Literatures of Liberalization

Global Circulation and the Long Nineteenth Century

Regenia Gagnier

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN:
  9783319984186
• eBook ISBN:
  9783319984193
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

 

© The Author(s) 2018

Regenia GagnierLiteratures of LiberalizationNew Comparisons in World Literaturehttps://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-98419-3_1

Begin Abstract

1. The Transcultural Transformation of a Field

Regenia Gagnier¹

(1)

College of Humanities, University of Exeter, Exeter, UK

Regenia Gagnier

Email: [email protected]

Keywords

GlobalizationModernizationTranslationVictorian LiteratureNationalismLiterary historyImperialColonialPostcolonialComparative literature

End Abstract

1.1 Transcultural Political Languages

In May 2017, I co-hosted a conference at the Indian Institute of Advanced Study, Shimla, with a call for papers that read “Scholar-participants are expected to address questions that … cut across at least two linguistic cultures. Papers that are too narrowly monolingual in their focus will be given a lower priority in comparison with those that have a multi-lingual focus” (CFP, IIAS, Shimla, “Cross-Cultural Concerns in Colonial and Postcolonial India,” 2017). The case of India makes clear the importance of language at the base of states, rights, and entitlements. The Belgian economist Phillipe Van Parijs , well known for his formulation and advocacy of a Universal Basic Income , has understood this in proposing the rather utopian notion of linguistic justice and a tax on English, and such ideas have given rise to a thriving field of the Economics of Language . In multilingual countries, a national literature will be diverse and promoted through translation, and India is a multilingual nation with one billion citizens and 415 languages and dialects. 415 is a conservative estimate. SIL Ethnologue lists 7000 languages in the world, and some argue that 2000 of them are currently in India, with 22 recognized in the Constitution for legal use, including English. The Sahitya Akademi was founded in 1954 amidst debates over national languages “to foster and co-ordinate literary activities in all the Indian languages and to promote through them all the cultural unity of the country” (Ministry of Education Report , 1971, in Singer 2012, p. 153). In 1956 Jawaharlal Nehru divided states along linguistic lines, exhorting them to learn each other’s languages to promote unity in the newly independent India. Although with hindsight it appears that contrary to Nehru’s hopes, this linguistic division actually decreased multilingualism, the debates tolerated even English as a possible force during the unification of the new nation-state: “[English] does help in our understanding each other, more especially the people from the North and the South … it provides a link between us and the outside world, and it is of the utmost importance that we should maintain and recognize that link. … And not try to cut ourselves from it and isolate ourselves” (Report of the Official Language Commission, 1956, minuting Nehru) (Singer 2012, p. 153). Today, it is worth noting that even the most oppressed groups in India can make claims for empowerment through English. One spokesperson for the Dalitbahujans (Dalit in Marathi is the term chosen by scheduled castes to mean oppressed or broken and bahujan means majority), Kancha Ilaiah , writes “English’s accessibility to the oppressed is creating a new philosophy … In future it can become a big instrument of liberation of the Dalitbahujans and women. It translates the new global ideas within no time and the organic intellectuals who could read and write in that global language would be in a better position to handle these ideas with much more confidence than those who cannot ” (Ilaiah 2010, loc. 3282–3286). Without taking sides on English, we may discern two contrasting possibilities for language: language as local identity and community or as a process of change, as in processes of globalization. Our attitude may be one of preservation and protection or laissez-faire and evolution. As languages become extinct, as English or Mandarin becomes hegemonic, we may take the tolerant view that languages serve the needs of their speakers and as speakers change for better or worse their languages will evolve with them. Or we may say with Van Parijs that global languages are forms of domination, and that local languages are worth fighting for .

Current translators tend to opt for tolerance, heteroglossia, dialogism, adapting Bakhtin’s theories of language change (Merrill 2009), pointing out that all medieval European literates were polylingual, insofar as, whatever they spoke, all of them learned to read from Latin (Psaki 2017), and that ideas of mother tongues and language purity only arose with modern nation-states (Pollock 2006). Even languages that are thought to be “dead” never quite die. The Vatican’s Lexicon Recentis Latinitas includes some 14,000 new words that update the Latin language to allow its speakers in the Vatican and elsewhere to talk about rush hour, the internet, and so forth. Closer to home for most us, we can expect that all gender-inflected languages will be transformed in the near future by changing conventions of gender neutrality. While a transgender subject need only change pronouns from male to female or vice versa, Anglophone subjects who claim gender neutrality tend to prefer the plural pronoun they, and our English sentences will be duly transformed.

