In the spirit of decolonization, the chapter argues that we read English as a vernacular and not simply a global or colonial language. It takes seriously the emphasis on “speakers” – people and technologies/media – in the “phone” of anglophone literatures to find vernacular grounds to read literary English from. The chapter parses the political meanings of English through the contested political and mediated lives it has across the world in South Asia (India, Sri Lanka, Bangladesh, and Pakistan), Caribbean, Eastern Europe, and anglophone Africa. For instance, English is not only a formerly colonial language in South Asia or a language of the postcolonial state in India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, and Sri Lanka. It is also a populist language that mediates Dalit, racioethnic, and Indigenous assertion against the fascist logics of postcolonial vernaculars like Hindi, Urdu, and Sinhala. Here, English often lives outside literary works – in other media and in other languages – as “less than a language,” as a sound, a sight, and materiality that inflects meanings on the page.Literary studies have long been concerned with the liberal axiom of voice – who speaks – and thus sought to bring new voices into the scholarly field. Through specific literary examples from the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, this chapter asks the critic to situate themselves and their conceptual categories: who listens and how? Which English is legitimized as “English” and which as its “other”? How do we, as readers, make English speak on the page? I use “vernacular” as a term to highlight the embodied and material mediations of English that alter its colonial meanings, as well as the very real political and multivalent desire to make common that animates English as eminently global and mobile. Vernacular names the colonial and transnational capitalist structures associated with English without re-inscribing them each time we discuss English.
