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Introduction: Theorizing the vernacular
Christina Kullberg and David Watson
… the great angst of the vernacular is its spatio-temporal entropy.
—Sheldon Pollock, “Cosmopolitan and Vernacular in History”
It may already be too late for the vernacular. Sheldon Pollock begins the
epilogue to The Language of the Gods in the World of Men: Sanskrit, Culture, and
Power in Premodern India (2006)—his magisterial study of the cosmopolitan
and vernacular—by warning the reader about the gradual disappearance of
vernacular languages. The globalization of English, he argues, is resulting
in a homogenization of language and culture, a “reduction of diversity in
the cultural ecosystem” (567) comparable to the global decline in biological
diversity during the last decades. Consequently, we are facing a stark choice
between a homogenous globalism, and a violent alliance between nationalism
and vernacular cultures intent on policing and excluding difference (568). From
this perspective, two futures, both cruel, remain open to vernacular cultures: to
dissolve into a globally deployed yet uneven neoliberal culture, or to become
complicit with a reassertion of exclusionary national and group formations.
More than a decade later, we are now well into the millennium that would
put an end to the vernacular. At first glance it seems like both cruel versions
of Pollock’s prophecy have been realized. Even languages such as French
that were considered to be dominating thirty years ago have lost prestige
and function under the pressure of global English. Nationalism along with
violent populism expand across the world, paradoxically enough often by
means of global English used on social media platforms. One could even add
to the dark scenario by suggesting that this is indeed also the closure of the
literary millennium and the end of the book. Yet, apocalyptic images such as
these rarely give the whole picture. Is it so that accounts heralding the end of
the vernacular or suspecting it of allying itself with a resurgent nationalism
2
Vernaculars in an Age of World Literatures
(Kymlicka 2001) reflect a certain blindness in theory and method to account
for it in an operative, productive way?
Our argument here is that it is not too late for the vernacular, which is to
say we should neither view it solely as a residual formation that is fading away
quickly, nor solely associate it with often-reactionary, populist political cultures.
On the contrary, given the precarious historical moment that we now experience
to various degrees of acuteness, critical engagements with literature in the
world—what is generally referred to as world literature—prompts a theorization
of the vernacular. Our time, shaped by a long century of decolonization, new
imperial formations, and emergent new technologies, is indeed an age that
requires a different take on the vernacular. We cannot, as was arguably the case
when Goethe famously coined the notion of world literature, take the West, or
the “canon” or even print culture and the world market as points of departure
for thinking literature in the world. Climate crises, rising economic inequalities,
platform capitalism, growing populisms and activisms spur new attention to
the active role of the local, the indigenous, the minor, and the peripheral in
international literary flows and exchanges. This is where our volume wants to
make a contribution by rethinking the vernacular through its various practices,
functions, and meanings. The case studies brought together here explore the
vernacular in different places, cultures, and historical moments. By means of
different methodologies from literary studies, anthropology, linguistics, and
history of ideas, they testify that the vernacular is not just one thing. It is always
plural and shifting. And as a protean category, the vernacular should not be
dismissed too quickly as if we always already know what it signifies, but should
instead be rethought and explored time and time again for what it tells us about
the variegated, uneven globe we inhabit and its cultures.
Such a project runs into an immediate problem. The development of the still
emergent field of world literary studies is to a large extent inimical to an exploration
of vernacular formations. From David Damrosch and Franco Moretti, world
literature, whether it is understood as a network of texts, as a “mode of reading”
or as an intellectual discourse (Tihanov 2018: 468), puts the emphasis on texts
that “gain in translation” in a broad sense (linguistically, thematically, culturally)
and therefore are marketable and circulate easily (Damrosch 2003: 281). Despite
accurate criticism, notably from postcolonial scholars, that world literature
could as well be called “literature for the West” (D’Haen 2013: 2–3), researchers
within the field continue to equate world literature with cosmopolitanism. It is
said to belong nowhere and everywhere—“at home in any place; free from local
Introduction: Theorizing the vernacular
3
attachments or prejudices”—and as such it is the literary expression of a world
citizen, a cosmopolitan subject belonging everywhere and nowhere. The problem
here is not so much the characterization of world literature as being “homeless”
in the world, but that the equation builds on a binary opposition between the
cosmopolitan and the vernacular and emphasizes, as well, exchanges between
center and periphery, forgetting and occluding other circuits of circulation and
modes of being in the world, and eliding thereby the place of the vernacular
from discussion within world literary studies. This has consequences for what
is being considered world literature and how we read these texts. Studying the
evolution of the contemporary novel, Rebecca Walkowitz (2015), for instance,
shows how politics of translation and global English impact on novels with
worldly ambitions; they are “born translated” and thus more internationally
marketable. Walkowitz continues to argue that the high commercialization of
literatures of the world does not pass unchallenged, partly due to individual
authors from peripheral places, often working between languages, who infuse
their globally exchangeable prose with differences and to the fact that global
English itself multiplies and is provincialized as it spreads across the world. In
an attempt to shift the focus from circulation and the “born translated,” Emily
Apter (2013) famously argued against world literature by insisting on the
untranslatability of certain textual dimensions. But to identify the vernacular
too quickly with what remains untranslatable in today’s world literary field is
to risk reducing it to an object or expression of difference, and equating it too
easily with the local, the “exotic,” or the national—formations easily considered
anachronistic today. In this framework, put bluntly, either literature from small
places and languages must adopt a form and style that abide by rules set by an
English-speaking market or else it can resist these demands by remaining local.
The premise and risk remain the same: the local is separated from the global,
elite cosmopolitanism from popular or regional vernaculars.
