{"title":"An Unsettling Affair: Territorial Anxieties and the Mutant Message","authors":"J. Eustace","doi":"10.1177/0021989405054306","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/0021989405054306","url":null,"abstract":"Some fifteen years after the publication of The Empire Writes Back (1989) announced the arrival of postcolonial studies, the legitimacy of a postcolonial critical practice seems beyond question. The healthy state of our relatively young practice can be quantified by the increasing number of scholarly journals and monographs directly and indirectly engaged with postcolonial subjects, and by the corresponding number of similarly engaged courses offered each year at tertiary institutions around the world. Often working in concert with other overtly politicized disciplines, we have helped to change the critical purview of commercial publishing houses, academic presses and universities, mostly for the better I like to think. For our part, we have extended the boundaries of academic and public discourse by engaging with and frequently advocating for those marginalized by colonial history. And we have done so, in general, while attending to the weaknesses inherent in any academic practice that also involves advocacy: trenchant debates over agency, over who can speak for whom and who can speak at all, have legitimized our practice more than undermined it, signalling a healthy level of self-reflexivity and a tendency to discern our discursive positions in relation to our various subjects. The great irony of our measurable success, one not lost on any selfreflexive postcolonial scholar, is that we are now a valuable part of the institutions we began by resisting from within. While we have helped to change the critical purview of commercial and academic presses, they have changed at least in part because there is profit in postcolonial studies; universities have filled seats and quotas with those drawn by our particular brand of institutionalized radicalism; and we have made alliances and careers for ourselves in those institutions. They now have An Unsettling Affair","PeriodicalId":44714,"journal":{"name":"JOURNAL OF COMMONWEALTH LITERATURE","volume":"40 1","pages":"65 - 91"},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2005-06-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1177/0021989405054306","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"65357032","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Ageing Subjects, Agentic Bodies: Appetite, Modernity and the Middle Class in Two Indian Short Stories in English","authors":"I. Raja","doi":"10.1177/0021989405050666","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/0021989405050666","url":null,"abstract":"Hindu literature and ideals, especially the model of life stages or ashramadharma, recommend renunciation of worldly pursuits in old age. According to Manu Smriti,1 when the householder, or the mature, economically active adult male on whom all others in society depend for sustenance, “sees his skin wrinkled and his hair white and the sons of his sons”, he should turn over the management of household affairs to his heir and retreat to a forest where, in order to disentangle himself from physical and emotional bonds of interdependence developed during the previous life stages, he will devote himself to contemplation, the performance of sacred rites and bodily self-mortification. If he succeeds in this, he is ready to enter the last stage, which involves the complete renunciation of the material world and its pleasures and ties. This is the manner in which ideally he should end his days, fully absorbed in the quest for spiritual perfection.2 Although Hindus in contemporary India may not subscribe to the idealized, four-stage life cycle in literal detail, they are nonetheless guided by the belief that life is made up of distinct developmental stages, each with its own normative code of conduct. Irrespective of the degree of direct familiarity with the classical texts, the idea that it is appropriate for old people to withdraw from active economic, productive or managerial involvement with household affairs and to renounce sensual in favour of Ageing Subjects, Agentic Bodies","PeriodicalId":44714,"journal":{"name":"JOURNAL OF COMMONWEALTH LITERATURE","volume":"40 1","pages":"73 - 89"},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2005-03-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1177/0021989405050666","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"65355893","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Shapes and Shadows: (Un)veiling the Immigrant in Monica Ali’s Brick Lane","authors":"J. Hiddleston","doi":"10.1177/0021989405050665","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/0021989405050665","url":null,"abstract":"Monica Ali’s Brick Lane burst into the public domain in the summer of 2003, generating both enthusiastic critical acclaim and defensive anger. Praised by some for providing a much needed and so far unprecedented portrait of the Bangladeshi community of London’s East End, the novel also irritated some members of that community, who saw its portrayal of their lives as inaccurate and derogatory. While some readers congratulated Ali for pulling back the curtains of the residences of Tower Hamlets and depicting the injustices and dissatisfactions suffered by their inhabitants, others