that the huge success of magical realism and novels such as Gabriel García Márquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude (1967) and Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children (1981) would have served as inspiration for this novel as well as Okri’s.

5 Afropolitanism Although Ben Okri was already in the England and Cheney-Coker was already away from Sierra Leone and living in Nigeria when their novels were written, they were still some time away from the full flourishing of the Afropolitan perspective. In her 2005 article “Bye Bye Babar”, Taiye Selasi describes what it means to be Afropolitan: [W]e are Afropolitans – the newest generation of African emigrants […]. You’ll know us by our funny blend of London fashion, New York jargon, African ethics, and academic successes. Some of us are ethnic mixes, e.g. Ghanaian and Canadian, Nigerian and Swiss; others merely cultural mutts: American accent, European affect, African ethos. Most of us are multilingual: in addition to English and a Romantic [sic] or two, we understand some indigenous tongue and speak a few urban vernaculars. There is at least one place on The African Continent to which we tie our sense of self: be it a nation-state (Ethiopia), a city (Ibadan), or an auntie’s kitchen. Then there’s the G8 city or two (or three) that we know like the backs of our hands, and the various institutions that know us for our famed focus. We are Afropolitans: not citizens, but Africans of the world. (Selasi 2005, n.pag.)

Writing at about the same time, Achille Mbembe describes Afropolitanism as “a way of being in the world, refusing on principle any form of victim identity” (2007, 29), mobile, cosmopolitan, untethered in the old ways to the rootedness of place, nation and identity that supposedly had defined African writing. In the introduction to his edited book of essays entitled Afropolitan Literature as World Literature, James Hodapp says: The major works of Afropolitanism such as Adichie’s Americanah, Cole’s Open City and Selasie’s Ghana Must Go are novels set mainly in the US about well-educated Africans and their ability to move in and out of Africa and the US as they please. The characters are not without their struggles, but being African outside of Africa is not an existential conundrum for them. For many critics of Afropolitanism (and world literature), this too easy global Africanness elides the struggles Africans continue to experience in the West as well as overlooks the lived realities of the majority of Africans living in Africa who cannot simply move around the world. (Hodapp 2020, 4)

The focus on mobility and migration that appears to characterise the major texts of Afropolitan literature has been critiqued by many and Hodapp’s book features some of these critiques. However, our focus is neither on the claims of the protagonists nor the critiques, the objective is to highlight the ways in which these writers of the

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Afropolitan moment have found a discursive opening in the field of interest and inquiry opened up by migration and globalization and located their works within that space. Afropolitan literature is clearly affiliated in many ways to the dominant discourses of migration and globalization. In a real sense, the Afropolitan attempt to write world literature is no different from the efforts of the earlier West African modernist writers discussed in this chapter. In fact, it fits into the pattern of strategic positioning and tactical engagements we have been trying to describe. There can be no doubt that – unlike the writers of an earlier generation such as Achebe, Soyinka, Ayi Kwei Armah, etc. – many West African writers now live and write from Western locations. In the wake of the economic crisis of the 1980s and the IMF and World Bank enforced policies of structural adjustment adopted by many West African countries, there was widespread disillusionment that was not helped by the brutality, corruption and venality of the ruling elites. The austerity measures adopted by many West African countries led to the collapse of education and the public health sector, among others, and professionals from these sectors began the slow trail of migration to other parts of the world that was to become a rush for the gates as conditions deteriorated. A Nigerian joke of that time was that since the IMF encouraged exports and an export orientation in the economy, those who had no goods to export decided to export themselves. With the collapse of the Soviet empire, the crisis in Eastern Europe and the fall of the Berlin wall, people in various parts of the world also became voluntarily and involuntarily self-exporting, to appropriate the Nigerian joke. This mass movement of peoples brought global attention to the question of displacement and migration and opened a discursive space for serious inquiry into questions of nation/home and diaspora that had previously not received much attention. However, Selasi traces the historical roots of the Afropolitan generation to a much earlier moment before the mass migration that began in the 1980s: It isn’t hard to trace our genealogy. Starting in the 60’s, the young, gifted and broke left Africa in pursuit of higher education and happiness abroad. A study conducted in 1999 estimated that between 1960 and 1975 around 27,000 highly skilled Africans left the Continent for the West. Between 1975 and 1984, the number shot to 40,000 and then doubled again by 1987, representing about 30% of Africa’s highly skilled manpower. Unsurprisingly, the most popular destinations for these emigrants included Canada, Britain, and the United States; but Cold War politics produced unlikely scholarship opportunities in Eastern Bloc countries like Poland, as well. (Selasi 2005, n.pag.)

It is important to make a distinction between the phenomenon of migration and mobility itself and the opening of the discursive space for new representations and performances of Afropolitanism, such as those she identifies. For her, the new Afropolitans are the children of the generation that migrated in the 1960s and 1970s. Since many of those West Africans who left in the 1960s and 1970s often travelled for education and better opportunities of social and economic mobility, it needs to be said that a good many of them returned. In general, they did not seek permanent expatriation.

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That was a phenomenon that occurred after the collapse. This is why we need to affirm that the failures of the nation-state which reached its heights from the 1980s onwards made it impossible to hold on to the dreams that nationalism had nurtured during the anti-colonial struggle. The collapse also made it intellectually possible to dream new worlds, in which the acceptance of diasporization rather than a rooting for return would become normative. To appropriate Hodapp’s words, the journey from initial departure to the point where being African outside of Africa was no longer an existential conundrum, was not simply a question of the history of mobility but also one of the cultivation of a discourse and an intellectual category. The transnational thrust of postcolonial studies had made the idea of in-betweenness, of mixture, of creoleness and hybridity, a cause for celebration rather than a source of nostalgia for rootedness and return. While Hodapp’s collection signals to a transatlantic conceptualization of this term based on Selasi’s essay, Achille Mbembe’s focus on continental mobility in relation to this concept points us to a slightly different focus and logic on mobility (cf. Sarah Balakrishnan 2017). Mbembe’s shift in focus brings to attention novels such as Yewande Omotoso’s Bomboy (2011) or the fiction of Zukiswa Wanner. It was within this discursive opening that Afropolitanism found voice. In addition to the writers’ self-positioning within this discursive opening, it must be said that the increasing importance and influence of prizes and awards in the literary world also played a role in introducing these new writers to a transnational if not global audience. Prizes and awards have thus also become one avenue through which West African writers acquire audiences that may be said to be global because of their international visibility. The Caine Prize of African Writing for instance or the Commonwealth Short Story Prize have created their own ecologies of world literary value and with that ways in which West African Writers have strategically positioned themselves. Many, if not all, of the Afropolitan writers have either won or been nominated for these awards. While these awards draw attention to the authors and their books, some of these authors have also been quite adept at using the Internet and social media platforms to acquire even greater visibility than the prizes generate. The strategic positioning of Afropolitan writers thus combines the prize economy of prestige (cf. English 2005; Kiguru 2016) and the Internet economy of visibility.

6 Global Themes: Child Soldiers, Environmental and Ecocritical Discourses Ken Saro-Wiwa has become best known as the writer and environmental activist who brought international attention to the plight of the Ogoni people of the Niger Delta. Less well known is the fact that his writing was also a precursor to a theme that was to gain international attention after the civil wars that ravaged several West African countries such as Liberia, Sierra Leone and later Ivory Coast from the late 1980s

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onwards – the phenomenon of child soldiers. Saro-Wiwa’s Sozaboy: A Novel in Rotten English (1985), set in the time of the Nigerian civil war (1967–1970), explores the life of a child soldier protagonist. Understandably, having been published before interest in the child soldier narrative took off, the critical reception of the novel largely concentrated on the “rotten English” of the child-protagonist and narrator of the novel. But by the time Uzodinma Iweala’s novel Beasts of No Nation (2005) and Ishmael Beah’s Long Way Gone: Memoirs of a Child Soldier (2007) were published, the theme of the child soldier had become one through which West African writers could aim for a world audience. And in short stories, poems, fictions and memoirs, many did. Perhaps the best illustration of the story of global discourses and strategic positioning that this chapter has been trying to tell can be found in the shifts that have characterized the literature of the Nigerian Niger Delta. In addition to a long tradition of oral narratives, the Niger Delta has always been a theme in Nigerian literature and writing about this area and the focus has always been on its environment, the sea and the people who inhabit this region. Early examples such as J.P. Clark’s play The Boat (1981) and Wole Soyinka’s The Swamp Dwellers (1973) also deal with the ravages of the sea and the precarity of the lives and livelihoods of the inhabitants of the Niger Delta. However, while these dramatists looked to plays like J.M. Synge’s Riders to the Sea (1904), the literature of the Irish Revival and forms of classical Greek tragedy for inspiration, the writing of more recent times are more consciously emplotted against the backdrop of the new concerns with the environment and the focus on ecological issues that have become a global preoccupation. As these issues were receiving worldwide attention, Ken Saro-Wiwa was able to harness this global attention to highlight the plight of the Ogoni people of the delta. In his campaigns against the activities of the oil companies that operate in the area and the pollution and contamination they had caused, Saro-Wiwa was particularly effective. This attention did not go unnoticed by the ruling military junta and the Royal Dutch Shell Oil Company, which were specifically targeted in his campaigns. The environmental pollution aptly described by Rob Nixon as “slow violence” in his book of that title (2013) puts on display the predicament of the riverine communities, caught between a corrupt and vicious state and oil companies more concerned with extraction and profits than people. The execution of Saro-Wiwa by the Nigerian military government of General Sani Abacha brought even more international attention to the region and the issues. As a result of the convergence of Saro-Wiwa’s activist campaigns against oil pollution, the activities of the oil companies in the creeks of the delta, and state oppression, on the one hand, and the rising forces of environmentalism and the focus on First World peoples, on the other, the spate of writing about the Nigeria delta grew exponentially in the years after his execution by the military. His killing only served to intensify the global campaigns against the oil companies and the military regime. Novels, plays, poems, theatre performance and movies exploring the theme of environmental pollution in the Niger Delta were published and performed at such speed that it became difficult/impossible to count. However, the focus of these

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works shifted from the folklorist and existentialist idioms previously adopted by J.P. Clark, for example, to a more explicit exploration of environmental and the ecological issues raised by the activities of the oil companies, and their impact on the people and on nature. Rather than the struggle of small communities against the ravages of nature, the destruction of the natural world itself and the impact of oil exploration on the environment and the communities took centre-stage. In short, the questions raised by the local eco-scape of the Niger delta are articulated on a worldwide scale through global ecological and ecocritical discourses, which provided templates of legibility through which they can be read and understood. Here the literary representation of the same theme, the same object, the same geography morphs from being anchored on a philosophical existentialism to being articulated in the idioms and languages of postcolonial eco-criticism (↗8 Anglophone World Literatures and World Ecologies).

7 Conclusion The argument made in this chapter is that long before the current surge of interest in their writing by metropolitan audiences, West African writers have always sought to explore and exploit various strategies for writing into discursive worlds beyond their immediate locality. What this chapter endeavored to do is to historicize these efforts to write world literature by identifying the strategic positions these writers have adopted and the forms of tactical engagements through which they have tried to realize their objectives. What we discover in the process is that they provincialize world literature by intensely focusing on their localities and the issues that they generate while simultaneously globalizing these issues by articulating them within easily recognizable discourses and themes that have acquired some dominance on the international stage. From adopting the modernist techniques of intertextuality and bricolage to speak of everyday local experience and/or traditional rituals and myths through cultivating the major motifs of postcolonial theory, to focusing on migration, diasporization and Afropolitanism, or deploying themes like those of the child soldier, or the environment, these writers, first, strategically position themselves on a global plane of legibility and then reconfigure or extend the frontiers of the discourses as they are conventionally represented.

8 Bibliography 8.1 Works Cited Achebe, Chinua. Things Fall Apart. Oxford: Heinemann, 1958. Achebe, Chinua. Arrow of God. Oxford: Heinemann, 1964.

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Achebe, Chinua. Hopes and Impediments: Selected Essays, 1965–1987. New York: Doubleday, 1989. Achebe, Chinua. “The Role of the Writer in a New Nation.” African Writers on African Writing. Ed. G.D. Killam. London: Heinemann, 1973. 7–13. Adebayo, Ayobami. Stay with Me. New York: Knopf Doubleday, 2017. Adichie, Chimamanda N. Americanah. New York: Anchor Books, 2014. Anozie, Sunday. Christopher Okigbo: Creative Rhetoric. London: Evans Bros, 1972. Apter, Emily. Against World Literature: On the Politics of Untranslatability. London and New York: Verso, 2013. Balakrishnan, Sarah. “The Afropolitan Idea: New Perspectives on Cosmopolitanism in African Studies.” History Compass 15.2 (2017): 1–11. Beah, Ishmael. Long Way Gone: Memoir of a Child Soldier. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2007. Beecroft, Alexander. An Ecology of World Literature: From Antiquity to the Present Day. London and New York: Verso, 2015. Cary, Joyce. Mister Johnson. London: Penguin, 1991 [1939]. Casanova, Pascale. The World Republic of Letters. Trans. Malcolm B. DeBevoise. Cambridge, MA and London: Harvard University Press, 2004 [1999]. Cheah, Pheng. What is a World? On Postcolonial Literatures as World Literature. Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2016. Cheney-Cocker, Syl. The Last Harmattan of Alusine Dunbar. London: Heinemann, 1990. Clarke, J.P. The Boat. Nigeria: University Press, 1981. Cole, Teju. Open City. New York: Random House, 2011. Conrad, Joseph. Heart of Darkness. Ed. Robert Kimbrough. New York: Norton, 1963 [1899]. Damrosch, David. What is World Literature. Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2003. Ede, Amatoritsero. “The Politics of Afropolitanism.” Journal of African Cultural Studies 29.1 (2016): 88–100. English, James F. The Economy of Prestige: Prizes, Awards, and the Circulation of Cultural Value. Harvard University Press, 2005. Eze, Chielozona. “Rethinking African Culture and Identity: The Afropolitan Model.” Journal of African Cultural Studies 26.2 (2014): 234–247. Garuba, Harry. “Explorations in Animist Materialism: Notes on Reading/Writing African Literature, Culture and Society.” Public Culture 15.2 (2003): 261–285. Garuba, Harry, and Okot Benge. “Lateral Texts and Circuits of Value: Okot p’Bitek’s Song of Lawino and Wer pa Lawino.” Social Dynamics 43.2 (2017): 312–327. Garuba, Harry. “The Unbearable Lightness of Being: Re-Figuring Trends in Recent Nigerian Poetry.” English in Africa 32.1 (2005): 51–72. Garuba, Harry. “Between Three Locations: Teaching Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart at the Universities of Ibadan, Zululand and Cape Town.” Teaching the African Novel. Ed. Guarav Desai. New York: MLA, 2009. 321–339. Garuba, Harry. “Postcolonial Modernity and Normalisation: Reading Chinua Achebe’s Arrow of God in the Present Tense.” Chinua Achebe’s Legacy: Illuminations from Africa. Ed. James Ogude. Pretoria: Africa Institute of South Africa, 2015. 16–29. Gikandi, Simon. “African Literature and the Colonial Factor.” The Cambridge History of African and Caribbean Literature. Ed. F. Abiola Irele and Simon Gikandi. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000. 379–397. Gikandi, Simon. “Chinua Achebe and the Invention of African Culture.” Research in African Literatures 32.3 (Autumn 2001): 3–8. Hammond, Dorothy, and Alta Jablow. The Africa that Never Was: Four Centuries of British Writing about Africa. Mountainview: Waveland Press, 1992.

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Hodapp, James, ed. Afropolitanism Literature as World Literature. London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2020. Huggan, Graham. The Postcolonial Exotic. London: Routledge, 2001. Irele, F. Abiola. The African Imagination. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001. Iweala, Uzodinma. Beasts of No Nation. New York: Harper Perrenial, 2005. Julien, Eileen. “The Extroverted African Novel.” The Novel, vol. 1: History, Geography and Culture. Ed. Franco Moretti. New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 2006. 667–700. Kalliney, Peter J. Commonwealth of Letters: British Literary Culture and the Emergence of Postcolonial Aesthetics. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013. Kern, Martin. “Ends and Beginnings of World Literature.” Poetica 49.1–2 (2017/2018): 1–31. Kiguru, Doseline. “Prizing African Literature: Creating a Literary Taste.” Social Dynamics: A Journal of African Studies 42.1 (2016): 161–174. Márquez, Gabriel García. One Hundred Years of Solitude. New York: Harper & Row, 1970. Mbembe, Achille. “Afropolitanism.” Africa Remix: Contemporary Art of a Continent. Ed. Simon Njami. Johannesburg: Johannesburg Art Gallery, 2007. 26–30. Mudimbe, V.Y. The Invention of Africa. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1988. Mufti, Aamir R. Forget English! Orientalisms and World Literature. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2016. Nixon, Rob. Slow Violence and the Environmentalism of the Poor. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2013. Nwakanma, Obi. Christopher Okigbo: Thirsting for Sunlight. Woodbridge: Boydell & Brewer, 2010. Nwoga, Donatus, ed. Critical Perspectives on Christopher Okigbo. Washington: Three Continents Press, 1984. Okigbo, Christopher. Collected Poems. London: Heinemann, 1986. Okri, Ben. The Famished Road. London: Jonathan Cape, 1991. Omotoso, Yewande. Bomboy. Cape Town: Modjaji Books, 2011. Ouma, Christopher E.W. “Reading the Diasporic Abiku in Helen Oyeyemi’s The Icarus Girl.” Research in African Literatures. 45.3 (Fall 2014): 108–205. Oyeyemi, Helen. The Icarus Girl. London: Bloomsbury, 2005. Rodman, Selden. “Tutuola’s World [Review of The Palm-Wine Drinkard].” The New York Times Review of Books (20 Sept. 1953): 5. Rushdie, Salman. Midnight’s Children. London: Penguin, 1981. Said, Edward W. Orientalism. New York: Vintage Books, 1979 [1978]. Saro-Wiwa, Ken. Sozaboy: A Novel in Rotten English. Port Harcourt: Saros International Publishers, 1985. Selasi, Taiye. “Bye-Bye Babar.” The Lip Magazine (3 Mar. 2019). http://thelip.robertsharp.co.uk/?p=76 (6 Feb. 2020). Selasi, Taiye. Ghana Must Go. New York: Penguin, 2013. Soyinka, Wole. The Swamp Dwellers. London: Oxford University Press, 1973. Suhr-Sytsma, Nathan. Poetry, Print, and the Making of Postcolonial Literature. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017. Synge, John. Riders to the Sea. New York: Vintage Books, 1935 [1904]. Thomas, Dylan. “Blithe Spirits.” The Observer (6 July 1952): 7. Tutuola, Amos. The Palm-Wine Drinkard. London: Faber and Faber, 1952. West, Anthony. “Shadow and Substance [Review of The Palm-Wine Drinkard].” The New Yorker (5 Dec. 1953): 222–223.

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8.2 Further Reading Adesokan, Akin. “New African Writing and the Question of Audience.” Research in African Literatures. 43.3 (Fall 2012): 1–20. Currey, James. Africa Writes Back: the African Writers Series & the Launch of African Literature. Athens, OH: Ohio University Press, 2008. Feldner, Maximilian. Narrating the New African Diaspora: 21st Century Nigerian Literature in Context. London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2019. Iheka, Cajetan. Naturalizing Africa: Ecological Violence, Agency and Postcolonial Resistance in African Literature. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017. Low, Gail. Publishing the Postcolonial: Anglophone West African and Caribbean Writing in the UK, 1948–1968. London: Routledge, 2011. Ouma, Christopher E.W. Childhood in Contemporary Diasporic African Literature: Memories and Futures Past. London: Palgrave, 2020.

Godwin Siundu

27 East Africa Abstract: Three recent developments have altered the nature and form of eastern African literature in English. First is the political move towards federation of a larger East African Community that now has six countries with one waiting on the wings. The second factor is the proliferation of popular cultural art forms in music, film and dance, as well as literary festivals that have proven more adept at social commentary compared to the traditional literary ‘texts’. The third major influence is the emergence of alternative sites of literary creativity and self-reflexivity among a crop of public intellectuals outside the universities and other traditional spaces of creating and critiquing ideas. Open Mic sessions, ubiquitous reading and book launch sessions and other artistic activities have all singularly and collectively altered the form, tone, and texture of eastern African literature in ways that have completely disrupted the logics associated with eastern African literature by earlier critics. Against this background, therefore, this chapter interrogates these changes in order to map out emerging generic, thematic, and structural patterns of the broader terrain of eastern African literature. It proposes that the socio-political and technological changes that have unfolded in eastern Africa since the early post-independence period have reconfigured the nature, form, and functions of literature in ways that bring to the surface more contemporary concerns using novel structural and stylistic approaches that both challenge and extend the traditional textual, stylistic, and generic ideas of literature. Key Terms: Eastern African literatures, English, Kiswahili, popular culture, literary prizes

1 Introduction The dynamism of eastern Africa and its literatures has been captured in two recent works that capture critical perspectives on eastern African literary thought. Justus Makokha, Egara Kabaji, and Dominica Dipio’s collection (2011) somewhat complements the limits recognised in Simon Gikandi and Evan Mwangi’s (2007) guide in terms of the sheer extent of generic, generational, and language varieties. In reading the Gikandi and Mwangi guide, James Ogude (2008) decries what he notes as thin cross referencing of the available critical responses to the creative output from the region, besides overlooking the volume of scholarship on popular cultural works for which eastern Africa – like other parts of the continent – is known. What Ogude illuminates as gaps in Gikandi and Mwangi’s work, while credible, also affirms the https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110583182-028

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fact of diversity and complexity of eastern African creative literatures and their critical responses. This is why, perhaps, Gikandi and Mwangi’s work serves best when read alongside a similar project by Makokha, Kabaji, and Dipio (cf. 2011). The latter effort brings together critical essays that focus on different genres of eastern African literatures, including print, folklore, and film, to show the diversity of primary works and similar variety in critical perspectives on these works. Although, as Ken Walibora (2012) suggests, some of the essays in this collection cry out for a theoretically more rigorous engagement with their primary texts, they nonetheless demonstrate a widespread scholarly interest in literary outputs, their concerns, and theoretical trajectories, in ways that remain unknown to many scholars in the region and beyond. Particularly critical in this collection are two points: one is the inclusion of criticism on Somali (cf. Afrax 2011; Jimale 1996) and Ethiopian literatures (cf. Gebre 2011) as part of eastern African literature and, second, the focus on the emerging crop of Tanzanian literature in English (cf. Mutembei 2011; Munara 2011; Mutugu 2011) given the historical preeminence of Kiswahili as the language of thought, governance, and business in Tanzania. Both points signal the impact of political gestures of regional integration on the creative industry, in which literature is central. At the same time, the shift towards English in Tanzanian and Ethiopian literatures acknowledges and claims space in the global economics of the publishing and knowledge production industries, thereby contributing a regional portion to the juggernaut of world literatures that had hitherto obscured literatures in minority – including African – languages. In a way, therefore, although Makokha, Kabaji, and Dipio do not overtly mention the ideological and political agenda in their work, it is implied that they seek to disrupt the ideological and geographical orthodoxies of eastern African literatures by simultaneously saluting the peculiarity of localised experiences captured in those national literatures, while situating them in the global circuits of literary flows that are enabled by the English language. In their critical introduction to East African Literature: Essays on Written and Oral Literatures, Makokha, Kabaji, and Dipio observe that there exists a disconnect between creativity, criticism, and target audiences, thereby precipitating a crisis of relevance where established scholars based in the region aim at international visibility and relevance, following research agendas set elsewhere, while generally creating blind spots that impede a panoramic appreciation of the expanse of creativity and criticism from the region. The editors write that numerous prominent reasons can be advanced when one begins to understand the present condition where serious literary critics […] consistently publish their research and scholarly (re)views in peer reviewed journals abroad and occasionally as part of proceedings of local conferences. […] Publication of full-length or edited books based on local research but aimed for both the local and international scholarly audiences is rare. (Makokha, Kabaji, and Dipio 2011, 11)

This observation partly informs the aims in this chapter. The chapter seeks to capture a panoramic view of trends and patterns in literary imagination and, where possible,

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reference some of the critical responses in order to signal the diversity and complexity of contemporary eastern Africa’s literatures. The chapter acknowledges with disapproval the much hyped but currently rubbished claim by Taban Lo Liyong (cf. 1969) that eastern Africa’s literary contribution to the entire Africa and the rest of the world is miniscule at best and sterile at worst. Nor does it buy into the more recent whispers that eastern Africa is inferior to its southern and western Africa counterparts in regard to the sheer number of print, oral, sonic, filmic literary and cultural works and their corresponding criticism (cf. Mwangi 2010). It is likely that eastern Africa has merely fallen prey to predatory, neoliberal economics that hamstring the circulation of the mass of literary outputs from the region. This renders a project similar to the current one both necessary and urgent because it allows the world to peep into the chambers of literary creativity and criticism in the region. However, this is not to say that the world is completely oblivious of the range of literary and critical outputs from eastern Africa. As this chapter shows later, protocols of intra- and inter-continental dialogues and collaborations via avenues such as literary festivals and awards tend to introduce a worldly aura to what are essentially local literary forms. Literary prizes, for Doseline Kiguru (cf. 2016), contribute to the exchange of literary value through the network of interlinkages between local writers and critics on the one hand, and international literary award institutions on the other hand. Kiguru further notes that awards such as the Caine and the Commonwealth have not only acted as a bridge for the transition from short stories to novels, from upcoming writers to global household names, they have also provided a platform for African writers to gain access to what Sarah Brouillette (2007) terms ‘the global literary marketplace’ in her book of the same title. (Kiguru 2016, 204)

Thus, these global literary award institutions reconfigure the canonical staple by determining which literatures make it to the global literary marketplaces in terms of the language of literary expression, dominant themes, style, and even genre. In regard to eastern Africa, this makes sense given that a conspiracy of economic constraints, the politics of canonicity, limited circulation of locally published books and journals, the slow spread of Kiswahili language in the region and beyond, as well as stringent regimes of transcontinental and transoceanic travel for academics based in the region, all cumulatively create an artificial invisibility of the whole gamut of literatures and cultures in the region. Whatever the world knows of eastern African literatures and cultures is that which filters through all these barriers, with the implication that those who seek to appreciate the entirety of eastern African literatures must take a keener look compared to those who do so elsewhere. This is especially so considering the recent developments in the region across the spectrum of politics, economics, cultures, and technologies, all of which are manifested in literatures. What is this new eastern Africa? And how has it shaped, or been shaped, by literatures and cultures from the region? The next section answers these questions.

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2 The Making of a New Eastern African Literary Imagination Towards the end of the 1990s, the East African political leadership resolved to reactivate the then moribund East African Community (EAC) to grow trade, enable easier mobility of people in the region, and perhaps simply fit in the grove of regional integration that had taken part in southern and western Africa. The original members of the EAC – Tanzania, Uganda, and Kenya – soon opened up the federation to membership from Rwanda, Burundi, and South Sudan, with Somalia now awaiting admission. The expansion of the EAC not only reconfigured the geographical idea of eastern Africa, but also enabled greater comingling of academics from the region in ways that had previously been hampered by immigration bottlenecks, language barriers between the Anglophone and Francophone members of the community, and memories of tensions within and between states. The historical challenges between Kenya and Uganda, Tanzania and Uganda, as well as the internecine problems in Rwanda had all made collegial fraternisation of academics in the region difficult. Similarly, the greater uptake of English in Tanzania and of Kiswahili in Uganda and Rwanda incentivised academics in these countries and the region generally to look at each other more keenly than they had done previously. The regional divisions that had previously followed language cartographies would now collapse, with immense literature from Rwanda and Burundi appearing in the English language, as opposed to French and Kinyarwanda or Kirundi, respectively. In Rwanda, these works include Augustin Ndayizeye and Sylvestre Ntabajyana’s short stories (2016), and Scholastique Mukasonga’s novel Our Lady of the Nile (2014). In Tanzania, this move towards federation led to further expansion through translations of earlier Kiswahili literatures into English, such as Ben Mtobwa’s Dar es Salaam Usiku (2008) to Dar es Salaam by Night (2009), as well as some new writings in English that, presumably, targeted audiences beyond Tanzania. Elieshi Lema’s Parched Earth (2001) exemplifies the attempt by Tanzanian artists to transcend the limits of Kiswahili – in terms of readership – and appeal to a regional, even universal, resonance with the theme of gender inequality due to dominant patriarchal sociological order. In Uganda, which has a long history of a troubled relationship with Kiswahili, the language has in the last few years attained greater sonic spaces among Ugandans through the musical works of Jose Chameleon, whose social commentaries have always reached out to the wider eastern African region as part of its ever-growing popular cultural oeuvre. Chameleon’s deliberate use of Kiswahili has raised its profile in Uganda, especially among the youth, but also acknowledged a greater regional rather than national language and social identities. Through musical concerts in Nairobi and other major cities in the region, Chameleon has demonstrated the region’s interconnectedness and shared socio-cultural tastes, and also contributed to the sustenance of the association of youth with innovation, open mindedness, and positive social change. Kiswahili

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allows Chameleon to compete with other musicians from the region – including Ali Kiba and Diamond Platinumz of Tanzania whose works will be discussed later in this chapter – but also assert his self-fashioning as an afropolitan (cf. Selasi 2005). However, unlike musical artists who appropriate an ‘uncommon’ language to insert themselves in regional social dynamics, literary writers have done this so as to push local experiences to regional visibility. For instance, the amount of written literatures in English that have emerged from Rwanda and Burundi which hitherto were captured in French and indigenous languages have tended to focus on the negative affect associated with war and other forms of collective trauma. Marie-Therese Toyi’s (2014) novels in Burundi, Gorretti Kyomuhendo’s and Moses Isegawa’s novels set in northern Uganda, and a range of war literature from the wider region must be read in this regard, as critics Audace Mbonyingingo (cf. 2018) and Edgar Nabutanyi (cf. 2016) have shown. It is as though these writers seek to export part of the national traumas associated with war to the rest of the eastern African region as a warning against the often precarious political sabre rattling that is regularly witnessed in Kenya (through the post-election violence of 2007/2008) and the Uganda leadership’s uneasy relationship with their opposition counterparts. Certainly, the decision to write in English is also informed by the colonial values and privileges of the English language and its economic-political dominance of the infrastructures of knowledge production in the region specifically and the continent generally. Given the recent shift towards English as the language of governance and business in Tanzania and Rwanda, actors along the value chain of literary creation and consumption, including publishers and booksellers, are impelled by neo-liberal market logics to privilege works in English and to target areas in the region where English is most entrenched, thus Kenya and Uganda. This, in a way, is part of the strategy of translation that Evan Mwangi (2017) has theorised as a never-ending process of literary creation responsible for the dual process of balancing the local while aspiring for the regional or global. The point is that while some of the artists from Rwanda and Burundi, Uganda and Tanzania have embraced English and Kiswahili to gesture towards an eastern African regional consciousness, they have done so with a particular sensitivity to their local experiences and social problems. This, in turn, has preceded and enabled conversations on how some of these challenges may be better understood and then resolved. What these developments demonstrate is that the political opening up of eastern Africa through the relaunched EAC has enabled authors to have a broader regional view of who their current and potential audiences, without losing sight of the particularity of social and other issues that these artists address. By creating literary and cultural works whose formal and thematic aspects resonate in the entire region, these artists have somewhat complicated Benedict Anderson’s (cf. 1983) well known idea of imagining nationhood, by crafting a variegated regionhood that acknowledges internal peculiarities. This move shows that despite the developments that the region has encountered over time in the domains of culture, politics and others, literary and cul-

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tural artists still find value in their traditional social responsibilities of showing direction to society and beaming light on its blemishes. It is the same ethical imperative that has been theorised (cf. Achebe and Bowen 2005; Thomas et al. 2016) as speaking truth to power in ways that link the current generation of writers to their earlier counterparts whose call could well be summarised as perpetual warnings to the regimes along the lines of ‘someone is watching you’. If these developments have animated the discursive literary trajectories of eastern Africa for the past two decades, the discourses have taken place in a number of spaces that spawned out of a widespread desire among a group of eastern African literary critics, activists, and writers to illuminate literary imaginations that have equally dominated the region. Among these are the Eastern African Literary and Cultural Studies Conference series that was inaugurated at the University of Nairobi in 2013, and which has so far mapped eastern Africa through a biannual conference series of literary and cultural studies scholars who, so far, have met in Makerere in Uganda (2015), Dar es Salaam in Tanzania (2017), Lalibela and Bahir Dar in Ethiopia (2019). As was with Makokha, Kabaji, and Dipio in their 2011 book, it is also clear in the minds of the organising committee of the EALCS Conference series that eastern Africa includes Ethiopia, whose literatures have remained largely unknown to the rest of eastern African scholars due to historical tensions between the country and its neighbours, but also because of the language barrier. Yet, the fact that Ethiopia was one of the only two African countries to escape the colonial experience somewhat isolated its literatures from a kindred fraternity because the widely thematised colonial experiences were not its common fodder; furthermore, language challenges meant that a lot of literature in Tigrinya and other Ethiopian languages were insulated from the readership of the larger eastern Africa and the world. It was only relatively recently that Maaza Mengiste (2010) and Dinaw Mengestu (2007) gave the world a peep into the atrocities of the Meles Zenawi dictatorship, and thus offered a basis for thematic comparisons with literatures from the rest of the region in terms of how dictatorships were encountered and fought across the region. A lot of Ethiopian literature, therefore, remains unintelligible to the rest of the larger eastern Africa. Although the rest of the region similarly has a range of literatures that are inscrutable due to language differences, the Ethiopian case stands out owing to its unique historical attributes, especially in the late twentieth century. Yet, accessing such literatures is necessary in what one may note as the initiatives by east Africanist scholars to reclaim the region’s cartographical beacons from political elites. This effort has of late been seen with the launch of the Eastern African Literary and Cultural Studies Conference, as mentioned above. The conference series has not only recreated the vibrant intellectual traditions that eastern Africa was known for from the 1960s and 1970s, but also sustained a new historicist and revisionist reexamination of the literary and cultural traditions that have since faded out. Notable among these are Rajat Neogy’s pioneer work in journal publishing of the Transition Magazine, the 1962 Conference of African Writers

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of English Expression (↗4 The King’s English and the Mother Tongue), as well as the debates on the revolution of the literature curriculum at the University of Nairobi spearheaded by Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o, Taban Lo Liyong, and Henry Owuor Anyumba. Not only did these initiatives put the entire eastern Africa on the continental and global literary maps, but they also inaugurated a literary canon in the region that inspired a widespread self confidence among East Africans. This canon, largely associated with Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o of Kenya, poet Okot p’Bitek of Uganda, and playwrights Francis Imbuga (Kenya) and Ebrahim Hussein (Tanzania), laid the basis of regional intellection that continues to date. The canon has been the foundation upon which leading critics from the region have opened up new discursive vistas for the rest of the world, and has recently been extended by an emerging crop of writers that draw on, critique, and nuance the formal and thematic concerns of their forbears. If the likes of Ngũgĩ, p’Bitek, and Hussein beamed light on the false starts of the then emerging post-independence eastern African nation-state, some of the most successful writers of later generations of eastern African writers have focused on specific failures in including divergent interest groups, as well as the seeming inability of the leadership to spur the desired economic growth of the region. Yvonne Owuor for instance dramatises in Dust (2013) the sterility of post-independence Kenya’s nationstate, a plight that threatens to implode the whole artifice of the nation. In Uganda, the failure of leadership has captured in recent novels, including the increasing prominence of war literature, whose luminaries include Moses Isegawa’s Abyssinian Chronicles and Goretti Kyomuhendo’s Waiting. In Tanzania, which successfully banished tribe or ethnicity as variables in negotiating national belonging, has witnessed an extensive oeuvre of literary imagination that problematises exclusionary practices of the youth and women. These are themes in Ben Mtobwa’s Dar es Salaam by Night (1999) that focuses on socio-economic marginalisation and the rapture of the Ujamaa dream propounded by Julius Nyerere, and in Elieshi Lema’s Parched Earth (2001), which narrates experiences of cultural constraints that limit women’s agency and sexual freedoms. Noteworthy, Dar es Salaam by Night is a translation of the original Dar es Salaam Usiku, which, presumably was translated into English as a way of establishing similarities with urban literatures in eastern Africa, of which Meja Mwangi’s Going Down River Road (1976) had set the pace. Relatedly, contemporary eastern African literary and cultural texts that focus on the challenges of urbanisation have built on the earlier associations of the east African city as a space for cultural and social alienation, a common theme that Chris Wanjala identified in both A Season of Harvest (1978) and For Home and Freedom (1980). In the works of earlier popular literatures associated with David Maillu, Charles Mangua, and Meja Mwangi, the protagonists were cast in the templates of villager-comes-to-town, a strategy that was useful in highlighting the paradoxes associated with urbanisation in the then newly independent eastern African states. While such works tended to correctly identify and narrate the tensions that urban experiences precipitated in the protagonists, they tended

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to deviate stylistically from what was then widely considered as ‘serious’ or canonical literatures (↗16 Canons and Canonicity) of the likes of Ngũgĩ. Indeed, although Wanjala and other critics of his generation acknowledged the thematic relevance of most popular literatures from eastern Africa, they did so grudgingly on the presumption that literary creativity had to adhere to a certain aesthetic standard that reified manner over matter, something akin to reinventing a regional variant of F.R. Leavis’s ‘Great Tradition’. Nonetheless, eastern Africa’s current literary stock seems to have ignored these sanctimonious positions of the Wanjala generation and continued to grow in both trajectories of the ‘popular’ and the ‘serious’ to a point where, at least for now, such binaries have been collapsed, thanks to a range of factors that include transcontinental networking among literary academics who benefited from the pioneering works of Karin Barber (cf. 1987) and her adherents including Tom Odhiambo (cf. 2006), Tom Michael Mboya (cf. 2009), and James Ogude (for example, cf. 2007, edited with Joyce Nyairo). These scholars, singularly and collectively, raised the profile of popular music, small print magazines, and other previously derided forms of artistic expression by researching on them and publishing their findings in respected journals, including Research in African Literatures, Africa Today, and Journal of African Cultural Studies. Subsequently, these scholars have broadened the spectrum of the idea of eastern African literature to more than what it was in the 1960s to late 1980s; they have reconfigured the idea of the literary text in ways that enabled eastern Africa to converse with southern and western Africa in celebrating variants of Drum magazine in South Africa and the whole archive of Onitsha market literature in Nigeria. In other words, the process referred to as remaking a new eastern African literary imagination is one that has progressively stretched both the geographical canvas upon which the region’s literatures are inscribed and mapped, but also willed into existence through forms of literary textualities that were unknown in the 1960s and 1970s. The ‘pure’, unalloyed idea of a literary text of those years has been expanded to include musical and filmic packages that similarly comment on and critique society. Actors in the literary and cultural studies industry now include emerging socio-cultural and economic identities such as youth, queer and the like, while spaces of literary expression and discourse have also transcended the traditional institutions of teaching and learning, categories of oral and written. But, as implied above, these changes have arisen because of a complex relationship between ‘eastern Africa and its elsewheres’, a phrase that was first used by the organisers of the fourth Eastern African Literary and Cultural Studies Conference to signal the symbiotic knowledge flows between the region and its diasporic microcosms. How, exactly, have these flows reflected and refracted eastern Africa in the literary worlds? In answering this question, this chapter draws attention to the role of modern-day travel of academics and their corresponding ideas to and from the region, the emergence of region-based genres of literature, as well as the re-emergence of (in) formal sites of literary imagination, production, and criticism.

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3 Eastern Africa’s Elsewheres: Some Implications on the Region’s Literary and Cultural Heritage This section’s subheading is borrowed from the theme of the fourth Eastern African Literary and Cultural Studies Conference that, among other things, sought to debate East Africa’s “nodes of connectivity, entanglement, engagement, contestations and transactions” (2019, n.pag.). This agenda was conceived in geographical and historical terms. It acknowledged the role of eastern Africa in constituting the Pan-Africanist project that animated continental debates in the period immediately preceding and long after political independence; its role as a source and recipient of economic and cultural exchanges involving Europe, Asia, and the whole of the Indian Ocean Coast. These exchanges have cumulatively imbued a sense of the global to the texture and breadth of eastern African literatures, for instance in the emergence of a rich archive of what has been known as East African South Asian literatures and their Afro-Arabian variants that are literary and socio-cultural legacies of the Indian Ocean Worlds (↗16 The Oceans). While these no doubt existed in the early post-independence period in the writings of Peter Nazareth (1972) and Bahadur Tejani (1971) of Uganda, for instance, their preoccupation with themes of political histories of colonial exploitation and post-colonial persecution ironically fed into rampant perceptions of racial minorities in the region as inclined towards the socio-cultural insularity. It was not until the late 1980s that notable writers of South Asian provenance – including Moyez Vassanji of Tanzania, Jameela Siddiqi of Uganda, and Neera Kapur-Dromson of Kenya – attempted a more nuanced representation of South Asians as eastern Africans rather than as remainders of the South Asian labour immigrants that had only come to the region to lay the Kenya-Uganda Railway and chose to remain around for mercantile trade. Vassanji, Siddiqui, and Kapur-Dromson have respectively complicated the totality of the region’s literary canon by injecting racial and gendered perspectives in their corpuses. The most notable contributions so far have been Vassanji’s The Gunny Sack (1989) and The Book of Secrets (1996), Jameela Siddiqui’s The Feast of Nine Virgins (2001) and Neera Kapur-Dromson’s From Jhelum to Tana (2007). Coming out at the historical moment that they did, these works inserted the entire eastern Africa into the praxis of postcolonial discourse as it played out in North America, Europe, South Asia, and parts of Southern Africa, regions that were immersed in debates on cultural implications of travel and the challenges of nation-formation in the era of resurgent ethnic nationalism. As the critical works of Peter Simatei (cf. 2001), Dan Ojwang (cf. 2013) and this writer show (cf. 2009; 2011), the range of South Asian literary output in the era of Vassanji and his contemporaries extended regional dialogues on nationality and belonging, as well as global conversations on diasporic experiences and their implications. While, for instance, the nationalist literatures of Ngũgĩ in Weep Not, Child (1964) had caricatured the Kenyan Indian as a sly shopkeeper inclined towards exploiting

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the African, later writers have tended to symbolically rehabilitate the Indian by recasting him as a victim of double marginalisation from both the economically dominant white, and the politically aggressive black Kenyans. This revisionist logic has somehow impelled other East African writers, including Ngũgĩ (2012), to rethink their positions. In “Asia in My Life” (2012), published in the literary magazine Pambazuka, Ngũgĩ acknowledged the long history of South Asian involvement in East African literary life, writing that in close interracial environments, “one can see and appreciate the real human person behind the racial and ethnic stereotypes” (2012, n.pag.). He reached this conclusion on remembering how his South Asian contemporaries at Makerere University helped him in honing his literary skills. Accordingly, [t]he lead role of an African woman in my drama, The Black Hermit, the first major play ever in English by an East African black native, was an Indian. No makeup, just a headscarf and a kanga shawl on her long dress but Suzie Wooman played the African mother to perfection, her act generating a standing ovation lasting into minutes. I dedicated my first novel, Weep Not, Child, to my Indian classmate, Jasbir Kalsi, probably as homage to our friendly but fierce intellectual rivalry in our English studies. Ghulsa Nensi led a multi-ethnic team that made the costumes for the play while Bahadur Tejani led the team that raised money for the production. (Ngũgĩ 2012, n.pag.)

Yet, it is only in 2012 that Ngũgĩ overtly stated what he could have done any time from 1960s to 1980s when the general public’s view of South Asians in eastern Africa was hostile, a period when South Asians in the region painstakingly built an archive of revisionist literatures whose core agenda was to assert the presence of South Asians in the region and its knowledge systems. This journey of group affirmation was captured in an essay by Vassanji, also a writer, who, while lauding Ngũgĩ’s celebration of his South Asian classmates in the success of his drama, nonetheless chastised him thus: “If only he – or someone – had said this thirty years earlier” (2014, 58). At the core of Vassanji’s concern above, as well as in his writings that are set in East Africa, is the preoccupation with communal traumas that accrued from the early pan-Africanist – racially exclusivist – nationalistic efforts at nation formation. A scrutiny of virtually all literatures created by South Asians in eastern Africa reveals a universal preoccupation with systemic exclusion, whose peak was the expulsion of Asians from Uganda by Idi Amin in 1972. This incident not only inspired the writings of Bahadur Tejani and Peter Nazareth; it has echoes in the work of Vassanji and other writers from racial minorities in the entire eastern Africa. Abdulrazak Gurnah is one such writer whose works have generally excavated narratives of anti-Arab violence that was witnessed during the 1964 Zanzibar Revolution, although he is not necessarily an Arab, in which the Sultan of Zanzibar and his mostly Arab government was deposed by the Abeid Karume and his African followers. The sheer extent of anti-Arab sentiments was seen in forced marriages of Arab girls and women to African political and economic elites, rapes, murders, and

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dispossession of property. All these led to widespread dispersals of Zanzibaris of Arab and Afro-Arab descent, most of whom were targeted for further violation by the African led regimes and who, in their dispersal, nursed deep resentment and bitterness against Zanzibar and African leadership generally. As some critics of Gurnah’s novels have observed, the concerns with collective trauma for Arab and Afro-Arab populations in eastern Africa manifest themselves in themes of isolation and loneliness, rapture of the family, sexual violence, and metaphors of decay and degeneration. In all, the writings of Gurnah and the critical responses that these works attract have further demonstrated the interconnections between the region and the rest of the world, as well as the similarity in experiences of marginalisation and targeted violence that the humanist world generally abhors. Gurnah’s contribution to eastern African literature is also in his elevation of Zanzibari literatures in English, which is an important addition to a region known more for Kiswahili literatures, music, and other artefacts. Following the 1967 Arusha Declaration that resulted to Zanzibar’s integration with Tanganyika to form the United Republic of Tanzania, Zanzibar often got subsumed in Tanzania to the extent that any study of Tanzanian literatures and cultures tended to inadvertently understate Zanzibar’s contribution to the totality of Tanzanian literature. Yet, since postcolonial scholars advanced the idea that like palimpsests, regions remain exhaustively unknowable because of the multilayered nature of paradoxical and contradictory experiences leading to multiplicity of competing narratives, it was only a matter of time before someone would magnify Zanzibari literature for wider consumption. Reading Gurnah’s writings, one notes that the traditional association of Zanzibar and other islands with paradisal and exotic lifestyles often camouflage experiences of pain, marginalisation, and historical injustices variously dramatised in Paradise (1994, short-listed for the Booker Prize), Admiring Silence (1996), By the Sea (2001), and Desertion (2005). These works have attracted extensive critical attention, partly as a tribute to their stylistic and thematic depth, but also because they demonstrate a similarity between Tanzanian and other postcolonial countries where officialdoms fail to configure inclusive states. If ever there was Tanzanian literature that rebuked Tanzania’s experiments with Ujamaa and its uncritical association of Africanness with blackness, then it is Gurnah’s writing. Unlike Vassanji or Sophia Mustafa (1962), whose laments about the racial marginalisation that seemed to have been inbuilt in the Ujamaa project seemed almost flippant, Gurnah’s criticism of the postcolonial Tanzania’s (specifically Zanzibar) exclusionary practices remains relentless virtually across his repertoire where family feuds, traumas of separation, and vagaries of migrancy are traceable to the violence of the Zanzibar Revolution. This violence, no doubt, was resident in and perpetuated by institutions that could influence the narrative trajectories in the region. Yet, the same institutions also became paradoxical objects of literary and cultural concern, simultaneously enabling and impeding creative imagination, as the next section of this chapter shows.

