No other world? Postcolonial inheritance in Anglophone world writing

This thesis theorises Anglophone world writing as a meta-genre that pivots between the localised politics of English and the transnational pressures of the Anglo-American book market in the period 1990-2010. Written from the perspectives of India, Malaysia, the Philippines and Singapore, my dissertation explores networks and circuits of literary imagining, which bring into visibility the charged contexts of writing English literature in postcolonial societies. By discussing selected novels, short stories and poetry from the four countries under study, the thesis foregrounds literary world-making as a unique and imaginative endeavour that both challenges and extends the scripting of locality in mobility. Amidst the inherited concerns of decolonisation, nation building and cross-border cultural flows, local literary traditions and contemporary writing practices continue to inflect and pluralise the Anglophone in resistance to the Anglosphere. Throughout its four chapters, the thesis foregrounds a readerly stance to Anglophone world writing as inheriting and expressing ongoing postcolonial processes in the long durée. My argument examines the work of the Indian diasporic writer Kiran Desai; the mobile Malaysian novelists Preeta Samarasan and Tan Twan Eng; the Filipino-Australian novelist Merlinda Bobis and Filipino fictionist Rosario Cruz-Lucero; and the Singapore poets Arthur Yap, Joshua Ip and Hamid Roslan. Anglophone world texts are textured by the play of enlarged, decentred cartographies (ch 1) and the contours of fictional memory, which inscribe alternative historical loci (ch 2). World-characters are both mythic and spectral in their interrogation of unfinished postcolonial processes (ch 3), while the literary voice in standard English is fruitfully fissured by an aberrant and startling range of English-ing (ch 4). By making a field distinction between “Anglophone world” and “Global Anglophone,” this dissertation returns the Anglophone to locations where the universalising pressures of global English are reterritorialised and revitalised as heterogenous, living literatures.