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Postcolonial Studies
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Postcolonialism and World Literature

a
Stefan Helgesson
a
Stockholm University, Sweden
Published online: 24 Oct 2013.

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To cite this article: Stefan Helgesson (2014) Postcolonialism and World Literature, Interventions:
International Journal of Postcolonial Studies, 16:4, 483-500, DOI: 10.1080/1369801X.2013.851825

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 POSTCOLONIALISM AND WORLD
L I T E R AT U R E
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, 483
500, 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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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, given how the work by writers from
colonies and postcolonies emerges in the force field between their irreducibly
subjective positions and other, internationally more influential fields of
literary and academic production, one should insist that postcolonial writing
is of paradigmatic importance to the theorization of world literature. In such
an act of theorization, ‘translation’ deserves pride of place as a pivotal
concept both in reading the poetics of individual writers and in investigating
how this work travels across continents and languages. I intend to
demonstrate this by example later in the essay by discussing work by Mia
Couto from Mozambique and Assia Djebar from Algeria.
Currently, of course, a merging of methodologies may seem far off the
1 Emily Apter’s agenda.1 The main reason for this is fairly clear: invested as both sides are in
Against World the current ‘upscaling’ of the humanities to a global level, conflicts around the
Literature, which
appeared after I validity of claims about both the ‘world’ and ‘literature’ will arise. There may
wrote this article, has also be a deeper contradiction between their respective intellectual trajec-
however contributed tories. If world literature endeavours ‘to be a thorn in the side, a permanent
towards drawing the
two fields together
intellectual challenge to national literatures’ (Moretti 2000: 68), then
with recourse to postcolonialism first and foremost challenges the manifold legacies of
philological Eurocentrism. In Graham Huggan’s words, it ‘posits itself as anticolonial’
methods. Apter’s
and ‘works towards the dissolution of imperial epistemologies and institu-
emphasis on political
and linguistic fault tional structures’ (Huggan 2001: 28). Even more to the point, if postcolo-
lines (the nialism has drawn on the energies of anticolonial nationalism, the civil rights
‘Untranslatable’) movement in the United States, and ‘third-worldist’ activism in Europe,
deepens rather than
debunks the notion which all spoke to the urgent need for social justice, world literature studies
of world literature. today emerges at a moment when clearly hierarchical new superpowers

such as India and China
with an investment in classicist literary heritages
have risen to prominence. Can these trajectories be combined? Not always.
Even so, I wish to salvage what I see as the potential for a mutually enriching
exchange between the two disciplinary fields.
To recapitulate: having lain dead and buried in the ‘theory’ decades of the
1970s and 1980s, the term ‘world literature’ made a rather spectacular
 POSTCOLONIALISM AND WORL D LI TERATURE
Stefan Helgesson
........................
485

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 Wallerstein’s world-systems theory and its centre
periphery model,
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while Casanova extends Bourdieu’s 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

the world in world literature is studiously neutral and requires no further

qualification: it is the twenty-first century ghost of nineteenth-century aestheticism
that at once announces the best that has been thought and said. Indeed, for all the
assumed neutrality, world literature has the drab hierarchization of petty-
bourgeois desire. At the very least it allows one to consume postcolonialism
without that nasty taste of social struggle in which a reader’s own cosmopolitanism
may be at stake. (Hitchcock 2010: 5)

Here, too, as in the SOAS announcement, ‘a reader’ should be read as a

particular ‘western reader’. This particular rhetorical manoeuvre is strangely
unconvincing in our age of heady geopolitical shifts (think of the influential
 i n t e r v e n t i o n s
16 :4 486
.........................
readers in our day from India, China, Brazil, Nigeria . . .), but if we turn to
Aamir Mufti the argument gains traction. In Mufti’s account, the

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: 465
6)

