Annual Bibliography of Commonwealth Literature 2020

Abstract

A genre which has positioned itself as offering one of the most direct and comprehensive responses to a 2020 lived under the sign of the Covid pandemic is the anthology. The year was imagined and discussed in collections of graphic fiction from Aotearoa New Zealand, poetry from East Africa and India, stories from India and Pakistan, essays from South Africa, poetry and art from Malaysia and around the world and multi-genre work from Australia exploring the pandemic as the third in a row of devastating calamities afflicting the country, following firestorms and floods.¹ Anthologies, in Barbara Benedict’s analysis, predicate themselves on “variety and dialogic exchange” to articulate “different responses to common events and feelings” and facilitate “sociability” (2003: 243), but are marked by a series of paradoxes: (literary) historicity and contemporaneity; communality and elitism; heteroglossia and homogeneity. They profess multiple authorship but are “stamped with the authority of the editor”; in A Pamphlet against Anthologies (1928), modernist poets Laura Riding and Robert Graves dubbed them a “publisher’s genre” (Benedict, 2003: 246), condemning their often thematic principle of organisation, where all poems about larks, for instance, can be muddled together, levelling up quality. Anthologies claim to be the expression of a community, but often create it themselves. They continue to underlie canon formation, to shape the discipline of literary criticism and to invite a repeated “dip, sip and skip” method of reading which parallels the editorial/scholarly processes of selection, criticality and the construction of a hierarchy of merit (2003: 242–237). At the same time, however, anthologies have been celebrated as a “reader’s genre” (anthology becomes synonymous with reader in one of the latter word’s modern meanings), as having provided literary movements with “definition and visibility” and as inviting non-linear readings of literary history (2003: 254).

These paradoxes of the genre highlight some of the issues underscored by the pandemic as what the Paris Review termed a “paradigm-shifting event” (Outka, 2020) and the respective questions raised by contributors to this Bibliographical issue in their introductions this year: questions of genre and classification, literariness, selectivity, exclusions, publics and modes of production and dissemination of works. The short-fiction collection Stained Glass Window: Stories of the Pandemic from Pakistan (2020), edited by Taha Kehar and Sana Munir, employs the stained-glass metaphor to harness the anthology’s simultaneous ambitions for communality and diversity. Sana Munir compares the glass fragments of the title image to the variety of shapes and personalities of the stories in the anthology: “When you sit back and look at the picture, the painting (of the stained-glass window) with a wholesome view, it all comes together” (cited in Iftikhar, 2020). In the graphic-fiction anthology, Lockdown: Tales from Aotearoa (Christchurch Art Gallery, 2020), it is one of the featured genre’s visual devices — the panel — which serves to capture the social distancing and segmentation of life under the Covid pandemic. Comprised of stories by 19 graphic and comic artists, the collection has its rows of panels reflecting and reflected by “support bubbles”, Zoom’s tiered participant boxes and the window-framed glimpses of the outside world. Under lockdown, like the reader of graphic fiction’s “sequential art” (Eisner, 1985), one needed to bridge empanelled units of action — the often asynchronous (delayed, disrupted, frozen or staggering) — synchronicities of various video-conferencing platforms, for example — in order to construct a whole, meaningful and continuous, narrative of existence. One of the contributors to the anthology, comics artist and writer Toby Morris describes the pandemic as a universal experience. Yet, as foregrounded by the paradoxical nature of anthologies, that experience is both universal — in the pandemic’s global ubiquity — and decisively particular, local, individual, fragmentary and exceptional. In last year’s editorial, I commented on the multitude of divides and precariats exacerbated by the pandemic. In the not-quite-post-pandemic world of mass vaccination programmes, geopolitical divides are sharpened further. As Grace Musila notes in her Introduction to the East and Central Africa listings, the virus continues its devastation across many countries of the global South whose most vulnerable citizens have little access to vaccines while most global North countries contemplate, or have indeed begun, an advanced phase of children’s immunisation and third, booster-shot vaccinations.

