ABSTRACT
For Pheng Cheah, texts become world literature “by virtue of [their] participation in worlding processes,” and these worlds are different from the market-driven and homogenizing processes of globalization. Drawing on this statement, this chapter examines how post-apartheid South African fiction unfolds into networks of diversified local epistemes and situated practices across the world that foreground the processes of worlding. In so doing, it argues that Achmat Dangor’s Kafka’s Curse (1997) demonstrates poietic worlds which are construed through a particular attention to the specificity and singularity of the individual literary text within cross-cultural interactions beyond the East/West divide. Dangor’s text critically and strategically uses English as a medium of exclusion and homogenization but also of plurality and resistance by juxtaposing different linguistic and non-Western cultural registers (i.e., Afrikaans, Dutch, Hindi, Arabic, Persian, and Turkish) alongside literary English and classical allusions. In this way, Kafka’s Curse, as this chapter contends, reworks the concept of the Anglophone within multidimensional contexts extending beyond reductive centre-periphery, local-global, universal-particular, diaspora-native, or individual-collective frameworks.