were shocked by her boldness and offended by what they considered to be a gross misrepresentation of Bengali culture in London. Included in Granta’s list of best young authors, nominated for the US Award of the National Book Critics’ Circle, and short-listed for the Booker Prize, Ali at the same time received a letter from the Greater Sylhet Development and Welfare council condemning her depiction of Bangladeshis as backward and uneducated. This divided response to Ali’s work reveals not only differences in readerly expectations and preconceptions regarding the community in hand, but also a mire of uncertainties concerning the nature of literary representation, in this particular case and more generally. This article will try to elucidate these uncertainties and establish more clearly the nature and implications of Ali’s fictional experimentation in Brick Lane. Both the responses cited above seem still to rely on some notion of literature as realist documentation, but an alternative approach might focus instead on the difficulties of such a construction, on the deceptive effects of the text’s rhetoric. The Shapes and Shadows","PeriodicalId":44714,"journal":{"name":"JOURNAL OF COMMONWEALTH LITERATURE","volume":"40 1","pages":"57 - 72"},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2005-03-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1177/0021989405050665","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"65355836","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Contexts of Exploration: Janet Frame’s The Rainbirds","authors":"J. Cronin","doi":"10.1177/0021989405050662","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/0021989405050662","url":null,"abstract":"Although short-listed twice within her lifetime for the Nobel Prize for Literature, and universally lauded upon her death as New Zealand’s greatest writer, Janet Frame inspires a surprising degree of reticence in literary scholars. Despite the inroads made by recent monographs,1 much of Frame’s work retains the status of a critical conundrum. The problem, it seems, revolves around contexts, both without and within Frame’s novels. Her later texts, those that are most recognizably postcolonial or postmodern in orientation, receive the most critical attention; yet criticism of them has a tendency to be more concerned with contested critical classifications than with textual elucidation.2 Equally problematic is the preponderance of marginalized individuals and flawed societies within Frame’s early novels. This recurring theme earned Frame the status of New Zealand’s national “Cassandra”,3 a role that continues to foster reductive conceptions of her work. Context, where Janet Frame’s novels are concerned, is a more complex affair than either the postcolonial and postmodern theorizations or the social realist accounts of place allow.4 The tendency for Frame’s texts to be other than they appear is wellknown. However, this “otherness” goes beyond Frame’s notorious shifts in reality and revelations of ventriloquism, to involve multiple manifestations of context within any given text. Before the critic can consider contextualizing Frame’s work in terms of established categories, the status of context within the text – as the norm from which the substance of the novel deviates, as the theoretical terrain of the text, and oftentimes as the philosophical or ontological subject of the work – must be negotiated. The two-fold challenge lies then in determining and elucidating the manifold internal context of each novel, and in turn describing and thereby contextualizing the external significance of that particular work. Contexts of Exploration","PeriodicalId":44714,"journal":{"name":"JOURNAL OF COMMONWEALTH LITERATURE","volume":"40 1","pages":"19 - 5"},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2005-03-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1177/0021989405050662","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"65355815","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Bathos, Architecture and Knowing India: E.M. Forster’s A Passage to India and Nineteenth-Century British Ethnology and the Romance Quest","authors":"J. Majeed","doi":"10.1177/0021989405050663","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/0021989405050663","url":null,"abstract":"Two years before the publication of A Passage to India (1924), Forster wrote in a letter to G.L. Dickinson, “I am bored not only by my creative impotence, but by the tiresomeness and conventionalities of the fictionform”.2 In many ways, A Passage to India articulated Forster’s dissatisfaction with the genre of the novel as a whole. Stephen K. Land reads Forster’s novels in terms of the ways in which their protagonists either embody or challenge social conventions.3 The aesthetic form and subjectmatter of A Passage to India can also be read in similar terms as a set of challenges to novelistic conventions. This is evident in the way the novel self-consciously plays with conventional literary expectations on a variety of levels. The key here is the deliberate uncertainty of what happens in the caves, which is the open question that structures the novel as a whole. Famously, Forster refused to clarify this, suggesting that neither the narrator nor the protagonists, and so neither the readers also, can ever know what happened in the Marabar caves. It is clear that the