In theorizations that do engage more overtly with the vernacular, particularly
when examining the consolidation of a specific (national) literature, the
vernacular is often only considered as a step toward a cosmopolitan language
within which it is subsumed. Pascale Casanova’s now classic account of the
emergence of French as the language of the “World Republic of Letters” (2004)
is a paradigmatic instance of such a move. The problem is that this approach
captures the cosmopolitan destiny of the vernacular, not necessarily the
vernacular as a concept in itself. As Pollock puts it, the vernacular is understood
as a “response to a specific history of domination and enforced change, along
4
Vernaculars in an Age of World Literatures
with a critique of the oppression of tradition itself, tempered by a strategic
desire to locate resources for a cosmopolitan future in vernacular ways of
being themselves” (2000: 624). In other contexts, the vernacular is analyzed as
an expression of resistance to the hegemony of cultural centers, as occurs, for
example, when multilingual literature mobilizes a defense of local languages
against the homogenizing pressure of imposed colonial languages and global
English. Here, too, the vernacular is not the starting point for analysis but is
framed as a reaction to cosmopolitan domination and relegated to a secondary
position within the literary field.
Our contention is that this glossing over of the vernacular hides
problematic tendencies within studies of world literature. A consequence of
the expectations surrounding the proper object of world literature—the globe,
its colonial geography, and so on—is that small-scale circulation, from one
small language to another, for instance, goes under the radar. Moreover, while
contemporary literary criticism may be leaving the vernacular behind it is also
the case that recent fiction by authors ranging from James Kelman to Marlon
James and Patrice Nganang are saturated with different vernaculars and that
more authors in West Africa for example chose to write in vernacular. It is also
the case that an increasing number of local publishing houses have surfaced
in places like the Caribbean and publish local authors for regional audiences
even while establishing new global networks. Moreover, it is indisputably
the case that histories of migration and diaspora have resulted in the global
dissemination and transformation of vernacular traces of the local, as notably
research on African-American literature has demonstrated (Lemke 2009). The
international success of hip-hop sufficiently shows how vernacular expressions
reach well beyond locality and are transformed when received in another
context.
This volume argues that the vernacular can and does indeed intervene
productively in the shaping of world literature as an aesthetic strategy, in terms
of a mode of reading, and as a global network of texts. Even more so, it poses
serious questions to the field. Can theories and methods of world literature
encompass the opposite of the cosmopolitan? And if that is indeed the case,
as we suggest here, how can we theorize the vernacular, in time, space, and
language, in a manner that interacts with, and contributes to, world literature
studies? It is the ambition of this volume to calculate what this inclusion would
mean for how we think about world literature, and, in the obverse, how accounts
of world literature force us to rethink and reimagine the vernacular. We seek
Introduction: Theorizing the vernacular
5
to bring out the vernacular as an operative and analytical concept, in itself
containing manifold versions of itself, rather than as a thing in and of itself, a
category that functions as a short-hand for national literatures as is often the
case within the European literary field. This is challenging in so far as the set of
terms used to carry out this investigation is broadly Western (European) and
thus, as Shaden Tageldin (2018) warns, does not always operate in accordance
with the material or their spatio-temporal contexts. However, as chapters in this
volume dealing with China and West Africa demonstrate, even if there might
not be a vernacular equivalent to “the vernacular,” the concept may nonetheless
be useful as a critical tool for reading, or misreading productively, temporal and
spatial layers in a text, for reading tensions between scripts and orality, between
languages of power.
In many ways the concept of the vernacular we seek to activate productively
in this volume is indebted to some of the oldest ways of thinking about it.
Etymologically, the word derives from learned Latin vernaculus, referring to
slaves born in the house. It is defined as particular to a country, to its habitants;
synonymous with native, domestic, indigenous; a language spoken by the people,
often equated with the mother tongue and vulgar language. The implicit
association with slavery has made it particularly useful in conceptualizing those
subordinate peripheral formations and modes of circulation that are often
obliterated in world literature theories. At the same time, the second connotation
of the term—the domestic—highlights a sense of attachment to a place or a
community, suggesting a resistance to universalizing claims of any theory of
literature. Yet looking at Dante Alighieri’s De vulgari eloquentia, it becomes
clear that the domestic connotation is intimately tied to the shifting character of
what he called vulgar languages. Exiled from his local Florence, Dante perceived
the language spoken by people in their everyday life as mobile as opposed to
stagnated “grammar” or Latin. Here the vernacular is understood in terms of
orality rather than written language, in the sense that it is the first language we
hear when we begin to distinguish sounds—a definition that echoes in African
literatures where the term “mother tongue” is often used (Warner 2019). It is a
language acquired without instruction, whereas “grammar” needs to be taught
following set rules rather than life. Dante thus reversed the dominant reasoning
around languages by eulogizing the vernacular as an expression of a universal
and natural human quality:
Of these two kinds of language, the more noble is the vernacular: first, because it
was the language originally used by the human race; second, because the whole
6
Vernaculars in an Age of World Literatures
world employs it, though with different pronunciations and using different
words; and third, because it is natural to us, while the other is, in contrast,
artificial.
(1996: 3)
The vernacular acquires value here not from being extremely local but from
the fact that everyone speaks it, an insight that would later allow for particular
instances of the vernacular to be reframed as national, perhaps even protodemocratic, forms of language. Dante himself does not distinguish one
vernacular language from others but considers the vernacular, which translates
into the human ability to speak and acquire a language. He defines it in relation
to speech (locutione), to body, and to practice. In the vernacular, sound (senses)
and meaning (reason) merge as an expression of distinctively and perfectible
human qualities. The plurality of languages across the world is an expression of
the richness of that perfectibility.
For Dante, then, even within one vernacular, languages multiply: there
are different languages for different arts and crafts (one for architects, one for
masons, etc.). Language is thus valued in terms of communication, practice, and
creativity; it is the means by which human beings get by in everyday life, cultivate
gardens, and construct worlds. These functions both deterritorialize and locate
the vernacular. It is a language that works precisely because it is not set by rules,
but evolves as it adapts to the situation. In this perspective—and contrary to
the logic of contemporary nationalisms—the vernacular would not hold the
promise of stability, nor would it be inimical to circulation. Rather, it would
be a language between a person and her immediate surroundings, between
practitioners in a particular context determined by time and purpose. As such
the vernacular, due to the mobility of the speakers propelling new linguistic
circumstances, would be transforming and include all kinds of expressions,
not only linguistic. Curiously, then, Dante’s ever emerging vernacular recalls a
process of creolization or language mixing, transforming through time, whereas
grammar is presented as a bordering performance that singles out a language.
