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FERRARI, Patricio (2018) (ed.). Inside the Mask: The English Poetry of Fernando Pessoa. Providence: Gávea-Brown, 360 p. ISBN: 978-0-943722-42-9.

Three letters to Hubert Jennings – two of them from the Afrikaans poet Uys Krige, one from the French poet Armand Guibert – prompt a reconsideration of the South African reception of Fernando Pessoa. Although this reception was and is clearly limited, Krige emerges here as a key individual connecting Jennings, Guibert, Roy Campbell and – by extension – Fernando Pessoa in a transnational literary network structured according to the logic of what Pascale Casonova has called "the world republic of letters" (La République Mondiale des Lettres). As such, however, this historical network has limited purchase on the contemporary concerns of South African literature. The letters alert us, thereby, not just to the inherent transnationalism of South African literature, but also to largely forgotten and, to some extent, compromised aspects of South African literary history.

With remarkable force, "decolonization" re-entered the academic agenda some ten years ago. Having been an ambivalent historical experience undergirding postcolonial studies in its emergence in the 1980s, "decolonization" today is wielded as a concept and a rallying call. One of its rhetorical purposes is to set up an opposition between morally objectionable and morally progressive ways of constructing and sharing knowledge, yet the content of the term is often vague. In this context, world literature has much to contribute, both methodologically and critically. If, on the one hand, there is a decolonizing potential in the very ambition to make the world's literary cultures visible, the critical dimension of world literature scholarship makes us aware of its colonial genealogy. Taking Mazisi Kunene's epic poem from South Africa, Emperor Shaka the Great, as its key example, this article discusses how the dual potential of world literature might contribute to a "decolonized" mode of literary reading. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Focusing on the reception of the two Nobel laureates Nadine Gordimer and J.M. Coetzee, this article investigates the literature prize as a national, and indeed Stockholm-based, phenomenon in Sweden. It makes two general claims. The first is that the press exercises a co-consecrating authority that both rivals and depends on the authority of the Swedish Academy. This becomes evident not least in occasional attempts by critics to deconsecrate a laureate. The second claim is that the dramaturgy of the literature prize, beginning with the announcement in October and ending with the award ceremony in December, culminates shortly before the ceremony with the Nobel lecture, when the laureate is heard in their own voice. In an analysis of Gordimer's and Coetzee's lectures, the article concludes that they present sharply different attempts at performatively resolving the tension between literary autonomy and heteronomy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

With reference to the five articles in the special issue, this introduction reflects on the relative absence of Lusophone African literature from the mainstream of African literary studies. Because of the insular and backward nature of Portugal's colonialism, the protracted wars in Angola and Mozambique, and the sheer magnitude of the postcolony of Brazil as a center for the reception of Lusophone writing, this literature has followed a path of its own. However, although a fair amount of scholarly attention has been paid to the early anticolonial and nationalist generations of writers, this special issue updates the account of the Luso-African literary world by looking also at current developments in publishing (locally and abroad) and reception, especially in Brazil. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

By looking simultaneously at the succession of translations of Pessoa into Swedish and the critical reception of Pessoa in Sweden, this article investigates when and how Pessoa became a point of reference in the Swedish literary field. The hypothesis is that there currently are two overlapping versions of Pessoa in circulation in Sweden. One is Pessoa as a metonym for Lisbon, the other is Pessoa as a distinct author figure defined by his four main heteronyms but often disconnected from any specific corpus of poetry. In the 1980s, this author figure was enlisted (by the winning side) in a struggle between competing aesthetic paradigms in Sweden. Among the handful of critics and translators that have shaped the Swedish reception, this article looks especially at the pioneering contributions of Arne Lundgren and Bengt Holmqvist. Particular attention is then paid to Orons bok (Livro do desassossego). First published in 1991, Orons bok has since appeared in two more editions and is the translation that has reached the largest number of readers. In this regard, the Swedish reception follows an international tendency to construct Pessoa as the author of Livro. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This introduction positions the essays in this special issue in relation to Pascale Casanova's model of inequality and value in the world republic of letters. Arguing that the vernacular has been an overlooked or underelaborated concept in subsequent world literary theorizations, the essay then proceeds to discuss the shifting value and nature of the vernacular – a concept that only has meaning if it is understood relationally. Both the vernacular and world literature are therefore utilized as heuristic tools, enabling dialogues across entrenched linguistic, cultural and theoretical boundaries. Hence, the unorthodox combination of South African, North American, Indian, Swedish, Russian, Mozambican and Latin American perspectives presented here. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article discusses various reports within the issue on topics including an examination of the vernacular worlds in Derek Walcott's poetry, an analysis of Egyptian dystopian novels and their English translations, and how sign language is thematized in Michael Roes' novel "Die Laute."

