CFP: Special Issue of The Global South (Fall 2021) - “Contextualizing the Anglophone Novel”
Since the 1980s, when the Jameson-Ahmad debate over how to read literatures putatively labeled as “third-world” and the notion of empire writing back to European literary traditions held sway in postcolonial studies, new contexts and ways of reading postcolonial and Anglophone literatures have been introduced and taken up. John J. Su’s Imagination and the Contemporary Novel (2011) and Mrinalini Chakrovorty’s In Stereotype (2014), for example, demonstrate that analyzing aesthetic and fictional representations of life in postcolonial realities brings into light the transnational aspect of contemporary literary production and the global marketplace with Anglo-American tastes and trends, both of which require further contextual consideration. Taking a cue from Peter Hitchcock, who, in “Decolonizing (the) English,” has argued that reading literature “in English as Anglophone . . . [calls for] explaining the logic of imbrication, particularly now, when the role of English in a geopolitical unconscious is made coterminous with globalization, or americanization, or the worldly largesse of the northern economic axis,” this volume sees the Anglophone novel as one current and contentious site of global knowledge production. This volume seeks essays on topics related to the Anglophone novel and ways of contextualizing and reading it, including but are not limited to: 1) the nature, politics, and/or uneven terrains of contextualization in the Anglophone novel; 2) Anglophone novels’ various representations of—and responses to—effects of neo-colonialism and neoliberalism; and 3) evaluation of established or emerging approaches to contextualizing the Anglophone novel.
Please submit a 300-word abstract and one-page bio to Shun Y. Kiang, the guest editor, at skiang@uco.edu by January 7th, 2019.