This chapter will explore the entangled histories of postcolonialism, world literature, and global anglophone as pedagogical and institutional rubrics. The English curriculum in the Anglo-American academy has in various degrees been reconfigured by these rubrics since the 1980s, but each has often been perceived as antagonistic to the other two, and scholars have devoted volumes to staking their territorial claim on each. Rather than wage partisan battles that perceive the rise of global anglophone as a threat to postcolonial studies, or world literature as a neoliberal takeover/erasure of the literary riches of the non-European world, it is worthwhile, I argue to trace their collective impetus to decolonize English and comparative literary studies.

How might writing “in the light of India” help us think about Latin American literature’s contemporary relationship to the world at large, especially the world of the so-called global Anglophone? The first half of this chapter examines fantasies of affiliation through which Latin American authors have expressed “cosmopolitan desires” for global connection. Over the last hundred years, authors have imagined circulating in two distinct networks. La red cósmica (the cosmic network) imagines a mystically mediated relationship of solidarity with India as a region with shared cultural and historical dimensions. In contrast, la red imperial (the imperial network) expresses a desired relationship to Europe through nostalgia and admiration for Britain’s colonial domination of India. The second half of the chapter explores how South Asian and Latin American authors have also related to each other through realities of affiliation in a third network: la red académica (the academic network), in the United States. Its legacies include restructuring of US English departments to accommodate writing from Latin America, and conceptual problems of writing in English, an issue that has long dogged South Asian writers and is newly relevant to counterparts in Latin America.

The epilogue surveys contemporary global fiction and alternate conceptions of world literature to stress the political, historical contingency of the Anglophone ambition to give formal literary expression to totality. Unlike their late modern predecessors, Italo Calvino, Jorge Luis Borges, and Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie delegate the task of crafting literary totalities to their readers, suggesting that one’s best chance of assimilating the world through text lies not in devouring a splendiferous Gesamtkunstwerk but in grazing across many national literatures. Recent trends suggest a privatization of world-making responsibilities; authors no longer claim the public function of rendering the world legible for their readerships, at least not within single works. I proceed from self-reflexive meditations on world literature in Calvino, Borges, and Adichie to explore the literary market in South Korea, where publishing houses have stayed solvent thanks to the evergreen demand for collectible sets of foreign literature in translation. Unlike the writers I examine in previous chapters, non-Anglophone writers frequently assume that the world is an entity to be read rather than written.

Studies of world literature and the Global Anglophone hinge on imagined locations where readers encounter texts: the university classroom, the state library, the airport kiosk. Yet all of these bookshelves are institutional, shaped by either the market or the state. In the meantime, South Asian authors themselves were constructing another collection, a “countershelf” of Latin American texts, authors, and locations through which they could identify against the Anglophone globe in which they were simultaneously compelled to circulate. Like the concept of a “counterpublic” from which it takes its name, the countershelf uses literature to enact a minoritized discursive space, one irreducible to – though not untouched by – institutional power. The Introduction traces the countershelf’s four key features: the idea of being “contrary” to a dominant, canonical tradition; of having been “curated” through interpersonal relationships with other readers and writers; of being “circulated” through channels both practical and affective; and, finally, of being “contested” between various writers participating in the tradition, rather than a site of pre-established ideological unity.