Lusophonia vs. Lusutopia, MLA vs. MTA
2013; Penn State University Press; Volume: 50; Issue: 2 Linguagem: Inglês
10.5325/complitstudies.50.2.0211
ISSN1528-4212
Autores Tópico(s)Philosophy, Ethics, and Existentialism
ResumoI do not mean to suggest that we cease to be Luso-Brazilianists and become comparatists.—Francis Rogers This epigraph, which comes from a 1953 article by one of the key figures in the rise of lusophone studies in the United States, should strike us as paradoxical: the discipline named already displays a hyphenated identity—encompassing both Lusitania (Portugal) and Brazil—that would seem to make comparative approaches inevitable.1 I should explain that Rogers is referring not to comparison within his discipline, but to the analogy between Portuguese and other “single” languages that have spread to four (or more) continents and become the official and literary languages of vastly different cultures. (In the case of Portuguese, the four continents are Europe, South America, Africa, and Asia, [Portuguese is a co-official language of East Timor and Macau].) Rogers is saying that the comparison of seemingly analogous situations of world languages in postcolonial contexts is intellectually suspect, and in any case more than any one scholar can handle. But I wish to read the quote on its surface, as it were, as pointing out the tension between Lusophonia and Lusutopia. Unlike English, French, and Spanish, the Portuguese language finds no place in the MLA divisional structure but it is rather called forth only in the dash that connects Lusitania with Brazil.The lusophonic approach reads the dash between “Luso” and “Brazilian” as a connector between two vastly different cultures that are related through the fact that they share a language. There are, of course, very pragmatic reasons for this connection: knowing the language is a necessary gateway to both cultures. But the dash can also be read disjunctively, as highlighting the doubleness of the name and the fact that the phonic connection is (Lus)utopian, creating a nonplace where comparison operates. Interestingly, translating “dash” into Portuguese yields “traço” or “tracinho”—the trace. The trace suggests absence and presence at the same time. It reminds us as well of those literatures that are missing from the formulation “Luso-Brazilian,” which are usually referred to as “lusophone African.”The idea of global comparison voiced in the title of this collection of articles invokes the dialectical relation between comparative and world literature, the utopian construction of a topos (the world) through an approach to literature that is nongeographical and supralinguistic. How does such a project fare when it kicks against the pricks of divisional slicing and dicing, such as those practiced by the premier organization in our field, the MLA? Elsewhere in this cluster, Françoise Lionnet provisionally answers this question: “The MLA should reexamine its binary separation of English from so-called foreign languages. The vibrant contemporary presence of many languages right here in the United States makes the MLA's basic structure increasingly irrelevant. Linguistic diversity has always existed on the ground in the United States…. But its role has been invisible to literary scholars who specialize in monolingual traditions reinforced by the MLA's separate domains” (221). Lionnet's statement defines the trace nature of polylingual reality on the ground. Were our episteme to be dominated by topographies of language, then we would need to organize so as to overcome these separate language domains. At its highest levels, however, the MLA is organized phonically, according to languages, then chronologically, and only then topically, that is, either by the topography of place or by topic.So, the “MTA” of my title does not signify the New York public transportation system that faithfully brings the valiant workers of the Manhattan MLA headquarters in to their work and then carries them back to home and family at the end of the day. The MTA in my title alludes to a heterotopical version of the MLA, the Modern Temporal/Topical Association, wherein “topos” is taken both in its basic meaning of “place” and in its metaphorical one of “topic.” My point is that while the “L” in MLA can sign both “language” and “literature,” the way the organizational structure of the MLA addresses its work has as much to do with temporae and topoi as it does with l-words. To repeat what is commonly known, the MLA was founded in 1883 (it is older than the MTA) to support and give voice to the study of modern, “live” languages as opposed to classical ones. It took from the more established and prestigious discipline of classics a philological approach to literature, which largely treated texts as depositories of linguistic data and emphasized commentary and translation over interpretation. Thus, the earliest division of the MLA was into a “phonetic section” and a “pedagogical section.” From the founding of the PMLA, philological and linguistics articles not only appeared alongside ones devoted to literary and cultural analysis but frequently outnumbered them. Tellingly, at the 1890 convention at Vanderbilt University, Professor John Phelps Fruit delivered a paper titled “A Plea for the Study of Literature from the Aesthetic Standpoint.”2As the MLA grew, its sections continued bifurcating until they became divisions. According to its website and judging by the way the program for its annual convention takes place, the MLA insists absolutely on the primacy of its divisional structure as the grounding episteme for scholarly work. The language is totalizing: “MLA divisions encompass the primary scholarly and professional concerns of the association” (emphasis mine).3 It is interesting to compare this epistemology with that of the other two organizations that support comparative and world literature: the International Comparative Literature Association and the American Comparative Literature Association. The latter organization has no divisions of any kind, while the former has research committees on a heterogeneous list of topics, from literary theory to literature and neuroscience.4When we examine the way the division structure as a whole accomplishes its