Abstract
Two overlapping sets of themes stand out in the bibliographies from 2017: one concerning language, translation and bi-, multi-, poly- and trans-lingualism and the other print and material cultures, book histories, publishing, circulation, genre and “literary value.” Works listed in this issue reflect and respond to the role of English or French as hegemonic languages in containing and sanctioning a range of “other,” “minor,” indigenous languages or vernaculars and their oratures/literatures in the manner of an omniscient narrative that frames and mediates the “foreign talk,” “accents” or idiolects of characters as deviations from its own normativity for a dominant linguistic community of “native speakers,” in the process erasing its own origin. We have inherited, as David Gramling reminds us in The Invention of Monolingualism (2016), the early modern idea of “‘a’ language, whose essence inhered in its promise to know everything, say everything, and translate everything” (Gramling, 2016: 2). Such a desire for linguistic mastery is reflected in the “enumerative modality” of colonialism setting out to identify, label and control local languages and their speakers. It continues to inform processes of “naming, misnaming, consolidation, marketing and reproduction” in the publishing, translation, academic research or host nation language teaching industries and the concomitant “thickening of citizenship around language competence and use”. Further, monolingualism appears capable of extending its repertoire by impersonating notions of multilingualism in the marketing of World Literature, as Graham Huggan has shown in The Postcolonial Exotic (Huggan, 2001), or varieties of “multilingual upskilling” promoted by the neoliberal state as “models for global success and competitiveness” (ibid: 12, 250).
An interesting collection from the East and Central Africa listings that demonstrates the historical interconnectedness of these issues is the bilingual Guidance (Uwongozi) by Sheikh Al-Amin Mazrui: Selections from the First Swahili Islamic Newspaper: A Swahili-English Edition (Kresse, 2017). A polemical conduct book of “guidance” and socio-political critique, this volume brings together essays from the early 1930s free weekly Swahili pamphlet, Sahifa, penned by the Islamic reformist scholar Sheikh Al-Amin Mazrui in the height of British colonial rule in East Africa. It testifies to the intermingling of languages in the region and the power relations which inform the contact that English has had with Swahili and Arabic. As Kai Kresse explains in his Introduction to the volume, the word sahifa connotes, at once, “page” or “writing surface” and a “bulletin” that is “to be read out and put into effect” (Kresse, 2017: 1). In sahifa as a word and a cultural practice, then, the scribal and the oral coalesce through their Swahili and Arabic significances. Sheikh Al-Amin Mazrui’s self-introspectively titled essays “Why Are We Imitating the Europeans?” (1930) and “What Leads Us to Wear Western Hats?” (1931) (Mazrui, 2017) address directly his Swahili-speaking coastal Muslim audience, urging them to consider the effects of the English language on their identity. In the former, he writes, And those among us who know the proper pronunciation of ‘Good morning’ or ‘Thank you’ no longer greet people or thank them in their own language – as if the English language alone were the only education required of a person… (Mazrui, 2017: 63)
In the latter, he extends his line of critique, satirising his peers’ unthinking adoption of English by comparing it to the donning of “Western hats,” a superficial mark of ‘the civilised’ that does not grant one the same socio-economic benefits, such as “jobs like theirs” (Mazrui, 2017: 161). Prefiguring Homi Bhabha’s work, Sheikh Al-Amin Mazrui’s analysis of mimicry as a product of the colonial mentality is “written in accessible language, based on Kimvita (the Mombasa dialect of Swahili) in a kind of oral mode” that “lent itself to be read out in public” (Kresse, 2017: 1). A peculiar effect of the contemporary bilingual textuality of Uwongozi/Guidance, in which each page of Swahili is followed by a page in English, is that it continues to perform the ambivalence of mimicry and problematises the interchangeability of the two languages. Although the Swahili “original” risks being perceived by those who do not speak it as a museum artefact, explained by a caption in English, with further footnotes of historical or ethnographic detail that do not appear on the Swahili pages, it is already shown in conversation with an unseen English pre-original, extending the effects of its inherent orality. Sheikh Al-Amin Mazrui’s essays, as the two quoted above demonstrate, appear to address, today, the contemporary English-language reader.
