Professing the common wealth of literature,Leeds 1957–1969 *

Abstract

Drawing on the work of Simon Gikandi and Peter Kalliney, this article addresses the imbrication of cultural diplomacy, language and politics, and cultural capital that facilitated the rise of Commonwealth Literature at the University of Leeds. It offers a brief account of the disciplinary gestation of “Commonwealth Literature” at Leeds, addressing some of the foundational arguments in this campaign; revisits the Leeds conference of 1964 and the aid it garnered from governmental agencies; and examines the cultural work that the field is made to perform in documentation and lectures. The paper also addresses the creation of The Journal of Commonwealth Literature in the light of the Arthur Ravenscroft papers at the University of Leeds, sieving the surviving papers for interventions on the spread of English language and literary studies, and the cultural capital that they are said to help cultivate.

Anil’s Ghost (2000), Michael Ondaatje’s fourth novel set during the recent civil war in Sri Lanka, poses some difficult questions about the nature and function of art and truth in the context of war and strife. Near the end of the book, Ondaatje includes a scene that insists on the necessity of art even in troubled times; Ananda, the stonemason and craftsman returns to his traditional calling after a long period in the wilderness brought about by the war. The act of healing for the villagers involves rebuilding the statue of a shattered stone Buddha. Ananda has to paint its eyes. The narrator tells us, the stonemason “did not believe in the originality of artists” nor “did he celebrate the greatness of a faith” but knew that “if he did not remain an artificer he would become a demon” in a war that had “to do with demons, spectres of retaliation” (Ondaatje, 2000: 304).

The ending of Anil’s Ghost is perhaps an odd place to begin an essay on the creation of the academic field of Commonwealth Literature in the UK, the peripatetic worldwide organization it engendered, the Association of Commonwealth Literature and Language Study (ACLALS), and The Journal of Commonwealth Literature (JCL), which now celebrates a half century since its inauguration. If Ondaatje as a Sri Lankan-born Canadian writer who lived for a time in England can be said to exemplify national and cultural border crossings in his own personal history, and if the ease with which this novel lends itself to postcolonial debates makes it a useful point of reference, the analogy might still appear somewhat stretched: Ondaatje is a writer and Ananda an artist, but both ACLALS and JCL were created primarily as academic disciplinary fields and not artistic endeavours as such.

Yet it is in the arena of rituals and faiths, however institutionalized, that both novel and literary criticism meet. Questions about the analytic and ethical efficacy of postcolonial studies lie behind the disenchantment with literature and cultural expressivity as emancipatory forces in the closing decades of the twentieth century. In his much quoted and thought-provoking essay, “Globalization and the Claims of Postcoloniality”, Simon Gikandi’s (2001) brief discussion of the formation and exponential global spread of English language and literature (as texts and as an academic discipline) must give us pause for concern. He reminds us of some of the reasons for that disciplinary turn towards culture, away from the more economic, political, and social-structural sociology of power, neo-colonial dependency, or underdevelopment: that culture “as a social and conceptual category” seems more fleet of foot in understanding global flows and mobilities; that culture speaks both to the “diversity and richness” of locality but also functions as “the common property of the world”; that “difference and hybridity” understood through cultural practices provided potent critiques of “the Eurocentric narrative of modernity” (2001: 631–3). If so much is promised, is so much delivered? In a compelling argument that takes postcolonial literary criticism at its word, both optimism and disenchantment are registered.

In his compressed institutional history, Gikandi argues that the firm links binding English with English Literature were chipped away, ironically, by one of its major exponents, F. R. Leavis. This uncoupling made for an academic discipline and a grammar that transformed the subject of study into a “free floating signifier” (2001: 652) even as it retained many of its pedagogic assumptions about nation, morality and cultural capital. The gift of English to colonies and to independent British Commonwealth nations was thus an ambivalent one of a humanities higher educational system anchored in the disciplinary rituals and practices of English Studies, but not necessarily to its canon. That the elites of newly independent nations were inducted into this ideological formation, that many of their intellectuals and leaders were educated in the English language and also in English literature, made for a “shared body of implicit and unquestionable values” based on those invoked by Leavisite-influenced literary studies, which could include other kinds of literature. In this way, literary studies became “one of the most powerful signs of global culture” (2001: 654).

