Introduction

Summary

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.