On what terms and concepts can we ground the comparative study of Anglophone literatures and cultures around the world today? What, if anything, unites the novels of Witi Ihimaera, the speculative fiction of Nnedi Okorafor, the life-writings by Stuart Hall, and the emerging Anglophone Arab literature by writers like Omar Robert Hamilton? This volume explores the globality of Anglophone fiction both as a conceptual framing and as a literary imaginary. It highlights the diversity of lives and worlds represented in Anglophone writing, as well as the diverse imaginations of transnational connections articulated in it. Featuring a variety of internationally renowned scholars, this book thinks through Anglophone literature not as a problematic legacy of colonial rule or as exoticizing commodity in a global literary marketplace but examines it as an inherently transcultural literary medium. Contributors provide new insights into how it facilitates the articulation of divergent experiences of modernity and the critique of hierarchies and inequalities within, among, and beyond post-colonial societies.
Acknowledgements List of Contributors Introduction: The Many Worlds of Anglophone Literature: The mobilizing potential of transcultural World Literature: Magdalena Pfalzgraf and Hanna Teichler Foreword: On excentric proximity: Some thoughts for Frank Homi K. Bhabha Part One Theories and concepts 1 'World Literature'? A perspective from the Centre, a perspective from the edge: Michael Chapman 2 Traversal, transversal: A poetics of migrancy: Robert J C. Young 3 On transcultural globalectics: Ngugi meets Schulze-Engler: Tanaka Chidora Part Two Transgressive kinships 4 Not-so-happy families: Durell, Goodall and the myth of Africa: Graham Huggan 5 The 'makings of a diasporic self': Transcultural life writing, diaspora and modernity in Stuart Hall's Familiar Stranger: Katja Sarkowsky 6 Toward re-centring the senescent: Pedagogical possibilities of Anglophone short fiction: Mala Pandurang and Jinal Baxi 7 Notes from a classroom: Teaching Anglophone transculturality amidst environmental devastations: Kathrin Bartha-Mitchell and Michelle Stork Part Three Transversal readings 8 Transculturality and the law: Witi Ihimaera's The Whale Rider and a river with personhood: Mita Banerjee 9 'Mobility at large': Anglophone travel writing as a medium of transcultural communication in a global context: Nadia Butt 10 The transcultural imaginary: South Asian writing from Aotearoa New Zealand: Janet Wilson 11 Passages to India: Jewish exiles between privilege and persecution Flora Veit-Wild Afterword: 'Objects in the rear-view mirror': Yvonne Adhiambo Owuor
Silvia Anastasijevic is a doctoral researcher at Goethe University Frankfurt and a research assistant at the University of Bonn, Germany. Magdalena Pfalzgraf is Junior Professor of English Literatures and Cultures at the University of Bonn, Germany. Hanna Teichler is a postdoctoral researcher at Goethe University Frankfurt, Germany.