Peter Kalliney’s recently published Commonwealth of Letters (2013) works this suggestive seam of thinking first by drawing attention to the high modernist legacies linking writers of the Anglophone Caribbean with their literary counterparts in the English (and also American) metropolis, that enabled for a short time, “concrete forms of [patronage], exchange and reciprocation between London elites and West Indian artists” (2013: 118). Kalliney’s assertions are certainly supported by my earlier investigations into discursive and material networks that contributed to the postwar Anglophone Caribbean publishing boom in the UK (Low, 2002, 2011). Kalliney argues that if these metropolitan writers and critics were engaged in an “instinctive attempt to preserve the tattered remnants of modernist culture in the face of national and imperial decline”, both groups were united in “mutually converging anxieties about the proper function of intellectual work” (2013: 118). Here the Leavisite connection is also pertinent. As a student at Cambridge, Kamau Brathwaite showed early enthusiasm for Leavis’ work; later Brathwaite’s iconic lecture on Caribbean folk culture, presented at the ACLALS conference of 1971, as a “little tradition” was conceived in part as a counter-discourse to Leavis’ “Great Tradition” (1971: 213). Yet it is in Kalliney’s chapter on the African Writers Series that we find a new and compelling extension of Gikandi’s arguments. Here Kalliney points out overlapping territories and intertwined histories in the history of higher education and the humanities, the spread of English, and also literary and educational publishing. He argues that the tropes and narratives of “disillusionment” in the African Writers Series publications allowed the servicing of two different constituencies with divergent needs. In Africa where the Series was sold as textbooks, the books were “part of an effort to maintain the centrality of an English curriculum” which elevated the educational establishment as “a refuge of disinterested thought”, with “teachers” in the novels sometimes appearing as dissidents or “surrogate politicians”, thus maintaining the “integrity” and ideals of an English education (2013: 216). In the metropolis, where liberal education came under siege, the turn to “minority” writing had much to do with the emergence of “new allies”, which supported the continued centrality of literary study (if not the received canon); here, “greater value” lay in English’s global reach and success (2013: 194). Drawing on John Guillory’s Cultural Capital (1993), Kalliney argues that, with the global spread of English, the dispensation of literacy, linguistic production and symbolic capital converged, thus initiating a “conversion of cultural capital into professional status” (2013: 191). As the humanities diminished in value for the new professional-managerial classes at home in the succeeding postwar decades, this expansion abroad helped militate against the perceived growing institutional decline of English Studies.

For the purposes of this essay, I want to — somewhat crab-like — attempt a sideways but no less important move addressing some of the points raised in Gikandi’s and Kalliney’s observations, with one eye also fixed anxiously on Guillory’s insistence on attending to the distribution of cultural capital taking place in educational establishments. In particular, I want to hover over the suggestion that while English was increasingly devalued in respect of professional and technical disciplines in the education reforms of the 50s and 60s, these decades also saw, as Kalliney observes, the rise of the English language as “the primary [global] language of international diplomacy, finance, and politics — as well as literature and cultural criticism” (2013: 193). As part of the network of literary-scholarly growth of connections between Africa, Britain, and North America across the decade from the mid-1960s, Kalliney notes the creation of the Association of Commonwealth Literature and Language Studies (ACLALS), the formation of The Journal of Commonwealth Literature (JCL) followed by African Literature Today (1968), Research into African Literatures (1970), and the creation of the African Literature Association (1975) (2013: 186). The scholarly attentiveness given to literatures in English outside the Anglo or Euro-American axes has most certainly contributed to the rise of postcolonial literary studies, even if the aims and goals of these two areas of study are not identical (see Tiffin, 1996). In this essay, I shall address the imbrication of cultural diplomacy, language and politics and cultural capital that facilitated the rise of Commonwealth Literature at the University of Leeds. I propose to do this by offering a brief account of the disciplinary gestation of “Commonwealth Literature” at Leeds, addressing some of the foundational arguments in this campaign; by revisiting the Leeds conference of 1964 and the aid it garnered from governmental agencies; and by examining the cultural work that the field is made to perform in documentation and lectures from the archive. I also address the creation of JCL in the light of the Arthur Ravenscroft papers at the University of Leeds, sieving the surviving papers for interventions on the spread of English language and literary studies, and the cultural capital that they are said to help cultivate.

