Bibliography Issue 2024 Introduction

This is the first bibliography issue since the journal changed its name from the Journal of Commonwealth Literature to Literature, Critique, and Empire Today in June of this year. The reasons for this change were explored extensively in a special issue published at the same time and celebrated in a launch event featuring a number of the issue’s contributors. The journal editors, Rehana Ahmed and Shital Pravinchandra (since joined by Nadia Attia), talked about their own journeys as scholars and editors coming to the decision to change the name and the process of consultation with the international editorial board to come up with an alternative title that better represents the field as it is today and the journal’s ambitions going forward. There was nevertheless substantial reflection on the important role that “Commonwealth” as a literary category played in its time, as a way of galvanising and making visible the literary contributions of once-colonised countries.

The name change is also an occasion for reflection on the bibliography issue, its history and the vital work it continues to do. The bibliography began at the same time as the journal’s inception in 1966. It was established as a way to record and reflect on the development of creative and critical practice in and about regions and countries whose histories and geopolitics have been bound up with colonialism and the English language. As put by John Thieme, JCL editor throughout the 1990s, it ensures such work would not be “airbrushed off the literary map” (Niven and Thieme, 2005: 4). Much has changed since the issue’s founding and, indeed, since this was said. There has certainly been much more global attention given to work emerging from Britain’s former colonies – one only has to look at the Booker Prize shortlist over the last 40 years to see the impact of writers from the regions covered by this bibliography. Nevertheless, ongoing issues of literary inequality remain, with books published in English and written with metropolitan audiences in mind having a much easier path to global recognition than those published in vernacular languages for local or regional audiences. The scholarly field itself, whether represented by the term Commonwealth Literature or the more recent Postcolonial Studies, has also been taken to task in a range of ways for exacerbating these dynamics (Brouillette 2007; Huggan 2001; Lazarus 2011; Loomba et al. 2005; Parry 2004; Rushdie 1992). It is for these reasons that we need to be continually reflective about not only our practices of reading, but those of citation and categorisation as well.

Since its founding, the issue has increased its coverage to the current 12 bibliographical articles: Aotearoa New Zealand, Australia, Bangladesh, Canada, the Caribbean, East and Central Africa, India, Malaysia and Singapore, Pakistan, South Africa, Sri Lanka and West Africa (though there is no West Africa section in this issue). Its decentred approach offers country or regional specificity and the potential for cross-regional (especially south-south) comparison that recognises the work produced on its own terms and within its own linguistic and cultural contexts, independent of the erstwhile metropole. Over the years, successive editors have also overseen the increased representation of work in translation, especially from non-European languages. This goes some way to place this important creative work on an even plane with those English-language texts that circulate much more readily in the global literary marketplace. The impressive range and quantity of material gathered in each issue is a testament to the vibrant literary landscapes of each of the respective countries or regions. At the same time, we need to be mindful of the output that is not captured by the tools of the bibliographer, themselves shaped by imperial histories and logics. As East and Central Africa contributor Grace Musila cautions in this issue, “these lists are far from comprehensive, and it is important to acknowledge their incompleteness — which in itself says something about street-level circuits of literary production and circulation that continue to flourish parallel to the more mainstreamed players and infrastructures.”

There is nevertheless much work to celebrate in 2023. Although still uneven, the cultural sphere seems to be finally bouncing back after the long impact of Covid-19, with one contributor describing the sense of a “bottleneck” being broken with a stream of big publications coming out all at once. The pace of creative works published on the topic also seems to be slowing (with perhaps the exception of India where the impact was especially severe), though due to its longer cycle, we are still seeing a steady stream of scholarship around pandemic literature and its broader social and cultural impacts (see, for example, Clode 2023; Grady 2023; Ndaka 2023; Rambukwella 2023). Some contributors have nevertheless noted a turn to the dystopian and apocalyptic in creative work, which they suggest might represent the sublimation of pandemic anxieties into a more generalised form [see Canada].

