Constellations is a peer-reviewed, online journal devoted both to literary and linguistic scholarship, and to creative writing across all genres.
Originally affiliated with the NYI Global Institute of Cultural, Cognitive, and Linguistic Studies), Constellations is now venturing beyond the bounds of NYI into the larger pluriverse.
Constellations is a capacious and welcoming home for scholars and writers, for many of whom English is an adoptive language. Few of the contributors are what were once called “native speakers,” and most have not resided in an anglophone country for any length of time—except insofar as the Internet may be considered a digital anglophone country. Rather than an obstacle to be overcome, we believe this is a source of our brilliance as a “constellation”; it is a source of light.
In our editorial practices and choices, we have made a conscious decision to avoid thoughtlessly correcting what might be deemed “errors” in standardized or textbook English. The “Englishes” of our contributors often work powerfully on the level of metaphor and association. Non-native speakers often dare to take risks with language that native speakers might, unfortunately, shy away from. For this reason, our editorial practice is one of “scrupulous reading”—by which we mean meeting the texts halfway, not emending them unnecessarily from on high.
We respond favorably to texts that are rooted in the urgencies of a living social context and praxis, texts that grope their way toward a futurity, in the absence of any guarantees that a future will materialize at all. At the same time, we do not shun nostalgia out-of-hand. Many of our contributors are “elsewheres,” as we have called ourselves—people who have been displaced, sometimes multiple times, under duress (war, political repressions, forced exile) from places/spaces they originally inhabited. Dwelling deeply on the past is sometimes the only means of finding passage beyond, through, or forth, into an unknown “now” (not to mention future).
Our errors are fecund; they lead us to new, truer paths of expression and action. Thus, we embrace the “errors of our ways.”
We also allow ourselves to fall into reflective, hibernatory sleep; to dream, and to be claimed by our dreamworlds. (After all, sleep and dreams are inevitable.) We acknowledge that the future must be envisioned—dreamed—before it can be lived, or averted.
Thus, our editorial practices are “scrupulous, with a difference.” And the difference is, perhaps, all.
