Abstract
This issue marks a significant moment in the journal’s 58-year history: its transition from the Journal of Commonwealth Literature to Literature, Critique, and Empire Today. In this editorial, which prefaces a special issue of ten short articles responding to this change, we outline our reasons for renaming the journal, chart our aims and ambitions for the journal as we move towards its seventh decade, and reflect on the essays that follow.
Writing in April 2018 following the appointment of then Prince Charles as the head of the Commonwealth and the breaking of the Windrush scandal, Afua Hirsch describes the Commonwealth as “a vessel of former colonies with the former imperial master at its helm”, or as “Empire 2.0” (2018: n.p.). Hirsch outlines Britain’s exploitation of its leadership of the Commonwealth as a means of retaining control over its members. She further notes the disjunction between the pride Britain takes in this institution — which declares itself a “common force for good” and cites among its core principles “mutual respect” and “inclusiveness” (Commonwealth Secretariat, 2024) — and its treatment of its racialized citizens today, as witnessed most starkly in the wrongful deportation, detainment, and degradation of members of British Caribbean communities in then prime minister Theresa May’s “hostile environment”. The Commonwealth entered the media spotlight again in spring 2023 as leaders of the majority of its member states attended the King’s coronation in London. The event prompted activists and commentators from former British colonies to amplify requests for reparations from the monarch for the UK’s role in slavery and colonialism, and to question the relevance of the institution as Commonwealth countries increasingly opt to become republics (Butler, 2023; Bulbulia, 2023; Blake-Hannah, 2023). It is the dissonance between the proclaimed inclusivity and fairness of the institution and the word itself — suggestive as it is of a shared wealth and of the ideas of “the commons” and “the common good” — and the economic and racial hierarchies that shape the relations between the Commonwealth’s nations that strikes us as most troubling. Within Britain, this dissonance is evident in the 1948 Nationality Act which gave millions of citizens of Commonwealth nations the right to enter and remain in Britain yet whose motivations were, as Ian Sanjay Patel explains, “squarely imperial”: “namely, retaining and rearticulating the scheme of British subjecthood for the post-war world, and keeping a soon-to-be-republican India in the Commonwealth” (2021: n.p.). The surface hospitality of this Act was clearly dented by the subsequent Immigration Acts of 1962, 1968, and 1971, which limited black and brown Commonwealth citizens’ entry into the UK. Yet from its beginning the Act was driven by an imperial bid to retain control over its colonies and former colonies as well as by its exploitative use of their citizens to compensate for labour shortages following the Second World War. The Act was, as Patel describes, “a constitutional pillar of what various officials, diplomats, and politicians hoped would be a British-led imperial Commonwealth” — perhaps an “Empire 2.0” (Hirsch, 2018: n.p.).
Patel opens his discussion of Britain’s immigration laws with a reference to the 2020 Windrush Lessons Learned Review, specifically its unusual recommendation that staff at the Home Office “should learn about the history of the UK and its relationship with the rest of the world” (2021: n.p.). This enjoinder to explore the past to better understand the present points us to the distortions and dangers of historical amnesia contained within the rhetoric of “Commonwealth” as well as the organization itself. In the cultural sphere, Nadine White excoriates the amnesia that underpins the Commonwealth Games, an institution that she describes as “rooted in chattel slavery and the brutalisation of African people”, also contrasting its lavish expenditure and surface diversity with Britain’s continued control of large amounts of Africa’s resources and refusal to pay reparations for slavery (2022: n.p.). Turning to literature — this journal’s lifeblood — Amitav Ghosh’s much discussed withdrawal of his novel The Glass Palace from consideration for the Commonwealth Writers’ Prize in 2001 was also underpinned by a contestation of deceptive modes of remembering the past. Motivated partly by the prize’s exclusion of non-Anglophone fiction, Ghosh decried its grouping of fiction within the category of “Commonwealth”, writing to the committee: “The issue of how the past is to be remembered lies at the heart of The Glass Palace and I feel that I would be betraying the spirit of my book if I were to allow it to be incorporated within that particular memorialization of Empire that passes under the rubric of ‘the Commonwealth’” (2001: n.p.). Ghosh’s understanding of the Commonwealth as a commemorative afterlife of empire resonates with our recognition of the term’s imperial markings and their obfuscation.
