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Common/wealth: Contested commons and proleptic critique The Journal of Commonwealth Literature (IF 0.3) Pub Date : 2024-02-14 Andrew van der Vlies
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
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Roots and routes: Literary archaeologies of British museums in contemporary Black and Asian poetry The Journal of Commonwealth Literature (IF 0.3) Pub Date : 2023-04-18 Rachel Gregory Fox
This article explores some of the ways in which contemporary poets are tracing the roots and routes via which objects have come to, and continue to, reside within the walls of the museum. Focusing ...
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“Hope and grief woven together”: Consolation in a queer reading of Arundhati Roy’s The Ministry of Utmost Happiness The Journal of Commonwealth Literature (IF 0.3) Pub Date : 2023-04-18 Beniamin Kłaniecki
This article considers the role of consolation in a biopolitical and queer reading of Arundhati Roy’s The Ministry of Utmost Happiness (2017). As a critique of contemporary Indian politics, Hindu n...
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“The same spaces but…different worlds”: Witness-bearing and redefinitions of shared space The Journal of Commonwealth Literature (IF 0.3) Pub Date : 2023-03-22 Lisa Propst
This article considers what witnessing calls for when it addresses ongoing inequities or structural violence. It can be all too easy for well-meaning acts of witnessing to perpetuate inequities by ...
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A strange and sublime longing: Looking back at childhood in Calcutta in A Strange and Sublime Address and The Blue Bedspread The Journal of Commonwealth Literature (IF 0.3) Pub Date : 2023-02-10 Pallavi Sanyal
Childhood is a universal trope in literature, where the figure of the child engenders feelings of pity, affection or horror in readers. This article will examine two novels — A Strange and Sublime ...
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A gulf of secrets: Priya Kuriyan’s graphic memoir “Ebony and Ivory” The Journal of Commonwealth Literature (IF 0.3) Pub Date : 2023-02-01 Gayathri Prabhu
While the key role that migration plays in the economies of countries like India is widely recognized, subtler affective and cultural circuits are both less easily discerned, and perhaps as a conse...
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Telling translocal histories: Reading the migrant life-worlds in Gulf-Keralan writing The Journal of Commonwealth Literature (IF 0.3) Pub Date : 2023-01-28 Heba Thankam Varghese
This article discusses three Malayalam texts written by Gulf-Kerala migrants: V. Musafar Ahammed’s (2014) Kudiyettakkarante Veedu [House of the emigrant], a collection of memoirs; Benyamin’s (2016)...
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“If I speak like you, I am you”: Racial passing in Trevor Noah’s Born a Crime and Other Stories The Journal of Commonwealth Literature (IF 0.3) Pub Date : 2023-01-28 Adam Levin
In his memoir Born a Crime and Other Stories (2016), stand-up comedian Trevor Noah, draws on the thematic concerns of his stand-up performances, as he documents his experiences of racial passing in...
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Malayalam literature as a transnational space of political change: Migration and Bahrain’s 2011 uprising in Benyamin’s Jasmine Days and Al Arabian Novel Factory The Journal of Commonwealth Literature (IF 0.3) Pub Date : 2023-01-13 Nadeen Dakkak
A central theme in Benyamin’s twin novels Jasmine Days (2014) and Al Arabian Novel Factory (2014) is the role of migrants in Bahrain’s 2011 uprising and their attitudes towards the ruling regime’s ...
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Labour migration, the Arabian Gulf, and the expanding territorial imagination in Malayalam cinema The Journal of Commonwealth Literature (IF 0.3) Pub Date : 2023-01-13 Yadukrishnan P T
Mainstream Malayalam cinema of the south Indian state of Kerala has, for the most part, attempted to sidestep the significance of Gulf migration to the region’s development. Part of the reason for ...
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Eye Errant: Kei Miller’s The Cartographer Tries to Map a Way To Zion and the geopoetics of the senses The Journal of Commonwealth Literature (IF 0.3) Pub Date : 2022-12-16 Wei Liu
This article discusses Kei Miller’s The Cartographer Tries to Map a Way to Zion through the lens of visuality and multisensory poetic performance. Reenacting the tradition of map critique in postco...
