Abstract
Editor’s Note
This year, the bibliography issue of Journal of Commonwealth Literature is delighted to be able to extend its coverage to literary production from Zimbabwe. Thanks are due to our South African contributors at the National English Literary Museum in Grahamstown – Crystal Warren, Debbie Landman, Lynne Grant, and Victor Clarke for undertaking this additional bibliographical record and for their excellent work in rectifying this omission. That the histories of what are today South Africa and Zimbabwe have been linked can be seen in the number of authors whose work is best situated in the “passage” between the two countries, as Crystal Warren comments in her introduction to JCL’s first Zimbabwean bibliography. Zimbabwe was demarcated by the British South Africa Company and colonized as “Southern Rhodesia” in the Scramble for Africa at the end of the nineteenth century. Led by President Robert Mugabe since independence in 1980 and tied, in the last two decades, to his increasingly controversial politics of a virulent nationalism interpellated by settler colonialism’s political culture of “intolerance, militarism, tribalism and violence” (Ndlovu-Gatsheni, 2009: 1145), Zimbabwe has been plagued by political turmoil and economic crisis. The country has had a vexed relationship with the Commonwealth – suspended in 2002, it finally withdrew in 2003. Jonathan Nkala’s play “The Crossing” (listed in the bibliography from South Africa and Zimbabwe) is situated in this context of political struggle and repression, relating the author’s journey from Zimbabwe to South Africa in 2003 and his life there as an illegal immigrant.
Trajectories of both forced and creative mobility in space and history and a broader exploration of place and local identities within the context of globalization form a part of this year’s bibliographical listings. Particularly prominent are explorations of the various ways in which the national and the global both intertwine and constitute each other. Such explorations point away from an unequivocal understanding of globalization as the end of the nation-state and towards the complexities of figuring the clashes, intersections, and complicities of the national and the global. As Vilashini Cooppan reminds us, the networks of the global “interrupt and cut across the fictive linearities of national history and the fictive homogeneities of national subjectivity, while also locating those mobile subjectivities and histories within the world-systems of imperialism, nationalism and capitalism” (2009: 3). This relationship of influence and exchange can be seen in critical explorations of the interplay of nation and globalization in the South African bibliography and in considerations of the position of Singapore within twenty-first century global history and its implications for national identity. A similar concern occupies critical attention to Sri Lanka as a national space and to Pakistan’s role in contemporary geopolitics, while critical discussions of Canada and the Caribbean seek to situate them in terms of their specific globalities – literary, cultural, linguistic. The relationship between globalization and language is explored in criticism on Indian writing in English that seeks to decolonize the English language by revealing its plurality as “Englishes”. Linguistic genealogies and mutual contaminations marked by colonialist, nationalist, and communalist violence are on focus in the bibliographies from India and Pakistan, where fiction continues to revision national, linguistic, and ethnic boundaries.
The focus on local−global politics in intertextuality is also interesting to observe – the use of Greek myth in Canadian drama to question twentieth-century genocide; the conversations between past and present, intertextually informed through travelling narratives and mythologies in New Zealand and, more urgently perhaps, the attempt at “looking inward” by tracing inter-ethnic, transnational African intertextual links rather than Euro-American ones in Ode Ogede’s Intertextuality in Contemporary African Literature (Lexington Books, 2011), recorded in the South African bibliography.
Specific explorations of the local, raising questions of public memory, can be observed in place histories of Botany Bay, the Waikato, and Nairobi, whereas creative output seeks to reimagine Johannesburg and Dar es Salaam and to revisit routes from and to Amsterdam in South African fiction and Russia and Guyana in Indian fiction. The journey of self-discovery figures in the prominent coming-of-age theme, combined with social and political commentary in creative writing from all African regions in this bibliography, including childhood memoirs set in East and Central Africa and the stories of boy soldiers related in drama from West Africa. Further routes explored in 2011 involve Somali piracy and kidnapping in the Indian Ocean and the industry and impact of beach tourism in Kenya in, respectively, fiction and criticism listed in the East and Central Africa bibliography; the connections between the West, Iran, Islam, and Australia in Australian poetry, as well as returns to sixth-century Byzantium and first-century Judea in South African fiction. It is pleasing to note, as the contributors for Malaysia and Singapore, Australia and South Africa report, the important role of small publishing houses in promoting local literature and, as those for Pakistan and South Africa observe, the translations from Afrikaans, Pashto, Sindhi, and Urdu. Genre fiction also seems to revolve around place in the imagination of a zombie Cape Town, of Sherlock Holmes in Delhi, and of the locale of the Western in Canadian revisionings of the genre.
Responses to 9/11 continue to occupy Pakistani American novels as well as critical and non-fiction output from and about Pakistan. The latter writing, in particular, seeks to redress, as Muneeza Shamsie notes, the persistent perceptions of Muslims as a single, monolithic community. Debunking such essentialist perceptions forms part of the focus of two recent, related articles, made especially urgent in the context of the publication of Salman Rushdie’s memoir, Joseph Anton (Jonathan Cape) in September 2012. One of these articles looks back (Ahmed and Stadtler, 2012), before the Rushdie Affair, to the comparatively much less known precedent of August 1938 when British working-class South Asian Muslims protested against the deprecating representations of the Prophet Muhammad and Islam in H.G. Wells’ A Short History of the World (1922), while the second article looks forward (Ahmed and Chambers, 2012), at similar protests since the Rushdie Affair, including the controversies surrounding the filming of Monica Ali’s Brick Lane (2003) in 2006 and the fictionalization of Muhammad’s wife, Aisha (echoing Rushdie’s Ayesha in The Satanic Verses), in Sherry Jones’s novel, The Jewel of Medina (2008), as well as the most recent wave of protests against the anti-Islam video, Innocence of Muslims, which started circulating on the Internet in 2012. Together, the authors of these articles, Rehana Ahmed, Florian Stadtler, and Claire Chambers, draw attention to the disadvantaged social position and the resulting lack of a public voice of cultural expression shared by all the protestors – a fact which complicates the existing analyses of such protests, particularly those arguments that effectively mask the real issues through the repetitive gesture of positing free speech against religious offence. In challenging this binary, Rehana Ahmed and Claire Chambers (2012) draw on Arthur Bradley and Andrew Tate’s diagnosis of “New Atheism”, whose novelist practitioners, including Rushdie, seek to critique religious extremism whilst often valorizing, in its stead, a mythos of humanist piety and the theological (in its own right) story of the novel as a redemptive and free utopian space (2010: 107-11).