d d d

The Empire Writes Back

lsquo the Empire writes back to the Centre rsquo Salman Rushdie

The experience of colonization and the challenges of a post-colonialworld have produced an explosion of new writing in English Thisdiverse and powerful body of literature has established a specificpractice of post-colonial writing in cultures as various as India Aus-tralia the West Indies and Canada and has challenged both thetraditional canon and dominant ideas of literature and culture

The Empire Writes Back was the first major theoretical account of awide range of post-colonial texts and their relation to the largerissues of post-colonial culture and remains one of the most signifi-cant works published in this field The authors three leading figuresin post-colonial studies open up the debates about the inter-relationships of post-colonial literatures investigate the powerfulforces acting on language in the post-colonial text and show howthese texts constitute a radical critique of Eurocentric notions ofliterature and language

This book is indispensable not only for its incisive analysis but forits accessibility to readers new to the field Now with an additionalchapter and an updated bibliography it is impossible to under-estimate the importance of this book for contemporary post-colonialstudies

Bill Ashcroft teaches at the University of New South Wales Aus-tralia Gareth Griffiths at the University of Albany USA and HelenTiffin at the University of Queensland Australia All three havepublished widely in post-colonial studies and together edited theground-breaking Post-Colonial Studies Reader (1994) and wrote KeyConcepts in Post-Colonial Studies (1998)

IN THE SAME SERIES

Alternative Shakespeares ed John DrakakisAlternative Shakespeares Volume 2 ed Terence HawkesCritical Practice Catherine BelseyDeconstruction Theory and Practice Christopher NorrisDialogue and Difference English for the Nineties ed Peter Brooker

and Peter HummThe Empire Writes Back Theory and Practice in Post-Colonial

Literature Bill Ashcroft Gareth Griffiths and Helen TiffinFantasy The Literature of Subversion Rosemary JacksonDialogism Bakhtin and his World Michael HolquistFormalism and Marxism Tony BennettMaking a Difference Feminist Literary Criticism ed Gayle Green and

Coppeacutelia KahnMetafiction The Theory and Practice of Self-Conscious Fiction

Patricia WaughNarrative Fiction Contemporary Poetics Shlomith Rimmon-KenanOrality and Literacy The Technologizing of the Word Walter J OngThe Politics of Postmodernism Linda HutcheonPost-Colonial Shakespeares ed Ania Loomba and Martin OrkinReading Television John Fiske and John HartleyThe Semiotics of Theatre and Drama Keir ElamSexualTextual Politics Feminist Literary Theory Toril MoiStructuralism and Semiotics Terence HawkesStudying British Cultures An Introduction ed Susan BassnettSubculture The Meaning of Style Dick HebdigeTelling Stories A Theoretical Analysis of Narrative Fiction

Steven Cohan and Linda M ShiresTranslation Studies Susan Bassnett

Bill

AshcroftGareth

GriffithsHelen

TiffinThe Empire Writes Back

Theory and practice in post-colonial literatures

2nd edition

London and New York

First published 1989by Routledge11 New Fetter Lane London EC4P 4EE

Simultaneously published in the USA and Canadaby Routledge29 West 35th Street New York NY 10001

This second edition first published 2002

Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor amp Francis Group

copy 1989 2002 Bill Ashcroft Gareth Griffiths and Helen Tiffin

All rights reserved No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced orutilized in any form or by any electronic mechanical or other means nowknown or hereafter invented including photocopying and recording or inany information storage or retrieval system without permission in writingfrom the publishers

British Library Cataloguing in Publication DataA catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication DataA catalog record for this book has been requested

ISBN 0ndash415ndash28019ndash2 (Hbk)ISBN 0ndash415ndash28020ndash6 (Pbk)

This edition published in the Taylor amp Francis e-Library 2004

ISBN 0-203-42608-8 Master e-book ISBN

ISBN 0-203-44073-0 (Adobe eReader Format)

CONTENTS

General editorrsquos preface ixAcknowledgements xi

Introduction 1What are post-colonial literatures 1Post-colonial literatures and English Studies 2Development of post-colonial literatures 4Hegemony 6Language 7Place and displacement 8Post-coloniality and theory 11

1 Cutting the ground critical models of post-colonialliteratures 14National and regional models 15Comparisons between two or more regions 17The lsquoBlack writingrsquo model 19Wider comparative models 22Models of hybridity and syncreticity 32

2 Re-placing language textual strategies in post-colonial writing 37Abrogation and appropriation 37Language and abrogation 40A post-colonial linguistic theory the Creole continuum 43The metonymic function of language variance 50Strategies of appropriation in post-colonial writing 58

3 Re-placing the text the liberation of post-colonialwriting 77The imperial moment control of the means ofcommunication 78Colonialism and silence Lewis Nkosirsquos Mating Birds 82Colonialism and lsquoauthenticityrsquo VS Naipaulrsquos TheMimic Men 87Abrogating lsquoauthenticityrsquo Michael Anthonyrsquos lsquoSandraStreetrsquo 90Radical Otherness and hybridity Timothy FindleyrsquosNot Wanted on the Voyage 96Appropriating marginality Janet Framersquos The Edge ofthe Alphabet 102Appropriating the frame of power RK Narayanrsquos TheVendor of Sweets 108

4 Theory at the crossroads indigenous theory andpost-colonial reading 115Indian literary theories 116African literary theories 122The settler colonies 131Caribbean theories 144

5 Re-placing theory post-colonial writing and literarytheory 153Post-colonial literatures and postmodernism 153Post-colonial reconstructions literature meaning value 178Post-colonialism as a reading strategy 186

6 Re-thinking the post-colonial post-colonialism inthe twenty first century 193

contentsvi

Who is post-colonial 200Theoretical issues 203Post-colonial futures 209

Conclusion More english than English 220

Readersrsquo guide 223Notes 238Bibliography 246Index 271

contents vii

GENERAL EDITORrsquoS PREFACE

No doubt a third General Editorrsquos Preface to New Accents seems hard tojustify What is there left to say Twenty-five years ago the series beganwith a very clear purpose Its major concern was the newly perplexedworld of academic literary studies where hectic monsters called lsquoThe-oryrsquo lsquoLinguisticsrsquo and lsquoPoliticsrsquo ranged In particular it aimed itself atthose undergraduates or beginning postgraduate students who wereeither learning to come to terms with the new developments or werebeing sternly warned against them

New Accents deliberately took sides Thus the first Preface spoke darklyin 1977 of lsquoa time of rapid and radical social changersquo of the lsquoerosionof the assumptions and presuppositionsrsquo central to the study of litera-ture lsquoModes and categories inherited from the pastrsquo it announced lsquonolonger seem to fit the reality experienced by a new generationrsquo Theaim of each volume would be to lsquoencourage rather than resist theprocess of changersquo by combining nuts-and-bolts exposition of newideas with clear and detailed explanation of related conceptual devel-opments If mystification (or downright demonization) was theenemy lucidity (with a nod to the compromises inevitably at stakethere) became a friend If a lsquodistinctive discourse of the futurersquobeckoned we wanted at least to be able to understand it

With the apocalypse duly noted the second Preface proceeded

piously to fret over the nature of whatever rough beast might staggerportentously from the rubble lsquoHow can we recognise or deal with thenewrsquo it complained reporting nevertheless the dismaying advance oflsquoa host of barely respectable activities for which we have no reassuringnamesrsquo and promising a programme of wary surveillance at lsquotheboundaries of the precedented and at the limit of the thinkablersquo Itsconclusion lsquothe unthinkable after all is that which covertly shapes ourthoughtsrsquo may rank as a truism But in so far as it offered some sort ofuseable purchase on a world of crumbling certainties it is not to beblushed for

In the circumstances any subsequent and surely final effort canonly modestly look back marvelling that the series is still here and notunreasonably congratulating itself on having provided an initial outletfor what turned over the years into some of the distinctive voices andtopics in literary studies But the volumes now re-presented have morethan a mere historical interest As their authors indicate the issues theyraised are still potent the arguments with which they engaged are stilldisturbing In short we werenrsquot wrong Academic study did changerapidly and radically to match even to help to generate wide reachingsocial changes A new set of discourses was developed to negotiatethose upheavals Nor has the process ceased In our deliquescent worldwhat was unthinkable inside and outside the academy all those yearsago now seems regularly to come to pass

Whether the New Accents volumes provided adequate warning ofmaps for guides to or nudges in the direction of this new terrain isscarcely for me to say Perhaps our best achievement lay in cultivatingthe sense that it was there The only justification for a reluctant thirdattempt at a Preface is the belief that it still is

TERENCE HAWKES

general editorrsquos prefacex

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

For help and generous support we should like to thank our partnersJudy Carolyn and Chris

For generous help in finding material tracing references and gener-ally making this book less inadequate than it remains we want to thankmany people but in particular Alan Lawson David Moody andStephen Slemon

INTRODUCTION

More than three-quarters of the people living in the world today havehad their lives shaped by the experience of colonialism It is easy to seehow important this has been in the political and economic spheres butits general influence on the perceptual frameworks of contemporarypeoples is often less evident Literature offers one of the most import-ant ways in which these new perceptions are expressed and it is in theirwriting and through other arts such as painting sculpture music anddance that the day-to-day realities experienced by colonized peopleshave been most powerfully encoded and so profoundly influential

WHAT ARE POST-COLONIAL LITERATURES

This book is concerned with writing by those peoples formerly colon-ized by Britain though much of what it deals with is of interest andrelevance to countries colonized by other European powers such asFrance Portugal and Spain The semantic basis of the term lsquopost-colonialrsquo might seem to suggest a concern only with the national cul-ture after the departure of the imperial power It has occasionally beenemployed in some earlier work in the area to distinguish between theperiods before and after independence (lsquocolonial periodrsquo andlsquopost-colonial periodrsquo) for example in constructing national literary

histories or in suggesting comparative studies between stages in thosehistories Generally speaking though the term lsquocolonialrsquo has been usedfor the period before independence and a term indicating a nationalwriting such as lsquomodern Canadian writingrsquo or lsquorecent West Indianliteraturersquo has been employed to distinguish the period afterindependence

We use the term lsquopost-colonialrsquo however to cover all the cultureaffected by the imperial process from the moment of colonization tothe present day This is because there is a continuity of preoccupationsthroughout the historical process initiated by European imperialaggression We also suggest that it is most appropriate as the term forthe new cross-cultural criticism which has emerged in recent years andfor the discourse through which this is constituted In this sense thisbook is concerned with the world as it exists during and after theperiod of European imperial domination and the effects of this oncontemporary literatures

So the literatures of African countries Australia Bangladesh CanadaCaribbean countries India Malaysia Malta New Zealand PakistanSingapore South Pacific Island countries and Sri Lanka are all post-colonial literatures The literature of the USA should also be placed inthis category Perhaps because of its current position of power and theneo-colonizing role it has played its post-colonial nature has not beengenerally recognized But its relationship with the metropolitan centreas it evolved over the last two centuries has been paradigmatic for post-colonial literatures everywhere What each of these literatures has incommon beyond their special and distinctive regional characteristics isthat they emerged in their present form out of the experience of colon-ization and asserted themselves by foregrounding the tension with theimperial power and by emphasizing their differences from theassumptions of the imperial centre It is this which makes themdistinctively post-colonial

POST-COLONIAL LITERATURES AND ENGLISH STUDIES

The study of English has always been a densely political and culturalphenomenon a practice in which language and literature have bothbeen called into the service of a profound and embracing nationalism

the empire writes back2

The development of English as a privileged academic subject innineteenth-century Britain ndash finally confirmed by its inclusion in thesyllabuses of Oxford and Cambridge and re-affirmed in the 1921Newbolt Report ndash came about as part of an attempt to replace theClassics at the heart of the intellectual enterprise of nineteenth-centuryhumanistic studies From the beginning proponents of English as adiscipline linked its methodology to that of the Classics with itsemphasis on scholarship philology and historical study ndash the fixing oftexts in historical time and the perpetual search for the determinants ofa single unified and agreed meaning

The historical moment which saw the emergence of lsquoEnglishrsquo as anacademic discipline also produced the nineteenth-century colonialform of imperialism (Batsleer et al 1985 14 19ndash25) Gauri Viswa-nathan has presented strong arguments for relating the lsquoinstitutional-isation and subsequent valorisation of English literary study [to] ashape and an ideological content developed in the colonial contextrsquoand specifically as it developed in India where

British colonial administrators provoked by missionaries on the onehand and fears of native insubordination on the other discovered anally in English literature to support them in maintaining control of thenatives under the guise of a liberal education

(Viswanathan 1987 17)

It can be argued that the study of English and the growth of Empireproceeded from a single ideological climate and that the developmentof the one is intrinsically bound up with the development of the otherboth at the level of simple utility (as propaganda for instance) and atthe unconscious level where it leads to the naturalizing of constructedvalues (eg civilization humanity etc) which conversely establishedlsquosavageryrsquo lsquonativersquo lsquoprimitiversquo as their antitheses and as the object of areforming zeal1

A lsquoprivileging normrsquo was enthroned at the heart of the formation ofEnglish Studies as a template for the denial of the value of the lsquoper-ipheralrsquo the lsquomarginalrsquo the lsquouncanonizedrsquo Literature was made as cen-tral to the cultural enterprise of Empire as the monarchy was to itspolitical formation So when elements of the periphery and margin

introduction 3

threatened the exclusive claims of the centre they were rapidlyincorporated This was a process in Edward Saidrsquos terms of consciousaffiliation proceeding under the guise of filiation (Said 1984) that is amimicry of the centre proceeding from a desire not only to be acceptedbut to be adopted and absorbed It caused those from the periphery toimmerse themselves in the imported culture denying their origins inan attempt to become lsquomore English than the Englishrsquo We seeexamples of this in such writers as Henry James and TS Eliot

As post-colonial societies sought to establish their difference fromBritain the response of those who recognized this complicity betweenlanguage education and cultural incorporation was to break the linkbetween language and literary study by dividing lsquoEnglishrsquo departmentsin universities into separate schools of Linguistics and of Literatureboth of which tended to view their project within a national or inter-national context Ngugirsquos essay lsquoOn the abolition of the Englishdepartmentrsquo (Ngugi 1972) is an illuminating account of the particulararguments involved in Africa John Dockerrsquos essay lsquoThe neocolonialassumption in the university teaching of Englishrsquo (Tiffin 1978 26ndash31) addresses similar problems in the settler colony contextdescribing a situation in which in contrast to Kenya little genuinedecolonization is yet in sight As Dockerrsquos critique makes clear in mostpost-colonial nations (including the West Indies and India) the nexusof power involving literature language and a dominant British culturehas strongly resisted attempts to dismantle it Even after such attemptsbegan to succeed the canonical nature and unquestioned status of theworks of the English literary tradition and the values they incorporatedremained potent in the cultural formation and the ideological institu-tions of education and literature Nevertheless the development of thepost-colonial literatures has necessitated a questioning of many of theassumptions on which the study of lsquoEnglishrsquo was based

DEVELOPMENT OF POST-COLONIAL LITERATURES

Post-colonial literatures developed through several stages which can beseen to correspond to stages both of national or regional consciousnessand of the project of asserting difference from the imperial centreDuring the imperial period writing in the language of the imperial

the empire writes back4

centre is inevitably of course produced by a literate elite whose pri-mary identification is with the colonizing power Thus the first textsproduced in the colonies in the new language are frequently producedby lsquorepresentativesrsquo of the imperial power for example gentrified set-tlers (Wentworthrsquos lsquoAustraliarsquo) travellers and sightseers (FroudersquosOceana and his The English in the West Indies or the travel diaries of MaryKingsley) or the Anglo-Indian and West African administrators sol-diers and lsquoboxwallahsrsquo and even more frequently their memsahibs(volumes of memoirs)

Such texts can never form the basis for an indigenous culture nor canthey be integrated in any way with the culture which already exists inthe countries invaded Despite their detailed reportage of landscapecustom and language they inevitably privilege the centre emphasiz-ing the lsquohomersquo over the lsquonativersquo the lsquometropolitanrsquo over the lsquoprovincialrsquoor lsquocolonialrsquo and so forth At a deeper level their claim to objectivitysimply serves to hide the imperial discourse within which they arecreated That this is true of even the consciously literary works whichemerge from this moment can be illustrated by the poems and storiesof Rudyard Kipling For example in the well-known poem lsquoChristmasin Indiarsquo the evocative description of a Christmas day in the heat ofIndia is contextualized by invoking its absent English counterpartApparently it is only through this absent and enabling signifier that theIndian daily reality can acquire legitimacy as a subject of literarydiscourse

The second stage of production within the evolving discourse of thepost-colonial is the literature produced lsquounder imperial licencersquo bylsquonativesrsquo or lsquooutcastsrsquo for instance the large body of poetry and proseproduced in the nineteenth century by the English educated Indianupper class or African lsquomissionary literaturersquo (eg Thomas MofolorsquosChaka) The producers signify by the very fact of writing in thelanguage of the dominant culture that they have temporarily or per-manently entered a specific and privileged class endowed with thelanguage education and leisure necessary to produce such works TheAustralian novel Ralph Rashleigh now known to have been written by theconvict James Tucker is a case in point Tucker an educated man wroteRashleigh as a lsquospecialrsquo (a privileged convict) whilst working at the penalsettlement at Port Macquarie as storekeeper to the superintendent

introduction 5

Written on government paper with government ink and pens thenovel was clearly produced with the aid and support of the super-intendent Tucker had momentarily gained access to the privilege ofliterature Significantly the moment of privilege did not last and hedied in poverty at the age of fifty-eight at Liverpool asylum in Sydney

It is characteristic of these early post-colonial texts that the potentialfor subversion in their themes cannot be fully realized Although theydeal with such powerful material as the brutality of the convict system(Tuckerrsquos Rashleigh) the historical potency of the supplanted anddenigrated native cultures (Mofolorsquos Chaka) or the existence of a richcultural heritage older and more extensive than that of Europe (any ofmany nineteenth-century Indo-Anglian poets such as Ram Sharma)they are prevented from fully exploring their anti-imperial potentialBoth the available discourse and the material conditions of productionfor literature in these early post-colonial societies restrain this possibil-ity The institution of lsquoLiteraturersquo in the colony is under the directcontrol of the imperial ruling class who alone license the acceptableform and permit the publication and distribution of the resulting workSo texts of this kind come into being within the constraints of adiscourse and the institutional practice of a patronage system whichlimits and undercuts their assertion of a different perspective Thedevelopment of independent literatures depended upon the abrogationof this constraining power and the appropriation of language and writ-ing for new and distinctive usages Such an appropriation is clearly themost significant feature in the emergence of modern post-colonialliteratures (see chs 2 and 3)

HEGEMONY

Why should post-colonial societies continue to engage with theimperial experience Since all the post-colonial societies we discusshave achieved political independence why is the issue of colonialitystill relevant at all This question of why the empire needs to write backto a centre once the imperial structure has been dismantled in politicalterms is an important one Britain like the other dominant colonialpowers of the nineteenth century has been relegated to a relativelyminor place in international affairs In the spheres of politics and

the empire writes back6

economics and increasingly in the vital new area of the mass mediaBritain and the other European imperial powers have been super-seded by the emergent power of the USA Nevertheless through theliterary canon the body of British texts which all too frequently stillacts as a touchstone of taste and value and through RS-English(Received Standard English) which asserts the English of south-eastEngland as a universal norm the weight of antiquity continues todominate cultural production in much of the post-colonial worldThis cultural hegemony has been maintained through canonicalassumptions about literary activity and through attitudes to post-colonial literatures which identify them as isolated national off-shootsof English literature and which therefore relegate them to marginaland subordinate positions More recently as the range and strength ofthese literatures has become undeniable a process of incorporation hasbegun in which employing Eurocentric standards of judgement thecentre has sought to claim those works and writers of which itapproves as British2 In all these respects the parallel between the situ-ation of post-colonial writing and that of feminist writing is striking(see ch 5)

LANGUAGE

One of the main features of imperial oppression is control over lan-guage The imperial education system installs a lsquostandardrsquo version ofthe metropolitan language as the norm and marginalizes all lsquovariantsrsquoas impurities As a character in Mrs Campbell Praedrsquos nineteenth-century Australian novel Policy and Passion puts it lsquoTo be colonial is to talkAustralian slang to be everything that is abominablersquo (CampbellPraed 1881154) Language becomes the medium through which ahierarchical structure of power is perpetuated and the mediumthrough which conceptions of lsquotruthrsquo lsquoorderrsquo and lsquorealityrsquo becomeestablished Such power is rejected in the emergence of an effectivepost-colonial voice For this reason the discussion of post-colonialwriting which follows is largely a discussion of the process by whichthe language with its power and the writing with its signification ofauthority has been wrested from the dominant European culture

In order to focus on the complex ways in which the English

introduction 7

language has been used in these societies and to indicate their ownsense of difference we distinguish in this account between the lsquostand-ardrsquo British English inherited from the empire and the english whichthe language has become in post-colonial countries Though Britishimperialism resulted in the spread of a language English across theglobe the english of Jamaicans is not the english of Canadians Maorisor Kenyans We need to distinguish between what is proposed as astandard code English (the language of the erstwhile imperial centre)and the linguistic code english which has been transformed and sub-verted into several distinctive varieties throughout the world For thisreason the distinction between English and english will be usedthroughout our text as an indication of the various ways in which thelanguage has been employed by different linguistic communities in thepost-colonial world3

The use of these terms asserts the fact that a continuum existsbetween the various linguistic practices which constitute english usagein the modern world Although linguistically the links between Englishand the various post-colonial englishes in use today can be seen asunbroken the political reality is that English sets itself apart from allother lsquolesserrsquo variants and so demands to be interrogated about itsclaim to this special status

In practice the history of this distinction between English and eng-lish has been between the claims of a powerful lsquocentrersquo and a multitudeof intersecting usages designated as lsquoperipheriesrsquo The language ofthese lsquoperipheriesrsquo was shaped by an oppressive discourse of power Yetthey have been the site of some of the most exciting and innovativeliteratures of the modern period and this has at least in part been theresult of the energies uncovered by the political tension between theidea of a normative code and a variety of regional usages

PLACE AND DISPLACEMENT

A major feature of post-colonial literatures is the concern with placeand displacement It is here that the special post-colonial crisis of iden-tity comes into being the concern with the development or recoveryof an effective identifying relationship between self and place Indeedcritics such as D E S Maxwell have made this the defining model of

the empire writes back8

post-coloniality (see ch 1) A valid and active sense of self may havebeen eroded by dislocation resulting from migration the experience ofenslavement transportation or lsquovoluntaryrsquo removal for indenturedlabour Or it may have been destroyed by cultural denigration the con-scious and unconscious oppression of the indigenous personality andculture by a supposedly superior racial or cultural model The dialecticof place and displacement is always a feature of post-colonial societieswhether these have been created by a process of settlement interven-tion or a mixture of the two Beyond their historical and culturaldifferences place displacement and a pervasive concern with themyths of identity and authenticity are a feature common to allpost-colonial literatures in english

The alienation of vision and the crisis in self-image which this dis-placement produces is as frequently found in the accounts of Canadianlsquofree settlersrsquo as of Australian convicts FijianndashIndian or TrinidadianndashIndian indentured labourers West Indian slaves or forcibly colonizedNigerians or Bengalis Although this is pragmatically demonstrablefrom a wide range of texts it is difficult to account for by theorieswhich see this social and linguistic alienation as resulting only fromovertly oppressive forms of colonization such as slavery or conquestAn adequate account of this practice must go beyond the usual categor-ies of social alienation such as masterslave freebonded rulerruledhowever important and widespread these may be in post-colonial cul-tures After all why should the free settler formally unconstrained andtheoretically free to continue in the possession and practice oflsquoEnglishnessrsquo also show clear signs of alienation even within thefirst generation of settlement and manifest a tendency to seek analternative differentiated identity

The most widely shared discursive practice within which this alien-ation can be identified is the construction of lsquoplacersquo The gap whichopens between the experience of place and the language available todescribe it forms a classic and allpervasive feature of post-colonial textsThis gap occurs for those whose language seems inadequate to describea new place for those whose language is systematically destroyed byenslavement and for those whose language has been renderedunprivileged by the imposition of the language of a colonizing powerSome admixture of one or other of these models can describe the

introduction 9

situation of all post-colonial societies In each case a condition of alien-ation is inevitable until the colonizing language has been replaced orappropriated as english

That imperialism results in a profound linguistic alienation isobviously the case in cultures in which a pre-colonial culture is sup-pressed by military conquest or enslavement So for example anIndian writer like Raja Rao or a Nigerian writer such as ChinuaAchebe have needed to transform the language to use it in a differentway in its new context and so as Achebe says quoting James Bald-win make it lsquobear the burdenrsquo of their experience (Achebe 197562) Although Rao and Achebe write from their own place and sohave not suffered a literal geographical displacement they have toovercome an imposed gap resulting from the linguistic displacementof the pre-colonial language by English This process occurs within amore comprehensive discourse of place and displacement in thewider post-colonial context Such alienation is shared by those whosepossession of English is indisputably lsquonativersquo (in the sense of beingpossessed from birth) yet who begin to feel alienated within its prac-tice once its vocabulary categories and codes are felt to beinadequate or inappropriate to describe the fauna the physical andgeographical conditions or the cultural practices they have developedin a new land The Canadian poet Joseph Howe for instance pluckshis picture of a moose from some repository of English nurseryrhyme romanticism

the gay moose in jocund gambol springsCropping the foliage Nature round him flings

(Howe 1874 100)

Such absurdities demonstrate the pressing need these native speakersshare with those colonized peoples who were directly oppressed toescape from the inadequacies and imperial constraints of English as asocial practice They need that is to escape from the implicit body ofassumptions to which English was attached its aesthetic and socialvalues the formal and historically limited constraints of genre and theoppressive political and cultural assertion of metropolitan dominanceof centre over margin (Ngugi 1986) This is not to say that the English

the empire writes back10

language is inherently incapable of accounting for post-colonialexperience but that it needs to develop an lsquoappropriatersquo usage in orderto do so (by becoming a distinct and unique form of english) Theenergizing feature of this displacement is its capacity to interrogate andsubvert the imperial cultural formations

The pressure to develop such a usage manifests itself early in thedevelopment of lsquoenglishrsquo literatures It is therefore arguable that evenbefore the development of a conscious de-colonizing stance theexperience of a new place identifiably different in its physical charac-teristics constrains for instance the new settlers to demand a languagewhich will allow them to express their sense of lsquoOthernessrsquo Landscapeflora and fauna seasons climatic conditions are formally distinguishedfrom the place of origin as homecolony EuropeNew WorldEuropeAntipodes metropolitanprovincial and so on although ofcourse at this stage no effective models exist for expressing this senseof Otherness in a positive and creative way

POST-COLONIALITY AND THEORY

The idea of lsquopost-colonial literary theoryrsquo emerges from the inability ofEuropean theory to deal adequately with the complexities and variedcultural provenance of post-colonial writing European theories them-selves emerge from particular cultural traditions which are hidden byfalse notions of lsquothe universalrsquo Theories of style and genre assump-tions about the universal features of language epistemologies andvalue systems are all radically questioned by the practices of post-colonial writing Post-colonial theory has proceeded from the need toaddress this different practice Indigenous theories have developed toaccommodate the differences within the various cultural traditions aswell as the desire to describe in a comparative way the features sharedacross those traditions

The political and cultural monocentrism of the colonial enterprisewas a natural result of the philosophical traditions of the Europeanworld and the systems of representation which this privilegedNineteenth-century imperial expansion the culmination of the out-ward and dominating thrust of Europeans into the world beyondEurope which began during the early Renaissance was underpinned

introduction 11

in complex ways by these assumptions In the first instance thisproduced practices of cultural subservience characterized by one post-colonial critic as lsquocultural cringersquo (Phillips 1958) Subsequently theemergence of identifiable indigenous theories in reaction to thisformed an important element in the development of specific nationaland regional consciousnesses (see ch 4)

Paradoxically however imperial expansion has had a radicallydestabilizing effect on its own preoccupations and power In pushingthe colonial world to the margins of experience the lsquocentrersquo pushedconsciousness beyond the point at which monocentrism in all spheresof thought could be accepted without question In other words thealienating process which initially served to relegate the post-colonialworld to the lsquomarginrsquo turned upon itself and acted to push that worldthrough a kind of mental barrier into a position from which allexperience could be viewed as uncentred pluralistic and multifari-ous Marginality thus became an unprecedented source of creativeenergy The impetus towards decentring and pluralism has alwaysbeen present in the history of European thought and has reached itslatest development in post-structuralism But the situation of margin-alized societies and cultures enabled them to come to this positionmuch earlier and more directly (Brydon 1984b) These notions areimplicit in post-colonial texts from the imperial period to the presentday

The task of this book is twofold first to identify the range andnature of these post-colonial texts and second to describe the varioustheories which have emerged so far to account for them So in the firstchapter we consider the development of descriptive models of post-colonial writing Since it is not possible to read post-colonial textswithout coming to terms with the ways in which they appropriate anddeploy the material of linguistic culture in the second chapter weoutline the process by which language is captured to form a distinctivediscursive practice In the third chapter we demonstrate throughsymptomatic readings of texts how post-colonial writing interactswith the social and material practices of colonialism One of the majorpurposes of this book is to explain the nature of existing post-colonialtheory and the way in which it interacts with and dismantles some ofthe assumptions of European theory In the fourth chapter we discuss

the empire writes back12

the issues in the development of indigenous post-colonial theories andin the fifth we examine the larger implications of post-coloniality fortheories of language for literary theory and for social and politicalanalysis in general

introduction 13

1CUTTING THE GROUND

Critical models of post-colonialliteratures

As writers and critics became aware of the special character ofpost-colonial texts they saw the need to develop an adequate model toaccount for them Four major models have emerged to date firstlsquonationalrsquo or regional models which emphasize the distinctive featuresof the particular national or regional culture second race-basedmodels which identify certain shared characteristics across variousnational literatures such as the common racial inheritance in litera-tures of the African diaspora addressed by the lsquoBlack writingrsquo modelthird comparative models of varying complexity which seek toaccount for particular linguistic historical and cultural features acrosstwo or more post-colonial literatures fourth more comprehensivecomparative models which argue for features such as hybridity andsyncreticity as constitutive elements of all post-colonial literatures(syncretism is the process by which previously distinct linguistic cat-egories and by extension cultural formations merge into a singlenew form) These models often operate as assumptions within criticalpractice rather than specific and discrete schools of thought in any

discussion of post-colonial writing a number of them may be operat-ing at the same time

NATIONAL AND REGIONAL MODELS

The first post-colonial society to develop a lsquonationalrsquo literature was theUSA The emergence of a distinctive American literature in the lateeighteenth century raised inevitable questions about the relationshipbetween literature and place between literature and nationality andparticularly about the suitability of inherited literary forms Ideas aboutnew kinds of literature were part of the optimistic progression tonationhood because it seemed that this was one of the most potentareas in which to express difference from Britain Writers like CharlesBrockden Brown who attempted to indigenize British forms like thegothic and the sentimental novel soon realized that with the change inlocation and culture it was not possible to import form and conceptwithout radical alteration (Fiedler 1960 Ringe 1966)

In many ways the American experience and its attempts to producea new kind of literature can be seen to be the model for all laterpost-colonial writing1 The first thing it showed was that some ofa post-colonial countryrsquos most deeply held linguistic and cultural traitsdepend upon its relationship with the colonizing power particularlythe defining contrast between European metropolis and lsquofrontierrsquo (seeFussell 1965) Once the American Revolution had forced the questionof separate nationality and the economic and political successes of theemerging nation had begun to be taken for granted American litera-ture as a distinct collection of texts also began to be accepted But it wasaccepted as an offshoot of the lsquoparent treersquo Such organic metaphorsand others like lsquoparentndashchildrsquo and lsquostreamndashtributaryrsquo acted to keep thenew literature in its place The plant and parent metaphors stressed ageexperience roots tradition and most importantly the connectionbetween antiquity and value They implied the same distinctions asthose existing between metropolis and frontier parents are moreexperienced more important more substantial less brash than theiroffspring Above all they are the origin and therefore claim the finalauthority in questions of taste and value

But as the extensive literature of the USA developed different

cutting the ground 15

characteristics from that of Britain and established its right to be con-sidered independently the concept of national literary differenceslsquowithinrsquo English writing became established The eventual consequenceof this has been that lsquonewerrsquo literatures from countries such as NigeriaAustralia and India could also be discussed as discrete national forma-tions rather than as lsquobranches of the treersquo Their literatures could beconsidered in relation to the social and political history of each coun-try and could be read as a source of important images of nationalidentity

The development of national literatures and criticism is fundamentalto the whole enterprise of post-colonial studies Without such devel-opments at the national level and without the comparative studiesbetween national traditions to which these lead no discourse of thepost-colonial could have emerged Nor is it simply a matter of devel-opment from one stage to another since all post-colonial studies con-tinue to depend upon national literatures and criticism The study ofnational traditions is the first and most vital stage of the processof rejecting the claims of the centre to exclusivity It is the beginning ofwhat Nigerian writer Wole Soyinka has characterized as the lsquoprocess ofself-apprehensionrsquo (Soyinka 1976 xi) Recent theories of a generalpost-colonial discourse question essentialist formulations which maylead to nationalist and racist orthodoxies but they do not deny thegreat importance of maintaining each literaturersquos sense of specific dif-ference It is this sense of difference which constitutes each nationalliteraturersquos mode of self-apprehension and its claim to be a self-constituting entity However nationalism in which some partial truthor clicheacute is elevated to orthodoxy is a danger implicit in such nationalconceptions of literary production The impetus towards national self-realization in critical assessments of literature all too often fails to stopshort of nationalist myth

Larger geographical models which cross the boundaries of languagenationality or race to generate the concept of a regional literature suchas West Indian or South Pacific literature may also share some of thelimitations of the national model While the idea of an lsquoAfricanrsquo litera-ture for instance has a powerful appeal to writers and critics in thevarious African countries it has only limited application as a descrip-tive label African and European critics have produced several regional

the empire writes back16

and national studies which reflect the widespread political economicand cultural differences between modern African countries (Gurr andCalder 1974 Lindfors 1975 Taiwo 1976 Ogungbesan 1979)

Clearly some regional groupings are more likely to gain acceptancein the regions themselves than are others and will derive from a col-lective identity evident in other ways This is true of the West IndiesAlthough the Federation of the West Indies failed the english-speakingcountries there still field a regional cricket team Both the West Indiesand the South Pacific have regional universities with a significant inputinto literary production and discussion lsquoWest Indianrsquo literature hasalmost always been considered regionally rather than nationally Therehave been no major studies of Jamaican or Trinidadian literatures asdiscrete traditions A different regional grouping emphasizing geo-graphical and historical determinants rather than linguistic ones hasalso developed to explore lsquoCaribbeanrsquo literature setting literature inenglish from the region alongside that written in spanish french andother European languages (Allis 1982)

Despite such variants on the national model most of the englishliteratures outside Britain have been considered as individual nationalenterprises forming and reflecting each countryrsquos culture The inevit-able consequence of this is a gradual blurring of the distinctionbetween the national and the nationalist Nationalism has usuallyincluded a healthy repudiation of British and US hegemony observablein publishing education and the public sponsorship of writing Yet alltoo often nationalist criticism by failing to alter the terms of the dis-course within which it operates has participated implicitly or evenexplicitly in a discourse ultimately controlled by the very imperialpower its nationalist assertion is designed to exclude Emphasis mayhave been transferred to the national literature but the theoreticalassumptions critical perspectives and value judgements made haveoften replicated those of the British establishment

COMPARISONS BETWEEN TWO OR MORE REGIONS

Theories and models of post-colonial literatures could not emergeuntil the separate colonies were viewed in a framework centred ontheir own literary and cultural traditions Victorian Britain had exulted

cutting the ground 17

The Empire Writes Back

lsquo the Empire writes back to the Centre rsquo Salman Rushdie

The experience of colonization and the challenges of a post-colonialworld have produced an explosion of new writing in English Thisdiverse and powerful body of literature has established a specificpractice of post-colonial writing in cultures as various as India Aus-tralia the West Indies and Canada and has challenged both thetraditional canon and dominant ideas of literature and culture

The Empire Writes Back was the first major theoretical account of awide range of post-colonial texts and their relation to the largerissues of post-colonial culture and remains one of the most signifi-cant works published in this field The authors three leading figuresin post-colonial studies open up the debates about the inter-relationships of post-colonial literatures investigate the powerfulforces acting on language in the post-colonial text and show howthese texts constitute a radical critique of Eurocentric notions ofliterature and language

This book is indispensable not only for its incisive analysis but forits accessibility to readers new to the field Now with an additionalchapter and an updated bibliography it is impossible to under-estimate the importance of this book for contemporary post-colonialstudies

Bill Ashcroft teaches at the University of New South Wales Aus-tralia Gareth Griffiths at the University of Albany USA and HelenTiffin at the University of Queensland Australia All three havepublished widely in post-colonial studies and together edited theground-breaking Post-Colonial Studies Reader (1994) and wrote KeyConcepts in Post-Colonial Studies (1998)

IN THE SAME SERIES

Alternative Shakespeares ed John DrakakisAlternative Shakespeares Volume 2 ed Terence HawkesCritical Practice Catherine BelseyDeconstruction Theory and Practice Christopher NorrisDialogue and Difference English for the Nineties ed Peter Brooker

and Peter HummThe Empire Writes Back Theory and Practice in Post-Colonial

Literature Bill Ashcroft Gareth Griffiths and Helen TiffinFantasy The Literature of Subversion Rosemary JacksonDialogism Bakhtin and his World Michael HolquistFormalism and Marxism Tony BennettMaking a Difference Feminist Literary Criticism ed Gayle Green and

Coppeacutelia KahnMetafiction The Theory and Practice of Self-Conscious Fiction

Patricia WaughNarrative Fiction Contemporary Poetics Shlomith Rimmon-KenanOrality and Literacy The Technologizing of the Word Walter J OngThe Politics of Postmodernism Linda HutcheonPost-Colonial Shakespeares ed Ania Loomba and Martin OrkinReading Television John Fiske and John HartleyThe Semiotics of Theatre and Drama Keir ElamSexualTextual Politics Feminist Literary Theory Toril MoiStructuralism and Semiotics Terence HawkesStudying British Cultures An Introduction ed Susan BassnettSubculture The Meaning of Style Dick HebdigeTelling Stories A Theoretical Analysis of Narrative Fiction

Steven Cohan and Linda M ShiresTranslation Studies Susan Bassnett

Bill

AshcroftGareth

GriffithsHelen

TiffinThe Empire Writes Back

Theory and practice in post-colonial literatures

2nd edition

London and New York

First published 1989by Routledge11 New Fetter Lane London EC4P 4EE

Simultaneously published in the USA and Canadaby Routledge29 West 35th Street New York NY 10001

This second edition first published 2002

Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor amp Francis Group

copy 1989 2002 Bill Ashcroft Gareth Griffiths and Helen Tiffin

All rights reserved No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced orutilized in any form or by any electronic mechanical or other means nowknown or hereafter invented including photocopying and recording or inany information storage or retrieval system without permission in writingfrom the publishers

British Library Cataloguing in Publication DataA catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication DataA catalog record for this book has been requested

ISBN 0ndash415ndash28019ndash2 (Hbk)ISBN 0ndash415ndash28020ndash6 (Pbk)

This edition published in the Taylor amp Francis e-Library 2004

ISBN 0-203-42608-8 Master e-book ISBN

ISBN 0-203-44073-0 (Adobe eReader Format)

CONTENTS

General editorrsquos preface ixAcknowledgements xi

Introduction 1What are post-colonial literatures 1Post-colonial literatures and English Studies 2Development of post-colonial literatures 4Hegemony 6Language 7Place and displacement 8Post-coloniality and theory 11

1 Cutting the ground critical models of post-colonialliteratures 14National and regional models 15Comparisons between two or more regions 17The lsquoBlack writingrsquo model 19Wider comparative models 22Models of hybridity and syncreticity 32

2 Re-placing language textual strategies in post-colonial writing 37Abrogation and appropriation 37Language and abrogation 40A post-colonial linguistic theory the Creole continuum 43The metonymic function of language variance 50Strategies of appropriation in post-colonial writing 58

3 Re-placing the text the liberation of post-colonialwriting 77The imperial moment control of the means ofcommunication 78Colonialism and silence Lewis Nkosirsquos Mating Birds 82Colonialism and lsquoauthenticityrsquo VS Naipaulrsquos TheMimic Men 87Abrogating lsquoauthenticityrsquo Michael Anthonyrsquos lsquoSandraStreetrsquo 90Radical Otherness and hybridity Timothy FindleyrsquosNot Wanted on the Voyage 96Appropriating marginality Janet Framersquos The Edge ofthe Alphabet 102Appropriating the frame of power RK Narayanrsquos TheVendor of Sweets 108

4 Theory at the crossroads indigenous theory andpost-colonial reading 115Indian literary theories 116African literary theories 122The settler colonies 131Caribbean theories 144

5 Re-placing theory post-colonial writing and literarytheory 153Post-colonial literatures and postmodernism 153Post-colonial reconstructions literature meaning value 178Post-colonialism as a reading strategy 186

6 Re-thinking the post-colonial post-colonialism inthe twenty first century 193

contentsvi

Who is post-colonial 200Theoretical issues 203Post-colonial futures 209

Conclusion More english than English 220

Readersrsquo guide 223Notes 238Bibliography 246Index 271

contents vii

GENERAL EDITORrsquoS PREFACE

No doubt a third General Editorrsquos Preface to New Accents seems hard tojustify What is there left to say Twenty-five years ago the series beganwith a very clear purpose Its major concern was the newly perplexedworld of academic literary studies where hectic monsters called lsquoThe-oryrsquo lsquoLinguisticsrsquo and lsquoPoliticsrsquo ranged In particular it aimed itself atthose undergraduates or beginning postgraduate students who wereeither learning to come to terms with the new developments or werebeing sternly warned against them

New Accents deliberately took sides Thus the first Preface spoke darklyin 1977 of lsquoa time of rapid and radical social changersquo of the lsquoerosionof the assumptions and presuppositionsrsquo central to the study of litera-ture lsquoModes and categories inherited from the pastrsquo it announced lsquonolonger seem to fit the reality experienced by a new generationrsquo Theaim of each volume would be to lsquoencourage rather than resist theprocess of changersquo by combining nuts-and-bolts exposition of newideas with clear and detailed explanation of related conceptual devel-opments If mystification (or downright demonization) was theenemy lucidity (with a nod to the compromises inevitably at stakethere) became a friend If a lsquodistinctive discourse of the futurersquobeckoned we wanted at least to be able to understand it

With the apocalypse duly noted the second Preface proceeded

piously to fret over the nature of whatever rough beast might staggerportentously from the rubble lsquoHow can we recognise or deal with thenewrsquo it complained reporting nevertheless the dismaying advance oflsquoa host of barely respectable activities for which we have no reassuringnamesrsquo and promising a programme of wary surveillance at lsquotheboundaries of the precedented and at the limit of the thinkablersquo Itsconclusion lsquothe unthinkable after all is that which covertly shapes ourthoughtsrsquo may rank as a truism But in so far as it offered some sort ofuseable purchase on a world of crumbling certainties it is not to beblushed for

