Editorial

It is widely acknowledged that the British empire rapidly unravelled during the 1940s, 50s, and 60s in the process of decolonization. Many of the nations that had newly become independent from the British empire (even republics such as India) joined the Commonwealth, designed as a decentralized and loose association of the countries that used to be part of the British empire. ‘The word “Commonwealth” in early modern England had been a catch-all term “referring to the public, social, or political community, or both” (Scott, 2004: 591). However, in the early twentieth century this term garnered new imperialist connotations at a time when words such as “empire” were encountering fierce resistance. Indeed, as James Mayall indicates, the Commonwealth continues to be seen by many as a device that was “hurriedly fashioned after 1945 to help the British political class come to terms with the loss of empire”, and that anticipates the euphemistic Anglo-American “special relationship” in its power imbalances and neoimperialist ambitions (1998: 379).

In 1926, Lord Balfour (who more famously declared the intention of creating a Jewish homeland in Palestine), authored the “Definition”, laying out the apparently equal, autonomous status of the members of the original Commonwealth “club” of South Africa, the Irish Free State, Canada, Newfoundland, Australia, and New Zealand, and asserting these states’ “common allegiance to the Crown”. In 1949, the Balfour Definition “facilitated republican membership, confirmed multi-racialism, and created the symbolic Headship [of the King]” (McIntyre, 2001: 27). Although the Commonwealth is less widely publicized or studied than might be expected, it experienced a resurgence of interest during the 1990s and 2000s, especially in relation to sports, non-governmental organizations (NGOs), and the arts. However, one trend associated with the Commonwealth since the mid-1990s has been the rise in public−private partnerships, which are seen as a panacea, but in fact implant the free market and untrammelled competition at the heart of an association already rent by severe economic disparities (McIntyre, 2001: 211–20, 228).

The many inequities that attach to the Commonwealth are often explored by experts, especially racism, “an issue never successfully resolved overseas in the Empire” (Srinivasan, 2005: 3), but which was brought home to Britain via Commonwealth and post-Second World War migration. One of the most shameful examples of this was the 1969 Commonwealth Immigrants Act, a piece of legislation which among other initiatives withdrew the right of entry into Britain from Asians who had been forced out of Kenya by Africanization policies, thus creating a group comprising hundreds of thousands of people who became effectively stateless (see Hansen, 1999: 809–10). Furthermore, unequal power relations were evident between the various countries which made up the Commonwealth, as was especially apparent in the paternalistic role held by Britain for at least its first few decades. However, from the 1960s onwards, as the organization became more democratic and therefore less easy to control, Britain lost interest and became increasingly aloof; for example, under Margaret Thatcher, the UK was alone among Commonwealth nations in opposing sanctions against South Africa’s apartheid regime.

In response to the decolonization process, and to the increasing wealth of national literatures being produced in formerly colonized countries, some academics from within English literature began to turn their attention towards literature from Commonwealth countries. “Commonwealth literature” as an area of serious study was developed at the University of Leeds in the 1960s, under the tutelage of such critics as William Walsh and Norman Jeffares. It was there too that Jeffares, Arthur Ravenscroft, and Douglas Grant founded the Journal of Commonwealth Literature. In the inaugural issue of JCL (1965: 1), the unaccredited editor/s wrote, “[t]he name of this journal is simply a piece of convenient shorthand, which should on no account be construed as a perverse underwriting of any concept of a single, culturally homogeneous body of writings to be thought of as ‘Commonwealth Literature’”. The Journal of Commonwealth Literature is now returning to Leeds after many years (albeit to a different institution, Leeds Metropolitan University), but this flexible statement remains germane to our thinking about its remit today.

As such, JCL continues to welcome a wide range of critical and theoretical submissions on literatures that have been shaped by the British Empire and its residues. We recognize that colonialism is not safely in the past, and the Journal reflects literature’s shifting margins, including criticism that explores diasporas, neo-colonialism, and literatures originally written in other languages as well as English. We also value articles that connect gender and sexuality with colonialism, the Commonwealth, and postcoloniality. And we are acutely aware that we have big shoes to fill as editors because, in addition to the founders, other key figures in postcolonialism such as Andrew Gurr, Angus Calder, Shirley Chew, and John Thieme (about the latter, more shortly) have previously edited the articles issues of the journal.

