The Journal of Commonwealth Literature : The 1980s

Abstract

This article reviews the state of Commonwealth literary studies in the 1980s and the place of The Journal of Commonwealth Literature in showcasing key critical trends that led to the flourishing of postcolonial literary studies in the 1990s and after.

Despite the conventional adoption of the 1990s as marking the formation of the field of postcolonial studies, it is nevertheless 1983 that we must take as the totemic date for the deployment of the term in an exclusively non-temporal sense in academic debate. In that year Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, then of the University of Texas at Austin, chaired an MLA panel titled Colonialist and Postcolonialist Discourse. Her co-panellists were Edward W. Said, Homi K. Bhabha, then at the University of Sussex, and William Pietz, who has since left academia to work in green politics and neurocognitive training. Spivak, Said, and Bhabha have long been hailed as providing the most significant early theoretical templates for the field of postcolonial studies, so that the 1983 panel — coming half-way as it did between the early theoretical publications of the 1970s (Rodney, 1972; Said, 1978; Wallerstein, 1974, 1979, 1980), and what was to later become a veritable flood from the 1990s — acquires special significance in this regard. ¹ With respect to The Journal of Commonwealth Literature, its place in consolidating what later came to be known as Postcolonial Studies throughout the fervent 1980s has to be explored in view of four different yet interrelated axes, namely: (1) the overall impact of critical theory in challenging the centrality of the West and the concomitant emergence of various minority discourses such as feminism, ethnic studies, lesbian and gay studies, and postcolonialism that came to exemplify this challenge; (2) the steady shift in evaluations of the literary−aesthetic domain from the analysis of texts to the analyses of the over-determining discursive formations of which they are seen to be a part; (3) the rise of interdisciplinarity in the human sciences, especially in the emphasis on the “readerly” nature of cognate disciplines such as history and anthropology and the progressive significance of literary texts and literary methodologies for organizing and thinking about such disciplines; ² and (4) the increasing popularity of award-winning writers from the formerly colonized world on curriculum design and reading habits. That Gabriel García Márquez (1982), Wole Soyinka (1986), Naguib Mahfouz (1988), Nadine Gordimer (1991), and Derek Walcott (1992) all won Nobel Prizes in the long 1980s only signalled the maturation of a process that had been in slow gestation but accelerated in that decade. Add to this Salman Rushdie’s 1981 Booker Prize for Midnight’s Children and the worldwide controversy surrounding the Satanic Verses in 1989 and 1990, and we see that the decade of the 1980s was crucial for laying the agenda for literary studies in the decades that were to follow. The four axes we have noted must collectively be taken as signs of the inexorable rise of different and vigorous communities of production, interpretation, and consumption shaped around concerns deriving from and about the formerly colonized world, with significant impact on the shaping of literary taste and cultural values well beyond that world.

Critical to the shaping of postcolonialism was also the rise of journals specifically dedicated to the field. Taking Commonwealth Literature and Postcolonial Literature as part of a single continuum, Ira Raja and Deepika Bahri (2012) divide journals in the field into three overlapping categories:

1. Those journals that have a distinctly literary−critical inflection, either with a mixture of creative and critical writing, such as Kunapipi (1979), Wasafiri (1984), and Moving Worlds (2001), or those that have an exclusively critical bent, such as The Journal of Commonwealth Literature (1965), the Journal of Postcolonial Writing (formerly World Literature Written in English, 1970), and ARIEL: A Review of International English Literature (1970);

2. Those journals with a focus on area studies, such as Research in African Literatures (1970; Africa), Meanjin (1940; Australia and New Zealand), South Asian Review (1976; South Asia), Pretexts (2000; South Africa), and Callaloo (1976; the Black Diaspora);

3. Those journals of a broadly interdisciplinary purview, such as Interventions (1998) and Postcolonial Studies (1998). ³

Significantly also, some of the most celebrated and highly debated essays in postcolonial literary studies by scholars as diverse as Fredric Jameson (1986), Aijaz Ahmad (1987), Gayatri Spivak (1985), Abdul JanMohamed (1983), and Homi Bhabha (1985) appeared in non-Commonwealth or postcolonial-type journals. Within this broad range of journals, the Journal of Commonwealth Literature must be seen as an early vanguard in the field, especially with respect to showcasing the literatures of the newly-independent Commonwealth nations.

