Eng. Lit after empire: The political stakes of public goods

Abstract

The overhaul of the Journal of Commonwealth Literature is part of a lineage of acts that reshape critical space through wielding the symbolic power to name. This article responds to the journal’s divestment from Commonwealth literary studies by exploring the interplay between the structures of power that guarantee literary and critical space and the structures of perception that guide it. It does so by contrasting two parallel acts of syllabus reform in national education in the late twentieth century: the introduction of African and Caribbean literature in external school examinations in Britain and in Kenya in the late 1970s and early 1980s. These records of past practice speak to current debates about decolonizing curricula by staging issues of positionality, the place of literary education in multi-ethnic states, and increasing centralization in education. Above all, they remind us that the political stakes of literary study after empire have always been high, precisely because school education is a matter of state.

The “plain” and “descriptive” title the Journal of Commonwealth Literature caused its editors problems from the beginning, not least “what the nomenclature excluded or included” (Low, 2015: 276). Its renaming in 2024 shows more is at stake than the mere legibility of words. Read as a conscious act of change-making, the new name is a symbolic divestment from the discursive and contextual burdens of Commonwealth literary studies — the explicit humanism, implicit “colonial condescension”, and risky proximity to “cultural diplomacy practices and commercial considerations” (Low, 2015: 272, 274) — in favour of a sharper analytical and political focus on “literature, critique, and empire today”.

This essay does not linger on the semantic limitations of particular words, but uses the occasion of the journal’s name change to explore the risks and gains that accompany such moments of literary-critical reform. We can think of acts of institutional change in two ways: as relatively modest modifications of content or framing in the spirit of modernization, or in the more powerful sense as conscious interventions to restore something more deeply to function. This is particularly clear, I suggest, when turning to national education: the common good and public space that might connect us. In what follows, I move from the present moment of re-orientating intent to the record of past practice, demonstrating that such acts are not just motivated, but shaped, by the political realities in which they are situated. I do so by revisiting the parallel introduction of something like “Commonwealth literature” — actually African and Caribbean literary production — in external school examinations in the late 1970s and early 1980s, the first initiated for racial minorities in Britain and the second by the racial majority in Kenya.

In a 1978 lecture titled “The Uses of African Literature” Chinua Achebe outlined two fallacies accompanying the inclusion of African literature in the education systems of the West. The first held that such writing was essentially different and therefore in need of special handling and separate treatment. Conceptions of African literature as positioned outside “the realm of other literatures” led, all too often, however, to its total neglect or its superficial incorporation as an end-of-week “Friday fun-filler” (1979: 9). The second approach believed in no difference at all, thereby removing all “legitimate distinctiveness” and treating differences of style, language, content, or form as a “pandering to exoticism”. Achebe was speaking at a particular historical conjuncture in which longstanding critical debates about the political commitment of writers met emerging educational markets for African writing in Britain and North America. His own view at the time imagined the writer as a guardian of culture in opposition to the hungry ambitions of the postcolonial state. But it was the conceptual and educational issues arising from shifts in publishing that provided the real setting for his talk at the inaugural conference of the British Association for the Teaching of Caribbean and African Literature (ATCAL) at the University of Kent in England. ATCAL was threaded through with some of the formative institutions, contexts, and figures associated with the Journal of Commonwealth Literature. Although he was introduced by its founding editor, the “academic fossil” Arthur Ravenscroft (qtd. in Achebe, 1979: 8), Achebe’s audience that day contained as many schoolteachers as university-based literary critics.

In 1980 the University of London School Examinations Board published a reformed A-Level Paper featuring a limited selection of African and Caribbean literary texts for the first time. The same year, the Kenyan Ministry of Higher Education ratified major changes to its Advanced Certificate of Education that overhauled Eurocentric geographies and implemented an imaginative approach to oral, as well as written, literature. Each prompted public debates about the place of literary education in multi-ethnic states and staged the increasing centralization of national education. These contrasting examples, which negotiate the descriptive or gradualist versus the active or radical senses of what “reform” might mean, speak to our current moment by revealing the creative stakes and political realities that surround such acts of change. They raise questions about the positionality of who was bringing the change: those lobbying school examination boards in 1970s Britain were ignorable because they were either racially minoritized members of the diaspora or white members of the educated classes advocating on behalf of second-generation children. The social position of the Kenyan reformers as university-educated elites and members of a racial majority did not, however, necessarily protect them from political repression or exile. In their different ways, then, these case studies of late twentieth-century syllabus and curricular change remind us that the political stakes of literary study after empire have always been high — precisely because school education is a matter of state.

