Abstract
We (Claire Chambers and Susan Watkins) had our first meeting with John Thieme and our publisher SAGE in June 2010. We started shadowing John and answering correspondence immediately after that, with a view to becoming the new editors of the Journal of Commonwealth Literature. The announcement of the change in editorship was sent to the board on 31 August 2010 and we officially became co-editors on 14 December 2010. The first issue under our editorship came out in September 2011 (46.3), with essays by Stuti Khanna and Nicole Thiara on Salman Rushdie, Mac Fenwick on Lorna Goodison, and Patrick Evans on Janet Frame, among others. Our first term ran until 31 December 2013, and the second will come to an end on 31 December 2015. In this, our 50th anniversary year, and in our final issue with the two of us as co-editors (about which, more later), it seems an appropriate moment to reflect on the journal’s development.
In his March 2010 (45.1) editorial, John Thieme used the example of Caryl Phillips’s A Distant Shore (2003), 1 to point to authors who, writing from within Britain, create “different versions of the national imaginary”, shaped by postcolonial and diasporic concerns (Thieme, 2010: 5). The pendulum had shifted dramatically since the uncredited first editorial in JCL (1966) where it seems Arthur Ravenscroft, subsequently the named editor, excluded studies of British authors from the journal because “many of the problems that face writers using English outside the United Kingdom suggest that, in a literary sense at least, Britain is in a very different position” (n.a. 1966: v). By 2010, John Thieme could state that JCL welcomes articles “on British writing that very obviously speak to the nation’s postcolonial identity” (2010: 6). Using the analogy of literary prizes, Thieme felt that JCL was to the Commonwealth Writers Prize what other journals in English were to the Man Booker. In other words, like the Commonwealth Writers Prize, JCL tends not to privilege British authors. If and when it does, the focus tends to be on those like Phillips and Andrea Levy (two of just three British recipients of the award between 1987 and 2011) who have strong diasporic connections. By contrast, the (Man) Booker Prize, which is just three years younger than JCL, has been won by 29 writers with full or partial British nationality, and only 20 non-British authors. This may of course change; in September 2013, it was controversially announced that the Man Booker would be opened up to American novelists (see Hensher, 2013). However, the changes to this prestigious prize only cast into sharper relief its more mainstream focus than that of JCL.
Our first editorial (in 46.3) is markedly distinct from both Ravenscroft’s and Thieme’s, in that it unravels the problematic nature of the term “Commonwealth” in a capitalist world order of immeasurable inequality. In this global world we acknowledge that defining oneself as cosmopolitan does not mean that the subject has now been empowered with a freedom not available to him or her under colonialism. On the contrary, colonialism, which was always a capitalist–imperialist system, simply becomes another mode of exploitation in the new world order. “Commonwealth” life worlds are now varied and JCL needs to adapt to new demands and imperatives. The journal must acknowledge works that capture more than just imaginative writing that can be easily slotted into the humanist paradigm on which it was founded: the paradigm, that is, of universal aesthetic value. The political becomes important, but gender, religion, and ecology also take centre stage. Ownership of language shifts, as do received theories of literary composition, as well as the terrain covered by the exclusive nature of the Commonwealth as a club. In a later editorial, we stated our aim to develop the journal’s “elastic boundaries” and engage with an “ever-increasing range of subjects, authors, and theoretical paradigms” (Chambers and Watkins, 2012a: 3). The principle of universalism which had hitherto shadowed both ethics and the cosmopolitan necessitates an honest reappraisal of the paradigms used and the need for these paradigms to cross-fertilize each other. 2
Another important aim has been to include more articles that address how gender and sexuality are “imbricated in colonialism” (Chambers and Watkins, 2012b: 297). Clearly postcolonial critics such as Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak (1985) and Chandra Talpade Mohanty (1984) had valid concerns in the mid-1980s about Western feminism’s tendency to universalize the female experience. More recently, however, in the neo-liberal austerity environment in the UK of increasing backlash against the narrative of “feminist individualism”, we have been concerned with two key issues. First, it troubles us that the successes that have been achieved both politically and critically in a number of different contexts under the auspices of the feminist movement have been delegitimized. Second, we wish to challenge the widespread misconception that the “Western” feminist individualist narrative is the only feminist narrative. In fact, feminisms plural are historically and geographically diverse, and are thus very capable of engaging with difference.