I have begun with language because the global circulation of English language and literatures is largely the effect of the Victorian British empire and Anglophone settlements, and in future this empire and settlements and their international relations, rather than an island’s literature, will be central to Victorian Studies . Postcolonial studies have shown us the interdependence of things British and things global, and an even longer history of Marxisms has shown us the horizontal contexts between Britain and other empires and settler colonies in the nineteenth century and the vertical struggles (socio-economic class, caste, ethnicity, gender, religion, etc.) within each of them. Between 1780 and 1930, the so-called long nineteenth century, the number of English speakers rocketed from twelve million to 200 million, and what James Belich has called the Anglo Divergence, including the United States as well as the British settler dominions of Canada , Australasia , and South Africa , reproduced Anglophone societies through long-range migration (Belich 2009). These reached further and lasted longer than the British or other European “gunpowder” empires, though they no less displaced, marginalized, and in some cases exterminated indigenous peoples.

In Poetics of Relation, on “the entanglements of world-wide relation,” Edouard Glissant in the Caribbean wrote that “relation is spoken multilingually ” (Glissant 1997, p. 19) and in both Writers in Politics (1981) and Decolonizing the Mind (1986) the Kenyan Ngugi wa Thiong’o addressed the relation of English to local languages: Dohluo, Kiswhahili, Gikuyu, Luluba, Kikamba, Kimasai, Kigiriama (Gikandi 2000, p. 264). Glissant saw English as a vehicular language, merely a sabir, a lingua franca or medium of communication between peoples of different languages for business, as opposed to a vernacular. Like Nehru and Ilaiah , he perceived that access to technology was a source of progress that might require language flexibility, using vehicles, travelling or carrier languages, as well as vernaculars (108–119).

Given the complexity of language and culture change, the term I prefer in this book is transculturation, from the Cuban anthropologist Fernando Ortiz’s Contrapunteo Cubano Del Tabaco Y El Azúcar Cuban Counterpoint: Tobacco and Sugar (1940) (Ortiz [1940] 1947 English Trans.; Font and Quiroz 2005). Ortiz was writing about the transculturation of commodities and industries, as in the exporting of indigenous Cuban tobacco and importing of North American sugar industries, in which, as he wrote, there is always a change of culture, something is always given in return for what is received. I prefer such terms as transculturation, trans- or intertextuality, circulation, appropriation, use, revoicing, reaccentuation, indigenization, (re)mediation and so forth to “translation” because the latter has often meant the simple carrying over from one source language or culture to another target and I shall be emphasizing, in Anna Tsing’s term, the frictions of such encounters. Throughout, I am interested less in literal translation than in how cultures borrow from and use each other. Sometimes the use will be dominant or exploitative, as in processes of colonization , but at other times it will be voluntary, as in willed processes of modernization.

In this book, Victorian English and Anglophone culture and Victorian ideologies of liberalism , individualism , nationalism , socialism , cosmopolitanism , and Internationalism will often be seen through other geopolitical movements, such as the May Fourth and New Culture movements in China , the Meiji Restoration in Japan , the Turkish Tanzimat and the Arab Romanticism that resisted it. Well known in Victorian Britain, Theosophy was also a global movement intended to rationalize and universalize religions; Esperanto was meant to provide a modern universal language; even the New Woman was a social type circulated to modernize gender relations. She appeared in Britain in the 1880–1890s, in China in the 1920–1930s, and in Arabic-speaking cultures in the 1890s, was muted during Arab nationalisms, and then resurfaced again loudly in the 1950s (Ahmed 1992; Amin 2000; Badran 2009; Badran and Cooke 2004; Cooke 2001; Fleischmann 2003).

We shall be analyzing the literature of such modernization processes throughout, from Lao She’s experiment in individualism in Rickshaw Boy (1939) to Oscar Wilde’s “Soul of Man under Socialism ” in Vietnam in the 1930s, to the Korean use of the Irish Renaissance /Celti...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Front Matter
• 1. The Transcultural Transformation of a Field
• 2. Global Circulation and Some Problems in Liberalism, Liberalization, and Neoliberalism
• 3. Dialogical Imaginations: European Ideas of Plasticity, Freedom, and Choice in the Long Nineteenth Century
• 4. Trollope’s Modernity: The Speed-up, Stress, and Resentments of a Public Sphere
• 5. The Global Circulation of Charles Dickens’s Novels
• 6. Global Literatures of Decadence
• 7. Crossed Histories: Social Formations in Friction 1783–Present
• 8. Coda on Processes of Sex, Gender, and Desire in the Anthropocene
• Back Matter