Haunting also seems to be a recurring theme in a number of this year’s contributions, whether due to the lingering effects of the pandemic or much longer histories of repression and exclusion. I note the forthcoming publication of Tithi Bhattacharya’s exciting book, Ghostly Past, Capitalist Presence: A Social History of Fear in Colonial Bengal, which is just about to come out at the time of writing, and we can also see the influence of this topic in the 2023 lists. In the Caribbean, Victoria Chang highlights the publication of three scholarly monographs about spirits and ghosts: Joshua Deckman’s Feminist Spiritualities: Conjuring Resistance in the Afro-Caribbean and Its Diasporas; Kristina Gibby’s Ancestral Voices, Healing Narratives: Female Ghosts in Contemporary US and Caribbean Fiction and Rebeca Hey-Colón’s Channeling Knowledges: Water and Afro-Diasporic Spirits in Latinx and Caribbean Worlds [all Criticism: General Studies]. The past can also be felt as a kind of haunting when it stubbornly refuses to stay where we leave it. South African contributor Marike Beyers notes the number of fictional titles around this theme, including Sven Axelrad’s Buried Treasure, Almini van der Merwe’s Ghost Limb and Craig Higginson’s The Ghost of Sam Webster [all Fiction]. The Australian contributors also draw attention to a similar dynamic in indigenous Australian writing, with a focus on the role of ancestors, such as in Alexis Wright’s new novel Praiseworthy and Melissa Lucashenko’s Edenglassie [both Fiction]. Relatedly, Joel Deshaye foregrounds the topic of kinship in this year’s indigenous Canadian writing, including Michelle Porter’s A Grandmother Begins the Story [Fiction] and Helen Knott’s Becoming a Matriarch [Autobiography], as well as scholarship like Jennifer Brant’s essay “Indigenous Literary Expressions of Matriarchal Worlding as Kinship” [Criticism: General Studies].

As in the previous year, genre fiction is holding strong and has been foregrounded by a number of our contributors. As an extension of the theme of haunting, horror proved to be an inspiring genre among indigenous Canadian writers, often with decolonial aims. There was the publication of Blackfoot writer Alex Soop’s Whistle at Night and They Will Come: Indigenous Horror Stories Vol 2, which brings wilderness spirits like Sasquatch and Wendigo into modern urban life to comment on systemic problems such as racism, sexism, poverty and addiction. Others included Cree artist Christopher Twin’s graphic short horror stories Bad Medicine and Jessica Johns’ similarly titled Bad Cree, which echoes the Freddy Krueger story [all Fiction]. Also in Canada, Aaron Tucker’s novel Soldiers, Hunters, Not Cowboys turns the once-ubiquitous imperialist genre of the Western on its head to critique the hyper-masculine figure of the American movie star and conservative icon John Wayne. Relatedly, Jordan Abel’s Empty Spaces reimagines and even rewrites parts of the classic Western The Last of the Mohicans in an indigenous critique of the genre. Crime fiction is still going strong in India with the publication of Harini Nagendra’s Murder Under a Red Moon, the second book in her much-vaunted Bangalore Detectives Club series. There are also works which reimagine criminal capers involving Western literary figures on the subcontinent: Anuradha Kumar’s The Kidnapping of Mark Twain entails the famous author disappearing from a hotel in Bombay in 1896 and Divyaroop Bhatnagar’s The Mussoorie Murders, which depicts the true story of a British woman murdered in a locked room in Mussoorie in 1909 that was never solved, includes personages like Rudyard Kipling and Arthur Conan Doyle who took an interest in the case. We are also seeing the continuing uptick of fantasy and broadly speculative works in which world-building is shaped by distinctly local beliefs and concerns. In Bangladesh, Sajid Hasan’s The Lighthouse Tales is inspired by the genre of Japanese fantasy manga but with “an Islamic twist in which a Muslim god (‘Allah’) presides over the book’s infinite universe, where creatures big and small are familiar with verses from the Quran and the Hadith” (as put by Bangladesh contributor Mahruba Mowtushi). In another localised re-imagining, the first translation has been published of Muhammad Zafar Iqbal’s science fiction novella Trinitri Sequence (Trinitri Rashimala, 1995), part of a series in which Bangladesh is at the forefront of scientific breakthroughs with Bengalis leading rescue operations in the midst of ecological and technological disasters. In Pakistan, Bina Shah published her dystopian feminist novel The Monsoon War (the sequel to Before She Sleeps), set in a region devastated by an Indo-Pakistan nuclear war and attacked by a virus which decimates the female population. Malaysia and Singapore contributor Ismail S. Talib also comments on the growing presence of genre fiction (and genre elements in the region’s more “literary” novels) and highlights the role of digital platforms like Wattpad in facilitating such work by writers locally but also in countries like India and Nigeria. In the words of Canadian contributor Joel Deshaye’s, “We might have reached a point of no return, or at least no return to the critical sidelining of genre fiction and experimental poetry that helps us to address … major [global] issues. Such writing sets aside the status quo of societal realism of the world as it is.”

