Intertextuality, World Literature and Migration: Dictionaries and the Female Body in Najat El Hachmi’s L’últim Patriarca and Xiaolu Guo’s A Concise Chinese–English Dictionary for Lovers

Abstract

This essay argues that globalization has textual implications and leads to increasing similarities between literary texts that emerge from the experience of migration but are located in disparate contexts. These textual entanglements are unintended but not necessarily arbitrary, since they are deeply rooted in today’s high interconnectivity between people, economic systems and cultural artefacts. The essay bridges the gap between the fields of world literature and literary theory by complementing Julia Kristeva’s notion of intertextuality with a contextual approach that adds understudied aspects of migration, multilingualism, gender and the market as key factors in discovering new resemblances between texts in a transnational context. By defining migration literature as a genre characterized by an open-ended web of intertextual relations and conceiving of intertextuality – the intersection of texts – as a concept that mirrors the crossing of different cultures that goes hand in hand with globalization, the essay also takes world literature studies into new directions. The essay shows how world literature’s focus on circulation and centre–periphery dynamics has implicitly favoured a narrow understanding of intertextuality as an intended world literary device that does not account for less linear crossings. Through a comparative analysis of A Concise Chinese–English Dictionary for Lovers by the Chinese-British author Xiaolu Guo and L’últim patriarca by the Catalan-Amazigh writer Najat El Hachmi the essay examines the processes of linguistic and sexual maturation that are at the core of both narratives of migration. The intertextual entanglements between these novels can be explained neither through conscious practices of rewriting nor through notions of intertextuality that focus exclusively on aesthetic matters and leave aside the cultural dimensions of globalization, but through a new approach that highlights the similarities between different subjectivities of migration and the social embeddedness of literature in a global context.