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4 Institutionalising Eastern African Literatures Eastern Africa’s elsewheres are also manifest in the literary spaces in which the region’s literature is created, critiqued, and promoted. In so doing, this literature connects with world literatures because of the dynamics of literary festivals and awards, the latter of which Kiguru (cf. 2016) has written about. Writivism, which started in 2012 in Uganda, mentors emerging writers and publishes annual anthologies of short stories, novels, and other genres, as well as organizing writing residencies. Writivism’s annual writing festival is organised to nurture emerging talent, and its influence has seen it grow in scale to have a continental presence, as stated in its website (2020). Other related literary fiestas are the Babishai Poetry Festival, which has operated in Kenya since 2009; Story Moja Hay Festival and Macondo Literary Festival that have also shaped the Kenyan literary scene since 2007 and 2019, respectively. Yet, these festivals also feed on similar growth patterns in regional and continental literary awards. The Caine Prize for Literature, launched in 2000, recognises outstanding short stories at a time when the genre remains subsumed under longer prose forms such as the novel and memoirs. The Caine is arguably the most influential literary prize in the region because of the respectability it accords winning entries. Indeed, most of the winners of this prize have earned international repute as prose writers. Eastern Africa has had six of the winners so far, signaling that the region is no longer a creative backwater that earlier critics such as Taban Lo Liyong took it to be. Except perhaps Kenya’s Makena Onjerika (“Fanta BlackCurrant”, 2018) and Okwiri Oduor (“My Father’s Head”, 2014), all other past winners from the region have become an integral part of a contemporary eastern Africa’s literary canon. These are Sudanese Leila Aboulela, who won the inaugural Caine Prize in 2000 with her story entitled “The Museum”, Kenya’s Binyavanga Wainaina, who won the 2002 edition of the same prize with his story “Discovering Home”, and Yvonne Owuor who triumphed in 2003 with “Weight of Whispers”. These, as well as Uganda’s Monica Arec de Nyeko (winner, “Jambula Tree”, 2007) have been significant voices in reimagining an (eastern) Africa beyond the templates that were set by the Ngũgĩ, Taban, and p’Bitek generations. Eastern Africa’s literary elsewheres have also been enabled by the Mabati-Cornell Kiswahili Prize for African Literature, which was inaugurated by Mukoma wa Ngugi and Lizzy Attree in 2014 “to promote writing in African languages and encourage translation from, between and into African languages” (https://kiswahiliprize.cornell. edu/about-the-prize/). Although the stock of eastern African literature in Kiswahili has always been rich, its circulation and visibility beyond the region has arguably been hamstrung by systemic and other impediments that deprive the rest of the world of the joys of Kiswahili thought and cultures. At the same time, anecdotal evidence suggests that many east African urban and peri-urban households are increasingly relying on the English language as the only medium of interaction, something that, unless checked, dooms the future of Kiswahili and other African languages.

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There have also been developments in Sheng, a hybrid mix of Kiswahili and English, that was initially spoken by socio-economically marginalised urban youth, but which has now been widely embraced by speakers in Kenya as the language of social discourse as well as creative imagination. The significance of this language transformation has invited a number of reputable scholars to explore its potential and limits as a medium of literary creativity and possibly criticism. Lutz Diegner and Frank Schulze-Engler (cf. 2015), in their intervention, deploy Mary Louise Pratt’s concept of ‘contact zones’ to capture the extent to which English and Swahili have (counter)influenced each other in shaping the trajectory of literary imagination, creativity and criticism in eastern Africa. While recognising the status of Kiswahili as a lingua franca in the region, Diegner and Schulze-Engler examine the linguistic intertwinement of both Kiswahili and English, while highlighting possible implications for Kiswahili language and literatures in the region. In Diegner and Schulze-Engler’s collection, Lillian Kaviti argues that the continued use of Sheng as a complementary language of literary thought and production has bequeathed it (Sheng) with some respectability in a process that she calls “from stigma to status” (2015, 223). Chege Githiora’s (cf. 2019) recent intervention is more extensive and nuanced; it is the ultimate badge of status that Kaviti wrote about earlier. The issue is that while earlier writers and critics of eastern African literatures were apprehensive about the suitability and seriousness of Sheng as a medium of regional literatures, the same has of late become just one of the options available for imagination, creation, and critique of literary and cultural texts in the region. This is linked to the emergence of popular urban youth music that this chapter addressed earlier, but also variants such as Open Mic sessions, stand-up comedy, and poetry cafes that have recently become popular in east Africa. The hip hop music of Ali Kiba from Tanzania, and the comedies of Daniel Ndambuki aka Mwalimu King’ang’i of the Churchill Show from Kenya have gained traction partly because of their use of Sheng as the language of creative imagination and social performance of their shows. But these developments have also precipitated some anxiety among language puritans who worry for the future of Kiswahili language, and who insist on using Kiswahili language that is considered pure, or sanifu. This has been seen as the surest way of rising in the coterie of Kiswahili writers such as Ken Walibora, whose novel, Siku Njema (1996) propelled him to regional prominence for capturing an elegance in Kiswahili that was presumed lost. Perhaps because of this, the novel was adopted as a set text in the Kenya Certificate of Secondary Examination, making it a mandatory reading for every Kenyan pupil. This means that the growth of literary tradition – in whatever language – in the region has to some extent been influenced by the school systems of the respective members of the larger East African Community. The recent adoption of English in Rwanda implies that eastern African literature in English will acquire more readership there, in the same way Kiswahili shall grow in Uganda. This is perhaps why a literary prize such as Mabati-Cornell that privileges Kiswahili and translation fills

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a critical gap in growing a literature in Kiswahili that, as at now, may be the only medium of thought and expression that eastern Africa can contribute to the world. In Kenya, Yvonne Owuor’s Dust (2013), and The Dragonfly Sea (2019) engage, respectively, with national contestations in post-independence Kenya, and the lost histories of eastern Africa’s contact with oriental worlds in the period predating colonialism. It is also critical that in both works, Owuor uses some Kiswahili lexicons in a way that may well transcend traditional forms of code-mixing. In fact, through the deliberate use of Kiswahili words, Owuor’s novels – especially the second one – illustrate the long-held idea of eastern Africa as a ‘contact zone’ as a way of debunking the myths of more autochthonic claims to the region, which myths inform the antagonisms that her earlier novel problematises. On his part, Binyavanga Wainaina’s memoir, One Day I Will Write about this Place (2011) dramatises cultural and sociopolitical struggles in postcolonial Africa broadly. In what Binyavanga later called the missing chapter in this memoir, he let out his same sex orientation for the first time in a country that still has rampant cases of homophobia. Thus, just as he had blazed the trail of a younger generation of Kenyan and eastern African writers to break free from the sociological writings and preoccupation with canonical themes, Wainaina also demonstrated a tenacious willingness to demolish old taboo subjects on queer and other alternative sexualities. It is a statement for the growth of eastern African literatures that, unlike the 1970s and 1980s when even literatures that portrayed heteronormative sexual freedoms were rubbished as low-brow (cf. Wanjala 1978), the region is now generally less predisposed to anxiety panics that may be provoked by moralistic readings of culturally transcendental literary and cultural texts. But the long-drawn push for intellectual freedoms – which is partly how this chapter reads the experiments in expression that Binyavanga conducted – encounters systemic resistance from some state agents who are sometimes reactionary gatekeepers of an imagined pure morality. In Kenya, this was especially pronounced with regard to the film Rafiki (2018) which, although highly lauded for its creativity and topicality, was still banned from public airing in Kenya for allegedly corrupting the morals of younger viewers. In Tanzania and Uganda, some popular youth songs have also attracted the ire of state sponsored moralists who have banned them in the pretext of conserving societal norms, especially those that relate to sex and sexuality. So while celebrating or even acknowledging the strides that the current generation of eastern African writers have made in extending the frontiers of literary imagination, they still pay heed to claw backs from the regimes that are anxious about what liberal creativity can do to a people’s political and moral consciousness. Said otherwise, eastern African literary and cultural outputs have also been slotted into existing structural institutions of intellection, approval or disapproval, all of which demonstrate the lingering suspicion that the political elite still holds against the rising public intellectual. This tension has only been moderated by two distinct but related institutions: the resilience of private publishing firms that have weathered the challenges of state control and market slumps as well as the huge role that the South African academy has

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and continues to play in moulding its east African counterpart. In an earlier project, Tom Odhiambo and Godwin Siundu (cf. 2014) noted the role of the University of the Witwatersrand from early 2000s in reconfiguring the East African literary and cultural academy through training of a crop of academics who reified popular literary and cultural studies across the eastern African region. These scholars went on to produce critical works that have established a closer relationship between writers and critics, which was a shift from the early postcolonial era when these categories were largely adversarial. George Ogola’s studies on the literary journalism of Wahome Mutahi and Tom Odhiambo’s pioneering study on David Maillu, as well as Grace Musila’s focus on the creativity of cartoons were partly influenced by a longer tradition of works on South Africa’s Drum magazine and the more vibrant literary works in post-apartheid South Africa at a time when the country was resetting its creative compass. These efforts were refracted in eastern Africa with literary and cultural research projects that disrupted scholarly orthodoxies that had barely recognised multiple ideas of literature and of literary texts. Notable names from Wits of that era include James Ogude, whose leadership in research projects led to influential books that reconfigured the idea of literature. In Urban Legends, Colonial Myths: Popular Culture and Literature in East Africa (2007, edited with Joyce Nyairo), Ogude brought “together a wide range of original and path-breaking studies in diverse areas of popular culture and literature, in a region where scholarship on popular culture has been far and in between” (2007, 1). Later, Ogude (2012, with Grace Musila and Dina Ligaga) edited a collection that probed further into emerging thinking about literatures and cultures of the region, this time including a section on literatures from racial minorities in the region. It was also in taking their cue from this intellectual culture that Tom Odhiambo and this author conceptualised and launched the journal of Eastern African Literary and Cultural Studies to situate the region within continental and global circuits of knowledge dissemination. Odhiambo and Siundu had noted that while immense scholarly work was going on in the region, much of this remained unseen and thus un-interrogated by scholars in other parts of the world because the practices of journal publishing in the region for global circulation was constrained by institutional, economic, and other structural challenges. Again, with support from their networks in South African, Odhiambo and Siundu thus launched the Eastern African Literary Studies to harness hitherto ‘invisible’ debates, circulate them to the wider world by leveraging on the distribution networks of journal publishers Taylor & Francis, while also stretching the idea of literature that was dominant in the region – notably print prose, poetry, and orature. Acknowledging the importance of Kiswahili in the region, the journal’s editorial collective (that now includes Tina Steiner, Lynda Spencer, and Dina Ligaga) decided to pioneer the publication of a bilingual Kiswahili-English issue in 2019, with plans to make bilingual publishing of at least one issue of the journal an annual agenda. The impact of this move on literary and cultural creativity and consumption in the region and beyond is yet to be gauged, but so far the decision plays a significant role in gesturing at the ideal situation of language parity between English

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and Kiswahili. Thus, if in the 1960s Makerere University in Kampala was the nucleus of literary thought and its ideological underpinnings where critics from the rest of the continent came to test their ideas, this role now singularly belongs to South Africa. Lastly, the recent growth and development of contemporary eastern African literary and cultural studies has been boosted by the presence of tenacious publishing houses that, by inference, believed in the ideals of knowledge creation amidst crumbling economies due to neoliberal market dynamics, systemic inabilities and failures by states to support the project of knowledge production and, in some cases, outright hostility through censorship and punitive tax regimes that render books simply unaffordable. These publishing houses include Walter Bgoya’s Mkuki na Nyota in Tanzania that has produced immense work in new literatures and re-issues of works such as Shaaban Robert’s that had gone out of print. In Uganda, Femrite – Uganda Women Writers Association, associated with award winning novelist Mary Okurut, has pushed a feminist agenda in publishing novels and other creative works that offer a gendered view of literary concerns in Uganda. In Kenya, Kyallo Wamitila’s Vide Muwa publishers have also contributed tremendously in creating an archive of literature in Kiswahili and English, generally in defiance of economic and other considerations that would render such projects either unprofitable or politically perilous.

5 Conclusion Ghanaian philosopher Kwame Anthony Appiah’s widely cited pronouncement regarding creative vibrancy in climates of deprivation is apt in describing the state of literary and cultural outputs in eastern Africa. Appiah writes that “[d]espite the overwhelming reality of economic decline; despite unimaginable poverty; despite wars, malnutrition, disease and political instability […] African cultural productivity grows apace: popular literatures, oral narrative and poetry, dance, drama, music and visual art all thrive” (1997, 157). This is doubly true; in the vibrancy and diversity of literary production in the region, but also in the debilitating material conditions in which such ‘rethinking eastern African literary landscapes’ is possible at all. Internecine strife in parts of northern Uganda, Ethiopia, Somalia, and the Great Lakes region; extreme poverty in rural Kenya, Uganda, and Tanzania, and state intolerance of independent thought across the entire eastern Africa have provided both the rationale and themes for what now stands as contemporary eastern African literature. Yet, scorning these and other challenges that affect literary creativity and consumption generally, eastern African literary and cultural production has in the past two decades yielded world renowned authors such as Kenya’s Peter Kimani and Uganda’s Jennifer Makumbi. Kimani’s (2017) and Makumbi’s (2018) works, respectively, have won world prizes for taking a long view of regional histories in order to reshape the narratives of identity politics and the attendant affiliations in stylistically deep

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ways. For Kimani, the moment of colonial arrival in Kenya was marked by the building of a railway whose economic value was transposed into literary imagination in its metaphoric variant. It is right to argue here that Kenya is yet to recover from the impact of this railway, now over a hundred years old; its implications in racial and ethnic relations continue to cast a shadow on possible meanings of being Kenyan. Similarly, Makumbi’s Kintu, which is cast in the epic form, is only possible because of the economic and political stability that Uganda has witnessed in the recent years, which has allowed the emergence of authors whose thematic concerns are not overdetermined by open conflicts. It is the climate of relative peace that allows such writers to outgrow the shadows of their more established literary forbearers such as Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o in Kenya, Okot p’Bitek in Uganda, and Shaaban Robert, Ebrahim Hussein, and Euphrase Kezilahabi in Tanzania. In a way, the current crop of eastern African writers has reached a point where they can ‘rediscover the ordinary’, a phrase that South African writer critic Njabulo Ndebele (1986) used in bemoaning the predominance of the spectacular in literatures of conflict, literatures that were praiseworthy for their sociological rather than aesthetic attributes. The emergence of literary and cultural works that tease out concerns of the everyday life across racial, demographic, and gendered divides from revisionist and prospective standpoints is part of this preoccupation with the ordinary. As this chapter shows, all these have been possible by concerted efforts of different influencers within and beyond the region – authors and other cultural artists, prize sponsors, publishers, formal and informal book sellers, and an indefatigable and widely networked academy – all of who are directly or otherwise concerned with the necessity and urgency of self or group affirmation. All these influencers have had a net effect of adorning the spectrum of eastern African literary and cultural works with a global feel that this chapter theorises as eastern Africa’s elsewheres.

6 Bibliography 6.1 Works Cited Afrax, Maxamed D. “Opposing Influences of Tradition and Modernity in Somali Drama.” East African Literature: Essays on Written and Oral Literatures. Ed. Justus K.S. Makokha, Egara Kabaji, and Dominica Dipio. Berlin: Logos Verlag, 2011. 493–507. Ali, Jimale A. Daybreak is Near: Literature, Clans, and the Nation-State in Somalia. Asmara: Red Sea Press, 1996. Anderson, Benedict. Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism. London: Verso, 1983. Appiah, Kwame Anthony. In My Father’s House: Africa in the Philosophy of Culture. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992. Barber, Karin. “Popular Arts in Africa.” African Studies Review 30.3 (1987): 1–78.

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Bowen, Roger, and Chinua Achebe. “Speaking Truth to Power: An Interview with Chinua Achebe.” Academe 91.1 (2005): 45–50. Diegner, Lutz, and Frank Schulze-Engler. “Introduction.” Habari ya English? What about Kiswahili? East Africa as a Literary Contact Zone. Ed. Lutz Diegner and Frank Schulze-Engler. Amsterdam: Brill and Rodopi, 2015. 1–22. Eastern African Literary and Cultural Studies Conference. Call for papers (2019). http://www.asauk. net/eastern-african-literary-and-cultural-studies-conference/ (31 Jan. 2020). Gebre, Tewodros. “Nature, Religion and History: De/Mythologizing of the Romance of Ethiopia in ‘Abbay’ and Adefris.” East African Literature: Essays on Written and Oral Literatures. Ed. Justus K.S. Makokha, Egara Kabaji, and Dominica Dipio. Berlin: Logos Verlag, 2011. 69–84. Gikandi, Simon, and Evan Mwangi. The Columbia Guide to East African Literature in English Since 1945. New York: Columbia University Press, 2007. Githiora, Chege. Sheng: Rise of a Kenyan Swahili Vernacular. London: James Currey, 2019. Gurnah, Abdulrazak. Admiring Silence. London: New Press, 1996. Gurnah, Abdulrazak. By the Sea. London: Bloomsbury Paper Backs, 2002. Gurnah, Abdulrazak. Desertion. London: Anchor Books, 2006. Gurnah, Abdulrazak. Paradise. London: Hamish Hamilton, 1994. Isegawa, Moses. Abyssinian Chronicles. New York: Vintage, 2001. Kapur-Dromson, Neera. From Jhelum to Tana. New Delhi: Penguin India, 2007. Kiguru, Doseline. “Literary Prizes, Writers’ Organisations and Canon Formation in Africa.” African Studies 75.2 (2016): 202–214. Kimani, Peter. Dance of the Jakaranda. New York: Akashic Press, 2017. Lema, Elieshi. Parched Earth: A Love Story. Dar es Salaam: E&D Limited, 2001. Lo Liyong, Taban. The Last Word: Cultural Synthesism. Nairobi: East African Publishing House, 1969. Makokha, Justus K.S., Egara Kabaji, and Dominica Dipio, eds. East African Literature: Essays on Written and Oral Literatures. Berlin: Logos Verlag, 2011. Makokha, Justus K.S., Egara Kabaji, and Dominica Dipio. “Introduction: Broadening Thought on Contemporary East African Literary Criticism.” East African Literature: Essays on Written and Oral Literatures. Ed. Justus K.S. Makokha, Egara Kabaji, and Dominica Dipio. Berlin: Logos Verlag, 2011. 11–26. Makumbi, Jennifer N. Kintu. London: One World Publications, 2008. Mbonyingingo, Audace. “War Memories and the Refugees’ Representation in Marie-Thérèse Toyi’s Weep Not, Refugee.” Eastern African Literary and Cultural Studies 4.1 (2018): 55–75. Mboya, Tom M. “My Voice is Nowadays Known: Okatch Biggy, Benga and Luo Identity in the 1990s.” Muziki: Journal of Music Research in Africa 6.1 (2009): 14–25. Mengestu, Dinaw. Children of the Revolution. London: Random House, 2007. Mengiste, Maaza. Beneath the Lion’s Gaze. London: Random House, 2010. Mtenje, Asante L. “‘Celibacy is certainly not for me!’ Transgressive Sexualities in Male Children in Moses Isegawa’s Abyssinian Chronicles.” Eastern African Literary and Cultural Studies 3.2–4 (2017): 73–90. Mtobwa, Ben. Dar es Salaam by Night. Dar es Salaam: Spear Books, 1999. Mtobwa, Ben. Dar es Salaam Usiku. Dar es Salaam: Mkuki Books, 1998. Mukasonga, Scholastique. Our Lady of the Nile. Trans. Melanie Mauthner. Steerforth Press, 2014. Mustapha, Sophia [Fawzia]. The Tanganyika Way: A Personal Story of Tanganyika’s Growth to Independence. London: Oxford University Press, 1962. Mutembei, Aldin. “A Comparative Study of Plays on AIDS from Tanzania and USA.” East African Literature: Essays on Written and Oral Literatures. Ed. Justus K.S. Makokha, Egara Kabaji, and Dominica Dipio. Berlin: Logos Verlag, 2011. 415–434.

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Mutugu, Beth. “A Feminist Stylistic Approach to the Swahili Fiction of Ben Mtobwa.” East African Literature: Essays on Written and Oral Literatures. Ed. Justus K.S. Makokha, Egara Kabaji, and Dominica Dipio. Berlin: Logos Verlag, 2011. 209–222. Mwangi, Evan. “Why East Africa still remains a literary dwarf”, The Nation on Saturday (16 Apr. 2010). https://www.nation.co.ke/news/Why-East-Africa-still-remains-a-literary-dwarf-/1056900798-s3fyeh/index.html (31 Jan. 2020). Mwangi, Evan. Translation in African Contexts: Postcolonial Texts, Queer Sexuality, and Cosmopolitan Fluency. Kent: Kent State University Press, 2017. Nabutanyi, Edgar. “Child Abuse or Discipline? Moses Isegawa’s Critique of Ugandan Child-rearing Practices in Abyssinian Chronicles.” Eastern African Literary and Cultural Studies 2.1–2 (2016): 25–33. Nazareth, Peter. In a Brown Mantle. Nairobi: East African Literature Bureau, 1972. Nazareth, Peter. The General Is Up. Toronto: TSAR, 1991. Ndayizeye, Augustin, and Sylvestre Ntabajyana. Short Stories from Rwanda. Longmeadow: Full Media Services, 2016. Ndebele, Njabulo. “The Rediscovery of the Ordinary: Some New Writings in South Africa.” Journal of Southern African Studies 12.2 (1986): 143–157. Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o. “Asia in my life.” 2012. https://www.pambazuka.org/governance/asia-my-life (26 Jan. 2020). Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o. Weep Not, Child. Nairobi: Heinemann Educational Books, 1964. Odhiambo, Tom, and Godwin Siundu. “Journeying into Eastern African Literary and Cultural Studies.” Eastern African Literary and Cultural Studies 1.1–2 (2014): 1–6. Odhiambo, Tom. “Inventing Africa in the Twentieth Century: Cultural Imagination, Politics and Transnationalism in Drum Magazine.” African Studies 65.2 (2006): 157–174. Odiemo-Munara, Lennox. “Towards the Collapse of Otherising Patriarchal Narratives in Elieshi Lema’s Parched Earth (2001).” East African Literature: Essays on Written and Oral Literatures. Ed. Justus K.S. Makokha, Egara Kabaji, and Dominica Dipio. Berlin: Logos Verlag, 2011. 177–208. Ogude, James, and Joyce Nyairo, eds. Urban Legends, Colonial Myths: Popular Culture and Literature in East Africa. Trenton: Africa World Press, 2007. Ogude, James, Grace Musila, and Dina Ligaga, eds. Rethinking Eastern African Literary and Intellectual Landscapes. Trenton: Africa World Press, 2012. Ogude, James. “Review of The Columbia Guide to East African Literature in English since 1945 by Simon Gikandi and Evan Mwangi.” African Studies Review 51.1 (2008): 185–186. Ojwang, Dan. Reading Migration and Culture: The World of East African Indian Literature. London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013. Owuor, Yvonne A. Dust. London: Granta Books, 2015. Owuor, Yvonne A. Dragon Fly Sea. London: Knopf Publishing Group, 2019. Pratt, Mary L. “Arts of the Contact Zone.” Profession (1991): 33–40. Selasi, Taiye. “Bye-Bye Babar.” 2005. The LIP Magazine. http://thelip.robertsharp.co.uk/?p=76 (30 Jan. 2020). Siddiqi, Jameela. The Feast of the Nine Virgins. London: Bogle-l’Overture, 2001. Simatei, Tirop P. The Novel and the Politics of Nation Building in East Africa. Bayreuth: Bayreuth University Press, 2001. Siundu, Godwin. “Beyond Auto/Biography: Power, Politics, and Gender in Kenyan Asian Women’s Writings.” Research in African Literatures 42.3 (2011): 117–131. Siundu, Godwin. Imagining Home and Community in East African Asian Writings. Saarbrücken: VDM Verlag, 2009. Tejani, Bahadur. Day After Tomorrow. Nairobi: East African literature Bureau, 1977.

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Thomas, P.L., Christian Z. Goering, and Sarah L. Morris. “Speaking Truth to Power: Changing Minds: Critical Reflection.” The English Journal 106.1 (2016): 69–72. Toyi, Marie-Thérèse. Weep Not, Refugee. Benin City: Good-Books Publications, 2014. Vassanji, Moyez. “The New (Asian) African: Politics and Creativity in the 1960s.” Eastern African Literary and Cultural Studies 1.1–2 (2014): 51–58. Vassanji, Moyez. The Book of Secrets. Toronto: Picador, 1996. Vassanji, Moyez. The Gunny Sack. Oxford: Heinemann, 1989. Walibora, Ken. “Review of East African Literature: Essays on Written and Oral Traditions.” Research in African Literatures 43.2 (2012): 188–189. Walibora, Ken. Siku Njema. Nairobi: Longhorn Nairobi, 1996. Wanjala, Chris. For Home and Freedom. Nairobi: Kenya Literature Bureau, 1980. Wanjala, Chris. The Season of Harvest: Some Notes on East African Literature. Nairobi: Kenya Literature Bureau, 1978. Writivism. 2020. https://writivism.org/about/ (31 Jan. 2020).

6.2 Further Reading Killam, G.D., ed. The Writing of East & Central Africa. Nairobi: Heinemann, 1984. Kurtz, Roger. Nyarloka’s Gift: The Writing of Marjorie Oludhe Macgoye. Nairobi: Mvule Africa, 2005. Lindfors, Bernth. Popular Literatures in Africa. Trenton: Africa World Press, 1991. Mbugua wa Mungai. Nairobi’s Matatu Men: Portrait of a Subculture. Nairobi: Native Intelligence, 2013. Muchiri, Jennifer. Women’s Autobiography: Voices from Independent Kenya. Saarbrücken: VDM Verlag, 2010. Mwangi, Evan. Africa Writes Back to Self: Metafiction, Gender, Sexuality. New York: SUNY Press, 2009. Nabutanyi, Edgar, Danson Kahyana, and Dominica Dipio, eds. Discourse and Identity: Writing and Contemporary Eastern African Peripheral Subjectivities. Kampala: Fountain Publishers, 2019. Ogude, James, Grace Musila, and Dina Ligaga, eds. Rethinking Eastern African Literary and Cultural Landscapes. Trenton: Africa World Press, 2012. Steiner, Tina. Translated People, Translated Texts: Language and Migration in Contemporary African Literature. London and New York: Routledge, 2009. Wawrzinek, Jennifer, and Justus K.S. Makokha, eds. Negotiating Afropolitanism: Essays on Borders and Spaces in Contemporary African Literature and Folklore. Amsterdam and New York: Rodopi, 2011.

Ragini Tharoor Srinivasan

28 South Asia

Abstract: This chapter asks what it means to read South Asian Anglophone literatures as ‘world literatures.’ It begins from the premise that there is a gap between the geographical quantity to which ‘South Asia’ refers and the national literatures which circulate in its name. Attempts to read South Asian Anglophone literatures as ‘world literatures’ must therefore first reckon with the instability of the regional formation itself. Where earlier scholarship has been concerned with negotiating the universalist aspirations of the ‘world’ in world literatures, this chapter puts pressure on the social and cultural complex of the ‘Anglophone,’ which can be understood as both a conditional renomination of the Postcolonial and a critical renewal of English Studies’ commitment to Anglophone literatures beyond British and American canons. The chapter closes with readings of three South Asian literary fictions that use the Anglophone not simply as a linguistic medium, but rather as a rubric through which to query the worlding capacities of human and nonhuman agents, and which can consequently be read under the signs of both the Postcolonial and the World. Key Terms: Postcolonial, nonhuman, India, English, Anglophone

1 South Asian Anglophone World Literatures: Where, What, When, and Why The brief of this chapter is to consider how South Asian Anglophone world literatures are situated in the subcontinent, on the one hand, and oriented toward worlds, on the other – or, in Birgit Neumann and Gabriele Rippl’s more sophisticated framing, to understand how South Asian Anglophone literatures track between “topographical singularity,” on the one hand, and “transcultural entanglement,” (2017, 3) on the other. The very positing of ‘South Asian Anglophone world literatures’ as a field is an argument for the conjoining and coherence of its terms: an argument that there is a singular ‘South Asia;’ an argument that there is an Anglophonism that is or has been or can be made ‘South Asian;’ an argument that South Asia has itself given rise to an ‘Anglophone World,’ among others; an argument that ‘South Asian Anglophone Literatures’ belong to or have something to say to the ‘World,’ and vice versa. To be clear: these are not all arguments that this chapter seeks to make, though we will variously explore their respective stakes. To begin, then, every term in this rubric – South Asian Anglophone world literatures – requires further specification. First, South Asia. By the official counts of geopolitical institutions like the South Asian Association for Regional Cooperation, the https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110583182-029

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subcontinent is comprised of eight independent nation-states. These are, in alphabetical order, Afghanistan, Bangladesh, Bhutan, India, Maldives, Nepal, Pakistan, and Sri Lanka. The region may also, however, be defined more broadly; for example, the major English-language newsmagazine Himal Southasian, founded by Kanak Mani Dixit in 1987 and currently operating out of Colombo, Sri Lanka, also covers Tibet and Burma, given the cultural continuity, histories, and sensibilities they share with other South Asian countries. Uniquely, Himal refers to the region as ‘Southasia;’ the one-word coinage signals the journal’s robust, regional imaginary and commitment to writing against national orthodoxies. The ‘South Asia’ of South Asian Anglophone world literatures is less unified and, in the Anglo-American academy especially, has long been dominated by the Indian example. Indian Anglophone writers, including both those based in India, like Arundhati Roy and Aravind Adiga, and those living in the diaspora, like Salman Rushdie and Amitav Ghosh, are overrepresented in curricula, anthologies, and research programs in the field, even when they purport to refer to ‘South Asia.’ Roy’s The God of Small Things (1997), Adiga’s The White Tiger (2008), Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children (1981), and Ghosh’s The Shadow Lines (1988) and, more recently, the Ibis Trilogy (2008, 2011, 2015) are all novels that can be read as species of South Asian, postcolonial, global, and Anglophone world literature – and all are also ‘Indian.’ This dominance is correlated to, if not caused by, India’s political, military, and economic dominance in the region. India is by far the largest South Asian country in terms of area, population, and GDP, and, according to a 2015 study conducted by the United Nations Department of Economic and Social Affairs, it has the world’s largest diaspora. Adiga, Roy, and Rushdie, along with Kiran Desai and V.S. Naipaul (who is Trinidadian of Indian origin, and also winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature) are all winners of the prestigious Booker Prize (↗15 Marketing Anglophone Literatures); to date, no writer from any other South Asian country has earned that particular distinction. This is not to say that the only South Asian Anglophone writers of consequence are from India. Scholars are increasingly paying attention to emergent Pakistani and Bangladeshi Anglophone world literatures, including the work of writers like Tahmima Anam, Mohsin Hamid, Mohammad Hanif, Daniyal Mueenuddin, Zia Haider Rahman, and Kamila Shamsie (cf. Anam 2018; Aslam and Kanwal 2018; Shamsie 2017). But these are the present limits of the category’s capaciousness; even when the lens expands beyond India, it still generally only refers to Anglophone literatures written by writers from, or located in, India, Pakistan, and Bangladesh. Why the eclipse of the other nations in the region? For one, the postcolonial history that shapes the Anglophone present is not shared by all South Asian countries. Nepal, for instance, was never a British colony nor a protectorate, and English-language instruction in the country is a comparatively recent and embattled phenomenon. It is also the case that many South Asian Anglophone writers in the diaspora, like the Afghani-American writer Khaled Hosseini (The Kite Runner, 2003), the Sri Lankan-British writer Romesh Gunesekara (Reef, 1994), and the Sri

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Lankan-American writers V.V. Ganeshananthan (Love Marriage, 2008) and Nayomi Munaweera (Island of a Thousand Mirrors, 2012) have been inducted into the Asian American and Asian British multiethnic literary fields, perhaps for seeming lack of a substantive cohort of fellow ‘nationals.’ Similarly marginal in the South Asian Anglophone literary field are writers of South Asian origin from non-Western diasporas, like Malaysia-born Preeta Samarasan (Evening is the Whole Day, 2008) and Abu Dhabi-born Deepak Unnikrishnan (Temporary People, 2017). There are numerous nations and names that do not fit comfortably within the bounds of ‘South Asia’ and yet are also spoken by it, hailed by the sign, collected under its umbrella, and read in its name. Perhaps this goes without saying; it bears repeating nonetheless. The irony is that even as ‘South Asia’ is definitionally a regional formation, the inevitably partial nature of its deployment returns us to the primacy of the nation form, laying bare the continuing challenge of striving for “planetary” (cf. Spivak 2003) and “new, open, polycentric, and plural” (Neumann and Rippl 2017, 17) modes of reading and writing world literatures in an era of persistent nation-thinking, at the levels of both geopolitics and scholarship. In India, the 2014 and 2019 electoral triumphs of the Hindu-nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party and its chauvinistic leader Narendra Modi indicate the nation’s increasing unwillingness to think and act in pluralistic, never mind regional, terms (for over two decades, one of the BJP’s slogans has been “Hindi, Hindu, Hindustan,” a call which deliberately flies in the face of the nation’s incredible linguistic, religious, and ethnic diversity). At the same time, much of the significant work happening on Anglophone world literatures in South Asia focuses on the Indian Anglophone (cf. Anjaria 2015; Chakravorty 2014; Gajarawala 2013; Ghosh 2004). When we say South Asia, we intend not-just-India, and yet, India remains at the center of the South Asian Anglophone literary project. Does this mean that scholars should produce a theory of South Asian Anglophone world literatures that is more substantively South Asian, or should our collective aim be further development and cultivation of national categories like the Pakistani Anglophone and the Bangladeshi Anglophone? Many of the chapters in the present volume are organized according to national containers (↗19 Britain; ↗20 Ireland; ↗21 USA; ↗22 Canada; ↗30 Australia; ↗31 New Zealand/Aotearoa). While each of these nations has its own significant internal divisions, linguistic diversity, and ethnic plurality, they are relatively self-contained and there are legible literary traditions that speak in their names. At approximately 4.78 million, the population of Ireland is not much greater than that of Surat, which is only the eighth-largest city in India. Or, to consider another contrast, the sixthlargest country in South Asia, Sri Lanka, which is also the third smallest, has nearly 22 million people. Any consideration of how South Asian Anglophone world literatures marshal the local in the address of the world must recognize at the outset that nearly a quarter of the world’s population already lives, reads, and writes in the subcontinent. Rather than ask how South Asian writers manage their literary intercourse with the world, we might ask whether any work of contemporary Anglophone litera-

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ture can be considered worldly if it is ignorant of its South Asian literary antecedents, intertexts, interlocutors, and readers. By that same token, while they cannot simply be conflated with South Asia, the Indian, Pakistani, and Bangladeshi Anglophones are not deficient categories which require regional expansion in order to have purchase on the world. Second, the Anglophone. This chapter follows Aamir Mufti’s recent specification of English as not just a language, but also a “cultural system” (2016, 12), “a vanishing mediator” (2016, 6), “a social imaginary” (2016, 190), and an “apparatus for the assimilation and domestication of diverse practices of writing (and life-worlds) on a world scale” (2016, 17). Taken together, Mufti’s definitions capture how English works in the world as a social and cultural complex, discursive technology, and assemblage – in other words, as the Anglophone, which cannot be conflated with the English language qua language even as it emerges from and through it. Jan Steyn’s elaboration of all literature as “fundamentally comparative” also distinguishes the Anglophone from English; the former is the means through which a body of world literatures “[positions itself] against other world literary texts” and “reflect[s] and produce[s] a constellation of such texts” (↗11 Comparative Literature). South Asian Anglophonism participates in the larger global spread of English, brought about by two successive Anglophone empires, British and American, and hastened by information technologies. This point might also be made conversely: The increasing consolidation of the ‘Anglophone World’ – which includes a significant fraction of the global population, and is the target audience of almost all other language-literatures given English’s dominance as a translational medium – assumes the continuous spread of English in South Asia. The centrality of English in formerly-colonized South Asian countries has been widely studied (cf. Viswanathan 1989; Aravamudan 2006; Sadana 2012a), and the English language is spoken and read throughout South Asia (for example, it is one of two languages of state in India; it is also on the rise in non-Anglophone countries like Nepal). This is why the Japanese literary critic Minae Mizumura observes, in The Fall of Language in the Age of English, that “the rise of India […] will only strengthen the dominance of English,” since it is in fact second-language acquisition, and not putative nativity, that “makes a language ‘universal’” (2015, 40–41). At the risk of understatement, the rise of South Asian Anglophonism has not been universally celebrated. Whatever the material advantages of having English – and there are considerable economic and social advantages to be had, given that English continues to cement its status as the global lingua franca – the advance of English in formerly colonized nations is also understood by some as an alienating force that distances individuals from their communities, resulting in what the Kenyan writer Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o famously called postcolonial societies of “bodiless heads and headless bodies” (1986, 28). For Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o, language is never just a technology of communication or merely functional; it is also vitally a carrier of culture and values that actively creates modes of seeing, thinking, and being in the

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world. In words reminiscent of Frantz Fanon’s theorization of language as carrying “the weight of a civilization” (2008 [1952], 15), Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o refers to the spread of English in the formerly-colonized world as a “cultural bomb” (1986, 3). In a similar vein, the Hindi-language poet Ashok Vajpeyi recommends that “there should be a movement [in India] to protect and preserve languages and mother tongues, just as there is an environmental movement” (Sadana 2012b). In a later section we will return to Vajpeyi’s claim, in readings of Indian Anglophone world literatures that specifically posit the relationship between language loss and ecological devastation, and that use not just the English language but more pointedly the problem of the Anglophone as a way of accessing this relation. The question undergirding the claim, however, deserves elaboration as well – namely, is English a South Asian language in the first place? Answering in the affirmative are writers and scholars like K.R.S. Iyengar, who announced in 1959 that “English has become ours” (qtd. in Joshi 2002, 205), Salman Rushdie, who wrote in 1997 that “English has become an Indian language” (1997, 54), and Vikram Chandra, who, in 2000, claimed English as his ‘father-tongue’ (2000, n.pag.; cf. Nambisan 2003). Others emphasize the extent to which English has gained from its encounters with South Asian languages. In “Because I Never Learned the Names of Trees in Tamil,” poet K. Srilata describes the colonially-imposed language as a bug in her ear, a “convent-English insect, / frantically alive, trapped there since grade one.” When the insect is doused in “the warm oil of tree names in Tamil,” like “Poovarasamaram, vepamaram, magizhamaram,” English acquires “a certain sparkle,” becoming “something else entirely” (2018, n.pag.). Answering in the negative are those who do not permit that English, however indigenized and sparkling it becomes, will ever be a South Asian language, since it is not “native” to the region (cf. Paranjape 1997; Sarkar 2015). Despite the increasing numbers of South Asians for whom English is a usable second (or third) language, dominant ideologies of nativity continue to posit the language as foreign to the subcontinental habitus. Thus, the project of South Asian Anglophonism, whether it refers to writing about South Asia in English, or to those nominally South Asian writers who produce literature in English, continues to be vexed by questions of authenticity, nativity, and debates about postcolonial writers’ overdetermined ‘choices’ to write in English (cf. Achebe 1965; Chow 2014). In other words, and as suggested at the opening of this chapter, the ‘South Asian Anglophone’ is never a given; it is a position of speaking and writing that must continually be created, marshalled, and defended. The third and final term of this chapter’s organizing rubric is ‘world literatures.’ Neumann and Rippl (co-editors of this volume) have argued that rather than focusing on how literatures circulate in the world and acquire new audiences, scholars would do well to examine “the world-making capacities of literature” (2017, 3). In this, they are largely in agreement with Pheng Cheah’s Heideggerian conception of world literature, though they also argue that Cheah’s “ascription of an inherent,

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quasi-given disruptive value to literature cannot do justice to the creative variety of world-making in literature” (Neumann and Rippl 2017, 10; cf. Hayot 2012). If literature has world-making capacities, if it has agency, if it does things in the world, then it also matters how it conceives of agency and agents, both human and nonhuman. The literary examples which follow in this chapter are consequently Anglophone texts that attempt not only to think about the world, or to communicate the worldliness of South Asia, but to world themselves. In order to do this, they marshal the specificity of local situations in performing their orientation to the nonhuman world. They also draw on the rich theoretical legacy of Postcolonial Studies, which is the subject of the next section.

2 Basic Coordinates: From Postcolonial to Anglophone A decade ago, a chapter on Anglophone world literatures in and from South Asia would likely have focused on fragmented, hybrid linguistic and literary forms issuing from the postcolony. Texts examined might include those that ‘chutnefy’ English, like G.V. Desani’s All About H. Hatterr (1945) and Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children (1981), or indigenize the nineteenth-century novel, like Vikram Seth’s A Suitable Boy (1993), or explore the hyphenated identities of diasporic South Asians, like Jhumpa Lahiri’s The Namesake (1999) and Monica Ali’s Brick Lane (2003), or mix social and magical realism to explore personal and political trauma, like Arundhati Roy’s A God of Small Things (1997). Space would also have been given to South Asian Anglophone world literatures’ critique of the nation form, as in Rushdie’s canonical novel, as well as in Rohinton Mistry’s A Fine Balance (1995), and more recently, Aatish Taseer’s The Way Things Were (2014), as well as experiments with ‘placelessness’ like Mohsin Hamid’s How to Get Filthy Rich in Rising Asia (2013), the setting of which is never specified beyond the title. These are some of the most well-hashed topics in Postcolonial Studies, which Ulka Anjaria, in her recent call for a renewed study of the contemporary beyond postcolonial tropes, describes as the “exhaustively studied and documented themes” of “the nation and its fragments, exile, melancholy, memory, violence, and trauma” (2019, 13). For Anjaria, reading South Asia in the global moment necessitates moving away from subjects like the nation and diaspora to the thematization of aspiration, pleasure, desire, and dreams of self-making (cf. Varughese 2013). This chapter looks to another trend in contemporary South Asian literary production – namely, recent engagements with the nonhuman – in order to posit that recent engagements with the global and world are more consistent with the postcolonial project than not. Texts like Indra Sinha’s Animal’s People (2007), Nilanjana Roy’s The Wildings (2012), Tania James’s The Tusk that Did the Damage (2015), Kanishk Tharoor’s Swimmer among the

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Stars (2016), Deepak Unnikrishnan’s Temporary People (2017), and Neel Mukherjee’s A State of Freedom (2018) all offer literary encounters with the nonhuman, from chemical explosions, to outer-space settlements, to the affective lives and experiences of cats, elephants, bears, and suitcases. And that’s only select book-length volumes. Numerous works of short fiction, like Rajesh Parameswaran’s “The Infamous Bengal Ming” (2011) and James’s “What to Do with Henry” (2012), provocatively interrogate the animal-human boundary, as in Parameswaran’s tale of miscommunicated love between a tiger and his keeper. In Aamer Hussein’s Another Gulmohar Tree (2009), the middle-aged couple Usman and Rokeya rekindle their early-life romance and reignite their respective artistic talents by translating together Usman’s moody, magical, and sparse Urdu folktales, which are populated by frogs, cows, deer, and crocodiles. We might also add to the above list Benyamin’s Goat Days, translated from Malayalam in 2012. Such assignment follows Rashmi Sadana’s argument that even those texts that have been translated into English should be considered part of the broader literary landscape of the Anglophone, “as a contribution to Indian writing in English and not merely translated texts” (2015, 148). Although in-depth discussion of the politics of translation is beyond the scope of this chapter, it bears noting that Sadana’s is not a widely shared position. For example, Susan Bassnett observes in this volume a widespread “Anglocentric reluctance to take translation seriously” (↗10 Anglophone World Literatures and Translation). Faculty in many English departments continue to resist the inclusion of translated texts within the purview of ‘English Studies,’ a position that is symptomatic of world literatures’ interstitial position between English and Comparative Literatures (cf. Srinivasan 2018b). At the time of writing in 2019, many English departments in the American academy that hitherto organized their hiring and teaching around British and American literatures (hiring in specialties like Renaissance literature, Victorian literature, nineteenth-century American, and so on) are now also hiring and teaching in a third area, the Anglophone, which does double duty as a global ‘area’ of specialty that exceeds Britain and the United States (while also occasionally overlapping with their multiethnic literatures) and a linguistic container for English-language literatures that are, in Homi Bhabha’s memorable words, “almost the same, but not quite” (1984, 126). The Anglophone is English literature in the world; the Anglophone is English literature’s worldly aspect; the Anglophone is English literature in relation to the world of languages and literatures. Another way of saying this is that the Anglophone produces English simultaneously in its most worldly and most provincial forms (cf. Gikandi 2014). But, and to repeat a point made above, there would be no global Anglophone, no Anglophone World, without the history of colonialism. Two recent special issues, “From Postcolonial to World Anglophone: South Asia as Test Case” in Interventions (cf. Srinivasan 2018a) and “Forms of the Global Anglophone” in Post45 Contemporaries (cf. Anam 2019), posit that what is at stake in this seeming expansion of the purview of Anglo-American ‘English Studies’ is the eclipse of the postcolonial.

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This  is especially evident in the case of South Asia, and when one considers how jobs for scholars of South Asian Anglophone literatures used to be advertised. The South Asian Anglophonist is no longer responsible simply to or for the transnational and transhistorical experience of the postcolonial (itself an unwieldy task, given that across the table, another English department colleague is responsible for “Shakespeare”), but must also impossibly serve as her department’s representative of the Anglophone world or globe (cf. Bhagat-Kennedy 2018). Considerable scholarship problematizes the universalist pretensions of world literature, on the one hand, while striving to redeem its humanist, critical, and world-making aspirations, on the other (cf. Apter 2013; Walkowitz 2015; Mani 2016). Less frequently examined is the conjuncture of specious universalism and generative “pragmatism” (cf. Kantor 2018) that attends the discourse of the Anglophone itself, which is the brief of the aforementioned dossiers. What does it mean to posit Anglophone world literature as a renomination of the postcolonial? It bears recalling that, over and above its well-known critiques of the nation and elaboration of the exilic position, postcolonialism’s signal theoretical intervention was in understandings of time and temporality. Postcolonial theories of temporality and critiques of Western historiography, including Johannes Fabian’s work on allochronism (1983), Dipesh Chakrabarty’s theorization of heterotemporality (2000), the alternative modernities debate, and, more recently, Sarah Sharma’s elaboration of power-chronography (2014), significantly established the terms in which Anglophone writers now imagine human history, futurity, and temporality. Against spatial and taxonomic theories of time that posit its possible parceling, management, and control, and which enabled the pernicious colonial relegation of the colonized world to the distant and primitive past, Postcolonial Studies advances theories of time as intersubjective, entangled, non-integral, continuous, differential, and, in Chakrabarty’s phrase, “out of joint with itself” (2000, 16). Postcolonial Studies’ apprehension of historical time has always been, to borrow a coinage from the Victorianist collective V21, ‘strategically presentist’: it “think[s] of the past as something other than an object of knowledge that is sealed off, separated from the present by the onrush of sequential time” (Coombs et al. 2017, 87). Rather than situate the historical subject in time, in other words, the postcolonial project has been to understand the subject as time. Anglophone world literatures inherit and inhabit this critical space, as they are concerned with the question of finitude – specifically, with the specter of English’s ultimate metabolism of its vernacular others – and as such advance earlier postcolonial revisions of the Hegelian and Fukuyaman ‘end of history’ theses. They are thus less oriented toward the historical preconditions of the present conjuncture, than they are concerned with recovering the futurity that is always already immanent in the world, in “freeing the future,” to quote Keya Ganguly quoting Walter Benjamin, “from its disfigured form in the present” (2015, 175).

