Vernacular Cosmopolitanism in Anglophone World Literatures: Comparative Histories of Literary Worlding

Abstract

Abstract The article explores the concept and practice of world literature from the perspective of postcolonial Anglophone literature. To account for the agency of literature and to move beyond the old centre/periphery model, the contribution focuses on literary acts of worldmaking rather than on the circulation of literature across the globe. It is argued that Anglophone world literature thrives on a poetics that bind diverse literary histories, languages, and distinct creative practices into patterns of exchange and thus exposes the constitutive exteriority within European (literary) histories. The use of the vernacular is identified as a central element of world literature’s poetics, staging a conflictual interplay between transcultural relationality and the formative impact of locality. As the vernacular binds the global and the local into loops of relation, it also offers an opportunity to consider the classification of “language as a language” (Young 1209). A reading of Sam Selvon’s The Lonely Londoners (1956) provides insights into literary ways of worldmaking, showing how the poetics of Anglophone world literature shuttles among several places to create a vernacular cosmopolitanism (Bhabha). Finally, the article examines how an understanding of world literature as a polycentric network emerging from different literary traditions changes our practice of comparative literary history.