ABSTRACT
Over the last decade, the “global Anglophone” has taken institutional, if not intellectual, hold in English departments and MLA job listings. It offers the questionable benefits of breadth and imprecision, the opportunities and hazards that accompany a lack of definition. Moreover, it has provoked considerable academic resistance. In appropriating the territory of the postcolonial and subjecting it to a single measure, that of the English language, the global Anglophone may seem a neo-colonial imposition. This chapter argues that transnational networks of production and reception do, in fact, give a material and imaginative existence to the global Anglophone – that the field of literary activity justifies the field of literary study and provides a conceptual framework for it. Publishing history unites, and editorial activity reveals, the relationships between writers, readers, and institutions that bind Anglophone publics and produce literatures in English. The chapter offers a theoretical account of the nature of editorial power and a case study in its operation across the global Anglophone. With Miguel Street (1959), V. S. Naipaul discovers his literary voice against the oral background of Caribbean Voices, the BBC radio programme which he was editing at the time. Thus this chapter develops a flexible editorial framework for the emergent field, showing how the global Anglophone can become a capacious, critical, and pluralist discipline for literatures in English.