Our personal narratives are rooted in or routed through Karachi and Delhi, as well as Edinburgh, the Scottish Highlands, and Cambridge (Rehana); and Gujarat, Dar-es-Salaam and Zanzibar, Mozambique’s capital Maputo, and Spain’s first colony, the Canary Islands (Shital). As such, our own lives and histories are embedded in the racial hierarchies of imperialism and its legacies. Our intellectual and political discomfort with the term Commonwealth in the title of the journal that we edit, then, is shaped and compounded by the lived experiences of our parents and grandparents as well as our own (here in London today, and growing up; in our everyday lives and in the academy). Deeply aware of the power of names and naming, we are, as Asha Rogers states in her essay for this special issue, “wielding” our “symbolic power to [re]name” (31) as a means of reaffirming and highlighting the journal’s commitment to excavating, exploring, and resisting the damage and degradation wrought by colonialism and its afterlives, against the flattening and condescending resonances of “Commonwealth”.
And yet we remain cognisant of the complexities and contradictions of the Commonwealth, illuminated in some of the essays that follow. Shameem Black explores the competing meanings of the association in three South Asian nations, including the perceived advantages of membership for their leaders. Andrew van der Vlies, on the other hand, ruminates on the potential value of the “commonalities” referenced by the term “Commonwealth” and contemplates the “utopian residue of the communal […] that lingers” within it via the work of South African writer Olive Schreiner (50). Hirsch’s description of the association as “Empire 2.0”, then, might risk flattening the complexities of its history. Some of these complexities are evident in the case of Shital’s birth country, Mozambique — the first nation without any connection to the British Empire to join the Commonwealth. Mozambique’s admission in 1995 instigated a revision of the Commonwealth’s membership criteria, allowing nations with a constitutional affiliation to a current member-state to join (McIntyre, 2008: 274–275). To smooth out this messiness could work to obscure and invalidate the agency and strategic choices of Global South nations and to simplify ideas of affiliation and attachment. Our own histories of migration and settlement also speak to the entangled nature of affiliation, attachment, and provenance, as well as the complexities of naming. In 1947, Rehana’s father and his family had to form an attachment to a newly named, newborn nation, Pakistan, following their forced displacement from Delhi to Karachi. Almost three decades later, in 1975, Shital’s parents, Portuguese citizens of newly independent Mozambique’s capital city, learned to replace its colonial name, Lourenço Marques, with Maputo, their Mozambican daughter’s named place of birth. An important divestment from its colonial history and assertion of its independence, Maputo’s retitling makes the point that naming matters. And yet, the traces of this Portuguese explorer’s name continue to haunt the city, resisting erasure. Similarly, while the new title of the journal marks an important break from its association with the Commonwealth, the journal’s deep roots in the term mean that it will remain a spectral presence. As we drop the word “Commonwealth”, it is important to make the critically honest gesture of recognizing that the journal’s history cannot be effaced. It can, however, be acknowledged. By overwriting the 58-year-old title, we are confronting the many contradictions, hypocrisies, and erasures of colonial violence that the term “Commonwealth” (and indeed, the Commonwealth of Nations itself) enables.
Even as we distance ourselves from its former title, we wish also to mark our recognition of the journal’s pioneering role in ensuring that the literatures of Britain’s former colonies became a worthy and important area of academic scholarship in their own right. To erase the role of “Commonwealth literature” as a (flawed) precursor to postcolonial literary studies would be to ignore the history of how our academic field came into being, at least in the UK. However, in keeping with the liberal humanist tradition in which it was anchored, Commonwealth literary studies read for shared, so-called universal experiences rather than for inequality, cultural difference, and the violence of colonial extractivism. We see in Literature, Critique, and Empire Today an occasion for the journal to reaffirm its commitment to the study of literature’s ability to shape, recast, and negotiate the complexities of imperial and postimperial imaginaries, and at the same time an opportunity to honour that commitment with a new name.
While “postcolonial literature” may be a better fit than “Commonwealth literature” to describe the journal’s remit, we have deliberately opted not to use the term “postcolonial” in the new title. If the critical purchase of “postcolonial” has always been under scrutiny, today it rightly faces renewed examination for its inability to account for complex South–South relations that are not mediated by colonial metropolitan networks, for its insufficient attention to the centuries of uninterrupted settler-colonial violence inflicted upon Indigenous peoples, and for its overreliance on Western epistemologies, especially. While the journal’s name may have dampened its voice in what Alison Donnell, writing for this special issue, calls “the noisy labyrinth of postcolonial theory”, this quietness has also allowed it to gently but persistently redress the field’s major shortcomings (107). The dominant role that English and other European languages play in postcolonial studies, for example, has been countered by the journal’s longstanding commitment to publishing scholarship on literary works composed in non-European languages. Likewise, the journal’s recognition of settler colonialism and Indigenous peoples’ experiences is reflected in its publication record: a symposium on “Indigenous Peoples in Commonwealth Literature” was published as early as 1985, and the journal has regularly returned to this topic since (Halpé, 1992; Mussi, 2021). Similarly, postcolonial studies’ tendency to privilege colonialism — rather than internal hierarchies and local cultural dynamics — as the dominant force shaping post-independence realities has been repeatedly challenged in the journal’s contents. For example, a 2017 special issue is dedicated to caste and Dalit literature (including works written in languages other than English); in 2023 a symposium on Kerala and the Gulf showcased migration patterns that are not routed through the colonial metropole.
