1. Global publics

There is probably no good way of thinking about anything like a single global public, but, we wager, there is some use to be had from proposing the existence of global publics in the plural, at least in two senses. First, there exist publics whose membership is global, bound by connections which the term “transcultural” attempts to grasp: tied perhaps more closely in their everyday life experiences to similarly situated people across an ocean than to those with very different experiences just down the road. Such global publics are often addressed and converse through the lingua franca of English—to which we will return below—and they might be more readily expected to be addressed by digital projects (the work done by Anne Schwan and Tara Thompson in the Palgrave Handbook of Digital and Public Humanities [2022] is suggestive here in highlighting the confluence between the public and digital). Second, there are diverse publics around the globe, publics whose specific constitution changes how we understand public humanities work. Such publics need not be purely local, but they are still distinct and open to forms of local address. Whether locally specific or transculturally globalised, these publics are all, as Mohammed Muharram’s essay below reminds us, caught up in the twenty-first century’s many global crises—this is another dimension of the notion of the global.

Narrowly, and for the moment, we want to sketch the shifting fortunes of English as a world literary language to suggest the difficulty of even separating out these two heuristics of global publics. English, because and despite being the language of colonial oppression in nearly half the world and of declining Western hegemony over all, not coincidentally, is also the language in which we write this introduction: it promises the widest possible publics. It also runs into issues firmly connected with our own proposal, made from the global North, Western-centric in our understanding of what the mission of public humanities work is, and its necessarily limited perspective. As advocates of the public humanities, it bears recognising that the effort to globalise the public humanities’ project is itself fraught with its connection to specifically Western practices. As Nobuhiko Kikuchi says, of the Japanese context, “the concept of public humanities was brought to Japan mainly by the activities of individual disciplines in Europe and the US.”Footnote ⁷ Schwan and Thompson broaden this point to suggest that “phrases such as ‘public humanities’ are contingent and resonate differently (or perhaps not at all) in different national-geographical contexts.”Footnote ⁸ One of the purposes of working towards a global public (literary, but also otherwise) humanities, then, is to highlight that contingency, but also the continuities that might be established in a globalised world.

As we have suggested above, there are at least two specific ways in which global publics and their relationship to the humanities can be defined. The traditional, less risky route is to press the academic discourse of the humanities to public service, or put simply, make it useful to the needs of global publics. Such an approach, however, at least potentially falls prey to the poisonous invitation of neoliberal capitalism to prove the usefulness of both literary aesthetics and, more importantly for our context, of knowledge production.Footnote ⁹ The riskier and more radical route is to heed “public” demands to diversify the specialised knowledge of the humanities by incorporating marginal, subaltern, Indigenous, or non-academic conceptions of being human and practising global humanities—what we might call, in the terms invoked above, attention to globally distributed local publics. Decolonising, postcolonialising, minoritising, or indigenising humanities are part and parcel of this radical approach to the humanities. They break away from the mainstream but operate within the protocols set forth by the Euro-American academy.Footnote ¹⁰ Between these positions, however, there is little or no consensus on what a “global public” or even the humanities might constitute, understood as both a local and a global set of disciplines. As Simon During remarks:

The essays featured in this special issue offer concrete examples of those sites and spaces the (literary) “humanities worlds” inhabit, and where the idea of the human makes its way back into the discourse in the guise of global publics. The “return of human” into the humanities is indeed a salient feature of Edward Said’s (via Giambattista Vico) appeal to public intellectualism, wherein an intuitive rejection of global or worldly humanism redeems itself by issuing a course correction to the abuses of the humanities in the name of universalism.Footnote ¹² This a paradox is best illustrated in Trevor Ross’s Writing in Public: Literature and the Liberty of the Press in Eighteenth-Century Britain (2018), which engages with the notion of:

Here, Ross nostalgically recounts the May 1695 non-renewal of the Licensing Act, and more importantly, Thomas Babington Macaulay’s—the imperialist visionary, educationalist, and politician—celebration of the event as a milestone in the history of the humanities: a point at which “English Literature was emancipated, and emancipated forever, from the control of the government.”Footnote ¹⁴ Against this celebratory framing, consider, in another corner of the globe, the publication of Macaulay’s Minute on Education in 1835, which advocated the superimposing of English as the mandatory medium of education for Indians for its perceived superiority over the vernacular tongues. No two public policy measures, issued a century apart, are perhaps more decisive than these in swaying public opinion about commissioned and missioned humanities in modern history. While the 1695 Licensing Act had global implications for the liberation of English literature from the clutches of state censorship, the same liberatory impulses of English would choke the vernacular humanities in other parts of the globe, including the Horton-Asquith language-education model in colonial Africa.Footnote ¹⁵ The irony of these colonial policies was that they were intended to make the colonial subjects better humans than they were, better than their humanities could ever make them.

