What’s in a Name?: the Global Anglophone, the Anglosphere, and the English-Speaking Peoples

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What does it mean to "do" Global Anglophone Studies at a time when an ordinary conversation in Spanish in a New York restaurant could propel a customer into such a fit of rage that he would threaten to call ICE on the spot? The fact that scenes like this are also being reported in the post-Brexit UK indicate a resurgent violent and racist investment in the category of the English speaker on both sides of the Atlantic. What do these things have in common: an emergent, new field of English literary studies, and a white American rejecting Spanish-speakers as possible fellow-citizens? On the most basic level, both emphasize Anglophone belonging over other forms of local, regional, or identity-based affiliation.

English departments in the US have been steadily rebranding postcolonial studies into something called the Global Anglophone. This shift is best reflected in the MLA Job Information List, where openings previously described under the rubric "postcolonial" are either completely swapped out for "Global Anglophone" or are awkwardly qualified as "postcolonial/world anglophone. Though you would be hard-pressed to find a single living writer (or dead one for that matter) identifying as a "Global Anglophone" one, junior scholars of postcolonial literature cannot avoid reckoning with this shift in nomenclature from power structures (colonialism) to linguistic spheres (Anglophone), because the Global Anglophone is now the category in which they are being hired. As a new hiring classification, it is also subject to approval by heads of departments and deans, many of whom are still catching up on what postcolonial means. Thus, junior scholars find themselves in the strange predicament of not only being interpellated as scholars of the Global Anglophone, but also being saddled with the task of justifying and defining a field that they may well be politically and intellectually ambivalent about to these same hiring committees and deans.

Given the rise of nativism and Anglochauvinism in the US and Britain alike, there are considerable political stakes in naming the Anglophone—as opposed to the postcolonial, for instance— as the primary source of meaning and identity for both our students and the writers whose work they are reading. While we have been debating the relative merits and drawbacks of this emergent field called the Global Anglophone, a very different set of actors has been touting the merits of another kind of Anglophone world to the public. The seemingly antiquated phrase "English-speaking Peoples," and the more modern iteration "Anglosphere" crop up consistently in the tweets, articles, and books of Eurosceptics. According to the champions of the Anglosphere, the term originated in a 1995 science fiction novel, The Diamond Age by Neal Stephenson, and has subsequently made its way into contemporary political discourse.1

The term Anglosphere typically refers to five core members: the US, Britain, Canada, New Zealand, and Australia, but some proponents of the Anglosphere also count India, Singapore, and the West Indies as its constituents. As the International Relations scholar Duncan Bell points out, champions of the Anglosphere believe themselves to be "anchored by a shared language, culture, history and institutions" and thus "dismiss the European project as inherently flawed due to the political, cultural, religious and linguistic diversity of the continent."2 Srdjan Vučetić, author of The Anglosphere: A Genealogy of a Racialized Identity in International Relations emphasizes the racial origins of the Anglosphere, locating its beginnings in the late-nineteenth-century rapprochement "between the expanding United States and declining Britain" propelled by "a discourse of identity that implied natural unity and moral superiority of the "Anglo-Saxon race."3 While many of the examples of magical Anglospheric thinking pertain to its British articulations, it has also informed—and indeed continues to inform—US foreign policy.4 Similar arguments have been made about the incongruence of Canada and the US with the so-called "Hispanosphere" to which the Spanish-speaking Americas purportedly belong. Dismissing such thinking as "fringe," and unworthy of publicity misses the extent to which it has crept into the mainstream. Nigel Farage and Boris Johnson may have been the faces of Brexit, but as journalist Sam Knight points out in his Guardian article, "The man who brought you Brexit," the "script" for this historic vote was written long ago precisely by "fringe" figures like Conservative MEP for Southeast England, Daniel Hannan. According to Knight, "you don't get to Brexit without someone dreaming up the window - the remedy of leaving - in the first place. And during those long years inside the European project, that was the work of the right wing of the Conservative party."5 If anything, Knight's article highlights the importance of not dismissing the creeping, nefarious influence of fringe conservative and so-called alt-right movements across the world.