We have been pleased to publish articles that connect issues of gender and sexuality with those of race, nation, and postcoloniality and demonstrate the plurality and locality of feminisms. For example, Dashini Jeyathurai explored the figure of the Malaysian Indian estate girl in two Malaysian novels by Preeta Samarasan and K. S. Maniam’s Between Lives and a comic, Meena: A Plantation Child Worker (Jeyathurai, 2012). And Elizabeth Jackson, a scholar who is best known for her monograph Feminism and Contemporary Indian Women’s Writing (2010), wrote two paired articles for JCL, on Shama Futehally’s depiction of the relegation of Indian women to the domestic sphere in Reaching Bombay Central (Jackson, 2011) and on Muslim weddings in another of Futehally’s novels, Tara Lane, and Samina Ali’s Madras on Rainy Days (Jackson, 2013).
At the beginning of our time as editors we discontinued the “Books Received” section that came at the end of regular issues of JCL, 3 on the grounds that our annual Bibliography issue, edited by the wonderful Vassilena Parashkevova, performs this function already. Wishing to expand the reach of this resource for our readers, we have included some new regions in the Bibliography issue. First, since 2014 Zimbabwe has been incorporated within the South African entry (now titled “South Africa and Zimbabwe”). Crystal Warren, who compiled this entry with the help of colleagues from the National English Literary Museum Criticism, notes that “criticism of Zimbabwean literature was also sparse […] It is hoped that the persistent efforts of the writers, and the international success of authors like NoViolet Bulawayo will encourage increased interest in publishing and studying Zimbabwean literature” (Warren, 2014: 641). The unique history of Zimbabwe has produced writers as diverse as Doris Lessing, Alexandra Fuller, Tsitsi Dangarembga, Chenjerai Hove, Dambudzo Marechera, and Yvonne Vera. Zimbabwe (formerly Southern Rhodesia) was a British colony until 1965, when Ian Smith made a Unilateral Declaration of Independence from the UK, and only achieved independence in 1980. Zimbabwe has had a troubled past as well as present under Robert Mugabe, whose controversial policies of land re-apportionment and Murambatsvina — Operation Drive Out Rubbish, officially Operation Restore Order (in fact a policy of slum clearance) — have had their effects both materially and in the work of many of these writers. With all this in mind, we felt it was important for JCL to mark that history and its writing.
Second, because Bangladesh has a steadily growing body of Anglophone writing, from criticism by Niaz Zaman (2003) and Fakrul Alam (2007), to creative writing by Adib Khan (1994), Tahmima Anam (2007/2008; 2011), Zia Haider Rahman (2014), and Kaiser Haq (2012; 2013), we could see the pressing need to prepare an annual Bibliography entry for this country. Our Indian, Pakistani, and Sri Lankan bibliographers, Shyamala A. Narayan, Muneeza Shamsie, and S. W. Perera, have been doing a marvellous job for other countries in South Asia. We have recently found a suitable scholar to join their ranks, in Khademul Islam, a writer, translator, and editor. He edited The Daily Star Book of Bangladeshi Writing in English (Islam, 2006) when he was the paper’s literary editor. Islam is also currently editor of Bengal Lights, a biannual magazine coming out of ULAB (University of Liberal Arts Bangladesh), and is writing a memoir entitled Shooting at Sharks contracted to Bloomsbury. Since he keeps track of what is appearing in English and indeed contributes to that body of work, he is an excellent person to take on this task and we are pleased to welcome him to JCL.
The year in which we produced our first issue of JCL, 2011, was the year in which the term “Arab Spring” was optimistically coined, although in light of the ongoing bloodshed in Syria and elsewhere it is now often described as the Arab Winter. JCL is unlikely to expand its Bibliography issue to include Arab nations, but in several editorials (Chambers and Watkins, 2011; 2012a; 2013) we discussed the events in the Middle East as they unfolded. At the same time, we made it clear to potential contributors that submissions on Anglophone or translated literature from this part of the world were welcomed by JCL, even though there are no Arab countries in the Commonwealth. As editors we have always viewed the journal’s scope as incorporating literature from nations affected by the British Empire and its legacies (see Chambers and Watkins, 2011: 389). Writers from countries like Palestine, Egypt, and Sudan are therefore demonstrably within our remit, whereas it would be harder to make the case for including Francophone authors from the Maghreb nations.