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The specular dream: Historical imaginary in speculative fiction of colonial Bengal The Journal of Commonwealth Literature (IF 0.3) Pub Date : 2022-09-20 Atanu Bhattacharya, Preet Hiradhar
This article examines Bhudeb Mukhopadhyaya’s Swapnolabdho Bharatbarsher Itihas (History of India Revealed in a Dream) as a speculative dream narrative within the wider context of literary practices...
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The Partition and Bengal, seventy-five years on The Journal of Commonwealth Literature (IF 0.3) Pub Date : 2022-09-07 Kaiser Haq
This article looks at the Partition of 1947 as it affected Bengal, from the perspective of the present. A historical survey of the distinctiveness of the Partition experience in Bengal is considere...
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Against Afropolitanism: Race and the Black migrant body in contemporary African poetry The Journal of Commonwealth Literature (IF 0.3) Pub Date : 2022-09-07 Tosin Gbogi
A growing body of Afropolitan literary and theoretical writing privileges urban migratory crossings that highlight the fluidity of borders, bodies, and identities in contemporary times. Focusing on...
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Remembering against sentimentality: Partition’s literary shadows in the work of Najm Hosain Syed The Journal of Commonwealth Literature (IF 0.3) Pub Date : 2022-09-05 Anne Murphy
Although Punjabi is written in two different scripts in India and Pakistan, there are striking parallels between the literary work in Punjabi produced on both sides of the India and Pakistan border...
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The dark forest of exile: A Dandakaranya memoir and the Partition’s Dalit refugees The Journal of Commonwealth Literature (IF 0.3) Pub Date : 2022-09-05 Debjani Sengupta
The Partition of India in 1947 has often been studied through the lenses of territoriality, communal identity, and the high nationalist politics of the attainment of the two nation-states of India ...
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Trans*versality, a hijra politics of knowledge, and Partition postmemory in Khushwant Singh’s Delhi: A Novel The Journal of Commonwealth Literature (IF 0.3) Pub Date : 2022-09-05 Alberto Fernández Carbajal
In contrast with Train to Pakistan (1956), Khushwant Singh’s Delhi: A Novel (1990) has not received critical attention in light of India and Pakistan’s Partition. The diegetic narrator, a middle-ag...
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Partition and its echoes in Karachi: The political agencies of Fahmida Riaz and Perween Rahman The Journal of Commonwealth Literature (IF 0.3) Pub Date : 2022-09-05 Amina Yaqin, Naiza Khan
This article, shaped as a conversation between a scholar and an artist, critically examines the mapping of the lived experience of Karachi after Partition through a discussion of the poetic journey...
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Unfinished stories of the Partition: Across 75 years The Journal of Commonwealth Literature (IF 0.3) Pub Date : 2022-09-05 Kamran Asdar Ali, Tabish Khair
This conversation between two second cousins born and brought up on different sides of the India/Pakistan border and now, as academics and writers, engaged in examining the Partition, looks at what...
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Primitivist tensions in Caribbean-American literature: Claude McKay’s and Paule Marshall’s return to the island The Journal of Commonwealth Literature (IF 0.3) Pub Date : 2022-07-24 Mónica Fernández Jiménez
Following Immanuel Wallerstein’s and Giovanni Arrighi’s world-systems perspective, this article undertakes a materialist analysis of the novels Banana Bottom (1933) by Claude McKay and The Chosen P...
