The Form of Global Anglophone Literature is Grenfell Tower

On 14 June 2017, shortly after midnight, a fire broke out in the public housing flats at Grenfell Tower in North Kensington, London. The fire spread rapidly, due in large part because of renovations made in 2012-2016, a low-cost aluminum cladding meant to cosmetically improve the brutalist building. 71 people, many of them children, died from either burns or smoke inhalation.

Ben Okri's poem, "Grenfell Tower, June 2017," offered one of the few proper eulogies to the causalities of the preventable fire. "It burnt like a matchbox in the sky," he writes - a blaze that we, the reader, see from a safe distance:

. . .  you in your garden of flowers,
In your house of books, who gaze from afar
At a destiny that draws near with another name.

Those of us who weren't forced, economically or otherwise, to resort to living in the obviously unsafe conditions of Grenfell could appreciate the fire as a domestic metaphor from our "garden of flowers," safe within our "house of books." To those who escaped the fire; to those who were offered a paltry £5,000 to rebuild their entire lives (unless it was revealed that their immigration status was questionable); to those "survivors," there were never gardens of flowers or houses of books. There was only the tenuous tolerance of the British government and the £5,000 it offered on the condition that one assimilate, again, into British society.

Gardens of flowers and houses of books are the promise of British and American culture; they are the spaces of Anglo-American literature. Those who do not inherit these gardens and houses may be half-heartedly offered other forms of architecture, which do not have room for books and flowers, and which will certainly kill them: the slave quarter, the slum tenement, the public housing tower.

In the 1950s, the "Windrush Generation," a group of mostly Caribbean (and South Asian) migrants who arrived on the shores of Great Britain as its Empire was collapsing, begged and demanded for inclusion in England.1 They were reluctantly tolerated and were benevolently shuttled away to public housing, like Grenfell Tower, in British cities.

The first postcolonial critics, writers, and scholars were the children of the Windrush Generation (or, alternatively, "midnight's children"2). Like their parents, they demanded inclusion into the English literary canon. Like their parents, they faced an instant and severe backlash. The "problem" with "postcolonial literature," like the "problem" with postcolonial subjects, was not that it wanted to be added to the British society or to the English literary canon.3 The "problem" was that it forced English departments to confront the historical fact that "postcolonial literature" had the right to do so: that for almost three hundred years, literature from a substantial portion of the world was British literature, and it was made so by force.

Rather than face up to the fact that "the trouble with the Engenglish is that their hiss hiss history happened overseas," as a stuttering Whiskey Sisodia declares in Satanic Verses, English departments in the North Atlantic world made tiny spaces for postcolonial studies: those allowed in the manor house were given the servants' quarters; others were given the tenement housing.4

But these spaces were ugly to the white British subjects that had to deal with their lingering presence. In the 1980s, Margaret Thatcher begin eliminating public services and privatized a majority of public housing, especially in London. Children of the Windrush Generation found themselves tenuous tenets in flats now run by indifferent landlords who viewed, from the outside, their very existence an eyesore. In line with British politics, English departments disavowed their responsibility to postcolonial literature: blaming it for its own failures, shoving it off to the margins, and, finally, covering it with an aesthetically pleasing cladding. Gone now was the ugly reminder of the "postcolonial"; now there was, simply, the "Global Anglophone."

But let us not mince words. There is only one reason why the "globe" is now "anglophone" in any sense: colonial dominance and oppression, British in its first iteration and American in its second.