I Britain, 1978–1984

Given the world-wide recognition now accorded African and Caribbean writers who have written in and extended the English and French languages;

given the fact that there is a large population of African and Caribbean descent residing in Britain;

and given the need for all Britons to understand the worth and variety of one another’s cultures;

the Teachers’ Association for Caribbean and African Literature has been formed. (ATCAL, 1980)

ATCAL was an educational pressure group and coalition of school and university teachers, librarians, writers, and publishers established to expand “knowledge and understanding” of African and Caribbean authors in Britain, increase the quantity of “books, audio-visual and background material” available to teachers, students, and communities, and keep titles “express[ing] the experience of those of African and Caribbean descent in Britain” from falling out of print. ¹ Their last objective, “to ensure that examination boards include works by African and Caribbean authors in their syllabi”, was among the most challenging, though. The verb “include” proved particularly fraught because of the university examination boards presiding over external rather than school-based examinations at the ages of 14 to 16 (Ordinary Level) and 16 to 18 (Advanced Level). It was also very much an English and Welsh issue, with Scotland operating an open, or teacher-selected, syllabus.

In 1982, four years after ATCAL’s initial formation, its homespun newsletter bristled over the precise shape the much-needed reforms to the A-Level should take. Examinations in English literature, which involved applying supposedly objective standards to apparently subjective judgements, had long been a problematic issue in Britain. Objecting to a recent workshop on the matter, Arthur Pollard, a “founder member of ATCAL who […] pioneered the study of Commonwealth literature”, likened his own perceived exclusion from the gathering to “Hamlet without the Prince” (1982: 2). Pollard, a Professor of English Literature at the University of Hull, was a scholar of satire and nineteenth-century literature who had studied at Leeds and Oxford in the late 1940s and early 1950s, before developing special interests in Australian literature thanks to another of the journal’s Leeds-based founders, Norman Jeffares (1989: 50–52). Pollard had started a significant early programme of Commonwealth literature at Hull in 1971. He also happened to be the Chief Examiner for the University of London examination board, and his absence from the ATCAL workshop that year was not altogether surprising. Titled “‘Eng. Lit’ or Literature in English?”, the workshop responded to the lacklustre inclusion of African and Caribbean literature by Pollard’s board, following calls from Hackney Downs School in London “to make the ‘A’ Level syllabus more sensitive to the needs of black students” (Heron, 1985: 37). The board had introduced a relatively fixed canon of works by male writers for the 1981 and 1982 examinations: Kamau Brathwaite’s Masks, V. S. Naipaul’s A House for Mr Biswas, V. S. Reid’s New Day, Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o’s The River Between, Wole Soyinka’s The Lion and the Jewel, and Achebe’s Things Fall Apart. (Ngũgĩ’s Petals of Blood, Jean Rhys’s Wide Sargasso Sea, and Derek Walcott’s Selected Poems were later added, for 1984). However the chief controversy of the so called “special alternative” or “special relief” option, which stood outside the mainstream of the syllabus, was its separatism; Achebe’s fallacy one par excellence. ² Objecting to the selection of titles “distanced […] from the Black British-Caribbean connection” and to “the traditional ethnocentric English evaluation that goes with the whole ‘Commonwealth literature’ approach to these works” (Heron, 1981: 21), the Inner London Education Authority (ILEA) English Centre and the ATCAL A-Level syllabus subcommittee begged the obvious question: “relief for whom, from what?” (Grant, 1981: 2). ³

For all its inflated self-importance and theatrical woundedness, Pollard’s interjection established an important irony in the syllabus debate unfolding in Britain: the disavowal of the value of a whole body of modern literature by its principal guardians in the national education system. His justification querulously poured petrol on the flames:

The fact remains that, with the possible exception of Naipaul, there really is nothing in African and Caribbean literature to match in quality those works which are normally found within the substantive body of texts set at Advanced Level. The introduction of the [London board] relief paper was therefore a concession to, and recognition of, very laudable enthusiasms. I share those enthusiasms but I cannot in all honesty subscribe to the view that the writers set for that paper have any considerable claim for study within the rest of the syllabus. (1982: 3)