Keeping the Arab Spring/Winter in view, we began publishing occasional pieces of creative writing from JCL 48.2 (June 2013) onwards. In that issue we showcased two poems by British Asian writer John Siddique on the Tunisian and Egyptian revolutions, respectively entitled “A Specific” and “Blue Water Lilies” (Chambers and Watkins, 2013: 181–4). Subsequently, the Pakistani journalist and novelist Bina Shah wrote a lively guest editorial, “Literature: The Antidote to the Pakistani Identity Crisis” for JCL 49.1 (March 2014), while Indian author and academic Tabish Khair’s provocative essay on Narendra Modi is included as the last essay in the present issue (Khair, 2015). It has been exciting to broaden JCL’s scope to include poetry, short short stories, and opinion pieces by creative writers.
Another change to JCL has been its entry into the world of social media. The journal is on Facebook and Twitter, where first Claire Chambers and now our excellent Social Media Manager and Editorial Assistant Edward Powell post updates about our activities, news about forthcoming and previous issues, and general posts about literary events, links, and trends. 4 At the time of writing (July 2015), we had 1059 Likes for our Facebook page and 267 followers of the Twitter news feed. The design and look of the journal also changed at the start of 2012. The older design of JCL had a trim size of 216 x 138 mm and was called Demy. It now has a trim size of 234 x 156 mm and is known as Royal.
Our primary debts of gratitude are to JCL’s previous editors, John Thieme and Shirley Chew. Claire’s career trajectory has been especially affected by these two rigorous and generous scholars, as Shirley was her PhD supervisor at the University of Leeds (1999–2003), while John was her external examiner. Through these connections she became involved in the journal, first as an avid reader of its articles as a postgraduate, and later when she joined the Editorial Board in 2006. We would like to thank both John and Shirley for their years of outstanding service to JCL. Going further back, we are also indebted to A. Norman Jeffares, who conceived of the journal, to its first editor Arthur Ravenscroft, and to his successors Andrew Gurr, Alastair Niven, and Angus Calder. The fact that even after 50 years the journal is still at the forefront of interventions in the field is testament to all these scholars’ vision, implementation, and diligence. John’s stewardship as editor was just shy of 20 years (1992–2011), while Shirley was his co-editor from 1992 until the late 1990s. In 2001 she published the inaugural issue of her highly regarded Moving Worlds: A Journal of Transcultural Writing (Chew, 2001); we are also grateful to Shirley for her advice to Elleke Boehmer and Alex Tickell in writing their essay on the 1990s in this issue.
We would like to thank the people we have worked with at SAGE during our time as editors. Kerry Barner welcomed us to SAGE and to the journal on John Thieme’s retirement and was the source of invaluable support until she moved on to a different position within the company. Her replacement, Livia Melandri, has been equally helpful and positive about the journal. Managing JCL day-to-day on SAGETrack rather than solely via email (a move we made in June 2011) has meant that in theory it is impossible to lose a manuscript or forget to prompt reviewers and authors. We know that negotiating SAGETrack can, on occasion, be counter-intuitive for some authors and reviewers, but the benefits of managing workloads and timeliness hugely outweigh any disadvantages, and we have found that most users do not have problems. In January 2011, production of the journal moved to SAGE’s India office, in itself an example of globalization but an extremely positive one for us. We have found both our current production editor, Abhishek Silas, and his predecessor Sweety Singh, to be unfailingly helpful, polite, and knowledgeable. It is a shame we haven’t yet met in person.
In February 2013 we provided evidence to the Second Parliamentary Inquiry into the UK’s Open Access Policy. SAGE had already provided written evidence to the House of Lords Science and Technology Select Committee of 18 January 2013. In addition to the concerns raised in SAGE’s written evidence and by many other subject associations and learned societies in the Arts, Humanities and Social Sciences, and supported by our editorial board, we emphasized a number of points, including the following observations. We expressed our concern about the prohibitive cost of article processing charges (APCs) under the gold open access model for authors in developing countries. We were also worried that early UK adoption of the gold model ahead of other countries might potentially disadvantage UK researchers, if authors from outside the UK were not required to pay APCs whilst those from the UK were. In common with most Arts, Humanities and Social Science journals, a substantial number of the articles published by JCL written by UK-based authors are produced by individual scholars not supported by large-scale research council funding, or even, in some cases, by QR (Quality-related Research) funding. These include early-career scholars without full-time, permanent institutional affiliation, and in other cases academics working at supposedly “non-research intensive” universities without substantial QR funding. Under the gold open access model a large number of these authors would not have easy or automatic access to the funding necessary to pay APCs.
