Abstract
Editorial: Covid-19 Chronotopes
This year, the retrospective glance of Journal of Commonwealth Literature’s Bibliographic Issue, from the midst of the Covid-19 pandemic to pre-pandemic creative and critical publications, opens up multiple questions of time and temporality. We look back at 2019 with the benefit of hindsight, anticipating literary responses to this crisis, dissociating ourselves from it so as to examine pre-Covid works in their own right, seeing it already prefigured in 2019 publications and events and negotiating the demands of writing and of access to published works within the polyphony of its multiple overlapping chronotopes, Bakhtinian time-spaces embodying historical, biographical and social contradictions, inequalities and struggles (Bakhtin 1975). We live in chronotopes of Covid’s origins and trajectories; its symptomaticity, development and complications; its nostalgias and neologisms; the recursive postponements it necessitates; its uneven spread, divisions and precariats; its global figurations and the planetary solidarities emerging in response; the stasis, escapism, isolation, trauma, sacrifice and mourning it has brought about alongside Bacchic rule-breaking and excess alongside the policing of the self, of the other and of the boundaries between them; its socially distant deaths and virtual synchronicities; its fragmentation into national temporalities; its impetus to international competitiveness; its dystopias, its conspiracy theories and the politically inflected allegories of the fight against it; the cyclicity of its waves; the curves and peaks of its rates of infection and the race towards the fulfilment of a utopian post-Covid future, ranging from a return to pre-Covid times to a progression to a better, lessons-learned condition.
These diverse chronotopes intersect and complicate the legacies of time-space colonisations, exposing and exacerbating historical divides and injustices and producing local mutations in their adaptation to national politics in Johnson’s Britain, Modi’s India, Morrison’s Australia, Putin’s Russia or Bolsonaro’s Brazil. Drawing on Judith Butler’s Precarious Life: The Powers of Mourning and Violence (2004) and In Frames of War (2009) in their respective editorials for Journal of Commonwealth Literature and Journal of Postcolonial Writing, Chambers and Gilmour (2020) and Wilson et al. (2020) discuss the environmental, social, economic and academic configurations of precariousness in the times of Covid. Precariousness – “the inherent state of vulnerability and dependence resulting from … inequality, whereby subjects might be exposed to disease, violence, poverty, and civil war” (Wilson et al. 2020: 440) – affects biodiversity and ecosystem stability; refugees and asylum seekers; the poor; women; black, Asian and Muslim communities in the west; people with disabilities; gig-economy labourers on zero-hours contracts and early-career researchers, among many others.
Covid’s chronotopes, however, also articulate carnivalesque inversions and ironic twists of expectations. While Varlik (2020) highlights the ways in which narratives of Covid’s contagion trajectories rehearse the “epidemiological Orientalism” (290) informing accounts of the 18th-century Plague of Marseille or the global cholera epidemic’s visitations upon Western Europe, such narratives ignore the complexity of contemporary mobilities and vectors of contagion – including Europe-to-Africa vectors – or case statistics, where most African countries remain some of the least affected and the US tops the charts. Multiple sightings of wildlife in urban spaces deserted by humans earlier this year also offered, however partially and temporarily, a glimpse of a post-apocalyptically inflected modality of the possible, including new ways of relating to animals in urban ecosystems.
While the pandemic has underscored globalisation’s homogenising and hierarchising forces, it has also pointed to the possibility of partial reorientations. This year, works which offer such reorientations address, for instance, literary periodisations as Paul Giles does in his planetary-framework project Backgazing: Reverse Time in Modernist Culture (2019) seeking to deconstruct hegemonic ideas of time, aligned with Greenwich that have produced the “time-lag condition” (10) and the “tyranny of distance” (3) characterising the societies and literatures of Australia and New Zealand by tracing representations of reverse time in modernist culture as a subliminal manifestation of modernism’s antipodean variant (16). Similarly, Science Fiction in Colonial India, 1835-1905: Five Tales of Speculation, Resistance and Rebellion (2019) edited by Mary Gibson showcases science fiction writings which started developing in India years before the work of Jules Verne or H. G. Wells as the “products of and producing untimely space” – “untimely” in challenging the idea of realism as an antecedent of speculation, but also in its frustration of colonial articulations of time. In “Jamaican String Theory: Quantum Sounds and Postcolonial Spacetime in Marcia Douglas’ The Marvellous Equations of the Dread” (2019), Njelle W. Hamilton makes the case for a chronopolitical poetics of time in Marcia Douglas’ 2016 novel imagining Bob Marley as a posthumous time-traveller, returning to Kingston’s Victorian Clock Tower installed in 1913 in honour of King Edward VII on the site of a historic cotton tree, the Halfway Tree of pre-colonial memory, which becomes, in the novel, “an interdimensional portal at the intersection of diverse moments in Jamaican history” (89–92). The historical