The Journal of Commonwealth Literature current issue

Editorial

Thieme, J. — 2008-08-26

"What's Love" in an Interconnected World? Ghanaian Market Literature for Youth Responds1

de Bruijn, E. — 2008-08-26

This paper argues that discourses of love in Ghanaian market literature for youth offer a view into complex negotiations of agency and empowerment. Drawing on Deborah Durham's notion of youth as "social `shifters'" and Francis Nyamnjoh's conception of the "interconnectedness" of agency, I take Ghanaian market literature as one specific case of how African literature for youth foregrounds questions of continuity and change as African societies enter into increasingly complex global relations. In this literature for youth, received notions of love, often constructed out of impressions from American pop and hip hop music, carry new notions of agency that compete with existing "domesticated" forms. Authors like Ike Tandoh and Evelyn Tay employ discourses of love to offer youth alternative avenues for empowerment in a context of socio-economic disenfranchizement. In a creative process of "straddling", this writing both reveals and reproduces the contradictions that obtain in youth configurations of agency.

Mining the Archive: Historical Fiction, Counter-modernities, and Suchen Christine Lim's A Bit of Earth

Poon, A. — 2008-08-26

Historical fiction often serves to provide us with an opportunity to question the past as well as the identities that have crystallized around the archive. As an example of historical fiction, Suchen Christine Lim's A Bit of Earth depicts the emergence of anti-imperialist feeling, self-realization, and national consciousness in nineteenth-century Malaya, celebrating nationalist feeling as a commendable gesture beyond the self towards a larger sociality. The text invokes these sentiments to look for alternatives within a cultural and political space that continues to be strongly influenced by postcolonial state-sanctioned histories and masculinist versions of the past. Its attempt to loosen our received ways of knowing about history, modernity, Chineseness, and inter-racial relations is not an unqualified success, however. For in foregrounding gender and race as crucial components of modern subjectivity, A Bit of Earth ultimately shows itself to be more certain of its stand on women and its vision of modern Chinese identity than of its position vis-à-vis multiracial possibilities.

Alternatives to the Novel Form: Oral Storytelling and Internet Patterns in Vikram Chandra's Red Earth and Pouring Rain

Draga Alexandru, M.-S. — 2008-08-26

Contemporary Indian fiction in English revives the novel genre through alternative writing techniques inspired from the Indian oral storytelling tradition. In Vikram Chandra's Red Earth and Pouring Rain digressive storytelling that reflects oral patterns merges with structural strategies derived from the logic of the Internet, hypertext and computer games. The author's creation of an online storytelling community that gives him email feedback on his writing mimics the tradition of oral storytelling in a way that responds to both Bakhtinian expectations of the novel form and the demands of hypertextual interactivity. The implied audience is drawn into the process of storytelling, so that the novel's polyphony emerges from the work of a whole community rather than of an individual author/narrator. Red Earth and Pouring Rain is a modern version of the Arabian Nights, with a frame-narrative filled in by well-told tales meant to earn the protagonist's survival. Throughout the novel the classical concerns of the novel genre, which focuses on individual development and makes statements about society at specific historical moments, based on objective factual observation, are challenged by the presence of elements of myth-based traditional storytelling, digressions and ponderings on the meanings of events, in a discourse in which what matters is the endless storytelling process that must keep growing "like a lotus vine".

Indian Pulp Fiction in English: A Preliminary Overview from Dutt to De

Khair, T. — 2008-08-26

This article provides an overview of the long history of Indian pulp fiction in English, offering a tentative definition of the genre by identifying both qualitative and quantitative markers. Beginning with nineteenth-century romances, such as Toru Dutt's Bianca, K. K. Lahiri's Roshinara and K. Chakravarti's Sarata and Hingana, it moves forward to a consideration of twentieth-century pulp forms, including detective fiction, science fiction and fantasy fiction. It includes a more detailed account of the rise of Shoba Dé, discussing her work in relation to the phenomenon of Indian film and gossip magazines like Stardust, and of the fiction of Sujata Massey, "the creator of the Rei Shimura mysteries". It argues that while Dé's work expresses the half-realized social and cultural issues of urban and metropolitan India, Massey's fiction is self-consciously topical within a cosmopolitan scenario.