The pandemic has had its toll on literary events, prizes, bookshops, publishers, libraries and, most palpably, on theatre and performance. As reported by many contributors this year, productions were forced to close or reinvent themselves, digitally, artistically and commercially. The Singapore Repertory Theatre’s The Coronalogues (2020) — or Corona monologues — were penned, like anthology pieces, by nine playwrights and performed by nine actors on social media. The review of The Coronalogues cited by Ismail Talib in his introduction to Malaysia and Singapore’s listings also echoes criticisms aimed at anthology pieces viewed as parts of a whole — “bite-sized”, “uneven” and “patchy” (Ong Sor Fern, 2020). In further echoes of the anthology’s ironies, a report on the pandemic as a creative awakening in Singapore notes that over 40 per cent of theatre workers in the country are self-employed (Yusof, 2020), a social precariat belying theatre’s communal spirit and not at all limited to Singapore. In Aotearoa New Zealand, 48 Nights on Hope Street (Auckland Theatre Company, 2020) signalled the return of live but socially-distanced theatre. Written by five young playwrights and featuring five flatmates during 48 nights of lockdown, it draws inspiration from Bocaccio’s Decameron and the staged vernacular collectivity of its multiple tales to add coherence and continuity to the performance in a juxtaposition of 2020 Auckland and 1348 Florence of the Black Death.

The livestreamed production of Bangladeshi-born British writer Tahmima Anam’s otherwise yet unpublished play Shahrazad evokes another strand of the history of the anthology as a Western genre. Tracing its origins to the 18th century, when it “gave a literary form to a particular ideology” — a diverse, plural society which both based itself on communality and “licence[d] divergence” — it became possible by the leisure afforded by the colonial enterprise (Benedict, 2003: 254; 232). A collection of flowers by etymology, the anthology is linked to the 18th-century’s cabinets of curiosity and other collections and visual displays stocked on European collecting expeditions of colonial discovery, which gave rise to the modern museum and to the “specimen poetics” of the 19th century. Then, “books of pressed plants, catalogs of specimens and anthologies of poems began to stand for one another”, combining the competing taxonomic and vitalist strands of Enlightenment natural history (Porter, 2017: 62–63). The fate of Anam’s eponymous heroine, Shahrazad, closely mirrors not only that of the storyteller speaking for her life that she is named after, but also that of the text in which Shahrazad is a character, the Arabian Nights. Like Alf layla wa-layla (Thousand and One Nights), Anam’s Shahrazad has been “discovered”, “rescued”, uprooted to Britain, translated (her English husband renames her “Zadie Brown”) and given a new life or “re-vitalised” like a botanical specimen. The first English, Grub-street translation of the Nights was from the French of Antoine Galland’s early 18th-century Orientalist collection of tales based on the “three volumes of manuscripts comprising Alf layla wa-layla in Arabic, Syrian in origin”, to which he added, “fatefully but erroneously”, his translation of a manuscript of “Sinbad” as well as what “might be his compositions” of the now well-known “Aladdin” and “Ali Baba” tales, “concocted of pomegranates and ebony, damask and jasmine” (Warner, 2011: 12–16). The operations of abstracting, abridgement, expurgation and compilation which informed Galland’s belle infidèle translation (2011: 17) and his editorial approach are also characteristic of the work of the anthologist.

The short- and long-term repercussions of the pandemic, including theatre’s move to a virtual stage, prompt some of our contributors’ reflections on digitisation, genre and literariness as well as the ways in which the relationships between these issues inform the dilemmas and choices of the bibliographer as an arbiter of “literary quality”. These dilemmas pertain to the inclusion or exclusion of performance versus drama; digital versus print works; auto/biography versus fiction or creative non-fiction; “popular”, “genre”, YA and graphic fiction versus “literary” or realist works or those penned with an eye to their own critical reception. To some of these fundamental, timely questions, the 2020 listings may themselves provide interesting answers that challenge such divides and help recalibrate our bibliographic listings in ways that do justice to the range of forms and modes of the creative and critical production from the 12 countries and regions in our current coverage. The genre principle of organising the bibliography that we adopt is meant to offer a flexible shorthand for the reader’s convenience rather than a rigid classification, with possibilities for cross-referencing, annotations on genre and a more detailed commentary on specific works in the introductions to the listings.