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The following section offers readings of three fictional works that are variously routed through South Asia and the experiences of colonialism and postcolonialism. The problem of Anglophone temporality – that is, human temporality and its vexed relations to what Cheah calls “the inappropriable nonhuman other” (2016, 173) – is also central to each text. Indra Sinha’s Animal’s People, Tania James’s “What to Do with Henry,” and Kanishk Tharoor’s “Swimmer Among the Stars” were published between 2007–2017, a decade that saw heightened attention within Postcolonial Studies to climate change and the nonhuman (cf. Aravamudan 2013; Chakrabarty 2009; Chakrabarty 2012; Nixon 2011). Each text addresses the aftermath of a colonial or neo-colonial encounter. Animal’s People retells the story of the multinational American chemical corporation, Union Carbide’s, deadly pesticide leak in Bhopal, India, in 1984; it imagines an American company (“Kampani”) perpetrating and then avoiding responsibility for such a disaster in the fictional city of Khaufpur. “What to Do with Henry” stages two interlinked scenes of postcolonial rescue and intervention: the adoption of a young Sierra Leonean girl by an Ohio teacher, and the adoption of an endangered Sierra Leonean chimpanzee, first by the same teacher and then by an American zoo. Tharoor’s story details a Western research outfit’s attempts to capture and preserve an endangered language that has only one known remaining speaker. And yet, despite the priority each narrative affords to the ‘East-West’ encounter, they ultimately center on what we might term ‘East-East’ relations: Sinha’s Animal to his fellow Khaufpuris; James’s Sierra Leonean Neneh to her chimpanzee brother, Henry; Tharoor’s unnamed speaker to the declining language itself. Together, they invite readers to look anew at relations between the dominant and the marginal, and to consider how forms of vernacular, indigenous, and nonhuman agency might in fact rival that of those with greater claim to the global and world. Sinha, James, and Tharoor are acclaimed fictionists at various career stages, each writing at a tangent to what once was the conventional South Asian postcolonial literary project of national allegory: Sinha’s novel has to date been read primarily by ecocritics; James’s novels and short stories are read as ethnic and multicultural; Tharoor, a relative newcomer, risks appropriation by science fiction. Their respective transnational affiliations – Sinha is India-born but Britain-based; James U.S.-born and -based; Tharoor Singapore-born, an Indian citizen, and U.S.-based – means that their writing, like that of many South Asian Anglophones, is marketed and studied variously as Commonwealth, Asian/American, diasporic, global, and World. The texts in question are each equally legible under the signs of India, South Asia, and Anglophone world literatures. Taken together, the narrative progression of these texts  – from Sinha’s depiction of a person rendered Animal, to James’s tale of an animal rendered human brother and son, to Tharoor’s engagement with endangered human language – sheds light on how the critical project of postcolonialism, in particular its querying of the temporality of human agency, continues to inflect South Asia Anglophone literatures in their most ‘worldly’ forms.

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3 Literary Ways of World-Making: Three ‘South Asian’ Examples The human pursuit of freedom has always involved the hubris-laden pursuit of freedom specifically from nature, whether through the colonization of those deemed more bestial than human, domination of air and sea, eradication of diseases, or innovation of time-space compressing communication technologies. And it is this very pursuit that ultimately confirms that humans have always been natural, always geological, always of and bound to the earth, even when, especially when, we imagine we are most free. We have never been human. We have never stood outside of nor not been implicated in that world which we would seek to control. Indra Sinha’s Animal’s People explores this premise through its treatment of a young Khaufpuri boy stricken with a terrible spinal deformity after an industrial disaster. The nineteen-year-old gets around on all fours and goes by the name of “Jaanvar,” or Animal. Scrappy and ingenious, Animal fends for himself on the streets after having been raised in an orphanage run by French nuns, including Ma Franci, his adoptive ‘mother,’ who herself suffers brain damage and believes that “the Apokalis” (2007, 37) has begun. Since the “great méla of death,” Ma Franci has been unable to understand any language except French. What’s more, she no longer recognizes any other human language as language: “she thought [non-French-speakers] were just making stupid grunts and sounds” (2007, 37). As a result, all of Animal’s exchanges with Ma Franci take place in French, which is translated into English immediately afterward in text for the benefit of “Eyes,” the imagined, Western audience of Animal’s story. The novel is then doubly mediated, for it is framed as a translation and transcription of audio cassettes recorded in Hindi at the behest of a journalist (“Jarnalis”) who seeks to expose the conditions in Khaufpur and tells Animal that “thousands of other people are looking through his eyes” (2007, 7). Ma Franci’s inability to recognize Hindi, English, or any other language as human sets up the series of misapprehensions around which the narrative pivots. The primary action of the novel centers on the arrival of an American (“Amrikan”) doctor, Elli, who claims that she is in Khaufpur to offer free medical services to the thousands afflicted with post-accident sicknesses. Animal’s gang of friends, which includes the community leader Zafar and fellow activist Nisha, suspect that Elli is actually working at the behest of the “Kampani,” which for years has avoided responsibility for the disaster, failed routinely to appear in court, and allowed thousands to die and suffer as a result of their badly secured factory. Zafar’s group ostracizes Elli and prevents the community from accepting her medical services; they also ask Animal to spy on her. Animal, who proudly and frequently disavows his humanity (“I no longer want to be human” (2007 2007, 1); “I’m not a fucking human being, I’ve no wish to be one” (2007. 23); “I am not a human” (2007, 166); “I long ago gave up trying to be human”, 2007, 186), actually nurses a deep desire to walk upright, to make love, and to win Nisha’s hand

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away from that of Zafar. He therefore befriends Elli in the hope that she will arrange for him a life- and gait-changing operation in the United States. It is ironic, but unsurprising, that the “cure” for the poisons unleashed by an American company should be found in the United States. “I can assure you,” Elli tells Animal, “that if you had been born in Amrika, you would not be running around on all fours” (2007, 140). The statement is offered as testament to the skill and perseverance of the American medical establishment, but it captures also the differential exposure to industrial waste in the developed and developing worlds, what Rob Nixon describes in his reading of Animal’s People as “risk relocation” (2009, 444). By the end of the novel, Elli’s relationship to the Kampani has been ascertained (she has connections, but is not a traitor), the Kampani factory burns down, Zafar and other activists survive a hunger strike undertaken to thwart a backroom deal between the Kampani and the local government, and Elli secures funding for Animal’s surgery in the United States. There are even signs of life after death; on the grounds of the fire-blackened factory “grass is growing again, and the charred jungle is pushing out green shoots” (2007, 365). But the life Animal chooses is not, finally, the one he thought he wanted. Instead of pursuing surgery, he buys a childhood friend out of prostitution and arrives at a greater understanding of the “animality” he has always claimed: Right now I can run and hop and carry kids on my back, I can climb hard trees, I’ve gone up mountains, roamed in jungles […] If I’m an upright human, I would be one of millions, not even a healthy one at that. Stay four-foot, I’m the one and only Animal […] Eyes, I’m done. (Sinha 2007, 366)

This passage, which appears on the novel’s final page, is both a reclamation of Animal’s nonhuman humanity and a striking account of the limits of human agency and understanding. Ma Franci, who hears only “stupid grunts” in the words of others, saves many grunters’ lives in the factory fire while sacrificing her own. Only by renouncing their lives in the hunger strike Zafar and others are able to communicate the value of Khaufpuri life. What has been perpetrated by men cannot be undone by men, Animal concludes, but it might yet be lived and survived by those who would give up the impossible dream of redemptive humanity. Animal’s People illustrates how some humans pay a disproportionate price for the geological agency of others. The temporality of violence in Khaufpur is both fast and slow; many die immediately in the Kampani accident, while others spend the rest of their lives in gradual pursuit of death. The variously mediated languages of Khaufpur illustrate this also, as they are ultimately appropriated by the novel’s dominant Anglophonism – “such guttural baliverne,” in Ma Franci’s words (2007, 56). By that same token, the specificity of South Asia and India is somewhat lost in translation; thus, Nixon’s ecocritical reading of the novel focuses on how Khaufpur serves as “a synecdoche for a web of poisoned communities spread out across the global South” (2009, 446). The doubly mediated English-language text also lays bare the limits of the Anglophone literary project, insofar as numerous critics to date have focused on the novel’s Western addressee – the humanitarian subject position of

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“Eyes” (cf. Rickel 2012), the politics of witnessing (cf. Carrigan 2012), “readerly cooptation” (cf. Snell 2008) – at the expense of its ultimate rejection of Western intervention. Rickel, whose driving aim is offering a critique of human rights discourse, reads Animal’s rejection of “humanitarian aid” as a “decoupling [of] what it means to be human from its normative discursive framing” (2012, 102). In pursuit of its resolution, Sinha’s novel rehearses a series of refusals: not only Animal’s rejection of the premise of sovereign human agency, but also refusals of medical treatment, food, life, and surgery. In the short story “What to Do with Henry” (2012), James turns more explicitly to the animal-human interface in order to show how the willed suspension of agency might be the only adequate response to an agency that has radically compromised abilities to live and thrive. The story begins in postcolonial Sierra Leone, where Pearl Groves, a Baptist schoolteacher from Canton, Ohio, and her newly adopted daughter, Neneh, are wandering through Nguebu Market. There, a young man named Saffa is selling an orphaned chimpanzee, and Pearl seems like one of the Peace Corps-types who might like a baby chimp for a pet. “He want you to carry him,” Saffa says to Pearl as they pass by. She is surprised, having “had no idea that he had been the smartest of his form-five class, that he had taught himself English from movies” (2012, 24). If Saffa’s intelligibility is a surprise to Pearl, the chimpanzee’s familiarity is not. Saffa “could see how human the chimp looked to the white woman. The color of its face was nearly as pink as her own” (2012, 24). From this opening, with its telling reversal of fellowship, the white woman drawn to the animal and distanced from the black man, the story continues to complicate conventional understandings of the animal-human boundary. Pearl, Neneh, and the chimpanzee, named Henry, return to the United States, where they constitute an unlikely family (Neneh is in fact the illegitimate child of Pearl’s former husband, a philandering researcher who has no interest in the girl). Henry is childlike and quirky; he likes fried egg sandwiches, Dole fruit cups, popcorn, and “the dial tone of an unhooked phone” (2012, 28–29). He blows kisses to the mailperson and is partial to blondes. For Pearl, Henry is “as precious to her as any human being who had walked into or out of her life” (2012, 33). Neneh and Henry are siblings; “He was her brother, whose leathery soles she liked to tickle […] who winced when the trunk door fell on her head, who rubbed his own head in sympathy” (2012, 31). Importantly, rather than observe the wonder that is their inter-species communication, the narrative comments on one of Henry’s calculating feints: he would steal “the last grape Popsicle […] break off a melty half and hold it out to her on his palm,” and then when Neneh asked for the other half, would play “innocent, he would look away, as if he couldn’t understand her” (2012, 31). The point, of course, is that Henry does understand. It’s Neneh’s classmates who do not, nor do their neighbors, who after seven years complain so much about having an adult male chimpanzee in their midst that Pearl has to give Henry up for adoption by Willow Park Zoo. She asks the zookeepers to treat Henry “with as much dignity as they would afford to each other” (2012, 33), not to trade or sell him, and to ensure that he can visit privately with her and Neneh. But Pearl has no intention of visiting Henry,

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telling Neneh that the chimpanzee “can’t be two things at once” (2012, 37). Years later, a Willow Park zookeeper will similarly tell Neneh: “We can’t just impose our world on theirs” (2012, 40). Both statements bely the history of imposition, the man-made world into which Henry was from birth inducted, and the fact of his and their own shared dual identities. Unsurprisingly, Henry struggles to adjust to the zoo, to the expectation that he be alpha-male, to the food, and to the company of other chimps. Fast forward ten years. Sierra Leone now seems to Neneh “like yet another photograph in National Geographic, the natives serene and strange, the land lush and yet unyielding of its mysteries” (2012, 41). Pearl has passed away. Neneh, who feels that she “share[s] more with [Henry] than with anyone else” (2012, 42), is volunteering at Willow Park. She desires reunion, recognition, but it is not to be. Henry is a supplanted former alpha male who sits and pokes at termite mounds with a stick; she is a young woman and a college graduate. Despite their history, kinship, and the fact that they are “two ruined souls doomed to wander their minds, if not the earth, trying to remember from whence they came” (2012, 42), too much time has passed. When Neneh and Henry are finally granted a semi-private audience, it is ruined by another zookeeper’s interference. There will be no other meetings, no future to consummate the promise of their shared past. “By rescuing him, they had ruined him,” Neneh recalls Pearl saying of Henry; by the end of the story, Neneh seems to agree (cf. 2012, 41). But what is rescue here, and what is ruination? Who is the rescuer and who the rescued? Chimpanzees are an endangered species; in fact, due to factors including habitat loss, poaching, and disease, the Western Chimpanzee of Sierra Leone is one of the most endangered in Africa. But to what life is Henry restored? In its economical 23 pages, “What to Do with Henry” depicts a series of events – Henry’s removal from Sierra Leone, Henry’s integration into a human family, Henry’s adoption by the zoo – that are each at once the poison and the cure. The difference between James’s tale and Sinha’s is that Henry cannot refuse any of these well-intentioned interventions. His agency is suspended from without. The story closes by recounting a dream of Neneh’s, in which she takes a hunter’s bullet for Henry: […] she felt no pain as the bullet entered her, only an electric tide that swept through her body. This was death […] prolonged, painless, as Henry crouched beside her. And though he could not talk, they were communicating in a wordless language all their own, and he was thanking her, he was telling her that he loved her, he was promising her that she was not alone. (James 2012, 45)

After years of misfired human communications (between Pearl and her husband, between Pearl and Henry, between the family and its neighbors, between Pearl and the zoo, between the zoo and Henry), Neneh and Henry’s relationship can only be realized through “a worldless language,” suspended in dream time, and consummated in death. Like Neneh, Sinha’s Animal dreams of reunion with Ma Franci and others he has lost in death – “until I die this wound will never heal” (Sinha 2007, 365) – which

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means projecting resolution into the realm of the ultimate unknown. In the title story from Tharoor’s Swimmer Among the Stars, the last speaker of an unnamed language in an unnamed country (though if poplar trees and mustard fields are any evidence, the country may be India) is visited by a group of academic ethnographers, who have come to record her language for future study. They “show up at the door [of the last speaker of a language] with digital recorders, ready to archive every declension, each instance of the genitive, the idiosyncratic function of verbal suffixes” (2017, 56). “We’ll take [the recordings] to our university,” they tell the old woman, “we’ll study them, we’ll write about them, we’ll archive them. We’ll organize them such that all future generations can learn about you and your language” (2017, 62). The ethnographers aim “to reconstruct the language in its fullness,” (2017, 65) to preserve its diversity, dynamism, and difference, emblematized in Tharoor’s story by the endangered language’s dozen-plus ways to express “gratitude” (2017, 65). Ironically, however, the scientific attempt at preservation confirms that the endangered language is “no longer of this world” (2017, 62); it “can only be pulped into a computer” (2017, 56). Moreover, the diversity of meaning that the ethnographers seek to preserve is always already contaminated by alterity. As the last speaker of her language, the speaker is already something other than human: “the old world of her mind is cut adrift from humans” (2017, 56). Whereas the ethnographers do not understand her language, “the microphone understands” (2017, 57), and whereas the speaker cannot transmit her thoughts directly to the ethnographers, “a computer lab” in another country will eventually digest her “full meaning” (2017, 59). Over the years, the only others with whom the speaker has been able to share her language have been “objects, the pots and pans, a creaking, door, the sharp corner of a table […] a teacup” (2017, 58). The speaker has no fellow speaker, not even one to mourn, as there is “no one else left to die” (2017, 61). This estrangement of the language from the human sphere of interlocution ironizes the ethnographers’ demand that the speaker “speak as it comes naturally” (2017, 57), as if there were anything ‘natural’ about speaking so as not to be understood, as if there were anything natural about human language in the first place. Over the course of the story, the last speaker reflects on the life she has lived outside of and without her language, a life during which she has had to speak even to her own children in a common language not her own. Growing up, she heard her language only at home. At school, as in so many colonial contexts, she was reprimanded for using it; “teachers slapped her wrists if she ever misspoke and emitted the unwelcome sounds of her own tongue” (2017, 61). Since then, she has only heard her language at funerals. Now that she is the last speaker, she asks the ethnographers to ensure that a recording of her own singing is played at her funeral. This posthumous funereal playback represents the language’s “ghostly future […]. Clinically speaking, it is already dead” (2017, 58–59). The final irony of Tharoor’s story is that the last speaker’s unnamed, endangered language is rendered entirely in English, anticipating the English-language scholarship that will, through the apparatuses of

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technological, literary, and critical mediation, render the other-worldly speaker and her other-worldly language into evidence that they too once belonged to a world. What death is this, and what ghostly life? What future is there for the last speaker’s language, after its final end? “How can anybody learn […] that which nobody knows any longer?” (Tharoor 2017, 66). Tharoor’s story, along with Sinha’s and James’s, stages its “response-ability” (cf. Haraway 2016) to the present by refusing the interventions of the knowing. The ethnographers have for the last speaker “the love of the student for the studied” (Tharoor 2017, 60); the Willow Park Zoo employees have for Henry the love of keepers for their pets; the “Eyes” addressed by Animal love him as readers do the read. But the last speaker’s language escapes the researchers; the old wedding songs she sings sound to the ethnographers, weeks later and oceans away, like “a list of unconnected phrases, shards of speech, jagged and inscrutable, the debris of a language swept clean” (Tharoor 2017, 68). Henry and Neneh are reunited in dream time and assured the final communion of death away from the well-meaning interference of the zoo. Animal stops talking to Eyes, stops dreaming of surgical intervention, and resumes living his unrecorded life of slow death. Together, these texts show us how we might conceive of time on a scale of one million years, and write it in a paragraph. The possible literary worlds they furnish are both incomplete and finished, offering visions of the future that are variously open or determined. They show us how, through rhythmically intentional narration, an “event [can] be reversed even though it has already begun” (Aravamudan 2013, 17). They are also bound by a mounting sense that we need to conceptualize what it means to exercise agency – human, nonhuman, and literary – specifically through refusal, by not acting or speaking, or by giving ourselves over to another world. To this end, they participate in a broader critical revisioning of the concept of agency that also includes work on post-humanism (cf. Hayles 1999; Radhakrishnan 2015), critiques of reproductive futurism (cf. Edelman 2004), voicelessness (cf. Rangan 2015), and, in a Heideggarian vein, the nonhuman force of temporalization undergirding literature’s worlding capacities (cf. Cheah 2016). Rather than moving outward to expand the spatial boundaries of the territorial world, these literatures move in time and across species to language-realms and endangered subjects that lay bare the promise and impossibility of writing the world in the first place.

4 Bibliography 4.1 Works Cited Achebe, Chinua. “English and the African Writer.” Transition 18 (1965): 27–30. Anam, Nasia. “Bangladeshi Anglophone Literature: Rerouting the Hegemony of Global English.” Interventions 20.3 (2018): 325–334.

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Anam, Nasia. “Introduction: Forms of the Global Anglophone.” Special issue Forms of the Global Anglophone. Post 45 Contemporaries (Feb. 2019). http://post45.research.yale.edu/2019/02/ introduction-forms-of-the-global-anglophone/ (12 Aug. 2019). Anjaria, Ulka, ed. A History of the Indian Novel in English. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2015. Anjaria, Ulka. Reading India Now: Contemporary Formations in Literature and Popular Culture. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2019. Apter, Emily. Against World Literature: On the Politics of Untranslatability. London: Verso, 2013. Aravamudan, Srinivas. Guru English: South Asian Religion in a Cosmopolitan Language. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2006. Aravamudan, Srinivas. “The Catachronism of Climate Change.” Diacritics 41.3 (2013): 6–30. Aslam, Saiyma, and Aroosa Kanwal, eds. The Routledge Companion to Pakistani Anglophone Writing. London: Routledge, 2018. Bhabha, Homi. “Of Mimicry and Man: The Ambivalence of Colonial Discourse.” October 28 (1984): 125–133. Bhagat-Kennedy, Monika. “Nation After World: Rethinking ‘The End of Postcolonial Theory.’” Interventions 20.3 (2018): 335–344. Carrigan, Anthony. “‘Justice is on Our Side?’ Animal’s People, Generic Hybridity, and Eco-Crime.” The Journal of Commonwealth Literature 47.2 (2012): 159–174. Chakrabarty, Dipesh. Provincializing Europe: Postcolonial Thought and Historical Difference. Princeton University Press, 2000. Chakrabarty, Dipesh. “The Climate of History: Four Theses.” Critical Inquiry 35 (2009): 197–222. Chakrabarty, Dipesh. “Postcolonial Studies and Climate Change.” New Literary History 43.1 (2012): 1–18. Chakravorty, Mrinalini. In Stereotype: South Asia in the Global Literary Imagination. New York: Columbia University Press, 2014. Chandra, Vikram. “The Cult of Authenticity.” Boston Review (Feb. 2000). http://bostonreview.net/ vikram-chandra-the-cult-of-authenticity (1 Feb. 2020). Cheah, Pheng. What is a World? On Postcolonial Literature as World Literature. Durham: Duke University Press, 2016. Chow, Rey. Not like a Native Speaker: On Languaging as a Postcolonial Experience. New York: Columbia University Press, 2014. Coombs, David S., and Danielle Coriale. “V21 Forum on Strategic Presentism: Introduction.” Victorian Studies 59.1 (2017): 87–89. Edelman, Lee. No Future: Queer Theory and the Death Drive. Durham: Duke University Press, 2004. Fabian, Johannes. Time and the Other: How Anthropology Makes its Object. New York: Columbia University Press, 1983. Fanon, Frantz. Black Skin, White Masks. Trans. Richard Philcox. New York: Grove Press, 2008 [1952]. Gajarawala, Toral. Untouchable Fictions: Literary Realism and the Crisis of Caste. New York: Fordham University Press, 2013. Ganguly, Keya. “Temporality and Postcolonial Critique.” The Cambridge Companion to Postcolonial Literary Studies. Ed. Neil Lazarus. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press (2015): 162–180. Ghosh, Bishnupriya. When Borne Across: Literary Cosmopolitics in the Contemporary Indian Novel. New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2004. Gikandi, Simon. “Editor’s Column: Provincializing English.” PMLA 129.1 (2014): 7–17. Haraway, Donna. Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene. Durham: Duke University Press, 2016. Hayles, N. Katherine. How We Became Posthuman: Virtual Bodies in Cybernetics, Literatures, and Informatics. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1999.

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Hayot, Eric. On Literary Worlds. New York: Oxford University Press, 2012. James, Tania. Aerogrammes and Other Stories. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2012. Joshi, Priya. In Another Country: Colonialism, Culture, and the English Novel in India. New York: Columbia University Press, 2002. Kantor, Roanne L. “Futures Past: South Asian Literature ‘Post-Boom.’” Interventions 20.3 (2018): 345–353. Mani, B. Venkat. Recoding World Literature: Libraries, Print Culture, and Germany’s Pact with Books. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016. Mizumura, Minae. The Fall of Language in the Age of English. Trans. Mari Yoshihara and Juliet Winters Carpenter. New York: Columbia University Press, 2015. Mufti, Aamir R. Forget English! Orientalisms and World Literature. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2016. Nambisan, Vijay. Language as an Ethic. New Delhi: Penguin Books, 2003. Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o. Decolonising the Mind: The Politics of Language in African Literature. Nairobi: East African Educational Publishers, 1986 [1981]. Neumann, Birgit, and Gabriele Rippl. “Anglophone World Literatures: Introduction.” Special issue Anglophone World Literatures. Anglia 135.1 (2017): 1–20. Nixon, Rob. “Neoliberalism, Slow Violence, and the Environmental Picaresque.” Modern Fiction Studies 55.3 (2009): 443–467. Nixon, Rob. Slow Violence and the Environmentalism of the Poor. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2011. Paranjape, Makarand, ed. Nativism: Essays in Criticism. New Delhi: Sahitya Akademi, 1997. Radhakrishnan, Rajagopalan. “Flights of the Human as Flights from the Human.” Symploke 23.1–2 (2015): 173–200. Rangan, Pooja. “In Defense of Voicelessness: The Matter of the Voice and the Films of Leslie Thornton.” Feminist Media Histories 1.3 (2015): 95–126. Rickel, Jennifer. “‘The Poor Remain:’ A Posthumanist Rethinking of Literary Humanitarianism in Indra Sinha’s Animal’s People.” Ariel 43.1 (2012): 87–108. Rushdie, Salman. Midnight’s Children. London: Cape, 1981. Rushdie, Salman. “Damme, This is the Oriental Scene for You!” The New Yorker (23 June 1997): 50–61. Sadana, Rashmi. English Heart, Hindi Heartland: The Political Life of Literature in India. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2012a. Sadana, Rashmi. “Managing Hindi: How we live multilingually and what this says about our language and literature.” The Caravan (2012b). http://www.caravanmagazine.in/ reviews-essays/managing-hindi (12 Aug. 2019). Sadana, Rashmi. “Found in Translation: Self, Caste, and Other in Three Modern Texts.” A History of the Indian Novel in English. Ed. Ulka Anjaria. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015. 147–161. Sarkar, Subodh. “We are Anglo-Clones and yet Indians: A Tale of Two South Asias.” Indian Literature 59.4 (2015): 6–10. Sharma, Sarah. In the Meantime: Temporality and Cultural Politics. Durham: Duke University Press, 2014. Sinha, Indra. Animal’s People. New York: Simon & Schuster, 2007. Snell, Heather. “Assessing the Limitations of Laughter in Indra Sinha’s Animal’s People.” Postcolonial Text 4.4 (2008): 1–15. Spivak, Gayatri C. Death of a Discipline. New York: Columbia University Press, 2003. Srilata, K. “Because I Never Learned the Names of Trees in Tamil.” Guftugu (2018). https://guftugu. in/2018/08/k-srilata-poems/ (12 Aug. 2019).

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Srinivasan, Ragini T. “Introduction: South Asia from Postcolonial to World Anglophone.” Special issue From Postcolonial to World Anglophone: South Asia as Test Case. Interventions 20.3 (2018a): 309–316. Srinivasan, Ragini T. “What Literature Does.” boundary 2 (2018b). https://www.boundary2. org/2018/10/ragini-tharoor-srinivasan-what-literature-does-review-of-amit-chaudhuri-edliterary-activism/ (12 Aug. 2019). Tharoor, Kanishk. Swimmer Among the Stars. New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2017. Varughese, E. Dawson. Reading New India: Post-Millennial Indian Fiction in English. London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2013. Viswanathan, Gauri. Masks of Conquest: Literary Study and British Rule in India. Columbia University Press, 2014 [1989]. Walkowitz, Rebecca L. Born Translated: The Contemporary Novel in an Age of World Literature. New York: Columbia University Press, 2015.

4.2 Further Reading Gandhi, Leela. Postcolonial Theory: A Critical Introduction. New York: Columbia University Press, 1998. Layoun, Mary N. “The Postcolonial as a Category.” Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Literature (26 Apr. 2019). https://oxfordre.com/literature/view/10.1093/ acrefore/9780190201098.001.0001/acrefore-9780190201098-e-49 (12 Aug. 2019). Lazarus, Neil, ed. The Cambridge Companion to Postcolonial Literary Studies. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015. Shamsie, Muneeza. “Pakistani-English Writing.” Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Literature (24 May 2017). https://oxfordre.com/literature/view/10.1093/ acrefore/9780190201098.001.0001/acrefore-9780190201098-e-69 (12 Aug. 2019). Singh, Amardeep. “The Indian Novel in the 21st Century.” Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Literature (26 Feb. 2018). https://oxfordre.com/literature/view/10.1093/ acrefore/9780190201098.001.0001/acrefore-9780190201098-e-414 (12 Aug. 2019).

Kwok-kan Tam

29 Southeast Asia (Hong Kong and Singapore) Abstract: Southeast Asia is a cultural construct emerging out of the colonial legacy of the British Empire, and as such, one of the linguistically and culturally most complex regions in the world. Its literature is marked by its mix between the British, Chinese, Indian and Malay cultures, as well as a religious mixture of Christianity and Islam. Southeast Asia has a vibrant literary scene in which writers experiment with new varieties of English in expressing their growing awareness of Southeast Asian subjectivity and literary sensibility. The English literature in Southeast Asia is part of the Anglophone world, but is also distinctly different, as it is expressed in English without being Anglicized in its cultural orientations and value preferences. Key Terms: Southeast Asia, Hong Kong, Singapore, Englishization, postcolonialism, Southeast Asian subjectivity, identity, globalization

1 Geographical Encounters and the Cultural Construct of Southeast Asia Southeast Asia is a geographical location that refers to the intersection between East Asia and South Asia, currently comprising of countries such as Thailand, Laos, Cambodia, Myanmar (Burma), Vietnam, Brunei, East Timor, the Philippines, Indonesia, Malaysia, and Singapore. However, it is historically also a cultural and political construct: soon after the Second World War, the Colonial Office in London grouped Malaya and Hong Kong under the administration of the Southeast Asia Department. Malaya, including Singapore, and Hong Kong were considered distinctly different from other British controlled territories in Southeast Asia for reasons that they form a route of British trade and were English-speaking with a British legal system. Culturally and historically, Malaya and Hong Kong shared many similarities, such as being multi-racial, multi-religious, and multilingual, with English being dominant. The separation of Singapore from Malaya in 1965 created two separate countries: Malaysia and Singapore. Historically and culturally, Hong Kong, Singapore and Malaysia have played a significant role in the formation of the Southeast Asian Corridor in British colonialism. From the Chinese perspective, Singapore and Malaysia are part of the Chinese imaginary of “Nanyang,” meaning South Ocean, carrying a sense of being geographically distant from the Central Chinese culture, yet remaining in close contact. Situated between East and South Asia, Southeast Asia is criss-crossed by influences from China, India and the Middle East. Malaya and Hong Kong have been inhabited by a mainly Chinese, https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110583182-030

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Indian and Malay population. Since the return to China in 1997, Hong Kong is politically a special administrative region of China, but it remains culturally connected to the United Kingdom and to many former British colonies in Southeast Asia. The region has a long history of colonization by the Portuguese, Dutch, English, French and Japanese, but also a strong migratory presence of Indian and Chinese cultures. In many instances, such as food and language, the region exhibits a localization of all the major civilizations in the world. Because of the high degree of hybridization, it is highly globalized in the sense that the region is connected with all major civilizations. Historically, Southeast Asia has been under the religious and cultural influence of Islam, Confucian and Buddhist cultures from the Arab world, China and India over the last 1000 years. Britain gained influence in the region when the British East India Company was established in 1763 and when Britain took over Hong Kong in 1842. However, British influence in the region began to cede with the British Empire in Asia being crippled by the Japanese Empire during the Second World War and subsequently crumbled with the rise of independence movements in India and other parts of Asia. The independence of Singapore in 1965 created an independent state, forming a triangle of Malaysia, Singapore and Hong Kong, in which there is a strong British legacy in language, culture, education and the legal system. A striking feature of Southeast Asia is that the region exemplifies a high degree of cultural hybridization in its intersections with the Chinese, Indian, Malay and the Islam worlds, with all of them being subsumed and integrated under British culture and the English language. It is an extremely complex but rich site of cultural, literary and linguistic creativity. The rich cultures in Southeast Asia have been formed as a result of long-time processes of hybridization among different languages, religions and civilizations. Today, the region has created its own forms of culture and its own English full of code-mixing and code-switching with local languages.

2 Theorizing the Southeast Asian Anglophone World There are three theoretical frameworks in which Southeast Asia Anglophone literature can be examined in terms of its historical, cultural and literary formation: (1) Postcolonialism and Globalization; (2) World Englishes and Literary Creativity; and (3) Southeast Asian Anglophone Literature and World Literature. All three frameworks account for certain aspects of the culture of the region, and they complement each other in offering views that can explain how the region has come to its formation and how it is connected in history and in culture to the rest of the world.

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2.1 Postcolonialism and Globalization Colonialism has brought Western culture to different parts of the world. Over the past two centuries, the British Empire and the American dominance in world affairs have, respectively, produced far-reaching cultural changes in Southeast Asia, particularly in processes of colonization, decolonization and globalization. Language is the way in which “social, economic and political discourse are grounded […]. [I]t is incontestable that language is the mode of a constant and pervasive extension of cultural dominance – through ideas, attitudes, histories and ways of seeing – that is central to imperial hegemony” (Ashcroft 2009, 2). Writings in English in Hong Kong, Singapore and Malaysia have achieved different degrees of decolonization as a reaction to and revolt against colonization, particularly during the colonial and postcolonial periods. Postcolonialism in Hong Kong, Singapore and Malaysia does not mean anti-colonialism, but a movement beyond the cultural space of colonialism, as well as a further development from colonialism. The adoption of English as lingua franca is a necessity because of the need to have an interlanguage in a multilingual society. However, the adoption of the English language requires adaptation too, so that the language can become a language of the region and be separated from its colonial master. An oft-quoted example to illustrate the love-hate attitude toward the English language in Southeast Asia is Caliban’s retort in The Tempest: “You taught me language, and my profit on’t / Is I know how to curse. The red plague rid you / For learning me your language!” (1611, 1.2.363–365). On this point, Singapore poet and scholar Edwin Thumboo remarks that “[t]he nerve to knock English about, and re-tune it for creativity, came with the founding of the University of Malaya in Singapore in October 1949. It started with the poetry, chiefly, of Wang Gungwu and Goh Sin Tub. A few short stories emerged as offshoots of the experiment and search for a common identity and national language/idiom” (Thumboo 1990, xvii). It is the need to express their sentiments, their feelings and their imagination that give creative writers the urge to have their own language – a new variety of English that can incorporate irreplaceable local expressions. As in many multilingual societies, language is an important issue in the postcolonial construction of a nation. In identity politics, language plays a significant role in the construction of a national identity in Singapore, which has to go above and beyond racial differences. While the depoliticization of English succeeds in making it available for use as a lingua franca of society, concerns are raised about the cultural consequences of the dominance of English: Cultural discourse in Singapore from then on took on an increasing disparaging portrayal of the ‘West’ as an imaginary unitary entity, eliminating differences between the people of Europe, America, and Australia. Second, it was argued in essentialist fashion that the domination of English is emotively problematic because it remains a ‘superimposed’ Western language, thereby lacking cultural authenticity and legitimacy. (Chua and Kuo 1998, 52–53)

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If English serves as the lingua franca in Singapore, it has to be depoliticized and deculturalized; however, the opposite seems to be the case: “The government’s success in actively propagating a very particular notion of the ‘practical’ and in ‘convincing’ even academics and intellectuals to accept this conception of the ‘practical’ is indicative of its ideological success and not of the end of ideology nor the end of politics” (Chua 1983, 32). Historian Samuel Huntington has also raised a similar point on the relation between language and identity: “A lingua franca is a way of coping with linguistic and cultural differences, not a way of eliminating them” (1998, 61). And he further says, “[t]he use of English for intercultural communication thus helps to maintain and, indeed, reinforces peoples’ separate cultural identities. Precisely because people want to preserve their own culture they use English to communicate with peoples of other cultures” (Huntington 1998, 62). In the case of Singapore, teaching English in deculturalized contexts is next to impossible, unless a new variety of English is artificially created. The only way that is practical is to teach English by transcending the cultural specificity of one variety. As a nation with a population comprising of multinational ethnicities, such as Chinese, Malay, Indian, Filipino, and many others, and also a nation with multiple religions, English is taught in Singapore without giving privilege to one variety and without emphasizing the religious overtones accompanying a specific variety. A look at the English literature syllabus in secondary schools in Singapore will show that local English writers, Indian English writers and African English writers are taught alongside British and American writers (cf. Tam 2002; Tam 2003). English is taught as a global language so as to highlight Singapore English, or “Singlish,” as a variety that is characterized by the cultural mix in the nation. As a colloquial variety, Singlish has become recognized as new English. The sociocultural development of modern Asia must be conceived together with the culture of Englishization. In many Asian countries, English has become not only the lingua franca but also the language of government, law, business, and education. For more than a century, intellectuals in many non-English-speaking countries have been educated and trained in various professions through the medium of English. In professions that form the backbone of government and business administration, British, and therefore English, standards have become yardsticks of quality. It is these professional standards, together with the language through which they are mediated, that have placed English in a culturally advantageous and dominant language position. We see an instance of this in English language teaching, in which ESP (English for Specific Purposes) has developed as a methodology to teach English to professionals in various fields of technical specialization. English has become the medium of international communication because it connects different parts of the world through the various professions that are strategic in the advancement of society. British linguist David Crystal has outlined several conditions that make English the global language, the most important of which is the military and economic power that serves as a key factor in sustaining the influence of Britain and the United States (cf. 1997, 53). However, the reality is that there is an

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English-speaking culture behind military and economic power. On this point, David Block and Deborah Cameron put forth the view that “language is the primary medium of human social interaction, and interaction is the means through which social relations are constructed and maintained” (2002, 1). It is the English-speaking professionals in different fields of specialization that have linked the world and formed global circuits of cultural and knowledge flows. It is also through the medium of English that these professionals are connected to the “global networks of finance, trade, industry, and higher education.” And together “they make up the source for new epicentres of English speakers” (Pakir 2001, 2). It is impossible for Hong Kong, Singapore, or Malaysia, the former British colonies, to replace English as a means of international communication for business and for education. For these three places, the need to continue to use English is a necessity resulting, on the one hand, from a colonial legacy and, on the other, from a globalization drive. Hong Kong, as Rey Chow has argued (1992), is an anomaly in postcoloniality. Hong Kong has no prehistory before colonialism because it was a small fishing village in the 1840s. After the retreat of the British in 1997, Hong Kong does not become an independent state. However, Hong Kong was under British rule for 150 years and Britain has created in Hong Kong an Anglophone culture connected with the British Empire in Southeast Asia. In Hong Kong too, there have been numerous attempts in constructing a postcolonial Hong Kong identity since the mid-1980s when Britain entered into an agreement with China that Hong Kong would be returned to China in 1997. In the English writings produced since then, particularly in drama, poetry and fiction, questions were raised about Hong Kong identity and its future relation with China and the international community. The rise of local culture, characterized by the Cantopop and the long-time language mix between English and Cantonese Chinese in daily use, literary writings, popular songs and films, has made Hong Kong culture distinctly different from China’s culture and shows more affinity with Southeast Asia. More complex than Singapore, Hong Kong did not become an independent state after 1997 and its postcolonial experience is more a cultural reality than a political one.

2.2 World Englishes and Literary Creativity “World Englishes” is a concept invented by linguist Braj Kachru in 1985 to designate the different varieties of English that have attained the status of world language. Kachru divides the world of Englishes in three circles: the Inner, the Outer and the Expanding. In the Inner Circle are the native varieties, such as British, American, Canadian, and Australian. In the Outer Circle are the varieties where English is used as a second language, such as Indian, Singaporean, Malaysian, African, Caribbean, the Philippines, and Hong Kong. In the Expanding Circle are the varieties where English is used as a foreign language, such as Chinese, Russian, Japanese, and Korean. From the Inner Circle to the Outer Circle and the Expanding Circle is a continuum of language

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evolution, both historically and culturally. In this model, the dominant varieties are obviously those of the colonial and globalization powers, that is, the British and American varieties. Kachru’s model takes into account issues of population which shows a ratio of 1:4 between native speakers and non-native speakers. The ratio sends an alarm that the English language is dominated by non-native uses. In Newsweek, there was a special issue in 2005 carrying the title “Who Owns English? Non-native Speakers are Transforming the Global Language,” in which stories were reported on how Asians used English in contexts different from the native speakers’ (cf. Tam 2019, 10). While varieties of English in the Outer and Expanding Circles depend on the norms derived from the native varieties in the Inner Circle, the Inner Circle also sees changing signs since the 1970s that non-native varieties, such as Asian and African, have become more and more wide-spread in large cities, such as London, Birmingham, Manchester, New York, Chicago, and Los Angeles. Asian American writers, for example, Maxine Hong Kingston, Caribbean British writers and Indian British writers, for example, V.S. Naipaul and Salman Rushdie, are also transforming the English language from inside the Inner Circle. The question of who owns English apparently points to the fact that no single country owns “global English,” which is a matter of the combined effects of postcolonialism and globalization. As language arts, literary writings in English are not simply language use devoid of cultural content; they are related and connected to the prototypes in British literature. However, in postcolonial Southeast Asia, particularly in Hong Kong, Singapore and Malaysia, English writings often take on models and works in British literature as sites of revolt, reinvention and contestation. Literary scholar Kwok-kan Tam has devised a model in 2019 to account for the contestations in World Englishes. This model addresses issues of the global reception of literary works that originate in the peripheries, or Outer and Expanding Circles. It also seeks to explain how regional literary works have become global, not simply because of circulation and translation, but because of their intrinsic connections and dialogic relations with prototypes of the global canons. Such relations form an intricate web of contestation and dialogism that inform the subjectivity and sensibility of the writers who are multilingual and have more than one cultural resource in the variety of English they use. In London, as well as in many other large cities in Britain, there is the co-existence of different varieties of English: British, African, Asian, and Caribbean. The shift of the linguistic centre of English can be understood as a change of language partnership in that African, Asian, and Caribbean linguistic and cultural elements have now entered English usage in Britain. It has become impossible to ignore the presence of non-British writers and their role in shaping contemporary British literature. Many of the award-winning authors studied in British universities, such as Rudyard Kipling, Joseph Conrad, Doris Lessing, Salman Rushdie, and V.S. Naipaul, are from cultural and linguistic backgrounds outside Britain. Many non-Western English writers are recognized for their uniqueness in language creativity, which is a result of hybridized language use. That they are now taught in universities means that they have

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entered the curriculum and their use of non-Western Englishes is recognized and institutionalized. As a hybridized cultural identity, Englishness in today’s Britain is not immune from the pluralism of Englishes in the world (cf. Tam 2019, 23). No matter what model is devised to conceptualize the world of Englishes, the issues of population, ownership, standard, and creative use in literary writings and performing arts inform the changing relations among different varieties of English in terms of their interdependence and their impact on each other. Such a web of relations calls for a framework that will consider them in terms of dynamic interaction and contestation. Southeast Asian Englishes, as expressed through literature, provide some of the typical examples of dynamism and creativity in new language uses. As the intersection between the Inner and Expanding Circles, Southeast Asian Anglophone literature shares many common features between native and non-native Englishes, and exemplifies the double phenomena of Asianizing, hence localizing, English and Englishizing, hence also globalizing, the native languages. Because of the localization of English, the use of bilingual mixed codes and the invention of bicultural metaphors have become common in Southeast Asia. Such bilingual and bicultural creativity gives English writings in Hong Kong and Singapore a new sensibility, behind which is a new subjectivity. Examples of bilingual mixed-code metaphors can be found in literary writings in Hong Kong and Singapore. Many writers, like Xu Xi, Louise Ho and Andrew Parkin from Hong Kong have experimented with bilingual metaphors mixing Chinese with English elements. Similarly, Mary Lo and Jason Leow from Singapore also use hybrid metaphors in their writings as markers of local identity. Details will be discussed in the next sections.

2.3 Southeast Asian Anglophone Literature as World Literature The concept of world literature, since Goethe proposed it in the eighteenth century, carries several senses, two of which are: the sum total of all national literatures, and the circulation of national works in global networks of literary and cultural formations. Literature scholar David Damrosch (2003) emphasizes the latter as a defining feature of world literature, which is actually an age-old methodology in Comparative Literature and it sees world literature as works that transcend linguistic and national boundaries (cf. Aldridge 1980). The comparative literature method is to consider major works in the world, that is, works from different national literatures, that have impact on other works and together they form a relation in the form of genre, style, theme, or movement. Such a methodology characterizes world literature as international relations in literature. The relations are structural relations consisting of archetypes and flows in their relations of dynamic interactions. From an anthropological perspective, Anthropologist Arjun Appadurai (1996) proposes a concept

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of modernity as characterized by different kinds of flows, including ideas, media, capital, technology and people. World literature, as a theoretical construct, is better understood in terms of flows and encounters. Appadurai’s theorization of modernity has been extended by literary anthropologist Susan Friedman to remap world literature as flows, encounters, and cycles. World literature, in the age of globalization, has to be reconceived as cycles and global flows in literature that create impacts on the local (cf. Friedman 2011). There is also the view that world dominant languages shift from one to another, for example, from French in the eighteenth century to English in the nineteenth century because of the change in imperial power (cf. Casanova 2015). All of these world dominant languages, together with their cultures and literary legacies, have left their marks in transforming the linguistic and literary map of the world. Culturally and linguistically, both colonialism in the nineteenth century and globalization in the twentieth century have been driving forces to universalize Western values and standards and spread them to the rest of the world through English, thus placing the English-speaking world allied with Britain and the United States in a dominant position in world politics. In Southeast Asia, what has happened is a phenomenon of what Bill Ashcroft, Griffiths and Tiffin call “the Empire writes back” (2002), with writers in the region promoting their own English variety with new sensibilities. Many of the Southeast Asian English writers, such as Catherine Lim, Timothy Mo, Louise Ho, and Xu Xi are read and taught in the Inner Circle of World Englishes, that is, the UK, US, Canada, and Australia. In their writings, there are expressions that are peculiar to their cultural milieu. It is through English, in its own form as varieties, that Southeast Asian Anglophone literature enters into the structural flows of world literature, as they are works that speak the Southeast Asian voice in English. Programmes that study Southeast Asian English writers as authors of “World Englishes” and “postcolonial literature” can be found in British and American universities. Leeds University has a Master’s Degree programme in World Englishes, while University of Southampton has an MA in Global Englishes. English writers with Asian backgrounds and writing about Asian experience, such as Maxine Hong Kingston, Salman Rushdie, and Kazuo Ishiguro, are taught in the English curriculum in British and American universities. The international literary prizes they have won are evidence of their voice speaking beyond British and American cultures. It is the Southeast Asian voice that has given English writings in Hong Kong, Singapore and Malaysia a place in world literature. The culture and the world presented in Hong Kong, Singapore and Malaysian writings intersect with the wider world beyond Southeast Asia. As language structures thinking, new varieties of English are invented and devised to facilitate new thinking and new mindsets. A new Asian subjectivity has emerged as a result of Englishization via processes of colonization, postcolonization, globalization and localization. Localization does not mean getting rid of English but making it a language relevant to local contexts. Englishization thus occurs hand in hand with localization of English.

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A new Asian subjectivity has emerged, which is linguistically and culturally Englishized, and thus hybridized. As a global language, and an interlanguage in many places, English has a dominant position over other languages that it interacts with. An example of this phenomenon is that new Englishes have emerged as a result of Englishization of local languages in former British colonies, such as India, Singapore, and Hong Kong where local languages have been relexified. Louise Ho, a Hong Kong poet, has used metaphors transliterated from Chinese for incorporation into her English poems. In a poem, “Jamming,” she has used the Chinese metaphor “Geeleegulu” to refer to people speaking nonsense: Call it what you will Variously-tongued Multicultural Cosmopolitan or apartheid Each is to the other

   – geeleegulu – (Ho 1994, 23)

Louise Ho’s experimentation with using Cantonese Chinese expressions in her English poem is echoed in Xu Xi’s novel, The Unwalled City, in which “geeleegulu” is also used to refer to new English uses mixing English with local Cantonese: She locked up the office, annoyed that she was once again the last to leave. Just that morning, Gu Kwun had asked her what “hobby” meant, “for real.” She had been only half paying attention, and the question surprised her. “Surely you know the meaning. It’s such a simple word. Why are you asking?” “I thought it was a makeup word, like one of your geeleegulu.” (Xi 2001, 221)

“Geeleegulu” is a Cantonese Chinese term that is used to refer to speeches that have sounds only, but not sense. It may refer to unintelligibility, non-sense or miscommunication. For a long time, Singlish has been regarded as non-standard and as a variety spoken by people who are uneducated, or at least not British educated. So is Yinglish, or Hong Kong English. However, there has been a gradual change of attitude toward Singlish since the 1980s when World Englishes scholars, such as Braj Kachru and Edwin Thumboo, see it as a marker of Singapore identity. In creative writings, particularly in drama and fiction, it is unauthentic to use standard British English in dialogue when the characters are Singaporeans. Singaporeans, particularly youngsters, all speak colloquial Singapore English, that is, Singlish in daily use. As can be seen in the poem “Not Too Obiang” by Singapore poet Jason Leow, there is resentment against the non-recognition of Singapore writers using Singlish to express their identity and cultural sentiments: “A Poem Not Too Obiang” From fiddlesticks and By Jove, I pick my words to find Alamak

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 Kwok-kan Tam

stirring spicily on my tongue – like the first bite of green chillies that sends tentative excitement popping out of their seeds. Why should I not drink teh tarek and discuss Lee Tzu Pheng (without putting them in italics) among friends who read but tread on the trappings of blind Miltonic and Shakespearean worship? Like the prata man’s flips and flaps of the dough, taking shape with each dose of local flavour, I look for my place in a Singaporean life. My place in the sun is certainly not too LC for some others’ meringue pies and afternoon tea.

