If written texts usually involve some kind of performative dimension, oral performances also entail the constitution of a text. American linguistic anthropology uses the term ‘entextualization’ for the process by which stretches of spoken discourse are detached from their immediate context and rendered repeatable and thus transmissible. In African oral poetry there are entextualizing strategies which involve rendering discourse object-like: by making it the focus of exegesis, or by presenting it as quotable, thus foregrounding the perception that these words pre-existed their present moment of utterance and could continue to exist after it. However, African oral praise poetry is also highly dynamic. Text is not consolidated in order to constitute it as an unchanging monument, but rather so that it can be re-activated in a new context of utterance, where it has an effectual engagement and dialogic force. Thus the performative and the entextualizing dimension can be seen to be inseparable and mutually dependent.

The notion of text, along with the issues relating to how variable or fixed a text may be, has been a central issue in the study of oral literature for some time. In this article it will be argued that the notion of the poetic text as being unchangeable is central to Somali maanso poetry, and that such poems are instances of what become, through the composition process, ‘definitive texts’. Arguments in favour of this will be presented from a number of different perspectives. Maanso poetry will be contrasted with traditional hees and the characteristics of both outlined, with a view to showing how the ‘texts’ of each type of poetry differ from an extra-textual viewpoint, that is from the point of view of people's expectations regarding the different types of poetry. Intratextual characteristics will also be mentioned with a view to showing the objectivity and autonomy of maanso definitive texts. The development of modern hees from the heello and also the development of the use of writing in Somali poetry will also be considered and shown to support the idea of the maanso definitive text.

This paper examines the nature of performance literature in Ancient Greece, comparing it with other modern and medieval examples. It concentrates on archaic Greek ‘song culture’, and especially choral praise poetry. It discusses the social and cultural significance of the original performances and, drawing on comparative examples, investigates the ‘gap’ between performance and text, possible cultural explanations and interpretations of ‘difficult’ performed literature—particularly competitive and religious—which stand out in comparison to performance literatures elsewhere.

This article examines the role of performance (defined in its broadest sense) in Japanese literary culture, specifically the relationship between performance and the production of physical texts, both script and illustration. It postulates the thesis that performance has been an essential part of artistic creation even among highly literate artists/writers in the genres of poetry (waka, renga, haikai, kyōka), Nō and kabuki drama. A case is made that artists' salons (including professionals and amateurs) were an integral part of cultural life and that their activities were as important as the physical texts produced in response to such performances. The core of the article focuses on the Kabuki ‘culture of play’ in Osaka, through which actors, poets, artists and fans participated both in performances and in the production of texts such as books on actors (yakusha ehon), books on theatre (gekisho), surimono (privately-commissioned prints commemorating a poetry gathering), single-sheet actor prints, and actor critique books (yakusha hyōbanki).

Taking its cue from two specific examples (particular terms used by Aristotle and by Yan Fu) the first part of this article rehearses the hermeneutic question of cross-cultural understanding but gears the discussion to the specific issues of the complicity of translation in cross-cultural understanding, whether in an historical or an anthropological sense, and of the need to inspect critically the vocabulary used in the exercise. The second part considers practical ways in which the cross-cultural study of translation might proceed. It harks back to I. A. Richards, draws on the anthropology of Clifford Geertz and on philosophical pragmatism to redefine the aim of cross-cultural translation studies, and finally settles on the notion of ‘thick translation’ as a self-reflexive way to engage with other concepts of translation.

How translatable are concepts across cultures? How do translated concepts interact with the receiving culture's repertoire of concepts and influence its prevailing mode of thinking? How do translated concepts, specifically concepts of category of knowledge such as ‘science’, ‘philosophy’, ‘religion’, etc., have an impact on the receiving culture's existing body of knowledge? This paper explores the above questions with reference to an anthology currently being compiled by the author, in English translation, of texts on Chinese thinking about translation. The initial title was ‘An anthology of Chinese translation theories: from ancient times to the revolution of 1911’; this was changed to ‘An anthology of Chinese thought on translation’ before the present title, ‘An anthology of Chinese discourse on translation’, was adopted. By analysing, in a self-reflective manner, the decisions involved in the movement from ‘theory’ to ‘thought’ to ‘discourse’, I hope to throw some light on the epistemological impact produced by translated concepts in the receiving culture. The impact is analysed in terms of the disciplining of knowledge that could be effected by translated concepts—disciplining in the sense of organizing, ordering, hierarchizing, including/excluding, centring/decentring, aligning and re-aligning of material deemed to constitute knowledge in the receiving culture, for the purpose of mono-cultural cross-cultural, or intercultural study. As the use of translated concepts (e.g. ‘science’, ‘philosophy’, ‘religion’) to name bodies of knowledge in ancient China is a common, though not uncontroversial practice, the issue of the disciplining of knowledge dealt with in this paper should be relevant not only to translation scholars but also to sinologists and Chinese scholars the world over.

