‘Read! Learn!’: Grobalisation and (G)localisation in Caribbean Textbook Publishing

Low, Gail

doi:10.1007/978-3-319-51334-8_5

Gail Low⁷

Part of the book series: New Directions in Book History ((NDBH))

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Abstract

This essay addresses educational and literary publishing interfaces, how literary material circulates formal institutional practices of reading and learning, and the social and cultural work to which these texts are put. The first section of the essay uses George Ritzer’s terms ‘grobalisation’ and ‘glocalisation’ to situate twentieth century textbook publishing within an overview of British educational presses’ penetration of markets abroad so as to tease out some recurring patterns. It then addresses localisation as a floating signifier within the global export of examinations, remarking specifically on key moments in the history University of Cambridge Local Examinations Syndicates (UCLES); the third part addresses the emergence of the Caribbean Examinations Council (CXC), an attempt to redress the expanding neo-colonial educational examinations universe, providing initially an example of the (g)localisation of imported exams and then, latterly, the creation of an independent regionally specific examining authority. Finally the essay addresses Heinemann Educational Books’, penetration of the Caribbean market to capitalise on a post-independence local schools market and compares, briefly, both the African Writers Series and the Caribbean Writers Series.

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Notes

1.
V.S. Naipaul, A House for Mr. Biswas (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1984). All references will be to this edition of the text.
2.
Jerome De Lisle, ‘Secondary School Entrance Examinations in the Caribbean: Legacy, Policy and Evidence within an era of Seamless Education’, Caribbean Curriculum, 19 (2012), pp. 114–115.
3.
Carl C. Campbell, The Young Colonials: A Social History of Education in Trinidad and Tobago 1834–1939 (Kingston, Jamaica: The Press University of the West Indies, 1996), p. 175. Elsewhere Campbell notes that between 1956 and 1961 scholarships for University study overseas expanded to 56 in Trinidad and Tobago. See Campbell, Endless Education: Main Currents in the Education System of Trinidad and Tobago 1939–1986 (Kingston, Jamica: The Press University of the West Indies, 1997), p. 101.
4.
Naipaul, A House for Mr. Biswas, p. 471.
5.
ibid., p. 437.
6.
ibid., p. 463.
7.
ibid., p. 494.
8.
John Nesfield, Manual of English Grammar and Composition (London: Macmillan, 1908); David Bell and Alexander Bell, Bell’s Standard Elocutionist (London: William Mullan and Son, 1878); Joseph Oliver Cutteridge, Nelson’s West Indian Readers, 6 volumes (London, Edinburgh and New York, 1926–1929); Blackie’s Tropical Readers, 4 volumes (London and Glasgow, Blackie and Son, 1897–1911); Cecil Hunt, How To Write a Book (London and Glasgow: Blackie and Son, 1939); William Shakespeare, The Complete Works of Shakespeare, Introduced by St. John Ervine (London and Glasgow: Collins Clear Type Press, 1923).
9.
Neil ten Kortenaar, Postcolonial Literature and the Impact of Literacy: Reading and Writing in African and Caribbean Fiction (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011), p. 7.
10.
Quoted in David McKitterick, A History of Cambridge University Press, Volume 3: New Worlds for Learning 1873–1972 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), p. 378.
11.
Alan Hill, ‘Company Memo: William Heinemann Limited Educational Department’, HEB Box 11 Reports 1959. University of Reading Special Collections. Unless indicated otherwise, all Heinemann Educational Books archival materials are taken from the University of Reading Special Collections.
12.
Alan Hill, In Pursuit of Publishing (London: John Murray, 1988), p. 72.
13.