A little over a decade ago, I sketched very briefly ACLALS’s beginnings at the University of Leeds, describing the key figures of that narrative, before proceeding to explore the tropes employed in some of the key speeches that played a role in the creation and consolidation of the subject area (Low, 2004). As I indicated in that earlier paper, both ACLALS, JCL, and the Leeds Conference were part of a flurry of activity and writing throughout the two postwar decades that also included the steady and not inconsequential stream of literary material from writers from, especially the Anglophone Caribbean and Africa, but also India, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand that were published in Britain. London-based newspapers, periodicals, and little magazines such as the Times Literary Supplement, Life and Letters, The Spectator, and the London Magazine paid notice both to individual writers and to literature grouped generically under national, regional labels, or even impossible categories such as “writing abroad”. These would reach a substantial presence in 1965, the year of the Commonwealth Arts Festival in the port cities of London, Liverpool, Glasgow, and Cardiff. At the same time and also further afield, scholarly disciplines were already starting to coalesce as comparative literary studies. Antipodean–Canadian exchanges initiated by the “Dominions Project” at the Humanities Research Council of Canada and the Australian Humanities Research Council in the 1950s were restricted to the settler nations. The “Dominions Project” led to working parties investigating Canadian library holdings of books dealing with Australia and New Zealand (McDougall and Whitlock, 1987: 4), and some of these preoccupations were central in the various working parties on language, literature, teaching and, especially, into library holdings of Commonwealth Literature in the UK. In Africa and the then West Indies, the English and English-related curriculum of so-called Asquith special colleges of the University of London also contributed to a flurry of little magazines that provided spaces for the early creative and scholarly work of individuals that would later go on to have thriving academic and artistic careers (Kalliney, 2013; Lindfors, 1987; Low, 2011; Okunoye, 1999). In North America, particularly in Pennsylvania, Austin (Texas), and Kingston (Ontario), courses were taught and scholarly sub-groups met under the banner, “British Commonwealth Literature”; a sub-group, tabled at the 1958 annual Modern Languages Association conference, would later become the “Division of English Literature Other than British and American” with its own house journal, World Literature Written in English, published from 1966 (McLeod, 1989; Watson, 2000). Revisiting the archive, however, it behoves us to remember that the term “British Commonwealth” applied only to the settler nations until the London Declaration of 1949, which oversaw the birth of a modern Commonwealth of Nations that included former colonies outside the Dominions. Writing and scholarship of the 50s and early 60s bears traces of the semantic bleed between the two senses of Commonwealth, and this is important to bear in mind when reading texts written in this period.

A. Norman “Derry” Jeffares was instrumental in formally initiating Commonwealth Literature as a field of study in the UK. Jeffares, who was appointed to a Chair at the University of Adelaide in 1951, had taken a lively interest in Australian writing and he actively encouraged Antipodean–Canadian exchanges. In a spirited reply to Tim Watson’s more recent account of the unacknowledged overlap between postcolonial and American studies during the 1950s (Watson, 2000), Jeffares writes that it was in Australia that he began to wonder about the “parallels between Australian and Canadian [literature], both countries colonized in different ways” (Jeffares, 2000: 140). In 1957, Jeffares moved to the University of Leeds and brought some of these new interests, organizational links and research strategies with him, establishing the annual visiting Fellowship in Commonwealth Literature with University and British Council funding in 1958, and also starting a postgraduate diploma that included Commonwealth Literature, arguing that the latter complemented the study of American Literature. After establishing that other universities with interests in Commonwealth studies were not in competition with Leeds, Jeffares wrote to Sir Roger Stevens, Vice Chancellor of the University of Leeds, lobbying for more resources to make the University an “obvious centre” for this work in both language and literary study. ¹ In the same memo, Jeffares added that while the “educational importance” of the field might be taken for granted, its “political importance was perhaps even more obvious”. He indicated also that he had approached officials at the British Council who were said to have “strongly approved” of the project; Jeffares would also try governmental agencies such as the Commonwealth Relations Office (CRO). Sir Roger would later write to the CRO, repeating the main points of Jeffares’ communication to him: the “vital role” that literature would play in the “shaping” of newly independent countries; the need to establish one centre that would hold “common knowledge of what [was] done throughout the Commonwealth”; Leeds’ plans for a forthcoming international conference and also initiating a “bibliographical project which would provide a unifying source of material”. In a direct echo of Jeffares’ memo, Sir Roger added that such efforts would “serve useful educational — and political ends”. ² The Vice Chancellor’s return memo to Jeffares on his discussions at the British Council noted the Council’s general sympathy and welcoming of these activities, even if they could not offer an injection of funds to establish an Institute of this nature at Leeds. ³