(Leow 1995, 138)

The poem is full of bilingual metaphors that work on the principle of mapping between the source and target language domains (cf. Ahrens 2002). Bilingual metaphors are new metaphors because of the use of a new element that is “not already part of the conceptual system of a culture as reflected in its language” (Lakoff and Johnson 1980, 139). “Alamak,” the Malay expression for “alas,” is mapped onto “From fiddlesticks and By Jove.” The effect of using “alamak” for “alas” is compared to “green chillies” “stirring spicily on my tongue.” The images of cultural hybridity, like “teh tarek,” and the identity of in-betweenness, like “the prata man’s / flips and flaps of the dough,” as expressed in the poem, are presented also as code-mixing in language, “alamak” as Malay relexification of English. Again, “obiang,” meaning “old-fashioned,” is a Malay relexification of English. Yet what is more interesting is the cultural mix of the speaker’s self, which falls in-between the culture of English and that of Chinese in the image of hybridized food. At another level, the poem presents a dilemma between the local and the foreign. Instead of speaking of one’s identity as ethnic and cultural, what is delineated here is that of the “local.” “LC” means “low class.” Writing about Chinese poetry and not using British English should not be regarded as “low class.” Jason Leow’s poem describes a situation in Singapore where local poets for some time have not been recognized as English writers or granted a place among the canonic writers in English literature, such as Milton, because they use hybrid expressions, and therefore

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their names have to be italicized as foreign authors. However, the hybrid words are considered by the poet as more expressive than English words and are irreplaceable.

3 Englishized Southeast Asian Subjectivity Englishization also refers to processes in which other languages are Englishized as a result of language contact and hybridization. When Asian languages are colonized by English, new varieties of English arise and the new varieties adopt English syntax mixing local lexical items with English. Linguists call such activities code-mixing and code-switching. There is also the phenomenon of relexification in reverse, in which English words are localized by either transliteration or translation and used in local languages. The Englishization of major Asian languages, including Chinese and Tamil, occur not in the Asian countries that host these languages, but mostly in Southeast Asia because of the population and language mix there. The rise of new varieties of English (cf. Kachru 1986; Thumboo 1990; Crystal 1997, McArthur 1998; Tam 2019) are reflections of new linguistic and cultural identities, as well as the need for new means to express new identities. For practical functions of communication, English serves as an interlanguage in the region. However, English also serves as a neutral means of communication in some countries, such as Singapore where there is more than one language. Using English as a politically neutral language does not mean that English does not have political content and judgement; it means only that it is originally not a local language and therefore will not privilege any of the rival local languages in the region. Englishization occurs also because of the need to globalize the culture, commerce and the work force. Singapore is a successful example of Englishization because it has attracted American investment since it turned all Chinese-medium schools into English in the mid-1960s and educated a young generation of English-speaking Singaporeans. In other words, there is the need of nation building in Singapore by using English as an international and intranational language. The result of English education is that it has produced new generations of English writers, journalists and workers. Englishization has given rise to new varieties of English and new styles of writing which are adopted by local writers in Southeast Asia for the reason that they are more expressive and more representative of their identities than British or American English. Especially in drama and fiction, authenticity in dialogue is possible only with the use of local hybrid English. Examples of using Hong Kong English, or using Singlish, can be found in Hong Kong and Singapore writers whose works present how local people interact in English. Today, many Asian English words have entered the vocabulary of British English and are accepted by the Oxford English Dictionary. Many of the new English words are extended metaphors derived from bilingual usage. Southeast Asia is culturally and linguistically connected with the rest of the world not only because it is a site of experimentation in cultural hybridity, but also because

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it is situated in the “Outer Circle of World Englishes” (cf. Kachru 1986; Thumboo 2001) in which English serves mostly as a second language, but sometimes also as a first language depending on whether the speaker speaks the localized variety of English. Southeast Asian English has its own form of being a language of creativity, and in this way, it challenges the conventional form and use of English in the “Inner Circle,” which is the native speakers’ circle. Take Singapore and Hong Kong as examples, it can be seen that Singlish is a local variety with local expressions which, however, marks the Singaporean identity of the speakers. In Hong Kong, too, there is a variety which writer and journalist Nury Vittachi calls “Yinglish” (cf. Vittachi 2002). “Yinglish” is a term coined by Vittachi to refer to the variety of Hong Kong English which incorporates Chinese expressions into English syntax. It is natural that local expressions are used in Singlish or Yinglish to refer to local cultural terms that do not have equivalents in English. In Hong Kong writer Xu Xi’s novel The Unwalled City (1995), there is the expression “dungsai” carrying the double meaning of “East-West” and “something,” which in the novel refers to “identity as an East-West thing.” However, there are uses of new expressions in Singlish or Yinglish for creative purposes, especially in drama, poetry and fiction. New images are created by mixing English with local words. The most far-reaching impact of Englishization in Southeast Asia is the emergence of new subjectivities that see the world from the perspective of English-language media, and construct life in the local world with the vocabulary of Southeast Asian English culture. Cultural contestation does not necessarily lead to confrontation. It may be manifested as productive interactions in the formation of identity. In Huntington’s formulation of the new world order, as he has said, “local politics is the politics of ethnicity, global politics is the politics of civilizations” (1998, 28). In Singapore, while ethnicity defines people’s cultural identity, it is ethnicity expressed particularly in the form of the language they speak, the style of clothes they wear, and the food they consume as cultural markers that exhibit a high-degree hybridization of civilizations. In the daily life of the Singaporeans, differences in civilization are turned into objects of desire for consumption of cultural hybridization. Thus, although Chinese food has found its way into Malay cuisine, it is also Islamized. So is Indian food in its mix with Chinese and Malay elements, which is an example of identity mix (cf. Chua and Rajah 2001, 161–197).

4 Hong Kong and Singapore Voices in Remaking the World Hybridity can be viewed as a social phenomenon, in which cultural contestation takes form in the production of impure types, yet its consumption goes beyond the social into the psychological. At the heart of the consumption of hybridized products is a desiring self that seeks to affirm its ethnicity as a pure type in contact with the impure other. As  Huntington says, “in social psychology, distinctiveness theory holds that people

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define themselves by what makes them different from others in a particular context” (1998, 67). The consumption of hybridity exhibits a psychoanalytical lack in the identity of the subject. Seen in this way, the construction of a new Singapore national identity is, in psychoanalytic terms, an effort in fostering a hybridized identity as an alternative other to the ethnic self. One may also argue that it is this dilemma in identity construction that makes Singapore, as well as some other Southeast Asian countries, an active site of contestation in cultural production, in which new forms of lifestyle, language, arts and literature have emerged. In the poem “1991 (Kwan Yin, Goddess of Mercy)” by Goh Kasan, there is a description of a globalized and hybridized Singapore identity: The New Year’s Day. The morning after. The crowds file into the fake Gothic church off the street. Be-scarved women hail Marys and toss candles into a plastic Nativity, under the patient gaze of a plaster-of-Paris Jesus. Spoke with a Maltese Franciscan priest from Australia. He asked me if I came from Singapore, and so we talked about food. We are crossing so many borders now. We are trying to wear out the old definitions with our footprints. Like the masonry on the corner of that old building over there, leaning out into fog, like the prow of an ancient ship. Perhaps, one day, we’ll not need to know what countries mean. In the smoky tea rooms hung above the tattered canopies of the fish market, they rub their chins and play chess, or cut a pack of cards, or cut a plate of food. Sip raki and talk politics. About impending war. We feel we are standing at the edge of something. We don’t know what. Like the morning before, we can only harden like a clenched fist. But me, I’m thinking of Kwan Yin. How she’s maybe sitting in a quiet

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room somewhere, and how she would look at it all. The expression on her face is benevolent. She’s musing on all our failings. We button our coats and we turn up our collars. We trudge through the streets and the cold Turkish night. Our breaths fossilize under the glare of neon street lights. We are setting out to god knows where. The city lying still Beneath the fog and mist – An undeveloped negative.

(Goh Kasan 1995, 106–107)

While the speaker speaks of a Singapore identity in the image of hybridized food, the speaker’s self feels lost and appeals to the Chinese Buddhist goddess Kwan Yin for mercy. Here the reader sees a self that is certain about her identity at one moment but also feels lost in her direction of life. Situated in between large civilizations, such as the British, Chinese and Indian, Singaporean identity, as well as its literary writings, is a fusion of all of them and a reinvention of its own. In the poem “Chopsticks,” by Heng Siok Tian, there is more vivid description of the cultural conflicts represented in the dilemma over the use of chopsticks: A pair of chopsticks squints at me. My pragmatics teach me Western convenience in fork and spoon. My parents frown at my Cultural unrespectability in crossing the chopsticks. There is an etiquette for handling chopsticks (for handling lives). Suddenly how to handle chopsticks Involves a moral dimension.

(Heng Siok Tian 1995, 109)

The chopsticks serve as cultural symbols and the use of them in an un-Chinese way is regarded by the older generation as disrespect for Chinese culture. However, the interesting point in the poem is the clash of two civilizations, Chinese and Western, as well as the new generation of Singaporean culture. In many Singapore literary works, there is the critical reflection on how major civilizations in the world come to life, in an amazing way, when they come into contestation. The poem quoted above is evidence of a new subjectivity that has emerged in Southeast Asian English writings. Writing in English with a Chinese mind is similar to

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using Chinese chopsticks in Western ways and treat them like using forks and knives. The poem is an extended metaphor comparing the speaker’s use of chopsticks to self-definition. As William Carlos Williams says, “unless there is a new mind there cannot be a new line” (Williams 1946–1985, n.pag.). In this new subjectivity, the writers’ mind works in bilingual and bicultural thinking and bicultural visualization. Bilingual writings using bicultural metaphors are a rising phenomenon in Southeast Asian English writings that signify the cultural contestations in the writers’ identity quest. Such issues of cultural contestation are the topic of many contemporary Singapore writings. In the play “The Coffin Is Too Big for the Hole,” the playwright Kuo Pao Kun explores the complex relations among ethnic tradition, self, and the new Singapore identity. The “North-South” dilemma in Singapore identity, as portrayed in the play, has now become an “East-West” dilemma, as epitomized in the burial of the grandfather: “And so, my grandfather was safely put to rest in his hole at last. It was a very special burial to the very last. Because of the extra big size of his coffin, while everyone else slept north-south, he slept east-west” (Kuo 1990, 45). In another play by Kuo Pao Kun, “Mama Looking for Her Cat,” the cultural change in Singapore is vividly captured as generation gaps and differences in language. The mother speaks in Hokkienese Chinese, but the children speak in English and Mandarin. In the play, Hokkienese Chinese represents tradition but is now a dialect considered passé, whereas English and Mandarin are the languages of a contemporary Singapore identity. In the works discussed above, the self is represented as a voice that attempts to question the social representations, in a desire to reconstruct its subjecthood. In this process of reconstruction and questioning, the identity of the self is explored in relation to voice and discourse, as Ian Parker states: The object that a discourse refers to may have an independent reality outside discourse, but is given another reality by discourse. An example of such an object is the subject who speaks, writes, hears or reads the texts discourses inhabit […] a subject, a sense of self, is a location constructed within the expressive sphere which finds its voice through the cluster of attributes and responsibilities assigned to it as a variety of object. (Parker 1992, 9)

Viewed in this way, the self and the nation are imaginary constructs of discourse and culture. In Ovidia Yu’s short story “A Dream of China,” China is both a dream of the imagination and a dream of idealization. As the narrator says, there is much idealization in the father’s imagination of China as his cultural roots. However, the point is not to contrast the China in reality with the China in the father’s dream. The father needs a referent in his identity construction: “My father’s China no longer exists except in him and in other men who try to live true to the dream of China in their hearts. Perhaps like the heaven of Christian converts it is theirs both as an ideal to strive for and a vision of things to come” (Yu 1990, 611).

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If one’s cultural roots are imaginary constructs, so is the self. In Lacanian psychoanalysis, the ego is mirrored in the other and the selfhood of the subject is inseparable from the otherness of the Other (cf. Lacan 1997, 1–7). Hence, conflicts or harmony come as a matter of the heart. In the poem “My Country and My People,” by Singapore poet Lee Tzu Pheng, the speaker sees the possibility of resolving cultural tensions in the recognition of the self in the other and by the other: My country and my people I never understood. I grew up in China’s mighty shadow, with my gentle, brown-skinned neighbours; but I kept diaries in English. I sought to grow in humanity’s rich soil, and started digging on the banks, then saw life carrying my friends downstream. Yet, careful tending of the human heart may make a hundred flowers bloom; and perhaps, fence-sitting neighbour, I claim citizenship in your recognition of our kind. My people, and my country, Are you, and you my home.

(Lee 1985, 520)

From the 1960s to the 1990s, there was a persistent quest for identity in Hong Kong, shown in journalistic literary writings. Disillusionment with the political reality in China led to a general loss of belief among Hong Kong writers, many becoming pessimistic about the future. History is both remembered history and reality in contemporary Hong Kong journalistic literary writing. In studying the cultural critiques and journalistic literary writing produced in Hong Kong in 1997, one can have a more thorough perspective on the complex interplay not only of politics but also of cultures between the East and the West, the colonizer and the colonized, the Rightist and the Leftist, and the colonial and the postcolonial in the emergence of a Hong Kong identity since the mid-1980s. The writers’ search for identity is in fact a process of decolonization, in which the poet finds dissatisfaction with the British Hong Kong, the old exploitative colonizer. This pattern of identity quest has a strong personal tone in many Hong Kong writers, but it can also be seen as a general pattern in Hong Kong people’s collective search for identity. In the Hong Kong play Archaeological Bird, such a pattern of identity quest at the levels of the Personal-National-Cultural can also be discerned. Through the process of archaeological excavation, the play attempts to show the complex relations among personal identity, location, family history, ethnicity, and nation. In the scene “Family Heredity: My Tail,” which parodies the English language lesson typical of Hong Kong education, there is an exercise in the form of filling in the blanks:

29 Southeast Asia (Hong Kong and Singapore) 

I’m in my

, I’m about

tall, and quite

 505

built, but I have rather

shoulders. I have

hair. My eyes are chin, a

nose. I have

expression. My face changes a lot when I it looks

.

. I’ve got a rather

face, with a

lips, and I usually have a . I have a

forehead: I like to think (Chen 1999, 247; original in English)

The “blanks” that need to be filled in are the missing links between personal identity and ethnicity in contemporary Hong Kong. The linkage with Chinese heritage is seen in the play as a “tail,” which not only appears to be redundant but also makes Hong Kong people feel uneasy about themselves. In another scene, “A Game of the Tail,” the quest for identity is parodied in the style of an absurd play as a game of children chasing after their tails (cf. Chen 1999, 244). In this sense, the quest for identity in the 1960s–1990s generation of Hong Kong people is seen as a sad, futile game. The use of English in this section of the play has the effect of lamenting not only the lack of a native language but also ridiculing the reliance on English, the language borrowed from the colonial master, in the construction of identity. It points out the reality of Hong Kong people’s predicament of being situated, linguistically and culturally, in between the Chinese and English languages. Hybridity in language, literature and identity represents a new breed that is not readily accepted. However, it is this new breed that transcends old definitions of the self which are culture-, race- and language-bound. So are the Eurasians living in Hong Kong. Against the Chinese discourse of racial identity, which is blood related, is the presentation of different voices yearning for recognition of the hybrid. Racial identity is imagined and serves as a discourse to set boundaries for a community. The voice of the hybrid is to break down this boundary and the stereotyping arising as a result of being racialized. A critique of racial discourses of identity can be found in the Hong Kong English-language plays: Face (1997), by Veronica Needa. The play presents the need for identity reinvention in Eurasians who are forever considered outsiders, whether they are in Hong Kong or in London. Needa’s Face was written in 1997 and first performed in Hong Kong in Cantonese and then in English in London in 1998. In the midst of the heated debates on identity crisis by Hong Kong people facing China’s takeover, the play brought the focus back on the definition of self. It is literally a performance of the self, for in the play there is only one character, who serves as both narrator and protagonist. While the protagonist narrates her self-stories, she also performs her self in conflicting subject positions which critique the various discourses of cultural and racial identity that she has been subjected to in Hong Kong and England. Needa’s play was well received in London and in Hong Kong, raising a voice against the non-recognition of the intercultural and the interracial who are caught in between the major civilizations. Such bilingual and bicultural writing is indicative of a hybridized subjectivity and an alternative voice beyond the canonical writings.

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Eurasians in Hong Kong are racially hybrid and culturally both Chinese and Western. However, they are not accepted as Chinese, or as English, whether they are in Hong Kong or in Britain. What are they then? In Colonial Desire, Robert Young argues that acceptance of hybridity is recognition of difference (cf. 1995, 25). Apparently, the difficulties the Eurasians face in Hong Kong or Britain are non-recognition and non-acceptance of their transnational, transcultural, and transracial identity. Eurasians may think that they occupy an in-between position and can cross over and bridge the racial and cultural gaps, but they are stuck in the gaps of the in-between. The characters tell stories in the form of a series of monologues about themselves and their parents or grandparents and how they face the non-recognition of their transcultural and transnational selves. Ironically, the problem of non-recognition is made in the form of praise, for example, on characters that look like Westerners but speak fluent Cantonese. Veronica, the protagonist, tells of how she is praised by people for speaking fluent Cantonese, but behind the praise is that she is not recognized as a Hong Kong person: V (Veronica): In Hong Kong whether I am shopping or in a taxi, people say to me ‘Wa nay sik gong Gongdonghua, ga?’, ‘Oh you speak Cantonese?’, “Nay dee Gongdonghua haih been do hok ga?’, “where did you learn it?’, ‘yu-gwor ngo m geen do lay, ngo joong yee-wai nay hai Junggwokyun teem!’, ‘If I didn’t see you, I’d think you were Chinese’… and some of them stare at me with big eyes, and others just think I am English. It’s so difficult to explain. I know they don’t mean to be unkind. But one moment I am feeling at home, part of the community, another moment I feel pushed out, alien, from another world. As if I don’t belong to this place as much as they do. (V walks to chair, climbs up, crouching, and places hands over face.) (V reveals her face.) My face overwhelms my identity again. (Needa 2005, 36)

Behind the praise is the non-recognition that Veronica finds frustrating. In her yearning for recognition, she also laments that Hong Kong people have become easily adaptable to changes and forgetful of Hong Kong as a place of hybridity. Her experience in London makes her understand that she is (Eur-)Asian: I might have spoken excellent English and looked as if I was English, but I was behaving “differently.” Some people felt uncomfortable with me in the classroom. My enthusiasm unnerved them. When we divided into small groups, no one wanted to work with me. Now the other American girl in the other class was also incredibly hardworking and keen – she was a “swot” – but that was OK. She was from the States and they made allowances for her. It wasn’t OK when the “swot” was me – in their eyes a very very English girl – one of their own, it seemed. Of course, now I realise I was behaving in a perfectly normal Hong Kong way. Then I didn’t know how different I was. […] The next fourteen years I lived in England. My Chineseness became even more invisible there […]. […] Life in England has sometimes felt like pushing through porridge, or like treading water, hard work to stay afloat…. I began to see myself as the other side of a coin to many Chinese people born overseas. They are perceived as Chinese and assumed to be Chinese when some feel quite

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differently inside. And I feel a Chineseness inside which isn’t normally visible. My face overwhelms my identity. […] Now having made my home in London, found my ground there, consciousness of my Chinese cultural heritage becomes more and more strong, and I find myself drawn back to Hong Kong. Ironic, isn’t it? […] (Needa 2005, 34–35)

Situated between the major civilizations, such as the Chinese, Indian and the British, and between religions as opposite as Christianity and Islam, Southeast Asian culture has not only to struggle for its place among the dominant cultures, but also to reinvent itself so as to create its own identity for a meaningful existence and for nation building. Literary writings are full of images probing tensions between the self and the community, and between ethnic culture and national identity. Redefining the self in relation to a reinvented identity, both personal and national, is a key concern in many Southeast Asian writers who see themselves as being caught between dominant cultures of the world, but belonging to neither of them. They need to have their own voice and to be heard. The use of new varieties of English mixing English syntax with Chinese, Indian or Malay expressions is a way to represent their neither/nor identity and a new Southeast Asian subjectivity. It is a miniature of a world being globalized in the cultural contacts of the East and the West, and of the North and the South. The growing popularity of Singlish and Hong Kong English, particularly in literary writings, is evidence of the shift in linguistic identity from the colonial British to the postcolonial English-speaking Southeast Asian. Writing about Southeast Asia is writing beyond the British colonial legacy and asserting a postcolonial self that is interracial, intercultural and sometimes international. It is an identity that is Englishized without being Anglicized, for the English that the Southeast Asian speaks is the “other tongue” (Kachru, 1982, 2–4) that they have adopted from their colonial master but modified it to speak their own voice, as Caliban does in The Tempest. It is new writing in a new variety of English with a voice to assert the postcolonial’s voice and his/her identity.

5 Bibliography 5.1 Works Cited Ahrens, Kathleen. “When Love is Not Digested: Underlying Reasons for Source to Target Domain Pairings in the Contemporary Theory of Metaphor.” Proceedings of the First Cognitive Linguistics Conference. Ed. Yuchau E. Hsiao. Taipei: National Cheng-chi University, 2002. 273–302. Aldridge, A. Owen, ed. Comparative Literature: Matter and Method. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1980. Appadurai, Arjun. Modernity at Large: Cultural Dimensions of Globalization. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1996.

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Ashcroft, Bill, Gareth Griffiths, and Helen Tiffin. The Empire Writes Back: Theory and Practice in Post-Colonial Literatures. London and New York: Routledge, 2002 [1989]. Ashcroft, Bill. Caliban’s Voice: The Transformation of English in Post-Colonial Literatures. London: Routledge, 2009. Block, David, and Deborah Cameron. Globalization and Language Teaching. London and New York: Routledge, 2002. Casanova, Pascale. La langue mondiale: Traduction et domination. Paris: Seuil, 2015. Chen Bingzhao (Chen Ping Chiu). “Archaeological bird [Fei ba! lin liu niao, fei ba!].” Voice of Hong Kong: Drama 1997 [Xianggang de shengyin: Xianggang huaju 1997]. Ed. Kwok-kan Tam. Hong Kong: International Association of Theatre Critics, 1999. 218–270. Chow, Rey. “Between Colonizers: Hong Kong’s Postcolonial Self-Writing in the 1990s.” Diaspora 2.2 (1992): 151–170. Chua Beng Huat. “Re-opening Ideological Discussion in Singapore: A New Theoretical Direction.” Southeast Asian Journal of Social Science 11.2 (1983): 31–45. Chua Beng Huat, and Ananda Rajah. “Hybridity, Ethnicity and Food in Singapore.” Changing Chinese Foodways in Asia. Ed. David Y.H. Wu and Tan Chee-Beng. Hong Kong: The Chinese University Press, 2001. 161–197. Chua Beng Huat, and Eddie Kuo. “The Making of a New Nation: Cultural Construction and National Identity in Singapore.” From Beijing to Port Moresby: The Politics of National Identity in Cultural Politics. Ed. Virginia R. Dominguez and David Y.H. Wu. Amsterdam: Gordon and Breach Publishers, 1998. 35–67. Crystal, David. English as a Global Language. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997. Damrosch, David. What is World Literature? Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2003. Friedman, Susan Stanford. “Why Not Compare?” PMLA 126.3 (2011): 753–762. Goh Kasan. “1991 (Kwan Yin, Goddess of Mercy).” Journeys: Words, Home and Nation: Anthology of Singapore Poetry (1984–1995). Ed. Edwin Thumboo et al. Singapore: UniPress, Centre for the Arts, National University of Singapore, 1995. 106–107. Great Britain, Colonial Office. An Annotated Bibliography on Land Tenure in the British and British Protected Territories in South East Asia and the Pacific. London: Her Majesty’s Stationery Office, 1952 (+ Z 7164.L3 G7). Great Britain, Colonial Office. The Colonial Territories. London: Her Majesty’s Stationery Office, 1939/47–1961/62 (Olin JV33.G7 A4). Heng Siok Tian. “Chopsticks.” Journeys: Words, Home and Nation: Anthology of Singapore Poetry (1984–1995). Ed. Edwin Thumboo et al. Singapore: UniPress, Centre for the Arts, National University of Singapore, 1995. 109. Ho, Louise. “Jamming.” Local Habitations. By Ho. Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press, 1994. 21–23. Huntington, Samuel P. The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order. London: Simon and Schuster, 1998. Kachru, Braj B. “The Power and Politics of English.” World Englishes 5.2/3 (1986): 121–140. Kachru, Braj B., ed. “Introduction: The Other Side of English.” The Other Tongue: English Across Cultures. By Kachru. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1982. 1–15. Kuo Pao Kun. The Coffin Is Too Big for the Hole and Other Plays. Singapore: Times Books International, 1990. Lacan, Jacques. Écrits: A Selection. Trans. Alan Sheridan. New York and London: W.W. Norton & Company, 1997. Lakoff, George, and Mark Johnson. Metaphors We Live By. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980. Lee Tzu Pheng. “My Country and My People.” Anthology of ASEAN Literatures, vol. 1: The Poetry of Singapore. Ed. Edwin Thumboo et al. Singapore: The ASEAN Committee on Culture and Information, 1985. 520.

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Leow, Jason. “A Poem Not Too Obiang.” Journeys: Words, Home and Nation: Anthology of Singapore Poetry. Ed. Edwin Thumboo et al. Singapore: UniPress, Centre for the Arts, National University of Singapore, 1995. 138. McArthur, Tom. The English Languages. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988. Mufti, Nassa. Civilizing War: Imperial Politics and the Poetics of National Rupture. Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 2017. National Archives (United Kingdom). CO 1022/194: Colonial Office: South East Asia Department: Original Correspondence: Formation and activities of the Pan-Malayan Labour Party. (D2015070029, HD201507020). Needa, Veronica. “Face.” City Stage: Hong Kong Playwriting in English. Ed. Mike Ingham and Xu Xi. Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press, 2005. 24–37. Pakir, Anne. “The Voices of English-knowing Bilinguals and the Emergence of New Epicentre.” Evolving Identities: The English Language in Singapore and Malaysia. Ed. Vincent B.Y. Ooi. Singapore: Times Academic Press, 2001. 1–11. Parker, Ian. Discourse Dynamics: Critical Analysis for Social and Individual Psychology. London: Routledge, 1992. Shakespeare, William. The Tempest. Ed. Virginia M. Vaughan and Alden T. Vaughan. London and New York: Bloomsbury, 2011 [1611]. Singh, D.S. Ranjit. “British Proposals for a Dominion of Southeast Asia, 1943–57.” Journal of the Malaysian Branch of the Royal Asiatic Society 71.1 (1998): 27–40. Tam, Kwok-kan. “Postcoloniality, Localism and the English Language in Hong Kong.” Sights of Contestation: Localism, Globalism and Cultural Production in Asia and the Pacific. Ed. Kwok-kan Tam, Wimal Dissanayake, and Terry S. Yip. Hong Kong: The Chinese University Press, 2002. 111–130. Tam, Kwok-kan. The Englishized Subject: Postcolonial Writings in Hong Kong, Singapore and Malaysia. Singapore: Springer, 2019. Tam, Kwok-kan. The Politics of Subject Construction in Modern Chinese Literature. Hong Kong and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000. Tarling, Nicholas. “The Superintendence of British Interests in South-East Asia in the Nineteenth Century.” Journal of Southeast Asian History 7.1 (1966): 97–110. Thumboo, Edwin, ed. The Three Circles of English: Language Specialists Talk about the English Language. Singapore: Unipress, Centre for the Arts, National University of Singapore, 2001. Thumboo, Edwin. “General Introduction.” Anthology of ASEAN Literatures, vol. 2: The Fiction of Singapore. Ed. Edwin Thumboo et al. Singapore: The ASEAN Committee on Culture and Information, 1990. i–xx. Vittachi, Nury. “From Yinglish to Sado-Mastication.” Hong Kong English. Ed. Kingsley Bolton. Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press, 2002. 207–218. Williams, William C. “Paterson.” 1946–1958. Internet Archive. https://archive.org/stream/ PatersonWCW/Paterson-William_Carlos_Williams_djvu.txt (8 July 2019). Xi, Xu. The Unwalled City: A Novel of Hong Kong. Hong Kong: Chameleon Press, 2001. Yu, Ovidia. “A Dream of China.” Anthology of ASEAN Literatures, vol. 3: The Fiction of Singapore. Ed. Edwin Thumboo et al. Singapore: The ASEAN Committee on Culture and Information, 1990. 599–611.

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5.2 Further Reading Ashcroft, Bill, Gareth Griffiths, and Helen Tiffin, eds. The Post-Colonial Studies Reader. London and New York: Routledge, 2002 [1995]. Kachru, Braj B. “Englishization and Contact Linguistics.” World Englishes 13.2 (1994): 135–154. Kachru, Braj B. “Englishization: Asia and Beyond.” Asian Englishes: Beyond the Canon. Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press, 2005. 99–120. Phillipson, Robert, and Tove Skutnabb-Kangas. “Englishization: One Dimension of Globalization.” English in a Changing World. Ed. David Graddol and Ulrike H. Meinhof. Milton Keynes: Catchline, 1999. 1–12. Tam, Kwok-kan. The Englishized Subject: Postcolonial Writings in Hong Kong, Singapore and Malaysia. Singapore: Springer, 2019. Tam, Kwok-kan, ed. Englishization in Asia: Language and Cultural Issues. Hong Kong: Open University of Hong Kong Press, 2009. Tam, Kwok-kan, Wimal Dissanayake, and Terry S. Yip, eds. Sights of Contestation: Localism, Globalism and Cultural Production in Asia and the Pacific. Hong Kong: The Chinese University Press, 2002. Thumboo, Edwin et al., eds. Journeys: Words, Home and Nation: Anthology of Singapore Poetry (1984–1995). Singapore: UniPress, Centre for the Arts, National University of Singapore, 1995. Young, Robert J.C. Colonial Desire: Hybridity in Theory, Culture and Race. London: Routledge, 1995.

Nicole Moore

30 Australia Abstract: An effort to reposition Australian literature within world literary paradigms has been ongoing for almost twenty years. The essay argues that in the contemporary moment, however, what is required is a greater focus on ‘deep time’, longer histories and pre-settlement cultures, as well as a re-reading of the imperial archive more actively against itself, re-animating and respecting Indigenous voices speaking both on country and in sovereignty. A critical politics of comparison needs not just more informed attention to comparable Anglophone settler literatures, but also to contexts where obvious differences can hide telling connections. Trans-indigenous vectors are revealing, moving outside the determining boundaries of imperial cartography. Tracking Australian literature’s reception further, beyond the Anglophone world, can allow alternative canons to move into view, through which much of the dominant national narrative is refracted and reformed in often unexpected ways. Key Terms: Australian, Aboriginal, Torres Strait Islander, settler, postcolonial

1 Australia and Australian Literature in the World A wealthy English-speaking nation in the southern hemisphere, with a relatively small population inhabiting an island that counts as a continent, and as a key strategic partner for the United States and United Kingdom, Australia has enjoyed much relative advantage in the global Anglosphere. Sustaining what was figured as the ‘White Australia’ policy until the mid-1960s, from the time of its federation as a group of British colonies into an independent nation in 1901 and earlier, Australia’s identity as a settler nation has been an imaginative assertion of whiteness over its Indigenous history and into and beyond its Asian and Oceanic location. Yet, slung between the Pacific and Indian Oceans, Australia’s distance from both Europe and the United States means it still counts as peripheral, like New Zealand/Aotearoa and Southern African nations, if not as the definition of the periphery – or the “paraperiphery”, for some accounts (Spivak and Grosz 1984/1985, 178). Even the arrangement of content in collections such as this can reproduce a cultural world order in which the English-speaking Antipodes remain the far (or relegated) horizon of legibility. Despite Australia’s strategic and economic importance in global markets and in forums of international regulation and security, its cultural identity remains supplementary and intangible to many globalised literary paradigms, and for British colonial models, more recently reproduced in American popular culture, implausible or even risible. https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110583182-031

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As Nicholas Birns elaborates, from New York, “on the map, Australia seems this large island, a placid, magnified Britain of the South, and thus scores of recent academic projects that have taken on global literature and global modernities have rarely included Australia” (2015, 1). Australia can seem at once too far away from and too similar to the Anglophone centres to strike interest, particularly for new world literature paradigms charged with levelling the hierarchies of European dominance for the metropoles, much of its literature appearing at once insufficiently exotic and incorrectly familiar. A settler culture with a British heritage, Australia’s is yet not, in acute and profound ways, as well as the obvious ones, a European culture. At the same time, this Anglophone familiarity is exactly Australian writing’s passport into the homogenised, bourgeois, global, English language publishing industry – Australian commercial fiction writer Liane Moriarty’s 2014 novel Big Little Lies has sold an estimated 14 million books worldwide, for example, its best-selling status boosted by an HBO miniseries featuring Hollywood stars Reese Witherspoon and Nicole Kidman. The miniseries saw the book’s setting on Sydney’s northern beaches transferred to the Monterey area of coastal California; one of the world’s wealthy enclaves of white privilege seamlessly substituted for another. So, as numbers of Australian critics have tallied, Australian literature is virtually absent from the work of the largest names in the contemporary, reconfigured field of world literature (cf. Sharrad 2013, 16; Dixon and Rooney 2013, xv). No Australian author, title, publisher or reading city is mentioned in Pascale Casanova’s field-making survey The World Republic of Letters (2004), in Spivak’s Death of a Discipline (2003, the book in which she introduces her concept of “planetarity”), in Theo D’haen’s Concise History of World Literature (2012), or in any of David Damrosch’s multiple volumes, excluding a chapter by Elvia Pulitano comparing Indigenous literatures (Damrosch 2003; 2009a; 2009b; 2014; Damrosch et al. 2009; Damrosch and Pike 2004), while Wai Chee Dimock and translation scholar Emily Apter discuss only one Australian writer each (Dimock 2013, 3–15; Apter 2005, 196–201). Lisa Lowe’s recent influential, interdisciplinary work on what she describes as The Intimacies of Four Continents (2015) reveals this take in her title alone. Rather than “introduce a new continent into literature” (Swedish Academy 1973) as the Swedish Academy laggardly couched Patrick White’s achievement in 1973, this essay pursues the ways in which the conditions of Australian literature as such have provoked, and continue to provoke, anxieties about and challenges to the model of global reception for literature inherited from the European Enlightenment. Australian writers and their works are more diverse than the colonial model prescribes, or even the postcolonial, and continue to be read in surprising places and unexpected ways, while their place in global history is at once distinctive and tellingly unexceptional. It is worth repositioning the frame – rather than view Australian literature solely through the lens of the Anglophone centres, we can follow transverse connections across more diverse contexts internationally, and look to the ways its local histories and its challenges to national narratives may hold lessons for the larger contexts into

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which Australia fits. Two of these connectors are particularly salient for contemporary global literary debate. First of all, it is important to recall to the present Australia’s inhabitation through what Wai Chee Dimock calls “deep time” (2001), since Indigenous cultures in Australia currently are estimated to have at least 65,000 years of continuity, and contemporary reckonings with that extraordinarily lengthy cultural legacy need to inform the long view of worlded histories. Secondly, attention to the ways in which settler histories have produced similar forms of settler culture across national contexts is becoming more international, influenced by some notable Australian scholarship in “settler theory” and settler studies, with resonance for some of the world’s thorniest political debates (Wolfe 2006; Veracini 2010). In tracking global networks of Empire, Ann Laura Stoler’s recent work contributes to this case in new settler studies, bringing contemporary settler states, notably Israel, into juxtaposition with older nations such as Australia. Such transverse comparativism now calls, she argues, for “historicized accounts and a critical politics of comparison […]. The cascade of new work depends not just on identifying silenced histories but also on tracking new genealogies that place suspended histories as resources for new possibilities” (2016, 61). For Australia, what is required is a new focus on deep time, longer histories and pre-settlement cultures, as well as a re-reading of the imperial archive much more actively against itself, re-animating and respecting Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander voices speaking both on country and in sovereignty (Harkin 2014; Dunk 2017). And a critical politics of comparison needs not just more informed attention to Canadian, South African as well as New Zealand contexts, tracking comparable Anglophone settler literatures, but also to American, Caribbean or Pacific contexts, for instance, where obvious differences can hide telling connections. Trans-Indigenous vectors are critically revealing, moving outside the determining boundaries of imperial cartography, as the work of Chadwick Allen (2012) and Alice Te Punga Somerville (2012), among others, shows. And if we track Australian literature’s reception further, beyond the Anglophone world, a set of alternative canons moves into view, through which, in David Damrosch’s terms, much of the dominant national narrative is refracted and reformed in often unexpected ways (2003, 281).

2 Locations: A Continent for a Nation Australia’s European history is coeval with the success of print culture (Bird 2000, 203; Birns and Moore 2017, 15), and it is no accident that its contemporary place in the global book trade is still determined by colonial structures that favour British deals for imports, rights trading and translation. British cultural dominance has been a determining factor in the history of Australian literature, of course, as for all Britain’s colonies, not least through prescribing a ‘developmental’ nationalist model, with a

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full set of growth tropes through ‘infancy’ to ‘maturity’. White Australia’s insistence on its cultural youth is voiced in the opening lines of the national anthem, “Advance Australia Fair” (written by Peter Dodds McCormick in 1878 but instituted as a formal, postcolonial replacement for “God Save the Queen” only after a vote in 1984), and this is also a subscription to Enlightenment modernity: “for we are young and free”. Challenges to such cultural amnesia dot the literary tradition and are increasingly recognised, but cultural nationalism framed in these terms has been the readiest answer to an infantilised colonial position. Until the later third of the twentieth century, up to ninety percent of Australian reading material was imported from Britain or the United States. An agonised relationship to world literary space has been characteristic of Australian literature’s “rage for nation” (Mead 2009, 549) – expressions of ‘Australian’ culture, seeking something unique and distinctive in its settler response to the alien landscape, were asserted half a century before the six separate colonies were united as a single-voiced nation called Australia. Against that impulse has worked the more cosmopolitan consciousness of writers and readers partaking in the transnational traffic of the international book trade, its vectors drawn by imperial agreements and the economics of Empire as much as by conventions of genre and form. This dynamic has been well traced in the changing reputation of the literature of the 1890s. On the one hand, the writers of the Bulletin school, grouped around a magazine whose masthead read “Australia for the White Man”, wrote short stories and poetry informed by organised labour politics and the experiences of itinerant male agricultural workers, in an assertively realist style with rural settings in the ‘bush’. The school included Henry Lawson and Banjo Paterson, still the best-known canonical figures in mainstream Australia. On the other hand, and through the same period, a group of women writers sold their many popular novels to British publishers and enjoyed a readership around the Empire and in the US, their urban, cultured, self-conscious writing straining at the conventions of romance and set in the capital cities. Rosa Praed seems to have been the first Australian-born writer to be published in America, in 1883, and recent research by David Carter and Roger Osborne establishes that of her forty-seven published works, twenty-five appeared in American editions and many of her novels in multiple editions (2018, 51). These women and their legacies disappeared from view for much of the twentieth century, as new generations of writers looked to the Bulletin school for a claim to national identity or authenticity, and Rosa Praed, Ada Cambridge and others suffered the fates of many women writers deemed too popular and too feminine, until rescued by second-wave feminists and brought back into print. Lawson’s and Paterson’s egalitarianism was a central facet in their appeal for modernist cultural nationalists such as Vance and Nettie Palmer, a writing couple whose mid-century efforts as critics were instrumental for a later mythic modelling of white Australian identity through the tropes of working-class masculinity. It was a counter to the version of inferiority that the critic A. A. Phillips in an essay from 1950 described as the “cultural cringe”: in Australia a colonially framed narrative

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that underplays local effort as inevitably second-rate and backs away from assertions of distinctiveness as too familiar and so inconsequential. The 1950s and 1960s saw, on the one hand, a reinvestment in Australian settler folk traditions and demotic realism, particularly by the cultural left, while Antipodean writers found readers behind the iron curtain, and on the other hand a latter-day modernist critique of explorer myths and suburban pieties, which pitched a different, more self-conscious Australia, sneering with White at its tradition of “dun-coloured realism” (White 2009 [1958], 559). By the late 1960s and 1970s, any mythic version of a democratic tradition was itself the subject of fun and derision, as the domestic publishing industry finally became self-sustaining and Australian theatre and film took up a vernacular voice with self-lambasting gusto. The Association for the Study of Australian Literature, a fully professional academic association, was founded in 1977, in the wake of the much older Australian Literature Society, a group for readers and writers, but postcolonial critiques of cultural nationalism were hot on ASAL’s egalitarian heels. Through the 1980s, Australian scholars contributed influential formulations of theoretical literary postcolonialism internationally, drawing on a reconsideration of the white Australian tradition as a postcolonial formation, including Ashcroft’s, Griffiths’s and Tiffin’s high-profile The Empire Writes Back from 1989. Simon During, Alan Lawson, Bob Hodge and Vijay Mishra are other notable contributors, with Helen Gilbert on theatre. This version of comparative postcolonialism was not always striated by distinctions between settler and non-settler forms, however, and was simultaneously under critique in Australia from Aboriginal scholars and some writers of colour, for whom the prefix “post” was still notably in question (Trees and Mudrooroo 1993; Heiss 2003, 43–46; Whitlock 2013, 180–181). Indigenous forms of literary expression have been bound tightly with the political struggle for land rights and self-determination (Noonuccal poet and activist Oodgeroo voiced poems from her break-through collection We Are Going through loudspeakers at rallies in the mid-1960s, in a key example), but neither have these been limited by national horizons (the influence of Garveyist transnational black militantism and international Indigenous rights activism through the 1970s is evident in the disruptive poetry of Yoogum and Kudjela man Lionel Fogarty from the 1980s onwards, in a different example (cf. Furiah 2017, 5–7)). Since the late 1990s, scholarship on Australian literature has been grappling with how to reorient its largely national focus – an areas-studies style commitment to studying Australia as a “nation apart” (Dale 1999, 134) – via the transnational turn that has reinvigorated the fields of world and comparative literature, as American literature “deterritorialises” (Giles 2011, 1) and British models decline in relative quantity and reach (D’haen 2012, 160). Twenty years later, it is clear that, at least for critical models, the “national period” has “come to an end” (Dixon and Rooney 2013, xv), and the question posed by Dixon and Rooney in 2013 as to whether Australian literature is a world literature has been answered in the inevitable affirmative. In so far as there was a need to ask this question, however, anxiety relates to the future of a national

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literature about which the rest of the world cannot be trusted to care. For Dixon’s and Rooney’s collection, with that question as its title, what is at stake is “the force and specificity of local epistemologies that make Australian literature interesting and challenging to readers at home, as well as those steeped in other traditions within the world republic of letters” (2013, xvi). For Russell McDougall (2014), the stakes are about survival. “If Australian Literature is now to be situated as World Literature, somehow that overarching concept has to be renegotiated as part of the process, a complex synthesis of global and local realities that will historically and geographically enrich the fundamental idea”, he argues (2014, 3). Other scholars working with some synthesis of the local and global are perhaps more critical of one position against another, and more prepared either to defend national legacies or to deconstruct them. The emphasis on ‘enrichment’ comes from a position in which critics are forced to act as curators or literary historians first of all, unable to take for granted a shared audience for most writing from Australia, even domestically. And this position sustains crucial endeavours such as the AustLit database and electronic resource, which seeks to maintain a comprehensive bibliographic index of all literary and literary critical publications in Australia, stretching to include performance, film and television in many cases. It was a venture at the forefront of the digital humanities when it was established in the late 1990s and is still an exceptional resource in the English-speaking world: nevertheless, few nonAustralian universities subscribe. AustLit’s horizon is functionally and necessarily the nation state: it is precisely the minority status of Australian literature that makes most of the data inaccessible in similar form elsewhere and thus impels its existence. Critical takes and alternative models have come from a number of scholars. From a postcolonial nationalist position, Paul Sharrad rehearsed whether world literature as an American endeavour will have “the same negative effect [as comparative literature] of flattening the cultural horizon”, and called for a model with “several worlds” (2013, 30) and an emphasis on Fourth World literatures. From the UK, Graham Huggan’s (2007) postcolonial re-reading of the canon via critical race theory stands as a counter to a nationalist model, but perhaps not a national one. In 2009, Philip Mead took a provincialising move, removing the national as an horizon by focusing more closely, rather than expanding the view, and arguing for a “critical regionalism”, elaborated from Spivak, seeking to reread the local in more thoroughly connected relation to place or “place-consciousness” (Mead 2009, 551). Informed by spatial theory and Indigenous understandings of country and belonging, Mead sought to “draw to the centre of critical attention the specific, the singular, the (imagined and historical) places of literary texts and locational perspectives on authors, oeuvres and reception”, which he argues ought to “look very different from what it did within the older nationalist paradigm” (2009, 552). Dissenting from the ‘distant’ reading model of Franco Moretti, in 2010 Ken Gelder offered “proximate reading” as a means to move beyond both close and national reading. “Proximate reading can provide a way of thinking through these newer ‘forms of attachment’, these transnational ‘connective

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tissues’, insofar as it relies on the reader’s negotiation of relationships between origin and destination, what is close and what is distant” (Gelder 2010, 5). In a more radical departure, Gillian Whitlock’s work on the international reception of Indigenous Australian writing, particularly testimony, points to its connections with transnational and international trajectories of trauma, conflict and loss: to “archives of feeling that remain unredeemed and unreconciled by the nation” (2013, 186). Its radical potential, she argues, is not just to breach the horizon of the nation, but to generate new subjects and sovereignties beyond the scope of territorial power (cf. 186).

