Abstract
In the 2000s, The Journal of Commonwealth Literature (JCL) continued to provide a forum for the expansion, layering and critical self-examination of the transnational Anglophone literary/cultural and scholarly fields. During this period of expansion and growth JCL participated in the formation of an emergent postcolonial canon in which certain authors and texts have served to function as tropes for a certain idea of nations and regions in the postcolonial world. This article tracks those tendencies through a critical assessment of a range of exemplary essays, editorials, and surveys published in the journal during this decade.
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In the 2000s, the decade when “Postcolonial Literature” entered the metropolitan institutional mainstream and when several academic publications re/branded themselves accordingly, The Journal of Commonwealth Literature (JCL) chose to reiterate a loyalty to the emancipatory implications of its name, unchanged since its foundation in 1965. Half-way into the decade, in a characteristically thoughtful editorial co-written on the occasion of the journal’s fortieth anniversary, John Thieme expressed his wariness of an emerging discursive hegemony and warned that an increasing focus on globalized literary production risked a new set of silencings and exclusions. For Thieme, JCL’s unfashionable name could be understood to hark back (at least aspirationally) to the days when the journal’s various constituencies — academic scholars, literary practitioners, and their readers — could more easily be imagined broadly to overlap in terms of geographical location. “[T]he metropolitan institutionalization of the subject”, he writes, “has affected the nature of the Journal’s constituency. In its early days, it was very much a journal not only about the Commonwealth, but also of the Commonwealth and by the Commonwealth” (Niven and Thieme, 2005: 4). By 2005, however, the advent of new technologies had meant that the cultural production of “some countries (and their peoples) [was] being airbrushed off the map” (Niven and Thieme, 2005: 4). The journal’s name and the complex set of associations it evokes — to do with incomplete decolonization, but also the ideal of shared, or common, wealth — may thus be understood to entail both a plea for discursive inclusivity and a warning against scholarly homogenization of the world’s cultural production.
In the 2000s, then, JCL continued to provide a forum for the expansion, layering and critical self-examination of the transnational Anglophone literary/cultural and scholarly fields. In the course of the decade, the editors’ manner of referring to these fields varied. References to “literary works published in English by writers from Commonwealth countries”, “postcolonial literatures”, and “world literatures in English” all appear side by side in one memorable Bibliography issue editorial (Stoneham, 2002: 1). Elsewhere in the journal, routine mention of “post-colonial studies” became the norm (Thieme, 2004: 1). These nuances of angle and meaning (Stoneham’s concern was with mapping cultural production, John Thieme’s with methodologies of intellectual inquiry) signal both the discursive and terminological layering that the journal performed and its inclusivity of approach.
As Niven and Thieme’s benchmark editorial points out, JCL had since the early 1990s encouraged methodological diversity and a broadly-understood cultural and geographical remit. The fortieth anniversary issue underscores its welcome to submissions on non-Anglophone writing; and while in the first decade of the twenty-first century the journal maintained its tendency to publish detailed analytical scrutinies of globally-circulating Anglophone fiction, it also featured contributions related to other kinds of texts and media, as well as theoretical deliberations.
In a 2005 article, for example, Hugh Hodges memorably situated Bob Marley’s song lyrics within a Caribbean tradition of religious rhetoric. A few years later, Grace Musila performed a nuanced and imaginative reading of the epistemological disarticulation between British and Kenyan discourses surrounding the much-publicized death of British wildlife photographer Julie Ward in a Kenyan game park in the 1980s (Musila, 2008). In the third issue of 2008, Esther de Bruijn read the trope of heterosexual love in Ghanaian fiction for young adults by authors such as Ike Tandoh and Evelyn Tay as an articulation of new forms of local agency (De Bruijn, 2008). Esther de Bruijn’s article carries over from earlier Africa-related debates – most notably, Stephanie Newell’s important 2000 monograph on popular Ghanaian fiction — an understanding of popular literature as clearly distinct from “official” literary texts and genres. By contrast, Tabish Khair’s article on Indian pulp fiction in the same JCL issue prefers to express the relationship between textual form and social prestige in terms of cross-pollinating genre tendencies or “broad generic folds” (Khair, 2008: 62), rather than stable categories. He speaks of “pulp-prone [textual] elements” (Khair, 2008: 62) and points out that the rise of India’s pulp queen Shobhaa Dé in the 1980s is in many ways connected to the global ascent of Salman Rushdie in the same decade.
