This introduction positions the essays in this special issue in relation to Pascale Casanova’s model of inequality and value in the world republic of letters. Arguing that the vernacular has been an overlooked or underelaborated concept in subsequent world literary theorizations, the essay then proceeds to discuss the shifting value and nature of the vernacular – a concept that only has meaning if it is understood relationally. Both the vernacular and world literature are therefore utilized as heuristic tools, enabling dialogues across entrenched linguistic, cultural and theoretical boundaries. Hence, the unorthodox combination of South African, North American, Indian, Swedish, Russian, Mozambican and Latin American perspectives presented here.
In O Olho de Hertzog (2010), set in the immediate aftermath ofthe First World War, the Mozambican writer João Paulo Borges Coelho presentsa cosmopolitan panorama of colonial south-eastern Africa. «Mozambique» emergeshere not primarily as a Portuguese colonial space but as a site of multipleentanglements between interests: transnational and local, European and African,South African and Mozambican, British and German, colonial and proto-nationalist.In such a way, and differently from previous Mozambican literature, O Olhode Hertzog performs a complex act of worlding that exceeds the bounded colonial/national space of Mozambique, but resists synthesis. This cosmopolitanismcan be read expressive of the strained relations and constitutive hierarchies ofcolonial society as well as, by implication, of contemporary globalisation. Themost important index of such a critical cosmopolitanism is the trope of the «twoworlds» of Lourenço Marques, embodied in the central character João Albasini,legendary mestiço activist and founder of the proto-nationalist journal O BradoAfricano (1918-1974). Albasini functions as a Virgil for the protagonist HansMahrenholz’s descent into the colonial inferno of Mozambique. Not least byciting documentary material –Albasini’s editorials and shop signs in LourençoMarques– Coelho problematises the divisions of the colonial city, sustained byinternational capital, and provides a sharp contrast to the otherwise dominant«European» narrative of novel, which revolves around a fabled diamond andwhite South African intrigue.
With the March 1979 issue of the South African literary journal Staffrider as its empirical case, this chapter demonstrates how the journal can be read as a world-making enterprise. Based in an Arendtian understanding of world-making as a collective and public human undertaking that is intended to persist through time, the analysis focuses on how Staffrider’s cultivatation of literary value harnessed formal, linguistic and canonical resources of a wider literary world for local and politically radical ends. Hence, properly accounting for its significance in the history of South African literature requires that we move beyond its immediate location and moment, and adopt a broader and deeper analytical framework that recognises the relative autonomony of literature as an aspect of its world-making capacity. In its generality, this may seem like a harmless claim, but its interest lies in how such a harnessing of resources is done – and also how this may adjust or even challenge the received South African understanding of Staffrider’s importance.
With methodological support in Reinhart Koselleck’s notion of historical semantics, and an empirical focus on the Brazilian critic Antonio Candido (1918−2017), this article approaches “literature” as a layered concept that will always fail to function as that “plane of equivalence” that Aamir Mufti sees as an outcome of the Orientalist episteme. This failure is historical in the strongest sense; it derives from the condition that “history is never identical with its linguistic registration,” as Koselleck puts it. A concept will therefore, throughout its life span, always encompass a combination of persisting and new meanings. In this way, Candido and the São Paulo school of criticism that he was instrumental in forming can be read as a strong instance of “theory from the South” that exploits the malleability of the concept from within its historical situatedness and contributes thereby to the conceptual worlding of literature.
The central claim of this article is that the Kenyan writer Ngugi wa Thiong'o, known above all for his advocacy of African-language writing, performs in his essays a conceptual worlding of literature that serves to diversify its semantic content and thereby enable the recognition and expanded production of otherwise marginalised literatures. The logic of this conceptual worlding is read through a cosmopolitan-vernacular optic, which presupposes that Ngugi's interventions can neither be defined as ethnically particularist nor as expansively cosmopolitan. Rather, his approach 1) combines multiple literary 'ecologies', in Alex Beecroft's sense, and 2) attempts to reroute the temporality of 'literature' so that it is no longer reducible to Eurochronology. What unites these interventions is that they both draw on and attempt to recalibrate 'world literature' as a symbolic value in response to a postcolonial predicament. Three texts provide the empirical focus of the article: the department circular "On the Abolition of the English Department" that Ngugi co-authored in 1968 with Taban Lo Liyong and Henry Owuor-Anyumba; the essay "Literature and Society", first written in 1973; and "Memory, Restoration and African Renaissance", which is the third chapter in Something Torn and New from 2009.
By looking simultaneously at the succession of translations of Pessoa into Swedish and the critical reception of Pessoa in Sweden, this article investigates when and how Pessoa became a point of reference in the Swedish literary field. The hypothesis is that there currently are two overlapping versions of Pessoa in circulation in Sweden. One is Pessoa as a metonym for Lisbon, the other is Pessoa as a distinct author figure defined by his four main heteronyms but often disconnected from any specific corpus of poetry. In the 1980s, this author figure was enlisted (by the winning side) in a struggle between competing aesthetic paradigms in Sweden. Among the handful of critics and translators that have shaped the Swedish reception, this article looks especially at the pioneering contributions of Arne Lundgren and Bengt Holmqvist. Particular attention is then paid to Orons bok (Livro do desassossego). First published in 1991, Orons bok has since appeared in two more editions and is the translation that has reached the largest number of readers. In this regard, the Swedish reception follows an international tendency to construct Pessoa as the author of Livro.