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African strangers, spaces of belonging and the “democracy to come” in Helon Habila’s Travellers The Journal of Commonwealth Literature (IF 0.3) Pub Date : 2022-06-02 María J. López
This article analyses Helon Habila’s Travellers (2019), focusing on its depiction of African migrants in Europe as strangers, as defined by Sara Ahmed in Strange Encounters (2000): those who, in spite of their proximity, are recognized as not belonging or out of place. Following Ahmed, this essay deals with the relation between space and migrant experience in Habila’s novel, in which the configuration
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“A bit of the other”: Black edibility and white consumption in Andrea Levy’s Small Island The Journal of Commonwealth Literature (IF 0.3) Pub Date : 2022-05-18 Corrine Collins
This article examines depictions of interracial violence in Andrea Levy’s Small Island to argue that the novel challenges the ways that interraciality is mobilized as a symbol of progress. By examining tropes of black edibility and white consumption, this article situates the duality of attraction and repulsion white characters feel for black characters within libidinal economies of racialized desire
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Agential realism and trans-corporeality in contemporary South Asian literature The Journal of Commonwealth Literature (IF 0.3) Pub Date : 2022-01-24 Megan E. Fourqurean
South Asian literature has a history of engaging with ecocriticism and environmentalism from a postcolonial, locally specific perspective. New materialism shares this ecocritical commitment through its posthumanist conceptions of embodiment and material entanglement between human and nonhuman material agencies. Despite their common interest in alternative possibilities for human and nonhuman engagement
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Cinematic empire and nostalgia in Viceroy’s House and Victoria and Abdul The Journal of Commonwealth Literature (IF 0.3) Pub Date : 2022-01-19 Tehmina Pirzada, Saba Pirzadeh
The commercial viability of Gurinder Chadha’s Viceroy’s House (2017) and Stephen Frears’ Victoria and Abdul (2017) can be attributed to their effective use of heritage film elements to offer romanticized versions of British rule. Decoding the teleological intent behind these romanticized versions, this article contends that the chosen films promote nostalgia in response to the postimperial melancholia
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A call for mutual change and progress: An interview with Aravind Malagatti and Dharani Devi Malagatti The Journal of Commonwealth Literature (IF 0.3) Pub Date : 2021-11-18 Surya Simon
This interview with Dr Aravind Malagatti and Dr Dharani Devi Malagatti, conducted in Mysore, India, in April 2019, was one of several interviews I conducted for my doctoral thesis that examines caste system and Dalit struggles in the context of India. Dr Aravind Malagatti has contributed more than sixty books to Kannada literature, out of which his autobiography, Government Brahmana published in 1994
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“New patriotism” in post-war Sri Lanka and the revival of the Walauva as a site of power in contemporary Sri Lankan English fiction The Journal of Commonwealth Literature (IF 0.3) Pub Date : 2021-11-17 Vihanga Perera
An emerging body of fiction by contemporary English novelists in Sri Lanka during the immediate post-civil war decade (2010–2020) indicates a renewed interest in the feudal grand house (the walauva) as a site of power. Often described in romantic terms and presented from positions of entitlement, in its renewed form, the walauva is constructed as a benevolent patriarchal system in which class superiors
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The aesthetic sublimation of pain in Niyi Osundare’s City Without People The Journal of Commonwealth Literature (IF 0.3) Pub Date : 2021-11-12 Kazeem Adebiyi-Adelabu
Niyi Osundare is a Nigerian poet-scholar, who was a victim of the Hurricane Katrina catastrophe in 2005 in New Orleans, Louisiana. A few years after the cataclysmic event, Osundare versified his experience in the poetry volume entitled City Without People. This article examines the narration of his painful experience and memories in the collection. I begin by exploring the thematization of pain in
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Annual Bibliography of Commonwealth Literature 2020 The Journal of Commonwealth Literature (IF 0.3) Pub Date : 2021-11-09 Vassilena Parashkevova
A genre which has positioned itself as offering one of the most direct and comprehensive responses to a 2020 lived under the sign of the Covid pandemic is the anthology. The year was imagined and discussed in collections of graphic fiction from Aotearoa New Zealand, poetry from East Africa and India, stories from India and Pakistan, essays from South Africa, poetry and art from Malaysia and around
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Land and storytelling: Indigenous pathways towards healing, spiritual regeneration and resurgence The Journal of Commonwealth Literature (IF 0.3) Pub Date : 2021-09-28 Francesca Mussi