Another text that historicises the ideologies of value, hierarchy or ethnographic authenticity that often mark the work of translation, its material products and their reception is Valerie Henitiuk’s “‘Memory Is So Different Now”: The Translation and Circulation of Inuit-Canadian Literature in English and French.” It traces the stories of two recent literary translations that have each been tendentiously labelled “the first Inuit novel” (Henitiuk, 2017: 246): Harpoon the Hunter by Markoosie and Sanaaq by Mitiarjuk. The Inuit tradition of the use of single names already throws into confusion the Western idea of authorship and its practical principles of alphabetising and cataloguing, including Henitiuk’s own list of references in the case of the latter text. The Canadian government performed a violent “translation” of cultural difference by forcing the Inuk to adopt surnames in the 1940s (Henitiuk, 2017: 256). The English and French renditions of these two Inuktitut-syllabics originals tend to conceal what are otherwise circuitous trajectories of “self-translation, relay translation, and retranslation” (ibid, 2017: 246). The most recent, 2013 French translation of Harpoon poses as the rendition of the Inuktitut original (serialised in 1969–1970), alongside which it appears in a bilingual edition while in fact being based on the English self-translation by Markoosie. Another relay translation, the 2013 English version of Sanaaq is based on the 2002 French translation, itself based, tellingly, on the translator’s doctoral research in anthropology (supervised by none other than Claude Lévi-Strauss) that engaged with Mitiarjuk’s work. Henitiuk traces the genesis of the interlinked stories of Sanaaq back to the 1950s when Mitiarjuk was “asked by a missionary to draw up some word lists to help him learn Inuktitut” (Henitiuk, 2017: 247). Having far outgrown the missionary’s request for what is effectively a glossary, reflective of the disembodied, “enumerative logic” of colonialism, Mitiarjuk’s stories mirrored back the image of the missionaries in portraying her community’s contact with them, in this way claiming agency and rejecting translatability.
Henitiuk discusses the problematics of self-translation, an issue of particular relevance to this bibliographical record which testifies, every year, to the pervasiveness of this phenomenon, especially in African and South Asian contexts of translation from indigenous languages into English. In this issue, Crystal Warren notes, for example, that in the South African context in 2017, most of the poetry in translation falls into this category. In Self-Translation: Brokering Originality in Hybrid Culture (2013), Anthony Cordingley suggests that “self-translation typically produces another ‘version’ or a new ‘original’ of a text,” so that while translators as such act as cross-cultural interlocutors, self-translators negotiate “not only an ‘original’ text, and perhaps the self which wrote it, but the vexatious notion of ‘originality’ itself” (Cordingley, 2013: 1–2). Translation, he argues, should be viewed not simply as the “movement of texts from one language to another” but of “cultural products, ideas, bodies and selves between different linguistic communities” (Cordingley, 2013: 4). In the case of self-translation, as Henitiuk argues, it is often a “secondary,” “relay-style” version that “becomes the stable text, making possible renditions into other languages” (2017: 251–252). This is demonstrated by the story of Mazisi Kunene’s epic poem Emperor Shaka the Great, originally written in isiZulu but published in English translation by the author in 1979 (2017). Only in 2017, on the 10th anniversary of Kunene’s death, does the isiZulu original appear in print — not entirely on its own, but alongside and mediated by its re-issued English counterpart in two parallel publications.
Such displacements of “minor-language originals” are further compounded by the fact that “literary works written in minor languages are typically granted only one chance at being rendered into a given major language” (Henitiuk, 2017: 252). Self-translated authors respond by insisting on the difference between the two versions of their text, on the ideas of adaptation, invention and rewriting, as is the case of Masitha Hoeane’s play, Mama Mudu’s Children (2017). The edition listed in the bibliography from South Africa is “bilingual,” English and Sesotho, with the author rejecting the term translation, as Warren explains in her Introduction, over “recreation in a different linguistic and cultural context.” The title of Vivian de Thabrew’s Poems of Nature in Sandesa Poetry: Sinhala Paraphrase and English Translation (2017), listed in the Sri Lanka bibliography, also complicates both the notions of a bilingual text and of translation by implying an elusive alinguistic or multilinguistic “original” of classic Indic messenger poetry (Berkwitz, 2017: 95), co-eval with its Sinhala “paraphrase” and (not “in” but “and”) an English version. The end “product,” as indicated by the title, is English, with Sinhala serving a mediating role, a translation in process. The nature of sandesa poetry as a transregional, multi-religious and multi-linguistic genre, featuring the transportation of messages “by various flying creatures or atmospheric phenomena (such as clouds or wind) from one individual to another” (Berkwitz, 2017: 96) offers an interesting utopian alternative to the traditional paradigm of translation for the travel of cultural forms to their audiences.