The push at introducing Commonwealth literature into the curriculum that started with A. L. McLeod at SUNY, A. Norman Jeffares at Leeds, and Bruce Sutherland at Penn State College (later University) and others in the 1960s was oriented toward exemplifying a national or hemispheric consciousness. Comparativism was much sought-after but rarely achieved in the pioneering journals in the field, something that was highlighted in several JCL editorials of the 1980s. In an editorial of March 1980 Alistair Niven stated that JCL hoped to “encourage contributors to write more comparative articles — establishing links (but not manufacturing them) between different literatures of the Commonwealth” (1980: 4). By 1984 this hope had turned into a veritable lament:

I am tempted to speak of “unity in diversity” or some such conference-sounding phrase, but with what conviction? As I look through back issues of JCL over nearly twenty years I see remarkable evidence of the English language flowering in many different forms but I fluctuate from month to month about the identifiable coherence of all this productivity. JCL has no difficulty in securing excellent articles for publication — we regretfully turn away many that only limitations of space prevent us from printing — but very few of those submitted are truly comparative or show evidence of cross-fertilization between the various areas of the Commonwealth. Is it significant that in this issue our essay on recent Australian poetry is by one of the best-respected established Australian poets, Chris Wallace-Crabbe, just as it was Peter Porter in an earlier issue who superbly evaluated Les Murray? We have a Canadian on Davies, an Indian on Chaudhuri, and a Maltese on Maltese poetry. There are many exceptions, in this issue as in others, but is there any overriding sense in Commonwealth literary studies today of cultural interaction? This journal would welcome more articles from people of one society writing about literature in another and more comparative pieces of the kind which Gillian Whitlock has written for Volume XX, no. 1, comparing the sketches and stories of Henry Lawson, C. L. R. James and Susannah Moodie. But do such articles run counter to a prevailing isolationism and nationalism in individual Commonwealth literatures? Do the oft-heard arguments that Europeans cannot be useful critics of African writing or that Poms cannot speak of Australia without condescending to it have their parallel in every area of the Commonwealth so that few people feel confident about commenting on books outside their own immediate environment? The evolution of Commonwealth literary studies was once one of the great hopes for cultural contact across continents. Have we lost direction or am I imagining things? (Niven, 1984: i)

Niven’s primary lament about the lack of cross-cultural fertilization is another way of noting the lack of comparative work in the field. And yet the way he couches the lament also suggests that Commonwealth literature was considered primarily as a vessel for bearing culture, perceived in part as an entity that might also be translated from the literature to the contexts beyond it. The move from the notion of the Commonwealth text as expressive of a particular culture to that of literature in general as being reflective or nominative rather than semiotic is one that would be robustly challenged later in post-colonial studies. But what Niven notices about the nationalism and isolationism of Commonwealth literary criticism was not to be taken idly, since it also meant that that criticism was overly fixated with explicating narrow parameters for understanding this exciting new writing.

By 1988 however, there appeared to have been a sea change in Commonwealth literary criticism. This time Niven was to note, with some approval:

Many of us who attended this year’s conference of the European branch of the Association of Commonwealth Literature and Language Studies in Nice were struck by the almost routine way in which comparative and exploratory topics were the order of the day. We are a long way from those gatherings of ten years or more ago when “What is Commonwealth literature?” vied with “Can the English language develop its own forms in different countries?” as the hoariest theme of the event. The comparative approach is emphasised by the three writers who contribute to the symposium on new critical approaches to Commonwealth literature which we publish in this issue and it will be the predominating theme of the Silver Jubilee Conference of ACLALS at Kent in August 1989. There is in these new developments in criticism a strongly historical bias, with much greater emphasis than before on the place of indigenous and immigrant minorities. Commonwealth literature is no longer seen as a single movement, albeit a slightly iconoclastic one, which is trying to break down a metropolitan monolith. It is fractured and complex, achieving its energy from different currents which converge, as in the sea, from many sources. The critic’s task is to recognise this diversity and to resist the tendency of the past to examine a single connection — usually that between the new literature, perceived as a national entity, and England. (1988: 1; emphasis added).

The growing interest in indigenous writing, especially in Australia and to a lesser degree in Canada was by no means insignificant in altering the terms of comparativism in the field, but by far the most important factor in inducing the new comparativism was the increased number of new migrants from the global south to the global north from the period of the politicization of oil prices in 1973 (Lazarus, 2004). While several economies in Africa and the Caribbean were already struggling leading up to that period, many of them went on to collapse following the OPEC price hikes. This led to major economic migrations from these regions to Europe, North America, and other parts of the global north. There have been more African-born Africans migrating to the United States annually since 1970 than the annual average transported for the entire 400-year period of slavery. This amazing fact was posted on Barack Obama’s campaign website during the Democratic Party presidential nomination contest in 2008, but had previously been given wide circulation from an article by Sam Roberts published in The New York Times in 2005. ⁴ Similar figures may be cited for population movements out of South Asia, Latin America, and the Caribbean for the same period, all of which are the areas prominent in Commonwealth and Postcolonial Studies. In the case of Australia, the Vietnam War had already triggered major migration of Vietnamese to Australian shores such that by the late 1980s these new migrants had begun to contribute and change the cultural milieu that was Australian literature (Murphet, 2012; Ommundsen, 2011). And for Canada the government’s introduction of new immigration policies in 1967 meant that the way was opened for the arrival of immigrants from non-traditional European sending countries, such that by the 1980s the bulk of immigrants came from Africa, South Asia, and China (Adelman et al., 1994). We should note too that 1973 also marked a significant moment for Israeli–Palestinian relations, and that the low intensity conflicts that had run continuously from 1947 and led to wars in 1967 and 1973 led to many levels of Arab migrations to other parts of the world (Bayeh, 2015; Hage, 1997).