If the term “humanities” here is fraught, how about the notion of the “public”? Are we take the term “human” in the humanities as a free pass for the plebs, plethos, or “people” as they have to be recognised in contemporary public discourses? Again, Ross leads the way in uncovering the latent disjunctures in the literary humanities’ relationship to its implied publics: “literature, it seems, expresses without publicizing; it is and is not public,” and since “the norms governing speech cannot be made fully coherent,” “utilitarian speech […] exempts the aesthetic on grounds that are beyond rational interrogation.”Footnote ¹⁶ As a symptom of this paradox, Ross envisions literature as an instrument that helps “define a people while at the same time purposely serving no definable function in public life.”Footnote ¹⁷ If the “people” here can be read as both the subjects and recipients of that very imagination, then the very protocols of the discourse that mark certain textual forms and traditions as properly aesthetic, while “exempting” them from other utilitarian, low-brow, or even demotic purposes, must be treated with a great deal of caution or even suspicion. This naturalisation of canonical aesthetics as the classical standard of literature, set against the popular, pulp, or kitsch, goes to the core of Euro-American humanism, something which Said termed “didactic humanism,” as evinced in Allan Bloom’s claim that “[o]nly in the Western nations, i.e. those influenced by Greek philosophy, is there some willingness to doubt the identification of the good with one’s own way.”Footnote ¹⁸ Such reductive humanism, and its implications to the practice of (pedagogical) ethics in an age of globalisation have been further problematised in Gayatri Spivak who, in her reading of R. K. Narayan’s The Guide as a “culturally different book,” advocates the sort of global education in which the “culturally different” subject be imagined through non-totalised, non-universalised aesthetic sensibilities, whose cultural practises are marked by vernacular distinctions, local hierarchies, and forms of difference internal to the formerly colonised world.Footnote ¹⁹

In the vertical hierarchy of conceptualising and conceiving “people” variedly as the consumers of classics and canonical aesthetics, postcolonial “subalterns,” and Indigenous subjects who are further subjugated by such postcolonial subjects, the conception of “global publics” is subject to the same deferral logic as the conception of “people” in political theory. Consider, for instance, Ernesto Laclau’s reading of the rhetorical rift between populus, as the represented majority, and plebs, the non-represented minority. “Populists typically construct plebs as populus, a process that attempts to create a ‘chain of equivalence’ without erasing difference, and in doing so, always leaves out some sections of the population on the margins of representation.”Footnote ²⁰ Any conception of “global publics”—including the transnational one referenced above—must thus contend with this ever-sliding signifier of “people” who, both by definition and by dint of long-standing practice, are the excluded lot from the discourse and practices of literary humanities.

The essays featured in this issue struggle in various ways with this position, confronting the idea of the canon, of reading vernacularly, of seeking out addressees within the privileged university classroom and also contending that the tensions and contradictions inherent to the conception of people need not necessarily be resolved. Far from being aberrations or violations (with regard to normative conceptions of the humanities), the essays demonstrate that such contradictions are central to the practice of the humanities, and thus to their opening to publics, among the most culturally diverse societies in both the global South and the North. In India, for instance, although the anti-English sentiments have been rife as part of the right-wing decolonial discourse, many subaltern groups, such as the Dalits (Untouchables), celebrate October 25, the birthday of Lord Macaulay, as the birthday of the English Goddess, and English as an emancipating language against the oppressive tenors of vernacular nativism. In Egypt, the ruling elite send their children to Ivy League universities in the United States but label anyone who speaks grammatically correct English at home as anti-national elements, or at best, the agents of American cultural imperialism.Footnote ²¹ In Sri Lanka, the Sinhala Only Act of 1956, an anti-English policy, and a prime weapon of nativism and Sinhala nationalism, has had a catastrophic effect on the public sphere, unleashing twenty-five years of civil war. As Harshana Rambukwella’s article in this issue recounts, English language and literature have made a roaring comeback in Sri Lanka and are embraced by all ethnic groups alike the conduits of justice, reparations, and reconciliation. Among the most recent developments, Algeria, Burundi, Gabon, and Mali have turned to English, while dropping French as the official state language not only as an overt decolonial gesture, but to reap from the cultural capital of the increasingly Anglophonised globe. Much the same way, the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples (UNDRIP) of 2007 does not denounce the idea of the human emanating from the European humanities and humanist tradition. Instead, it is noted for its calculated appreciation of individual rights emanating from the European humanist curriculum, while inscribing collective rights of the Indigenous cultures into the charter and putting the rights of non-human entities, including access to land, water, territory, and sacred places on the same pedestal as the right to free movement, speech, citizenship, and dignity of the community. The paradoxical co-existence of the (once) colonial, postcolonial, and decolonial conceptions of the human and humanities is perhaps best illustrated in the reconciliation of Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o—once a staunch opponent of English—with the European canon and its humanist traditions:

