Decolonisations of Literature: Critical Practice in Africa and Brazil After 1945

In Decolonisations of Literature: Critical Practice in Africa and Brazil After 1945, Stefan Helgesson illuminates a problematic that has occupied a host of productive studies in recent years: the place of the Global South in the conceptualization of “world literature.” By tracing a history of critical literary studies at key moments in the twentieth century across four productive geographic sites—South Africa, Brazil, Senegal, and Eastern Africa—Helgesson takes seriously a problem that remains implicit in the field of world literature and the disciplines of comparative literature and literary studies more broadly: the presumed stability of literature as an object of study. Helgesson approaches literature as a concept whose “meaning … is constantly made and remade” and thus is inseparable from critical practice, showing that “intellectuals of the global South are strategically positioned agents in this process” (5). He does so via a dual focus on debates about the meaning of literature and literary scholarship within the localities and circuits most meaningful to the figures he analyzes and through drawing out the multiple temporalities that such localized considerations of “literature” and “world” simultaneously occupy, where critical practices are “folded, as a towel or a linen sheet, allowing for earlier positions or approaches suddenly to become proximate to later concerns” (29). Helgesson maintains a close dialogue with a broad range of key theorists of world literatures who have brought approaches from material cultures, world systems theories, and the sociology of literature to illuminate the co-implications of the “world” of world literature with European imperialism, including work by Sarah Brouillette, Pascale Casanova, Pheng Cheah, and Amir Mufti. However, the result of his focus on localized critical praxis, understood geographically and temporally, is not to argue for representativity or to reveal new networks of influence among his subjects. Helgesson enacts a mode of comparison flexible enough to bring institutionally “disconnected” locales into conversation via a common decolonizing drive (24) through recognizing in the critics he studies the authority to negotiate the concept of literature out of “whatever cultural resources and legacies … happen to be at hand” (171). In so doing, he argues for decolonizing the very concept of literature.Across the book’s four chapters, Helgesson argues that the processes of decolonization and of the “worlding of literature” operate in tandem (65), though not synchronously, and traces both scholarly clusters (in the chapters on South Africa and Eastern Africa) and the influence of influential individuals (Antônio Cândido and Léopold Sédar Senghor). He elucidates the stakes of the multiple, folded temporalities that guide conceptualizations of literature in his discussion of South Africa’s internal coloniality under apartheid. This first chapter, “Literature, Locality and Value in Apartheid South Africa,” argues that between the 1940s and the 1990s, debates about South African canon formation in English were ultimately debates about synchronization. Critics adjusted their notions of the literary with reference to a constellation of chronologies: the Euro-American cosmopolitan North (David Atwell); white British settlerhood (H. K. Girling, Guy Butler, and William Plomer); anti-apartheid resistance inflected by Marxism, materialism, and Black consciousness (Isabel Hofmeyr, Mike Kirkwood, and Kelwyn Sole); and “Africanist” temporalities (Tim Couzens, Stephen Gray, and Es’kia Mphahlele) that accommodated more capacious local cultural registers, both oral and print. He concludes that differing institutional spaces helped shape the international collectives, including scholars both on and off the African continent, and local collectives, including scholars located in specific institutions in South Africa, to which critics appealed for authority in their claims about the literary.In moving to Brazil in the second chapter, “A Latin American Counterpoint: Antonio Candido and the São Paulo School of Criticism,” Helgesson finds a case where a “local field” of literature is established much earlier and is more strongly institutionalized than in any of the African cases. These historical developments, however, in some ways serve to complicate the question of decolonizing concepts of literature, since in Brazilian institutional contexts, the “worlding” of literature took as its international points of reference a broad swath of Euro-American examples. The chapter examines twentieth-century Brazil’s most influential literary critic, Antônio Cândido, and the São Paulo school of criticism that developed around him through their embrace of a “strong” concept of literature—one constituted by shared characteristics such that they form a transmissible system, traced through “moments where topic and form connect and disrupt each other” (83). In the case of Brazil, Cândido