Italian, French, and Spanish were long considered to be “corrupt” versions of
Latin, a description historically used for explaining the emergence of Creole
languages too (Bachmann 2013). The vernacular, as it were, is a language that
cannot be counted, to rephrase Naoki Sakai (2009); it is shifting because it opens
up to other languages.
We thus understand the vernacular as a concept that would not refer to a
specific object but rather capture a precodified status of language and culture
undergoing the fraught, contested process of becoming a language or a culture.
Introduction: Theorizing the vernacular
7
The meaning and function of vernacular changes with time and place, and
depends on a range of factors such as actors, media, and oppositional forces.
This conceptualization of the term allows for discussing language and culture
in statu nascendi, thus better capturing the variety of aesthetic engagements
with the vernacular in different contexts and in different times. It can be used
as an identity marker in nationalist formations. It can also be an instrument
for subaltern resistance. As seen in Kamau Brathwaite’s “jazz-novel,” the
vernacular may reach well beyond language as an object and include non-verbal
expressions, sensibilities, and rhythm. In the current state of global warming,
vernacular literary explorations extend to engagement with the non-human
world, as in Patrick Chamoiseau’s novel Les Neuf consciences du Malfini (2009)
which is narrated from the perspective of a bird and attempts to account for the
local Caribbean experience of climate crisis. As such it may open up new modes
of reading literature in the world that draws attention to the co-production of
literature and the world rather than to a pre-established canon of texts or map
of the globe. To put this otherwise, to view the vernacular as the statu nascendi
of literary language provides this volume with the means to analyze the world
literary trajectory of a text.
As will be demonstrated in the case studies, the vernacular can be used as
a pluriform concept rather than as a thing in itself. It will thus mean different
things and do different things depending on context and methodology, leaving
it open for constant negotiations. In order to situate our conceptualization of
the term, what follows in the rest of this theoretical introduction is an account
of how it has been used within world literary studies, first on a temporal scale
in regard to the deep-history of the field and to the rise of nation-formations,
which is imbricated in the notion of world literature, and second, on a spatial
scale where we discuss the concept in relation to minor, sub-altern, and diasporic
movements. Perhaps counterintuitively, it is precisely because of the tensions
between the different uses and interpretations of the vernacular that we propose
it as an operative concept for reading literatures in the world.
The vernacular in global deep histories
and in the rise of the nation-state
The recent critical turn toward world literary studies has necessitated the
rethinking of the vernacular in various ways. It has rendered legible the
importance of the vernacular to literary history across millennia by extending
8
Vernaculars in an Age of World Literatures
deep into the past the study of vernacular formations, and, thereby, necessitating
a comparative analysis of the concept of the vernacular. In doing so it has also
shifted attention for such an investigation away from European history, secular
modernity, and the formation of the nation-state. Christian Høgel (2018) for
instance argues for the term trans-imperialism to do better justice for how
literature circulated in earlier periods. In this and many other accounts of literary
circulation and formation beyond the modern nation-state, it becomes obvious
that the connection between power and politics, language and literature is still
there, only it is not the West that is taken as a point of departure or a model for
explanation. The decolonization of world literature by means of a longue durée
perspective is thus not a de-politicization of the term. Quite to the contrary,
language and literature are considered in terms of power struggles, which in
turn entails that vernacular and cosmopolitan languages emerge in relation to
one another.
When a language, through various means, is then constituted and
articulated in relation to another dominant language it enters into a process
of vernacularization. This is the term used by Alexander Beecroft, Pascale
Casanova, and Sheldon Pollock, in different contexts, to describe the
consolidation of a language with regard to time and space and, ultimately, in
literature that differentiates itself from a cosmopolitan language. Pollock, for
instance, identifies a connection between increasing movements among peoples
simultaneously in southern Asia and western Europe around the eighth century
ad, which, following on a cosmopolitan epoch, saw the emergence of vernacular
languages and literary cultures, and assisted in inaugurating the early modern
period. It is here that he localizes the vernacular millennium, which is now
supposedly brought to a close.
Leaving aside the anxieties imbuing Pollock’s account, part of the significance
of his work for our understanding of the vernacular is that he explores it by
rethinking the time frame and temporal scale within which vernacular languages
and literatures are to be investigated. Within the enlarged frame proposed by his
study the premodern and modern are interlinked, and the vernacular emerges
as the subject of a continuous history stretching across a millennium. It is clear
that Pollock’s “vernacular millennium” shares in the turn within the emergent
field of world literary studies toward new enlarged time frames or scalar
expansions. In his critique of this turn in “Prolegomena to a Cosmopolitanism
in Deep Time” (2016), Bruce Robbins identifies three discreet reasons for the
new methodological investment in expanded time frames: a movement initially
Introduction: Theorizing the vernacular
9
occurring within postcolonial studies to engage as Pollock does with cultures
and texts predating modernity, attention to ecological degradation and the
enlarged time frames such a project requires, and the international indigenous
movement which has drawn attention to non-European colonial ventures. And
indeed, such an expanded frame could widen and deepen our understandings of
the cosmopolitan and vernacular dynamics in East Asia where literary Chinese,
wenyan, was, in Denecke’s and Zhang’s terms, the scripta franca (Denecke and
Zhang 2015: vii–viii) and the main medium of communication between the elites
for almost two millennia up until the twentieth century. Japan, Vietnam, and
Korea had adopted the Chinese script and the Chinese literary language although
it was pronounced in local, “vernacular” languages. Chapter 6 of this volume
discusses how China underwent radical language reforms in the first half of the
twentieth century with the creation of a modern vernacular Chinese in which the
oral baihua and the scriptural wenyan was fused. In Chapter 9, we see how this
language reform, along with the linguistic effects of Mao’s cultural revolution,
mark even contemporary literature, written in French by Chinese authors in exile.