On a personal note I allow myself here, it is with particular delight that I recognize the ancient echo of sandesa poetry in a Bulgarian folklore-based poem and song, “Tell Me, Little White Cloud” (my translation), which has acquired, since the fall of communism, a new significance as an anthem of Bulgarian emigrants, exchanging messages of hope with loved ones at home, bypassing borders and passport controls, via the eponymous cloud messenger. The endurance of this form in an age of instant global connectivity points to a desire for a different, more authentic, intimate and mystical, if romanticised, form of communication, with a shared nature replacing technology in a juxtaposition of “near and far, local and cosmopolitan” but “stressing geographical belonging” (Berkwitz, 2017: 97–98). It transcends the crude understanding of translation that Marina Warner has recently described as “analogous to currency conversion” (2018: 24), an understanding that continues to inform, to various degrees, the Western publishing industry’s investment choices. For example, commenting on current debates about the literary value and circulation of African writing, Grace Musila, in this issue, observes a worrying trend where Northern-based multinational publishers treat local, African publishers as “risk-testing initiatives,” “outsourcing” risk to them before making an investment in local writing. This “potentially predatory” relationship, in Musila’s words, is not unlike that between the “minor”-language “original” and the “major”-language “translation,” as we have seen.
Similar issues are explored in publications such as Aamir R Mufti’s Forget English! Orientalisms and World Literature (2016), listed in the bibliography from Pakistan. It draws attention to “the continuing dominance of English as a literary language and a cultural system of international reach” on which “the very possibility of world literature” is predicated. The ideas of the English language as “not only the key to cultural capital” but “itself capital in a primary, material sense” as well as the monolingualism of the publishing industry are also addressed in Rachael Gilmour and Tamar Steinitz’s edited collection Multilingual Currents in Literature, Translation and Culture (Gilmour and Steinitz, 2017: 9), represented in the Zimbabwe bibliography, but also of particular interest to Canadian and Caribbean contexts and of much broader, geographical and critical reach, offering alternative views on language, culture, and translation in contemporary literature as seen from “multiple locations and disciplinary specialisms” (ibid, 2017: 3) against nationalist constructions of what Rey Chow, following Derrida, refers to as monolanguages (Chow, 2014: 31).
The multi-, poly- or trans-lingual realities of life as well as their linguistic divides or hierarchies and transgressive practices of code-switching across them are reflected in the bibliographies from many of the countries and regions represented here. An example from the Malaysia and Singapore listings is Philip Holden’s article “Always Already Translated: Questions of Language in Singapore Literature” (2017) in the online magazine Asymptote. Asymptote describes itself as “the premier site for world literature in translation” whose name is derived from “the dotted line on a graph that a mathematical function may tend toward, but never reach” as a metaphor for a “translated text [that] may never fully replicate the effect of the original.” Ironically, the term asymptote has also been used to describe the logic underlying the construction of the “non-native speaker” (or, even more tellingly, the “near-native” speaker) whose linguistic knowledge is seen as “at best asymptotic, approaching but never achieving,” as Thomas Paul Bonfiglio has observed, the authority of the “native speaker” granted to him/her by birth right or “biological nationality” (Bonfiglio, 2010: 8, 13). Although the two usages of asymptote appear to chart out trajectories in opposite directions, “English” remains the same centripetally stable point of reference in both, even as translations from “other,” “world” languages into English and for English-speaking audiences consciously negotiate their proximity to the “original” as an ideal/-ised destination.
Holden’s Asymptote article, however, draws attention to Singapore’s polylinguistic environment, where languages seep into one another, not only involving continuous informal translation on a daily basis, but also inspiring creative strategies for their representation in fiction, drama, or film. Holden charts out the development of the linguistic “soundscape of the city-state” from “a colonial entrepôt featur[ing] a medley of languages and overlapping linguistic communities, stitched together by English both as an elite language of governance and a pidgin, and the much more widespread use of a simplified form of Malay […] as a lingua franca” to modern state policies of “rationalisation,” including a prescribed bilingualism of English plus “a mother tongue designated according to race,” to transgressions of racialised linguistic boundaries in The Necessary Stage’s play, Manifesto (2016), or parodies of the monolingual English speaker in Sonny Liew’s graphic novel The Art of Charlie Chan Hock Chye (Liew, 2015). In the latter, an English-speaking character’s incomprehension of another language is anticipated and “translated” in the form of “small, indecipherable, cursive strokes” in the speech balloon of characters speaking in “other” languages.