This article aims to contribute to discourses of healing, Indigenous resurgence and spiritual regeneration within the context of the Indian Residential School Truth and Reconciliation Commission that took place in Canada between 2008 and 2015. First, it considers to what extent the TRC’s restorative justice process can relate to Indigenous ways of conceptualising healing. Secondly, it reflects on the
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The Australian Reifungsroman: Reading women’s ageing in Kate Grenville’s The Idea of Perfection and Dorothy Hewett’s Neap Tide The Journal of Commonwealth Literature (IF 0.3) Pub Date : 2021-09-15 Yuanhang Liu
Women’s ageing processes raise important questions about the relationship between the body, the self, and society, but this topic has been widely ignored in Australian literature. The Australian Reifungsroman, through nuanced articulations of ageing women’s experiences of being doubly othered, shows itself to be a critical discourse that helps to break the cultural silence accorded to ageing women
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“A point that escapes Darwin”: Crises of colonial self in the nature essays of Edward Hamilton Aitken and Philip Robinson The Journal of Commonwealth Literature (IF 0.3) Pub Date : 2021-09-15 Jason Sandhar
This article shows how the colonial nature essay both spoofs and affirms crises of the European self in British India’s post-Rebellion era (1857–1947). Authored by English civil servants who took to naturalism as a hobby, the nature essay’s exaggerated misadventures with quotidian animals such as ants, beetles, and mosquitos parody British accounts of the 1857 Rebellion, while dehumanizing caricatures
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Gender and the politics of war historiography in Buchi Emecheta’s Destination Biafra The Journal of Commonwealth Literature (IF 0.3) Pub Date : 2021-08-01 Sarah Jilani
Buchi Emecheta’s novel about the Nigerian Civil War, Destination Biafra (1982), challenges war historiography in ways that scholarship designating it a “female perspective” on the conflict can sometimes overlook. This article focuses on how Emecheta deploys a dual narrative approach that weaves an omniscient narrator with diverse Nigerian women’s points of view in order to position their lived experiences
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The culture of erosion: Settler colonialism, geological agency, and New Zealand literature, 1930s–1950s The Journal of Commonwealth Literature (IF 0.3) Pub Date : 2021-07-02 Philip Steer
The Pākehā (settler) writing that flourished in New Zealand in the middle decades of the twentieth century is often seen as an attempt to ground settler culture in the precolonial earth. Produced at a time when erosion was seen as a pressing national and global environmental crisis, however, this essay argues New Zealand literary culture in fact was suffused with awareness of settlement’s profoundly
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Elsa Joubert’s Cul-de-sac: A disability politics reflection The Journal of Commonwealth Literature (IF 0.3) Pub Date : 2021-05-07 Leslie Swartz
Elsa Joubert’s 1978 novel Die swerfjare van Poppie Nongena, translated into English and a number of other languages and adapted into a play and a film, is recognized as one of the 100 best African books of the twentieth century, a landmark in South African writing. The work and its reception have drawn heated criticism around the politics of race, gender, privilege, and voice. Critics have expressed
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An ocean of languages? Multilingualism in Arundhati Roy’s The Ministry of Utmost Happiness The Journal of Commonwealth Literature (IF 0.3) Pub Date : 2021-04-29 Birgit Neumann
The article examines the multilingual poetics of Arundhati Roy’s novel The Ministry of Utmost Happiness, focusing on the historically strained relations between English and India’s other languages. As a contribution to the project of “unforgetting English” (Walkowitz, 2015), the close reading of Roy’s novel reveals how English is construed and posited as a language within India’s multilingual environment
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“Immerse my eye in every colour”: A conversation with Aamer Hussein The Journal of Commonwealth Literature (IF 0.3) Pub Date : 2021-04-19 Muddasir Ramzan
This in-depth interview focuses on Aamer Hussein’s role as a writer in general and his Muslim identity and heritage in particular. Among the issues raised are his ideas about identity; his life in Britain; Black, Asian and minority ethnic (BAME) writing; Islamophobia; his response to the Rushdie Affair and post-9/11 discourses; Muslim literary traditions; and bilingualism. Hussein is mostly acclaimed
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African poetry and the intellectual: A critique of the academy in verse The Journal of Commonwealth Literature (IF 0.3) Pub Date : 2021-04-15 Ken Junior Lipenga
In The Wretched of the Earth (1963), Frantz Fanon holds an optimistic view of the intellectual in the colony, as one who plays a key role in confronting the colonial administrators and addressing them on level intellectual turf. Long after African countries have gained independence, university campuses continue to sprout and grow on the continent. The intellectual finds their position changed. Now