On the subject of poetry, this year’s list has shown interesting intra-Asian connections, especially between South Asia and Japan. I already mentioned the influence of Japanese manga in Sajid Hasan’s The Lighthouse Tales, but the impact of Japanese poetic forms is even more marked. The Bangladeshi poet Quazi Johirul Islam produces a fusion between Teikei haiku and the shorobritto cchanda, one of three rhythmic patterns unique to Bangla poetry, in 100 Haiku. We see similar cross-pollinations happening in India: Ranjit Hoskote’s Icelight is influenced by the Japanese aesthetic of “mono no aware” where the poems express different moods; Johannes Manjrekar’s posthumously published collection Jacarandas are a Deep Shade of Blue includes poems in the Japanese form haibun and Rajorshi Patranabis’s Checklist Anomaly is the first ever collection of gogyoshi in English by an Indian poet.

There is a continuing healthy output of translated work and it is great to see that this has gone beyond literary fiction to include genre fiction like the aforementioned sci-fi writing of Muhammad Zafar Iqbal and more historical work like Ghulam Murshid’s Bengali Culture Over a Thousand Years [Bangladesh: Translations: Non-Fiction]. There seems to be a particular interest in collecting and translating traditional folktales and stories: Needle at the Bottom of the Sea: Bengali Tales from the Land of the Eighteen Tides [Fiction] contains five Bengali folk romances about the Sundarbans region from the 17th to 19th centuries and The Unwritten Stories is, relatedly, a volume of 12 folk stories by locals from the riverine districts in the south of Bangladesh [Anthologies]. In addition, the Leverhulme-funded “Rohingya Futures” project has helped facilitate the publication of two volumes of Rohingya poets’ work in English: Sayedur Rahman’s Echoes of Home and Sirajul Islam’s If I Were a Bird: A Voice of Resilience [both Poetry]. There is also a growing appetite for bilingual and multi-lingual works that avoid the linguistic compartmentalisation produced by traditional translation. In Aotearoa New Zealand, Hiwa: Contemporary Māori Short Stories includes short stories by Māori writing in English and te reo Māori [Anthology] and Grace Yee’s first collection Chinese Fish, which was recognised with the Mary and Peter Biggs Award for Poetry, fuses Cantonese-Taishanese and English. In South Africa, Tlotlisang David Mhlambiso’s A Journey Worth the Ride and Nataniël’s Help, Help [both Fiction], include stories in isiXhosa and Afrikaans, respectively, and the work of poets Jonas Ntsiko, Edwin T. Smith and Victor Wessels has been published in bilingual editions. In India, Ipsita Ganguli, Gopa Bhattacharjee and Lopamudra Banerjee have brought out the Bouquet of Bilingual Poetry, with poems in English and Bangla.

Pakistani-heritage academic Noreen Masud gained recognition for her memoir A Flat Place, which was shortlisted for the inaugural Women’s Prize for Non-Fiction [Pakistan: Letters and Auto/biography]. This is a work which links the landscapes of England and Scotland with memories of Pakistan where Masud spent her childhood. However, hers was not the only memoir this year that draws on the natural world to contemplate memory, place and migration. Also in Pakistan, Mariam Pirbhai published her memoir Garden Inventories: Reflections on Land, Space and Belonging [Letters and Auto/biography] and, sticking with the gardening theme, Marchelle Farrell published Uprooting: From the Caribbean to the Countryside – Finding Home in an English Country Garden [the Caribbean: Letters and Auto/biography].