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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colonialism and orientalist philology. Rather than a sanctioned realm for

aesthetic contemplation, Mufti sees literature as constitutively inscribed in
the colonial ordering of the world with enduring consequences for how the
dominant conception of ‘literature’ is shaped. His central example is the
Calcutta school of orientalism, with its determined attempt at aligning South
Asian and European languages and textual traditions within a comprehen-
sive comparative framework. One result of this process, Mufti contends, is
that ‘the Latinate term literature, and the set of its cognates in the Western
languages, together with a number of calques (or loan translations) in the
languages of the global South, now provide the dominant, universalizing, but
by no means absolute vocabulary for the comprehension of verbal
textual
expression worldwide’ (2010: 488; original emphasis). This inescapable and
problematic historicity of the very term ‘literature’ is indeed all too often
conveniently ignored and provides a crucial starting point for the type of
institutionally grounded critique outlined in this essay.
Mufti’s historicizing postcolonial analysis, with its global implications,
does have an edge over many instances of world literature studies which
appear limited as theorizations of literature in the long history of globaliza-
tion. Moretti’s and Casanova’s systemic models are indeed quite inflexibly
Eurocentric, despite their acknowledgement of systemic inequality and even
the possibility of rebellion within the system. As for Damrosch’s influential
definition, whereby a work enters world literature by first ‘being read as
literature’ and secondly by ‘circulating out into a broader world beyond its
linguistic and cultural point of origin’ (2003: 6), it is for all its elegance and
generosity not sustained by a strong analysis of how the very act of reading a
text ‘as literature’ is shaped historically.
It is, however, possible to approach this issue from another direction. If we
read world literature as, in the words of Jean Franco, an attempt ‘to rescue
the specificity of literature in the face of cultural studies’ (2006: 445), the
terms of judgement will be different. What does the notion of ‘rescue’ imply
here? To begin with, it turns the tables on the idea that literature is
‘dominant’. On the contrary, literature can be seen as being under threat
from the proliferation of new media technologies, alternative forms of
 POSTCOLONIALISM AND WORL D LI TERATURE
Stefan Helgesson
........................
487

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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and assess postcolonialism, is less of a focus on ‘world’ and more on the

failure of postcolonial studies to read ‘literature’ on its own terms.
Thomsen’s Mapping World Literature (2008) provides an interesting
example of this line of argument. Although Thomsen does argue that
postcolonialism is one of the energizing factors behind the current interest in
world literature, he finds its disciplinary scope too limited. Firstly, because
postcolonial literature ‘is mostly attached to young nations’ this means that
postcolonialism generally is too attached to the category of the nation and
national literature to be relevant to the study of transnational literature in a
transnational age (2008: 24). Secondly, he argues that the dichotomy
between authenticity and hybridity remains unresolved in the postcolonial
field. Although both sides ‘obviously have something going for them’,
Thomsen seems to be saying that there is a conceptual incommensurability
between notions of authenticity and hybridity (2008: 24). Thirdly, post-
colonial scholars have failed to provide ‘convincing ideas and methods for
dealing with the literature of the traditional centres’ and hence demonstrate a
‘lack of interest in seeing post-colonial literature as part of the same system
as the literature of the West, as well as literature from the West that could
qualify as post-colonial literature’ (2008: 25).
Even if we remain alert to Thomsen’s own disclaimer that his critique
‘does not apply to the whole paradigm and institutional network [of
postcolonialism] as such’ (2008: 24), these points seem however to miss
their mark. To begin with, where has transnationalism been theorized and
the category of the nation interrogated if not in a plethora of postcolonial
investigations (Appadurai 1996; Bhabha 1994; Boehmer 1995, 2002, 2005;
Chakrabarty 2000; Gilroy 1993)? Indeed, Neil Lazarus faults postcolonial-
ism precisely for what he sees as ‘an undifferentiating disavowal of all forms
of nationalism and a corresponding exaltation of migrancy’ (2011: 21), and
Thomsen himself refers to Gayatri Spivak’s criticism of relying too heavily
on the national paradigm in literary studies (2008: 25). Thomsen’s second
claim, emerging from what I see as a partial misreading of ‘authenticity’ as
essentialism in Elleke Boehmer’s work, also misses the target. Is this really
the kind of dichotomy that can be ‘resolved’? Doesn’t this
as indeed I am
 i n t e r v e n t i o n s
16 :4 488
.........................
arguing in this essay
have more to do with any given writer’s negotiation
between local, and irreducibly personal, demands and transnational modes
of writing? This negotiation will also necessarily be unique in each instance
(and this applies to any act of translation as well), which is why it does not
lend itself well to generalizing claims about the postcolonial or the migrant
experience. The mistake would be to block either the local/personal or
transnational pole from view, not to keep both in play. Thomsen’s third
claim also apparently ignores that academic postcolonialism began precisely
as a critique of literature of the traditional centres (Said 1978, 1993; Spivak
1985; Viswanathan 1989) and as a development of new methods of reading
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western and ‘other’ literature together, as differentiated expressions of the

