Editorial [CounterText, 11(1)]

Abstract

CounterText: A Journal for the Study of the Post-Literary was launched in the Spring of 2015; this number marks its tenth anniversary. The first number was a special issue on the theme of Postcolonial Springs. It was just about possible then to think vernally. That quite different and, in some ways, distant time preceded a global pandemic, the swagger of transactional cynicisms at the high tables of politics, expanded and multivalently evolved warfare and existential conflict, and the irruptions of Artificial Intelligence on anything and everything previously presumed to be humanity’s preserve. That’s among other events still working their impacts on the world and its psyches, never mind on any sense of the (post-)literary or the (counter)textual. There would be many reasons, then, to suggest that holding on, holding up – rather than holding to promise and prospect – mark the tone and colour of the present and the foreseeable. This must surely be the case for the (post-)literary too. It would apply also to (counter)textual (re)inventions. After all, so many spaces where those ideas and practices churn and turn find themselves depleted. Theorising the (post-)literary and refiguring the (counter)textual could seem blinkered – worse, indulgent – in the current moment. Read the time, instead. Write that. Critique that.