Jeffares’ 1957 essay, “The Expanding Frontiers of English Literature”, published in the same year as his appointment to the Leeds Chair in English and prior to the Leeds 1964 Commonwealth Literature conference, can be read as an early manifesto for a new area of study. With its deliberate metaphoric nod towards pioneering efforts, this is perhaps the earliest published Jeffares essay on the subject, marking his concerted effort to outline what Commonwealth Literature might involve and what it might have to offer. With a firm eye on the development of Commonwealth Literature studies elsewhere, he starts out by chastising UK higher educational institutions for not moving with the times, despite the sense that England might be thought to be the “logical centre for such work”, and given that it might be taken to be the putative “root of this tree” of language and literature. Regardless of developing differently through “accidents of geography or politics, or racial blending, or social philosophies”, one would be “stupid” to “avoid recognising the spreading and burgeoning of the parent stock” that spring “from and continue English ways of living”; the study of literature must, however, be “inclusive” (1957: 363). Jeffares’ use of “organic metaphors of affiliation”, as Graham Huggan has pointed out, “while not openly cultural-supremacist” must at the very least “hint of colonial condescension” (2001: 232). In my earlier assessment of this essay, I noted that Jeffares’ developmental metaphors perform the cultural work of putting England at the very heart of the new discipline. His insistence that new nationalistic inclinations, while understandable, should not be encouraged for art is “primarily concerned with human beings” (1957: 362) is clearly part of such a strategy. However, my earlier essay accords less attention to a number of other areas which should also be highlighted. First, despite Jeffares’ brief allusions to Sri Lanka and the Caribbean, his discussion and examples are culled predominantly from an understanding of the Commonwealth in the older sense of reference, as primarily a Dominions affair. This position would change by the time of the 1964 conference. Second, the essay is concerned as much with the literature of the Commonwealth as it is about the academic study of this area, the latter being fundamentally comparative in characteristic. As regards scholarship, Jeffares is adamant that Commonwealth Literary study must address the local context — history and culture — as well as aesthetics and poetics. Finally, and to my mind more importantly, given recent discussions about globalization and postcolonial literary work, Jeffares is all too aware of the global reach of the English language: the 1957 essay contains tentative, if opportunistic and imaginative, feelers about what might be gained from such linguistic spread.

In a significant way, despite its Anglo-centric cast, Jeffares’ plea for more universalistic values is an appeal against the breakup of literary and humanistic study, and for its continued relevance: “language provides the literature, the flowering of scholarship which preserves and protects the literature is its criticism”; “insularity” is to be avoided by showing awareness of cross-cultural similarities and differences; criticism is just such a “continual reinterpretation and reassessing of values” (1957: 365). Such a pronouncement would be secured by un-chauvinistic, disinterested comparative study involving all the tools of the trade: books, exchanges, fellowships, journals, and other disciplinary resources. If Jeffares’ remarks are, as Pierre Bourdieu (1993) would characterize, the interventions of a new disciplinary entrant that must make its own way in accordance with both the practices and “logic of the field”, the competitive elbowing of other subject areas in an already well-established, crowded, and hierarchical academic world of letters is understandable. Yet it is Jeffares’ awareness of the status of the English language as a world language that adds a different layer and texture.

Jeffares’ hand in the first international UK conference on Commonwealth Literature in 1964, “Unity and Diversity in a Common Culture”, which led to the formation of ACLALS and the creation of JCL is well-known. The report and recommendations delivered at the conference and the conference proceedings published by Heinemann Educational Books make the case for the necessary and orderly progression of both academic study and the development of a literary ecology attendant to its scholarly needs: publishing, the distribution of books, exchanges, libraries and other repositories, media corporations, educational authorities, and pedagogic development. This much is also present in Jeffares’ 1964 opening speech which restages some of the themes of his 1957 essay — the importance of literature and the arts; the dangers of being “too local” or insular; the obligation to be “supranational” and “cosmopolitan”; the need to do comparative work; specific academic practices. Jeffares does all this but with one significant difference: cultural commonality no longer wears a predominantly English cultural face. Language use, its role in education worldwide and the cultural capital that come in its wake, is highlighted:

We have a situation at present where more and more people are learning English and using it as a language: not only in the English-speaking areas of the world but in areas where it is a second language, and others where it is a foreign language. There is a utilitarian aspect to this use of English as a world language: a medium for communication chosen for convenience. A common language can help to transcend internal as well as external barriers. Through it information and ideas — in politics, economics, science, and technology — can be exchanged more easily between men and women of different countries. (1965: xiii)

