Annual Bibliography Of Commonwealth Literature 2017

Abstract

Translation, material cultures and questions of genreTwo overlapping sets of themes stand out in the bibliographies from 2017: one concerning language, translation and bi-, multi-, poly-and trans-lingualism and the other print and material cultures, book histories, publishing, circulation, genre and "literary value." Works listed in this issue reflect and respond to the role of English or French as hegemonic languages in containing and sanctioning a range of "other," "minor," indigenous languages or vernaculars and their oratures/literatures in the manner of an omniscient narrative that frames and mediates the "foreign talk," "accents" or idiolects of characters as deviations from its own normativity for a dominant linguistic community of "native speakers," in the process erasing its own origin. We have inherited, as David Gramling reminds us in The Invention of Monolingualism (2016), the early modern idea of "'a' language, whose essence inhered in its promise to know everything, say everything, and translate everything" (Gramling, 2016: 2). Such a desire for linguistic mastery is reflected in the "enumerative modality" of colonialism setting out to identify, label and control local languages and their speakers. It continues to inform processes of "naming, misnaming, consolidation, marketing and reproduction" in the publishing, translation, academic research or host nation language teaching industries and the concomitant "thickening of citizenship around language competence and use". Further, monolingualism appears capable of extending its repertoire by impersonating notions of multilingualism in the marketing of World Literature, as Graham Huggan has shown in The Postcolonial Exotic (Huggan, 2001), or varieties of "multilingual upskilling" promoted by the neoliberal state as "models for global success and competitiveness" (ibid: 12, 250).An interesting collection from the East and Central Africa listings that demonstrates the historical interconnectedness of these issues is the bilingual Guidance (Uwongozi) by Sheikh Al-Amin Mazrui: Selections from the First Swahili Islamic Newspaper: A Swahili-English Edition (Kresse, 2017). A polemical conduct book of "guidance" and socio-political critique, this volume brings together essays from the early 1930s free weekly Swahili pamphlet, Sahifa, penned by the Islamic reformist scholar Sheikh Al-Amin Mazrui in the height of British colonial rule in East Africa. It testifies to the intermingling of languages in the region and the power relations which inform the contact that English has had with Swahili and Arabic. As Kai Kresse explains in his 811271J CL0010.