The methodological investment in enlarged timescapes, or “deep time”
as Robbins puts it, has shaped recent inquiries other than Pollock’s into the
vernacular and its literatures. For instance, Beecroft’s exploration of vernacular
literature in his An Ecology of World Literature: From Antiquity to the Present
Day (2015) situates this literature within a time frame dwarfing even the
vernacular millennium. According to him, vernacular literature developed
in a series of consecutive historical waves, “beginning with the emergence of
ancient Near Eastern vernaculars about three thousand years ago, followed
by the emergence of a series of vernaculars in Europe and the Mediterranean
between the third century bc and the fourth century ad, and then by Pollock’s
vernacular millennium beginning around the eight century ad” (148). Each
one of the vernacular ecologies, to use his term, is preceded by a cosmopolitan
tradition, which it emulates and transforms. In the long history Beecroft is
narrating, once the vernacular has supplanted the cosmopolitan it too gives way
to a different literary ecology: “when the era of the coexistence of cosmopolitan
and vernacular came to an end, it was a specifically European ecology that was to
take its place,” he argues, “that of the national literature” (193). Indeed, national
literature plays a similar role in Beecroft’s account as the globalization of English
does in Pollock’s history, with both signaling if not the end of the history of the
vernacular then certainly a transformation in its status as the dominant literary
ecology of an epoch.
10
Vernaculars in an Age of World Literatures
Ecological metaphors such as Beecroft’s are absent in Casanova’s The World
Republic of Letters (2004). She reads instead the constitution of languages and
the flows of literature through a grid borrowed from Pierre Bourdieu’s sociology.
Consequently, rather than referring to organic constellations, she insists on the
institutional dimension of the relationship between the vernacular and the
cosmopolitan. Vernacularization understood in political terms translates as
a struggle for recognition: it is the process by which a local language gains in
value so that it can compete with another, cosmopolitan, language’s dominance.
Literature is crucial in Casanova’s model, since print culture makes it possible
for a language to intervene in the formation of knowledge and ultimately in the
shaping of politics. This leads her to conclude that even national literatures are a
global affair, as they are “constructed through literary rivalries, which are always
denied, and struggles, which are always international” (36). Accordingly, it was
because Joachim du Bellay’s La Deffence et illustration de la langue francoyse
(1549) marked “the first time that a national literature had been founded in a
complex relation to another nation and, through it, another language, one that
moreover was dominant and apparently indomitable, namely Latin” (46), that it
became the foundation of the world republic of letters, not because it eulogized
France or the French language. Nonetheless, the effect of Du Bellay’s treatise
was that France reversed the power balance in a century and a half and became
the dominant literary power of Europe, to the extent that Paris, according to
Casanova, still holds its central place as the cultural capital of the world, even if
English is the global language and the economic power resides elsewhere.
This model is somewhat nuanced in La Langue mondiale: traduction et
domination (2015). Here Casanova points out the impossibility of localizing
a moment in time when French took over Latin for instance, citing Lodge’s
contention that standard language is a dialect among other dialects (25). She
concludes that a language only becomes prestigious once its users (les locuteurs
et les scripteurs) give it prestige and significance beyond the communicative
function of language (29). The transition from vernacular into a prestigious
language was, in the case of French, supported by a conscientious strategy
that had little to do with regional attachment. The Renaissance authors of the
Pléiade-group to which Du Bellay belonged validated French by borrowing from
the Ancients (51). Put differently: the vernacular became a literary language by
means of plagiarism. Reading between the lines, Casanova seems to adopt a
French libertine conception of language: as a language enters into the grammar
of sociability, its arbitrary quality increases, it becomes artificial. In this process,
Introduction: Theorizing the vernacular
11
vernacularization “denaturalizes” local language by turning it into a cosmopolitan
language and distinguishing it from other languages viewed as vernacular. Not
only does vernacularization produce a travesty of another language, but also far
from the authenticity and the naturality often implied in the idea of the mother
tongue, its originality (in the double sense of the term) lies in a construction:
the lexical, topical, and phraseological borrowings are converted into something
characteristic of that vernacular.
Casanova’s demonstration sharply proves that equating the vernacular with
authenticity is historically inaccurate and theoretically suspect. If the vernacular
is interpreted as an expression of cultural authenticity, it is charged with a
particular political meaning occluding that it is in itself a construction. But as old
regimes fell and new state formations emerged in Europe in the late eighteenth
century and all through the nineteenth century, language became the bearer
of the nation and by extension the people. The standardization of vernaculars
through the establishment of academies of letters and dictionaries since the
seventeenth century became a principle for unifying the people under the state.
The process almost mirrors vernacularization around the eighth century AD:
now the vernacular, which had become cosmopolitan, turns inward to seal a
pact between its speakers, the space of belonging, and the space of power.
Yet, as we can see by studying peripheral regions like the Baltic, discussed in
Chapter 7, this process did not follow a neat evolutionary chronology. The case
of Aino Kallas’ Estonian novels from the 1920s also show that the presumably
local sources of inspiration for constructing a vernacular literature for the new
nation-state were indeed multicultural and even written in languages of foreign
powers that had been dominating the region.