George Ritzer, Globalization: A Basic Text (Malden, MA; Oxford and Chichester: Wiley-Blackwell, 2010), p. 267.
14.
George Ritzer, The Globalization of Nothing 2 (Thousand Oaks, California: Pine Forge Press, 2007), pp. 23, 19.
15.
Marc Augé, Non-places, trans. John Howe, Second edition (London and New York: Verso, 2009).
16.
Ritzer, The Globalization of Nothing 2, p. 74.
17.
ibid., p. 99.
18.
ibid., pp. 181, 183.
19.
See Rimi B. Chatterjee, Empires of the Mind: A History of the Oxford University Press in Indian under the Raj (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2006), chapter 12; Priya Joshi, In Another Country (New York: Columbia University Press, 2002); Asa Briggs, A History of Longmans and their books 1724–1990 (London and New Castle, Delaware: The British Library and Oak Knoll Press, 2008), chapter 7; A.P.R. Howatt and H.G. Widdowson, A History of English Language Teaching, second edition (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004); Caroline Davis, ‘Creating a Book Empire: Longmans in Africa,’ in Caroline Davis and David Johnson, eds., The Book in Africa (Houndsmill: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015), pp. 128–152.
20.
The proliferation of English Language teaching textbooks using, for example, Dr. Michael West’s ‘New Method’ (and rival publications) is a good example of this; see G.C. Darton, ‘The “New Method” of Teaching English’, African Studies, 4:1 (1945), pp. 41–44.
21.
Quoted in Robert Fraser, ‘Educational Books’ in Wm. Roger Louis, ed., The History of Oxford University Press, Volume III: 1896–1970 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), p. 455.
22.
Fraser, ‘Educational Books’, pp. 456–458.
23.
Gail Low, ‘An Educational Empire of Print: Thomas Nelson and the West Indian Readers’, in Carla Sassi and Theo Van Heijnsbergen, eds., Within Without Empire (Cambridge: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2013), pp. 108–122.
24.
Ritzer, Globalization, p. 255.
25.
Ritzer, The Globalization of Nothing 2, p. 21.
26.
ibid., p. 197.
27.
See George Ritzer, Jeffrey Stepnisky and Jon Lemich, ‘The Magical World of Consumption: Transforming Nothing into Something’, Berkeley Journal of Sociology, 49 (2005), pp. 117–136.
28.
Naipaul, A House for Mr. Biswas, pp. 78, 471.
29.
Joshi, In Another Country, p. 26.
30.
Jamaica Kincaid, Annie John (London: Vintage, 1997); George Lamming, In the Castle of My Skin (London: Michael Joseph, 1953); Erna Brodber, Myal (London: New Beacon, 1988); The Mighty Sparrow, ‘Dan is the Man’, in Alison Donnell and Sarah Lawson Welsh, eds., The Routledge Reader in Caribbean Literature (London and New York: Routledge, 1996).
31.
Andrew Watts, ‘Cambridge Local Examinations 1858–1945’, in Sandra Raban, ed., Examining the World (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008), p. 45. Much of this brief historical overview of Cambridge Local Examinations was obtained from Watts, John Sadler, ‘University of Cambridge Local Examinations Syndicate’ in M. Bray and L. Steward, eds., Examinations in Small States (London: Commonwealth Secretariat, 1998), pp. 198–206; and A.J. Stockwell, ‘Examinations and Empire’, in J.A. Mangan, ed., Making Imperial Mentalities (Manchester and New York: Manchester University Press, 1990), pp. 213–220.
32.
Watts, ‘Cambridge Local Examinations 1858–1945’, p. 57.
33.
Watts, ‘Cambridge Local Examinations 1858–1945’, p. 62.
34.
Cambridge Assessment, 150 Anniversary exhibition: Enriching the Education of Individuals around the World, http://www.cambridgeassessment.org.uk/images/126044-150th-anniversary-archive-exhibition.pdf.
35.
Hill writes that with the AWS, HEB were seen by the local population as not only the provider of textbooks but also the publisher of `leading Nigerian creative writers’; thus the company had a ‘double-barrelled’ prestige quite ‘disproportionate’ to their size and status, and were considered by locals to be one of the ‘few genuinely Nigerian publishers’. See Gail Low, Publishing the Postcolonial (London and New York: Routledge, 2011), p. 76.