saw this system as a “post-European affair” that drew from European models but with an increasingly postcolonial outlook (76–80). Cândido—like virtually every other Brazilian intellectual in a similar position—saw Brazil’s colonial past and the social inequalities it bequeathed as disconnected from the colonial present of the contemporary Global South, a position that he somewhat modifies late in his career. He does so, however, without acknowledging either the institutional suppression of Black Brazilian writers or their emerging prominence within the School’s own chronology and temporality toward the end of the twentieth century. Helgesson points out that this tension in Cândido’s work introduces a disjunction with the African critics addressed in the book’s other chapters: the São Paulo school remains “beholden to a particular version of literary time that … failed to register the twentieth-century articulation of a new regime of literary relevance within the Black Atlantic” (102).In the final two chapters of the book, “Léopold Senghor’s Performative Criticism” and “‘Our Cultural Take-Off into the World’: The Cosmopolitan-Vernacular Making of East African Literature,” Helgesson argues that Senghor and the East African decolonial circle of the 1970s, especially in the critical and theoretical work of Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o, more radically extend debates about the cultural objects of literary study that developed in South Africa and respond to the blind spots introduced in the São Paulo critics’ silence around authors of African descent by thinking through the politics of vernacular forms and languages. These chapters trace tensions in the ways that the Senghor and the Eastern African critics attempt to deal with the question of literature as a “site of encounter across differences” (110), by focusing on two volumes of Senghor’s collected writings in the Liberté series (1962–1993) and Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o, Taban Lo Liyong, and Henry Owuor-Anyumba’s “On the Abolition of the English Department” (1968) and Ngũgĩ’s Decolonising the Mind (1986). Helgesson sees a de-essentializing critical practice in Senghor’s expansive concept of language and literature as fundamentally plastic, where all languages would be available to be reshaped by African users and contact with African cultures. The final chapter argues for this kind of plasticity, conversely, as located in the form of literature for Ngũgĩ, where the novel form becomes the globalized vehicle reshaped and transformed by an African vernacular experience through language.Tracking the disjunctures and multiple temporalities that emerge from diverse sites where decolonization is debated during the mid-late twentieth century, Helgesson deliberately avoids tracing routes of influence and contact among writers and texts to insist on the plural “decolonisations” of the title. Decolonisations of Literature is invested in drawing out what he sees as a recursivity in the critical conversations he has traced: literature and critical practice do not just reflect broader notions of decolonization, but co-create them. His book therefore differs in its approach, though it complements, recent critical works that have productively brought African and Latin American literary practice together, including Magalí Armillas-Tiseyra’s The Dictator Novel: Writers and Politics in the Global South (2019) and Sarah Quesada’s The African Heritage of Latinx and Caribbean Literature (2022). While a risk of this methodology might be that the logic of comparison is less evident, Helgesson signals throughout the book the conceptual convergences and overlaps among critical practices. The advantage of such an approach is to draw out the complexities of the temporalities of decolonizing practice, which move out of sync with each other, while arguing that critics in the Global South establish a local and regional authority over concepts of literature that do not depend on adapting them to the times and models to other places, particularly of the Euro-American north. Decolonisations of Literature thus also converses with innovative works that interrogate the constitution of objects of cultural analysis both in postcolonial studies such as Sarah Brouillette’s UNESCO and the Fate of the Literary (2019), which he engages directly, and further afield of his geographies such as Karen Emmerich’s Literary Translation and the Making of Originals (2017).Helgesson’s compelling and subtle examinations of the four sites across Africa and Brazil thus productively demand that we reconsider two concepts fundamental to postcolonial cultural studies whose meanings are often taken for granted: “decolonization” and “literature.” Decolonisations of Literature convincingly argues that across a constellation of sites of debate, the objects of literary study are constituted together with the critical methods that have developed in formerly colonized spaces and offers a refreshing model for Global South comparison.