The idea of world literature emerged contemporaneously with innovative modes of conceptualizing the dynamics of world history, from the idealism of Hegel to the materialism of Marx and Engels. This affiliation has endured as the intellectual descendant of the nineteenth-century world-historical imagination, “world-systems theory, has gained traction in literary studies” (Apter 2009: 45). The large-scale displacements and migrations produced by and productive of the modern world economic system have deeply imprinted global literary production: the African, Chinese, and Indian diasporas fueled by colonial political economy, for example, have attained an expansive and overlapping textual presence throughout Europe and Asia, Africa and the Americas. Both bearing witness to dispersal and fashioning its literary implications, ancient and modern diasporic formations cut across geopolitical as well as aesthetic categories. If in many ways it appears, though, that diasporic writing manifests the border-crossing promise foundational to the world literature idea, it just as reliably forges a counter-discourse challenging the temporal and spatial trajectories operative in Eurocentric theorizations of world literature and its history. In one of the earliest reflections on the modern circulation of world literature,

Goethe (see Pizer in this volume) took the French interest in his play Torquato Tasso as indicative of a new moment in global letters, offering “a broader view of international and human relations” (Goethe 1973: 5). He tied this moment to the exchange of goods and ideas made possible by post-Napoleonic economic development. As Fritz Strich and others have noted, the economic scenario underwrote Goethe’s proclamation that “National literature means little now, the age of world literature has begun; and everyone should further its course” (Strich 1949: 5; Goethe 1973: 6). Goethe participated in what he imagined to be, in the words of Vilashini Cooppan, “a conversation conducted between nations through their most representative and greatest works of literature, a vision that at once overflows national boundaries and confirms them” (Cooppan 2001: 24). This conversation leads from a collection of national masterpieces, embodying what Goethe calls “the true inner soul of a people” (Goethe 1973: 5) to world literature, what various scholars have referred to

as “a dream of works yet to be written” (Cooppan 2001: 17) and “a literature to come” (Lawall 1994: 13). In The Communist Manifesto, Marx and Engels echoed Goethe and extended this forward-looking view when they wrote: “National onesidedness and narrow-mindedness become more and more impossible, and from the numerous national and local literatures, there arises a world literature” (Marx and Engels 1978: 476). A similar teleology operates in the works of the contemporary theorist of world literature Pascale Casanova. In her elegant study The World Republic of Letters she traces the gradual emergence of a world system of literary value with New York, London, and Paris as centers, and writers from the margins who, despite the operation of certain feedback loops, overwhelmingly accumulate literary capital by way of said centers. In these understandings, international circulation and translation become hall-

marks of the modern literary era, catalysts for a world literature made possible by an economic system under European dominance. Diasporic perspectives, however, call into question the nation-based, proleptic emphasis of world literature, and the modernity of the world economic system that underpins it. Rather than a literary history comprised of national masterpieces that will be surpassed by transnational expressions, diasporic writers conjure a literary past marked precisely by the circulation, translation, and revision which Goethe identifies as a hallmark of the contemporary era of world literature. For writers of the African diaspora, an evocation of the world literary past, furthermore, retroactively asserts a place for Africa and Africans excluded by the narrative of a Eurocentric historiography from meaningful contributions to the world’s cultural heritage. One way this literary past is evoked is through allusions to lines and spaces of narrative exchange whose archives, often transmitted orally, may or may not have survived. Thus, throughout her literary and ethnographic work, Zora Neale Hurston will connect African diasporic folklore about Moses back to Moses’ place in the narrative pathways of the religious and popular imagination of Africa and the Middle East. Another way writers of the African diaspora conjure a deep history of world

literature is through intertextuality with multinational compendia including the Panchatantra, Kalila wa Dimna, Aesop’s Fables, and the Anancy tales of West Africa. With a chorus of frogs emitting “Greek-croak! Greek-croak!” (Walcott 1971: 85), Derek Walcott’s “folk” drama Ti-Jean and His Brothers conjoins the African-derived Caribbean krik-krak story-telling tradition to the ancient Greek comedies of Aristophanes, thereby evoking a circum-Mediterranean exchange of animal tales linking together the story-telling worlds of ancient Africa, Europe, and Asia, and, eventually, the American New World, as Walcott’s own work illustrates. Unstable collections of animal tales, like reconstructed transmissions of Moses stories, waver between orality and textuality, reading and performance, local and cosmopolitan scenes. Out of this wavering, the writers under consideration shape a poetics of the African diaspora and a revisionist sense of world literature. The works of two Jewish writers, the Argentine Juan Gelman and the Iraqi-born

