Introduction to Afro-Asian Literature
landmass.
Asia, what?
Asia is the world’s largest and most diverse
continent. It occupies the eastern four-fifths
of the giant Eurasian landmass. Asia is more
a geographic term than a homogeneous
continent, and the use of the term to
describe such a vast area always carries the
potential of obscuring the enormous
diversity among the regions it encompasses.
Asia has both the highest and the lowest
points on the surface of Earth, has the
longest coastline of any continent, is subject
overall to the world’s widest climatic
extremes, and, consequently, produces the
most varied forms of vegetation and animal
life on Earth. In addition, the peoples of Asia
have established the broadest variety of
human adaptation found on any of the
continents.
Where did Asia get its name?
The name Asia is ancient, and its origin has
been variously explained. The Greeks used
it to designate the lands situated to the east
of their homeland. It is believed that the
name may be derived from the Assyrian
word asu, meaning “east.” Another possible
explanation is that it was originally a local
name given to the plains of Ephesus, which
ancient Greeks and Romans extended to
refer first to Anatolia (contemporary Asia
Minor, which is the western extreme of
mainland Asia), and then to the known world
east of the Mediterranean Sea. When
Western explorers reached South and East
Asia in early modern times, they extended
that label to the whole of the immense
Southeast Asian Literature
The term Southeast Asia refers to the huge
peninsula of Indochina and the extensive
archipelago of what is sometimes called the
East Indies. The region can be subdivided
into mainland Southeast Asia and insular
Southeast Asia. The political units contained
in this region are Myanmar (Burma),
Thailand, Laos, Cambodia, Vietnam,
Malaysia, Singapore, Indonesia, and the
Philippines. The Philippines originally was
not included, because Philippine history has
not followed the general historical pattern of
Southeast Asia, but, because of its
geographic position and the close affinities
of its cultures with the cultures of Southeast
Asia, it is now usually regarded as the
eastern fringe of Southeast Asia.
The entire region of Southeast Asia, with the
single exception of Thailand, fell under colonial
rule, and Thailand itself survived more as a
buffer state than as a truly independent
kingdom. At the courts of the kings of Laos,
Cambodia, and Vietnam, which fell under
French suzerainty, and in the palaces of the
sultans of the British Malay states, vernacular
literature managed to survive for a time; but
since these literatures had long ago ceased to
develop—as a result of harassment by the Thai
in the case of Laos and Cambodia, by the
Portuguese in the case of Malaya, and by the
French in the case of Vietnam—they soon
became moribund. In all of Southeast Asia,
except Burma and Thailand, the vernacular and Taiwan (1895-1945), Japan cast a different
languages themselves lost their status, as the spell on the literature of those two countries with
languages of the colonial rulers became the its own variant of modern aesthetics.
languages of administration and of a new elite.
A revival of interest in the native languages and
literature occurred only toward the close of the
colonial period, as a consequence of national
movements for freedom.

East Asian Literature

A useful start to understanding “world literature”
in East Asia is to think in terms of cross-cultural
interactions within the region. A historical
perspective demands that we start with China.
The long and powerful Chinese cultural
hegemony, especially through the Confucian
schools of thought, left a lasting impact on the
development of China’s neighbors.
The Confucian canon is indeed “the repository
of a cultural grammar” which “constituted the
interpretive community of those with an orthodox
education in East Asia” (Lee 2003: 5). Chinese
literary norms, canons of poetry, lyrical prose,
and classical novels have shaped both the
ideological consciousness and the literary taste
of the gentry and ruling class of East Asian
countries, especially Japan and Korea.
The two world wars of the twentieth century
oriented East Asia towards American
culture, though writers of Mainland China
were denied access to this during the Cold
War period. The spread of “world literature”
is heavily dependent on translation. In the
case of East Asia, though, the language of
literature was largely monolingual in
classical times, as Chinese was the lingua
franca in Korea, Japan, and Vietnam. When
Chinese civilization arrived in those
countries, none had a script of its own. The
Chinese writing system, coupled with the
sophisticated Confucian bureaucracy,
became the vehicle of development. It was
not until Western modernization began to
take hold of the region that translation
became pivotal for both literary and cultural
developments.

When modernization and westernization

exposed China, Japan, and the entire East
Asian region to new cultural imaginations from
the later nineteenth century on, Anglo-European Recent decades of technological
influences prevailed. Modern literature in East advancement have triggered fundamental
Asia subsequently developed along a more changes in cultural behavior, giving rise to
dichotomized East/West, traditional/modern more dialogical, global, and virtual
path. During its colonization of Korea (1910-45) encounters. The literatures of East Asia are
drawing inspiration from pluralistic sources,
within as well as beyond their own region.
Middle East Asian Literature
Twenty-first-century Middle Eastern
(primarily Arabic, Persian, and Turkish)
literature encompasses a rich variety of
genres, whose maturation has profited from
internal and external influences upon this
literature over the past fourteen centuries.
Modern Arabic literature addresses the full
range of human experience, often through a
realist approach that employs the Arabic
language in ways ranging from the most
formal to the most colloquial. While Turkish
and Persian literatures have both followed
individual trajectories since the modern
period, they too evince a similar range with
respect to genre and employment of
language.
Although today these three literatures
appear as discrete entities, they share a
long early religious, cultural, and political
history. While pre-Islamic Persian and
Turkish literature would prove influential
when taken up by writers in the first few
centuries after Islam, pre-Islamic Arabic
literature provided the first literary model.
African Literature
African literature is the body of traditional
oral and written literature in Afro-Asiatic and
African languages together with works
written by Africans in European languages.
Traditional written literature, which is limited
to a smaller geographic area than is oral
literature, is most characteristic of those
sub-Saharan cultures that have participated
in the cultures of the Mediterranean. In
particular, there is written literature in both
Hausa and Arabic, created by the scholars
of what is now northern Nigeria, and the
Somali people have produced a traditional
written literature. There are also works
written in Geʿez (Ethiopic) and Amharic, two
of the languages of Ethiopia, which is the
one part of Africa where Christianity has
been practiced long enough to be
considered traditional. Works written in
European languages date primarily from the
20th century onward.
Themes in the literary traditions of
contemporary Africa are worked out
frequently within the strictures laid down by
the imported religions Christianity and Islam
and within the struggle between traditional
and modern, between rural and newly
urban, between genders, and between
generations. The oral tradition is clearly
evident in the popular literature of the
marketplace and the major urban centers,
created by literary storytellers who
manipulate the original materials much as
oral storytellers do, at the same time
remaining faithful to the tradition. Some of
the early writers sharpened their writing
abilities by translating works into African
languages; others collected oral tradition;
most experienced their apprenticeships in
one way or another within the contexts of
living oral traditions.