In the circumstances any subsequent and surely final effort canonly modestly look back marvelling that the series is still here and notunreasonably congratulating itself on having provided an initial outletfor what turned over the years into some of the distinctive voices andtopics in literary studies But the volumes now re-presented have morethan a mere historical interest As their authors indicate the issues theyraised are still potent the arguments with which they engaged are stilldisturbing In short we werenrsquot wrong Academic study did changerapidly and radically to match even to help to generate wide reachingsocial changes A new set of discourses was developed to negotiatethose upheavals Nor has the process ceased In our deliquescent worldwhat was unthinkable inside and outside the academy all those yearsago now seems regularly to come to pass

Whether the New Accents volumes provided adequate warning ofmaps for guides to or nudges in the direction of this new terrain isscarcely for me to say Perhaps our best achievement lay in cultivatingthe sense that it was there The only justification for a reluctant thirdattempt at a Preface is the belief that it still is

TERENCE HAWKES

general editorrsquos prefacex

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

For help and generous support we should like to thank our partnersJudy Carolyn and Chris

For generous help in finding material tracing references and gener-ally making this book less inadequate than it remains we want to thankmany people but in particular Alan Lawson David Moody andStephen Slemon

INTRODUCTION

More than three-quarters of the people living in the world today havehad their lives shaped by the experience of colonialism It is easy to seehow important this has been in the political and economic spheres butits general influence on the perceptual frameworks of contemporarypeoples is often less evident Literature offers one of the most import-ant ways in which these new perceptions are expressed and it is in theirwriting and through other arts such as painting sculpture music anddance that the day-to-day realities experienced by colonized peopleshave been most powerfully encoded and so profoundly influential

WHAT ARE POST-COLONIAL LITERATURES

This book is concerned with writing by those peoples formerly colon-ized by Britain though much of what it deals with is of interest andrelevance to countries colonized by other European powers such asFrance Portugal and Spain The semantic basis of the term lsquopost-colonialrsquo might seem to suggest a concern only with the national cul-ture after the departure of the imperial power It has occasionally beenemployed in some earlier work in the area to distinguish between theperiods before and after independence (lsquocolonial periodrsquo andlsquopost-colonial periodrsquo) for example in constructing national literary

histories or in suggesting comparative studies between stages in thosehistories Generally speaking though the term lsquocolonialrsquo has been usedfor the period before independence and a term indicating a nationalwriting such as lsquomodern Canadian writingrsquo or lsquorecent West Indianliteraturersquo has been employed to distinguish the period afterindependence

We use the term lsquopost-colonialrsquo however to cover all the cultureaffected by the imperial process from the moment of colonization tothe present day This is because there is a continuity of preoccupationsthroughout the historical process initiated by European imperialaggression We also suggest that it is most appropriate as the term forthe new cross-cultural criticism which has emerged in recent years andfor the discourse through which this is constituted In this sense thisbook is concerned with the world as it exists during and after theperiod of European imperial domination and the effects of this oncontemporary literatures

So the literatures of African countries Australia Bangladesh CanadaCaribbean countries India Malaysia Malta New Zealand PakistanSingapore South Pacific Island countries and Sri Lanka are all post-colonial literatures The literature of the USA should also be placed inthis category Perhaps because of its current position of power and theneo-colonizing role it has played its post-colonial nature has not beengenerally recognized But its relationship with the metropolitan centreas it evolved over the last two centuries has been paradigmatic for post-colonial literatures everywhere What each of these literatures has incommon beyond their special and distinctive regional characteristics isthat they emerged in their present form out of the experience of colon-ization and asserted themselves by foregrounding the tension with theimperial power and by emphasizing their differences from theassumptions of the imperial centre It is this which makes themdistinctively post-colonial

POST-COLONIAL LITERATURES AND ENGLISH STUDIES

The study of English has always been a densely political and culturalphenomenon a practice in which language and literature have bothbeen called into the service of a profound and embracing nationalism

the empire writes back2

The development of English as a privileged academic subject innineteenth-century Britain ndash finally confirmed by its inclusion in thesyllabuses of Oxford and Cambridge and re-affirmed in the 1921Newbolt Report ndash came about as part of an attempt to replace theClassics at the heart of the intellectual enterprise of nineteenth-centuryhumanistic studies From the beginning proponents of English as adiscipline linked its methodology to that of the Classics with itsemphasis on scholarship philology and historical study ndash the fixing oftexts in historical time and the perpetual search for the determinants ofa single unified and agreed meaning

The historical moment which saw the emergence of lsquoEnglishrsquo as anacademic discipline also produced the nineteenth-century colonialform of imperialism (Batsleer et al 1985 14 19ndash25) Gauri Viswa-nathan has presented strong arguments for relating the lsquoinstitutional-isation and subsequent valorisation of English literary study [to] ashape and an ideological content developed in the colonial contextrsquoand specifically as it developed in India where

British colonial administrators provoked by missionaries on the onehand and fears of native insubordination on the other discovered anally in English literature to support them in maintaining control of thenatives under the guise of a liberal education

(Viswanathan 1987 17)

It can be argued that the study of English and the growth of Empireproceeded from a single ideological climate and that the developmentof the one is intrinsically bound up with the development of the otherboth at the level of simple utility (as propaganda for instance) and atthe unconscious level where it leads to the naturalizing of constructedvalues (eg civilization humanity etc) which conversely establishedlsquosavageryrsquo lsquonativersquo lsquoprimitiversquo as their antitheses and as the object of areforming zeal1

A lsquoprivileging normrsquo was enthroned at the heart of the formation ofEnglish Studies as a template for the denial of the value of the lsquoper-ipheralrsquo the lsquomarginalrsquo the lsquouncanonizedrsquo Literature was made as cen-tral to the cultural enterprise of Empire as the monarchy was to itspolitical formation So when elements of the periphery and margin

introduction 3

threatened the exclusive claims of the centre they were rapidlyincorporated This was a process in Edward Saidrsquos terms of consciousaffiliation proceeding under the guise of filiation (Said 1984) that is amimicry of the centre proceeding from a desire not only to be acceptedbut to be adopted and absorbed It caused those from the periphery toimmerse themselves in the imported culture denying their origins inan attempt to become lsquomore English than the Englishrsquo We seeexamples of this in such writers as Henry James and TS Eliot

As post-colonial societies sought to establish their difference fromBritain the response of those who recognized this complicity betweenlanguage education and cultural incorporation was to break the linkbetween language and literary study by dividing lsquoEnglishrsquo departmentsin universities into separate schools of Linguistics and of Literatureboth of which tended to view their project within a national or inter-national context Ngugirsquos essay lsquoOn the abolition of the Englishdepartmentrsquo (Ngugi 1972) is an illuminating account of the particulararguments involved in Africa John Dockerrsquos essay lsquoThe neocolonialassumption in the university teaching of Englishrsquo (Tiffin 1978 26ndash31) addresses similar problems in the settler colony contextdescribing a situation in which in contrast to Kenya little genuinedecolonization is yet in sight As Dockerrsquos critique makes clear in mostpost-colonial nations (including the West Indies and India) the nexusof power involving literature language and a dominant British culturehas strongly resisted attempts to dismantle it Even after such attemptsbegan to succeed the canonical nature and unquestioned status of theworks of the English literary tradition and the values they incorporatedremained potent in the cultural formation and the ideological institu-tions of education and literature Nevertheless the development of thepost-colonial literatures has necessitated a questioning of many of theassumptions on which the study of lsquoEnglishrsquo was based

DEVELOPMENT OF POST-COLONIAL LITERATURES

Post-colonial literatures developed through several stages which can beseen to correspond to stages both of national or regional consciousnessand of the project of asserting difference from the imperial centreDuring the imperial period writing in the language of the imperial

the empire writes back4

centre is inevitably of course produced by a literate elite whose pri-mary identification is with the colonizing power Thus the first textsproduced in the colonies in the new language are frequently producedby lsquorepresentativesrsquo of the imperial power for example gentrified set-tlers (Wentworthrsquos lsquoAustraliarsquo) travellers and sightseers (FroudersquosOceana and his The English in the West Indies or the travel diaries of MaryKingsley) or the Anglo-Indian and West African administrators sol-diers and lsquoboxwallahsrsquo and even more frequently their memsahibs(volumes of memoirs)

Such texts can never form the basis for an indigenous culture nor canthey be integrated in any way with the culture which already exists inthe countries invaded Despite their detailed reportage of landscapecustom and language they inevitably privilege the centre emphasiz-ing the lsquohomersquo over the lsquonativersquo the lsquometropolitanrsquo over the lsquoprovincialrsquoor lsquocolonialrsquo and so forth At a deeper level their claim to objectivitysimply serves to hide the imperial discourse within which they arecreated That this is true of even the consciously literary works whichemerge from this moment can be illustrated by the poems and storiesof Rudyard Kipling For example in the well-known poem lsquoChristmasin Indiarsquo the evocative description of a Christmas day in the heat ofIndia is contextualized by invoking its absent English counterpartApparently it is only through this absent and enabling signifier that theIndian daily reality can acquire legitimacy as a subject of literarydiscourse

The second stage of production within the evolving discourse of thepost-colonial is the literature produced lsquounder imperial licencersquo bylsquonativesrsquo or lsquooutcastsrsquo for instance the large body of poetry and proseproduced in the nineteenth century by the English educated Indianupper class or African lsquomissionary literaturersquo (eg Thomas MofolorsquosChaka) The producers signify by the very fact of writing in thelanguage of the dominant culture that they have temporarily or per-manently entered a specific and privileged class endowed with thelanguage education and leisure necessary to produce such works TheAustralian novel Ralph Rashleigh now known to have been written by theconvict James Tucker is a case in point Tucker an educated man wroteRashleigh as a lsquospecialrsquo (a privileged convict) whilst working at the penalsettlement at Port Macquarie as storekeeper to the superintendent

introduction 5

Written on government paper with government ink and pens thenovel was clearly produced with the aid and support of the super-intendent Tucker had momentarily gained access to the privilege ofliterature Significantly the moment of privilege did not last and hedied in poverty at the age of fifty-eight at Liverpool asylum in Sydney

It is characteristic of these early post-colonial texts that the potentialfor subversion in their themes cannot be fully realized Although theydeal with such powerful material as the brutality of the convict system(Tuckerrsquos Rashleigh) the historical potency of the supplanted anddenigrated native cultures (Mofolorsquos Chaka) or the existence of a richcultural heritage older and more extensive than that of Europe (any ofmany nineteenth-century Indo-Anglian poets such as Ram Sharma)they are prevented from fully exploring their anti-imperial potentialBoth the available discourse and the material conditions of productionfor literature in these early post-colonial societies restrain this possibil-ity The institution of lsquoLiteraturersquo in the colony is under the directcontrol of the imperial ruling class who alone license the acceptableform and permit the publication and distribution of the resulting workSo texts of this kind come into being within the constraints of adiscourse and the institutional practice of a patronage system whichlimits and undercuts their assertion of a different perspective Thedevelopment of independent literatures depended upon the abrogationof this constraining power and the appropriation of language and writ-ing for new and distinctive usages Such an appropriation is clearly themost significant feature in the emergence of modern post-colonialliteratures (see chs 2 and 3)

HEGEMONY

Why should post-colonial societies continue to engage with theimperial experience Since all the post-colonial societies we discusshave achieved political independence why is the issue of colonialitystill relevant at all This question of why the empire needs to write backto a centre once the imperial structure has been dismantled in politicalterms is an important one Britain like the other dominant colonialpowers of the nineteenth century has been relegated to a relativelyminor place in international affairs In the spheres of politics and

the empire writes back6

economics and increasingly in the vital new area of the mass mediaBritain and the other European imperial powers have been super-seded by the emergent power of the USA Nevertheless through theliterary canon the body of British texts which all too frequently stillacts as a touchstone of taste and value and through RS-English(Received Standard English) which asserts the English of south-eastEngland as a universal norm the weight of antiquity continues todominate cultural production in much of the post-colonial worldThis cultural hegemony has been maintained through canonicalassumptions about literary activity and through attitudes to post-colonial literatures which identify them as isolated national off-shootsof English literature and which therefore relegate them to marginaland subordinate positions More recently as the range and strength ofthese literatures has become undeniable a process of incorporation hasbegun in which employing Eurocentric standards of judgement thecentre has sought to claim those works and writers of which itapproves as British2 In all these respects the parallel between the situ-ation of post-colonial writing and that of feminist writing is striking(see ch 5)

LANGUAGE

One of the main features of imperial oppression is control over lan-guage The imperial education system installs a lsquostandardrsquo version ofthe metropolitan language as the norm and marginalizes all lsquovariantsrsquoas impurities As a character in Mrs Campbell Praedrsquos nineteenth-century Australian novel Policy and Passion puts it lsquoTo be colonial is to talkAustralian slang to be everything that is abominablersquo (CampbellPraed 1881154) Language becomes the medium through which ahierarchical structure of power is perpetuated and the mediumthrough which conceptions of lsquotruthrsquo lsquoorderrsquo and lsquorealityrsquo becomeestablished Such power is rejected in the emergence of an effectivepost-colonial voice For this reason the discussion of post-colonialwriting which follows is largely a discussion of the process by whichthe language with its power and the writing with its signification ofauthority has been wrested from the dominant European culture

In order to focus on the complex ways in which the English

introduction 7

language has been used in these societies and to indicate their ownsense of difference we distinguish in this account between the lsquostand-ardrsquo British English inherited from the empire and the english whichthe language has become in post-colonial countries Though Britishimperialism resulted in the spread of a language English across theglobe the english of Jamaicans is not the english of Canadians Maorisor Kenyans We need to distinguish between what is proposed as astandard code English (the language of the erstwhile imperial centre)and the linguistic code english which has been transformed and sub-verted into several distinctive varieties throughout the world For thisreason the distinction between English and english will be usedthroughout our text as an indication of the various ways in which thelanguage has been employed by different linguistic communities in thepost-colonial world3

The use of these terms asserts the fact that a continuum existsbetween the various linguistic practices which constitute english usagein the modern world Although linguistically the links between Englishand the various post-colonial englishes in use today can be seen asunbroken the political reality is that English sets itself apart from allother lsquolesserrsquo variants and so demands to be interrogated about itsclaim to this special status

In practice the history of this distinction between English and eng-lish has been between the claims of a powerful lsquocentrersquo and a multitudeof intersecting usages designated as lsquoperipheriesrsquo The language ofthese lsquoperipheriesrsquo was shaped by an oppressive discourse of power Yetthey have been the site of some of the most exciting and innovativeliteratures of the modern period and this has at least in part been theresult of the energies uncovered by the political tension between theidea of a normative code and a variety of regional usages

PLACE AND DISPLACEMENT

A major feature of post-colonial literatures is the concern with placeand displacement It is here that the special post-colonial crisis of iden-tity comes into being the concern with the development or recoveryof an effective identifying relationship between self and place Indeedcritics such as D E S Maxwell have made this the defining model of

the empire writes back8

post-coloniality (see ch 1) A valid and active sense of self may havebeen eroded by dislocation resulting from migration the experience ofenslavement transportation or lsquovoluntaryrsquo removal for indenturedlabour Or it may have been destroyed by cultural denigration the con-scious and unconscious oppression of the indigenous personality andculture by a supposedly superior racial or cultural model The dialecticof place and displacement is always a feature of post-colonial societieswhether these have been created by a process of settlement interven-tion or a mixture of the two Beyond their historical and culturaldifferences place displacement and a pervasive concern with themyths of identity and authenticity are a feature common to allpost-colonial literatures in english

The alienation of vision and the crisis in self-image which this dis-placement produces is as frequently found in the accounts of Canadianlsquofree settlersrsquo as of Australian convicts FijianndashIndian or TrinidadianndashIndian indentured labourers West Indian slaves or forcibly colonizedNigerians or Bengalis Although this is pragmatically demonstrablefrom a wide range of texts it is difficult to account for by theorieswhich see this social and linguistic alienation as resulting only fromovertly oppressive forms of colonization such as slavery or conquestAn adequate account of this practice must go beyond the usual categor-ies of social alienation such as masterslave freebonded rulerruledhowever important and widespread these may be in post-colonial cul-tures After all why should the free settler formally unconstrained andtheoretically free to continue in the possession and practice oflsquoEnglishnessrsquo also show clear signs of alienation even within thefirst generation of settlement and manifest a tendency to seek analternative differentiated identity

The most widely shared discursive practice within which this alien-ation can be identified is the construction of lsquoplacersquo The gap whichopens between the experience of place and the language available todescribe it forms a classic and allpervasive feature of post-colonial textsThis gap occurs for those whose language seems inadequate to describea new place for those whose language is systematically destroyed byenslavement and for those whose language has been renderedunprivileged by the imposition of the language of a colonizing powerSome admixture of one or other of these models can describe the

introduction 9

situation of all post-colonial societies In each case a condition of alien-ation is inevitable until the colonizing language has been replaced orappropriated as english

That imperialism results in a profound linguistic alienation isobviously the case in cultures in which a pre-colonial culture is sup-pressed by military conquest or enslavement So for example anIndian writer like Raja Rao or a Nigerian writer such as ChinuaAchebe have needed to transform the language to use it in a differentway in its new context and so as Achebe says quoting James Bald-win make it lsquobear the burdenrsquo of their experience (Achebe 197562) Although Rao and Achebe write from their own place and sohave not suffered a literal geographical displacement they have toovercome an imposed gap resulting from the linguistic displacementof the pre-colonial language by English This process occurs within amore comprehensive discourse of place and displacement in thewider post-colonial context Such alienation is shared by those whosepossession of English is indisputably lsquonativersquo (in the sense of beingpossessed from birth) yet who begin to feel alienated within its prac-tice once its vocabulary categories and codes are felt to beinadequate or inappropriate to describe the fauna the physical andgeographical conditions or the cultural practices they have developedin a new land The Canadian poet Joseph Howe for instance pluckshis picture of a moose from some repository of English nurseryrhyme romanticism

the gay moose in jocund gambol springsCropping the foliage Nature round him flings

(Howe 1874 100)

Such absurdities demonstrate the pressing need these native speakersshare with those colonized peoples who were directly oppressed toescape from the inadequacies and imperial constraints of English as asocial practice They need that is to escape from the implicit body ofassumptions to which English was attached its aesthetic and socialvalues the formal and historically limited constraints of genre and theoppressive political and cultural assertion of metropolitan dominanceof centre over margin (Ngugi 1986) This is not to say that the English

the empire writes back10

language is inherently incapable of accounting for post-colonialexperience but that it needs to develop an lsquoappropriatersquo usage in orderto do so (by becoming a distinct and unique form of english) Theenergizing feature of this displacement is its capacity to interrogate andsubvert the imperial cultural formations

The pressure to develop such a usage manifests itself early in thedevelopment of lsquoenglishrsquo literatures It is therefore arguable that evenbefore the development of a conscious de-colonizing stance theexperience of a new place identifiably different in its physical charac-teristics constrains for instance the new settlers to demand a languagewhich will allow them to express their sense of lsquoOthernessrsquo Landscapeflora and fauna seasons climatic conditions are formally distinguishedfrom the place of origin as homecolony EuropeNew WorldEuropeAntipodes metropolitanprovincial and so on although ofcourse at this stage no effective models exist for expressing this senseof Otherness in a positive and creative way

POST-COLONIALITY AND THEORY

The idea of lsquopost-colonial literary theoryrsquo emerges from the inability ofEuropean theory to deal adequately with the complexities and variedcultural provenance of post-colonial writing European theories them-selves emerge from particular cultural traditions which are hidden byfalse notions of lsquothe universalrsquo Theories of style and genre assump-tions about the universal features of language epistemologies andvalue systems are all radically questioned by the practices of post-colonial writing Post-colonial theory has proceeded from the need toaddress this different practice Indigenous theories have developed toaccommodate the differences within the various cultural traditions aswell as the desire to describe in a comparative way the features sharedacross those traditions

The political and cultural monocentrism of the colonial enterprisewas a natural result of the philosophical traditions of the Europeanworld and the systems of representation which this privilegedNineteenth-century imperial expansion the culmination of the out-ward and dominating thrust of Europeans into the world beyondEurope which began during the early Renaissance was underpinned

introduction 11

in complex ways by these assumptions In the first instance thisproduced practices of cultural subservience characterized by one post-colonial critic as lsquocultural cringersquo (Phillips 1958) Subsequently theemergence of identifiable indigenous theories in reaction to thisformed an important element in the development of specific nationaland regional consciousnesses (see ch 4)

Paradoxically however imperial expansion has had a radicallydestabilizing effect on its own preoccupations and power In pushingthe colonial world to the margins of experience the lsquocentrersquo pushedconsciousness beyond the point at which monocentrism in all spheresof thought could be accepted without question In other words thealienating process which initially served to relegate the post-colonialworld to the lsquomarginrsquo turned upon itself and acted to push that worldthrough a kind of mental barrier into a position from which allexperience could be viewed as uncentred pluralistic and multifari-ous Marginality thus became an unprecedented source of creativeenergy The impetus towards decentring and pluralism has alwaysbeen present in the history of European thought and has reached itslatest development in post-structuralism But the situation of margin-alized societies and cultures enabled them to come to this positionmuch earlier and more directly (Brydon 1984b) These notions areimplicit in post-colonial texts from the imperial period to the presentday

The task of this book is twofold first to identify the range andnature of these post-colonial texts and second to describe the varioustheories which have emerged so far to account for them So in the firstchapter we consider the development of descriptive models of post-colonial writing Since it is not possible to read post-colonial textswithout coming to terms with the ways in which they appropriate anddeploy the material of linguistic culture in the second chapter weoutline the process by which language is captured to form a distinctivediscursive practice In the third chapter we demonstrate throughsymptomatic readings of texts how post-colonial writing interactswith the social and material practices of colonialism One of the majorpurposes of this book is to explain the nature of existing post-colonialtheory and the way in which it interacts with and dismantles some ofthe assumptions of European theory In the fourth chapter we discuss

the empire writes back12

the issues in the development of indigenous post-colonial theories andin the fifth we examine the larger implications of post-coloniality fortheories of language for literary theory and for social and politicalanalysis in general

introduction 13

1CUTTING THE GROUND

Critical models of post-colonialliteratures

As writers and critics became aware of the special character ofpost-colonial texts they saw the need to develop an adequate model toaccount for them Four major models have emerged to date firstlsquonationalrsquo or regional models which emphasize the distinctive featuresof the particular national or regional culture second race-basedmodels which identify certain shared characteristics across variousnational literatures such as the common racial inheritance in litera-tures of the African diaspora addressed by the lsquoBlack writingrsquo modelthird comparative models of varying complexity which seek toaccount for particular linguistic historical and cultural features acrosstwo or more post-colonial literatures fourth more comprehensivecomparative models which argue for features such as hybridity andsyncreticity as constitutive elements of all post-colonial literatures(syncretism is the process by which previously distinct linguistic cat-egories and by extension cultural formations merge into a singlenew form) These models often operate as assumptions within criticalpractice rather than specific and discrete schools of thought in any

discussion of post-colonial writing a number of them may be operat-ing at the same time

NATIONAL AND REGIONAL MODELS

The first post-colonial society to develop a lsquonationalrsquo literature was theUSA The emergence of a distinctive American literature in the lateeighteenth century raised inevitable questions about the relationshipbetween literature and place between literature and nationality andparticularly about the suitability of inherited literary forms Ideas aboutnew kinds of literature were part of the optimistic progression tonationhood because it seemed that this was one of the most potentareas in which to express difference from Britain Writers like CharlesBrockden Brown who attempted to indigenize British forms like thegothic and the sentimental novel soon realized that with the change inlocation and culture it was not possible to import form and conceptwithout radical alteration (Fiedler 1960 Ringe 1966)

In many ways the American experience and its attempts to producea new kind of literature can be seen to be the model for all laterpost-colonial writing1 The first thing it showed was that some ofa post-colonial countryrsquos most deeply held linguistic and cultural traitsdepend upon its relationship with the colonizing power particularlythe defining contrast between European metropolis and lsquofrontierrsquo (seeFussell 1965) Once the American Revolution had forced the questionof separate nationality and the economic and political successes of theemerging nation had begun to be taken for granted American litera-ture as a distinct collection of texts also began to be accepted But it wasaccepted as an offshoot of the lsquoparent treersquo Such organic metaphorsand others like lsquoparentndashchildrsquo and lsquostreamndashtributaryrsquo acted to keep thenew literature in its place The plant and parent metaphors stressed ageexperience roots tradition and most importantly the connectionbetween antiquity and value They implied the same distinctions asthose existing between metropolis and frontier parents are moreexperienced more important more substantial less brash than theiroffspring Above all they are the origin and therefore claim the finalauthority in questions of taste and value

But as the extensive literature of the USA developed different

cutting the ground 15

characteristics from that of Britain and established its right to be con-sidered independently the concept of national literary differenceslsquowithinrsquo English writing became established The eventual consequenceof this has been that lsquonewerrsquo literatures from countries such as NigeriaAustralia and India could also be discussed as discrete national forma-tions rather than as lsquobranches of the treersquo Their literatures could beconsidered in relation to the social and political history of each coun-try and could be read as a source of important images of nationalidentity

The development of national literatures and criticism is fundamentalto the whole enterprise of post-colonial studies Without such devel-opments at the national level and without the comparative studiesbetween national traditions to which these lead no discourse of thepost-colonial could have emerged Nor is it simply a matter of devel-opment from one stage to another since all post-colonial studies con-tinue to depend upon national literatures and criticism The study ofnational traditions is the first and most vital stage of the processof rejecting the claims of the centre to exclusivity It is the beginning ofwhat Nigerian writer Wole Soyinka has characterized as the lsquoprocess ofself-apprehensionrsquo (Soyinka 1976 xi) Recent theories of a generalpost-colonial discourse question essentialist formulations which maylead to nationalist and racist orthodoxies but they do not deny thegreat importance of maintaining each literaturersquos sense of specific dif-ference It is this sense of difference which constitutes each nationalliteraturersquos mode of self-apprehension and its claim to be a self-constituting entity However nationalism in which some partial truthor clicheacute is elevated to orthodoxy is a danger implicit in such nationalconceptions of literary production The impetus towards national self-realization in critical assessments of literature all too often fails to stopshort of nationalist myth

Larger geographical models which cross the boundaries of languagenationality or race to generate the concept of a regional literature suchas West Indian or South Pacific literature may also share some of thelimitations of the national model While the idea of an lsquoAfricanrsquo litera-ture for instance has a powerful appeal to writers and critics in thevarious African countries it has only limited application as a descrip-tive label African and European critics have produced several regional

the empire writes back16

and national studies which reflect the widespread political economicand cultural differences between modern African countries (Gurr andCalder 1974 Lindfors 1975 Taiwo 1976 Ogungbesan 1979)

Clearly some regional groupings are more likely to gain acceptancein the regions themselves than are others and will derive from a col-lective identity evident in other ways This is true of the West IndiesAlthough the Federation of the West Indies failed the english-speakingcountries there still field a regional cricket team Both the West Indiesand the South Pacific have regional universities with a significant inputinto literary production and discussion lsquoWest Indianrsquo literature hasalmost always been considered regionally rather than nationally Therehave been no major studies of Jamaican or Trinidadian literatures asdiscrete traditions A different regional grouping emphasizing geo-graphical and historical determinants rather than linguistic ones hasalso developed to explore lsquoCaribbeanrsquo literature setting literature inenglish from the region alongside that written in spanish french andother European languages (Allis 1982)

Despite such variants on the national model most of the englishliteratures outside Britain have been considered as individual nationalenterprises forming and reflecting each countryrsquos culture The inevit-able consequence of this is a gradual blurring of the distinctionbetween the national and the nationalist Nationalism has usuallyincluded a healthy repudiation of British and US hegemony observablein publishing education and the public sponsorship of writing Yet alltoo often nationalist criticism by failing to alter the terms of the dis-course within which it operates has participated implicitly or evenexplicitly in a discourse ultimately controlled by the very imperialpower its nationalist assertion is designed to exclude Emphasis mayhave been transferred to the national literature but the theoreticalassumptions critical perspectives and value judgements made haveoften replicated those of the British establishment

COMPARISONS BETWEEN TWO OR MORE REGIONS

Theories and models of post-colonial literatures could not emergeuntil the separate colonies were viewed in a framework centred ontheir own literary and cultural traditions Victorian Britain had exulted

cutting the ground 17

IN THE SAME SERIES

Alternative Shakespeares ed John DrakakisAlternative Shakespeares Volume 2 ed Terence HawkesCritical Practice Catherine BelseyDeconstruction Theory and Practice Christopher NorrisDialogue and Difference English for the Nineties ed Peter Brooker

and Peter HummThe Empire Writes Back Theory and Practice in Post-Colonial

Literature Bill Ashcroft Gareth Griffiths and Helen TiffinFantasy The Literature of Subversion Rosemary JacksonDialogism Bakhtin and his World Michael HolquistFormalism and Marxism Tony BennettMaking a Difference Feminist Literary Criticism ed Gayle Green and

Coppeacutelia KahnMetafiction The Theory and Practice of Self-Conscious Fiction

Patricia WaughNarrative Fiction Contemporary Poetics Shlomith Rimmon-KenanOrality and Literacy The Technologizing of the Word Walter J OngThe Politics of Postmodernism Linda HutcheonPost-Colonial Shakespeares ed Ania Loomba and Martin OrkinReading Television John Fiske and John HartleyThe Semiotics of Theatre and Drama Keir ElamSexualTextual Politics Feminist Literary Theory Toril MoiStructuralism and Semiotics Terence HawkesStudying British Cultures An Introduction ed Susan BassnettSubculture The Meaning of Style Dick HebdigeTelling Stories A Theoretical Analysis of Narrative Fiction

Steven Cohan and Linda M ShiresTranslation Studies Susan Bassnett

Bill

AshcroftGareth

GriffithsHelen

TiffinThe Empire Writes Back

Theory and practice in post-colonial literatures

2nd edition

London and New York

First published 1989by Routledge11 New Fetter Lane London EC4P 4EE

Simultaneously published in the USA and Canadaby Routledge29 West 35th Street New York NY 10001

This second edition first published 2002

Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor amp Francis Group

copy 1989 2002 Bill Ashcroft Gareth Griffiths and Helen Tiffin

All rights reserved No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced orutilized in any form or by any electronic mechanical or other means nowknown or hereafter invented including photocopying and recording or inany information storage or retrieval system without permission in writingfrom the publishers

British Library Cataloguing in Publication DataA catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication DataA catalog record for this book has been requested

ISBN 0ndash415ndash28019ndash2 (Hbk)ISBN 0ndash415ndash28020ndash6 (Pbk)

This edition published in the Taylor amp Francis e-Library 2004

ISBN 0-203-42608-8 Master e-book ISBN

ISBN 0-203-44073-0 (Adobe eReader Format)

CONTENTS

General editorrsquos preface ixAcknowledgements xi

Introduction 1What are post-colonial literatures 1Post-colonial literatures and English Studies 2Development of post-colonial literatures 4Hegemony 6Language 7Place and displacement 8Post-coloniality and theory 11

1 Cutting the ground critical models of post-colonialliteratures 14National and regional models 15Comparisons between two or more regions 17The lsquoBlack writingrsquo model 19Wider comparative models 22Models of hybridity and syncreticity 32

2 Re-placing language textual strategies in post-colonial writing 37Abrogation and appropriation 37Language and abrogation 40A post-colonial linguistic theory the Creole continuum 43The metonymic function of language variance 50Strategies of appropriation in post-colonial writing 58

3 Re-placing the text the liberation of post-colonialwriting 77The imperial moment control of the means ofcommunication 78Colonialism and silence Lewis Nkosirsquos Mating Birds 82Colonialism and lsquoauthenticityrsquo VS Naipaulrsquos TheMimic Men 87Abrogating lsquoauthenticityrsquo Michael Anthonyrsquos lsquoSandraStreetrsquo 90Radical Otherness and hybridity Timothy FindleyrsquosNot Wanted on the Voyage 96Appropriating marginality Janet Framersquos The Edge ofthe Alphabet 102Appropriating the frame of power RK Narayanrsquos TheVendor of Sweets 108

4 Theory at the crossroads indigenous theory andpost-colonial reading 115Indian literary theories 116African literary theories 122The settler colonies 131Caribbean theories 144

5 Re-placing theory post-colonial writing and literarytheory 153Post-colonial literatures and postmodernism 153Post-colonial reconstructions literature meaning value 178Post-colonialism as a reading strategy 186

6 Re-thinking the post-colonial post-colonialism inthe twenty first century 193

contentsvi

Who is post-colonial 200Theoretical issues 203Post-colonial futures 209

Conclusion More english than English 220

Readersrsquo guide 223Notes 238Bibliography 246Index 271

contents vii

GENERAL EDITORrsquoS PREFACE

No doubt a third General Editorrsquos Preface to New Accents seems hard tojustify What is there left to say Twenty-five years ago the series beganwith a very clear purpose Its major concern was the newly perplexedworld of academic literary studies where hectic monsters called lsquoThe-oryrsquo lsquoLinguisticsrsquo and lsquoPoliticsrsquo ranged In particular it aimed itself atthose undergraduates or beginning postgraduate students who wereeither learning to come to terms with the new developments or werebeing sternly warned against them

New Accents deliberately took sides Thus the first Preface spoke darklyin 1977 of lsquoa time of rapid and radical social changersquo of the lsquoerosionof the assumptions and presuppositionsrsquo central to the study of litera-ture lsquoModes and categories inherited from the pastrsquo it announced lsquonolonger seem to fit the reality experienced by a new generationrsquo Theaim of each volume would be to lsquoencourage rather than resist theprocess of changersquo by combining nuts-and-bolts exposition of newideas with clear and detailed explanation of related conceptual devel-opments If mystification (or downright demonization) was theenemy lucidity (with a nod to the compromises inevitably at stakethere) became a friend If a lsquodistinctive discourse of the futurersquobeckoned we wanted at least to be able to understand it

With the apocalypse duly noted the second Preface proceeded

piously to fret over the nature of whatever rough beast might staggerportentously from the rubble lsquoHow can we recognise or deal with thenewrsquo it complained reporting nevertheless the dismaying advance oflsquoa host of barely respectable activities for which we have no reassuringnamesrsquo and promising a programme of wary surveillance at lsquotheboundaries of the precedented and at the limit of the thinkablersquo Itsconclusion lsquothe unthinkable after all is that which covertly shapes ourthoughtsrsquo may rank as a truism But in so far as it offered some sort ofuseable purchase on a world of crumbling certainties it is not to beblushed for

In the circumstances any subsequent and surely final effort canonly modestly look back marvelling that the series is still here and notunreasonably congratulating itself on having provided an initial outletfor what turned over the years into some of the distinctive voices andtopics in literary studies But the volumes now re-presented have morethan a mere historical interest As their authors indicate the issues theyraised are still potent the arguments with which they engaged are stilldisturbing In short we werenrsquot wrong Academic study did changerapidly and radically to match even to help to generate wide reachingsocial changes A new set of discourses was developed to negotiatethose upheavals Nor has the process ceased In our deliquescent worldwhat was unthinkable inside and outside the academy all those yearsago now seems regularly to come to pass

Whether the New Accents volumes provided adequate warning ofmaps for guides to or nudges in the direction of this new terrain isscarcely for me to say Perhaps our best achievement lay in cultivatingthe sense that it was there The only justification for a reluctant thirdattempt at a Preface is the belief that it still is

TERENCE HAWKES

general editorrsquos prefacex

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

For help and generous support we should like to thank our partnersJudy Carolyn and Chris

For generous help in finding material tracing references and gener-ally making this book less inadequate than it remains we want to thankmany people but in particular Alan Lawson David Moody andStephen Slemon

INTRODUCTION

More than three-quarters of the people living in the world today havehad their lives shaped by the experience of colonialism It is easy to seehow important this has been in the political and economic spheres butits general influence on the perceptual frameworks of contemporarypeoples is often less evident Literature offers one of the most import-ant ways in which these new perceptions are expressed and it is in theirwriting and through other arts such as painting sculpture music anddance that the day-to-day realities experienced by colonized peopleshave been most powerfully encoded and so profoundly influential

WHAT ARE POST-COLONIAL LITERATURES

This book is concerned with writing by those peoples formerly colon-ized by Britain though much of what it deals with is of interest andrelevance to countries colonized by other European powers such asFrance Portugal and Spain The semantic basis of the term lsquopost-colonialrsquo might seem to suggest a concern only with the national cul-ture after the departure of the imperial power It has occasionally beenemployed in some earlier work in the area to distinguish between theperiods before and after independence (lsquocolonial periodrsquo andlsquopost-colonial periodrsquo) for example in constructing national literary

histories or in suggesting comparative studies between stages in thosehistories Generally speaking though the term lsquocolonialrsquo has been usedfor the period before independence and a term indicating a nationalwriting such as lsquomodern Canadian writingrsquo or lsquorecent West Indianliteraturersquo has been employed to distinguish the period afterindependence

We use the term lsquopost-colonialrsquo however to cover all the cultureaffected by the imperial process from the moment of colonization tothe present day This is because there is a continuity of preoccupationsthroughout the historical process initiated by European imperialaggression We also suggest that it is most appropriate as the term forthe new cross-cultural criticism which has emerged in recent years andfor the discourse through which this is constituted In this sense thisbook is concerned with the world as it exists during and after theperiod of European imperial domination and the effects of this oncontemporary literatures

So the literatures of African countries Australia Bangladesh CanadaCaribbean countries India Malaysia Malta New Zealand PakistanSingapore South Pacific Island countries and Sri Lanka are all post-colonial literatures The literature of the USA should also be placed inthis category Perhaps because of its current position of power and theneo-colonizing role it has played its post-colonial nature has not beengenerally recognized But its relationship with the metropolitan centreas it evolved over the last two centuries has been paradigmatic for post-colonial literatures everywhere What each of these literatures has incommon beyond their special and distinctive regional characteristics isthat they emerged in their present form out of the experience of colon-ization and asserted themselves by foregrounding the tension with theimperial power and by emphasizing their differences from theassumptions of the imperial centre It is this which makes themdistinctively post-colonial

POST-COLONIAL LITERATURES AND ENGLISH STUDIES

The study of English has always been a densely political and culturalphenomenon a practice in which language and literature have bothbeen called into the service of a profound and embracing nationalism

the empire writes back2

The development of English as a privileged academic subject innineteenth-century Britain ndash finally confirmed by its inclusion in thesyllabuses of Oxford and Cambridge and re-affirmed in the 1921Newbolt Report ndash came about as part of an attempt to replace theClassics at the heart of the intellectual enterprise of nineteenth-centuryhumanistic studies From the beginning proponents of English as adiscipline linked its methodology to that of the Classics with itsemphasis on scholarship philology and historical study ndash the fixing oftexts in historical time and the perpetual search for the determinants ofa single unified and agreed meaning

The historical moment which saw the emergence of lsquoEnglishrsquo as anacademic discipline also produced the nineteenth-century colonialform of imperialism (Batsleer et al 1985 14 19ndash25) Gauri Viswa-nathan has presented strong arguments for relating the lsquoinstitutional-isation and subsequent valorisation of English literary study [to] ashape and an ideological content developed in the colonial contextrsquoand specifically as it developed in India where

British colonial administrators provoked by missionaries on the onehand and fears of native insubordination on the other discovered anally in English literature to support them in maintaining control of thenatives under the guise of a liberal education

(Viswanathan 1987 17)

It can be argued that the study of English and the growth of Empireproceeded from a single ideological climate and that the developmentof the one is intrinsically bound up with the development of the otherboth at the level of simple utility (as propaganda for instance) and atthe unconscious level where it leads to the naturalizing of constructedvalues (eg civilization humanity etc) which conversely establishedlsquosavageryrsquo lsquonativersquo lsquoprimitiversquo as their antitheses and as the object of areforming zeal1

A lsquoprivileging normrsquo was enthroned at the heart of the formation ofEnglish Studies as a template for the denial of the value of the lsquoper-ipheralrsquo the lsquomarginalrsquo the lsquouncanonizedrsquo Literature was made as cen-tral to the cultural enterprise of Empire as the monarchy was to itspolitical formation So when elements of the periphery and margin

introduction 3

threatened the exclusive claims of the centre they were rapidlyincorporated This was a process in Edward Saidrsquos terms of consciousaffiliation proceeding under the guise of filiation (Said 1984) that is amimicry of the centre proceeding from a desire not only to be acceptedbut to be adopted and absorbed It caused those from the periphery toimmerse themselves in the imported culture denying their origins inan attempt to become lsquomore English than the Englishrsquo We seeexamples of this in such writers as Henry James and TS Eliot

As post-colonial societies sought to establish their difference fromBritain the response of those who recognized this complicity betweenlanguage education and cultural incorporation was to break the linkbetween language and literary study by dividing lsquoEnglishrsquo departmentsin universities into separate schools of Linguistics and of Literatureboth of which tended to view their project within a national or inter-national context Ngugirsquos essay lsquoOn the abolition of the Englishdepartmentrsquo (Ngugi 1972) is an illuminating account of the particulararguments involved in Africa John Dockerrsquos essay lsquoThe neocolonialassumption in the university teaching of Englishrsquo (Tiffin 1978 26ndash31) addresses similar problems in the settler colony contextdescribing a situation in which in contrast to Kenya little genuinedecolonization is yet in sight As Dockerrsquos critique makes clear in mostpost-colonial nations (including the West Indies and India) the nexusof power involving literature language and a dominant British culturehas strongly resisted attempts to dismantle it Even after such attemptsbegan to succeed the canonical nature and unquestioned status of theworks of the English literary tradition and the values they incorporatedremained potent in the cultural formation and the ideological institu-tions of education and literature Nevertheless the development of thepost-colonial literatures has necessitated a questioning of many of theassumptions on which the study of lsquoEnglishrsquo was based

DEVELOPMENT OF POST-COLONIAL LITERATURES

Post-colonial literatures developed through several stages which can beseen to correspond to stages both of national or regional consciousnessand of the project of asserting difference from the imperial centreDuring the imperial period writing in the language of the imperial

the empire writes back4

centre is inevitably of course produced by a literate elite whose pri-mary identification is with the colonizing power Thus the first textsproduced in the colonies in the new language are frequently producedby lsquorepresentativesrsquo of the imperial power for example gentrified set-tlers (Wentworthrsquos lsquoAustraliarsquo) travellers and sightseers (FroudersquosOceana and his The English in the West Indies or the travel diaries of MaryKingsley) or the Anglo-Indian and West African administrators sol-diers and lsquoboxwallahsrsquo and even more frequently their memsahibs(volumes of memoirs)

Such texts can never form the basis for an indigenous culture nor canthey be integrated in any way with the culture which already exists inthe countries invaded Despite their detailed reportage of landscapecustom and language they inevitably privilege the centre emphasiz-ing the lsquohomersquo over the lsquonativersquo the lsquometropolitanrsquo over the lsquoprovincialrsquoor lsquocolonialrsquo and so forth At a deeper level their claim to objectivitysimply serves to hide the imperial discourse within which they arecreated That this is true of even the consciously literary works whichemerge from this moment can be illustrated by the poems and storiesof Rudyard Kipling For example in the well-known poem lsquoChristmasin Indiarsquo the evocative description of a Christmas day in the heat ofIndia is contextualized by invoking its absent English counterpartApparently it is only through this absent and enabling signifier that theIndian daily reality can acquire legitimacy as a subject of literarydiscourse