36.
Anna Spry Rush, Bonds of Empire: West Indians and Britishness from Victoria to Decolonization (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), p. 227.
37.
Low, ‘An Educational Empire of Print’, pp. 118–119.
38.
ibid., p. 119.
39.
Lamming, In the Castle of My Skin, p. 58.
40.
Rush, Bonds of Empire, pp. 227–228.
41.
Patrick E. Bryan, A History of the Caribbean Examinations Council 1973–2013 (St Michael, Barbados: Caribbean Examination Council, 2015), p. 2.
42.
Bryan, A History of the Caribbean Examinations Council, p. 5.
43.
Eric Williams, Inward Hunger: The Education of a Prime Minister (Princeton: Markus Wiener Publishers, 2006), pp. 23, 35.
44.
John Figueroa, Staffing and Examinations in British Caribbean Secondary Schools (London: Evans Brothers, 1964), pp. 17, 18.
45.
Philip Sherlock and J.H. Parry, A Short History of the West Indies (London: Macmillan, 1956); Roy Augier, Douglas Hall and Shirley Gordon, The Making of the West Indies (London: Longman, 1960); Roy Augier and Shirley Gordon, Sources of Caribbean History (London: Longmans, 1962); Anthony Phillips and Kamau Brathwaite, The People who Came: Books 1–3 (Harlow: Longmans, 1968–1972).
46.
Kenneth Ramchand, West Indian Narrative: An Introductory Anthology (London: Nelson, 1966); G.R. Coulthard, Caribbean Literature (London: University of London, 1966); O.R. Dathorne, Caribbean Narrative: An Anthology (London: Heinemann Educational Books, 1966); O.R. Dathorne, Caribbean Verse: An Anthology (London: Heinemann Educational Books, 1967); John Figueroa, Caribbean Voices: An Anthology of West Indian Poetry (London: Evans, 1966); Andrew Salkey, Caribbean Prose (London: Evans, 1967); Anne Walmsey, The Sun’s Eye: West Indian Writing for Young Readers (London: Longman, 1968).
47.
Rush, Bonds of Empire, p. 220.
48.
Bryan, A History of the Caribbean Examinations Council, p. 15.
49.
Mervyn Morris, ‘Review’, Caribbean Quarterly, 13:2 (1967), p. 36.
50.
Quoted in Sue Bradley, ed., The British Book Trade: An Oral History (London: British Library, 2010), p. 39.
51.
Anne Walmsley, ‘Sam Selvon: Gifts’, Kunapipi, 17:1 (1995), p. 76. Alison Donnell charts some of the critiques and debates over the use of creole languages in literary writing Twentieth Century Caribbean Literatures (London and New York: Routledge, 2006), pp. 21–27.
52.
Walmsley, ‘Sam Selvon: Gifts’, p. 77.
53.
For more on the African Writers Series see Low, Publishing the Postcolonial (2011), chapter 3, James Currey, Africa Writes Back: The African Writers Series and the Launch of African Literature (Oxford: James Currey, 2008); Olabode Ibironke, Between African Writers and Heinemann Educational Publishers (Ann Arbour: UMI, 2008).
54.
KS (Keith Sambrook) to AH (Alan Hill), 7/6/1968; ‘Memos 1968’, HEB Box 171; University of Reading Special Collections.
55.
Hill, In Pursuit of Publishing, p. 300.
56.
KS to AH, ‘Memo: Overseas Editor/Overseas Development’ 1966; HEB Box 162.
57.
Gail Low, ‘Professing the Commonwealth of Literature, Leeds 1957–1969’, Journal of Commonwealth Literature, 50:3 (2015), pp. 267–281.
58.
Richard Rive, ed., Modern African Prose (London: Heinemann Educational Books, 1964).
59.
HEB had no office in the region at that time and used the Collins representative, Aubrey Gonsalves, as their representative for Jamaican schools, training colleges and University departments. This practice was common practice for firms with no office or representatives in regions they were selling to.
60.
AH to KS, Memo, 9/11/67; HEB General Box 93: Keith Sambrook’s Trip to the Caribbean, 1967.
61.
KS to AH, ‘Letter no. 4: Jamaica’, 21/11/67; HEB General Box 93: Keith Sambrook’s Trip to the Caribbean, 1967.
62.
See Sambrook’s account of this in a letter dated 10/4/69 to Kenneth Ramchand, HEB44/10.
63.