The disciplinary fields of postcolonialism and world literature are currently engaged in some sharp exchanges over the global study of literature. With Mia Couto and Assia Djebar as its test cases, this article assesses and expands the debate. While postcolonial and world literature scholars clearly have some common ground, misunderstandings as well as disagreements prevail. More importantly, however, there are evident disciplinary blind spots on both sides that call for a combination of methodologies to account for literature as grounded in local, conflictual histories and as a circulational phenomenon that moves across languages and literary fields. Insofar as literature is a globally transportable institution, it cannot be understood exclusively in terms of political power and domination, but also as a world of its own and an enabling alternative to other domains of power. Conversely, the article argues, given the tensions between their subjective position and the transnational valency of literature, writers from colonies and postcolonies are of specific and paradigmatic importance to the theorization of world literature.
This article is an attempt to address on a theoretical level an antinomy in postcolonialapproaches to the question of temporal difference. Current scholarship tends bothto denounce the way in which the others of the Western self are placed notionally inanother time than the West and not only analytically affirm but indeed valorize multipletemporalities. I elaborate on the two problematic temporal frameworks—linear developmentalismand cultural relativism—that belong to a colonial legacy and generate theantinomy in question, and then proceed to discuss possible alternatives provided by aKoselleck-inspired approach to historical time as inherently plural. I thereby make twocentral claims: (1) postcolonial conceptions of multiple temporalities typically, if tacitly,associate time with culture, and hence risk reproducing the aporias of cultural relativism;(2) postcolonial metahistorical critique is commonly premised on a simplified and evenmonolithic understanding of Western modernity as an ideology of “linear progress.”Ultimately, I suggest that the solution lies in radicalizing, not discarding, the notion ofmultiple temporalities. Drawing on the Brazilian classic Os sertões as my key example,I also maintain that literary writing exhibits a unique “heterochronic” (in analogy with“heteroglossic”) potential, enabling a more refined understanding of temporal difference.
In an attempt to conceptualise literary multilingualism—or just “lingualism,” to use Robert Stockhammer’s term—without reifying language boundaries, this article reads literary fiction as a negotiation of different regimes of comprehensibility. These negotiations occur (1) on the level of the story-world, (2) materially, in the mediation of the narrative as book artefact and (3) between these two levels. Lingualism, then, is notjust context-sensitive but context-constituted. The apparently anarchic freedom of literary language is held in check by regimes of comprehensibility that ensure that even nonsense will carry meaning. The article’s analysis of works by Abdulrazak Gurnahand Zoë Wicomb shows how they engage potentially transformative moments of (in)comprehensibility in what Pratt named the colonial “contact zone.”
Set during the devastating war in Mozambique in the 1980s, Lília Momplé's short novel Neighbours tells the story of some few individuals in the capital of Maputo. Neighbours is as good a place as any to begin exploring the notion of “Southern Africa.” A distinctive aspect of Southern African literature from the twentieth century is what Ranka Primorac has identified as a “frontline” imaginary. The discussion is guided by the assumption that Southern African literature is formed by and to some extent formative of the embattled modernities of the subcontinent. In this chapter, special attention is paid to how verbal art is conditioned by its main enabling media technologies, orality and print, but without assuming a teleological progression from one to the other, or rigid boundaries between them.
A crucial theoretical question in world literature studies concerns the dual trajectories of extroversion and introversion, and how they relate to or even are predicated on each other. By discussing the examples of Tayeb Salih and, in particular, Sol Plaatje, this article tries to demonstrate that although the current turn towardmore “introverted” literary studies can be seen as justifiably critical of single-system modes of world literature theory, an attentiveness to the combined and contradictory trajectories of extroversion and introversion will enable a more situated and localized form of world literature studies that nonetheless evades the risk of reifying nationalor linguistic provenance. This also requires a stronger conception of reception history not as a transparent vessel for the literary object, but as an active agent in rendering specific texts or authorships readable as introverted or extroverted.
Whither literature in an age of semiotic overload? In a discussion of J.M. Coetzee’s El Polaco, Mohamed Mbougar Sarr’s La plus secrète mémoire des hommes and Zoë Wicomb’s Still Life, this essay suggests that a dialectic between textual evasion and the intertextual productivity of commentary, translation and generative AI might show the way forward.
Three letters to Hubert Jennings—two of them from the Afrikaans poet Uys Krige, one from the French poet Armand Guibert—prompt a reconsideration of the South African reception of Fernando Pessoa. Although this reception was and is clearly limited, Krige emerges here as a key individual connecting Jennings, Guibert, Roy Campbell and—by extension—Fernando Pessoa in a transnational literary network structured according to the logic of what Pascale Casonova has called “the world republic of letters” (La République Mondiale des Lettres). As such, however, this historical network has limited purchase on the contemporary concerns of South African literature. The letters alert us, thereby, not just to the inherent transnationalism of South African literature, but also to largely forgotten and, to some extent, compromised aspects of South African literary history.