The Nortoning of Nagra

One would imagine that a new edition of something like the Norton Anthology of English Literature would come out once in a decade or even two. But, these days, it (henceforth referred to as the Norton English) comes out every sixth year. The 2012 edition has been replaced this year, forcing our students to stop recycling the old anthologies and purchase this brand-new edition.

Of course, the editors and publishers might convince themselves that so much is happening in the literary world today that the Norton English needs to be updated every five years. I suspect their marketing people do the convincing. Marketing people tend to be very convincing these days. Because, honestly, there are not that many differences between the 2012 and 2018 editions. A few texts dropped, a few texts added; the additions — despite what any editor can do — by no means sufficient to compensate for the vast number of equivalent texts by equivalent authors perforce left out. Despite the superficial tinkering, which, as suggested, is justified by a marketing rationale rather than a literary one, what lingers on is the general incapacity of the Norton English to really step out of mainstream Anglo-American critical paradigms. This has nothing to do with the capabilities of its editors, who are among the best scholars in the world: the series editor being none other than the great Stephen Greenblatt, and the editor of the volume I will refer to below being a major scholar of recent writing and poetry, Jahan Ramazani.

The problem is not with the editors, but with the format and tradition of mainstream anthologizing into which they have been inserted. Such “anthologizing” suffers from three major flaws, as noted by an American scholar in informal commentary: 1) inevitably unrepresentative selection that nevertheless has a canonical impact on the material “out there”; 2) headnote foreclosure and preemption; 3) “neutral” notes that obscure or slant by glossing the wrong things rightly. Let me illustrate these with reference to just one text that has been added to Volume F—“The Twentieth and Twenty-First Century”—of the Norton English anthologies. It is a welcome addition, as it drags into the cozy warmth of the Norton a rising star of Black British—or postcolonial—poetry. The text is Daljit Nagra’s 2011 poem, “A Black History of the English-speaking Peoples.”

The Norton English headnote introductions to its selected texts are always precise and very helpful along mainstream lines, the lines that most students are still supposed to imbibe in departments of English. What can be said in them seems to be largely determined by the format of the Norton, which permits mainstream annotating, not tangential or against-the-stream criticism or extensive contextualization. Polemical headnotes and footnotes are — rightly from an academic perspective — not allowed, which is a mixed blessing, especially in evolving fields of literature, where polemics can sometimes illuminate more than the assumption of neutrality. This headnote introduction is no exception. The first line tells us that Look, We Have Coming to Dover (2007) is Daljit Nagra’s first, Forward Prize–winning collection of poems, its title “alluding to Matthew Arnold and W. H. Auden and inflecting an iconic British site with Indianized English” (896). Then follows a description of Nagra as the child of Sikh Punjabi immigrants, a mention of him growing up “in Britain between Punjabi and English cultures,” and a list of his books that weave together “his disparate inheritances.” This is all in the first paragraph of the introduction.

The second and last paragraph of the introduction brings up, as it would, Winston Churchill’s “monumental History of the English-speaking Peoples” and provides a brisk intertextual summary of Nagra’s poem, listing “Shakespeare, Tennyson, Walcott and Auden.” It also adds this bit of information: “Although some of Nagra’s poetry is an ebulliently performative Indian English, this poem and others are written in Standard English richly threaded with literary allusions.”

Now, as an Indian who speaks a kind of English that often differs from the English that many other Indians speak, I have always found the notion of “Indian English...