OWRI Creative Multilingualism Strand 5
Creativity and World Literatures: Languages in Dialogue
(Workshop 1)
Titles and Abstracts
Session 1 Pair A
Keya Anjaria
Multilingualism and the Ottoman Novel
In the second half of 19th century Ottoman Istanbul, multilingualism was an obvious and significant factor in administrative, social, religious, and informal experience. It shaped both written and colloquial modes of communication and, ever increasingly, had a profound impact on the publishing and literary scene. At the same time, within the ever growing multilingualism of print culture, the Ottoman (Turkish) novel made its first appearance. This paper will consider multilingualism and the first Ottoman novels together. With particular interest in Ahmet Midhat Efendi’s groundbreaking novel, Felâtun Bey and Rakım Efendi (1875), it will ask how the experience of multilingualism is communicated and in what ways it has influenced the emergent novel form. By way of a preliminary answer, this paper will argue that the novel draws upon a multilingual register and, at times, thematises it, transforming expectations of the genre, particularly those which see the novel and nation as correspondent. Furthermore, multilingual experiences are abstracted and pull focus away from characterization and towards language itself, thus creating a self-conscious and self-referential form. This paper will thus argue that multilingualism functions as an ambivalence within the novel that resists the central ambitions of the latter half of the 19th century: namely, modernization, westernization and nation-building.
Multilingualism and North African Postcolonial Literature
In my paper, I will examine a few of the ways in which the critique of the monolingual paradigm has been theorised, and draw out some of the issues and difficulties in thinking about multilingualism and multilingual creativity in literary form. Reflecting briefly on critical works by theorists such as Doris Sommer, Yasemin Yildiz and Brian Lennon, I will identify the shortcomings of associating multilingual writing either with a celebratory form of hybridisation, or with exile and loss. I’ll also look at the implications of multilingual writing in the specific context of the postcolonial Maghreb, where the encounter between French and Arabic, as well as between spoken dialects and Berber languages, occurs as a result of a history of violence, and where the interpenetration between languages is, for francophone writers, explored and performed with considerable, and often multi-layered, ambivalence. My argument will be that multilingualism in literary writing does not have to be either enriching and productive, or painful and anxious, but in most cases reflects elements in public and private memory in a combination that engenders conflicting responses and effects. Most importantly, the postcolonial context of francophone North African writing means that multilingualism is a political issue, as well as a complex affective experience, and an ethical concept. Close examination of works by Abdelkébir Khatibi and Assia Djebar can help us to think about the ways in which these various dimensions impact upon or also exceed one another.
Session 1 Pair B
Ross Forman
Riding Wilde Waves: The Queer World of Multilingualism in 1895
This thought paper will consider queerness in the context of multilingualism. How, from the late nineteenth century forward, did concepts of queer identity—sexological and medical, subcultural, pornographic—developed in the Anglophone environment travel across languages and cultures and, in so doing, shape concepts of sexuality and sexual behaviour? Although particular vocabularies are an important aspect of this engagement, the wider emphasis is on the mechanics of cross-linguistic thinking. My (speculative) prism will be the reporting of the Wilde trials in 1895 in Brazil and the resonances—and lack thereof—in the conceptualisation of homosexuality and “gross indecency” across geographical and cultural-linguistic divides.
Brigit Kaiser
Multi-lingual formations – Cixous and the writing of “I-with-the-others”
My current project pursues the question how contemporary literary texts imagine and phrase subjecthood on such (linguistically, historically, socially) multi-layered terrain, otherwise than monolingual (in the sense of unified and homogenous) or hybrid (in the sense of ‘split between’ or the ‘merging of two’). Particular focus lies here on the work of feminist writer Hélène Cixous. The narrative voices in her poetic fictions stage subject-formation in an intra-cultural mode marked by cultural, temporal/historical and linguistic thickness.
Session 2 Pair A
Kamran Rastegar
Gulistan, Translation, and Suspect Mediation
My current project is an examination of the life of the Gulistan as a circulatory text in modern—18th through 20th century—contexts, recovering it from Iranian nationalist literary historiography and allocating it to different other modes of literary imagination. What is the Gulistan if viewed as sustained in its resonances with an oceanic—specifically, Indian Ocean—imagination? What is the Gulistan if viewed as representing specifically colonial forms of knowledge, a tool of Empire that doubles back to serve multiple nationalist ends? What is the Gulistan if thought of as representing a transition from a pre-modern disposition of sacred untranslatability to a modern realm of multilingualism—reaching beyond its original Arabic reflections to its various 19th century translations produced in English, Arabic, Urdu and Ottoman Turkish? What is the Gulistan if it is viewed through the lens of those who presumably loved it, by which I mean its translators—could it be viewed as a work of suspect mediation?