Israeli Shimon Ballas, also embody at the formal level the overdetermined genealogies – the irresolvably entangled sources – of the literary past, in which diasporic literary, linguistic, and identitarian formations consistently disrupt and supplement nationbased discourses. In his 1994 poetry volume Dibaxu, Gelman writes in sefardí, one of

many names for Ladino, the language of Jews expelled from Spain in 1492. The roots of Ladino not only reach back to translations of scripture into a medieval Spanish vocabulary with Hebrew syntax, but also incorporate the unstable regional varieties of the Latin-derived Iberian vernaculars. Ladino’s diversity intensified as communities of Sephardic Jews settled throughout North Africa and the Ottoman Empire. Gelman, an activist writer exiled from Argentina by the military dictatorship that assumed power in 1976, explicitly embraces sefardí as an act of racial-ethnic border crossing (his family’s origins being Ashkenazi and Yiddish-speaking) and a rejection of dictatorial nationalist monoglossia (Gelman 1994: 7; Balbuena 2009: 295). Dibaxu, with its companion volumes Com/posiciones and Citas y comentarios, uses a diasporic language in order to bear witness to the overdetermined origins of Castilian language and poetry, and to displace the illusory certainties of racial, ethnic, and national belonging. Shimon Ballas executes a similar project in his Hebrew-language novels from The

Transit Camp to The Outcast. Mourning his exile from storied Baghdadi and Arabic literary culture, and responsive to the anti-Mizrahi (eastern Jewish) discrimination and anti-Arab racism of Israeli society, Ballas’ writing “brings Hebrew closer and closer to Arabic,” a project he connects to learning the language from “the sources, the Bible and the Mishnah” (Alcalay n.d.). The resonances between Hebrew and Arabic composition and sensibilities were an assumed starting-point for centuries of Jewish poets, writers, and rabbinic scholars in their Arabic-speaking homelands (Anidjar 2008: 84-101). Ballas decries how such resonances have been excised from a Modern Hebrew designed to serve the Eurocentric, ethnic nationalism of the Zionist project of “return” (Alcalay n.d.). Thus, rather than show Modern Hebrew serving as a language of homecoming, Ballas’ texts enact an exile into Modern Hebrew that marks the ironies and tragedies attendant upon the upheavals in Israel-Palestine since 1948. Notably, Ballas’ intervention in this linguistic drama struggles against illegibility in

translation. The histories of diaspora violently create such linguistic dramas while also testing the capacity of translation to mediate them across the internal fractures of diasporic identities. Francophone Algerian literature emerged as a consequence of the brutal repression of Arabic literacy since that nation’s incorporation into la plus grande France following a ten-year “pacification” campaign from 1830-40. With strong anti-colonial impulses, writers such as Kateb Yacine and Assia Djebar trenchantly, beautifully deformed and Arabized French language and syntax in works such as Nedjma and L’Amour, la fantasia, and their work affected Francophone writers from West Africa to the Caribbean. After Algeria achieved independence in 1961-62, a massive Arabization campaign worked to bring literacy and literature back into the Arabic fold. Published after her own diasporic sojourn in France, Ahla¯m Mustagha¯namı¯’s best-selling Arabic novel, Dha¯kirat al-jasad (Memory of the Flesh), has been read as one of the fruits of that campaign. Formally and thematically, as Elizabeth Holt has made clear, the novel turns on the linguistic drama between French and Arabic, intertextually inserting itself into the modern Arabic canon as an assertion of Algerian literary-linguistic independence. Yet the French translation renders Mustagha¯namı¯’s intervention into this drama illegible, obscuring for readers of French that this novel was even written in Arabic. Even more

troublesome, this illegibility for French readers of Algerian descent poignantly highlights the diasporic ruptures of Algerian national identity in the aftermath of empire. Literary and historical wakefulness to the diasporic itineraries of people, texts, and

