On Global English and the Transmutation of Postcolonial Studies into "Literature in English"

Diaspora 8:1 1999 On Global English and the Transmutation of Postcolonial Studies into "Literature in English"1 Rita Raley University of Minnesota "English Literature is dead—long live writing in English." The multiplication of Englishes throughout the world and their attendant literatures, the impossibility of holding literary development within any one centrally agreed form, /sic/ it is this explosion of writing in English which reflects back on the past to fissure the monument that is English literature into a plurality of writings. —Colin MacCabe What does it signify to speak of a World Literature in English? In what ways might diaspora studies and transnationalism be linked to the contemporary phenomenon of global English, with a mode of comprehending the world that holds English at its center? What can diaspora studies and transnationalism learn from the "language question" frequently raised in discussions ofboth cultural imperialism and postcolonial writing? What can they learn from the question of globalism now so ubiquitous in contemporary criticism? How does the Literature in English concept relate, on the one hand, to Edouard Glissant's outline of the "liberation" that results from compromising major languages with Creoles (250), and, on the other, to Fredric Jameson's implicit yearning for a philosophical universal linguistic standard not circumvented by linguistic heteroglossia (16-7)? These questions outline the conceptual terrain of this article, in which I read the discursive transmutation of the discipline of Postcolonial Studies into "Literature in English" as both symptom and cause ofthe emerging visibility of global English as a recognizable disciplinary configuration situated on the line between contemporary culture and the academy. Over the course of this article, I chart this discursive transmutation and its necessary preconditions—the critical investiture in the "global," the renewed attention to dialects, the abstraction ofthe "postcolonial"—as a way ofarticulating profound reservations about the "new universalisms," of which Literature in English is a primary instance. As a sub-field of academic study, Literature in English is marked by critical attention to linguistic heterogeneity and internal differences among English-speaking cultures, and it thus signifies a destabilization of Diaspora 8:1 1999 the whole notion of a standard language that has historically been aligned with colonialism. Building as it does on the critical concepts of hybridity and cultural creolization, this celebration of a global linguistic heterogeneity seeks to locate emancipatory possibilities within the literal "speaking back" to the imperial force of monolingualism . However, Literature in English, global English, global studies, and cosmopolitanisms can be read as new universalisms that are merely simulations of the old, that themselves contain a homogenizing and totalizing impulse, and that signify an epistemic and literal violence that the academy cannot afford to ignore.2 Having come ofcritical age in an academy that reverberated with the newly felt influence of Postcolonial Studies and the profound critique it brought to bear on Western epistemologies and their attendant assumptions about the world, scholars ofmy generation are now witness to a dramatic transformation that is also a mutation of this critical field into Literature in English.3 The consequences ofthe globally common language this new disciplinary configuration implies have yet to be articulated. Without suggesting the possibility of total disciplinary coverage, I argue that Postcolonial Studies has still to come to terms with global English, and that it is important to effect such scrutiny because it is precisely through this language that the field has most prominently come to exist in the Western academy. Within English and Comparative Literature departments , which is where it has had its first crystallization as such in the West, Postcolonial Studies is still primarily a study of the English empire, despite the loosely metaphoric terms in which it has been employed and despite the burgeoning body of criticism on East Asia. Even though a substantial history of English as a linguistic , cultural, and literary program has accumulated, the problem of an assumed global language needs still to be thought, and the centrality of English in particular needs further consideration, for this "language ofculture" continues to enjoy academic and social privilege (Zachrisson 10). Despite the fantastic promises of a benign and neutral means of communication that attend upon a vision of a globally common language...