Response

Abstract

Let’s start with the starkest, most tendentious version of what’s happened to the field. The movement “from” Postcolonial “to” World Anglophone has involved two principal gestures: the promotion of medium (language) and the demotion of methodology, political orientation and historical analysis. Medium appears at best neutral and at worst inert, naive and denotative, whereas methodology is strategic, pointed and sophisticated. I take it that this is what Roanne Kantor means when she argues, more neutrally than I have put it here, that the category of “Global English” is “anti-theoretical”: it names an object but not an approach to that object. Kantor neatly encapsulates her position with this witty distinction: “increasingly postcolonial studies is something we do; Global Anglophone is what we are” (emphasis in original). Kantor’s account serves neither to lament nor to deny. She thinks the denotative is an opportunity, and indeed we find this refreshing and provocative disposition expressed throughout several of the essays collected here. In fact, many of the essays propose that the denotative can improve the connotative: that the temporary demotion of methodology might be good, in the end, not only for what we are but also for what we do. Kantor argues the emphasis on Global English makes the field’s unstated language biases more visible, opens up a scholarship to comparison with literary traditions that are not rooted in anticolonial projects and creates room for the investigation