Abstract
The essay draws on Pierre Bourdieu’s The Field of Cultural Production (1993) to address how the global spread of Anglophone literary studies compels an accounting for who consecrates what and why. Bourdieu’s model of consecration involves the reciprocal validation of intellectual elites and aesthetic canons, a model which has been adopted in such recent influential works as Pascale Casanova’s The Republic of Letters (2004) and Brouillette’s UNESCO and the Fate of the Literary (2019). Asian institutions, even as they turn their critical gaze inward, continue to seek validation from Anglo-center conferences, journals, and publishers. The chapter considers whether the consecratory power of Asian English centers can avoid merely reproducing Anglo-centric colonial, postcolonial, or neo-colonial hierarchies of aesthetic value, canonical durability, and institutional practice.
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https://dictionary.cambridge.org/dictionary/english/consecration.
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Chilton, M. (2021). Global English’s Centers of Consecration. In: Chilton, M., Clark, S., Yoshihara, Y. (eds) Asian English. Asia-Pacific and Literature in English. Palgrave Macmillan, Singapore. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-16-3513-7_13
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