Abstract
At the end of a depressing year for politics, the environment, and gender and racial relations, we take this editorial as an opportunity for a palate-cleansing reflection on the more optimistic state of the field of postcolonial literary studies, and to pose some questions that take us into the year ahead.
The Journal of Commonwealth Literature continues to be inundated by submissions on the “Holy Trinity” of postcolonial writers (Chambers and Watkins, 2012: 3), which comprises J. M. Coetzee, Amitav Ghosh, and Salman Rushdie. The ongoing interest in Coetzee is evolving, and in particular directions — around questions that pertain to the origin, development, and travelling life of literary texts — due to the inauguration in 2012 of Coetzee’s archive at the Harry Ransom Center at the University of Texas in Austin. Indeed, in October this year a conference at the Institute of English Studies in London scrutinized this very topic (Coetzee & the Archive, 2017: n.p.). In the current issue, Rachael Isom’s article examines through a Bakhtinian lens Coetzee’s use of communicative interaction in his “fluid” 2007 novel Diary of a Bad Year (Isom, 2017: 7-20). Although this issue contains no articles on Rushdie or Ghosh, the former’s papers found at the Woodruff Library at Emory University in Atlanta, Georgia, are similarly reshaping Rushdie scholarship. The special issue of JCL edited by Ana Cristina Mendes and Charlie Wesley in 2017 reflected on “new directions in Rushdie studies” instigated by the near-simultaneous release of Rushdie’s archive and his memoir Joseph Anton (Rushdie, 2012). Scholars may have to wait some time, perhaps forever, for the emergence of a Ghosh archive. A related point to consider is that alongside Coetzee’s papers at Austin, Kazuo Ishiguro’s archive is also open for perusal. Ishiguro’s somewhat unexpected win of the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2017 (Ellis-Petersen and Flood, 2017: n.p.) makes it probable that the trinity will become a quartet of male writers, with the already significant trickle of submissions to JCL on the genre-defying British-Japanese author likely becoming a flood in the coming years. We might well reflect on when, if ever, this all-male pantheon will be joined by a woman writer of similar stature.
In a field in which scholars are supposedly negligent of matters relating to literary form (Zimbler et al., 2014: 273), the Journal of Commonwealth Literature maintains literary–textual analysis as one of its founding principles, and consistently receives nuanced work devoted to literary technique. A good example in this issue is Megan Jones’s article, which considers protest poetry written in Soweto between 1961 and 1976. As Jones argues, in the work of writers such as Mongane Wally Serote, a distinctive mode of activist poetics helped to establish new, resistant visions of Soweto pitched against the ideologies of apartheid. Florian Gargaillo’s contribution to the issue, meanwhile, examines how the metrical and rhythmic shifts and patterns of repeated sound in Kamau Brathwaite’s Rights of Passage enact, and give poetic shape to, the experience of migration. Arguing for a close mirroring between the rhythmic principles enacted in Rights of Passage and Brathwaite’s theory of Caribbean history as “tidalectic” rather than “dialectic”, cyclical rather than linear, Gargaillo demonstrates again the critical importance of close attention to literary form. As both of these articles, as well as the 2014 “Crafts of World Literature” special issue make clear, JCL continues to be committed to publishing innovative work in the areas of form and poetics.