We have chosen “Empire Today”, rather than “postcolonial”, to index imperialism’s acts of historical violence, as well as its legacies and afterlives. To us, this formulation avoids wedding the journal to another term that risks becoming outdated; yet it remains capacious enough to address the journal’s commitment to literary criticism engaged with the inequalities that imperialism created and compounds in its treatment of asylum seekers and refugees, in its creation of new forms of value extraction, and in its persistent climate neglect. In keeping with this commitment, our aim is to continue publishing work on writers who come from regions of the world that Britain once colonized, and who write in English as well as in other languages. We welcome proposals for special issues and symposia on established and emerging areas in the field, such as Indigenous studies, postcolonial health humanities, postcolonial environmental studies, refugee and diaspora studies, and decolonizing methodologies. At this juncture, when its editors are reflecting on the journal’s title and remit, we also welcome interventions that think critically about innovating and reforming the field still widely known as “postcolonial” literary studies to address its reach, its critical foothold on contemporary realities, and its limitations.
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To mark this new chapter for the journal, we asked ten scholars at different points in their academic careers and located across the Anglosphere (although with a clustering within the UK) to engage with the shift in title according to their own expertise and interests. Our suggestions for focus included the limitations of the term “Commonwealth”, the keywords in the new title, the journal’s role in shaping the field of postcolonial studies over time, and the evolution of the field with reference to keywords in the old and new titles. We welcomed approaches engaging with literary or cultural texts, more theoretical responses to the brief, and essays that focused on particular geographical or cultural contexts.
It was especially important to us to invite the journal’s most recent former editors, Claire Chambers and Rachael Gilmour, to contribute. In their article, “The Evolution of Commonwealth, Postcolonial, and Decolonial Scholarship: Tracing the Impact of Field Transformation on the Journal of Commonwealth Literature and Vice Versa”, they in turn cite some of the journal’s earlier editors to consider the evolution of terminology in the field and the journal’s increasing discomfort with its own title. Moving their analysis from the term “Commonwealth” to postcolonial and decolonial scholarship, they argue persuasively that the synergies of these last two fields are more significant than their differences. Ultimately, they welcome the inclusion of “Empire” in the new title of a journal that has long been committed to exposing imperial legacies, naming the change a “quiet revolution in the journal’s mission and purpose” (18). Shameem Black, in “‘Commonwealth’, Empire, and Critique in South Asia”, also zooms in on two of the keywords of the journal’s titles, old and new: “Commonwealth” and “Empire”. By tracking the appearance and use of these two terms in the Journal of Commonwealth Literature and South Asia: Journal of South Asian Studies, which Black edits, she scrutinizes the ways in which these terms have mattered, concluding that it is the latter term, “Empire”, that remains most generative for both journals today, allowing South Asian (and, we would add, postcolonial more broadly) literary scholarship “to grapple with power and inequality” in a multiplicity of forms (21). While these two articles are explicit in their engagement with the journal’s keywords, Asha Rogers’s article, “Eng. Lit after Empire: The Political Stakes of Public Goods”, reads the journal’s shift in title as a “conscious act of change-making” that resonates with her interest in literary reforms in school curricula (31). Her article illuminates and explores two cases of school syllabus reform in 1980s’ Britain and Kenya: that of the University of London School Examinations Board whose reformed A-Level Paper featured a selection of African and Caribbean literary texts for the first time, and that of the Kenyan Ministry of Higher Education’s overhaul of its Advanced Certificate of Education to provincialize European geographies and to include oral as well as written literatures. As Rogers suggests, these case studies speak to contemporary concerns about decolonizing our curricula in universities as well as schools. As such, the article serves as an important reminder to turn to the past when thinking about pathways to a more racially just and inclusive present.
