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Tayeb Salih, Sol Plaatje, and the Trajectories of World Literature

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  03 August 2015

Stefan Helgesson
Stefan Helgesson*
Affiliation:
Stockholm University
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Abstract

A crucial theoretical question in world literature studies concerns the dual trajectories of extroversion and introversion, and how they relate to or even are predicated on each other. By discussing the examples of Tayeb Salih and, in particular, Sol Plaatje, this article tries to demonstrate that although the current turn toward more “introverted” literary studies can be seen as justifiably critical of single-system modes of world literature theory, an attentiveness to the combined and contradictory trajectories of extroversion and introversion will enable a more situated and localized form of world literature studies that nonetheless evades the risk of reifying national or linguistic provenance. This also requires a stronger conception of reception history not as a transparent vessel for the literary object, but as an active agent in rendering specific texts or authorships readable as introverted or extroverted.

Keywords

extroversionintroversionSol Plaatjeprint culturereception historyTayeb Salihworld literature
Type
Forum on Literary World Systems
Information
Cambridge Journal of Postcolonial Literary Inquiry , Volume 2 , Issue 2 , September 2015 , pp. 253 - 260
Copyright
© Cambridge University Press 2015 

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References

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2 An obvious case would be Simon Gikandi’s forthcoming special issue of PMLA on the theme of “literature in the world.” Other instances are Emily Apter, Against World Literature (London: Verso, 2013); Hofmeyr, Isabel, Gandhi’s Printing Press (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2013)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Lazarus, Neil, “Cosmopolitanism and the Specificity of the Local in World Literature,” Journal of Commonwealth Studies 46.1 (2011): 119–137 Google Scholar. Laura’s Doyle’s notion of “interimperiality”—even if it is not restricted to literature—is also a significant step forward in the development of a polycentric global framework for literary study. See Doyle, Laura, “Inter-Imperiality: Dialectics in a Postcolonial World History,” Interventions 16.2 (2014): 159–196 CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

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6 I have asked and been granted permission by Najlaa Eltom (also spelt Naglaa Eltoum) to mention her name and her work on Salih in this article. Her essay is accessible through the Stockholm University library. Ms. Eltom, it should mentioned, is also a well-known poet in Sudan.

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