This article traces the metamorphoses of Scheherazade, the heroine of The Thousand and One Nights' frame-tale, in modern fiction and film. It examines these metamorphoses in the context of a discussion of the function of narrative across cultures and disciplines. It looks more particularly at the role of genre ideologies—paradigms of knowledge implicit in generic expectations, ideologies external to genre, and subjectivities in narrative transformation—in transforming the story as it travels in time and across media of expression and cultures. Analysis of the Nights frame-tale, the story of Scheherazade, and its transformations, is further informed by an interrogation of the process of reading ‘texts’ critically. Do genre, ideology and subjectivity inform our readings of ‘texts’? In what ways do paradigms of knowledge perceived as inherent in these categories in turn affect our understanding of story and narrative?

A traveller in distress vows to God, piously but apparently pointlessly, that he will never eat elephant flesh. Subsequently, the oath would seem to be his perdition, yet in the end he is saved because of it, unlike his fellow travellers. This entertaining story is told by al-Tanūkhī (d. 384/994) in two almost identical versions. It is also found in other sources, both Arabic and Persian, among them translations or adaptations of al-Tanūkh¯ (by ‘Awfī and Dihistānī), works on lives of the Sufis (Abū Nu‘aym, Jāmī), a travelogue (Ibn Baūa), anthologies (al-Damīrī, al-‘Āmilī), and a collection of mystical and moral tales in verse (Rūmī). These versions, spanning at least six centuries, differ in the name of the protagonist, plot, language, style, length, ‘outlook’, and quality. In general, it will be argued, travelling has done the story little good: unlike al-Tanūkhī's tale, its beginning is happier than its ending.

This paper traces how Amitav Ghosh's novel The circle of reason (1986) inscribes what might be termed a ‘magical real’ sensibility of quotidian extreme, wild coincidence and tangential, picaresque epic against bounded ideas of language, history and genre. The perception of a linear shift from the British Empire into a postcolonial world of discrete nations is challenged by Ghosh's portrayal of a teeming world of transverse histories. This diffusion of ‘big history’ into the long movements and strange moments of diaspora is most crucially drawn out through Ghosh's heightened, sometimes perplexed and at other times enchanted, exploration of what might be described—using the work of Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari—as the ‘polylingualism’ of language. Ghosh portrays a world in which the smaller terms of community belie the ideologies of nation impressed by the ‘traditional’ realist novel form—and the apparently organic, rooted terms of ‘community’ are themselves collapsed into a recognition that all people can be traced back to histories of displacement and migration.

With defeat in the Pacific War in 1945, the very notion of ‘community’ (as described by Benedict Anderson) in Japan was under threat, the future of the nation dependent, as never before, on the response of the international community. Viewed in a different light, however, the slate was clean—the possibilities, indeed the need, for revised terms of reference for this ‘imagined community’ now of paramount importance. The ensuing attempts to define the parameters of the emerging national identity were far-reaching and multi-faceted, seeking as they did to encompass the memories of loss and devastation through the realm of everyday culture as well as through political discourse. The focus of this paper will be on the contribution to this radical reassessment of the relationship between the nation and the individual made by the group of authors collectively known as the Sengoha (après guerre literary coterie). More specifically, I shall be examining the novellas, Shin'ya no shuen (The midnight banquet, 1947) and Eien naru josho (The eternal preface, 1948), two early texts by the author, Shiina Rinzō, arguably the most representative Sengoha writer, for evidence of the extent to which this literature helped to shape and modify the ‘imagined community’ of Japan.

The ‘novel of the future’ speculates on the ‘temporal’ utopia/dystopia. Its strange fate in modern China reveals much about the relationship between imagination, ideology and modernity in the Chinese mindset. Prior to the concept of modernity being imported into China there had been no fiction about the future. For, in traditional China, history did not have directionality. Two powerful Western ideologies, both ‘progressive’, took turns to dominate modern China. Social Darwinism led to the great explosion of the novel of the future in the early twentieth century. From the 1920s onwards, with Marxism becoming the dominant ideology, the novel of the future disappeared completely: when the future was predetermined, no speculation was to be tolerated. In the 1990s, there erupted another spectacular flourishing of novels of future in China, although these works are pessimistic in tone, as belief in the future has been thrown into serious doubt.

This article uses the World Anti-Slavery Convention of 1840, and the way in which it was represented in Benjamin Robert Haydon's painting of it, to reflect on the ways in which Britons thought of themselves as an ’imperial people’, ’lords of humankind’, fit to rule over others. The Whig reforms of the 1830s had brought the enfranchisement of large numbers of middle-class men, and the emancipation of the enslaved across the British Empire. Excavating the assumptions of the abolitionists who gathered at the Convention allows us to see how new hierarchies of difference were encoded by 1840, placing freed black men, middle-class women and Irish Catholics on the margins of the new body politic.

The applicability of Western concepts to an understanding of gender in other cultural settings has become increasingly problematic. We need to elicit an understanding of how particular societies define sexual difference, and derive locally grounded ideas of self and the materiality of the body as a starting point for analysis. This paper examines some of the wider implications of this view for notions of cultural context and comparison. Its ethnographic examples come from Latin America. They build on the regional interest in spiritual and symbolic forms as ‘scripts’ for gender identifications, exploring the diverse ways in which idealizations, images and icons are read in ways that encompass both ‘local’ and ‘non-local’ narratives. However, the discussion aims to be relevant beyond this geographical location, suggesting that both secular and sacred discourses appear to work at a number of different, sometimes contradictory, levels, often drawing together transcultural notions of being, and generating a field of meaning in which gender, value and morality are constituted.