This book explores core issues in the emerging field of World Anglophone Studies. It shows that traditional frameworks based on the colonial and imperial legacies of English need to be revised and extended to understand the complex adaptations, iterations, and incarnations of English in the contemporary world.
The chapters in this volume make three significant interventions in the field:
- First, they showcase the emergence of Anglophone literatures and cultures in parts of the world not traditionally considered Anglophone – Cuba, the Arab world, the Balkan region, Vietnam, Algeria, and Belize, among others
- Second, they feature new zones of contact and creolization between Anglophone literatures, cultures, and languages such as Swahili, Santhali, Ojibway, and Hindi, as well as Anglophone representations of colonial encounters and contemporary experiences in non-Anglophone settings such as Cuba, Angola, and Algeria
- And finally, the volume turns to Anglophone literary and cultural productions on new platforms such as social media and Netflix and highlights the role of English in emergent sites of resistance involving women, Indigenous populations, queer and other non-heteronormative sexualities, as well as post-conflict societies
Mapping linguistic transgressions and the transmigration of cultural tropes between Englishes, vernaculars, and a wide variety of other languages with a rich set of case studies, this volume will be essential reading for courses such as world literatures in English, postcolonial studies, anglophone studies, literature and culture, Indian Ocean worlds, Global Englishes, and Global South studies.
Pavan Kumar Malreddy (Goethe University Frankfurt) specializes in 20th- and 21st-century comparative Anglophone literatures and cultures with a regional focus on East Asia, Africa, and South Asia and with a thematic focus on conflicts, communal bonds, insurgencies, populism, public life, and migrancy. He co-edits Kairos: A Journal of Critical Symposium; his recent books include several co-edited volumes and the monograph Insurgent Cultures: World Literatures and Violence from the Global South (2024).
Frank Schulze-Engler was Professor of New Anglophone Literatures and Cultures at the Institute of English and American Studies at Goethe University Frankfurt and retired in 2023. His research and publications focus on African, Asian, Caribbean, Pacific, and Indigenous literatures and cultures; comparative perspectives on anglophone literatures in English; Indian Ocean Studies; "postcolonial" Europe; postcolonial theory; and transculturality in a world of globalized modernity.
