Eng. Lit after empire: The political stakes of public goods

The overhaul of the Journal of Commonwealth Literature is part of a lineage of acts that reshape critical space through wielding the symbolic power to name. This article responds to the journal’s divestment from Commonwealth literary studies by exploring the interplay between the structures of power that guarantee literary and critical space and the structures of perception that guide it. It does so by contrasting two parallel acts of syllabus reform in national education in the late twentieth century: the introduction of African and Caribbean literature in external school examinations in Britain and in Kenya in the late 1970s and early 1980s. These records of past practice speak to current debates about decolonizing curricula by staging issues of positionality, the place of literary education in multi-ethnic states, and increasing centralization in education. Above all, they remind us that the political stakes of literary study after empire have always been high, precisely because school education is a matter of state.