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As with many emerging publications,
ABC
started out as a project animated by the desire to provide a
forum for young scholars of English studies making their debut
in the Academia. But whereas the manifest objective was to
permeate a conservative caste-stratified Romanian HE milieu, the
‘sponsoring thought’, i.e. the thought behind the thought
motivating the
ABC
project, was of a more ambitious nature. It was to do with
fixing the foundations of an integrated mode of exploring
Anglophone identity, one informed by a breadth of view
characteristic of the encyclopaedic propensities inherent in
Romanian scholarship. Nourished by the will to forge a
‘disinterested’, transcultural consciousness of Anglophone
studies, the desideratum illustrates in retrospect a
constructive albeit naïve vision of Anglistics as the site of
liaisons and congenial belief systems. And yet, while
contrasting sharply with the atomistic specialism at work in
today’s arena, this cultural logic, the catalyst, indeed the
bottom-line motivator of ‘juvenile’
ABC,
taps into the principles of trans-disciplinarity informing
academic practice. And whereas the pursuit of a unified
sensibility will have struck a discordant note in the late
1990’s, with studies still distinctly ‘American’, ‘British’ and
‘Canadian’, in the current scene, with demarcations between
subject areas growing both ever narrower and looser at one and
the same time, the idea of an ‘expanded consciousness’ of the
body of writings, knowledges, and idioms constitutive of global
English is the logical development one takes for granted. With
the benefit of hindsight, the sort of ‘generalism’ and far reach
typifying the mode in which the publication approached ‘the
great and the good’ of Anglistic heritage appears somewhat
avant la lettre.
Ten years on, looking back on
the ABCs of ABC, the overarching impression is that the journal
has from its very inaugural issue sought to capture areas of
newness without being ‘trendy’, focusing on the relatively
under-researched of Anglophone Studies, without slipping into
‘marginalism’, taking stock of the changing humanities as it
moved from a dominant ‘native speakerist/ culturalist’ attitude
to one of internationalism. And as it pondered pre-millennial
and post-millennial English Studies and its ‘foreign relations’,
it strove to incorporate new writing forms and media, tune in
with work done in webinars and webzines, on webarts and online
conference forums and, in the process, turn intercontinental.
As we reminisce on a decade of
ABC experience, we are pleased to welcome here new members to
the ABC editorial board, salute our regular contributors
in a cordial “thank you” for their continuing inspiration,
indeed for the invaluable professional capital they invested in
the undertaking, which has over the years made for a veritable
boost of confidence.
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