complex global historical moment of imperialism (Ashcroft et al. 1989; Said
1993; Boehmer 1995).
However, it is when Thomsen discusses the deep time of literary cultures
and the shifting geographical centres of literature through history that his
claim gathers strength. There are indeed vast archives of literature that are
simply not on the radar of postcolonial studies. To the European examples
mentioned by Thomsen, such as nineteenth-century Russian and Scandina-
vian literature, one could add any number of literary cultures through
history, including Japanese court poetry, pre-Islamic Arabic poetry and
Chinese classical novels. With respect to the wide world of interlinked
literary cultures (and bracketing the question of the transcultural validity of
‘literature’ as a concept), it is undoubtedly the case that postcolonial studies
is limited in its scope. Indeed, even if we remain within the temporal ambit of
postcolonialism, there are increasing complaints that scholars have neglected
not only the diversity but also the locally grounded qualities of literary
production in the postcolonized world (Lazarus 2011; Gikandi 2011).
Conversely, and this will be my subsequent focus in this essay, the
transposition of the work of internationally successful postcolonial writers
such as Couto and Djebar to such diverse settings as Brazil, France, Israel,
Norway and the Czech Republic calls for a wider, yet specifically literary,
analytical perspective for which the metropole
colony optic of postcoloni-
alism will not suffice.
It seems then that the epistemological needs of literary scholarship on a
transnational and global scale are only partially met by postcolonial studies.
The bluntest statement along these lines comes from Casanova:

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

If Thomsen emphasizes that postcolonialism ignores literary cultures and

historical periods outside of the colonial
imperial drama, Casanova argues
rather that literature must be understood as an agonistic world of its own
‘whose divisions and frontiers are relatively independent of political and
linguistic borders’, a world ‘with its own laws, its own history, its specific
revolts and revolutions; a market where non-market values are traded,
within a non-economic economy’ (2005: 72). The validity of Casanova’s
outlook hinges once again on the extent to which postcolonial scholars have
either sidestepped literature or read it instrumentally with a view to
addressing issues relating to history, politics, gender, etc. (and here one
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could mention works such as Ahmed 2004; Chakrabarty 2000; Mohanty

