Abstract
Editor’s Note
In their first editorial for the Journal of Commonwealth Literature (46[3]) earlier this year, Claire Chambers and Susan Watkins offered a timely reconsideration of the idea of Commonwealth literature in relation to the Journal’s remit and to both historical and contemporary developments, from the processes of post-World War II decolonization to the “Arab Spring” uprisings of today. They noted the problematic implications of the term’s at once homogenizing and exclusive scope as well as its fading relevance to contemporary literature’s changing margins. Equally, however, they pointed out the indebtedness of postcolonial studies to the work of Commonwealth literature critics and stressed the term’s usefulness for organizing the Journal as responding to a world in which the Commonwealth Writers Prize continues to be awarded and where neither are the effects of colonialism over nor have imperialisms of the day been in more urgent need of critical exploration. As Chambers and Watkins reminded us, quoting the editors of JCL’s 1965 inaugural issue, the Journal’s name should be treated as ‘a piece of convenient shorthand’ rather than as an attempt to posit ‘a single, culturally homogenous body of writings’.
Nowhere is this more evident than in the heterogeneous bibliographical offerings from the various regions and countries of the Commonwealth represented here and in the task of reflecting on their togetherness in this bibliographical issue’s annual editorials. Every year, recurrent themes can be noted and in 2010 these included both broad investigations of environmental issues and more specific critical and creative responses to events such as the 2010 Haiti earthquake or the 2009 Black Saturday bushfires in the Australian state of Victoria; explorations of gender and sexuality, of the idea and scope of national literatures, and of cities (the year saw the publication of multi-genre collections and anthologies on (New) Delhi, Karachi, Johannesburg, Nairobi, Dar es Salaam, Cape Town, Lagos, Melbourne and Toronto). Such tendencies, however, are to some extent symptomatic of global developments in criticism and publishing. Often, multi-national collections will seem to evince a trend merely because of being listed by multiple regions/countries. My observations will inevitably be more representative of critical rather than creative writing since more can be gleaned of the year’s development from the listings of the former. The bibliographies offered here are further subject, to various degrees, to accessibility of sources within certain periods of time. The contributors for Australia, Malaysia and Singapore, or Sri Lanka, for instance, note the necessary limitations involved in compiling a bibliography in retrospect of only one year when books published in the last quarter of a given year will appear in bookstores and other bibliographies increasingly later in the following year, while in other regions, such as the Caribbean or Pakistan, bibliographical sources seem more easily available at an earlier point. Such divergences point as much to the heterogeneity of local marketplaces as to the challenges of compiling the bibliographies as guides on yearly developments.
The continuing interrelated concerns with language, textuality and genre mark this year’s bibliographies. They can be seen in the revision and negotiation of English as a colonial legacy in explorations of contemporary Englishes on the Indian subcontinent and in the countries and regions of Africa represented here as well as in the prominence of the short story form in both creative and critical publications. The popularity and significance of the Anglophone short story (noted in the introductions of the contributors for the Caribbean, New Zealand and Pakistan this year) evinces its ‘more dissident’ potential, in a specifically postcolonial sense, than that of the ‘major genres’, as Paul March-Russell reminds us, by offering a form of what Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari have termed ‘minor literature’, revisioning a ‘major’ language in their fragment-like nature (2009: 247-8). Contemporary local-global configurations, conditioned by British colonialism, also become apparent in transnational/diasporic engagements – particularly, in explorations of Australian-Asian connections, of social histories of East Africa’s Asian communities and of the myth of the “island paradise” in Sri Lankan and Caribbean contexts. While the first two themes bear witness to historical indentured labour trajectories, an idea of another lingering asymmetry of power in relation to travel, the division into what Mary Louise Pratt has referred to as ‘travellers’ and ‘travellees’ (1982: 7), emerges from the introduction of the contributor for Sri Lanka. The ambiguities and shortcomings of the term Commonwealth literature are demonstrated in the high cost of travel ‘within the Commonwealth’, as he notes, for the 15th Triennial ACLALS Conference, otherwise held under the rubric “Strokes across Cultures”, in Cyprus in 2010. That the bibliographical issue of JCL presents, precisely through its continuing organizational valence, a platform for discussing such issues as well as seeking to offer an indispensable research resource is undeniable.
This year, we welcome a new contributor for the Caribbean, Nadia Johnson, who has taken over from Sheri-Marie Harrison. Thanks are due to both – to Sheri-Marie Harrison, for her consistently thorough listings and insightful introductions, and to Nadia Johnson, for immediately rising up to the challenges of the role. My gratitude goes too to all of our continuing contributors, for making possible the Journal’s bibliographical record and, just as importantly, for bringing their expertise to its presentation and introduction and to their astute observations on its development.