AustLit

'I am very pleased to be introducing my first issue of the JCL Bibliography, having taken up the post of editor in January 2023. My appointment follows the long tenure of Vassilena Parashkevova, who held the position since 2008. I am sure JCL readers will join me in thanking Vassilena for her years of excellent leadership of this essential annual resource; they will also know that I have some very large shoes to fill. I hope that I can keep up her capable work, while also adding some of my own flavour to the issue going forward.' (Lucinda Newns, Introduction)

'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. 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). (Vassilena Parashkevova : Editorial introduction)

'In this introduction to the special issue on “Illuminating Lives: The Biographical Impulse in Postcolonial Literatures”, we start by situating the genre of biographical fiction, which has become increasingly popular in postcolonial literatures and beyond, in relation to more “traditional” nonfictional biography. We then examine how postcolonial biofiction might be distinguished from its postmodern avatar, and we tentatively circumscribe some of the tendencies that appear to cluster more systematically in postcolonial biofiction than in other types of writings: the focus on individuals — including artist figures — either forgotten or marginalized in traditional history; the use of the biofictional as a veritable mode of knowledge that allows writers and their critics to explore the philosophical implications of examining human trajectories; and the presence of narrative fragmentation, which often problematizes the possibility of ever fully apprehending an individual life.' (Daria Tunca, Benedicte Ledent Towards a definition of postcolonial biographical fiction, Introduction)

'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)' (Editorial introduction)

'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)

'What does the recent rise in prominence of moves to decolonize the curriculum in English departments across universities in the UK mean for what we teach, how, why, and to whom?

'I want to start by thinking about the resistance to these moves to decolonize the curriculum. Some of this opposition is a knee-jerk backlash. In the spirit of Thomas B. Macaulay’s disparagement of non-European texts, there remains a lurking suspicion in Senior Common Rooms across the country that literature from the global south does not “merit” consideration alongside “the classics”. This is rarely articulated so bluntly but instead finds expression, often sotto voce, in claims that proposed reforms provide yet another example of “political correctness gone mad”.'  (Ruvani Ranasinha, Editorial introduction)

'At the end of a depressing year for politics, the environment, and gender and racial relations, we take this editorial as an opportunity for a palate-cleansing reflection on the more optimistic state of the field of postcolonial literary studies, and to pose some questions that take us into the year ahead.' (Claire Chambers, Rachael Gilmour Editorial introduction pp 3-6)

'In 2017, India and Pakistan mark 70 years since Independence and Canada 150 since Confederation. Decolonisation was accompanied by exclusions from national imaginings, rooted in the economic, cultural and political imperatives of British colonialism, including its territorial claims, cartographic revisions, power hierarchies and divide-and-rule policies. These exclusions were evinced in the bloodshed of Partition’s communal rioting, with its now iconic images of refugees fleeing across the newly created Indo-Pakistani border, and the violent displacement of Indigenous peoples by European “settler” societies such as those of Canada. In his Introduction in this issue, Joel Deshaye comments on Canada’s residential school system’s assimilative practices towards Indigenous children in the nineteenth century as reflected in 2016 poetry and criticism, engaging, in part directly, with the findings of Canada’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission report (2015) and the traumas resulting from such “immersive forms of colonial pedagogy” (Hutchings, 2016: 301).' (Introduction)

'This Editorial feels like it is being written from a very dark place and time, in view of the seismic shifts in the world order which have happened over the past year. In June 2016, a majority of the British electorate voted for the UK to leave the European Union. The referendum drama unfolded amid a toxic set of debates around race and immigration, which continue to dominate the political conversation. With the continental far right also currently experiencing a surge driven by similar nationalist, racist, and Islamophobic agendas, the whole postwar European project of alliance and unity, however flawed, may be in jeopardy. At the same time, hypermasculine, autocratic ideologues across the world — including Vladimir Putin in Russia and Narendra Modi in India — appear to be learning from each other’s playbooks. Meanwhile, in the United States, the election of Donald Trump signals disaster for both human and environmental justice, the scale of which we are only beginning to see.' (Editorial introduction)