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The Tongue-Tied Imagination [Table Of Contents], Tobias Warner

Literature

Should a writer work in a former colonial language or in a vernacular? The language question was one of the great, intractable problems that haunted postcolonial literatures in the twentieth century, but it has since acquired a reputation as a dead end for narrow nationalism.

Focusing on the case of Senegal, Warner investigates the intersection of French and Wolof. Drawing on an under-studied corpus of novels, poetry, and films in both languages, the book traces the emergence of a politics of language from colonization through independence to the era of neoliberal development.

Refusing to see the turn to vernacular languages …