The relationship between translation studies and world literature is complex if not vexed. Tobias Warner’s erudite revisitation of the topic in The Tongue-Tied Imagination invites us to imagine the potential for translation studies to chart a new course in literary criticism and comparative literature. The premise of Warner’s investigation is the language question—about whether African writers should discontinue writing in the language of the colonialist and return to their native vernacular or take the cosmopolitan route of appropriating and subverting the colonialist’s language. But instead of reinforcing this long-standing dichotomy, the book nuances the language question by conceiving of it as a struggle over the conditions and limits of literature and literary production.

Warner traces the untimeliness of the language question by tracking its agency in defamiliarizing the institutions of the literary present and subjecting them to a critical inquiry into the possibilities and influences of other patterns and notions of literary culture. By placing in conversation Senegalese literary works in French and Wolof, Warner investigates both the genesis of the language question and how writers have so far responded to it. These two plots make up the contents of this three-part book.

In the first part, Warner tries to unravel the extent to which colonial encounters and European imperialism in Senegal recuperate knowledge of African lifeworlds expressed in Wolof. David Boilat’s 1843 notebooks, which contain Wolof performances of tales and songs, are explored in chapter 1 to demonstrate evidence of a literary past that precedes the language debates, establish the possibility of other modes of reframing of texts as literature, and, consequently, question the terms through which a sense of a literary past emanates and is appropriated. For a Senegalese writer in French, Léopold Senghor, writing in Wolof is not enough. Producing a quintessential modern African literature requires a paraliterary authorship that disavows the practice of translation, to instead allow Senghor and his fellow writers to express their African experience primarily in French and thus purchase for their works the status of the literary (chapter 2). Surely, this connects with Senghor’s articulation of Négritude. However, this contemporary trajectory of colonial literary modernity in Senegal (of writing in French) is problematized in chapter 3, which questions the rationale behind producing African writings that address a public that cannot read nor access it, a question of audience earlier raised by Ousmane Sembène at the March 1963 African literature conference in Dakar.

The second part of the book attends to the task of decolonizing the colonial literary practices explored in part 1. To this end, chapter 4 examines the conflicts that beset postcolonial Senegal’s literary modernity vis-à-vis a nativist return to Wolof. The contest was over which authority was to be admitted in the writing system of Wolof, as a return to Wolof is considered prominent in the decolonization project of accounting for the past and imagining the future. But as chapter 5 demonstrates, the language question is not a site of rupture in which an embrace of a vernacular necessitates a total abandonment of the colonial language. Just as Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o writes in Gikuyu and auto-translates in English, Warner uses the examples of Sembène and Ndao’s film and novel, respectively performed and written in Wolof and French, to buttress the idea that translation is a mediating condition of expression—that is, translation mitigates the linguistic constraints experienced in artistic expression.

The end part of the book trains its sight on how Senegalese writings can be read as world literature and how they address neoliberal ideas. Using Mariama Bâ’s 1979 novel So Long a Letter, chapter 6 reflects on how the interpretations of Letter (as both an antipolygamous novel and an example of the emancipatory powers of literature) explain the introduction of postcolonial literature to a world literary public. And chapter 7, looking at Boubacar Boris Diop’s 2003 Wolof novel, Golo (The Monkey’s Offspring), examines the influence of structural adjustment policies in Senegal on the kinds of audiences projected to be produced by vernacular literary movements.

It is hard to think of any other work that has addressed, with so much depth, ways of rethinking the politics of language and its influence on the literary present. Warner’s intervention in this regard is timely—even as he takes up the language question as an untimely arena—if one considers how The Tongue-Tied Imagination connects the fields of translation and postcolonial literary studies, literary theory, and world literature. Scholars in these fields will relish the book’s contributions for quite a long time.