Blackwell Reference Online

Extract

The worlds of world literature are often worlds in collision. ( Damrosch, 2003 : p. 14) The differences between languages are very important lines. […] We live in a society where heteroglossia is commonplace. It's a society where, if you seek to represent that society in a single language, no matter what that language is, you are in some profound way distorting the reality. ( Kumar, 2007 , p. 104) In March 2007, a text appeared in Le Monde des Livres , the weekly literary supplement to France's leading national daily newspaper, announcing the death of “Francophonia.” Dismissing this category of literary production as one supported by the neo-colonial, centralizing apparatus of the French state, the manifesto announced the simultaneous emergence of “world-literature in French.” The signatories of this statement attempted as such to reflect, or even engineer, a further shift in the cultural reconfigurations of the French-speaking world. They endeavored to move away from any Gallocentric imagination and projection of such a space in terms of political or diplomatic considerations (according to which intercultural communication and exchange are often grounded in asymmetrical situations of power), and to approach instead an understanding of Francophonia as a “world region held together by historical events, [by] the binding strength of joint common experiences and places of remembrance” ... log in or subscribe to read full text