South Asian Writers, Latin American Literature, and the Rise of Global English

by Roanne Kantor

Overview

Ever since T.B. Macaulay leveled the accusation in 1835 that 'a single shelf of a good European library was worth the whole native literature of India,' South Asian literature has served as the imagined battleground between local linguistic multiplicity and a rapidly globalizing English. In response to this endless polemic, Indian and Pakistani writers set out in another direction altogether. They made an unexpected journey to Latin America. The cohort of authors that moved between these regions include Latin-American Nobel laureates Pablo Neruda and Octavio Paz; Booker Prize notables Salman Rushdie, Anita Desai, Mohammed Hanif, and Mohsin Hamid. In their explorations of this new geographic connection, Roanne Kantor claims that they formed the vanguard of a new, multilingual world literary order. Their encounters with Latin America fundamentally shaped the way in which literature written in English from South Asia exploded into popularity from the 1980s until the mid-2000s, enabling its global visibility.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781316510797
Publisher:	Cambridge University Press
Publication date:	02/24/2022
Series:	Cambridge Studies in World Literature
Pages:	274
Product dimensions:	6.22(w) x 9.25(h) x 0.79(d)

About the Author

Roanne L. Kantor is Assistant Professor of English at Stanford University. She has published in Comparative Literature, Interventions, South Asia, Global South Studies, Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa, and the Middle East, and Transmodernity. Her translation of Juan José Saer's La mayor won the 2009 Susan Sontag Prize.

Table of Contents

Introduction; 1. Transmigrant: Neruda's rebirth as the soul of world literature; 2. Stranger: Paz's peregrinations through Indian poetry; 3. Displacee: The Andalusian allegory and dreams of a shared past; 4. Pilgrim: Journeys to the roots of magical realism; 5. Revenant: Dictator fiction and mobile modernist form; Epilogue.