However, this inward turn produced by the alliance between language
and nation-building projects should not lead us to overlook that the revernacularization of cosmopolitan languages that occurred in the nineteenth
century and onward came about in part as a result of globalization and
colonization. It is in this light that John K. Noyes (2015) reads the key thinker of
place, language, and literature as foundation of that collective identity that forms
the modern nation-state, the German philosopher Johann Gottfried Herder. It
must be said that the influence of Herder’s thoughts on the importance of the
vernacular language can hardly be overstated. It planted the seeds for the growth
of a truly cosmopolitan phenomenon—the nation-state—and the incessant
philological activity that accompanied it put the study of literature at the service
of power and paved the way for the scholarly literary disciplines divided by
12
Vernaculars in an Age of World Literatures
language as well as for comparative literature. As problematic as Herder is,
Noyes manages to rescue him from the far-right and reads his investment in the
local as a critical response to globalization during the colonial expansion of the
second half of the eighteenth century. Imperialist expansion made the European
intellectual discover the infinite diversity of the world, but also that imperialism,
in its brutal exploitation, was a threat to that very diversity. According to Noyes,
it was the knowledge about the horrors of imperialism that motivated Herder
to develop an attachment to locality and language in terms of anti-imperialist
thinking. In this context he developed the notion of Volk, “people,” referring to
more than just the inhabitants of a place. Volk implied an ethnic and cultural
community, carried by a common language so that it became interwoven with or
even synonymous to the nation. If the Volk was to survive and prosper, it had to
search for its own, particular soul instead of following cosmopolitan standards,
including writing in cosmopolitan languages. This did not necessarily mean
closing in on the region. On the contrary, other vernaculars were mobilized in
the articulation of Volk culture; Herder found inspiration in faraway languages,
such as Peruvian oral poetry (Tihanov 2018: 476–7). Its stance is thus global
but in terms of an exoticizing of other languages. And in this turn, language
becomes an expression of authenticity and origins.
We may fruitfully contrast this account with that of Benedict Anderson
on the nation as an “imagined community.” He conceives of the nation
as a community or “sociological organism moving calendrically through
homogenous, empty time” (1983: 26). In Anderson’s reasoning, the possibility
to imagine the nation came when three fundamental conceptions began losing
their grip: the idea that a particular script language offered privileged access to
ontological truth, precisely because it was an inseparable part of that truth; the
belief that society was naturally organized under sovereigns ruling by divine
dispensation; and third, a conception of temporality in which cosmology and
history were indistinguishable, the origins of the world and of people essentially
identical. The slow decline of these certainties was caused by economic change,
social and scientific discoveries, and the development of increasingly rapid
communications. But the stark alliance between nation, people, and language
identified by Anderson as taking the place of these certainties denies the
vernacular the ability to transform, excludes it from mobility, and denies it
temporal “coevalness,” to use anthropologist Johannes Fabian’s term (Fabian
2014). The modern nation-state thus seems to impose a particular time frame
onto the vernacular languages of the world, either by forcing them to enter into
Introduction: Theorizing the vernacular
13
modernity by means of cultural and linguistic assimilation with the nation-state
or by refusing them entry into modernity.
Juxtaposing Herder and Anderson, it seems like the imagined community
of the nation-state is built upon a fundamentally contradictory relationship
to vernaculars. On the one hand, the world’s cultural and linguistic diversity
is revealed and used as an argument against the centralization of power under
one monarch in one place. As such the thought of the nation state appears as
an incitement to anti-imperialism which was the case in Latin America and
the Spanish islands of the Caribbean in the late nineteenth century. Still using
the language of the imperial power—Spanish—Cuban authors turned to native
Caribbean mythology and African diasporic songs and storytelling to challenge
Spain’s authority in the Americas. This would in the twentieth century explode
into a vernacular literary language where Spanish was fused with Creole, AfroCuban and indigenous cultural expressions in the work of Alejo Carpentier
and José Lezama Lima, for example, that questioned the post-independence
dictatorships. On the other side of the spectrum, the standardization of language
within the Western modern nation-state, a language that made it possible to
imagine a community, occurred at the expense of linguistic diversity. Chapter 2
in this volume makes this point clear by investigating the complicated process
behind the construction of Castilian as the language of Spain under Franco. The
dictatorship forcefully struck down the other languages of the country. Yet, as
the chapter shows, this linguistic repression was not monolithic but adapted to
the situation and to the particularity of the different languages in Spain. The
vernacular is situated here in a precarious position within a modernity in which
language, culture, and the nation-state enter into an often-exclusionary alliance.
At the same time, in other contexts, such as East Asia, where a cosmopolitan
language, literary Chinese, had for almost two millennia been coexisting with
various local languages, the link between vernacularization and the emergence
of nations was built on a long history of complicated linguistic negotiations
(Zhou 2011: 129–30).
It is undoubtedly the romantic understanding of the vernacular as a vehicle
for a specific locality, culture, and authenticity that has prevailed in European
thought and thus framed much of how the vernacular has been opposed to
and subjugated under the cosmopolitan in world literary theory. As argued
in Chapter 3, this has further consequences for literatures deemed vernacular
in a Eurocentric partition of the literatures in the world, which has been at
the basis of world literature since Goethe. Working through and practicing
14
Vernaculars in an Age of World Literatures
translations, the chapter demonstrates how the romantic-nationalist reading
eschews complex spatial and temporal trajectories within a literature—in this
case Tamil classics. Another example of other processes of vernacularization
beyond both the nation and the cosmopolitan destiny would be the Saamaka
maroon community discussed in Chapter 5. Leaning on international law, the
community won the right to both their territory and language over the Surinam
government and Chinese multinational companies in 2007. At the same time,
parts of Saamaka culture risk being lost as young Saamaka are today spread
across the globe and the chapter offers an anthropological approach to how
Saamaka history is passed on to new generations. Our volume accounts for
different temporal trajectories of the term vernacular, thus clearly showing that
vernacularity as an expression of the local and of “authenticity” is not “natural”;
it is a product of a particular time and place. This insight should not, however,
belittle the fact that the political consequences of such a construction of the
vernacular in complicity with the rise of the nation-state have been far-reaching,
even violent, and still affect us today.