Andrew van der Vlies’s article, “Common/wealth: Contested Commons and Proleptic Critique”, takes us further back into the past to reflect on the term “Commonwealth” and its rich ambiguities. Taking as its starting point Olive Schreiner’s muted praise for Jan Smuts, an early advocate of the Commonwealth of Nations, the article examines Schreiner’s larger body of work to argue that she foresaw the ethical potential of the term “Commonwealth” even as she anticipated its pitfalls and political compromises. While he recognizes why the term has fallen out of favour, van der Vlies draws on Schreiner’s ambivalence to urge readers to retain sight of the laudable commonalities and aspirations that “Commonwealth” might still invoke. In stark contrast, Aretha Phiri’s article, “Literature at the Frontier of our Commonwealth”, suggests that the principles and values that underpin the Commonwealth of Nations are visibly belied in the canonical national literature of its member states. In a comparative reading of Patrick White’s Voss and J. M. Coetzee’s Dusklands — novels by writers from Commonwealth member states Australia and South Africa that are ripe for comparison given their inspiration in the colonial journeys of white male explorers — Phiri argues that both works reveal the prejudicial ideologies of settler colonialism that ultimately make the Commonwealth’s aspirations unrealizable.
As Phiri shows through her close reading, the medium of literature, a central word in the journal’s old and new titles, is especially suited to reveal the complexities and tensions that shape our postcolonial realities. Our next two contributors, Phoenix Alexander and Stephen Morton, turn to the literary modalities of speculative fiction and allegory, respectively, to consider how they might challenge colonial imaginaries of extractivism. Alexander’s article, “Island of Dreams: Post/colonial Imaginaries in Contemporary Cypriot Anglophone Literature”, addresses this understudied area of the Commonwealth to read two literary works that seek to critique the island’s role in the imperial imagination. This task, Alexander shows, requires a layered exploration of Cyprus’s strategic position in the Byzantine, Ottoman, and British Empires. Stephen Morton, in “Commonwealth Literature in the Longue Durée of Extractivism”, explores allegory as a vehicle for anti-imperialist critique. Offering highly generative readings of a number of texts, including M. NourbeSe Philip’s poem Zong!, the article demonstrates how allegory and counter-allegory can work to offer images of alternative worlds beyond the racial and patriarchal markings of imperialism.
Our next two contributors engage with the remaining keyword in the journal’s new title, “Critique”. Philip Tsang does this explicitly via Rita Felski’s notion of “postcritique” which, for him, has the potential to revitalize postcolonial analysis. His essay, “The Meanings of Postcolonial Critique”, argues that by breaking with “the hermeneutics of suspicion” — a mode of reading that van der Vlies also cautions against — postcolonial critique can produce surprising and even uncomfortable readings that broaden the field’s understanding of “how to critique and what it means to critique” (92). Tsang models just such an expanded notion of critique in his reading of an understudied work by an otherwise canonical postcolonial writer: Sam Selvon’s Moses Migrating. This novel, for Tsang, asks the postcolonial critic to acknowledge — rather than sideline — its complex attachments and concerns, even if (indeed, precisely because) they do not speak to postcolonial scholarship’s established political commitments. This reading chimes with John McLeod’s powerful intervention, “Re: placement: Commonwealth, Postcolonial, and the Politics of Positioning”. Cautioning against an overly programmatic approach to the field, he warns of the dangers of what he describes as “the fetishizing of primal filiation” in emerging responses to questions of identity (97). McLeod argues for the inclusivity of a field whose rights to membership should be guided by politics rather than provenance. Drawing on Zadie Smith and Bernadine Evaristo, he contends that some newer approaches in the field might in fact be harking back to old “Commonwealth literature” by tethering texts to provenance and place. Instead, he advocates for the more agile, nuanced, and sophisticated treatment of identity that postcolonial literary studies ushered in.
Perhaps the most personal response to our brief is Alison Donnell’s piece, “What’s in a Name? Circles of Attention and Critical Sensibilities”, which looks back on how the early stages of her career were shaped by the issues of nomenclature that frame our field, and, of course, this journal’s renaming. Identifying key moments in the field’s history — including JCL’s inaugural editorial (and its omissions and naïveté), the heated debates of the 1971 Association for Commonwealth Literature and Language Studies Conference, and the critical excitement surrounding postcolonial theory in its heyday — Donnell reminds us that we all have different and shifting attachments to and expectations of the discipline, many of them shaped by our personal and professional histories. Her essay also captures the spirit with which we begin this new chapter for the journal: naming and renaming certainly matter, but what matters more is the continual critical reflection marked by the effort to rename and redefine. As the current editors of Literature, Critique, and Empire Today, we hope that this special issue will remind readers of the journal’s pioneering work, while also asserting its renewed commitment to shaping the field in response to the ever-shifting modes in which empire operates.