2003; Boehmer 2005; Huggan 2001).
The enabling point that I wish to retain in positing literature, on a
Bourdieuan understanding, as a world of its own is that it makes the full
range of the literary visible, from local generic conventions and the singular
encounter between a reader and a text (Attridge 2004) all the way to the
global flows of genres, books and translations across dozens of languages
(Heilbron 1999; Sapiro 2008; Moretti 2000, 2005). It is also a world,
regardless of any insistence on untranslatability or local irreducibility, whose
texts are by definition made public, mediated, either prior to the critic’s
intervention or as a result of it. For the term ‘literature’ to be useful, it must
include a minimal notion of public address of some kind, as distinct from,
say, epistolary communication intended for one individual only. Such a
minimal notion also applies to orature, moreover: a proverb or the
performance of a praise poem is public in a way that a conversation
between two friends is not (Lorentzon 2006).
Hence, although the exchanges between postcolonial and world literature
scholars may often be read merely as field-defining exercises, replete with
simplifications and even caricatures of the ‘other’ side, they do help us to
refocus the substance and relevance of the literary. What is literature? Is it
only valid as a phenomenon either to be critically deconstructed or as a
vehicle for political or historical analysis? Or does literature merit another
order of attention than the purely political, given the peculiarity of poetic
language as well as its fluidity in translation?
I will approach these questions by focusing at first on a single word. In
Marianne Eyre’s Swedish translation of the Mozambican writer Mia Couto’s
novel Terra sonâmbula, called Sömngångarland in Swedish and
Sleepwalking Land in English, we come across the neologism ‘blygförvirrad’
(Couto 1995: 109). It doesn’t quite exist in Swedish, but its combination of
‘shy’ and ‘confused’ is nonetheless understandable. Turning to Mia Couto’s
original, we see that this is an innovative rendering of what in Portuguese
reads as ‘perturbabado’ (Couto 2009a: 106). Couto’s neologism is con-
structed out of ‘perturbado’, or ‘perturbed’ in English
and in David
 i n t e r v e n t i o n s
16 :4 490
.........................
Brookshaw’s English translation the word is indeed normalized in such a
way. The redundant syllable ‘ba’
which has recurred in all ten Portuguese
editions of Terra to date, so it is not a typo
creates an auditory, stammering
effect in Portuguese, as though the first-person narrator had pronounced the
word in a perturbed state of mind. It is this that Marianne Eyre has amplified
semantically (rather than phonetically) with ‘blygförvirrad’.
In the English translation the full sentence reads: ‘I went in, perturbed,
aflame with intention’ (Couto 2006: 96); in Swedish: ‘Omtumlad trädde jag
in till henne, blygförvirrad och brinnande av hemliga avsikter’ (Couto 1995:
109); in Portuguese: ‘Entrei, perturbabado, ardendo de intenção’ (Couto
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2009a: 140). The ‘I’ is Kindzu, the central narrator of this novel. To be
precise, he is the author of the notebooks that two other protagonists,
Muidinga and Tuahir, find in the burnt-out remains of a bus. As readers of
Couto’s novel, we read these notebooks in tandem with Muidinga and
Tuahir, and follow thereby their painful, gradual reconstruction of selfhood
amid the devastation of war. The quoted sentence belongs nonetheless to
Kindzu’s own narrative; the situation is the erotically charged encounter
between him and the young girl Farida, on board a wrecked ship.
I wish to underline here that I am already dealing with three versions of
supposedly the same word and the same sentence in a given novel. I could
also throw into the mix the French (Couto 1994a), Danish (Couto 2000),
German (Couto 1994b) and Norwegian (Couto 1994c) versions that I have
consulted. Not to mention Dutch (Couto 1996), Greek (2003a), Czech
(Couto 2003b), Hebrew (Couto 2003c), Spanish (1998), Italian (1999) and a
handful of other translations of Terra sonâmbula whose existence can be
ascertained through databases such as the Index Translationum, WorldCat,
Karlsruher Virtueller Katalog, various national library catalogues and so on,
but that I have not yet been able to get hold of physically. Even before
translation proper, of course, the novel has also been published in separate
(and multiple) Lusophone editions in Mozambique, Portugal and Brazil. Mia
Couto belongs in other words to the select group of African writers who
succeed in numerous literary networks. Or that is perhaps putting it too
mildly: the combination of transcontinental Portuguese editions and
subsequent translations makes Couto’s work nothing less than spectacularly
global. Other types of consecration could be mentioned to strengthen this
claim, such as the inclusion of Terra sonâmbula among the top 12 on the
Africa’s 100 best books list, the prestigious Premio Unione Latina di
Letterature Romanze that he was awarded in Rome in 2007, or the fact
that he was one of the keynote speakers at the first WALTIC conference in
Stockholm in 2008 (a global conference for literary authors and translators).
Typically, this high international profile seldom merits more than a
passing mention in Couto-criticism
if mentioned at all
and the existence
of widely dispersed translations and editions is routinely ignored. Instead,
 POSTCOLONIALISM AND WORL D LI TERATURE
Stefan Helgesson
........................
491

