In May 1917, two South African feminist friends and critics of empire then in London sent a telegram to Field Marshal Jan Smuts, the Union of South Africa’s Defence Minister and delegate to the Imperial War Cabinet, in response to his early proposal for a Commonwealth of Nations. It read simply: “Your speech was fine”. Whether intended sincerely (as in “very fine”) or as faint praise (“fine as far as it goes, but”) is not known, but the ambiguity is fitting for an association and description with such contested associations – and one that, by some accounts, originated in the colonies (from an idea proposed by Canadian Prime Minister William Lyon Mackenzie King and South Africa’s then-Prime Minister J. B. M. Hertzog). It is fitting, too, that one of the cable’s authors was Olive Schreiner (1855-1920), leading novelist of the “New Woman”, advocate of sex equality, and clear-sighted critic of empire’s presumptions, rapacious designs, and gendered and ethnic biases, as well as of the race politics taking shape in South Africa at the start of the twentieth century. Even as we read Schreiner’s work today with an eye to its own prejudices and contradictions, this essay contends that it is worth considering the value of the proleptic critique it embodies for an understanding of the ongoing limitations — but also use-value — of the term “Commonwealth”, as well as of any term that might replace it. The outlines of Schreiner’s critique suggest that the term might yet encode a counter-ideal that points to an ongoing latent potential for the common to be reactivated as promise of a more equal and just division of empire’s spoils.
The number of migration narratives published in recent years in the form of short stories, novels, poetry, and nonfiction has been considerable, particularly by writers connected with the African continent. Previous studies on this body of work have included investigations of identity and otherness, transnational connections, and cosmopolitan aspirations. Despite this abundance of perspectives on the literature, there have also been urgent calls for new ways of theorizing migration (Fasselt, 2019; Kraler, 2011; Edmunds, 2006). Postmigration is just such an intervention, a concept that aims to go beyond previous meanings of migrant and migration, to critique instances of othering and the gap between the margins and the majority society (Römhild, 2017), and to focus explicitly on trajectories relating to the future. Postmigration, as outlined by Roger Bromley (2017: 39), is not a concept solely tied to temporal distinctions, but is also ideological in its attempts to construct “a new set of emergent spaces of plurality”. The present article argues that Leila Aboulela’s short story collection Elsewhere, Home (2018) manifests such spaces, particularly through its representations and negotiations of gender, family practices, generation, and religious belief and practice. My analysis shows that Aboulela subverts tropes regarding gendered and religious identity and mobility. Elsewhere, Home is no longer primarily occupied with the displacement of individual characters but moves toward seeing migration as interaction and participation instead of integration (Moslund and Petersen, 2019), and as transcultural (Petersen and Schramm, 2017) instead of transnational. Keywords Leila Aboulela , , , , , family , gender , generation , postmigration , religion
A central theme in Benyamin’s twin novels Jasmine Days (2014) and Al Arabian Novel Factory (2014) is the role of migrants in Bahrain’s 2011 uprising and their attitudes towards the ruling regime’s repression of dissent amongst native citizens. This article argues that Benyamin’s novels advocate recognition of the political impact of migration from Kerala and elsewhere by questioning the supposedly depoliticized economic space to which migrants belong in Bahrain and the other Gulf States, and by asserting Keralan migrants’ long-standing connection to the region and not merely their contributions to its economy as transitory outsiders. Writing in a regional Indian language and for a Malayalam readership about the political and social dilemmas of an Arab city, Benyamin constructs a transnational multilingual space where writing and translation enable dissent and where individuals from different national and linguistic backgrounds have a stake in political change and its repercussions. Keywords Migration , Gulf , Bahraini 2011 uprising , Malayalam literature , translation
Differences in culture, language, and context alter the reading experience, meaning, and textual relations of modern Arabic literature in translation, which raises questions about the relationship between the Arabic and translated canon. Drawing on Lawrence Venuti, Pascale Casanova, and Abdelfattah Kilito, I explore translation as consecration, annexation , and decontextualization in order to illustrate the issues involved in Arabic–English literary travel and to move the scholarly debate on Arabic–English translation beyond questions of strategy and domestication. Through textual and paratextual analysis of the English translation of Ahmed Saadawi’s Frankenstein in Baghdad (2013/2018), I show how even a highly translatable modern Arabic text undergoes multiple semantic and symbolic shifts as it transfers into English. Bringing these findings together with observations on the wider Arabic literary translation environment, I argue that modern Arabic literature in translation is its own canon, deserving of independent study, whose hybridity can teach us much about the dynamics of cultural encounter, effects of literary capital, and the discursive and semantic disjunctions between English and Arabic culture and literature. Keywords Arabic/English translation , Pascale Casanova , decontextualization , , , intertextuality , literary capital , Ahmed Saadawi
Based on a stylistic analysis of selected African novels, centrally Okot p’Bitek’s Lak Tar/White Teeth (1953; English translation: 1989), this article identifies a narrative technique employed by these novels, to use heterogeneous genres inserted into the prose fiction of the novel. Typically, various genres of poetry are used in this way, creating a textuality that is richly “heteroglossic” (Bakhtin, 1981). However, the range of genres that can be used in this way is not limited and includes proverbs, sayings, songs, newspaper articles, letters, or more recently digital texts such as blogs or tweets. The article uses the term “generic fracturing” to refer to this technique. Generic fracturing is used in novels for specific purposes. The article focuses on the employment of a genre of Acoli praise poetry, mwoc , in White Teeth for characterization. It is further argued here that such heterogeneous genres do not only serve to construct the narrative, but are in fact markers of thought systems that differ from the “default” ontology, epistemology, and aesthetics of the novel. These features were inherited from the genre’s European history and imposed in Africa by colonial administration through which novelistic production was initially engineered. Generic fracturing is thus a textual strategy to effectuate disruptions and subversions of an intellectual framework that was a colonial imposition, and it points towards alternative ways of thinking. These were usually derived from local African cultural traditions in early African-language novelistic production. Generic fracturing, however, continues being used up to the present day in African novels to signal the co-existence and interaction of heterogeneous knowledges and philosophical frameworks. Keywords Acoli , generic fracturing , , , Okot p’Bitek , ,
Buchi Emecheta’s novel about the Nigerian Civil War, Destination Biafra (1982), challenges war historiography in ways that scholarship designating it a “female perspective” on the conflict can sometimes overlook. This article focuses on how Emecheta deploys a dual narrative approach that weaves an omniscient narrator with diverse Nigerian women’s points of view in order to position their lived experiences and subjective knowledges as collectively amounting to the definitive history of the Civil War. This draws the reader’s attention to the gendered effects of the civil war as the lens whereby which all facets of the war can be understood - even and especially its macro causes in neocolonialism and petrocapitalism. By writing women who know the economic imperatives behind the conflict; exercise agency under dangerous circumstances; and employ methods of survival that safeguard others, Emecheta reveals the gendered politics of war historiography, and tests these politics by collapsing distinctions between what is habitually conceived of as the war front (and therefore to be narrated by active combatants), and everywhere else (to be narrated by witnesses, refugees, or survivors). Destination can therefore be understood as an attempt to intervene directly in historiographical method, as it rejects the designation of women’s war experiences as mere addenda and questions gendered expectations of where to look for and find historical truths. Keywords African feminisms , African women’s writing , Buchi Emecheta , Nigerian Civil War , Nigerian literature , postcolonial studies