These interventions blur the boundaries between literary studies, cultural studies, and discourse analysis, while maintaining a laudable specificity of focus and nuance of contextualization. Alongside other articulations, they thus belie concerns related to the theoretical turn in transnational and comparative literary scholarship, expressed in JCL’s pages early on in the decade by Ken Goodwin in an article on the “trunks” and “branches” of literary-historical categorization (Goodwin, 2000). Without the benefit of hindsight available to the authors of this article, Goodwin was not able to articulate fully the realization that the notion of “the canonical” with which his article operates was shifting and expanding even as he wrote, partly under the pressure of the branching-out critical field whose various permutations he was discussing. Nevertheless, his unselfconscious use of the phrase “world literature” at the very end of the article (2000: 125) resonates with The World Republic of Letters, Pascale Casanova’s influential 1999 analysis of the global politics of literary consecration, which appeared in English translation in 2004. Unavoidably, during this period of expansion and growth JCL participated in the formation of an emergent postcolonial canon in which certain authors and texts have served to function as tropes for a certain idea of nations and regions in the postcolonial world. We say more about this in sections three and four below.
The journal’s increase in publication frequency in this period underscores how fast the sheer textual volume of the global Anglophone literary/critical field was increasing. In 2003, in consultation with its new publishers, Cambridge Scientific Abstracts (CSA) and in response to large numbers of submissions, JCL became a quarterly, with three (rather than two) article issues a year, and (as before) an annual Bibliography issue. The journal now accepted email submissions. The “Notice Board” section was discontinued, rendered obsolete by electronic media (its last appearance in the journal named the Commonwealth Writers Prize winners for 2002). The “Books Received” section was expanded, and, over several years, showcased (alongside a wide range of monographs, edited volumes and literary works) a widening stream of textbooks, historical introductions, and other kinds of systematization of the rapidly institutionally-embedding field.
The Bibliography issues continued to refer to the previous calendar year. They were, in this decade, successively edited by Geraldine Stoneham (2000
When placed alongside Casanova’s discussion of how “peripheral” nation-states made their bids for global literary legitimacy in the era of decolonization, Lazarus’s insistence on the economic, political, and cultural importance of nations and national boundaries may be related to the inclusion, exclusion, and naming of JCL’s Bibliographies’ geographical components. Apart from obvious logistical difficulties in putting the issues together (to which associate editors’ annual prefaces amply attest), such considerations point directly at John Thieme’s mid-decade concern, mentioned above, with certain “countries” (in other words, literary nations) and “peoples” (or literary producers and consumers) being “airbrushed off” the global literary map. We return to a discussion of JCL’s Bibliography issues and their intellectual and institutional implications in section five below.
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During the 2000s, article issue editorials highlighted key scholarly themes of the decade, and showed how some of those themes re-cast the concerns of past decades and anticipated fresh intellectual angles. The editorials also engage with several kinds of cultural and scholarly milestones.
The second issue of 2000, for example, refracts and augments the critical terrain related to the interface of historiography and literary form; the second issue of 2002 adds to the body of scholarly work related to post/colonial desire, while the June 2006 issue and editorial re-visit the well-established postcolonial tropes of hybridity and liminality. These concepts and topics were often (though not exclusively) addressed through critical discussions of texts by Salman Rushdie, Amitav Ghosh, Michael Ondaatje, and J. M. Coetzee (among others): we will say more about some of those authors shortly. Such a focus on mainstream male postcolonial authors should not be taken as a sign that questions of gender, or for that matter, of race and sexuality are not also addressed in many of the essays included in The Journal of Commonwealth Literature during this decade. On the contrary, there are a number of essays that address the complex intersections between gender, race, sexuality, and nationalism in nuanced and sophisticated ways, as we go on to suggest. Considerations related to textual constructions of space also continued to be at the forefront of postcolonial critical interest in the first decade of the twenty-first century. In JCL, these were present in the form of contributors’ interest in migration and the related topic of literary cosmopolitanism, a continued interest in postcolonial intertexts and an emergent interest in the environment (John Thieme’s Postcolonial Con-Texts (2001b) came out in 2001, while Helen Tiffin’s edited Five Emus to the King of Siam: Environment and Empire was flagged up in JCL’s “Books Received” section in 2007).
In the first issue of 2004, JCL joined in with the mourning of the 2003 death of Edward Said. In memorializing the legacy of a scholar often taken to be a foundational figure of academic postcolonialism, the issue’s editorial underscored Said’s repeated assertion of his allegiance to humanist politics and took it as a signal of both the field’s implication in Western institutions, and of the extent to which Said’s work was able to turn its humanist bias against the West. Indeed, Said’s thinking continued to make itself widely felt in the journal throughout the decade, and beyond. A single example will have to suffice: in an essay on the work of Ghanaian writer Ama Ata Aidoo, Cheryl Sterling (2010) appropriates Said’s notion of travelling theory in order to highlight Aidoo’s construction of transformational consciousness in her pioneering 1977 novel Our Sister Killjoy.