It is through this very horizontal positioning of European and non-European languages and their literary traditions, Ngũgĩ suggests, that a “global public” can emerge that becomes the primary addressee of the public humanities. The complex case of English and its literatures (of whose market power we have not even spoken) points exemplarily to the way in which it is not difficult to find spatially distant yet culturally and cultural-politically closer than one might expect. It also points us to the problem that the contexts of the public humanities involve them in politics, even as, in our case of canonised, world literature, there shines through a hint of the universal. We will not resolve the aporias of this field of tensions, but hope that the essays collected here go some way towards situating them, identifying them, and indeed moving beyond them.

2. Public literary humanities

“The humanities,” Mellon Foundation executive vice-president Mariët Westermann has written, “inherently concern the cultural record of the world.”Footnote ²³ That this notion of the world is fraught is something we have just explored in some detail, but at the same time, the hopeful call to understand the humanities not, as implied in the German cognate Geisteswissenschaften, a science of the mind, but of the world, is something we would like to echo. We understand the idea of the “literary humanities” as speaking to this kind of worldliness, as we will elaborate in the following.

One of the key moments here is, as we have hinted at above, to separate the question of what it means to read literature from the purposes of studying it and thus, what it would mean to make this work of studying public, rather than merely advocating (as we do virtually nowhere else as professionals) for literature. The idea that literature, a still amorphous notion that today ties together concrete market relations and culturally conditioned but generally assumed-to-be transhistorical ideas of quality of style and content, is in and of itself a boon to the public is one of long standing. Reading literature, in the simplest formulation, is good for you, making you empathise with others, introducing you to new concepts, and making you think. Sometimes it may not even take “literature”; as David Castillo and William Egginton suggest, maybe it is just “fiction” alone that “has the power to attune minds to actively reading reality as opposed to passively receiving it.”Footnote ²⁴ The obvious problem from the angle of the public literary humanities, alas, remains one that one of us has identified in several articles.Footnote ²⁵ When we conceive of literature as important—as “good,” in the most basic sense—we do not in fact arrive at the “urgent prescription: More humanities!,” because we do not add what the humanities—the literary humanities—add to that pre-existing capacity of literature.Footnote ²⁶ In their 2013 “Manifesto for the Literary Humanities,” James Carney and Emily Troscianko ask pointedly: “what is the origin of the conviction that literature matters?”Footnote ²⁷ They propose this question as a point of departure for what they understand as a quasi-anthropological project, an interdisciplinary effort to ask after a fundamental assumption of the disciplines of literary studies, thus lifting them to a higher, self-reflexive level. Like them, we are perhaps less interested in simply exploring ways in which literature might be mobilised in the public, on the grounds of an already-assumed conviction that it matters, than we are interested in broadening our inquiry to the question of what it means, in a global context, to share this conviction. And we are interested in the question of what it matters that we have this conviction: if there is a global public literary humanities that could forego the simple answers to why literature matters (its “slightly mysterious goodness,” as Troscianko puts it in her 2023 “updated manifesto”), and instead work towards the public as a way of making literature obviously matter. Ten years after the initial manifesto, Troscianko expands, calling on us to “stop contributing to the endless mix-up between the relative goods of the arts and the humanities, which probably arises mostly from a bad-faith inkling in the humanities that everyone likes the arts, so let’s just pretend that’s us.”Footnote ²⁸ In fact, in the simple terms Jonathan Kramnick has offered: “People like literature. They just do not like literature professors.”Footnote ²⁹ And, presumably, the reason they do not like literature professors is that it’s unclear what literature professors do, why they do it, and why anyone should care.