For those of us working within the field of the Global Anglophone, this fringe of Anglosphere champions should be especially disconcerting, not because any of this discourse is new, but precisely because it is so familiar. It is familiar in that it replicates largely-disputed arguments about the so-called the English-speaking world as commonplaces. Hannan's articles, interviews, and books are just as likely to expound on the uniqueness of the so-called English-speaking peoples, as they are to argue for an economically "independent Britain." A case in point is his 2012 book, How We Invented Freedom & Why It Matters, published in the United States under the title Inventing Freedom: How the English-Speaking Peoples Made the Modern World. Tellingly, in the US edition, the original "We" is swapped out for the phrase "The English-Speaking Peoples"—a clear nod to Winston Churchill's four-tome volume History of the English-Speaking Peoples and the first book of Theodore Roosevelt's The Winning of the West, The Spread of English-Speaking Peoples. In the spirit of these statesmen-historians, Hannan fetishizes the English language as a vehicle of law, order, and love of freedom, arguing that "English doesn't simply unite its speakers in the sense that it lets them read the same books, watch the same television programs, and sing the same songs. It also seems to have inherent qualities that facilitate a certain view of the world."6 For decades, postcolonial studies have countered such claims by highlighting the systemic colonial violence that facilitated the spread of the English language, English liberal institutions, and English "order." Moreover, as an offshoot of postcolonial studies, the Global Anglophone indexes a departure from monolithic conceptions of an English speaker or English literature, highlighting instead their multiplicity.7

Yet despite of the Global Anglophone's important critiques of Anglospheric greatness its very name communicates an insidious commonplace, suggesting that there is such thing as an Anglophone world in the first place. We risk falling into this epistemological and ethical trap every time our course offerings and course descriptions off-handedly refer to the Global Anglophone as an existing formation in the world. Given the angry investment of racists and xenophobes in this myth, and their investment in English speakers as citizens and bearers of rights, except, apparently, if they are black, we as scholars of the Global Anglophone find ourselves in the same corner as our medievalist colleagues, who have been contending with the specter of alt-right medievalisms. In the wake of Charlottesville, and the alt-right's (mis)appropriation of Medieval symbols, scholars of Medieval literature and history have written extensively about the need to teach the genealogies of racist medievalisms in order to counter popular misconceptions about the Medieval period as a bastion of white purity. White supremacist appropriation of Anglo-Saxon and Celtic iconography in the late nineteenth century (i.e. one of the key medievalisms) went hand-in-hand with the fabrication of a transnational Anglo-Saxon identity, and ultimately the Anglosphere. They go hand in hand today too. In a blog post for the medieval studies blog In the Middle, literary scholar Sierra Lomuto marks this convergence between Medieval Studies, the postcolonial, and the global, arguing that "it is no coincidence that Medieval Studies has embraced the turn from the postcolonial to the global within our larger field designations," citing as one of the reasons for this shift "[her] field's general resistance to the political, its discomfort with racial discourse."8 These same concerns have been voices about the Global Anglophone turn in later periods. For Lomuto, an ethics of Medieval Studies "ensure[s] that the knowledge we create and disseminate about the medieval past is not weaponized against people of color and marginalized communities in our own contemporary world," appositely, the ethics of Global Anglophone Studies is that the knowledge we create and disseminate about Anglophone belonging and Anglophone worlding is not weaponized against people of color and marginalized multi-lingual and non-Anglophone communities.

To resist the norming impulse of the Global Anglophone in job descriptions to curricula alike, Global Anglophone studies can refuse to provide fodder for those seeking cultural justifications for Anglophone exceptionalism and superiority. After all, the seemingly innocent statement "people read, write, and speak in English there," is a breath away from the threat that people must read, write, and speak English there...or else. If anything, postcolonial studies taught us to be vigilant about the violence constitutive to seemingly nonchalant acts of norming and naming. By tracing the genealogy of the idea of the English-speaking peoples rather than implying that such a formation exists in some loose shape or form, we make visible the rhetorical moves through which conceptions of the Global Anglophone or the English-speaking world became calcified as givens—places on a map and countable communities that erased and continue to erase other ways of mapping and counting. Though we cannot predict the correlation between the conversations in our classroom and whatever mischief occurs in spaces outside of it, we can actively trouble and refuse the coherence of the Anglophone locally and globally. If we cannot drown out the now ubiquitous threat disguised as a statement—"We speak English here"—we can at least try to counter it in whatever forums are available to us.

Marina Bilbija is an Assistant Professor of English at Wesleyan University, where she teaches and writes about Afro-diasporic print cultures and literary histories of Black Internationalism.

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