KS to AH, ‘Letter no. 5a (i): Jamaica (continued)’; HEB General Box 93: Keith Sambrook’s Trip to the Caribbean, 1967.
64.
KS to AH, ‘Letter no. 5a (i): Jamaica (continued)’; HEB General Box 93: Keith Sambrook’s Trip to the Caribbean, 1967.
65.
KS to AH, ‘Letter no. 5a: Jamaica report’; HEB General Box 93: Keith Sambrook’s Trip to the Caribbean, 1967.
66.
KS to AH, ‘Letter no. 10: Jamaica (Second visit)’; HEB General Box 93: Keith Sambrook’s Trip to the Caribbean, 1967.
67.
KS to AH, ‘Letter no. 10: Jamaica (Second visit)’; HEB General Box 93: Keith Sambrook’s Trip to the Caribbean, 1967.
68.
KS to AH, ‘Letter no. 10: Jamaica (Second visit)’; HEB General Box 93: Keith Sambrook’s Trip to the Caribbean, 1967.
69.
There is some suggestion of tardiness on Figueroa’s part as the reason for his moving over to Longmans.
70.
Tensions between Louis James and Kenneth Ramchand and within the circle of UWI academics represented in the archive can be situated within the debates about the socio-cultural and political direction of Caribbean writing at this time.See Donnell, Twentieth Century Caribbean Literatures, pp. 10–76.
71.
No author, ‘Caribbean Writers Series’, guidelines for writers; HEB 50/7: CWS General Correspondence Files 1976–1982.
72.
No author, ‘Caribbean Writers Series’, guidelines for writers; HEB 50/7: CWS General Correspondence Files 1976–1982.
73.
Ritzer, The Globalization of Nothing 2, p. 38.
74.
In Ritzer’s example of the touring show of van Gogh’s art, the works themselves will always something but the consumer paraphernalia that surrounds these exhibitions, such as posters, gifts items, postcards, scarves, pens and touristic material using images derived from van Gogh’s art ‘can move in the direction of nothing’. Ritzer, The Globalization of Nothing 2, p. 129.
75.
Derek Walcott, Selected Poetry, ed. Wayne Brown (London: Heinemann Educational Books, 1981) As late as 1976, James Currey was expressing doubts about publishing poetry in the series (see Currey to Ian Randle, HEB Jamaica, 15/12/76; HEB 50/7: CWS General Correspondence File 1976–1982).
76.
Anthony’s books were also published simultaneously in HEB’s New Windmill Series.
77.
KS to Ian Randle, 2/11/77; HEB 50/7: CWS General Correspondence Files 1976–1982.
78.
See Cambridge International Examinations, ‘Our history’, http://www.cie.org.uk/about-us/who-we-are/our-history/.
79.
Cambridge English, ‘Global recognition’, http://www.cambridgeenglish.org/why-cambridge-english/global-recognition/index.aspx?s=1.
80.
Some exceptions include Robert Phillipson, Linguistic Imperialism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992), Alastair Pennycook, The Cultural Politics Of English As An International Language (London and New York: Routledge, 2014) and Howatt and Widdowson, The History of English Language Teaching (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004).
81.
Low ‘Professing the Commonwealth’, pp. 267–281
82.
I have taken this phrase from Edward Said, Culture and Imperialism (London: Chatto and Windus, 1993).

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Acknowledgements

I am grateful for the award Carnegie Trust travel grant to undertake the archival research for this paper. All quotations from the Heinemann Education Books archives at the University of Reading Special Collections is reproduced by kind permission of Random House.

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Priyasha Mukhopadhyay
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Asha Rogers

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Low, G. (2017). ‘Read! Learn!’: Grobalisation and (G)localisation in Caribbean Textbook Publishing. In: Boehmer, E., Kunstmann, R., Mukhopadhyay, P., Rogers, A. (eds) The Global Histories of Books. New Directions in Book History. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-51334-8_5

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