Even though the word has been around for over one thousand years, bitch has proven that an old dog can be taught new tricks. Over the centuries, bitch has become a linguistic chameleon with many different meanings and uses. Bitch has become a shape-shifter too, morphing into modern slang spellings like biatch, biznatch, and betch. Bitch is a versatile word. It can behave like a noun, an adjective, a verb, or an interjection, while it also makes a cameo appearance in lots of idioms. Bitch can be a bitch of a word. Calling someone a bitch once seemed to be a pretty straightforward insult, but today – after so many variations, reinventions, and attempts to reclaim the word – it’s not always clear what bitch really means. Nowadays, the word appears in numerous other languages too, from Arabic and Japanese to Spanish and Zulu. This chapter takes a look at bitch in the present day, and beyond.

This chapter will explore the entangled histories of postcolonialism, world literature, and global anglophone as pedagogical and institutional rubrics. The English curriculum in the Anglo-American academy has in various degrees been reconfigured by these rubrics since the 1980s, but each has often been perceived as antagonistic to the other two, and scholars have devoted volumes to staking their territorial claim on each. Rather than wage partisan battles that perceive the rise of global anglophone as a threat to postcolonial studies, or world literature as a neoliberal takeover/erasure of the literary riches of the non-European world, it is worthwhile, I argue to trace their collective impetus to decolonize English and comparative literary studies.