Pollard’s objection on the basis of literary value stoked the ever-present spectre of public sector educational standards. ⁴ To this, he added two further qualifications: the poor knowledge among examiners “entirely or almost entirely ignorant of Commonwealth literature” and the need to study African and Caribbean materials only when equipped “with a proper literary and cultural background”. Roundly redubbed “Professor Polardius, Fishmonger” (Fraser, 1983: 2) in the next issue of the newsletter, Pollard was seemingly unbothered by the circularity of his own logic that such literature could only become part of the mainstream syllabus when understood and valued by examiners properly. As the Sheffield-based West African specialist Adetokunbo Pearse pointed out, “If African and Caribbean texts are not good enough for inclusion in substantive G.C.E. A-Level Literature syllabuses […] how can Professor Pollard justify teaching these texts at Hull?” (1983: 3).

The ATCAL response, which contested the authority of the university examination boards over the discipline and Pollard as Chief Examiner, was rooted in radical approaches to school education and the growing influence of cultural studies. Chief among Pollard’s rivals in this respect was George Heron, a teacher vocal on the syllabus reforms who sought to reorient the A-Level from simply reproducing the standard readings of major English authors to developing a wider set of interdisciplinary skills. Heron was not eschewing literary value as such, but amplifying literature’s capacity to increase “understanding of the contemporary social and cultural life of our community” (qtd. in Grant, 1982: 2). Heron played an influential role within ATCAL as a member of its syllabus sub-committee, even if his ideas were not always adopted outright in its policies. ⁵ Drawing on a multiculturalist commitment to social justice that stressed the urgent need for change, he evoked the Birmingham Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies’ recent diagnosis that English was caught between “ever-extending processes of certification and qualification dominating the post-war growth of the state education system” and its status as among the most “open and ambiguous [of] disciplinary space[s]” (English Studies Group, 1979: 242).

Crucially, though, and unlike the Birmingham group, Heron also took a step further — beyond Europe. Contrasting the ‘“Commonwealth approach’” of British universities to the “liberating ‘Nairobi’ approach of the 1970s in Kenya” (Grant, 1982: 3), he brought a much-needed internationalism to the debate by referencing the major reconceptualizations of literariness taking place in East Africa. As is well-known, the University of Nairobi had from the late-1960s attempted to transform a colonially inherited model of literary studies emphasizing the historical continuity of English literary culture into a spatial model of world literatures. The new schema, which worked “to assimilate new experiences in order of their relevance to an illumination of [one’s] own experience” (qtd. in Wasambo Were, 1983), moved concentrically from the principal entry point of the average Kenyan undergraduate — East African oral literatures, and behind that, the system of language itself — toward African letters, Black Atlantic, Latin American, and other world literatures, including (eventually) the English literary tradition. ⁶ The co-written 1968 document “On the Abolition of the English Department”, which for a time held hyper-canonical status for reasons of its publication in Ngũgĩ’s Homecoming and subsequent anthologization, was just one part of a complex and evolving institutional picture at Nairobi that turned as much on the labour politics of a largely expatriate academic staff body as it did on issues of disciplinarity. This more familiar story has overshadowed the fact that Kenyan efforts to decentre an entrenched “Eng. Lit” approach were not restricted to Higher Education. As we shall see, it was precisely because the same thinking was extended to secondary schools that it became subject to state concern.

Despite his undoubted significance more generally, the creative and intellectual intermediary linking East Africa to the British debate was not Ngũgĩ, who had studied at the Leeds School of English with Heron, the Ugandans Pio and Elvania Zirimu, and others between 1965 and 1968. It was instead Okot p’Bitek, the subject of a doctorate Heron completed at Leeds some years later under the supervision of Ravenscroft and with significant ties to the Nairobi Literature Department. Heron’s study built on the dynamic relationship rather than separate domains of the written and the oral through a detailed comparative analysis of the long poem Song of Lawino. He was particularly interested in the techniques through which Okot p’Bitek had interposed written craft and oral literature in the poem’s three distinct linguistic and textual versions in Acholi and English. ⁷ Where the West African Ibadan-school poets Christopher Okigbo, J. P. Clark, and even Soyinka had negotiated the critical challenges facing poets on the continent through “mastery over the literature and colloquial language of the metropolitan country” (Heron, 1976: 11), Okot p’Bitek had done so through mastery of the Acholi language and its conventions. Significantly, he had expanded “the range of what are considered acceptable subjects for poetry” and “acceptable modes of writing in English” because of formative years outside the “conventional training” of university English departments (Heron, 1976: 2).