In drama, Akbar S. Ahmed brought out Gandhi and Jinnah Return Home: A Play in Three Acts, which portrays an encounter between Gandhi and Jinnah in the afterlife [Pakistan: Drama]. Sri Lanka contributor S.W. Perera comments on the rarity of drama scripts published in English in Sri Lanka, yet is pleased to report that three appeared in 2023: the Australia-based Sri Lankan playwright Ernest MacIntyre published two plays, Pass Along There, Please: A Play Celebrating the Times of Karen and Nimal Breckenridge and Manimekali – A Story of Tamil and Sinhala Buddhism and Tharanga Dandeniya published The God King Drama, a component of his PhD research. Perhaps this a sign that theatre in Sri Lanka is starting to recover after Covid and the difficult period of the forex crisis and Aragalaya protests in 2022.

A notable scholarly publication this year is the collection of critical essays and reflections on Mahasweta Devi, the Bengali writer, feminist and activist [Bangladesh: Criticism: Studies on Individual Writers]. There has also been significant work published on British-Zanzibari writer Abdulrazak Gurnah this year, in the wake of his Nobel Prize win in 2021, including an article discussing the translation of his works in China [East and Central Africa: Criticism: Studies on Individual Writers]. This is a testament to the continuing impact of such prizes in bringing writers to global readerly and scholarly attention.

In terms of notable events, 2023 will probably be most remembered for the October 7 Hamas terrorist attack on Israel, its abduction of hostages and Israel’s ensuing invasion and bombing of the Gaza strip. As of the day of writing, the Gaza Health Ministry has published figures that more than 40,000 Gazans have lost their lives in the conflict, though the real number is expected to be significantly higher. As protests and calls for a cease-fire take place around the world, South Africa has been the first country to bring a case of genocide to the International Court of Justice regarding Israel’s conduct in Gaza. It seems fitting that a country so marred by the history of apartheid would be the first ones to fully recognise the violent impact of this system in another place. Interestingly, one of the publications in this year’s list, Andrew Brown’s The Bitterness of Olives (his first novel set outside South Africa) is set amongst the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and, therefore, seems to anticipate the potential of this cross-regional solidarity. Another significant event of 2023 was Australia’s Indigenous Voice referendum, held on 14 October. This sought to enshrine in the country’s constitution a representative body of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islanders to advise parliament on issues affecting their people. As the contributors of the Australia section explain, the referendum was heavily debated amongst the country’s literary community, as it was in the wider population, with many journals foregrounding Aboriginal voices and campaigning for a “Yes” vote. Unfortunately, even this meagre attempt to right the historical wrongs of settler colonialism was unsuccessful. The quote the contributors cite from the editors of the literary journal Overland sums up the mood aptly: “watching the majority of the settlers on stolen land reject even such minimal terms has starkly clarified the failed project of reconciliation that has already demanded so much from Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people and communities” (Evelyn Araluen and Jonathan Dunk Overland 252).

2023 also saw the continuing violence and discrimination directed towards Muslims in India, as precipitated by the Hindutva ideology of Prime Minister Narendra Modi, whose re-election in 2024 (though without his party obtaining an absolute majority) suggests this hostile climate will persist. The oppression of Indian Muslims is the subject of a number of the publications in India’s 2023 list, including Ziya Us Salaa’s Being Muslim in Hindu India: A Critical View [Non-Fiction] and Zeyad Masroor Khan’s City on Fire: A Boyhood in Aligarh [Letters and Auto/biography]. Though, as the contributors point out, speaking out can be dangerous for writers, as the activist Aakar Patel experienced following the publication of his Price of the Modi Years (2021). Unfortunately, around the time of writing, we have seen the inverse happening in Bangladesh, with Hindus as the targets of violence following the ousting of Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina. Our own Bangladesh contributor has been directly affected by the unrest, with the closure of universities and long internet blackouts. These are fairly pessimistic notes to be ending this year’s bibliographic issue introduction but perhaps it is fitting given the state of things. Here in the UK, we are reeling from the recent Far-Right riots, which involved the attempted burning down of a hotel housing asylum seekers. The US election is also looming in November and there is reason to be worried.