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" Comparative Literature in the Spirit of Bandung: "
Annette Damayanti Lienau
C. L. Miller
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Latin Dissertation
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English
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| Record Number
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1103756
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| Doc. No
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TLpq922421478
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| Main Entry
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Annette Damayanti Lienau
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C. L. Miller
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| Title & Author
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Comparative Literature in the Spirit of Bandung:\ Annette Damayanti LienauC. L. Miller
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| College
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Yale University
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| Date
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2011
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| student score
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2011
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| Degree
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Ph.D.
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| Page No
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316
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| Abstract
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My dissertation compares the politics and poetics of language choice in the literary histories of Senegal and Indonesia as national case studies from Africa and Asia. It examines key historical moments through which the contours of literary nationalism were posited and challenged by ideologically informed, transnational literary movements (pan-Islamism and Communism). The positions of Senegal and Indonesia at the extremes of a trans-continental literary realm with an Arabic textual tradition, and the marginalization of Arabic for transcription during the colonial period, offers a primary basis for comparison between the two national contexts. The first portion of the dissertation on Senegalese literature is subdivided into three chapters, with each devoted to an author whose work represents a distinct linguistic, literary orientation in Senegal: Amadu Bamba (the Arabic language poet and founder of Senegal's most widespread Sufi Order, Muridism), Leopold Sklar Senghor (the Francophone poet and Senegal's first president and linguistic policymaker after independence), and Ousmane Sembene (the author and filmmaker whose oppositional language politics drew him to vernacular language film-making, primarily in Wolof, and to the founding of the first vernacular language journal in Senegal). By complementing my analysis on the politics and poetics of linguistic choice in the works of Amadu Bamba (in Arabic) and Senghor (in French) with an interpretation of Ousmane Sembene's work, I develop an initial method of reading that considers how the traces of foregone linguistic alternatives are nonetheless sustained in individual texts and in the fissures of Senegalese literary history. If my reading of Bamba analyzes his poetry in the context of the French colonial displacement and manipulation of Arabic within the public sphere at the turn of the twentieth century, and if my reading of Senghor's work (written in the wake of this displacement) considers Senghor's reconfiguration of French as a linguistic choice rather than a systemic imposition, Sembene's fictional re-narrations of Senegalese history present a foreshortened reading of these linguistic vicissitudes, while offering a counter-prescription (Wolof) embedded in the bilingual patterns of his written work. This "palimpsestic" interpretation of Sembene's work, in other words, not only considers its synchronic value, by examining how the linguistic texture of his work depends on bilingual narrative patterns, it also considers its diachronic value, by assessing the text itself as a historical event. Focused on Indonesian literature, the second half of the dissertation employs the interpretive methods developed in the introductory chapters, while offering comparative readings of Senegalese and Indonesian authors on the displacement of Arabic as a literary language (and a mode of transcription), the coupling of language choice and ideology, and the representation of linguistic competition in the revisionist historical fiction of leftist authors and filmmakers. The Indonesian case study is also divided into chapters devoted to representative figures of Indonesian proto-nationalist poetry (Chairil Anwar), leftist literature and film (Pramoedya Ananta Toer and Sjuman Djaya), and Indonesian authors of pan-Islamist, religious persuasion (fiamka). At the other extreme of an Arabic-language cosmopolis, my Indonesian case study begins by examining the legacy of colonial, Arabic script displacement in both the literary and political spheres, traced through the writings of the trilingual authour and chairman of Indonesia's first Islamic clerical council, Hamka (a prominent arbiter on Indonesian language politics in the "New Order"). This inaugural chapter on Indonesian literature, like my preceding work on Senegal, highlights the centrality of romanization and Arabic script displacement in the formation of a "nationalized" language, and considers its implications for the development of local literature and the projections of literary "mode nity." The subsequent chapter of my Indonesian case study, on comparative experiments in leftist literature, examines the work of Pramoedya Ananta Toer (an ardent defender of socialist realism in Indonesia) and Sjumanjaya (who, like Sembene, was trained in cinematography in Moscow). In this chapter, I focus not only on the common ideological influences that inform their work, but also on the portrayal of linguistic choice in their revisionist historical fiction, their depiction of Arabic as a linguistic alternative to Malay or Wolof, and their common dignification of vernacular print culture. To conclude the joint analysis of two case studies on Senegal and Indonesia, the final chapter of the dissertation returns to a comparative examination of poetic form and poetry's reception. Beginning with a comparative reading of Senghor and the Indonesian poet Chairil Anwar (whose poetry has become synonymous with the Indonesian Revolution), the chapter explores the relationship between poetry and sacralized language, and the predicament of poetry's relative monoglossia for the bilingual poet who chooses between competing languages and scripts.
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Comparative literature
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Indonesia
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Language choice
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Language, literature and linguistics
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Senegal
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Third World literature
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