In addition to the “utilitarian aspect” of English use, Jeffares’ introduction contains, of course, more humanistic rhetoric regarding the arts of a nation revealing much about itself; yet this gesture is quickly qualified by a hard-nosed awareness of dissemination and spread through educational practices: the writer’s effect is more “immediate”, “his [sic] books are, increasingly, set upon the school or university syllabus and he has, as a result, a larger audience of his own people.” Furthermore, where a writer might be tempted to be too local and consequently less accessible to readers outside his/her locale, he/she will be tempered by publishers: “they — and he — know the value of an overseas market”. Given that postcolonial literary criticism has only recently addressed the imbrications of locality, exoticism, and the global literary marketplace (Brouillette, 2007; Davis, 2013; Huggan, 2001; Low, 2011), Jeffares’ remarks about publishing as primarily the business of books are perhaps prescient. His discussion of African readers and writers also underscores the relationship between cultural capital and English language use; in Africa, no less India, “English is used in a setting where education is increasingly designed for the masses rather than for a small and select elite”; in African literature, an African would see “his situation” “reflected or interpreted by his authors” (1965: xv).

It should come as no surprise that Jeffares’s opening speech, conference reports, and recommendations affiliated the Leeds conference with conferences on the role of English Language and Literature teaching particularly overseas. Instead of, for example, aligning the Commonwealth Literature meeting with the important 1962 Makerere conference on African writers of English expression, Jeffares remarks that the Leeds meeting “follows logically” (1965: xvii) from the 1961 Makerere Commonwealth Conference on the Teaching of English as a Second Language and the 1962 Cambridge conference on the Teaching of English Literature Overseas. The latter two meetings were part of a general pedagogic discussion, sponsored by the British Council, on curricular strategies to cope with expanding and diverse global, but, especially, new Commonwealth markets in English language and literature teaching. In D. S. Brewer’s candid review of these conferences, he writes, solutions to the “problems […] about language and literature discussed” must arise when “welding together a properly conducted study of language and literature, both understood in a thoroughly up-to-date way”; in a climate where the Humanities “are everywhere on the defensive”, direction must come “chiefly from English Departments” (1965: 585). It is perhaps not a coincidence then that the British Council part-funded the Leeds fellowship by paying the travel expenses and costs for visiting scholars, and also contributed to the new journal, JCL, in its early years. The Council’s history and role are worth exploring.

Formed in 1934, the British Council started life as the “British Committee for Relations with Other Countries”, a mix of government and non-governmental experts from education and business. Renamed simply the “British Council” in 1940, the new organization’s aims included the promotion of a “wider appreciation of British culture” through “encouraging the study and use of the English language” and literature, thereby also contributing to the arts, sciences, philosophy, and politics (Donaldson, 1984: 1). After the publication of the influential Drogheda Report in 1954 on Britain’s information services overseas, the Council’s work focused on education, particularly English language teaching, but it did not lose sight of cultural diplomacy goals nor of supporting British commercial and political interests more generally. Again, one needs perhaps to be reminded, as Robert Phillipson (1992) has advised, that these two areas were not seen to be mutually exclusive. The history of the Council’s involvement in English Language teaching, including teaching practice, curriculum development, textbook promotion and sales, has shown, in the words of the Council’s Annual report of 1963–64, that the organization “does not pretend to dispense charity” (quoted in Pennycook, 1994: 148). In an earlier governmental report on the teaching of English abroad, as Phillipson highlighted, there was “explicit recognition of the commercial relevance of English”; colonial schools, publishing, exchanges, the dissemination and promotion of English language were all acknowledged as performing the work of cultural diplomacy, thus strengthening “links with potential leaders of political and economic development abroad” (1992: 148; 146). The Council’s work in the 1950s was undertaken in full recognition that a rival centre of English language promotion, notably America, did exist and was growing in influence, thus presenting a putative challenge to British interests. Relations were, however, not always combative. In 1961 the Council sponsored an Anglo-American conference on English Teaching Abroad, directed at sharing information, developing educational aids, and pedagogic practices. Significantly, literary academics such as I. A. Richards were also present at the conference and his interventions reinforced the links between literature and language. Published as an appendix to the conference report, Richards positioned language acquisition within an Arnoldian cultural framework: learning to function in English was not only “representative of contemporary English-speaking thought and feeling but a vehicle of the entire developing human tradition: the best (and the worst) that has been thought and felt by man in all places and in all recorded times” (quoted in Phillipson, 1992: 167). Literary studies and language teaching were thus caught in a nexus of cultural diplomacy practices and commercial considerations.