In the 1980s, Salman Rushdie described Commonwealth literature as a “strange beast” (1988: 37). The two anomalies he discusses — of South African and Pakistani writing being considered part of Commonwealth literature when the nations are not members — have now largely been resolved, since the former was readmitted to the group in 1994 after it abandoned apartheid policies, while Pakistan is currently on the inside, but has proven a hokey cokey member, having left in protest after its seceded East Wing, Bangladesh, joined the Commonwealth in 1972; rejoining in 1989; and having two further periods of suspension. Rushdie also sharply observes that Commonwealth literature “excludes Britain which when last observed was a member, although an extremely badly behaved one” (1988: 37–8). Yet in an astute editorial, John Thieme counters such arguments by pointing out that canonical English literature is amply served by other journals and that “it remains appropriate for JCL to continue to place its primary, though not its only, emphasis on Commonwealth writing from outside Britain, while also including articles on British writing that very obviously speak to the nation’s postcolonial identity” (2010: 6).

Just as the Commonwealth itself contains member states such as Cameroon, a minority area of which had been administered by Britain in the colonial period, so too the Journal is interested in critical approaches to literature from nations touched — whether roughly or comparatively lightly — by the British empire. That said, there is not scope within JCL to include literary criticism of writing from former colonies that were exclusively ruled over by other nations than Britain, such as France, Spain, or China. As groundbreaking and ambitious as their The Empire Writes Back undoubtedly was, we will not follow Bill Ashcroft, Gareth Griffiths, and Helen Tiffin in characterizing even the current superpower of the United States as being to some extent a postcolonial nation, because it was once colonized by Britain. According to this logic, even Britain has some claim to “postcolonial status”, because of its erstwhile subjugation by the Romans and Normans. Famously, the writers of The Empire Writes Back argue:

We use the term “post-colonial” […] to cover all of the culture affected by imperial process from the moment of colonisation to the present day. This is because there is a continuity of preoccupations throughout the historical process initiated by European imperial aggression. (Ashcroft et al., 1989: 2)

While the “continuity of preoccupations” of which they speak may usefully be described as the connective tissue that binds much contemporary anti-globalization, environmental, and “third worldist” struggle, the statement encircles vastly different experiences of colonialism within much too capacious an umbrella term. As such, parallels between the postcolonial texts studied here and writings from countries colonized by other European (and occasionally non-European) occupiers must for the most part be induced by readers themselves.

John McLeod (2000: 21–16) has demonstrated that there were certain problems with the original University of Leeds Commonwealth critics’ approach to non-Western literatures. Firstly, critics such as William Walsh judged the literature being produced by non-Western writers by the standards that English Literature deemed appropriate to define “great literature”. Thus, they looked for evidence of “universal” themes, aesthetic merit, and linguistic excellence, but unlike later postcolonial critics they did not think to challenge the Eurocentric bias upon which these judgements were made. Secondly, as a result of their preoccupation with universal, liberal themes, the Commonwealth critics often overlooked the nationalist and local concerns of the writers they were studying. For example, when examining the work of the Indian writer R. K. Narayan, they tended to argue that his writing evoked images of a universal humanity, but neglected his discussions of India’s struggle for national self-definition.

Despite their liberal humanist assumptions, the work of the Commonwealth literature critics was important as it allowed new voices from non-Western countries to enter the literary canon. They kick-started what now tends to be termed “postcolonial studies” through their efforts to get writers such as Chinua Achebe, Raja Rao, and George Lamming to be recognized as great artists. Their influence can still be felt today not only in the Journal of Commonwealth Literature’s name, but in literary awards such as the Commonwealth Writers’ Prize. This lucrative literary prize rewards both established and debut novelists working in English from four regions: Africa; the Caribbean and Canada; South Asia and Europe; and South East Asia and the Pacific. In 2001, Amitav Ghosh caused something of a literary sensation by withdrawing his novel, The Glass Palace, from the Commonwealth Writers Prize: he was a Eurasia regional finalist and had been nominated for the overall prize. In a letter to the prize’s organizers, Ghosh argued against the category “Commonwealth Literature”, suggesting that the term subsumes the myriad concerns of fiction under the residues of imperialism. He also objected to the fact that the Prize is awarded only to Anglophone writing, which, he rightly contended, “excludes the many languages that sustain the cultural and literary lives of [‘Commonwealth’] countries”. His refusal of potential prize money of £10,000 seems in many ways like a principled stand by a writer who has long been hailed as a leading postcolonial author. In 2010, however, Ghosh shared with Margaret Atwood US$1m of prize money from the David Dan Prize of Tel Aviv University, using their acceptance speech to criticize their detractors, rather than providing any substantial critique of the Israeli military-industrial complex that keeps Gaza-based Palestinians living in siege-like conditions. Although it is worth keeping in mind Ghosh’s salient warning about the dangers of defining literary texts in relation to their increasingly distant relationship to colonialism, and of neglecting literature being produced in other languages than that of the former colonizers’ tongue, the difference in his responses to the two prizes indicates that it is easier to be horrified by imperialism from earlier centuries than to formulate a nuanced response to the deterritorialized, shapeshifting, but no less violent imperialisms of the present day. To adapt the metaphor of an even more controversial postcolonial writer, Salman Rushdie, when one’s nose is “almost pressed against the screen” of history, it is hard to see the actors’ faces as anything but “dancing grain […] grotesque proportions”, necessitating a loss of “deep perspective” and a more partial, although no less important, vision (1991: 13).