Similarly, in his Introduction to the Sri Lanka listings, Walter Perera cites a commentary by Nandanga Kalugampitiya on the ways in which senior poet Kamala Wijeratne’s Early Poems: A Compendium 1983–2007 (Wijeratne, 2017) works towards “Sri-Lankanizing” the English language. A special issue of the journal of Caribbean Studies, “Language Contact, Creoles and Multilingualism,” also emphasises the complexity and creativity in the language use of the region’s multilingual communities, urging against the marginalisation and stigmatisation of contact languages (Guzzardo Tamargo et al., 2017: 7). One of a number of works that explore issues of creolisation in the Caribbean listings, introduced by Maria Alonso, Emily Sahakian’s Staging Creolization: Women’s Theater and Performance from the French Caribbean builds on a significant body of work that has extended the linguistic remit of creolisation to include syncretic performance, historically a form that has interwoven European and indigenous cultures into a “creative recombination,” disrupting essentialist, colonial and gender-normative paradigms (2017: 1–4).
The role of local and multinational publishers and of literary prizes and anthologies in the production, international distribution or ascription of “value” to works in English, in indigenous languages or in translation are addressed in several introductions this year. On the occasion of 2017’s 25th anniversary of the Gratiaen Prize, set up by Michael Ondaatje for literary work in English by a resident Sri Lankan, Walter Perera comments on the ways in which the Prize has had to negotiate its role against those who dismiss it as “exclusivist,” “elitist” or “westernised,” a response inevitably in part to the broader issue of the choice of English over vernacular languages. Yet, in Ruvani Ranasinha’s analysis, the Gratiaen “provides not only a genuinely internal assessment of Lankan writers, but has also developed more self-referential conversations between domestic readers and writers about the key questions facing those living in Sri Lanka,” unsettling “the construction of diasporic writers as privileged insiders” and offering, instead, nuanced “perspectives on questions of cultural nationalism, communalism, and political insurgency,” honouring “long-standing women writers” and introducing emerging writers (Ranasinha, 2013: 35). An example of an analogous, if much smaller-scale, venture is the three-volume multi-genre anthology, Write to Reconcile, inaugurated in 2012 by Sri Lanka-born Canadian novelist, Shyam Selvadurai, of writing by Sri Lankan writers on “issues of conflict, peace, reconciliation, memory and trauma, as they related to Sri Lanka’s civil war and the postwar period” (shyamselvadurai.com n.d.). While the writing is in English, with some authors choosing to include glossaries to their work, Selvadurai announces in the Introduction to the final volume that the “only goal left for me is to compile a single anthology that includes selections from all three editions, and to publish this compilation in all three national languages” (Selvadurai, 2017: 11).
In the South African context, it is interesting to note that poetry, in particular, appears to lend itself more easily to multi-lingual promotion and circulation. In this issue, Crystal Warren comments on the success of multi-lingual poetry prizes in the country — the Sol Plaatje European Union Poetry Award and, surprisingly, the funeral company AVBOB’s Poetry Project on the themes of death, life, birth and hope, both inviting entries in all 11 official languages. In the Australian context, the contributors discuss the discontinuing of the long-standing “Best Australian” anthologies in the genres of the essay, the short story and poetry as a result of debates on what they stand for. The announced transformation of The Best Australian Stories (1999–2017), an annual series published by Black Inc., Melbourne) into the forthcoming Best Summer Stories seems to indicate a move away from national identifications, but the loss of the series is also a loss of “a pulse-taking and a showcase” of Australian literature, as the contributors note.
