Journal of World Literature 6 (2021) 216–244 brill.com/jwl Congolese Literature as Part of Planetary Literature Silvia Riva | orcid: 0000-0002-0100-0569 Università degli Studi di Milano, Milan, Italy
[email protected] Abstract Historically and economically, the Congo has been considered one of the most interna- tionalized states of Africa. The idea that African cultural plurality was minimized dur- ing the colonial era has to be reconsidered because textual negotiations and exchanges (cosmopolitan and vernacular, written and oral) have been frequent during and after colonization, mostly in urban areas. Through multilingual examples, this paper aims to question the co-construction of linguistic and literary pluralism in Congo and to advo- cate for the necessity of a transdisciplinary and collaborative approach, to understand the common life of African vernacular and cosmopolitan languages. I show that world literature models based on Pierre Bourdieu’s notion of negotiation between center and periphery thus have to be replaced by a concept of multilingual global history. Finally, I propose the notion of “planetary literature” as a new way of understanding the inter- connection between literatures taking care of the world. Keywords restitution – post-scriptural orality – planetary literature – multilingualism – Third Landscape 1 Recast, Return, and the Opening Up to the World Let me start by recalling an essay dating back to the early 1990s by the philoso- pher V.Y. Mudimbe. In relation to contemporary African art, he introduced the notion of reprendre (literally, “to retake”) to mean both the act of taking up an interrupted tradition, not out of a desire for purity, which would testify only to the imaginations of dead ancestors, but in a way © silvia riva, 2021 | doi:10.1163/24056480-00602006 This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the cc by-ncDownloaded4.0 license.