To think about the public literary humanities is, however, to ask exactly this question: What is the specific potential good of the literary humanities, and how is that good made available to the “ethical, sustainable, engaged research with (rather than for or on) the community?”Footnote ³⁰ (Which is not even to speak about what literary humanities research for the community would look like.) We add the question, of course, of what the global version of this “community” could be; but more immediately, we take the public literary humanities to ask after precisely this question of what it is that literary studies disciplines do in excess of literature, and how they would do this in contact with a community, any community, to that community’s benefit.

In this light, we think it helps to specify, too, the nature of the “literary humanities,” a term that (at least by the imperfect metric of Google’s Ngram Viewer) has seen an almost ninefold increase in currency since 2010. For all that interest, there currently exists no succinct definition (that we could find) for the literary humanities, and so we feel empowered to suggest instead our own sense of the term. Perhaps it pays to do so, first, with attention to the idea of the humanities. Kwame Anthony Appiah suggests, perhaps slightly idiosyncratically, three constitutive and essentially methodological differences between the humanities and the sciences. First, “the universal in the humanities is in the service of the particular,” a “particular poem, a particular painting, a particular sonata.”Footnote ³¹ Second, we pay attention to these particulars in order to “account for the meaning, the significance, the symbolic working” of those particulars. Third, we “pick the ones that are significant for certain kinds of human purpose,” which ties us up “with the complex evaluations that underlie [our] differentiated patterns of attention.”Footnote ³²

One way of understanding our use of the public literary humanities, then, is to tie the disciplines of literary studies more firmly to one another and to the idealistic tradition that Appiah invokes, his belief that “we must speak to nonspecialists because we must speak to the untrained young.”Footnote ³³ Invoking the humanities involves invoking a mission that, frankly, goes beyond the simple idea of literary studies. In the space of the more concrete (and disciplinarily located) idea of literary studies, the idea of the literary humanities locates the literary more fully in the domain of the humanities, and conversely, links the humanities broadly more concretely to literary production and specifically to literary studies, to the concrete methods and ideas of that field of inquiry.

To make such a term operative, however, takes some more work, both terminologically and visionarily. Russell West-Pavlov uses the term “literary humanities” to gesture towards the coherence between those disciplines that operate with a shared set of assumptions and methods operating on the object of “literature.” In his use, then, one crucial way in which the term “literary humanities” functions is in its dissolution of the (language-)disciplinary boundaries usually built around different literary studies fields—from English and French to world and postcolonial. But West-Pavlov’s point is more relevant to this special issue in a different sense. In insisting that we need to reframe the literary humanities against “planetary threat and looming systemic collapse” by emphasising their “placed-ness, their embeddedness in contiguous chains of causality,” he highlights a duality similar to that which the “global public literary humanities” names in our sense, between the localness of “place” and the global idea of the “planetary”—fall the while echoing, in the idea of the humanities, the widest possible reach and the broadest possible conception of literary studies disciplinarity. For West-Pavlov, as for us here, the “literary humanities” moniker emphasises usefully the “peculiar combination of intellectual coalitions” of the literary studies disciplines, whose disciplinarity itself may well have been more of a “crucial institutional issue” than a meaningful epistemological one. “If agency,” West-Pavlov writes, “does accrue to literary creation, and by extension to literary critical work or literary education, it emerges out of its connective, coalitional linkage to other practices,” and, we might add, across the globe.Footnote ³⁴ Highlighting the specificity of a literary studies-inflected mode of insight is only one angle of insisting on the specificity of the literary humanities in a larger constellation of the public humanities. The obverse is that some humanities disciplines appear more readily to slot into modes of public engagement, from history to philosophy. We have drawn our perspective more closely: we look specifically at the public literary humanities. Such a view also takes in, then, the specific literatures of the countries that are addressed in the various versions of the global. West-Pavlov ultimately argues for the literary humanities’ “insertion within interdisciplinary networks of crosshatched knowledge-production”; our intervention here, such as it is, is to suggest the expansion of these networks to an, admittedly often local, planet of publics.Footnote ³⁵

