South Asian Writers, Latin American Literature, and the Rise of Global English (2022)

"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"-- Provided by publisher. Cover Half-title page Series page Title page Copyright page Dedication Contents List of Figures Acknowledgments Introduction Chapter 1 Transmigrant: Neruda’s Rebirth as the Soul of World Literature Chapter 2 Stranger: Paz’s Peregrinations through Indian Poetry Chapter 3 Displacee: The Andalusian Allegory and Dreams of a Shared Past Chapter 4 Pilgrim: Journeys to the Roots of Magical Realism Chapter 5 Revenant: Dictator Fiction and Mobile Modernist Form Epilogue Notes References Index This book traces an unexpected journey to Latin America for South Asian literature in English. It shows how this encounter fundamentally shaped the way in which South Asian literature exploded into popularity from the 1980s until the mid-2000s.