Abstract
I (Claire Chambers) was working on this, our farewell editorial for the Journal of Commonwealth Literature after ten happy years, the first five of which I spent co-editing with Susan Watkins (Leeds Beckett University) and the second five with Rachael Gilmour (Queen Mary University of London). So absorbed was I in my work that when the coronavirus pandemic really took hold and went global, I was blindsided and had to rethink the editorial’s original premise. Going back to the drawing board, I thought of Mohsin Hamid’s novel The Reluctant Fundamentalist, in which the protagonist Changez declares: I [. . .] had previously derived comfort from my firm’s exhortations to focus intensely on work, but now I saw that in this constant striving to realize a [. . .] future, no thought was given to the critical personal and political issues that affect one’s emotional present. In other words, my blinders were coming off, and I was dazzled and rendered immobile by the sudden broadening of my arc of vision. (Hamid, 2007: 145)
This resonates with how Rachael and I feel about the pandemic and the fast-moving “emotional present” in general, as well as our loved ones’ health in particular. The two of us usually throw ourselves into our research and editorial work, but over the last three months we have suffered a series of personal and professional crises that have meant we have been overwhelmed by the situation’s enormity. Part of our out-of-office autoreply currently reads: “As a small, relatively young, female team with caring responsibilities, this virus has hit JCL extremely hard”. Indeed, I write this on my own, although we did the planning together and I am ably supported in spirit. Rachael is currently on compassionate leave due to a death of a close family member not caused by Covid-19 but immeasurably complicated by it. My heart goes out to my dear colleague and close friend. Rachael has been a big-hearted, good-humoured, and staunch collaborator from 2015 until now, and it is my sincere hope that we continue writing together in the future.
This plague has taken many by surprise, “dazzl[ing] and render[ing us] immobile”. To be sure, sober warnings came from China and other countries in East Asia. However, as Ipek Demir shows, these harbingers were “underestimate[d]” by a complacent and ethnocentric West, whose hubris was fuelled by “epidemiological neoliberalism” (2020: n.p.). The current dystopian situation feels like Kali Yuga, or at least the beginning of the world’s end. You have to remind yourself that this is real and no fever dream. Things should slowly return to some semblance of normality but, to adapt the titles of Sabyn Javeri’s story and that of its parent anthology (edited by JCL’s Pakistan Bibliography editor Muneeza Shamsie) which collected together post-9/11 Pakistani women’s writing, there is no doubting that “the world [has] changed” (Javeri, 2005; Shamsie, 2005: titles). Covid’s metamorphoses are entrenching inequalities in ways that will be difficult to reverse. Far from being a leveller, the crisis is widening already vast social chasms.
Take the gender pay gap. The pandemic is likely to set female academics back by decades and calcify gender inequalities in higher education because of the emotional labour and caring burdens women tend to shoulder. The virus itself and consequent lockdowns lay bare the faultlines of social injustice that structure our world. Writing in the Guardian in April, Stefan Collini shone a spotlight on universities’ ruthless and pervasive use of insecure contracts. Holders of these contracts are mostly women, who are cheaper and more expendable than their male colleagues. Collini calls this group the “academic precariat” (2020: n.p.). Amid the scramble to move undergraduate teaching online, the struggle for a just dispensation for this precariat is being undermined now more than ever before. As student numbers fall, zero-hour contract holders will be forced to do even more work for less, or will lose their jobs altogether. The Twitter account @Ass_Deans, which satirizes HE middle and upper management, grimly summarized this situation in the directive: “I know you are on a nine month contract but we still need [. . .] online only, in-person only, and hybrid course syllabi for your new course by June 1” (Associate Deans, 2020: n.p.). Put differently, universities are cynically using this crisis to “streamline” the already austerity-pummelled higher education sector, and to make swingeing expenditure cuts.
In Precarious Life: The Powers of Mourning and Violence (2004), Judith Butler gives readers a detailed understanding of precarity and the precariat. Precarity is commonly, and rightly, associated with social class, being widely interpreted as vulnerability, another word of which Butler is fond. She characterizes precarity and vulnerability as being embodied, alluding to the precarity of bodies — our rupturable skin and easily failing organs — in ways that find new echoes in the time of coronavirus. She further emphasizes that humans’ sociability connect us to other bodies within relational networks. Demonstrating the interdependence of all humans and the fallacy of individualism, Butler writes, “[Y]ou make me and your loss undoes me: It is not as if an ‘I’ exists independently over here and then simply loses a ‘you’ over there, especially if the attachment to ‘you’ is part of what composes who ‘I’ am. [. . .] Who ‘am’ I, without you?” (2004: 22). She shows that we experience mourning and grief with the loss of that other whom we love and without whom we do not exist in the same way.