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Between “the lights and shadows”: Reading the new edition of Olive Schreiner’s From Man to Man or Perhaps Only — The Journal of Commonwealth Literature (IF 0.3) Pub Date : 2021-03-16 Sanja Nivesjö, Heidi Barends
The introduction to this written symposium considers Olive Schreiner’s novel From Man to Man or Perhaps Only — (1926) in light of the release of a new edition by Dorothy Driver and UCT Press (2015). The symposium’s first article, by Liz Stanley, reflects on Schreiner’s writing process by studying two early manuscript fragments of the novel from 1886–1887. Joyce Berkman and Dorothy Driver then both
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Postcolonial disjuncture: Kashmir as the other in Basharat Peer’s Curfewed Night The Journal of Commonwealth Literature (IF 0.3) Pub Date : 2021-03-09 Payel Pal
Basharat Peer’s Curfewed Night (2008) is a perspicacious commentary on the violence, exile and dispossession that have wrecked the lives of ordinary Kashmiris since 1947. Peer compellingly ruminates on the gradual loss of the Kashmiris’ belongingness in the last few decades that eventually curtailed their sense of individual and collective selfhood. The present article aims to analyse how Peer’s memoir
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Between Madras and Chennai: Narratives of belonging in a post colonial city The Journal of Commonwealth Literature (IF 0.3) Pub Date : 2021-03-05 Kavithaa Rajamony, Jyotirmaya Tripathy
Fictional narratives on Chennai, after its official conversion from Madras in 1996, offer an intriguing register for exploring ways of belonging. Using a postcolonial framework, the paper closely scrutinizes T. S. Tirumurti’s Clive Avenue and Chennaivaasi (and some other authors invested in Chennai’s contemporary culture) and subjects them to critique as sites of meaning making. An effort is made to
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Decolonization and the aesthetics of disorder: Naipaul, Evaristo, Boland The Journal of Commonwealth Literature (IF 0.3) Pub Date : 2021-03-04 Matthew Whittle
Decolonization is presented in dominant accounts as an orderly transition and not the culmination of anticolonial resistance movements. This in turn contributes to what Paul Gilroy terms an endemic “post-imperial melancholia” across contemporary European nations and the removal of empire and its demise from understandings of European history. Drawing on Bill Schwarz’s reconceptualization of a Fanonian
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Self-possession and the crisis of post-colony in Achebe’s A Man of the People The Journal of Commonwealth Literature (IF 0.3) Pub Date : 2021-03-01 Thomas Jay Lynn
Chinua Achebe’s fourth novel, A Man of the People, portrays a wider range of significant female figures than any other fictional narrative by Achebe. The leading female characters defy literary marginalization because the text humanizes their personal predicaments and validates their choices. As a result, their collective voice is as important to the novel’s themes as the male voice expressed through
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World Literature, the opaque archive, and the untranslatable: J. M. Coetzee and some others The Journal of Commonwealth Literature (IF 0.3) Pub Date : 2021-02-24 Andrew van der Vlies
A key concern of recent theoretical orientations in the development of “World Literature” as a discipline has been the question of accessibility to literatures in minor languages, which is to say of literal and metaphorical translatability, even transparency. This essay explores the challenge posed by the occlusion of the possible intertextual influence of works in such languages that are evident only
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Generic fracturing in Okot p’Bitek’s White Teeth The Journal of Commonwealth Literature (IF 0.3) Pub Date : 2021-02-05 Alena Rettová
Based on a stylistic analysis of selected African novels, centrally Okot p’Bitek’s Lak Tar/White Teeth (1953; English translation: 1989), this article identifies a narrative technique employed by these novels, to use heterogeneous genres inserted into the prose fiction of the novel. Typically, various genres of poetry are used in this way, creating a textuality that is richly “heteroglossic” (Bakhtin
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Rethinking nineteenth-century literary culture: British worlds, southern latitudes and hemispheric methods The Journal of Commonwealth Literature (IF 0.3) Pub Date : 2021-01-20 Sarah Comyn, Porscha Fermanis
Drawing on hemispheric, oceanic, and southern theory approaches, this article argues for the value of considering the nineteenth-century literary cultures of the southern settler colonies of Australia, New Zealand, and South Africa from within an interconnected frame of analysis. First, because of their distinctive historical and structural conditions; second, because of the density of their interregional
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Marginalia as narratives of ordinary lives: Shaughnessy Bishop-Stall’s Down to This The Journal of Commonwealth Literature (IF 0.3) Pub Date : 2021-01-05 Silvia Julia Caporale-Bizzini