One listing from the bibliography of Bangladesh which is pertinent to some of the dilemmas I noted is Anam’s play discussed above. Performed on Zoom, livestreamed on YouTube and set on Instagram, where Zadie Brown hosts her live show during lockdown, Shahrazad (Komola Collective, 2020) encapsulates the full documented historical trajectory of the Nights’ production and dissemination and, more broadly, of storytelling: from the 2^nd-century Persian collection of folk tales (in which the name “Shahrazad” appears), themselves having been initially narrated by itinerant storytellers who, with each retelling “larded the tales with further details and jingles, reflecting their own particular tastes” (Kabbani, 2004: 26) to 21st-century global social media. Comprised of traditional oral tales from India, Persia, Iraq, Syria and Egypt that were “recounted in vulgar, vernacular Arabic, the TV soap-operas of their day, they would never have been considered ‘cultivated’ literature” (2004: 26). “Hosting” the stories of women about their experience of domestic violence in 2020, Anam’s Shahrazad adds to the Nights’ storyteller’s worldly corpus of tales, the anthology’s many-in-one.

Critical studies listed in the bibliography from East and Central Africa and South Africa this year also offer exciting ways of problematising and extending our bibliographical coverage while recognising the incredible range of works that have been and continue to be recorded by our contributors. In “African Street Literature: A Method for an Emergent Form beyond World Literature”, Ashleigh May Harris and Nicklas Hållén (2020) respond to the danger of world literature’s frequent positioning in anticipation of its critical reception as (ethnographically) representative of African cultures. The authors propose and demonstrate a method of reading in situ or, in this case, from the street, of three street forms of what they term emergent African literature or literature which “occurs as a response to technological innovations and the new markets that technology creates and participates in” (2020: 11). Drawing on Ato Quayson’s (2003; 2014) and Franco Moretti’s work (2013), among others’, they take the social as produced and registered by as well as being “in a constant state of co-production with the literary”, rather than being merely reflected by it (3–4). They examine, firstly, Khazimla’s Adventures (Hlobo et al., 2017), which they characterise as “ephemeral street literature” — “an A5 folded pamphlet comic printed in black-and-white on low cost, recycled paper”, composed by Cape Town writers and artists and distributed by the small collective Ordinary Superheroes — as a “project inspired by and directed back to […] the streets of Khayelitsha”, a township of Cape Town (6–7). Then, they turn their attention to flash-fiction stories from Nigeria in the context of expanding mobile networks and short-fiction infrastructures which legitimate the genre. These stories’ intended reader, Harris and Hållén argue, is a networked reader, “networked not only by mobile technologies […] but by an emergent form that speaks to and from the level of the street” (16). Finally, they discuss an amateur recording, later posted on YouTube, of spoken-word poetry by Nairobi poet Mamboleo Kimitta, urging for a reading across the multiple modes that frame the poetry — street performance, film and internet (16–17). Harris and Hållén’s theorizations are applicable beyond African contexts, especially in light of the pervasive digitisation of literary forms during 2020’s Covid lockdowns, to works such as Denmark-based Indian English author Tabish Khair’s eBook, Quarantined Sonnets: Sex, Money and Shakespeare (2020), for example. Sonnets from his social and political satire of the world’s foibles, placed in sharp relief by the pandemic, were performed on YouTube by Shakespeare scholars “quarantined” in Singapore, Britain and Denmark. On camera, they add their own framing commentary on Khair’s work in relation to their experience of lockdown.

Postcolonial Text’s special issue, Digital Africas (Adenekan et al., 2020), too, explores the extraordinary range of digital forms in African literary production — in Ghana, Kenya, Nigeria, Namibia, South Africa and, more recently, in the less well networked Malawi, Tanzania and Cameroon — noting the critical and theoretical work that has been carried out alongside it since the late 20th century. The articles in this issue analyse Digital Africas’ platforms, audiences and “everydayness”, from “Nollywood videos and live poetry sessions now posted on YouTube, to serialized Facebook fictions with rigorous daily posting schedules, and apps designed specifically for African language fiction” (Adenekan et al., 2020: 3). African digital literature, in the editors’ definition, does not sever its connection to print forms and genres in

embrac[ing] the digital as subject, technique, and mode of production. It includes not only digital-born works, but also print works that thematize the digital or make use of new stylistic conventions and ways of constructing literary subjectivity that writing online has brought to the fore. (2020: 5)

While African digital literature is put to the service of social activism, creativity and self-expression and to connecting African voices on the continent with those in diaspora, especially in the context of the Black Lives Matter movement, Adenekan et al. also draw attention to the fact that Digital Africa’s platforms tend to be “designed, produced and monetized in and by the West” (4–6).