3 Deep Time and Non-Anglophone Australia A characteristic way of reading a national literature as a world literature is to seek examples of it in transnational space and in Wai Chee Dimock’s “deep time” (Dixon and Rooney 2013, xii), identifying routes and connections that bind it as a field to the rest of the world. These two formulations currently have a more urgent character in Australian literature, as it reconceives or re-recognises itself as a settler literature, thoroughly and without exception, in exemplary relationship with other settler literatures in transnational comparison; and as it recasts itself locally in accord with Indigenous conceptions of precolonial history, through Aboriginal and Islander as well as Pacific deep time. In this latter regard, and with reference to Apter’s (2006) critique of the ‘Anglosphere’ model as a colonialist formulation that reproduces “neo-colonial geopolitics”, as Revathi Krisnaswarmy (2010, 138) also articulates such, it is worth first emphasising one of the primary ways in which Australia is not English-speaking. Australian Indigenous nations spoke over 250 languages in the late eighteenth century, when Europeans claimed the continent for settlement, and in contemporary Australia around 120 of those are still spoken. The largest language groups have only approximately 3000 speakers, but there are expanding efforts to preserve and reinvigorate these as well as those with few or no living speakers (AUSTLANG). Indigenous languages carry their own long histories of cultural expression and performative engagement, some parts of which have been translated or transferred across to English and Aboriginal English and some parts of which remain as living cultural practice reserved to those language groups. Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander cosmologies and law are constituted in consciousness of this long inheritance, often challenging the separation of time and space (cf. Leane 2015, 152), and find literary expression in many different ways in contemporary writing. Prominent Waanyi novelist Alexis Wright, whose award-winning books sell into contexts as diverse as China, the US, the UK, Italy, France and Poland, acknowledges her debt to “the world’s oldest library – the land, seas, skies and atmosphere of this country” (2019). Goorie writer Melissa Lucashenko describes a vast and “complex interwoven narrative – our great Aboriginal creation myths” that “spans the continent” (2017, 1). Some settler versions

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of the canon have included translations of inherited song cycles or songpoetry done by anthropologists in the 1930s and later – T. G. Strehlow’s translations of Arrente songpoetry in a formal poetic mode and register, especially – and have couched them, sometimes unattributed, as “mysterious”, “timeless” or “immemorial” examples of Indigenous literature, and even as inaugurating texts for the Australian tradition (Lehmann and Gray 2011, 3, 327). The communities to which these belong, however, can prefer much more direct control over the circulation of their stories and dreaming motifs, and do not necessarily sanction the removal of songs from the performative realm, from language or from country. Gularabulu, a 1983 collaboration between Paddy Roe, an author of Nyikina descent, and Stephen Mueke, a white Australian theorist, offers a different model that sought to keep an Indigenous oral poetics emplaced in country, and to make appropriate forms of meaning available to nonIndigenous audiences (cf. Cooke 2013, 90–92). Indigenous Australia’s extended history is a challenge for Australian literary history. Most standard accounts still begin with the figuration of the Australian continent in the European imagination, confining definitions of the literary to European models, so work needs to be done to reconcile ancient occupation with worlded understandings of global culture. The challenges offered by Penny van Toorn in her 2006 book Writing Never Arrives Naked to the pre-eminence of writing in colonial structures of recognition have been insufficiently taken up. She contests the idea that Aboriginal oral cultures were superseded by the colonisers’ paper culture, demonstrating that Aboriginal people incorporated reading and writing into their existing cultures, and used reading, letter and petition writing, translation and graphic traditions to help them navigate their colonial context (cf. van Toorn 2006). In 2009 The Macquarie PEN Anthology of Australian Literature, published as the Literature of Australia by Norton for northern hemisphere readerships, took this seriously. The first comprehensive anthology for more than a decade, its inclusive ambit counted the largest proportion of Indigenous writers to date, and stretched to embrace petitions, letters to the editor, radio broadcasts, speeches and protest songs, besides manifestos, journalism and life writing. In prominent forums, this was met with complaints about a perceived over-representation of Indigenous authorship and a lowering of aesthetic standards, established white critic Peter Craven accusing the anthology of “obscuring the heritage” (2009, 7). Peter Minter (2009), one of two Indigenous editors of the anthology, points to parallels between this response and those that met We Are Going, Oodgeroo’s poetry collection, in 1964. In so far as Australia was part of the “carceral archipelago of empires”, as both a convict colony and a model for settler “containment” of Indigenous occupation, it has been “an exemplary node in a global network” as Ann Laura Stoler’s Duress: Imperial Durabilities in Our Times explicates (2016, 104). The phrase “carceral archipelago” is found in Foucault’s Discipline and Punish (1975), where he refers to domestic French penitentiaries, not overseas penal colonies, as Stoler clarifies (2016, 93–94), but its resonance for Australia is profound, given Australia’s island iconography and many

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coastal islands, numbers of which were used as natural jails through the nineteenth and early twentieth century. Parallels with other postcolonial island imaginaries, particularly in the Caribbean (the West Indies, Dominica, Jamaica, Granada, and Trinidad), have been traced by Elizabeth McMahon in Islands, Identity and the Literary Imagination (2016), while Stoler calls for more attention to the “deeply dependent genealogies of ‘colony’ and ‘reservation’ [that] beg for renewed consideration” (2016, 104). A shift from a long-term focus on the so-called ‘colonial poets’ of the nineteenth century – Wentworth, Harpur, Kendall – to more demotic outputs in which women and Indigenous writers as well as male convicts are better represented is part of this. Convict broadsides and testimonies are particularly telling literary documents of the “carceral archipelago of empires”: composed in colonial prisons, posted as pamphlets on the streets of London, and sung and memorised in performance and oral traditions. Though Simon During has argued that “the objects of fascination finally are not the texts themselves, but the texts in relation to the driven lives of their authors, and behind that the forces that work on those lives” (2004, 20), the texts themselves can have a great deal of resonance in reckoning with the global forces of exile, oppression and punishment to which they testify (cf. Garvey 2013, 435–436). An expanded emphasis via book history on the international reception of colonial and nineteenth-century writing shows us literature’s role in the promulgating the ‘infamy’ of convict Australia: the best-known novel of convict life, journalist Marcus Clarke’s His Natural Life from 1870, reached eventually to the German Democratic Republic, where its 1957 translation, Lebenslänglich from Volk und Welt, was the best-selling foreign literature title in that nation’s forty-year history. Russell WestPavlov traces the connections between its figuring of Australia’s “continental enclosure” (2016, 52) and the carceral structures evident to East German citizens, their movement also restricted by walls and barbed wire. Further parallels with ongoing carceral practices – of Indigenous people historically and their over-representation in the modern prison system; of migrants, often in hostels or camps pending ‘settlement’; of refugees, especially in contemporary Australia’s much criticised ‘off-shore solution’ to asylum seekers arriving by sea – are also drawn by West-Pavlov and others (cf. 2016, 51–52; Hage 2003; Perera 2009). On the other hand, convict literature and folk music have fed a powerfully centred, classed identity – attached also to the ‘pioneer’ and the ‘Aussie battler’ – that historian Ann Curthoys argues informs a settler model of Australian ‘victimhood’ (2003, 187–194). Peter Carey’s Booker Prize winning True History of the Kelly Gang tours through this mythic terrain in its revivifying of the extraordinary voice of Australia’s most famous bushranger, or nineteenth-century highwayman, Ned Kelly. A number of well-published Aboriginal texts in English continue to circulate internationally as flagship ambassadors for Australian literature, such as Sally Morgan’s My Place (1987), Alice Pilkington Garimara’s Follow the Rabbit Proof Fence (1996) and Alexis Wright’s Carpentaria (2006). These are vulnerable to possible commodification of culture, appropriation and misreadings in the translation zone, but nevertheless

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the reach and connectivity of Indigenous voices has transformative potency that well exceeds settler-articulated national narratives, as Whitlock suggests (cf. 2013, 178–179), besides moving into the transnational receptivity afforded to Fourth World literatures. Yet there is an apparent paradox in classifying Indigenous literatures as ‘world’ literatures, since it is often their distinctive localism, through inhabited connections to determining place, that precisely distinguish them from metropolitan literatures and from a globalising model of unrooted placelessness, transnational exchange and cosmopolitanism. It is the metropole that terms them ‘world’ literatures and only in so far as they issue from a different part of the world, as for ‘world’ music; viewed from the Global South, and from the minor margins, no literature is not a world literature. A further question to ask is what is it to be an Anglophone culture for a contemporary multicultural nation? Another way in which Australia is not English speaking is in its complex migrant and multicultural literatures, which are still inadequately accounted for in national models, even when written and published in English. More than that, “in this transnational turn”, Michael Jacklin warns, “multicultural writing, although manifestly transnational in so many of its aspects, risks remaining sidelined” (2009, 3). In this regard, Elke Sturm-Trigonakis’s vision in Comparative Cultural Studies and the New Weltliteratur, translated from the 2007 German edition, can be illuminating for Australian debates, offering a different version of ‘world literature’ in which the focus is on received transcultural exchange, particularly in the form of migration, rather than exported national imaginaries. As McDougall elaborates, Sturm-Trigonakis’ comparative method establishes how migrant literatures “have more in common with each other, as a distinct formation (‘new world literature’) than they have with their individual national monolingual literatures that otherwise contain them” (2014, 8). A stable of writers from non-English speaking and non-Anglo-Saxon migrant backgrounds have achieved some prominence writing in English about their communities and experiences over the last thirty years or more, including Christos Tsiolkas, Arnold Zable, Michelle de Kretser, Antigone Kefala, Hsu Ming Teo and Nam Le, stretching back to include the earlier work of writers such as Judah Waten in Alien Son from 1952 and Peter Skrzynecki in Immigrant Chronicle from 1975, and many others. This is a list through which women move in and out, their feminism and aesthetic politics often placing them at an even greater remove from mainstream memory – as has been the case for poets Ania Walwicz and Anna Couani, for example, or novelist Rosa Cappiello, whose excoriatingly parodic portrait of migrant life in Australia Paese Fortunato won the Premio Calabria prize in Italy in 1981, its English translation released in Australia as O Lucky Country in 1984. The pre-eminently transnational experience of Cappiello’s book – published first in her original language and country, about her life as a migrant in Australia, and then received with suspicion by most of both the Australian literary sphere and the Australian Italian community (cf. Moore 2009, v–vi) – is a revelatory one in debates about what constitutes Australian writing in a globalising world. Its fate might be revealingly compared with the work of J. M. Coetzee,

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also a migrant Australian published in both his home and adopted countries, his work reaching a stratosphere of global prominence with which few can compete. Boehmer asks a similar question in comparing the reception of Coetzee and Chinua Achebe, considering both as African writers: At what point, […] and how, did J.M. Coetzee escape his South African condition to become widely considered as a world writer, if South African-born, in a way that the late Chinua Achebe, for all his status as a writer included in the Norton Anthology (with his well-known essay on Conrad), is still widely considered an African writer first and a world writer second? (Boehmer 2014, 304)

One answer, arguably, to both questions, is that it was at the points at which Coetzee emigrated to Australia (2002), won a Nobel Prize for Literature (2003) and gained Australian citizenship (2006), and then began substantially rerouting his writing through first world conduits that a world prominence could be used to make sense of his (dis)location. More ramifying answers, for Achebe and Cappiello, of course, are to do with race, gender and language. An increasing focus on Australian literature in languages other than English is part of a shift away from the ‘multicultural’ model of the 1980s and 1990s. Even AustLit, with its apparent national horizon, has sustained a number of large and influential projects researching, on the one hand, the publication of Australian books in translation – including West-Pavlov’s German project, but also translations in Italian, Polish, Chinese and Japanese (cf. Wilson et al. 2010) – and on the other hand, literary work published in Australia in languages other than English including, since 2012 and 2013, Arabic, Chinese, Polish, Spanish and Vietnamese (cf. Ommundsen and Jacklin 2018). Sneja Gunew (2017), a long-term commentator and theorist of literary multiculturalisms in settler contexts, has recently made a case for what she terms “post-multicultural” writing, which she places within a new and dynamic (neo-)cosmopolitanism that is planetary rather than strategic, and inclusive of Indigenous critiques beyond postcolonial nationalism.

4.1 Transverse Receptions Australian literature’s reach internationally has been difficult to gauge but it is clear, as Huggan declares, that “national literatures are globally produced” (2007, 11). New work tracking reception histories in the United States has been revelatory, exposing an American audience for Australian authors across more than 150 years, but also the ways in which the structures of the British Empire have determined that exchange. Carter and Osborne outline the history of the American reception of Australian fiction, focusing on the century from 1840 to 1940 – from the moment when an ‘Australian’ literature as such was articulated, to the outbreak of the war in which the US replaced the UK as Australia’s principal strategic partner. As they characterise it, through that period the relationship between Australia, London and the US was a “two-sided

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triangle”: that is, a triangle with three nodes, but only two “activated” sides (the imperial connection between London and Australia, and the transatlantic book trade between London and New York) (Carter and Osborne 2018, 2). As they note, “[w]ith the global marketplace divided in this manner, and Australia locked firmly into the British sphere, there are relatively few instances of works travelling directly from Australia to the United States” (6). Effectively, Australian books for Americans from the late nineteenth century were sold as “local variants of the broader themes of ‘AngloSaxon’ fiction” (8–9). And it is clear that in many non-English speaking reading communities, Australia’s status as a global Anglophone literature places it in a hierarchy below British and American literatures, and in contest with the ranking of Canadian and sometimes New Zealand literatures. A developmental nationalist model has also been determining in obscuring the varying fortunes of Australian authors and books in international markets. “Certainly, no evolutionary pattern of steadily increasing awareness of Australian authors or Australian literature emerges over the decades” (Carter and Osborne 2018, 9). The refracting lenses through which a national literature is viewed from outside, in transnational exchange mediated through the complex and often opaque commercial structures of the global publishing industry, can be quite distinct across different national and geopolitical contexts. The question of which of these lenses matters, however, in identifying a literature’s history or its reading witness, is an issue of relative power. Literatures in English may travel between Anglophone readerships but are not always straightforwardly readable in those contexts. Even without the barriers of translation, cultural differences can mean that minority literatures are subject to modifications and can require paratextual scaffolding in order to fit the palates of dominant readerships. Australian English is routinely modified by American editors – ‘removalists’ become ‘movers’, for instance – or glossaries at the end render speech and linguistic conventions quaint and exotic, but American literature is never subject to such adjustments for Australian readers. Similarly, during the Cold War, it took some time for the new Eastern European socialist states to recognise Australian books as a separate category from British imports, and to process them independently through state-controlled translation, censorship and publication. Interestingly, Australian literature had enough appeal in the German Democratic Republic for it to be ranked as the third most popular Anglophone literature, after American and British but ahead of Canadian or other Commonwealth literatures (Moore and Spittel 2016, 20–21). The vectors through which Australian books reached that market, through the iron curtain, were complexly political, however, and like those of most other foreign language literatures, did not track along established trade routes. The German Democratic Republic’s version of Australian literature was radically dissimilar to the established national canon, even in so far as there was no formalised agreement on such a list in Australia through the mid-twentieth century (since Australian literature gained traction as a designated university subject only through the late 1960s and into the 1970s, cf. Dale 2012).

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As Russell West-Pavlov suggests, such a field is a version of Australian literature that has been “invisible” (2010, iii) in Australia, even though German is the dominant language into which Australian literature is translated. Moreover, once titles had been approved by the centralised publication control apparatus, GDR publishers were required to provide “Afterwords” to most foreign language books, in which a proper socialist reading was modelled for East German readers. Such apparatus provided these books’ passports to the Leseland. It is along such transverse vectors of exchange, on alternative routes for comparativism such as that between Australia and the socialist reading world, outside established Anglophone connections and rerouted without the metropole, that we can find revelatory revisions of our understanding of minority world literatures. Australian literature’s reception in Mao’s New China, for example, had more in common arguably with that in the GDR than in other Asian nations, because of their comparable socialist publishing economies and the powerful influence of Soviet models, particularly through the 1950s and 1960s, as the developing work of Li Jianjun from Beijing Foreign Studies University is demonstrating. The work of social and socialist realist writers such as Frank Hardy, Katharine Susannah Prichard, Judah Waten, Alan Marshall and Dymphna Cusack, most either members of the Communist Party of Australia or so-called ‘fellow travellers’, was circulated and fostered by Soviet publishing houses and journals, and translated in parallel ways. Besides its model of centralised control, China’s strengthening university system has also been a key factor. From the late 1970s, the influence of the ‘gang of nine’ has been powerful: a group of scholars who, in the wake of Australian diplomatic recognition of the PRC in the early 1970s, were among the first Chinese students sponsored to study abroad after the Cultural Revolution. They were supported to study literature at the University of Sydney and their research interests and nominated canon of Australian writers have shaped the character of Australian Studies in China profoundly since then. One of them, Li Yao, moreover, has been single-handedly responsible for the translation of more than 40 titles since 1991, beginning with a collaborative translation of Patrick White’s The Tree of Man (1955) with perhaps the most influential member of the nine, Hu Wenzhong. The list of Li’s translated works would be familiar to many international readers of contemporary Australian writing, including works by Brian Castro, Colleen McCullough, Richard Flanagan, Alex Miller, and Aboriginal writers Kim Scott, Anita Heiss and Alexis Wright, as well as history and non-fiction, many of these published by the state sponsored, prestigious People’s Publishing House, and some of them award winning. He has also supervised and facilitated the translation of key works of children’s literature such as Blinky Bill (1955), Dot and the Kangaroo (1899) and Seven Little Australians (1894). Key Australian commentator on Chinese Australian literature Wenche Ommundsen can suggest, however, that the list of Australian works in Chinese translation is a narrow reflection of a dominant understanding of the canon, with insufficient representation of women and migrant writers, including Chinese Australians, or radical

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and critical voices (cf. 2001, 85, 88). In 2018 a Beijing production of Sydney playwright David Williamson’s canonical 1971 play The Removalists for a major performing arts festival was cancelled by censors because of voiced concerns about its “salty language” and violent content (“Salty Language”). Williamson opined that further concerns about its representation of police abuse and overreach were also at play, in a context in which the strength of police powers is a critical question for many. More and larger collaborative projects are a striking feature of the expanding transnational scholarly reception of Australian literature in India, widening access to texts and critical frames. For many years this exchange occurred under the ambit of Commonwealth Literature and was limited by difficulty accessing Australian books in India, usually routed through British sanction and publishing houses: thus Judith Wright, Patrick White and A. D. Hope were the key figures, as Paul Sharrad outlines (cf. 2010, 4). By contrast, the 2009 encyclopaedic Reading Down Under: Australian Literary Studies Reader, edited by Amit Sarwal and Reema Sarwal and published in New Delhi, includes 52 chapters and 59 contributors, with seven essays on Indigenous issues alone and eight on ‘multicultural realms’, covering Ukrainian, Italian, Chinese, Greek, Jewish, Hungarian, Slovene and Vietnamese writing in Australia.

4.2 Decolonising Theory Australian perspectives on world literature paradigms can be seen to be positioned to necessarily interrogate large scale or generalising theoretical models – from world systems theory to Moretti’s distant reading and other extensions. Identifying a tendency to “sublimation” in reading practices generated from the metropole, those that “work to nest the local within the transnational”, against a tendency to “provincialisation” in those that reverse this and “counter the tendency to a benign or utopian cosmopolitanism”, Dixon and Rooney position Australian readings with the latter, via Dipesh Chakrabarty’s forceful re-reading of European sources. This reading position, or their sense of an Australian point of view, is “committed to the relativising force of national and provincial epistemologies, including [a] capacity to provincialise North American and European critical theory” (2013, xxii–xxiii). There is something of this orientation in Elleke Boehmer’s recently expressed reservations about what it means to replace postcolonial literary theory with world literature paradigms: Whereas the postcolonial ultimately always returns us to political and geo-historical questions – who has voice, whose land is this – world literary studies with its commitment to what translates, and to distant reading and generic overview, etc, could be seen as overriding or conflating those often ethically difficult and historically specific questions. (Boehmer 2014, 303)

But the reach and impact of postcolonialism and postcolonial literary theory can be seen to have been complex in Australia. While enabling powerful critiques such as Hodge’s and Mishra’s Dark Side of the Dream from 1991, drawing on classic

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psychoanalytic models via Bhabha to expose the ways in which settler Australia has been haunted by its colonised other, it has also been subject to telling questions and resistance from Indigenous writers and critics, for whom any equation between settler nationalist resistance to British dominance and a vocalised struggle for Indigenous self-representation has been profoundly problematic (Heiss 2003, 43–46). Where world literature paradigms may be enabling for Australian contexts, as for much of the Global South, is through such critiques as Revathi Krishnaswarmy’s, in which she argues for the need to expand not just literary canons but “world literary knowledges” beyond “Euro-America” (2010, 143), redefining a conception of theory so that it is not confined to high, formal or abstracted versions of aesthetic and poetics. Raewyn Connell’s Southern Theory (2007) connects Australian thinking to the parts of the world Krishnaswarmy signals, emphasising further that theory from the Global South is required to remain restricted to its geopolitical origins, while theory from the West or North can be traded as universal. Indigenous Australian epistemologies and cosmologies are finding increasingly prominent expression in scholarly contexts in Australia, but their status is still marginal and often acutely defamiliarised. Aileen Moreton-Robinson’s (2013) feminist work in this area is perhaps the best circulated, using critical race theory and feminist stand-point theory. In literary studies, Indigenous positions in line with Māori scholar Linda TuhiwaiSmith’s 2002 argument in Decolonising Methodologies include award-winning Nyoongar novelist Kim Scott’s characterisation of settler Australian literature as a “sickly stream” (2003, i), pointing to its historical dependency on the repression or exclusion of Indigenous stories, and Wiradjuri writer Anita Heiss’s (2013) critique of Australian publishing practices, as well as more recent re-readings of settler representations from an Indigenous point of view by Jeanine Leane, Melissa Lucashenko, Natalie Harkin and Evelyn Araluen Corr, among others (Leane 2014; Lucashenko 2017; Harkin 2014; Araluen Corr 2018). Reading Harkin’s poetry and Alexis Wright’s award-winning novel The Swan Book (2013), Araluen Corr articulates a decolonising position in which deep time, sovereignty and embodied belonging intertwine: “Aboriginal epistemology […] shows that history has its own agency in its embodiment and presence in land and through ancestors. Time and history act upon place and person without being textually read: we may not always be aware of history, but history is always aware of us” (2018, 495). Michael Griffiths’s (2018) recent move to theorise appropriation as a characteristic rather than exceptional or mistaken move of settler literatures can be included in this direction, fuelled too by reformulations of critical race and whiteness theory for Australian contexts (cf. Brewster 2010; Huggan 2007), as well as explicit attempts to decolonise the Australian stage (cf. Casey 2009). In the contemporary moment, Australian literary studies is witnessing a calling to account of all forms of settler representation for their role in perpetuating damaging imaginaries of Indigenous identity, belonging, history and sovereignty, nominating their ultimate horizon as the “logic of elimination” identified as endemic to settler cultures by historian Patrick Wolfe (2006, 387).

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5 Bibliography 5.1 Works Cited Allen, Chadwick. Trans-Indigenous: Methodologies for Global Native Literary Studies. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2012. Apter, Emily. The Translation Zone: A New Comparative Literature. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2005. Apter, Emily. “Je ne crois pas beaucoup à la littérature comparée: Universal Poetics and Postcolonial Comparatism.” Comparative Literature in an Age of Globalization. Ed. Haun Saussy. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2006. 54–62. Araluen Corr, Evelyn. “Silence and Resistance: Aboriginal Women Working Within and Against the Archive.” Continuum 32.4 (2018): 487–502. Ashcroft, Bill, Gareth Griffiths, and Helen Tiffin. The Empire Writes Back: Theory and Practice in Post-Colonial Literatures. London: Routledge, 1989. AUSTLANG. Australian Institute of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Studies. https://collection. aiatsis.gov.au/austlang/search (15 Nov. 2018). Bird, Delys. “New Narrations.” The Cambridge Companion to Australian Literature. Ed. Elizabeth Webby. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000. 183–208. Birns, Nicholas. “Is Australian Literature Global Enough?” Journal of the Association for the Study of Australian Literature 15.3 (2015): 1–4. Birns, Nicholas, and Nicole Moore. “Relocating Literary Sensibility: Colonial Australian Print Culture in the Digital Age.” Teaching Australian and New Zealand Literatures. Ed. Nicholas Birns, Nicole Moore, and Sarah Shieff. New York: The Modern Languages Association, Options for Teaching Series, 2017. 15–28. Boehmer, Elleke. “The World and the Postcolonial.” European Review 22.2 (2014): 299–308. Brewster, Anne. “Critical Whiteness Studies and Australian Indigenous Literature.” Modern Australian Criticism and Theory. Ed. David Carter and Wang Guanglin. Qingdao: China Ocean University Press, 2010. 190–205. Carter, David, and Roger Osborne. Australian Books and Authors in the American Marketplace 1840s–1940s. Sydney: Sydney University Press, 2018. Casanova, Pascale. The World Republic of Letters. Trans. Malcolm B. DeBevoise. Cambridge, MA and London: Harvard University Press, 2004 [1999]. Casey, Mary R. “Indigenous Australian Drama: Decolonising the Australian Stage.” Reading Down Under: Australian Literary Studies Reader. Ed. Amit Sarwal and Reema Sarwal. New Delhi: SSS Publications, 2009. 193–204. Connell, Raewyn. Southern Theory: The Global Dynamics of Knowledge in Social Science. Sydney: Allen & Unwin, 2007. Cooke, Stuart. “Tracing a Trajectory from Songpoetry to Contemporary Aboriginal Poetry.” A Companion to Australian Aboriginal Literature. Ed. Belinda Wheeler. Rochester: Camden House, 2013. 89–106. Craven, Peter. “Obscuring the Heritage: Regrettable Omissions in the New National Anthology.” Australian Book Review 319 (2009): 7–8. Curthoys, Ann. “Constructing National Histories.” Frontier Conflict: The Australian Experience. Ed. Bain Atwood and Stephen G. Foster. Canberra: National Museum of Australia, 2003. 185–200. Dale, Leigh. “New Directions in Australian Literary Studies.” Australian Literary Studies 19.2 (1999): 131–135.

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Dale, Leigh. The Enchantment of English: Professing English Literatures in Australian Universities. 2nd ed. Sydney: Sydney University Press, 2012. Damrosch, David. What Is World Literature? Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2003. Damrosch, David. How to Read World Literature. Chichester: Wiley-Blackwell, 2009a. Damrosch, David, ed. Teaching World Literature. New York: Modern Language Association of America, 2009b. Damrosch, David. World Literature in Theory. Chichester: Wiley-Blackwell, 2014. Damrosch, David, Natalie Melas, and Mbongiseni Buthelezi. The Princeton Sourcebook in Comparative Literature. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2009. Damrosch, David, and David L. Pike, eds. The Longman Anthology of World Literature. New York: Longman, 2004. D’haen, Theo. The Routledge Concise History of World Literature. London and New York: Routledge, 2012. Dimock, Wai Chee. “Deep Time: American Literature and World History.” American Literary History 13.4 (2001): 755–777. Dimock, Wai Chee. “Recycling the Epic: Gilgamesh on Three Continents.” Scenes of Reading: Is Australian Literature a World Literature? Ed. Robert Dixon and Brigid Rooney. North Melbourne: Australian Scholarly Publishing, 2013. 3–15. Dixon, Robert, and Brigid Rooney. “Introduction: Australian Literature, Globalization and the Literary Province.” Scenes of Reading: Is Australian Literature a World Literature? Ed. Robert Dixon and Brigid Rooney. North Melbourne: Australian Scholarly Publishing, 2013. ix–xxxvi. Dunk, Jonathan. “Reading the Tracker: The Antinomies of Aboriginal Ventriloquism.” Journal of the Association for the Study of Australian Literature 1 (2017): 1–12. During, Simon. “Out of England: Literary Subjectivity in the Australian Colonies, 1788–1867.” Imagining Australia: Literature and Culture in the New New World. Ed. Judith Ryan and Chris Wallace-Crabbe. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2004. 3–21. Furaih, Ameer Chasib. “‘For Their Fights Affect Our Fights:’ The Impact of African American Poetics and Politics on the Poetry of Lionel Fogarty.” Journal of the Association for the Study of Australian Literature 1 (2017): 1–13. Garvey, Nathan. “The Convict Voice and British Print Culture: The Case of ‘Mellish’s Book of Botany Bay.’” Australian Historical Studies 44.3 (2013): 423–437. Gelder, Ken. “Proximate Reading: Australian Literature in Transnational Frameworks.” Special Issue Common Readers and Cultural Critics. Journal of the Association for the Study of Australian Literature (2010): 1–12. Giles, Paul. The Global Remapping of American Literature. Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2011. Griffiths, Michael. The Distribution of Settlement: Appropriation and Refusal in Australian Literature and Culture. Perth: University of Western Australia Press, 2018. Gunew, Sneja. Post-Multicultural Writers as Neo-Cosmopolitan Mediators. London: Anthem Press, 2017. Hage, Ghassan. Against Paranoid Nationalism: Searching for Hope in a Shrinking Society. Sydney: Pluto Press, 2003. Harkin, Natalie. “The Poetics of (Re)Mapping Archives: Memory in the Blood.” Journal of the Association for the Study of Australian Literature 14.3 (2014): 1–14. Heiss, Anita. Dhuuluu-Yala: To Talk Straight: Publishing Indigenous Literatures. Canberra: Aboriginal Studies Press, 2003. Hodge, Bob, and Vijay Mishra. Dark Side of the Dream: Australian Literature and the Postcolonial Mind. North Sydney: Allen and Unwin, 1991.

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Huggan, Graham. Australian Literature: Postcolonialism, Racism, Transnationalism. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007. Jacklin, Michael. “The Transnational Turn in Australian Literary Studies.” Special Issue Australian Literature in a Global World. Journal of the Association for the Study of Australian Literature (2009): 1–14. Krishnaswarmy, Revathi, “Toward World Literary Knowledges: Theory in the Age of Globalization.” World Literature in Theory. Ed. David Damrosch. Chichester: Wiley-Blackwell, 2014 [2010]. 134–158. Leane, Jeanine. “Tracking our Country in Settler Literature.” Journal of the Association for the Study of Australian Literature 14.3 (2014): 1–17. Leane, Jeanine. “Historyless People.” Long History, Deep Time: Deepening Histories of Place. Ed. Ann McGrath and Maryanne Jebb. Canberra: ANU EPress, 2015. 151–162. Lehmann, Geoffrey, and Robert Gray, eds. Australian Poetry Since 1788. Sydney: University of New South Wales Press, 2011. Lowe, Lisa. The Intimacies of the Four Continents. Durham: Duke University Press, 2015. Lucashenko, Melissa. “I Pity the Poor Immigrant.” Journal of the Association for the Study of Australian Literature 1 (2017): 1–10. McDougall, Russell. “The ‘New’ World Literature: A Review Essay.” Transnational Literature 6.2 (2014). https://dspace.flinders.edu.au/xmlui/bitstream/handle/2328/27567/New_World_ Literature.pdf?sequence=1&isAllowed=y (1 Nov. 2018). McMahon, Elizabeth. Islands, Identity and the Literary Imagination. London and New York: Anthem Press, 2016. Mead, Philip. “Nation, Literature, Location.” The Cambridge History of Australian Literature, Ed. Peter Pierce. Melbourne: Cambridge University Press, 2009. 549–567. Minter, Peter. Unpublished letter to Australian Book Review, 2009. Personal correspondence. Moore, Nicole. “Introduction.” Oh Lucky Country. By Rosa Cappiello. Sydney: Sydney University Press, 2009. v–xi. Moore, Nicole, and Christina Spittel, “South by East: World Literature’s Cold War Compass.” Australian Literature in the German Democratic Republic: Reading through the Iron Curtain. Ed. Nicole Moore and Christina Spittel. London: Anthem Press, 2016. 1–32. Moreton-Robinson, Aileen. “Towards an Australian Indigenous Women’s Standpoint Theory.” Australian Feminist Studies 28.78 (2013): 331–347. Ommundsen, Wenche. “Transnational (Il)literacies: Reaching the ‘New Chinese Literature in Australia’ in China.” Antipodes 25.1 (2001): 83–89. Ommundsen, Wenche, and Michael Jacklin. Multicultural Writing in Australia: A Bibliography. St Lucia: AustLit, 2018. https://www-austlit-edu-au.wwwproxy1.library.unsw.edu.au/austlit/ page/5960600 (12 Dec. 2018). Perera, Suvendrini. Australia and the Insular Imagination: Beaches, Borders, Boats and Bodies. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009. Phillips, Arthur A. “The Cultural Cringe.” Meanjin 4 (1950): 299–302. “‘Salty language’ blamed for Australian play axed in Beijing.” Sydney Morning Herald (7 June 2018). https://www.smh.com.au/entertainment/salty-language-blamed-for-australian-play-beingaxed-in-beijing-20180606-h111nv.html (15 Oct. 2018). Sarwal, Amit, and Reema Sarwal, eds. Reading Down Under: Australian Literary Studies Reader. New Delhi: SSS Publications, 2009. Scott, Kim. “Foreword.” Dhuuluu-Yala: To Talk Straight: Publishing Indigenous Literatures. By Anita Heiss. Canberra: Aboriginal Studies Press, 2003. i–iv. Sharrad, Paul. “Which World, and Why Do We Worry about It?” Scenes of Reading: Is Australian Literature a World Literature? Ed. Robert Dixon and Brigid Rooney. North Melbourne: Australian Scholarly Publishing, 2013. 16–33.

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Sharrad, Paul. “Seen Through Other Eyes: Reconstructing Australian Literature in India.” Journal of the Association for the Study of Australian Literature 10 (2010): 1–15. Spivak, Gayatri C. Death of a Discipline. New York: Columbia University Press, 2003. Spivak, Gayatri C., and Elizabeth Grosz. “Criticism, Feminism and the Institution.” Thesis Eleven 10–11 (1984/1985): 175–187. Stoler, Ann Laura. Duress: Imperial Durabilities in Our Times. Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2016. Swedish Academy. “Patrick White.” NobelPrize.org. https://www.nobelprize.org/prizes/ literature/1973/press-release/ (30 Jan. 2020). Te Punga Somerville, Alice. Once Were Pacific: Maori Connections to Oceania. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2012. Tuhiwai Smith, Linda. Decolonising Methodologies: Research and Indigenous Peoples. 2nd ed. London: Zed Books, 2012. Trees, Kathryn, and Mudrooroo. “Postcolonialism: Yet Another Colonial Strategy?” Span: Postcolonial Fictions 36 (1993): 264–272. van Toorn, Penny. Writing Never Arrives Naked: Early Aboriginal Cultures of Writing in Australia. Canberra: Aboriginal Studies Press, 2006. Veracini, Lorenzo. Settler Colonialism: A Theoretical Overview. Houndmills: Palgrave, 2010. West-Pavlov, Russell. Australian Literature in German Translation: A Catalogue of Titles, Translators and Trends 1789–2010. Berlin: Institut für Englische Philologie, 2010. West-Pavlov, Russell. “Towards a Cross-Border Canon: Marcus Clarke’s For the Term of His Natural Life Behind the Wall.” Australian Literature in the German Democratic Republic: Reading through the Iron Curtain. Ed. Nicole Moore and Christina Spittel. London: Anthem Press, 2016. 51–69. Whitlock, Gillian. “Outside Country: Indigenous Literature in Transit.” Scenes of Reading: Is Australian Literature a World Literature? Ed. Robert Dixon and Brigid Rooney. North Melbourne: Australian Scholarly Publishing, 2013. 178–188. White, Patrick. “The Prodigal Son.” 1958. The Macquarie PEN Anthology of Australian Literature. Ed. Nicholas Jose. Sydney: Allen & Unwin, 2009. 557–560. Wilson, Rita, Russell West-Pavlov, Leah Gerber, et al. Windows on Australia: Perceptions in and through Translation. St Lucia: AustLit, 2010. https://www.austlit.edu.au/austlit/page/5962382 (15 November 2018). Wolfe, Patrick. “Settler Colonialism and the Elimination of the Native.” Journal of Genocide Research 8.4 (2006): 387–409. Wright, Alexis. “Telling the Untold Stories: Alexis Wright on Censorship.” Overland (8 Feb. 2019). https://overland.org.au/2019/02/telling-the-untold-stories-alexis-wright-oncensorship/?fbclid=IwAR0ZWQi9_rBeTQACbiupLJ6aRALcj8_fQFLa3a00lY7XzEwjtCbxvs0GM4 (20 Feb. 2019).

5.2 Further Reading Bird, Delys, Robert Dixon, and Christopher Lee, eds. Authority and Influence: Australian Literary Criticism 1950–2000. St. Lucia: University of Queensland Press, 2001. Birns, Nicholas, and Rebecca McNeer, eds. A Companion to Australian Literature since 1900. Rochester: Camden House, 2007. Heiss, Anita, and Peter Minter, eds. The Macquarie PEN Anthology of Aboriginal Literature. St. Leonards: Allen & Unwin, 2008.

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Jose, Nicholas, ed. The Literature of Australia: An Anthology. New York: W.W. Norton, 2009. McCallum, John. Belonging: Australian Playwriting in the Twentieth Century. Sydney: Currency Press, 2009. Mead, Philip, and John Tranter, eds. The Penguin Book of Modern Australian Poetry. Melbourne: Penguin, 1991. Webby, Elizabeth, ed. The Cambridge Companion to Australian Literature. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000.

Andrew Dean

31 New Zealand Literature and the World Abstract: As in the title of a well-known New Zealand poem, the nation’s literature can be thought of as ‘a small room with large windows’ (Curnow 2017 [1962], 137–139). Katherine Mansfield’s early writing brings late nineteenth-century British aestheticism together with the materials offered by the colonial frontier; in her mature writing, she would draw from the imaginative resources that the colony offered, to bring a particular angle to modernism. Her model would prove decisive, as New Zealand writers would find themselves moving between the local and different understandings of the ‘world’ – and often while contesting Mansfield’s legacies. For cultural nationalists from the 1930s to 1960s, the literature reflected a distinctive identity in the making (albeit connecting with other nationalisms and culturalist theories then circulating). The emergence of a more playful, distinctly ‘American’ register from the 1970s indicates a changing understanding of New Zealand’s literature’s distinctiveness. Finally, Māori and Pasifika writing shows New Zealand literature to be part of a ‘sea of islands’, connected to practices of migration, translation, and incorporation. Key Terms: New Zealand, Pākehā, Māori, Pacific, Oceania, modernism, settler writing, colonialism, bush, nationalism

1 The Bush Bushes are worrying places for Katherine Mansfield. In one of her earliest published fictions, the narrator finds herself wandering the “smooth swept paths” (2012 [1907],  85) of the Wellington Botanical Gardens. At first, she moves away from the enclosure, passing “a little gully, filled with tree ferns, and lit with pale virgin lamps of arum lilies” (2012 [1907], 85). Leaving the path, and climbing up a track, she finds the world disappearing before her. Where once were manicured gardens is now “bush, silent and splendid” (2012 [1907], 85). In this strange, disquieting place, the narrator confronts another side of colonial life: Shall I, looking intently, see vague forms lurking in the shadow staring at me malevolently, wildly, the thief of their birthright? Shall I, down the hillside, through the bush, ever in shadow, see a great company moving towards me, their faces averted, wreathed with green garlands, passing, passing, following the little stream in silence until it is sucked into the wide sea […] [.] (Mansfield 2012 [1907], 85)

It takes no special effort to recognize just what these vague forms might be, what (or rather, whom) the narrator is seeing, and why they may accuse her of being the ‘thief of https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110583182-032

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their birthright’. This intense narrative, composed by a writer only eighteen years old, powerfully registers the history and imaginative conditions of settler colonialism. In a moment in which settlement was being affirmed in a process of forgetting and acclimatization – ideological, biological, and physical – Mansfield’s narrator finds bush haunting her until the end. The sketch finishes with the narrator leaving the gardens, but aware that behind her “the bush lies, hidden in the shadow” (2012 [1907], 85). The thinking of “In the Botanical Gardens” (2012 [1907]), about what lies underneath colonial settlement, never quite left Mansfield. In one of her best-known works, “The Garden Party” (2014 [1921]), flora again disturbs the lives of genteel settlers in Wellington. The story opens with a description of the gardener, who has been working since the morning to prepare the grounds for the guests. Mowing and sweeping the lawns, and preparing the roses, he transforms the house and grounds into an upper middle-class botanical garden. Mansfield emphasizes the relationship between roses and class: “As for the roses, you could not help feeling they understood that roses are the only flowers that impress people at garden-parties; the only flowers that everybody is certain of knowing” (2014, 401). ‘They’ are the gardeners – or, perhaps, the class of gardeners able to be described as ‘they’ – who this narrator feels confident she can describe. Here, in Mansfield’s mature fiction, her handling of narrative voice has developed considerably, leading to a more controlled and indeed ambivalent work. Despite the blithe confidence of the upper middle-class narrator, flowers menace the story as it progresses. The florist brings “canna lilles, big pink flowers, wide open, radiant, almost frighteningly alive on bright crimson stems” (2014, 404). Flowers then return at the end, when Mrs Sheridan dispatches a basketful to the family of a dead workman – in the presence of the corpse, Laura’s world of “garden parties and baskets and lace frocks” is inconsequential (2014, 413). Native trees in “The Garden Party” further connect the story with Mansfield’s early fiction. When the workmen come, Laura discusses the placement of the marquee. “Against those trees”, the man says. Laura serves as a focalizer: Against the karakas. Then the karaka trees would be hidden. And they were so lovely, with their broad, gleaming leaves, and their clusters of yellow fruit. They were like trees you imagined growing on a desert island, proud, solitary, lifting their leaves and fruits to the sun in a kind of silent splendour. Must they be hidden by a marquee? They must. (Mansfield 2014, 403)

Note the similarities between this passage (‘a kind of silent splendour’) and the terms Mansfield had used over a decade earlier to describe the bush in her short narrative (where the bush is ‘silent and splendid’). Here native flora again refuses the work of settlement that is being done in the nearby enclosures, registering a powerful, yet repressed, dimension of experience. If Mansfield finds disturbing power in flowers and native plants, her personal writings demonstrate just how strongly connected this power is with the colonial world that was forming around her, and in which she was implicated. In her journals

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from her November–December 1907 camping trip to Te Urewera in the central North Island, for example, Mansfield is divided between attempts to account, in the terms of the picturesque, for the environment she sees through her train window, and attempts to represent that environment’s strangeness and potential horror. She writes: I watch the long succession of brown paddocks – beautiful with here, a think spreading of buttercups – there a sweetness of arum lilies – And there are valleys – lit with the swaying light of broom blossom – in the distance – grey whares […]. (Mansfield 2015, 88)

This quickly gives over, though, to an intense night-time space, in which the hills come to life: Everywhere on the hills – great masses of charred logs – looking for all the world like strange fantastic beasts a yawning crocodile, a headless horse – a gigantic gosling – a watchdog – to be smiled at and scorned in the daylight – but a veritable nightmare in the darkness – and now & again the silver tree trunks – like a skeleton army, invade the hills – […]. (Mansfield 2015, 88)

It is not difficult to determine what has caused this shift in tone. Charred logs mark the wholesale devastation of the natural environment that preceded pastoral farming in New Zealand, and they prompt comparisons – crocodile, headless horse, gigantic gosling, skeleton armies – that speak of the overwhelming dimensions of what she is seeing. It is little surprise that she sees siege and occupation: she is observing their direct legacies, played out on the hillsides of colonial New Zealand. Sure enough, she soon has “visions of long dead Maoris – of forgotten battles and vanished feuds” (2015, 89) – seemingly the same visions that motivate “In the Botanical Gardens”, which she wrote shortly after returning to Wellington. These three passages from throughout Mansfield’s career – early journals and short sketches, and her late fiction – show that she was formed by numerous intersecting intellectual and political lines of influence. If she is now thought to be one of the paradigmatic early European literary modernists, one of the ‘Blooms Berries’, there is little doubt that she was also drawing from the imaginative resources afforded by settler colonialism in New Zealand, and her own somewhat more idiosyncratic practices of reading. In a sense, this should be no surprise – thinking between provincial or foreign biographical materials and metropolitan literary culture is not exactly unusual for modernism. As John Newton points out in a discussion of Mansfield, “exile and deracination formed the matrix that gave birth to Anglophone modernism” (2017, 42) – James Joyce, T. S. Eliot, Ezra Pound, Samuel Beckett, Jean Rhys, and others. What Mansfield brought to modernism, as many others did too, was a particular angle on the global economic and cultural system known as empire. The legacies of Mansfield’s writing have been contested since her death in both New Zealand and in the reception of modernism more generally. On the one hand, New Zealand literary nationalists in the mid-twentieth century tended to overlook and ignore her work. Writers such as Frank Sargeson refused to take Mansfield’s interiority seriously – refusing, too, a predominant strategy of modernism – as these 1930s–

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1950s prose writers developed their own conception of the nation, largely masculine in nature. On the other hand, in the study of European modernism, as Saikat Majumdar suggests, “[c]ritical, biographical, and editorial interventions have […] tended to emphasize Mansfield’s relationship with and place within metropolitan European culture and have diminished the sense of personal importance that her colonial home had for her” (2015, 77). That is, Mansfield has been turned into the wanderer she thought herself to be, despite the significance of New Zealand and what it afforded her in much of her finest work. It would be better, as Majumdar finds, to examine the “play of desire, distaste, longing, and disillusionment that shaped [Mansfield’s] back-and-forth movement between New Zealand and Europe” (2015, 78), as in these relationships lies the imaginative energy of much of her fiction. The later reception of Mansfield, after the literary nationalists, only shows how significant the world in Mansfield’s New Zealand and Mansfield’s New Zealand in the world can be. And it is telling that her legacies are felt throughout this chapter: nearly all the writers I discuss – including a Māori writer in New York, a Pākehā novelist in France, and a Pākehā poet in Wellington – engage with Mansfield’s distinctive imaginative materials and myths. In what follows this chapter surveys how New Zealand writers have interacted with, and defined themselves in relation to global literary networks throughout the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Rather than simply checking off the apparent ‘turns’ to different parts of the globe or literatures that might have taken place in this literary tradition, or listing a familiar canon of works, its thinking is directed by powerful texts and oeuvres. It focuses on three moments in particular: literary nationalism; the thawing of the hard frost in the 1970s and 1980s; and the development of a distinctive canon of Māori and Pasifika writing in English. It shows that if the locus of literary influence has shifted from different metropolitan centres to a more connected, ‘globalized’, sense of international literary fiction, including pan-indigenous fictions, it has done so through a series of distinctive interventions which look back to the New Zealand tradition.

2 ‘Shadow of Departure’: Literary Nationalism The first issue of The Phoenix in 1931, produced by undergraduates at the University of Auckland, opens with an editorial by James Bertram, “The Cause of It All”: [T]he Phoenix is founded upon enthusiasm for an idea, and upon very little else. It is an attempt to make that idea real, to give it significant expression. And the idea itself is protean. It might be variously described – in descending order of grandiloquence – as the integration of national consciousness, the focussing of contemporary opinion upon local needs, the creation of cultural antennae, the communication of definite standards of taste, the “redeeming of the times”. (Bertram 1932, n.pag.)

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This undergraduate manifesto, surprisingly enough, does indeed mark a transition in New Zealand literature away from colonial writing and towards what became the nationalist tradition. Taking ideas already alive in the culture, this new and ambitious group of writers, at least in their own account, sought to turn these ideas toward national self-understanding – integrating (their term) a ‘national consciousness’. On the face of it, promising to create an intensive national literature, which reports from the country’s imaginative interior, should have little to do with European literary modernism, a movement known for its cosmopolitanism. Yet look a little closer and modernism’s marks are throughout the magazine. The striking cover image of a phoenix is inspired by Art Deco. There are frequent mentions of precursor modernist magazines: a note on the verso of the contents page states that the “device on the title page is adapted from a signet ring given by D. H. Lawrence to [John] Middleton Murry at Christmas, 1923 when the latter was engaged in establishing the New Adelphi” (Bertram 1932, n.pag.). Bertram’s description of the magazine – that it is seeking to revalue taste – is itself a distinctively modernist gesture. In the place of the soft there will be the hard; rather than the loose and vague there will be the definite and precise. Several paragraphs into his editorial Bertram cites Middleton Murry and T.S. Eliot in defence of the ‘new asceticism’. For a nationalist magazine, as Rachel Barrowman writes, there was in fact “nothing particularly ‘New Zealand’ about the content of Phoenix” (1991, 2). Instead, its contributors drew inspiration from both “the young leftish poets, [W. H.] Auden, [Stephen] Spender, [Louis] MacNeice, and [Cecil] Day Lewis” as well as the likes of “D. H. Lawrence and John Middleton Murry” (1991, 2). The result was writing that often imagined New Zealand through a poetics not of affirmation but rather of failure and dissolution. John Newton, for example, finds that the “angst-ridden turmoil of modernism” – “formalist”, “urbane”, “mandarin”, and “child of the City” – was put into dialogue with a mode that on the Australian and American models was “localist, populist and representational” (2017, 29). Paradoxical as this generation of writers may have been, there were some in New Zealand – Allen Curnow most obviously – who were able to turn this modernist nationalism into an almost “coherent cultural programme” for nationalist writing and art (Newton 2017, 30). In Curnow’s forty-two page introduction to his 1945 Caxton Press anthology, A Book of New Zealand Verse 1923–45, he describes recent poets in New Zealand as “returning so often to the theme of land and people, the particular theme of this land and this people”, such that they may make “a home for the imagination” (1945, 18). If these observations are decidedly nationalist, the terms in which he makes them are indebted to modernism. These writers were avoiding the pitfalls of Georgian verse, he writes, the tendency to write poems which are “trivial”, “fanciful”, “simply bad” (1945, 16), sentimental, insincere, divorced from the living of life, and so on. In this handling, the nation will instead be invented by a practice of modernist close reading – “[t]he good poem is something we may in time come to recognise New Zealand by, not something in which we need expect to recognise obvious traces of the New Zealand we know” – and the poet will act as “a prophet to his people” (1945, 22).

