{"title":"Common/wealth: Contested commons and proleptic critique","authors":"Andrew van der Vlies","doi":"10.1177/00219894241228715","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/00219894241228715","url":null,"abstract":"In May 1917, two South African feminist friends and critics of empire then in London sent a telegram to Field Marshal Jan Smuts, the Union of South Africa’s Defence Minister and delegate to the Imperial War Cabinet, in response to his early proposal for a Commonwealth of Nations. It read simply: “Your speech was fine”. Whether intended sincerely (as in “very fine”) or as faint praise (“fine as far as it goes, but”) is not known, but the ambiguity is fitting for an association and description with such contested associations – and one that, by some accounts, originated in the colonies (from an idea proposed by Canadian Prime Minister William Lyon Mackenzie King and South Africa’s then-Prime Minister J. B. M. Hertzog). It is fitting, too, that one of the cable’s authors was Olive Schreiner (1855-1920), leading novelist of the “New Woman”, advocate of sex equality, and clear-sighted critic of empire’s presumptions, rapacious designs, and gendered and ethnic biases, as well as of the race politics taking shape in South Africa at the start of the twentieth century. Even as we read Schreiner’s work today with an eye to its own prejudices and contradictions, this essay contends that it is worth considering the value of the proleptic critique it embodies for an understanding of the ongoing limitations — but also use-value — of the term “Commonwealth”, as well as of any term that might replace it. The outlines of Schreiner’s critique suggest that the term might yet encode a counter-ideal that points to an ongoing latent potential for the common to be reactivated as promise of a more equal and just division of empire’s spoils.","PeriodicalId":507079,"journal":{"name":"The Journal of Commonwealth Literature","volume":"86 20","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2024-02-13","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"139781320","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Common/wealth: Contested commons and proleptic critique","authors":"Andrew van der Vlies","doi":"10.1177/00219894241228715","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/00219894241228715","url":null,"abstract":"In May 1917, two South African feminist friends and critics of empire then in London sent a telegram to Field Marshal Jan Smuts, the Union of South Africa’s Defence Minister and delegate to the Imperial War Cabinet, in response to his early proposal for a Commonwealth of Nations. It read simply: “Your speech was fine”. Whether intended sincerely (as in “very fine”) or as faint praise (“fine as far as it goes, but”) is not known, but the ambiguity is fitting for an association and description with such contested associations – and one that, by some accounts, originated in the colonies (from an idea proposed by Canadian Prime Minister William Lyon Mackenzie King and South Africa’s then-Prime Minister J. B. M. Hertzog). It is fitting, too, that one of the cable’s authors was Olive Schreiner (1855-1920), leading novelist of the “New Woman”, advocate of sex equality, and clear-sighted critic of empire’s presumptions, rapacious designs, and gendered and ethnic biases, as well as of the race politics taking shape in South Africa at the start of the twentieth century. Even as we read Schreiner’s work today with an eye to its own prejudices and contradictions, this essay contends that it is worth considering the value of the proleptic critique it embodies for an understanding of the ongoing limitations — but also use-value — of the term “Commonwealth”, as well as of any term that might replace it. The outlines of Schreiner’s critique suggest that the term might yet encode a counter-ideal that points to an ongoing latent potential for the common to be reactivated as promise of a more equal and just division of empire’s spoils.","PeriodicalId":507079,"journal":{"name":"The Journal of Commonwealth Literature","volume":"60 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2024-02-13","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"139841210","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"“The past does not lie behind us”: Warrior-matriarchs’ retrotopia in Witi Ihimaera’s fiction","authors":"Gerardo Rodríguez-Salas","doi":"10.1177/00219894231219111","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/00219894231219111","url":null,"abstract":"Contrary to an apolitical, pessimistic, and non-feminist perception of Witi Ihimaera’s work, this article contends that his early novel The Matriarch (1986) and its sequel The Dream Swimmer (1997) frame Māori communities as an ancient, patriarchal space in need of revision to accommodate women. Reconsidering the role of tribalism and Māori utopian and cyclical land narratives, this study argues that the confessional male narrator of both novels, Tamatea Mahana, learns to embrace a matrilineal genealogy not only of powerful Māori women leaders of chiefly status, but also of charismatic women in the shadow, like his mother Tiana. Beyond Pākehā imperial democracy and Māori “male utopias of domination”, Tamatea and the exceptional gallery of warrior-matriarchs implement a peculiar and controversial retrotopia — a return to the prematurely buried grand ideas of the past — which, even when dangerously resonating with nostalgia, aims at an open-ended model of democracy through spiral temporality. 