A Tale of Two Novels: Developing a Devolved Approach to Black British Writing

Fowler, C. — 2008-08-26

In October 2000, Penguin launched Zadie Smith's novel White Teeth. In the same month, Headline Review released a novel by Joe Pemberton. It was called Forever and Ever Amen. This article traces the differing fortunes of these two British novels and seeks to understand why Forever and Ever Amen, which was also a critical success, came nowhere near the sales or popular acclaim of White Teeth. It examines the commercial and (multi)cultural logic by which novels are coded as worthy of national and international readerships by corporate publishers and high street retail outlets. Emphasizing the significance of many black British novels that emerge from non-metropolitan glocalities, the author calls for a sustained focus by literary scholarship on the discomforting links between the political and literary economy. Most particularly, novels such as Pemberton's invite popular and critical engagement with what James Procter has described as "devolved" diasporic cultures throughout Britain.

Daljit Nagra, Faber Poet: Burdens of Representation and Anxieties of Influence

Gunning, D. — 2008-08-26

This article examines Daljit Nagra's recent poetry collection Look We Have Coming to Dover! in relation to the idea of the burden of representation placed upon minority writers. While Nagra has been lionized as "the voice of British Asian poetry", his verse actually serves to question the homogenization of diverse individuals and communities implied within such labelling. The collection consists of a mix of confessional poetry and dramatic monologues, and is marked by repeated quotation from and parody of the English poetic tradition as well as a linguistic inventiveness in portraying the voices of British Punjabis: the article suggests that each of these aspects can be seen as part of Nagra's attempt to engage with his anxieties of influence. Crucially, these anxieties must be understood not only in the Bloomian sense of the writer's relation to tradition, but also as formed by the discursive expectations of a society structured by racialization.

The Multicultural Bildungsroman: Stereotypes in Monica Ali's Brick Lane

Perfect, M. — 2008-08-26

Monica Ali's phenomenally popular debut novel Brick Lane has often been accused of reinforcing rather than challenging stereotypes of cultural otherness. Interestingly, literary critics who have championed the novel have not sought to deny that it employs stereotypes, but rather to emphasize its sense of knowing irony in doing so. Critically analysing debates which have attempted to assert that Brick Lane either propagates or ironically subverts cultural stereotypes, this article scrutinizes the valency of the kinds of "postmodern" readings of the novel which have thus far prevailed. I argue that the major concern of the novel is not the destabilization of stereotypes but the celebration of the potential for adaptation in both individuals and societies. I argue that Ali employs stereotypes as counterpoints in order to further emphasize her protagonist's final integration into contemporary British society, and that the novel might usefully be understood as a "multicultural Bildungsroman".

Terms of Hospitality: Abdulrazak Gurnah's By the Sea

Farrier, D. — 2008-08-26

This article seeks to relate asylum issues to postcolonial studies. In the current immigration climate hospitality is an increasingly conditional provision; refugees are reclassified as asylum seekers, conditional presences dependent on the discretion of the host. Following Derrida's investigation of hospitable relationships, I examine how the reception of the asylum seeker is made conditional, through a reading of the relationship between an asylum seeker, Saleh Omar, and his various hosts in Abdulrazak Gurnah's novel By the Sea (2001). I argue that the increasingly fractured legal terminology of asylum represents a deliberate strategy of exclusion, and read the encounter between host and guest as a contest to define hospitality as either conditional or unconditional. I also consider Derrida's assertion that this contest is always interrupted by the urgent need to make a decision and how this interruption can represent a postcolonial inversion of the neo-colonial relationship of host and guest.

Making up with Painful History. The Partition of India in Bapsi Sidhwa's Work: Bapsi Sidhwa interviewed by Isabella Bruschi: Isabella Bruschi interviewed Bapsi Sidhwa in Turin on 14 May 2007

2008-08-26

The interview engages Bapsi Sidhwa in a discussion on Partition, a central issue in her novel Ice-Candy-Man , which also recurs in her other works. The author's interest in the historical event, beside having auto-biographical origins, demonstrates the tremendous impact it had on ordinary people's lives, the way it shaped their identities and the trauma it caused, which is not yet healed in contemporary India and Pakistan. According to Sidhwa, literature can dig into painful memory and try to make sense of it more successfully than history can. Her adoption (unprecedented in the context of Partition literature) of a marginal point of view — that of a Parsi girl who looks at reality with the immediacy and absence of prejudice typical of childhood — has enabled Sidhwa to tell her story with greater impartiality and to treat the problematic question of women's rape and abduction from a gendered perspective. The interview also explores the relationship between Sidhwa and film director Deepa Mehta, and between novel writing and filmmaking in connection with both Ice-Candy-Man/Earth and Water.

Books Received

2008-08-26