The Tongue-Tied Imagination

Should a writer work in former colonial language, or in a vernacular? The language question was once one of the great, intractable problems that haunted postcolonial literatures in the twentieth century, but it has since acquired a reputation for being a dead end of narrow nationalism. Instead of asking whether language matters, The Tongue-Tied Imagination explores how the language question itself came to matter. Focusing on the case of Senegal, this book studies the intersection of French and Wolof. Drawing on extensive archival research and an under-studied corpus of novels, poetry, and films in both languages, the chapters follow the emergence of a politics of language from colonization into the early independence decades and through to the era of neoliberal development. Chapters explore the works of well-known francophone authors such as Léopold Senghor, Ousmane Sembène, Mariama Bâ, and Boubacar Boris Diop alongside the more overlooked vernacular artists with whom they are in dialogue. Pushing back against a prevailing view of postcolonial language debates as a terrain of nativism, this book argues for the language question as a struggle over the nature and limits of literature itself. Language debates tend to pull in two directions: first, they produce literary commensurability by suturing vernacular traditions into the normative patterns of world literature; but second, they create space to imagine how literary culture might be configured otherwise. Drawing on these insights, this book models both a new understanding of translation and a different approach to literary comparison.