ABSTRACT
In mapping the emerging field of World Anglophone Studies, this introduction gestures toward a move away from traditional explanatory frameworks based on the colonial and imperial legacies of English in order to understand the complex adaptations, iterations, and incarnations of English in the contemporary world. It does so by drawing attention to contexts in the Global South (and beyond) where Anglophone cultural capital lends deeper insights into the crimes not only of the colonial past but also of the postcolonial present – the everyday forms of domestic and vernacular hegemonies and the resistance against them. The introduction opens with a number of philological examples from India, Egypt, and Kenya that distil a concept of the ‘Anglophone imaginary’ as a constellation of internalized and vernacularized Englishes at the level of idioms, lexis, and metaphors with significant heuristic implications for the formation of cultural networks and forms of filiation, affiliation, and agency in an age of interlaced digital pathways. This is followed by a brief contextualization of relevant debates in the intersections of world literature, global literatures, and Anglophone world literatures. We conclude with the contextualization of the chapter in conjunction with these debates while making a case for World Anglophone Studies: a philological exposition of vernacular worlds and Anglophone metaphors, symbols, and structures of expression.
