Professing the common wealth of literature, Leeds 1957–1969

Abstract

Drawing on the work of Simon Gikandi and Peter Kalliney, this article addresses the imbrication of cultural diplomacy, language and politics, and cultural capital that facilitated the rise of Commonwealth Literature at the University of Leeds. It offers a brief account of the disciplinary gestation of "Commonwealth Literature" at Leeds, addressing some of the foundational arguments in this campaign; revisits the Leeds conference of 1964 and the aid it garnered from governmental agencies; and examines the cultural work that the field is made to perform in documentation and lectures. The paper also addresses the creation of The Journal of Commonwealth Literature in the light of the Arthur Ravenscroft papers at the University of Leeds, sieving the surviving papers for interventions on the spread of English language and literary studies, and the cultural capital that they are said to help cultivate.

‘Read! Learn!’: Grobalisation and (G)localisation in Caribbean Textbook Publishing

“…As with AWS titles in the 1970s, CWS titles could also sell to British and North American secondary schools; in the higher education market, the pedagogic umbrella of British Commonwealth Literature which included African and Caribbean writing was gaining traction. 57 It is worth pausing over Heinemann's entry into publishing Caribbean material and the Caribbean market. Several important moments in the HEB archive bear witness to these developments: in particular, the commissioning of OR Dathorne's Caribbean Narrative and In 1967 Sambrook was asked to undertake a tour of the Caribbean islands to assess the potential of the Anglophone market there, and to investigate Collins' representation of HEB in the region.…”

Eng. Lit after empire: The political stakes of public goods

“…The “plain” and “descriptive” title the Journal of Commonwealth Literature caused its editors problems from the beginning, not least “what the nomenclature excluded or included” (Low, 2015: 276). Its renaming in 2024 shows more is at stake than the mere legibility of words.…”

“…Its renaming in 2024 shows more is at stake than the mere legibility of words. Read as a conscious act of change-making, the new name is a symbolic divestment from the discursive and contextual burdens of Commonwealth literary studies — the explicit humanism, implicit “colonial condescension”, and risky proximity to “cultural diplomacy practices and commercial considerations” (Low, 2015: 272, 274) — in favour of a sharper analytical and political focus on “literature, critique, and empire today”.…”