This brief detour into British Council activity is necessary to remind us of the close linkages between literary and language studies, the publishing infrastructure that supported such linkages, and the general commercial and political motivations than underpinned such activities. I am not arguing that the British Council made funds available, enabling writers and academics to visit Leeds, to wage political, cultural or linguistic imperialism, but I am arguing that their support of Commonwealth Literature in the UK in the early years was undertaken within the contexts of the commercial advantages and the cultural diplomacy returns that such activities brought with them.

The steering committee to establish ACLALS met in 1965, drawing up the articles of the new association. These articles emphasize the need for comparative study, the investigation of the relationship between Anglophone and indigenous vernacular literatures, new kinds of English use, and mass media communications; they also promoted the fostering of research and exchange through usual scholarly channels and practices. The Secretariat would rotate triennially, moving from one Commonwealth university to another. In the first few years ACLALS produced, somewhat fitfully, a news sheet, later appearing as the Bulletin. ACLALS was supported by the Commonwealth Foundation after the latter’s creation in 1966 and the organization still remains in receipt of grants from the Foundation. ⁴ A publication including “critical articles and annual bibliographies” was also one of the recommendations put forward by the 1964 Leeds conference. It resulted in the creation of JCL.

Arthur Ravenscroft was JCL’s first editor, a role he fulfilled until 1978, when it was then passed to Andrew Gurr. In an unpublished talk delivered in 1976, Ravenscroft revealed something of the journal’s gestation. ⁵ Having arrived from the University of Rhodesia in 1963, he was asked shortly after his appointment at Leeds if he would edit a journal, which might put together “4 roneoed pages” of the year’s publications in Commonwealth Literature, assembled with the help of information sent by academics from across the Commonwealth. Ravenscroft’s reply that it would fill a good deal more pages was met by Jeffares’ quip that it only needed the addition of a few articles to make the pages a journal. Despite the casual nature of Jeffares’ response, the project was undertaken seriously. Jeffares persuaded Heinemann Educational Books (HEB) to publish the journal with arguments about the service it would perform, the “latent appetite for it” and the likelihood of profitable library sales. As educational publishers and also as the publishers of the recently released African Writers Series, HEB would, of course, have been sympathetic to such an enterprise. But Heinemann wanted the reassurance of a financial subsidy. Employing a cricketing metaphor, Ravenscroft related a jocular anecdote of Jeffares’ encounter with the British Council and the Commonwealth Relations Office:

From there we went straight to the British Council in search of the subsidy Heinemann’s had quietly thought they would need. Again Prof Jeffares batted first. Again I faced some very nasty bowling. Prof Jeffares did a second innings which warned that the nefarious Americans were thinking of starting just such a journal. I think there was also a parting threat about public proclamation of how unimaginative the British Council could be made to seem. A few weeks later the Council wrote in a friendly way that it would continue to think about the proposal.

In September 1964, the old Commonwealth Relations Office sent 2 observers to the first International Conference on Commonwealth Literature which was held in Leeds. They were very impressed; some days later, one of the observers phoned Professor Jeffares, while I happened to be in his office, and asked how the C.R.O. could help the study of Commonwealth Literature financially. Jeffares clapped his hand over the mouthpiece and asked: “How much for the annual issue of your journal?” I plucked a figure of £700 out of the air. He removed his hand and said: “£1420.” And so I became editor of a journal, the first member of which was due to be published 12 months from then, to co-incide [sic] with the Commonwealth Arts Festival of 1965 …

JCL became a three-way partnership. While it is not inconceivable that the threat of the Americans was used as a strategy to soften Council management, that it was only a ruse is also highly unlikely. Competition from the United States as regards language teaching, the textbook trade, and cultural diplomacy were increasingly significant worries when, as Phillipson observes, “American government funding for all types of educational and cultural work throughout the world became increasingly available in the 1950s onwards” (1992: 157). Allusions to American competition are also present in the correspondence relating to the proposal for an Institute of Commonwealth Studies at Leeds; for example, Sir Roger’s draft letter to the Nuffield Foundation warned that while the “dissemination of the English language overseas is the most remarkable linguistic phenomenon of history” and would remain a legacy of “British imperial power”, “several American Universities” were “increasingly aware of the possibilities” provided by the spread of English. Sir Roger added that if Britain took no action, they “might awake too late to the fact that the traditions that they have nurtured find their best expositors abroad”; “American cooperation would be most warmly welcomed” but it ought to be undertaken on “something approaching terms of equality”. ⁶ Ravenscroft’s own correspondence in the archives also registers American scholarly rivalry, if only tangentially. For example, in early discussions over a suitable date for the first issue of JCL, the 1965 June conference at Penn State College offered an opportune moment. In relation to the inclusion of an article penned by one notable US scholar on Commonwealth Literature which, incidentally, the British Council thought below par, Ravenscroft writes diplomatically, JCL “must not appear in the light of British opposition to, or assault upon, American interests in Commonwealth Literature, which are expanding very rapidly”; one way to “overcome any such suspicion among Americans is to include an American contribution in the very first issue”. ⁷

