Should a writer work in a former colonial language or in a vernacular? The language question was one of the great intractable problems that haunted postcolonial literatures in the twentieth century. But instead of asking whether language matters, The Tongue-Tied Imagination explores how the language question itself came to matter.
Focusing on Senegal, Warner draws on extensive archival research and an understudied corpus of novels, poetry, and films in both French and Wolof, as well as educational projects and popular periodicals. In tracing the politics of language from colonization through independence to the era of neoliberal development, Warner reveals language debates as a site from which to rethink the terms of world literature and chart a renewed practice of literary comparison.