Can the Subaltern laugh? Humour, translatability, and the inequalities of World Literature

ABSTRACT

This article discusses translatability and the figure of the illiterate “fanatic” – in the context of the Muslim Egyptian fellah – as the limit of World Literature. The illiterate/fellah’s words cannot reach global readers due to crises of access and translation that characterize the world literary periphery, and forms of “killjoy” critical reading that can silence “subaltern” voices in the written text. Using as case studies Waguih Ghali’s Beer in the Snooker Club (1964) and Amitav Ghosh’s In an Antique Land (1992), it argues that one can side-step the modernizing binary of literacy and fanaticism and hear subalterns “differently” by listening for humour. Humour becomes an instance of surprising translatability between the fellah and global literary centres, allowing him to shed the pejorative connotations of “fanaticism” and highlighting points of resistance in the form of laughter that crosses barriers of literacy, nation, religion, and power.

KEYWORDS:

• World Literature
• translatability
• humour
• modernity
• Egypt
• Amitav Ghosh

Acknowledgments

I would like to thank my advisor, Bruce Robbins, and my partner, Sophus Helle, for reading multiple iterations and providing generous feedback. Special thanks also to the editors of this journal, and the anonymous peer reviewers.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Aya Labanieh

Aya Labanieh is a doctoral candidate at Columbia University researching the intersection between imperial conspiracy, conspiracy theories, and postcolonial critique in the 20th-century Middle East. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in MOSF Journal of Science Fiction, Ancient Exchanges, Aeon, Politics/Letters, and Culturico, as well as the edited volumes Global Science Fiction and Approaches to Teaching Gilgamesh..