Niven’s comments about the energy that Commonwealth literature derives from various currents and sources is also not insignificant in understanding the shift from isolationism to comparativism. And yet, the sources of energy must be traced much further afield. For primarily the challenge to the Eurocentric canon and the dominant critical perspectives that had been enshrined around it were first made manifest in the Civil Rights movement of the 1960s. An immediate outcome of the movement was the rise of ethnic studies programs in the US. Thus the first African American Studies program was established at Berkeley in 1968 and by the 1980s it had been joined not only by other African American programs but also a range of ethnic studies offerings. The key feature of these new initiatives was that they were first and foremost interdisciplinary, and by the same token also comparative, even if in an often intra-hemispheric rather than cross-regional sense. In Britain on the other hand, the coming of age of the generation of immigrants that had arrived in the country shortly after the Second World War (the Empire Windrush generation of 1947), and of their children, meant fresh agitations both about social conditions and also concomitantly about how these new immigrants and their descendants were represented in public discourse and in the curriculum. ⁵ The various London riots of the 1980s were collectively a critical threshold in this respect. While the riots were primarily aimed at the Metropolitan Police, the social ferment that they signified went well past the insensitive racial policies of the time. Rather, as Stuart Hall was to note in several interventions, the race riots were the sign of a new claim to what constituted Britishness that was being put forward by post-Second World War immigrants and their children. ⁶ The indirect upshot of this was the pressure that was put on the curriculum to come to terms with these new realities and to acknowledge that at least up to that time “there ain’t no black in the Union Jack”, to appropriate the felicitous title of Paul Gilroy’s book of 1991. From a more literary standpoint, Hanif Kureishi’s 1985 screenplay for the film My Beautiful Laundrette, directed by Stephen Frears, provided a particularly fruitful way to understand how much the new generation of immigrants had re-appropriated extant notions of Britishness. In the film an extended Pakistani family shows itself adept at reproducing Thatcher’s ideology of the self-help entrepreneurial economy. But one key inflection of Kureishi’s shows us is that in this new economy there are no secure classifications of racial hierarchies. The Pakistani Omar takes over his uncle’s ailing launderette business and promptly hires Johnny, his English former school mate with an explicitly white supremacist past but now a struggling and unemployed school drop-out hanging out with other embittered white friends on the streets. The theme of white loitering versus the immigrant quest for stability is evident from the start of their encounter. That the movie shows them in a budding homoerotic scene at the end does not obviate the essential master/slave dynamic that determines the economic interactions between Omar, the boss, and Johnny, his always-obedient worker. Even though My Beautiful Laundrette does not provide the kind of cross-cultural interaction that Niven had in mind (i.e., that between different areas of the Commonwealth), by staging this particular South Asian/White interaction within a Thatcherite milieu of painful economic transformation Kureishi suggests a new idiom of race relations fully sensitive to changing historical conditions. This makes Niven’s model only one of the many that were to be sought for in reforming the Commonwealth literary criticism of the 1980s.