After initially identifying defamiliarization as a central aspect of Nancy Rose Hunt's essay "History as Form," this comment reflects on the implications that her reading of Georg Simmel and her emphasis on objects and materiality have for the writing of history. If Hunt suggests, with Simmel, that the form of history is autonomous from history as it unfolds, the claim here is rather that there is no necessary relationship between writing and its topic. Considering how earlier European historiography excluded Africa (in particular) from the domain of history, it is no coincidence that this contingent relation between form and history has been particularly energizing for Africanist historiography—leading to innovations both in practice and theory. The comment concludes by briefly discussing three concepts that have informed such innovation: the vernacular, suturing, and multiple temporalities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This special issue considers networked cultural responses loosely figured as “cultural solidarities” in the Global South, on the understanding that mid-twentieth century struggles to end colonialism were addressed within a transnational domain. It takes apartheid South Africa as its point of departure, positioning literature from South Africa within a broadly anti-colonial commons. As they consider works by Alex La Guma, Nazim Hikmet Ran, Athol Fugard, and Todd Matshikiza, among others, our contributors—Christopher J. Lee, Gül Bilge Han, Ashleigh Harris and Andrea Thorpe—question the role of aesthetic forms in constructing long-distance solidarities in a Cold War setting. Mohammad Shabangu’s assertion of the necessity of “opacity” as a counter to the recuperation of the African writer brings such questions into the present, intersecting contemporary debates on world literature. Finally, solidarity is framed in temporal rather than geographical terms in Andrew van der Vlies and Julia Willén’s dialogue on “reading for hope” in the aftermath of failed revolutionary projects. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the article author provides an overview of some world-conceptions, both in contemporary world literature debates and in the philosophy of Hannah Arendt. Topics discussed include that author argues in favour of a multiple-level understanding of literary world-making; and author's empirical case is the South African literary journal Staffrider; and vernacular valence which derives to no small degree from its commitment to literature.

An introduction is presented which discusses article on topics including overview of some world-conceptions, alternative genres of inter-war modernism and French realism which traces the characteristic trajectory of protagonists.

The article offers information on world literature, which is defined as a concept and a field of study that has generated a significant amount of debate in recent years. Topics discussed include that Peter Hitchcock has complained that the world in world literature is studiously neutral, whereas Gayatri Spivak has accused it of remaining beholden to Europe as guide to disciplinary objectivity, an observation that resonates with Aamir Mufti's point that "the Latinate term literature.

The central claim of this article is that the Kenyan writer Ngugi wa Thiong'o, known above all for his advocacy of African-language writing, performs in his essays a conceptual worlding of literature that serves to diversify its semantic content and thereby enable the recognition and expanded production of otherwise marginalised literatures. The logic of this conceptual worlding is read through a cosmopolitan-vernacular optic, which presupposes that Ngugi's interventions can neither be defined as ethnically particularist nor as expansively cosmopolitan. Rather, his approach 1) combines multiple literary 'ecologies', in Alex Beecroft's sense, and 2) attempts to reroute the temporality of 'literature' so that it is no longer reducible to Eurochronology. What unites these interventions is that they both draw on and attempt to recalibrate 'world literature' as a symbolic value in response to a postcolonial predicament. Three texts provide the empirical focus of the article: the department circular "On the Abolition of the English Department" that Ngugi co-authored in 1968 with Taban Lo Liyong and Henry Owuor-Anyumba; the essay "Literature and Society", first written in 1973; and "Memory, Restoration and African Renaissance", which is the third chapter in Something Torn and New from 2009. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