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 novel’s 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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the close-reading critic supposedly attains an im-mediate level of a politically

or nationally inflected poetics. It is here, in the fault line between immediacy
and mediation, that I discern a methodological need for combining
postcolonial close reading with an institutional and circulational world
literary reading. What links these two levels, I wish to argue, is translation.
To clarify: translation operates here both at the level of the writing
produced individually by Mia Couto and Assia Djebar and as a systemic
phenomenon involving an ever expanding number of additional agents.
Postcolonial writing emerges precisely by engaging with the vicissitudes of
translation, as when Homi Bhabha states that ‘it is the ‘‘inter’’
the cutting
edge of translation and negotiation, the in-between space
that carries the
burden of the meaning of culture’ (Bhabha 1994: 38; see also Young 2001;
Tymoczko 1998; Hitchcock 2010: 40
1). The traffic between languages, the
negotiation between the domestic and the foreign, the predicament of having
to resort to a ‘colonial’ language, the need to translate the untranslatable

these often fraught concerns of writers in the postcolonized world mark out
an acute awareness not only of the writerly subject’s limited agency
(specifically as a writer) but also of the qualified yet emancipatory
possibilities on offer in the sections of the world literary networks that
they actively speak to and participate in. Various modes of translation, in
other words, are already constitutive of their ‘original’ work, but this is then
reinscribed, transformed and even ironized in subsequent translations.
Translation proper and the individual act of self-reflexive writing may
seem to be distinct from each, but both negotiate the boundaries of the
literary.2 To be precise, they negotiate the boundaries of the singular literary
2 I should point out text and of the literary as an institutional phenomenon.
that I use the term Questions of positionality, modes of address and language use are central
‘translation proper’
synonymously with to this analysis. What are the various audiences implied by a given text (and
what Roman versions of it)? What does the institutionally recognized literary use of
Jakobson once called language enable, in contrast to discursive or didactic uses of language? As
‘interlingual
translation’ in order
Phillip Rothwell (2004: 53
90) has observed, different modes of address are
to designate what is precisely what Mia Couto’s texts bring into play. This is noticeable both in
commonsensically his frequent use of the epistolary form and the multiple ways in which he
 i n t e r v e n t i o n s
16 :4 492
.........................
thought of as invokes and stages Mozambican orality. He does so, nonetheless, in the
translation: the
rewriting of a given
publicly and transnationally mediated form of printed literature, an obvious
text in another but crucial fact easily overlooked if only because of the assumed transpar-
language. It is not ency of print in the tradition of literary criticism.
intended as a means
As a case in point, we see how Terra sonâmbula is composed as an implied
to distinguish
between ‘real’ dialogue between the increasingly entangled stories of, on the one hand,
translation and Muidinga and Tuahir, and, on the other, the story that Kindzu tells in his
cultural translation; notebooks. At the beginning of the novel, Muidinga and Tuahir belong
on the contrary,
cultural translation
among the living dead, with neither memory nor hope. When they salvage
which is simply one the notebooks from the burnt-out wreck of a bus, and Muidinga discovers
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way of naming the that he is able to read, Kindzu’s 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 Kindzu’s notebooks is transformed, within the fiction, into a
translation proper. literary experience. The novel does not, however, ultimately hypostatize
Kindzu’s 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 Farida’s 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 Couto’s 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 Couto’s original. This effect is,
however, never consistent. If we return to the example of ‘perturbabado’, of
all the translations of Terra sonâmbula into German, English, French,
Swedish, Danish and Norwegian, it is only Marianne Eyre’s 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 Couto’s poetics, to which many of his book
titles bear witness: Interinvenções (‘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), Couto’s inventive use of
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Stefan Helgesson
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493

