ABSTRACTS

Literature after Empire: a comparative reading of two literary manifestos

David Murphy
(University of Stirling)

In a landmark essay from 1983, the celebrated Anglo-Indian author Salman Rushdie proclaimed that Commonwealth literature does not exist. Essentially, Rushdie was reacting against what he perceived to be the marginalisation of writing by Britain's former colonial subjects, which he believed was relegated to an inferior position in relation to both British and American literature. Although the category of Commonwealth literature had emerged from the academic and publishing world as a way of identifying and celebrating the emergent literature of the former colonies, in Rushdie's view, this inclusive gesture effectively excluded such writing from mainstream fiction, conflating its literary status with the ethnic identity of the author.
In this paper, I propose to carry out a comparative reading of Rushdie's essay and the equally polemical manifesto, Pour une littérature-monde', first published in Le Monde in March 2007, and developed in the subsequent volume edited by the French writers Michel Le Bris and Jean Rouaud. As in Rushdie's earlier piece, the littérature-monde' manifesto challenges the processes of exclusion and inclusion involved in the classification of work (primarily) from the former colonial periphery, and demands a radical de-centring of our understanding of what is meant by French literature, which it argues should no longer be focused on the French nation. My paper will pose a series of key questions about these two manifestos. Firstly, do they express achievable, or for that matter desirable, goals, or is it more useful to think of them as strategic manoeuvres in wider literary-cultural battles? And, secondly, to what extent do they reveal tensions between the attitudes of writers and scholars towards literary classification? Rushdie called for the study of a world literature in English, just as the more recent manifesto has called for the recognition of a littérature-monde en français'. However, in those locations where Commonwealth literature has disappeared as a mode of classification, it has most often been replaced not by world literature but by what is for some the highly contentious term postcolonial literature .Are there other forces are at work in the field of literary classification, which may similarly derail the project of the littérature-monde' authors, and lead to currently unforeseen alternatives to the term littérature francophone'?