This article examines Canadian author Shaughnessy Bishop-Stall’s 2004 memoir Down to This: Squalor and Splendour in a Big-City Shantytown through the notions of marginalia and the ordinary in order to question dichotomic representations of homelessness. It explores how the author moves beyond binaries, interrogating the dichotomy ordinary/out of the ordinary lives by narrating his ethical encounter
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Afterlives of colonialism: Nostalgia, reader’s response and the case of Noel Barber’s Tanamera The Journal of Commonwealth Literature (IF 0.3) Pub Date : 2020-12-31 Vandana Saxena
Noel Barber’s Tanamera plots the story of Singapore during World War II as an adventure and interracial romance. Published in 1981, Tanamera enjoyed immense popularity along with other colonial romances that circulated at the time. This article explores readers’ continuing fascination with the genre of colonial romance. Read in light of the postcolonial theory, the study turns to the way the reading
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Narratives of city exposure: Incarnations of the street person in Zanta: The Living Legend and The Dregs The Journal of Commonwealth Literature (IF 0.3) Pub Date : 2020-12-29 María Jesús Hernáez Lerena
This article examines the rationale for definitions of the homeless in the public imagination and the kind of discourses used to create a physical, psychological, and moral distance between the domiciled and the destitute. In a society where the worthy individual is tied to an ideal of entrepreneurial, rational, homed, successful consumer, and where public space is solely destined for the unobstructed
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Between vulnerability and resistance: Rhetorical strategies in Indigenous Canadian nonfiction The Journal of Commonwealth Literature (IF 0.3) Pub Date : 2020-12-25 Martina Horakova
This article explores two Henry Kreisel lectures by Indigenous authors, Eden Robinson’s The Sasquatch At Home: Traditional Protocols & Modern Storytelling (2010, published 2011) and Tomson Highway’s A Tale of Monstrous Extravagance: Imagining Multilingualism (2014, published 2015), to demonstrate how Indigenous nonfiction employs complex rhetorical strategies in order to engage cross-cultural readers
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Flaunting dissonance: The queering of narrative and gender boundaries in Patrick White’s The Aunt’s Story The Journal of Commonwealth Literature (IF 0.3) Pub Date : 2020-12-24 Greg Graham-Smith
The Twyborn Affair (1979) is generally regarded as Patrick White’s covert “coming out” novel, followed by his frank “confession” in his autobiography, Flaws in the Glass (1981). However, this article explores how even an earlier work such as The Aunt’s Story (1977/1948), from the Nobel laureate’s modernist phase, may be seen as a pre-text for the gay self, whereby the author stages incomplete representations
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Trans-poetics in Hiromi Goto’s novels The Journal of Commonwealth Literature (IF 0.3) Pub Date : 2020-12-24 Zhen Liu
“Trans-” ideas — such as transgender, transnation, translation, and transculture — are being redefined in current research, and their full potential as critical categories is coming into view. Stryker, Currah, and Moore propose, for instance, that “transgender” should be seen not only as a descriptive term for identity, but as a valuable tool for dismantling the violence of the binary system and transcending
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Tanure Ojaide on the poet: Preliminary notes on a writer’s poetics The Journal of Commonwealth Literature (IF 0.3) Pub Date : 2020-12-15 Isidore Okeawolam Diala
Tanure Ojaide’s poetry has been discussed primarily with focus on his social activism, with occasional attention paid to his deployment of the techniques of indigenous Urhobo poetry. However, a career-long preoccupation which hitherto has hardly received any critical attention is the poet’s presiding use of his poetry as metacommentary on the craft and purpose of his art. While privileging his 2010
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Reassembling components: Ivan Coyote writes down difficult things The Journal of Commonwealth Literature (IF 0.3) Pub Date : 2020-12-15 Isabel González-Díaz
The aim of this article is to analyze a selection of texts from Ivan Coyote’s One in Every Crowd (2012) and Tomboy Survival Guide (2016) and to discuss the author’s ability to transform vulnerability into strength and resistance through their self-referential storytelling. The reading of Coyote’s stories is guided by Judith Butler’s conception of the relational character of vulnerability, Leticia Sabsay’s
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Ahmed Saadawi’s Frankenstein in Baghdad as a case study of consecration, annexation, and decontextualization in Arabic–English literary translation The Journal of Commonwealth Literature (IF 0.3) Pub Date : 2020-12-16 Christina Phillips
Differences in culture, language, and context alter the reading experience, meaning, and textual relations of modern Arabic literature in translation, which raises questions about the relationship ...