Speaking about the university classroom, Patrick Collier suggests that the teaching of literature is the teaching of “advanced literacy, and its foundation is advanced reading comprehension,” from which at least two concrete learning goals emerge: “metacognition and hypothesis testing and schematising knowledge.”Footnote ³⁶ However closely Collier’s suggestions hew to the specific publics of the university classroom, something of the same impulse may be translatable to the context of public literary humanities as a worthwhile goal, no matter what concrete context (local or digital) one finds oneself in. As literary humanities scholars, we already “act as coaches on method”; the expansion of the teaching method that one of us has advocated for as the minimum goal of public literary studies appears also as a promising horizon of the wider notion of the global public literary humanities.Footnote ³⁷

3. Towards Global Public Literary Humanities

Adam Matthews argues that the current university landscape is reconstituting itself as what he calls a “creative knowledge environment,” in which the university is part of a wider network, seeing “outside influence and collaboration externally from a range of sectors.”Footnote ³⁸ It’s not sufficient, in other words, to understand the university’s relation with its societal outsides as one of knowledge or technology transfer—instead, the mode in which the university functions today must be one of extensive exchange of knowledge.Footnote ³⁹ This is, in other words, a system of the university that appears attuned to the question of how to reach out to, and be reached by, its publics. There are obvious points to make here, though. On the one hand, despite the open language, it bears pointing out that this university landscape is, first and foremost, the Western, usually global northern, university landscape, within which public humanities emerges at least in part in relation to a system-immanent crisis. In simpler terms, outreach becomes a means by which the relevance of the humanities is sustained or, at worst, rekindled, at least in theory. But the situation that pertains in the global North is by no means simply mirrored in the wider global context, and across a wider array of university systems, university–society relationships, or indeed disciplinary horizons. Part of the work of a global public literary humanities is to identify the ways in which these specific situations are nonetheless caught in a network of global similarities.

There is, it might be argued, a link between the way the university is reconstituting itself and as being reconstituted by the pressures on it to be more open, and the ways in which public humanities (and, for that matter, citizen science and science communications efforts) are coming to be increasingly valued by administrators, funding agencies, but also scholars themselves. And, as this introduction has sought to point out, this reflects an even wider search for globally viable ways of doing scholarship. As Carin Berkowitz and Matthew Gibson have it, “the public humanities are in some ways richer and broader than they have ever been, more rooted in a form of knowledge construction that embraces people who have been systematically and historically excluded from the construction of the academic humanities.”Footnote ⁴⁰ In this, the public humanities appear to be at least conceptually linked to processes of exclusion, alternative forms of knowledge, and the universalisation of de facto culturally and contextually specific institutional forms that also are a persistent theme in postcolonial and decolonial thought. We have no interest in making this parallel too glib, but for our purposes, we would like to identify the contemporary interest in public humanities approaches, in the sense Berkowitz and Gibson propose as “the publics’ humanities” as at least suggestively similar to such efforts to decentre the specifically Western form of the research and teaching university.Footnote ⁴¹ Where public humanities work invokes the idea of transdisciplinarity, work done with and by the public, not just for the public, the kinds of transcultural and transnational approaches involved in postcolonial thought appear suggestively similar in their fundamental outline.

The essays collected here are an assemblage of the global, and if they do not all individually speak to the question of the global, they are also not parochial. At the same time, our own call is not for the amalgamation or flattening of a diverse set of circumstances, but for a greater attentiveness to everything that is bound up in making a call for a global public literary humanities—the different valences of the global, the inclusions and exclusions necessary to any particular project, the ways in which particular concerns might speak across borders (or not), the very notion of the “humanities” as designating both a universal subject but also shortchanging the difficulties of this universalism; finally, the ways in which the very idea of a public humanities, tied as it is to the Western university and its ethos and method, must negotiate its global aspirations. “In our increasingly culturally interconnected world, we won’t be able to manage our relations with one another, whether in politics or economics or cultural life, unless we develop the habit of conversation across cultures.”Footnote ⁴² To advocate, as this special issue does, for a global public literary humanities is to locate oneself at the intersection of a variety of urgent crises and opportunities that need to be understood as related. One benefit of exploring, as this special issue of Public Humanities does, the complex intersections of the global public literary humanities is to obtain some much needed clarity about the reach and purpose of the literary humanities and of the public humanities both. The question of what literary humanities is for becomes more acute in the moment of its translation to diverse, dispersed, culturally, and economically situated publics. Appiah’s point has only become more urgent since the quaint days of 2019. As the relations that hold together the global community fray, and conversations become scarcer, finding community across the globe, indeed building communities, becomes more urgent. This effort cannot, of course, centre on a quasi-neo-colonial attempt to simply expand the moves that public humanities makes in its originary, Western context—except when, as we also have been at pains to suggest, such moves are viable, because in the contemporary interplay of the global as the globalised, transcultural, and the global as the locally specific, simple solutions are not available.

