Locating Translation: On the Question of Japanophone Literature

Abstract

Adding-Phone to the name of a National Language Entails an Expansion of Geographic and Historical Perspective. This expansion of perspective in the national-literature departments of the West was initially made possible by decolonization and the collapse of the European empires, when scholars in francophone studies and anglophone studies rethought the relation between language and culture in the postcolonial moment. While the move to -phone studies brings with it some potential to reinstate the national-literature paradigm in a different form, it can just as easily mean a departure into questions of transnationalism, transcoloniality, translation, and old and new creolizations. To study literature in terms of -phone is to assume no longer that language and literature follow the tidy dictates of national sovereignty, national identity, and realpolitik, as these were articulated during the age of high imperialism.