AustLit

'This year I am delighted to announce the extension of the Journal of Commonwealth Literature’s bibliographic coverage to cultural production from and about Bangladesh and to welcome the co-authors of the country’s entry in our listings – Mafruha Mohua of Queen Mary, University of London, and Mahruba T. Mowtushi of the University of Liberal Arts, Bangladesh. In their inaugural Introduction, Mohua and Mowtushi map out the literary contours of Bangladesh, its historical trajectories of migration and displacement and the attempts at reparation and rehabilitation in the aftermath of the war of 1971, with attention to the positioning of women and linguistic minorities in relation to national narratives. They offer insightful readings of the silences surrounding Partition in Bangladeshi fiction’s symbolic deferrals and subplots and trace the development of Bangladeshi literature from elements of its Perso-Arabic heritage to its contemporary local and diasporic trajectories. The bibliographic listings reflect this scope, including works dating from the beginning of the 20th century that engage with this heritage to works published in the year under review. As Mohammad A. Quayum and Md. Mahmudul Hasan write in their editorial to Asiatic’s 2018 special issue on Bangladeshi writing in English, “this distinct literary tradition has not yet received the critical attention it deserves”, lagging “behind its Indian, Pakistani and Sri Lankan counterparts in the region, which have thus far claimed precedence in literary history books” (1). Mohua and Motushi’s contribution to JCL’s bibliographic record offers important, timely work towards rectifying this imbalance.' (Vassilena Parashkevova Annual Bibliography of Commonwealth Literature 2018, Editorial introduction)