The Journal of Commonwealth Literature 

About: The Journal of Commonwealth Literature is an academic journal published by SAGE Publishing. The journal publishes majorly in the area(s): Poetry & Narrative. It has an ISSN identifier of 0021-9894. Over the lifetime, 1214 publications have been published receiving 6323 citations. The journal is also known as: Journal of Commonwealth Literature.

3. Post-Colonialism, Post-Modernism and the Rehabilitation of Post-Colonial History

Abstract: Continental European thinkers from Valery and Heidegger to Sartre, Levi-Strauss and Michel Foucault have cast serious doubts on the value of a specifically ‘ ‘historical&dquo; consciousness, stressed the fictive character of historical reconstructions, and challenged history’s claims to a place among the sciences. At the same time, AngloAmerican philosophers have produced a massive body of literature on the epistemological status and cultural function of historical thinking which justifies serious doubts about history’s status ...

2. Post-Colonial Allegory and the Transformation of History:

Abstract: There has been a resurgence in allegorical writing in recent years, and in my view the most interesting examples of it are coming out of postcolonial cultures. Alongside this resurgence has come a renewal of critical interest in the mode, much of it due to the increasing purchase of poststructural codes of recognition in Western society the valorisation of textuality, irony, and the arbitrary in the theory of meaning, for example, and the corresponding devaluation of expressive and formal elements in art. This critical interest has in turn sparked a significant revaluation of allegorical practice, soihatlhe marked prejudice against allegory’ that was initiated in the Romantic period, that continued through into New Criticism, and that still prevails in some areas even now, has become sharply, even radically, reversed. Whereas critics of the Romantic period understood allegory as a constrained and mechanical mode of expression that was utterly determined by the historical or textual matter which formed its external referent or

Cosmopolitanism and the Specificity of the Local in World Literature

Abstract: Taking its cue from recent scholarship de-linking the idea of “modernity” from the idea of “the West”, this article advocates the notion of “world literature” as the body of literature that has, in the last 150 to 200 years, registered and encoded the social logic of modernity. Building on Franco Moretti’s postulation of a single world-literary system (structured not merely by difference but also by inequality) and on the theoretical work of Fredric Jameson, the article traces some of the ways in which the local detail of peripheral modernity is represented in literary texts by Thomas Mofolo, Patrick Chamoiseau, Lao She, Rohinton Mistry, Ivan Vladislavic and others, demonstrating that there is no necessary contradiction between the ideas of the “universal” and the “local” or the “national”, but that, on the contrary, there are only local universalisms (and, for that matter, only “local cosmopolitanisms”), which it becomes the task of readers to situate as completely as they can.

Bama’s Karukku: Dalit Autobiography as Testimonio:

Abstract: This essay argues that Dalit autobiographies must be treated as testimonio, atrocity narratives that document trauma and strategies of survival. Using Bama’s Karukku as a case-study, it explores the shift between the generic conventions of individual life-writing and collective biography in this text. It analyses the strategy of witnessing in Bama’s narrative, arguing that she functions as a witness to a community’s suffering, and calls upon readers to undertake “rhetorical listening” as secondary witnesses. This act of recording trauma and witnessing, the essay proposes, is one of subaltern agency.