The relationship among publishing, funding and education has come to the fore in Zimbabwe and Singapore this year. In this issue, Crystal Warren reports the Zimbabwean government’s launch of a new school curriculum with texts to be specially commissioned by writers and publishers and the concerns this initiative has triggered as to the extent of government involvement. Similar issues, pushed to a dystopian extreme, figure in fiction from South Africa — Tammy Baikie’s Selling LipService (2017), ironically, itself the winner of a prize that has projected it into visibility, the Dinaane Debut Fiction Award for an unpublished novel. In a near-future world, people can only write or speak if they wear a LipService patch, turning them into “lipservants” to a corporate sponsor of a brand, their speech having been scripted by copywriters. LipService, as imagined by an author who is a professional translator, in a novel praised for its linguistic ingenuity, specifically its representation of commercialised language, can be seen as a metaphor for monolingualism, its multiple-brand varieties posing, as suggested earlier, for diversity, whilst concealing its monolithic nature.
In his Introduction to the Malaysia and Singapore bibliographies, Ismail Talib compares the case of Jeremy Tang’s novel, State of Emergency (2017) to that of Sonny Liew’s graphic novel The Art of Charlie Chan Hock Chye (mentioned above), which were both viewed as “controversial” by Singapore’s National Arts Council to the extent that it withdrew their funding, in the process sparking a debate on the influence of such funding, whether awarded or refused, on writers’ freedom of artistic expression as well as adding to issues of the nature and extent of support available to local writers. As the Singapore bibliographic listings also demonstrate, local publishers and bookstores need to be increasingly creative in the promotion of local writing, with examples including the #BuySingLit campaign led by over 30 publishers and booksellers with the aim of promoting local literature (Retnam, 2017) and bookstore BooksActually’s launch of a 24-hour “mystery book vending machine.” BookActually’s owner, Kenny Leck appeals to readers, “We’re a Singaporean bookstore, we should be carrying Singaporean content. Not because of national pride or out of loyalty — it’s our narrative, it’s our story” (Koh and Klimowicz, 2017). Joel Deshaye, in this issue, also comments on “cultural nation-building projects,” including sponsorship by the Canada Council for the Arts in studies that examine the 1960s–1980s CanLit era and the relationship between multinational publishers and local, Canadian ones. Elaine Dewar’s narrative title The Handover: How Bigwigs and Bureaucrats Transferred Canada’s Best Publisher and the Best Part of Our Literary Heritage to a Foreign Multinational (2017) evinces the complexity of the interplay of local and global, of financial and cultural capital in the unfolding story of corporate monolingualism exercising its polyglot “multinationalism.” In the India listings, Yakaiah Kathy explores the now established tradition of the Indian Booker Prize novel in The Booker and the Postcolonial Indian Award Winning Novels (2017).
Issues of literary value continue to be invoked in considerations of genre or popular fiction, with the former being often denigrated to, or by virtue of being, the latter. This is Ismail Talib’s observation in this issue; he muses on the debates about whether graphic novels should be considered “serious literature” and whether they should be included in university syllabi in Malaysia and Singapore. In this issue, Grace Musila also comments on how genre fiction has divided the Kenyan academy into camps of opposing views because of or despite their “unconventional modes of critique and strategies of escaping censure.” It is pleasing to note that genre fiction and the studies that explore it continue to thrive in all regions represented here. Sam Naidu and Elizabeth le Roux’s A Survey of South African Crime Fiction: Analysis and Publishing History (2017) considers the extent to which crime fiction has become the new political novel in South Africa, the genre most disapproved of by apartheid censors, and situates this incredibly successful literary category within its social and historical contexts. Erin Mercer’s Telling the Real Story: Genre and New Zealand Literature, published in early 2018, is included here as prefigured in Mercer’s editorial to a 2017 special issue of the Journal of New Zealand Literature: “New Zealand Gothic.” In her book and her editorial, she argues that a realist aesthetic was imposed on New Zealand writing in the beginning of the 20th century as the “mode deemed most suitable for the task of creating a national literature distinctive from Britain” (Mercer, 2017a: 8), in the process not only marginalising popular genres such as the Gothic tale, the detective story, romance or science fiction but also their interplay with the nationally prescribed realism in New Zealand fiction of the period. Mercer’s article in this issue examines the slaughterhouse as a trope of a New Zealand Gothic where fictional scenes of agricultural slaughter belie the ideal of a “settler nation based on the notion of the pastoral” (Mercer, 2017a: 10) — “Britain’s farm in the South Pacific” (Mercer, 2017b: 53) — by staging the return of the repressed in images of rotting meat or episodes of lamb castration. In Australian contexts of criticism, Suzette Mayr demonstrates how Vivienne Cleven’s novel Her Sister’s Eye revisits the pervasive gothic trope of “the Aboriginal burial ground as the rationale for a piece of land being uncanny or haunted”; in the novel, Australia is haunted not by a spectral Aboriginal past but by its history of Indigenous dispossession of land (Mayr, 2017: n.p.).