encompassing of MLA scholarly and professional concerns, we find that little has changed since Reed Way Dasenbrock's analysis of “English department geography” in a 1987 issue of the ADE Bulletin.5 Notice, first of all, the “T” (topographical) idea as an organizational principle. Dasenbrock found that professional activity occurred within the limitations of four nested hierarchical structures, beginning with what he calls “us” and “them,” which is the most fundamental. In MLA terms, these are of course the English and the foreign language arms of the association, the Association of Departments of English and the Association of Departments of Foreign Languages, topically situated in the two main hotels of the convention. Next come the specific language areas, such as those of Lusophonia. Then comes the topographic situatedness of nationality. Here Dasenbrock shows his English affiliations when he notes the strong division between American and British in specialization, anthologization, and other regimes of knowledge production. Readers will be familiar with a similar divide within the Spanish language between Peninsular and American specializations, and this divide generally obtains in the study of the Portuguese language as well. Then there is frequently a final, smaller divider, usually a period of time, as one can see in the division structure that prominently features centuries. Only two divisions of the MLA are devoted to single authors: Chaucer and Shakespeare, leading to the former author being exiled from the language he wrote in—“Middle English Language and Literature, Excluding Chaucer.” Read without the comma, as a newspaper headline, this division title acquires a radical poignancy.Despite its nested hierarchies, the divisional structure of the MLA seems on its surface to be more favorable to comparative studies than, for example, funding entities at most universities. (consult the complete listing at the site referenced in endnote 3). There are no less than six divisions under the heading “Comparative Studies,” covering the predictable temporalities of literature from medieval to the twentieth century and also including European literary relations. This rivals the number of American divisions, which is eight. Genre studies, another rubric, seems to encourage and would certainly allow for comparative studies as well—of drama, of the novel, or of literary criticism, for example. Then there are the interdisciplinary divisions that delimit neither with an “L” (language) nor a “T” (topography), adding to the enforced or mandated comparison of the comparative studies divisions the implicit or allowed comparison of these rubrics.Yet in the end, such apparent promotions of comparativism are really fata morgana leading comparatists into the divisional desert to die of thirst. Comparative literature exists in those aporetic interstices that neither belong to nor can exist independently from structure, as Jacques Derrida has exemplified with the statement that the center of a structure is, “paradoxically, within the structure and outside it” (emphasis his).6 To put it another way, comparative literature has no object of study, the way most academic disciplines can be said to have one, or perhaps more accurately, can be said to construct one. Economics studies economy, sociology studies society, anthropology studies anthropoi, English studies English, Spanish studies Spanish, and of course Luso-Brazilian—as is evident from its name—studies Portuguese. But there is no comparative literature to be studied, it is only the studying. Comparative literature is the Humean third term not directly observed betwixt two (or more) objects.7 The statement “I study comparative literature” is a qualitatively different utterance from “I study English literature.” The latter delimits a corpus of texts, while the former gestures towards a methodology.Compared to the alternative isolationism of the major languages that are divided by period, the minor-language status of Lusophonia that allows it only a single division that dare not state its name seems to provide an advantage. The struggle for visibility from underneath the shadow of the major languages could be conducive to a kind of transnational solidarity. An example of how the division on Luso-Brazilian language and literature benefits from its singleton status is a session at the 2011 MLA: entitled “Luso-Brazilian Literatures and the Critical Global Humanities,” it cashed in doubly on the comparative opportunities provided, with presentations on the Angolan Manuel dos Santos Lima, the Brazilian João Guimarães Rosa in his global reception, and a comparison between Rubem Fonseca and the Chilean writer Roberto Bolaño. Even more promising, then, are the other singleton and doubletons, such as East Asian literatures and African literatures. Rather than being isolated in luxury suites or skyboxes at a football game, as happens with the American and English literature divisions, scholars in these divisions enjoy a forced camaraderie, like travelers in a train compartment on a long journey, perhaps a three-day one from Paris to Lisbon. Such situations can produce a remarkable amount of cultural interchange; they can also result in fistfights and mutual incomprehension. Incomprehension may especially appear when resources are scarce, and other hungry travelers are eyeing your extravagant mortadella sandwich. In the academy, scarcity is measured mostly in FTEs; in the MLA it is mostly gauged in guaranteed paper sessions, and the belief seems to reign that the more papers in your language area that are delivered at the MLA and the better positioned that area is in terms of knowledge production, the larger its footprint on the global map as drawn by the MLA becomes. Admittedly, the attraction of the cozy, big tent of a single division under which all of Lusutopia can fit depends in part on the seeming coordination with other events that may or may not be part of the MLA structure: the number of interviews for Portuguese-language positions, for example, or the number of field-specific offerings at the book exhibit. In any case, however, rather than dividing the field further, I would prefer to see an even larger tent, a topos we can all relate to, or a new