Post-Monolingual Anglophone Novels Writing Beyond English

Acknowledgements

1        Introduction: Theorizing Post-monolingual Anglophone Novels

1.1    Language as a Verb 

1.2    The Post-monolingual Anglophone – Metareflexive Engagements with Language

1.3    Literary Post-monolingualism – Aesthetic Configurations

1.4    Some Central Concepts: Multilingual – Translingual – Post-monolingual

1.5    English, Anglophone and the Global Anglophone

1.6    The Global Anglophone, Post-monolingualism and the Book Market

1.7    Chapter Overview

2        “[B]inding together worlds that have been ripped apart” – Reinventing English in Arundhati Roy’s The Ministry of Utmost Happiness

2.1    A Morally Appropriate Language?

2.2    Language and Community-building: Pluralizing Global English

2.3    Post-monolingual Translation

2.4    From Global English to Small English: “A language to come”

2.5    Domestic Publishing in India: Shifting Valences of Language

2.6    Language Politics in Anuja Chauhan’s The Zoya Factor

3        Yvonne Adhiambo Owuor and Jennifer Nansubuga Makumbi – Histories of Linguistic Entanglement in East Africa

3.1 ‘Global South Ways of Speaking’

3.2 ‘The World’s Swirl of Languages’

3.3‘Trickling Languages’ in Yvonne Owuor’s The Dragonfly Sea

3.4 The Dragonfly Sea in the Book Market:: Modes of Production and Circulation

3.5 Jennifer Nansubuga Makumbi’s Kintu – Asking for Fish & Chips in Uganda

3.6 ‘Too African’ for Western Readers?

4        “English – not my property’: Ex-appropriations of Language in J.M. Coetzee’s The Childhood of Jesus

4.1 "Monolingualism of the Other" and Linguistic Hospitality in a "World of Strangers"

4.2  Linguistic Hospitality in a “World of Strangers”

4.3    Non-congruent Languaging

4.4  The Lost Original, Lost Origins

4.5  Translation in Migratory Contexts: Circumventing Checkpoints

4.6 Post-monolingual Forms of Literary Production

5        Lost ‘Mother Tongues’ and Queer Languaging in Ocean Vuong’s On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous

5.1  Migrating into English

5.2  Language "across Porous Boundaries": From the "Mother Tongue" to the "Orphan Tongue"

5.3  Wearing English, "Like a Mask"

5.4  Post-monolingual Retrievals: “A Language for Falling out of Language”

5.5  On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous in the Literary Field Not “the usual worn-out MFA fodder”

6        Travelling Languages: Creoles and Multilingualism in Marlon James’s A Brief History of Seven Killings

6.1  "The Planetary Circuit of Tongues"

6.2  Creolizing the Nation: Sam Selvon’s The Lonely Londoners

6.3  A Brief History of Seven Killings: “[M]e feel like me want chat patois all night”

6.4  ‘Saving English’: Literary Retrievals of Creole

6.5  ‘Vernacular Realism’ or Global Multilingualism?

6.6  Ghosts and Possible Liberations: Languaging beyond (Neo)Colonial Agents

7        Conclusion: Reading Post-monolingual Novels

7.1 “I want to read my way”

7.2 Coda

Works Cited

Index

Biography

Birgit Neumann is Professor and Chair of English Literature & Anglophone Studies at Heinrich-Heine-Universität Düsseldorf.