Intermediality, Literary Studies and Anglophone World Literature

In the last twenty years, intermediality and related concepts such as adaptation (Linda Hutcheon), remediation (Jay David Bolter/Richard Grusin) and transmedia (Henry Jenkins) have become exceptionally productive in a range of disciplines within the humanities – for example in English and American literature but also, in particular, in modern languages such as French and Italian. This is reflected in the funding practices of national research foundations such as the AHRC which now finance interdisciplinary cutting-edge projects such as Interdisciplinary Italy at Trinity College Dublin. These projects are dedicated to explorations of the manifold interartistic and intermedial techniques and medial interfaces that characterize modern and contemporary works of art, cultural artifacts, literary texts and other cultural configurations. As a central notion in the analysis of the arts, the media and their border-crossing, the concept of intermediality allows for a reading of cultural configurations and their production of meaning against the backdrop of their medial contexts from systematic and historical perspectives.

However, there are some disciplines whose commitment to investigate interartistic and intermedial cultural practices has been restricted to this day. In postcolonial literary studies, comparative literature and world literature studies, for example, intermediality has not yet received the scholarly attention it deserves. Scholars have only recently, for instance, started to investigate the intermedial aesthetics of the new Anglophone world literature, which includes writers such as Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, NoViolet Bulawayo, Teju Cole and Taiye Selasi, to list a few of the most prominent (Birgit Neumann/Gabriele Rippl, Verbal-Visual Configurations in Postcolonial Literature, 2020). The fiction of these transcultural Afropolitan writers exhibits productive intermedial techniques and creative word-image configurations which are based on semiotic and material in-between-ness. These word-image configurations lend themselves to a critical examination of the inequalities and hierarchies that exist in our complex networks of transcultural exchanges. What is more, these intermedial techniques have the potential to unsettle common epistemologies: they manifest new meaning-making processes, imagining worlds beyond global late capitalism, and make visible the unevenly distributed geo-political and socio-cultural power constellations of our neo-liberal world.

Ekphrasis is one of the most productive types of word-image relationships. In this intermedial category, termed intermedial reference (Werner Wolf; Irina O. Rajewsky), only text is present in its medial form. The second medium, image, is evoked via verbal description – Homer’s description of Achilles’s shield in Book 18 of the Iliad is a famous example. According to James A.W. Heffernan’s widely accepted definition, ekphrasis is ‘the verbal representation of visual representation’ (The Museum of Words, 1993, 3). To give some examples: Zimbabwean writer NoViolet Bulawayo mobilizes ekphrasis in her novel We Need New Names (2013) to question the socio-political conditions that regulate media access and the global circulation of images. She foregrounds the close, but often precarious, ties between subjectivity, materiality and mediality in globalized media landscapes. Bulawayo’s intermedial aesthetics investigates both unstable African postcolonial politics and the powerful role of western mass media and media corporations in world-making by producing reductive, highly stereotypical representations of Africa. In addition to images of documentary TV pictures and pornographic films, Bulawayo’s ekphrases also present African batik painting and masks. These ekphrases invite readers to think about western systems of cultural value, symbolic capital and notions of ‘world’ and to question hidden ideological agendas that legitimize western hegemony.

Another contemporary Anglophone novelist is Teju Cole, an American-Nigerian, whose Every Day Is for the Thief (2007/2014) and Open City (2011) are excellent examples of how contemporary Anglophone world literature engages with today’s media cultures. These works are preoccupied with visuality, practices of seeing and dense networks of intertextual and intermedial references to art. They explore forms and effects of contemporary digital media while simultaneously addressing violence, trauma, memory and diaspora. Their intermedial aesthetics engages readers in meta-representational reflections on the socio-formative impact of visuality. While Every Day Is for the Thief contains a number of black-and-white photographs that depict (seemingly) random vignettes of life in Nigeria’s megacity Lagos, Open City is rife with ekphrastic passages which contemplate the changing nature of writing in the digital age. Both Bulawayo and Cole create open, non-Eurocentric worlds-in-motion that serve as invitations to imagine plural, enmeshed (if uneven) worlds characterized by transcultural entanglements and exchanges, openness and polycentricity, locally situated practices and experiences and global networks. Their ‘worlding’ (Pheng Cheah) involves intermedial literary configurations based on interactions between different media, semiotic systems, poetic traditions, various settings, transcultural characters, multiple perspectives and generic transgressions. The ‘worlding’ of contemporary Anglophone writers invites readers to imagine worlds beyond global neo-capitalism – even if Anglophone world literatures will never be able to escape enmeshment with global market dynamics.