Karima Laachir
Connecting Multilingual literary traditions in the Maghreb
Postcolonial studies have not adequately explored the linguistic and cultural diversity of regions like the Maghreb, particularly Algeria, Morocco and Tunisia where the politics of language and culture remain largely understudied. This multilingual region where vernacular languages such as Darija (spoken Maghrebi dialects) and Amazigh (the language of the indigenous population of the Maghreb) have cohabited with Fusha (standard Arabic used in print culture, media, and religious affairs, and modernised form of classical or Quranic Arabic), as well as Judeo-Arabic, and Judeo-Spanish. These languages have all shaped the oral and written cultures of the Maghreb. The arrival of the French and Spanish as colonial languages in late nineteenth and early twentieth century further complicated the picture, particularly as the French colonial power imposed their language as the sole language of education and administration. This linguistic diversity and multilingual cultural production are not unique to the Maghreb and a number of African and Asian countries share this linguistic plurality. However, what one finds in the Maghreb (as well in other postcolonial multilingual nations such as the case of India) is that these multilingual literary and cultural productions, particularly in Arabic and French, the most prolific so far, have been studied in postcolonial literary studies in separation from one another. This has created a polarized multilingual literary field and a division between these two literary worlds (Francophone and Arabophone), and an unproductive ideological dichotomy set up between languages that are perceived as ‘national’ and those perceived as ‘foreign’, although French has become an integral part of the multilingual literary scene in the Maghreb. The paper proposes ‘reading together’ Maghrebi novels in Arabic and French: a comparative, connected reading that highlights the particular ties of the Maghreb’s postcolonial multilingual literature to its pre-modern traditions, and to the Mashreqi, African and European influences; it also sheds light on their entangled ‘local’ aesthetics and politics, and their strong ties to a vernacular context.
Session 2 Pair B
Michael Gibb Hill
The Perils of Reading: Luṭfī al-Manfalūṭī and Lin Shu
This paper explores a startling coincidence in world literature: the overlapping careers of Lin Shu 林紓 (1852–1924) and Muṣṭafā Luṭfī al-Manfalūṭī (1876–1924). Both men—who died in the same year—published famous “translations” of Western-language fiction without the benefit of knowing foreign languages and asserted a set of traditionalist literary values through their practice as translators, writers, and figures in the popular press. Their popularity also generated harsh, sometimes unhinged disavowals from their contemporaries and from later generations interested in shoring up their status as writers, critics, and readers of modern Arabic and Chinese literatures. Although the parallels between the careers of these two translators seem like pure coincidence, their rise to fame and subsequent fall from favor tells us about the importance of translators as new-style intellectuals and about the quandaries of colonial and postcolonial literature.
Charles Forsdick
Monolingualism, Francopolyphonie and the dynamics of translation
A focus on the politics and practices of language use is central to understanding those processes shaping and determining the production and reception of emerging forms of contemporary literature in the Francosphere, where the problematic term of the ‘Francophone’ is slowly but increasingly yielding to alternatives such as the ‘Francopolyphone’ or the ‘Francopolygraphe’. Such an approach necessitates active reflection on questions of language—and specifically issues of monolingualism, and the risks of viewing contemporary literary production within a series of cross-cultural yet linguistically singularized frames.
Session 3 Pair A
Francesca Orsini
Clothing words
Cloth and weaving threads through warp and weft, have long been metaphors for existence in Indian devotional literature, as this very famous song attributed to Kabir shows. But cloth has also been a metaphor for rewriting in another language (putting a text into “a new jāma”)—whether in the case of translation or adaptation. Cloth as a commodity typically carried into a language specific, often very distant, place-names (Kashmir/cachemere, others?), turning those toponyms into metonyms for luxury items from faraway lands and for exotic alternatives to a humdrum provincial life (muslin from X in Cranford). Within the globalizing world of the 19c, foreign cloth names that had become all too common (e.g. langkilath in Hindi for “longcloth”) also became metonyms in India, e.g. for the Hindi writer Bharatendu Harishchandra, for global trade and the inevitable “race to development” among peoples and nations (speech ‘How can India progress’, 1877, also Bayly). Clothing became of course most significant as a symbol in the swadeshi rejection of foreign cloth and Gandhi’s mission to have everyone spinning their own khadi cloth (Tarlo, Clothing matters). But for our purposes, when thinking about creative multilingualism, clothing is an apt choice in two main respects.
First, as colonial satire: mixing items of clothing or wearing items deemed inappropriate/too westernized was systematically satirized on both sides of the “contact zone”, in India as well as in other colonial as well as non-colonial contexts (Egypt, Turkey, the cover of Imagined Communities). Though in fact even “local” clothing was often made of foreign material, foreign/inappropriate/anglicized/western/ babu fashion was ruthlessly made fun of, both in men and in women, though of course satire was also gendered. While often expressed in terms of binaries of good/bad, homespun or traditional/westernized, difference was more a matter of relative terms. (We are familiar with the long-lasting strategy in Hindi films not just of making the heroine transition from western to Indian clothes when she becomes the appropriate soulmate but also, when wanting to show her in “modern/western clothes”, to show another woman in even more western/modern/skimpier clothes.) So one of the set of examples we can look at are satirical verses or skits about clothing, where foreign words and fashion become a source of creativity, fun, and critique.