A year on from ‘Ghosh and Atwood’s’ distasteful acceptance, we write this Editorial in June 2011, after the revolutions in Tunisia and Egypt, and during protracted NATO strikes against Muammar Qaddafi’s regime in Libya. Unrest is also continuing in other parts of the Middle East, including Bahrain, Yemen, and Syria. Each conflict seems to ignite another within the “Arab world”, and the monumental scale of the changes in the Middle East may prove as significant as the post-war decolonization described at the start of this Editorial, although from our front row perspective it is not yet clear what alternative will fill the power vacuum caused by the collapse of corrupt regimes, most of whose “stabilizing dictators” had been armed and supported by the US. Amid all the turmoil and rejection of the established order, it may be necessary to put “under erasure” the concept of Commonwealth, while recognizing its usefulness as a valence for organizing the Journal.

Many of the articles in this issue tacitly accord with Ghosh’s suggestions about the different and complex ways in which language bears witness to histories of colonial power and privilege. In “Language and the Postcolonial City”, Stuti Khanna examines the idea of the “lettered city” in Salman Rushdie’s novels. Khanna suggests that the fractured multiplicity of the postcolonial metropolis can be read in the various kinds of “writing-shiting” in Rushdie’s Bombay: in advertisements, slogans, signs, instructions, and Rushdie’s own attempt to construct a version of the bambaiya dialect, Bombay’s “garbage argot”, as he refers to it in The Ground Beneath Her Feet (1999). Rushdie’s English-language version of bambaiya becomes a form of “city speak” that Khanna argues is “the raison d’être of his linguistic project”. However, this hybrid mixture of street slang, Hindi, Urdu, Gujarati, Marathi, and English actually works, she suggests, to cover up rather than expose the heterogeneities, schisms, and inequalities in the postcolonial cityscape by virtue of the fact that it is deployed throughout all his novels and spoken by all his characters regardless of class, education, or gender.

Rushdie’s later novel, The Enchantress of Florence (2008) makes use of what Nicole Weickgenannt Thiara calls an “architecture of hybridity” that she believes to be distinct from the “rowdy hybridity” of his earlier novels. Set in the reign of Emperor Akbar, the novel’s construction mirrors the Mughal architecture of the city of Fatehpur Sikri: an architecture of synthetic harmony rather than the chaos and confusion of the eponymous city of Florence, or the Bombay of his earlier novels. Thiara argues that despite the potentially dangerous, elitist character of Mughal hybridity it does represent “an ideal to hold on to, to cherish and develop” in the novel.

The poet Lorna Goodison has written about gardens throughout her published work. In his essay, “Simply There: Lorna Goodison’s Gardens”, Mac Fenwick argues that, while often perceived as redemptive, transformative, and celebratory, Goodison’s use of the language of plants and planting in her poetry also marks the history of an imperial agricultural project with its attendant dispossession and loss. The (highly contested) idea that some species do not “belong” and can be described as “invasive”, while others are (sometimes incorrectly) identified as “native”, aptly suggests the pace of change in Jamaican ecologies after colonization and suggestively parallels the construction of identity and complex sense of belonging in Goodison’s poetic language.

The issue of the negotiation and ownership of words and their histories is also to the fore in Janet C. Myers’s article, “‘As These Fresh Lines Fade’: Narratives of Containment and Escape in Peter Carey’s Jack Maggs”. The struggle for ownership of Maggs’s story is key to the novel and to Myers’s argument that settler colonial societies negotiate ties with the mother country in complex, ambivalent ways. The rewriting of conventional English ideas of “home” and parentage is a central part of Maggs’s eventual reclamation of his own history, as he becomes author of his own story. Myers’s emphasis on this successful appropriation indicates a much more optimistic view of the relation in Carey’s novel between language and the legacies of colonial power than both Fenwick and Khanna argue is present in Rushdie’s and Goodison’s work.