trajectories of tea and sugar, and lives lived under the sign of each, are re-imagined in 2019 fiction set in Sri Lanka and the Caribbean: Bandu Edussuriya’s The Saga of Tea: A Historical Novel and Curdella Forbes’ A Tall History of Sugar. Priyamvada Gopal’s monumental study, Insurgent Empire: Anticolonial Resistance and British Dissent (2019), reorients the trajectories of notions of freedom and self-determination, often seen as having travelled from Britain and Europe to their colonies, by revealing and examining their traffic in the opposite direction, from the West Indies, East Africa, Egypt and India, having been intellectually conceived there “through struggle and by crises occasioned by insurgency” over more than a century, starting with the 1857 uprising in India (8). Dir Klopper’s “Dry Bones: The Story of Paleoanthropology in South Africa” (2019) offers a reading of Olive Schreiner’s The Story of an African Farm (1883) to argue for “a narrative of becoming human” that exists in a dialogical relation with the indigenous rather than what is informed by paleoanthropology’s “retrospective prophecy” (33; 35). CanLit across Media: Unarchiving the Literary Event (2019), edited by Jason Camlot and Katherine McLeod, examines the variety of ways in which “the archival structures that inform cultural meaning may be reconfigured, refused, and remade through critical and creative practice” which has “documented and preserved Canadian literature in a wide array of cultural formations since the 1950s” (3). Basavaraj Naikar’s The Sport of Allama and Other Plays (2019) employs hagiographic understandings of time and life narrative in dramatizing the lives of saints from the 12th-century tradition of Karnataka for contemporary audiences.
These works are merely representative of the incredible volume, scope and diversity of creative and critical production in the eleven countries and regions in our coverage. Notable themes in 2019 include islands; disabilities; World War I; queer sexualities; genre fiction; graphic narratives; the senses, synaesthesia and multimedia; ecopoetics and ecocriticism; translation and (feminist) Indigenous theatre and performance. Readers are advised to consult our contributors’ Introductions on local themes and developments, book histories and commentaries on competitions, prizes, literary festivals, performances and new journals as well as valuable, first-hand commentary on or by authors, competition judges and performance producers in the case of Walter Perera’s Introduction to the listings from Sri Lanka.
Also prominent in this year’s listings are refugee trajectories of flight and physical/symbolic return and narratives of home, detention camp, border and uprootedness in Somali-Canadian author Nur Abdi’s novel, The Somali Camel Boy, tracing a refugee passage to Toronto; Lien Chao’s bilingual, Chinese-and-English, poetry collection Salt in My Life, revisiting the effects of China’s Cultural Revolution in travelogue form; the configurations of Jewish diasporas in Kenya in the auto/biographical Road Less Travelled: German-Jewish Exile Experiences in Kenya, 1933–1947 by Natalie Eeppelsheimer and “They Called Us Bloody Foreigners”: Jewish Refugees in Kenya, 1933 until the 1950s by Cilli Kasper-Holtkotte and Alexandra Berlina, discussed in detail by Grace Musila in her Introduction to the bibliographic listings from East and Central Africa. Brigitta Olubas’ “‘Where We Are Is Too Hard’: Refugee Writing and the Australian Border as Literary Interface” focuses on the Australian Government-controlled detention centre on Manus Island, Papua New Guinea, in the writings of Kurdish-Iranian journalist Behrouz Boochani on his experience there. Pakistani activist for female education Malala Yousufzai’s We Are Displaced: My Journey and Stories from Refugee Girls around the World interweaves memoir and communal storytelling and Rukhsana Ahmad’s stageplay Homing Birds dramatises the adoption of an Afghan refugee child by a British couple in London. Monica Ali’s “The Son’s Tale”, as told to her by a Nigerian immigrant about his detention and deportation by the British Home Office, appears in the third volume of the perhaps inevitably problematic, the-subaltern-cannot-speak Refugee Tales. The “function” of what Claire Gallien refers to as “refugee poetics” includes raising awareness about “the conditions of life for those displaced” (2018: 722), a task in which the Refugee Tales project continues to do inspiring work, its Chaucerian-framed journeying of refugee-charities-organised walks with detained people to end “indefinite detention” (Flood 2016) preserving their anonymity whilst allowing their voices to be heard. Yet, while it occasions consensual and therapeutic tellings, the project places British-based authors in the position of an uncomfortable rehearsal of the colonial orality-literacy divide. The sad irony of the fate of the detained refugee is that she needs to symbolically exchange her life story with writers of presumably superior English, artistic skill and status – currencies in which they, in turn, donate – in a bid for freedom.
Many thanks are due to Claire Chambers and Rachael Gilmour who are stepping down as co-editors of the Journal of Commonwealth Literature for their brilliant work and inspiring legacy for the Journal and for their support for its Bibliography Issue’s team of contributors and for me as its editor. It has been an absolute pleasure and privilege to work alongside them and I look forward to working with their chosen successors, Rehana Ahmed and Shital Pravinchandra of Queen Mary University of London.