The East African literary field thus bore on the school English debate in Britain through ATCAL, revealing through Pollard and Heron the different intellectual genealogies and sensibilities Leeds had produced. (There was much traffic between the two universities: a subsequent editor of the Journal of Commonwealth Literature, Andrew Gurr, for instance, moved from the department at Leeds to Nairobi in 1969). The British assimilation of the Nairobi experience was funnelled through Heron but also the publisher Anne Walmsley, who wrote an MA thesis on reforms to the Kenyan secondary literature curriculum at Sussex University and was active in ATCAL. It shifted the focus of the local debate from relatively narrow questions about whether to include African and Caribbean writing and which few titles if so, to socio-political ones like who was doing the including and on what terms. Asking difficult questions about power, institutions, and “those who control our O and A level exams” (Heron, 1981: 21) not only put the historic role of the universities in the spotlight. It also implicitly supplanted received ideas about literariness, decentring the longstanding focus on historical continuity with a local interpretation of the Nairobi concept of relevance: young people’s “cognitive engagement in the setting and solving of problems about the world they live in” (Heron, 198: 21). Works of African, Caribbean, South Asian, and, above all, second-generation Black British and diaspora writing, now held value as part of contemporary literature in English.

Heron’s own location and focus is instructive here. Following posts at a Kenyan teacher training college and Abdullahi Bayero University College in northern Nigeria, he joined the Abraham Moss Centre in Manchester, a shared educational facility for both school and adult learning. Typically, A-Level English Literature was the domain of a privileged white, middle- and upper-class minority; according to Heron its genuine transformation lay first in extending the techniques of “experiential learning” (1985: 37) used in lower school and adult education to external examinations, and second in expanding the definition of literary studies to nothing less than “the study of verbal art in English — a study which could include both popular and serious literature, oral literature, drama and modern forms like film” (qtd. in Grant, 1982: 3; emphasis added). Heron’s emphasis on “verbal” as well as written “art” was only a couple of steps removed from Okot p’Bitek’s own “democratic definition” of literature as “all the creative works of man expressed in words” (1972: 23; emphasis in original). To him, literature was a festival — a symbol of “participation in a living oral literature” against the system of lifeless examination associated with its formal study through the universities.

Such analyses could not have been more different to Pollard’s own commitments. Recoiling at Heron’s account of the systematic ways Britain’s “official national culture” dispersed power and social values through the A-Level to the detriment of both “ethnic minorities” and “the white working class” (Grant, 1982: 2), he rounded on such analyses as an “attack on established and traditional standards which is now a familiar Marxist ploy” (1982: 2). Or, as another commentator put it, “a multi-disciplinary, multi-ethnic mish-mash reflecting the patently ‘political’ prejudices of so many of its propagators” (Melvin, 1981: 15).

II Kenya, 1974–1983

If Heron and Okot p’Bitek represented one aspect of the exchange between Britain and East Africa at this historical moment, another was the direct influence upon ATCAL of the reformers who had made Kenya “the trailblazer for the continent” by centring African literature in schools (Walmsley, 1986: 149). At ATCAL’s sixth national conference at Kent in 1983 Lauretta Ncgobo (1983) described the “very clear parallel” between those seeking to create space for non-European literature in British classrooms and “what has happened in Kenya”. “We see […] it in the minority children in our classrooms”, she observed, “children who […] bring into their classrooms half of themselves”. Ncgobo was introducing the ATCAL keynote speaker, Luka Wasambo Were, a former Inspector of Literature and Drama at the Kenyan Ministry of Higher Education, who had “succeeded where many of us are struggling” by instituting a syllabus attuned to the situational, cultural, and educational needs of children in classrooms.

