At the same time, the Journal of West Indian Literature remains committed to the same format as any other international peer-reviewed academic journal, maintaining high standards for scholarship and a rigorous and thorough peer review process. This way, we can put the Journal more directly in the hands of Caribbean literary scholars, and ensure they are aware of the latest scholarship which circulates via JWIL. We now review the Editorial Board and our list of readers every five years, and have linked membership in the WIACLALS, The West Indian Association for Commonwealth Literature and Language Studies (ostensibly the organizational structure for the attendees of our West Indian literature conference) with subscription to the Journal. So the Journal, like so many others, is now fully online, with an energetic and committed Editorial Team drawing on colleagues (several of a “younger vintage”) from all over the world as well as from the wider Caribbean, beyond the UWI campus territories. But much had changed since the journal’s inception and we realized it was time for JWIL to enter a new era in terms of technology as well as leadership. With Victor’s retirement from UWI a few years ago, I became Editor-in-Chief and Michael turned Senior Editor, soon joined in that role by Lisa Outar, thus passing the care and survival of JWIL from one generation to the next. Antonia McDonald continues the good work. During Chang’s tenure, a Book Review Editor was appointed and, thanks to the indefatigable work of Curdella Forbes, a more robust review section was produced. McWatt acknowledges that the survival of his project depended on the enormous contribution of his co-editor Victor Chang eventually Chang himself assumed editorial responsibility, with the assistance of co-editors Michael A. The same applies for the significance of JWIL. So it is worth recapping the history and achievements of this publication in the words of McWatt himself. In 2015, at the 34 th annual conference on West Indian literature – another regional and initially UWI-led project dedicated to Caribbean literary scholarship, largely disseminating and discussing work by critics in the region – it surfaced that many delegates, especially younger scholars of Caribbean literature, had no idea of the significance of the conference’s continuity. Of course, things moved slowly when the editors were all full-time academics juggling multiple responsibilities across the three campuses of the University of the West Indies but only three years afterward, JWIL indeed transitioned to an online platform. McWatt observed at the time that there was talk about the journal, which printed its first volume in 1986, “becoming exclusively an on-line publication” in the interests of international recognition and access. In 2011, Mark McWatt, Founding Editor of the Journal of West Indian Literature celebrated JWIL’s twenty-fifth year of publication as a regional, University of the West Indies-led Caribbeanist project invested in highlighting and critically examining the prolific literary production of the Anglophone Caribbean.
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