Portuguese has been the central aspect of his work
precisely that which
most translations render invisible.
In the case of ‘peturbabado’ and ‘blygförvirrad’ 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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instance Maria Tymoczko (1998) has seen as a given of postcolonial

literature, they are the outcome of that free play enabled by what is
recognized as the literary use of language. Here we are in the gratuitous
presence of the literary as a translational and institutionally sustained
phenomenon. The capacity of the words to generate meaning depends
exclusively on their proximity to and deviation from the norms of written
Portuguese and Swedish, respectively. Both words remain securely within the
boundaries of their respective languages, as these are encoded and
regimented institutionally, but they also push against these boundaries,
thanks to the licence
note the word
that is granted literature.
This can be contrasted with another type of neologism, also from Terra: ‘A
chuva timbilava no tecto do machimbombo’ (Couto 2009b: 179). This is
more in line with language variance and a more predictable marker of
cultural difference that many non-African readers expect in a novel from
Africa. The timbila
a musical instrument proper to southern Mozambique

is turned into a verb by Couto to describe the sound of rain falling on, well,
the machimbombo. A machimbombo, in turn, is a colloquial Mozambican
word for ‘bus’, which is encountered already in the first chapter (in the
original) but only rarely used by the translators. Eyre uses it a lot,
Brookshaw never. In keeping with his domesticating strategy, Brookshaw
renders this last sentence as ‘The rain was falling tunefully on the roof of the
bus’ (Couto 2006: 126), replacing the metaphorical ‘timbilava’ with the
merely descriptive ‘falling tunefully’. Karin von Schweder-Schreiner renders
this in German as ‘Der Regen trommelt auf das Busdach’ (Couto 1994b:
129), which substitutes the generically ‘African’ drum for the timbila. In
Eyre’s translation we read ‘Regnet spelar marimba på busstaket’ (Couto
1995: 139; ‘The rain plays marimba on the roof of the bus’) just as Ole
Eistrup writes in Danish ‘Regnen spiller marimba på taget af bussen’ (Couto
2000: 145), which falls midway between Brookshaw’s domestication and
Couto’s inventive use of Portuguese. Both Eyre and Eistrup refrain from
using ‘machimbombo’ and recode the timbila as the somewhat exotic
but
in Scandinavia
familiar instrument marimba, hence retaining the
metaphor but without inventing a new verb.
 i n t e r v e n t i o n s
16 :4 494
.........................
These details, I wish to argue, help us bypass the more harshly generalizing
and systematizing features of both postcolonial and world literature theory,
and focus instead on what, in the final instance, are literary texts actualized
in the event of reading, in reading as a singular event (Attridge 2004). Or, as
Gayatri Spivak phrases it, ‘the singular is the always universalizable, never
the universal’ (2011: 466). I take her to mean that such universalizability is
predicated on the work of the careful, critical reader
and, I would add, on
the work of the translator.
The difference between my two examples of neologisms, which can be
codified as the difference between linguistically and culturally generated
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wordplay, also enables us to distinguish between local, historically grounded

and more distinctly world literary aspects
literature as sanctioned,
gratuitous wordplay that may or may not be reinscribed in translation

of Couto’s narrative. These are different orders of singularity; both are
crucially important to the constitution of his work.
With respect to translation and multiple literary networks, we should
however note once again that the negotiation of different audiences does not
begin when Couto is translated into other languages. On the contrary, it is a
defining feature of his situation as a writer. Materially, this is evident from
the fact that most of his readers are to be found in Portugal and Brazil, and
that his local Mozambican publisher Ndjira is a subsidiary of the Portuguese
publishing house Caminho. We see something similar in the case of Assia
Djebar, who throughout her long career beginning in 1957
with the
exception of a decade-long hiatus in the 1970s
has written in French and
published her books in Paris. She was elected a member of the Academie
française in 2006 and lived for many years in New York, which further
emphasizes her far from easy relationship with Algeria. She is, as Jane
Hiddleston (2006: 1) puts it, at once ‘preoccupied with and severed from her
native land’ and in this respect entirely reliant on her writing as the only
remaining connection to her past.
These writers depend, in effect, on ‘other’ literary fields in their endeavour
to function precisely as writers. They are stretched between their personal
attachments and experiences and the literary arenas in which they emerge.
This produces, I argue, a poetics of difference and linguistic estrangement, in
order to mark a boundary (in the text) between what is perceived as a norm
and transgressions of the norm, not unlike what I just highlighted in Terra
sonâmbula. In Djebar’s work, such an ambivalence towards language is
thematized almost obsessively. As early as 1968, she wrote an essay about
the ‘bilingual’ predicament of the writer in the third world (Djebar 1968),
and virtually all of her mature works from Femmes d’Alger dans leur
appartement (1980) onward are deeply self-reflexive with regard to the
materiality of language(s) and the intractability of translation. This is
evident, for example, in her frequent inclusion of untranslated Arabic and
 POSTCOLONIALISM AND WORL D LI TERATURE
Stefan Helgesson
........................
495

