Lyannaj in Simone Schwarz-Bart, Michelle Cliff, Buchi Emecheta and Assia Djebar: Towards Relational Approaches to World Literature

Abstract

Missing from recent studies on world literature is an explicit engagement with relationality as both a template and model to reconsider the connections between literatures, languages, capitalism, gender, and resistances to cultural and patriarchal hegemony within the world-system. This thesis thus proposes a comparative study of four novels written by a selection of authors from the Caribbean and the African continent through the literary and cultural implications of "lyannaj" that this work proposes to consider as a new mode of reading world literature across geographies. It looks at the representations of interdependent differences and inequalities within the novels of Simone Schwarz-Bart, Michelle Cliff, Buchi Emecheta and Assia Djebar across the span of the 1970s to 1990s. It questions to what extent lyannaj devises a new reading method through the building of solidarities and non-hegemonic dialogues between the literary forms, content, and lived experiences of the marginalized rather than the dominant. Therefore, this thesis offers a re-articulation via lyannaj of the Warwick Research Collective's work on the "capitalist world-system" by introducing the active and restorative relationality of a "Poetics of Relation" theorized by Édouard Glissant. Drawing upon "relational approaches" to the corpus, this work engages with a deepening complication of the world-system through its articulation with the visible or hidden relationality between spaces and cultures propelled by the "relational phenomenon." It is supported by the intermingling of feminist and anticolonial theories from the Caribbean and African continent, as well as an evidence-based approach to the circulation and dissemination of texts in order to read novels relationally, that is as interrelated and in relation to one another. Reading the novels under the sign of the literary and cultural implications of lyannaj shows how relationality devises a counter-narrative to capitalist globalization narratives of connectivity. Ultimately, lyannaj shapes an archipelagic terrain of creative and relational entanglement that lays the foundations of a new comparatist method to read world literature beyond disciplines, languages and geographies as narrowly conceived.