Appearing alongside Ngũgĩ, his former tutor on the BA English and Education at Nairobi, Wasambo Were focused on the radical reforms to the Kenyan Certificate and Advanced Certificate of Education under the “Change the Literature Syllabus movement”, which had originated in the Overseas syllabus of the University of Cambridge Local Examinations Syndicate. This last was so “static in content, objective, and manner of teaching” that, he wryly observed, “one would have seen little difference between two lessons taught in Nairobi, Kenya and maybe Canterbury in England” (Wasambo Were, 1983). The Overseas syllabus was followed by gradualist regional changes via the Cambridge East African syllabus in 1968 that allowed “for the teaching of one or two African writers” in its entirety but did little else to address the fundamental issues. In 1974 Wasambo Were had been a practising secondary school teacher present at a landmark conference on the Africanization of the secondary school literature curriculum. It proposed the same spatial relevance-based model as the Nairobi Literature department: “to deepen the students’ understanding and appreciation of Literature of the people of East Africa, Africa, the third world and the rest of the world in that order” (Ministry of Higher Education, 1980). Wasambo Were resuscitated the proposals, shelved for some years as being too controversial, upon joining the Inspectorate in 1979 as its first African member. ⁸

The new Advanced Certificate consisted of three papers: Critical Appreciation (with sections on prose and poetry), African Literature (with sections on the novel and short fiction, plays, and oral literature), and Literature from the Rest of the World, with four papers covering “Literature from the African Diaspora”, “from the Americas”, “from Asia”, and “from Europe” (Ministry of Higher Education, 1980). Significantly, it introduced the study of oral literature alongside poetry, prose, and drama for the first time in Kenyan schools. There is much more to say about the specific terms in which the reformers imagined and implemented oral literature as “a conscious craft bearing aesthetic and artistic expression […] stimulated by physical and socio-economic environments, the collective preferences of generations as well as talented individual innovations” (qtd. in Wasambo Were, 1983). The new literature examinations not only required students to recognize the techniques used in oral literatures and to analyse them individually within their cultural contexts and comparatively across regions, but to show an “ability to record oral literature” and “describe the problems involved” in moving from the spoken to the written (Ministry of Higher Education, 1980). For now, it is worth noting two things. First, unlike the debate in Britain, which turned largely on the terms of normative canonicity, the Kenyan situation went beyond widening the pool of texts in the spirit of inclusivity, instead intervening in the governing categories through which literature was understood. This raised questions not only of location and value, but also of the material and form of language itself, and recast the pupil from empty vessel to active fieldworker in culture. Second, the reforms took place amid growing political authoritarianism which forced the Kenyan reformers to navigate a complex bureaucracy and the increasingly mercurial disposition of Daniel arap Moi’s government. This made the educational stakes of the reforms much higher and the political risks too.

The year prior to Wasambo Were’s ATCAL address, a public debate in the Kenyan broadsheet press scrutinized the school reforms’ legitimization of oral literature by bringing it into the classroom. Many of the objections betrayed entrenched colonial attitudes about orature as uncreative, ahistorical, authoritarian, and custom-based (Vail and White, 1991). While some contributors argued that teaching oral literature would “instil into the Kenya youth tribal inclinations and partisanships”, other Christian groups associated it with religious practices and a “‘primitive’ past of mutilating bodies, sacrificing goats and human heads in the name of culture” (Omari, 1982: 6). A far trickier argument came from those objecting on the basis of the fragile inter-ethnic relations between Africans, Asians, and white settlers. Projecting “race” onto language, and, through that, literature, they claimed the reforms prevented Asian and European children from fulfilling mandatory examination components because of linguistic competency. The allegation “that oral literature is racist” appeared “downright cynical” to some, but needed careful unpicking nonetheless (Wanjala, 1982: 6). The opposition had exposed the edges and vulnerabilities of the astonishingly bold and ambitious methodological vision of the reformed curriculum and its deeper thinking about the inseparability of language and literature as “means of knowing ourselves, our environments and our place in the world” (qtd. in Wasambo Were, 1983). Crucially, it also raised practical dilemmas of implementation in a multilingual state made up of what Wasambo Were called “many cultures rather than just one culture”.

The most interesting riposte to calls to scrap the syllabus on the false terms of racial harmony came from those with a strong multiculturalist defence of the new measures. To D. H. Kiiiru, oral literature was neither primitive nor separated off from other ethnic and linguistic groups, but a “reflection of reality” — it was a vital contemporary literature in “symbiotic relationship to all literature” (1982: 7). Chris Wanjala, who was not only one of the first students to study oral literature in the new syllabus but helped to foreground it in future versions, added that orature was a radically open category: Asian pupils might come into the examination room “with a Gujarat song translated into English”; “the child of British origin who is a Kenyan national” might choose to retell a Scottish ballad (1982: 6). Oral literature, though tethered to living connections with previous generations, was not itself fixed to the past. Instead, as citizens of a “multi-racial society” its contemporary audiences were “to stand on the shoulders of our grandparents to leap into the future” (1982: 6). Recasting orature as a primary site of literature’s cosmopolitan “cultural synthesis”, Wanjala’s resonant multiculturalist defence made the case for its school literary study as the means by which future generations could read the “innovative features” of a community even as “it takes in so many new cultural values” (1982: 6).

