'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)
'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 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)
'Two overlapping sets of themes stand out in the bibliographies from 2017: one concerning language, translation and bi-, multi-, poly- and trans-lingualism and the other print and material cultures, book histories, publishing, circulation, genre and “literary value.” Works listed in this issue reflect and respond to the role of English or French as hegemonic languages in containing and sanctioning a range of “other,” “minor,” indigenous languages or vernaculars and their oratures/literatures in the manner of an omniscient narrative that frames and mediates the “foreign talk,” “accents” or idiolects of characters as deviations from its own normativity for a dominant linguistic community of “native speakers,” in the process erasing its own origin. We have inherited, as David Gramling reminds us in The Invention of Monolingualism (2016), the early modern idea of “‘a’ language, whose essence inhered in its promise to know everything, say everything, and translate everything” (Gramling, 2016: 2). Such a desire for linguistic mastery is reflected in the “enumerative modality” of colonialism setting out to identify, label and control local languages and their speakers. It continues to inform processes of “naming, misnaming, consolidation, marketing and reproduction” in the publishing, translation, academic research or host nation language teaching industries and the concomitant “thickening of citizenship around language competence and use”. Further, monolingualism appears capable of extending its repertoire by impersonating notions of multilingualism in the marketing of World Literature, as Graham Huggan has shown in The Postcolonial Exotic (Huggan, 2001), or varieties of “multilingual upskilling” promoted by the neoliberal state as “models for global success and competitiveness” (ibid: 12, 250).' (Introduction)
'Two overlapping sets of themes stand out in the bibliographies from 2017: one concerning language, translation and bi-, multi-, poly- and trans-lingualism and the other print and material cultures, book histories, publishing, circulation, genre and “literary value.” Works listed in this issue reflect and respond to the role of English or French as hegemonic languages in containing and sanctioning a range of “other,” “minor,” indigenous languages or vernaculars and their oratures/literatures in the manner of an omniscient narrative that frames and mediates the “foreign talk,” “accents” or idiolects of characters as deviations from its own normativity for a dominant linguistic community of “native speakers,” in the process erasing its own origin. We have inherited, as David Gramling reminds us in The Invention of Monolingualism (2016), the early modern idea of “‘a’ language, whose essence inhered in its promise to know everything, say everything, and translate everything” (Gramling, 2016: 2). Such a desire for linguistic mastery is reflected in the “enumerative modality” of colonialism setting out to identify, label and control local languages and their speakers. It continues to inform processes of “naming, misnaming, consolidation, marketing and reproduction” in the publishing, translation, academic research or host nation language teaching industries and the concomitant “thickening of citizenship around language competence and use”. Further, monolingualism appears capable of extending its repertoire by impersonating notions of multilingualism in the marketing of World Literature, as Graham Huggan has shown in The Postcolonial Exotic (Huggan, 2001), or varieties of “multilingual upskilling” promoted by the neoliberal state as “models for global success and competitiveness” (ibid: 12, 250).' (Introduction)
'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)
'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)
