Greetings! I write to you as the new Chief Editor of South Asian Review. The journal underwent significant changes in 2018. The South Asian Literary Association, SALA, entered into a publishing agreement with Taylor & Francis and volume 39 was the first one published through them. At the end of 2018, Dr P.S. Chauhan completed his five-year term as Chief Editor and SALA elected me as the new Editor for this journal. In its nearly four decades of publication, I am the first woman named to the position of Editor, and I am both humbled and honored by the opportunity. During Dr Chauhan’s editorship, the journal made major strides and published several important special issues including one on Salman Rushdie and the more recent special issues on the graphic novel and on precarity and resistance (volume 39). We thank Dr Chauhan and Arcadia University for the successes of this journal. With the support and assistance of Dr Robin Field, Managing Editor, and Dr John C. Hawley, then President of SALA and Associate Editor of the journal, Dr Chauhan initiated the transition of the journal from Arcadia University to Taylor & Francis.
The transition to Taylor & Francis has come with several advantages to our authors and readers: digital access to the archives, a submissions portal that allows for timely review and decision making on essays, and opportunities to be marketed with other prominent journals in the fields of postcolonial and South Asian studies. The new editorial team also hopes to broaden the reach of the journal, to continue to publish cutting-edge special issues, to provide a scholarly platform for scholars across the globe, and to continue our commitment to publishing both emerging and established scholars in the field. We will publish four issues each year and will have both general and special issues each year.
The new editorial team brings a range of expertise and scholarly interests to this journal. I am Professor of English at Seattle University where I teach postcolonial literatures with an emphasis on South Asia and Africa. My research interests include postcolonial studies, the relationship between Anglophone and vernacular literatures in South Asia, South Asian diaspora studies, South Asian feminisms, and Partition studies. My publications include Other Tongues: Rethinking the Language Debates in India (co-edited with Bonnie Zare), Roots and Reflections: South Asians in the Pacific Northwest (co-authored with Amy Bhatt), Revisiting India’s Partition: New Essays in Memory, Culture, and Politics (co-edited with Amritjit Singh and Rahul K. Gairola). I have also edited a special issue of South Asian Review, “Beyond the Post-Colonial: Meaning-Making and South Asian Studies in the Twenty-First Century,” and co-edited (with Amritjit Singh) a special issue of Comparative Literature Studies, “Beyond the Anglophone – Comparative South Asian Literatures.” Additionally, I have published essays on M.G. Vassanji, Lalithambika Antherjanam, Bharati Mukherjee, Dhan Gopal Mukherji, Bama, Shyam Selvadurai, and Meena Alexander.
Managing Editor, Robin E. Field, is Professor of English at King’s College in Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania. She is co-editor of Transforming Diaspora: Communities beyond National Boundaries (2011, with Parmita Kapadia) and has published essays on Jhumpa Lahiri, Ayad Akhtar, Sandra Cisneros, Alice Walker, Jana Monji, and Lynne Sharon Schwartz. She co-edited (with Chandrima Chakraborty) the special issue of South Asian Review on South Asian Canadian Literature and Culture. She was awarded NEH fellowships in 2011 and 2016. Her book, Writing the Survivor: The Rape Novel in Late Twentieth-Century American Fiction, will be published by Clemson University Press.
Dr Pallavi Rastogi is Associate Editor and Book Review Editor. She is an associate professor of English at Louisiana State University and has published widely on South Asian and South African literature, including a book, Afrindian Fictions: Diaspora, Race and National Desire in South Africa (2008) and a co-edited anthology, Before Windrush: Recovering an Asian and Black Heritage Within Britain (2008). She also edited a special issue of South Asian Review on “Precarities, Resistance, and Care Communities in South Asia,” with a preface by Homi Bhabha, poems by K. Satchidanandan, and an afterword by Gaurav Desai. Her second book, Postcolonial Disaster: Narrating Catastrophe in The Twenty-First Century, will be published by Northwestern University Press in Spring 2020. She is currently vice-president of the South Asian Literary Association and a member of the publications committee of the American Comparative Literature Association (ACLA).
Dr John C. Hawley is Associate Editor. He is Professor of English at Santa Clara University. He has served as President of SALA and the US chapter of the Association for Commonwealth Literature and Language Studies. He has also served twice as chair of his department and is former member of three executive committees of the Modern Language Association. He has edited 16 books and published many articles on postcolonial topics. He is a recipient of a Rockefeller Foundation study grant, five NEH summer stipends, and a Fulbright award.
Dr Maryse Jayasuriya is Associate Editor and is Professor of English and Associate Dean of Liberal Arts at the University of Texas at El Paso. She is the author of Terror and Reconciliation: Sri Lankan Anglophone Literature, 1983–2009 (Lexington, 2012) and the editor of The Immigrant Experience: Critical Insights (Salem Press, 2018). She has also guest-edited a special issue of South Asian Review on Sri Lankan Anglophone Literature. She has published articles in South Asian Review, Journeys, Margins, Indialogs, The Journal of Postcolonial Cultures and Societies, and Asiatic, as well as essays in numerous edited collections. She has served in the past as the editor of the SALA Newsletter.
We invite our readers to submit their scholarly essays to the journal for consideration. If you have a recently published or about-to-be-published book related to South Asian literatures and cultures, please contact our Book Reviews Editor, Pallavi Rastogi ([email protected]). We also invite scholars who might want to serve as peer reviewers to contact me at [email protected]. All article submissions go through the submissions portal: https://www.editorialmanager.com/rsoa/default.aspx.
This journal’s continued success owes much to the Editorial Advisory Board, to the SALA Executive Committee, and to the support of Editorial and production staff at Taylor & Francis. I also thank Seattle University and Dean David Powers of the College of Arts and Sciences for their support of my work on this journal.