Multilingual locals and textual circulation before colonialism

Against the nationalist production of monolingual literary histories, this introduction to the special section “Multilingual Locals” urges literary and intellectual historians to “place languages back into dialogue.” Colonialism did not always affect, let alone silence, cultural actors, but it did introduce a language ideology that associated one language to one community, and vice versa. Comparing the precolonial and the colonial period entails looking at multilingual systems, whose internal hierarchies and regional/transnational power dynamics evolved in time, but without reducing the plurality of languages involved. The essay suggests different ways in which we can place languages back into dialogue. One is looking at multilingual traces within a given text; another approach moves beyond the text to explore how multilingual canons and curricula were embodied in individuals or coexisted within the same social space. A third approach is an analysis of circuits and circulation. Finally, multilingualism can be turned into the plural as a study of comparative multilingualisms. Through these and other approaches, we can trace how colonial languages reorganized multilingual language systems but were far from replacing them, contrary to the stated objectives of monolingual nationalist ideologies

The Literary World of the North African taghrība: Novelization, Locatedness and World Literature

The novels by North African novelists Waciny Laredj, Majid Toubia and Abdelrahim Lahbibi that refashioned the traditional Arabic genre of the taghrība inspired by the medieval epic of Taghrība of Banū Hilāl, still a living oral tradition in the region, offer an interesting case-study of location in world literature. They circulate both within national (Algerian, Egyptian and Moroccan) literary systems and the pan-Arab literary field while maintaining a distinct aesthetic and political locality. In these novels, the literary life of the North African taghrība takes forms and meanings that are geographically and historically located and that are shaped by the positionality of the authors. This paper intervenes in the discussion on location in world literature from the perspective of Arabic novelistic traditions by showing that the pan-Arabic literary field itself is far from homogenous but is marked by a diversity of narrative styles and techniques that can be both local/localised and transregional at the same time. Therefore, we need to shift our understanding of world literature beyond macro-models of “world-system” that assume a universally shared set of literary values and tastes

Multilingual locals and significant geographies: For a ground-up and located approach to world literature

‘World literature’ has been much theorized and re-theorized in recent years as comparative literature for the globalized age. As it moves out of the Euro-American ‘core’ of earlier comparative literature, it embraces those of us who work on Asian, Middle Eastern and African literatures, spurring us on to participate in this broader conversation and engage more directly and explicitly with the categories and models that underpin world literature.1 Yet its theoretical approaches based on world-system theory, diffusion and circulation, its geographical meta-categories such as ‘world’ and ‘global’, and its linear and teleological historical narratives that inevitably begin with Goethe all seem to imprison non-Western literatures in categories, timelines and explanations that do not fit, rather than genuinely interrogate them

Significant Geographies: in lieu of world literature

One of the problems with current theories of world literature is that the term “world” is insufficiently probed and theorized. As a category, “world” is too generic and suggests a continuity and seamlessness that are both deceptive and self-fulfilling. Easy invocations of “world” and “global” (novel, literary marketplace) replicate the blindspots that Sanjay Krishnan identified when he called the global an instituted perspective, with macro-theories drawing unproblematically on theories of globalization elaborated in the social sciences. Instead, in our comparative project Multilingual Locals and Significant Geographies we argue that to theorize world literature taking on board the complexities, layers and multiplicity of “literatures in the world” (as S. Shankar prefers to call it), we need a richer spatial imagination of the “world.” Here we propose the notion of “significant geographies” as the conceptual, imaginative, and real geographies that texts, authors, and language communities inhabit, produce, and reach out to

The aesthetics and politics of ‘reading together’ Moroccan novels in Arabic and French

This paper attempts to break down the common practices of reading multilingual Moroccan novels, particularly Moroccan postcolonial novels in Arabic and French. I argue that dominant reading practices are based on binary oppositions marked by a reductionist understanding of language and cultural politics in Morocco. They place the Moroccan novel in Arabic and French in independent traditions with the presupposition that they have no impact on each other, thereby reifying each tradition. They also ignore the similar historical, social and cultural context from which these novels emerge, and tend to reinforce the marginalisation of the Moroccan novel within hegemonic single-language literary systems such as the Francophone or Arabic literary traditions. I advocate ‘reading together’ – or an entangled comparative reading of – postcolonial Moroccan novels in Arabic and French, a reading that privileges the specificity of the literary traditions in Morocco rather than language categorisation, and that considers their mutual historical, cultural, geographical, political, and aesthetic interweaving and implications

Writing in London. Home and Languaging in the Work of London Poets of Chinese Descent

This essay discusses literary works produced in London by poets of Chinese descent who are foreign-born or London native. Some of these works are written in English, and some in Chinese. The aim is to discuss poetry that has emphatically or reluctantly embraced the identity narrative, talking of home and belonging in substantially different ways from each other, according to each poet’s individual relationship with movement, migration, and stability. Therefore, through the use of the phrase ‘London poets of Chinese descent’, I do not aim at tracing a shared sense of identity, but instead I am interested in using London as a method for an oblique reading that recognises the variety of angles and approaches in these poets’ individual experience, history and circumstances that can range from occasional travel to political exile

The ethics and politics of hospitality in contemporary French society: "Beur" literary translations

The thesis examines the issue of the ethics and politics of hospitality in the French contemporary context in relation to the diasporic populations of the descendants of post-war North African immigrants or the 'Beur', using an approach which combines philosophy, sociology and literature. I argue that the concept of hospitality has been framed by the enduring effects of colonial legacy, the legacy of the 'camp-thinking' mentality marked by bio-cultural kinship and the ties of blood or 'race' as the basis for belonging to a nation. I maintain that hospitality is exactly the anti-logic of the camp-thinking mentality in its rejection of closure and overdetermination by keeping the political open to the ethical. Even though a hiatus between the ethics and the politics of hospitality exists, the two can not exist separately. I argue that this aporia does not mean paralysis, but in fact, it means the primacy of the ethics of hospitality over politics, and thus, keeps alive the danger of hostility in the making of the politics of hospitality by means of 'political invention' that respects the uniqueness of the Other and that does not exclude him/her every time a decision is taken. The language of deconstruction and its political and ethical rejection of nationalisms, borders and centres reflects the experience of those who are marginalised at the peripheries of societies, whom I call the hyphenated peoples or diasporic populations like the Beurs. But at the same time, this language enables them to assert and articulate their own existence, their own politics and identities in a way that opens new possibilities of resistance to violence and exclusion. Jacques Derrida's concepts of marginality, diaspora, translation and democracy-to-come express the experience of minority diasporic groups such as the Beurs in France. I attempt a close deconstructive reading of the Beur texts in order to trace their translations of the contradictions of French hospitality and the way the Beurs have been 'racialised' as an 'external group' threatening the supposed 'purity' of the French national culture by their physical, cultural and religious 'difference' though they are French citizens with strong affiliations with France. I argue that with their mixed origins and cultural multiplicity, the Beurs resist the authority of the 'constructed' and 'mythical' national purity and cultural determinis1n, since their position at the threshold between communities (the French and the North African immigrant communities) and national camps (the French and the North Africans) allows them to offer a basis for solidarity that transcends ethnic absolutism and national belonging. I argue in my thesis that it is the diasporic populations such as the Beurs in France that can open up hospitality to an attitude beyond nationalistic determinism and xenophobia