notion that a novel with a supposedly third-person omniscient narrator who can inform the reader of what happens within the world of the text is undermined by the absent centre of A Passage to India, in which the status of its central event, and even the nature of what constitutes an event, is left ambiguous and uncertain. But Forster argued that this uncertainty was linked to his theme of India itself. In a letter of June 1924 he wrote: Bathos, Architecture and Knowing India","PeriodicalId":44714,"journal":{"name":"JOURNAL OF COMMONWEALTH LITERATURE","volume":"40 1","pages":"21 - 36"},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2005-03-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1177/0021989405050663","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"65356008","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Pringle v. Cadell and Wood v. Pringle: The Libel Cases over The History of Mary Prince","authors":"Sue Thomas","doi":"10.1177/0021989405050668","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/0021989405050668","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":44714,"journal":{"name":"JOURNAL OF COMMONWEALTH LITERATURE","volume":"40 1","pages":"113 - 135"},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2005-03-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1177/0021989405050668","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"65356346","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Authorship as Crisis in Salman Rushdie’s Fury","authors":"Sarah Brouillette","doi":"10.1177/0021989405050669","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/0021989405050669","url":null,"abstract":"The development of literary fiction as a popular niche for the publishing industry has been accompanied and encouraged by the increasing presence of writers of non-European origins, often from formerly colonized nations, writing in English for the Anglo-American market. The literature championed by postcolonial scholarship develops largely out of this matrix, and Salman Rushdie is one of its definitive lead authors. Rushdie has built a career on fictions set in locales foreign to many of those who read them, having taken up the task of exploring some of the most topical and contentious political phenomena of the late twentieth century, from anti-capitalist, anti-American revolutions in Central America to religious fundamentalisms in South Asia, from racism in England to the increasing presence of corporate influence in cultural production. Though his first novel Grimus (1979) sold a dismal 800 copies in hardcover,1 since Midnight’s Children was published in 1981 by Jonathan Cape, then the “most prestigious house for literary fiction”, Rushdie has been a lead author.2 The initial printing of Midnight’s Children in England was 1,750 copies, but it eventually sold 40,000 copies in hardcover.3 Marketing the book in the United States was more difficult, perhaps due to the lack of American attachment to India, the novel’s major setting and subject. Eventually Alfred P. Knopf did acquire it and they marketed it aggressively. A review by V.S. Pritchett was slated to appear in the New Yorker to coincide with the US release. It went on to sell very well in hardcover in the US, where the paperback rights went Authorship as Crisis","PeriodicalId":44714,"journal":{"name":"JOURNAL OF COMMONWEALTH LITERATURE","volume":"40 1","pages":"137 - 156"},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2005-03-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1177/0021989405050669","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"65356440","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"“We Too Sing”: Kofi Anyidoho and Ewe Poetic Traditions in Elegy For The Revolution","authors":"O. Okùnoyè","doi":"10.1177/0021989405050667","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/0021989405050667","url":null,"abstract":"This article estimates the debt of Kofi Anyidoho, a leading Ghanaian poet, to the poetic traditions of the Ewe people of West Africa. It proceeds from situating the work of the poet within his immediate cultural environment, clarifying the dynamism of Ewe literary traditions and the possibilities of perpetuating, extending and subverting them. It suggests that received traditions in this context often prove amenable to functional manipulation and that practices of this nature are increasingly enriching the distinctive literary practices of other postcolonial societies. But the article denies any simplistic transference of values from the Ewe practices that provide the enabling base for Anyidoho’s creative project, suggesting, instead, that a proper evaluation of his work must take his own outlook and the circumstances that necessitate his appropriation of aspects of indigenous poetic practices into consideration. The Ewe traditions of dirge and the Halo (song of abuse) are recognized as the particular Ewe poetic practices that shape Kofi Anyidoho’s creative project. The Ewe people are believed to have migrated from Oyo in Southwestern Nigeria, through Ketu in the present Republic of Benin, to Notse in Togo, where they eventually dispersed. In the political geography of contemporary Africa, they are found in three West African states – Benin, Togo and Ghana. The people still maintain a reasonable measure of cultural unity in spite of the failure of their moves