4. The essays collected here

It is as desirable as it is impossible to do the work this special issue proposes is urgent to exhaustion within its own bounds—and, helplessly, we gesture towards this truism by saying we are heading “towards” a global public literary humanities. At the same time, the essays collected here strive to cover a significant enough array of locativities and practices to offer the Vorschein of such a new disciplinary constellation.

Kevin Curran’s essay “Performance Pedagogy: Theatrical Judgment and Global Citizenship” takes a classical route to achieve practical results. The essay conjures the genealogies of the idea of judgement from Artiste to Arendt without undermining its everyday usage or implications to the classroom. The essay drives the six tenets of ethical judgement that could help transform humanities towards its public—“collaboration, empathy, listening, critical thinking, responsibility, and stakeholding”—home with concrete in-class examples, with the use of both classics and minor texts. The essay holds that these six tenets play a formative role in the Global South contexts where classics are often rewritten and reapplied to suit the local needs and demands.

Dirk Wiemann and Satish Poduval’s essay, “Against Literary Activism,” expands on the ethical and philosophical questions of Curran’s essay by questioning the activist turn in literary studies, which tends to dismiss and at times discredit existing literary practices altogether. Driven by the politics of anti-intellectualism, the emerging trends in literary activism seem to mimic and even dissolve into the very solipsism of high art and litany in an attempt to forge a counter-canon, and veer away from any objective approach to the humanities in the guise of vaunted radicalism. With select examples from India and England, the article’s penchant for orienting literature towards the public experience, public reading, and its formation and formations in social collectives offers a refreshing critique of the binary between the canon and the minor, the elite and the subaltern, the singular and the common, the sarkari and the sarvjenic.

Rachel Arteaga’s “Resonance and Method in Literary Studies” offers an equally engaging critique of the perceived binary between academic and public reading practices by suggesting that they “share a general disposition toward literature, in that all readers are drawn to the page by the interplay between thought and feeling.” These affective trajectories manifest themselves more frequently and commonly in the public domain than academic criticism is prepared to concede. Employing concepts such as “interpretive responsibility,” the essay calls for the practitioners of humanities to place themselves not as those merely trained in literary studies but as participants of its practice, whose objects lie outside of the textual world. Such vocational transgressions could help identify the potential common ground between the academic and public spheres and would enable literary critics to adopt a dynamic approach to the university classroom, which is shaped by the external social factors such as class, race, gender, and privilege, and bears the potential to bring “public insights” into academic practice.

Elizaveta Shatalova’s essay, “Digital Postscholarly Criticism: Understanding the Global Public Transformation of Literary Humanities through the Video Essay Genre (and Beyond),” deploys digital media as the bridge between the academic and public humanities, enabling the non-academic users of scholarly knowledge to distil and distribute the latter for larger public consumption and use. Using select example from digital platforms such as BreadTube, the essay holds that “the production of popular intellectual content allows many video essayists across the globe to significantly expand the reach and transform the public understanding of literary humanities by exposing vast audiences to themes, concepts, authors, and concerns that these authors have studied during their time spent in the university.” This is both a timely and pertinent claim, given that literary critics often have a sceptical, if not a skewed perception of the “watered down” or “diluted” literary content into other mediums. This piece counters such academic classicism by placing its argument in the genre of post-scholarly criticism, and “popular intellectual expression,” which holds that public intellectual expressions (“cultural communities”) can be cultivated outside of the university walls.

Milan Terlunen’s “Engaging Newcomers with the Global Great Unread: Working Together to Expand the Canon” espouses the anti-elitist proclivities of the previous essays, especially the decisive shift from the literary cannon to the fringes and the margins. The “Global Great Unread” refers to a selection of literary material that has remained unexplored or in the shadows of the global literary canon. Through select examples of the global canon beyond the North American and European contexts, the author presents case studies of reading experiences with his students, tasked to work with texts by Filipino and Georgian authors. These case studies offer significant insights into students’ ability to engage with the “public” facets of storytelling, including their context, cultures, adaptability in relation to the language of learning, interpretation, and exposition. On the basis of the case studies, the essay arrives at the conclusion that “instead of blaming ourselves for failing our students and the world, we can make allies of our students—and perhaps of other non-specialist communities—in the goal of exploring a mass of texts so vast that no one can explore more than the tiniest fraction of it.”