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One result of the modernism of nationalism in New Zealand was the emergence of a Pākehā ‘anti-myth’ of settlement, as Curnow put it (2017, 376). If the ‘myth’ is heroic colonial narratives about settlement, in which plucky settlers conquered the largely empty, inimical land, the ‘anti-myth’ is decidedly unheroic – but without clear positive content. One of the best-known of Curnow’s early poems, “The Unhistoric Story” (1943), insistently emphasizes what has not happened, and the strangeness of what has arisen instead: “And whatever these islands may be/Under or over the sea,/ It is something different, something/Nobody counted on” (2017, 58). There is a disenchanted negativity to these poems, an insistent “Not I”, in the words of another of his best-known poems from the period, “The Skeleton of the Great Moa in the Canterbury Museum, Christchurch” (2017, 99). I will return to Māori responses to the Pākehā antimyth of settlement later in this article, in section four, in what amounts to a broad re-evaluation of the appropriateness of deploying European modernist poetics of disavowal to describe colonial history and contemporary experience. Modernist nationalism in New Zealand allows contemporary scholars to reexamine the cosmopolitanism of literary modernism more generally. Jed Esty traces what he calls the “literary prehistory” to the “anthropological turn” in Britain in the twentieth century – the process by which the knowledges and practices developed in the colonies were translated at the “end of empire into a resurgent concept of national culture” (2004, 2). One of the implications of the work of Esty and others is that the much-celebrated transnationality and border-crossing associated with literary modernism, might overlook European modernism’s more parochial nationalisms, both in later decades and perhaps too in the pre-war period. The New Zealand example certainly suggests as much. What appears to be incoherent, an odd local example in the face of overwhelming global evidence, might be thought of instead as one variant among many in the range of possibilities that exist between modernist literary poetics and the nation. But then again, it should not be a surprise that these possibilities are as heterodox as high literary modernism itself. Modernism’s adherents were invested in everything from Irish national histories to American literary traditions to parochial culturalisms to pan-Europeanism, and much else besides. It is Curnow’s modernist education that gives his poems from the 1940s what Patrick Evans describes as an at once a “vatic, almost grandiose” mood and a sense of being “strangely deflated” (2007, 130). “Landfall in Unknown Seas” opens: “Simply by sailing in a new direction/You could enlarge the world” (2017, 95). In this poem, the world’s people “gave seas to history/And islands to new hazardous tomorrows” (2017,  96). Yet elsewhere in Curnow’s work, history happens in other places  – in “Spring, 1942,” for example, the speaker does not expect symbols to emerge on his bus trip into central Christchurch, because, after all, it is a bus trip to central Christchurch. Some significance does emerge despite all, though – the image of a city deserted and destroyed – only for the poem to pull away again, ending with an image of the persona mourning at the harbour front for “what slips away there” (2017, 92). In Curnow’s writing from this period modernist disenchantment and nationalist

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affirmation seem to produce each other. When Curnow edited the second line of “The Skeleton of the Great Moa in the Canterbury Museum, Christchurch”, from “Figures in no waste land” to “Broods over no great waste; a private swamp”, he not only quietly removed the reference to T.S. Eliot, but also diminished the significance of what this skeleton watches over (Newton 2017, 181). There can be no greatness in New Zealand, it seems, not even a greatness of waste. The nation is being made, certainly, but it is made through its diminution. Alongside the 1920s European modernists, there is another figure whose shadow arguably hangs just as long over New Zealand letters from the 1930s onwards – the Cambridge critic F.R. Leavis. Again, exploring the role of Leavis in a nationalism that is not of the British Isles seems a paradoxical exercise, and even more so given Leavis’s association with the concept of the ‘organic community’ – a group settled in place, before the dissociation of thought and feeling under modernity. Yet some of New Zealand’s most influential critics from the cultural nationalist period, such as E.H. McCormick, drew extensively on Leavis’s literary criticism and sociological ambitions. McCormick was the author of Letters and Art in New Zealand (1940), one of the New Zealand ‘Centennial Surveys’, which were commissioned by the first Labour government to celebrate the one-hundred-year anniversary of the signing of the Treaty of Waitangi. Leavis’s assumptions are throughout the work: McCormick searches for how the local literature might connect with the development of a national spirit. As Christopher Hilliard notes, Leavis himself advised McCormick to leave behind what he had been writing at Cambridge on Tudor writing, and instead to develop the master’s thesis he had written in Wellington on New Zealand literature. The sociological tenor of the work that resulted, which puts texts that fall short in a literary sense to use for “some explanatory and thus constructive purpose” (2012, 244), is a consequence of the way that McCormick deployed a Leavisian grammar in his account of local writing. There may be bad writing in New Zealand, the logic goes, but it is bad writing that tells us something about the nature of New Zealandness itself. It is little surprise, then, that the writer who McCormick celebrates most in his 1940 survey is Frank Sargeson. This is not because Sargeson is a bad writer, far from it, but rather because it was Sargeson who sought to bring what he thought of as distinctive national speech and attitude into fiction. McCormick concludes that Sargeson’s characters – “Kens, Toms, and Neds” – have “in their outlook something that is deeply rooted in this country” (1940, 181). By locating a New Zealand voice, McCormick continues, Sargeson has become ‘the exponent of a local tradition that has hitherto been inarticulate’. It is with all of this in mind that McCormick calls Sargeson ‘traditional’ – this is pure Leavis, channelling the Cambridge critic’s insistence that an artist of true significance will emerge from a unified culture (1940, 82). By adopting a Leavisian view of literary value, McCormick effectively describes Sargeson and Mansfield as though they are similar writers – albeit that Mansfield, unlike Sargeson, did not finally achieve the new literature, and is more limited for having failed to do so.

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McCormick’s reading of Sargeson shows how a broadly Leavisian cultural politics, conception of history, and understanding of literary value, came to be predominant in mid-century Pākehā prose fiction. Writing that sought the vernacular – writing which might reassociate sensibility – was promoted ahead of that which might represent disunification itself. This is a divide in Leavis’s own work, of course: he celebrates D.H. Lawrence over James Joyce, declaring that where Lawrence seeks the “vital whole”, Ulysses is a “pointer to disintegration” (1960, 25). One consequence of McCormick’s and others’ use of Leavis was a masculinization of the literary tradition. Images of hard, male working-class life, written in a laconic realist mode, tended to be promoted over feminine sentimentality and ornamentation – and this became the picture of the nation. In this long-running journal, Landfall (1947–), the ideological home in the postwar period is the provincial town, its representative men are farmers, gardeners, labourers, and soldiers. Most importantly, though, this search for a distinctive local voice suggests something deeply rooted in the ideology of cultural nationalism, namely a desire to make a place for Pākehā settlement in New Zealand, to make theirs an identity as authentically local as that of Māori. Harry Scott’s later article in Landfall, “From Emigrant to Native”, sums this up in its title. Where Curnow’s antimyth leaves room to address the fallenness of settler colonialism, of how there might be a “stain of blood that writes an island story”, mid-century vernacular prose writing was often less ambivalent (2017, 98). None of this is to say that the best prose fiction from this period, such as Sargeson’s, unfailingly lends its support to the culture theory of mid-century criticism. Indeed, some of Sargeson’s early fiction is made considerably more intriguing for the way that it handles gay desire – desire which unsettles the pursuit of unities in literary reception, including the unity of a nation with its masculine literary voice. Simon During’s reading of “The Hole that Jack Dug” demonstrates how the story’s “fair dinkum naif narrator” (1983, 79) gives voice to numerous sexual innuendos in his seeming attraction to Jack. Bringing the story out of the closet contests what During thinks of as the way the work wishes to read itself, that is, as primarily operating at an ideological level in regards to the nation. Instead, we have a much less decided text, in which the circulation of desire makes it harder to rationalize the cultural claims being made. In this reading, we can no longer be innocent, as During suggests, about an “amazing sentence” in the story – “Just about any man, I should say, would find it awfully trying to be a woman married to Jack” (1983, 81). Sargeson’s seemingly ‘fair dinkum’ narrators, as in “That Summer”, belie a sophisticated literary sensibility that draws on nationalist literary thought, but ranges well beyond it. If only, as John Newton writes, Sargeson had been able to see this himself, the trajectory of mid-century prose fiction may have been rather different (2017, 298). Even while the literary nationalists drew from international literary culture to build a nation for themselves, though, there were in New Zealand discontents who were unwilling to cede either their vision of the state or indeed of literary value. One of these is Janet Frame, who lived in an army hut in Frank Sargeson’s garden during

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the composition of her first novel, Owls Do Cry (1957). Pitched between the sentiments of the literary nationalists on the one hand, and an imagination interested in the disturbing affordances of literary experience on the other, the novel shows Frame’s ambivalent handling of the legacies of cultural nationalist thought. The rather heavyhanded epilogue demonstrates this ambivalence most of all: she mounts a social critique of suburbia, very much in Sargeson’s terms, by representing unruly elements of life breaking through a domestic scene. Beneath good society, she seems to suggest, are repressions waiting to burst through. Here the cultural nationalist project announces its strength, but also quietly registers its end. Frame would later explicitly re-evaluate the cultural nationalist legacy. In her 1980s autobiographies she looks back to the 1950s and the beginning of her writing career. Here, the line of critique is specifically through gender. She describes how Curnow’s 1945 anthology, along with Sargeson’s from the same year (Speaking for Ourselves), came to be “primer[s] of New Zealand literature” (1989, 234). She continues: “I accepted every judgment without question: if a poem or story was said to be the ‘best’, then I believed it to be so” (1989, 234). The sense that there might be an “authority” that confirms the rightness or wrongness of a poem or story recalls the chapters immediately preceding, in which various male authorities have been seeking to confirm her apparent madness. When she meets Charles Brasch, she repeats Sargeson’s views back to him; Brasch decides that he agrees. Yet it is also in this moment that Frame’s resistance emerges. “I told Mr Brasch that my mother had worked for old Mrs Beauchamp, Katherine Mansfield’s grandmother, and for ‘old Mr Fels’, his own grandfather” (1989, 236). Brasch responds by talking about New Zealand literature, but not about Mansfield. He cannot hear what Frame is saying, or how she may be positioning herself, as a seeming downstairs “domestic” in the house of New Zealand literature, with Mansfield, not Sargeson, upstairs. It is Mansfield after all who gives Frame an education about the bourgeois feminine world – she reads works such as “Her First Ball” as part of “the literature of first dances” (a literature in which Brasch ultimately has no interest) (1989, 233). What we see in Frame is the tailing off of the ideological conditions that the nationalists helped to produce, via distinctive receptions of British and Irish modernism, and which would otherwise sustain them for some time yet. She came to think of their culture criticism and tastes – and perhaps their poetics too – as limitations to realizing herself in writing and in life.

3 ‘Allen Curnow Meets Judge Dredd’: The Americans What happens to New Zealand literature after the decline of literary nationalism from the 1960s onwards? Where did authors look to reinvigorate their writing? Janet Frame is a useful figure to think with here. Her career shows her receiving, and then increasingly contesting, cultural nationalist concepts about literary value and the nation.

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She left New Zealand following the composition of Owls Do Cry, living and writing in Britain for a productive period (1956–1963). This “British” period of Frame’s writing contrasts her later publications in the 1970s, which are set wholly or partially in the United States: Daughter Buffalo (1972) in New York, and Living in the Maniototo (1979) in Baltimore and California. The reason for this shift is partly biographical, as Frame from the later 1960s maintained and developed relationships with artists, writers, and friends in the United States, and was in residence a number of times at Yaddo and MacDowell artists colonies. Yet Frame’s shift away from a New Zealand and Britain nexus to a New Zealand and United States one is also true of her poetics. She has always fitted awkwardly into broader literary historical narratives – none more so than the apparent international rise of ‘postmodernism’. But there is no doubt a distinct shift in sensibility that took place in her later career, one that receives more of the United States than it does of Britain. Her 1970s and 1980s work is less subject to the pathos of her earlier writing, instead allowing a comic exuberance to emerge – as much an indication of the transitions in her literary thinking as anything else. Living in the Maniototo, for example, is interrupted by mystifying events – the plague of ‘Blue Fury’, a cleaning product, kills off one of the characters, while the novel is structured around a novelist failing to write another novel, one about a family named Watercress and a writer named Margaret Rose Hurndell (a thinly veiled Katherine Mansfield). This is metafiction at its most outrageous, and indeed, funny. The same is true of Daughter Buffalo, a novel which seems to transform Frank Sargeson into an elderly, gay, and dishevelled writer living in New York. In this period Frame left behind the concerns endorsed by nationalists in the 1950s – suburban vacuity; the limitations society enforce on those who see differently – and developed interests and practices which, while still idiosyncratic, fit more clearly with the kinds of writing deployed by John Barth and other American metafictionalists from the later 1960s and 1970s. Frame’s friendship from 1969 with William Theophilus Brown, with whom she explored possibilities in contemporary visual art, was particularly significant for the development of her later work. The collages reproduced in the recent volume of letters, Jay to Bee (2016), show her using visual art to think about the limits of identity, as well as to explore the comic side of her creative practice. Taking snippets of speech and images from the culture of the day was important for many writers in this period – including John Ashbery, who himself experimented with collage – even if in Frame’s later writing this would be in the service of her idiosyncratic theory of composition. She quotes from Auden’s letter to Byron to describe the significance of her collages: “Every exciting letter has enclosures/and so shall this […] I’m going to be very up-todate indeed./It is a collage that you’re going to read” (Harold 2016, 201). Being up-todate meant being part of a creative art scene based in the United States, and finding new avenues for expression. The period in which Frame was exchanging letters with Brown, the late 1960s and early 1970s, ultimately marked a reorientation of postwar Pākehā writing in New

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Zealand – but if anything, this was truer for poetry than it was for prose. Alan Riach notes that there was a shift in poetics through the 1960s, “triggered by the publication of the anthology edited by Donald Allen, The New American Poetry (1960), which drew on a range of work by poets form the Beat, Black Mountain, New York, and San Francisco groups” (2016, 218). The short-lived but influential periodical, Freed (1969–72), became an early home for this new way of writing in New Zealand, publishing the work of Alan Brunton and Murray Edmond. Another significant marker is the course in American literature that filmmaker and academic Roger Horrocks taught at the University of Auckland in the late 1960s, which “introduced racy new work to bright, mischievous, restless students” (2016, 19). The result was an innovation in poetic form, as the period after cultural nationalism would come to prefer open verse forms instead of regular rhyme, metre, and stanzas, and tone. The previous earnestness of state verse too would be left behind in favour of more playful attitudes. This transition was also part of a change in direction in the conception of poetic purpose and value. While the question of what might be distinctive about New Zealand and New Zealanders remained part of the larger imaginative matrix, the overall trajectory was away from what Curnow, who re-emerged as a major force in the 1970s, called “questions which present themselves as public and answerable”, and “towards the questions which are always private and unanswerable” (2017, 377). Curnow’s new writing would be much looser, recognizably opened up by encounters with both postwar American poetry (as represented in Allen’s anthology) and the “Young New Zealand Poets” (Manhire, Edmond, Jan Kemp, Ian Wedde, and others). Yet there are hints of his later trajectory in poems from as far back as 1949–1950, a period in which he travelled to both the United States and the United Kingdom (“sailing in a new direction” to “enlarge the world”, 2017, 95). “Elegy on My Father”, written in the wake of his father’s death, tender a move away from the sense of marginality of his earlier work. Here the “sound of the Pacific and the hills he tramped singing” do not diminish his father’s life and significance, but rather unite it with the poet’s “Paddington autumn” (2017, 120). Once the nationalist theme had more assuredly gone into decline, what would emerge in its place would be more personal, often ambivalent, encounters with memory and landscape. Hence the later poems of private reminiscence such as “A Balanced Bait in Handy Pellet Form” and “The Unclosed Door”. These poems may be interested in the bloodshed and violence at the heart of the nation, closing a loop with his earliest work, but most of all they are personal memories of a Canterbury childhood, ones that are much harder to rationalize into national myth (or indeed “anti-myth”, 2017, 376). John Newton suggests that one of the consequences of Curnow’s relative silence between 1957 and 1972 is that his “second career” took place alongside not the generation of writers immediately younger (such as Frame), but rather with the cohort of writers that formed around Freed and Islands (2016, 5). Perhaps the most enduring of this new generation is Bill Manhire, whose first collection, The Elaboration (1972), was published in Curnow’s comeback year. Manhire, like Curnow, will remain

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interested throughout his career in the “local” in some sense. But the local in his treatment speaks of a different formation as a poet. In his 1991 lecture, “Dirty Silence”, Manhire describes the value he finds in poetry which does not seek pure expression, but rather in the demotic speech of the many different voices of the nation – this is poetry as a “monologue which has room for conversations” (1991, 156). As Harry Ricketts and Mark Williams argue, Manhire’s interests are ultimately less with “the global movements of poetic form replicated at a national level,” and instead more with “the particulars of phrase and tone, the evasions of voice that speak and conceal the self, echoes of prior voices in contemporary ones, the unstable concentrations of influence and observation that make a poem” (2016, 237). Hence it is not place which “produce[s] the ‘New Zealand’ inflections of [Manhire’s] poetry”, as with the cultural nationalist poets, but rather the ever vibrant languages of the nation that does so – and Manhire is unmistakably a New Zealand poet (2016, 237). The tradition Manhire draws from is not quite the modernist canon according to C.K. Stead – W.B. Yeats, Pound, Eliot – but instead one more tolerant of accident, playfulness, domestic scenes – Wallace Stevens, William Carlos Williams – and elaborated through postwar American writing. In an interview, Manhire noted his reading at the beginning of his career of both Robert Creeley and Charles Olson (there was “range of voice that had amazed me in the sixties”, Sharp and Manhire 1992, 32). Most of all, he valued the “American poets” who “somehow use words to make the world a little more mysterious” (Sharp and Manhire 1992, 17). This comes through powerfully in his poetry. For example, in “Milky Way Bar” (1991) – the title referring to both a kind of chocolate treat and the galaxy – he writes, “my whole pleasure is in the inconspicuous/I love the unimportant thing” (2014, 68). Moving between the candy sweetness of a chocolate bar and the humbling enormity of the heavens, he characteristically oscillates between levels of significance, finding the world transformed in the process. Perhaps this is the world cast anew, but perhaps too it is just a milky way bar. Nicholas Wright, describing another Manhire poem, “Water, A Stopping Place”, suggests that there is in Manhire a distinct “romantic-anti-romantic” strategy (2016, 123). The pleasures that emerge from his writing are more in the way of intensities, wonder, inauguration, and appreciation, than they are in recognition, description, accounting. It is against this background that Manhire develops his distinctive images of the nation. The poem “Phar Lap”, one of his best-known ‘state’ poems, is not subject to the same plangencies of the cultural nationalists, but nor is it as locked within the severities even of Curnow’s later work. Instead, the pieces of this ‘unlikely starter’, dispersed across the world, become an exciting meeting point of national mythologies, languages, and histories (2014, 85). Or in “Zoetropes”, the nation is the search for a reassuring capital letter “Z” in a book or newspaper – writing from London, the persona finds not the unspoken “New Zealand”, but instead finds “Zero” and “nil”, “the quiet starting point/of any scale of measure” (2014, 63). If the search for the words is faintly comic, though, the image in the penultimate stanza, of the land as “smoke

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at anchor, drifting above/Antarctica’s white flower”, is not (2014, 63). Here the comic shades into deeper forms of seriousness, as Manhire looks from elsewhere to see the nation in its historical context, all the while discovering a transitory beauty anew.

4 Te Ao Hou: Māori and Pasifika Writing The second section of this chapter suggested that 1930s–50s literary nationalism in New Zealand draws on international resources, specifically European literary modernism and other literary nationalisms. What is otherwise defined as a particularist tradition, in this light, becomes part of a wider story of the development and direction of mid-century writing. The rapid emergence of Māori and Pasifika English language literary traditions after the Second World War similarly drew upon, and contributed to, the global development of indigenous literatures – as well as conditions specific to New Zealand. The results are distinctive and powerful traditions, ones that have energized the literary culture as much as cultural nationalism had several decades earlier. It should be no surprise that Māori and Pasifika writing has been resolutely engaged with both regional and international literatures. As Epeli Hau’ofa has suggested, Oceania is best thought of not as “islands in the sea” but rather as a “sea of islands”, and its indigenous inhabitants as “ocean peoples” (1993, 7). The Pacific Ocean connects trading routes, families of languages, and cultural practices, in what is ultimately an integrated system of trade and cultural exchange. Māori and Pacific literatures in New Zealand emerge out of these practices and traditions – they are international because Pacific identities are. This ‘oceanic’ sensibility is clear in both foundational theoretical and creative pieces from the post-1960 period. Albert Wendt – a critic, novelist, and poet who had lived between Samoa and New Zealand – wrote in a 1976 article: “I belong to Oceania – or, at least, I am rooted in a fertile portion of it – and it nourishes my spirit, helps to define me, and feeds my imagination” (1976, 49). Wendt’s vision is a broad and inclusive one, encompassing “a scatter of islands, nations, cultures, mythologies, and myths” (1976, 49); the new writing that he and others were bringing into being, he says, is “a South Pacific literature” (1976, 59). It is significant here that Wendt draws on shared, but distinct, mythologies of migration to describe this new literature and identity. All writers of the Pacific are “in search of that heaven, that Hawaiki, where our hearts will find meaning”: the ocean is as much a physical space for migration as it is an imaginative condition, and it is one shared by Māori and Pasifika alike (1976, 49). This comes through in his fiction too. The Samoa-Auckland nexus is central, for example, to Wendt’s first novel, Sons for the Return Home (1973), as the protagonist Sione finds himself displaced between two nations and cultures. The 1970s saw the emergence of a broader-based Māori prose tradition in English. In particular, Witi Ihimaera’s first three books, Pounamu Pounamu (1972), Tangi

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(1973), and Whanau (1974) mark a moment of transition. From this point, writers such as Patricia Grace, Keri Hulme, and Ihimaera himself would develop their careers, gain international recognition, and become representative of New Zealand writing more generally. No longer could New Zealand writing be a monocultural endeavour of settler self-understanding. This moment of emergence has a longer history, though. The ‘Kōmako’ project, a bibliography of Māori writing (primarily in English), features sources written by Māori back to the nineteenth century. Landfall published the early work of Māori writers Hone Tūwhare (1959) and Rowley Habib (1961); Ihimaera published early versions of chapters from Tangi in Landfall in 1970. Most significant of all, though, was Te Ao Hou [The New World], the magazine published by the Maori Purposes Fund Board of the Department of Maori Affairs from 1952 to 1975. Collecting a range of Māori voices, young and old, across the country – it was introduced by its first editor as a ‘marae on paper’ – the journal gave institutional support to a developing written Māori literary culture (cf. Somerville 2016, 182). The magazine also connected Māori with other indigenous peoples, featuring articles about trips abroad – such as to visit Australian Aboriginal figures – and trips from other indigenous peoples to New Zealand to connect with Māori. Indeed, it was during the Te Ao Hou era, and almost a decade before Ihimaera and Patricia Grace’s first books, that Hone Tūwhare published No Ordinary Sun (1964), his first volume of poetry. From this vantage, Tūwhare’s earliest writing endures in a way that works such as Pounamu Pounamu do not. There are some more explicitly politicized poems. In “O Africa”, for example, colonization is a psychological condition, one which must be transvalued: “let revulsion rise”, he writes, against “bloody acts/[…] so that innocence/and the child shall reign/so that we may dream/good dreams again” (2011, 74). This connects with international decolonizing movements in southern Africa, as Tūwhare advocates overcoming psychic harms through seizing the means of mental production. Yet at his most powerful Tūwhare tends to temper his political thinking with accounts of what might not be translatable into politics, or what might exceed it in some way. In “Sea Call”, the speaker goes to the beach and is transformed in an imagined encounter with the water: “There let the waves lave/pleasuring the body’s senses: […] and the paua’s stout kiss/shall drain a rock’s heart/to the sandbar’s booming” (2011, 68). This is a far cry from the likes of James K. Baxter’s “Poem in the Matukituki Valley” (1949), in which the persona encounters a remote, inimical, frozen, and enormous alpine valley. Instead, Tūwhare’s landscapes are smaller, sensual, and personal – and untroubled by worries about tenure. It would take some time, but Pākehā poets such as Baxter and Curnow would eventually find in the 1970s poetic registers that dispensed with their nation-making project – and find within themselves something more like Tūwhare’s warmer, more generous-minded poetry on display here. In the 1980s Māori writing in English became more fully ‘globalized’. I use this term deliberately: it was not that Māori writing was not already connected with anticolonial literatures globally, or with new writing from the Pacific – it clearly had

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been – but rather that around this time there emerged a newly globalized community of reception for indigenous literature. The international success of Keri Hulme’s The Bone People (1983) demonstrates this more than any other single work. While the novel sold well in New Zealand, it was winning the Pegasus Prize for Maori Literature which put it on its path toward international recognition (and a Booker). The Pegasus Prize was funded by ExxonMobil and awarded in different nations for each round; it aimed, in James English’s assessment, to “promote international, and especially North American, awareness of local literary cultures that have been marginalized by linguistic and/or economic circumstances” (2005, 314). In short: the Pegasus book award sought to translate the subnational to the global, and in 1985 it was New Zealand’s turn. When translated into this global frame, The Bone People becomes rather a different novel from the one that its first publishers at Spiral imagined it to be. Now, it appears to be an indigenizing of the magical realist tradition. As Ben Holgate writes in his account of the novel’s success, “magical realism” was at this time “an international publishing phenomenon rather than a literary style restricted to Latin America” – Isabel Allende, J.L. Borges, and Gabriel García Marquez, most notably (2017, 299). Hence the elements of the novel which rely on Māori spiritual beliefs came to appeal to this new international audience which might have little familiarity with these traditions. The mute child, the powerful and riddling kaumatua, the rebuilding of Kerewin’s home in the form of spirals (imitating the ‘sweep of galaxies and the signing curve of the universe’) – these are the stock and trade of a broadly resacralized spirit world (2001, 537). In this sense, thinking in a world literary frame focuses us less on how Hulme braids Māori beliefs into the novel, but rather on how these elements connect with transitions in the world literary marketplace, that in turn allowed the book to be valued internationally. Yet the terms in which Hulme’s work were celebrated depart notably from her sense of herself in history and culture. In an essay she wrote for a 1981 collection, on literatures from across the world, she describes herself as a “mongrel”: A sizeable number of New Zealanders have both Maori and European ancestry, and a large proportion of these “mongrels” are familiar with both cultures. I am a mongrel myself. When the frightened seek to erect a fence between two peoples, we are on both sides of it. Such fencemaking tries to separate yourself from…yourself. (Hulme 1981, 294)

Hulme here refuses to be what literary cultures at home and abroad wish to make her, namely a ‘Māori’ writer firmly on one side of the bicultural framework, an indigenous writer who is just one thing. Her term, “mongrel,” is well-pitched. In the place of biological notions of racial purity, she suggests that she is an embodied, fleshy product of historical encounter, and its attendant, possibly uncontained, sexual desires. Throughout the article she describes the whakapapa of writers as both Pākehā and Māori – “Keri Hulme”, she says at the end of the article, is “Ngai Tahu, Scots and English” (1981, 305). These thoughts suggest that she is an especially poor target for

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the infamous criticism C.K. Stead levelled at her in 1985. He said that the bone people is “a novel by a Pakeha which has won an award intended for a Maori” (1985, 104). He concluded that she is Pākehā, among other reasons, because she only acquired Te Reo Māori later in life and apparently lacked sufficient Māori ancestry: “of Keri Hulme’s eight great-grandparents one only was Maori” (1985, 103). Hulme’s much less restrictive understanding of identity makes a mockery of Stead’s limited notions, as she develops instead a richly generous account from colonial histories, embodied life, and multiple sets of identifications. Hers is a more inclusive, less spiteful, and distinctively plural sense of whakapapa. In a 2017 address, Tina Makereti – author of three books, including Where the Rēhoku Bone Sings (2014) – develops the metaphor of the wharenui (meeting house) for “The Literature of Aotearoa” (2017). One of the inspirations for this is Patricia Grace’s Pōtiki (1986). Makereti quotes from Grace’s work (itself another monument in the Māori literary tradition in English): We could not afford books so we made our own. In this way we were able to find ourselves in books. It is rare for us to find ourselves in books, but in our own books we were able to find and define our lives. But our main book was the wharenui, which is itself a story, a history, a gallery, a study, a design structure and a taonga. (Grace 1987, 104; qtd. in Makereti 2017, n.pag.)

As Makereti develops it, the idea of the wharenui as a book indigenizes the New Zealand literary tradition. This wharenui would “welcome and absorb and connect all the literatures and writers and readers of Aotearoa”. The “method” would be “whakapapa”: “ancestors who connect and represent different literatures are chosen carefully”, such that Hone Tūwhare and Apirana Ngata face “Katherine Mansfield, Frank Sargeson, Janet Frame”; invited into the whare too would be Pacific writers Epeli Hau’ofa, Alistair Campbell, and as many as are able to be remembered (2017, n.pag.). The thrust of Makereti’s lecture is to critique the ongoing underrepresentation of Māori in contemporary publishing and accounts of New Zealand literature in curricula. She suggests that the whare at this moment is more “like a flashy, modern, architecturally designed statement, the kind you see in our wealthiest suburbs” (2017, n.pag.). Her hope is for a literature which might be inclusive and syncretic, which might be organized according to Māori principles as opposed to Pākehā ones. Nearly one hundred years on from Mansfield’s scene of encounter, Makereti is imagining a new future for New Zealand literature. Now it is not a young Katherine Mansfield looking out at Māori figures looming in the bushes, but rather a shared literary tradition that incorporates many histories of migration and encounter, local and international, in the distinctively Māori way. In this “kaupapa whare”, as Makereti calls it, there is an “extraordinary mix of language and narrative and metaphor that could only take root in this one place on Earth” (2017, n.pag.). This whare is both a model and a challenge.

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5 Bibliography 5.1 Works Cited Barrowman, Rachel. A Popular Vision: The Arts and the Left in New Zealand, 1930–1950. Wellington: Victoria University Press, 1991. Bertram, James. “The Cause of It All.” The Phoenix 1 (March 1932): n.pag. Curnow, Allen. Allen Curnow: Collected Poems. Ed. Elizabeth Caffin and Terry Sturm. Auckland: Auckland University Press, 2017. Curnow, Allen. “Introduction.” A Book of New Zealand Verse 1923–45. Christchurch: Caxton Press, 1945. 13–55. During, Simon. “Towards a Revision of Local Critical Habits.” And 1 (1983): 75–93. English, James F. The Economy of Prestige: Prizes, Awards, and the Circulation of Cultural Value. London: Harvard University Press, 2005. Esty, Joshua. A Shrinking Island: Modernism and National Culture in England. Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2004. Evans, Patrick. The Long Forgetting: Post-Colonial Literary Culture in New Zealand. Christchurch: Canterbury University Press, 2007. Frame, Janet. An Autobiography. Auckland: Vintage, 1989. Grace, Patricia. Potiki. London: The Women’s Press, 1987. Harold, Denis, ed. Jay to Bee: Janet’s Frame’s Letters to William Theophilus Brown. Berkeley: Counterpoint, 2016. Hau’ofa, Epeli. “Our Sea of Islands.” A New Oceania: Rediscovering Our Sea of Islands. Ed. Epeli Hau’ofa, Eric Waddell, and Vijay Naidu. Suva: University of the South Pacific, 1993. 2–16. Hilliard, Christopher. English as a Vocation: The Scrutiny Movement. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012. Holgate, Ben. “The Fear of Solitude: How Marketing Makes Real Magic.” The Global Histories of Books: Methods and Practices. Ed. Elleke Boehmer et al. London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2017. 297–317. Hulme, Keri. “‘Mauri:’ Bi-Cultural Poetry in New Zealand.” Only Connect: Literary Perspectives East and West. Ed. Guy Amirthanayagam. Adelaide: Centre for Research in the New Literatures in English and East-West Center, 1981. 290–310. Hulme, Keri. The Bone People. London: Picador, 2001. Leavis, Frank R. The Great Tradition: George Eliot, Henry James, Joseph Conrad. London: Chatto & Windus, 1960 [1948]. Majumdar, Saikat. Prose of the World: Modernism and the Banality of Empire. New York: Columbia University Press, 2015. Makereti, Tina. “Tina Makereti: Stories Can Save Your Life.” E-Tangata (27 May 2017). https:// e-tangata.co.nz/arts/tina-makereti-stories-can-save-your-life/ (10 Oct. 2018). Manhire, Bill. “Dirty Silence: Impure Sounds in New Zealand Poetry.” Dirty Silence: Aspects of Language and Literature in New Zealand. Ed. Graham McGregor and Mark Williams. Auckland: Oxford University Press, 1991. 143–57. Manhire, Bill. Selected Poems. Manchester: Carcanet, 2014. Mansfield, Katherine. The Collected Fiction of Katherine Mansfield, vol. 1: 1898–1915. Ed. Gerri Kimber and Vincent O’Sullivan. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2012. Mansfield, Katherine. The Collected Fiction of Katherine Mansfield, vol. 2: 1916–1922. Ed. Gerri Kimber and Vincent O’Sullivan. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2014.

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Mansfield, Katherine. The Urewera Notebook. Ed. Anna Plumridge. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2015. McCormick, E.H. Letters and Art in New Zealand. Wellington: Dept. of Internal Affairs, 1940. Newton, John. Hard Frost: Structures of Feeling in New Zealand Literature 1908–1945. Wellington: Victoria University Press, 2017. Newton, John. “Running With the Fast Pack.” Ka Mate Ka Ora: A New Zealand Journal of Poetry and Poetics 14 (2016): 4–29. Riach, Alan. “‘Physician of Society:’ The Poet in the 1950s and 1960s.” A History of New Zealand Literature. Ed. Mark Williams. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2016. 208–223. Ricketts, Harry, and Mark Williams. “From Hiruharama to Hataitai: The Domestication of New Zealand Poetry, 1972–1990.” A History of New Zealand Literature. Ed. Mark Williams. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2016. 227–245. Sharp, Iain, and Bill Manhire. “An Interview with Bill Manhire.” In the Same Room. Ed. Elizabeth Alley and Mark Williams. Auckland: Auckland University Press, 1992. 15–36. Somerville, Alice Te Punga. “Te Ao Hou: Te Pataka.” A History of New Zealand Literature. Ed. Mark Williams. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2016. 182–94. Stead, Christian K. “Keri Hulme’s The Bone People and the Pegasus Award for Maori Literature.” Ariel 16.4 (1985): 101–108. Tuwhare, Hone. Small Holes in the Silence: Collected Works. Auckland: Random House New Zealand, 2011. Wendt, Albert. “Towards a New Oceania.” Mana Review 1.1 (1976): 49–60. Wright, Nicholas. “Traversing ‘The Same River’: John Newton’s Unforbidden Romanticism.” Journal of New Zealand Literature 34.1 (2016): 123–142.

5.2 Further Reading Calder, Alex. The Settler’s Plot: How Stories Take Place in New Zealand. Auckland: Auckland University Press, 2011. Evans, Patrick. The Long Forgetting: Post-Colonial Literary Culture in New Zealand. Christchurch: Canterbury University Press, 2007. Murray, Stuart. Never a Soul at Home: New Zealand Literary Nationalism and the 1930s. Wellington: Victoria University Press, 1998. Somerville, Alice Te Punga. Once Were Pacific: Māori Connections to Oceania. Minnesota: Minnesota University Press, 2012. Stead, Christian K. The Glass Case: Essays on New Zealand Literature. Auckland: Auckland University Press, 1981. Williams, Mark, ed. A History of New Zealand Literature. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2016.

Name Index Abacha, Sani 446 Aboulela, Leila 294, 462 – Minaret 294 – “The Museum” 462 Abrahams, Peter 424 Achebe, Chinua 60–61, 135, 200–201, 266–267, 269, 440–441, 444, 521 – “The African Writer and the English Language” 60 – Things Fall Apart 135, 200–202, 269, 440 – Arrow of God 441 – “The Role of the Writer in a New Nation” 440 – “The Novelist as Teacher” 441 Aching, Gerard 412 Adamson, Joni 389 Adebayo, Ayobami 442 – Stay with Me 442 Adebayo, Diran 300 – Some Kind of Black 300 Adichie, Chimamanda Ngozi 194, 248, 335 Adiga, Aravind 235–237, 472 – The White Tiger 235–237 Ahmad, Aijaz 43–44, 71 Alaimo, Stacy 129 Alexander, Elizabeth 186–187 Alexander the Great 177 Alharthi, Jokha 235 – Celestial Bodies 235 Ali Kiba 455, 463 Ali, Monica 293–294, 476 – Brick Lane 293, 476 – In the Kitchen 293 Allan, Michael 74 Allende, Isabel 545 Allen, Donald 541 Amin, Idi 460 Anam, Tahmima 472 Anderson, Benedict 49, 105, 116, 322, 455 – Imagined Communities 105, 322 Anim-Addo, Joan 204 – Imoinda: Or She Who Will Lose Her Name 204 Anyidoho, Kofi 439 Appadurai, Arjun 105–106, 495–496 – “Disjuncture and Difference in the Global Cultural Economy” 105 https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110583182-033

Appiah, Kwame Anthony 466 Applbaum, Kalman 229 Apter, Emily 7, 21, 54, 62–64, 72, 78, 135, 167, 254, 269, 272, 347–348, 411, 512, 517 – Dictionary of Untranslatables: A Philosophical Lexicon 54, 62–64, 254 – Against World Literature: On the Politics of Untranslatability 7, 63–64, 72, 135, 254 – The Translation Zone: A New Comparative Literature 167 Arac, Jonathan 15–18, 169, 265 – “Angloglobalism?” 265 Aristotle 175–178, 184, 188, 426 – Poetics 176–178, 184 Armah, Ayi Kwei 444 Armstrong, Nancy 342 Arnold, Matthew 251, 327 Ashbery, John 540 Ashcroft, Bill 154, 265, 496, 515 – The Empire Writes Back 3, 154, 265, 496, 515 – Caliban’s Voice Astair, Fred 306 Attree, Lizzy 462 Attridge, Derek 120, 292 – The Singularity of Literature 292 Attwell, David 425 Atwood, Margaret 123–124, 128, 218, 235, 358 – Oryx and Crake 123 – The Year of the Flood 123 – MaddAddam 123 – The Handmaid’s Tale 218, 358 – The Testaments 235, 358 – The Heart Goes Last 358 Auden, W.H. 540 Auerbach, Erich 3, 15–20, 23, 25–27, 86, 254 – Mimesis 17–18, 26 – “Philology and Weltliteratur” 3, 17 Austen, Jane 214, 233, 342 – Pride and Prejudice 214 Auster, Paul 54 Awoonor, Kofi 439 Aw, Tash 98 – Five Star Billionaire 98 Aze, Chizelona 435 Baartman, Sarah 204 Baker, Mona 150

550 

 Name Index

Bakhtin, Mikhail 176–178, 187–188 – The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays 178 Bamman, David 281, 283–284 – “The Transformation of Gender in EnglishLanguage Fiction” 281 Banerjee, Sarnath 220 – Corridor 220 Banville, John 315, 320–321, 326–330 – Doctor Copernicus 326, 328 Barad, Karen 129, 143, 200 – Meeting the Universe Halfway: Quantum Physics and the Entanglement of Matter and Meaning 129, 200 Barnes, Julian 303–305 – The Sense of an Ending 303–304 Barrenechea, Antonio 340 Barrowman, Rachel 535 Barth, John 341, 540 Barthes, Roland 45 – Writing Degree Zero 45 Bar-On, Yinon M. 128 Bassnett, Susan 150, 165–166, 254, 477 – Comparative Literature: A Study of the Discipline 165 Bauer, Ralph 343 Baumbach, Sibylle 237–238 Baverstock, Alison 232 – How to Market Books 232 Baxter, James K. 544 – “Poem in the Matukituki Valley” 544 Beah, Ishmael 446 – Long Way Gone 446 Bearden, Romare 186–188 Beckett, Samuel 315, 324–326, 328, 330, 533 Murphy 342 Krapp’s Last Tape 325 Beecroft, Alexander 4, 105–107, 110, 257 – “World Literature Without a Hyphen: Towards a Typology of Literary Systems” 106 Bhatia, Gautam 220 – Lie: A Traditional Tale of Modern India 220 Behn, Aphra 204 Bellay, Joachim du 1, 32 – La Deffence et Illustration de la Langue Francoyse 1, 32 Benjamin, Walter 115, 140, 257, 478 Bennet, Jane 129

Bennett, Louise 398, 401, 409, 412 – “Sammy Intres” 398 – “Independence” 401 Benyamin 477 – Goat Days 477 Berger, John 236 Bergthaller, Hannes 121 Berman, Jessica 343 Bermann, Sandra 163 Bernal, Martin 177 Bertram, James 534–535 Bezos, Jeff 275 Bgoya, Walter 466 Bhabha, Homi K. 3–4, 20, 22, 31–32, 36, 136, 140, 179, 188, 257, 477, 525 – The Location of Culture 3, 31 Bhattacharya, Baidik 37–38 – Postcolonial Writing in the Era of World Literature: Texts, Territories, Globalizations 37 Birus, Hendrik 21 Bizot, Richard 318 Blanchot, Maurice 327 Bloom, Harold 140, 245–251, 253, 255 Blum, Hester 379 Boccaccio 183 – Decameron 183 Bode, Katherine 282 – Reading by Numbers: Recalibrating the Literary Field 230, 234 – A World of Fiction: Digital Collections and the New Literary History 282 Boehmer, Elleke 3–4, 37–38, 521, 524 Bolaño, Roberto 239 Bolter, Jay David 212–213 – Remediation: Understanding New Media Bond, Lucy 133–134 Borges, Jorge Luis 46, 50–51, 286, 545 – “The Garden of Forking Paths” 286 Bourdieu, Pierre 25, 248 Boxall, Peter 326 Boyle, Danny 292 – Trainspotting 292 – Slumdog Millionaire 292 Bradstreet, Anne 333 – “Semiramis” 333 Braidotti, Rosi 129 Brand, Dionne 358, 398

Name Index 

– Another Place, Not Here 358 – Land to Light On 398 Brandes, Georg 86–87 – “World Literature” 86–87 Brasch, Charles 539 Brathwaite, E. Kamau 299, 338, 382–383, 400–401, 410 – The Arrivants 383, 400 – The Development of Creole Society in Jamaica 410 – “Islands” 400 Breytenbach, Breyten 424 Brickhouse, Anna 343, 346 Brink, André 416 Brouillette, Sarah 71, 138, 238, 399 – Postcolonial Writers in the Global Literary Marketplace Brown, Stephen 239 Brown, William Theophilus 540 Brunton, Alan 541 Brutus, Dennis 424 Brydon, Diana 357, 370–371 Buell, Lawrence 120, 378 Bulawayo, NoViolet 220–221, 418, 427–429 – We Need New Names 221, 418, 427–429 Burnham, Michelle 345 Burns, Anna 235 – Milkman 235 Butler, Octavia 333 – Dawn 333 Byron, George Gordon 22–23, 540 Cabri, Louis 364 Cambridge, Ada 514 Camões, Luís de 184 – The Lusiads 184–185 Campbell, Alistair 546 Campbell, Chris 403–404 Campt, Tina 196 Cappiello, Rosa 520–521 – Paese Fortunato 520 Carey, Peter 238, 519 – True History of the Kelly Gang 238, 519 Carlyle, Thomas 20–24 Carson, Rachel 126–127 – Silent Spring 126–127 Carter, David 514, 521 Cary, Joyce 441

 551

– Mister Johnson 441 Casanova, Pascale 3–4, 18, 21–22, 31–34, 37, 68–69, 104, 134–135, 165, 168, 254, 308, 313, 320, 324, 330, 347, 355, 436, 440, 512 – The World Republic of Letters 18, 31, 33, 314, 512 – La langue mondiale: traduction et domination 168 Cassin, Barbara 54, 62–64, 169, 254 – Vocabulaire européen des philosophies: Dictionnaire des intraduisibles 62–63 Castro, Brian 523 Castronovo, Russ 347 Cawdrey, Robert 53–56, 64 – The First English Dictionary 1604: Robert Cawdrey’s Table Alphabetical 53, 55 Cervantes, Miguel de 426 Césaire, Aimé 182, 197–198, 299, 336, 422 – Notebook of a Return to the Native Land 197–198 – Discourse on Colonialism 422 Chakrabarty, Dipesh 123, 478, 253, 524 – “The Climate of History: Four Theses” 123 Chameleon, Jose 454–455 Chandra, Vikram 50, 475 Chariandy, David 358, 369, 399 – Brother 359 Chatterjee, Partha 41 Chattopadhyay, Bankimchandra 47 Chaudhuri, Amit 41 Cheah, Pheng 4, 35, 38, 67, 77, 120, 127, 130, 141, 167, 258, 265, 347–348, 360, 371, 376, 382, 399, 401, 417, 429, 475, 479 – What Is a World? On Postcolonial Literature as World Literature 4, 35, 77, 95, 141 Chen Bingzhao (Chen Ping Chiu) 505 – Archaeological Bird 504 Cheney-Coker, Syl 442–443 – The Last Harmattan of Alusine Dunbar 442 Ch’ien, Evelyn Nieng-Ming 339 Cho, Lily 369 Chow, Rey 493 Christie, Agatha 150 Chua Beng Huat 491–492, 500 Chun, Eunkyung 324 Clarke, George Elliott 358 Clarke, Marcus 519 – His Natural Life 519 Clark, J.P. 439, 442, 446–447

552 

 Name Index

– The Boat 446 Clarkson, Carrol 53 Clemens, Samuel Langhorne 229 – The Gilded Age: A Tale of Today 229 Cliff, Michelle 35, 347–348, 398, 402, 408 – Abeng 398, 408 – Free Enterprise 402 Clive, Robert 42 Coetzee, J.M. 35, 54–55, 64, 139–140, 170, 230–231, 237–238, 257, 381, 425–426, 428, 520–521 – Foe 35, 139–140, 381 – Diary of a Bad Year 170 – Summertime 170 – Elizabeth Costello 230, 238, 381 Coleridge, Samuel Taylor 22–23, 210 Cole, Teju 143–144, 220–221 – Open City 143–144, 221 – Every Day Is for the Thief 221 Comaroff, Jean 198 Comaroff, John 198 Condé, Maryse 396 Connell, Raewyn 525 Conrad, Joseph 27, 49, 264, 268–269, 272, 376, 379–380, 423, 441, 494 – Heart of Darkness 139, 269, 423, 441 – The Mirror of the Sea 380 – “Youth” 379–380 Cooper, Carolyn 409 Cooppan, Vilashini 19 Coovadia, Imraan 426 – The Wedding 426 – The Institute for Taxi Poetry 426 Couani, Anna 520 Corr, Araluen 525 Creeley, Robert 542 Crichlow, Michaeline A. 410 – Globalization and the Post-Creole Imagination 410 Croce, Benedetto 165, 175, 188 – Aesthetic: As Science of Expression and General Linguistic Cronin, Michael 149–150 – Eco-Translation: Translation and Ecology in the Age of the Anthropocene 149 Crownshaw, Rick 133 Crystal, David 492 Culler, Jonathan 78, 166