A few years before Said’s death, Rushdie’s work continued to make inroads into the UK’s university syllabi, and a new generation of India’s authors, spearheaded by Ghosh, followed in his wake. It was in this moment that John Thieme commented on the passing of the “Grand Old Men” of Indian fiction — Nirad C. Chaudhuri in 1999, G. V. Desani in 2000, and R. K. Narayan in 2001. Thieme describes Narayan as “an intensely local writer” (Thieme, 2001a: 4); Khair was later to point out that cheap editions of his books, bought up by Indian Thought Publications and sold from railway kiosks, “were immensely pulp-like in appearance and pricing” (Khair, 2008: 60). By the late 1960s — as Ranga Rao writes in an obituary tribute — Narayan’s works had sold in hundreds of thousands of copies; no mean feat for “a writer of provincial, non-metro [sic] origins, forced to combat, in the early decades, a closed sceptical world” (Rao, 2001: 119). Yet the textual reach of Narayan’s work went far beyond southern India, as a JCL article by Ian Almond published in the year of the author’s death attests. Famously read, debated, and arguably misinterpreted by Graham Greene and V. S. Naipaul, Narayan’s fictions “open lines of communication between different geographies and cultures” (Thieme, 2003a: 1) in part by embodying the tension “between the modernity which disappoints and the traditions which stultify” (Almond, 2001: 113) — a tension that marked urban fictions emerging from many parts of the world in the era of decolonization.
In the 2000s, the cultural parameters of such tensions — of what happens when “the local and the international coincide and collide” (Thieme, 2003a: 1) — occasionally became the focus of general public attention. Although Narayan’s name had often been mentioned in connection with the Nobel Prize for Literature, he did not win it. By contrast, an incisive 2002 JCL editorial entitled “Naipaul’s Nobel” interrogated the institutional workings of the 2001 Prize awarded to Narayan’s self-declared admirer V. S. Naipaul. Naipaul’s prize was awarded in the post-9/11 global moment when his conservative pro-Western political and textual stance (veiled by the elegance of his prose style and his professions of apolitical individualism) may have seemed attractive to the Academy. “If […] these speculations”, writes Thieme, “ha[ve] any substance, then the Academy has scored a spectacular own goal” (2002: 5). The editorial’s concern with the institutional and textual politics of literary prestige resonates with two benchmark monographs of the 2000s, whose impact made itself felt in various ways in JCL’s pages in the course of the decade.
One is Graham Huggan’s (2001) The Postcolonial Exotic, which paved the way for the emergence of postcolonial book history by considering (following Bourdieu) the material conditions that structure the production of books globally sold as “postcolonial”, and arguing that literary commodities emanating from global peripheries circulate in globalized literary markets under the sign of the exotic. The other is Sarah Brouillette’s incisive 2007 Postcolonial Writers in the Global Literary Marketplace. Brouillette interrogates Huggan’s distinction between “postcolonialism” (comprising localized agencies of resistance including the academic field) and “postcoloniality” (a global condition of cross-cultural symbolic exchange, powerfully regulated by the corporate publishing industry) and examines the anxious figurations of authorial and readerly positionings in the work of several globally-consecrated authors. Both books left their traces in the pages of JCL in the first decades of the current millennium. Indeed, Huggan is a JCL editorial board member, while Brouillette co-edited a special issue on “Postcolonial Print Cultures” in 2013. The publication of The Postcolonial Exotic was highlighted in the journal in the second issue of 2003, both in the Editorial and in the Books Received section. Postcolonial Writers in the Global Literary Marketplace was prefigured in the journal’s pages by Brouillette’s 2005 article on authorship in Rushdie’s Fury, summarized in section three below. In 2008, Corinne Fowler took inspiration from Brouillette’s analytical approach and used it as a springboard for a critical comparison between the critical reception, marketing, and sales of two “black British” novels published at the same time: Zadie Smith’s globally acclaimed 2000 novel White Teeth and Joe Pemberton’s much less successful (though arguably not less aesthetically valuable) novel Forever and Ever Amen (2000).
Zadie Smith’s multicultural family saga White Teeth was, as is well known, published to immediate international critical and popular acclaim. But the 2000s also saw the publication of a string of new British fictional texts from the African and South Asian diaspora. Abdulrazak Gurnah’s novel By the Sea (2001), for example, uses competing family narratives of two migrants from Zanzibar to question and complicate the stereotyping, criminalization, and dehumanization of asylum seekers in contemporary British political discourse. Monica Ali’s 2003 novel Brick Lane depicts the vicissitudes of a Bangladeshi woman and her London and Bangladeshi families. This novel sparked controversy among some leaders of East London’s Bangladeshi community, who alleged that its representation of Bangladeshi migrants dwelling in London was stereotypical.