The term precariat is popular in academia, especially for discussing the vulnerability of those whom Amitava Kumar, writing about the US context in World Bank Literature, calls “adjunct faculty” (2003: xxiv–xxv). These are the early career lecturers highlighted by Collini who work from contract to contract with no sick pay, holiday wage, or future assurance. Butler’s concept of precarity might also be extended to encompass our present coronacrisis, with the British government’s identification of “extremely vulnerable” people for shielding, as well as the unprecedented threat the virus poses to existing and future jobs or careers. Anyone experiencing severe anxieties around sudden unemployment or potential homelessness might be seen as part of the academic precariat.
It is also important to note that when the virus strikes, it is people from impoverished and minoritized areas the world over who are dying at higher rates than those able to shelter at home in more privileged places. In Britain BAME (Black, Asian, and Minority Ethnic) people are dying at exponentially higher rates due to a complex nexus of poverty; classist, racial, and religious discrimination; lack of access to healthcare; and risky occupations — among other factors (see Razaq et al., 2020). As the head of Bradford’s QED Foundation Mohammed Ali puts it, “they said that Covid-19 does not discriminate. That was clearly not true” (2020: n.p.). The pandemic makes plain the unequal access to resources held by various groups and individuals.
In Singapore, which was initially held up as a great Covid success story for its contact tracing and virus containment, it emerged that those who are dying are overwhelmingly minorities. This so-called success relies on ignoring the country’s 300,000 migrant labourers, who live amid quasi-segregated, crowded conditions in foreign worker dormitories. There has been a resurgence of the virus because this precariat were never looked after, with over three-quarters of the new cases coming from the vulnerable migrant group (Bhandare, 2020). Something similar is happening with foreign workers from South Asia in the oil-rich states of the Arabian Gulf (Wallen, 2020). The virus exposes and magnifies the often ignored fact that the elite greatly benefit from the stark structural inequalities on which their countries rest.
At an excellent online conference on our post-coronavirus future organized by Om Prakash Dwivedi at Auro University, India, the novelist and politician Shashi Tharoor gave one of the keynote addresses alongside Ankhi Mukherjee, Pavan Malreddy, and other luminaries. Presenting the example of India’s prime minister Narendra Modi, Tharoor observed that in countries where strongmen are in office, these populists have used the virus to shore up further power. The human consequence is increased fear of the other, whereby there is a marked and widespread hostility to entire communities, such as the Chinese or anyone who looks East Asian. Tharoor rightly poured opprobrium on the toxic hatred many right-wing Hindus have been showing towards Muslims. An ill-advised meeting held by the proselytizing Tablighi Jamaat movement in March has been used as a stick to beat Muslims with for spreading illness. However, the governmental Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) also held a big gathering around that time, so this is selective outrage. Indian politics is severely infected by religious hatred. Communal tension has been escalating in areas where most people never imagined this would happen. One friend told me that even if the country manages to escape the worst excesses of Covid-19, India is now doomed to live with this virus of communal hatred.
All this points us back to JCL’s founding principles. First with Susan and then Rachael, I have been eager to publish articles that scrutinize the involvement of gender and sexuality in colonialism (see Chambers and Watkins, 2012: 297; Chambers and Watkins, 2015: 260; Chambers and Gilmour, 2016: 4). Another of our most pressing concerns over the last decade has been the progressively more marketized neoliberal conditions in universities worldwide, which impact disproportionately on women and on ethnic-minority and younger colleagues. Early career researchers are the future of our discipline. One of our greatest pleasures in editing the Journal of Commonwealth Literature is to read, support, and develop work by these resonant new voices. The research of the academic precariat is what is taking postcolonial studies forward and transforming the discipline’s canon, ideas, and methodology. Finally, given my 15 years of researching Muslim fiction and my push while at JCL for greater inclusion of criticism dealing with Arab (diasporic) writing, religious identities have been another strong current of interest.
Rachael and I are handing over to two stellar women academic editors, Rehana Ahmed and Shital Pravinchandra (both also at Queen Mary University of London). Vassilena Parashkevova has edited JCL’s annual Bibliography brilliantly for over ten years, and we will miss her very much. Warm thanks are due too to Indrani Karmakar, the journal’s terrific Social Media Editor. We are also succeeded by an astonishing team of women publisher–editors who will continue doing their roles with unshakeable aplomb. Indeed, we will be forever indebted to Livia Melandri in SAGE’s London office and Ashwani Shahi at SAGE Delhi for their consistent support and kindness. We are also grateful to you, our readers, authors, and reviewers, for your patience at this difficult time. We may require it from now until our last day on 31 December 2020 — though I very much hope not.