languages attune the field of world literature to precisely such slippages. The multiplicity of Jewish and Algerian diasporic experience finds a counterpart in the literature of the Indian diaspora, especially in its influential Anglophone trajectories in Britain, Canada, the Caribbean, and the United States. Trinidad-born, Canada-based writer Shani Mootoo’s short story “Out on Main Street” limns a paradigmatic series of misrecognitions. Confusion over the proper names for sweets marks the chasm between the Trinidadian narrator, whose Indian culture has been extensively creolized after more than a century in the Caribbean, and her male servers, recent South Asian immigrants. As the servers begin to make advances upon their female clientele, a nascent pan-diasporic feminist identification promises to link the protagonist and her friend to a group of Indian-via-India women at another table. However, as a lesbian couple enters the sweet shop and outs the narrator and her friend to the table of women, the feminist overture retreats and the Indians-from-India, male and female, reconsolidate. Finally, a drunken pair of Anglo-Canadian men arrive, and their clumsiness in the face of racial and gender difference prompts a universal sense of community in everyone else, overriding each of the previous contests. In “Out on Main Street,” as an Indian diaspora gets relayed into queer and Caribbean diasporas, identitarian conjunctures and disjunctures multiply. Indo-Trinidadian Sam Selvon’s The Lonely Londoners and Indian-born Salman Rushdie’s The Satanic Verses take up precisely such multiplications as they play out in London. While ostensibly explorations of immigrant and minority cultures in a specific national context, the diverse “roots and routes” (Clifford 1994) of the diasporic characters quickly “world” these texts, pushing the readers outward to the disjunctures and conjunctures of colonial, religious, and racial-ethnic subjectivities. For a closer look at an exemplary diasporic figure, in the following pages I will

consider the novels of the Francophone, Guadeloupean author Maryse Condé, who has emerged as a seminal author of African diaspora literature and criticism. Her broadly intertextual strategies, weaving together multiple global diasporas and narrative cartographies, paradigmatically bring into focus the slippages and blockages, the circulations and overdeterminations, that mark the terrain of world literature. Her novels Segu and Windward Heights allow particular insight into the textual mechanics that frequently unfold out of diasporic formations. Accessing long-lived dynamics of the world economic system, these revisionist texts highlight transnational narrative histories that complicate Eurocentric hierarchies of value and originality. Condé’s personal history parallels the models of transnational circulation corre-

lated here with diasporic perspectives on world literature. She left Guadeloupe for Paris in 1953 to continue her studies, first at the Lycée Fénélon and then at the Sorbonne. She remained in Paris until 1959, when she moved with her first husband to his native Guinea. Afterwards, she lived in Ivory Coast, Senegal, and Mali. She later resided in the United States and returned to Guadeloupe in 1986, since that time spending part of the year teaching at American universities and traveling extensively. Her years in West Africa provide the setting for her early

novels Hérémakhonon (1972), A Season in Rihata (1981), and the two volumes of Segu (1984, 1985). Segu recounts the decline of the Bambara kingdom in the late eighteenth and early

nineteenth centuries, in what is now Mali. These two volumes were bestsellers in France and are frequently taught in US college courses. Segu follows the progeny of Dousika Traoré through the turmoil of religious wars, encroaching European colonialism, the slave trade, and the countless smaller events that shape the lives of its characters. The descendants of Dousika get scattered throughout North and West Africa, England, Brazil, and Jamaica. Some remain in or return to Segu, the capital city of the Bambara kingdom; many do not. The story of the Bambara kingdom, though, does not simply paint the decline of a static ancestral homeland suddenly shaken out of its equilibrium. If Segu offers a partial, metonymic genealogy of modern Africa and the African diaspora, it does so without leveraging what Edouard Glissant calls “a return to the dream of origin” (Glissant 1997: 56). Segu does not present the journey back in time as a return to an organic whole-

ness. We encounter Bambara history in medias res. When the book opens, the Scottish explorer Mungo Park waits on the other bank of the Niger/Joliba River, minarets rise from within the walls of polytheistic Segu, and Quranic verses decorate the body of the Mansa, the ruler of Segu. Demystifying Africa as a mythical place of origin outside of history, Condé’s portrait foregrounds the instability and diversity of Segu, a result of its place in global networks of economic and intellectual exchange. Siga, a son of Dousika Traoré, is a narrative cipher of Segu’s involvement in these overlapping networks of language, economy, and culture. Having moved from Segu to Timbuktu and then to Morocco, he participates in an economic system reaching from sub-Saharan Africa to the Mediterranean shores of North Africa all the way to the Levant:

Abdallah had recently put him in charge of his dealing in salt. Twice a month he went to Teghaza or Taoudenni with a caravan to be laden with bars of salt, seeing to it that they were properly bound together so that they didn’t suffer damage in transit. At those times he ruled over a whole company of slaves, who carried the bars to and fro and marked them with black lines or diamonds to indicate to whom they belonged. Then he brought the bars back to Timbuktu and sold them to merchants from Morocco, or even from the Middle East and North Africa. It was hard work, but he liked it. As he supervised the slaves and bargained with the merchants he had a feeling of usefulness, if not of power. He was part of a great system, a grand network of exchanges and communications that extended across the universe.