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Rethinking the Boundaries
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Stefan Helgesson
Stockholm University, Sweden
................ The disciplinary fields of postcolonialism and world literature are currently
Couto, Mia engaged in some sharp exchanges over the global study of literature. With Mia
Couto and Assia Djebar as its test cases, this essay assesses and expands the
Djebar, Assia debate. While postcolonial and world literature scholars clearly share some
common ground, misunderstandings as well as disagreements prevail. More
postcolonialism
importantly, however, there are evident disciplinary blind spots on both sides
translation that call for a combination of methodologies to account for literature as
grounded in local, conflictual histories and as a circulational phenomenon that
world moves across languages and literary fields. Insofar as literature is a globally
literature 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 essay argues, given the
tensions between their subjective position and the transnational valency of
literature, writers from colonies and postcolonies are of specific and paradig-
................ matic importance to the theorization of world literature.
.....................................................................................
interventions, 2014
Vol. 16, No. 4, 483500, http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/1369801X.2013.851825
# 2013 Taylor & Francis
i n t e r v e n t i o n s 16 :4 484
.........................
The disciplinary fields of postcolonialism and world literature currently
produce a number of conflicting views on literature and the elaboration of a
global framework for literary studies. One way to approach this polemic is
by seeing what a visual artist would call its negative spaces, the de facto
manifestation of blind spots on both sides of the debate. On such a reading,
there may be good reason up to a point to attempt a combination of
postcolonial and world literary methodologies that may account for
literature both as grounded in local, conflictual histories and as a circula-
tional phenomenon that moves across languages and literary fields. That is to
say, insofar as literature is a globally transportable but also changeable
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comeback round the year 2000. Moretti (2000), Casanova (1999) and David
Damrosch (2003) were the most prominent forerunners in what has since
widened to become a rich field of enquiry, not only as is sometimes claimed
in North America, but also in numerous locales, such as Turkey, France,
China and Scandinavia. A common and justified question is, of course, what
the qualifier world adds to the study of literature. Theorists in the field
typically provide two answers to this. The Moretti and Casanova response is
that literature, particularly since the nineteenth century, is produced and
received systemically on a transcontinental scale. Moretti borrows liberally
from Wallersteins world-systems theory and its centreperiphery model,
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while Casanova extends Bourdieus field concept to what she sees as the dual
system of national literatures shaped through international rivalry. The
Damroschian motivation for the qualifier world, by contrast, is more
focused on the individual literary work in circulation.
What could seem strange at the same time to those of us emerging from the
intense postcolonial debates of the 1990s was how these world literary
scholars skated past a number of hard questions about Eurocentric
epistemological privilege. Indeed, the most common rejoinder by postcolo-
nial scholars to these global vistas is that the world in world literature is
disingenuous and therefore naively or deliberately disconnects literature
from its own Euro-colonial historicity. A fairly recent example would be the
Web announcement for a world literature seminar in June 2011 at the School
of Oriental and African Studies, London, formulated by scholars in African
and Asian languages, which flatly declared that current models of world
literature proposed by Moretti, Casanova and others, with their singular
conception of modernity and its identification of the world reader as a
western reader, are so Eurocentric and poor in history and geography that
they are of little use to us (SOAS 2011). Peter Hitchcock, whose The Long
Space is one of the more sustained postcolonial attempts at engaging with
world literature theory, remarks along similar lines that
ongoing discussion about world literature, in the singular and plural, is both hugely
encompassing and strangely timid; it seems unaware of the enormous role played
by the institution of literature in the emergence of the hierarchies and identities that
structure relations between societies in the modern world. (Mufti 2010: 4656)
What this calls for is a denser analysis of how literature was produced on a
global scale as a differentiated object of knowledge in the nexus of
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cultural expression and the general downsizing of the humanities across the
world. Speaking of rescue points therefore also to the possibility of
affirmation, of claiming a specific value associated with literature as a
mode of reading, as a set of historical linguistic resources that is not
reducible only to a matter of domination and resistance. As I shall
demonstrate, this is necessary to bear in mind when approaching writers
such as Mia Couto from Mozambique and Assia Djebar from Algeria, given
how ambiguously they are positioned and position themselves in the literary
field.