Each of these diaspora novels received significant critical attention in the pages of The Journal of Commonwealth Literature: David Farrier’s essay (2008) considers how the language of Gurnah’s novel raised important ethical questions about the British government’s immigration and asylum policies, with reference to Jacques Derrida’s theoretical reflections on the distinction between conditional and unconditional hospitality. Sissy Helff’s (2009) essay on By the Sea also touches on the correspondence between Gurnah’s narrative and Derrida, but her consideration of how Gurnah challenges the stereotypes of the African refugee and discourses of illegal diaspora simultaneously sheds light on the construction of a certain idea of Britishness.
Jane Hiddlestone’s (2005) essay “‘Shapes and Shadows’: (Un)veiling the Immigrant in Monica Ali’s Brick Lane” also inhabits broadly the critical terrain of discourse analysis. It considers the extent to which Brick Lane subverts the Orientalist trope of unveiling an “Eastern” culture. Emphasizing the ways in which the novel draws attention to the dominant discourses and stereotypes that mediate the public understanding of British Muslims, Hiddlestone offers a nuanced account of the rhetorical significance of the novel’s shifting frames of representation; in her argument, such a technique works to complicate attempts to read the novel as a realist representation of Brick Lane. By contrast, Michael Perfect’s (2008) essay on Brick Lane focuses on the significance of the novel’s generic codes. Specifically, Perfect reads Nazneen’s integration into British society as an example of what he calls the multicultural Bildungsroman. Taking issue with Hiddlestone’s reading of the novel’s postmodern textuality on the grounds that they are overstated, Perfect argues that Ali’s use of stereotypes serves to emphasize Nazneen’s assimilation into British multicultural society.
Yet Corinne Fowler’s (2008) unflinching materialist analysis of two turn-of-the-century novels — White Teeth and Forever and Ever Amen (to which we now return) — differs from these valuable and innovative treatments of postcolonial British texts in its attention to how fiction which subverts one kind of stereotype may, at the same time, re-exoticize its own subject-matter in other ways, and thus align itself with the demands of the corporate book market discussed differently by Huggan and Brouillette. Fowler traces how a specific configuration of textual, paratextual, social, and institutional factors related to Joe Pemberton’s (2000) Forever and Ever Amen resulted in his novel’s relative lack of commercial success, which should (therefore) not be straightforwardly ascribed to an abstract and self-evident notion of “literary value”. Such a configuration included the novel’s treatment of the “postcolonial everyday”, an absence from it of self-exoticizing tropes, such as a “multicultural” sexual initiation in representations of “Britain’s literary ‘other’” (Fowler, 2008: 76), the fact that Pemberton’s novel is not set in London, his lack of Oxbridge connections, and an absence of high-powered publicity marketing campaign. Fowler ends her analysis by calling on literary researchers to attend to “a fuller range of British writing rather than confining literary discussions to a limited number of internationally acclaimed writers” (2008: 90).
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Just as importantly, in the last decade JCL became part of the intellectual sphere for the critique and interrogation of Western liberal interventionism and its colonial origins. The previous decade had already witnessed a period of such reflection — as the title of Gayatri Spivak’s monograph A Critique of Postcolonial Reason (1999) attests. In the wake of the so-called “war on terror”, the wider interdisciplinary field of postcolonial studies provided an intellectual sphere for the critique of new formations of Western imperialism. For example, the social geographer Derek Gregory in The Colonial Present (2004) traced the colonial origins of counterinsurgency in Iraq, Afghanistan, and Palestine, to question the moral arguments for Western liberal interventionism. In a similar vein, many of the contributors to a special issue of New Formations on “After Iraq: Reframing Postcolonial Studies” (2006), edited by Priyamvada Gopal and Neil Lazarus, examined how the invasion of Iraq instantiated the consolidation of imperialism and the structural unevenness of the capitalist world system.
Such political concerns may not have been addressed directly at the forefront of many of the articles published in The Journal of Commonwealth Literature during the first decade of the twenty-first century. Yet the publication of articles on particular authors, texts, and regions certainly hints at a wider concern with the politics of literary postcoloniality. In her 2006 essay “Representations of the Oil Encounter in Amitav Ghosh’s The Circle of Reason”, for example, Claire Chambers re-reads the line of flight of Ghosh’s protoganist, Alu, from India to the fictional Middle Eastern Gulf state of al-Ghazira in his 1986 novel, The Circle of Reason, in light of Ghosh’s subsequent reflections on the imaginative challenge that the global oil economy presents to novelists in the influential 1992 essay “Petrofiction”. Chambers makes a persuasive case for reading the novel as a reflection on the rhetoric of terrorism and an imaginative response to the structural inequalities of the oil economy.