Several of the new ethnic studies courses in the US taught Commonwealth literature as a counterpoint to standard Euro-American canonical texts in hope of literary dialogue outside of the ex-colonial metropolitan centres. If comparativism was a recognizable fact in Commonwealth literary studies by the time of Niven’s editorial of 1988, then it must also be noted that this started initially from comparing Australian and New Zealand literature to those from other parts of the Commonwealth. Of the three pioneering curriculum innovators we noted earlier, both A. L. McLeod and Bruce Sutherland were Australian specialists. Lyn Innes, long regarded as one of the most important critics working under both Commonwealth and Postcolonial critical rubrics, was born in Australia before moving to the United States to do her PhD at Cornell on Black and Irish Cultural Nationalism. She spent over three decades at the University of Kent at Canterbury, crafting a comprehensive understanding of the field through various interventions and the supervision of dozens of students. The titles of her books reveal the steady pursuit of Commonwealth and postcolonial literary history from decidedly comparative perspectives: The Devil’s Own Mirror: The Irish man and the African in Modern Literature (1990); Chinua Achebe (1992); Woman and Nation in Irish Literature and Society, 1880−1935 (1993); The Cambridge Introduction to Postcolonial Literatures in English (2007); A History of Black and South Asian Writing in Britain (2008a); and Ned Kelly (2008b), among various others. While the bulk of her writing was published in the 1990s, there is no doubt that her formation as a Commonwealth–Postcolonial comparativist took inspiration from similar sources to that of McLeod and Sutherland before her. If India, through Gayatri Spivak, Homi Bhabha, Arjun Appadurai, Dipesh Chakrabarty, Gyan Prakash, and others came to be perceived as the powerhouse of postcolonial studies in the 1990s, perhaps it is important to also acknowledge the place of Australia in the first instalment of what was later to become the biggest challenge to the dominance of the Western canon and from the formerly colonized world. Hence we must note that the Australian nationality of the trio of Bill Ashcroft, Gareth Griffiths, and Helen Tiffin was not entirely accidental and that the publication of their The Empire Writes Back (1989) was perhaps the most important publishing event for Commonwealth and postcolonial literary studies in the entire decade, second only to Edward Said’s Orientalism (1978) in its overall impact. The Empire Writes Back was comparative in the fullest sense of the word: it sought at once to generate a new paradigm of cross-cultural criticism that would take the new ‘englishes’ (the small letters and plural form was one of their signal innovations) and illuminate different ways in which these literatures were posing a challenge to the centrality of the Western canon. After laying out what they understood by the term post-colonialism, Ashcroft et al. stated their manifesto in plain terms:

In this sense this book is concerned with the world as it exists during and after the period of European imperial domination and the effects of this on contemporary literatures.

So the literatures of African countries, Australia, Bangladesh, Canada, Caribbean countries, India, Malaysia, Malta, New Zealand, Pakistan, Singapore, South Pacific Island countries, and Sri Lanka are all post-colonial literatures. The literature of the USA should also be placed in this category. Perhaps because of its current position of power, and the neo-colonizing role it has played, its post-colonial nature has not been generally recognized. But its relationship with the metropolitan centre as it evolved over the last two centuries has been paradigmatic for post-colonial literatures everywhere. (1989: 2)

Even though the inclusion of the United States under the rubric of postcolonialism was to be much criticized, what Ashcroft, Griffiths, and Tiffin did by this wide-ranging and bold statement was to insist on seeing all the literatures from the formerly colonized Anglophone world as sharing a number of features. This, by implication, required that they be best understood comparatively. This is certainly the case for comparing minoritarian African American and ethnic literatures with postcolonial writing, since there are many elements that they feature in common. ⁷ Ashcroft, Griffith, and Tiffin’s proposition for literary comparison across all areas of the decolonized world was an extraordinarily bold statement of intent, and whether one agreed or disagreed with them the idea of a global cross-cultural mode of postcolonial literary study that was to be taken for granted in the 1990s was firmly put in place.

In the end, The Empire Writes Back faltered precisely on the issue of the assumed addressee of the postcolonial literatures. It was soon felt that the focus on writing back to Empire placed these works in an overly monological and adversarial contest with their former colonial masters, and that in reality the relationship was much more subtle and thus required a more complex model of analysis. The inflection of “anti-”(as in anti-colonial) was felt to have been folded too easily into the postcolonial, something that has affected lay views of the field to this day. This inflection cannot be entirely attributed to Griffiths et al., but they certainly helped in consolidating it. The flip side of writing back was of course the idea of influence and mimicry, and both sets of terms seemed always to shadow each other in any adversarial contest. The question of influence and what the precise relationship might be between Commonwealth writers and the Western canon had already been raised with regard to Derek Walcott’s comprehensive intertextual borrowings much earlier in the decade. In a 1982 New York Review of Books piece, Helen Vendler criticized what she termed the “ventriloquism” of Derek Walcott, future Nobel Prize laureate, whom she found “peculiarly at the mercy of influence”. This accusation implied a fundamental lack of understanding of what constituted Commonwealth and indeed postcolonial comparison, something that as we saw alters by the time of Niven’s 1988 editorial in JCL. Indeed, there is no better riposte to Vendler’s criticism than the words of Walcott himself, provided through the character of Shabine in the poem “The Schooner Flight”:

I know these islands from Monos to Nassau,

a rusty head sailor with sea-green eyes

that they name Shabine, the patois for

any red nigger, and I, Shabine, saw

when these slums of empire was paradise.

I’m just a red nigger who love the sea,

I had a sound colonial education,

I have Dutch, nigger, and English in me,

And either I’m nobody, or I’m a nation. (Walcott, 1990: 346).