What we find, then, when world literature scholars return the compliment
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Postcolonialism posits a direct link between literature and history, one that is
exclusively political. From this, it moves to an external criticism that runs the risk
of reducing the literary to the political, imposing a series of annexations or short-
circuits, and often passing in silence over the actual aesthetic, formal or stylistic
characteristics that actually make literature. (Casanova 2005: 71)
POSTCOLONIALISM AND WORL D LI TERATURE
Stefan Helgesson
........................
489
critics are concerned with reading the actual novel and how it addresses the
postcolonial tribulations of Mozambique (Rothwell 2004; Matusse 1998;
Leite 2003). The meaningfulness of such close reading, which grounds its
authority in an intimate knowledge of the novels local historical and
cultural circumstances, is obvious. What typically happens however and
this is a methodological sleight of hand that virtually defines literary
criticism is that the numerous mediations of the novel and its inscription
in the institutions of literature are bracketed, particularly the institutions of
publishing and translation. By looking through such mediations as though
they were transparent and ultimately tangential to the essence of the novel,
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way of naming the that he is able to read, Kindzus story gradually enables them to move away
contextuality of
translation is
from this degree zero of existence to retrieve a measure of self-awareness.
always a feature of The intimacy of Kindzus notebooks is transformed, within the fiction, into a
translation proper. literary experience. The novel does not, however, ultimately hypostatize
Kindzus writing. Not only does much of his narrative consist of oral stories
that he has listened to, but also at the closing moment of anamnesis, when
Kindzu recognizes Muidinga as his beloved Faridas long-lost son Gaspar,
the writing dissolves and becomes one with the land:
Blown by a wind born not from the air but from the ground itself, the sheets scatter
along the road. Then, one by one, the letters turn into grains of sand, and little by
little, all my writings are transformed into pages of earth. (Couto 2006: 213)
Writing never has the last word in Coutos poetics. It is malleable, subject to
a transformative intermediation with orality and relativized by the historical
pressures of postcolonial Mozambique. However and I return to this his
critique of the regime of writing is sanctioned and enabled by the very
institution of written and printed literature. This critique, which involves
different modes of public and intimate language use, is then repeatedly
retraced and made public in other literary contexts through translation.
If we take translations seriously as the effective life of a given text, then the
enabling effect of the institution(s) of literature is foregrounded at the cost of
the supposedly unmediated meaning of Coutos original. This effect is,
however, never consistent. If we return to the example of perturbabado, of
all the translations of Terra sonambula into German, English, French,
Swedish, Danish and Norwegian, it is only Marianne Eyres Swedish version
that matches perturbabado with a new neologism. This is not surprising,
given that wordplay stakes out the limits of translatability. On the other
hand, it is an integral part of Mia Coutos poetics, to which many of his book
titles bear witness: Interinvencoes (Interinventions), Jesusalem, Vinte e
Zinco (literally Twenty-five, but also Twenty and zinc, referring to the
metal roofs of the shanties in Maputo). For many Lusophone critics in
Portugal (Angius and Angius 1998; Cavacas 1999), Coutos inventive use of
POSTCOLONIALISM AND WORL D LI TERATURE
Stefan Helgesson
........................
493
Portuguese has been the central aspect of his work precisely that which
most translations render invisible.
In the case of peturbabado and blygforvirrad it is worth underlining
that neither word affords any specific cultural or, for that matter, political
inflection. It is at moments such as these that not only rigidly political but
also culturalist conceptions of postcolonial literature fall short. The two
neologisms are not, strictly speaking, examples of what postcolonial scholars
have identified as language variance, serving to provide an intimation of a
suppressed language within a hegemonic one (Ashcroft et al. 1989: 51;
Bandia 2008). And rather than marking cultural difference, which for
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(1993: 132). In the historical chapters that narrate the French conquest of
Algeria in the 1830s and that are based mainly on French accounts of the
war, Djebar tries to reimagine the presence of other languages so as to make
the act of translation and its conflictual historicity visible:
One of Bu Mazas lieutenants, El-Gobbi, also wrote his account of the events . . .
