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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 06 July 2017
This essay is a brief response to Tejumola Olaniyan’s article titled “African Literature in the Post-Global Age: Provocations on Field Commonsense.” Taking up the concept of the “post-global” advanced in Olaniyan’s article, this essay argues for the continued relevance of the concept of postcoloniality as it emerged in literary and cultural criticism in the 1990s.
1 Olaniyan, Tejumola, “African Literature in the Post-Global Age: Provocations on Field Commonsense,” Cambridge Journal of Postcolonial Literary Inquiry 3.3 (September 2016): 387–396 CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
2 Hall, Stuart, “When Was ‘The Post-Colonial’? Thinking at the Limit,” The Post-Colonial Question, eds. Ian Chambers and Lidia Curti (London: Verso, 1996), 242–260 Google Scholar.
3 For a sampling of currently ongoing arguments on the limits or promises of the paradigm of “world literature” as a productive direction for literary studies in the global age, see the following: Jonathan Arac, “Anglo-Globalism?” New Left Review 16 (July-August 2002): 35–45; Emily Apter, The Translation Zone: A New Comparative Literature (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2006); Peter Hitchcock, The Long Space: Transnationalism and Postcolonial Form (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2010); Gayatri Spivak, Death of a Discipline (New York: Columbia University Press, 2003); and Ngugi wa Thiong’o, Globalectics: Theory and the Politics of Knowing (New York: Columbia University Press, 2012).
4 Achebe, Chinua, Things Fall Apart (London: Heinemann, 1996)Google Scholar.
5 Ogunyemi, Wale, Ìgbésí Ayé Okonkwo (Ibadan: New Horn Press, 1997)Google Scholar.
6 Achebe, Things Fall Apart, 148; Ogunyemi, Ìgbésí Ayé Okonkwo, 132.
7 On the concept of ọ̀làjú, see Peel, J. D. Y., “Olaju: A Yoruba Concept of Development,” The Journal of Development Studies 14 (January 1978): 139–165 CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
8 See Samuel Crowther, Rev., A Vocabulary of the Yoruba Language (London: Seeleys, 1852), 242; Samuel Johnson, Rev., The History of the Yorubas (London: Routledge, 1921), 36–37 Google Scholar and 149–52. For a recent ethnographic discussion of some mythological narratives surrounding Ọya, see Olajubu, Oyeronke, Women in the Yoruba Religious Sphere (Albany, NY: SUNY Press, 2003), 65–92 Google Scholar.
9 Of course, this reinforces the critical consensus that the meaning of Achebe’s novel is indissociable from the history and language of European colonial adventure in Africa. In translations of the novel into Afrikaans and French, for instance, the translators do not face the kind of linguistic tangle that Ogunyemi confronts in seeking to render the words a British colonial administrator might use in official language. Chris Barnard’s 1966 Afrikaans translation renders the title as “Die Pasifikasie van die Primitiewe Stamme van die Laer-Niger” and Michel Ligny’s French makes it “La Pacification des Tribus primitives du Bas-Niger.” See’n Pad loop Dood (Johannesburg: Afrikaanse Pers-Boekhandel, 1966) and Le Monde S’Effondre (Paris: Présence Africaine, 1972). In these renditions, “primitive” and “Niger” have clear epistemic reference and linguistic cognates in a fictional colonial administrator’s interior monologue. The examples of Afrikaans and French are particularly relevant because both are by now African languages, too. Ogunyemi’s negotiation of the nexus/disjunction between “primitive” and “kògbédè” points to a productive direction that African studies might take in our transnational moment: namely, to continue to work against mystifications of language as innocent repository of stable identity.