Situating Chick lit of the Global South in Print and Online

Our chapter looks at negotiations of form and language in chick lit from India and Nigeria. Later years have seen an influx of chick lit on Anglophone literary markets in the Global South. This relatively recent and fast appropriation of a form that is typically associated with metropolitan and economically affluent Western spaces prompts us to ask to what extent Global South aspirational iterations of chick lit can accommodate the cracks inherent in the tension between the genre and regional inflections of English. In the emerging ecologies of chick lit in Nigeria and India, social mobility and aspiration are key issues that are also inscribed into the form itself, partly by being a prominent theme and through the authors’ entrepreneurship, not least in social media where many writers actively build an audience for themselves. Englishes - which overlap with other vernacular languages and work at different levels of proficiency – are central in both cases, and this chapter is concerned with thinking through the tripartite constellation of language, aspiration and genre. Our main claim is that different englishes are used to signal rootedness in the local but also connectedness with lifestyles and identity constructions that are associated with spaces located in the Global North, and that this relation between the local and an ‘elsewhere’ is central to chick lit in its Indian and Nigerian forms.