Despite Ravenscroft’s and Jeffares’ recollections, archival papers show that Jeffares approached the British Council for an initial yearly subsidy of £1020, increased after negotiations to £1420 to cope with a larger issue. Positive post-conference responses from the Commonwealth Relations Office representatives at the Leeds meeting helped. The proposed journal title, “Compass” and other proposed new world inflected titles such as “Discoveries” or “Horizons”, reflected the pioneering aspect of the discipline and the need for navigational aids. A plainer and more descriptive title was recommended by Douglas Grant who thought that such a name would do better with academic library subscriptions and sales (Ravenscroft, 1986: 2). Despite the journal being well on its way, the label “Commonwealth Literature”, and including what the nomenclature excluded or included, was still problematic, as acknowledged repeatedly in Ravenscroft’s editorials and in his private letters to friends and other academics.

A publicity flyer for the first issue of the journal announced that the periodical would “cover the whole range of writing in English throughout the Commonwealth, with the exception of writing in Britain” (later USA and the Republic of Ireland), linking scholars and writers across the Commonwealth who “share a common literary tradition in the English language and its literature and who are now occupied in the development of writing in their own countries”. The journal would publish reviews, criticism, and also “up-to-date bibliographical records”. ⁸ HEB’s print run was pegged at 2,000 copies. The first issue would appear in September 1965, to be followed by a second a year later, and henceforth the journal would appear twice annually and carry the now familiar bibliography. Despite funding coming from government sources, Ravenscroft would have editorial independence.

Although Ravenscroft did have editorial independence, archival correspondence shows that the director of publications at the British Council, Ian Scott-Kilvert, did take an interest in the first planned issue of the journal and was also not shy in making his views known. Ravenscroft responded very robustly to Scott-Kilvert’s reservations about the density and the scholarly calibre of the articles; while Scott-Kilvert’s interventions do not point to censorship they do show that the Council took an active interest in what it was funding. Early in 1965, Scott-Kilvert wrote to Jeffares objecting to the planned bibliographical section on South African Literature, adamant that the journal must exclude South Africa as it was no longer part of the Commonwealth:

The Council takes the view that the term “Commonwealth literature” must be strictly interpreted as applying to the literature only of countries belonging to the Commonwealth and that this must exclude South Africa […] Since the subsidy for the journal originates from C.R.O. funds it cannot be spent on countries which are outside the Commonwealth, and the Council therefore feels it is essential that the principle I have mentioned above should be clearly understood. ⁹

Ravenscroft chafed against such exclusions; in a letter to Neil Compton in Canada, he expressed his frustration:

(the exclusion of South Africa on the absurd grounds that it is no longer in the club) make me very dubious about the whole enterprise. Add to that, that I am no great enthusiast for whatever might be meant by “Commonwealth Literature” […] and hate the thought of acquiring a label as a result of these labours, and you have some idea of my own reservations about the whole thing. On the other hand, there is always the hope of a change of name and especially of emphasis as the journal gets into a stride. Moreover, I am all in favour of anything that widens the very insular horizons of the British complacency, so the only thing to do was to try to make it as good as one could. ¹⁰

