Publishing the Postcolonial: Anglophone West African and Caribbean Writing in the UK 1948-1968 (review)

In this addition to Routledge Research in Postcolonial Literatures, Gail Low explores the ways in which literary value was constructed and circulated through the publicatio of West African and Caribbean authors from London in the two decades following 1948. Her first chapter and case study revisits the problematic editing and shaping of Amos Tutuola's The Palm-Wine Drinkard by Faber and Faber, highlighting that "the positing of authorship as a singular agency by literary criticism masks, perhaps, the consultative and collaborative nature of publishing as an enterprise" (9). The book's second chapter maps the growth and decline of Oxford University Press's Three Crowns imprint, conspicuously moving nearly a decade beyond the book's stated scope to 1976. Like Caroline Davis in her more detailed thesis, "Postcolonial Literary Publishing: Oxford University Press in Africa and the Three Crowns Series," Low uses reports on manuscripts, correspondence with authors, and sales figures to document tensions and shifts in the way Three Crowns was valued and positioned economically and aesthetically across London and Africa, and also across educational and trade book publishing imperatives. The third chapter explores the first five years in the development of Heinemann's African Writers Series (AWS), using archival research to shed light on the editorial selection processes and decisions made about format. Low demonstrates the ways in which choices made during these formative years impacted the development of AWS as a brand, and the "complex, uneven and even contradictory" (92) processes that shaped texts for both "metropolitan" and "local" constituencies. The final case study traces the literary networks that produced and enabled the publication of anglophone Caribbean writing in postwar Britain. Low puts her work in dialogue with debates around the "postcolonial exotic," showing how ideas of value mutated as writing moved between a Caribbean literary circuit and a British one, and also as writing moved from "metropolitan" editorial gatekeepers to reviewers and readers.

What unites these four sometimes seemingly disparate case studies, and what makes this book a significant contribution to the field of postcolonial literary studies, is methodology. Low's attention to editorial correspondence, the materiality of the text, and literary networks succeeds in demonstrating that "the object of literary criticism—the text—is less an object than a palimpsest of the process of making and unmaking as writers' manuscripts are edited and packaged for publication, and then studied" (141-42). Her final chapter provides an important interrogation of the colonial legacy of prestige and privilege associated with print and authorship, and highlights the particular dangers of neglecting the processes and institutions that create literary value in a colonial or postcolonial context. Low's work reflects both the challenges and rewards of trying to trace complex and multilayered interactions between "metropolitan" and "local" in the publishing of West African and Caribbean authors from London. However, her call for more work that addresses "literature's interlocking social, aesthetic, cultural, economic, institutional and discursive relationships," and her demonstration of how book history can be used to bring tangible insights to postcolonial literary studies, remains powerful and persuasive.