Vernacular mobilities in the diaspora and the post-colony
Once the language of the nation-state was imposed onto speakers of other
languages by means of universal education, the spread of print culture, and
of political administration, it became a strong force of domination over other
peoples. For this reason, postcolonial scholars in particular have wondered what
an account of the vernacular that is oriented more towards complex interlinkages
between national and imperial as well as cosmopolitan and vernacular
formations—formations frequently threaded together by an unprecedented
increase in human mobility, willing or unwilling—would look like. For instance,
by the turn of the millennium, Homi K. Bhabha (2000) framed the postcolonial
subject in terms of a “vernacular cosmopolitanism,” who despite colonial
oppression and inequalities could enter into global exchanges as a citizen of the
world. Here, as previously in Location of Culture (1998), Bhabha is primarily
interested in interrogating the liminality of the (postcolonial) contemporary
subject, caught between the local and the global. Vernacular is associated with
subalternity to put it simply. Yet implicitly this means that it is only by adapting
a cosmopolitan posture that the vernacular, or its subject, can be relevant to the
world, while another type of vernacular, the one that stays at home, remains
Introduction: Theorizing the vernacular
15
excluded from modernity. As S. Shankar argues in Flesh and Fish Blood (2012),
the emphasis on hybridity and up-rootedness within postcolonial studies has
made the field “suspicious of any robust idea of the local or the vernacular” (20);
it has failed to acknowledge vernacular modes of knowledge “oriented away
from the transnational, the modern, and the hybrid and toward the local, the
traditional, and the culturally autonomous” (1).
Taking his examples from the Indian context, Shankar defines the vernacular
in terms of local languages and literatures. Rather than tracing a sense of
belonging, as in Pollock’s reading of vernaculars in the deep history of Chinese
literature, Shankar detects global concerns in these texts. The postcolonial
vernacular would thus be a local expression of the anxiety of modernity. In
other words, the vernacular becomes a way to question the frames in which we
usually think of the world be it from the point of view of the nation or that of the
cosmopolitan. In an interesting turn, Shankar reaches beyond the postcolonial
moment by reading the vernacular in light of universalism and humanism.
Vernacular humanism, he claims, is marked by an anxiety; it does not assume its
own humanness, but redefines the human from their own particular perspective
and in so doing articulates a “conflicted approach to the universal that is not yet
ready to relinquish an orientation toward the rooted, the culturally autonomous,
and the local” (100). In comparison with Casanova’s model of prestige and
consecration within the world literary system, Shankar’s local angle suggests
that the vernacular does not necessarily seek to take the place of a dominant
language. It can be understood as an assertion that questions the exclusionary
grounds of universalism and humanism alike.
Voices critical of the postcolonial approach, or rather its inability to approach
the vernacular, have also been raised in African contexts. In Vernacular
Palavers: Imaginations of the Local and Non-Native Languages in West Africa
(2004), Moradewun Adejunmobi suggests that it is necessary to get rid of the
presupposition that using colonial language is a matter of decolonial struggle or
is indicative of a desire for recognition. History shows that the promotion of local
languages has also been a tool for asserting power over colonial subjects in West
Africa. Adejunmobi problematizes the common assumption that “a return to
the mother tongue would imply a remedy to alienation” (viii) caused by colonial
suppression. The response to alienation is here instead to open up towards the
world as if the mother tongue is not a language but an expression of practice
that articulates itself by finding resonance in other contexts. Focusing on the
vernacular reveals a different pattern where colonial and postcolonial subjects
16
Vernaculars in an Age of World Literatures
alike have adjusted to a polyglot life. In Chapter 1 in this volume, Adejunmobi
extends this discussion in relation to Afrobeat, showing that the vernacular is
not necessarily equivalent to a traditional expression, or to writing in either the
mother tongue or the colonial language, but serves to distinguish between the
local and the non-local in a particular context.
In the African diaspora, however, the meaning of the local has undergone
a significant shift. In The Vernacular Matters in American Literature (2009),
Sieglinde Lemke argues that the vernacular should be identified with the
“expressions of culturally excluded people,” whether by virtue of race, class, or
gender, and that its usage “signals a lack of cultural capital” (3), in part because
the vernacular is often understood as being synonymous with the popular. The
vernacular participates then in a politics of recognition attuned to cultural
difference and different processes of exclusion and marginalization. In the context
of transatlantic slavery, the etymological roots of the vernacular obviously come
out with particular force and frame it within an urgent contemporary politics.
Grant Farred approaches the vernacular, or what he terms vernacularity, in a
similar albeit more radical fashion than Lemke in his What’s My Name: Black
Vernacular Intellectuals (2003). According to Farred, vernacular speech signifies
economic and political disenfranchisements, it is politicized “minority discourse”
(17) that is “characterized by its informality, its nontraditional grammatical
structures, its discursive hybridity, and its proclivity for drawing on and
incorporating other cultural formations, even other languages” (18). As already
politicized discourse, vernacular utterances are often political themselves and
substitute for other modes of engagement in the public sphere and civil society.
Farred and Lemke are writing from a critical tradition in which vernacular
expression is associated with the language of the disenfranchised, dispossessed,
and social movements. The vernacular signifies for them cultural differences and
political contestations. Moreover, it is understood as embodying a diversity—
that of languages, culture, and the population—that exists in tension with the
nation-state and its regular disavowal of such forms of difference.
As this perhaps suggests, one feature that has attached itself to critical
treatments of vernacular formations we may very well gloss by using the notion
of cultural survival. In his “On Cultural Survival” (2004), Gil Anidjar explains
that what is at stake in the notion of cultural survival is the “community ‘as it is,’
mastering and controlling its past and its future, rather than living its changes
in its intricate connections with alterities that can no longer be thought as
simply exterior” (7–8). The notion of cultural survival encodes, then, something
Introduction: Theorizing the vernacular
17
about the contingencies faced by different cultures, the temporalities of risk,
endurance or extinction that come into play once a cultural formation becomes
intent on reproducing itself into a future identical with its present. Chapter 4
in this volume investigates how poetry from the Lesser Antilles mediates such
a mode of cultural survival in the wake of hurricanes Maria and Irma in 2017.