Shabine lays claim here to what Walcott himself asserts in the versatile comprehensiveness of his poetry where the entire tradition of poetic discourse makes itself present in the mixture of French, Dutch, English, and Creole. As Robert Leyshon puts it in a review of Walcott’s What the Twilight Says (1999), the poet’s display of an

“Adamic” sense of entitlement, of his ability to name the world (and not just the New World), to confront the muse of history with neither recrimination nor despair, is an absolute conviction, and is articulated throughout with a religious, at times even messianic, force. (Leyshon, 2005: 197)

The “neither recrimination nor despair” that Leyshon points to with regard to Walcott may be generalized as a challenge to any interpretative model that would reduce Commonwealth and postcolonial literature to mere adversariality or mimicry of Western canonical forms.

Two contradictory impulses came to underpin anthologies and collections in the field of Commonwealth Literature into the 1980s. The first is the principle of coevalness, and the other is that of an implicit hierarchy among the regions that provide the sources of that literature. The principle of coevalness was easily defended under the rubric of Commonwealth Literature, since the term Commonwealth itself was inherently a convenient political as opposed to literary label and was used from the beginning to demarcate the literature coming out of Britain’s former colonies from the rest of English Literature. This principle was later to be discarded under the growing influence of postcolonialism from the early-1990s onwards, but not after some conceptual confusion under the new term. As a rule postcolonialism organized the field of literary studies according to a variant model that did not necessarily privilege the Commonwealth as such, but rather sought to bring together literatures from different parts of the global south. Thus, while in Commonwealth literature anthologies or courses it was rare that any justification was sought in bringing together Anglophone writing from Africa, South Asia, the Caribbean, Australia, and Canada between the covers of a single umbrella, and in excluding from this company the literatures of Latin America or the Arab world, for example — under the rubric of postcolonialism the literatures of all these places were read alongside one another. ⁸

In contrast, the principle of implicit hierarchy is still shared by both Commonwealth and postcolonial models of interpretation. This is mainly because of the category of race and how it is thought to cross-articulate with deep questions of historical oppression. Hence Kenyan literature is considered intrinsically more postcolonial than say Canadian literature, given that the first was shaped in large measure by a rabid and oppressive settler-cum-administrative colonialism and is from the Third World, while the second draws from the dynamics of settler colonialism and is obviously centred in a developed economy. It does not help that Canadian literary scholars, unlike their Australian counterparts, have not been at the vanguard of setting the agenda for postcolonial literary criticism. However it might be ventured from a historical and comparative perspective that Irish and Indian literatures on the one hand are more postcolonial than, say, Nigerian and Australian literature on the other, due to the much more complicated character of colonial space-making that affected the first two. This is of course to ignore the complex nature of Australian literature and the fact that far from being just the literature of settlers, it is also fed by a rich tributary of Aboriginal and diasporic features (Vietnamese-, Lebanese-, and even Indian-Australian). Indeed, the rise of diaspora studies has come to put pressure on postcolonialism to justify its unreconstructed reliance on models of methodological nationalism. Methodological nationalism implies the assumption that the nation is the natural container for understanding politics and society. This has been seriously questioned by scholars of migration and diasporas (Glick Schiller and Wimmer, 2002). The often violent birth of nations following colonialism (think of India and Pakistan, Algeria and Angola) served to install an idea of the epochality of the nation-state, guaranteeing that it provided the preferred horizon for elaborating social, political, and cultural history. Decolonization succeeded in elevating the struggles and sacrifices of political elites against colonialism to the level of an ontological necessity and thereby obliterated other modes of analysis that were not seen as central to that model. Methodological nationalism adopts the nation as the main horizon for understanding society and its cultural products. Thus even postcolonialism’s trenchant critiques of the nation-state are effectively a privileging of methodological nationalism. Diaspora studies, on the other hand, insist on seeing the nation-state as only one, and sometimes the least significant vector, for understanding societies and the cultures that they produce. Rather, the emphasis is on the multi-striated character of identity stretched over transnational borderlands, and the concomitant opportunities and pitfalls that they produce for understanding such identities in the first place. While Arjun Appadurai’s (1996) Modernity at Large provided the first coherent theoretical framework for understanding these multi-striations, diaspora studies has since evolved extensive models that encourage us to review the main terms of postcolonial studies and the critical explorations of the Commonwealth that preceded it. ⁹ It is not surprising then that in the 1980s most of the literary criticism to be found in JCL, while increasingly comparativist, still remained securely positioned within a nationalist as opposed to diasporic methodology.