Curnow, Allen 535–539, 541–542, 544 – “The Unhistoric Story” 536 – “The Skeleton of the Great Moa in the Canterbury Museum, Christchurch” 535–536 – “Landfall in Unknown Seas” 536 – “Elegy on My Father” 541 – “A Balanced Bait in Handy Pellet Form” 541 – “The Unclosed Door” 541 Cusack, Dymphna 523 D’Aguiar, Fred 300 – The Longest Memory 300 – Feeding the Ghosts 300 Dabydeen, David 143, 220, 402–404, 408 – A Harlot’s Progress 143, 220, 408 – “Turner” 143, 220, 308, 402, 408 Damrosch, David 3–4, 19, 21, 31–32, 35–37, 77, 104, 133–136, 149–150, 165, 178, 253–255, 278, 313, 315–316, 319, 330, 348, 376, 397, 437, 495, 512–513 – What Is World Literature? 31, 35–36, 278 Dante 119, 142, 181, 247, 250 Danticat, Edwidge 171–172, 183, 334 – Claire of the Sea Light 171–172 – Krik? Krak! 183 Dastur, Françoise 93 Datta, Michael Madhusudan 45–47, 50–51 Davis, Rocío 183 Deckard, Sharae 138 Defoe, Daniel 24, 139, 378, 381 – Robinson Crusoe 24, 139–140, 378 – Roxana 139, 381 De Certeau, Michel 363 de Kock, Leon 418–419, 423 de Kretser, Michelle 520 Deleuze, Gilles 97, 316, 326, 410 DeLillo, Don 284–285, 341, 346 – Underworld 284–285 – Cosmopolis 284 – Ratner’s Star 284 – The Names 284, 346 Derozio, Henry Louis Vivian 46 Derrida, Jacques 54, 122, 130, 292 – Monolingualism of the Other 54 – A Taste for the Secret 122 Desai, Kiran 141, 472

Name Index 

– The Inheritance of Loss 141 – Baumgartner’s Bombay 143 Desani, G.V. 267–268, 476 – All About H. Hatterr 267, 476 D’haen, Theo 313–314, 512 – Concise History of World Literature 512 Dharwadker, Vinay 2 Díaz, Hernan 121 – In the Distance 121 Díaz, Junot 179, 182–183, 187–188, 334, 339 – Drown 179, 182–184 – The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao 182–183 – This is How You Lose Her 183 Dimaline, Cherie 358 – The Marrow Thieves 358 Dimock, Wai Chee 6, 107–109, 119–120, 136, 141, 178–179, 339–340, 347, 512–513, 517 – Through Other Continents: American Literature across Deep Time 107 – Shades of the Planet 336 Diop, Cheikh Anta 177 Dipio, Dominica 451–452, 456 Dixit, Kanak M. 472 Dixon, Robert 515–516, 524 Djebar, Assia 111–112 – Fantasia: An Algerian Cavalcade 111 Doerr, Anthony 335 – All the Light We Cannot See 335 Donnell, Alison 396–397 Doody, Margaret 109 – The True Story of the Novel 109 Dostoevsky, Fyodor 187 – Notes from Underground 187 Doyle, Arthur Conan 283 Doyle, Laura 345 Dryden, John 151 During, Simon 515, 519, 538 Dutts, the 46 Dvořak, Marta 357 Dyer, Geoff 170 – Jeff in Venice, Death in Varanasi 170 Eagleton, Terry 153, 155 Earle, Sylvia 386

 553

East, Edward Hyde 42 Eckermann, Johann Peter 16, 20–21, 36, 49, 86 – Gespräche mit Goethe in den letzten Jahren seines Lebens Ede, Amatoritsero 435–436 Edmond, Murray 541 Edoro, Ainehi 235 Edugyan, Esi 359, 361–362, 369–370 – Half-Blood Blues 359 – The Second Life of Samuel Tyne 359, 362 Egan, Jennifer 335 – A Visit from the Goon Squad 335 Einboden, Jeffrey 343 Eliot, George 283, 434, 542 Eliot, T.S. 108, 338, 423, 434, 533, 535, 537, 542 – The Waste Land 423 Ellison, Ralph 179, 182–183, 185–187 – Invisible Man 179, 185–188 – Juneteenth 186 Emmett, Robert S. 121 Engels, Friedrich 20, 23, 420, 252 – Communist Manifesto 16, 20, 25, 252–253 English, James F. 545 – The Economy of Prestige: Prizes, Awards, and the Circulation of Cultural Value 545 Equiano, Olaudah 407 – The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano, Or Gustavus Vassa 407 Erll, Astrid 133–135, 137 Esty, Jed 536 Evans, Patrick 536 Evans, Paul 125 Evaristo, Bernardine 236 – Girl, Woman, Other 236 – Lara 300 Even-Zohar, Itamar 137, 150–151, 153, 156 Fanon, Frantz 74, 76, 475 Farah, Nuruddin 35, 141, 347–348 – Hiding in Plain Sight 141 Farrell, Joseph 176 Faulks, Sebastian 239 Ferrante, Elena 158 Ferraris, Maurizio 122 Ferre, Rosario 158 Finney, Gail 168 Firingi, Antony 49

554 

 Name Index

Fishkin, Shelley F. 335, 338 Flanagan, Richard 523 Fluck, Winfried 337 Flynn, Deirdre 328–329 Fogarty, Lionel 515 Forster, E.M. 268 Foucault, Michel 518 – Discipline and Punish 518 Frame, Janet 538–540 – Owls Do Cry 539–540 – Daughter Buffalo  540 – Living in the Maniototo 540 Fraser, Nancy 342–343 Frenkel, Ronit 426 Freud, Esther 305 – Lucky Break 305 Friedman, Susan Stanford 6, 496 Frydman, Jason 396, 408 Fuentes, Carlos 157 Gaddis, William 346 – Carpenter’s Gothic 346 Ganeshananthan, V.V. 473 – Love Marriage 473 Ganguly, Debjani 4, 67 Garrard, Greg 122 Gates Jr., Henry Louis 182, 249–253, 259, 339 – Signifying Monkey: A Theory of AfricanAmerican Literary Criticism 339 Gee, Maggie 293 – The White Family 293 – My Cleaner 293 Greer, Andrew Sean 335 – Less 335 Genette, Gérard 139, 175 Genova, Lisa 234 – Still Alice 234 Gentzler, Edwin 137, 140, 150 Gershwin, George 204 – Porgy and Bess 204 Ghosh, Amitav 35, 98, 124–125, 143, 269–270, 347–348, 383–384, 387, 472 – The Hungry Tide 98 – The Great Derangement: Climate Change and the Unthinkable 124 – The Shadow Lines 143, 472 – The Ibis Trilogy 269, 472 – In an Antique Land 383

– Sea of Poppies 384–385 Ghosh, Aurobindo 49 Ghosh, Bishnupriya 473 Ghosh, Kasiprasad 46–47 Gifford, Don 323 Gikandi, Simon 436–437, 441, 451–452 Giles, Paul 339 – Virtual Americas: Transnational Fictions and the Transatlantic Imaginary 229 Gillman, Susan 336–337 Gilroy, Paul 293, 301, 369, 382, 411 – After Empire: Melancholia and Convivial Culture – The Black Atlantic 411 Glissant, Edouard 270–272, 396, 410–412 – Caribbean Discourse 270, 272 – Poetics of Relation 200, 411 Goethe, Johann W. v. 15–25, 32, 36–37, 49, 85–91, 95, 134, 167, 176–177, 181, 184, 217, 251, 263, 266, 327, 419–420, 495 – Götz von Berlichingen 23 – Werther 22 – West-östlicher Divan 24 – Conversations with Eckermann 1823–1832 86–87 – Correspondence Between Goethe and Carlyle 20 Goh Kasan 501 – “1991 (Kwan Yin, Goddess of Mercy)” 501 Goldstein, Alyosha 337 Goodman, Nelson 143 Gordimer, Nadine 418, 423–424, 426, 428 – The Lying Days 423 – A World of Strangers 424 – July’s People 424 – The House Gun 424 – No Time Like the Present 424 Goyal, Yogita 343, 348 – The Cambridge Companion to Transnational American Literature 347 Grace, Patricia 385, 544, 546 – “Parade” 385 – Pōtiki 546 Grainger, James 404 – The Sugar Cane 404 Gramsci, Antonio 26, 76 – Further Selections from the Prison Notebooks 76 Grant, Ulysses S. 184

Name Index 

Green, Michael 200 Greenwood, Emily 179 Griffiths, Gareth 154, 265, 496, 515 – The Empire Writes Back 3, 154, 265, 496, 515 Griffiths, Michael 525 Grotius, Hugo 376 Gruesz, Kirsten S. 336–337, 343 Grusin, Richard 212–213 – Remediation: Understanding New Media 212–213 Guattari, Félix 97, 410 Guérard, Albert 36 Guillory, John 248–249 Gumbrecht, Hans-Ulrich 122 Gunaratne, Guy 269 – In Our Mad and Furious City 269 Gunesekara, Romesh 472 – Reef 472 Gunew, Sneja 521 Gunner, Liz 193–195 Guo, Xiaolu 62, 64 – A Concise Chinese-English Dictionary for Lovers 62 Gupta, Iswar 47–48 – Sambad Prabhakar 47–48 Gurnah, Abdulrazak 384, 460–461 – Paradise 384, 461 – Admiring Silence 461 – By the Sea 384, 461 – Desertion 461 Habermas, Jürgen 96, 342 Habib, Rowley 544 Habila, Helon 428 Haggard, H. Rider 419 Halim, Hala 198 Hall, Edith 180 Hall, Stuart 179, 183, 264, 267, 396–397, 410 Halliwell, Stephen 176, 184 – “Cultural Identity and Diaspora” 410 Hamid, Mohsin 143, 237, 472, 476 – The Reluctant Fundamentalist 143 – How to Get Filthy Rich in Rising Asia 237 Hanif, Mohammad 472 Hansen-Löve, Aage 210 Haraway, J. Donna 123 – When Species Meet 123, 129 Hardy, Frank 523 Harkin, Natalie 525

 555

Harpur, Charles 519 Harrison, Tony 155–156 – The School of Eloquence 155 Hau’ofa, Epeli 385, 543, 546 – “Our Sea of Islands” Hayot, Eric 4, 167, 399, 406 – On Literary Worlds 4 Head, Bessie 424 Heaney, Seamus 157–158 Heffernan, James A.W. 220 – Museum of Word: The Poetics of Ekphrasis from Homer to Ashbery 220 Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich 25 Heidegger, Martin 91–95, 97, 327 – Being and Time 92 Heise, Ursula K. 163, 166, 346 Heiss, Anita 523, 525 Helgesson, Stefan 4, 7, 145, 194, 216, 302, 308, 416, 417, 420, 421 – World Literatures: Exploring the Cosmopolitan-Vernacular Exchange 194 Hemon, Aleksandar 286 – The Lazarus Project 286 Heng Siok Tian 502 – “Chopsticks” 502 Herder, Johann Gottfried 16 Higgins, Dick 210 Highway, Tomson 367 – Kiss of the Fur Queen 367 Hilliard, Christopher 537 Hill, Lawrence 359 – The Illegal  359 Hirson, Denis 75 – I Remember King Kong (The Boxer) 75 Hitchcock, Peter 137 Hodapp, James 436, 443, 445 Hodge, Bob 515, 524 Hofmeyr, Isabel 196, 384 Hogan, Linda 388–389 – People of the Whale 388–389 Hölderlin, Friedrich 92–93, 95 Holgate, Ben 545 Hollinghurst, Alan 304 – The Stranger’s Child 304 Ho, Louise 495–496, 497 – “Jamming” 497 Homer 17, 142, 176, 178–185, 187, 220, 321 – Odyssey 178–187, 321, 323

556 

 Name Index

Hooks, S.J. 286 – Absolute Beginners 286 Hope, A. D. 524 Hopkinson, Nalo 406–407 – Midnight Robber 406–407 Horace 219 – Ars poetica 219 Horrocks, Roger 541 Hoskins, Janet 345 Hosseini, Khaled 472 Howard, June 340 Huggan, Graham 169, 236, 399, 516, 521 – The Postcolonial Exotic: Marketing the Margins 236 Hughes, Langston 335–336 Hulme, Keri 385, 544–546 – The Bone People 385, 545–546 – “‘Mauri’: Bi-Cultural Poetry in New Zealand” Huntington, Samuel P. 492, 500 Hussein, Aamer 477 – Another Gulmohar Tree 477 Hussein, Ebrahim 457, 467 Huston, Nancy 158 Hu Wenzhong 523 Hutcheon, Linda 358 – A Theory of Adaptation 213 – A Poetics of Postmodernism 358 Hyde, Douglas 320 – Abhráin Ghrá Chúige Chonnacht: Love Songs of Connacht 320 Ihimaera, Witi 385–386, 389, 543–544 – Pounamu Pounamu 386–389 – The Whale Rider 543–544 – Tangi 544 – Whanau 544 Imbuga, Francis 457 Ingram, Forrest 183 Irele, Abiola 435, 437 Iron, Ralph 418 Irr, Caren 341 – Toward the Geopolitical Novel 341 Isegawa, Moses 455, 457 – Abyssinian Chronicles 457 Ishiguro, Kazuo 237, 496 Itäranta, Emmi 121 – Memory of Water 121 Iweala, Uzodinma 446

– Beasts of No Nation 446 Iyengar, K.R.S. 475 Jackson, Michael 301 Jafar, Mir 42 Jagoda, Patrick 342 James, C.L.R. 299 James, E.L. 286 – Fifty Shades of Grey 286 James, George G.M. 177 James, Henry 24, 327, 339, 346 – The Ambassadors 24, 346 James, Marlon 235 – A Brief History of Seven Killings 235 James, Tania 476–477, 479, 482–483, 485 – The Tusk that Did the Damage 476 – “What to Do with Henry” 477, 479, 482–483 Jayes, Karen 121–122 – For the Mercy of Water 121–122 Jameson, Fredric 31–33, 256 Jeffares, A. Norman 266 Jenkins, Henry 214–215 Jetnil-Kijiner, Kathy 390 – Iep Jaltok: Poems from a Marshallese Daughter 390 – “Dear Matafele Peinam” 390 Jiyane, Magolwane 198 Jockers, Mathew 284 Johnson, Adam 335 – The Orphan Master’s Son 335 Johnson, Denis 341, 346 – Tree of Smoke 346 Johnson, Linton Kwesi 300, 338 Johnson, Samuel 54–60, 63–64 – A Dictionary of the English Language: An Anthology 54 Johnston, Wayne 358 – The Colony of Unrequited Dreams 358 Jones, Gavin 339 Jordison, Sam 239 Joyce, James 33, 35, 135, 142, 315–316, 320–324, 326, 328–330, 533, 538 – Ulysses 135, 321, 323–324, 326, 330–331 – Finnegan’s Wake 324 Joyce, Michael 286 – Afternoon: A Story 286 Juchau, Mireille 121 – The World without Us 121 Julien, Eileen 437–438

Name Index 

Kabaji, Egara 451–452, 456 Kachru, Braj B. 493–494, 497 Kadir, Djelal 19, 21 Kafka, Franz 426 Kalidasa 45 Kamboureli, Smaro 357 Kaplan, Amy 344 Kapoor, Deepti 237 – A Bad Character 237 Kapur-Dromson, Neera 459 – From Jhelum to Tana 459 Karume, Abeid 460 Kaufmann, Helen 180 Kaza, Madhu H. 156 – Kitchen Table Translation 156 Kazanjian, David 344 Kean, Danuta 233 Keats, John 122, 126 Kefala, Antigone 520 Kelley, Robin 199–200 Kelly, Ned 238, 519 Kelman, James 171–172 – Translated Accounts 171 Kemp, Jan 541 Kendall, Henry 519 Kezilahabi, Euphrase 467 Kgositsile, Keorapetse 196, 199, 424 Kiberd, Declan 319–321, 323, 327 Kidman, Nicole 512 Kiguru, Doseline 453, 462 Killens, John Oliver 187 Kimani, Peter 466–467 Kim, Jodi 344 Kincaid, Jamaica 397, 404–405 – A Small Place 397, 404 – My Garden 405 Kingsolver, Barbara 121 – Flight Behaviour 121 Kingston Maxine H. 334, 339, 494, 496 Knausgård, Karl Ove 158 Kopf, David 44 Kunene, Mazisi 196–199 – Emperor Shaka the Great 197 – Anthem of the Decades 197 Kunzru, Hari 139, 341 – The Impressionist 140 Kuo Pao Kun 503 – “The Coffin Is Too Big for the Hole” 503 – “Mama Looking for Her Cat” 503

 557

Kureishi, Hanif 298, 300–302, 305 – The Buddha of Suburbia 300–301, 305 Kurosawa, Akira 218 Kutzinski, Vera M. 336 Kyomuhendo, Goretti 455, 457 – Waiting 457 Lacan, Jacques 327 Lachmann, Renate 138–139, 142 – Memory and Literature: Intertextuality on Russian Modernism 138 La Guma, Alex 198, 424 Lahiri, Jhumpa 334, 341, 476 – The Namesake 476 Olivia Laing 297 – The Trip to Echo Spring 297 Lakoff, George 498 Lamming, George 299, 397–398 – The Emigrants 397–398 – The Pleasures of Exile 398 Lanchester, John 293–294, 304 – Capital 293, 294, 304 Latour, Bruno 107, 125 Lawall, Sarah 35 Lawrence, D.H. 538 Lawson, Henry 514 Lazarus, Neil 265 Leavis, F.R. 153, 157, 247, 458, 537–538 – The Great Tradition 153 Lee, Sabrina 281, 283–284 – “The Transformation of Gender in EnglishLanguage Fiction” 140, 152 Lee, Steven S. 336 Lee Tzu Pheng 504 – “My Country and My People” 504 Lefevere, André 140, 152 – Translation, Rewriting and the Manipulation of Literary Fame 140, 152 Lema, Elieshi 454, 457 – Parched Earth 454, 457 Le, Nam 520 Leow, Jason 495, 497–498 – “Not Too Obiang” 497 Lessing, Doris 220, 279–280, 418, 422–423, 428, 494 – The Grass Is Singing 422–423 Lessing, Gotthold Ephraim 219–220 – Laocoön: An Essay on the Limits of Painting and Poetry 219

558 

 Name Index

Levine, Caroline 6, 342 – Forms: Whole, Rhythm, Hierarchy, Network 296, 342 Levy, Andrea 300, 303, 408 – The Long Song 300, 408 – Every Light in the House Burnin’ 300 – Never Far from Nowhere 303 Levy, Daniel 144 Ligaga, Dina 465 Lindenberger, Herbert 18–20, 27 Li, Yao 523 Lo Liyong, Taban 453, 457, 462 Lomas, Laura 344 Lowe, Hannah 294 – Chick 294 Lucashenko, Melissa 517, 525 Lugones, Maria 195 Lumumba, Patrice 434 Lunde, Maja 121 – The History of Bees 121 – Blue 121 Macaulay, Thomas B. 41–44, 46 – “Minute on Indian Education” 41, 43 Machado Sáez, Elena 399 Mackenzie, Craig 426 Macpherson, James 22 Maillu, David 457, 465 Majumdar, Saikat 534 Makereti, Tina 546 – Where the Rēhoku Bone Sings 546 Makokha, Justus K. S. 451–452, 456 Makumbi, Jennifer N. 466–467 – Kintu 467 Malkani, Gautam 269 – Londonstani 269 Malouf, David 180 – Ransom 180 Mangua, Charles 457 Manhire, Bill 541–543 – The Elaboration 541 – “Milky Way Bar” 542 – “Water, A Stopping Place” 542 – “Phar Lap” 542 – “Zoetropes” 542 Mani, B. Venkat 232 Mansfield, Katherine 531–534, 537, 539, 546 – “In the Botanical Gardens” 532–533

– “The Garden Party” 532 Manzoni, Alessandro 22 Maracle, Lee 359 – Ravensong 359 – Celia’s Song 359 Márquez, Gabriel García 157, 443, 545 – One Hundred Years of Solitude 443 Marshall, Alan 523 Martinez, Odaline de la 204 Marx, Karl 15–17, 19–20, 23–25, 27, 77, 88–89, 90–92, 249, 252, 420 – Communist Manifesto 16, 20, 25, 252–253 – Capital: A Critique of Political Economy 89 Mashile, Lebogang 204 – Venus vs Modernity 204 Masilela, Ntongela 197–198 Mbeki, Thabo 205 Mbembe, Achille 443, 445 Mboya, Tom Michael 458 McArthur, Tom 499 McClure, David 281 McConnell, Justine 182, 184, 186 McCormick, E.H. 537–538 – Letters and Art in New Zealand 537 McCormick, Peter Dodds 514 McCullough, Colleen 523 McDonald, Peter D. 319 McDougall, Russell 516, 520 McGill, Meredith 343 McGurl, Mark 348 McMahon, Elizabeth 519 McMinn, Joseph 328 Medovoi, Leerom 345 Meer, Sarah 343 Melas, Natalie 162 – All the Difference in the World: Postcoloniality and the Ends of Comparison 162–163 Melville, Herman C. 334, 340–341, 378–379, 381–382, 434 – Clarel: A Poem and Pilgrimage in the Holy Land 340 – Moby-Dick 341, 375, 378–379 – “Benito Cereno” 379 Mendes, Ana Christina 237 Mengestu, Dinaw 341, 456 – Children of the Revolution 456 Mengiste, Maaza 456 – Beneath the Lion’s Gaze 456

Name Index 

Mentz, Steve 377 Meyer, Deon 426 Mgqwetho, Nontsizi 196–197 Miller, Alex 523 Miller, J. Hillis 317 – “Globalization and World Literature” 317 Miller, Joshua L. 339 Miller, Kei 401, 402 – The Cartographer Tries to Map a Way to Zion 401 – “Establishing the Metre” 402 Milosz, Czeslaw 157 Mishra, Vijay 515, 524 Mistry, Rohinton 359, 476 – A Fine Balance 359, 476 Mitchell, David 103–104, 108, 110, 112–114 – Cloud Atlas 103–104, 107, 112–113 Mitchell, W.J.T. 212 – Picture Theory 212 Modi, Narendra 473 Moodie, Susanna 356 – Roughing It in the Bush 356 Moraru, Christian 341 Moretti, Franco 3–4, 31–32, 34–35, 37, 68–69, 78, 87, 104, 135, 138, 165, 257, 279, 313–314, 375–376, 411, 516, 524 – Modern Epic: The World System from Goethe to García Márquez 34 – Atlas of the European Novel, 1800–1900  34, 279 – “Conjectures on World Literature” 31, 34 – Graphs, Maps, Trees: Abstract Models for Literary History 34 – Distant Reading 34 Morgan, Sally 519 – My Place 519 Moriarty, Liane 512 – Big Little Lies 512 Morris, Christopher D. 229 Morrison, Toni 157, 204 – Song of Solomon 204 Moses, Daniel David 359, 366–367, 369–370 – Brébeuf’s Ghost 359, 366–367 Mphahlele, Es’kia (Ezekiel) 60, 418, 424–425, 429 – Down Second Avenue 424

 559

– The Image of Africa 424 Mqhayi, S.E.K. 196 Mtobwa, Ben 454, 457 – Dar es Salaam Usiku 454–457 Mueenuddin, Daniyal 472 Mueke, Stephen 518 Mufti, Aamir R. 2, 4–5, 18, 56, 58, 60, 64, 137, 169, 259, 396, 474 – Forget English! Orientalisms and World Literatures 4, 137, 259 Mugabe, Robert 428 Mukasonga, Scholastique 454 –  Our Lady of the Nile 454 Mukherjee, Ankhi 140, 257 Mukherjee, Meenakshi 50 Mukherjee, Neel 477 – A State of Freedom 477 Mukoma wa Ngugi 462 Mukundaram 47 Munaweera, Nayomi 473 – Island of a Thousand Mirrors 473 Munro, Alice 359–361, 369 – “What Do You Want to Know For?” 359 – The View from Castle Rock 359 Murphy, Gretchen 344 Murry, Middleton 535 Mussgnug, Florian 6 Mustafa, Sophia 461 Mutabaruka 205 Mutahi, Wahome 465 Mwangi, Evan 451–452, 455 Mwangi, Meja 457 – Going Down River Road 457 Naipaul, V.S. 22, 24, 33, 35, 266–268, 299, 409, 472, 494 – A House for Mr. Biswas 268 – An Enigma of Arrival 268 – The Mystic Masseur 409 Nakasa, Nat 424 Nancy, Jean-Luc 231 Naudé, S.J. 415–417, 424 – Alfabet van die voëls 415 – The Alphabet of Birds 415, 424 Nazareth, Peter 459–460 Ndayizeye, Augustin 454 Ndebele, Njabulo 180, 467 – The Cry of Winnie Mandela 180

560 

 Name Index

Neate, Patrick 293 – City of Tiny Lights 293 – Jerusalem 293 Needa, Veronica 505 – Face 505 Nelson, Ted 286 Neogy, Rajat 456 Neumann, Birgit 4–6, 120, 133, 141–144, 164, 215–217, 220–221, 231, 238, 292, 357, 395, 408, 428, 471, 473, 475–476 New, William H. 356 Newton, John 533, 535, 538, 541 Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o 27, 58, 60–61, 64, 153–156, 158, 265, 376, 457–460, 462, 467, 474–475 – Decolonising the Mind: The Politics of Language in African Literature 61, 154 – Devil on the Cross 61, 265 – Weep Not, Child 459 – Globalectics 375 – “Asia in My Life” 460 Nguyen, Viet T. 335, 341, 345 – The Sympathizer 335 Niblett, Michael 404 Nichols, Grace 383, 404 – I Is a Long Memoried Woman 383 – “Sugar Cane” 404 Ní Dhomhnaill, Nuala 154 Nischik, Reingard M. 356 Nixon, Rob 122, 387, 446, 481 – Slow Violence and the Environmentalism of the Poor 122, 387 Nkosi, Lewis 424 Normandin, Shawn 318 Nortje, Arthur 424 Ntabajyana, Sylvestre 454 Nwankwo, Ifeoma K. 344 Nye, David E. 121 Nyerere, Julius 457 Nyeko, Monica Arac de 462 “Jambula Tree” 462 O’Brien, Eugene 328–329 Odhiambo, Tom 458, 465 Oduor, Okwiri 462 – “My Father’s Head” 462 O’Gorman, Edmundo 396 Ogude, James 451, 458, 465

O’Hare, Denis 184 Okai, Atukwei 439 Okigbo, Christopher 433–434, 439–440 – Labyrinths 434 – “The Passage” 439 Okorafor, Nnedi 121 – Who Fears Death 121 Okri, Ben 157, 237, 442–443 – The Famished Road 442 Okurut, Mary 466 Olson, Charles 542 Ommundsen, Wenche 523 Omotoso, Yewande 445 – Bomboy 445 Ondaatje, Michael 237, 359 – Anil’s Ghost 359 Onjerika, Makena 462 – “Fanta Blackcurrant” 462 Oodgeroo 515 Opland, Jeff 197 Ortiz, Fernando 292 Osborne, Roger 514, 521 Osofisan, Femi 439 O’Sullivan, Michael 319 Oswald, Alice 297 – Dart 297 Ové, Horace 299 Ovid 183 – Metamorphoses 183 Owuor Anyumba, Henry 457 Owuor, Yvonne 143, 457, 462, 464 – Dust 143, 457, 464 – The Dragonfly Sea 464 – “Weight of Whispers” 462 Oyeyemi, Helen 442 Palmer, Nettie 514 Palmer, Vance 514 Parameswaran, Rajesh 477 – “The Infamous Bengal Ming” 477 Paredes, Américo 336 – George Washington Gomez 334 Parks, Suzan-Lori 179, 182–188 – Father Comes Home from the Wars, Parts 1, 2, and 3 179, 184–185 – Topdog/Underdog 185 Paterson, Banjo 514

Name Index 

Paton, Alan 422 – Cry, the Beloved Country 422 p’Bitek, Okot 457, 462, 467 Pease, Donald 337 Petersen, Lisa 184 Philip II of Macedon 177 Philip, NourbeSe 403 – Zong! 403 Phillips, A.A. 514 Phillips, Adam 61 Phillips, Caryl 293, 295, 300, 305, 383, 407–408 – In the Falling Snow 293 – The Lost Child 293 – Cambridge 407 – Dancing in the Dark 305 – Crossing the River 383 – “Atlantic Sound” 383 Phillips, Mike 303 – A Shadow of Myself 303 Pilkington Garimara, Alice 519 – Follow the Rabbit Proof Fence 519 Pinsky, Robert 157 Pinto, Samantha 205 Piper, Andrew 282, 284 – Enumerations 282 Pissarro, Camille 405–406 Pizer, John 19 Plaatje, Solomon T. 196, 200–201, 418, 420–421, 429 – Mhudi 200–201, 420 – Sechuana Proverbs 201, 421 – A Sechuana Reader 201 – Native Life in South Africa 201 – Sechuana Proverbs 201, 421 Platnumz, Diamond 455 Plato 175, 177 Plumwood, Val 119, 125 Poe, Edgar Allan 23, 343 Pope, Alexander 151 Porter, James 16, 20 Posnett, Hutcheson M. 314 Pound, Ezra 153, 338, 533, 542 Powell, Kersti T. 328 Power, Arthur 321 Powers, Richard 335 – The Overstory 335 Prado, Ignacio M. Sanchez 231 Praed, Rosa 514 Pratt, Mary L. 54, 418, 463

 561

– Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and Transculturation 418 Prawer, Siegbert 25 Prichard, Katharine Susannah 523 Pringle, Thomas 417 Puchner, Martin 36, 231 Pullman, Philip 233–234 Pynchon, Thomas 251, 339, 341, 345 – Gravity’s Rainbow 345 Quincey, Thomas de 23, 25 Rahman, Zia Haider 472 Rajewsky, Irina O. 211, 213 Ramanujan, A.K. 50 Ramazani, Jahan 6, 338–339, 347 Rankine, Patrice 186 Rao, Raja 266–268 – Kanthapura 266–267 Rapson, Jessica 133–134 Reichhardt, Tony 127 Rhys, Jean 35, 139, 299, 408, 533 – Wide Sargasso Sea 35, 139, 408 Riach, Alan 541 Richardson, D.L. 46 Richardson, Samuel 22 Ricketts, Harry 542 Rigney, Ann 133, 135, 140 Rilke, Rainer Maria 91, 93–94, 327 Rippl, Gabriele 4, 6, 120, 143, 164, 210–211, 215–221, 357, 395, 408, 471, 473, 475–476 Robert, Shaaban 466–467 Roberts, Aldwyn 298 – “London Is the Place for Me” 298 Roberts, Ginger 306 Robertson, Robin 297 – The Long Take 297 Roe, Paddy 518 Rogers, Gayle 336 Rooney, Brigid 515–516, 524 Rorty, Richard 298, 307 – Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity 292, 298, 307 Rose, Deborah Bird 121, 123, 128 Ross, Bruce 365, 368 Rothberg, Michael 136–137 – Multidirectional Memory: Remembering the Holocaust in the Age of Decolonization 136

562 

 Name Index

Rotimi, Ola 439 Rowling, J.K. 239 – Harry Potter 239 Roy, Arundhati 157, 236–237, 472, 476 – The God of Small Things 236, 472, 476 Roy, Nilanjana 476 – The Wildings 476 Rushdie, Salman 24, 33, 35, 141, 157, 180, 220–221, 237, 236, 257, 266–269, 272, 443, 472, 475–476, 494, 496 – Midnight’s Children 141, 220, 236, 472, 476 – Shalimar the Clown 180 – The Moor’s Last Sigh 220 – The Enchantress of Florence 220 – The Satanic Verses 268, 272 – Imaginary Homelands 266 – “Commonwealth Literature Does Not Exist” 266 Ryan, Marie-Laure 214–215 Sadana, Rashmi 477 Said, Edward W. 3, 15–20, 22–23, 25–27, 43, 62, 109–110, 253, 378–379, 435, 437 – Beginnings 18 – Culture and Imperialism 18, 20, 26–27 – The Text, the World, and the Critic 20 – Orientalism 3, 20, 22, 24, 26, 43, 109–110, 453 Saldívar, José D.  344 Saldívar, Ramón 336 – The Borderlands of Culture 336 Samarasan, Preeta 473 – Evening is the Whole Day 473 Sanghi, Ashwin 234 – The Rozabal Line 234 Sargeson, Frank 533, 537–540 – “The Hole that Jack Dug” 538 Saro-Wiwa, Ken 271, 445–446 – Sozaboy 271 Sastri, Haraprasad 47 Saussy, Haun 166, 265 – State of the Discipline Report 163 Schätzing, Frank 121 – The Swarm 121 Schiller, Friedrich 176–177, 181, 184 Schlözer, August Wilhelm 21 Schmitt, Carl 376

Schreiner, Olive 415, 418–420, 423, 428–429 – The Story of an African Farm 418–419, 429 – Thoughts on South Africa 420 – From Man to Man 420 Scott, Harry 538 Scott, Kim 523, 525 Scott, Sir Walter 22–23, 398, 408 – Ivanhoe 398 Sebald, W.G. 286 – Austerlitz 286 Séjour, Victor 334 – “The Mulatto” 334 Selasi, Taiye 143, 435, 443–445 – Ghana Must Go 143 – “Bye Bye Babar” 443 Selepe, Magoleng wa 204 Selvon, Sam 268, 299, 396, 409 – The Lonely Londoners 409 – An Island Is a World 396 Sen, Dineshchandra 48–50 – History of Bengali Language and Literature 48 Senior, Olive 405 – “Brief Lives” 405 Sen, Samar 42 Seth, Vikram 476 – A Suitable Boy 476 Shacochis, Bob 341, 346 – The Woman Who Lost Her Soul 346 Shakespeare, William 22, 27, 135–136, 139, 142, 150, 217–218, 377, 387, 398, 421, 439 – The Tragedy of Hamlet, Prince of Denmark 217, 218 – The Tempest 139, 218, 377, 381, 383, 387, 491, 507 – Macbeth 218 Shamsie, Kamila 472 Shapiro, Stephen 345 Sharp, Iain 542 Sheller, Mimi 397 Shukri, Isthiaq 426 – The Silent Minaret 426 Siddiqi, Jameela 459 – The Feast of Nine Virgins 459 Sidney, Sir Philip 1 – An Apology for Poetry 1 Siemerling, Winfried 364, 369 – The Black Atlantic Reconsidered 369

Name Index 

Silko, Leslie Marmon 334, 341 – Almanac of the Dead 341 Singha, Kaliprasanna 47 Sinha, Indra 476, 479, 480–483, 485 – Animal’s People 476, 479, 480–481 Sirajuddaula, Nawab 42 Siskind, Mariano 178–179 Skrzynecki, Peter 520 – Immigrant Chronicle 520 Slaughter, Joseph 4 Smith, Zadie 141, 143, 158, 268, 291–292, 295–298, 300–308 – White Teeth 143, 269, 297, 298 – The Embassy of Cambodia 298 – Swing Time 141, 291, 296, 298, 300–308 Soyinka, Wole 60, 439, 442, 444, 446 – The Swamp Dwellers 446 Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty 2–3, 21, 36, 38, 78, 140, 166–167, 169, 265, 339, 359, 370–371, 376, 389, 512, 516 – Death of a Discipline 36, 166, 512 – “Can the Subaltern Speak?” 3, 256 Squires, Claire 232, 236 Srilata, K. 475 – “Because I Never Learned the Names of Trees in Tamil” 475 St Aubyn, Edward 237 – Lost for Words 237 St. Omer, Dunstan 181 Stead, C. K. 542, 546 Steiner, Ann 231–232 Stephenson, Neal 342 – Cryptonymicon 342 Sterne, Laurence 22 Stevens, George 306 – Swing Time 306 Stevens, Wallace 327, 329, 542 Stoler, Ann Laura 513, 518–519 – Duress: Imperial Durabilities in Our Times 518 Stone, Robert 341, 346 – A Flag for Sunrise 346 Strehlow, T.G. 518 Strich, Fritz 17, 21–22, 86–87 – Goethe and World Literature 22 Stuart, Toni 204 Sugars, Cynthia 370 Suhr-Sytsma, Nathan 440

 563

Sullivan, Robert 385 – Star Waka 385 Sutherland, Efua 439 Syal, Meera 300 – Anita and Me 300 Synge, J.M. 446 – Riders to the Sea 446 Szczeszak-Brewer, Agata 324 Sznaider, Natan 144 Tagore, Rabindranath 21, 48, 252, 264 – The Home and the World 264 Tam, Kwok-kan 494 Taneja, Preti 140 – We That Are Young 140 Tart, Donna 335 – The Goldfinch 335 Taseer, Aatish 476 – The Way Things Were 476 Tawada, Yoko 158 Tejani, Bahadur 459–460 Tenen, Dennis 283–284 Tennenhouse, Leonard 342 – Novels in the Time of Democratic Writing 342 Teo, Hsu Ming 520 Tharoor, Kanishk 476, 479, 484–485 – Swimmer among the Stars 476–477 – “Swimmer Among the Stars” 479 Theal, George 197 Themba, Can 424 Thompson, J.B. 239 – Merchants of Culture: The Publishing Business in the Twenty-first Century 239 Thomsen, Mads Rosendahl 257 Thomson, James 292, 378 Thoreau, Henry David 318–319, 339 – Walden 318–319, 339 Thumboo, Edwin 491, 497 Tiffin, Helen 154, 179, 265, 496, 515 – The Empire Writes Back 154, 265, 515 Todd, Richard 237 Tolstoy, Lew 358 – Anna Karenina 358 Toyi, Marie-Therese 455 Tripathi, Amish 234 – The Immortals of Meluha 234 Trivedi, Harish 136 Tsiolkas, Christos 520

564 

 Name Index

Tuhiwai-Smith, Linda 525 Turner, J.W.M. 402–403, 408 – Slavers Throwing Overboard the Dead and Dying 402–403 Tutuola, Amos 61, 64, 438 – The Palm-Wine Drinkard 438 Tūwhare, Hone 544 – No Ordinary Sun 544 – “O Africa” 544 – “Sea Call” 544 Twain, Mark 229–230 Underwood, Ted 281, 283–284 – “The Transformation of Gender in EnglishLanguage Fiction” 281 Unnikrishnan, Deepak 473, 477 – Temporary People 473, 477 Vajpeyi, Ashok 475 Van Dooren, Thom 121, 128–129 Van Herk, Aritha 358 – Places Far From Ellesmere: A Geografictione 358 Van Toorn, Penny 518 – Writing Never Arrives Naked 518 Vargas Llosa, Mario 157 Vassanji, Moyez 459–461 – The Gunny Sack 459 – The Book of Secrets 459 Vazquez, Rolando 193 Venuti, Lawrence 150, 156, 254 Vermeulen, Pieter 4 Verne, Jules 150, 152 Vernon, Karina 362 Vico, Giambattista 26 Vidal, Gore 184 Vidyapati 47 Vink, Markus 376 Virgil 45, 142, 181, 184, 187 – Aeneid 184, 185, 187 Viswanathan, Gauri 43–44, 58, 64 – Masks of Conquest: Literary Study and British Rule in India 43–44, 58, 64 Vittachi, Nury 500 Vladislavić, Ivan 58, 64, 75, 171, 415–418, 427–429 – The Restless Supermarket 58 – Portrait with Keys: The City of Johannesburg Unlocked 75

– 101 Detectives 171 – “Propaganda by Monuments” 418, 427 Wagner, Erica 239 Wah, Fred 359, 364–366, 369–370 Waiting for Saskatchewan 359, 364–365, Wainaina, Binyavanga 462, 464 – One Day I Will Write about this Place 464 – “Discovering Home” 462 Walcott, Derek 141–143, 161–162, 169, 179–184, 187–188, 220, 233, 382, 387–388, 399–400, 403, 405–406, 408, 412 – Omeros 141–142, 161, 179, 180–183, 382, 388 – Tiepolo’s Hound 141, 143, 220, 405–406 – The Odyssey: A Stage Version 184 – “The Sea is History” 382, 403, 405 Walibora, Ken 452, 463 – Siku Njema 463 Wali, Obi 60 Walkowitz, Rebecca L. 170, 256, 322 – Born Translated: The Contemporary Novel in an Age of World Literature 170, 256, 294 – Cosmopolitan Style: Modernism Beyond the Nation 322 Wallerstein, Immanuel 34, 69, 254 Walwicz, Ania 520 Wamitila, Kyallo 466 Wanjala, Chris 457–458 – A Season of Harvest 457 – For Home and Freedom 457 Wanner, Zukiswa 445 Warner, Charles Dudley 229–230 Warner, Marina 139 – Indigo 139 Waten, Judah 520, 523 – Alien Son 520 Webby, Elizabeth 238 Webster, Noah 54, 56, 59, 64 – American Dictionary of the English Language 54 Wedde, Ian 541 Wellek, René 165–166, 175–176, 188 Wendt, Albert 543 – Sons for the Return Home 543 Wentworth, William C. 519 West, Martin 177 Whitehead, Colson 335 – The Underground Railroad 335

Name Index 

Whiteman, Maria 129 White, Patrick 512, 515, 523–524 – The Tree of Man 523 Wieland, Martin 21 Wilkens, Matthew 282, 284 – “Textual Geographies” 282 Wilkinson, Jane 197 Willan, Brian 200–201 Williams, Charlotte 294–295 – Sugar and Slate 294–295 Williams, Mark 542 Williams, Raymond 73, 78 Williams, William Carlos 503, 542 Williamson, David 524 – The Removalists 524 Wilson, Rob 337 Winton, Tim 238 – Dirt Music 238 Witherspoon, Reese 512 Wolf, Werner 211, 214–215 – The Musicalization of Fiction: A Study in the Theory and History of Intermediality 211 Wolfe, Cary 129 Wolfe, Patrick 513, 525 Woolf, Virginia 17, 142, 233, 380–381 – The Voyage Out 380 – To the Lighthouse 380 – The Waves 381 Wright, Alexis 121, 390, 517, 519, 523, 525 – Carpenteria 121 – The Swan Book 121, 525 Wright, Judith 524

 565

Wright, Kate 129 Wright, Michelle 196, 205 Wright, Nicholas 542 Xavier, Subha 231 Xi, Xu 495–497, 500 – The Unwalled City 497, 500 Yanique, Tiphanie 396 Yao, Li 523 Yeats, William B. 33, 315–321, 328, 330, 440, 542 – “The Cold Heaven” 317 – “The Lake Isle of Innisfree” 317, 319 Yildiz, Yasemin 55, 58, 64 – Beyond the Mother Tongue: The Postmonolingual Condition 55 Yoon, Duncan 199 Young, Robert J.C. 37–38, 90–91, 110, 116, 506 – “World Literature and Postcolonialism” 38, 91 – Postcolonialism: An Historical Introduction 110 – Colonial Desire: Hybridity in Theory, Culture and Race 506 Yu, Ovidia 503 Zable, Arnold 520 Zacharias, Robert 370–371 Zavala, Oswaldo 239 Zenawi, Meles 456 Zulu, Shaka 197–198

Subject Index #SayHerName 204 Abiku 442 Aboriginal and Islander 513, 517 Aboriginal English 517 Aboriginal Law 390 Aboriginal scholars 515 Aboriginal texts 519 Aboriginal writers 523 abstraction 72, 111, 249, 250, 411 actualisation 85, 87, 88, 90, 136  – of humanity 86, 89, 91 adaptation 15, 122, 135, 209, 210, 213, 214, 216–219, 222, 491 aesthetics 24, 63, 143, 198, 220, 221, 247, 249, 251, 253, 268, 297, 336, 365, 399 affectivity 317–319, 321, 329 Africa 27, 76, 79, 97, 195, 221, 299, 307, 375, 382, 410, 418, 428, 435, 437, 440, 445 African 297, 305, 377, 382–384 African literature 8, 60, 154, 424, 434, 436, 437, 441, 462 African novel 61, 200, 230, 437 African slaves 378, 384, 403 African writers 60, 428, 435, 441, 464, 521 Afrikaans 415, 416 Afropolitan 221, 428, 443–445 Afropolitanism 221, 418, 435, 443–445, 447 agency 43, 44, 63, 123, 125, 141, 200, 204, 218, 385, 404, 436, 457, 476, 479, 481–483, 485, 525 alterity 3, 96, 98, 267, 484 alternative modernities 199, 478 Amazon (corporation) 233, 234, 239, 257, 275, 276 America 382, 388, 428 American capitalism 2 American hemisphere 333 Americanisation 36 American literature 333–349, 515, 522, 541 analogical lateralisation 268 ANC 417, 420 Anglocentric 159 Anglophone 230, 474 Anglophonism 471, 474, 475,481 Angola 416, 426 animist realism 442 Anthropocene 121, 123, 387 https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110583182-034

Anthropocene literature 121 anthropocentric 94, 123 anthropocentrism 125 anthropological exotic 441 anticolonialism 268, 426, 491 anticolonial poetry 417 antiphonic 203, 205, 206 apartheid 76, 204, 259, 268, 416, 417, 418, 422, 424, 425, 426 Arabic 198, 279, 334, 421, 521 Area Studies 167 Arnoldian 245, 328 Arusha Declaration 461 Aryan Model 177 Association for the Study of Australian Literature (ASAL) 515 Atlantic (see also: black Atlantic) 382, 383, 403 Atlantic slave trade 379, 396 Atlantic world 339, 383 Atlantic world-system 335, 384 attention economy 235, 237 attentive interaction 129 AustLit (database) 516, 521 Australia 121, 238, 265, 266, 280, 294, 356, 386, 390, 496, 512–525 Australian literature 8, 230, 231, 512–525 Australian Literature Society 515 Australian stage 525 Australian Studies in China 523 Australian theatre 515 authority 1, 21, 140, 141, 185, 245, 248, 320, 337, 368, 408, 427, 429, 435, 539 autonomy 105, 106, 254, 325, 339, 429, 440 banalisation 85, 87, 88, 90 Banvillean 327 barbarian 104, 110, 113, 114 barbarism 103, 107, 108, 113–115 Beckettian 326, 328 Bengal 42, 44, 45, 47, 48, 269 Bengali 42, 45–49, 98, 264 Bengali canon 47 bibliomigrancy 232, 233 Big Little Lies 512 Birus translation  15 black Atlantic 3, 362, 369, 382, 383

