Abstract
In the Journal of Commonwealth Literature 41(1), our predecessor as editor, John Thieme, wrote that submissions to JCL “represent some sort of barometer” of postcolonial interests, trends, and intellectual problems (2006: 1). Scholars notice that material on particular writers and theories has appeared in the Journal before, and often assume that this makes JCL the natural home for further discussion of the same topics. As Thieme notes, this can lead to lively debate, but also to tired rehashing of the same ideas, and he quotes Salman Rushdie’s plea, “For God’s sake, open the universe a little more!” (Thieme, 2006: 1).
As the new co-editors, we are keen for JCL to maintain and develop its elastic boundaries, while remaining within the remit described in our first editorial of considering literature touched by the British empire, only excluding writing from nations that have very few residues from British colonialism (see Chambers and Watkins, 2011: 389). We wish to continue JCL’s proud history of expanding the scope of postcolonial scholarship, to incorporate an ever-increasing range of subjects, authors, and theoretical paradigms.
From the submissions to the Journal we have received so far, we have not been surprised to receive many articles on the “Holy Trinity” of J.M. Coetzee, Amitav Ghosh, and Salman Rushdie, all well-established, male writers; the first a white South African Nobel Prize holder, and the other two award-winning Indian writers based in the United States. Indeed, there is an article on Rushdie in this issue, Yael Maurer’s “Rage against the machine: Cyberspace narratives in Rushdie’s Fury”. However, Maurer’s article offers a new reading of his perhaps less well-known 2002 novel as a text that makes creative use of elements of the science fiction genre. These three writers are currently at the heart of the postcolonial canon and doubtless will remain so; we remain committed to showcasing innovative approaches to their writing and to the body of criticism on them.
However, it is also encouraging to witness some exciting new areas of literary enquiry. K.W. Christopher has written what has the potential to become a truly groundbreaking essay for postcolonial studies, “Between two worlds: The predicament of Dalit Christians in Bama’s works”. Christopher observes that autobiographical texts by fellow Dalit Christian, Bama, have been categorized as Dalit writing, but that their Christian aspects have been neglected. More importantly, perhaps, he argues that postcolonial theory has tended to overlook or misinterpret the crucial subcontinental issue of caste. Fiona Moolla’s essay on Soyinka’s Aké examines the ways in which the text’s play with autobiographical forms of life writing negotiates a particular form of modern African subjectivity. Her discussion of the place of ritual scarification in this narrative seeks to explain how the text embodies local literatures and oratures as well as referring to canonical Western forms such as the bildungsroman. Both Helen Cousins’s and Maria Alonso Alonso’s articles on the Gothic discuss the legend of the soucouyant, the former in the African diaspora and the latter in the Caribbean. Cousins relates her discussion of Helen Oyeyemi’s White is for Witching to the trope of reverse colonization beloved of late Victorian gothic in order to demonstrate how Oyeyemi’s text handles contemporary concerns with immigration and border control. In contrast, for Alonso Alonso, the figures of the soucouyant and the lougarou in David Chariandy’s Soucouyant and Edwige Danticat’s “Nineteen Thirty-Seven” allow pertinent distinctions to be made between the texts’ use of magic and marvellous realist forms in order to explain diasporic fictional treatments of violence against women and family trauma.
Weihsin Gui stays with the Caribbean and diasporic writing to discuss the canonical, if controversial writer V.S. Naipaul alongside an emerging novelist, Andrea Levy. He suggests that their novels, The Enigma of Arrival and Fruit of the Lemon, position migrancy as a contestation of narrow late twentieth-century British discourses of heritage and patriotism. Lindsey Moore takes up our challenge of discussing countries only touched by British colonialism “comparatively lightly”, in the case of Morocco, which in her study of the work of Paul Bowles, emerges as both a hybrid cultural, linguistic, and aesthetic space and one that he can treat in a prototypically Orientalist fashion.
Colleen McGloin’s article on Australian surfer culture in Tim Winton’s Breath argues that the misogynistic representation of the central female character’s sexuality is a significant, if occluded way of constructing white Australian nationalist masculinity. McGloin entwines both feminist and postcolonial readings of the text in order to argue that the novel’s potential to reconfigure white masculine surfing clichés is denied by its own strategic treatment of Eva’s body and her preferred sexual practices. In fact, the focus on the body of the woman connects McGloin’s, Alonso Alonso’s and Cousins’s articles; the masculine body and its ritual markings also features significantly in Moolla’s article.
2011 was an unusually eventful year, with the unedifying executions of Qaddafi in Libya and bin Laden in Pakistan, global economic meltdown, and political protest and rioting on the streets from Athens, Manchester, London, and New York, to Cairo, Benghazi, and Damascus. 2012 began with a guilty verdict for two of the killers of Stephen Lawrence, the black schoolboy murdered by racists in London in 1993, and failed by institutional racism and incompetence in the British police and legal system. As the poet Benjamin Zephaniah puts it, “[w]e have watched them strut before us / As proud as sick Mussolinis” (2001: 20): the killers have paraded their defiance and hatred for almost two decades, but there is finally some closure on the case, although three others still walk free. The uncomfortable issues this landmark case has raised about racism and the British establishment have not gone away, and are referred to in Weihsin Gui’s analysis of Andrea Levy’s Fruit of the Lemon. Also ongoing is the instability and violence in the Middle East; as a new spring begins, the Arab Spring of 2011 continues, with de facto civil war in Syria. Writers, artists, and film-makers are at the forefront of revolutionary activity, but are also being sickeningly punished for their courage and farsightedness. It is hoped that JCL will continue to anticipate, document, and reflect on the literary fallout when “newness come[s] into the world” (Rushdie, 1988: 8).