Translation and the Global South: Comparing Ngugi’s Globalectics and Glissant’s Poetics (original) (raw)

Translation and the Global South: Comparing Ngugi’s Globalectics and Glissant’s Poetics

Over a decade into the 21st century, the West is no longer the primary locus of economics, technology, and culture. With the rise of China, India, Brazil and South Africa as the largest economies within the Global South, development and exchange can often obviate the West. This multi-polar world—as many theorists of globalization have pointed out—represents an unprecedented shift in global power dynamics. How then is this multi-polarity understood? And within the cultural sphere, what kind of theory of knowledge is needed to vocalize the contemporary moment? Although Ngugi wa Thiong’o’s globalectic grows out of an amalgamation of materialism and the negotiations of a Gikuyu and Anglophone Kenyan context, Édouard Glissant’s poetics of relation emerges from a poststructural and creolized Francophone Caribbean context. However, both arrive at strikingly similar conclusions concerning the role of orality and literature in the formation of an analytic for the cultural exchanges of a multi-polar world. As a result, the postcolonial emerges as an ethic with which to articulate and engage with definitions of globalization and world literature.