Since this intervention, much has changed. The current situation at JCL is that there are two open access options. The first, the SHERPA RoMEO (Rights MEtadata for Open Archiving) Green Archiving Policy (where no funding is available), allows the author to post the accepted version (Version 2) of an article on his/her own personal website, department’s website, or the repository of his/her institution without any restrictions. The author may not post Version 2 of the article in any repository other than those listed above until 12 months after first publication of the article in the journal. In addition, the second option is the gold open access model: SAGE Choice (where funding is available). The SAGE Choice programme offers authors the option to make their article freely available as soon as it publishes and upon payment of a standard article processing charge (APC). SAGE Choice is only available to authors after their manuscripts have been accepted for publication. This prevents any potential conflicts of interest, and ensures that authors’ choice and/or funder requirements have no influence on the editorial peer review and decision-making process. JCL has published one article under the SAGE Choice scheme so far: “Nurse Going Native: Language and Identity in Letters from Africa and the British West Indies” by Jessica M. Howell (2015). This article was published via Online First on 28 January of this year. It is a big achievement for a Humanities journal and significant that this is happening in the 50th year of publication. We are delighted that JCL is able to include one open access article in its offering, and that it makes use of both the green and gold open access models.
When we began our work as co-editors, the journal was located at Leeds Metropolitan, now Leeds Beckett University, where Susan continues to work. Indeed, we launched our inaugural issue (Chambers and Watkins, 2011) at a party in the School of Cultural Studies at that institution. However, in October 2012, Claire departed Leeds Met after eight happy years to take up a position in the Department of English and Related Literature at the University of York. That is why we have chosen to launch this 50th anniversary with a celebration at the neighbouring member of the White Rose consortium, the University of York, in September 2015. It is also with a mixture of regret and anticipation that Claire wishes to announce that Susan Watkins will step down on 31 December 2015 as co-editor of JCL, when she will be replaced by Rachael Gilmour of Queen Mary University of London. Claire couldn’t have asked for a more painstaking, humorous, or quick-witted co-editor than Susan, and their editorials over cups of tea in Oakwood in northeast Leeds will be sorely missed. Though the new co-editorship will necessarily mostly be conducted over email, telephone, and Skype, Claire feels sure that co-editing with Rachael will be an equally enjoyable experience. Rachael researches how questions of language, translation, and linguistic encounter are mediated by literary and other texts. Her excellent essays for JCL (Gilmour, 2012; 2014) and judicious work as a reviewer convinced us that she would step into Susan’s big shoes with ease. With sadness Claire says goodbye to Susan, but she greatly looks forward to working with Rachael in the future.
For this anniversary issue, we wanted to reflect on JCL’s development and trajectory over the period 1965 to the present day, in the context of developments in postcolonial criticism and theory over the same 50 years. In JCL 21.1 (March 1986), the “four As” of Arthur Ravenscroft, Andrew Gurr, Angus Calder, and Alastair Niven wrote editorials ruminating on “Twenty-one Years of The Journal of Commonwealth Literature” (Ravenscroft et al., 1986). Then, exactly 10 years ago, Niven and John Thieme co-authored an editorial for JCL 40.3 (September 2005) examining “JCL 40 Years On”, and concluding that the journal “seems healthier than ever” (2005: 15). Going one step further than these earlier commemorative issues, we commissioned an entire special issue of the journal, in which leading scholars in the field reflect on JCL’s development and trajectory over this period, in the context of developments in postcolonial criticism and theory over the same 50 years. A select number of scholars, whose work has been key to the development of the field, wrote substantial pieces for our anniversary issue. This issue is organized by the decades in which the journal has been published, from the 1960s to the 2000s. Its articles reflect on the following, with varying emphasis: the significance of the decade under consideration for postcolonialism as a discipline, in both the UK and the Commonwealth; JCL’s overall trajectory and development in that period; and the significance of certain key articles published in that decade. The issue as a whole provides an indispensable guide to the field, and JCL’s central place within it, from the 1960s to the present day. We recommend it to you, and look forward to 50 more creative and critical years of the Journal of Commonwealth Literature.