Prefrace

Abstract

A discipline is never simply a body of knowledge. It is also a set of exclusions—decisions, often unacknowledged, about whose voices matter, whose experience counts as literature, and whose languages are permitted to carry intellectual authority. The six contributions gathered in this issue  of IJELRS do not share a single argument, but they share a common orientation: each, in its own register, interrogates the terms on which English literary studies has been conducted, and each finds those terms wanting. Taken together, they constitute not a manifesto but something more valuable—a sustained, many-voiced reckoning with what the field has inherited, what it has suppressed, and what it might yet become.

The question of who speaks—and who is permitted to remain silent—is at the centre of Bambara’s “The Lesson,” as read in the first essay of this issue. The author’s close textual analysis of Sylvia’s narration challenges the routine critical assumption that silence signals absence. What Sylvia withholds, the essay argues, is not passivity but proto-political consciousness: a young Black girl’s refusal to perform the awakening that others expect of her. By situating the story within Black feminist cultural criticism and Black Girlhood Studies, the essay recovers silence as a mode of meaning-making, a form of interiority that precedes, and perhaps exceeds, the articulations that follow. The intervention matters because it insists on reading girlhood not as an apprenticeship to adult political selfhood but as a site of political knowledge in its own right.