'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)
