Introduction

Abstract

Since English is the dominant global language at present, English Studies features significantly in humanistic pedagogy and scholarship worldwide. Of necessity then, English Studies has become a site of sustained and ongoing pluralization. The conventional integrities and geopolitical centrings of the academic discipline now seem anachronistic. The global purchase of the discipline has been described and examined to some extent already. For instance, James English’s The Global Future of English Studies (2012) gave a useful comparative description of student recruitment figures, career trajectories, and curricular emphases for the discipline in various countries across several continents. From a different direction, in Globalization and Literature (2009) I had outlined how globalization is represented in and acts upon literature, primarily with the Anglophone circuit in mind and with specific reference to English Studies. However, while such accounts confirm the global purchase of English Studies, what that means for the discipline is yet indifferently conceptualized. It is clear that in practice English Studies is global but it is unclear whether English Studies is yet conceptualized as global, whether its current diversities and integrities are yet sufficiently embedded in pedagogy and scholarship. English Studies is usually still engaged in limited ways: either by deferring to dominant Anglophone cultures, or by focusing on local relevance, or by exploring transactions across preconceived boundaries (North/South, Anglophone/non-Anglophone, colonial/postcolonial, etc.).