The second stage of production within the evolving discourse of thepost-colonial is the literature produced lsquounder imperial licencersquo bylsquonativesrsquo or lsquooutcastsrsquo for instance the large body of poetry and proseproduced in the nineteenth century by the English educated Indianupper class or African lsquomissionary literaturersquo (eg Thomas MofolorsquosChaka) The producers signify by the very fact of writing in thelanguage of the dominant culture that they have temporarily or per-manently entered a specific and privileged class endowed with thelanguage education and leisure necessary to produce such works TheAustralian novel Ralph Rashleigh now known to have been written by theconvict James Tucker is a case in point Tucker an educated man wroteRashleigh as a lsquospecialrsquo (a privileged convict) whilst working at the penalsettlement at Port Macquarie as storekeeper to the superintendent

introduction 5

Written on government paper with government ink and pens thenovel was clearly produced with the aid and support of the super-intendent Tucker had momentarily gained access to the privilege ofliterature Significantly the moment of privilege did not last and hedied in poverty at the age of fifty-eight at Liverpool asylum in Sydney

It is characteristic of these early post-colonial texts that the potentialfor subversion in their themes cannot be fully realized Although theydeal with such powerful material as the brutality of the convict system(Tuckerrsquos Rashleigh) the historical potency of the supplanted anddenigrated native cultures (Mofolorsquos Chaka) or the existence of a richcultural heritage older and more extensive than that of Europe (any ofmany nineteenth-century Indo-Anglian poets such as Ram Sharma)they are prevented from fully exploring their anti-imperial potentialBoth the available discourse and the material conditions of productionfor literature in these early post-colonial societies restrain this possibil-ity The institution of lsquoLiteraturersquo in the colony is under the directcontrol of the imperial ruling class who alone license the acceptableform and permit the publication and distribution of the resulting workSo texts of this kind come into being within the constraints of adiscourse and the institutional practice of a patronage system whichlimits and undercuts their assertion of a different perspective Thedevelopment of independent literatures depended upon the abrogationof this constraining power and the appropriation of language and writ-ing for new and distinctive usages Such an appropriation is clearly themost significant feature in the emergence of modern post-colonialliteratures (see chs 2 and 3)

HEGEMONY

Why should post-colonial societies continue to engage with theimperial experience Since all the post-colonial societies we discusshave achieved political independence why is the issue of colonialitystill relevant at all This question of why the empire needs to write backto a centre once the imperial structure has been dismantled in politicalterms is an important one Britain like the other dominant colonialpowers of the nineteenth century has been relegated to a relativelyminor place in international affairs In the spheres of politics and

the empire writes back6

economics and increasingly in the vital new area of the mass mediaBritain and the other European imperial powers have been super-seded by the emergent power of the USA Nevertheless through theliterary canon the body of British texts which all too frequently stillacts as a touchstone of taste and value and through RS-English(Received Standard English) which asserts the English of south-eastEngland as a universal norm the weight of antiquity continues todominate cultural production in much of the post-colonial worldThis cultural hegemony has been maintained through canonicalassumptions about literary activity and through attitudes to post-colonial literatures which identify them as isolated national off-shootsof English literature and which therefore relegate them to marginaland subordinate positions More recently as the range and strength ofthese literatures has become undeniable a process of incorporation hasbegun in which employing Eurocentric standards of judgement thecentre has sought to claim those works and writers of which itapproves as British2 In all these respects the parallel between the situ-ation of post-colonial writing and that of feminist writing is striking(see ch 5)

LANGUAGE

One of the main features of imperial oppression is control over lan-guage The imperial education system installs a lsquostandardrsquo version ofthe metropolitan language as the norm and marginalizes all lsquovariantsrsquoas impurities As a character in Mrs Campbell Praedrsquos nineteenth-century Australian novel Policy and Passion puts it lsquoTo be colonial is to talkAustralian slang to be everything that is abominablersquo (CampbellPraed 1881154) Language becomes the medium through which ahierarchical structure of power is perpetuated and the mediumthrough which conceptions of lsquotruthrsquo lsquoorderrsquo and lsquorealityrsquo becomeestablished Such power is rejected in the emergence of an effectivepost-colonial voice For this reason the discussion of post-colonialwriting which follows is largely a discussion of the process by whichthe language with its power and the writing with its signification ofauthority has been wrested from the dominant European culture

In order to focus on the complex ways in which the English

introduction 7

language has been used in these societies and to indicate their ownsense of difference we distinguish in this account between the lsquostand-ardrsquo British English inherited from the empire and the english whichthe language has become in post-colonial countries Though Britishimperialism resulted in the spread of a language English across theglobe the english of Jamaicans is not the english of Canadians Maorisor Kenyans We need to distinguish between what is proposed as astandard code English (the language of the erstwhile imperial centre)and the linguistic code english which has been transformed and sub-verted into several distinctive varieties throughout the world For thisreason the distinction between English and english will be usedthroughout our text as an indication of the various ways in which thelanguage has been employed by different linguistic communities in thepost-colonial world3

The use of these terms asserts the fact that a continuum existsbetween the various linguistic practices which constitute english usagein the modern world Although linguistically the links between Englishand the various post-colonial englishes in use today can be seen asunbroken the political reality is that English sets itself apart from allother lsquolesserrsquo variants and so demands to be interrogated about itsclaim to this special status

In practice the history of this distinction between English and eng-lish has been between the claims of a powerful lsquocentrersquo and a multitudeof intersecting usages designated as lsquoperipheriesrsquo The language ofthese lsquoperipheriesrsquo was shaped by an oppressive discourse of power Yetthey have been the site of some of the most exciting and innovativeliteratures of the modern period and this has at least in part been theresult of the energies uncovered by the political tension between theidea of a normative code and a variety of regional usages

PLACE AND DISPLACEMENT

A major feature of post-colonial literatures is the concern with placeand displacement It is here that the special post-colonial crisis of iden-tity comes into being the concern with the development or recoveryof an effective identifying relationship between self and place Indeedcritics such as D E S Maxwell have made this the defining model of

the empire writes back8

post-coloniality (see ch 1) A valid and active sense of self may havebeen eroded by dislocation resulting from migration the experience ofenslavement transportation or lsquovoluntaryrsquo removal for indenturedlabour Or it may have been destroyed by cultural denigration the con-scious and unconscious oppression of the indigenous personality andculture by a supposedly superior racial or cultural model The dialecticof place and displacement is always a feature of post-colonial societieswhether these have been created by a process of settlement interven-tion or a mixture of the two Beyond their historical and culturaldifferences place displacement and a pervasive concern with themyths of identity and authenticity are a feature common to allpost-colonial literatures in english

The alienation of vision and the crisis in self-image which this dis-placement produces is as frequently found in the accounts of Canadianlsquofree settlersrsquo as of Australian convicts FijianndashIndian or TrinidadianndashIndian indentured labourers West Indian slaves or forcibly colonizedNigerians or Bengalis Although this is pragmatically demonstrablefrom a wide range of texts it is difficult to account for by theorieswhich see this social and linguistic alienation as resulting only fromovertly oppressive forms of colonization such as slavery or conquestAn adequate account of this practice must go beyond the usual categor-ies of social alienation such as masterslave freebonded rulerruledhowever important and widespread these may be in post-colonial cul-tures After all why should the free settler formally unconstrained andtheoretically free to continue in the possession and practice oflsquoEnglishnessrsquo also show clear signs of alienation even within thefirst generation of settlement and manifest a tendency to seek analternative differentiated identity

The most widely shared discursive practice within which this alien-ation can be identified is the construction of lsquoplacersquo The gap whichopens between the experience of place and the language available todescribe it forms a classic and allpervasive feature of post-colonial textsThis gap occurs for those whose language seems inadequate to describea new place for those whose language is systematically destroyed byenslavement and for those whose language has been renderedunprivileged by the imposition of the language of a colonizing powerSome admixture of one or other of these models can describe the

introduction 9

situation of all post-colonial societies In each case a condition of alien-ation is inevitable until the colonizing language has been replaced orappropriated as english

That imperialism results in a profound linguistic alienation isobviously the case in cultures in which a pre-colonial culture is sup-pressed by military conquest or enslavement So for example anIndian writer like Raja Rao or a Nigerian writer such as ChinuaAchebe have needed to transform the language to use it in a differentway in its new context and so as Achebe says quoting James Bald-win make it lsquobear the burdenrsquo of their experience (Achebe 197562) Although Rao and Achebe write from their own place and sohave not suffered a literal geographical displacement they have toovercome an imposed gap resulting from the linguistic displacementof the pre-colonial language by English This process occurs within amore comprehensive discourse of place and displacement in thewider post-colonial context Such alienation is shared by those whosepossession of English is indisputably lsquonativersquo (in the sense of beingpossessed from birth) yet who begin to feel alienated within its prac-tice once its vocabulary categories and codes are felt to beinadequate or inappropriate to describe the fauna the physical andgeographical conditions or the cultural practices they have developedin a new land The Canadian poet Joseph Howe for instance pluckshis picture of a moose from some repository of English nurseryrhyme romanticism

the gay moose in jocund gambol springsCropping the foliage Nature round him flings

(Howe 1874 100)

Such absurdities demonstrate the pressing need these native speakersshare with those colonized peoples who were directly oppressed toescape from the inadequacies and imperial constraints of English as asocial practice They need that is to escape from the implicit body ofassumptions to which English was attached its aesthetic and socialvalues the formal and historically limited constraints of genre and theoppressive political and cultural assertion of metropolitan dominanceof centre over margin (Ngugi 1986) This is not to say that the English

the empire writes back10

language is inherently incapable of accounting for post-colonialexperience but that it needs to develop an lsquoappropriatersquo usage in orderto do so (by becoming a distinct and unique form of english) Theenergizing feature of this displacement is its capacity to interrogate andsubvert the imperial cultural formations

The pressure to develop such a usage manifests itself early in thedevelopment of lsquoenglishrsquo literatures It is therefore arguable that evenbefore the development of a conscious de-colonizing stance theexperience of a new place identifiably different in its physical charac-teristics constrains for instance the new settlers to demand a languagewhich will allow them to express their sense of lsquoOthernessrsquo Landscapeflora and fauna seasons climatic conditions are formally distinguishedfrom the place of origin as homecolony EuropeNew WorldEuropeAntipodes metropolitanprovincial and so on although ofcourse at this stage no effective models exist for expressing this senseof Otherness in a positive and creative way

POST-COLONIALITY AND THEORY

The idea of lsquopost-colonial literary theoryrsquo emerges from the inability ofEuropean theory to deal adequately with the complexities and variedcultural provenance of post-colonial writing European theories them-selves emerge from particular cultural traditions which are hidden byfalse notions of lsquothe universalrsquo Theories of style and genre assump-tions about the universal features of language epistemologies andvalue systems are all radically questioned by the practices of post-colonial writing Post-colonial theory has proceeded from the need toaddress this different practice Indigenous theories have developed toaccommodate the differences within the various cultural traditions aswell as the desire to describe in a comparative way the features sharedacross those traditions

The political and cultural monocentrism of the colonial enterprisewas a natural result of the philosophical traditions of the Europeanworld and the systems of representation which this privilegedNineteenth-century imperial expansion the culmination of the out-ward and dominating thrust of Europeans into the world beyondEurope which began during the early Renaissance was underpinned

introduction 11

in complex ways by these assumptions In the first instance thisproduced practices of cultural subservience characterized by one post-colonial critic as lsquocultural cringersquo (Phillips 1958) Subsequently theemergence of identifiable indigenous theories in reaction to thisformed an important element in the development of specific nationaland regional consciousnesses (see ch 4)

Paradoxically however imperial expansion has had a radicallydestabilizing effect on its own preoccupations and power In pushingthe colonial world to the margins of experience the lsquocentrersquo pushedconsciousness beyond the point at which monocentrism in all spheresof thought could be accepted without question In other words thealienating process which initially served to relegate the post-colonialworld to the lsquomarginrsquo turned upon itself and acted to push that worldthrough a kind of mental barrier into a position from which allexperience could be viewed as uncentred pluralistic and multifari-ous Marginality thus became an unprecedented source of creativeenergy The impetus towards decentring and pluralism has alwaysbeen present in the history of European thought and has reached itslatest development in post-structuralism But the situation of margin-alized societies and cultures enabled them to come to this positionmuch earlier and more directly (Brydon 1984b) These notions areimplicit in post-colonial texts from the imperial period to the presentday

The task of this book is twofold first to identify the range andnature of these post-colonial texts and second to describe the varioustheories which have emerged so far to account for them So in the firstchapter we consider the development of descriptive models of post-colonial writing Since it is not possible to read post-colonial textswithout coming to terms with the ways in which they appropriate anddeploy the material of linguistic culture in the second chapter weoutline the process by which language is captured to form a distinctivediscursive practice In the third chapter we demonstrate throughsymptomatic readings of texts how post-colonial writing interactswith the social and material practices of colonialism One of the majorpurposes of this book is to explain the nature of existing post-colonialtheory and the way in which it interacts with and dismantles some ofthe assumptions of European theory In the fourth chapter we discuss

the empire writes back12

the issues in the development of indigenous post-colonial theories andin the fifth we examine the larger implications of post-coloniality fortheories of language for literary theory and for social and politicalanalysis in general

introduction 13

1CUTTING THE GROUND

Critical models of post-colonialliteratures

As writers and critics became aware of the special character ofpost-colonial texts they saw the need to develop an adequate model toaccount for them Four major models have emerged to date firstlsquonationalrsquo or regional models which emphasize the distinctive featuresof the particular national or regional culture second race-basedmodels which identify certain shared characteristics across variousnational literatures such as the common racial inheritance in litera-tures of the African diaspora addressed by the lsquoBlack writingrsquo modelthird comparative models of varying complexity which seek toaccount for particular linguistic historical and cultural features acrosstwo or more post-colonial literatures fourth more comprehensivecomparative models which argue for features such as hybridity andsyncreticity as constitutive elements of all post-colonial literatures(syncretism is the process by which previously distinct linguistic cat-egories and by extension cultural formations merge into a singlenew form) These models often operate as assumptions within criticalpractice rather than specific and discrete schools of thought in any

discussion of post-colonial writing a number of them may be operat-ing at the same time

NATIONAL AND REGIONAL MODELS

The first post-colonial society to develop a lsquonationalrsquo literature was theUSA The emergence of a distinctive American literature in the lateeighteenth century raised inevitable questions about the relationshipbetween literature and place between literature and nationality andparticularly about the suitability of inherited literary forms Ideas aboutnew kinds of literature were part of the optimistic progression tonationhood because it seemed that this was one of the most potentareas in which to express difference from Britain Writers like CharlesBrockden Brown who attempted to indigenize British forms like thegothic and the sentimental novel soon realized that with the change inlocation and culture it was not possible to import form and conceptwithout radical alteration (Fiedler 1960 Ringe 1966)

In many ways the American experience and its attempts to producea new kind of literature can be seen to be the model for all laterpost-colonial writing1 The first thing it showed was that some ofa post-colonial countryrsquos most deeply held linguistic and cultural traitsdepend upon its relationship with the colonizing power particularlythe defining contrast between European metropolis and lsquofrontierrsquo (seeFussell 1965) Once the American Revolution had forced the questionof separate nationality and the economic and political successes of theemerging nation had begun to be taken for granted American litera-ture as a distinct collection of texts also began to be accepted But it wasaccepted as an offshoot of the lsquoparent treersquo Such organic metaphorsand others like lsquoparentndashchildrsquo and lsquostreamndashtributaryrsquo acted to keep thenew literature in its place The plant and parent metaphors stressed ageexperience roots tradition and most importantly the connectionbetween antiquity and value They implied the same distinctions asthose existing between metropolis and frontier parents are moreexperienced more important more substantial less brash than theiroffspring Above all they are the origin and therefore claim the finalauthority in questions of taste and value

But as the extensive literature of the USA developed different

cutting the ground 15

characteristics from that of Britain and established its right to be con-sidered independently the concept of national literary differenceslsquowithinrsquo English writing became established The eventual consequenceof this has been that lsquonewerrsquo literatures from countries such as NigeriaAustralia and India could also be discussed as discrete national forma-tions rather than as lsquobranches of the treersquo Their literatures could beconsidered in relation to the social and political history of each coun-try and could be read as a source of important images of nationalidentity

The development of national literatures and criticism is fundamentalto the whole enterprise of post-colonial studies Without such devel-opments at the national level and without the comparative studiesbetween national traditions to which these lead no discourse of thepost-colonial could have emerged Nor is it simply a matter of devel-opment from one stage to another since all post-colonial studies con-tinue to depend upon national literatures and criticism The study ofnational traditions is the first and most vital stage of the processof rejecting the claims of the centre to exclusivity It is the beginning ofwhat Nigerian writer Wole Soyinka has characterized as the lsquoprocess ofself-apprehensionrsquo (Soyinka 1976 xi) Recent theories of a generalpost-colonial discourse question essentialist formulations which maylead to nationalist and racist orthodoxies but they do not deny thegreat importance of maintaining each literaturersquos sense of specific dif-ference It is this sense of difference which constitutes each nationalliteraturersquos mode of self-apprehension and its claim to be a self-constituting entity However nationalism in which some partial truthor clicheacute is elevated to orthodoxy is a danger implicit in such nationalconceptions of literary production The impetus towards national self-realization in critical assessments of literature all too often fails to stopshort of nationalist myth

Larger geographical models which cross the boundaries of languagenationality or race to generate the concept of a regional literature suchas West Indian or South Pacific literature may also share some of thelimitations of the national model While the idea of an lsquoAfricanrsquo litera-ture for instance has a powerful appeal to writers and critics in thevarious African countries it has only limited application as a descrip-tive label African and European critics have produced several regional

the empire writes back16

and national studies which reflect the widespread political economicand cultural differences between modern African countries (Gurr andCalder 1974 Lindfors 1975 Taiwo 1976 Ogungbesan 1979)

Clearly some regional groupings are more likely to gain acceptancein the regions themselves than are others and will derive from a col-lective identity evident in other ways This is true of the West IndiesAlthough the Federation of the West Indies failed the english-speakingcountries there still field a regional cricket team Both the West Indiesand the South Pacific have regional universities with a significant inputinto literary production and discussion lsquoWest Indianrsquo literature hasalmost always been considered regionally rather than nationally Therehave been no major studies of Jamaican or Trinidadian literatures asdiscrete traditions A different regional grouping emphasizing geo-graphical and historical determinants rather than linguistic ones hasalso developed to explore lsquoCaribbeanrsquo literature setting literature inenglish from the region alongside that written in spanish french andother European languages (Allis 1982)

Despite such variants on the national model most of the englishliteratures outside Britain have been considered as individual nationalenterprises forming and reflecting each countryrsquos culture The inevit-able consequence of this is a gradual blurring of the distinctionbetween the national and the nationalist Nationalism has usuallyincluded a healthy repudiation of British and US hegemony observablein publishing education and the public sponsorship of writing Yet alltoo often nationalist criticism by failing to alter the terms of the dis-course within which it operates has participated implicitly or evenexplicitly in a discourse ultimately controlled by the very imperialpower its nationalist assertion is designed to exclude Emphasis mayhave been transferred to the national literature but the theoreticalassumptions critical perspectives and value judgements made haveoften replicated those of the British establishment

COMPARISONS BETWEEN TWO OR MORE REGIONS

Theories and models of post-colonial literatures could not emergeuntil the separate colonies were viewed in a framework centred ontheir own literary and cultural traditions Victorian Britain had exulted

cutting the ground 17

Bill

AshcroftGareth

GriffithsHelen

TiffinThe Empire Writes Back

Theory and practice in post-colonial literatures

2nd edition

London and New York

First published 1989by Routledge11 New Fetter Lane London EC4P 4EE

Simultaneously published in the USA and Canadaby Routledge29 West 35th Street New York NY 10001

This second edition first published 2002

Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor amp Francis Group

copy 1989 2002 Bill Ashcroft Gareth Griffiths and Helen Tiffin

All rights reserved No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced orutilized in any form or by any electronic mechanical or other means nowknown or hereafter invented including photocopying and recording or inany information storage or retrieval system without permission in writingfrom the publishers

British Library Cataloguing in Publication DataA catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication DataA catalog record for this book has been requested

ISBN 0ndash415ndash28019ndash2 (Hbk)ISBN 0ndash415ndash28020ndash6 (Pbk)

This edition published in the Taylor amp Francis e-Library 2004

ISBN 0-203-42608-8 Master e-book ISBN

ISBN 0-203-44073-0 (Adobe eReader Format)

CONTENTS

General editorrsquos preface ixAcknowledgements xi

Introduction 1What are post-colonial literatures 1Post-colonial literatures and English Studies 2Development of post-colonial literatures 4Hegemony 6Language 7Place and displacement 8Post-coloniality and theory 11

1 Cutting the ground critical models of post-colonialliteratures 14National and regional models 15Comparisons between two or more regions 17The lsquoBlack writingrsquo model 19Wider comparative models 22Models of hybridity and syncreticity 32

2 Re-placing language textual strategies in post-colonial writing 37Abrogation and appropriation 37Language and abrogation 40A post-colonial linguistic theory the Creole continuum 43The metonymic function of language variance 50Strategies of appropriation in post-colonial writing 58

3 Re-placing the text the liberation of post-colonialwriting 77The imperial moment control of the means ofcommunication 78Colonialism and silence Lewis Nkosirsquos Mating Birds 82Colonialism and lsquoauthenticityrsquo VS Naipaulrsquos TheMimic Men 87Abrogating lsquoauthenticityrsquo Michael Anthonyrsquos lsquoSandraStreetrsquo 90Radical Otherness and hybridity Timothy FindleyrsquosNot Wanted on the Voyage 96Appropriating marginality Janet Framersquos The Edge ofthe Alphabet 102Appropriating the frame of power RK Narayanrsquos TheVendor of Sweets 108

4 Theory at the crossroads indigenous theory andpost-colonial reading 115Indian literary theories 116African literary theories 122The settler colonies 131Caribbean theories 144

5 Re-placing theory post-colonial writing and literarytheory 153Post-colonial literatures and postmodernism 153Post-colonial reconstructions literature meaning value 178Post-colonialism as a reading strategy 186

6 Re-thinking the post-colonial post-colonialism inthe twenty first century 193

contentsvi

Who is post-colonial 200Theoretical issues 203Post-colonial futures 209

Conclusion More english than English 220

Readersrsquo guide 223Notes 238Bibliography 246Index 271

contents vii

GENERAL EDITORrsquoS PREFACE

No doubt a third General Editorrsquos Preface to New Accents seems hard tojustify What is there left to say Twenty-five years ago the series beganwith a very clear purpose Its major concern was the newly perplexedworld of academic literary studies where hectic monsters called lsquoThe-oryrsquo lsquoLinguisticsrsquo and lsquoPoliticsrsquo ranged In particular it aimed itself atthose undergraduates or beginning postgraduate students who wereeither learning to come to terms with the new developments or werebeing sternly warned against them

New Accents deliberately took sides Thus the first Preface spoke darklyin 1977 of lsquoa time of rapid and radical social changersquo of the lsquoerosionof the assumptions and presuppositionsrsquo central to the study of litera-ture lsquoModes and categories inherited from the pastrsquo it announced lsquonolonger seem to fit the reality experienced by a new generationrsquo Theaim of each volume would be to lsquoencourage rather than resist theprocess of changersquo by combining nuts-and-bolts exposition of newideas with clear and detailed explanation of related conceptual devel-opments If mystification (or downright demonization) was theenemy lucidity (with a nod to the compromises inevitably at stakethere) became a friend If a lsquodistinctive discourse of the futurersquobeckoned we wanted at least to be able to understand it

With the apocalypse duly noted the second Preface proceeded

piously to fret over the nature of whatever rough beast might staggerportentously from the rubble lsquoHow can we recognise or deal with thenewrsquo it complained reporting nevertheless the dismaying advance oflsquoa host of barely respectable activities for which we have no reassuringnamesrsquo and promising a programme of wary surveillance at lsquotheboundaries of the precedented and at the limit of the thinkablersquo Itsconclusion lsquothe unthinkable after all is that which covertly shapes ourthoughtsrsquo may rank as a truism But in so far as it offered some sort ofuseable purchase on a world of crumbling certainties it is not to beblushed for

In the circumstances any subsequent and surely final effort canonly modestly look back marvelling that the series is still here and notunreasonably congratulating itself on having provided an initial outletfor what turned over the years into some of the distinctive voices andtopics in literary studies But the volumes now re-presented have morethan a mere historical interest As their authors indicate the issues theyraised are still potent the arguments with which they engaged are stilldisturbing In short we werenrsquot wrong Academic study did changerapidly and radically to match even to help to generate wide reachingsocial changes A new set of discourses was developed to negotiatethose upheavals Nor has the process ceased In our deliquescent worldwhat was unthinkable inside and outside the academy all those yearsago now seems regularly to come to pass

Whether the New Accents volumes provided adequate warning ofmaps for guides to or nudges in the direction of this new terrain isscarcely for me to say Perhaps our best achievement lay in cultivatingthe sense that it was there The only justification for a reluctant thirdattempt at a Preface is the belief that it still is

TERENCE HAWKES

general editorrsquos prefacex

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

For help and generous support we should like to thank our partnersJudy Carolyn and Chris

For generous help in finding material tracing references and gener-ally making this book less inadequate than it remains we want to thankmany people but in particular Alan Lawson David Moody andStephen Slemon

INTRODUCTION

More than three-quarters of the people living in the world today havehad their lives shaped by the experience of colonialism It is easy to seehow important this has been in the political and economic spheres butits general influence on the perceptual frameworks of contemporarypeoples is often less evident Literature offers one of the most import-ant ways in which these new perceptions are expressed and it is in theirwriting and through other arts such as painting sculpture music anddance that the day-to-day realities experienced by colonized peopleshave been most powerfully encoded and so profoundly influential

WHAT ARE POST-COLONIAL LITERATURES

This book is concerned with writing by those peoples formerly colon-ized by Britain though much of what it deals with is of interest andrelevance to countries colonized by other European powers such asFrance Portugal and Spain The semantic basis of the term lsquopost-colonialrsquo might seem to suggest a concern only with the national cul-ture after the departure of the imperial power It has occasionally beenemployed in some earlier work in the area to distinguish between theperiods before and after independence (lsquocolonial periodrsquo andlsquopost-colonial periodrsquo) for example in constructing national literary

histories or in suggesting comparative studies between stages in thosehistories Generally speaking though the term lsquocolonialrsquo has been usedfor the period before independence and a term indicating a nationalwriting such as lsquomodern Canadian writingrsquo or lsquorecent West Indianliteraturersquo has been employed to distinguish the period afterindependence

We use the term lsquopost-colonialrsquo however to cover all the cultureaffected by the imperial process from the moment of colonization tothe present day This is because there is a continuity of preoccupationsthroughout the historical process initiated by European imperialaggression We also suggest that it is most appropriate as the term forthe new cross-cultural criticism which has emerged in recent years andfor the discourse through which this is constituted In this sense thisbook is concerned with the world as it exists during and after theperiod of European imperial domination and the effects of this oncontemporary literatures

So the literatures of African countries Australia Bangladesh CanadaCaribbean countries India Malaysia Malta New Zealand PakistanSingapore South Pacific Island countries and Sri Lanka are all post-colonial literatures The literature of the USA should also be placed inthis category Perhaps because of its current position of power and theneo-colonizing role it has played its post-colonial nature has not beengenerally recognized But its relationship with the metropolitan centreas it evolved over the last two centuries has been paradigmatic for post-colonial literatures everywhere What each of these literatures has incommon beyond their special and distinctive regional characteristics isthat they emerged in their present form out of the experience of colon-ization and asserted themselves by foregrounding the tension with theimperial power and by emphasizing their differences from theassumptions of the imperial centre It is this which makes themdistinctively post-colonial

POST-COLONIAL LITERATURES AND ENGLISH STUDIES

The study of English has always been a densely political and culturalphenomenon a practice in which language and literature have bothbeen called into the service of a profound and embracing nationalism

the empire writes back2

The development of English as a privileged academic subject innineteenth-century Britain ndash finally confirmed by its inclusion in thesyllabuses of Oxford and Cambridge and re-affirmed in the 1921Newbolt Report ndash came about as part of an attempt to replace theClassics at the heart of the intellectual enterprise of nineteenth-centuryhumanistic studies From the beginning proponents of English as adiscipline linked its methodology to that of the Classics with itsemphasis on scholarship philology and historical study ndash the fixing oftexts in historical time and the perpetual search for the determinants ofa single unified and agreed meaning

The historical moment which saw the emergence of lsquoEnglishrsquo as anacademic discipline also produced the nineteenth-century colonialform of imperialism (Batsleer et al 1985 14 19ndash25) Gauri Viswa-nathan has presented strong arguments for relating the lsquoinstitutional-isation and subsequent valorisation of English literary study [to] ashape and an ideological content developed in the colonial contextrsquoand specifically as it developed in India where

British colonial administrators provoked by missionaries on the onehand and fears of native insubordination on the other discovered anally in English literature to support them in maintaining control of thenatives under the guise of a liberal education

(Viswanathan 1987 17)

It can be argued that the study of English and the growth of Empireproceeded from a single ideological climate and that the developmentof the one is intrinsically bound up with the development of the otherboth at the level of simple utility (as propaganda for instance) and atthe unconscious level where it leads to the naturalizing of constructedvalues (eg civilization humanity etc) which conversely establishedlsquosavageryrsquo lsquonativersquo lsquoprimitiversquo as their antitheses and as the object of areforming zeal1

A lsquoprivileging normrsquo was enthroned at the heart of the formation ofEnglish Studies as a template for the denial of the value of the lsquoper-ipheralrsquo the lsquomarginalrsquo the lsquouncanonizedrsquo Literature was made as cen-tral to the cultural enterprise of Empire as the monarchy was to itspolitical formation So when elements of the periphery and margin

introduction 3

threatened the exclusive claims of the centre they were rapidlyincorporated This was a process in Edward Saidrsquos terms of consciousaffiliation proceeding under the guise of filiation (Said 1984) that is amimicry of the centre proceeding from a desire not only to be acceptedbut to be adopted and absorbed It caused those from the periphery toimmerse themselves in the imported culture denying their origins inan attempt to become lsquomore English than the Englishrsquo We seeexamples of this in such writers as Henry James and TS Eliot

As post-colonial societies sought to establish their difference fromBritain the response of those who recognized this complicity betweenlanguage education and cultural incorporation was to break the linkbetween language and literary study by dividing lsquoEnglishrsquo departmentsin universities into separate schools of Linguistics and of Literatureboth of which tended to view their project within a national or inter-national context Ngugirsquos essay lsquoOn the abolition of the Englishdepartmentrsquo (Ngugi 1972) is an illuminating account of the particulararguments involved in Africa John Dockerrsquos essay lsquoThe neocolonialassumption in the university teaching of Englishrsquo (Tiffin 1978 26ndash31) addresses similar problems in the settler colony contextdescribing a situation in which in contrast to Kenya little genuinedecolonization is yet in sight As Dockerrsquos critique makes clear in mostpost-colonial nations (including the West Indies and India) the nexusof power involving literature language and a dominant British culturehas strongly resisted attempts to dismantle it Even after such attemptsbegan to succeed the canonical nature and unquestioned status of theworks of the English literary tradition and the values they incorporatedremained potent in the cultural formation and the ideological institu-tions of education and literature Nevertheless the development of thepost-colonial literatures has necessitated a questioning of many of theassumptions on which the study of lsquoEnglishrsquo was based

DEVELOPMENT OF POST-COLONIAL LITERATURES

Post-colonial literatures developed through several stages which can beseen to correspond to stages both of national or regional consciousnessand of the project of asserting difference from the imperial centreDuring the imperial period writing in the language of the imperial

the empire writes back4

centre is inevitably of course produced by a literate elite whose pri-mary identification is with the colonizing power Thus the first textsproduced in the colonies in the new language are frequently producedby lsquorepresentativesrsquo of the imperial power for example gentrified set-tlers (Wentworthrsquos lsquoAustraliarsquo) travellers and sightseers (FroudersquosOceana and his The English in the West Indies or the travel diaries of MaryKingsley) or the Anglo-Indian and West African administrators sol-diers and lsquoboxwallahsrsquo and even more frequently their memsahibs(volumes of memoirs)

Such texts can never form the basis for an indigenous culture nor canthey be integrated in any way with the culture which already exists inthe countries invaded Despite their detailed reportage of landscapecustom and language they inevitably privilege the centre emphasiz-ing the lsquohomersquo over the lsquonativersquo the lsquometropolitanrsquo over the lsquoprovincialrsquoor lsquocolonialrsquo and so forth At a deeper level their claim to objectivitysimply serves to hide the imperial discourse within which they arecreated That this is true of even the consciously literary works whichemerge from this moment can be illustrated by the poems and storiesof Rudyard Kipling For example in the well-known poem lsquoChristmasin Indiarsquo the evocative description of a Christmas day in the heat ofIndia is contextualized by invoking its absent English counterpartApparently it is only through this absent and enabling signifier that theIndian daily reality can acquire legitimacy as a subject of literarydiscourse

The second stage of production within the evolving discourse of thepost-colonial is the literature produced lsquounder imperial licencersquo bylsquonativesrsquo or lsquooutcastsrsquo for instance the large body of poetry and proseproduced in the nineteenth century by the English educated Indianupper class or African lsquomissionary literaturersquo (eg Thomas MofolorsquosChaka) The producers signify by the very fact of writing in thelanguage of the dominant culture that they have temporarily or per-manently entered a specific and privileged class endowed with thelanguage education and leisure necessary to produce such works TheAustralian novel Ralph Rashleigh now known to have been written by theconvict James Tucker is a case in point Tucker an educated man wroteRashleigh as a lsquospecialrsquo (a privileged convict) whilst working at the penalsettlement at Port Macquarie as storekeeper to the superintendent

introduction 5

Written on government paper with government ink and pens thenovel was clearly produced with the aid and support of the super-intendent Tucker had momentarily gained access to the privilege ofliterature Significantly the moment of privilege did not last and hedied in poverty at the age of fifty-eight at Liverpool asylum in Sydney

It is characteristic of these early post-colonial texts that the potentialfor subversion in their themes cannot be fully realized Although theydeal with such powerful material as the brutality of the convict system(Tuckerrsquos Rashleigh) the historical potency of the supplanted anddenigrated native cultures (Mofolorsquos Chaka) or the existence of a richcultural heritage older and more extensive than that of Europe (any ofmany nineteenth-century Indo-Anglian poets such as Ram Sharma)they are prevented from fully exploring their anti-imperial potentialBoth the available discourse and the material conditions of productionfor literature in these early post-colonial societies restrain this possibil-ity The institution of lsquoLiteraturersquo in the colony is under the directcontrol of the imperial ruling class who alone license the acceptableform and permit the publication and distribution of the resulting workSo texts of this kind come into being within the constraints of adiscourse and the institutional practice of a patronage system whichlimits and undercuts their assertion of a different perspective Thedevelopment of independent literatures depended upon the abrogationof this constraining power and the appropriation of language and writ-ing for new and distinctive usages Such an appropriation is clearly themost significant feature in the emergence of modern post-colonialliteratures (see chs 2 and 3)

HEGEMONY

Why should post-colonial societies continue to engage with theimperial experience Since all the post-colonial societies we discusshave achieved political independence why is the issue of colonialitystill relevant at all This question of why the empire needs to write backto a centre once the imperial structure has been dismantled in politicalterms is an important one Britain like the other dominant colonialpowers of the nineteenth century has been relegated to a relativelyminor place in international affairs In the spheres of politics and

the empire writes back6

economics and increasingly in the vital new area of the mass mediaBritain and the other European imperial powers have been super-seded by the emergent power of the USA Nevertheless through theliterary canon the body of British texts which all too frequently stillacts as a touchstone of taste and value and through RS-English(Received Standard English) which asserts the English of south-eastEngland as a universal norm the weight of antiquity continues todominate cultural production in much of the post-colonial worldThis cultural hegemony has been maintained through canonicalassumptions about literary activity and through attitudes to post-colonial literatures which identify them as isolated national off-shootsof English literature and which therefore relegate them to marginaland subordinate positions More recently as the range and strength ofthese literatures has become undeniable a process of incorporation hasbegun in which employing Eurocentric standards of judgement thecentre has sought to claim those works and writers of which itapproves as British2 In all these respects the parallel between the situ-ation of post-colonial writing and that of feminist writing is striking(see ch 5)

LANGUAGE

One of the main features of imperial oppression is control over lan-guage The imperial education system installs a lsquostandardrsquo version ofthe metropolitan language as the norm and marginalizes all lsquovariantsrsquoas impurities As a character in Mrs Campbell Praedrsquos nineteenth-century Australian novel Policy and Passion puts it lsquoTo be colonial is to talkAustralian slang to be everything that is abominablersquo (CampbellPraed 1881154) Language becomes the medium through which ahierarchical structure of power is perpetuated and the mediumthrough which conceptions of lsquotruthrsquo lsquoorderrsquo and lsquorealityrsquo becomeestablished Such power is rejected in the emergence of an effectivepost-colonial voice For this reason the discussion of post-colonialwriting which follows is largely a discussion of the process by whichthe language with its power and the writing with its signification ofauthority has been wrested from the dominant European culture

In order to focus on the complex ways in which the English

introduction 7

language has been used in these societies and to indicate their ownsense of difference we distinguish in this account between the lsquostand-ardrsquo British English inherited from the empire and the english whichthe language has become in post-colonial countries Though Britishimperialism resulted in the spread of a language English across theglobe the english of Jamaicans is not the english of Canadians Maorisor Kenyans We need to distinguish between what is proposed as astandard code English (the language of the erstwhile imperial centre)and the linguistic code english which has been transformed and sub-verted into several distinctive varieties throughout the world For thisreason the distinction between English and english will be usedthroughout our text as an indication of the various ways in which thelanguage has been employed by different linguistic communities in thepost-colonial world3

The use of these terms asserts the fact that a continuum existsbetween the various linguistic practices which constitute english usagein the modern world Although linguistically the links between Englishand the various post-colonial englishes in use today can be seen asunbroken the political reality is that English sets itself apart from allother lsquolesserrsquo variants and so demands to be interrogated about itsclaim to this special status

In practice the history of this distinction between English and eng-lish has been between the claims of a powerful lsquocentrersquo and a multitudeof intersecting usages designated as lsquoperipheriesrsquo The language ofthese lsquoperipheriesrsquo was shaped by an oppressive discourse of power Yetthey have been the site of some of the most exciting and innovativeliteratures of the modern period and this has at least in part been theresult of the energies uncovered by the political tension between theidea of a normative code and a variety of regional usages

PLACE AND DISPLACEMENT

A major feature of post-colonial literatures is the concern with placeand displacement It is here that the special post-colonial crisis of iden-tity comes into being the concern with the development or recoveryof an effective identifying relationship between self and place Indeedcritics such as D E S Maxwell have made this the defining model of

the empire writes back8

post-coloniality (see ch 1) A valid and active sense of self may havebeen eroded by dislocation resulting from migration the experience ofenslavement transportation or lsquovoluntaryrsquo removal for indenturedlabour Or it may have been destroyed by cultural denigration the con-scious and unconscious oppression of the indigenous personality andculture by a supposedly superior racial or cultural model The dialecticof place and displacement is always a feature of post-colonial societieswhether these have been created by a process of settlement interven-tion or a mixture of the two Beyond their historical and culturaldifferences place displacement and a pervasive concern with themyths of identity and authenticity are a feature common to allpost-colonial literatures in english

The alienation of vision and the crisis in self-image which this dis-placement produces is as frequently found in the accounts of Canadianlsquofree settlersrsquo as of Australian convicts FijianndashIndian or TrinidadianndashIndian indentured labourers West Indian slaves or forcibly colonizedNigerians or Bengalis Although this is pragmatically demonstrablefrom a wide range of texts it is difficult to account for by theorieswhich see this social and linguistic alienation as resulting only fromovertly oppressive forms of colonization such as slavery or conquestAn adequate account of this practice must go beyond the usual categor-ies of social alienation such as masterslave freebonded rulerruledhowever important and widespread these may be in post-colonial cul-tures After all why should the free settler formally unconstrained andtheoretically free to continue in the possession and practice oflsquoEnglishnessrsquo also show clear signs of alienation even within thefirst generation of settlement and manifest a tendency to seek analternative differentiated identity

The most widely shared discursive practice within which this alien-ation can be identified is the construction of lsquoplacersquo The gap whichopens between the experience of place and the language available todescribe it forms a classic and allpervasive feature of post-colonial textsThis gap occurs for those whose language seems inadequate to describea new place for those whose language is systematically destroyed byenslavement and for those whose language has been renderedunprivileged by the imposition of the language of a colonizing powerSome admixture of one or other of these models can describe the

introduction 9

situation of all post-colonial societies In each case a condition of alien-ation is inevitable until the colonizing language has been replaced orappropriated as english

That imperialism results in a profound linguistic alienation isobviously the case in cultures in which a pre-colonial culture is sup-pressed by military conquest or enslavement So for example anIndian writer like Raja Rao or a Nigerian writer such as ChinuaAchebe have needed to transform the language to use it in a differentway in its new context and so as Achebe says quoting James Bald-win make it lsquobear the burdenrsquo of their experience (Achebe 197562) Although Rao and Achebe write from their own place and sohave not suffered a literal geographical displacement they have toovercome an imposed gap resulting from the linguistic displacementof the pre-colonial language by English This process occurs within amore comprehensive discourse of place and displacement in thewider post-colonial context Such alienation is shared by those whosepossession of English is indisputably lsquonativersquo (in the sense of beingpossessed from birth) yet who begin to feel alienated within its prac-tice once its vocabulary categories and codes are felt to beinadequate or inappropriate to describe the fauna the physical andgeographical conditions or the cultural practices they have developedin a new land The Canadian poet Joseph Howe for instance pluckshis picture of a moose from some repository of English nurseryrhyme romanticism

the gay moose in jocund gambol springsCropping the foliage Nature round him flings

(Howe 1874 100)

Such absurdities demonstrate the pressing need these native speakersshare with those colonized peoples who were directly oppressed toescape from the inadequacies and imperial constraints of English as asocial practice They need that is to escape from the implicit body ofassumptions to which English was attached its aesthetic and socialvalues the formal and historically limited constraints of genre and theoppressive political and cultural assertion of metropolitan dominanceof centre over margin (Ngugi 1986) This is not to say that the English

the empire writes back10

language is inherently incapable of accounting for post-colonialexperience but that it needs to develop an lsquoappropriatersquo usage in orderto do so (by becoming a distinct and unique form of english) Theenergizing feature of this displacement is its capacity to interrogate andsubvert the imperial cultural formations

The pressure to develop such a usage manifests itself early in thedevelopment of lsquoenglishrsquo literatures It is therefore arguable that evenbefore the development of a conscious de-colonizing stance theexperience of a new place identifiably different in its physical charac-teristics constrains for instance the new settlers to demand a languagewhich will allow them to express their sense of lsquoOthernessrsquo Landscapeflora and fauna seasons climatic conditions are formally distinguishedfrom the place of origin as homecolony EuropeNew WorldEuropeAntipodes metropolitanprovincial and so on although ofcourse at this stage no effective models exist for expressing this senseof Otherness in a positive and creative way

