10 Years of Literary Activism: Beyond The Peer-Reviewed Essay

When I first encountered ‘The Non-Peer Reviewed Essay’ (via email, as one does most events at Ashoka), I made a pact to attend both days of the event, spanning 12 hours in its entirety. The essay is a form that I have long since been enamoured by, and I awaited the opportunity to hear this expansively about it at Literary Activism’s 10th anniversary.

The symposium is part of a yearly series presented by the Centre for the Creative and the Critical in partnership with the Institute of Advanced Studies at University College London (UCL) and the India International Centre, New Delhi. The conference’s opening remarks, incidentally enough, were interrupted by a recording of the livestream itself. “So I have the benefit of listening to my own words,” remarked Amit Chaudhuri, Professor of Creative Writing and Director of the Centre for the Creative and Critical, who delivered the address. I resonated particularly with Chadhuri’s insistence on reminding the world that creative writers think, and are not just talented people who feel.

The idea of literary activism came to Chaudhuri and his friends in 2010. Chaudhuri conceptualised literary activism as a space interested in investigating the value of failure. Literature, for Chaudhuri, is not something to be revered but something that is “part of the problem of human language”, a belief that is deeply contradictory to the kind of conversations that dominate literary festivals today. 

Chaudhuri felt the need for literary activism after the Berlin Wall fell in 1989. Trade barriers were lifted and the most powerful countries no longer benefited from a homogenised system of exchange. “Publishers were taken over by large conglomerates. This developed into the individual companies that Random House owns now, for instance,” says Chaudhuri in an interview with The Edict. 

Publishers were calling books that were yet to be published ‘classics’, and in this manner, what one saw on the bookshelf was always pre-decided. “In literary festivals, it was often the case that a novelist might be speaking at one venue and a film star at another. And the film star was often more central to the literary festival than the writer,” says Chaudhuri. He also emphasises the strangulation of the “waywardness of the creative impulse” that the market endorses today, which has also historically been an impulse that imagination embraces. 

The conference has its roots in the University of East Anglia’s creative writing department, after Chaudhuri, in 2014, began the program’s first ‘international workshop’, as he terms it in the anthology Literary Activism: Perspectives, in Calcutta. Following a period of online symposia during the pandemic, the series restarted its in-person format two years ago. “It’s trying to open up an oppositional space to bring back through humour and theory, what is most exciting in literature,” Chaudhuri tells The Edict. 

In this vein, past symposia have featured themes that are outwardly rebellious in nature, such as Deprofessionalisation, which criticised the idea of specialisation; Reassessments, which aimed to expand literary tradition; and even Against Storytelling, which sought to find the compelling outside the form of the story. 

When asked about his rationale behind picking the theme for this year’s edition, the non-peer-reviewed essay, Chaudhuri talked about academia’s inclination towards the method of peer review, pointing to a massive reverence for legitimacy and the scientific verifiability. The conference’s ultimate goal is also to step away from the language of homogenised professionalism that pervades academic spaces and speak about literature in an essayistic form— one that is constantly thinking things through. “We need to be reminded that if legitimacy is what the peer-reviewed essay is, then illegitimacy is where insight and the history of intellect lies,” says Chaudhuri. 

For Saikat Majumdar, Professor of Creative Writing, a panellist at the symposium, the idea of the non-peer-reviewed essay is a gesture towards the amateurism of the evaluation process. “But it’s an amateurism of the highest form, unearthing moments and movements that scholarly professionalism can’t, or is not even interested in,” Majumdar tells The Edict. 

n+1 magazine editor Colin Vanderburg’s review-essay, or, as he terms it, director’s cut ‘Quiet Please, Critics at Work’, was undoubtedly my favourite of the symposium. There was a kind of incisive awareness of the literary landscape within which Vanderburg delivered his address, even if it was an inherently American one. Vanderburg recalled teaching Antigone the day after the detention of student activist Mahmoud Khalil following pro-Palestine demonstrations at Columbia, citing men who want to transform universities into precincts. The essay ends with a simple question: Who will be around to miss our crisis when it's gone? 

Chaudhuri’s presentation, ‘What on Earth Does Non-Fiction Mean?’ also stood out to me for its handling of crisis, with the writer employing the example of the documentary’s human-centric vision. He spoke of the politically charged film Ram Ke Naam, of which a screening on campus a year ago had become the site of controversy. Patwardhan’s focus was on the villagers and not the kar sevaks. “First-person experience is not divorced from intellectual history,” said Chaudhuri during the talk.

Sumana Roy, Professor of Creative Writing’s talk ‘Disobedient Women and the Terror of Reviewer 2’ was an undeniable hit - one that elicited a series of responses from the audience, accelerating in intensity as she progressed from Woolf’s arguments about female form to C.J. Hauser’s feminist subversion of the traditional folktale in The Crane Wife. Roy’s presentation also talked about how peer review often does the work of misogyny by its violent misunderstanding of the text before it. “The essay reorders time. It is a history that can move that way and this, as it does in Dubravka Ugresic's essay," concluded Roy. 

On this note of straying, the symposium’s concluding panel, titled ‘What Can the Essay Do?’ took place, featuring Professor of English Mandakini Dubey, senior copy editor at Penguin Random House, Vineet Gill, Majumdar, and author Cynthia Zarin. I quite distinctly enjoyed how the discussion began by thinking of the essay in its Indian contexts, especially as a form of punishment given to children and, in the case of the 2014 Pune accident, those who are not quite adults yet. 

The question of what a non-didactic essay for a child reader would look like was one that understandably stumped the panellists. “I think the non-peer-reviewed essay forces us to be more honest, both in our writing and our reading, and it distances us somewhat from the calculated instrumentalism of academic writing,” Majumdar, who teaches the Literature and the World foundation course to undergraduates, told The Edict in an email correspondence. 

“The essays are bound to the moment in which they were written. It will speak to other people at other times,” said Zarin during the panel discussion. On the aimlessness of the essay, Dubey then concluded, "The way the essay form breaks down rupture, that might be the subject of another symposium."

The speakers of the symposium may have engaged with seemingly disparate features of the non-peer-reviewed essay, but were in continuous, transcendent conversation with one another. A conversation that is inherent to the project of literary activism. “I wanted to remind everyone that literature is not some unbroken language that you can own,” said Chaudhuri. The non-peer-reviewed essay, then, is the essay at the height of its powers, a form that grapples with the ordinary and the remarkable, the relevant and obsolete. The essay has always been around, and it will always, always, have places to go. 

(Edited by Giya Sood and Srijana Siri Murthy)