The Australian listings include a multitude of works exploring genre fiction and its creative encounter with Aboriginal aesthetics — from stock characters in colonial fiction to the idea of a “Koori-noir” to Aboriginal post-apocalyptic, grotesque, fantasy and gothic worlds — as well as an anthology of Australian detective and mystery stories in which Sherlock Holmes investigates cases “down under,” Sherlock Holmes: The Australian Casebook, edited by Christopher Sequeira (2017). In India, genre fiction is also explicitly politicised, exploring the dystopian forces of Hindutva or the criminality of homophobia; in the “geopolitical science-fiction thriller” Aliens in Delhi (2017) by Sami Ahmad Khan, Pakistan’s Inter-Services Intelligence and India’s Research and Analysis Wing abandon securing the border between the two countries when threatened by an alien invasion that turns out to be uncannily familiar. Singapore features in dystopian fiction and in the annual anthology The Almost Complete Collection of True Singapore Ghost Stories (Lee, 2017) and Pakistan in political thrillers, romantic fiction and a djinn-inspired fantasy. A volume of the now classic tales of Trinidad Noir (Lovelace and Antoni, 2017) appears in the Caribbean listings, alongside a critical reclamation of the zombie as a figure of terror, not in its demonization of Haiti and Haitians in North Atlantic fiction and film, but as a symbol of the Haitian Revolution, “the only successful slave revolution in the Atlantic World” (Hoermann, 2017: 152). The South African listings feature a post-apocalyptic Johannesburg and a dystopian Cape Town in fiction as well as the futuristic play, Kudu (2017) by Lwanda Sindaphi, staging questions around the issue of land restitution, as Warren comments, by having a group of “Khoi-Coloured descendants” claiming their ancestral land from the AmaXhosa Nation now living there in the year 2030 (Magnet Theatre, 2018).
Other prominent themes in the 2017 listings include folklore, myth, oral cultures and indigeneity; student newspapers and political activism; life writing, including exile, refugee-camp and prison narratives and auto/biographical fiction exploring writerly lives and alter egos; critical explorations of the contemporary; experiments with form in poetry and fiction and anthologies of experimental writing, and animals, the environment and ecocriticism, with a focus on cartography, navigation and concepts of space. Russia, the Soviet Union and their cultural and political traditions meet those of South Africa (in author Alex la Guma’s travel account, A Soviet Journey, originally published in 1978 and Jeanne-Marie Jackson’s fascinating South African Literature’s Russian Soul, exploring how 19th-century Russian writing has served as a model for South African writers during and after apartheid), of New Zealand (in case studies of the synthesis of Stanislavski’s System with Māori performance practices or Katherine Mansfield’s encounter with Russia) and of Pakistan (in Tariq Ali’s The Dilemmas of Lenin: Terrorism, War, Empire, Love, Revolution). Literary cities and places are explored in poetry, fiction and criticism, including Nairobi, Madras, Kashmir, Johannesburg, Lagos, Singapore, Lahore, the fictional city of “Zamana,” meaning “era,” “age” or “time,” in Muneeza Shamsie’s translation from Urdu, standing for Pakistan’s contentious yet hopeful contemporaneity in Nadeem Aslam’s The Golden Legend (Aslam, 2017) and Western Australia’s Wheatbelt region whose gradual creation over the 20th century, made possible through the destruction of the region’s native habitat, is explored in Tony Hughes-d’Aeth’s Like Nothing on This Earth: A Literary History of the Wheatbelt, an extensive, methodologically fascinating study, with creative writing bearing witness to this almost 100-year history and providing a “document of record” on “what the wheatbelt felt like” as a “socio-ecological event of planetary significance” and an “inner event” for participants in the wheatbelt’s founding (Hughes-d’Aeth: 2017: 7–8).
Finally, it needs to be noted that although it is impossible for this editorial to do justice to the diversity, complexity and sheer volume of creative and critical output from the 11 regions and countries represented here, it is hoped that, along with our contributors’ introductions, it offers possible ways into the richness of this unique database of material year upon year.