Cirrus@Austlit

'This article explores the title change from the Journal of Commonwealth Literature (JCL) to Literature, Critique, and Empire Today using a tripartite structure. We are the journal’s most recent ex-editors, and so the article is the culmination of about 15 years of thinking on these and related matters. In the essay’s first part, we interrogate the limitations of the term “Commonwealth” across the axes of global geopolitics as well as literature, in order to draw out some common threads within and beyond postcolonial studies. The second section thinks through the journal’s role in shaping postcolonial studies over time. Changes have been wrought in response to literary-critical and political concerns, as well as amid the self-transformation the journal has undergone over the past decade so as to open itself up to more diverse perspectives. Finally, we analyse the likely impact of the journal’s altered title for both registering and challenging understandings in its field. We hope that the article constitutes a thought-provoking exploration of the journal’s present and future avenues, and the knock-on effects this will have for postcolonial, world, and decolonial literary studies more broadly.'  (Publication abstract)

'Taking as its starting point the most recent, failed Australian referendum, this essay considers the efficacy of the Commonwealth of Nations — of the attendant ideological principles and values upon which the political association is based and to which its member states subscribe. Tracing the colonial histories and legacies of two current member states, Australia and South Africa — nations whose genesis in settler colonialism follow somewhat similar contours — the essay explores, in their canonical literature, the evolution of a kind of whitewashed nationalism that is not just racially exclusory but also registers, inversely, the anxieties of the self in relation to the “imagined community” (Anderson, 1983) endorsed in ideologies of nationhood. In a comparative, transnational reading of Patrick White’s Voss and J. M. Coetzee’s Dusklands, this essay probes how this settler-colonial literary tradition simultaneously underwrites and complicates (continued) white imperialism and black un-belonging in ways that both suggest and test the conceptual prospects and limits of a universal, egalitarian “commonwealth”.'  (Publication abstract)

'This essay explores the politics of positioning as it has shifted from the paradigms of “Commonwealth literature” to postcolonial studies, and asks if older mechanisms of placing literary and critical endeavours may be emerging refurbished in the present day. It recognizes the ways in which early enthusiasts of Commonwealth literature often tethered texts to firm nation-based foundations while also promoting a transcendentalist vision of literariness. This modus operandi gave way, I argue, to a much more agile and dimensional cognisance of the politics of positioning, for both literature and its critique, which hallmarks postcolonial studies in general. By briefly discussing the work of the writers Zadie Smith and Bernardine Evaristo, the essay calls for the sustaining of postcolonialism’s often sophisticated engagement with positionality at a moment when a less interrogative approach to matters of place, identity, literature, and critique may be circulating — so that the important wisdom of postcolonial studies is not overwritten by newly emergent approaches which seem familiar from old.'  (Publication abstract)

'This article reflects on the history of The Journal of Commonwealth Literature as it connects to my personal engagement with the naming and re-naming of the field of Commonwealth / postcolonial / Empire studies across my academic career and contrasting institutional orientations. It considers the ways in which we can shape our field by aligning our critical attention with particular modes of scholarly engagement and sociopolitical commitments.'  (Publication abstract)