SOUTH ASIAN WRITERS, LATIN AMERICAN LITERATURE, AND THE RISE OF GLOBAL ENGLISH

Abstract

Ever since T.B. Macaulay leveled the accusation in 1835 that 'a single shelf of a good European library was worth the whole native literature of India,' South Asian literature has served as the imagined battleground between local linguistic multiplicity and a rapidly globalizing English. In response to this endless polemic, Indian and Pakistani writers set out in another direction altogether. They made an unexpected journey to Latin America. The cohort of authors that moved between these regions include Latin-American Nobel laureates Pablo Neruda and Octavio Paz; Booker Prize notables Salman Rushdie, Anita Desai, Mohammed Hanif, and Mohsin Hamid. In their explorations of this new geographic connection, Roanne Kantor claims that they formed the vanguard of a new, multilingual world literary order. Their encounters with Latin America fundamentally shaped the way in which literature written in English from South Asia exploded into popularity from the 1980s until the mid-2000s, enabling its global visibility. •Offers a new way of thinking about the relationship between theories of World Literature and the ascendent category of the Global Anglophone. •Rewrites the history of twentieth century South Asian literature in English to reveal its foundational debt to World Literature in translation. •Addresses a broad array of work in a range of literary and media genres, expanding the reach of a body of scholarship usually focused on canonical novels.