Comparative Studies in Theme (413-0-20)
Topic
Politics and Poetics of Language and Writing
Instructors
Nasrin Qader
847/491-8263
1860 S. Campus Drive, Crowe Hall #2-101
Meeting Info
Kresge Centennial Hall 2-440: Tues 2:00PM - 4:50PM
Overview of class
In 1986, the Kenyan writer and critic, Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o published Decolonizing the Mind, a canonical reference for the language debate in the decolonial/postcolonial era. In this work, he famously called for a more nuanced and perhaps more difficult project of decolonization after pollical independence from colonialism. Language, he observed, must be an essential feature of every long lasting decolonial project. Subsequently, he changed his own creative language from English to Gikuyu. Ngũgĩ's book has resonated with the thorny entanglement of language and the colonial legecy across the African continent and beyond since at least the mid-20th century. For instance, in 1962 Malek Haddad famously abandoned creative writing all together following Algeria's independence since he could not write in Arabic and refused to continue in French. In Senegal, Boubacar Boris Diop shifted two decades ago his primary language of creative writing to Wolof and has undertaken self-translation. In 2013, the Moroccan Abdelfattah Kilito published Je parle toutes les langues mais en Arabe, a title inspired by Kafka, foregrounding the irony subtending the decolonial/postcolonial context to date since the book is written in French. This course is dedicated to understanding the ways in which this multifaceted problematic has been thought both theoretically and creatively by thinkers hailing from Francophone Africa, in conversation with theorists of language and translation from beyond the continent. The aim of the course is neither to be exhaustive nor to limit the scope of our investigations regionally or linguistically. Students will be invited to reflect with nuance on the questions in context and develop their own projects by bearing in mind both the universality of the question and the singularity of its inscription. We will have the great opportunity to discuss with Souleymane Bachir Diagne via zoom his recent book De language à langue (2022).
Class Materials (Required)
Tentative reading list (subject to revision):
Boubacar Boris Diop « Quand la mémoire va ramasser du bois mort »
Jacques Derrida Monolinguisme de l'autre « Tour de Babel"
Gilles Deleuze, Félix Guattari, Kafka : Pour une littérature mineure
Walter Benjamin « La tache du traducteur »
Paul de Man « ‘Conclusions' Walter Bejamin's ‘The Task of the Translator'"
Souleymane Bachir Diagne De langue à langue
Assia Djebar Ces voix qui m'assiègent
Abdelkebir Khatibi's Amour Bilingue "Pensée-autre », « Double critique », « Le bilinguisme et la littérature »
Le Scribe et son ombre
« Langue de l'autre »
« Lettre ouverte à Jacques Derrida »
Abdelfattah Kilito : L'auteur et ses doubles
Je parle toutes les langues mais en Arabe
Abdelwahab Meddeb Talismano
Ahlam Mostaghaenmi Mémoires de la chair (original in Arabic : Dhakirat al jasad)