Ecocritical approaches to literature and the environment and relations between human and non-human life have proven an important and growing subject for research in the 2010s, as is evident in another recent special issue of JCL, edited by Veronica Barnsley, Jade Munslow Ong, and Matthew Whittle in 2016. In the current issue we publish a paper by Chitra Sankaran and John Nkengasong, which examines human relations with forests along a global south–south axis in the work of two contemporary novelists, one Singaporean and the other Cameroonian. Similarly bringing together Africa and South Asia is the emergence of work on the “double diaspora” of Asians in East Africa by such scholars as Maya Parmar (2013), as well as in the work of creative writers including Shailja Patel (2010), which have helped to complicate and move postcolonial literary studies off their established north–south axis. Writing on Yasmin Alibhai-Brown in this issue, Felicity Hand argues that the Ugandan-born journalist, life writer, and playwright grapples with “the ambiguous position of the South Asian community in East Africa” (2018: 75). The issue of South Asian diaspora appears very differently articulated, meanwhile, in Hyacinth Simpson’s article on Sam Selvon’s late short story “Turning Christian”. As Simpson argues, Selvon’s fiction positions Indian communities in Trinidad (whether peasants or members of the working or middle classes) in relation to other ethno-racial groups in ways that construct Trinidadianness, through the lens of creolization, as an inclusive and dynamic negotiation of self and culture across the various communities represented in the nation.
If we began this editorial with discussions of the long-established postcolonial canon, it is clear that another male writer is entering the big league: Pakistani author Mohsin Hamid, whose novels so deftly focalize contemporary issues of globalization, securitization, Islamophobia, and the so-called “War on Terror”. 2017 saw the publication of Hamid’s fourth novel, the sonorous Exit West, about the global refugee crisis and affluent nations “strengthen[ing] […] their borders” in response (Hamid, 2017: 71). The novel was named by Barack Obama as one of his books of the year (Liptak and Zaru, 2017: n.p.), the only text out of six works of fiction chosen by the former president to have been written by a postcolonial author. As such, this new Man Booker-shortlisted novel seems likely at least to match the success of Hamid’s previous work. Lisa Lau and Ana Cristina Mendes’s article in this issue reads Hamid’s second novel (also Booker-shortlisted) The Reluctant Fundamentalist alongside its 2012 film adaptation to explore the shifting public discourse around Pakistan and Muslims. In her article on Hamid’s third novel, which won the Tiziano Terzani International Literary Prize, Liliana M. Naydan argues that How to Get Filthy Rich in Rising Asia parodies the self-help genre to create a critique of global capital.
Just as innovative an example of ecocritical thinking as that offered by Sankaran and Nkengasong is Emilia Quinn’s article, which addresses South Asian and Muslim literature by reading against the grain of Kamila Shamsie’s Burnt Shadows to bring Islamophobia studies into dialogue with animal rights discourse. Staying with the field of Muslim writing, a longstanding strength of JCL, and this time bringing issues of gender and class explicitly to the fore, Elizabeth Jackson takes a comparative approach to Indian Muslim women writers Attia Hosain and Shama Futehally. Finally, we regularly receive fascinating work in the growing field of Dalit writing and are looking forward to a forthcoming special issue on the subject, edited by Nicole Thiara, K. Satyanarayana, and Judith Misrahi-Barak (see Thiara and Misrahi-Barak, 2017). In the present issue, long-term friend to JCL, the eminent Dalit literature critic K. W. Christopher, takes a long view of Dalit conversion to Christianity and its representation in one text in particular, Kalyan Rao’s Untouchable Spring.
Taken together, the articles collected in this issue and the many excellent essays that regularly enter the journal’s inbox indicate the health and resilience of postcolonial literary studies. Not only that, but this work also demonstrates how the field’s vital critical energies may be devoted to literature’s intersections with the pressing issues of the present: globalization, environmental justice, the growing gulf between the world’s rich and poor, and ongoing inequalities of race, class, and gender. And while the past year has been bleak in many ways — whether we look to the rise of racist nationalisms across Europe and the US, or the renewed nuclear threat — it has also held out hope, much of which has been driven by women’s activism. 2017 began with a worldwide women’s march (Smith-Spark, 2017), progressed through #MeToo (Khomani, 2017), and ended with paedophile Roy Moore losing to Democrat Doug Jones in Alabama, thanks in large part to the campaigning of black women (Fausset and Robertson, 2017). As such, we look forward with enthusiasm to our capacity to work collaboratively in a spirit of justice — and, in the sphere of postcolonial literary futures, to the opening of our field’s canons to more women writers.