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Annual Bibliography of Commonwealth Literature 2019 The Journal of Commonwealth Literature (IF 0.3) Pub Date : 2020-12-01 Vassilena Parashkevova
This year, the retrospective glance of Journal of Commonwealth Literature’s Bibliographic Issue, from the midst of the Covid-19 pandemic to pre-pandemic creative and critical publications, opens up multiple questions of time and temporality. We look back at 2019 with the benefit of hindsight, anticipating literary responses to this crisis, dissociating ourselves from it so as to examine pre-Covid works
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India The Journal of Commonwealth Literature (IF 0.3) Pub Date : 2020-12-01 Payal Nagpal, Shyamala A. Narayan
Interesting debut collections of poetry appeared in 2019 with fresh ways of looking at the irregularities in the world: Sumana Roy’s Out of Syllabus; Amit Shankar Saha’s Fugitive Words; Aparna Upadhyaya Sanyal’s Circus Folks and Village Freaks and Saima Afreen’s Sin of Semantics. Resistance poetry by Ra Sh in The Bullet Train and Other Loaded Poems; a continuum of feminist voices in Sanjukta Dasgupta’s
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The Caribbean The Journal of Commonwealth Literature (IF 0.3) Pub Date : 2020-12-01 María Alonso Alonso
The COVID-19 pandemic did not have such as an enormous impact on the Caribbean region as it had in other parts of the world. Whilst, sadly, the Dominical Republic, Puerto Rico or Cuba had the biggest number of fatalities by May 2020, other islands such as Bonaire, Saba or the British Virgin Islands had less than ten cases. Additionally, most, if not all, of the infected on Anguilla, Dominica or Saint
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South Africa The Journal of Commonwealth Literature (IF 0.3) Pub Date : 2020-12-01 Crystal Warren
We are living in strange times; looking back on the literature of 2019 in mid-2020, only a few months ago, it already seems a different world. By the time this issue of the Journal of Commonwealth Literature appears, at the end of 2020, we might be in yet another world again. Before turning to the literature, it is worth noting the impacts that the Covid19 pandemic, and specifically the South African
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Aotearoa New Zealand The Journal of Commonwealth Literature (IF 0.3) Pub Date : 2020-12-01 Kirstine Moffat, Aimee-Jane Anderson-O’Connor, David Simes
We write this in early June 2020 as New Zealand draws a relieved collective breath at having emerged from months of anxiety and lockdown into the expanded freedoms of Level 1 and a nation that appears to have contained COVID-19. Our borders remain tightly controlled and restricted, but our daily lives are returning to pre-pandemic norms, with growing opportunities to meet with friends, attend a poetry
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Australia The Journal of Commonwealth Literature (IF 0.3) Pub Date : 2020-12-01 Nathan Hobby, Van Ikin
The global COVID-19 pandemic of 2020 in which we write was preceded in Australia by a shock election result in May 2019 and the worst bushfire crisis the nation has known over the summer of 2019-20. The Labor opposition had been expected to easily take power in the federal election and end six years of the centre-right Coalition government. Those years had been marked by leadership instability, inaction