In a similar vein, in her Journal of Commonwealth Literature article, “When is biography fiction?” (2020), Madhu Krishnan foregrounds questions of genre, arguing that while non-European writing continues to be seen as “an untroubled archive for the development of European knowledge”, this tendency is amplified in the case of biographical fiction and, more broadly, life writing, as “enabl[ing] unfettered access to other minds” (365–366). She examines three works by contemporary Kenyan authors which push the limits of biography. Billy Kahora’s The True Story of David Munyakei (2008) is a “non-fiction novella”, a formal device employed towards an “ontological-epistemic decentring” (2008: 369). Kwani Trust’s fifth issue (2008) of its flagship Kwani? journal, published by the Concerned Kenyan Writers group, explores the 2007 Kenyan presidential elections through the juxtaposition of such a vast range of genres (including “short fiction, poetry, journalistic writing and essays, photography, visual art, cartoons and graphic narratives, and personal testimonials in the form of interviews with participants, victims, and bystanders from across the country”) that it brings about “an interpretative excess” which completely frustrates “the drive to typologize, categorize, and catalogue” (368–369). Finally, Binyavanga Wainaina’s viral 2014 blog post, “I Am a Homosexual, Mum”, which posits itself as a “lost chapter” from his 2011 memoir, One Day I Will Write about This Place, places two versions of the author’s life, an “incorrect” one (in which, while living in South Africa at the time, he remains in Kenya) and the “correct” one, in a sequential narrative, to produce an effect where “the interpretative guide for fact becomes fiction and vice versa” and “writing and re-scribing the limits of a life and its story” serve to disrupt attempts at arriving at a stable epistemic order or a linear temporal progression (372–373).

Popular fiction is also the focus of specific studies this year. They include Spes Nibafasha’s “The politics of the popular: Definitions and uses of African popular fiction” (2020) and Indian Popular Fiction: New Genres, Novel Spaces edited by Prem Kumari Srivastava and Mona Sinha (2020). Nibafasha examines African popular fiction as a contested notion, arguing that the transposition of “popular fiction” as a western term into African contexts has extended the boundaries of the genre and put it in the service of local socio-critical analysis. In an Indian context, Srivastava and Sinha discuss genres such as graphic novels, microfiction, popular entertainment and political satire on television and the reality of social-media romances.

In Pakistan’s listings, The Gollancz Book of South Asian Science Fiction (2019), edited by Tarun K. Saint, includes stories from Bangladesh, Pakistan and India and features anti-colonial revolts, the partitions of the subcontinent and ecological themes, among others. In “Stealing the Sea” by Asif Aslan Farrukhi, translated from Urdu by Syed Saeed Naqvi, the residents of Karachi wake up one morning to find that the sea has vanished. In her review, Veena Muthuraman (2019) notes that Saint’s introductory overview traces non-Anglo-American strands of the genre — the Strugatsky brothers, Stanislaw Lem and Cixin Liu — and comments that recent South Asian science fiction has tended towards more genre-fluid and self-aware narratives. Medical doctor Faraz Talat’s debut novella, Seventy Four (2020), is another work of science fiction from Pakistan, a genre which reviewer Nawal Aamir Khan (2021) argues is “one of the rarest and most unexpected” in the country. In an ironic nod to George Orwell’s 1984, the novella’s title refers to the age of 74 beyond which, in a post-pandemic world emerging from a global neo-staph contagion, people are denied not only the treatment for the disease — phage therapy — but also any health care. The various ageist prejudices in medical treatment and health care made prominent by the Covid pandemic will resonate with readers around the world.

