Reviewed by:

• The Tongue-Tied Imagination: Decolonizing Literary Modernity in Senegal by Tobias Warner
• Brian Valente-Quinn

Tobias Warner's book, The Tongue-Tied Imagination: Decolonizing Literary Modernity in Senegal, begins by proposing a new approach to a familiar topic in the study of post-colonial literatures that is also one of its thorniest. The author addresses the so-called "language question," or the frequently heated debates that once ignited regarding the language in which post-colonial authors chose to write. In his introduction, Warner revisits two major events in the early framing of such discussions: the 1962 conference of African Writers of English Expression at Makerere University in Kampala, Uganda, and a similar event held in the following year in Dakar for African writers of French expression. Through the archival traces of discussions held at the Dakar event, Warner recounts how the Senegalese author Birago Diop pointedly asked his compatriot Ousmane Sembène if he could repeat in his native Wolof, rather than in French, a spoken intervention in which Sembène had voiced a biting criticism of the privileging of colonial languages in African literary institutions. Sembène conceded that he could not, and their exchange appears, in retrospect, to highlight the endless contradictions and entanglements that have since caused the language question to fall from prominence in contemporary critical discussions. It is as though, Warner points out, the debate has since come to a close but with no clear winner, or as though its terms and assumptions might easily be relegated to a bygone era of predominantly nationalistic sentiments.

Warner's brilliant and timely intervention serves to point out how such discussions aimed not only to interrogate the institutionalization of African literature, but also to explore the terms of literary modernity. The language question, he points out, has always been of an untimely nature due to its implicit "refusal to inhabit the given conditions of a literary present" (4). [End Page 365] Rather than attempt to revive or resolve the tensions raised by the language question, Warner meticulously examines the myriad entanglements that have come to constitute such a literary present. The image of the knot serves as a fitting metaphor throughout the book. The language question may present itself as a hopelessly entangled knot, given that colonial European languages and institutions are difficult to dislodge from post-colonial literary practices. However, attempts at disentanglement can also produce "unexpected attachments that bind together elements in new configurations" (6). The knot metaphor is made all the more fitting by Warner's recourse in his theorizing of the act of translation to the Wolof term tekki, which can mean "to translate," but implies a process of unwinding rather than a simple transmission from one language to another. This conceptual framework allows Warner to explore translation through its internal complexities, or, as Warner states, through the processes of "knotting and unknotting by which literary institutions are held together and by which they can be pulled apart" (8).

In its exploration of major works of Senegalese literature in both Wolof and French, The Tongue-Tied Imagination engages extensively with the field of world literature studies, whose models, Warner argues, tend to privilege spatiality by focusing on the distances (material, geographic) that separate authors from their potential readers. To complement such a spatially rooted framework, Warner foregrounds the temporal aspect by considering how "vernacular writers" might address an imagined reader cast in futures near or far, doing so in ways that serve to constitute textuality and/or literarily. Indeed, one of this book's many strengths stems from its close attention to the means by which different forms of writing are made into "texts" or "literature." This approach is used to explore, in the first chapter, the writings of the nineteenth-century Franco-Senegalese abbot and scholar David Boilat. Warner frames Boilat's studies and text-collecting practices as a form of "entextualization," which he then considers in relation to the "literarization" carried out much later by Léopold Sédar Senghor through a little-known anthology titled Les Plus beaux écrits de...

审核人：

• 舌头约束的想象力：托比亚斯·华纳（Tobias Warner）塞内加尔的文学现代性非殖民化
• 布莱恩·瓦伦特·奎因

托比亚斯·华纳（Tobias Warner）的著作《舌头的想象力：塞内加尔的文学现代性非殖民化》首先，提出一种新的方法来研究后殖民文学中的一个熟悉的话题，这也是它最棘手的问题之一。作者谈到了所谓的“语言问题”，或者一度引发关于后殖民作者选择写作语言的激烈辩论。Warner在其介绍中回顾了早期讨论中的两个主要事件：1962年在乌干达坎帕拉的马凯雷雷大学举行的非洲英语表达作家会议，以及于次年在达喀尔为非洲法国作家编写的类似事件。表达。通过在达喀尔赛事中进行的档案讨论，华纳讲述了塞内加尔作家比拉戈·迪奥普（Birago Diop）如何尖锐地问他的同胞OusmaneSembène，他是否可以在他的家乡沃洛夫（Wolof）而不是法文中重演，塞姆贝恩（Sembène）对非洲文学机构中殖民语言特权的尖锐批评。森布雷承认，他不能这样做，回想起来，他们之间的交流似乎突出了无休止的矛盾和纠缠，这些矛盾和纠缠使语言问题从当代批判性讨论中脱颖而出。Warner指出，辩论似乎已经结束，但没有明确的获胜者，或者好像它的术语和假设很容易退回到以民族主义情绪为主的时代。强调无休止的矛盾和纠缠，这些矛盾和纠缠使语言问题从当代批判性讨论中脱颖而出。Warner指出，辩论似乎已经结束，但没有明确的获胜者，或者好像它的术语和假设很容易退回到以民族主义情绪为主的时代。强调无休止的矛盾和纠缠，这些矛盾和纠缠使语言问题从当代批判性讨论中脱颖而出。Warner指出，辩论似乎已经结束，但没有明确的获胜者，或者好像它的术语和假设很容易退回到以民族主义情绪为主的时代。

华纳出色而及时的干预措施旨在指出这种讨论不仅旨在询问非洲文学的制度化，而且还旨在探讨文学现代性的术语。他指出，语言问题一直具有不合时宜的性质，因为它隐含的“拒绝适应文学现状的给定条件”（4）。[结束页365]华纳没有试图重振或解决语言问题所引起的紧张关系，而是认真地研究了构成这种文学存在的各种纠缠。结的图像在整本书中都是合适的隐喻。鉴于欧洲殖民地语言和机构很难摆脱后殖民时期的文学实践，语言问题可能会表现为无可救药的纠结。但是，尝试进行纠缠也会产生“意外的附件，这些附件将新配置中的元素绑定在一起”（6）。沃纳在对沃洛夫语tekki的翻译行为进行理论化处理时所采用的手段，使这种结比喻更加恰当。，其含义为“翻译”，但意味着展开过程而不是从一种语言到另一种语言的简单传递。这个概念框架使华纳可以通过其内部的复杂性来探索翻译，或者如华纳所言，通过“将文学机构结合在一起并可以将它们拆散的过程”（8）。

在探索塞内加尔文学的沃洛夫语和法语主要作品时，《舌头的想象力》华纳认为，世界文学研究领域与之广泛接触，其模型倾向于通过关注作者与潜在读者之间的距离（物质，地理）来优先考虑空间性。为了补充这种在空间上扎根的框架，华纳通过考虑“本土作家”可能如何处理近距离或远距离期货中的虚构读者来突出时间方面，从而以构成文本性和/或文学性的方式进行处理。确实，本书的众多优势之一源于其对将不同形式的写作转化为“文本”或“文学”的方式的密切关注。在第一章中，使用这种方法来探索19世纪的佛朗哥-塞内加尔方丈和学者David Boilat的著作。华纳构架Boilat'Les Plus美容霜...