Anindya Purakayastha’s “Literature and the Counterpublics: Restoring the Archive of Sahajiya Sahity” draws from distinctly Global South experiences. Working with Amartya Sen, Rabindranath Tagore, and Judith Butler, this essay delineates counterpublics in a subaltern domain of linguistic and poetic traditions, oral and nomadic literary cultures that resist classicism or canonical formulations. The paper delineates counterpublics from two distinct perspectives: first, Global South literary traditions that have resisted canonisation and Eurocentric appropriations, and the literary traditions within the Global South that counter local cultural hierarchies and power structures. Dubbing the literary traditions of the counterpublics as Sahajiya (literally, co-existence), this essay echo’s Wiemann and Poduval’s critique of the isonomic, elitist treatment of literary ethics and aesthetics by literary activists, and showcases the literary voices of Bauls, Fakris, rural mystics and minstrels of the non-Hindu, and non-Brahmin traditions of India, which have had a strong public presence due to their orality and mnemonic power.

Rambukwella’s paper “Literary-Public Entanglements in Postcolonial Sri Lanka: Challenges, Possibilities and Potentialities” complicates the relationship between English, colonialism, and the linguistic nationalisms. It traces the role of English and the vernacular languages in shaping the ideologies of nationalism through popular cultures. Although English enjoyed a momentous glory as the preferred reading language of the national elite, postcolonial Sri Lanka turned to Pali as the language of national myth-making. The national elite particularly used the Pali genealogy to pit Sinhala as the majoritarian national language through popular magazines, pulp periodicals, religious propaganda documents, and other accessible media outlets targeting the Sinhalese ethnic populace. Simultaneously—and paradoxically—English became a language of reconciliation for its Tamil minorities, and thus a popular language of address since the 1980s, and again after the end of the civil war in 2009. On the basis of these local–global linguistic influences and convergences in the public sphere, the article concludes: “As the history of the linguistically and culturally bifurcated Sri Lankan literary public sphere I trace in this essay demonstrates, literary public cultures develop in tandem with the larger political economy of a given society.”

Ina Schenker’s “Transferability: Considerations on a Mode of Transculturality in Global Public Literary Humanities” critically appraises the concepts of “mediation” and “transfer” endemic to the German knowledge context. This essay injects a transcultural approach to public humanities through examples from Canada and Germany. In Francophone Canada, traditionally, white researchers dominated the research on Indigenous cultures. In the past few years, there has been a steady rise of Indigenous scholars, collaborating with university academic structures in producing what the essay terms “multicultural allyship,” in which minority groups become active partners in knowledge production. In the German context, the so-called Third Mission movement—with a mandate to transfer academic knowledge into the public domain—has been underway for decades. However, it is in the recent migrations fictions, which the paper labels as “transfictions,” that the potential of such knowledge transfer is found. Shida Bazyar’s novels are a case in point, which revolve around Iranian migrant experiences in Germany, wherein “individuals participate in transformative processes that transcend fixed notions of nationality or ethnicity.” Given their penchant for public reception, participation, and potential for open debate, Bazyar’s work presents itself as global public literature in the German context.

Finally, Muharram’s essay “Making the Invisible Visible: How the Blue Humanities Translate Climate Change to the Public” positions the Blue Humanities as public humanities and aims to bridge “the divide between scientific and humanistic knowledge, and the disconnect between expert science and public understanding.” By virtue of its public relevance, the paper argues that the Blue Humanities as a sub-discipline is best positioned to address the global ecological challenges that require a synthesis of academic knowledge, cultural movements, public opinions, and social demands. The essay suggests that there are two ways the public humanities could be transformed into global action: first by integrating Blue humanities approaches into the humanities at large, and second by bridging the gap between scientific and public knowledge about climate disasters. The essay offers two pedagogical examples of achieving this in the classroom—centred on stories “Hermie” and its adapted film, and the immersive video game Abzû—with the use of digital technologies, visualisation of climate challenges, and engagement in social media.