ABSTRACT This article is an attempt to address on a theoretical level an antinomy in postcolonial approaches to the question of temporal difference. Current scholarship tends both to denounce the way in which the others of the Western self are placed notionally in another time than the West and not only analytically affirm but indeed valorize multiple temporalities. I elaborate on the two problematic temporal frameworks-linear developmentalism and cultural relativism-that belong to a colonial legacy and generate the antinomy in question, and then proceed to discuss possible alternatives provided by a Koselleck-inspired approach to historical time as inherently plural. I thereby make two central claims: (1) postcolonial conceptions of multiple temporalities typically, if tacitly, associate time with culture, and hence risk reproducing the aporias of cultural relativism; (2) postcolonial metahistorical critique is commonly premised on a simplified and even monolithic understanding of Western modernity as an ideology of 'linear progress.' Ultimately, I suggest that the solution lies in radicalizing, not discarding, the notion of multiple temporalities. Drawing on the Brazilian classic Os sertões as my key example, I also maintain that literary writing exhibits a unique 'heterochronic' (in analogy with 'heteroglossic') potential, enabling a more refined understanding of temporal difference. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Searching for Sugar man, for all its success in appealing to a global audience, has a distinctly Swedish provenance. Attention to its local preconditions can shed light on the film-maker Malik Bendjelloul's project and explain some of its elisions and emphases. With a media degree from a Swedish university, Bendjelloul started working for public service television in Sweden. This enabled him to experiment with documentary formats and later to discover the story of Sixto Rodriguez. With a public grant and large amounts of enthusiasm, he shaped a film that could be interpreted as an outcome of a specifically Anglo-Swedish culture. As a heavily anglicised country, Sweden is reaping the benefits of globalisation, but this also produces anxieties of influence.Searching for Sugar manis, in that respect, more about providing an alternative narrative about the USA and the English-speaking world, than exploring the cultural politics of South Africa. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The article focuses on the necessity of exile and struggles concerning seeking new life away from a native place. This applies to the case of Trinidadian writer V.S. Naipaul, who exiled in England to pursue a writing career using English as his language. European literary writers including James Joyce, Samuel Beckett and Paul Celan have made literary works concerning desire for modern lifestyle as the reason for exile.

The article discusses various parts and stories published in this book including the one on the influence of exits in African literature, another on the literature of African immigrants in Europe, and the one by Sverker Sörlin on the history of environmental policy all over the world.

Drawing on the transnationally successful examples of Clarice Lispector and J.M. Coetzee, this article argues that it is through a critical combination of perspectives from world literature theory and translation studies (after the cultural turn) that we can arrive at a more precise understanding of how literary works enter multiple networks. Rather than reducing literature emerging from postcolonies to a matter of transferring local culture, literature should also be seen as a transnational, if locally inflected, culture of its own. The translatability of Lispector's and Coetzee's works is then possible to read in terms of how they participate in this particular culture. However, entering multiple networks also entails the loss of the writer's authority and necessitates the theorization of literary translation in terms of seriality and serial collectivity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Presented is a collection of opinion articles about "District 9," a film directed by Neill Blomkamp. Included are essays such as "The Strange Ride of Wikus Van De Merwe," by Michael Valdez Moses, Lucy Valerie Graham's "Amakwerekwere and Other Aliens: District 9 and Hospitality," and "District 9: The Global South as Science Fiction," by Stefan Helgesson.

Copyright of Cross / Cultures: Readings in the Post / Colonial Literatures in English is the property of Brill / Rodopi and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

This article argues that Ivan Vladislavić's The exploded view approaches metropolitan life in Johannesburg by way of antinomies such as separation/connection, knowledge/unknowability and intimacy/anonymity. Composed like a rhizome, this work of fiction departs, not only from an earlier practice of separating Johannesburg conceptually from Africa, but also from the current rhetoric of Africanization and national unity. Instead, Vladislavić's exploration of antinomial oppositions deconstructs the boundaries of both the racial identities and the geopolitical imaginary that determine the painful yoking of psyche and architectural topography in his fictional metropolis. The (re)writing of visual representations is of particular importance to this task. By disrupting aesthetic hierarchies and inserting hypostasized images of “Europe” and “Africa” into the flow of narration,“Africanness” is evoked as an itinerant form of becoming rather than a static term in a binary opposition. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Focusing onItinerário, a journal published in Maputo between 1941 and 1955, this article investigates how a modernist rhetoric of newness evolved in post-Second World War Mozambique. Literature and art enjoyed a place of prominence inItinerário. Contrary to clichéd perceptions of Mozambique as a “backward” Portuguese outpost at the time, contributors to the journal explored numerous contemporary, international cultural developments. The article looks briefly at three such transnational moments in the journal, namely its writing on neo-realism, the Harlem Renaissance and Angolan literature. This advanced level of cultural receptivity facilitated, it is argued, the notion of a yet-to-be-realized Mozambican literature, as distinct from Portuguese or colonial literature. Rather than being the product of nativist “authenticity”, then, the ambition to create a national literature was imbricated with globally dispersed literatures in which the will to newness was of constitutive importance. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This essay focuses on the 1918 film "The Rose of Rhodesia," directed by Harold Shaw. Particular attention is given to viewing the film as an imperial or colonial romance. The author states that the film's three storylines conflict by revealing different facets of the political culture in South Africa at the time.