The structural inequalities of the capitalist world system also inform Tim Woods’ (2003) article on Nuruddin Farah’s novel Gifts; this essay traces the ways in which Farah uses the gift as a concept–metaphor to explore the relationship of economic debt and dependency implicit in the “gift” of First World aid to Somalia. Referring to Marcel Mauss’s seminal essay on the gift, Woods considers how Farah’s novel complicates Mauss’s theory by exploring the possibility of an ethical gift that does not objectify the receiver or place them in a relationship of indebtedness. Through a careful and sensitive reading of the novel, Woods teases out the multiple dimensions of gift giving that frame the narrative, and addresses the parallels between the romance plot and the novel’s critique of First World development aid as a paternalistic gift which infantilizes African nations.
A survey of the authors and texts discussed in the ten volumes of The Journal of Commonwealth Literature published in the first decade of the twenty-first century can also tell us something about the politics of the postcolonial author function and its relationship to the global literary marketplace. Michel Foucault once suggested that the proper names of Marx and Freud refer beyond the bearers of these names to an entire body of knowledge. A similar point could be made about the proper names of authors such as Rushdie, Coetzee, or Ondaatje. These proper names do not merely stand in for a particular style of writing or a body of work; they can also work to define and delimit the generic and geographical boundaries of a postcolonial republic of letters. This is not to suggest, however, that the individual articles published on these authors during this decade simply reproduce a dominant literary canon of postcolonial texts for consumption in the metropolitan institution, as discussed below. Yet considered together, the prevalence of articles on Rushdie and Coetzee (and to a lesser extent Ghosh and Ondaatje) raises important questions about the politics and geopolitics of postcolonial literary value and canon formation.
Among the articles published on Salman Rushdie in JCL during the 2000s, Sarah Brouillette’s essay “Authorship as Crisis in Salman Rushdie’s Fury” (2005) stands out as a sophisticated set of reflections on Rushdie’s own position as a literary celebrity in the global literary marketplace; it also foreshadows some of the concerns addressed in her monograph Postcolonial Authors in the Global Literary Marketplace (2007/2011). Brouillette’s argument centres on the ways in which Rushdie’s success in the multinational publishing industry has led away “from a general attention to the politics of contemporary nation-formation, particularly within a South Asian context, to a more solipsistic interest in the status of authorship and origins within the field of cultural production for a global market” (2005: 140). By focusing on the parallels between Fury and his earlier non-fictional travel narrative about Nicaragua after the Sandinista rebellion, The Jaguar Smile (1987), Brouillette traces how Rushdie’s more recent fiction is less concerned with the ways in which political movements such as the Sandinistas are represented in the media. Instead, she suggests that novels such as Fury betray an anxiety about Rushdie’s celebrity status — particularly his “anxiety about the impossibility of authoring the political meaning of his own works” (2005: 154).
In a more generous reading of Rushdie, Andrew Teverson’s (2004) essay “Salman Rushdie and Aijaz Ahmad: Satire, Ideology and Shame” offers an articulation of the politics of Rushdie’s satire in Shame. In response to Ahmad’s polemical critique of Rushdie’s blinkered class-sensibility in Shame, Teverson patiently traces the ways in which Rushdie’s fiction never claimed to be social realist or to offer a blueprint for political change. Teverson finds that the politics of Rushdie’s aesthetics may be closer to Brecht’s views on aesthetic alienation than the Lukácsian mimetic aesthetic view held by Ahmad, and makes a persuasive case for re-assessing the political potentiality of Rushdie’s Menippean satire in Shame.
Rushdie’s satire is also explored in Rachel Trousdale’s (2005) essay “‘City of Mongrel Joy’: Bombay and the Shiv Sena in Midnight’s Children and The Moor’s Last Sigh”. Trousdale considers the ways in which Rushdie’s novels explore the promises of Nehru’s vision of a secular, pluralist India, and the limitations of this vision in combating the threat posed by an exclusionary Hindu nationalism. Hema Ramachandran’s (2005) article “Salman Rushdie’s The Satanic Verses: Hearing the Postcolonial Cinematic Novel”, on the other hand, considers the ways in which the auditory technology of cinema and the soundtracks of iconic Bombay films are mediated in The Satanic Verses. These latter essays certainly shed new and interesting light on Rushdie’s fiction, but they also tend to take its literary value for granted; in so doing they run the risk of reproducing the exclusionary grounds of postcolonial canon formation discussed above.
