African-language literatures and the ‘transnational turn’ in Euro-American humanities

Abstract

This article relates the recent ‘transnational turn’ in Euro-American humanities to African literary criticism – and African-language literatures in particular. While some African intellectuals embraced the new globalist way of analysing literature, there is a strong resistance in African studies against it, as African intellectuals often work with a set of intellectual priorities and philosophical premises that are very different from those who inspired transnational criticism. The article argues, in particular, that world literature theories, just like postcolonial studies before them, perpetuate a vision of African-language literatures as locally constrained, peripheral, and pre-modern. Contrary to this vision, the article claims for African literature a right to disconnectivity on the one hand, and on the other calls for the construction of new epistemological connectivities between Afrophone and Europhone, oral and written literatures. At the same time, though, the transnational turn in the humanities offers some important insights into how to overcome the influence, in African literary criticism, of rigid forms of nativism and nationalism (including linguistic nativism and linguistic nationalism). Following these observations, the article proposes a study of African literature based on the idea of intersecting and multi-layered literary systems, some existing in relative autonomy, some interacting with each other across regions or within the same sociocultural space.

Keywords:

• literatures in African languages
• world literature
• transnational criticism
• literary theory
• African intellectual history
• oral literature

Acknowledgements

I would like to thank Francesca Orsini and Alena Rettová for their comments on an earlier version of this article.

Notes

1. The debate seems particularly prominent in the US academy, see Fishkin (2005) and Fluck, Pease, and Rowe (2011). The next paragraph will talk in particularly about transnationalism in literary studies; another field where scholars are increasingly discussing transnational approaches is historical studies, see Siegel (2005) and Saunier (2008).

2. For the many critiques to Mbembe and Afropolitanism, see the editorial to this issue.

3. For instance Fabian (1986) and Harries (1988) and, more recently, Makoni and Pennycook (2007), Pennycook and Makoni (2007), and Makoni, Brutt-Griffler, and Mashiri (2006).

4. A process, of course, by no means unique to the African case.

5. One example of comparative investigation is Rettová (2008).

6. Prendergast later collected Moretti's article and some of the early critical responses it provoked in the volume Debating World Literature (Prendergast 2004).

7. See the Thomas theorem in sociology, ‘if men define situations as real, they are real in their consequences’ (Thomas and Thomas 1928, 571–572). In the social world, according to Thomas, ‘subjective impressions can be projected on to life and thereby become real to projectors’.

8. For a more comprehensive discussion of the prejudices surrounding oral literature in Africa, see the seminal study by Ruth Finnegan, Oral Literature in Africa (1970), particularly pages 3–50.

9. It is against this assimilationism that Carli Coetzee (2013) proposes the notion of ‘accent’ and ‘accentedness’, to be understood as ‘resistance to absorption’. Accented thinking ‘brings difference to the surface, and does not strive for a unified and unitary position’ (2013, 167). Coetzee's argument against translation seems particularly relevant for world literature studies, whose proponents, although encouraging readers to learn as many foreign languages as possible, work almost exclusively in global languages like English and French. Coetzee opposes translation on the grounds that it ‘predominantly happens into English [ … ] for the benefit of monolingual English-speakers’ (2013, 5), thus reinforcing the cultural and social privileges of English speakers and ‘serving an agenda of neutralising accents and diluting heteroglossia’ (2013, 6).

10. The Ethiopians Käbbädä Mikael (1915–1999) and Mängəstu Lämma (1928–1988) are a case in point.