When Berard composes his memoirs, he declares that he had knowledge of El-
Gobbis account. Could he perhaps have read the translation of the Arabic text, or
might he have had a copy of the original in his hands? For the moment, this is lost.
(Djebar 1993: 100)
Djebar is however not concerned only or even primarily with French and
Arabic as named, formalized languages. What emerges in Lamour, la
fantasia is rather a tension between the strictures of literary French and the
wealth of different, embodied moments of language use particularly the
cries, laughter, conversations of women that her writing reaches for but
never will attain:
Speaking of oneself in a language other than that of the elders is indeed to unveil
oneself, not only to emerge from childhood but to leave it, never to return. (Djebar
1993: 1567)
The intense corporeality of this meditation serves above all to mourn the loss
of an ephemeral embodiment of multiple languages. Djebars written French,
at the very moment that it is directed towards those early, heteroglossic
memories, renders them lifeless.
i n t e r v e n t i o n s 16 :4 496
.........................
Insofar as Djebar is drawing our attention to the colonial history of
French, this is familiar postcolonial terrain, captured in the trope of writing
back. Postcolonial criticism tends however to read the directly political and
experiential dimensions of such formulations while ignoring the complexities
of their mediation. Or conversely, as in Graham Huggans critique of the
industry of postcoloniality, mediation and commodification are virtually all
that remain and dismissed accordingly as betrayals of true, politically
radical postcolonialism (2001: 133). Here we can see again that the world
literary perspective may contribute with an account of (1) literature as a type
of language use with boundaries of its own that nonetheless licenses the
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Peut-etre meme, pendant longtemps, me suis-je sentie portee le plus souvent par des
voix non francaises elles qui me hantent et qui se trouvaient etre souvent voix
ennemies de loccupant pour les ramener, elles, justement en les inscrivant et je
devais, obscurement contrainte, en trouver lequivalence, sans les deformer, mais
sans hativement les traduire . . .
Oui, ramener les voix non francophones les gutturales, les ensauvagees, les
insoumises jusqua un texte francais qui devient enfin mien. (Djebar 1999: 29)
Perhaps it is even so that I, for a long time now, have most often felt myself carried
by non-French voices which haunt me and have for the most part been voices of
enmity in relation to the conqueror so as to reinstate them by inscribing them,
hence challenging me, obscurely constrained, to find their equivalence, without
misshaping them, but also without translating them prematurely . . .
Yes, to reinstate the non-Francophone voices the guttural, the brutalized, the
disobedient voices in a text in French that ultimately becomes mine. (my
translation)
i n t e r v e n t i o n s 16 :4 498
.........................
Pointedly, Djebar describes herself in this essay as Francographic rather
than Francophone, which indicates with precision how French just like
Portuguese carries a particular authority as a written and printed language
that can be separated from the various oral, socially embedded communica-
tion practices called French. Even more to the point, we see how in the
graphie, the subjective and systemic/institutional aspects of literature
converge. The writing that Djebar indicates as hers is already a translation
of all the different languages and linguistic registers into the literary and
institutional protocols of French.
It is here, in this active translational work by writers such as Couto and
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concerns, it is not stating too much that postcolonial and colonial writers
have been among the first to understand the ambiguous logic of literature as
a globalized phenomenon. What remains understudied in the all too often
monolingual world of postcolonial studies is how their ensuing poetics of
cultural and linguistic difference is reinscribed and made public in multiple
literary networks. For all its inequality, the world of world literature relies
for its existence on the contingent desire for literary inventiveness rather than
political affirmation.
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