2000s: Expansion and change

Abstract

In the 2000s, The Journal of Commonwealth Literature (JCL) continued to provide a forum for the expansion, layering and critical self-examination of the transnational Anglophone literary/cultural and scholarly fields. During this period of expansion and growth JCL participated in the formation of an emergent postcolonial canon in which certain authors and texts have served to function as tropes for a certain idea of nations and regions in the postcolonial world. This article tracks those tendencies through a critical assessment of a range of exemplary essays, editorials, and surveys published in the journal during this decade.