The vernacular here is not necessarily located in linguistic terms but in rhythm
and sound language. Another, similar mode of survival is at stake when Vicente
Rafael details in his Motherless Tongues: The Insurgency of Language amid Wars of
Translation (2016) how the language policies of the United States both at home,
especially in relation to immigrants, but also within imperial contexts, such as
its occupation of the Philippines, have regularly resulted in the suppression of
vernacular languages in favor of American English. He describes this process
as a form of “repression that amounts to an act of translation, transforming
a train of possible expressions into a grammatically correct and stylistically
recognizable discourse” (1). Speaking of the Philippines, he argues that the
repression of local languages and vernaculars in favor of English “turned natives
neither into Filipinos nor Americans but into failed copies of the latter” (30).
Rafael’s depiction of Filipinos as sent “ontologically adrift by English” (30) serves
as a stark reminder of what is at stake in the survival of vernacular formations
in imperial and national contexts. But as Rafael notes, the desire for a shared,
singular language, for a disavowal of linguistic plurality, also stems from a desire
for cultural survival. He argues that “signs of linguistic difference,” of different
languages and vernaculars, are often experienced as a “cultural assault” (93)
to be readdressed by an assertion of monolingualism. The desire for cultural
survival emerges here as a shared currency circulating between, for instance,
migrant communities, colonized subject, as well as the nation-state.
One mode of survival, of course, relies on the circulation of the vernacular.
Arguing that African American literature should be considered as a diasporic and
not a national formation, Wai Chee Dimock reads this literature as a “linguistic
force—articulated in the vernacular rather than in formal speech—and as
bearing witness to the global migration of tongues, the mixing of syntax and
phonemes across continents” (2006: 142). Drawing on linguistic studies of the
black vernacular as a creole form incorporating traces of an African past into
standard English, Dimock argues that the vernacular produces and testifies to
routes and pathways stretching across centuries and interlinking Africa, the
Caribbean, and the United States. In this account, the expanded time frame
within which Dimock situates African American literature is not exactly the
18
Vernaculars in an Age of World Literatures
result of a methodological choice made by the critic, as it is for Pollock and
Beecroft. Rather, it is in a sense produced by instances of the vernacular itself, by
acts of language that summon forth past histories and suggest the consanguinity
of distant places. In other words, the vernacular houses and memorializes a
long history stretching back across slavery, the Middle Passage, and the African
beginnings of this diasporic literary formation. In this respect Dimock’s work,
as she acknowledges, is indebted to that of such Caribbean authors as Wilson
Harris. Harris, in his The Womb of Space: The Cross-Cultural Imagination (1983),
identifies what he terms “primordial resources within a living language” that,
once activated, produce an experience of “simultaneity in the imagination of
times past and future” (1983: x). Dimock, like Harris, invites us to imagine a
vernacular language as a heterochrony, a collection of slices of time that carries
traces of the past into the present and future, and undulates its own non-linear,
expansive temporality. To put this more concretely, the vernacular continues to
bear witness to a “global migration of tongues,” as she glosses the violent acts of
enslavement and expulsion making up the history of the Black Atlantic. Chapter
8 in this volume continues this exploration of the “migration of tongues” focusing
on Marlon James’ A Brief History of Seven Killings, the circulation of vernacular
tongues and cultural forms in the hemispheric Americas, and the cultural and
social impact of neoliberalism on Jamaica and its relation to the United States.
Moving away from the concerns of the American empire and back to the
question of world literature that concerns us here, the “culturally excluded” would
translate into that which passes unnoticed by center–periphery theories. This is
the point made by Françoise Lionnet and Shu Mei Shih in Minor Transnationalism
(2005) where they argue for the need for examining relationships among different
margins, instead of studying the relationship between center and periphery in
binary terms. Similarly, in Vernacular Worlds, Cosmopolitan Imagination (2015),
Stephanos Stephanides and Stavros Karayanni explore the idea of vernacular
worlds arising from “more scattered and less scripted” contexts. There are spaces
of circulation and exchange that warrant further attention as they suggest that
the vernacular operates regardless of the cosmopolitan. Or else, the vernacular
may work through the cosmopolitan. An example in point would be indigenous,
locally bounded literatures written in what Ronne Moberg and David Damrosh
call “ultra-minor” languages that have reached well beyond their local origin
thanks to translations into cosmopolitan English. Here, as in the work of
Lionnet and Shih and some scholars of African American vernaculars, the
tensions between margins and centers are conceptualized through Gilles
Introduction: Theorizing the vernacular
19
Deleuze and Félix Guattari’s philosophy of language, more precisely the concept
of minor literature (1991). It is not necessarily a literature of rootedness written
by minorities, but a literature that cannot belong anywhere because it is minor.
There is thus a crucial difference between minor and cosmopolitan literature as
well. The former exists everywhere by virtue of its minor status, while the latter
is the circumscribed domain of the elite, the powerful, the dominant. This allows
for entering the local–global dynamics differently. Ultraminor vernaculars like
Sámi literature may via cosmopolitan languages connect to other ultra-minor
vernaculars without losing their vernacularity. The vernacular is thus not lost in
translation, but gains political force by using the cosmopolitan as vehicle. Such
rethinking of global dynamics adds yet another dimension to the complexity of
the concept that motivates this volume. The vernacular is not only a language or
a thing such as an expression of the local, rather it refers to certain potentiality
of language to become something else; it is a pre-coded language that may be
politically, aesthetically, or culturally charged.