Alongside the essays published on Rushdie, this decade saw a burgeoning scholarly interest in the fiction of Amitav Ghosh. In addition to Chambers’s essay on The Circle of Reason (discussed above), the journal featured essays on The Shadow Lines, In an Antique Land, and The Hungry Tide. Anjali Roy’s essay (2000) “Microstoria: Indian Nationalism’s ‘Little Stories’ in Amitav Ghosh’s The Shadow Lines” begins by considering the parallels between Rushdie’s critique of Indian nationalist narratives in essays such as “The Riddle of Midnight” and Ghosh’s use of micro-histories to complicate dominant narratives of Indian nationalism in The Shadow Lines. Through an insightful reading of the novel, Roy considers how Ghosh
retells the stories of the minor personages and the unknown players of Indian nationalism to retrieve those counter-narratives occluded or appropriated by official bourgeois nationalisms through the circumscribed but close-up perspective of micro-history, which tends to focus on the local rather than the national. (2000: 42)
Cosmopolitanism is a central concern for Shameem Black (2006) in “Cosmopolitanism at Home: Amitav Ghosh’s The Shadow Lines”. This essay traces the ways in which Ghosh’s representation of the domestic sphere provides a site for exploring the gendered dynamics of cosmopolitanism. In a conceptually sophisticated article, Anshuman Mondal considers how Ghosh’s In an Antique Land and The Shadow Lines highlight the limitations of a postmodern idiom for articulating the “discrepant and ultimately incommensurable experiences of modernity” (2003: 33) in postcolonial India. Neelam Srivastava’s (2001) essay on Ghosh’s In an Antique Land offers an insightful account of Antique Land’s textual history — specifically, the ways in which Ghosh transformed the materials assembled in his doctoral thesis in social anthropology and in an essay he wrote for Subaltern Studies. By re-reading In an Antique Land alongside these important sources, Srivastava identifies a strategic humanism in Ghosh’s fiction that seeks to counter the religious separatism underpinning communal violence in India.
Like Srivastava, Terri Tomsky (2009) is cautious of making grandiose political claims about Ghosh’s fiction. In a careful reading of Ghosh’s novel The Hungry Tide, Tomsky considers how Ghosh’s focalizing characters position readers as anxious witnesses to the social, economic, and environmental struggles of subaltern people dwelling in the tide country of the Sundurbans in rural Bengal. In Tomsky’s reading, “The Hungry Tide asserts that the emancipatory possibilities of an interventionist ethics reside within the very structures of transnational middle-class privilege” (2009: 64).
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If the proper names of Rushdie and Ghosh are increasingly framed as metonyms for a certain nationalist literary form, the short fiction and essays of the Bengali writer Mahasweta Devi offer an important counterpoint to the self-conscious elitism of some contemporary South Asian fiction. In “Tribal Stories, Scribal Worlds: Mahasweta Devi and the Unreliable Translator” (2000), Minoli Salgado considers how the translation and global dissemination of Devi’s short fiction raises important questions about the politics and ethics of textual transmission. More specifically, Salgado identifies an implicit contest over textual meaning between the author and the translator, which leads to a nuanced analysis of the ways in which all translation — like representation — is necessarily inadequate.
A concern with local or “small” textual histories also informs Alex Tickell’s (2003) reflections on the literary form and rhetorical stance of Arundhati Roy’s God of Small Things. In response to criticisms of Roy’s literary commodification of South Asian culture for metropolitan consumption (such as that of Aijaz Ahmad), Tickell makes a persuasive case for reading the formal and linguistic specificity of Roy’s novel (which entails an indebtedness to popular representations of cross-caste love) as a sign of the novel’s “vernacular cosmopolitanism”.
If the exclusions of dominant Indian nationalist narratives are a significant concern for writers such as Ghosh, Devi, and Roy, the burden of representing the history of ethnic nationalism in Sri Lanka has preoccupied writers such as Michael Ondaatje and Shyam Selvadurai. In “Writing Sri Lanka, Reading Resistance: Shyam Selvadurai’s Funny Boy and A. Sivanandan’s When Memory Dies”, Minoli Salgado (2004) summarizes this dilemma well when she asserts that “Sri Lankan literature in English is increasingly read in terms of its relationship to the country’s ethnic conflict and the ability to narrate history as it is being made” (2004: 5). However, questions of sexuality, class, and gender complement and complicate readings of these novels as national allegories. Sharanya Jayawickrama (2005) makes a similar argument in “At Home in the Nation? Negotiating Identity in Shyam Selvadurai’s Funny Boy”. Tracing the ways in which the construction of national and sexual identity is registered spatially, Jayawickrama likens the violence of heteronormativity and ethnic nationalism represented in the novel to an experience of the uncanny. Again, however, this concern with the uncanny spaces of Selvadurai’s literary narration of the nation does not extend to a sustained reflection on the marketing of Sri Lankan fiction in the global literary marketplace.