POST-COLONIALITY AND THEORY

The idea of lsquopost-colonial literary theoryrsquo emerges from the inability ofEuropean theory to deal adequately with the complexities and variedcultural provenance of post-colonial writing European theories them-selves emerge from particular cultural traditions which are hidden byfalse notions of lsquothe universalrsquo Theories of style and genre assump-tions about the universal features of language epistemologies andvalue systems are all radically questioned by the practices of post-colonial writing Post-colonial theory has proceeded from the need toaddress this different practice Indigenous theories have developed toaccommodate the differences within the various cultural traditions aswell as the desire to describe in a comparative way the features sharedacross those traditions

The political and cultural monocentrism of the colonial enterprisewas a natural result of the philosophical traditions of the Europeanworld and the systems of representation which this privilegedNineteenth-century imperial expansion the culmination of the out-ward and dominating thrust of Europeans into the world beyondEurope which began during the early Renaissance was underpinned

introduction 11

in complex ways by these assumptions In the first instance thisproduced practices of cultural subservience characterized by one post-colonial critic as lsquocultural cringersquo (Phillips 1958) Subsequently theemergence of identifiable indigenous theories in reaction to thisformed an important element in the development of specific nationaland regional consciousnesses (see ch 4)

Paradoxically however imperial expansion has had a radicallydestabilizing effect on its own preoccupations and power In pushingthe colonial world to the margins of experience the lsquocentrersquo pushedconsciousness beyond the point at which monocentrism in all spheresof thought could be accepted without question In other words thealienating process which initially served to relegate the post-colonialworld to the lsquomarginrsquo turned upon itself and acted to push that worldthrough a kind of mental barrier into a position from which allexperience could be viewed as uncentred pluralistic and multifari-ous Marginality thus became an unprecedented source of creativeenergy The impetus towards decentring and pluralism has alwaysbeen present in the history of European thought and has reached itslatest development in post-structuralism But the situation of margin-alized societies and cultures enabled them to come to this positionmuch earlier and more directly (Brydon 1984b) These notions areimplicit in post-colonial texts from the imperial period to the presentday

The task of this book is twofold first to identify the range andnature of these post-colonial texts and second to describe the varioustheories which have emerged so far to account for them So in the firstchapter we consider the development of descriptive models of post-colonial writing Since it is not possible to read post-colonial textswithout coming to terms with the ways in which they appropriate anddeploy the material of linguistic culture in the second chapter weoutline the process by which language is captured to form a distinctivediscursive practice In the third chapter we demonstrate throughsymptomatic readings of texts how post-colonial writing interactswith the social and material practices of colonialism One of the majorpurposes of this book is to explain the nature of existing post-colonialtheory and the way in which it interacts with and dismantles some ofthe assumptions of European theory In the fourth chapter we discuss

the empire writes back12

the issues in the development of indigenous post-colonial theories andin the fifth we examine the larger implications of post-coloniality fortheories of language for literary theory and for social and politicalanalysis in general

introduction 13

1CUTTING THE GROUND

Critical models of post-colonialliteratures

As writers and critics became aware of the special character ofpost-colonial texts they saw the need to develop an adequate model toaccount for them Four major models have emerged to date firstlsquonationalrsquo or regional models which emphasize the distinctive featuresof the particular national or regional culture second race-basedmodels which identify certain shared characteristics across variousnational literatures such as the common racial inheritance in litera-tures of the African diaspora addressed by the lsquoBlack writingrsquo modelthird comparative models of varying complexity which seek toaccount for particular linguistic historical and cultural features acrosstwo or more post-colonial literatures fourth more comprehensivecomparative models which argue for features such as hybridity andsyncreticity as constitutive elements of all post-colonial literatures(syncretism is the process by which previously distinct linguistic cat-egories and by extension cultural formations merge into a singlenew form) These models often operate as assumptions within criticalpractice rather than specific and discrete schools of thought in any

discussion of post-colonial writing a number of them may be operat-ing at the same time

NATIONAL AND REGIONAL MODELS

The first post-colonial society to develop a lsquonationalrsquo literature was theUSA The emergence of a distinctive American literature in the lateeighteenth century raised inevitable questions about the relationshipbetween literature and place between literature and nationality andparticularly about the suitability of inherited literary forms Ideas aboutnew kinds of literature were part of the optimistic progression tonationhood because it seemed that this was one of the most potentareas in which to express difference from Britain Writers like CharlesBrockden Brown who attempted to indigenize British forms like thegothic and the sentimental novel soon realized that with the change inlocation and culture it was not possible to import form and conceptwithout radical alteration (Fiedler 1960 Ringe 1966)

In many ways the American experience and its attempts to producea new kind of literature can be seen to be the model for all laterpost-colonial writing1 The first thing it showed was that some ofa post-colonial countryrsquos most deeply held linguistic and cultural traitsdepend upon its relationship with the colonizing power particularlythe defining contrast between European metropolis and lsquofrontierrsquo (seeFussell 1965) Once the American Revolution had forced the questionof separate nationality and the economic and political successes of theemerging nation had begun to be taken for granted American litera-ture as a distinct collection of texts also began to be accepted But it wasaccepted as an offshoot of the lsquoparent treersquo Such organic metaphorsand others like lsquoparentndashchildrsquo and lsquostreamndashtributaryrsquo acted to keep thenew literature in its place The plant and parent metaphors stressed ageexperience roots tradition and most importantly the connectionbetween antiquity and value They implied the same distinctions asthose existing between metropolis and frontier parents are moreexperienced more important more substantial less brash than theiroffspring Above all they are the origin and therefore claim the finalauthority in questions of taste and value

But as the extensive literature of the USA developed different

cutting the ground 15

characteristics from that of Britain and established its right to be con-sidered independently the concept of national literary differenceslsquowithinrsquo English writing became established The eventual consequenceof this has been that lsquonewerrsquo literatures from countries such as NigeriaAustralia and India could also be discussed as discrete national forma-tions rather than as lsquobranches of the treersquo Their literatures could beconsidered in relation to the social and political history of each coun-try and could be read as a source of important images of nationalidentity

The development of national literatures and criticism is fundamentalto the whole enterprise of post-colonial studies Without such devel-opments at the national level and without the comparative studiesbetween national traditions to which these lead no discourse of thepost-colonial could have emerged Nor is it simply a matter of devel-opment from one stage to another since all post-colonial studies con-tinue to depend upon national literatures and criticism The study ofnational traditions is the first and most vital stage of the processof rejecting the claims of the centre to exclusivity It is the beginning ofwhat Nigerian writer Wole Soyinka has characterized as the lsquoprocess ofself-apprehensionrsquo (Soyinka 1976 xi) Recent theories of a generalpost-colonial discourse question essentialist formulations which maylead to nationalist and racist orthodoxies but they do not deny thegreat importance of maintaining each literaturersquos sense of specific dif-ference It is this sense of difference which constitutes each nationalliteraturersquos mode of self-apprehension and its claim to be a self-constituting entity However nationalism in which some partial truthor clicheacute is elevated to orthodoxy is a danger implicit in such nationalconceptions of literary production The impetus towards national self-realization in critical assessments of literature all too often fails to stopshort of nationalist myth

Larger geographical models which cross the boundaries of languagenationality or race to generate the concept of a regional literature suchas West Indian or South Pacific literature may also share some of thelimitations of the national model While the idea of an lsquoAfricanrsquo litera-ture for instance has a powerful appeal to writers and critics in thevarious African countries it has only limited application as a descrip-tive label African and European critics have produced several regional

the empire writes back16

and national studies which reflect the widespread political economicand cultural differences between modern African countries (Gurr andCalder 1974 Lindfors 1975 Taiwo 1976 Ogungbesan 1979)

Clearly some regional groupings are more likely to gain acceptancein the regions themselves than are others and will derive from a col-lective identity evident in other ways This is true of the West IndiesAlthough the Federation of the West Indies failed the english-speakingcountries there still field a regional cricket team Both the West Indiesand the South Pacific have regional universities with a significant inputinto literary production and discussion lsquoWest Indianrsquo literature hasalmost always been considered regionally rather than nationally Therehave been no major studies of Jamaican or Trinidadian literatures asdiscrete traditions A different regional grouping emphasizing geo-graphical and historical determinants rather than linguistic ones hasalso developed to explore lsquoCaribbeanrsquo literature setting literature inenglish from the region alongside that written in spanish french andother European languages (Allis 1982)

Despite such variants on the national model most of the englishliteratures outside Britain have been considered as individual nationalenterprises forming and reflecting each countryrsquos culture The inevit-able consequence of this is a gradual blurring of the distinctionbetween the national and the nationalist Nationalism has usuallyincluded a healthy repudiation of British and US hegemony observablein publishing education and the public sponsorship of writing Yet alltoo often nationalist criticism by failing to alter the terms of the dis-course within which it operates has participated implicitly or evenexplicitly in a discourse ultimately controlled by the very imperialpower its nationalist assertion is designed to exclude Emphasis mayhave been transferred to the national literature but the theoreticalassumptions critical perspectives and value judgements made haveoften replicated those of the British establishment

COMPARISONS BETWEEN TWO OR MORE REGIONS

Theories and models of post-colonial literatures could not emergeuntil the separate colonies were viewed in a framework centred ontheir own literary and cultural traditions Victorian Britain had exulted

cutting the ground 17

First published 1989by Routledge11 New Fetter Lane London EC4P 4EE

Simultaneously published in the USA and Canadaby Routledge29 West 35th Street New York NY 10001

This second edition first published 2002

Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor amp Francis Group

copy 1989 2002 Bill Ashcroft Gareth Griffiths and Helen Tiffin

All rights reserved No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced orutilized in any form or by any electronic mechanical or other means nowknown or hereafter invented including photocopying and recording or inany information storage or retrieval system without permission in writingfrom the publishers

British Library Cataloguing in Publication DataA catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication DataA catalog record for this book has been requested

ISBN 0ndash415ndash28019ndash2 (Hbk)ISBN 0ndash415ndash28020ndash6 (Pbk)

This edition published in the Taylor amp Francis e-Library 2004

ISBN 0-203-42608-8 Master e-book ISBN

ISBN 0-203-44073-0 (Adobe eReader Format)

CONTENTS

General editorrsquos preface ixAcknowledgements xi

Introduction 1What are post-colonial literatures 1Post-colonial literatures and English Studies 2Development of post-colonial literatures 4Hegemony 6Language 7Place and displacement 8Post-coloniality and theory 11

1 Cutting the ground critical models of post-colonialliteratures 14National and regional models 15Comparisons between two or more regions 17The lsquoBlack writingrsquo model 19Wider comparative models 22Models of hybridity and syncreticity 32

2 Re-placing language textual strategies in post-colonial writing 37Abrogation and appropriation 37Language and abrogation 40A post-colonial linguistic theory the Creole continuum 43The metonymic function of language variance 50Strategies of appropriation in post-colonial writing 58

3 Re-placing the text the liberation of post-colonialwriting 77The imperial moment control of the means ofcommunication 78Colonialism and silence Lewis Nkosirsquos Mating Birds 82Colonialism and lsquoauthenticityrsquo VS Naipaulrsquos TheMimic Men 87Abrogating lsquoauthenticityrsquo Michael Anthonyrsquos lsquoSandraStreetrsquo 90Radical Otherness and hybridity Timothy FindleyrsquosNot Wanted on the Voyage 96Appropriating marginality Janet Framersquos The Edge ofthe Alphabet 102Appropriating the frame of power RK Narayanrsquos TheVendor of Sweets 108

4 Theory at the crossroads indigenous theory andpost-colonial reading 115Indian literary theories 116African literary theories 122The settler colonies 131Caribbean theories 144

5 Re-placing theory post-colonial writing and literarytheory 153Post-colonial literatures and postmodernism 153Post-colonial reconstructions literature meaning value 178Post-colonialism as a reading strategy 186

6 Re-thinking the post-colonial post-colonialism inthe twenty first century 193

contentsvi

Who is post-colonial 200Theoretical issues 203Post-colonial futures 209

Conclusion More english than English 220

Readersrsquo guide 223Notes 238Bibliography 246Index 271

contents vii

GENERAL EDITORrsquoS PREFACE

No doubt a third General Editorrsquos Preface to New Accents seems hard tojustify What is there left to say Twenty-five years ago the series beganwith a very clear purpose Its major concern was the newly perplexedworld of academic literary studies where hectic monsters called lsquoThe-oryrsquo lsquoLinguisticsrsquo and lsquoPoliticsrsquo ranged In particular it aimed itself atthose undergraduates or beginning postgraduate students who wereeither learning to come to terms with the new developments or werebeing sternly warned against them

New Accents deliberately took sides Thus the first Preface spoke darklyin 1977 of lsquoa time of rapid and radical social changersquo of the lsquoerosionof the assumptions and presuppositionsrsquo central to the study of litera-ture lsquoModes and categories inherited from the pastrsquo it announced lsquonolonger seem to fit the reality experienced by a new generationrsquo Theaim of each volume would be to lsquoencourage rather than resist theprocess of changersquo by combining nuts-and-bolts exposition of newideas with clear and detailed explanation of related conceptual devel-opments If mystification (or downright demonization) was theenemy lucidity (with a nod to the compromises inevitably at stakethere) became a friend If a lsquodistinctive discourse of the futurersquobeckoned we wanted at least to be able to understand it

With the apocalypse duly noted the second Preface proceeded

piously to fret over the nature of whatever rough beast might staggerportentously from the rubble lsquoHow can we recognise or deal with thenewrsquo it complained reporting nevertheless the dismaying advance oflsquoa host of barely respectable activities for which we have no reassuringnamesrsquo and promising a programme of wary surveillance at lsquotheboundaries of the precedented and at the limit of the thinkablersquo Itsconclusion lsquothe unthinkable after all is that which covertly shapes ourthoughtsrsquo may rank as a truism But in so far as it offered some sort ofuseable purchase on a world of crumbling certainties it is not to beblushed for

In the circumstances any subsequent and surely final effort canonly modestly look back marvelling that the series is still here and notunreasonably congratulating itself on having provided an initial outletfor what turned over the years into some of the distinctive voices andtopics in literary studies But the volumes now re-presented have morethan a mere historical interest As their authors indicate the issues theyraised are still potent the arguments with which they engaged are stilldisturbing In short we werenrsquot wrong Academic study did changerapidly and radically to match even to help to generate wide reachingsocial changes A new set of discourses was developed to negotiatethose upheavals Nor has the process ceased In our deliquescent worldwhat was unthinkable inside and outside the academy all those yearsago now seems regularly to come to pass

Whether the New Accents volumes provided adequate warning ofmaps for guides to or nudges in the direction of this new terrain isscarcely for me to say Perhaps our best achievement lay in cultivatingthe sense that it was there The only justification for a reluctant thirdattempt at a Preface is the belief that it still is

TERENCE HAWKES

general editorrsquos prefacex

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

For help and generous support we should like to thank our partnersJudy Carolyn and Chris

For generous help in finding material tracing references and gener-ally making this book less inadequate than it remains we want to thankmany people but in particular Alan Lawson David Moody andStephen Slemon

INTRODUCTION

More than three-quarters of the people living in the world today havehad their lives shaped by the experience of colonialism It is easy to seehow important this has been in the political and economic spheres butits general influence on the perceptual frameworks of contemporarypeoples is often less evident Literature offers one of the most import-ant ways in which these new perceptions are expressed and it is in theirwriting and through other arts such as painting sculpture music anddance that the day-to-day realities experienced by colonized peopleshave been most powerfully encoded and so profoundly influential

WHAT ARE POST-COLONIAL LITERATURES

This book is concerned with writing by those peoples formerly colon-ized by Britain though much of what it deals with is of interest andrelevance to countries colonized by other European powers such asFrance Portugal and Spain The semantic basis of the term lsquopost-colonialrsquo might seem to suggest a concern only with the national cul-ture after the departure of the imperial power It has occasionally beenemployed in some earlier work in the area to distinguish between theperiods before and after independence (lsquocolonial periodrsquo andlsquopost-colonial periodrsquo) for example in constructing national literary

histories or in suggesting comparative studies between stages in thosehistories Generally speaking though the term lsquocolonialrsquo has been usedfor the period before independence and a term indicating a nationalwriting such as lsquomodern Canadian writingrsquo or lsquorecent West Indianliteraturersquo has been employed to distinguish the period afterindependence

We use the term lsquopost-colonialrsquo however to cover all the cultureaffected by the imperial process from the moment of colonization tothe present day This is because there is a continuity of preoccupationsthroughout the historical process initiated by European imperialaggression We also suggest that it is most appropriate as the term forthe new cross-cultural criticism which has emerged in recent years andfor the discourse through which this is constituted In this sense thisbook is concerned with the world as it exists during and after theperiod of European imperial domination and the effects of this oncontemporary literatures

So the literatures of African countries Australia Bangladesh CanadaCaribbean countries India Malaysia Malta New Zealand PakistanSingapore South Pacific Island countries and Sri Lanka are all post-colonial literatures The literature of the USA should also be placed inthis category Perhaps because of its current position of power and theneo-colonizing role it has played its post-colonial nature has not beengenerally recognized But its relationship with the metropolitan centreas it evolved over the last two centuries has been paradigmatic for post-colonial literatures everywhere What each of these literatures has incommon beyond their special and distinctive regional characteristics isthat they emerged in their present form out of the experience of colon-ization and asserted themselves by foregrounding the tension with theimperial power and by emphasizing their differences from theassumptions of the imperial centre It is this which makes themdistinctively post-colonial

POST-COLONIAL LITERATURES AND ENGLISH STUDIES

The study of English has always been a densely political and culturalphenomenon a practice in which language and literature have bothbeen called into the service of a profound and embracing nationalism

the empire writes back2

The development of English as a privileged academic subject innineteenth-century Britain ndash finally confirmed by its inclusion in thesyllabuses of Oxford and Cambridge and re-affirmed in the 1921Newbolt Report ndash came about as part of an attempt to replace theClassics at the heart of the intellectual enterprise of nineteenth-centuryhumanistic studies From the beginning proponents of English as adiscipline linked its methodology to that of the Classics with itsemphasis on scholarship philology and historical study ndash the fixing oftexts in historical time and the perpetual search for the determinants ofa single unified and agreed meaning

The historical moment which saw the emergence of lsquoEnglishrsquo as anacademic discipline also produced the nineteenth-century colonialform of imperialism (Batsleer et al 1985 14 19ndash25) Gauri Viswa-nathan has presented strong arguments for relating the lsquoinstitutional-isation and subsequent valorisation of English literary study [to] ashape and an ideological content developed in the colonial contextrsquoand specifically as it developed in India where

British colonial administrators provoked by missionaries on the onehand and fears of native insubordination on the other discovered anally in English literature to support them in maintaining control of thenatives under the guise of a liberal education

(Viswanathan 1987 17)

It can be argued that the study of English and the growth of Empireproceeded from a single ideological climate and that the developmentof the one is intrinsically bound up with the development of the otherboth at the level of simple utility (as propaganda for instance) and atthe unconscious level where it leads to the naturalizing of constructedvalues (eg civilization humanity etc) which conversely establishedlsquosavageryrsquo lsquonativersquo lsquoprimitiversquo as their antitheses and as the object of areforming zeal1

A lsquoprivileging normrsquo was enthroned at the heart of the formation ofEnglish Studies as a template for the denial of the value of the lsquoper-ipheralrsquo the lsquomarginalrsquo the lsquouncanonizedrsquo Literature was made as cen-tral to the cultural enterprise of Empire as the monarchy was to itspolitical formation So when elements of the periphery and margin

introduction 3

threatened the exclusive claims of the centre they were rapidlyincorporated This was a process in Edward Saidrsquos terms of consciousaffiliation proceeding under the guise of filiation (Said 1984) that is amimicry of the centre proceeding from a desire not only to be acceptedbut to be adopted and absorbed It caused those from the periphery toimmerse themselves in the imported culture denying their origins inan attempt to become lsquomore English than the Englishrsquo We seeexamples of this in such writers as Henry James and TS Eliot

As post-colonial societies sought to establish their difference fromBritain the response of those who recognized this complicity betweenlanguage education and cultural incorporation was to break the linkbetween language and literary study by dividing lsquoEnglishrsquo departmentsin universities into separate schools of Linguistics and of Literatureboth of which tended to view their project within a national or inter-national context Ngugirsquos essay lsquoOn the abolition of the Englishdepartmentrsquo (Ngugi 1972) is an illuminating account of the particulararguments involved in Africa John Dockerrsquos essay lsquoThe neocolonialassumption in the university teaching of Englishrsquo (Tiffin 1978 26ndash31) addresses similar problems in the settler colony contextdescribing a situation in which in contrast to Kenya little genuinedecolonization is yet in sight As Dockerrsquos critique makes clear in mostpost-colonial nations (including the West Indies and India) the nexusof power involving literature language and a dominant British culturehas strongly resisted attempts to dismantle it Even after such attemptsbegan to succeed the canonical nature and unquestioned status of theworks of the English literary tradition and the values they incorporatedremained potent in the cultural formation and the ideological institu-tions of education and literature Nevertheless the development of thepost-colonial literatures has necessitated a questioning of many of theassumptions on which the study of lsquoEnglishrsquo was based

DEVELOPMENT OF POST-COLONIAL LITERATURES

Post-colonial literatures developed through several stages which can beseen to correspond to stages both of national or regional consciousnessand of the project of asserting difference from the imperial centreDuring the imperial period writing in the language of the imperial

the empire writes back4

centre is inevitably of course produced by a literate elite whose pri-mary identification is with the colonizing power Thus the first textsproduced in the colonies in the new language are frequently producedby lsquorepresentativesrsquo of the imperial power for example gentrified set-tlers (Wentworthrsquos lsquoAustraliarsquo) travellers and sightseers (FroudersquosOceana and his The English in the West Indies or the travel diaries of MaryKingsley) or the Anglo-Indian and West African administrators sol-diers and lsquoboxwallahsrsquo and even more frequently their memsahibs(volumes of memoirs)

Such texts can never form the basis for an indigenous culture nor canthey be integrated in any way with the culture which already exists inthe countries invaded Despite their detailed reportage of landscapecustom and language they inevitably privilege the centre emphasiz-ing the lsquohomersquo over the lsquonativersquo the lsquometropolitanrsquo over the lsquoprovincialrsquoor lsquocolonialrsquo and so forth At a deeper level their claim to objectivitysimply serves to hide the imperial discourse within which they arecreated That this is true of even the consciously literary works whichemerge from this moment can be illustrated by the poems and storiesof Rudyard Kipling For example in the well-known poem lsquoChristmasin Indiarsquo the evocative description of a Christmas day in the heat ofIndia is contextualized by invoking its absent English counterpartApparently it is only through this absent and enabling signifier that theIndian daily reality can acquire legitimacy as a subject of literarydiscourse

The second stage of production within the evolving discourse of thepost-colonial is the literature produced lsquounder imperial licencersquo bylsquonativesrsquo or lsquooutcastsrsquo for instance the large body of poetry and proseproduced in the nineteenth century by the English educated Indianupper class or African lsquomissionary literaturersquo (eg Thomas MofolorsquosChaka) The producers signify by the very fact of writing in thelanguage of the dominant culture that they have temporarily or per-manently entered a specific and privileged class endowed with thelanguage education and leisure necessary to produce such works TheAustralian novel Ralph Rashleigh now known to have been written by theconvict James Tucker is a case in point Tucker an educated man wroteRashleigh as a lsquospecialrsquo (a privileged convict) whilst working at the penalsettlement at Port Macquarie as storekeeper to the superintendent

introduction 5

Written on government paper with government ink and pens thenovel was clearly produced with the aid and support of the super-intendent Tucker had momentarily gained access to the privilege ofliterature Significantly the moment of privilege did not last and hedied in poverty at the age of fifty-eight at Liverpool asylum in Sydney

It is characteristic of these early post-colonial texts that the potentialfor subversion in their themes cannot be fully realized Although theydeal with such powerful material as the brutality of the convict system(Tuckerrsquos Rashleigh) the historical potency of the supplanted anddenigrated native cultures (Mofolorsquos Chaka) or the existence of a richcultural heritage older and more extensive than that of Europe (any ofmany nineteenth-century Indo-Anglian poets such as Ram Sharma)they are prevented from fully exploring their anti-imperial potentialBoth the available discourse and the material conditions of productionfor literature in these early post-colonial societies restrain this possibil-ity The institution of lsquoLiteraturersquo in the colony is under the directcontrol of the imperial ruling class who alone license the acceptableform and permit the publication and distribution of the resulting workSo texts of this kind come into being within the constraints of adiscourse and the institutional practice of a patronage system whichlimits and undercuts their assertion of a different perspective Thedevelopment of independent literatures depended upon the abrogationof this constraining power and the appropriation of language and writ-ing for new and distinctive usages Such an appropriation is clearly themost significant feature in the emergence of modern post-colonialliteratures (see chs 2 and 3)

HEGEMONY

Why should post-colonial societies continue to engage with theimperial experience Since all the post-colonial societies we discusshave achieved political independence why is the issue of colonialitystill relevant at all This question of why the empire needs to write backto a centre once the imperial structure has been dismantled in politicalterms is an important one Britain like the other dominant colonialpowers of the nineteenth century has been relegated to a relativelyminor place in international affairs In the spheres of politics and

the empire writes back6

economics and increasingly in the vital new area of the mass mediaBritain and the other European imperial powers have been super-seded by the emergent power of the USA Nevertheless through theliterary canon the body of British texts which all too frequently stillacts as a touchstone of taste and value and through RS-English(Received Standard English) which asserts the English of south-eastEngland as a universal norm the weight of antiquity continues todominate cultural production in much of the post-colonial worldThis cultural hegemony has been maintained through canonicalassumptions about literary activity and through attitudes to post-colonial literatures which identify them as isolated national off-shootsof English literature and which therefore relegate them to marginaland subordinate positions More recently as the range and strength ofthese literatures has become undeniable a process of incorporation hasbegun in which employing Eurocentric standards of judgement thecentre has sought to claim those works and writers of which itapproves as British2 In all these respects the parallel between the situ-ation of post-colonial writing and that of feminist writing is striking(see ch 5)

LANGUAGE

One of the main features of imperial oppression is control over lan-guage The imperial education system installs a lsquostandardrsquo version ofthe metropolitan language as the norm and marginalizes all lsquovariantsrsquoas impurities As a character in Mrs Campbell Praedrsquos nineteenth-century Australian novel Policy and Passion puts it lsquoTo be colonial is to talkAustralian slang to be everything that is abominablersquo (CampbellPraed 1881154) Language becomes the medium through which ahierarchical structure of power is perpetuated and the mediumthrough which conceptions of lsquotruthrsquo lsquoorderrsquo and lsquorealityrsquo becomeestablished Such power is rejected in the emergence of an effectivepost-colonial voice For this reason the discussion of post-colonialwriting which follows is largely a discussion of the process by whichthe language with its power and the writing with its signification ofauthority has been wrested from the dominant European culture

In order to focus on the complex ways in which the English

introduction 7

language has been used in these societies and to indicate their ownsense of difference we distinguish in this account between the lsquostand-ardrsquo British English inherited from the empire and the english whichthe language has become in post-colonial countries Though Britishimperialism resulted in the spread of a language English across theglobe the english of Jamaicans is not the english of Canadians Maorisor Kenyans We need to distinguish between what is proposed as astandard code English (the language of the erstwhile imperial centre)and the linguistic code english which has been transformed and sub-verted into several distinctive varieties throughout the world For thisreason the distinction between English and english will be usedthroughout our text as an indication of the various ways in which thelanguage has been employed by different linguistic communities in thepost-colonial world3

The use of these terms asserts the fact that a continuum existsbetween the various linguistic practices which constitute english usagein the modern world Although linguistically the links between Englishand the various post-colonial englishes in use today can be seen asunbroken the political reality is that English sets itself apart from allother lsquolesserrsquo variants and so demands to be interrogated about itsclaim to this special status

In practice the history of this distinction between English and eng-lish has been between the claims of a powerful lsquocentrersquo and a multitudeof intersecting usages designated as lsquoperipheriesrsquo The language ofthese lsquoperipheriesrsquo was shaped by an oppressive discourse of power Yetthey have been the site of some of the most exciting and innovativeliteratures of the modern period and this has at least in part been theresult of the energies uncovered by the political tension between theidea of a normative code and a variety of regional usages

PLACE AND DISPLACEMENT

A major feature of post-colonial literatures is the concern with placeand displacement It is here that the special post-colonial crisis of iden-tity comes into being the concern with the development or recoveryof an effective identifying relationship between self and place Indeedcritics such as D E S Maxwell have made this the defining model of

the empire writes back8

post-coloniality (see ch 1) A valid and active sense of self may havebeen eroded by dislocation resulting from migration the experience ofenslavement transportation or lsquovoluntaryrsquo removal for indenturedlabour Or it may have been destroyed by cultural denigration the con-scious and unconscious oppression of the indigenous personality andculture by a supposedly superior racial or cultural model The dialecticof place and displacement is always a feature of post-colonial societieswhether these have been created by a process of settlement interven-tion or a mixture of the two Beyond their historical and culturaldifferences place displacement and a pervasive concern with themyths of identity and authenticity are a feature common to allpost-colonial literatures in english

The alienation of vision and the crisis in self-image which this dis-placement produces is as frequently found in the accounts of Canadianlsquofree settlersrsquo as of Australian convicts FijianndashIndian or TrinidadianndashIndian indentured labourers West Indian slaves or forcibly colonizedNigerians or Bengalis Although this is pragmatically demonstrablefrom a wide range of texts it is difficult to account for by theorieswhich see this social and linguistic alienation as resulting only fromovertly oppressive forms of colonization such as slavery or conquestAn adequate account of this practice must go beyond the usual categor-ies of social alienation such as masterslave freebonded rulerruledhowever important and widespread these may be in post-colonial cul-tures After all why should the free settler formally unconstrained andtheoretically free to continue in the possession and practice oflsquoEnglishnessrsquo also show clear signs of alienation even within thefirst generation of settlement and manifest a tendency to seek analternative differentiated identity

The most widely shared discursive practice within which this alien-ation can be identified is the construction of lsquoplacersquo The gap whichopens between the experience of place and the language available todescribe it forms a classic and allpervasive feature of post-colonial textsThis gap occurs for those whose language seems inadequate to describea new place for those whose language is systematically destroyed byenslavement and for those whose language has been renderedunprivileged by the imposition of the language of a colonizing powerSome admixture of one or other of these models can describe the

introduction 9

situation of all post-colonial societies In each case a condition of alien-ation is inevitable until the colonizing language has been replaced orappropriated as english

That imperialism results in a profound linguistic alienation isobviously the case in cultures in which a pre-colonial culture is sup-pressed by military conquest or enslavement So for example anIndian writer like Raja Rao or a Nigerian writer such as ChinuaAchebe have needed to transform the language to use it in a differentway in its new context and so as Achebe says quoting James Bald-win make it lsquobear the burdenrsquo of their experience (Achebe 197562) Although Rao and Achebe write from their own place and sohave not suffered a literal geographical displacement they have toovercome an imposed gap resulting from the linguistic displacementof the pre-colonial language by English This process occurs within amore comprehensive discourse of place and displacement in thewider post-colonial context Such alienation is shared by those whosepossession of English is indisputably lsquonativersquo (in the sense of beingpossessed from birth) yet who begin to feel alienated within its prac-tice once its vocabulary categories and codes are felt to beinadequate or inappropriate to describe the fauna the physical andgeographical conditions or the cultural practices they have developedin a new land The Canadian poet Joseph Howe for instance pluckshis picture of a moose from some repository of English nurseryrhyme romanticism

the gay moose in jocund gambol springsCropping the foliage Nature round him flings

(Howe 1874 100)

Such absurdities demonstrate the pressing need these native speakersshare with those colonized peoples who were directly oppressed toescape from the inadequacies and imperial constraints of English as asocial practice They need that is to escape from the implicit body ofassumptions to which English was attached its aesthetic and socialvalues the formal and historically limited constraints of genre and theoppressive political and cultural assertion of metropolitan dominanceof centre over margin (Ngugi 1986) This is not to say that the English

the empire writes back10

language is inherently incapable of accounting for post-colonialexperience but that it needs to develop an lsquoappropriatersquo usage in orderto do so (by becoming a distinct and unique form of english) Theenergizing feature of this displacement is its capacity to interrogate andsubvert the imperial cultural formations

The pressure to develop such a usage manifests itself early in thedevelopment of lsquoenglishrsquo literatures It is therefore arguable that evenbefore the development of a conscious de-colonizing stance theexperience of a new place identifiably different in its physical charac-teristics constrains for instance the new settlers to demand a languagewhich will allow them to express their sense of lsquoOthernessrsquo Landscapeflora and fauna seasons climatic conditions are formally distinguishedfrom the place of origin as homecolony EuropeNew WorldEuropeAntipodes metropolitanprovincial and so on although ofcourse at this stage no effective models exist for expressing this senseof Otherness in a positive and creative way

POST-COLONIALITY AND THEORY

The idea of lsquopost-colonial literary theoryrsquo emerges from the inability ofEuropean theory to deal adequately with the complexities and variedcultural provenance of post-colonial writing European theories them-selves emerge from particular cultural traditions which are hidden byfalse notions of lsquothe universalrsquo Theories of style and genre assump-tions about the universal features of language epistemologies andvalue systems are all radically questioned by the practices of post-colonial writing Post-colonial theory has proceeded from the need toaddress this different practice Indigenous theories have developed toaccommodate the differences within the various cultural traditions aswell as the desire to describe in a comparative way the features sharedacross those traditions

The political and cultural monocentrism of the colonial enterprisewas a natural result of the philosophical traditions of the Europeanworld and the systems of representation which this privilegedNineteenth-century imperial expansion the culmination of the out-ward and dominating thrust of Europeans into the world beyondEurope which began during the early Renaissance was underpinned

introduction 11

in complex ways by these assumptions In the first instance thisproduced practices of cultural subservience characterized by one post-colonial critic as lsquocultural cringersquo (Phillips 1958) Subsequently theemergence of identifiable indigenous theories in reaction to thisformed an important element in the development of specific nationaland regional consciousnesses (see ch 4)

Paradoxically however imperial expansion has had a radicallydestabilizing effect on its own preoccupations and power In pushingthe colonial world to the margins of experience the lsquocentrersquo pushedconsciousness beyond the point at which monocentrism in all spheresof thought could be accepted without question In other words thealienating process which initially served to relegate the post-colonialworld to the lsquomarginrsquo turned upon itself and acted to push that worldthrough a kind of mental barrier into a position from which allexperience could be viewed as uncentred pluralistic and multifari-ous Marginality thus became an unprecedented source of creativeenergy The impetus towards decentring and pluralism has alwaysbeen present in the history of European thought and has reached itslatest development in post-structuralism But the situation of margin-alized societies and cultures enabled them to come to this positionmuch earlier and more directly (Brydon 1984b) These notions areimplicit in post-colonial texts from the imperial period to the presentday

The task of this book is twofold first to identify the range andnature of these post-colonial texts and second to describe the varioustheories which have emerged so far to account for them So in the firstchapter we consider the development of descriptive models of post-colonial writing Since it is not possible to read post-colonial textswithout coming to terms with the ways in which they appropriate anddeploy the material of linguistic culture in the second chapter weoutline the process by which language is captured to form a distinctivediscursive practice In the third chapter we demonstrate throughsymptomatic readings of texts how post-colonial writing interactswith the social and material practices of colonialism One of the majorpurposes of this book is to explain the nature of existing post-colonialtheory and the way in which it interacts with and dismantles some ofthe assumptions of European theory In the fourth chapter we discuss

the empire writes back12

the issues in the development of indigenous post-colonial theories andin the fifth we examine the larger implications of post-coloniality fortheories of language for literary theory and for social and politicalanalysis in general

introduction 13

1CUTTING THE GROUND

Critical models of post-colonialliteratures

As writers and critics became aware of the special character ofpost-colonial texts they saw the need to develop an adequate model toaccount for them Four major models have emerged to date firstlsquonationalrsquo or regional models which emphasize the distinctive featuresof the particular national or regional culture second race-basedmodels which identify certain shared characteristics across variousnational literatures such as the common racial inheritance in litera-tures of the African diaspora addressed by the lsquoBlack writingrsquo modelthird comparative models of varying complexity which seek toaccount for particular linguistic historical and cultural features acrosstwo or more post-colonial literatures fourth more comprehensivecomparative models which argue for features such as hybridity andsyncreticity as constitutive elements of all post-colonial literatures(syncretism is the process by which previously distinct linguistic cat-egories and by extension cultural formations merge into a singlenew form) These models often operate as assumptions within criticalpractice rather than specific and discrete schools of thought in any

discussion of post-colonial writing a number of them may be operat-ing at the same time

NATIONAL AND REGIONAL MODELS

The first post-colonial society to develop a lsquonationalrsquo literature was theUSA The emergence of a distinctive American literature in the lateeighteenth century raised inevitable questions about the relationshipbetween literature and place between literature and nationality andparticularly about the suitability of inherited literary forms Ideas aboutnew kinds of literature were part of the optimistic progression tonationhood because it seemed that this was one of the most potentareas in which to express difference from Britain Writers like CharlesBrockden Brown who attempted to indigenize British forms like thegothic and the sentimental novel soon realized that with the change inlocation and culture it was not possible to import form and conceptwithout radical alteration (Fiedler 1960 Ringe 1966)

In many ways the American experience and its attempts to producea new kind of literature can be seen to be the model for all laterpost-colonial writing1 The first thing it showed was that some ofa post-colonial countryrsquos most deeply held linguistic and cultural traitsdepend upon its relationship with the colonizing power particularlythe defining contrast between European metropolis and lsquofrontierrsquo (seeFussell 1965) Once the American Revolution had forced the questionof separate nationality and the economic and political successes of theemerging nation had begun to be taken for granted American litera-ture as a distinct collection of texts also began to be accepted But it wasaccepted as an offshoot of the lsquoparent treersquo Such organic metaphorsand others like lsquoparentndashchildrsquo and lsquostreamndashtributaryrsquo acted to keep thenew literature in its place The plant and parent metaphors stressed ageexperience roots tradition and most importantly the connectionbetween antiquity and value They implied the same distinctions asthose existing between metropolis and frontier parents are moreexperienced more important more substantial less brash than theiroffspring Above all they are the origin and therefore claim the finalauthority in questions of taste and value

But as the extensive literature of the USA developed different

cutting the ground 15

characteristics from that of Britain and established its right to be con-sidered independently the concept of national literary differenceslsquowithinrsquo English writing became established The eventual consequenceof this has been that lsquonewerrsquo literatures from countries such as NigeriaAustralia and India could also be discussed as discrete national forma-tions rather than as lsquobranches of the treersquo Their literatures could beconsidered in relation to the social and political history of each coun-try and could be read as a source of important images of nationalidentity

The development of national literatures and criticism is fundamentalto the whole enterprise of post-colonial studies Without such devel-opments at the national level and without the comparative studiesbetween national traditions to which these lead no discourse of thepost-colonial could have emerged Nor is it simply a matter of devel-opment from one stage to another since all post-colonial studies con-tinue to depend upon national literatures and criticism The study ofnational traditions is the first and most vital stage of the processof rejecting the claims of the centre to exclusivity It is the beginning ofwhat Nigerian writer Wole Soyinka has characterized as the lsquoprocess ofself-apprehensionrsquo (Soyinka 1976 xi) Recent theories of a generalpost-colonial discourse question essentialist formulations which maylead to nationalist and racist orthodoxies but they do not deny thegreat importance of maintaining each literaturersquos sense of specific dif-ference It is this sense of difference which constitutes each nationalliteraturersquos mode of self-apprehension and its claim to be a self-constituting entity However nationalism in which some partial truthor clicheacute is elevated to orthodoxy is a danger implicit in such nationalconceptions of literary production The impetus towards national self-realization in critical assessments of literature all too often fails to stopshort of nationalist myth

Larger geographical models which cross the boundaries of languagenationality or race to generate the concept of a regional literature suchas West Indian or South Pacific literature may also share some of thelimitations of the national model While the idea of an lsquoAfricanrsquo litera-ture for instance has a powerful appeal to writers and critics in thevarious African countries it has only limited application as a descrip-tive label African and European critics have produced several regional

the empire writes back16

and national studies which reflect the widespread political economicand cultural differences between modern African countries (Gurr andCalder 1974 Lindfors 1975 Taiwo 1976 Ogungbesan 1979)

Clearly some regional groupings are more likely to gain acceptancein the regions themselves than are others and will derive from a col-lective identity evident in other ways This is true of the West IndiesAlthough the Federation of the West Indies failed the english-speakingcountries there still field a regional cricket team Both the West Indiesand the South Pacific have regional universities with a significant inputinto literary production and discussion lsquoWest Indianrsquo literature hasalmost always been considered regionally rather than nationally Therehave been no major studies of Jamaican or Trinidadian literatures asdiscrete traditions A different regional grouping emphasizing geo-graphical and historical determinants rather than linguistic ones hasalso developed to explore lsquoCaribbeanrsquo literature setting literature inenglish from the region alongside that written in spanish french andother European languages (Allis 1982)

Despite such variants on the national model most of the englishliteratures outside Britain have been considered as individual nationalenterprises forming and reflecting each countryrsquos culture The inevit-able consequence of this is a gradual blurring of the distinctionbetween the national and the nationalist Nationalism has usuallyincluded a healthy repudiation of British and US hegemony observablein publishing education and the public sponsorship of writing Yet alltoo often nationalist criticism by failing to alter the terms of the dis-course within which it operates has participated implicitly or evenexplicitly in a discourse ultimately controlled by the very imperialpower its nationalist assertion is designed to exclude Emphasis mayhave been transferred to the national literature but the theoreticalassumptions critical perspectives and value judgements made haveoften replicated those of the British establishment

COMPARISONS BETWEEN TWO OR MORE REGIONS

Theories and models of post-colonial literatures could not emergeuntil the separate colonies were viewed in a framework centred ontheir own literary and cultural traditions Victorian Britain had exulted

cutting the ground 17

CONTENTS

General editorrsquos preface ixAcknowledgements xi

Introduction 1What are post-colonial literatures 1Post-colonial literatures and English Studies 2Development of post-colonial literatures 4Hegemony 6Language 7Place and displacement 8Post-coloniality and theory 11

1 Cutting the ground critical models of post-colonialliteratures 14National and regional models 15Comparisons between two or more regions 17The lsquoBlack writingrsquo model 19Wider comparative models 22Models of hybridity and syncreticity 32

2 Re-placing language textual strategies in post-colonial writing 37Abrogation and appropriation 37Language and abrogation 40A post-colonial linguistic theory the Creole continuum 43The metonymic function of language variance 50Strategies of appropriation in post-colonial writing 58

3 Re-placing the text the liberation of post-colonialwriting 77The imperial moment control of the means ofcommunication 78Colonialism and silence Lewis Nkosirsquos Mating Birds 82Colonialism and lsquoauthenticityrsquo VS Naipaulrsquos TheMimic Men 87Abrogating lsquoauthenticityrsquo Michael Anthonyrsquos lsquoSandraStreetrsquo 90Radical Otherness and hybridity Timothy FindleyrsquosNot Wanted on the Voyage 96Appropriating marginality Janet Framersquos The Edge ofthe Alphabet 102Appropriating the frame of power RK Narayanrsquos TheVendor of Sweets 108