568 

 Subject Index

blackness 199, 423, 428, 461 Black Orpheus 424 black radical traditions 195, 203 Bloomian 252, 406 blue planet 389, 390 book covers 236 Booker Prize 235–237, 297, 385, 442, 461, 472, 519 book history 519 book market 7, 150, 230, 231, 233, 236, 237, 239, 314, 416 border crossing 18, 139, 141, 210, 212, 218, 342, 440, 536, Botswana 416 Bourdieusian  4, 32 Britain 22, 34, 78, 79, 143, 151, 152, 155, 188, 194, 202, 236, 265, 291–309, 314, 320, 326, 356, 377, 419, 477, 479, 490, 492, 493, 494, 495, 496, 506, 512, 513, 514, 536, 540 Britannia 292, 378, 380 British Empire 43, 421, 490, 491, 493, 521 British imperialism 3, 55, 259, 269 British India 41, 42, 43 British Isles 2, 301, 537 British literature 22, 259, 291–309, 494, Britishness 291–297, 300 Buddhist 490, 502 Bulletin 514 Burundi 454, 455 bush 514, 531, 532, 546 Caine Prize 445, 462 Calcutta 42, 43, 45–49 Calcutta Review 47 Caliban 267, 377, 383, 491, 507 Cambridge 2 canon 3, 6, 8, 37, 45–47, 49, 50, 51, 59, 89, 110, 121, 135, 140, 141, 153, 163, 165, 178, 179, 182, 217, 218, 219, 245–260, 265, 267, 281, 294, 298, 302, 327, 330, 347, 355, 437, 457, 459, 462, 516, 518, 522, 523, 534, 542 canonical 4, 8, 138–141, 201, 217, 218, 248, 257, 283, 335, 377, 398, 458, 464, 476, 505, 514, 524 canonical centripetality 266 canonical counter-discourse  179 canonicity 162, 245–260, 453 canonisation 5, 7, 219, 237

capitalist 23, 69, 76, 87, 89–91, 95–98, 141, 215, 237, 238, 248, 344, 376, 386, 417, 429 carceral practices 519 Caribbean 3, 8, 27, 162, 180, 182, 183, 205, 299, 333, 347, 377, 378, 382, 387, 395, 396–412, 493, 494, 513 Caribbean garden 405 Caribbean literature 8, 395–412 Caribbean locality 398 cartographic 92, 400–403, 456 cartography 76, 204, 400–403, 513 Casanovian 324 centre 2, 27, 33, 37, 38, 79, 105, 109, 139, 194, 195, 199–202, 215, 230, 250, 254, 264–267, 295, 324, 330, 398, 405, 406, 419, 429, 441, 473, 494, 512 centre-periphery 6, 24, 37, 103–116, 120, 134, 180, 195, 405, 406, 411, 421 China 98, 106, 112, 253, 365, 366, 384, 489, 490, 493, 503–505, 517, 523 Chinese Australian literature 523 Chinese Australians 523 Chinese translation 523 Christianity 507 circulated 16, 134, 142, 229, 282, 308, 317, 359, 421, 436, 523, 525 circulation 2, 7, 20, 23, 24, 87–90, 97, 133–136, 141–143, 164, 165, 167, 170, 194–196, 214, 217, 218, 221, 252, 255, 256, 276, 278–280, 283, 292, 297, 308, 333, 337, 338, 343, 344, 370, 381–383, 395, 397–400, 422, 428, 429, 436, 437, 453, 462, 465, 494, 495, 518, 538 circulation model 397, 399, 436, 437 circulatory 89, 134, 217 class 1, 41–44, 59, 75, 151, 152, 155, 156, 218, 258, 293, 301, 304, 307, 407, 423, 429, 514, 532 classism 293 climate 123, 124, 127, 128, 130, 387, 390 climate change 106, 120, 127–130, 387, 479 climate fiction 120–123 close reading 34, 37, 122, 128, 265, 280, 281, 315, 535 code-mixing 464, 490, 498, 499 code-switching 490, 499 Cold War 253, 284, 418, 427, 522

Subject Index 

collage 186–188, 540 collage-like  180, 186 colonial apparatus 178 colonial discourse 177, 397, 403, 404, 407, 423, 441 Colonial Discourse Analysis 43 colonialism 1, 2, 4, 6, 8, 16, 44, 45, 50, 103, 106, 112, 115, 141, 182, 183, 187, 188, 203, 205, 218, 266, 293, 315, 337, 343–345, 349, 371, 385, 389, 399, 400, 403–405, 407, 409, 422, 436, 464, 477, 479, 489, 491, 493, 496, 532, 533, 538 colonial writings 417 colonisation 113, 193–195, 203, 268, 340, 378, 410, 480, 490, 491, 496, 544 colonised 3, 15, 44, 110, 116, 195, 196, 200, 206, 317, 396, 398, 474, 478, 499, 504 commerce 22–24, 254, 345, 375, 383, 384, 420, 499 Commonwealth 79, 236, 259, 265–267, 295, 296, 299, 479 Commonwealth literature 263, 263, 266, 272, 522, 524 Commonwealth Short Story Prize 445 Communist Manifesto 16, 20, 25, 252, 253 Communist Party of Australia 523 comparative literature 7, 18, 36, 38, 70, 73, 78, 153, 161–172, 210, 252, 254, 346, 348, 495, 515 comparativism  6, 76, 77, 513, 523 Conradian 265, 266 contact zone 54, 57, 63, 217, 294, 335, 345, 463, 464 convergence 4, 112, 214, 365, 446 convict literature 519 – broadsides and testimonies  519 convicts 519 cosmopolitan 1, 7, 21, 49, 50, 91, 96, 98, 105, 106, 109, 116, 165, 167, 194, 218, 246, 257, 258, 314, 320, 337, 343, 344, 346, 383, 384, 416, 421, 426, 443, 514 cosmopolitan intercourse 91 cosmopolitanism 8, 46, 49, 86, 88, 95, 103–116, 257, 320, 344, 520, 521, 535, 536 cosmopolitan memory 133 cosmopolitan-vernacular dynamics  7 Creole 268, 270, 271, 294, 334, 382, 401, 406, 408–410, 412

 569

creolisation 396, 397, 409, 410 creolising 400, 410 crisis 78, 123, 124, 127–128, 130, 151, 162, 164–167, 172, 204, 260, 301, 306, 326, 346, 362, 386, 444, 452, 505 critical race theory 516, 525 Crystal 492 Cuchulain 324 cultural locality 314 cultural nationalism 514, 515, 538, 541, 543 cultural nationalists 514, 542 cultural products 8, 210, 214, 215 Cultural Revolution 253, 523 cultural roots 503, 504 dance 202, 203, 270, 303, 306, 307, 383, 466 dancer 303, 304, 306 Danish 218, 279, 421 Darwinian 236 Dasein 91, 92 decolonial 194–196, 204, 205, 246, 253, 263, 382 decolonisation 3, 154, 199, 236, 246, 250, 253, 258, 268, 272, 356, 371, 417, 491, 504 deep time 104–106, 123, 196, 513, 517–521 525 devolution 294 diaspora 98, 115, 116, 177, 179, 180, 182, 183, 186, 188, 195, 196, 199, 205, 205, 221, 299, 322, 329, 336, 337, 339, 342, 343, 347, 362, 369, 371, 399, 402, 410, 411, 424, 444, 472, 473, 476 diasporic experiences 425, 436, 459 diasporisation 436, 445, 447 dictionary 53–59, 62–64 digital age 149, 209, 214, 221, 233, 234, 276, 277 digital humanities 8, 121, 168, 275–287, 516 digital media 134, 142, 210, 212–214, 221, 276, 285, 286 discourse (see also: colonial discourse, postcolonial discourse) 41, 43, 44, 60, 76, 110, 114, 138, 151, 166, 177, 179, 210, 313, 314, 325, 339, 342, 397, 399, 403, 404, 407, 410, 423, 425, 426, 435–442, 444–447, 456, 458, 459, 463, 478, 482, 503, 505 disillusionment 444, 504 dissemination 24, 87, 195, 205, 206, 235, 343, 406, 465

570 

 Subject Index

distant reading 4, 34, 165, 280, 281, 516, 524 doppelganger 303 drama 8, 23, 176, 185, 187, 188, 268, 285, 325, 327, 359, 366, 367, 377, 378, 427, 439, 460, 466, 493, 497, 499, 500 Dublin 317, 321, 323, 329 Dutch 1, 335, 376, 415, 446, 490 early modernity 32 East German 519, 523 ecocritical reading 481 eco-criticism 447 ecocritics 479 ecological 122, 128, 149, 400, 403–405, 446, 447, 475 ekphrasis 188, 209, 212, 216, 219, 221–222 ekphrastic 220, 221, 306, 408 electronic literature 286 empire (see also: British Empire) 2, 89, 107, 109, 111, 116, 265, 267–270, 292, 295, 333, 337, 340, 345, 377, 378, 380, 381, 384, 404, 405, 418–421, 436, 444, 474, 490, 491, 493, 513, 514, 533 England 21, 22, 79, 151, 152, 157, 201, 218, 294, 299, 314, 319, 330, 377, 380, 384, 398, 409, 443, 505 English dictionary 53–56, 58, 63, 64 Englishes 60, 79, 153, 169, 202, 265–267, 294, 490, 493–495, 496, 497 Englishisation 492, 496, 497, 499, 500 Englishised 497, 499, 507 English literature 1, 2, 31, 44, 48, 59, 151, 153, 154, 259, 398, 477, 492, 498 Enlightenment 19, 21, 202, 252, 512, 514 enslavement 378, 396 entanglements 8, 54, 123, 125, 126–129, 222, 297, 308, 348 environmental humanities 7, 119–130 environmental turn 120 epic 175–188, 194–198, 205, 268, 340, 382, 387, 390, 406, 443, 467 epistemicide 195 Ethiopia 456, 466 Ethiopian literature 452, 456 ethnographer 116, 484, 485 Eurasians 505, 506 Euro-Atlantic 375, 384 Eurocentric 4, 16, 20, 78, 85, 87–90, 162, 167, 172, 178–183, 186, 330, 376, 409, 410, 435

Eurocentric world literature 89 Eurocentrism 19, 97, 177, 247, 256 Eurochronology 406 Europe 15, 23, 24, 32, 50, 104, 106–108, 110–112, 114, 115, 169, 171, 172, 180, 181, 219, 253, 254, 296, 340, 375, 422, 428, 435, 459, 511 European 1, 3, 17, 23, 41, 44, 46–49, 89, 90, 103, 106, 111–114, 144, 157, 168, 172, 177, 178, 180–182, 197, 201, 218, 220, 230, 247, 253, 254, 259, 267, 293, 295, 327, 328, 360, 361, 369, 376, 378, 384, 396–398, 400, 401, 403, 406, 408, 421, 422, 426, 441, 512, 513, 518, 524, 533–537, 543 European canon 51 exile 16, 18, 119, 139, 203, 315, 398, 424, 425, 442, 476, 519 exotic 236, 376, 380, 385, 408, 461, 512, 522 expansion 27, 61, 104, 106, 112, 141, 163, 182, 193, 194, 337, 339, 340, 344, 377, 396, 404, 454, 474 477 expression 7, 63, 74, 76, 110, 136, 194, 198, 203, 252, 267, 268, 270, 271, 323, 325, 347, 438, 453, 457, 458, 464, 491, 496–500, 507, 515, 517, 540, 542 extraction 345, 375, 376, 389, 390, 446 feminism 5, 31, 419, 520 feminist stand-point theory 525 film 142, 152, 210, 211, 214, 215, 218, 221, 239, 292, 298, 300, 306, 452, 464, 493, 515, 516 filmmaker 299, 300, 541 film musical 306 folklore 186, 438, 452 folkloric 186, 187 forced poetics 270 form 292, 296, 297, 308 formal 1, 6, 74, 75, 96, 97, 135, 143, 154, 163, 206, 211, 212, 292, 319, 338, 339, 369, 371, 428, 429, 455, 457, 458, 518, 525 formation 1, 17, 21, 49, 50, 73, 79, 88, 89, 91, 93, 121, 172, 176, 196, 203, 221, 246, 248, 249, 251, 256, 259, 263, 265, 269, 271, 303, 334, 335, 337, 342–344, 349, 357, 459, 460, 473, 489, 490, 495, 500, 515 Fourth World literatures 516, 520 Francophone 33, 270, 271, 454

Subject Index 

French 1, 2, 25, 32, 33, 37, 45, 49, 60, 63, 64, 74, 77, 79, 111, 112, 150, 151, 154, 155, 157, 165, 171, 172, 198, 269, 272, 279, 324, 334, 340, 355, 356, 366, 368, 423, 434, 454, 455, 480, 490, 496, 518 Gaelic 314 Garveyist 515 gender 5, 8, 75, 121, 153, 195–197, 214, 218, 281, 283, 284, 358, 429, 454, 539 generic 144, 175, 178, 180, 181, 187, 188, 222, 265, 267, 268, 270, 292, 297, 303, 324, 341, 400, 409, 419, 451 genre 6, 8, 23, 34, 62–64, 88, 122, 139, 144, 150, 169, 175–188, 194, 196, 209, 220, 265–268, 270, 281, 285, 286, 292, 297, 308, 325, 334, 338, 340, 341, 345, 358, 359, 365, 366, 395, 407, 426, 438, 452, 453, 458, 462, 495, 514 geographical and linguistic locations 120 German 16, 17, 21–25, 61, 63, 77, 79, 97, 150, 168, 171, 210, 279, 282, 423, 519–523 German Democratic Republic (GDR) 519, 522, 523 Gikuyu 61, 62, 154, 156, 158, 265 global capitalist system 417 global circulation 2, 87, 90, 221, 333, 465 global economy 345, 347, 384 globalisation 4, 6, 16, 19, 20, 55, 70–72, 77, 85, 89–91, 95, 96, 130, 134, 141, 149, 214, 218, 248, 256, 258, 285, 287, 308, 316, 337, 349, 369, 370, 380, 381, 389, 395, 397, 399, 400, 410, 416–418, 426, 490–494, 496 globality 254, 417, 427 global literary market 215, 229 global literature 85–99, 218, 280 global memory 133 global memoryscape 138 Global South 3, 122, 344, 346, 520, 525 globe 2, 4, 15, 32, 71, 86, 89, 90, 130, 136, 149, 168, 188, 264–267, 331, 337, 341, 345, 376, 378, 380, 386, 390, 478, 534 glocal 231, 233, 235, 238, 240 glocality 239, 240 glocalisation 88 glocal memory 133 Goethean 18, 97, 264 Gramscian 76

 571

Greek 1, 17, 22, 25, 48, 63, 90, 92, 93, 97, 151, 155, 162, 177–181, 185–187, 220, 406, 446, 524 Gularabulu 518 haunting 263, 532 Hebrew 63, 421 Hegelian 23, 26, 86, 478 hemispheric Americas 341 heteroglossia 177 Hiberno-English 320, 327 Hindi 98, 475, 480 Hindu 48, 49, 267, 384 Hindu College 43 historical revision 298, 300, 400 History, idea of 93, 195, 197, 270, 403–405, 427, 504, 525 hologram 439 homecoming 179 Homeric 142, 179–182, 184–187 Homeric epic 182,184,186 Hong Kong 489–491, 493–497, 499, 500, 504–507 Hong Kong identity 493, 504 hospitality 383, 385 human 17, 19, 25, 26, 85–87, 89, 91–98, 120–125, 127–130, 194, 195, 200, 202, 203, 211, 212, 249, 277, 286, 297, 303, 334, 335, 359–361, 383, 404, 405, 476–485, 493 human agency 123, 200, 479, 481, 482 humanity 85–92, 110, 115, 121, 124, 275, 371, 420, 480, 481 human rights  111, 114, 482 human temporality 479 hybridiser 317 hybridity  317, 442, 445, 498–501, 505, 506 identity 36, 49, 162, 179, 181, 183, 187, 196, 218, 238, 257, 315–318, 323, 337, 344, 365, 366, 369, 410, 443, 491, 492, 495, 497, 498, 500–507, 511, 514, 519, 525, 538, 540, 543, 546 identity politics 16, 218, 466, 491 Igbo 201, 202, 266, 269 Igbo oral traditions 201, 202 imagination 86, 105, 120, 124, 135, 144, 145, 199, 255, 329, 357, 359, 452, 454–458, 461, 463, 464, 467, 491, 503, 518 imaginative geography 435

572 

 Subject Index

imbongi 196 immanence 316, 317, 323, 327, 329 imperial 27, 88, 107, 111, 136, 164, 182, 188, 194, 216, 250, 257, 258, 263–265, 267–269, 271, 293, 308, 334, 337–339, 342, 344, 345, 376, 379, 380, 382, 384, 385, 388, 390, 401, 405, 419, 420, 421, 496, 513, 514, 522 imperial capitalism 378 imperialism 3, 19, 55, 57, 70, 111, 116, 172, 206, 245, 256, 259, 269, 293, 296, 319, 321, 324, 337, 338, 340, 343–345, 349, 378, 405 imperial romance 419 in-between 142, 498, 506 in-betweenness 216, 442, 445, 498 Index Translationum 150, 152, 279 India 2, 41–46, 49–51, 106, 170, 234, 237, 265–267, 410, 472–474, 479, 481, 484, 489, 490, 497, 524 Indian Ocean 270, 379, 380, 383–385, 459 Indian Ocean Worlds 459 indigenous 31, 111, 112, 116, 120, 123, 194, 194, 197, 199–203, 233, 337, 358–360, 366–369, 377, 386, 388, 396, 438, 441, 479, 511, 513, 515–521, 524, 525, 543–545 Indigenous Australian writing 517 Indigenous authorship 518 Indigenous forms of literary expression  515 Indigenous languages 197, 200, 201, 203, 455, 517 Indigenous literature  375, 512, 518, 520, 543, 545 Indigenous rights activism 515 Indigenous writers 371, 375, 518, 519, 525, 545 insular 157, 295, 300, 396, 405 insularity 319, 459 intercourse 22, 23, 85–99, 473 interlanguage 491, 497, 499 intermedial 143, 163, 168, 209–213, 216, 218–222, 306, 408 intermedial adaptations 218 intermedial circulation 217, 218 intermedial configurations 211, 212, 216, 217, 297, 408 intermediality 8, 142, 143, 168, 209–222 intermediality studies 209, 212, 216, 220, 222 intermedial reference 209, 211, 212, 221, 306 intermedial word-image configurations 221 Internet, the 1, 213, 232, 275, 276, 279, 284–287, 445 interpretive communities 436, 438

intertextual 24, 104, 140–142, 182, 184, 213, 218, 263, 358, 400, 407–409, 433, 434 intertextual engagement 182 intertextuality 134, 138–142, 183, 218, 407, 408, 439, 447 intertextual references 139, 142, 182, 218, 221, 433, 434 intertextual traffic and transformation 263 Irishness 315, 319, 325 Irish Revival 318, 446 Islam 122, 343, 490, 507 island 157, 169, 318, 319, 337, 358, 378, 390, 396, 397, 401, 402, 405, 511, 522, 528, 529 Johannesburg 58, 76, 196, 416, 423 Johnson’s dictionary 58, 59 journals 22, 121, 276, 453, 458, 523, 532, 533 Kapal Kundala 47 Kenya 112, 265, 266, 424, 454, 455, 457, 459, 462–464, 466, 467 Kinyarwanda 454 Kirundi 454 Kiswahili 61, 452–455, 462–466 Kiswahili-English 465 Kiswahili literatures 461 land rights 515 language 1, 2, 5, 7, 17, 19, 20, 22–24, 32, 33, 36, 37, 42, 45–51, 54–64, 67–69, 72–76, 79, 89, 96–98, 107, 120, 122, 130, 149–151, 154–159, 163–165, 167–170, 172, 193–195, 197–203, 211, 220, 230, 232, 234, 249, 251, 253, 254, 259, 263–272, 275, 277–279, 282, 287, 292, 294, 313, 314, 316, 317, 320, 324, 327, 330, 334, 336, 338, 339, 343, 345, 355, 356, 359, 362–364, 366, 377, 400, 409, 410, 412, 415, 416, 419, 421, 422, 427, 447, 451–456, 462, 463, 465, 472, 474, 475, 477, 479–481, 484, 485, 490–501, 503–505, 512, 517, 518, 520–523, 542, 543 langue 58, 315 Last Night of the Proms 292, 293 Latin 1, 22, 25, 63, 151, 155 Leavisian 537, 538 legitimation 109, 260 linguistic hegemony 19, 168 linguistic identity 507

Subject Index 

literary agents 135, 232, 234, 235, 239 literary canons 49, 165, 298, 525 Literary Creativity 425, 453, 458, 463, 466, 490 literary histories 152, 296, 395 literary marketplace 398, 399, 412, 453, 545 literary multiculturalisms 521 literary nationalism 356, 370, 534, 539, 543 literary prize 89, 137, 235, 237, 238, 355, 453, 462, 463, 496 literary space 134, 324, 330, 370, 420, 438, 462, 514 literary studies 1, 3, 4, 7, 23, 27, 31, 37, 78, 79, 85, 120, 128, 138, 141, 149, 152, 153, 165, 169, 172, 210, 278, 283, 287, 346–348, 376, 525 literary systems 150, 165 literary theory 7, 8, 166, 524 literary value 89, 138, 245, 335, 398, 440, 445, 453, 537–539 local 2, 6, 7, 27, 34, 35, 88, 105, 112, 114, 120, 136, 142–144, 168, 170, 180, 218, 219, 230, 231, 238, 239, 253, 266, 268, 268, 285, 291, 294, 296, 297, 314, 315, 317–319, 321, 323, 324, 326, 327, 340, 342, 355, 357, 358, 380, 387, 389, 390, 395–397, 405, 409, 411, 412, 417, 424–426, 428, 429, 434, 436, 437, 447, 453, 455, 473, 476, 481, 490–493, 495–500, 512, 515, 516, 536–538, 542, 546 locale 144, 253, 297, 308 locality 142, 253, 314, 316, 317, 319, 321, 326, 365, 396–398, 416, 447 London 16, 215, 216, 268, 282, 291–294, 296–299, 301, 302, 304, 305, 308, 318, 320, 324, 330, 356, 377, 409, 416, 419, 421–423, 428, 429, 440, 489, 494, 505, 506, 519, 521, 522, 542 London Olympic Games 292 loss 122, 128, 130, 136, 271, 315, 316, 319, 323–330, 403, 475, 483, 504, 517 Lusophone 33, 416 lyric 175, 268 Macaulayan 49 magical realism 33, 157, 443, 476 Malawi 416 Mandarin  1, 503 Māori 112, 113, 385, 386, 525, 534, 536, 538, 543–546

 573

maps 34, 116, 167, 203, 265, 267, 272, 316, 360, 383, 385, 400, 402, 457 marketing 19, 215, 229–240, 256 marketplace 88, 96, 232, 275, 381, 399 Marxist 25, 26, 69, 76, 77, 90 Mashonaland 422 Mbari Club 424 meaningfulness 92, 93 media 1, 8, 122, 134, 135, 137, 142, 143, 153, 155, 172, 209–222, 232, 234–236, 239, 276, 277, 284, 285, 287, 295–297, 308, 342, 420, 445, 496, 500 media borders 212, 219 media corporations 215, 219, 221 media ecology 212, 284, 285 medial 2, 209–213, 215, 216, 218–220 medial border crossing 218 medial configurations 216 mediaverses 217 medium 22, 194, 211–214, 220, 249, 254, 269, 284, 387, 412, 438, 462–464, 474, 492, 493, 499 methodologies 4, 6, 23, 44, 122, 126, 128, 130, 254 Middle Passage 345, 382, 383, 396, 400, 403, 404, 406 migrant 144, 258, 269, 293, 299, 300, 302, 308, 334, 337, 341, 442, 519–521, 523 migrant literatures 520 migrant writers 299, 300, 302, 308, 523 migration 3, 6, 55, 115, 116, 134, 139, 142, 143, 268, 292, 295, 337, 339, 357, 362, 396–398, 428, 436, 443, 444, 447, 520, 543, 546 mobility 2, 90, 133, 134, 137, 138, 210, 218–221, 299, 334, 335, 375, 417, 436, 443–445, 454 modern African literature  433, 434, 437, 441 modernism 267, 336, 339, 343, 356, 406, 433, 438, 440, 533–536, 539, 543 modernist 268, 336, 338, 339, 343, 364, 365, 434, 435, 439, 440, 444, 447, 514, 515, 533, 535, 536, 542 modernist nationalism 535, 536 modernities 43, 69, 512 modernity 32, 34, 41, 42, 49, 69, 91, 98, 106, 107, 109, 116, 125, 195, 196, 198, 201, 202, 204, 206, 269, 285 , 336, 371, 405, 406, 421, 423, 436, 496, 514, 537 monarchs 295, 401

574 

 Subject Index

monarchy 295, 296 mondialisation 130, 240 monolingual 53–56, 59, 265, 347 monolingual English dictionaries 54, 59 monolingualism 54, 55 Mother Country 398, 409 mother tongue 1, 50, 53–56, 60, 61, 98, 154, 158, 201, 272, 362 Mozambique 416, 426 multicultural 163, 268, 335, 356, 398, 479, 520, 521, 524 multicultural literatures 520 multidirectional 136, 137 multidirectional memory 136, 137 multilingual 54–56, 60, 62, 64, 164, 171, 199, 229, 334, 339, 489, 491, 494 multilingualism 55, 168, 294, 334, 339, 409 multinational 171, 229, 231, 378, 390, 479, 492 multiplicity 105, 120, 142, 183, 255, 256, 267, 270, 358, 461 multispecies relationality  121 musical film 306 Namibia 205, 416 nation 1, 17, 50, 79, 121, 167, 188, 205, 270, 271, 296, 322, 336, 348, 369–371, 378, 386, 443, 460, 472–474, 476, 478, 492, 499, 503, 507, 511, 514, 516, 535, 537, 538, 542, 543 national 1, 2, 5, 17, 22, 24, 32, 34, 36, 44, 50, 60, 61, 68, 74, 79, 86, 87, 89, 97, 105, 107, 120, 135, 136, 143, 155, 164, 166, 167, 187, 198, 199, 203, 206, 230, 231, 239, 240, 263, 264, 266, 271, 277, 291, 295, 296, 299, 300, 308, 313, 314, 317, 320, 337, 341, 342, 347, 348, 355–357, 362, 366, 369–371, 397, 402, 411, 415–417, 424, 425, 452, 454, 455, 457, 464, 472, 473, 479, 495, 501, 504, 507, 512–517, 520, 521, 522, 533–537, 541, 542 national ambiguity 314 nationalism 6, 21, 218, 250, 268, 319, 321, 323, 356, 445, 459, 521, 535–537, 541, 543 nationalist 46, 47, 49, 50, 116, 267, 317, 321, 322, 324, 326, 335, 356, 434, 459, 473, 513, 516, 522, 535–542 national limitations 87

national literature 22, 32, 34, 36, 50, 60, 68, 86, 166, 230, 231, 239, 313, 320, 342, 356, 357, 397, 452, 495, 517, 522, 535 nation building 499, 507 nation-formation 459 nation-state  1, 17, 55, 79, 107–109, 116, 161, 220, 221, 265, 334, 335, 337–339, 342, 343, 345, 346, 354, 357, 359, 370–372, 379, 383, 384, 438, 445, 457, 472 native 1, 49, 55, 57, 144, 194, 196, 200–202, 204, 318, 329, 371, 384, 475, 493–495, 500, 505, 532 natural poetics 270 naturecultures  123 neoclassical 176, 188 neoclassicists 176 neoliberal 44, 134, 138, 236, 237, 248, 301, 337, 347, 349, 453, 466 neoliberalist 308 network 19, 91, 92, 134, 137, 138, 142, 179, 202, 209, 210, 212, 215–217, 220, 221, 263, 265, 269, 333, 335, 342, 343, 369, 371, 396, 406, 408, 421, 453, 458, 465, 495, 513, 534 networked nonlinearity 263 new digital media 134,210, 212, 214 new media 137, 212, 214, 219, 284–286 New York 215, 267, 297, 423, 429, 494, 512, 522, 534, 540, 541 New Zealand 112, 266, 356, 385, 511, 513, 522, 533–546 Nigeria 266, 424, 434, 439, 443, 446, 458 Nobel Prize for Literature 150, 359, 472, 521 nomadism 316 nonhuman 125, 128, 130, 297, 334, 476, 477, 479, 481, 485 nonhuman agency 125, 479 normativity 92 North America 3, 16, 21, 422, 428, 435, 459 Norway 422 Norwegian 61, 121, 152 novel 23, 32, 34–36, 49, 58, 61, 62, 64, 98, 103, 104, 109, 113, 114, 121–126, 130, 140, 143, 144, 150, 170, 171, 176–180, 183, 186–188, 194–196, 200, 201, 204, 206, 212, 213, 218–221, 229, 230, 233, 234, 236–240, 264–266, 268–271, 276, 281–287, 291, 293, 294, 296–300, 302–307, 321, 324, 331, 335, 341, 342, 345–347, 358, 359, 362–364, 367, 369–371, 378–380, 383–390, 396–398,

Subject Index 

400, 402, 406–409, 418–420, 422–428, 437, 440–443, 445, 446, 454, 455, 457, 461–464, 466, 472, 476, 479–482, 497, 500, 512, 514, 519, 525, 539, 540, 543, 545 novel of formation 303 Oceania 385, 543 oceanic 337, 375, 376, 379, 381, 385, 387, 389–390, 511, 543 oceanic hospitality 385 oceanic world 390 odyssey 386 Onitsha market literature 458 ontological erasure 204 Oodgeroo 515, 518 opacity 272, 412 oral forms 205, 408 orality 183, 193–196, 200, 205, 206, 266, 270, 409, 421, 441 oral traditions 183, 201–203, 417, 438, 519 Orientalism 43, 44, 89, 111, 253, 379 Orientalists 44 Oxford 2, 233 Pacific 337, 385–387, 511, 513, 517, 543, 544, 546 Pākehā 534, 536, 538, 540, 544, 545, 546 Paris 33, 110, 127, 254, 299, 324, 334, 406, 424 parole 58, 315 Pasifika 534, 543 pedagogical 3, 36, 267, 268, 270 People’s Publishing House 523 periodicals 22, 151, 343 periphery 24, 37, 105, 106, 110, 120, 134, 180, 196, 405, 406, 411, 511 phenomenological 85, 315–317, 321 phenomenology 316 philology 18, 25, 26 planet 2, 103, 105, 126–128, 149, 150, 376, 387, 389, 390, 406, 407 planetary 106, 109, 111, 123, 127, 128, 167, 214, 386, 387, 389, 390 plantation 270, 271, 377, 378, 383, 384, 386, 388, 396, 404, 405, 407, 409, 410, 412 plurilingual  149, 158 poetics 7, 24, 142, 144, 199, 216, 266, 270, 271, 336, 338, 339, 383, 399, 412, 417, 419, 428, 429, 442, 518, 525, 535, 536, 539–541 polysystem 151

 575

polysystem theory 137 portrait of migrant life 520 Portuguese 1, 49, 63, 150, 421, 490 postcolonial 2–4, 19, 23, 31–33, 35–38, 41, 43, 44, 60, 71, 72, 90, 91, 95–98, 106, 116, 120, 121, 140, 141, 144, 153, 166, 178, 194, 195, 205, 210, 216, 218, 220–222, 236, 237, 246, 253, 254, 256, 257, 259, 313, 315, 316, 320, 324, 346, 348, 375–377, 381–383, 386, 395, 396, 399, 401, 435, 441, 442, 445, 447, 459, 461, 464, 465, 472, 474–479, 482, 491, 493, 494, 504, 507, 512, 514–516, 519, 521, 524 postcolonial discourse 60, 459 postcolonialism 4, 31, 35, 315, 433, 479, 490, 491, 494, 515, 524 postcolonialist 38 postcoloniality 258, 268, 493 postcolonial literatures 36, 140, 216, 236 postcolonial south 91, 376 postcolonial studies 3, 4, 38, 44, 71, 72, 106, 153, 216, 253, 265, 346, 395, 445, 476–479 postcolonial world literature 98, 401 postimperial 267, 271, 300 postmodern 267, 324, 442 postmonolingual  55 post-translation 137 Premio Calabria 520  prestige 1, 67, 76, 216, 235, 237, 239, 277, 294, 321, 324, 335, 435, 446 Pretoria 427 print-capitalism  1 printing press 194, 195, 196 progress 19, 20, 85, 87, 113–115, 164, 193, 195–197, 305, 420 proverb 196, 199–202, 269, 421 public sphere 5, 47, 133, 279, 299, 338, 342–344 publishing 1, 44, 138, 151, 165, 177, 215, 219, 230–235, 239, 259, 276, 294, 355, 398, 421, 423, 428, 429, 452, 456, 458, 464–466, 512, 515, 522–525, 541, 545, 546 race relations 300 racialisation 337 racialised 294, 304, 345, 505, 420 racial minorities 459, 460, 465 racism 110, 111, 136, 256, 293, 300, 322, 362, 422, 423

576 

 Subject Index

racist 116, 299, 363, 398, 421, 422 Ramayana 45 readers 35, 53, 56, 64, 69, 70, 72, 74, 89, 90, 141, 150–152, 157, 158, 186, 216, 217, 221, 222, 229, 231, 234, 236, 239, 245, 269, 272, 276–279, 281, 285, 286, 294, 305, 308, 324, 334, 347, 379, 381, 384, 420–424, 429, 434, 479, 485, 514, 515, 522, 523 readership 6, 36, 37, 53, 71, 98, 154, 164, 229–231, 239, 286, 342, 415, 419, 422, 424, 454, 456, 463, 514, 518, 522 reception 4, 61, 64, 71, 137, 150, 165, 170, 176–178, 180, 184, 219, 235, 258, 343, 363, 375, 398, 399, 403, 417, 418, 429, 446, 494, 512, 513, 517, 519, 521, 523, 524, 533, 534, 538, 539, 545 referential 92, 306 reggae 194, 206 regionalism 294 relation 24, 42, 61, 63, 64, 87, 91–95, 97, 98, 108, 114, 144, 162, 170, 172, 179, 198, 203, 263, 266, 287, 313–315, 330, 336–338, 341, 345, 346, 349, 358, 364, 369, 389, 418, 422, 425, 429, 436, 438, 440, 445, 475, 477, 492, 493, 495, 503, 507, 516, 534 relational 123, 129, 137, 212, 264, 265, 268, 269, 272, 341, 342, 410 relationality 6, 121, 144, 200, 264, 265, 341 relexification 498, 499 remediated 218 remediation 137, 209, 210, 212, 213, 217, 219, 222 representation 17, 26, 89, 94, 106, 143, 144, 195, 198, 201, 213, 216, 219, 221, 251, 255, 257, 296, 355, 402, 410, 441, 442, 444, 447, 459, 503, 518, 519, 523–525 resonance 139, 179, 185, 198, 263, 402, 427, 434, 454, 513, 518, 519 revision 19, 110, 141, 298, 302, 306, 381, 478, 523 revisionist 298, 300, 400, 456, 460, 467 re-writes 35 rewriting 137, 139–141, 152, 204, 217, 218, 370, 404, 408, 440 rhizomatic 269 rhizome 410 Rhodesia 417, 422

Romantic 17, 23, 25, 45, 99, 150, 152, 318, 417, 422 Romanticism 25, 321 Russian 63, 79, 150, 210, 280, 335, 340, 427, 493 Rwanda 454, 455, 463 (self-)marketing 232 sacred 1, 203, 269, 321, 325 Saidian 43, 44 Sanskrit  1, 22, 47, 339 scale 32, 49, 106, 109–111, 114, 115, 120, 123, 138, 172, 251–255, 258, 265, 270–272, 279, 281, 285, 335, 336, 339, 340, 343, 370, 386, 397, 390, 417, 424, 447, 462, 485, 524 science fiction 268, 406, 479 sea 70, 99, 240, 253, 268, 323, 375–390, 398, 402, 403, 406, 429, 446, 480, 519 seaborne empire 377, 380 second-wave feminists 514 self 26, 49, 55, 316, 361, 467, 498, 500–505, 507 self-determination  112, 515 self-marketing 230, 231–235, 237, 239 sensibility 115, 200, 299, 396, 405, 409, 410, 472, 494–496, 538, 540, 543 Setswana 199, 201, 421 settler 193, 203, 266, 355, 356, 386, 390, 406, 421–423, 511–515, 517–521, 525, 532, 536, 544 settler colonialism 103, 203, 337, 344, 349, 371, 385, 389, 422, 532, 533, 538 settler literatures 428, 513, 517, 525 settler narratives 417 settler studies 513 Sheng 463 short-story cycle 183 Singapore 88, 479, 489–504 Singapore identity 497, 501–503 Singlish 492, 497, 499, 500, 507 slave 113, 184, 185, 195, 204, 300, 343, 344, 378, 379, 383, 384, 388, 402–404, 406–408 slave-holding 185 slavers 378, 381, 382, 384 slavery 104, 114, 136, 143, 180, 182, 183, 187, 268, 293, 335, 339, 344, 345, 383, 396, 402–404, 407, 408, 410, 443 slave trade 144, 205, 269, 300, 379, 396, 403 slow scholarship 122, 128 slow violence 122

Subject Index 

small magazines 433 social novel 304 Somali 452 Somalia 454, 466 song cycles 518 songpoetry 518 South Africa 58, 62, 75, 180, 205, 206, 249, 266, 415–417, 419–422, 424, 425, 427, 458, 465, 466 South African literature 418, 426 South Asia 69, 459, 471–485, 489 South Asian literature 8, 459 Southeast Asia 489–507 southern 98, 114, 237, 376, 381, 382, 387, 390, 511 southern Africa 197, 202, 204, 415–429, 453, 454, 458, 459, 511, 544 southern African literature 415–418, 424, 426–429 South Rhodesia 417, 422 South Sudan 171, 454 Soviet 119, 253, 254, 284, 336, 427, 444, 523 Soweto uprising 425 Spanish 1, 2, 25, 150, 279, 282, 334, 336, 343, 434, 521 spatial theory 516 speculative 285, 400 speculative fiction 268, 406 Stockholm 423 storytelling 24, 61, 183, 203, 210, 214, 215, 267, 371, 402 strategic positioning 436, 438, 444–446 strategies of worlding 121, 122 style 35, 45, 144, 205, 209, 236, 264, 267, 272, 276, 278, 283, 316, 424, 438, 453, 495, 499, 505, 514, 515 subjectivity 93, 95, 195, 196, 200, 221, 297, 364, 494–497, 500, 502, 503, 505, 507 subjects 53, 64, 85, 90, 92, 94, 96–99, 116, 204, 221, 297, 299, 303, 318, 346, 365, 383, 410, 478, 481, 485, 501, 504, 505, 517 Swedish 61, 121, 152, 279, 334, 364, 423 Swedish Academy 512 Tanzania 112, 384, 452, 454–457, 459, 461, 463, 464, 466, 467 Tanzanian 452, 454, 461 teaching 37, 247, 263–272, 317, 347, 458, 477, 492 teaching world anglophone literatures 264

 577

teleology 87, 141, 193, 197, 202, 324 temporality 136, 141, 193, 195, 196, 200, 202, 203, 206, 326, 336, 405, 478, 479, 481 temporalisation 92, 485 theatre 71, 151, 155, 170, 194, 195, 204, 204, 211, 218, 377, 446, 515 Tigrinya 456 tolerance 96 tout-monde 411 toyi toyi 203 trade (see also: slave trade, triangular trade) 230, 232, 366, 378, 379, 384, 427, 454, 459, 482, 489, 513, 514, 522, 543, 545 tradition 2, 7, 19, 23–27, 46, 48, 51, 60, 69, 96, 144, 153–155, 158, 169, 170, 172, 180–183, 188, 194–196, 201–203, 222, 246, 247, 250, 255, 263, 270, 285, 286, 292, 293, 297, 298, 300, 303, 317, 320, 327, 342, 348, 355, 356, 359, 364, 378, 381, 388, 398, 410, 412, 417, 423, 434, 438, 440–442, 446, 456, 463, 465, 473, 503, 514, 515, 518, 519, 534–537, 538, 542, 543, 545, 546 traditional 45, 96, 98, 129, 178, 196, 197, 221, 233, 234, 251, 284, 286, 293, 298, 308, 342, 368, 388, 406, 434, 439, 442, 447, 456, 458, 461, 464, 537 tragedy 175, 176, 185, 218, 419, 446 transatlantic 144, 218, 300, 333, 339, 340, 345, 379, 388, 443, 445, 522 transcendental 321, 323, 464 transcendental field 316, 323 Transcendentalism 321 transcultural 6, 7, 134, 136–139, 141–145, 177, 181, 182, 212, 214, 217, 220, 222, 259, 282, 299, 338, 359, 421, 506, 520 transcultural memory 133–137, 143–145 transculturation 7, 292, 293, 343, 356, 357, 368 translatable 169, 255, 293, 296, 544 translated 3, 15, 23, 31, 32, 37, 61, 62, 72, 73, 88, 141, 150–152, 154, 156–158, 164, 171, 198, 199, 232, 234, 235, 255, 257, 279, 294, 334, 359, 360, 426, 438, 457, 477, 480, 517, 520, 523, 536, 545 translation 4–8, 15, 18, 22–25, 36–38, 46, 54, 61, 63, 70, 72–77, 87, 89, 96, 98, 130, 135–137, 140–143, 149–159, 164–172, 193, 195, 197–201, 219, 220, 251, 253–255, 263, 277, 279, 317, 320, 327, 330, 331, 334, 336, 343, 355, 360, 384, 400, 411, 415, 421,

578 

 Subject Index

423, 437, 454, 455, 457, 463, 477, 480, 481, 494, 499, 512, 513, 518–523 translational 73, 98, 167, 217, 294, 474 translator 22, 25, 64, 76, 150, 155, 158, 169–171, 197, 204, 317, 420, 427 translocation 6, 339 transmedia 209, 210, 214, 217, 222 transmedial 168, 214 transmediality 209, 210, 215, 217, 222 transmedial storytelling 215 transmedia storytelling 210, 214 transnational 4, 19, 23, 25, 89, 122, 165, 182, 270, 286, 299, 335–340, 342–346, 355, 357, 359, 362, 366, 369–371, 411, 418, 425, 428, 445, 478, 479, 506, 514–517, 520, 522, 524 transnational American studies 335–338, 346–349 transnationalism 20, 77, 230, 337 transnational memory 133, 137 transnational public sphere 338, 342–344 transpacific 333, 344, 345 triangular trade 383 Uganda 60, 171, 454–457, 459, 460, 462–464, 466, 467 Ujamaa 457, 461 unfinalisability 187 unfinished 186, 187, 205, 420 United States (USA) 2, 16, 36, 37, 72, 79, 112, 156, 157, 162, 180, 185, 186, 204, 219, 266, 280, 296, 333–349, 356, 366, 378, 384, 424, 477, 481, 482, 492, 496, 511, 514, 517, 521, 540, 541 universalism 21, 71, 255, 411, 478 untranslatability 72, 169, 254, 269–272 untranslatable 63, 165, 169, 171, 240, 348 vernacular 1, 50, 105, 138, 151, 182, 193, 194, 198, 202, 258, 339, 429, 478, 479, 515, 538 vernacularisation  88, 421 Victorian literature 23, 477 Vietnam 335, 346, 388, 389, 489 Volk und Welt 519 war literature 455, 457 Warwick Research Collective (WReC) 4, 78, 344

Weltliteratur 5, 15–27, 36, 87, 167, 266, 410 West African literature 433–447 Western canon 175, 178, 179, 182, 218, 246, 247, 249, 250, 251, 255, 330 White Australia 514 White Australia policy 511 Windrush 293, 295, 298, 299 women 53, 104, 112, 195, 197, 202, 204, 298, 303, 315, 358, 380, 457, 460, 514, 519, 520, 523 women writers 405, 514 word-image relations  210, 220 world Anglophone 68, 71, 72, 74,79, 263–272 World Englishes 79, 169, 294, 490, 493, 494, 496, 497 worlding 6,78, 85, 86, 91–99,120,122,124,125, 129,130, 141, 218, 222, 232, 251, 252, 253, 263, 264, 268, 336–341, 345, 358, 359, 370, 371, 417, 419, 429, 485 worlding literature 86, 95, 97, 98, 232 worldliness 46, 87, 89, 91, 92, 98, 109, 245, 251, 252, 253, 254, 256, 260, 334, 335, 382, 385, 397, 398, 401, 406, 410, 417, 424, 427, 434, 476 world literary system 4, 34, 79 world-literary system 77 world-making/worldmaking 6, 8, 89, 91, 130, 134, 140, 143, 167, 210, 217, 218, 220, 221, 306–308, 358, 359, 360, 364, 366, 368, 369, 370, 371, 372, 385, 387, 388, 398, 400, 412, 475, 476, 478. world-making capacities/power of literature 6, 399, 406, 475, 476 world-system 69, 70, 76, 237, 335, 336, 344, 345, 376, 379, 384 world-systems theory 34, 69, 106, 375 Yinglish 497, 500 Yoruba-English 64 Zanzibar 70, 384, 460, 461 Zanzibar Revolution 460 Zimbabwe 201, 203, 280, 416, 428

List of Contributors Susan Bassnett is Professor of Comparative Literature at the University of Glasgow, UK, and Professor Emeritus and Special Advisor on Translation Studies at the University of Warwick, UK. Sibylle Baumbach is Professor of English Literatures at the University of Stuttgart, Germany. Sarah Phillips Casteel is Professor of English at Carleton University, Canada, where she is crossappointed to the Institute of African Studies and the Institute for Comparative Studies in Literature, Art and Culture. Rosinka Chaudhuri is Director and Professor of Cultural Studies, Centre for Studies in Social Sciences, Calcutta, India. Pheng Cheah is Professor of Rhetoric and Geography at the University of California, Berkeley, USA. Carrol Clarkson is Professor of Modern English Literature in the Faculty of Humanities at the University of Amsterdam, Netherlands, and Honorary Research Associate at the University of Cape Town, South Africa. Vilashini Cooppan is Associate Professor of Literature at the University of California at Santa Cruz, USA. Theo D’haen is Professor Emeritus of English and Comparative Literature at the University of Leuven (KU Leuven), Belgium, and Professor Emeritus of English and American Literature at the University of Leiden, Netherlands. Andrew Dean is a Junior Research Fellow at the Institute of Advanced Studies at University College London, UK. Claudia Egerer is Associate Professor in the Department of English at Stockholm University, Sweden. Harry Garuba (1958–2020) was Professor in the African Studies Unit and held a joint appointment in the English Department at the University of Cape Town, South Africa. Stefan Helgesson is Professor of Literature in the Department of English at Stockholm University, Sweden. Peter Hitchcock is Professor of English at Baruch College and the Graduate Center of the City University of New York, USA. Neil Lazarus is Professor of English and Comparative Literary Studies at the University of Warwick, UK. Justine McConnell is Senior Lecturer in Comparative Literature at King’s College London, UK. Nicole Moore is Professor in English and Media Studies and Associate Dean for Special Collections at UNSW Canberra, Australia. https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110583182-035

580 

 List of Contributors

Birgit Neumann is Professor and Chair of Anglophone Literatures at Heinrich Heine University Düsseldorf, Germany. Reingard Nethersole is Professor Emeritus of Comparative Literature at the University of Witwatersrand Johannesburg, South Africa. Christopher E.W. Ouma is Senior Lecturer in the English Language and Literature Department at the University of Cape Town, South Africa. Uhuru Portia Phalafala is a Lecturer in English at Stellenbosch University, South Africa. Eva Ulrike Pirker is Senior Lecturer of Anglophone Studies at Heinrich Heine University, Duesseldorf, Germany. Gabriele Rippl is Professor and Chair of Literatures in English at the University of Bern, Switzerland. Bruce Robbins is Old Dominion Foundation Professor in the Humanities at Columbia University, USA. Meg Samuelson is Associate Professor in the Department of English and Creative Writing at the University of Adelaide, Australia, and Associate Professor extraordinary at Stellenbosch, South Africa. Katja Sarkowsky is Professor and Chair of American Studies at Augsburg University, Germany. Godwin Siundu is Senior Lecturer of Literature at the University of Nairobi, Kenya. Ragini Tharoor Srinivasan is Assistant Professor of English and Social, Cultural, and Critical Theory at the University of Arizona, USA. Jan Steyn is a Lecturer in Literary Translation and French in the Division of World Languages, Literatures and Cultures at the University of Iowa, USA. Kwok-kan Tam is the Dean of the School of Humanities and Social Science and Chair Professor of English at Hang Seng University of Hong Kong. Mads Rosendahl Thomsen is Professor of Comparative Literature at the School of Communication and Culture at Aarhus University, Denmark. David Watson is Associate Professor of American Literature at the Department of English at Uppsala University, Sweden. Joakim Wrethed is Associate Professor in the Department of English at Stockholm University, Sweden.