The fiction of Michael Ondaatje has tended to avoid direct references to the Sri Lankan civil war — until the publication of Anil’s Ghost in 2000. In this novel, Ondaatje’s protagonist — an American forensic scientist of Sri Lankan descent — visits Sri Lanka to investigate allegations of human rights violations: a plotline that ostensibly places Sri Lanka’s recent history of ethnic violence at the forefront of the novel. Two of the JCL essays published on Ondaatje during this decade focus on Anil’s Ghost. Antoinette Burton’s (2003) “Archive of Bones: Anil’s Ghost and the Ends of History” considers how the figure of the forensic scientist seeking to recover the truth about the history of violence from human remains provides Ondaatje with a means of exploring the ethical and epistemological limitations of empirical approaches to the past. In a related but distinct discussion of Anil’s Ghost, Milena Marinkova (2009) considers how the novel makes use of witness writing to establish an affectionate relationship between his forensic scientist–narrator and the body of evidence she encounters. In Marinkova’s analysis, an “intimate gesture” of micropolitical affect which “sidesteps the exigencies of identitarianism and macro-political allegiance” (2009: 110) sheds light on the politics of Ondaatje’s diasporic vision of Sri Lanka.
Since the publication of Derek Attridge’s (2004) groundbreaking monograph, J. M. Coetzee and the Ethics of Reading: Literature in the Event, the critical framing of John Coetzee as a South African writer or a writer of South African fiction has been increasingly open to question. For Attridge, to read Coetzee’s literary corpus as an a priori national allegory is to ignore the formal singularity of his writing. This is not to suggest that Coetzee’s fiction has not responded to the history and culture of South Africa, but it is to say that the language, imagery, and narrative techniques of Coetzee’s fiction encourage readers to reflect on the ways in which the fictional world of Coetzee’s South Africa is textually mediated. As nuanced and stimulating as Attridge’s approach to Coetzee’s fiction is, it does not fully take account of the marketing of Coetzee as a South African writer in the global literary marketplace or of the ways in which the critical industry that has developed around Coetzee’s fiction shapes and influences the politics and geopolitics of postcolonial literary canon formation, particularly in Southern Africa. We return to this question in section five below.
Broadly speaking, the critical essays published on Coetzee in The Journal of Commonwealth Literature during this decade tend to wrestle with the aesthetic and philosophical implications of Coetzee’s fiction. Gilbert Yeoh’s (2003) article “Love and Indifference in J. M. Coetzee’s Age of Iron” offers a thoughtful account of how Coetzee’s fatigue with political contestation during a period of intense state repression in the latter half of the 1980s gains expression in Coetzee’s novel. In Yeoh’s account, Coetzee’s use of unreliable narration, a writing of indifference inspired by Samuel Beckett, and chiasmus in Age of Iron work to establish an ethics of love as a counterpoint to the political demands placed on writers during the apartheid era. Mike Marais’s (2001) essay on Life & Times of Michael K offers a thought-provoking account of negation and identity in Coetzee’s novel. In Marais’s account, Michael K rejects the Hegelian model of negativity that involves shoring up the identity and consciousness of the self through the negation of an external other. Instead, with reference to the thought of Emmanuel Levinas and Maurice Blanchot, Marais suggests that Life & Times of Michael K connects the writer’s concerns with the limitations of language as a means of representation and an ethics of responsibility. Tamlyn Monson’s (2003) insightful essay on Coetzee pushes the Levinasian reading of Life & Times of Michael K further by emphasizing the discontinuities between the radical ethics of Levinas and Blanchot and the position of Coetzee as a writer in the global literary marketplace:
In the same way as K and Visagie initially foreclose on the land by treating it as a farm and structuring their roles within this preconceived, controlled framework, Coetzee has fenced his work as a writer and commodified it as an intellectual product. (2003: 101)
In a nuanced reading of Disgrace, Kai Easton considered the ways in which Coetzee’s “critical interest in the colonial history and settlement of southern Africa” (2007: 114) can help to shed light on the significance of his allusions to Byron’s writings on Italy in this novel. Indeed, the historical parallels between Bryon’s travels in Italy and British colonial settlement in the Eastern Cape offer compelling evidence for reading Coetzee’s reference to Byron in Italy as a means of exploring the relationship between British romantic aesthetics and the settler discourse of the Eastern Cape. Following a careful and illuminating discussion of nineteenth-century British literary, painterly, and cartographic representations, Easton proceeds to consider the significance of Coetzee’s location of David Lurie’s Byron in Italy plot in “old Kaffraria” (2007: 122). In her reading, Coetzee’s “‘new South African’ anti-pastoral […] also contains a Romantic or utopian dimension” (2007: 125).