Second, names of specific types of cloth and clothing can act as islands of multilingualism within single-language texts that point to the value, and often nostalgia, for a richer, more mixed world in an era of stricter cultural and ethnic nationalisms that translate into ideologies of monolingualism. I can think here of the Hindi writings of Krishna Sobti (e.g. Dilo dāniś), which uses specific Persian and Urdu names of items of clothing to convey the richness of the world of Old Delhi. This choice of evocative names of clothing is particularly strong in Urdu, too, as part of the nostalgic evocation of the material, social, and cultural world of Indo-Persian elites that modern India turned resolutely its back on (Qazi Abdul Sattar, Shab ghazīda (1962), S.R. Faruqi, Chand tare sāre āsmān).
Multilingualism and Barbarism
In spite of the transnational turn in literary and especially modernist studies, there are few studies of multilingualism that extend beyond defined literary movements, theoretical discourses, or the cultural politics of particular nations. But, as Jahan Ramazani argues with respect to transnational poetry, ‘although creolization, hybridization, and the like are often regarded as exotic or multicultural sideshows to literary histories of formal advancement or the growth of discrete national poetries, these cross-cultural dynamics are arguably among the engines of modern and contemporary poetic development and innovation’ (2009, 2-3). If cross-cultural dynamics are among the engines of modern literary development, multilingualism is not just a consequence of those dynamics but is rather emblematic of the mixing effects they produce. It therefore becomes important to conceive multilingualism in broader relation to modernity, to view it not only in literary historical terms as a modernist practice, but to think of it figuratively as a literary embodiment of modernity. But how to describe this figurative embodiment? Do cosmopolitanism and hybridity provide adequate frames for viewing the often fraught encounter of languages in a multilingual text, or are these notions too easily absorbed into a globalised idea of difference? Drawing on the etymology of the word ‘barbarism,’ which onomatopoeically conveys the stuttering or repetitive sound of incomprehensible foreign speech (ba-ba, bla-bla, bara-bara), this paper will suggest that the word’s evocation of a specifically linguistic mode of difference and a specifically formal mode of interruption gives barbarism strength as a descriptive marker for multilingual practice, even as it remains problematic in its associations.
Session 3 Pair B
Spectacle, spectator, spectacular: exuberant multilingualism in the 19th century Arabic print culture
How may multilingualism inherent in one seemingly monolithic language be theorized? Can a history of the multilingual, as well as multicultural, context be helpful? And, what would be the definition of culture, therefore, multicultural and multuralism, in this instance? More importantly, what bearing does the notion of ‘multilingualism inherent in a language’, particularly in the case of ‘metropolitan’ languages, have on thinking about ‘world literature’? Locating my discussion of these questions in the exuberant 19th century Arabic print culture, with particular reference to ‘Abou Naddarah’, a body of journals published in Cairo and Paris between 1878 and 1906, I look at this material (written in Arabic and French, using both high, middle and colloquial Arabic, and supplementing words with images) through and beyond the prism of ‘circulation’ proposed in ‘world literature’ and consider the ways in which multilingualism thrives in cultural encounters and conceptual blending. I argue, on this occasion, that the opening up of ‘classical Arabic’, if there is such a thing, to a new plurality in the 19th century, may best be articulated through an examination of sites on which discourses on cross-cultural encounters focalize. An example is ‘naddarah’, or spectacles, a material object that comes with a set of scientific underpinnings about sight, perspective and vision. On this site, encounters between Arabic and French, classical genres and print culture, and literature and science, come together to energize a new form of multilingualism in the Arabic language.
Siobhán Shilton
Creative Multilingualism in the Visual Arts: Photography, Performance and the ‘Arab Spring’
This paper focuses on an example of art that dialogues with, and exceeds, multiple languages – visual and verbal – to produce alternative images of women in response to the ‘Arab Spring’. Art representing the female body in this context has to negotiate a way between a complex web of icons, from Samuel Aranda’s photograph of the fully veiled Yemeni woman holding her injured son to the controversial naked selfies posted on social media by certain women from Tunisia and Egypt in 2011. US-based Moroccan artist Lalla Essaydi uses the medium of photography, which has contributed to reinforcing ‘icons of revolutionary exoticism’ and enduring Orientalist myths. She combines references to French and other European works of art (particularly Orientalist, Revolutionary and Christian), as well as incorporating Arabic calligraphy. I ask how traces of languages are incorporated and contested in Essaydi’s photographic work. How does the mixing of languages in visual art lead to the creation of new meanings in the contexts of the ‘Arab Spring’ and its aftermath? Which theoretical approaches might be adopted in analysing such ‘multilingual’ art?