4 Theory at the crossroads indigenous theory andpost-colonial reading 115Indian literary theories 116African literary theories 122The settler colonies 131Caribbean theories 144

5 Re-placing theory post-colonial writing and literarytheory 153Post-colonial literatures and postmodernism 153Post-colonial reconstructions literature meaning value 178Post-colonialism as a reading strategy 186

6 Re-thinking the post-colonial post-colonialism inthe twenty first century 193

contentsvi

Who is post-colonial 200Theoretical issues 203Post-colonial futures 209

Conclusion More english than English 220

Readersrsquo guide 223Notes 238Bibliography 246Index 271

contents vii

GENERAL EDITORrsquoS PREFACE

No doubt a third General Editorrsquos Preface to New Accents seems hard tojustify What is there left to say Twenty-five years ago the series beganwith a very clear purpose Its major concern was the newly perplexedworld of academic literary studies where hectic monsters called lsquoThe-oryrsquo lsquoLinguisticsrsquo and lsquoPoliticsrsquo ranged In particular it aimed itself atthose undergraduates or beginning postgraduate students who wereeither learning to come to terms with the new developments or werebeing sternly warned against them

New Accents deliberately took sides Thus the first Preface spoke darklyin 1977 of lsquoa time of rapid and radical social changersquo of the lsquoerosionof the assumptions and presuppositionsrsquo central to the study of litera-ture lsquoModes and categories inherited from the pastrsquo it announced lsquonolonger seem to fit the reality experienced by a new generationrsquo Theaim of each volume would be to lsquoencourage rather than resist theprocess of changersquo by combining nuts-and-bolts exposition of newideas with clear and detailed explanation of related conceptual devel-opments If mystification (or downright demonization) was theenemy lucidity (with a nod to the compromises inevitably at stakethere) became a friend If a lsquodistinctive discourse of the futurersquobeckoned we wanted at least to be able to understand it

With the apocalypse duly noted the second Preface proceeded

piously to fret over the nature of whatever rough beast might staggerportentously from the rubble lsquoHow can we recognise or deal with thenewrsquo it complained reporting nevertheless the dismaying advance oflsquoa host of barely respectable activities for which we have no reassuringnamesrsquo and promising a programme of wary surveillance at lsquotheboundaries of the precedented and at the limit of the thinkablersquo Itsconclusion lsquothe unthinkable after all is that which covertly shapes ourthoughtsrsquo may rank as a truism But in so far as it offered some sort ofuseable purchase on a world of crumbling certainties it is not to beblushed for

In the circumstances any subsequent and surely final effort canonly modestly look back marvelling that the series is still here and notunreasonably congratulating itself on having provided an initial outletfor what turned over the years into some of the distinctive voices andtopics in literary studies But the volumes now re-presented have morethan a mere historical interest As their authors indicate the issues theyraised are still potent the arguments with which they engaged are stilldisturbing In short we werenrsquot wrong Academic study did changerapidly and radically to match even to help to generate wide reachingsocial changes A new set of discourses was developed to negotiatethose upheavals Nor has the process ceased In our deliquescent worldwhat was unthinkable inside and outside the academy all those yearsago now seems regularly to come to pass

Whether the New Accents volumes provided adequate warning ofmaps for guides to or nudges in the direction of this new terrain isscarcely for me to say Perhaps our best achievement lay in cultivatingthe sense that it was there The only justification for a reluctant thirdattempt at a Preface is the belief that it still is

TERENCE HAWKES

general editorrsquos prefacex

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

For help and generous support we should like to thank our partnersJudy Carolyn and Chris

For generous help in finding material tracing references and gener-ally making this book less inadequate than it remains we want to thankmany people but in particular Alan Lawson David Moody andStephen Slemon

INTRODUCTION

More than three-quarters of the people living in the world today havehad their lives shaped by the experience of colonialism It is easy to seehow important this has been in the political and economic spheres butits general influence on the perceptual frameworks of contemporarypeoples is often less evident Literature offers one of the most import-ant ways in which these new perceptions are expressed and it is in theirwriting and through other arts such as painting sculpture music anddance that the day-to-day realities experienced by colonized peopleshave been most powerfully encoded and so profoundly influential

WHAT ARE POST-COLONIAL LITERATURES

This book is concerned with writing by those peoples formerly colon-ized by Britain though much of what it deals with is of interest andrelevance to countries colonized by other European powers such asFrance Portugal and Spain The semantic basis of the term lsquopost-colonialrsquo might seem to suggest a concern only with the national cul-ture after the departure of the imperial power It has occasionally beenemployed in some earlier work in the area to distinguish between theperiods before and after independence (lsquocolonial periodrsquo andlsquopost-colonial periodrsquo) for example in constructing national literary

histories or in suggesting comparative studies between stages in thosehistories Generally speaking though the term lsquocolonialrsquo has been usedfor the period before independence and a term indicating a nationalwriting such as lsquomodern Canadian writingrsquo or lsquorecent West Indianliteraturersquo has been employed to distinguish the period afterindependence

We use the term lsquopost-colonialrsquo however to cover all the cultureaffected by the imperial process from the moment of colonization tothe present day This is because there is a continuity of preoccupationsthroughout the historical process initiated by European imperialaggression We also suggest that it is most appropriate as the term forthe new cross-cultural criticism which has emerged in recent years andfor the discourse through which this is constituted In this sense thisbook is concerned with the world as it exists during and after theperiod of European imperial domination and the effects of this oncontemporary literatures

So the literatures of African countries Australia Bangladesh CanadaCaribbean countries India Malaysia Malta New Zealand PakistanSingapore South Pacific Island countries and Sri Lanka are all post-colonial literatures The literature of the USA should also be placed inthis category Perhaps because of its current position of power and theneo-colonizing role it has played its post-colonial nature has not beengenerally recognized But its relationship with the metropolitan centreas it evolved over the last two centuries has been paradigmatic for post-colonial literatures everywhere What each of these literatures has incommon beyond their special and distinctive regional characteristics isthat they emerged in their present form out of the experience of colon-ization and asserted themselves by foregrounding the tension with theimperial power and by emphasizing their differences from theassumptions of the imperial centre It is this which makes themdistinctively post-colonial

POST-COLONIAL LITERATURES AND ENGLISH STUDIES

The study of English has always been a densely political and culturalphenomenon a practice in which language and literature have bothbeen called into the service of a profound and embracing nationalism

the empire writes back2

The development of English as a privileged academic subject innineteenth-century Britain ndash finally confirmed by its inclusion in thesyllabuses of Oxford and Cambridge and re-affirmed in the 1921Newbolt Report ndash came about as part of an attempt to replace theClassics at the heart of the intellectual enterprise of nineteenth-centuryhumanistic studies From the beginning proponents of English as adiscipline linked its methodology to that of the Classics with itsemphasis on scholarship philology and historical study ndash the fixing oftexts in historical time and the perpetual search for the determinants ofa single unified and agreed meaning

The historical moment which saw the emergence of lsquoEnglishrsquo as anacademic discipline also produced the nineteenth-century colonialform of imperialism (Batsleer et al 1985 14 19ndash25) Gauri Viswa-nathan has presented strong arguments for relating the lsquoinstitutional-isation and subsequent valorisation of English literary study [to] ashape and an ideological content developed in the colonial contextrsquoand specifically as it developed in India where

British colonial administrators provoked by missionaries on the onehand and fears of native insubordination on the other discovered anally in English literature to support them in maintaining control of thenatives under the guise of a liberal education

(Viswanathan 1987 17)

It can be argued that the study of English and the growth of Empireproceeded from a single ideological climate and that the developmentof the one is intrinsically bound up with the development of the otherboth at the level of simple utility (as propaganda for instance) and atthe unconscious level where it leads to the naturalizing of constructedvalues (eg civilization humanity etc) which conversely establishedlsquosavageryrsquo lsquonativersquo lsquoprimitiversquo as their antitheses and as the object of areforming zeal1

A lsquoprivileging normrsquo was enthroned at the heart of the formation ofEnglish Studies as a template for the denial of the value of the lsquoper-ipheralrsquo the lsquomarginalrsquo the lsquouncanonizedrsquo Literature was made as cen-tral to the cultural enterprise of Empire as the monarchy was to itspolitical formation So when elements of the periphery and margin

introduction 3

threatened the exclusive claims of the centre they were rapidlyincorporated This was a process in Edward Saidrsquos terms of consciousaffiliation proceeding under the guise of filiation (Said 1984) that is amimicry of the centre proceeding from a desire not only to be acceptedbut to be adopted and absorbed It caused those from the periphery toimmerse themselves in the imported culture denying their origins inan attempt to become lsquomore English than the Englishrsquo We seeexamples of this in such writers as Henry James and TS Eliot

As post-colonial societies sought to establish their difference fromBritain the response of those who recognized this complicity betweenlanguage education and cultural incorporation was to break the linkbetween language and literary study by dividing lsquoEnglishrsquo departmentsin universities into separate schools of Linguistics and of Literatureboth of which tended to view their project within a national or inter-national context Ngugirsquos essay lsquoOn the abolition of the Englishdepartmentrsquo (Ngugi 1972) is an illuminating account of the particulararguments involved in Africa John Dockerrsquos essay lsquoThe neocolonialassumption in the university teaching of Englishrsquo (Tiffin 1978 26ndash31) addresses similar problems in the settler colony contextdescribing a situation in which in contrast to Kenya little genuinedecolonization is yet in sight As Dockerrsquos critique makes clear in mostpost-colonial nations (including the West Indies and India) the nexusof power involving literature language and a dominant British culturehas strongly resisted attempts to dismantle it Even after such attemptsbegan to succeed the canonical nature and unquestioned status of theworks of the English literary tradition and the values they incorporatedremained potent in the cultural formation and the ideological institu-tions of education and literature Nevertheless the development of thepost-colonial literatures has necessitated a questioning of many of theassumptions on which the study of lsquoEnglishrsquo was based

DEVELOPMENT OF POST-COLONIAL LITERATURES

Post-colonial literatures developed through several stages which can beseen to correspond to stages both of national or regional consciousnessand of the project of asserting difference from the imperial centreDuring the imperial period writing in the language of the imperial

the empire writes back4

centre is inevitably of course produced by a literate elite whose pri-mary identification is with the colonizing power Thus the first textsproduced in the colonies in the new language are frequently producedby lsquorepresentativesrsquo of the imperial power for example gentrified set-tlers (Wentworthrsquos lsquoAustraliarsquo) travellers and sightseers (FroudersquosOceana and his The English in the West Indies or the travel diaries of MaryKingsley) or the Anglo-Indian and West African administrators sol-diers and lsquoboxwallahsrsquo and even more frequently their memsahibs(volumes of memoirs)

Such texts can never form the basis for an indigenous culture nor canthey be integrated in any way with the culture which already exists inthe countries invaded Despite their detailed reportage of landscapecustom and language they inevitably privilege the centre emphasiz-ing the lsquohomersquo over the lsquonativersquo the lsquometropolitanrsquo over the lsquoprovincialrsquoor lsquocolonialrsquo and so forth At a deeper level their claim to objectivitysimply serves to hide the imperial discourse within which they arecreated That this is true of even the consciously literary works whichemerge from this moment can be illustrated by the poems and storiesof Rudyard Kipling For example in the well-known poem lsquoChristmasin Indiarsquo the evocative description of a Christmas day in the heat ofIndia is contextualized by invoking its absent English counterpartApparently it is only through this absent and enabling signifier that theIndian daily reality can acquire legitimacy as a subject of literarydiscourse

The second stage of production within the evolving discourse of thepost-colonial is the literature produced lsquounder imperial licencersquo bylsquonativesrsquo or lsquooutcastsrsquo for instance the large body of poetry and proseproduced in the nineteenth century by the English educated Indianupper class or African lsquomissionary literaturersquo (eg Thomas MofolorsquosChaka) The producers signify by the very fact of writing in thelanguage of the dominant culture that they have temporarily or per-manently entered a specific and privileged class endowed with thelanguage education and leisure necessary to produce such works TheAustralian novel Ralph Rashleigh now known to have been written by theconvict James Tucker is a case in point Tucker an educated man wroteRashleigh as a lsquospecialrsquo (a privileged convict) whilst working at the penalsettlement at Port Macquarie as storekeeper to the superintendent

introduction 5

Written on government paper with government ink and pens thenovel was clearly produced with the aid and support of the super-intendent Tucker had momentarily gained access to the privilege ofliterature Significantly the moment of privilege did not last and hedied in poverty at the age of fifty-eight at Liverpool asylum in Sydney

It is characteristic of these early post-colonial texts that the potentialfor subversion in their themes cannot be fully realized Although theydeal with such powerful material as the brutality of the convict system(Tuckerrsquos Rashleigh) the historical potency of the supplanted anddenigrated native cultures (Mofolorsquos Chaka) or the existence of a richcultural heritage older and more extensive than that of Europe (any ofmany nineteenth-century Indo-Anglian poets such as Ram Sharma)they are prevented from fully exploring their anti-imperial potentialBoth the available discourse and the material conditions of productionfor literature in these early post-colonial societies restrain this possibil-ity The institution of lsquoLiteraturersquo in the colony is under the directcontrol of the imperial ruling class who alone license the acceptableform and permit the publication and distribution of the resulting workSo texts of this kind come into being within the constraints of adiscourse and the institutional practice of a patronage system whichlimits and undercuts their assertion of a different perspective Thedevelopment of independent literatures depended upon the abrogationof this constraining power and the appropriation of language and writ-ing for new and distinctive usages Such an appropriation is clearly themost significant feature in the emergence of modern post-colonialliteratures (see chs 2 and 3)

HEGEMONY

Why should post-colonial societies continue to engage with theimperial experience Since all the post-colonial societies we discusshave achieved political independence why is the issue of colonialitystill relevant at all This question of why the empire needs to write backto a centre once the imperial structure has been dismantled in politicalterms is an important one Britain like the other dominant colonialpowers of the nineteenth century has been relegated to a relativelyminor place in international affairs In the spheres of politics and

the empire writes back6

economics and increasingly in the vital new area of the mass mediaBritain and the other European imperial powers have been super-seded by the emergent power of the USA Nevertheless through theliterary canon the body of British texts which all too frequently stillacts as a touchstone of taste and value and through RS-English(Received Standard English) which asserts the English of south-eastEngland as a universal norm the weight of antiquity continues todominate cultural production in much of the post-colonial worldThis cultural hegemony has been maintained through canonicalassumptions about literary activity and through attitudes to post-colonial literatures which identify them as isolated national off-shootsof English literature and which therefore relegate them to marginaland subordinate positions More recently as the range and strength ofthese literatures has become undeniable a process of incorporation hasbegun in which employing Eurocentric standards of judgement thecentre has sought to claim those works and writers of which itapproves as British2 In all these respects the parallel between the situ-ation of post-colonial writing and that of feminist writing is striking(see ch 5)

LANGUAGE

One of the main features of imperial oppression is control over lan-guage The imperial education system installs a lsquostandardrsquo version ofthe metropolitan language as the norm and marginalizes all lsquovariantsrsquoas impurities As a character in Mrs Campbell Praedrsquos nineteenth-century Australian novel Policy and Passion puts it lsquoTo be colonial is to talkAustralian slang to be everything that is abominablersquo (CampbellPraed 1881154) Language becomes the medium through which ahierarchical structure of power is perpetuated and the mediumthrough which conceptions of lsquotruthrsquo lsquoorderrsquo and lsquorealityrsquo becomeestablished Such power is rejected in the emergence of an effectivepost-colonial voice For this reason the discussion of post-colonialwriting which follows is largely a discussion of the process by whichthe language with its power and the writing with its signification ofauthority has been wrested from the dominant European culture

In order to focus on the complex ways in which the English

introduction 7

language has been used in these societies and to indicate their ownsense of difference we distinguish in this account between the lsquostand-ardrsquo British English inherited from the empire and the english whichthe language has become in post-colonial countries Though Britishimperialism resulted in the spread of a language English across theglobe the english of Jamaicans is not the english of Canadians Maorisor Kenyans We need to distinguish between what is proposed as astandard code English (the language of the erstwhile imperial centre)and the linguistic code english which has been transformed and sub-verted into several distinctive varieties throughout the world For thisreason the distinction between English and english will be usedthroughout our text as an indication of the various ways in which thelanguage has been employed by different linguistic communities in thepost-colonial world3

The use of these terms asserts the fact that a continuum existsbetween the various linguistic practices which constitute english usagein the modern world Although linguistically the links between Englishand the various post-colonial englishes in use today can be seen asunbroken the political reality is that English sets itself apart from allother lsquolesserrsquo variants and so demands to be interrogated about itsclaim to this special status

In practice the history of this distinction between English and eng-lish has been between the claims of a powerful lsquocentrersquo and a multitudeof intersecting usages designated as lsquoperipheriesrsquo The language ofthese lsquoperipheriesrsquo was shaped by an oppressive discourse of power Yetthey have been the site of some of the most exciting and innovativeliteratures of the modern period and this has at least in part been theresult of the energies uncovered by the political tension between theidea of a normative code and a variety of regional usages

PLACE AND DISPLACEMENT

A major feature of post-colonial literatures is the concern with placeand displacement It is here that the special post-colonial crisis of iden-tity comes into being the concern with the development or recoveryof an effective identifying relationship between self and place Indeedcritics such as D E S Maxwell have made this the defining model of

the empire writes back8

post-coloniality (see ch 1) A valid and active sense of self may havebeen eroded by dislocation resulting from migration the experience ofenslavement transportation or lsquovoluntaryrsquo removal for indenturedlabour Or it may have been destroyed by cultural denigration the con-scious and unconscious oppression of the indigenous personality andculture by a supposedly superior racial or cultural model The dialecticof place and displacement is always a feature of post-colonial societieswhether these have been created by a process of settlement interven-tion or a mixture of the two Beyond their historical and culturaldifferences place displacement and a pervasive concern with themyths of identity and authenticity are a feature common to allpost-colonial literatures in english

The alienation of vision and the crisis in self-image which this dis-placement produces is as frequently found in the accounts of Canadianlsquofree settlersrsquo as of Australian convicts FijianndashIndian or TrinidadianndashIndian indentured labourers West Indian slaves or forcibly colonizedNigerians or Bengalis Although this is pragmatically demonstrablefrom a wide range of texts it is difficult to account for by theorieswhich see this social and linguistic alienation as resulting only fromovertly oppressive forms of colonization such as slavery or conquestAn adequate account of this practice must go beyond the usual categor-ies of social alienation such as masterslave freebonded rulerruledhowever important and widespread these may be in post-colonial cul-tures After all why should the free settler formally unconstrained andtheoretically free to continue in the possession and practice oflsquoEnglishnessrsquo also show clear signs of alienation even within thefirst generation of settlement and manifest a tendency to seek analternative differentiated identity

The most widely shared discursive practice within which this alien-ation can be identified is the construction of lsquoplacersquo The gap whichopens between the experience of place and the language available todescribe it forms a classic and allpervasive feature of post-colonial textsThis gap occurs for those whose language seems inadequate to describea new place for those whose language is systematically destroyed byenslavement and for those whose language has been renderedunprivileged by the imposition of the language of a colonizing powerSome admixture of one or other of these models can describe the

introduction 9

situation of all post-colonial societies In each case a condition of alien-ation is inevitable until the colonizing language has been replaced orappropriated as english

That imperialism results in a profound linguistic alienation isobviously the case in cultures in which a pre-colonial culture is sup-pressed by military conquest or enslavement So for example anIndian writer like Raja Rao or a Nigerian writer such as ChinuaAchebe have needed to transform the language to use it in a differentway in its new context and so as Achebe says quoting James Bald-win make it lsquobear the burdenrsquo of their experience (Achebe 197562) Although Rao and Achebe write from their own place and sohave not suffered a literal geographical displacement they have toovercome an imposed gap resulting from the linguistic displacementof the pre-colonial language by English This process occurs within amore comprehensive discourse of place and displacement in thewider post-colonial context Such alienation is shared by those whosepossession of English is indisputably lsquonativersquo (in the sense of beingpossessed from birth) yet who begin to feel alienated within its prac-tice once its vocabulary categories and codes are felt to beinadequate or inappropriate to describe the fauna the physical andgeographical conditions or the cultural practices they have developedin a new land The Canadian poet Joseph Howe for instance pluckshis picture of a moose from some repository of English nurseryrhyme romanticism

the gay moose in jocund gambol springsCropping the foliage Nature round him flings

(Howe 1874 100)

Such absurdities demonstrate the pressing need these native speakersshare with those colonized peoples who were directly oppressed toescape from the inadequacies and imperial constraints of English as asocial practice They need that is to escape from the implicit body ofassumptions to which English was attached its aesthetic and socialvalues the formal and historically limited constraints of genre and theoppressive political and cultural assertion of metropolitan dominanceof centre over margin (Ngugi 1986) This is not to say that the English

the empire writes back10

language is inherently incapable of accounting for post-colonialexperience but that it needs to develop an lsquoappropriatersquo usage in orderto do so (by becoming a distinct and unique form of english) Theenergizing feature of this displacement is its capacity to interrogate andsubvert the imperial cultural formations

The pressure to develop such a usage manifests itself early in thedevelopment of lsquoenglishrsquo literatures It is therefore arguable that evenbefore the development of a conscious de-colonizing stance theexperience of a new place identifiably different in its physical charac-teristics constrains for instance the new settlers to demand a languagewhich will allow them to express their sense of lsquoOthernessrsquo Landscapeflora and fauna seasons climatic conditions are formally distinguishedfrom the place of origin as homecolony EuropeNew WorldEuropeAntipodes metropolitanprovincial and so on although ofcourse at this stage no effective models exist for expressing this senseof Otherness in a positive and creative way

POST-COLONIALITY AND THEORY

The idea of lsquopost-colonial literary theoryrsquo emerges from the inability ofEuropean theory to deal adequately with the complexities and variedcultural provenance of post-colonial writing European theories them-selves emerge from particular cultural traditions which are hidden byfalse notions of lsquothe universalrsquo Theories of style and genre assump-tions about the universal features of language epistemologies andvalue systems are all radically questioned by the practices of post-colonial writing Post-colonial theory has proceeded from the need toaddress this different practice Indigenous theories have developed toaccommodate the differences within the various cultural traditions aswell as the desire to describe in a comparative way the features sharedacross those traditions

The political and cultural monocentrism of the colonial enterprisewas a natural result of the philosophical traditions of the Europeanworld and the systems of representation which this privilegedNineteenth-century imperial expansion the culmination of the out-ward and dominating thrust of Europeans into the world beyondEurope which began during the early Renaissance was underpinned

introduction 11

in complex ways by these assumptions In the first instance thisproduced practices of cultural subservience characterized by one post-colonial critic as lsquocultural cringersquo (Phillips 1958) Subsequently theemergence of identifiable indigenous theories in reaction to thisformed an important element in the development of specific nationaland regional consciousnesses (see ch 4)

Paradoxically however imperial expansion has had a radicallydestabilizing effect on its own preoccupations and power In pushingthe colonial world to the margins of experience the lsquocentrersquo pushedconsciousness beyond the point at which monocentrism in all spheresof thought could be accepted without question In other words thealienating process which initially served to relegate the post-colonialworld to the lsquomarginrsquo turned upon itself and acted to push that worldthrough a kind of mental barrier into a position from which allexperience could be viewed as uncentred pluralistic and multifari-ous Marginality thus became an unprecedented source of creativeenergy The impetus towards decentring and pluralism has alwaysbeen present in the history of European thought and has reached itslatest development in post-structuralism But the situation of margin-alized societies and cultures enabled them to come to this positionmuch earlier and more directly (Brydon 1984b) These notions areimplicit in post-colonial texts from the imperial period to the presentday

The task of this book is twofold first to identify the range andnature of these post-colonial texts and second to describe the varioustheories which have emerged so far to account for them So in the firstchapter we consider the development of descriptive models of post-colonial writing Since it is not possible to read post-colonial textswithout coming to terms with the ways in which they appropriate anddeploy the material of linguistic culture in the second chapter weoutline the process by which language is captured to form a distinctivediscursive practice In the third chapter we demonstrate throughsymptomatic readings of texts how post-colonial writing interactswith the social and material practices of colonialism One of the majorpurposes of this book is to explain the nature of existing post-colonialtheory and the way in which it interacts with and dismantles some ofthe assumptions of European theory In the fourth chapter we discuss

the empire writes back12

the issues in the development of indigenous post-colonial theories andin the fifth we examine the larger implications of post-coloniality fortheories of language for literary theory and for social and politicalanalysis in general

introduction 13

1CUTTING THE GROUND

Critical models of post-colonialliteratures

As writers and critics became aware of the special character ofpost-colonial texts they saw the need to develop an adequate model toaccount for them Four major models have emerged to date firstlsquonationalrsquo or regional models which emphasize the distinctive featuresof the particular national or regional culture second race-basedmodels which identify certain shared characteristics across variousnational literatures such as the common racial inheritance in litera-tures of the African diaspora addressed by the lsquoBlack writingrsquo modelthird comparative models of varying complexity which seek toaccount for particular linguistic historical and cultural features acrosstwo or more post-colonial literatures fourth more comprehensivecomparative models which argue for features such as hybridity andsyncreticity as constitutive elements of all post-colonial literatures(syncretism is the process by which previously distinct linguistic cat-egories and by extension cultural formations merge into a singlenew form) These models often operate as assumptions within criticalpractice rather than specific and discrete schools of thought in any

discussion of post-colonial writing a number of them may be operat-ing at the same time

NATIONAL AND REGIONAL MODELS

The first post-colonial society to develop a lsquonationalrsquo literature was theUSA The emergence of a distinctive American literature in the lateeighteenth century raised inevitable questions about the relationshipbetween literature and place between literature and nationality andparticularly about the suitability of inherited literary forms Ideas aboutnew kinds of literature were part of the optimistic progression tonationhood because it seemed that this was one of the most potentareas in which to express difference from Britain Writers like CharlesBrockden Brown who attempted to indigenize British forms like thegothic and the sentimental novel soon realized that with the change inlocation and culture it was not possible to import form and conceptwithout radical alteration (Fiedler 1960 Ringe 1966)

In many ways the American experience and its attempts to producea new kind of literature can be seen to be the model for all laterpost-colonial writing1 The first thing it showed was that some ofa post-colonial countryrsquos most deeply held linguistic and cultural traitsdepend upon its relationship with the colonizing power particularlythe defining contrast between European metropolis and lsquofrontierrsquo (seeFussell 1965) Once the American Revolution had forced the questionof separate nationality and the economic and political successes of theemerging nation had begun to be taken for granted American litera-ture as a distinct collection of texts also began to be accepted But it wasaccepted as an offshoot of the lsquoparent treersquo Such organic metaphorsand others like lsquoparentndashchildrsquo and lsquostreamndashtributaryrsquo acted to keep thenew literature in its place The plant and parent metaphors stressed ageexperience roots tradition and most importantly the connectionbetween antiquity and value They implied the same distinctions asthose existing between metropolis and frontier parents are moreexperienced more important more substantial less brash than theiroffspring Above all they are the origin and therefore claim the finalauthority in questions of taste and value

But as the extensive literature of the USA developed different

cutting the ground 15

characteristics from that of Britain and established its right to be con-sidered independently the concept of national literary differenceslsquowithinrsquo English writing became established The eventual consequenceof this has been that lsquonewerrsquo literatures from countries such as NigeriaAustralia and India could also be discussed as discrete national forma-tions rather than as lsquobranches of the treersquo Their literatures could beconsidered in relation to the social and political history of each coun-try and could be read as a source of important images of nationalidentity

The development of national literatures and criticism is fundamentalto the whole enterprise of post-colonial studies Without such devel-opments at the national level and without the comparative studiesbetween national traditions to which these lead no discourse of thepost-colonial could have emerged Nor is it simply a matter of devel-opment from one stage to another since all post-colonial studies con-tinue to depend upon national literatures and criticism The study ofnational traditions is the first and most vital stage of the processof rejecting the claims of the centre to exclusivity It is the beginning ofwhat Nigerian writer Wole Soyinka has characterized as the lsquoprocess ofself-apprehensionrsquo (Soyinka 1976 xi) Recent theories of a generalpost-colonial discourse question essentialist formulations which maylead to nationalist and racist orthodoxies but they do not deny thegreat importance of maintaining each literaturersquos sense of specific dif-ference It is this sense of difference which constitutes each nationalliteraturersquos mode of self-apprehension and its claim to be a self-constituting entity However nationalism in which some partial truthor clicheacute is elevated to orthodoxy is a danger implicit in such nationalconceptions of literary production The impetus towards national self-realization in critical assessments of literature all too often fails to stopshort of nationalist myth

Larger geographical models which cross the boundaries of languagenationality or race to generate the concept of a regional literature suchas West Indian or South Pacific literature may also share some of thelimitations of the national model While the idea of an lsquoAfricanrsquo litera-ture for instance has a powerful appeal to writers and critics in thevarious African countries it has only limited application as a descrip-tive label African and European critics have produced several regional

the empire writes back16

and national studies which reflect the widespread political economicand cultural differences between modern African countries (Gurr andCalder 1974 Lindfors 1975 Taiwo 1976 Ogungbesan 1979)

Clearly some regional groupings are more likely to gain acceptancein the regions themselves than are others and will derive from a col-lective identity evident in other ways This is true of the West IndiesAlthough the Federation of the West Indies failed the english-speakingcountries there still field a regional cricket team Both the West Indiesand the South Pacific have regional universities with a significant inputinto literary production and discussion lsquoWest Indianrsquo literature hasalmost always been considered regionally rather than nationally Therehave been no major studies of Jamaican or Trinidadian literatures asdiscrete traditions A different regional grouping emphasizing geo-graphical and historical determinants rather than linguistic ones hasalso developed to explore lsquoCaribbeanrsquo literature setting literature inenglish from the region alongside that written in spanish french andother European languages (Allis 1982)

Despite such variants on the national model most of the englishliteratures outside Britain have been considered as individual nationalenterprises forming and reflecting each countryrsquos culture The inevit-able consequence of this is a gradual blurring of the distinctionbetween the national and the nationalist Nationalism has usuallyincluded a healthy repudiation of British and US hegemony observablein publishing education and the public sponsorship of writing Yet alltoo often nationalist criticism by failing to alter the terms of the dis-course within which it operates has participated implicitly or evenexplicitly in a discourse ultimately controlled by the very imperialpower its nationalist assertion is designed to exclude Emphasis mayhave been transferred to the national literature but the theoreticalassumptions critical perspectives and value judgements made haveoften replicated those of the British establishment

COMPARISONS BETWEEN TWO OR MORE REGIONS

Theories and models of post-colonial literatures could not emergeuntil the separate colonies were viewed in a framework centred ontheir own literary and cultural traditions Victorian Britain had exulted

cutting the ground 17

2 Re-placing language textual strategies in post-colonial writing 37Abrogation and appropriation 37Language and abrogation 40A post-colonial linguistic theory the Creole continuum 43The metonymic function of language variance 50Strategies of appropriation in post-colonial writing 58

3 Re-placing the text the liberation of post-colonialwriting 77The imperial moment control of the means ofcommunication 78Colonialism and silence Lewis Nkosirsquos Mating Birds 82Colonialism and lsquoauthenticityrsquo VS Naipaulrsquos TheMimic Men 87Abrogating lsquoauthenticityrsquo Michael Anthonyrsquos lsquoSandraStreetrsquo 90Radical Otherness and hybridity Timothy FindleyrsquosNot Wanted on the Voyage 96Appropriating marginality Janet Framersquos The Edge ofthe Alphabet 102Appropriating the frame of power RK Narayanrsquos TheVendor of Sweets 108

4 Theory at the crossroads indigenous theory andpost-colonial reading 115Indian literary theories 116African literary theories 122The settler colonies 131Caribbean theories 144

5 Re-placing theory post-colonial writing and literarytheory 153Post-colonial literatures and postmodernism 153Post-colonial reconstructions literature meaning value 178Post-colonialism as a reading strategy 186

6 Re-thinking the post-colonial post-colonialism inthe twenty first century 193

contentsvi

Who is post-colonial 200Theoretical issues 203Post-colonial futures 209

Conclusion More english than English 220

Readersrsquo guide 223Notes 238Bibliography 246Index 271

contents vii

GENERAL EDITORrsquoS PREFACE

No doubt a third General Editorrsquos Preface to New Accents seems hard tojustify What is there left to say Twenty-five years ago the series beganwith a very clear purpose Its major concern was the newly perplexedworld of academic literary studies where hectic monsters called lsquoThe-oryrsquo lsquoLinguisticsrsquo and lsquoPoliticsrsquo ranged In particular it aimed itself atthose undergraduates or beginning postgraduate students who wereeither learning to come to terms with the new developments or werebeing sternly warned against them

New Accents deliberately took sides Thus the first Preface spoke darklyin 1977 of lsquoa time of rapid and radical social changersquo of the lsquoerosionof the assumptions and presuppositionsrsquo central to the study of litera-ture lsquoModes and categories inherited from the pastrsquo it announced lsquonolonger seem to fit the reality experienced by a new generationrsquo Theaim of each volume would be to lsquoencourage rather than resist theprocess of changersquo by combining nuts-and-bolts exposition of newideas with clear and detailed explanation of related conceptual devel-opments If mystification (or downright demonization) was theenemy lucidity (with a nod to the compromises inevitably at stakethere) became a friend If a lsquodistinctive discourse of the futurersquobeckoned we wanted at least to be able to understand it

With the apocalypse duly noted the second Preface proceeded

piously to fret over the nature of whatever rough beast might staggerportentously from the rubble lsquoHow can we recognise or deal with thenewrsquo it complained reporting nevertheless the dismaying advance oflsquoa host of barely respectable activities for which we have no reassuringnamesrsquo and promising a programme of wary surveillance at lsquotheboundaries of the precedented and at the limit of the thinkablersquo Itsconclusion lsquothe unthinkable after all is that which covertly shapes ourthoughtsrsquo may rank as a truism But in so far as it offered some sort ofuseable purchase on a world of crumbling certainties it is not to beblushed for

In the circumstances any subsequent and surely final effort canonly modestly look back marvelling that the series is still here and notunreasonably congratulating itself on having provided an initial outletfor what turned over the years into some of the distinctive voices andtopics in literary studies But the volumes now re-presented have morethan a mere historical interest As their authors indicate the issues theyraised are still potent the arguments with which they engaged are stilldisturbing In short we werenrsquot wrong Academic study did changerapidly and radically to match even to help to generate wide reachingsocial changes A new set of discourses was developed to negotiatethose upheavals Nor has the process ceased In our deliquescent worldwhat was unthinkable inside and outside the academy all those yearsago now seems regularly to come to pass

Whether the New Accents volumes provided adequate warning ofmaps for guides to or nudges in the direction of this new terrain isscarcely for me to say Perhaps our best achievement lay in cultivatingthe sense that it was there The only justification for a reluctant thirdattempt at a Preface is the belief that it still is

TERENCE HAWKES

general editorrsquos prefacex

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

For help and generous support we should like to thank our partnersJudy Carolyn and Chris

For generous help in finding material tracing references and gener-ally making this book less inadequate than it remains we want to thankmany people but in particular Alan Lawson David Moody andStephen Slemon

INTRODUCTION

More than three-quarters of the people living in the world today havehad their lives shaped by the experience of colonialism It is easy to seehow important this has been in the political and economic spheres butits general influence on the perceptual frameworks of contemporarypeoples is often less evident Literature offers one of the most import-ant ways in which these new perceptions are expressed and it is in theirwriting and through other arts such as painting sculpture music anddance that the day-to-day realities experienced by colonized peopleshave been most powerfully encoded and so profoundly influential

WHAT ARE POST-COLONIAL LITERATURES

This book is concerned with writing by those peoples formerly colon-ized by Britain though much of what it deals with is of interest andrelevance to countries colonized by other European powers such asFrance Portugal and Spain The semantic basis of the term lsquopost-colonialrsquo might seem to suggest a concern only with the national cul-ture after the departure of the imperial power It has occasionally beenemployed in some earlier work in the area to distinguish between theperiods before and after independence (lsquocolonial periodrsquo andlsquopost-colonial periodrsquo) for example in constructing national literary

histories or in suggesting comparative studies between stages in thosehistories Generally speaking though the term lsquocolonialrsquo has been usedfor the period before independence and a term indicating a nationalwriting such as lsquomodern Canadian writingrsquo or lsquorecent West Indianliteraturersquo has been employed to distinguish the period afterindependence

We use the term lsquopost-colonialrsquo however to cover all the cultureaffected by the imperial process from the moment of colonization tothe present day This is because there is a continuity of preoccupationsthroughout the historical process initiated by European imperialaggression We also suggest that it is most appropriate as the term forthe new cross-cultural criticism which has emerged in recent years andfor the discourse through which this is constituted In this sense thisbook is concerned with the world as it exists during and after theperiod of European imperial domination and the effects of this oncontemporary literatures

So the literatures of African countries Australia Bangladesh CanadaCaribbean countries India Malaysia Malta New Zealand PakistanSingapore South Pacific Island countries and Sri Lanka are all post-colonial literatures The literature of the USA should also be placed inthis category Perhaps because of its current position of power and theneo-colonizing role it has played its post-colonial nature has not beengenerally recognized But its relationship with the metropolitan centreas it evolved over the last two centuries has been paradigmatic for post-colonial literatures everywhere What each of these literatures has incommon beyond their special and distinctive regional characteristics isthat they emerged in their present form out of the experience of colon-ization and asserted themselves by foregrounding the tension with theimperial power and by emphasizing their differences from theassumptions of the imperial centre It is this which makes themdistinctively post-colonial

POST-COLONIAL LITERATURES AND ENGLISH STUDIES

The study of English has always been a densely political and culturalphenomenon a practice in which language and literature have bothbeen called into the service of a profound and embracing nationalism

the empire writes back2

The development of English as a privileged academic subject innineteenth-century Britain ndash finally confirmed by its inclusion in thesyllabuses of Oxford and Cambridge and re-affirmed in the 1921Newbolt Report ndash came about as part of an attempt to replace theClassics at the heart of the intellectual enterprise of nineteenth-centuryhumanistic studies From the beginning proponents of English as adiscipline linked its methodology to that of the Classics with itsemphasis on scholarship philology and historical study ndash the fixing oftexts in historical time and the perpetual search for the determinants ofa single unified and agreed meaning

The historical moment which saw the emergence of lsquoEnglishrsquo as anacademic discipline also produced the nineteenth-century colonialform of imperialism (Batsleer et al 1985 14 19ndash25) Gauri Viswa-nathan has presented strong arguments for relating the lsquoinstitutional-isation and subsequent valorisation of English literary study [to] ashape and an ideological content developed in the colonial contextrsquoand specifically as it developed in India where

British colonial administrators provoked by missionaries on the onehand and fears of native insubordination on the other discovered anally in English literature to support them in maintaining control of thenatives under the guise of a liberal education

(Viswanathan 1987 17)

It can be argued that the study of English and the growth of Empireproceeded from a single ideological climate and that the developmentof the one is intrinsically bound up with the development of the otherboth at the level of simple utility (as propaganda for instance) and atthe unconscious level where it leads to the naturalizing of constructedvalues (eg civilization humanity etc) which conversely establishedlsquosavageryrsquo lsquonativersquo lsquoprimitiversquo as their antitheses and as the object of areforming zeal1

A lsquoprivileging normrsquo was enthroned at the heart of the formation ofEnglish Studies as a template for the denial of the value of the lsquoper-ipheralrsquo the lsquomarginalrsquo the lsquouncanonizedrsquo Literature was made as cen-tral to the cultural enterprise of Empire as the monarchy was to itspolitical formation So when elements of the periphery and margin

introduction 3

threatened the exclusive claims of the centre they were rapidlyincorporated This was a process in Edward Saidrsquos terms of consciousaffiliation proceeding under the guise of filiation (Said 1984) that is amimicry of the centre proceeding from a desire not only to be acceptedbut to be adopted and absorbed It caused those from the periphery toimmerse themselves in the imported culture denying their origins inan attempt to become lsquomore English than the Englishrsquo We seeexamples of this in such writers as Henry James and TS Eliot

As post-colonial societies sought to establish their difference fromBritain the response of those who recognized this complicity betweenlanguage education and cultural incorporation was to break the linkbetween language and literary study by dividing lsquoEnglishrsquo departmentsin universities into separate schools of Linguistics and of Literatureboth of which tended to view their project within a national or inter-national context Ngugirsquos essay lsquoOn the abolition of the Englishdepartmentrsquo (Ngugi 1972) is an illuminating account of the particulararguments involved in Africa John Dockerrsquos essay lsquoThe neocolonialassumption in the university teaching of Englishrsquo (Tiffin 1978 26ndash31) addresses similar problems in the settler colony contextdescribing a situation in which in contrast to Kenya little genuinedecolonization is yet in sight As Dockerrsquos critique makes clear in mostpost-colonial nations (including the West Indies and India) the nexusof power involving literature language and a dominant British culturehas strongly resisted attempts to dismantle it Even after such attemptsbegan to succeed the canonical nature and unquestioned status of theworks of the English literary tradition and the values they incorporatedremained potent in the cultural formation and the ideological institu-tions of education and literature Nevertheless the development of thepost-colonial literatures has necessitated a questioning of many of theassumptions on which the study of lsquoEnglishrsquo was based

DEVELOPMENT OF POST-COLONIAL LITERATURES

Post-colonial literatures developed through several stages which can beseen to correspond to stages both of national or regional consciousnessand of the project of asserting difference from the imperial centreDuring the imperial period writing in the language of the imperial

the empire writes back4

centre is inevitably of course produced by a literate elite whose pri-mary identification is with the colonizing power Thus the first textsproduced in the colonies in the new language are frequently producedby lsquorepresentativesrsquo of the imperial power for example gentrified set-tlers (Wentworthrsquos lsquoAustraliarsquo) travellers and sightseers (FroudersquosOceana and his The English in the West Indies or the travel diaries of MaryKingsley) or the Anglo-Indian and West African administrators sol-diers and lsquoboxwallahsrsquo and even more frequently their memsahibs(volumes of memoirs)

Such texts can never form the basis for an indigenous culture nor canthey be integrated in any way with the culture which already exists inthe countries invaded Despite their detailed reportage of landscapecustom and language they inevitably privilege the centre emphasiz-ing the lsquohomersquo over the lsquonativersquo the lsquometropolitanrsquo over the lsquoprovincialrsquoor lsquocolonialrsquo and so forth At a deeper level their claim to objectivitysimply serves to hide the imperial discourse within which they arecreated That this is true of even the consciously literary works whichemerge from this moment can be illustrated by the poems and storiesof Rudyard Kipling For example in the well-known poem lsquoChristmasin Indiarsquo the evocative description of a Christmas day in the heat ofIndia is contextualized by invoking its absent English counterpartApparently it is only through this absent and enabling signifier that theIndian daily reality can acquire legitimacy as a subject of literarydiscourse