Other collections of “genre” fiction include Monsters in the Garden: An Anthology of Aotearoa New Zealand Science Fiction and Fantasy (2020), edited by Elizabeth Knox and David Larsen; Love after the End: An Anthology of Two-Spirit and Indigiqueer Speculative Fiction (2020) from Canada, edited by Joshua Whitehead, and The Readomania Book of Crime Thrillers (Readomania, 2020) from India. Individual works which foreground and/or experiment with genre include Indian writer Meena Kandasamy’s novel, named after the surrealist game with words, Exquisite Cadavers (2019), which places “forms, fictions and truths” in conversation via parallel fiction and commentary columns on each page; Shehan Karuntilaka’s Chats with the Dead (2020), a whodunnit which portrays the culture of impunity in late 1980s Sri Lanka where a war photographer has to solve his own murder; Vihanga Perera’s Bodies in Art (2020), a multi-genre work— composed of biography, criticism, satire, fiction and poetry — exploring theatre and the arts in Sri Lanka’s Kandy and Colombo; Mexican Canadian author Silvia Moreno-Garcia, Mexican Gothic (2020), a historical Gothic-fantasy novel which bears its own genre category as its title, thus positing itself as a fictional tract on it; Canadian writer Thomas King’s novel, Indians on Vacation (2020), which traces the journey to Europe of an Indigenous couple (Bird and Mimi) in the opposite direction to the dominant trajectory of Western European travel to “exotic” locations and revisits its tropes in a style which incorporates oral-storytelling refrains; Canadian author of Haitian ancestry Junie Désil’s poetry collection eat salt | gaze at the ocean (2020), named after two of the alleged cures for zombification and composed of fictions, newspaper articles, dictionaries and judicial papers put together in a strategy of writing back to the “appropriated / […] white tales of zombies” (10); Eugenia O’Neal’s Obeah, Race and Racism: Caribbean Witchcraft in the English Imagination (2020), mixing criticism, mythography and historiography, and John A. Scott’s Shorter Lives (2020), which combines experimental fiction, biography, and poetry in “a series of poetic biographies” (Duwell, 2020) of European and Australian modernist artists and writers. As Crystal Warren reports in her Introduction, South African writers Stephen Embleton’s Soul Searching (2020) and Nikhil Singh’s Club Ded (2020) were shortlisted for The Nommo Award for African speculative fiction, defined as “fantasy, science fiction, stories that draw on traditions, horror and philosophical fiction” by the African Speculative Fiction Society (2021) which administers the award. Two 2020 verse novels — Tony Page’s Anh and Lucien and Luke Best’s Cadaver Dog — as well as a collection of interviews with practitioners of the genre, Linda Weste’s Inside the Verse Novel: Writers on Writing (2020), appear in Australia’s listings. Weste places Australia “at the forefront of the publication of Anglophone verse novels”, a form established by Alexander Pushkin’s Eugene Onegin: A Novel in Verse (1823–1831) and otherwise tracing its origin to ancient Indian and Greek epic poems (Atherton, 2020).

Many other intriguing titles appear in 2020’s listings. Diplomacy and the Modern Novel: France, Britain, and the Mission of Literature, edited by Isabelle Daunais and Allan Hepburn, proposes that diplomacy and novel-writing can be seen as “roughly homologous activities”, where

writing communiqués and promoting national culture through ancillary functions at an embassy, all while preserving an air of detachment, have a corollary in the writing of chapters and promoting a point of view through the decidedly oblique activity of narrating fictional events, all while keeping one’s distance from those imagined situations. (Hepburn, 2020: 5)

The collection explores the intertwined national diplomatic networks of these two imperial powers in novelistic representations, including those penned by writers who were themselves diplomats or moved in diplomatic circles.

