A Globalectical Imagination
Ngugi Wa Thiong’o A globalectical imagination also calls for changes in attitudes to languages: monolingualism suffocates, and it is often extended to mean mono-literature and mono-culturism. This also calls for a struggle against the view of literatures (languages and cultures) relating to each other in terms of a hierarchy of power. ‘My literature is more aristocratic than yours’ - that kind of approach should be replaced by the give and take inherent in the notion of network. I like Cesaire’s phrase that culture contact and exchange were the oxygen of civilization. Cesaire’s text, A Discourse on Colonialism, is actually very global in its references and even in its reading of history: it’s a text that could be read for classes in European, Asian, and African studies, but it is often read as a tirade against old colonialism. But the globalectical approach is still that of the method both in the organization and reading of literatures: any text can lead the reader from the “here” of one’s existence to the “there” of other people’s existence and back. In organizing the teaching of world literature one should start from wherever he or she is located. The Imperial approach wanted people no matter from whatever corner of the globe to start from the one imperial center, the metropolis of the empire, as the only center. A globalectical imagination assumes that any center is the center of the world. Each specific text can be read as a mirror of the world. Globalectical imagination assumes the particularity of the Blakean grain of sand and the universality in the notion of the world. Or as Cesaire writes in his celebrated poem, “Return to My Native Land” - “For it is not true that the work of man is finished, That we have nothing more to do in the world, That we are just parasites in this world, That it is enough for us to walk in step with the world, For the work of man is only just beginning and it remains to conquer all, The violence entrenched in the recess of his passion, And no race holds a monopoly of beauty, of intelligence, of strength, and, There is a place for all at the Rendezvous of Victory.” Pages: 1 2 3 4 5 |
Essays in this Forum
Break out of the Prison House of Hierarchy!
by Mukoma Wa Ngugi A Globalectical Imagination by Ngugi wa Thiong'o World Literature and the Postcolonial: Ngugi's Globalectics and Glissant's Poetics by Duncan McEachern Yoon “You Are the Prisoner, the Discoverer, the Founder, the Liberator”: Contextualizing Decolonial Paths of Afro-Hispanic Literature in Latin America, Equatorial Guinea and Spain by Elisa Rizo Globalectics Beyond Postcoloniality by Carole Boyce Davies |