Rethinking the vernacular
Where do all of these different histories and theorizations of the vernacular
leave us? For one thing we may conclude that if the vernacular is on the
path to extermination or is only an expression of narrow-minded and
violent nationalisms, it clearly still sparks critical debate. It may be that the
vernacular—in contrast to a reified, even exoticized, conception of the local—is
best understood in relation to more expansive milieus such as the nation, the
cosmopolitan, and the planet. To advance this argument requires a conception
of the vernacular that associates it with different even conflicting vectors in
the circulation of languages and cultures. Such an account would pay heed to
Beecroft’s contention that within European modernity the vernacular, whether
as language or literature, is subsumed by and incorporated within the national,
while also considering the fact that within this modernity imperial rule, settler
colonialism, slavery, class struggles, and the movements of peoples and cultures
have resulted in the production of regional, subnational vernacular formations
(Jones 1999; Miller 2010; Rafael 2016) that remain at odds with official and
national formations. But such an account would also pay attention to what
Pollock describes as the “dialectic between cosmopolitan and vernacular that
creates them both” (2000: 616).
20
Vernaculars in an Age of World Literatures
Rather than attending to the tense situation of the vernacular in relation to
the national we advance that it is necessary to explore the different flows and
circulations constitutive of the vernacular. It may, for instance, become necessary
to understand Franco Moretti’s thesis concerning the history of the modern
novel as naming one trajectory within Pollock’s dialectic—the European form
of the novel is vernacularized within the peripheries of the literary system when
it is made to accommodate local content, including vernacular languages. Or
in a contrastive vector, we may find in Casanova’s account of the “Faulknerian
revolution” (2004: 327) the resources to imagine the feedback loops whereby
vernacular literatures modify cosmopolitan literary systems. William Faulkner’s
vernacular modernist aesthetic is indissociably bound to his project of giving
expression to the numerous vernacular cultures and languages of the American
South. Yet, in Casanova’s account, in doing so he provides a model for writers in
Algeria, the Caribbean, and Latin America as to how to activate the vernacular
within literary forms also inhabiting the world literary system. Finally, we may
consider whether the works of authors such as the African American modernist
and anthropologist Zora Neale Hurston do not inhabit vernacular flows
and circuits anterior to the cosmopolitan milieu of European modernity and
world literature. Ostensibly engaging with the legacy of slavery in the United
States, her Their Eyes Were Watching God (1937), much of it written in Haiti,
incorporates the African American dialect alongside modernist narration, and
moreover, alludes to West African cultural traditions she first encountered in the
Caribbean (Pavlić 2004). In doing so the novel maps a diasporic terrain, and asks
of us to resituate the drift of vernacular cultures within the circuits and coils of
the Black Atlantic and the Middle Passage.
Such instances suggest that the vernacular is not simply to be equated with
the local, but that it should be understood in relation to its mediations by the
cosmopolitan and the national, how it transforms these in turn, and even in
relation to vectors of the vernacular operative underneath European modernity.
We argue, then, that the vernacular becomes visible within and is constituted by
flows, forces, and antagonisms unleashed when the local is set flowing within
the nation, the cosmopolitan, or across the globe. From such a vantage point the
concept would have no pre-established ontological claim, as if existing outside
and prior to other larger-scale formations, but would be constituted by the
contact between different and uneven language and cultural formations. After
all, we recognize the vernacular when it appears to be a subordinate peripheral
formation within a larger system, which it may then transform or which may
Introduction: Theorizing the vernacular
21
transform it in turn. Following on, to reintroduce it as a concept within world
literary studies may very well be to reorient ourselves towards the fate of the
peripheral and subordinate within such a system, which may include the
transformation of the system itself.
As we have seen from the discussion above the vernacular goes well beyond
literature as a form. It may respectively refer to “sensibilities,” to “ways of
belonging,” to oral literature, to music, to culture in general with an attachment
to locality or to a marginalized position. We must not forget that vernaculars
operate in everyday life, where it is not first and foremost an instrument in a
battle over power. The majority of language users remain untouched by language
struggles in their daily lives and switch unproblematically between languages.
Literature reflects this reality too. We may also conclude that the vernacular is
always political, but not necessarily in the ways that we think. In some situations,
it is a tool for contesting the current linguistic order. In others, it might be a way
to make room for maneuver. It may express a sense of belonging to a place or a
culture in order to consolidate a community against the surrounding world or
in order to better communicate with other communities across the globe. Again,
the notion of plurality is foregrounded not only in regard to the various types of
expression, but also to the observation that the vernacular seems to emerge in
multilingual situations. There are then a range of reasons to stretch the concept
even further and think it beyond pre-established political formations and beyond
a specific language, as a certain sensibility and a way of being in the world.
How can it be otherwise? If there is one thing to be learned from the history
of the vernacular it is that the term contains a multiplicity, and is constituted by
the various ways it has mediated the forces of the nation and empire, and has
circulated across cosmopolitan milieus. That strange thing the vernacular is a
conjunctural formation, transforming, retreating, advancing, and shapeshifting
in relation to the uneven system of languages and cultures it inhabits and refracts.
For this reason, we may wonder about prognoses worrying about the demise
of the vernacular. The contemporary global linguistic landscape can hardly be
understood solely in terms of an Anglo-globalism is which English accompanies
the global unrolling of the neoliberal economy. Within contemporary
neoliberalism, language is linked to entrepreneurship, personal enterprise, and
profit (Rojo 2018). While many languages are viewed as subordinate to English
in such a system, the acquisition of a new language, online services in multiple
languages, and, related, multilingual work at, for instance, call centers or within
tourist industries are all ways in which issues of language and mediation are
22
Vernaculars in an Age of World Literatures
connected with the global economy (Pujolar 2018). It may be that such an
environment, perhaps best described as a hierarchical multilingual milieu,
fosters rather than inhibits the growth of new vernacular formations.
Note: This theoretical introduction is the result of a collective work by the
members of the “Vernacularities” group in the research program “Vernacular
and Cosmopolitan Dynamics in World Literatures.” The critical discussions with
Christian Claesson, Elisabeth Herrmann, Katarina Leppänen, Shuangyi Li, Lena
Rydholm, and Irmy Schweiger have been crucial for the writing of this chapter.
Our special gratitude goes to Gahlin Tihanov for his perspicacious reading of
the text and for his engagement with our project.
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