Laëtitia Saint-Loubert’s The Caribbean in Translation: Remapping Thresholds of Dislocation (2020), the first book-length study of translation in the region, employs a multidirectional approach to translations of fiction, poetry, drama and the essay into various languages, with attention to translatory paratexts and their use by a range of cultural agents “to present translation as a decolonizing enterprise” (3–7). It includes discussions of self-translations, “Caribbean untranslatabilities” and translatory archipelagic crossings (14–18). Theatrical Speech Acts: Performing Language: Politics, Translations, Embodiments (2020), edited by Erika Fischer-Lichte, Torsten Jost and Saskya Iris Jain, examines historical and contemporary translations across performance cultures as a range of strategies of interweaving, counteracting or undermining (Fischer-Lichte et al., 2020: 1) and includes chapters on the politics of such translatory speech acts in East and Central Africa and India.

Rahul Rao’s Out of Time: The Queer Politics of Postcoloniality (2020) explores the ways in which queer politics in contemporary Uganda, India and Britain are shaped by the legacy of British colonialism in these countries, with Uganda and India having been linked, along with other British colonies, by their inheritance of colonial anti-queer laws (7). Whilst intervening in what has been the global-North-dominated queer theoretical literature on time and temporality, Rao also calls for “wading into the messy critical task of determining how responsibility for ongoing oppressions must be apportioned between colonial and postcolonial regimes” (9–10) and takes to task both the homophobic claim expressed in the global South that “homosexuality is Western” and the claim which aims to counter it — that “homophobia is Western” (18–19). In a similarly-inflected project on time and temporality in relation to world literature, Filippo Menozzi’s World Literature, Non-Synchronism, and the Politics of Time (2020) explores non-synchronicities or temporal dislocations of the present in contemporary anglophone fiction from Africa and South Asia, including nostalgia about and appeals to Golden-Age ideals, returns of the repressed and anxieties about imminent ecological catastrophes.

A broad range of historical and contemporary mobilities are investigated and theorised about in 2020’s The Things of Others: Ethnographies, Histories, and Other Artefacts by Olivia Maria Gomes da Cunha; The Passport That Does Not Pass Ports: African Literature of Travel in the Twenty-First Century, edited by Isabel Balseiro and Zachariah Rapola; Chocolate Surrealism: Music, Movement, Memory, and History in the Circum-Caribbean by Njoroge M. Njoroge; On the Edges of Whiteness: Polish Refugees in British Colonial Africa during and after the Second World War by Jochen Lingelbach; Ibn Battuta in Sri Lanka by Ameena Hussein and Oceanic Islam: Muslim Universalism and European Colonialism edited by Ayesha Jalal and Sugata Bose, among other works. Anthologies dedicated to the travels of food and/as storytelling and gastropolitics include In Bibi’s Kitchen: The Recipes and Stories of Grandmothers from the Eight African Countries That Touch the Indian Ocean edited by Hawa Hassan and Julia Turshen; Food Republic: A Singapore Literary Banquet edited by Ann Ang et al. and Desi Delicacies: Food Writing from Muslim South Asia edited by Claire Chambers and including a story, “Jackfruit with Tamarind”, by our very own contributors for Bangladesh, Mafruha Mohua and Mahruba T. Mowtushi.

Finally, to return to the anthology as a genre, trope and history, the sombre-themed volume Ways of Dying: Stories and Essays (2020a), including works by nine Indian or Indian-diaspora writers and George Orwell, is an anthology in the New Delhi Aleph Book Company’s Aleph Olio series. In their book description of the collection, the publishers (2020b) remind us that, in one of its meanings, olio is synonymous with miscellany, adding that the Aleph Olio books contain “a mélange of the best writing […] on present aspects of India and Indian life in ways that have seldom been seen before”. Benedict (2003) argues that “anthologies and miscellanies constitute the same genre because they share means of material production, processes of compilation, audiences, and forms that define their cultural functions” (4). Despite the botanical history of the anthology, along with the miscellany, it was represented by 18th-century booksellers and publishers as “a feast, a collation of fruits gathered in one banquet to suit a variety of tastes” (9). The olio has a more specifically food-related etymology — a Spanish or Portuguese spiced meat-and-vegetable stew — which points to the trajectories of other European colonialisms in India. In combination with “Aleph”, the symbol of mathematical and Kabbalistic infinity, the “ingredients” of the olio — its forms and voices and, in the context of the volume, the number of deaths in 2020 — are thus endlessly multiplied. Registered and unregistered, these deaths can never be fully fathomed but merely represented through what bridges the anthology, the miscellany or the olio with Jorge Luis Borges’ Aleph in his short story of the same title (1949/2000). The Aleph is the “irresolvable” paradox of enumerating infinity, the point at which all points converge or the whole, which contains everything, including itself, “without admixture or confusion”, but which is no greater than any of its parts. It proves a mere optical instrument, “a small iridescent sphere”, for perceiving the fact of an otherwise endlessly deferred true Aleph (127–129).