The second stage of production within the evolving discourse of thepost-colonial is the literature produced lsquounder imperial licencersquo bylsquonativesrsquo or lsquooutcastsrsquo for instance the large body of poetry and proseproduced in the nineteenth century by the English educated Indianupper class or African lsquomissionary literaturersquo (eg Thomas MofolorsquosChaka) The producers signify by the very fact of writing in thelanguage of the dominant culture that they have temporarily or per-manently entered a specific and privileged class endowed with thelanguage education and leisure necessary to produce such works TheAustralian novel Ralph Rashleigh now known to have been written by theconvict James Tucker is a case in point Tucker an educated man wroteRashleigh as a lsquospecialrsquo (a privileged convict) whilst working at the penalsettlement at Port Macquarie as storekeeper to the superintendent

introduction 5

Written on government paper with government ink and pens thenovel was clearly produced with the aid and support of the super-intendent Tucker had momentarily gained access to the privilege ofliterature Significantly the moment of privilege did not last and hedied in poverty at the age of fifty-eight at Liverpool asylum in Sydney

It is characteristic of these early post-colonial texts that the potentialfor subversion in their themes cannot be fully realized Although theydeal with such powerful material as the brutality of the convict system(Tuckerrsquos Rashleigh) the historical potency of the supplanted anddenigrated native cultures (Mofolorsquos Chaka) or the existence of a richcultural heritage older and more extensive than that of Europe (any ofmany nineteenth-century Indo-Anglian poets such as Ram Sharma)they are prevented from fully exploring their anti-imperial potentialBoth the available discourse and the material conditions of productionfor literature in these early post-colonial societies restrain this possibil-ity The institution of lsquoLiteraturersquo in the colony is under the directcontrol of the imperial ruling class who alone license the acceptableform and permit the publication and distribution of the resulting workSo texts of this kind come into being within the constraints of adiscourse and the institutional practice of a patronage system whichlimits and undercuts their assertion of a different perspective Thedevelopment of independent literatures depended upon the abrogationof this constraining power and the appropriation of language and writ-ing for new and distinctive usages Such an appropriation is clearly themost significant feature in the emergence of modern post-colonialliteratures (see chs 2 and 3)

HEGEMONY

Why should post-colonial societies continue to engage with theimperial experience Since all the post-colonial societies we discusshave achieved political independence why is the issue of colonialitystill relevant at all This question of why the empire needs to write backto a centre once the imperial structure has been dismantled in politicalterms is an important one Britain like the other dominant colonialpowers of the nineteenth century has been relegated to a relativelyminor place in international affairs In the spheres of politics and

the empire writes back6

economics and increasingly in the vital new area of the mass mediaBritain and the other European imperial powers have been super-seded by the emergent power of the USA Nevertheless through theliterary canon the body of British texts which all too frequently stillacts as a touchstone of taste and value and through RS-English(Received Standard English) which asserts the English of south-eastEngland as a universal norm the weight of antiquity continues todominate cultural production in much of the post-colonial worldThis cultural hegemony has been maintained through canonicalassumptions about literary activity and through attitudes to post-colonial literatures which identify them as isolated national off-shootsof English literature and which therefore relegate them to marginaland subordinate positions More recently as the range and strength ofthese literatures has become undeniable a process of incorporation hasbegun in which employing Eurocentric standards of judgement thecentre has sought to claim those works and writers of which itapproves as British2 In all these respects the parallel between the situ-ation of post-colonial writing and that of feminist writing is striking(see ch 5)

LANGUAGE

One of the main features of imperial oppression is control over lan-guage The imperial education system installs a lsquostandardrsquo version ofthe metropolitan language as the norm and marginalizes all lsquovariantsrsquoas impurities As a character in Mrs Campbell Praedrsquos nineteenth-century Australian novel Policy and Passion puts it lsquoTo be colonial is to talkAustralian slang to be everything that is abominablersquo (CampbellPraed 1881154) Language becomes the medium through which ahierarchical structure of power is perpetuated and the mediumthrough which conceptions of lsquotruthrsquo lsquoorderrsquo and lsquorealityrsquo becomeestablished Such power is rejected in the emergence of an effectivepost-colonial voice For this reason the discussion of post-colonialwriting which follows is largely a discussion of the process by whichthe language with its power and the writing with its signification ofauthority has been wrested from the dominant European culture

In order to focus on the complex ways in which the English

introduction 7

language has been used in these societies and to indicate their ownsense of difference we distinguish in this account between the lsquostand-ardrsquo British English inherited from the empire and the english whichthe language has become in post-colonial countries Though Britishimperialism resulted in the spread of a language English across theglobe the english of Jamaicans is not the english of Canadians Maorisor Kenyans We need to distinguish between what is proposed as astandard code English (the language of the erstwhile imperial centre)and the linguistic code english which has been transformed and sub-verted into several distinctive varieties throughout the world For thisreason the distinction between English and english will be usedthroughout our text as an indication of the various ways in which thelanguage has been employed by different linguistic communities in thepost-colonial world3

The use of these terms asserts the fact that a continuum existsbetween the various linguistic practices which constitute english usagein the modern world Although linguistically the links between Englishand the various post-colonial englishes in use today can be seen asunbroken the political reality is that English sets itself apart from allother lsquolesserrsquo variants and so demands to be interrogated about itsclaim to this special status

In practice the history of this distinction between English and eng-lish has been between the claims of a powerful lsquocentrersquo and a multitudeof intersecting usages designated as lsquoperipheriesrsquo The language ofthese lsquoperipheriesrsquo was shaped by an oppressive discourse of power Yetthey have been the site of some of the most exciting and innovativeliteratures of the modern period and this has at least in part been theresult of the energies uncovered by the political tension between theidea of a normative code and a variety of regional usages

PLACE AND DISPLACEMENT

A major feature of post-colonial literatures is the concern with placeand displacement It is here that the special post-colonial crisis of iden-tity comes into being the concern with the development or recoveryof an effective identifying relationship between self and place Indeedcritics such as D E S Maxwell have made this the defining model of

the empire writes back8

post-coloniality (see ch 1) A valid and active sense of self may havebeen eroded by dislocation resulting from migration the experience ofenslavement transportation or lsquovoluntaryrsquo removal for indenturedlabour Or it may have been destroyed by cultural denigration the con-scious and unconscious oppression of the indigenous personality andculture by a supposedly superior racial or cultural model The dialecticof place and displacement is always a feature of post-colonial societieswhether these have been created by a process of settlement interven-tion or a mixture of the two Beyond their historical and culturaldifferences place displacement and a pervasive concern with themyths of identity and authenticity are a feature common to allpost-colonial literatures in english

The alienation of vision and the crisis in self-image which this dis-placement produces is as frequently found in the accounts of Canadianlsquofree settlersrsquo as of Australian convicts FijianndashIndian or TrinidadianndashIndian indentured labourers West Indian slaves or forcibly colonizedNigerians or Bengalis Although this is pragmatically demonstrablefrom a wide range of texts it is difficult to account for by theorieswhich see this social and linguistic alienation as resulting only fromovertly oppressive forms of colonization such as slavery or conquestAn adequate account of this practice must go beyond the usual categor-ies of social alienation such as masterslave freebonded rulerruledhowever important and widespread these may be in post-colonial cul-tures After all why should the free settler formally unconstrained andtheoretically free to continue in the possession and practice oflsquoEnglishnessrsquo also show clear signs of alienation even within thefirst generation of settlement and manifest a tendency to seek analternative differentiated identity

The most widely shared discursive practice within which this alien-ation can be identified is the construction of lsquoplacersquo The gap whichopens between the experience of place and the language available todescribe it forms a classic and allpervasive feature of post-colonial textsThis gap occurs for those whose language seems inadequate to describea new place for those whose language is systematically destroyed byenslavement and for those whose language has been renderedunprivileged by the imposition of the language of a colonizing powerSome admixture of one or other of these models can describe the

introduction 9

situation of all post-colonial societies In each case a condition of alien-ation is inevitable until the colonizing language has been replaced orappropriated as english

That imperialism results in a profound linguistic alienation isobviously the case in cultures in which a pre-colonial culture is sup-pressed by military conquest or enslavement So for example anIndian writer like Raja Rao or a Nigerian writer such as ChinuaAchebe have needed to transform the language to use it in a differentway in its new context and so as Achebe says quoting James Bald-win make it lsquobear the burdenrsquo of their experience (Achebe 197562) Although Rao and Achebe write from their own place and sohave not suffered a literal geographical displacement they have toovercome an imposed gap resulting from the linguistic displacementof the pre-colonial language by English This process occurs within amore comprehensive discourse of place and displacement in thewider post-colonial context Such alienation is shared by those whosepossession of English is indisputably lsquonativersquo (in the sense of beingpossessed from birth) yet who begin to feel alienated within its prac-tice once its vocabulary categories and codes are felt to beinadequate or inappropriate to describe the fauna the physical andgeographical conditions or the cultural practices they have developedin a new land The Canadian poet Joseph Howe for instance pluckshis picture of a moose from some repository of English nurseryrhyme romanticism

the gay moose in jocund gambol springsCropping the foliage Nature round him flings

(Howe 1874 100)

Such absurdities demonstrate the pressing need these native speakersshare with those colonized peoples who were directly oppressed toescape from the inadequacies and imperial constraints of English as asocial practice They need that is to escape from the implicit body ofassumptions to which English was attached its aesthetic and socialvalues the formal and historically limited constraints of genre and theoppressive political and cultural assertion of metropolitan dominanceof centre over margin (Ngugi 1986) This is not to say that the English

the empire writes back10

language is inherently incapable of accounting for post-colonialexperience but that it needs to develop an lsquoappropriatersquo usage in orderto do so (by becoming a distinct and unique form of english) Theenergizing feature of this displacement is its capacity to interrogate andsubvert the imperial cultural formations

The pressure to develop such a usage manifests itself early in thedevelopment of lsquoenglishrsquo literatures It is therefore arguable that evenbefore the development of a conscious de-colonizing stance theexperience of a new place identifiably different in its physical charac-teristics constrains for instance the new settlers to demand a languagewhich will allow them to express their sense of lsquoOthernessrsquo Landscapeflora and fauna seasons climatic conditions are formally distinguishedfrom the place of origin as homecolony EuropeNew WorldEuropeAntipodes metropolitanprovincial and so on although ofcourse at this stage no effective models exist for expressing this senseof Otherness in a positive and creative way

POST-COLONIALITY AND THEORY

The idea of lsquopost-colonial literary theoryrsquo emerges from the inability ofEuropean theory to deal adequately with the complexities and variedcultural provenance of post-colonial writing European theories them-selves emerge from particular cultural traditions which are hidden byfalse notions of lsquothe universalrsquo Theories of style and genre assump-tions about the universal features of language epistemologies andvalue systems are all radically questioned by the practices of post-colonial writing Post-colonial theory has proceeded from the need toaddress this different practice Indigenous theories have developed toaccommodate the differences within the various cultural traditions aswell as the desire to describe in a comparative way the features sharedacross those traditions

The political and cultural monocentrism of the colonial enterprisewas a natural result of the philosophical traditions of the Europeanworld and the systems of representation which this privilegedNineteenth-century imperial expansion the culmination of the out-ward and dominating thrust of Europeans into the world beyondEurope which began during the early Renaissance was underpinned

introduction 11

in complex ways by these assumptions In the first instance thisproduced practices of cultural subservience characterized by one post-colonial critic as lsquocultural cringersquo (Phillips 1958) Subsequently theemergence of identifiable indigenous theories in reaction to thisformed an important element in the development of specific nationaland regional consciousnesses (see ch 4)

Paradoxically however imperial expansion has had a radicallydestabilizing effect on its own preoccupations and power In pushingthe colonial world to the margins of experience the lsquocentrersquo pushedconsciousness beyond the point at which monocentrism in all spheresof thought could be accepted without question In other words thealienating process which initially served to relegate the post-colonialworld to the lsquomarginrsquo turned upon itself and acted to push that worldthrough a kind of mental barrier into a position from which allexperience could be viewed as uncentred pluralistic and multifari-ous Marginality thus became an unprecedented source of creativeenergy The impetus towards decentring and pluralism has alwaysbeen present in the history of European thought and has reached itslatest development in post-structuralism But the situation of margin-alized societies and cultures enabled them to come to this positionmuch earlier and more directly (Brydon 1984b) These notions areimplicit in post-colonial texts from the imperial period to the presentday

The task of this book is twofold first to identify the range andnature of these post-colonial texts and second to describe the varioustheories which have emerged so far to account for them So in the firstchapter we consider the development of descriptive models of post-colonial writing Since it is not possible to read post-colonial textswithout coming to terms with the ways in which they appropriate anddeploy the material of linguistic culture in the second chapter weoutline the process by which language is captured to form a distinctivediscursive practice In the third chapter we demonstrate throughsymptomatic readings of texts how post-colonial writing interactswith the social and material practices of colonialism One of the majorpurposes of this book is to explain the nature of existing post-colonialtheory and the way in which it interacts with and dismantles some ofthe assumptions of European theory In the fourth chapter we discuss

the empire writes back12

the issues in the development of indigenous post-colonial theories andin the fifth we examine the larger implications of post-coloniality fortheories of language for literary theory and for social and politicalanalysis in general

introduction 13

1CUTTING THE GROUND

Critical models of post-colonialliteratures

As writers and critics became aware of the special character ofpost-colonial texts they saw the need to develop an adequate model toaccount for them Four major models have emerged to date firstlsquonationalrsquo or regional models which emphasize the distinctive featuresof the particular national or regional culture second race-basedmodels which identify certain shared characteristics across variousnational literatures such as the common racial inheritance in litera-tures of the African diaspora addressed by the lsquoBlack writingrsquo modelthird comparative models of varying complexity which seek toaccount for particular linguistic historical and cultural features acrosstwo or more post-colonial literatures fourth more comprehensivecomparative models which argue for features such as hybridity andsyncreticity as constitutive elements of all post-colonial literatures(syncretism is the process by which previously distinct linguistic cat-egories and by extension cultural formations merge into a singlenew form) These models often operate as assumptions within criticalpractice rather than specific and discrete schools of thought in any

discussion of post-colonial writing a number of them may be operat-ing at the same time

NATIONAL AND REGIONAL MODELS

The first post-colonial society to develop a lsquonationalrsquo literature was theUSA The emergence of a distinctive American literature in the lateeighteenth century raised inevitable questions about the relationshipbetween literature and place between literature and nationality andparticularly about the suitability of inherited literary forms Ideas aboutnew kinds of literature were part of the optimistic progression tonationhood because it seemed that this was one of the most potentareas in which to express difference from Britain Writers like CharlesBrockden Brown who attempted to indigenize British forms like thegothic and the sentimental novel soon realized that with the change inlocation and culture it was not possible to import form and conceptwithout radical alteration (Fiedler 1960 Ringe 1966)

In many ways the American experience and its attempts to producea new kind of literature can be seen to be the model for all laterpost-colonial writing1 The first thing it showed was that some ofa post-colonial countryrsquos most deeply held linguistic and cultural traitsdepend upon its relationship with the colonizing power particularlythe defining contrast between European metropolis and lsquofrontierrsquo (seeFussell 1965) Once the American Revolution had forced the questionof separate nationality and the economic and political successes of theemerging nation had begun to be taken for granted American litera-ture as a distinct collection of texts also began to be accepted But it wasaccepted as an offshoot of the lsquoparent treersquo Such organic metaphorsand others like lsquoparentndashchildrsquo and lsquostreamndashtributaryrsquo acted to keep thenew literature in its place The plant and parent metaphors stressed ageexperience roots tradition and most importantly the connectionbetween antiquity and value They implied the same distinctions asthose existing between metropolis and frontier parents are moreexperienced more important more substantial less brash than theiroffspring Above all they are the origin and therefore claim the finalauthority in questions of taste and value

But as the extensive literature of the USA developed different

cutting the ground 15

characteristics from that of Britain and established its right to be con-sidered independently the concept of national literary differenceslsquowithinrsquo English writing became established The eventual consequenceof this has been that lsquonewerrsquo literatures from countries such as NigeriaAustralia and India could also be discussed as discrete national forma-tions rather than as lsquobranches of the treersquo Their literatures could beconsidered in relation to the social and political history of each coun-try and could be read as a source of important images of nationalidentity

The development of national literatures and criticism is fundamentalto the whole enterprise of post-colonial studies Without such devel-opments at the national level and without the comparative studiesbetween national traditions to which these lead no discourse of thepost-colonial could have emerged Nor is it simply a matter of devel-opment from one stage to another since all post-colonial studies con-tinue to depend upon national literatures and criticism The study ofnational traditions is the first and most vital stage of the processof rejecting the claims of the centre to exclusivity It is the beginning ofwhat Nigerian writer Wole Soyinka has characterized as the lsquoprocess ofself-apprehensionrsquo (Soyinka 1976 xi) Recent theories of a generalpost-colonial discourse question essentialist formulations which maylead to nationalist and racist orthodoxies but they do not deny thegreat importance of maintaining each literaturersquos sense of specific dif-ference It is this sense of difference which constitutes each nationalliteraturersquos mode of self-apprehension and its claim to be a self-constituting entity However nationalism in which some partial truthor clicheacute is elevated to orthodoxy is a danger implicit in such nationalconceptions of literary production The impetus towards national self-realization in critical assessments of literature all too often fails to stopshort of nationalist myth

Larger geographical models which cross the boundaries of languagenationality or race to generate the concept of a regional literature suchas West Indian or South Pacific literature may also share some of thelimitations of the national model While the idea of an lsquoAfricanrsquo litera-ture for instance has a powerful appeal to writers and critics in thevarious African countries it has only limited application as a descrip-tive label African and European critics have produced several regional

the empire writes back16

and national studies which reflect the widespread political economicand cultural differences between modern African countries (Gurr andCalder 1974 Lindfors 1975 Taiwo 1976 Ogungbesan 1979)

Clearly some regional groupings are more likely to gain acceptancein the regions themselves than are others and will derive from a col-lective identity evident in other ways This is true of the West IndiesAlthough the Federation of the West Indies failed the english-speakingcountries there still field a regional cricket team Both the West Indiesand the South Pacific have regional universities with a significant inputinto literary production and discussion lsquoWest Indianrsquo literature hasalmost always been considered regionally rather than nationally Therehave been no major studies of Jamaican or Trinidadian literatures asdiscrete traditions A different regional grouping emphasizing geo-graphical and historical determinants rather than linguistic ones hasalso developed to explore lsquoCaribbeanrsquo literature setting literature inenglish from the region alongside that written in spanish french andother European languages (Allis 1982)

Despite such variants on the national model most of the englishliteratures outside Britain have been considered as individual nationalenterprises forming and reflecting each countryrsquos culture The inevit-able consequence of this is a gradual blurring of the distinctionbetween the national and the nationalist Nationalism has usuallyincluded a healthy repudiation of British and US hegemony observablein publishing education and the public sponsorship of writing Yet alltoo often nationalist criticism by failing to alter the terms of the dis-course within which it operates has participated implicitly or evenexplicitly in a discourse ultimately controlled by the very imperialpower its nationalist assertion is designed to exclude Emphasis mayhave been transferred to the national literature but the theoreticalassumptions critical perspectives and value judgements made haveoften replicated those of the British establishment

COMPARISONS BETWEEN TWO OR MORE REGIONS

Theories and models of post-colonial literatures could not emergeuntil the separate colonies were viewed in a framework centred ontheir own literary and cultural traditions Victorian Britain had exulted

cutting the ground 17

Who is post-colonial 200Theoretical issues 203Post-colonial futures 209

Conclusion More english than English 220

Readersrsquo guide 223Notes 238Bibliography 246Index 271

contents vii

GENERAL EDITORrsquoS PREFACE

No doubt a third General Editorrsquos Preface to New Accents seems hard tojustify What is there left to say Twenty-five years ago the series beganwith a very clear purpose Its major concern was the newly perplexedworld of academic literary studies where hectic monsters called lsquoThe-oryrsquo lsquoLinguisticsrsquo and lsquoPoliticsrsquo ranged In particular it aimed itself atthose undergraduates or beginning postgraduate students who wereeither learning to come to terms with the new developments or werebeing sternly warned against them

New Accents deliberately took sides Thus the first Preface spoke darklyin 1977 of lsquoa time of rapid and radical social changersquo of the lsquoerosionof the assumptions and presuppositionsrsquo central to the study of litera-ture lsquoModes and categories inherited from the pastrsquo it announced lsquonolonger seem to fit the reality experienced by a new generationrsquo Theaim of each volume would be to lsquoencourage rather than resist theprocess of changersquo by combining nuts-and-bolts exposition of newideas with clear and detailed explanation of related conceptual devel-opments If mystification (or downright demonization) was theenemy lucidity (with a nod to the compromises inevitably at stakethere) became a friend If a lsquodistinctive discourse of the futurersquobeckoned we wanted at least to be able to understand it

With the apocalypse duly noted the second Preface proceeded

piously to fret over the nature of whatever rough beast might staggerportentously from the rubble lsquoHow can we recognise or deal with thenewrsquo it complained reporting nevertheless the dismaying advance oflsquoa host of barely respectable activities for which we have no reassuringnamesrsquo and promising a programme of wary surveillance at lsquotheboundaries of the precedented and at the limit of the thinkablersquo Itsconclusion lsquothe unthinkable after all is that which covertly shapes ourthoughtsrsquo may rank as a truism But in so far as it offered some sort ofuseable purchase on a world of crumbling certainties it is not to beblushed for

In the circumstances any subsequent and surely final effort canonly modestly look back marvelling that the series is still here and notunreasonably congratulating itself on having provided an initial outletfor what turned over the years into some of the distinctive voices andtopics in literary studies But the volumes now re-presented have morethan a mere historical interest As their authors indicate the issues theyraised are still potent the arguments with which they engaged are stilldisturbing In short we werenrsquot wrong Academic study did changerapidly and radically to match even to help to generate wide reachingsocial changes A new set of discourses was developed to negotiatethose upheavals Nor has the process ceased In our deliquescent worldwhat was unthinkable inside and outside the academy all those yearsago now seems regularly to come to pass

Whether the New Accents volumes provided adequate warning ofmaps for guides to or nudges in the direction of this new terrain isscarcely for me to say Perhaps our best achievement lay in cultivatingthe sense that it was there The only justification for a reluctant thirdattempt at a Preface is the belief that it still is

TERENCE HAWKES

general editorrsquos prefacex

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

For help and generous support we should like to thank our partnersJudy Carolyn and Chris

For generous help in finding material tracing references and gener-ally making this book less inadequate than it remains we want to thankmany people but in particular Alan Lawson David Moody andStephen Slemon

INTRODUCTION

More than three-quarters of the people living in the world today havehad their lives shaped by the experience of colonialism It is easy to seehow important this has been in the political and economic spheres butits general influence on the perceptual frameworks of contemporarypeoples is often less evident Literature offers one of the most import-ant ways in which these new perceptions are expressed and it is in theirwriting and through other arts such as painting sculpture music anddance that the day-to-day realities experienced by colonized peopleshave been most powerfully encoded and so profoundly influential

WHAT ARE POST-COLONIAL LITERATURES

This book is concerned with writing by those peoples formerly colon-ized by Britain though much of what it deals with is of interest andrelevance to countries colonized by other European powers such asFrance Portugal and Spain The semantic basis of the term lsquopost-colonialrsquo might seem to suggest a concern only with the national cul-ture after the departure of the imperial power It has occasionally beenemployed in some earlier work in the area to distinguish between theperiods before and after independence (lsquocolonial periodrsquo andlsquopost-colonial periodrsquo) for example in constructing national literary

histories or in suggesting comparative studies between stages in thosehistories Generally speaking though the term lsquocolonialrsquo has been usedfor the period before independence and a term indicating a nationalwriting such as lsquomodern Canadian writingrsquo or lsquorecent West Indianliteraturersquo has been employed to distinguish the period afterindependence

We use the term lsquopost-colonialrsquo however to cover all the cultureaffected by the imperial process from the moment of colonization tothe present day This is because there is a continuity of preoccupationsthroughout the historical process initiated by European imperialaggression We also suggest that it is most appropriate as the term forthe new cross-cultural criticism which has emerged in recent years andfor the discourse through which this is constituted In this sense thisbook is concerned with the world as it exists during and after theperiod of European imperial domination and the effects of this oncontemporary literatures

So the literatures of African countries Australia Bangladesh CanadaCaribbean countries India Malaysia Malta New Zealand PakistanSingapore South Pacific Island countries and Sri Lanka are all post-colonial literatures The literature of the USA should also be placed inthis category Perhaps because of its current position of power and theneo-colonizing role it has played its post-colonial nature has not beengenerally recognized But its relationship with the metropolitan centreas it evolved over the last two centuries has been paradigmatic for post-colonial literatures everywhere What each of these literatures has incommon beyond their special and distinctive regional characteristics isthat they emerged in their present form out of the experience of colon-ization and asserted themselves by foregrounding the tension with theimperial power and by emphasizing their differences from theassumptions of the imperial centre It is this which makes themdistinctively post-colonial

POST-COLONIAL LITERATURES AND ENGLISH STUDIES

The study of English has always been a densely political and culturalphenomenon a practice in which language and literature have bothbeen called into the service of a profound and embracing nationalism

the empire writes back2

The development of English as a privileged academic subject innineteenth-century Britain ndash finally confirmed by its inclusion in thesyllabuses of Oxford and Cambridge and re-affirmed in the 1921Newbolt Report ndash came about as part of an attempt to replace theClassics at the heart of the intellectual enterprise of nineteenth-centuryhumanistic studies From the beginning proponents of English as adiscipline linked its methodology to that of the Classics with itsemphasis on scholarship philology and historical study ndash the fixing oftexts in historical time and the perpetual search for the determinants ofa single unified and agreed meaning

The historical moment which saw the emergence of lsquoEnglishrsquo as anacademic discipline also produced the nineteenth-century colonialform of imperialism (Batsleer et al 1985 14 19ndash25) Gauri Viswa-nathan has presented strong arguments for relating the lsquoinstitutional-isation and subsequent valorisation of English literary study [to] ashape and an ideological content developed in the colonial contextrsquoand specifically as it developed in India where

British colonial administrators provoked by missionaries on the onehand and fears of native insubordination on the other discovered anally in English literature to support them in maintaining control of thenatives under the guise of a liberal education

(Viswanathan 1987 17)

It can be argued that the study of English and the growth of Empireproceeded from a single ideological climate and that the developmentof the one is intrinsically bound up with the development of the otherboth at the level of simple utility (as propaganda for instance) and atthe unconscious level where it leads to the naturalizing of constructedvalues (eg civilization humanity etc) which conversely establishedlsquosavageryrsquo lsquonativersquo lsquoprimitiversquo as their antitheses and as the object of areforming zeal1

A lsquoprivileging normrsquo was enthroned at the heart of the formation ofEnglish Studies as a template for the denial of the value of the lsquoper-ipheralrsquo the lsquomarginalrsquo the lsquouncanonizedrsquo Literature was made as cen-tral to the cultural enterprise of Empire as the monarchy was to itspolitical formation So when elements of the periphery and margin

introduction 3

threatened the exclusive claims of the centre they were rapidlyincorporated This was a process in Edward Saidrsquos terms of consciousaffiliation proceeding under the guise of filiation (Said 1984) that is amimicry of the centre proceeding from a desire not only to be acceptedbut to be adopted and absorbed It caused those from the periphery toimmerse themselves in the imported culture denying their origins inan attempt to become lsquomore English than the Englishrsquo We seeexamples of this in such writers as Henry James and TS Eliot

As post-colonial societies sought to establish their difference fromBritain the response of those who recognized this complicity betweenlanguage education and cultural incorporation was to break the linkbetween language and literary study by dividing lsquoEnglishrsquo departmentsin universities into separate schools of Linguistics and of Literatureboth of which tended to view their project within a national or inter-national context Ngugirsquos essay lsquoOn the abolition of the Englishdepartmentrsquo (Ngugi 1972) is an illuminating account of the particulararguments involved in Africa John Dockerrsquos essay lsquoThe neocolonialassumption in the university teaching of Englishrsquo (Tiffin 1978 26ndash31) addresses similar problems in the settler colony contextdescribing a situation in which in contrast to Kenya little genuinedecolonization is yet in sight As Dockerrsquos critique makes clear in mostpost-colonial nations (including the West Indies and India) the nexusof power involving literature language and a dominant British culturehas strongly resisted attempts to dismantle it Even after such attemptsbegan to succeed the canonical nature and unquestioned status of theworks of the English literary tradition and the values they incorporatedremained potent in the cultural formation and the ideological institu-tions of education and literature Nevertheless the development of thepost-colonial literatures has necessitated a questioning of many of theassumptions on which the study of lsquoEnglishrsquo was based

DEVELOPMENT OF POST-COLONIAL LITERATURES

Post-colonial literatures developed through several stages which can beseen to correspond to stages both of national or regional consciousnessand of the project of asserting difference from the imperial centreDuring the imperial period writing in the language of the imperial

the empire writes back4

centre is inevitably of course produced by a literate elite whose pri-mary identification is with the colonizing power Thus the first textsproduced in the colonies in the new language are frequently producedby lsquorepresentativesrsquo of the imperial power for example gentrified set-tlers (Wentworthrsquos lsquoAustraliarsquo) travellers and sightseers (FroudersquosOceana and his The English in the West Indies or the travel diaries of MaryKingsley) or the Anglo-Indian and West African administrators sol-diers and lsquoboxwallahsrsquo and even more frequently their memsahibs(volumes of memoirs)

Such texts can never form the basis for an indigenous culture nor canthey be integrated in any way with the culture which already exists inthe countries invaded Despite their detailed reportage of landscapecustom and language they inevitably privilege the centre emphasiz-ing the lsquohomersquo over the lsquonativersquo the lsquometropolitanrsquo over the lsquoprovincialrsquoor lsquocolonialrsquo and so forth At a deeper level their claim to objectivitysimply serves to hide the imperial discourse within which they arecreated That this is true of even the consciously literary works whichemerge from this moment can be illustrated by the poems and storiesof Rudyard Kipling For example in the well-known poem lsquoChristmasin Indiarsquo the evocative description of a Christmas day in the heat ofIndia is contextualized by invoking its absent English counterpartApparently it is only through this absent and enabling signifier that theIndian daily reality can acquire legitimacy as a subject of literarydiscourse

The second stage of production within the evolving discourse of thepost-colonial is the literature produced lsquounder imperial licencersquo bylsquonativesrsquo or lsquooutcastsrsquo for instance the large body of poetry and proseproduced in the nineteenth century by the English educated Indianupper class or African lsquomissionary literaturersquo (eg Thomas MofolorsquosChaka) The producers signify by the very fact of writing in thelanguage of the dominant culture that they have temporarily or per-manently entered a specific and privileged class endowed with thelanguage education and leisure necessary to produce such works TheAustralian novel Ralph Rashleigh now known to have been written by theconvict James Tucker is a case in point Tucker an educated man wroteRashleigh as a lsquospecialrsquo (a privileged convict) whilst working at the penalsettlement at Port Macquarie as storekeeper to the superintendent

introduction 5

Written on government paper with government ink and pens thenovel was clearly produced with the aid and support of the super-intendent Tucker had momentarily gained access to the privilege ofliterature Significantly the moment of privilege did not last and hedied in poverty at the age of fifty-eight at Liverpool asylum in Sydney

It is characteristic of these early post-colonial texts that the potentialfor subversion in their themes cannot be fully realized Although theydeal with such powerful material as the brutality of the convict system(Tuckerrsquos Rashleigh) the historical potency of the supplanted anddenigrated native cultures (Mofolorsquos Chaka) or the existence of a richcultural heritage older and more extensive than that of Europe (any ofmany nineteenth-century Indo-Anglian poets such as Ram Sharma)they are prevented from fully exploring their anti-imperial potentialBoth the available discourse and the material conditions of productionfor literature in these early post-colonial societies restrain this possibil-ity The institution of lsquoLiteraturersquo in the colony is under the directcontrol of the imperial ruling class who alone license the acceptableform and permit the publication and distribution of the resulting workSo texts of this kind come into being within the constraints of adiscourse and the institutional practice of a patronage system whichlimits and undercuts their assertion of a different perspective Thedevelopment of independent literatures depended upon the abrogationof this constraining power and the appropriation of language and writ-ing for new and distinctive usages Such an appropriation is clearly themost significant feature in the emergence of modern post-colonialliteratures (see chs 2 and 3)

HEGEMONY

Why should post-colonial societies continue to engage with theimperial experience Since all the post-colonial societies we discusshave achieved political independence why is the issue of colonialitystill relevant at all This question of why the empire needs to write backto a centre once the imperial structure has been dismantled in politicalterms is an important one Britain like the other dominant colonialpowers of the nineteenth century has been relegated to a relativelyminor place in international affairs In the spheres of politics and

the empire writes back6

economics and increasingly in the vital new area of the mass mediaBritain and the other European imperial powers have been super-seded by the emergent power of the USA Nevertheless through theliterary canon the body of British texts which all too frequently stillacts as a touchstone of taste and value and through RS-English(Received Standard English) which asserts the English of south-eastEngland as a universal norm the weight of antiquity continues todominate cultural production in much of the post-colonial worldThis cultural hegemony has been maintained through canonicalassumptions about literary activity and through attitudes to post-colonial literatures which identify them as isolated national off-shootsof English literature and which therefore relegate them to marginaland subordinate positions More recently as the range and strength ofthese literatures has become undeniable a process of incorporation hasbegun in which employing Eurocentric standards of judgement thecentre has sought to claim those works and writers of which itapproves as British2 In all these respects the parallel between the situ-ation of post-colonial writing and that of feminist writing is striking(see ch 5)

LANGUAGE

One of the main features of imperial oppression is control over lan-guage The imperial education system installs a lsquostandardrsquo version ofthe metropolitan language as the norm and marginalizes all lsquovariantsrsquoas impurities As a character in Mrs Campbell Praedrsquos nineteenth-century Australian novel Policy and Passion puts it lsquoTo be colonial is to talkAustralian slang to be everything that is abominablersquo (CampbellPraed 1881154) Language becomes the medium through which ahierarchical structure of power is perpetuated and the mediumthrough which conceptions of lsquotruthrsquo lsquoorderrsquo and lsquorealityrsquo becomeestablished Such power is rejected in the emergence of an effectivepost-colonial voice For this reason the discussion of post-colonialwriting which follows is largely a discussion of the process by whichthe language with its power and the writing with its signification ofauthority has been wrested from the dominant European culture

In order to focus on the complex ways in which the English

introduction 7

language has been used in these societies and to indicate their ownsense of difference we distinguish in this account between the lsquostand-ardrsquo British English inherited from the empire and the english whichthe language has become in post-colonial countries Though Britishimperialism resulted in the spread of a language English across theglobe the english of Jamaicans is not the english of Canadians Maorisor Kenyans We need to distinguish between what is proposed as astandard code English (the language of the erstwhile imperial centre)and the linguistic code english which has been transformed and sub-verted into several distinctive varieties throughout the world For thisreason the distinction between English and english will be usedthroughout our text as an indication of the various ways in which thelanguage has been employed by different linguistic communities in thepost-colonial world3

The use of these terms asserts the fact that a continuum existsbetween the various linguistic practices which constitute english usagein the modern world Although linguistically the links between Englishand the various post-colonial englishes in use today can be seen asunbroken the political reality is that English sets itself apart from allother lsquolesserrsquo variants and so demands to be interrogated about itsclaim to this special status

In practice the history of this distinction between English and eng-lish has been between the claims of a powerful lsquocentrersquo and a multitudeof intersecting usages designated as lsquoperipheriesrsquo The language ofthese lsquoperipheriesrsquo was shaped by an oppressive discourse of power Yetthey have been the site of some of the most exciting and innovativeliteratures of the modern period and this has at least in part been theresult of the energies uncovered by the political tension between theidea of a normative code and a variety of regional usages

PLACE AND DISPLACEMENT

A major feature of post-colonial literatures is the concern with placeand displacement It is here that the special post-colonial crisis of iden-tity comes into being the concern with the development or recoveryof an effective identifying relationship between self and place Indeedcritics such as D E S Maxwell have made this the defining model of

the empire writes back8

post-coloniality (see ch 1) A valid and active sense of self may havebeen eroded by dislocation resulting from migration the experience ofenslavement transportation or lsquovoluntaryrsquo removal for indenturedlabour Or it may have been destroyed by cultural denigration the con-scious and unconscious oppression of the indigenous personality andculture by a supposedly superior racial or cultural model The dialecticof place and displacement is always a feature of post-colonial societieswhether these have been created by a process of settlement interven-tion or a mixture of the two Beyond their historical and culturaldifferences place displacement and a pervasive concern with themyths of identity and authenticity are a feature common to allpost-colonial literatures in english

The alienation of vision and the crisis in self-image which this dis-placement produces is as frequently found in the accounts of Canadianlsquofree settlersrsquo as of Australian convicts FijianndashIndian or TrinidadianndashIndian indentured labourers West Indian slaves or forcibly colonizedNigerians or Bengalis Although this is pragmatically demonstrablefrom a wide range of texts it is difficult to account for by theorieswhich see this social and linguistic alienation as resulting only fromovertly oppressive forms of colonization such as slavery or conquestAn adequate account of this practice must go beyond the usual categor-ies of social alienation such as masterslave freebonded rulerruledhowever important and widespread these may be in post-colonial cul-tures After all why should the free settler formally unconstrained andtheoretically free to continue in the possession and practice oflsquoEnglishnessrsquo also show clear signs of alienation even within thefirst generation of settlement and manifest a tendency to seek analternative differentiated identity

The most widely shared discursive practice within which this alien-ation can be identified is the construction of lsquoplacersquo The gap whichopens between the experience of place and the language available todescribe it forms a classic and allpervasive feature of post-colonial textsThis gap occurs for those whose language seems inadequate to describea new place for those whose language is systematically destroyed byenslavement and for those whose language has been renderedunprivileged by the imposition of the language of a colonizing powerSome admixture of one or other of these models can describe the

introduction 9

situation of all post-colonial societies In each case a condition of alien-ation is inevitable until the colonizing language has been replaced orappropriated as english

That imperialism results in a profound linguistic alienation isobviously the case in cultures in which a pre-colonial culture is sup-pressed by military conquest or enslavement So for example anIndian writer like Raja Rao or a Nigerian writer such as ChinuaAchebe have needed to transform the language to use it in a differentway in its new context and so as Achebe says quoting James Bald-win make it lsquobear the burdenrsquo of their experience (Achebe 197562) Although Rao and Achebe write from their own place and sohave not suffered a literal geographical displacement they have toovercome an imposed gap resulting from the linguistic displacementof the pre-colonial language by English This process occurs within amore comprehensive discourse of place and displacement in thewider post-colonial context Such alienation is shared by those whosepossession of English is indisputably lsquonativersquo (in the sense of beingpossessed from birth) yet who begin to feel alienated within its prac-tice once its vocabulary categories and codes are felt to beinadequate or inappropriate to describe the fauna the physical andgeographical conditions or the cultural practices they have developedin a new land The Canadian poet Joseph Howe for instance pluckshis picture of a moose from some repository of English nurseryrhyme romanticism

the gay moose in jocund gambol springsCropping the foliage Nature round him flings

(Howe 1874 100)

Such absurdities demonstrate the pressing need these native speakersshare with those colonized peoples who were directly oppressed toescape from the inadequacies and imperial constraints of English as asocial practice They need that is to escape from the implicit body ofassumptions to which English was attached its aesthetic and socialvalues the formal and historically limited constraints of genre and theoppressive political and cultural assertion of metropolitan dominanceof centre over margin (Ngugi 1986) This is not to say that the English

the empire writes back10

language is inherently incapable of accounting for post-colonialexperience but that it needs to develop an lsquoappropriatersquo usage in orderto do so (by becoming a distinct and unique form of english) Theenergizing feature of this displacement is its capacity to interrogate andsubvert the imperial cultural formations

The pressure to develop such a usage manifests itself early in thedevelopment of lsquoenglishrsquo literatures It is therefore arguable that evenbefore the development of a conscious de-colonizing stance theexperience of a new place identifiably different in its physical charac-teristics constrains for instance the new settlers to demand a languagewhich will allow them to express their sense of lsquoOthernessrsquo Landscapeflora and fauna seasons climatic conditions are formally distinguishedfrom the place of origin as homecolony EuropeNew WorldEuropeAntipodes metropolitanprovincial and so on although ofcourse at this stage no effective models exist for expressing this senseof Otherness in a positive and creative way

POST-COLONIALITY AND THEORY

The idea of lsquopost-colonial literary theoryrsquo emerges from the inability ofEuropean theory to deal adequately with the complexities and variedcultural provenance of post-colonial writing European theories them-selves emerge from particular cultural traditions which are hidden byfalse notions of lsquothe universalrsquo Theories of style and genre assump-tions about the universal features of language epistemologies andvalue systems are all radically questioned by the practices of post-colonial writing Post-colonial theory has proceeded from the need toaddress this different practice Indigenous theories have developed toaccommodate the differences within the various cultural traditions aswell as the desire to describe in a comparative way the features sharedacross those traditions

The political and cultural monocentrism of the colonial enterprisewas a natural result of the philosophical traditions of the Europeanworld and the systems of representation which this privilegedNineteenth-century imperial expansion the culmination of the out-ward and dominating thrust of Europeans into the world beyondEurope which began during the early Renaissance was underpinned

introduction 11

in complex ways by these assumptions In the first instance thisproduced practices of cultural subservience characterized by one post-colonial critic as lsquocultural cringersquo (Phillips 1958) Subsequently theemergence of identifiable indigenous theories in reaction to thisformed an important element in the development of specific nationaland regional consciousnesses (see ch 4)

Paradoxically however imperial expansion has had a radicallydestabilizing effect on its own preoccupations and power In pushingthe colonial world to the margins of experience the lsquocentrersquo pushedconsciousness beyond the point at which monocentrism in all spheresof thought could be accepted without question In other words thealienating process which initially served to relegate the post-colonialworld to the lsquomarginrsquo turned upon itself and acted to push that worldthrough a kind of mental barrier into a position from which allexperience could be viewed as uncentred pluralistic and multifari-ous Marginality thus became an unprecedented source of creativeenergy The impetus towards decentring and pluralism has alwaysbeen present in the history of European thought and has reached itslatest development in post-structuralism But the situation of margin-alized societies and cultures enabled them to come to this positionmuch earlier and more directly (Brydon 1984b) These notions areimplicit in post-colonial texts from the imperial period to the presentday