Gendered ideas about home and domesticity are also important in Elizabeth Jackson’s essay, “Gender and Communal Politics in Shama Futehally’s Reaching Bombay Central”. Jackson demonstrates that Futehally’s 2002 novel locates Muslim women in India’s subordinate status within domesticity and personal relationships rather than communal politics, religious ideology, or legal disadvantage. She also argues that the boundaries between “domestic” fiction and fiction that addresses larger political concerns cannot be clearly drawn, claiming that Futehally’s fiction challenges the assumption that Muslim women in India are “necessarily more vulnerable to patriarchal oppression than others, as well as the idea that elite women are necessarily less so”.

The issue of memory is key to both “Modernity and the Holocaust Counter-Memorial: Janet Frame’s American Fiction” by Patrick Evans and to Jopi Nyman’s “Beyond Liverpool, 1957: Travel, Diaspora, and Migration in Jamal Majoub’s The Drift Latitudes”. In Majoub’s novel, Nyman argues, the uncovering of silenced family narratives is important in forming a record of refugee histories. What Majoub calls “revenant kin” return as a form of haunting, challenging myths of national purity, and suggesting that transnational travel and migration are characteristic of British and European identity in historical perspective. The novel uses the idea of “drift” and the music of a Liverpool jazz club to suggest the importance of diasporic travel and global mobility for constructing identity.

Patrick Evans’s essay is a companion piece to his article in JCL 46: 83-101 on Janet Frame, modernity, and the Holocaust. In this second piece, he argues that Janet Frame’s “American fiction” is also marked by the issue of remembering, particularly Holocaust remembering. Evans discusses Frame’s use of traumatic witnessing and defines her American fiction as a form of what Michel Foucault would term “counter memorial”. Her generic mixing in this period, along with the tendency to reverse perspectives, use unreliable narrators, vanishing characters, and autobiographical details that can sometimes be overtly fictitious makes more sense, according to Evans, when this work is seen as post-Holocaust writing that emphasizes the importance of small-scale remembering.

Literary celebrity is the subject of Joel Deshaye’s article, “Celebrity and Passing in Gwendolyn MacEwen’s The T. E. Lawrence Poems”. MacEwen’s passing as Lawrence allows her to examine issues of gender, cultural standing, identification, and imperialism at a point just after the period that Deshaye identifies as “the era of celebrity in Canadian poetry” had ended. MacEwen’s imitation of Lawrence includes several quoting/ borrowings from his work which constitute a complex process of indebtedness or rewriting, a process that Deshaye terms a “gamble with her own sense of self”.

We are delighted and honoured to be taking over as co-editors of the Journal of Commonwealth Literature and cannot do so without acknowledging the enormous debt of gratitude that we and the Journal owe to the former editor, Professor John Thieme. We would like to thank John for his years of excellent stewardship. The journal’s outstanding reputation in the field and beyond is indicative of his meticulous attention to detail, intellectual rigour, and unfailing courtesy. We have both been lucky enough to work with him on JCL and other projects and cannot praise him highly enough for his dedication to the work of the Journal and to the wider field of postcolonial literature and criticism. John’s work beyond JCL has ranged widely. He has produced standard reference works in the field, such as Post-Colonial Studies: The Essential Glossary (2003), and edited and/or introduced a number of key editions and anthologies, including The Arnold Anthology of Post-Colonial Literatures in English (1996), and co-edited (with Leela Gandhi) the second edition of the collected poems of Nissim Ezekiel (2005) and with Ira Raja (2007) The Table is Laid: The Oxford Anthology of South Asian Food Writing. He is also the author of several key monographs, which range from single-author studies such as those on V.S. Naipaul (1987), Derek Walcott (1999), and R. K. Narayan (2007) to Postcolonial Con-Texts: Writing Back to the Canon (2001), a study of counter-discursive strategies in the postcolonial novel. This work, including his role as editor of JCL and as series editor of the Manchester University Press Contemporary World Writers series, has made a crucial contribution to increasing the visibility, circulation, and reputation of postcolonial literature and criticism.

We would also like to convey our thanks to Kerry Barner, Senior Publishing Editor at SAGE, and Vassilena Parashkevova, the Bibliography issues editor, for their warm welcome. Sweety Singh, our new production editor at SAGE India, has helped to smooth the transition of production from the UK to India. We are also very grateful to the editorial board for their continuing work reading submissions and innumerable other activities, and their support for us during the period of transition as we took over from John.