Editorial

Abstract

In our last editorial (Gilmour and Chambers, 2016), we discussed movements originating in South African higher education, #RhodesMustFall and #FeesMustFall. Similarly, in the United States and beyond, Black Lives Matter is gathering momentum. Emerging in response to lack of justice for the 2012 murder of Trayvon Martin, the movement combats systematic racism and discrimination as well as police killings of black people. There has been a vicious backlash against the group around the slogan "All Lives Matter", whose participants attempt to paint Black Lives Matter as violent Marxists. In July 2016, Patricia Leary, a professor at Whittier Law School, wrote an incisive rejoinder to a student letter criticizing her decision to wear a Black Lives Matter t-shirt on campus (Jaschik, 2016: n.p.). In this reply, Leary dismantles several premises inherent in the students' political attack on her sartorial choice. Perhaps her most searing rebuttal addresses their implicit assumption that the slogan "Black Lives Matter" is preceded by a silent "only":There are some implicit words that precede "Black Lives Matter," and they go something like this:Because of the brutalizing and killing of black people at the hands of the police and the indifference of society in general and the criminal justice system in particular, it is important that we say that … This is, of course, far too long to fit on a shirt. (Leary, 2016: n.p.) Moving from questions around decolonizing the curriculum and higher education that are central to the South African protests and to the deployment of Black Lives Matter in US universities, I now want more broadly to consider the university as a site of struggle. In India, Narendra Modi's Hindutva (or Hindu Right) Bharatiya Janata Party 665308J CL0010.

The evolution of Commonwealth, postcolonial, and decolonial scholarship: Tracing the impact of field transformation on the Journal of Commonwealth Literature and vice versa

“…The specific context was decolonial insurgencies then taking place on university campuses in South Africa and the UK around #RhodesMustFall and Black Lives Matter (2016a), and in India out of resistance to Narendra Modi’s Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party (2016b). Two years later, in 2018, we considered again the developments in our discipline in relation to that year’s embattled politics at the global level, asking how “the field’s vital critical energies may be devoted to literature’s intersections with the pressing issues of the present: globalization, environmental justice, the growing gulf between the world’s rich and poor, and ongoing inequalities of race, class, and gender” (2018a: 5). It was clear to us then, and remains clear now, that cultural critique is a space for interrogating the structures and operations of power.…”