toward political unification. Their main unifying factors include a common language and shared beliefs and practices, especially in their traditions of poetry. Of the many Ewe sub-groups – Anlo, Some, Be, Ge, Peki, Adaklu, Ave, “We Too Sing”","PeriodicalId":44714,"journal":{"name":"JOURNAL OF COMMONWEALTH LITERATURE","volume":"40 1","pages":"111 - 91"},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2005-03-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1177/0021989405050667","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"65356634","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Reading Risk in The Navigator of New York","authors":"J. Andrews","doi":"10.1177/0021989405050664","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/0021989405050664","url":null,"abstract":"In The Navigator of New York, Wayne Johnston explores the discourse of risk through a fictional account of the famously heated competition between Dr. Frederick Cook and Lt. Robert Peary to reach the North Pole. Narrated primarily through the voice of Devlin Stead, Cook’s illegitimate son, the novel examines how personal and professional risks have shaped the life of these explorers, their lovers and their offspring. As Johnston’s version of Cook, wrestling retrospectively with the consequences of having abandoned his pregnant lover, Amelia, explains in the second epigraph above, the trust she invested in him as an engaged woman from Newfoundland who visits New York City shortly before her wedding and his inability to economically and emotionally reciprocate have changed the direction of their lives forever. Amelia, in particular, pays for the risks she takes; she and her son, Devlin Stead, are ostracized by the St. John’s community, and she is eventually mysteriously murdered by her husband, Francis Stead. Cook, in the meantime, encounters Francis, who has become a fellow explorer, eventually learns of his crime and kills him in an act of revenge. To bond with the son he did not know existed, Cook then seeks out Devlin, writing him a series of lengthy letters that outline his parentage and share Cook’s obsessive passion for exploration. These letters spur the young man to risk it all by coming to New York and participating, with his father, in the race for the Pole; the results are physically and emotionally perilous, provoking Devlin to re-examine how he understands himself, his family, and his identity as a Newfoundlander. Reading Risk","PeriodicalId":44714,"journal":{"name":"JOURNAL OF COMMONWEALTH LITERATURE","volume":"40 1","pages":"37 - 56"},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2005-03-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1177/0021989405050664","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"65356086","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Malaysia and Singapore","authors":"Ismail S. Talib","doi":"10.1177/0021989404050278","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/0021989404050278","url":null,"abstract":"This is the first time that Malaysia is included in the Bibliographical issue of this journal after a gap of ten years. The annual bibliography for Malaysia until 1993 had always appeared together with that for Singapore. When I co-compiled the bibliography for Singapore literature for the years 1994–96 with Koh Tai Ann, we decided to exclude Malaysia. There were a few reasons for doing this. From my perspective, it had partly to do with the fact that I perceived Singapore literature in English as quite distinct from Malaysian literature in English. At the time that we compiled the bibliography, Singapore had been independent from Malaysia for over thirty years, and to an extent, its literature in English had gone on a different trajectory from that of Malaysian literature in the language. It would be disappointing if the two literatures were constantly packaged together, as there were connections with other literatures both in English and other languages. Looking at this bibliography alone, for example, we see the connections between Singapore and the United States of Chay Yew and Vyvyane Loh, between Malaysia and the United States of Shirley Lim, and between Singapore and the Australia of Simone Lazaroo. Another factor in any attempt to compile a bibliography that includes Malaysia is the fear that the entire Malaysian list will not be as substantial as that for Singapore, thus creating an imbalance. The present bibliography testifies to this to a certain extent, although the discrepancy does not apply across the board. However, there is nothing wrong with the imbalance if it is a faithful reflection of the output from both countries. I will return to this point again later, as it is not merely a matter of calculation, and does not only reflect on general trends in the respective development of literature in English of each country, which should not only be seen as a whole, but also on a more piecemeal comparative basis, in order to arrive at a more comprehensive picture. Malaysia and Singapore","PeriodicalId":44714,"journal":{"name":"JOURNAL OF COMMONWEALTH LITERATURE","volume":"39 1","pages":"71 - 96"},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2004-12-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1177/0021989404050278","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"65354864","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}