Crafts of world literature: Field, material and translation

Abstract

Early in 2012 we called for papers that would acknowledge the challenges of thinking about craft and of seeing craft itself as a kind of thinking. These aims could be meaningfully pursued only if craft and technique were understood to be the fundamental grounds for critical interpretation rather than subsidiary concerns for cultural critique and "textual analysis". Such an understanding, we suggested, had been missing as much from recent conversations about world literature as from older conversations about Commonwealth and postcolonial literatures, and this to their detriment, since it is in craft that works are oriented towards and have knowledge of the world.The enthusiasm of the response confirmed that others in the field shared our misgivings about the eclipse of craft and technique, though it soon emerged that each participant understood the reasons and remedies for this eclipse somewhat differently. This was not wholly unexpected, since we had asked for a range of approaches: formalist, stylistic, narratological, but also sociological, book historical, bibliographic; and we had hoped for the kind of geographic range that was in the end represented: Africa, the Caribbean, South Asia, the Middle East, China, Eastern Europe, Western Europe; ground which postcolonial criticism could hardly pretend to cover, even if we did choose to prioritize the context of decolonization in the call for papers. But over and beyond the divergence

Diary of some good in a bad year: Postcolonial studies now

“…In a field in which scholars are supposedly negligent of matters relating to literary form (Zimbler et al, 2014: 273), the Journal of Commonwealth Literature maintains literary–textual analysis as one of its founding principles, and consistently receives nuanced work devoted to literary technique. A good example in this issue is Megan Jones’s article, which considers protest poetry written in Soweto between 1961 and 1976.…”