In hindsight, that postcolonial literature was given room as "postcolonial literature" at all seems magnanimous: it was an acknowledgment of the fact that, often under the "masks" of British literature, England had endeavored to make the world in its own image.5 But even then, "postcolonial literature" knew it could stay "English literature" only on certain conditions: first, that it apologize for its continued existence and promised to keep quiet; second, that it could defend any new admission to the canon as "almost but not quite, almost but not white" British literature.6

Postcolonial critique, therefore perhaps sensing the inevitable, famously declared its own death nearly as soon as it announced its presence.7 It was, indeed, inevitable: no amount of declaring its own death and/or apologizing for its continued existence would save "postcolonial literature" from being killed off by English literature.8 When undergraduate enrollment in English departments began to decline, especially in the 2000s,9 the condition on which literatures that were once "postcolonial" could be allowed to stay in English departments was that they petition for admission under the name of "Global Anglophone literature."10

In the first instance, "Global Anglophone literature" is an atrocious misreading of the same white British authors that the creators of the phrase seek to defend. Given that most were beneficiaries of colonial exploitation, which British authors didn't write English novels in "global" ways? The scope of the British imagination has always been "the globe" (pun intended), but on the condition that it render itself legible both in English and to the English. In the second instance, "Global Anglophone literature" shoves every writer from the anglophone globe - presumably South Asia, Africa, and the Caribbean - into the single cramped space of public housing so that each white British and North American author can keep his (most often his) individual room in the "house of books."

One needn't look too hard for the political parallel to this disciplinary practice: the basic demands of Theresa May's Brexit platform were that the rest of the world humbly appease England on the stairs of Westminster. This was not too far from the questions the Right had asked in the wake of Grenfell: why had those people been living there, anyway? Shouldn't they have been living in houses with books and flowers? Theresa May famously refused to meet with survivors.11 Such are the politics and forms of Global Anglophone literature.

Ideally, we might recover the founders of postcolonial critique to interrogate the historical emergence and dominance of the English literary canon at all. Despite the persistent backlash he received from literary scholars, Edward Said did this with both fury and compassion: he was one of the few critics to love Jane Eyre enough to bother seeing all of its characters.12 His student, Gauri Viswanathan, demonstrated how the English literary canon was invented in the laboratory of the Indian schoolroom.13 Rather than beg for inclusion in the English canon on the narrow terms it proffers, we might find other ways of relating to it, or ignoring it altogether.

Alternatively, if English departments were to actually take "Global Anglophone literature" seriously (let alone "English literature" in the first place), they might begin by looking at the Anglophone globe. As of 2017, the majority of English speakers live in South Asia; the second and third largest (respectively) come from non-white and white populations in the United States and Canada; the fourth largest population comes from the Philippines; the fifth largest is from West Africa and the Caribbean, and lastly, far behind the rest, is the population of the United Kingdom.14

I would be thrilled to discover an English literature department whose undergraduate curriculum accurately reflects the globe England has rendered Anglophone. But English literary pedagogy, at least since T.B. Macaulay's famous "Minute on Indian Education" in 1835, has never been about English literature. It has been about the production of English subjects: "a class of persons [not white] in blood and colour, but English in tastes, in opinions, in morals and in intellect."15 We've cleaned up the language a bit: now we say that the mission of teaching British literature is to produce "critical thinkers" - but somehow those "critical thinkers" seem to have same tastes, opinions, morals, and intellect of T.B. Macaulay.

Macaulay loved his Calcutta bungalow, from where he wrote his Minute during one of the worst famines and housing crises in the nineteenth-century. His Minute offers guidelines for establishing the proper buildings for (global) anglophone education. Macaulay's successor in Calcutta, Robert Lytton, wrote poems to teach Indian school children while reducing public housing support for Indian farmworkers during the largest famine during the British Raj, in 1876-1878.16

Whatever the "house of books" that English literature is made of (certainly not substandard aluminum), they are the bungalows, manor houses, plantation mansions, and hill stations from Barbados to Cape Town, Bombay, and Hong Kong. The other architectural inventions of British imperial rule - the slave cabin, the corrugated-tin-roofed slum, the public housing flats, the Benthamite prison - were never places where anyone begged for admission. "Postcolonial literature" has always been housed in Grenfell Tower. "Global Anglophone" is its cladding.

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J. Daniel Elam is an assistant professor in Comparative Literature at the University of Hong Kong and a Fellow in the Society for the Humanities at Cornell University.

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