Berber words as well as her frequent defamiliarization of French, as in the

particularly harsh statement in her major novel L’amour, la fantasia that ‘le
français m’est langue marâtre’ (Djebar 2008: 298) or ‘French is my
‘‘stepmother’’ tongue’ (Djebar 1993: 214).
What we find in the intricately woven tapestry of L’amour, la fantasia are
repeated meditations on the range of linguistic registers in Algeria in relation
to the fraught historicity of French. This is most obviously the case when the
use of different spoken languages ‘behind’ the written French is brought to
the reader’s attention. There is the French soldier ‘who spoke Arabic’ (1993:
138) or the discovery in an Arabic context that ‘I could hear French spoken’
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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 Maza’s lieutenants, El-Gobbi, also wrote his account of the events . . .
When Bérard composes his memoirs, he declares that he had knowledge of El-
Gobbi’s 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 L’amour, 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:

To attempt an autobiography using French words alone is to lend oneself to the

vivisector’s scalpel, revealing what lies beneath the skin. The flesh flakes off and
with it, seemingly, the last shreds of the unwritten language of my childhood . . . As
the words pour out, inexhaustible, maybe distorting, our ancestral night lengthens.
Conceal the body and its ephemeral grace. Prohibit gestures
they are too specific.
Only let sounds remain.

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: 156
7)

The intense corporeality of this meditation serves above all to mourn the loss
of an ephemeral embodiment of multiple languages. Djebar’s 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 Huggan’s 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: 1
33). 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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transgression of other types of boundaries
linguistic, cultural, racial,

gendered, political
and (2) the transformations that occur as such writing is
repeatedly reformulated in other languages and settings. On such an
understanding, ‘literature’ cannot be seen either as a purely autonomous
realm or as a mere symptom of the colonial drama between dominant and
dominated
it is instead a more fluid phenomenon, evolving as it circulates.
This changeability of literature causes problems for Casanova’s notion of a
single literary world, dominated by a Greenwich Meridian. I am therefore
more in sympathy with those scholars who have begun to think of literature
as well as translation in accordance with Wittgenstein’s thoughts on ‘family
resemblances’ (Dimock 2006; Thomsen 2008: 58
9; Tymoczko 2007). The
point is that ‘literature’, just like ‘game’ in Wittgenstein’s example, should
not be thought of as a concept with a single referent. It has instead a cluster
of referents that are not identical but exhibit comparable features. My
translational examples from Couto would in fact support a reading of a
work in multiple languages in terms of such family likenesses. They are not
the same, and yet there is a strong kinship between them. This may seem to
weaken the argument in favour of literature as a world of its own, but it
enables us rather to finesse the distinction between the imaginary of a global
republic of letters and the different instantiations of this imaginary. Put
differently: the author names ‘Mia Couto’ and ‘Assia Djebar’ apparently
guarantee the coherence of their work in all of its circulated and translated
versions. In actual fact
and I have only had space here to demonstrate this
in the case of Mia Couto
each new readership and each translation brings
about differences that can be ascribed to the agency of the translator, the
interventions of editors and publishers, and the literary culture of the target
context.
Postcolonial writers, then, ambivalently negotiate the boundaries of this
literary world, often phrasing it as a problem of language, of a hierarchy
within the plurality of languages, but not necessarily with any explicit
political intent. Mia Couto’s essay ‘Lı́nguas que não sabemos que sabı́amos’
(2009b: 13
26) was, notably, first delivered as his keynote speech at
WALTIC in Stockholm in 2008. Translated by David Brookshaw as
 POSTCOLONIALISM AND WORL D LI TERATURE
Stefan Helgesson
........................
497