The task of this book is twofold first to identify the range andnature of these post-colonial texts and second to describe the varioustheories which have emerged so far to account for them So in the firstchapter we consider the development of descriptive models of post-colonial writing Since it is not possible to read post-colonial textswithout coming to terms with the ways in which they appropriate anddeploy the material of linguistic culture in the second chapter weoutline the process by which language is captured to form a distinctivediscursive practice In the third chapter we demonstrate throughsymptomatic readings of texts how post-colonial writing interactswith the social and material practices of colonialism One of the majorpurposes of this book is to explain the nature of existing post-colonialtheory and the way in which it interacts with and dismantles some ofthe assumptions of European theory In the fourth chapter we discuss

the empire writes back12

the issues in the development of indigenous post-colonial theories andin the fifth we examine the larger implications of post-coloniality fortheories of language for literary theory and for social and politicalanalysis in general

introduction 13

1CUTTING THE GROUND

Critical models of post-colonialliteratures

As writers and critics became aware of the special character ofpost-colonial texts they saw the need to develop an adequate model toaccount for them Four major models have emerged to date firstlsquonationalrsquo or regional models which emphasize the distinctive featuresof the particular national or regional culture second race-basedmodels which identify certain shared characteristics across variousnational literatures such as the common racial inheritance in litera-tures of the African diaspora addressed by the lsquoBlack writingrsquo modelthird comparative models of varying complexity which seek toaccount for particular linguistic historical and cultural features acrosstwo or more post-colonial literatures fourth more comprehensivecomparative models which argue for features such as hybridity andsyncreticity as constitutive elements of all post-colonial literatures(syncretism is the process by which previously distinct linguistic cat-egories and by extension cultural formations merge into a singlenew form) These models often operate as assumptions within criticalpractice rather than specific and discrete schools of thought in any

discussion of post-colonial writing a number of them may be operat-ing at the same time

NATIONAL AND REGIONAL MODELS

The first post-colonial society to develop a lsquonationalrsquo literature was theUSA The emergence of a distinctive American literature in the lateeighteenth century raised inevitable questions about the relationshipbetween literature and place between literature and nationality andparticularly about the suitability of inherited literary forms Ideas aboutnew kinds of literature were part of the optimistic progression tonationhood because it seemed that this was one of the most potentareas in which to express difference from Britain Writers like CharlesBrockden Brown who attempted to indigenize British forms like thegothic and the sentimental novel soon realized that with the change inlocation and culture it was not possible to import form and conceptwithout radical alteration (Fiedler 1960 Ringe 1966)

In many ways the American experience and its attempts to producea new kind of literature can be seen to be the model for all laterpost-colonial writing1 The first thing it showed was that some ofa post-colonial countryrsquos most deeply held linguistic and cultural traitsdepend upon its relationship with the colonizing power particularlythe defining contrast between European metropolis and lsquofrontierrsquo (seeFussell 1965) Once the American Revolution had forced the questionof separate nationality and the economic and political successes of theemerging nation had begun to be taken for granted American litera-ture as a distinct collection of texts also began to be accepted But it wasaccepted as an offshoot of the lsquoparent treersquo Such organic metaphorsand others like lsquoparentndashchildrsquo and lsquostreamndashtributaryrsquo acted to keep thenew literature in its place The plant and parent metaphors stressed ageexperience roots tradition and most importantly the connectionbetween antiquity and value They implied the same distinctions asthose existing between metropolis and frontier parents are moreexperienced more important more substantial less brash than theiroffspring Above all they are the origin and therefore claim the finalauthority in questions of taste and value

But as the extensive literature of the USA developed different

cutting the ground 15

characteristics from that of Britain and established its right to be con-sidered independently the concept of national literary differenceslsquowithinrsquo English writing became established The eventual consequenceof this has been that lsquonewerrsquo literatures from countries such as NigeriaAustralia and India could also be discussed as discrete national forma-tions rather than as lsquobranches of the treersquo Their literatures could beconsidered in relation to the social and political history of each coun-try and could be read as a source of important images of nationalidentity

The development of national literatures and criticism is fundamentalto the whole enterprise of post-colonial studies Without such devel-opments at the national level and without the comparative studiesbetween national traditions to which these lead no discourse of thepost-colonial could have emerged Nor is it simply a matter of devel-opment from one stage to another since all post-colonial studies con-tinue to depend upon national literatures and criticism The study ofnational traditions is the first and most vital stage of the processof rejecting the claims of the centre to exclusivity It is the beginning ofwhat Nigerian writer Wole Soyinka has characterized as the lsquoprocess ofself-apprehensionrsquo (Soyinka 1976 xi) Recent theories of a generalpost-colonial discourse question essentialist formulations which maylead to nationalist and racist orthodoxies but they do not deny thegreat importance of maintaining each literaturersquos sense of specific dif-ference It is this sense of difference which constitutes each nationalliteraturersquos mode of self-apprehension and its claim to be a self-constituting entity However nationalism in which some partial truthor clicheacute is elevated to orthodoxy is a danger implicit in such nationalconceptions of literary production The impetus towards national self-realization in critical assessments of literature all too often fails to stopshort of nationalist myth

Larger geographical models which cross the boundaries of languagenationality or race to generate the concept of a regional literature suchas West Indian or South Pacific literature may also share some of thelimitations of the national model While the idea of an lsquoAfricanrsquo litera-ture for instance has a powerful appeal to writers and critics in thevarious African countries it has only limited application as a descrip-tive label African and European critics have produced several regional

the empire writes back16

and national studies which reflect the widespread political economicand cultural differences between modern African countries (Gurr andCalder 1974 Lindfors 1975 Taiwo 1976 Ogungbesan 1979)

Clearly some regional groupings are more likely to gain acceptancein the regions themselves than are others and will derive from a col-lective identity evident in other ways This is true of the West IndiesAlthough the Federation of the West Indies failed the english-speakingcountries there still field a regional cricket team Both the West Indiesand the South Pacific have regional universities with a significant inputinto literary production and discussion lsquoWest Indianrsquo literature hasalmost always been considered regionally rather than nationally Therehave been no major studies of Jamaican or Trinidadian literatures asdiscrete traditions A different regional grouping emphasizing geo-graphical and historical determinants rather than linguistic ones hasalso developed to explore lsquoCaribbeanrsquo literature setting literature inenglish from the region alongside that written in spanish french andother European languages (Allis 1982)

Despite such variants on the national model most of the englishliteratures outside Britain have been considered as individual nationalenterprises forming and reflecting each countryrsquos culture The inevit-able consequence of this is a gradual blurring of the distinctionbetween the national and the nationalist Nationalism has usuallyincluded a healthy repudiation of British and US hegemony observablein publishing education and the public sponsorship of writing Yet alltoo often nationalist criticism by failing to alter the terms of the dis-course within which it operates has participated implicitly or evenexplicitly in a discourse ultimately controlled by the very imperialpower its nationalist assertion is designed to exclude Emphasis mayhave been transferred to the national literature but the theoreticalassumptions critical perspectives and value judgements made haveoften replicated those of the British establishment

COMPARISONS BETWEEN TWO OR MORE REGIONS

Theories and models of post-colonial literatures could not emergeuntil the separate colonies were viewed in a framework centred ontheir own literary and cultural traditions Victorian Britain had exulted

cutting the ground 17

GENERAL EDITORrsquoS PREFACE

No doubt a third General Editorrsquos Preface to New Accents seems hard tojustify What is there left to say Twenty-five years ago the series beganwith a very clear purpose Its major concern was the newly perplexedworld of academic literary studies where hectic monsters called lsquoThe-oryrsquo lsquoLinguisticsrsquo and lsquoPoliticsrsquo ranged In particular it aimed itself atthose undergraduates or beginning postgraduate students who wereeither learning to come to terms with the new developments or werebeing sternly warned against them

New Accents deliberately took sides Thus the first Preface spoke darklyin 1977 of lsquoa time of rapid and radical social changersquo of the lsquoerosionof the assumptions and presuppositionsrsquo central to the study of litera-ture lsquoModes and categories inherited from the pastrsquo it announced lsquonolonger seem to fit the reality experienced by a new generationrsquo Theaim of each volume would be to lsquoencourage rather than resist theprocess of changersquo by combining nuts-and-bolts exposition of newideas with clear and detailed explanation of related conceptual devel-opments If mystification (or downright demonization) was theenemy lucidity (with a nod to the compromises inevitably at stakethere) became a friend If a lsquodistinctive discourse of the futurersquobeckoned we wanted at least to be able to understand it

With the apocalypse duly noted the second Preface proceeded

piously to fret over the nature of whatever rough beast might staggerportentously from the rubble lsquoHow can we recognise or deal with thenewrsquo it complained reporting nevertheless the dismaying advance oflsquoa host of barely respectable activities for which we have no reassuringnamesrsquo and promising a programme of wary surveillance at lsquotheboundaries of the precedented and at the limit of the thinkablersquo Itsconclusion lsquothe unthinkable after all is that which covertly shapes ourthoughtsrsquo may rank as a truism But in so far as it offered some sort ofuseable purchase on a world of crumbling certainties it is not to beblushed for

In the circumstances any subsequent and surely final effort canonly modestly look back marvelling that the series is still here and notunreasonably congratulating itself on having provided an initial outletfor what turned over the years into some of the distinctive voices andtopics in literary studies But the volumes now re-presented have morethan a mere historical interest As their authors indicate the issues theyraised are still potent the arguments with which they engaged are stilldisturbing In short we werenrsquot wrong Academic study did changerapidly and radically to match even to help to generate wide reachingsocial changes A new set of discourses was developed to negotiatethose upheavals Nor has the process ceased In our deliquescent worldwhat was unthinkable inside and outside the academy all those yearsago now seems regularly to come to pass

Whether the New Accents volumes provided adequate warning ofmaps for guides to or nudges in the direction of this new terrain isscarcely for me to say Perhaps our best achievement lay in cultivatingthe sense that it was there The only justification for a reluctant thirdattempt at a Preface is the belief that it still is

TERENCE HAWKES

general editorrsquos prefacex

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

For help and generous support we should like to thank our partnersJudy Carolyn and Chris

For generous help in finding material tracing references and gener-ally making this book less inadequate than it remains we want to thankmany people but in particular Alan Lawson David Moody andStephen Slemon

INTRODUCTION

More than three-quarters of the people living in the world today havehad their lives shaped by the experience of colonialism It is easy to seehow important this has been in the political and economic spheres butits general influence on the perceptual frameworks of contemporarypeoples is often less evident Literature offers one of the most import-ant ways in which these new perceptions are expressed and it is in theirwriting and through other arts such as painting sculpture music anddance that the day-to-day realities experienced by colonized peopleshave been most powerfully encoded and so profoundly influential

WHAT ARE POST-COLONIAL LITERATURES

This book is concerned with writing by those peoples formerly colon-ized by Britain though much of what it deals with is of interest andrelevance to countries colonized by other European powers such asFrance Portugal and Spain The semantic basis of the term lsquopost-colonialrsquo might seem to suggest a concern only with the national cul-ture after the departure of the imperial power It has occasionally beenemployed in some earlier work in the area to distinguish between theperiods before and after independence (lsquocolonial periodrsquo andlsquopost-colonial periodrsquo) for example in constructing national literary

histories or in suggesting comparative studies between stages in thosehistories Generally speaking though the term lsquocolonialrsquo has been usedfor the period before independence and a term indicating a nationalwriting such as lsquomodern Canadian writingrsquo or lsquorecent West Indianliteraturersquo has been employed to distinguish the period afterindependence

We use the term lsquopost-colonialrsquo however to cover all the cultureaffected by the imperial process from the moment of colonization tothe present day This is because there is a continuity of preoccupationsthroughout the historical process initiated by European imperialaggression We also suggest that it is most appropriate as the term forthe new cross-cultural criticism which has emerged in recent years andfor the discourse through which this is constituted In this sense thisbook is concerned with the world as it exists during and after theperiod of European imperial domination and the effects of this oncontemporary literatures

So the literatures of African countries Australia Bangladesh CanadaCaribbean countries India Malaysia Malta New Zealand PakistanSingapore South Pacific Island countries and Sri Lanka are all post-colonial literatures The literature of the USA should also be placed inthis category Perhaps because of its current position of power and theneo-colonizing role it has played its post-colonial nature has not beengenerally recognized But its relationship with the metropolitan centreas it evolved over the last two centuries has been paradigmatic for post-colonial literatures everywhere What each of these literatures has incommon beyond their special and distinctive regional characteristics isthat they emerged in their present form out of the experience of colon-ization and asserted themselves by foregrounding the tension with theimperial power and by emphasizing their differences from theassumptions of the imperial centre It is this which makes themdistinctively post-colonial

POST-COLONIAL LITERATURES AND ENGLISH STUDIES

The study of English has always been a densely political and culturalphenomenon a practice in which language and literature have bothbeen called into the service of a profound and embracing nationalism

the empire writes back2

The development of English as a privileged academic subject innineteenth-century Britain ndash finally confirmed by its inclusion in thesyllabuses of Oxford and Cambridge and re-affirmed in the 1921Newbolt Report ndash came about as part of an attempt to replace theClassics at the heart of the intellectual enterprise of nineteenth-centuryhumanistic studies From the beginning proponents of English as adiscipline linked its methodology to that of the Classics with itsemphasis on scholarship philology and historical study ndash the fixing oftexts in historical time and the perpetual search for the determinants ofa single unified and agreed meaning

The historical moment which saw the emergence of lsquoEnglishrsquo as anacademic discipline also produced the nineteenth-century colonialform of imperialism (Batsleer et al 1985 14 19ndash25) Gauri Viswa-nathan has presented strong arguments for relating the lsquoinstitutional-isation and subsequent valorisation of English literary study [to] ashape and an ideological content developed in the colonial contextrsquoand specifically as it developed in India where

British colonial administrators provoked by missionaries on the onehand and fears of native insubordination on the other discovered anally in English literature to support them in maintaining control of thenatives under the guise of a liberal education

(Viswanathan 1987 17)

It can be argued that the study of English and the growth of Empireproceeded from a single ideological climate and that the developmentof the one is intrinsically bound up with the development of the otherboth at the level of simple utility (as propaganda for instance) and atthe unconscious level where it leads to the naturalizing of constructedvalues (eg civilization humanity etc) which conversely establishedlsquosavageryrsquo lsquonativersquo lsquoprimitiversquo as their antitheses and as the object of areforming zeal1

A lsquoprivileging normrsquo was enthroned at the heart of the formation ofEnglish Studies as a template for the denial of the value of the lsquoper-ipheralrsquo the lsquomarginalrsquo the lsquouncanonizedrsquo Literature was made as cen-tral to the cultural enterprise of Empire as the monarchy was to itspolitical formation So when elements of the periphery and margin

introduction 3

threatened the exclusive claims of the centre they were rapidlyincorporated This was a process in Edward Saidrsquos terms of consciousaffiliation proceeding under the guise of filiation (Said 1984) that is amimicry of the centre proceeding from a desire not only to be acceptedbut to be adopted and absorbed It caused those from the periphery toimmerse themselves in the imported culture denying their origins inan attempt to become lsquomore English than the Englishrsquo We seeexamples of this in such writers as Henry James and TS Eliot

As post-colonial societies sought to establish their difference fromBritain the response of those who recognized this complicity betweenlanguage education and cultural incorporation was to break the linkbetween language and literary study by dividing lsquoEnglishrsquo departmentsin universities into separate schools of Linguistics and of Literatureboth of which tended to view their project within a national or inter-national context Ngugirsquos essay lsquoOn the abolition of the Englishdepartmentrsquo (Ngugi 1972) is an illuminating account of the particulararguments involved in Africa John Dockerrsquos essay lsquoThe neocolonialassumption in the university teaching of Englishrsquo (Tiffin 1978 26ndash31) addresses similar problems in the settler colony contextdescribing a situation in which in contrast to Kenya little genuinedecolonization is yet in sight As Dockerrsquos critique makes clear in mostpost-colonial nations (including the West Indies and India) the nexusof power involving literature language and a dominant British culturehas strongly resisted attempts to dismantle it Even after such attemptsbegan to succeed the canonical nature and unquestioned status of theworks of the English literary tradition and the values they incorporatedremained potent in the cultural formation and the ideological institu-tions of education and literature Nevertheless the development of thepost-colonial literatures has necessitated a questioning of many of theassumptions on which the study of lsquoEnglishrsquo was based

DEVELOPMENT OF POST-COLONIAL LITERATURES

Post-colonial literatures developed through several stages which can beseen to correspond to stages both of national or regional consciousnessand of the project of asserting difference from the imperial centreDuring the imperial period writing in the language of the imperial

the empire writes back4

centre is inevitably of course produced by a literate elite whose pri-mary identification is with the colonizing power Thus the first textsproduced in the colonies in the new language are frequently producedby lsquorepresentativesrsquo of the imperial power for example gentrified set-tlers (Wentworthrsquos lsquoAustraliarsquo) travellers and sightseers (FroudersquosOceana and his The English in the West Indies or the travel diaries of MaryKingsley) or the Anglo-Indian and West African administrators sol-diers and lsquoboxwallahsrsquo and even more frequently their memsahibs(volumes of memoirs)

Such texts can never form the basis for an indigenous culture nor canthey be integrated in any way with the culture which already exists inthe countries invaded Despite their detailed reportage of landscapecustom and language they inevitably privilege the centre emphasiz-ing the lsquohomersquo over the lsquonativersquo the lsquometropolitanrsquo over the lsquoprovincialrsquoor lsquocolonialrsquo and so forth At a deeper level their claim to objectivitysimply serves to hide the imperial discourse within which they arecreated That this is true of even the consciously literary works whichemerge from this moment can be illustrated by the poems and storiesof Rudyard Kipling For example in the well-known poem lsquoChristmasin Indiarsquo the evocative description of a Christmas day in the heat ofIndia is contextualized by invoking its absent English counterpartApparently it is only through this absent and enabling signifier that theIndian daily reality can acquire legitimacy as a subject of literarydiscourse

The second stage of production within the evolving discourse of thepost-colonial is the literature produced lsquounder imperial licencersquo bylsquonativesrsquo or lsquooutcastsrsquo for instance the large body of poetry and proseproduced in the nineteenth century by the English educated Indianupper class or African lsquomissionary literaturersquo (eg Thomas MofolorsquosChaka) The producers signify by the very fact of writing in thelanguage of the dominant culture that they have temporarily or per-manently entered a specific and privileged class endowed with thelanguage education and leisure necessary to produce such works TheAustralian novel Ralph Rashleigh now known to have been written by theconvict James Tucker is a case in point Tucker an educated man wroteRashleigh as a lsquospecialrsquo (a privileged convict) whilst working at the penalsettlement at Port Macquarie as storekeeper to the superintendent

introduction 5

Written on government paper with government ink and pens thenovel was clearly produced with the aid and support of the super-intendent Tucker had momentarily gained access to the privilege ofliterature Significantly the moment of privilege did not last and hedied in poverty at the age of fifty-eight at Liverpool asylum in Sydney

It is characteristic of these early post-colonial texts that the potentialfor subversion in their themes cannot be fully realized Although theydeal with such powerful material as the brutality of the convict system(Tuckerrsquos Rashleigh) the historical potency of the supplanted anddenigrated native cultures (Mofolorsquos Chaka) or the existence of a richcultural heritage older and more extensive than that of Europe (any ofmany nineteenth-century Indo-Anglian poets such as Ram Sharma)they are prevented from fully exploring their anti-imperial potentialBoth the available discourse and the material conditions of productionfor literature in these early post-colonial societies restrain this possibil-ity The institution of lsquoLiteraturersquo in the colony is under the directcontrol of the imperial ruling class who alone license the acceptableform and permit the publication and distribution of the resulting workSo texts of this kind come into being within the constraints of adiscourse and the institutional practice of a patronage system whichlimits and undercuts their assertion of a different perspective Thedevelopment of independent literatures depended upon the abrogationof this constraining power and the appropriation of language and writ-ing for new and distinctive usages Such an appropriation is clearly themost significant feature in the emergence of modern post-colonialliteratures (see chs 2 and 3)

HEGEMONY

Why should post-colonial societies continue to engage with theimperial experience Since all the post-colonial societies we discusshave achieved political independence why is the issue of colonialitystill relevant at all This question of why the empire needs to write backto a centre once the imperial structure has been dismantled in politicalterms is an important one Britain like the other dominant colonialpowers of the nineteenth century has been relegated to a relativelyminor place in international affairs In the spheres of politics and

the empire writes back6

economics and increasingly in the vital new area of the mass mediaBritain and the other European imperial powers have been super-seded by the emergent power of the USA Nevertheless through theliterary canon the body of British texts which all too frequently stillacts as a touchstone of taste and value and through RS-English(Received Standard English) which asserts the English of south-eastEngland as a universal norm the weight of antiquity continues todominate cultural production in much of the post-colonial worldThis cultural hegemony has been maintained through canonicalassumptions about literary activity and through attitudes to post-colonial literatures which identify them as isolated national off-shootsof English literature and which therefore relegate them to marginaland subordinate positions More recently as the range and strength ofthese literatures has become undeniable a process of incorporation hasbegun in which employing Eurocentric standards of judgement thecentre has sought to claim those works and writers of which itapproves as British2 In all these respects the parallel between the situ-ation of post-colonial writing and that of feminist writing is striking(see ch 5)

LANGUAGE

One of the main features of imperial oppression is control over lan-guage The imperial education system installs a lsquostandardrsquo version ofthe metropolitan language as the norm and marginalizes all lsquovariantsrsquoas impurities As a character in Mrs Campbell Praedrsquos nineteenth-century Australian novel Policy and Passion puts it lsquoTo be colonial is to talkAustralian slang to be everything that is abominablersquo (CampbellPraed 1881154) Language becomes the medium through which ahierarchical structure of power is perpetuated and the mediumthrough which conceptions of lsquotruthrsquo lsquoorderrsquo and lsquorealityrsquo becomeestablished Such power is rejected in the emergence of an effectivepost-colonial voice For this reason the discussion of post-colonialwriting which follows is largely a discussion of the process by whichthe language with its power and the writing with its signification ofauthority has been wrested from the dominant European culture

In order to focus on the complex ways in which the English

introduction 7

language has been used in these societies and to indicate their ownsense of difference we distinguish in this account between the lsquostand-ardrsquo British English inherited from the empire and the english whichthe language has become in post-colonial countries Though Britishimperialism resulted in the spread of a language English across theglobe the english of Jamaicans is not the english of Canadians Maorisor Kenyans We need to distinguish between what is proposed as astandard code English (the language of the erstwhile imperial centre)and the linguistic code english which has been transformed and sub-verted into several distinctive varieties throughout the world For thisreason the distinction between English and english will be usedthroughout our text as an indication of the various ways in which thelanguage has been employed by different linguistic communities in thepost-colonial world3

The use of these terms asserts the fact that a continuum existsbetween the various linguistic practices which constitute english usagein the modern world Although linguistically the links between Englishand the various post-colonial englishes in use today can be seen asunbroken the political reality is that English sets itself apart from allother lsquolesserrsquo variants and so demands to be interrogated about itsclaim to this special status

In practice the history of this distinction between English and eng-lish has been between the claims of a powerful lsquocentrersquo and a multitudeof intersecting usages designated as lsquoperipheriesrsquo The language ofthese lsquoperipheriesrsquo was shaped by an oppressive discourse of power Yetthey have been the site of some of the most exciting and innovativeliteratures of the modern period and this has at least in part been theresult of the energies uncovered by the political tension between theidea of a normative code and a variety of regional usages

PLACE AND DISPLACEMENT

A major feature of post-colonial literatures is the concern with placeand displacement It is here that the special post-colonial crisis of iden-tity comes into being the concern with the development or recoveryof an effective identifying relationship between self and place Indeedcritics such as D E S Maxwell have made this the defining model of

the empire writes back8

post-coloniality (see ch 1) A valid and active sense of self may havebeen eroded by dislocation resulting from migration the experience ofenslavement transportation or lsquovoluntaryrsquo removal for indenturedlabour Or it may have been destroyed by cultural denigration the con-scious and unconscious oppression of the indigenous personality andculture by a supposedly superior racial or cultural model The dialecticof place and displacement is always a feature of post-colonial societieswhether these have been created by a process of settlement interven-tion or a mixture of the two Beyond their historical and culturaldifferences place displacement and a pervasive concern with themyths of identity and authenticity are a feature common to allpost-colonial literatures in english

The alienation of vision and the crisis in self-image which this dis-placement produces is as frequently found in the accounts of Canadianlsquofree settlersrsquo as of Australian convicts FijianndashIndian or TrinidadianndashIndian indentured labourers West Indian slaves or forcibly colonizedNigerians or Bengalis Although this is pragmatically demonstrablefrom a wide range of texts it is difficult to account for by theorieswhich see this social and linguistic alienation as resulting only fromovertly oppressive forms of colonization such as slavery or conquestAn adequate account of this practice must go beyond the usual categor-ies of social alienation such as masterslave freebonded rulerruledhowever important and widespread these may be in post-colonial cul-tures After all why should the free settler formally unconstrained andtheoretically free to continue in the possession and practice oflsquoEnglishnessrsquo also show clear signs of alienation even within thefirst generation of settlement and manifest a tendency to seek analternative differentiated identity

The most widely shared discursive practice within which this alien-ation can be identified is the construction of lsquoplacersquo The gap whichopens between the experience of place and the language available todescribe it forms a classic and allpervasive feature of post-colonial textsThis gap occurs for those whose language seems inadequate to describea new place for those whose language is systematically destroyed byenslavement and for those whose language has been renderedunprivileged by the imposition of the language of a colonizing powerSome admixture of one or other of these models can describe the

introduction 9

situation of all post-colonial societies In each case a condition of alien-ation is inevitable until the colonizing language has been replaced orappropriated as english

That imperialism results in a profound linguistic alienation isobviously the case in cultures in which a pre-colonial culture is sup-pressed by military conquest or enslavement So for example anIndian writer like Raja Rao or a Nigerian writer such as ChinuaAchebe have needed to transform the language to use it in a differentway in its new context and so as Achebe says quoting James Bald-win make it lsquobear the burdenrsquo of their experience (Achebe 197562) Although Rao and Achebe write from their own place and sohave not suffered a literal geographical displacement they have toovercome an imposed gap resulting from the linguistic displacementof the pre-colonial language by English This process occurs within amore comprehensive discourse of place and displacement in thewider post-colonial context Such alienation is shared by those whosepossession of English is indisputably lsquonativersquo (in the sense of beingpossessed from birth) yet who begin to feel alienated within its prac-tice once its vocabulary categories and codes are felt to beinadequate or inappropriate to describe the fauna the physical andgeographical conditions or the cultural practices they have developedin a new land The Canadian poet Joseph Howe for instance pluckshis picture of a moose from some repository of English nurseryrhyme romanticism

the gay moose in jocund gambol springsCropping the foliage Nature round him flings

(Howe 1874 100)

Such absurdities demonstrate the pressing need these native speakersshare with those colonized peoples who were directly oppressed toescape from the inadequacies and imperial constraints of English as asocial practice They need that is to escape from the implicit body ofassumptions to which English was attached its aesthetic and socialvalues the formal and historically limited constraints of genre and theoppressive political and cultural assertion of metropolitan dominanceof centre over margin (Ngugi 1986) This is not to say that the English

the empire writes back10

language is inherently incapable of accounting for post-colonialexperience but that it needs to develop an lsquoappropriatersquo usage in orderto do so (by becoming a distinct and unique form of english) Theenergizing feature of this displacement is its capacity to interrogate andsubvert the imperial cultural formations

The pressure to develop such a usage manifests itself early in thedevelopment of lsquoenglishrsquo literatures It is therefore arguable that evenbefore the development of a conscious de-colonizing stance theexperience of a new place identifiably different in its physical charac-teristics constrains for instance the new settlers to demand a languagewhich will allow them to express their sense of lsquoOthernessrsquo Landscapeflora and fauna seasons climatic conditions are formally distinguishedfrom the place of origin as homecolony EuropeNew WorldEuropeAntipodes metropolitanprovincial and so on although ofcourse at this stage no effective models exist for expressing this senseof Otherness in a positive and creative way

POST-COLONIALITY AND THEORY

The idea of lsquopost-colonial literary theoryrsquo emerges from the inability ofEuropean theory to deal adequately with the complexities and variedcultural provenance of post-colonial writing European theories them-selves emerge from particular cultural traditions which are hidden byfalse notions of lsquothe universalrsquo Theories of style and genre assump-tions about the universal features of language epistemologies andvalue systems are all radically questioned by the practices of post-colonial writing Post-colonial theory has proceeded from the need toaddress this different practice Indigenous theories have developed toaccommodate the differences within the various cultural traditions aswell as the desire to describe in a comparative way the features sharedacross those traditions

The political and cultural monocentrism of the colonial enterprisewas a natural result of the philosophical traditions of the Europeanworld and the systems of representation which this privilegedNineteenth-century imperial expansion the culmination of the out-ward and dominating thrust of Europeans into the world beyondEurope which began during the early Renaissance was underpinned

introduction 11

in complex ways by these assumptions In the first instance thisproduced practices of cultural subservience characterized by one post-colonial critic as lsquocultural cringersquo (Phillips 1958) Subsequently theemergence of identifiable indigenous theories in reaction to thisformed an important element in the development of specific nationaland regional consciousnesses (see ch 4)

Paradoxically however imperial expansion has had a radicallydestabilizing effect on its own preoccupations and power In pushingthe colonial world to the margins of experience the lsquocentrersquo pushedconsciousness beyond the point at which monocentrism in all spheresof thought could be accepted without question In other words thealienating process which initially served to relegate the post-colonialworld to the lsquomarginrsquo turned upon itself and acted to push that worldthrough a kind of mental barrier into a position from which allexperience could be viewed as uncentred pluralistic and multifari-ous Marginality thus became an unprecedented source of creativeenergy The impetus towards decentring and pluralism has alwaysbeen present in the history of European thought and has reached itslatest development in post-structuralism But the situation of margin-alized societies and cultures enabled them to come to this positionmuch earlier and more directly (Brydon 1984b) These notions areimplicit in post-colonial texts from the imperial period to the presentday

The task of this book is twofold first to identify the range andnature of these post-colonial texts and second to describe the varioustheories which have emerged so far to account for them So in the firstchapter we consider the development of descriptive models of post-colonial writing Since it is not possible to read post-colonial textswithout coming to terms with the ways in which they appropriate anddeploy the material of linguistic culture in the second chapter weoutline the process by which language is captured to form a distinctivediscursive practice In the third chapter we demonstrate throughsymptomatic readings of texts how post-colonial writing interactswith the social and material practices of colonialism One of the majorpurposes of this book is to explain the nature of existing post-colonialtheory and the way in which it interacts with and dismantles some ofthe assumptions of European theory In the fourth chapter we discuss

the empire writes back12

the issues in the development of indigenous post-colonial theories andin the fifth we examine the larger implications of post-coloniality fortheories of language for literary theory and for social and politicalanalysis in general

introduction 13

1CUTTING THE GROUND

Critical models of post-colonialliteratures

As writers and critics became aware of the special character ofpost-colonial texts they saw the need to develop an adequate model toaccount for them Four major models have emerged to date firstlsquonationalrsquo or regional models which emphasize the distinctive featuresof the particular national or regional culture second race-basedmodels which identify certain shared characteristics across variousnational literatures such as the common racial inheritance in litera-tures of the African diaspora addressed by the lsquoBlack writingrsquo modelthird comparative models of varying complexity which seek toaccount for particular linguistic historical and cultural features acrosstwo or more post-colonial literatures fourth more comprehensivecomparative models which argue for features such as hybridity andsyncreticity as constitutive elements of all post-colonial literatures(syncretism is the process by which previously distinct linguistic cat-egories and by extension cultural formations merge into a singlenew form) These models often operate as assumptions within criticalpractice rather than specific and discrete schools of thought in any

discussion of post-colonial writing a number of them may be operat-ing at the same time

NATIONAL AND REGIONAL MODELS

The first post-colonial society to develop a lsquonationalrsquo literature was theUSA The emergence of a distinctive American literature in the lateeighteenth century raised inevitable questions about the relationshipbetween literature and place between literature and nationality andparticularly about the suitability of inherited literary forms Ideas aboutnew kinds of literature were part of the optimistic progression tonationhood because it seemed that this was one of the most potentareas in which to express difference from Britain Writers like CharlesBrockden Brown who attempted to indigenize British forms like thegothic and the sentimental novel soon realized that with the change inlocation and culture it was not possible to import form and conceptwithout radical alteration (Fiedler 1960 Ringe 1966)

In many ways the American experience and its attempts to producea new kind of literature can be seen to be the model for all laterpost-colonial writing1 The first thing it showed was that some ofa post-colonial countryrsquos most deeply held linguistic and cultural traitsdepend upon its relationship with the colonizing power particularlythe defining contrast between European metropolis and lsquofrontierrsquo (seeFussell 1965) Once the American Revolution had forced the questionof separate nationality and the economic and political successes of theemerging nation had begun to be taken for granted American litera-ture as a distinct collection of texts also began to be accepted But it wasaccepted as an offshoot of the lsquoparent treersquo Such organic metaphorsand others like lsquoparentndashchildrsquo and lsquostreamndashtributaryrsquo acted to keep thenew literature in its place The plant and parent metaphors stressed ageexperience roots tradition and most importantly the connectionbetween antiquity and value They implied the same distinctions asthose existing between metropolis and frontier parents are moreexperienced more important more substantial less brash than theiroffspring Above all they are the origin and therefore claim the finalauthority in questions of taste and value

But as the extensive literature of the USA developed different

cutting the ground 15

characteristics from that of Britain and established its right to be con-sidered independently the concept of national literary differenceslsquowithinrsquo English writing became established The eventual consequenceof this has been that lsquonewerrsquo literatures from countries such as NigeriaAustralia and India could also be discussed as discrete national forma-tions rather than as lsquobranches of the treersquo Their literatures could beconsidered in relation to the social and political history of each coun-try and could be read as a source of important images of nationalidentity

The development of national literatures and criticism is fundamentalto the whole enterprise of post-colonial studies Without such devel-opments at the national level and without the comparative studiesbetween national traditions to which these lead no discourse of thepost-colonial could have emerged Nor is it simply a matter of devel-opment from one stage to another since all post-colonial studies con-tinue to depend upon national literatures and criticism The study ofnational traditions is the first and most vital stage of the processof rejecting the claims of the centre to exclusivity It is the beginning ofwhat Nigerian writer Wole Soyinka has characterized as the lsquoprocess ofself-apprehensionrsquo (Soyinka 1976 xi) Recent theories of a generalpost-colonial discourse question essentialist formulations which maylead to nationalist and racist orthodoxies but they do not deny thegreat importance of maintaining each literaturersquos sense of specific dif-ference It is this sense of difference which constitutes each nationalliteraturersquos mode of self-apprehension and its claim to be a self-constituting entity However nationalism in which some partial truthor clicheacute is elevated to orthodoxy is a danger implicit in such nationalconceptions of literary production The impetus towards national self-realization in critical assessments of literature all too often fails to stopshort of nationalist myth

Larger geographical models which cross the boundaries of languagenationality or race to generate the concept of a regional literature suchas West Indian or South Pacific literature may also share some of thelimitations of the national model While the idea of an lsquoAfricanrsquo litera-ture for instance has a powerful appeal to writers and critics in thevarious African countries it has only limited application as a descrip-tive label African and European critics have produced several regional

the empire writes back16

and national studies which reflect the widespread political economicand cultural differences between modern African countries (Gurr andCalder 1974 Lindfors 1975 Taiwo 1976 Ogungbesan 1979)

Clearly some regional groupings are more likely to gain acceptancein the regions themselves than are others and will derive from a col-lective identity evident in other ways This is true of the West IndiesAlthough the Federation of the West Indies failed the english-speakingcountries there still field a regional cricket team Both the West Indiesand the South Pacific have regional universities with a significant inputinto literary production and discussion lsquoWest Indianrsquo literature hasalmost always been considered regionally rather than nationally Therehave been no major studies of Jamaican or Trinidadian literatures asdiscrete traditions A different regional grouping emphasizing geo-graphical and historical determinants rather than linguistic ones hasalso developed to explore lsquoCaribbeanrsquo literature setting literature inenglish from the region alongside that written in spanish french andother European languages (Allis 1982)

Despite such variants on the national model most of the englishliteratures outside Britain have been considered as individual nationalenterprises forming and reflecting each countryrsquos culture The inevit-able consequence of this is a gradual blurring of the distinctionbetween the national and the nationalist Nationalism has usuallyincluded a healthy repudiation of British and US hegemony observablein publishing education and the public sponsorship of writing Yet alltoo often nationalist criticism by failing to alter the terms of the dis-course within which it operates has participated implicitly or evenexplicitly in a discourse ultimately controlled by the very imperialpower its nationalist assertion is designed to exclude Emphasis mayhave been transferred to the national literature but the theoreticalassumptions critical perspectives and value judgements made haveoften replicated those of the British establishment

COMPARISONS BETWEEN TWO OR MORE REGIONS

Theories and models of post-colonial literatures could not emergeuntil the separate colonies were viewed in a framework centred ontheir own literary and cultural traditions Victorian Britain had exulted

cutting the ground 17

piously to fret over the nature of whatever rough beast might staggerportentously from the rubble lsquoHow can we recognise or deal with thenewrsquo it complained reporting nevertheless the dismaying advance oflsquoa host of barely respectable activities for which we have no reassuringnamesrsquo and promising a programme of wary surveillance at lsquotheboundaries of the precedented and at the limit of the thinkablersquo Itsconclusion lsquothe unthinkable after all is that which covertly shapes ourthoughtsrsquo may rank as a truism But in so far as it offered some sort ofuseable purchase on a world of crumbling certainties it is not to beblushed for

In the circumstances any subsequent and surely final effort canonly modestly look back marvelling that the series is still here and notunreasonably congratulating itself on having provided an initial outletfor what turned over the years into some of the distinctive voices andtopics in literary studies But the volumes now re-presented have morethan a mere historical interest As their authors indicate the issues theyraised are still potent the arguments with which they engaged are stilldisturbing In short we werenrsquot wrong Academic study did changerapidly and radically to match even to help to generate wide reachingsocial changes A new set of discourses was developed to negotiatethose upheavals Nor has the process ceased In our deliquescent worldwhat was unthinkable inside and outside the academy all those yearsago now seems regularly to come to pass

Whether the New Accents volumes provided adequate warning ofmaps for guides to or nudges in the direction of this new terrain isscarcely for me to say Perhaps our best achievement lay in cultivatingthe sense that it was there The only justification for a reluctant thirdattempt at a Preface is the belief that it still is

TERENCE HAWKES

general editorrsquos prefacex

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

For help and generous support we should like to thank our partnersJudy Carolyn and Chris

For generous help in finding material tracing references and gener-ally making this book less inadequate than it remains we want to thankmany people but in particular Alan Lawson David Moody andStephen Slemon

INTRODUCTION

More than three-quarters of the people living in the world today havehad their lives shaped by the experience of colonialism It is easy to seehow important this has been in the political and economic spheres butits general influence on the perceptual frameworks of contemporarypeoples is often less evident Literature offers one of the most import-ant ways in which these new perceptions are expressed and it is in theirwriting and through other arts such as painting sculpture music anddance that the day-to-day realities experienced by colonized peopleshave been most powerfully encoded and so profoundly influential

WHAT ARE POST-COLONIAL LITERATURES

This book is concerned with writing by those peoples formerly colon-ized by Britain though much of what it deals with is of interest andrelevance to countries colonized by other European powers such asFrance Portugal and Spain The semantic basis of the term lsquopost-colonialrsquo might seem to suggest a concern only with the national cul-ture after the departure of the imperial power It has occasionally beenemployed in some earlier work in the area to distinguish between theperiods before and after independence (lsquocolonial periodrsquo andlsquopost-colonial periodrsquo) for example in constructing national literary

histories or in suggesting comparative studies between stages in thosehistories Generally speaking though the term lsquocolonialrsquo has been usedfor the period before independence and a term indicating a nationalwriting such as lsquomodern Canadian writingrsquo or lsquorecent West Indianliteraturersquo has been employed to distinguish the period afterindependence

We use the term lsquopost-colonialrsquo however to cover all the cultureaffected by the imperial process from the moment of colonization tothe present day This is because there is a continuity of preoccupationsthroughout the historical process initiated by European imperialaggression We also suggest that it is most appropriate as the term forthe new cross-cultural criticism which has emerged in recent years andfor the discourse through which this is constituted In this sense thisbook is concerned with the world as it exists during and after theperiod of European imperial domination and the effects of this oncontemporary literatures

So the literatures of African countries Australia Bangladesh CanadaCaribbean countries India Malaysia Malta New Zealand PakistanSingapore South Pacific Island countries and Sri Lanka are all post-colonial literatures The literature of the USA should also be placed inthis category Perhaps because of its current position of power and theneo-colonizing role it has played its post-colonial nature has not beengenerally recognized But its relationship with the metropolitan centreas it evolved over the last two centuries has been paradigmatic for post-colonial literatures everywhere What each of these literatures has incommon beyond their special and distinctive regional characteristics isthat they emerged in their present form out of the experience of colon-ization and asserted themselves by foregrounding the tension with theimperial power and by emphasizing their differences from theassumptions of the imperial centre It is this which makes themdistinctively post-colonial

POST-COLONIAL LITERATURES AND ENGLISH STUDIES

The study of English has always been a densely political and culturalphenomenon a practice in which language and literature have bothbeen called into the service of a profound and embracing nationalism

the empire writes back2

The development of English as a privileged academic subject innineteenth-century Britain ndash finally confirmed by its inclusion in thesyllabuses of Oxford and Cambridge and re-affirmed in the 1921Newbolt Report ndash came about as part of an attempt to replace theClassics at the heart of the intellectual enterprise of nineteenth-centuryhumanistic studies From the beginning proponents of English as adiscipline linked its methodology to that of the Classics with itsemphasis on scholarship philology and historical study ndash the fixing oftexts in historical time and the perpetual search for the determinants ofa single unified and agreed meaning

The historical moment which saw the emergence of lsquoEnglishrsquo as anacademic discipline also produced the nineteenth-century colonialform of imperialism (Batsleer et al 1985 14 19ndash25) Gauri Viswa-nathan has presented strong arguments for relating the lsquoinstitutional-isation and subsequent valorisation of English literary study [to] ashape and an ideological content developed in the colonial contextrsquoand specifically as it developed in India where

British colonial administrators provoked by missionaries on the onehand and fears of native insubordination on the other discovered anally in English literature to support them in maintaining control of thenatives under the guise of a liberal education

(Viswanathan 1987 17)

It can be argued that the study of English and the growth of Empireproceeded from a single ideological climate and that the developmentof the one is intrinsically bound up with the development of the otherboth at the level of simple utility (as propaganda for instance) and atthe unconscious level where it leads to the naturalizing of constructedvalues (eg civilization humanity etc) which conversely establishedlsquosavageryrsquo lsquonativersquo lsquoprimitiversquo as their antitheses and as the object of areforming zeal1

A lsquoprivileging normrsquo was enthroned at the heart of the formation ofEnglish Studies as a template for the denial of the value of the lsquoper-ipheralrsquo the lsquomarginalrsquo the lsquouncanonizedrsquo Literature was made as cen-tral to the cultural enterprise of Empire as the monarchy was to itspolitical formation So when elements of the periphery and margin

introduction 3

threatened the exclusive claims of the centre they were rapidlyincorporated This was a process in Edward Saidrsquos terms of consciousaffiliation proceeding under the guise of filiation (Said 1984) that is amimicry of the centre proceeding from a desire not only to be acceptedbut to be adopted and absorbed It caused those from the periphery toimmerse themselves in the imported culture denying their origins inan attempt to become lsquomore English than the Englishrsquo We seeexamples of this in such writers as Henry James and TS Eliot