Even more important than the frailty of comparative frameworks that were first suggested for Commonwealth literary studies was the ever-looming issue of context and how to stipulate it for the literatures in question. The shift in the perception of literary historical context had already been first suggested by Albert Memmi, Aimé Césaire, C. L. R. James, Frantz Fanon, and others from the 1950s. Thus by 1955 Aimé Césaire had outlined the earliest form of colonial discourse analysis in his monumental Discours sur le colonialisme. He was followed in rapid succession by Albert Memmi and Frantz Fanon in setting out a mode of cultural analysis that was highly sophisticated rhetorically as well as refracting fresh revolutionary, political, and cultural ideals. From the Caribbean we might note the works of C. L. R. James, Édouard Glissant, George Lamming, Wilson Harris, and V. S. Naipaul, each of whom raised key questions about nation and narration, the struggle between universalism and localism in the literature of the newly independent nations, and the fraught intersections of the aesthetic, the ethical, and the political dimensions of these new forms of writing. Politics and social formation were significant vectors for understanding the literary historical context. Throughout the 1980s these early concerns with historical context were given a more complex theoretical inflection by Edward Said, and further consolidated in the 1990s in the work of Gayatri Spivak, Homi Bhabha, and Abdul JanMohamed. The analytical models of colonial discourse analysis that these critics elaborated were in their turn joined to the interdisciplinary offerings of non-literary scholars such as Arjun Appadurai (anthropology), Dipesh Chakrabarty (history), and Achille Mbembe (political science) to foreground a heady theoretical and cultural mix that inspired a lot of lively debates in the field of postcolonial studies. However, the collocation of colonial discourse analysis and the interdisciplinary infusions from outside literary studies had the net effect of shifting emphasis in the field decisively away from the examination of literary and aesthetic products as such and toward the exploration of their discursive contexts and conditions of production. The study of rhetorical devices made way for that of discursive ensembles, but discursive ensembles were not couched necessarily in historical terms. ¹⁰ At the same time literary analysis proper was also gradually transferred to the study of culture, whether of the highbrow or popular variety. In postcolonial cultural studies the device of the expressive fragment that was somehow taken to reflect the social totality of which it was a part became commonplace, and the intercourse between discourse analysis and the study of culture was firmly established. By the end of the 1980s context had become integrated into text in certain branches of postcolonial literary studies and it was the text alone that was taken to illuminate history. The contexts of history were put to many uses and yet strictly speaking, after Said’s Orientalism (1978) and Culture and Imperialism (1993), the interdisciplinarity of postcolonial theory did not manage to provide a persuasive account of literature and history simultaneously. The distance of this vein of cultural studies from the Marxist-inspired version practised by scholars at the University of Birmingham’s Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies founded in 1964 by Richard Hoggart and later counting Stuart Hall and Paul Gilroy among its luminaries was soon being lamented by various observers. ¹¹ It has to be noted, however, that the trends that were manifested in the study of postcolonial literatures in the 1980s and into 1990s were of a piece with similar dispositions evident in literary studies more generally, which from at least the early 1980s had been heavily impacted by the poststructuralist and neo-formalist approaches of Michel Foucault, Jacques Lacan, Pierre Bourdieu, and Mikhail Bakhtin.

Since much of the literatures of formerly colonized societies were being introduced to a Western audience that was either largely ignorant about the cultures of these places or even worse still had views deeply jaundiced by colonial history, the early critics of Commonwealth literature were obliged to perform the functions of both education and revision. This was far from straightforward. Thus, for Commonwealth literature from Africa, for example, it was not uncommon to take the realism of, say, Chinua Achebe or Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o or Ayi Kwei Armah as providing testaments to the sociological realities of their various cultures and backgrounds. The assumption that these literatures shared a community of values with other non-literary discourses had already been asserted as a central premise in the general conceptions of the role of literature for the newly emergent African nations. As Anthony Kwame Appiah points out, African literature was thought to “reflect the recapitulation of the classic gestures of nation-formation in the domain of culture” (1992: 98). Alongside this impulse was also the sometimes pedantic urge to define an ambit of “authenticity” for African literature. Thus a prescriptivist standpoint was put forward by the notorious troika of Chinweizu, Onwuchekwa Jemi, and Ihechukwu Madubuike in Toward the Decolonization of African Literature (1980). To the troika’s accusation that Soyinka’s work was inauthentic, the writer famously quipped: “The tiger does not go about proclaiming its tigritude; it pounces” (Soyinka, 1975: 42). ¹² A 1984 JCL article on Wole Soyinka’s Death and the King’s Horseman by David Richards turns the entire idea of authenticity on its head by showing how the proverbial underpinnings of Death reveal different layers of incomprehension for both Yoruba and British characters. Given that even characters as culturally competent as the Praise-Singer are bewildered by Elesin Oba’s cryptic chant of the Not-I bird, and that much later when Elesin has failed in the ritual suicide and is confronted by the angry Iyaloja the two of them speak in the same series of proverbs but seem to be mutually incomprehensible, Richards suggests that at least in this play authenticity is far from self-evident. Rather, it is a problem that must be scrupulously worked at, even by those who assume themselves to be native to the traditional discourses of orality so lavishly provided by Soyinka in the play. By this Richards is also inadvertently proffering an answer to Niven’s query regarding the unwritten rules that debar scholars from one region of the Commonwealth from writing about literatures from another. This is a question that is the nightmare of graduate students in the field everywhere, and is by no means one that has been satisfactorily negotiated in the field of postcolonial studies. Authenticity, we might extrapolate from Richards, is a threshold of interpretative competence that does not remain stable but has to be continually augmented by deeper and deeper commitment to the discursivity of culture itself, even if that culture happens to be one’s own.

