The Romantic interest in popular and oral traditions accompanied the historicist interest in ancient manuscript materials but turned to living performers rather than to archives for its sources. This interest in oral-performative literature as a window on a nation’s ancient imagination was especially strong in the more peripheral parts of Europe, from the Scottish Highlands to the Balkans and the Baltic, but was theorized most effectively by the eminent German scholar Jacob Grimm. It deepened into an ethnographic interest in ancient national myths. It was felt that studying the roots of the nation’s language, customs and legends could map its primeval world-view and document the workings of its essential character or Volksgeist.

World Literature now knows itself as a corpus of peripatetic cultural texts held together by protocols “of circulation and of reading” (Damrosch 4–5), but some accounts of modern literary history in World Literature anthologies impoverish, rather than enrich, students’ understanding of Africa and the worldliness of African cultural texts. To change this, it is necessary to recalibrate the relationship between Africa and World Literature. Rethinking modern literary history, particularly literary modernism, is one way of doing so. Literary modernism was a global, rather than a regional, phenomenon. Globalizing its classics in World Literature anthologies would, therefore, encourage students to read them historically. In practice, this means reading African and Western modernism contrapuntally. Resisting the urge to subsume African cultural texts in pre-established generic categories is another way of doing so. That Son-Jara, Gilgamesh, and The Iliad are epics should not preclude acknowledging that how each produces epicality differs. Admitting that translation cannot overcome all obstacles to mutual intelligibility across languages is an additional way. Some words, some concepts, are simply untranslatable. Such recalibrations open World Literature up to the recognition that Africa and its cultural texts affirmatively intervene in, rather than merely augment, cultural texts of the West.