The Global Anglophone: An Institutional Argument

Most accounts of the rise of Global Anglophone as a disciplinary category and academic field have characterized it as an expansion, revision, or “repackaging” of the Postcolonial within literary studies. In this introductory essay, I make the case that the increased prominence of Global Anglophone in hiring in the US academy derives from broader shifts in the institutional landscape of English departments over the past twenty years. After situating Global Anglophone within a contemporary turn toward organizing literary fields around transnational, ethnic, and subnational categories rather than nation-states, I offer a model for approaching Global Anglophone as an umbrella term for all teaching and scholarship conducted in English departments. Using James Baldwin’s The Fire Next Time (1963) as a test case, I propose a newly revamped Global Anglophone curriculum that would better reflect the kinds of research that literary scholars are producing in the twenty-first century.