Even if not necessarily embracing the heady new protocols of theory-inflected criticism that was to gain ascendency in the field from the 1990s, by the late 1980s critics such as Derek Wright (1988) and Timothy Brennan (1989) attempted what we must now see as a revamping of the standard protocols of Commonwealth literary criticism from a sympathetic yet rigorously critical standpoint. These are just two examples, but their number can readily be added to with reference to some of the fine work that appeared on the pages of JCL in the mid-to-late 1980s, such as those by Judie Newman (1985), Chris Tiffin (1985), Elaine Savory Fido (1986), Stephen Slemon (1988), Hena Maes-Jelinek (1987), and David Richards (1984), as already noted.

Derek Wright opens his essay “Orality in the African Historical Novel: Yambo Ouloguem’s Bound to Violence and Ayi Kwei Armah’s Two Thousand Seasons” with the memorable words: “The transmutation of oral literary forms into written ones is an uncertain and unpredictable process, and the survival of the styles and narrative techniques of the oral story-teller into the modern African novel is an especially haphazard affair” (1988a: 91). He proceeds to detail the narrative voices in Ouloguem’s and Armah’s novels in terms of a “simulated orality” and in their “polemical implications for the literary status of oral tradition” (1988a: 91). This essentially constructivist view of orality is one that was subsequently to be taken up seriously by later critics, but in the 1980s Wright was perhaps alone in stating the problem succinctly. Before him the tendency was to see African literature as somehow obviously co-extensive with the worlds of orality, such that the literature written in English was to be read as a way of gaining access to a compendium of oral forms.

Wright must also be credited for laying out a fresh and highly nuanced form of mytho-allegorical criticism in Commonwealth and postcolonial studies. ¹³ We see this especially in his discussion of the mythology undergirding Kofi Awoonor’s This Earth, My Brother:

In Awoonor’s novel, however, the oppositions are of a different order. Here, the scatological presentation of the visible, historical world is countered and, to some extent, overridden by eschatological considerations of the life of the spirit in another, unseen one. The naturalistic prose chapters carry Amamu forward through the vignettes of a representative colonial childhood and adolescence, in the course of which the debris of colonial history and its legacy in postcolonial Ghana is accumulated and stored in the novel’s collective consciousness. But in contradistinction with this linear movement, the book’s poetic interludes carry Amamu back in a circle to a visionary rediscovery of his lost childhood cousin Dede who, in his personal subconscious, is identified with figures from a pre-European African mythology — notably Mammy Water, the mermaid or Woman of the Sea with magical, supernatural powers — which has survived the depredations of a century of colonialism. The Westernized linear time of the prose narrative is, in Gerald Moore’s words, “only a measure of the intervals between moments of vision.” This cycle of return to a reborn childhood is, moreover, complicated by being tied to a parallel eschatological cycle: the visionary liberation achieved by what Amamu refers to as the assumption of the “body” of Dede’s death can be purchased only by his own passage through madness and bodily death, and this death is presented as a process through which Amamu is reborn into the spirit world from which he arrives in the village of Deme in the first chapter. (1988b: 24)

The main elements of This Earth are succinctly laid out in Wright’s account: historical elements are conveyed in scatological terms yet subtend an eschatological matrix of utopian projection. Furthermore, the eschatological matrix lends itself to the circulation of various supplementary images, including those of Mammy Watta, the legendary mermaid common to West African folklore, along with the other pregnant private symbols of the butterfly, dunghill, and regenerative chrysalis that ebb and flow through the mind of the protagonist. At the same time, the inherent cyclicality of these images is set alongside a more linear teleology of the object of childhood love, Dede, the embrace of which requires a form of psychological dismemberment and the disavowal of the self. This speaks to a Christ-like symbolization for Amamu and the implication that he is fated to be a sacrificial carrier, a pharmakos in the idiom of classical Greek theatre.