1 A predominantly decolonizing theory and methodology is used, drawing on Kaupapa Māori and Mana Wāhine theories.","PeriodicalId":507079,"journal":{"name":"The Journal of Commonwealth Literature","volume":" 22","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-12-30","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"139138392","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Undoing slavery’s anonymity: The politics of identification in twenty-first century Black Canadian poetry","authors":"Pilar Cuder-Domínguez","doi":"10.1177/00219894231207479","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/00219894231207479","url":null,"abstract":"This essay discusses the language strategies deployed in twenty-first century works by three Black Canadian poets that engage with the archive of slavery (Sylvia D. Hamilton, charles c. smith and M. NourbeSe Philip) and reads them as performing a counter-pedagogy of cruelty against African-descended peoples. The analysis focuses on the politics of identification pursued by these poets in order to bring back the memory of enslaved Black subjects into the realm of the ‘human’, and particularly the recurrent device of naming or renaming as a way to counter one of the most pervasive dehumanizing practices of slavery, the erasure of one’s past and the imposition of anonymity. By means of this linguistic resource they achieve common aims: restoring dignity to the enslaved, constructing an alternative site of memorialization, and dismantling hegemonic narratives of Blackness in the nation.","PeriodicalId":507079,"journal":{"name":"The Journal of Commonwealth Literature","volume":"6 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-12-23","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"139161725","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Manto and the Mad Muselmann","authors":"Sana R. Chaudhry","doi":"10.1177/00219894231211571","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/00219894231211571","url":null,"abstract":"In Sa’adat Hasan Manto’s short story “Toba Tek Singh”, readers are introduced to Sikh inmate Bishan Singh living in an asylum in pre-Partition India.1 The disfigured, swollen, babbling body of Bishan Singh is redolent of Giorgio Agamben’s representation of the “ Muselmann”, the abject camp prisoners of Auschwitz, in his Remnants of Auschwitz: The Witness and the Archive. Drawing on Agamben’s insights, this article reads the figure of Bishan Singh as the Agambenian “ Muselmann” and Partition witness, caught in the space of the camp under the guise of an asylum for the mentally ill. This article also traces this space or holding centre for the mentally ill as a site of production of an ab-humanity marked not so much by a lack of speech, but by its provocative disorder. The figure of Bishan Singh as “ Muselmann” emerges as marked out by his garbled, traumatized language that signals both his ab-humanity and his exposure to the violence that attends the making of the human subject. This study argues that Bishan Singh’s wounded body and speech constitute traces of the unsayable, and that what is perceptible emerges from what is not.","PeriodicalId":507079,"journal":{"name":"The Journal of Commonwealth Literature","volume":"2 6","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-12-23","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"139162485","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"The global refugee: Oceanic border thinking in Abdulrazak Gurnah’s By the Sea","authors":"Keyvan Allahyari","doi":"10.1177/00219894231192075","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/00219894231192075","url":null,"abstract":"This article attends to Abdulrazak Gurnah’s By the Sea as a critique of the normative understanding of the border as having a singular, prohibitive function for the refugee, and reads it as a call to register the border as a moving and permeable formation. What I call oceanic border thinking conveys Gurnah’s insight into the imbrication of littoral and land zones, and the effect of the proliferation of biopolitical technologies associated with various iterations of colonial and postcolonial bordering, including partitioning, arbitrary detention, deportation, and expulsion. The border’s liquidity — the elemental property of water — captures the valence of By the Sea’s oceanic border imaginary, which, in turn, challenges overdetermined readings of the border as attached primarily to land, and the reduction of the refugee to a presentist conception of race or nationality. The liquidity of borders, here, is not meant to suggest a state of extremity, crisis, or morbidity of Indian Ocean polities; rather, it suggests an approach to Gurnah’s oceanic writing as a process of world-making across waters in tandem with the biopolitical technologies that reoriented lives in shifting geopolitical territories. Oceanic border thinking enables one’s sense of the world not only in water but onwards into the land, whether in Africa, England, or continental Europe. Transferrable and dissident, this method helps with the exploration of how cartographic, literary, and imaginative conceptions of the border, as observed from water, bear the potential to trouble easy categorizations of borders and the histories associated with them.","PeriodicalId":507079,"journal":{"name":"The Journal of Commonwealth Literature","volume":"64 2","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-12-11","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"139183909","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
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