divisional episteme corresponding more closely to postcolonial realities I now briefly discuss.As with English, the idea of Lusophonia encompasses both those nations that have evolved independent literatures and relatively strong domestic readerships for those literatures over the course of centuries—Brazil and Portugal—and at the same time also those emergent nations such as Angola, Cape Verde, and Mozambique, whose authors must frequently be published in Portugal or Brazil rather than in their native countries and whose works are heavily marked by an appeal to readers outside national and even regional boundaries. The lack of readership within these nations stems from the distance of the Portuguese language from the majority of their populations, or, to put it inversely, from the polylingual reality on the ground of Angola, Guinea-Bissau, or São Tomé. The name of the single MLA division responsible for all activities, Luso-Brazilian, mirrors that of the most venerable scholarly quarterly in the field, which was founded in 1964, before the wars of independence laid the groundwork for the entry of the literatures of lusophone Africa onto the world stage. The first article to quote an African author in Luso-Brazilian Review was Don Burness's four-page treatment of Nzinga Mbandi and Angolan Independence in 1977.8 (The authors were Agostinho Neto and Manuel Pacavira.) The dash deceives with its implied comparative “and,” when it really means “or”: choose one of the two then-independent nations with Portuguese as an official language. At present, however, the name seems to indicate something more akin to “Lusutopia plus Brazil,” meaning “Brazil and the rest of the lusophone countries.”In contrast, in a survey article on Portuguese-language literature as world literature, Earl Fitz takes care either to pair or differentiate “Luso-Brazilian” and “Luso-African.”9 Writers such as José Eduardo Agualusa (1960–) of Angola and Mia Couto (1955–) of Mozambique function as translators and literary intermediaries on two levels, first, between the largely oral cultures existing in local languages in their nations and their official and literary language of Portuguese, and second, between local, African conditions and a world readership. Couto has said the following about the language situation in Mozambique: “Portuguese is not yet the language of Mozambique, but it is without doubt the language of Mozambiqueness” (“A lingua portuguesa não é, ainda, a lingua de Moçambique, mas é seguramente a lingua da moçambicanidade”).10 Couto notes that only about 5 percent of Mozambicans have Portuguese as a mother tongue, placing the others in a situation whereby they are only exposed to this discourse of nation, this Mozambiqueness, in translation. He has also composed at least one novel on the theme of translation. The unnamed, first-person narrator-protagonist begins by recounting his experiences as a translator and defending himself against the charge of distorting reality: ‘It was I who wrote down, in visible Portuguese, the discourses that follow…. While events were happening, I was translator in the service of the administration of the city of Tizangara…. I was accused of lying, of falsifying proofs of the [soldiers’] murder. I was condemned” (translation mine) (“Fui eu que transcrevi, em português visível, as falas que daqui se seguem…. Na altura dos acontecimentos, eu era tradutor ao serviço da administração de Tizangara…. Fui acusado de mentir, falsear as provas de assassinato. Me condenaram”).11 The narrator is a prosthetic self of the author who condemns himself for his inability to convey the multilingual situation on the ground except through translation.José Eduardo Agualusa, who was born in Angola but who has spent a considerable amount of time in both in Lisbon and Rio de Janeiro, has expressed this situation thus: “African writers are in a curious position: Our readers are not in our own countries but in Europe. We write for foreigners, and it changes the way we write. We, as African authors, are more like translators—always trying to translate our reality for the foreign reader. I see it as a challenge more than an obstacle, however—a challenge that forces us to find literary solutions for our fiction.”12 In this sense, it is interesting to note the name of the official structure of so-called lusophone countries: it is not what I have just said in introducing it but rather “countries with Portuguese as an official language,” thus emphasizing that Lusutopia does not entirely coincide with Lusophonia, and in fact that it exceeds the conceptual space accorded to the lusophone. Conversely, a dominant theme of the prose fiction of Portugal after the end of its empire in the late 1970s has been the memory of Africa and its deferred deployment in the Portuguese psyche. Witness how this plays out in the fiction of António Lobo Antunes, for example, from Fado Alexandrino to Esplendor de Portugal and beyond.13 These novels use stream-of-consciousness technique to construct a u-topian space of narrative in which the reader experiences repeated shocks of temporal and geographical dislocation, as the trauma of Portuguese colonization and colonial warfare replay itself in the psyches and discourse of Lobo Antunes's protagonists. Like veteran roller-coaster riders, readers of Lobo Antunes learn to expect the experience of sudden dislocations between continents in the flow of the protagonists' acts of memory and retelling, in their attempts to recover the trace of their lost experiences in lusophone colonialism.Obviously, the MLA by itself cannot be expected to solve the issues addressed by lusophone African authors. It cannot by itself promote the study of the local languages spoken on the ground of Lusutopia or the study of their relation to the official language of Portuguese. The recent provision allowing for joint sessions might encourage collaboration between the Luso-Brazilian and the one and only division on African literatures. But the MLA should also recognize that there are scholarly and academic concerns related to modern languages that its present divisional structure fails to encompass. And Luso-Brazilianists should indeed be comparatists.
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