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In 2003, the only author on whom JCL received more submissions than Coetzee was Rushdie (Thieme, 2003b). This is, of course, not to say that Coetzee was South Africa’s or Africa’s only author represented in the journal’s pages. Apart from the articles on Farah and Ama Ata Aidoo mentioned above, Patrick Lenta’s 2009 essay on Ivan Vladislavić’s non-fictional account of his peregrinations in Johannesburg, Portrait with Keys, considers how Vladislavić textually conveys his position as a middle-class, white South African — at once a victim and a beneficiary of the socio-economic inequalities of his neoliberal homeland. In a related but different account of Southern African race politics, Antje M. Rauwerda (2009: 51) presents an insightful analysis of “displaced Rhodesian whiteness” in Alexandra Fuller’s memoir Scribbling the Cat. It is also important to acknowledge that the journal continued to publish leading scholarship on canonical African fiction during this decade. Brendon Nicholls (2005) offers an incisive analysis of the relationship between gendered bodies and “land” in Ngugi wa Thiong’o’s nationalist classic Weep Not, Child; while José Santiago Férnandez Vázquez (2002) re-reads Ben Okri’s Booker Prize-winning novel The Famished Road as a postcolonial Bildungsroman. There was, moreover, a trickle of contributions related to other major authors of the pan-African canon — Chinua Achebe, Buchi Emecheta, Tsitsi Dangarembga, and a few others — and there were timely and stimulating thematic blocs or “symposia” on cultural and intellectual trajectories from east and southern Africa (edited by James Ogude, in the first issue of 2008) and on an author whose life and work begs the question of what constitutes an “African” writer — the 2007 Nobel Prize winner Doris Lessing (edited by Susan Watkins and Claire Chambers, June 2008).
Historically, however, most Africa-based writers have not had easy access to the global literary marketplace, and this is (for a set of reasons to do with the state and status of Africa’s universities as well as its publishing sectors) reflected in the depth and nuance of the scholarly coverage of their work. Among those writers who have had a measure of international access, many have met with only limited commercial success. When, in 2005, John Thieme worried that some literary nations were being airbrushed off the map, he went on to refer specifically to two southern African writers: South Africa’s Phaswane Mpe and Zimbabwe’s Yvonne Vera. Both had died prematurely; both were memorialized (by Lizzy Attree [2005] and Ranka Primorac [2005], respectively) in JCL’s fortieth anniversary issue. For Thieme, the work of internationally-visible yet globally non-consecrated authors such as these sat uncomfortably under the sign “postcolonial”: neither Mpe nor Vera had, as he notes, “achieved the international recognition accorded to cosmopolitan writers such as Salman Rushdie, Michael Ondaatje or Arundhati Roy” (Niven and Thieme, 2005: 4). Thieme’s matter-of-fact alignment of “cosmopolitanism” with “globalization” may of course be questioned; the exclusions he is concerned with seem undeniable. In relation to Africa, they are to do with a combination of the continent’s global economic and political positioning and, complexly, the fact that, in many of its nation-states, the process of cultural decolonization took place under the sign of Pan-Africanism. On the pages of JCL, the hierarchies and fissures related to the process of global literary consecration of literary nations and regions (as opposed to texts and authors) can perhaps be glimpsed through a quick overview of the national and regional listings contained in the journal’s invaluable annual Bibliography issues.
In the 2000 edition (which, like all JCL Bibliographies, lists publications for the preceding years), the journal’s construction of the textual field of “Commonwealth literature” contained six subheadings: Australia (with Papua New Guinea), India, New Zealand (with South Pacific islands), Singapore, South Africa, and Sri Lanka. The 2001 issue saw the addition of “The West Indies” (renamed “The Caribbean” in 2004, the year when Malaysia was also added), and 2002 — of Canada. In 2005 “Central and East Africa” and Pakistan joined the listing. In 2009, a personal overview of West Africa appeared, as a prelude to the first official inclusion of the region in 2010.
The gradual increase in the visibility of Africa-related publications in the pages of the journal is heartening, and is surely one of the achievements of the 2000s. At the time of writing, the latest Bibliography issue extant (published in December 2014) continues a listing for “South Africa and Zimbabwe”. In 2001, when an early article on Yvonne Vera by Ranka Primorac (“Crossing into the Space–Time of Memory: Borderline Identities in Novels by Yvonne Vera”) was published in JCL, such a listing would, for various reasons, not have been feasible. Looking back over the first decade of the twenty-first century, the authors of this overview can do no better than express their faith in the journal’s ability to continue its careful balancing of both critical discourses and nomenclatures and the spatial scales of literary and cultural engagement, long into the future.
Footnotes
Funding
This research received no specific grant from any funding agency in the public, commercial, or not-for-profit sectors.