Studying African Literature in the Age of the Global

I have two main thoughts on the challenge of the global in the field of African studies, both of which stem from my own disciplinary position as a comparatist working on African literatures. The first relates to language and language study, and the second to collaboration with African institutions.

I should first contextualize my statements by mentioning that literary studies, too, have been affected by a general turn toward the global, despite the often-limited relationships between literature departments and area-studies programs. The last several decades have seen much grappling within the field of comparative literature with the notion of “world literature,” and as I can attest from my own experience on the academic market this year, “global anglophone” is the hot new subfield in English departments across the country. Marketing oneself as a scholar of global anglophone literature is far more strategic than, for instance, as an African literature specialist, or a specialist in any individual African literary tradition. While such shifts toward the global in literary studies reflect an effort to overcome the overriding eurocentrism of the field, they have often resulted in highly selective and superficial reading practices, focusing primarily on works written in, or translated into, the global languages of European origin and taking the West as their continual point of reference.

In response to this trend toward—or threat of—a monolingual and homogeneous world literature, Gayatri Spivak famously suggested in her Death of a Discipline (2003) a marriage and mutual transformation of the fields of comparative literature and area studies. She hoped such a marriage would both push eurocentric comparative literature toward deeper engagement with the global south and bring close reading and nuanced attention to language to the culturally conservative and generally social-science–focused area studies: “without the support of the humanities, Area Studies can still only transgress frontiers, in the name of crossing borders; and, without a transformed Area Studies, Comparative Literature remains imprisoned within the borders it will not cross” (2003:7).

Even if we as Africanist scholars redirect our attention to the processes of circulation that constitute globalization, a true understanding of how the ideas and cultural products that circulate supranationally interact with the cultures and knowledge structures of particular localities requires scholarly engagement with the languages and idioms of those localities. As David Damrosch has written: “if we . . . want to see the work of world literature as a window on different parts of the world, we have to take into account the way its images have been multiply refracted in the process of transculturation” (2003:24). Such a reckoning cannot be unidirectional. Studying both how the cultural material of dominant cultures (whether Western, Eastern, Northern or Southern) is incorporated into local aesthetic expressions and how local cultural material transforms the literature of dominant cultures (what Wendy Belcher has called discursive possession) is critical to the study of global circulation. As Damrosch implies but does not explicitly say, thinking globally, even in the context of an anglosphere, requires attention to language and translation. In the context of African studies, this kind of work is a necessary part of shifting scholarly attention from a view of Africans as objects of study acted upon by outside forces to Africans as active producers of knowledge and culture. To return to Spivak: “we must take the languages of the Southern hemisphere as active cultural media” (2003:9).

In practice, however, close attention to the interplay between African cultural expression in local languages and the europhone African literature that finds its way around the world and into American syllabi has been realized only in tiny pockets of scholarship by individual scholars. The number of languages on the continent and the absence of formal language programs in most of them pose real practical challenges to training new scholars (who are not native speakers/readers of African languages) to the level of proficiency necessary for this kind of work. Foreign Language and Area Studies (FLAS) fellowship support from the Department of Education has the potential to help in the dozen or so institutions where it has been granted, but even so...