Vassilena Parashkevova University of Surrey, UK

Footnotes

Notes

References

Adenekan

Cobham-Sander

Bosch Santana

Opoku-Agyemang

(2020) Digital Africas: Introduction to the guest issue. Postcolonial Text 15(3/4): 1–19. Available at: https://www.postcolonial.org/index.php/pct/article/view/2702 (accessed 10 September 2021).

African Speculative Fiction Society (2021) About us. Available at: https://www.africansfs.com/about-us (accessed 22 October 2021).

Aleph Book Company (2020a) Ways of Dying: Stories and Essays. New Delhi: Aleph Book Company. [India: Anthologies].

Aleph Book Company (2020b) Ways of Dying: Stories and Essays: Book description. Available at: https://www.alephbookcompany.com/book/ways-of-dying-stories-and-essays/ (accessed 19 October 2021).

Amuka

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(2020) Soaring above the Pandemic: Poetic Echoes from East Africa. Bungoma: InterCEN Books. [East and Central Africa: Anthologies].

Ang

Jie

DLW

Guang

(eds) (2020) Food Republic: A Singapore Literary Banquet. Singapore: Landmark Books. [Malaysia and Singapore: Anthologies: Singapore].

Atherton

(2020) Inside the Verse Novel: Writers on Writing by Linda Weste. Australian Book Review 424. Available at: https://www.australianbookreview.com.au/abr-online/archive/2020/september-2020-no-424/866-poetry/6759-cassandra-atherton-reviews-inside-the-verse-novel-writers-on-writing-by-linda-weste (accessed 20 September 2021). [Australia: Introduction].

Auckland Theatre Company (2020) 48 Nights on Hope Street ASB Waterfront Theatre, Auckland. First performance: 17 September 2020. [Aotearoa New Zealand: Introduction].

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10.

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11.

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B M.

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12.

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13.

Borges

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Andrew

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14.

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15.

Chambers

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17.

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18.

da Cunha

OMG

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19.

Cunningham

(ed.) (2020) Fire Flood Plague: Australian Writers Respond to 2020. Sydney: Vintage. [Australia: Anthologies].

20.

Daunais

Hepburn

(eds) (2020) Diplomacy and the Modern Novel: France, Britain, and the Mission of Literature. Toronto: University of Toronto Press. [Canada: Criticism: General Studies].

21.

Désil

Junie

(2020) eat salt | gaze at the ocean. Vancouver: Talonbooks. [Canada: Poetry].

22.

Duwell

(2020) John A. Scott: Shorter Lives. Australian Poetry Review, 1 May. Available at: http://www.australianpoetryreview.com.au/2020/05/john-a-scott-shorter-lives/ (accessed 20 October 2021).

23.

Eisner

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24.

Embleton

(2020) Soul Searching. Fife, UK: Guardbridge Books. [South Africa: Fiction].

25.

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26.

Fischer-Lichte

(2020) Introduction: Reflections on the politics and philosophy of language in performance. In: Fischer-Lichte

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Fischer-Lichte

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28.

Flint

(ed.) (2020) Unmasked: Reflections on Virus-Time. Singapore: Heliconia Press. [Malaysia and Singapore: Anthologies: Malaysia].

29.

Foo

Sek Han

Wing

Leon

(eds) (2020) 2020: An Anthology. Petaling Jaya: Fixi Novo. [Malaysia and Singapore: Anthologies: Malaysia].

30.

Harris

Hållén

(2020) African street literature: A method for an emergent form beyond world literature. Research in African Literatures 51(2): 1–27. [East and Central Africa / South Africa: Criticism: General Studies].

31.

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