The disquiet over the term “Commonwealth Literature” and what the journal signified extended to other issues too, in particular what the journal would concern itself with. In the inaugural editorial, Ravenscroft emphasized that “Commonwealth Literature” was simply a “convenient shorthand” and not “a perverse underwriting of any concept of a single, culturally homogeneous body of writing”. Having put the term under erasure, Ravenscroft nevertheless employed it, drawing attention to some of the themes that are still of particular interest to postcolonial literary studies more recently: the tension between locality and the need to “transcend the parochial”; the “chimera of local colour” (1965: vi); the question of value (further developed in the second editorial); the need for more knowledge, comparison, and discussion across distinct localities across the Commonwealth. What is perhaps also significant in this first public statement of intent by Ravenscroft is his insistence on building dialogue and knowledge exchanges outside that of the traditional Anglophone scholarly and literary hierarchy. The journal’s “most useful function” lay, he writes, in facilitating and forging links that need not be routed through Britain. Ravenscroft’s second editorial takes up very similar themes but also foregrounds some new anxieties: the strengths and the limitations of the impact of nationalism on literary output; concerns about metropolitan publishing’s searching “the mangrove swamps and the wide open spaces for more and newer titillations”; the urgency of, and impetus for, comparative scholarship (1966: vi). Concern with national identity increases in the third editorial which is focused on Canada, partly as a result of its Confederation centenary celebrations; national identity was, of course, also the subject of the first ACLALS conference in Brisbane a year later. The comparative method argued to be distinctive to the new area of study is actually pursued indirectly, by offering articles on Africa literature as a counterpoint; to Canada this yields the editorial reflection that “poets who have grown up under a transplanted English educational system, but not in a British-settled society,” seem to be “largely free from a deeply ingrained metropolitan poetic convention” that results in a greater degree of experimentation with language (1967: vi). Ravenscroft’s remaining editorials up to 1970 would repeatedly return to the “fuzzy blanket-thinking about Commonwealth Literature” (despite a deep desire for comparative thinking), and the scholarly difficulties of balancing meta, post, or trans-national critique with an attentiveness to locality and specificities. Writers, he goes on to say, have to avoid a “spurious internationalism whose real affinities are with ‘airport art’” and an all too “precious parochialism” and “provincialism” (1969: iv). In this brief assessment of JCL editorials in these first five years of its life, we see that many of the early concerns recur even in more recent debates in postcolonial literary studies.

The research undertaken thus far points to a particular configuration or assemblage of forces, anxieties, and institutions that worked to render the soil favourable for Commonwealth Literature to take root at Leeds, even though its eventual shape did not match what was foreseen. Helen Tiffin, for example, has argued that the insistence on comparative methodology would recede given the distinctiveness and concerns of “individual literatures”; these would dominate over the next decade (1983: 17). Commonwealth Literature did not, of course, begin at Leeds; any history of the subject area, indeed of postcolonial literary studies, will have to take into account the development of literary studies elsewhere. However, as both Gikandi and Kalliney suggest, these were based on the legacies of English Studies. Much more needs to be undertaken than I have done here to flesh out those distinctive and particular local configurations — educational, academic, publishing, governmental, and non-governmental agencies — that make literary studies what it is on the ground at any moment in time. Given the pace of globalization over the last half century, the production, circulation, and the value attached to literature worldwide, the institutions that support cultural industries and the cultural capital they generate need investigation. Yet as publishing, educational, and cultural industries become more and more interconnected, the comparative method advocated by Commonwealth Literature in its early days might grow in importance, even if what we compare is not of literary texts per se but also of institutions and locales.

Finally, in the light of these findings on literature teaching as cultural diplomacy and the growth of a new professional class, we must take a deep breath to pause over that most difficult issue of all. At the heart of Guillory’s understanding of the problem of literary canon formation as one of the differentiated and unequal distribution of cultural capital, he observes that reading and writing are “complex social phenomenon” taking place within “social and institutional contexts”. We must thus ask, “Who reads? What do they read? How do they read? […] Who writes? In what social and institutional circumstances? For whom?” (1993: 18). In Anil’s Ghost, Ondaatje invokes the religious symbolism accruing to pietàs in the book’s closing pages despite the realization that art has few messianic properties of its own to right social injustices, trauma, or conflict. However, when Ananda practises his traditional profession — the painting of eyes — readers are given a novelistic instance of transcendence and peace. Such moments foreground rituals and faith in one’s craft. Can this metaphor carry over to all of us professing the common wealth of literature even when the profession of literary studies is not artisanal but institutional? Ananda paints the Buddha’s eyes in order to see the world with new eyes and to transform stone into sacred icon; that there is a direct relationship between “artificer” and village is evidenced in the way Ananda is supported by the villagers with (and for) which he works. Gikandi draws attention to a new global culture of literary professionals who have grown up first with Commonwealth and then postcolonial literary studies and reminds us that they are not synonymous with the dead Guinean stowaways found in the bowels of a cargo plane at Brussels airport. Gikandi asks, are these professional “émigrés the same as those who cross national boundaries in dangerous circumstances? What, indeed is the consensual community shared by these two groups?”. I, for one, who has profited from the global expansion of literary studies, will continue to be haunted by such differences.