Of course, the oral literature debate was also revealing for what it did not say about the acute political pressure facing the syllabus reformers and its supporters. In this respect it was Okot p’Bitek’s vision of literature as a festival steeped in “the rich and exciting” — and, we might add revolutionary — “literary materials [of] the African countryside” that hinted at the real concerns of the postcolonial Kenyan state (1982: 23). Wasambo Were concluded his ATCAL talk with the political consequences of being regarded as anti-institutional by state power brokers. Marxism, he added, was “one word that nobody wants to be associated with in Kenya because it is also synonymous with being a revolutionist who is capable of indoctrinating young people” (Wasambo Were, 1983). By this time Wasambo Were was himself no longer a school’s inspector but a postgraduate student of Drama in Education in Birmingham.

Literary reforms and the critique of empire revisited

This essay has turned on the limits of inclusion and the meanings of institutional acts of change. Reflecting on the missed opportunities of introducing Commonwealth literature “piecemeal […] in peripheral optional courses” (1985: 37), Heron differentiated “the inner-city schoolteacher’s interest in Afro-Caribbean literature” arising from “the needs of his multiracial classes” from academic interests in an international canon originating in “expatriate contracts in the Third World” (1981: 27). The “disappointment” with the reformed A-Level had “made [ATCAL] realize how much more we are really asking for than a few changes of title” (1981: 21). In 1988, the Education Reform Act instituted the National Curriculum in England and Wales and abolished the Inner London Education Authority, a leading authority on antiracist, multicultural education. The previous year Margaret Thatcher (1987) had decried the “hard left education authorities and extremist teachers” teaching “anti-racist mathematics” and “political slogans”. By this time, the London board, too, had made significant changes. The “Topics in Literature” paper had diversified its fixed canon with a rotating selection of authors — even a few women! In 1989/1990 pupils might feasibly read Roger Mais’s The Hills were Joyful Together, Ama Ata Aidoo’s Anowa, and even Okot p’Bitek’s Song of Lawino and Song of Ocol (ULEAC, 1988: 230). But it was still examination, rather than coursework based, unlike other parts of the qualification, and still housed in its own separate, optional category. Despite the genuine and deep-seated arguments for the interdisciplinarity of literary studies and its definitional expansion under cultural studies, ATCAL was principally trapped in the dilemmas of representativeness, a legacy of an entrenched Leavisite “Great Books” approach which traded off teaching literary criticism for teaching cultural exposure. Caught in all-too predictable exchanges with members of the social establishment, it had stalled after being lumped with lacklustre gestures at institutional change.

Reading the pre-1988 situation in England and Wales through the Kenyan context gives an altogether different inflection to thinking about school literary study as a matter of state. Taking us outside of the usual canon debates that continue to define contemporary “culture wars” in Euro-American contexts, it points us back to multiculturalism — a term frequently overgeneralized and dismissed in recent history — as a global, rather than national, formation of the late twentieth century, and towards a more ambitious and challenging set of methodological debates about the public status of creative expression. Crucially, it also clarifies the distinct positionalities and political realities facing the two sets of changemakers: where one group advocated for racially minoritized members of the diaspora under increasingly centralized educational conditions, the other was part of a racial majority increasingly politically marginalized by a mercurial state. The stories of ATCAL versus the London board and of Wasambo Were’s revised Kenyan A-Level illustrate the dynamic and often unpredictable interplay between the structures of power that guarantee literary and critical space, and the structures of perception that guide it. The overhaul of the journal in 2024 is part of this lineage to reshape the terms of critical space. The journal’s editors and editorial board seek to overturn the language of the past and its tacit forms of domination, and to redirect the critical practices of the future under a fresh paradigm of value. If these stories of past educational reform have something to teach us, it is that such acts are never outside of history or the workings of institutional power, but, like literature and the public goods that might connect us, are always entangled with it.