South Asia

This chapter asks what it means to read South Asian Anglophone literatures as ‘world literatures.' It begins from the premise that there is a gap between the geographical quantity to which ‘South Asia’ refers and the national literatures which circulate in its name. Attempts to read South Asian Anglophone literatures as ‘world literatures’ must therefore first reckon with the instability of the regional formation itself. Where earlier scholarship has been concerned with negotiating the universalist aspirations of the ‘world’ in world literatures, this chapter puts pressure on the social and cultural complex of the ‘Anglophone, ' which can be understood as both a conditional renomination of the Postcolonial and a critical renewal of English Studies’ commitment to Anglophone literatures beyond British and American canons. The chapter closes with readings of three South Asian literary fictions that use the Anglophone not simply as a linguistic medium, but rather as a rubric through which to query the worlding capacities of human and nonhuman agents, and which can consequently be read under the signs of both the Postcolonial and the World.