If Wright provides a fresh way of understanding the relationship between mythography and nation in the work of a single Commonwealth writer that is suggestive for application in other contexts, then Timothy Brennan’s Salman Rushdie and the Third World: Myths of the Nation (1989) must also be noted for firmly linking the oeuvre of a writer to the variant shapes of the postcolony and its dispersed diasporas. Yet neither Brennan nor Wright’s work must be judged as falling into the simple frame of methodological nationalism that we already noted as dominant in the Commonwealth literary criticism of the 1980s. The two critics both raised complex questions with regard to the variant relationships between writer, literary form, and nation in ways that had hitherto remained unaddressed. Brennan’s book was recognized as a classic when it was first published, and remains a primary text for anyone interested in the work of Rushdie. And unlike Armah, Rushdie was a much more celebrated writer, one who brought together startlingly different constituencies in the evaluation of the role of a writer from the formerly colonized world. Keith Wilson was right to note in his review of the book that by the time it was published Rushdie was

no longer merely an author, of however remarkable originality, but a cause, one which has made strange bedfellows — none stranger than Margaret Thatcher’s government and the British literary and artistic establishment, neither of which had formerly managed to happen upon an issue conducive to the comradeship of shared outrage. (1990: 88)

Apart from elaborating certain key dialectical relations such as those between anti-colonial liberalism and nationalism, Brennan was the first to consider Rushdie not only as a Third World writer or spokesperson for India, but as a cosmopolitan writer first and foremost. To Brennan, Rushdie’s cosmopolitanism comes from his capacity to translate and mediate between cultures as well as discourses, and to be comfortable in the West as well as in the Indian homeland. This recalls Biodun Jeyifo’s typology of postcolonial writing, suggested in an essay of 1991. To see the nuances in the claims being made about postcolonial literary cosmopolitanism in that period Brennan and Jeyifo are best interleafed and read together. Jeyifo takes a two-tiered approach to postcolonial writing, categorizing it in terms of what he calls the postcoloniality of “normativity and proleptic designation” and that of “interstitial or liminal” postcoloniality. The first category embraces that in which the writer or critic speaks to, or for, or in the name of the post-independence nation-state, the regional, or continental community, the pan-ethnic, racial, or cultural agglomeration of homelands and diasporas. The normativity in this conception of postcoloniality often entails a return to cultural sources, the projection of a futurist agenda, and the celebration of authenticity. This dimension of postcoloniality is often saturated with what could be described as an ethical will-to-identity, an expression of which is that of Chinua Achebe’s regularly cited contention in “The Novelist as Teacher” (1975), that he wrote Things Fall Apart as an object lesson to his readers to prove that indigenous Africa had a viable culture before the white man came. That this normativity depends ultimately on a perception of literature as part of the contest against colonial hegemony it is impossible to deny, and the implication of “writing back” to the centre is much in evidence.

It is Jeyifo’s second category, that of “interstitial or liminal” postcoloniality, that expands to some degree Brennan’s description of cosmopolitanism in his book on Rushdie. Jeyifo notes that,

interstice or liminality here defines an ambivalent mode of self-fashioning of the writer or critic which is neither First World nor Third World, neither securely and smugly metropolitan, nor assertively and combatively Third-Worldist. The very terms which express the orientation of this school of post-colonial self-representation are revealing: diasporic, exilic, hybrid, in-between, cosmopolitan. (1990: 53)

He goes on to name Salman Rushdie as the paradigmatic figure of this mode of postcoloniality, along with Derek Walcott, J. M. Coetzee, and Dambudzo Marechera. One would immediately have to add to this list at least the names of Gabriel García Márquez, Isabel Allende, and Wole Soyinka in his more cosmopolitan essayistic temper. We should note that the two forms of postcoloniality — proleptic designation and interstitial/liminal — are also sometimes expressed within the same text such that it is preferable to speak of the two poles as a dialectical continuum, rather than as polarized and mutually exclusive entities. This is certainly the case with writers who, though defining a subject matter critical of the colonial heritage, simultaneously attack concepts and ideas within their local cultures that serve to reproduce colonial frames of reference and practices in the guise of nationalist sentiment. Thus the work of the most well-known postcolonial writers can be read both ways, depending on the strategic issues to be addressed. If we are to applaud Jeyifo for producing a supple theoretical framework in the early 1990s to interpret the work of Rushdie and others like him, we must also celebrate the work of Brennan for first setting out of the terms by which the debate would be joined and expanded at the very end of the 1980s.

From the vantage point of a now dominant postcolonialist framework of analysis it is easy to ignore the genealogy of its key terms and concerns. That the 1980s was a particularly fruitful threshold decade for the flowering of this field is not something to be taken for granted. For, from the start of the decade until its end, there was unobtrusive yet continual critical ferment, the effects of which came to impact the field in the 1990s and well beyond. The Journal of Commonwealth Literature was central to the staging of this ferment, and has to be recognized as such.