‘Languages we don’t know we know’ (Couto 2008), Couto speaks here in

defence of the ‘first language, the language of chaos’ that we all dwell in as
children (a notion that resonates with Gayatri Spivak’s recent work on ‘the
first language’ [2009]). This takes on a vitalist colouring as Couto speaks
of a Joycean ‘chaosmology’ that ‘breathes life into writing, whatever the
continent, whatever the nation, whatever the language or the literary genre’.
This ‘hidden language in which all things can have all names’, the language
of literature by Couto’s definition, is then contrasted with what he sees as the
harsh instrumentalization of language determined by commercial and
technological interests.
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There is too little space to indulge in Couto’s poignant illustration of the

incommensurability of languages
it involves a confusion between Swedes
and Mozambicans around a homonym meaning both ‘pig’ and ‘ancestral
spirit’
but the affinity between his and Djebar’s ambition constantly to
underscore the plurality of languages, or language as plurality, as opposed to
the monolingual imposition of a standardized, written language, should be
clear.
We find that Djebar develops comparable views in her collection of essays
Ces voix qui m’assiègent (1999; ‘These voices that assail me’). Here she
reiterates that it is the multiplicity of socially and historically situated uses of
language, on the one hand, and the singular, individual act of writing in
French on the other, that propels her work:

Peut-être même, pendant longtemps, me suis-je sentie portée le plus souvent par des
voix non françaises
elles qui me hantent et qui se trouvaient être souvent voix
ennemies de l’occupant
pour les ramener, elles, justement en les inscrivant et je
devais, obscurément contrainte, en trouver l’équivalence, sans les déformer, mais
sans hâtivement les traduire . . .

Oui, ramener les voix non francophones
les gutturales, les ensauvagées, les
insoumises
jusqu’à un texte français 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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Djebar
their reduction of the plurality of languages to the language of

Europhone literary writing
that we begin to see what I would call the paradox
of world literature. It is by subjecting themselves to the institutionalized,
monolingual authority of the graphie that they can speak across continents and
languages of what the graphie excludes. In this sense, their writing can never
function in terms of what Couto calls ‘the first language’, even if it continually
gestures towards this language. It is in other words something of a mirage to
make sharp distinctions between literature as an institution and ‘the literary’
(Hitchcock 2010: 2), or between what Huggan (2001: 1
33) sees as a
commodified ‘postcoloniality’ and authentic ‘postcolonialism’.
One could argue, then, that because of their heightened awareness of the
rift between subjective experience and institutionally sustained literary
language, writers from colonies and postcolonies have been at the vanguard
of world literature. Their position on the margins of the world of letters

but with the ambition to inhabit it
has forced upon them an awareness of
literature as a transportable institution that is enabling and repressive at the
same moment. This profound ambivalence towards the world of literature,
which marks the work of writers from Latin America, the Caribbean, India,
Australia and Africa, may possibly be described as a distinct aspect of what
Rey Chow has termed ‘post-European culture’, a coinage which

designates a relation of temporality, with Europe being experienced . . . as a

memory, a cluster of lingering idelogical and emotional effects whose force takes
the form of a lived historical violation, one that preconditions linguistic and
cultural consciousness. (Chow 2004: 305)

Although, as I have been arguing, it is too simplistic to speak exclusively of

violation without also acknowledging the promise and possibility afforded
by literature, I refer to Chow’s argument in closing because of its potential to
bridge the gap between the astuteness of postcolonialism as a symptomology
of the contemporary world and the broader (but distinctly literary)
comparative concerns of world literature. Although the radical diversity
and deep time of the world’s literary cultures will exceed postcolonial
 POSTCOLONIALISM AND WORL D LI TERATURE
Stefan Helgesson
........................
499

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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