After Caliban: Literary Education, Empire, and the “Global Anglophone”

This seminar invites renewed analysis and debate about the educational institutions of English literature within the scope of British and US empire, especially (though not only) within the light of the ambiguous formation “Global Anglophone.”

In her preface to the 25th Anniversary Edition of Masks of Conquest, Gauri Viswanathan reminds us that “English studies” has never been the production of a single national tradition. Rather, it is the constitution of heterogenous sites across nations and empire—from the literary classrooms of colonial India to the reinvention of English literary traditions by Scottish immigrants to Canada. On the one hand, the scope of the “Global Anglophone” invites renewed attention to the histories that Viswanathan highlights. In what ways might we think of English studies and literary education across national borders and empire in ways that defy an original “English studies” or “Englishness”? Does thinking “globally” (or transnationally, or “transimperially” to borrow from Sukanya Banerjee) allow us to move beyond or complicate familiar postcolonialist models of domination and resistance—“the reductive terms of Caliban writing back” to empire, as Viswanathan writes, in favor of other modes of readerly subjectivity and engagement? 

On the other hand, perhaps there has never been a more apt time to take after Caliban than to assume we come “after” Caliban when negotiating the “Global Anglophone”—a term that critics have argued erases the project of postcolonial critique and installs a monolithic “Anglophone” circumscription. Does the “Global Anglophone” represent an iteration or intervention into the longer formation of English literary studies as an imperialist enterprise? How do scholars and educators of the “Global Anglophone” (and English departments more generally) confront the question of teaching English literature given its long imperial shadow?

Paper topics may include:

Historical work on English literature and/or literary education within the scope of British/US empire 
Pedagogical institutions of literature across British/US empire—universities, colleges, high schools, elementary schools—as well as non-traditional teaching forms like radio, television, public lectures, etc
Studies of what Rachel Sagner Buurma and Laura Heffernan have called “teaching archives”—syllabi, lecture notes, student essays, etc—especially from sites beyond British/US classrooms, such as the Caribbean, Africa, South Asia, East Asia, Southeast Asia, Canada, New Zealand, Australia
Methods of literary interpretation as they relate to literary institutions and programs 
The “Global Anglophone” in relationship to postcolonial pedagogy 
Accounts from university educators on teaching the “Global Anglophone” and/or English literature in ways that acknowledge and reflect on its imperial history

Email queries and proposals to: [email protected]