Unsettling the air-conditioned room: journal work as ethical labour

Abstract

The scholarship that gets published in academic journals reflects and replicates particular conversations, and privileges authors schooled in certain methodologies. The friendships and collaborations between scholars of African literature based in different regions of the world are evident in the ongoing work and membership of the ALA, and make the organisation and its gatherings distinctive. Yet in order for publishing patterns to shift, we need to build not only better communication channels between north and south, but perhaps more crucially between the different intellectual traditions represented by literary scholars at universities on the African continent itself. Such a reorientation will arrest and trouble assumptions that what skews publishing patterns is solely that Africa-based scholars are in need of (northern) resources and developmental assistance. Unequal access to resources clearly does influence the publishing patterns of literary scholarship, but this is only part of the challenge we face. Instead I argue we need to articulate explicit and ethical frameworks for enabling dialogue, and for evaluating knowledge production from different parts of the world. This needs to happen at all levels of knowledge production, but crucially at editorial and peer review level. The topic I have been invited to address in this keynote is "the environments of publishing African literary scholarship". The natural environment, the ideal and protected habitat, of literary scholarship is in the pages of academic journals, listed on CVs and resumes, neatly ordered on the desks of selection committees, anxiously gathered in the tenure file. Here, African literary scholarship has an extremely high statushyper visible as the chief measure of our value and prestige. The published article and the scholarly monograph are our preferred currencies when we negotiate our careers and our professional trajectories. Yet this valuable and value-laden end product, the published article, becomes hyper-visible through routes that remain for the most part invisible. Some of this invisibility in fact contributes to the symbolic status of these publications, for example CONTACT Carli Coetzee

Creative Writing as Literary Activism: Decolonial Perspectives on the Writing Workshop

“…8. Coetzee (2018) has provided a powerful critique of the ethical imperative to break out of the 'air conditioned' room as part of our practice as academics and editors. See Carli Coetzee, "Unsettling the Air-conditioned Room: Journal Work as Ethical Labour", Journal of the African Literature Association, 12.2 (2018), 101-115. Notable responses to this piece have appeared in the African literature blog, Africa in Words.…”

The future of African Studies: what we can do to keep Africa at the heart of our research

“…Including larger numbers of African editors and reviewers could also help to develop reviewing practices that encourage all authors to recognise and address the gaps in their research (Coetzee 2018). A pro-African editorial policy must include more active strategies towards increasing the number of African authors.…”

What is Literary Activism? (Or Who keeps the housekeepers’ house?)

“…We learn from Carli Coetzee (2018) that the housekeeper performs invisible labour. This labour is invisibilised by the way it is feminised, domesticated, understood as chores, as informal 'behind the scenes' low stakes work.…”