As post-colonial societies sought to establish their difference fromBritain the response of those who recognized this complicity betweenlanguage education and cultural incorporation was to break the linkbetween language and literary study by dividing lsquoEnglishrsquo departmentsin universities into separate schools of Linguistics and of Literatureboth of which tended to view their project within a national or inter-national context Ngugirsquos essay lsquoOn the abolition of the Englishdepartmentrsquo (Ngugi 1972) is an illuminating account of the particulararguments involved in Africa John Dockerrsquos essay lsquoThe neocolonialassumption in the university teaching of Englishrsquo (Tiffin 1978 26ndash31) addresses similar problems in the settler colony contextdescribing a situation in which in contrast to Kenya little genuinedecolonization is yet in sight As Dockerrsquos critique makes clear in mostpost-colonial nations (including the West Indies and India) the nexusof power involving literature language and a dominant British culturehas strongly resisted attempts to dismantle it Even after such attemptsbegan to succeed the canonical nature and unquestioned status of theworks of the English literary tradition and the values they incorporatedremained potent in the cultural formation and the ideological institu-tions of education and literature Nevertheless the development of thepost-colonial literatures has necessitated a questioning of many of theassumptions on which the study of lsquoEnglishrsquo was based

DEVELOPMENT OF POST-COLONIAL LITERATURES

Post-colonial literatures developed through several stages which can beseen to correspond to stages both of national or regional consciousnessand of the project of asserting difference from the imperial centreDuring the imperial period writing in the language of the imperial

the empire writes back4

centre is inevitably of course produced by a literate elite whose pri-mary identification is with the colonizing power Thus the first textsproduced in the colonies in the new language are frequently producedby lsquorepresentativesrsquo of the imperial power for example gentrified set-tlers (Wentworthrsquos lsquoAustraliarsquo) travellers and sightseers (FroudersquosOceana and his The English in the West Indies or the travel diaries of MaryKingsley) or the Anglo-Indian and West African administrators sol-diers and lsquoboxwallahsrsquo and even more frequently their memsahibs(volumes of memoirs)

Such texts can never form the basis for an indigenous culture nor canthey be integrated in any way with the culture which already exists inthe countries invaded Despite their detailed reportage of landscapecustom and language they inevitably privilege the centre emphasiz-ing the lsquohomersquo over the lsquonativersquo the lsquometropolitanrsquo over the lsquoprovincialrsquoor lsquocolonialrsquo and so forth At a deeper level their claim to objectivitysimply serves to hide the imperial discourse within which they arecreated That this is true of even the consciously literary works whichemerge from this moment can be illustrated by the poems and storiesof Rudyard Kipling For example in the well-known poem lsquoChristmasin Indiarsquo the evocative description of a Christmas day in the heat ofIndia is contextualized by invoking its absent English counterpartApparently it is only through this absent and enabling signifier that theIndian daily reality can acquire legitimacy as a subject of literarydiscourse

The second stage of production within the evolving discourse of thepost-colonial is the literature produced lsquounder imperial licencersquo bylsquonativesrsquo or lsquooutcastsrsquo for instance the large body of poetry and proseproduced in the nineteenth century by the English educated Indianupper class or African lsquomissionary literaturersquo (eg Thomas MofolorsquosChaka) The producers signify by the very fact of writing in thelanguage of the dominant culture that they have temporarily or per-manently entered a specific and privileged class endowed with thelanguage education and leisure necessary to produce such works TheAustralian novel Ralph Rashleigh now known to have been written by theconvict James Tucker is a case in point Tucker an educated man wroteRashleigh as a lsquospecialrsquo (a privileged convict) whilst working at the penalsettlement at Port Macquarie as storekeeper to the superintendent

introduction 5

Written on government paper with government ink and pens thenovel was clearly produced with the aid and support of the super-intendent Tucker had momentarily gained access to the privilege ofliterature Significantly the moment of privilege did not last and hedied in poverty at the age of fifty-eight at Liverpool asylum in Sydney

It is characteristic of these early post-colonial texts that the potentialfor subversion in their themes cannot be fully realized Although theydeal with such powerful material as the brutality of the convict system(Tuckerrsquos Rashleigh) the historical potency of the supplanted anddenigrated native cultures (Mofolorsquos Chaka) or the existence of a richcultural heritage older and more extensive than that of Europe (any ofmany nineteenth-century Indo-Anglian poets such as Ram Sharma)they are prevented from fully exploring their anti-imperial potentialBoth the available discourse and the material conditions of productionfor literature in these early post-colonial societies restrain this possibil-ity The institution of lsquoLiteraturersquo in the colony is under the directcontrol of the imperial ruling class who alone license the acceptableform and permit the publication and distribution of the resulting workSo texts of this kind come into being within the constraints of adiscourse and the institutional practice of a patronage system whichlimits and undercuts their assertion of a different perspective Thedevelopment of independent literatures depended upon the abrogationof this constraining power and the appropriation of language and writ-ing for new and distinctive usages Such an appropriation is clearly themost significant feature in the emergence of modern post-colonialliteratures (see chs 2 and 3)

HEGEMONY

Why should post-colonial societies continue to engage with theimperial experience Since all the post-colonial societies we discusshave achieved political independence why is the issue of colonialitystill relevant at all This question of why the empire needs to write backto a centre once the imperial structure has been dismantled in politicalterms is an important one Britain like the other dominant colonialpowers of the nineteenth century has been relegated to a relativelyminor place in international affairs In the spheres of politics and

the empire writes back6

economics and increasingly in the vital new area of the mass mediaBritain and the other European imperial powers have been super-seded by the emergent power of the USA Nevertheless through theliterary canon the body of British texts which all too frequently stillacts as a touchstone of taste and value and through RS-English(Received Standard English) which asserts the English of south-eastEngland as a universal norm the weight of antiquity continues todominate cultural production in much of the post-colonial worldThis cultural hegemony has been maintained through canonicalassumptions about literary activity and through attitudes to post-colonial literatures which identify them as isolated national off-shootsof English literature and which therefore relegate them to marginaland subordinate positions More recently as the range and strength ofthese literatures has become undeniable a process of incorporation hasbegun in which employing Eurocentric standards of judgement thecentre has sought to claim those works and writers of which itapproves as British2 In all these respects the parallel between the situ-ation of post-colonial writing and that of feminist writing is striking(see ch 5)

LANGUAGE

One of the main features of imperial oppression is control over lan-guage The imperial education system installs a lsquostandardrsquo version ofthe metropolitan language as the norm and marginalizes all lsquovariantsrsquoas impurities As a character in Mrs Campbell Praedrsquos nineteenth-century Australian novel Policy and Passion puts it lsquoTo be colonial is to talkAustralian slang to be everything that is abominablersquo (CampbellPraed 1881154) Language becomes the medium through which ahierarchical structure of power is perpetuated and the mediumthrough which conceptions of lsquotruthrsquo lsquoorderrsquo and lsquorealityrsquo becomeestablished Such power is rejected in the emergence of an effectivepost-colonial voice For this reason the discussion of post-colonialwriting which follows is largely a discussion of the process by whichthe language with its power and the writing with its signification ofauthority has been wrested from the dominant European culture

In order to focus on the complex ways in which the English

introduction 7

language has been used in these societies and to indicate their ownsense of difference we distinguish in this account between the lsquostand-ardrsquo British English inherited from the empire and the english whichthe language has become in post-colonial countries Though Britishimperialism resulted in the spread of a language English across theglobe the english of Jamaicans is not the english of Canadians Maorisor Kenyans We need to distinguish between what is proposed as astandard code English (the language of the erstwhile imperial centre)and the linguistic code english which has been transformed and sub-verted into several distinctive varieties throughout the world For thisreason the distinction between English and english will be usedthroughout our text as an indication of the various ways in which thelanguage has been employed by different linguistic communities in thepost-colonial world3

The use of these terms asserts the fact that a continuum existsbetween the various linguistic practices which constitute english usagein the modern world Although linguistically the links between Englishand the various post-colonial englishes in use today can be seen asunbroken the political reality is that English sets itself apart from allother lsquolesserrsquo variants and so demands to be interrogated about itsclaim to this special status

In practice the history of this distinction between English and eng-lish has been between the claims of a powerful lsquocentrersquo and a multitudeof intersecting usages designated as lsquoperipheriesrsquo The language ofthese lsquoperipheriesrsquo was shaped by an oppressive discourse of power Yetthey have been the site of some of the most exciting and innovativeliteratures of the modern period and this has at least in part been theresult of the energies uncovered by the political tension between theidea of a normative code and a variety of regional usages

PLACE AND DISPLACEMENT

A major feature of post-colonial literatures is the concern with placeand displacement It is here that the special post-colonial crisis of iden-tity comes into being the concern with the development or recoveryof an effective identifying relationship between self and place Indeedcritics such as D E S Maxwell have made this the defining model of

the empire writes back8

post-coloniality (see ch 1) A valid and active sense of self may havebeen eroded by dislocation resulting from migration the experience ofenslavement transportation or lsquovoluntaryrsquo removal for indenturedlabour Or it may have been destroyed by cultural denigration the con-scious and unconscious oppression of the indigenous personality andculture by a supposedly superior racial or cultural model The dialecticof place and displacement is always a feature of post-colonial societieswhether these have been created by a process of settlement interven-tion or a mixture of the two Beyond their historical and culturaldifferences place displacement and a pervasive concern with themyths of identity and authenticity are a feature common to allpost-colonial literatures in english

The alienation of vision and the crisis in self-image which this dis-placement produces is as frequently found in the accounts of Canadianlsquofree settlersrsquo as of Australian convicts FijianndashIndian or TrinidadianndashIndian indentured labourers West Indian slaves or forcibly colonizedNigerians or Bengalis Although this is pragmatically demonstrablefrom a wide range of texts it is difficult to account for by theorieswhich see this social and linguistic alienation as resulting only fromovertly oppressive forms of colonization such as slavery or conquestAn adequate account of this practice must go beyond the usual categor-ies of social alienation such as masterslave freebonded rulerruledhowever important and widespread these may be in post-colonial cul-tures After all why should the free settler formally unconstrained andtheoretically free to continue in the possession and practice oflsquoEnglishnessrsquo also show clear signs of alienation even within thefirst generation of settlement and manifest a tendency to seek analternative differentiated identity

The most widely shared discursive practice within which this alien-ation can be identified is the construction of lsquoplacersquo The gap whichopens between the experience of place and the language available todescribe it forms a classic and allpervasive feature of post-colonial textsThis gap occurs for those whose language seems inadequate to describea new place for those whose language is systematically destroyed byenslavement and for those whose language has been renderedunprivileged by the imposition of the language of a colonizing powerSome admixture of one or other of these models can describe the

introduction 9

situation of all post-colonial societies In each case a condition of alien-ation is inevitable until the colonizing language has been replaced orappropriated as english

That imperialism results in a profound linguistic alienation isobviously the case in cultures in which a pre-colonial culture is sup-pressed by military conquest or enslavement So for example anIndian writer like Raja Rao or a Nigerian writer such as ChinuaAchebe have needed to transform the language to use it in a differentway in its new context and so as Achebe says quoting James Bald-win make it lsquobear the burdenrsquo of their experience (Achebe 197562) Although Rao and Achebe write from their own place and sohave not suffered a literal geographical displacement they have toovercome an imposed gap resulting from the linguistic displacementof the pre-colonial language by English This process occurs within amore comprehensive discourse of place and displacement in thewider post-colonial context Such alienation is shared by those whosepossession of English is indisputably lsquonativersquo (in the sense of beingpossessed from birth) yet who begin to feel alienated within its prac-tice once its vocabulary categories and codes are felt to beinadequate or inappropriate to describe the fauna the physical andgeographical conditions or the cultural practices they have developedin a new land The Canadian poet Joseph Howe for instance pluckshis picture of a moose from some repository of English nurseryrhyme romanticism

the gay moose in jocund gambol springsCropping the foliage Nature round him flings

(Howe 1874 100)

Such absurdities demonstrate the pressing need these native speakersshare with those colonized peoples who were directly oppressed toescape from the inadequacies and imperial constraints of English as asocial practice They need that is to escape from the implicit body ofassumptions to which English was attached its aesthetic and socialvalues the formal and historically limited constraints of genre and theoppressive political and cultural assertion of metropolitan dominanceof centre over margin (Ngugi 1986) This is not to say that the English

the empire writes back10

language is inherently incapable of accounting for post-colonialexperience but that it needs to develop an lsquoappropriatersquo usage in orderto do so (by becoming a distinct and unique form of english) Theenergizing feature of this displacement is its capacity to interrogate andsubvert the imperial cultural formations

The pressure to develop such a usage manifests itself early in thedevelopment of lsquoenglishrsquo literatures It is therefore arguable that evenbefore the development of a conscious de-colonizing stance theexperience of a new place identifiably different in its physical charac-teristics constrains for instance the new settlers to demand a languagewhich will allow them to express their sense of lsquoOthernessrsquo Landscapeflora and fauna seasons climatic conditions are formally distinguishedfrom the place of origin as homecolony EuropeNew WorldEuropeAntipodes metropolitanprovincial and so on although ofcourse at this stage no effective models exist for expressing this senseof Otherness in a positive and creative way

POST-COLONIALITY AND THEORY

The idea of lsquopost-colonial literary theoryrsquo emerges from the inability ofEuropean theory to deal adequately with the complexities and variedcultural provenance of post-colonial writing European theories them-selves emerge from particular cultural traditions which are hidden byfalse notions of lsquothe universalrsquo Theories of style and genre assump-tions about the universal features of language epistemologies andvalue systems are all radically questioned by the practices of post-colonial writing Post-colonial theory has proceeded from the need toaddress this different practice Indigenous theories have developed toaccommodate the differences within the various cultural traditions aswell as the desire to describe in a comparative way the features sharedacross those traditions

The political and cultural monocentrism of the colonial enterprisewas a natural result of the philosophical traditions of the Europeanworld and the systems of representation which this privilegedNineteenth-century imperial expansion the culmination of the out-ward and dominating thrust of Europeans into the world beyondEurope which began during the early Renaissance was underpinned

introduction 11

in complex ways by these assumptions In the first instance thisproduced practices of cultural subservience characterized by one post-colonial critic as lsquocultural cringersquo (Phillips 1958) Subsequently theemergence of identifiable indigenous theories in reaction to thisformed an important element in the development of specific nationaland regional consciousnesses (see ch 4)

Paradoxically however imperial expansion has had a radicallydestabilizing effect on its own preoccupations and power In pushingthe colonial world to the margins of experience the lsquocentrersquo pushedconsciousness beyond the point at which monocentrism in all spheresof thought could be accepted without question In other words thealienating process which initially served to relegate the post-colonialworld to the lsquomarginrsquo turned upon itself and acted to push that worldthrough a kind of mental barrier into a position from which allexperience could be viewed as uncentred pluralistic and multifari-ous Marginality thus became an unprecedented source of creativeenergy The impetus towards decentring and pluralism has alwaysbeen present in the history of European thought and has reached itslatest development in post-structuralism But the situation of margin-alized societies and cultures enabled them to come to this positionmuch earlier and more directly (Brydon 1984b) These notions areimplicit in post-colonial texts from the imperial period to the presentday

The task of this book is twofold first to identify the range andnature of these post-colonial texts and second to describe the varioustheories which have emerged so far to account for them So in the firstchapter we consider the development of descriptive models of post-colonial writing Since it is not possible to read post-colonial textswithout coming to terms with the ways in which they appropriate anddeploy the material of linguistic culture in the second chapter weoutline the process by which language is captured to form a distinctivediscursive practice In the third chapter we demonstrate throughsymptomatic readings of texts how post-colonial writing interactswith the social and material practices of colonialism One of the majorpurposes of this book is to explain the nature of existing post-colonialtheory and the way in which it interacts with and dismantles some ofthe assumptions of European theory In the fourth chapter we discuss

the empire writes back12

the issues in the development of indigenous post-colonial theories andin the fifth we examine the larger implications of post-coloniality fortheories of language for literary theory and for social and politicalanalysis in general

introduction 13

1CUTTING THE GROUND

Critical models of post-colonialliteratures

As writers and critics became aware of the special character ofpost-colonial texts they saw the need to develop an adequate model toaccount for them Four major models have emerged to date firstlsquonationalrsquo or regional models which emphasize the distinctive featuresof the particular national or regional culture second race-basedmodels which identify certain shared characteristics across variousnational literatures such as the common racial inheritance in litera-tures of the African diaspora addressed by the lsquoBlack writingrsquo modelthird comparative models of varying complexity which seek toaccount for particular linguistic historical and cultural features acrosstwo or more post-colonial literatures fourth more comprehensivecomparative models which argue for features such as hybridity andsyncreticity as constitutive elements of all post-colonial literatures(syncretism is the process by which previously distinct linguistic cat-egories and by extension cultural formations merge into a singlenew form) These models often operate as assumptions within criticalpractice rather than specific and discrete schools of thought in any

discussion of post-colonial writing a number of them may be operat-ing at the same time

NATIONAL AND REGIONAL MODELS

The first post-colonial society to develop a lsquonationalrsquo literature was theUSA The emergence of a distinctive American literature in the lateeighteenth century raised inevitable questions about the relationshipbetween literature and place between literature and nationality andparticularly about the suitability of inherited literary forms Ideas aboutnew kinds of literature were part of the optimistic progression tonationhood because it seemed that this was one of the most potentareas in which to express difference from Britain Writers like CharlesBrockden Brown who attempted to indigenize British forms like thegothic and the sentimental novel soon realized that with the change inlocation and culture it was not possible to import form and conceptwithout radical alteration (Fiedler 1960 Ringe 1966)

In many ways the American experience and its attempts to producea new kind of literature can be seen to be the model for all laterpost-colonial writing1 The first thing it showed was that some ofa post-colonial countryrsquos most deeply held linguistic and cultural traitsdepend upon its relationship with the colonizing power particularlythe defining contrast between European metropolis and lsquofrontierrsquo (seeFussell 1965) Once the American Revolution had forced the questionof separate nationality and the economic and political successes of theemerging nation had begun to be taken for granted American litera-ture as a distinct collection of texts also began to be accepted But it wasaccepted as an offshoot of the lsquoparent treersquo Such organic metaphorsand others like lsquoparentndashchildrsquo and lsquostreamndashtributaryrsquo acted to keep thenew literature in its place The plant and parent metaphors stressed ageexperience roots tradition and most importantly the connectionbetween antiquity and value They implied the same distinctions asthose existing between metropolis and frontier parents are moreexperienced more important more substantial less brash than theiroffspring Above all they are the origin and therefore claim the finalauthority in questions of taste and value

But as the extensive literature of the USA developed different

cutting the ground 15

characteristics from that of Britain and established its right to be con-sidered independently the concept of national literary differenceslsquowithinrsquo English writing became established The eventual consequenceof this has been that lsquonewerrsquo literatures from countries such as NigeriaAustralia and India could also be discussed as discrete national forma-tions rather than as lsquobranches of the treersquo Their literatures could beconsidered in relation to the social and political history of each coun-try and could be read as a source of important images of nationalidentity

The development of national literatures and criticism is fundamentalto the whole enterprise of post-colonial studies Without such devel-opments at the national level and without the comparative studiesbetween national traditions to which these lead no discourse of thepost-colonial could have emerged Nor is it simply a matter of devel-opment from one stage to another since all post-colonial studies con-tinue to depend upon national literatures and criticism The study ofnational traditions is the first and most vital stage of the processof rejecting the claims of the centre to exclusivity It is the beginning ofwhat Nigerian writer Wole Soyinka has characterized as the lsquoprocess ofself-apprehensionrsquo (Soyinka 1976 xi) Recent theories of a generalpost-colonial discourse question essentialist formulations which maylead to nationalist and racist orthodoxies but they do not deny thegreat importance of maintaining each literaturersquos sense of specific dif-ference It is this sense of difference which constitutes each nationalliteraturersquos mode of self-apprehension and its claim to be a self-constituting entity However nationalism in which some partial truthor clicheacute is elevated to orthodoxy is a danger implicit in such nationalconceptions of literary production The impetus towards national self-realization in critical assessments of literature all too often fails to stopshort of nationalist myth

Larger geographical models which cross the boundaries of languagenationality or race to generate the concept of a regional literature suchas West Indian or South Pacific literature may also share some of thelimitations of the national model While the idea of an lsquoAfricanrsquo litera-ture for instance has a powerful appeal to writers and critics in thevarious African countries it has only limited application as a descrip-tive label African and European critics have produced several regional

the empire writes back16

and national studies which reflect the widespread political economicand cultural differences between modern African countries (Gurr andCalder 1974 Lindfors 1975 Taiwo 1976 Ogungbesan 1979)

Clearly some regional groupings are more likely to gain acceptancein the regions themselves than are others and will derive from a col-lective identity evident in other ways This is true of the West IndiesAlthough the Federation of the West Indies failed the english-speakingcountries there still field a regional cricket team Both the West Indiesand the South Pacific have regional universities with a significant inputinto literary production and discussion lsquoWest Indianrsquo literature hasalmost always been considered regionally rather than nationally Therehave been no major studies of Jamaican or Trinidadian literatures asdiscrete traditions A different regional grouping emphasizing geo-graphical and historical determinants rather than linguistic ones hasalso developed to explore lsquoCaribbeanrsquo literature setting literature inenglish from the region alongside that written in spanish french andother European languages (Allis 1982)

Despite such variants on the national model most of the englishliteratures outside Britain have been considered as individual nationalenterprises forming and reflecting each countryrsquos culture The inevit-able consequence of this is a gradual blurring of the distinctionbetween the national and the nationalist Nationalism has usuallyincluded a healthy repudiation of British and US hegemony observablein publishing education and the public sponsorship of writing Yet alltoo often nationalist criticism by failing to alter the terms of the dis-course within which it operates has participated implicitly or evenexplicitly in a discourse ultimately controlled by the very imperialpower its nationalist assertion is designed to exclude Emphasis mayhave been transferred to the national literature but the theoreticalassumptions critical perspectives and value judgements made haveoften replicated those of the British establishment

COMPARISONS BETWEEN TWO OR MORE REGIONS

Theories and models of post-colonial literatures could not emergeuntil the separate colonies were viewed in a framework centred ontheir own literary and cultural traditions Victorian Britain had exulted

cutting the ground 17

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

For help and generous support we should like to thank our partnersJudy Carolyn and Chris

For generous help in finding material tracing references and gener-ally making this book less inadequate than it remains we want to thankmany people but in particular Alan Lawson David Moody andStephen Slemon

INTRODUCTION

More than three-quarters of the people living in the world today havehad their lives shaped by the experience of colonialism It is easy to seehow important this has been in the political and economic spheres butits general influence on the perceptual frameworks of contemporarypeoples is often less evident Literature offers one of the most import-ant ways in which these new perceptions are expressed and it is in theirwriting and through other arts such as painting sculpture music anddance that the day-to-day realities experienced by colonized peopleshave been most powerfully encoded and so profoundly influential

WHAT ARE POST-COLONIAL LITERATURES

This book is concerned with writing by those peoples formerly colon-ized by Britain though much of what it deals with is of interest andrelevance to countries colonized by other European powers such asFrance Portugal and Spain The semantic basis of the term lsquopost-colonialrsquo might seem to suggest a concern only with the national cul-ture after the departure of the imperial power It has occasionally beenemployed in some earlier work in the area to distinguish between theperiods before and after independence (lsquocolonial periodrsquo andlsquopost-colonial periodrsquo) for example in constructing national literary

histories or in suggesting comparative studies between stages in thosehistories Generally speaking though the term lsquocolonialrsquo has been usedfor the period before independence and a term indicating a nationalwriting such as lsquomodern Canadian writingrsquo or lsquorecent West Indianliteraturersquo has been employed to distinguish the period afterindependence

We use the term lsquopost-colonialrsquo however to cover all the cultureaffected by the imperial process from the moment of colonization tothe present day This is because there is a continuity of preoccupationsthroughout the historical process initiated by European imperialaggression We also suggest that it is most appropriate as the term forthe new cross-cultural criticism which has emerged in recent years andfor the discourse through which this is constituted In this sense thisbook is concerned with the world as it exists during and after theperiod of European imperial domination and the effects of this oncontemporary literatures

So the literatures of African countries Australia Bangladesh CanadaCaribbean countries India Malaysia Malta New Zealand PakistanSingapore South Pacific Island countries and Sri Lanka are all post-colonial literatures The literature of the USA should also be placed inthis category Perhaps because of its current position of power and theneo-colonizing role it has played its post-colonial nature has not beengenerally recognized But its relationship with the metropolitan centreas it evolved over the last two centuries has been paradigmatic for post-colonial literatures everywhere What each of these literatures has incommon beyond their special and distinctive regional characteristics isthat they emerged in their present form out of the experience of colon-ization and asserted themselves by foregrounding the tension with theimperial power and by emphasizing their differences from theassumptions of the imperial centre It is this which makes themdistinctively post-colonial

POST-COLONIAL LITERATURES AND ENGLISH STUDIES

The study of English has always been a densely political and culturalphenomenon a practice in which language and literature have bothbeen called into the service of a profound and embracing nationalism

the empire writes back2

The development of English as a privileged academic subject innineteenth-century Britain ndash finally confirmed by its inclusion in thesyllabuses of Oxford and Cambridge and re-affirmed in the 1921Newbolt Report ndash came about as part of an attempt to replace theClassics at the heart of the intellectual enterprise of nineteenth-centuryhumanistic studies From the beginning proponents of English as adiscipline linked its methodology to that of the Classics with itsemphasis on scholarship philology and historical study ndash the fixing oftexts in historical time and the perpetual search for the determinants ofa single unified and agreed meaning

The historical moment which saw the emergence of lsquoEnglishrsquo as anacademic discipline also produced the nineteenth-century colonialform of imperialism (Batsleer et al 1985 14 19ndash25) Gauri Viswa-nathan has presented strong arguments for relating the lsquoinstitutional-isation and subsequent valorisation of English literary study [to] ashape and an ideological content developed in the colonial contextrsquoand specifically as it developed in India where

British colonial administrators provoked by missionaries on the onehand and fears of native insubordination on the other discovered anally in English literature to support them in maintaining control of thenatives under the guise of a liberal education

(Viswanathan 1987 17)

It can be argued that the study of English and the growth of Empireproceeded from a single ideological climate and that the developmentof the one is intrinsically bound up with the development of the otherboth at the level of simple utility (as propaganda for instance) and atthe unconscious level where it leads to the naturalizing of constructedvalues (eg civilization humanity etc) which conversely establishedlsquosavageryrsquo lsquonativersquo lsquoprimitiversquo as their antitheses and as the object of areforming zeal1

A lsquoprivileging normrsquo was enthroned at the heart of the formation ofEnglish Studies as a template for the denial of the value of the lsquoper-ipheralrsquo the lsquomarginalrsquo the lsquouncanonizedrsquo Literature was made as cen-tral to the cultural enterprise of Empire as the monarchy was to itspolitical formation So when elements of the periphery and margin

introduction 3

threatened the exclusive claims of the centre they were rapidlyincorporated This was a process in Edward Saidrsquos terms of consciousaffiliation proceeding under the guise of filiation (Said 1984) that is amimicry of the centre proceeding from a desire not only to be acceptedbut to be adopted and absorbed It caused those from the periphery toimmerse themselves in the imported culture denying their origins inan attempt to become lsquomore English than the Englishrsquo We seeexamples of this in such writers as Henry James and TS Eliot

As post-colonial societies sought to establish their difference fromBritain the response of those who recognized this complicity betweenlanguage education and cultural incorporation was to break the linkbetween language and literary study by dividing lsquoEnglishrsquo departmentsin universities into separate schools of Linguistics and of Literatureboth of which tended to view their project within a national or inter-national context Ngugirsquos essay lsquoOn the abolition of the Englishdepartmentrsquo (Ngugi 1972) is an illuminating account of the particulararguments involved in Africa John Dockerrsquos essay lsquoThe neocolonialassumption in the university teaching of Englishrsquo (Tiffin 1978 26ndash31) addresses similar problems in the settler colony contextdescribing a situation in which in contrast to Kenya little genuinedecolonization is yet in sight As Dockerrsquos critique makes clear in mostpost-colonial nations (including the West Indies and India) the nexusof power involving literature language and a dominant British culturehas strongly resisted attempts to dismantle it Even after such attemptsbegan to succeed the canonical nature and unquestioned status of theworks of the English literary tradition and the values they incorporatedremained potent in the cultural formation and the ideological institu-tions of education and literature Nevertheless the development of thepost-colonial literatures has necessitated a questioning of many of theassumptions on which the study of lsquoEnglishrsquo was based

DEVELOPMENT OF POST-COLONIAL LITERATURES

Post-colonial literatures developed through several stages which can beseen to correspond to stages both of national or regional consciousnessand of the project of asserting difference from the imperial centreDuring the imperial period writing in the language of the imperial

the empire writes back4

centre is inevitably of course produced by a literate elite whose pri-mary identification is with the colonizing power Thus the first textsproduced in the colonies in the new language are frequently producedby lsquorepresentativesrsquo of the imperial power for example gentrified set-tlers (Wentworthrsquos lsquoAustraliarsquo) travellers and sightseers (FroudersquosOceana and his The English in the West Indies or the travel diaries of MaryKingsley) or the Anglo-Indian and West African administrators sol-diers and lsquoboxwallahsrsquo and even more frequently their memsahibs(volumes of memoirs)

Such texts can never form the basis for an indigenous culture nor canthey be integrated in any way with the culture which already exists inthe countries invaded Despite their detailed reportage of landscapecustom and language they inevitably privilege the centre emphasiz-ing the lsquohomersquo over the lsquonativersquo the lsquometropolitanrsquo over the lsquoprovincialrsquoor lsquocolonialrsquo and so forth At a deeper level their claim to objectivitysimply serves to hide the imperial discourse within which they arecreated That this is true of even the consciously literary works whichemerge from this moment can be illustrated by the poems and storiesof Rudyard Kipling For example in the well-known poem lsquoChristmasin Indiarsquo the evocative description of a Christmas day in the heat ofIndia is contextualized by invoking its absent English counterpartApparently it is only through this absent and enabling signifier that theIndian daily reality can acquire legitimacy as a subject of literarydiscourse

The second stage of production within the evolving discourse of thepost-colonial is the literature produced lsquounder imperial licencersquo bylsquonativesrsquo or lsquooutcastsrsquo for instance the large body of poetry and proseproduced in the nineteenth century by the English educated Indianupper class or African lsquomissionary literaturersquo (eg Thomas MofolorsquosChaka) The producers signify by the very fact of writing in thelanguage of the dominant culture that they have temporarily or per-manently entered a specific and privileged class endowed with thelanguage education and leisure necessary to produce such works TheAustralian novel Ralph Rashleigh now known to have been written by theconvict James Tucker is a case in point Tucker an educated man wroteRashleigh as a lsquospecialrsquo (a privileged convict) whilst working at the penalsettlement at Port Macquarie as storekeeper to the superintendent

introduction 5

Written on government paper with government ink and pens thenovel was clearly produced with the aid and support of the super-intendent Tucker had momentarily gained access to the privilege ofliterature Significantly the moment of privilege did not last and hedied in poverty at the age of fifty-eight at Liverpool asylum in Sydney

It is characteristic of these early post-colonial texts that the potentialfor subversion in their themes cannot be fully realized Although theydeal with such powerful material as the brutality of the convict system(Tuckerrsquos Rashleigh) the historical potency of the supplanted anddenigrated native cultures (Mofolorsquos Chaka) or the existence of a richcultural heritage older and more extensive than that of Europe (any ofmany nineteenth-century Indo-Anglian poets such as Ram Sharma)they are prevented from fully exploring their anti-imperial potentialBoth the available discourse and the material conditions of productionfor literature in these early post-colonial societies restrain this possibil-ity The institution of lsquoLiteraturersquo in the colony is under the directcontrol of the imperial ruling class who alone license the acceptableform and permit the publication and distribution of the resulting workSo texts of this kind come into being within the constraints of adiscourse and the institutional practice of a patronage system whichlimits and undercuts their assertion of a different perspective Thedevelopment of independent literatures depended upon the abrogationof this constraining power and the appropriation of language and writ-ing for new and distinctive usages Such an appropriation is clearly themost significant feature in the emergence of modern post-colonialliteratures (see chs 2 and 3)

HEGEMONY

Why should post-colonial societies continue to engage with theimperial experience Since all the post-colonial societies we discusshave achieved political independence why is the issue of colonialitystill relevant at all This question of why the empire needs to write backto a centre once the imperial structure has been dismantled in politicalterms is an important one Britain like the other dominant colonialpowers of the nineteenth century has been relegated to a relativelyminor place in international affairs In the spheres of politics and

the empire writes back6

economics and increasingly in the vital new area of the mass mediaBritain and the other European imperial powers have been super-seded by the emergent power of the USA Nevertheless through theliterary canon the body of British texts which all too frequently stillacts as a touchstone of taste and value and through RS-English(Received Standard English) which asserts the English of south-eastEngland as a universal norm the weight of antiquity continues todominate cultural production in much of the post-colonial worldThis cultural hegemony has been maintained through canonicalassumptions about literary activity and through attitudes to post-colonial literatures which identify them as isolated national off-shootsof English literature and which therefore relegate them to marginaland subordinate positions More recently as the range and strength ofthese literatures has become undeniable a process of incorporation hasbegun in which employing Eurocentric standards of judgement thecentre has sought to claim those works and writers of which itapproves as British2 In all these respects the parallel between the situ-ation of post-colonial writing and that of feminist writing is striking(see ch 5)

LANGUAGE

One of the main features of imperial oppression is control over lan-guage The imperial education system installs a lsquostandardrsquo version ofthe metropolitan language as the norm and marginalizes all lsquovariantsrsquoas impurities As a character in Mrs Campbell Praedrsquos nineteenth-century Australian novel Policy and Passion puts it lsquoTo be colonial is to talkAustralian slang to be everything that is abominablersquo (CampbellPraed 1881154) Language becomes the medium through which ahierarchical structure of power is perpetuated and the mediumthrough which conceptions of lsquotruthrsquo lsquoorderrsquo and lsquorealityrsquo becomeestablished Such power is rejected in the emergence of an effectivepost-colonial voice For this reason the discussion of post-colonialwriting which follows is largely a discussion of the process by whichthe language with its power and the writing with its signification ofauthority has been wrested from the dominant European culture

In order to focus on the complex ways in which the English

introduction 7

language has been used in these societies and to indicate their ownsense of difference we distinguish in this account between the lsquostand-ardrsquo British English inherited from the empire and the english whichthe language has become in post-colonial countries Though Britishimperialism resulted in the spread of a language English across theglobe the english of Jamaicans is not the english of Canadians Maorisor Kenyans We need to distinguish between what is proposed as astandard code English (the language of the erstwhile imperial centre)and the linguistic code english which has been transformed and sub-verted into several distinctive varieties throughout the world For thisreason the distinction between English and english will be usedthroughout our text as an indication of the various ways in which thelanguage has been employed by different linguistic communities in thepost-colonial world3

The use of these terms asserts the fact that a continuum existsbetween the various linguistic practices which constitute english usagein the modern world Although linguistically the links between Englishand the various post-colonial englishes in use today can be seen asunbroken the political reality is that English sets itself apart from allother lsquolesserrsquo variants and so demands to be interrogated about itsclaim to this special status

In practice the history of this distinction between English and eng-lish has been between the claims of a powerful lsquocentrersquo and a multitudeof intersecting usages designated as lsquoperipheriesrsquo The language ofthese lsquoperipheriesrsquo was shaped by an oppressive discourse of power Yetthey have been the site of some of the most exciting and innovativeliteratures of the modern period and this has at least in part been theresult of the energies uncovered by the political tension between theidea of a normative code and a variety of regional usages

PLACE AND DISPLACEMENT

A major feature of post-colonial literatures is the concern with placeand displacement It is here that the special post-colonial crisis of iden-tity comes into being the concern with the development or recoveryof an effective identifying relationship between self and place Indeedcritics such as D E S Maxwell have made this the defining model of

the empire writes back8

post-coloniality (see ch 1) A valid and active sense of self may havebeen eroded by dislocation resulting from migration the experience ofenslavement transportation or lsquovoluntaryrsquo removal for indenturedlabour Or it may have been destroyed by cultural denigration the con-scious and unconscious oppression of the indigenous personality andculture by a supposedly superior racial or cultural model The dialecticof place and displacement is always a feature of post-colonial societieswhether these have been created by a process of settlement interven-tion or a mixture of the two Beyond their historical and culturaldifferences place displacement and a pervasive concern with themyths of identity and authenticity are a feature common to allpost-colonial literatures in english

The alienation of vision and the crisis in self-image which this dis-placement produces is as frequently found in the accounts of Canadianlsquofree settlersrsquo as of Australian convicts FijianndashIndian or TrinidadianndashIndian indentured labourers West Indian slaves or forcibly colonizedNigerians or Bengalis Although this is pragmatically demonstrablefrom a wide range of texts it is difficult to account for by theorieswhich see this social and linguistic alienation as resulting only fromovertly oppressive forms of colonization such as slavery or conquestAn adequate account of this practice must go beyond the usual categor-ies of social alienation such as masterslave freebonded rulerruledhowever important and widespread these may be in post-colonial cul-tures After all why should the free settler formally unconstrained andtheoretically free to continue in the possession and practice oflsquoEnglishnessrsquo also show clear signs of alienation even within thefirst generation of settlement and manifest a tendency to seek analternative differentiated identity

The most widely shared discursive practice within which this alien-ation can be identified is the construction of lsquoplacersquo The gap whichopens between the experience of place and the language available todescribe it forms a classic and allpervasive feature of post-colonial textsThis gap occurs for those whose language seems inadequate to describea new place for those whose language is systematically destroyed byenslavement and for those whose language has been renderedunprivileged by the imposition of the language of a colonizing powerSome admixture of one or other of these models can describe the

introduction 9

situation of all post-colonial societies In each case a condition of alien-ation is inevitable until the colonizing language has been replaced orappropriated as english

That imperialism results in a profound linguistic alienation isobviously the case in cultures in which a pre-colonial culture is sup-pressed by military conquest or enslavement So for example anIndian writer like Raja Rao or a Nigerian writer such as ChinuaAchebe have needed to transform the language to use it in a differentway in its new context and so as Achebe says quoting James Bald-win make it lsquobear the burdenrsquo of their experience (Achebe 197562) Although Rao and Achebe write from their own place and sohave not suffered a literal geographical displacement they have toovercome an imposed gap resulting from the linguistic displacementof the pre-colonial language by English This process occurs within amore comprehensive discourse of place and displacement in thewider post-colonial context Such alienation is shared by those whosepossession of English is indisputably lsquonativersquo (in the sense of beingpossessed from birth) yet who begin to feel alienated within its prac-tice once its vocabulary categories and codes are felt to beinadequate or inappropriate to describe the fauna the physical andgeographical conditions or the cultural practices they have developedin a new land The Canadian poet Joseph Howe for instance pluckshis picture of a moose from some repository of English nurseryrhyme romanticism

the gay moose in jocund gambol springsCropping the foliage Nature round him flings

(Howe 1874 100)

Such absurdities demonstrate the pressing need these native speakersshare with those colonized peoples who were directly oppressed toescape from the inadequacies and imperial constraints of English as asocial practice They need that is to escape from the implicit body ofassumptions to which English was attached its aesthetic and socialvalues the formal and historically limited constraints of genre and theoppressive political and cultural assertion of metropolitan dominanceof centre over margin (Ngugi 1986) This is not to say that the English

the empire writes back10

language is inherently incapable of accounting for post-colonialexperience but that it needs to develop an lsquoappropriatersquo usage in orderto do so (by becoming a distinct and unique form of english) Theenergizing feature of this displacement is its capacity to interrogate andsubvert the imperial cultural formations

The pressure to develop such a usage manifests itself early in thedevelopment of lsquoenglishrsquo literatures It is therefore arguable that evenbefore the development of a conscious de-colonizing stance theexperience of a new place identifiably different in its physical charac-teristics constrains for instance the new settlers to demand a languagewhich will allow them to express their sense of lsquoOthernessrsquo Landscapeflora and fauna seasons climatic conditions are formally distinguishedfrom the place of origin as homecolony EuropeNew WorldEuropeAntipodes metropolitanprovincial and so on although ofcourse at this stage no effective models exist for expressing this senseof Otherness in a positive and creative way

POST-COLONIALITY AND THEORY

The idea of lsquopost-colonial literary theoryrsquo emerges from the inability ofEuropean theory to deal adequately with the complexities and variedcultural provenance of post-colonial writing European theories them-selves emerge from particular cultural traditions which are hidden byfalse notions of lsquothe universalrsquo Theories of style and genre assump-tions about the universal features of language epistemologies andvalue systems are all radically questioned by the practices of post-colonial writing Post-colonial theory has proceeded from the need toaddress this different practice Indigenous theories have developed toaccommodate the differences within the various cultural traditions aswell as the desire to describe in a comparative way the features sharedacross those traditions

The political and cultural monocentrism of the colonial enterprisewas a natural result of the philosophical traditions of the Europeanworld and the systems of representation which this privilegedNineteenth-century imperial expansion the culmination of the out-ward and dominating thrust of Europeans into the world beyondEurope which began during the early Renaissance was underpinned

introduction 11

in complex ways by these assumptions In the first instance thisproduced practices of cultural subservience characterized by one post-colonial critic as lsquocultural cringersquo (Phillips 1958) Subsequently theemergence of identifiable indigenous theories in reaction to thisformed an important element in the development of specific nationaland regional consciousnesses (see ch 4)

Paradoxically however imperial expansion has had a radicallydestabilizing effect on its own preoccupations and power In pushingthe colonial world to the margins of experience the lsquocentrersquo pushedconsciousness beyond the point at which monocentrism in all spheresof thought could be accepted without question In other words thealienating process which initially served to relegate the post-colonialworld to the lsquomarginrsquo turned upon itself and acted to push that worldthrough a kind of mental barrier into a position from which allexperience could be viewed as uncentred pluralistic and multifari-ous Marginality thus became an unprecedented source of creativeenergy The impetus towards decentring and pluralism has alwaysbeen present in the history of European thought and has reached itslatest development in post-structuralism But the situation of margin-alized societies and cultures enabled them to come to this positionmuch earlier and more directly (Brydon 1984b) These notions areimplicit in post-colonial texts from the imperial period to the presentday

The task of this book is twofold first to identify the range andnature of these post-colonial texts and second to describe the varioustheories which have emerged so far to account for them So in the firstchapter we consider the development of descriptive models of post-colonial writing Since it is not possible to read post-colonial textswithout coming to terms with the ways in which they appropriate anddeploy the material of linguistic culture in the second chapter weoutline the process by which language is captured to form a distinctivediscursive practice In the third chapter we demonstrate throughsymptomatic readings of texts how post-colonial writing interactswith the social and material practices of colonialism One of the majorpurposes of this book is to explain the nature of existing post-colonialtheory and the way in which it interacts with and dismantles some ofthe assumptions of European theory In the fourth chapter we discuss

the empire writes back12

the issues in the development of indigenous post-colonial theories andin the fifth we examine the larger implications of post-coloniality fortheories of language for literary theory and for social and politicalanalysis in general

introduction 13

1CUTTING THE GROUND

Critical models of post-colonialliteratures

As writers and critics became aware of the special character ofpost-colonial texts they saw the need to develop an adequate model toaccount for them Four major models have emerged to date firstlsquonationalrsquo or regional models which emphasize the distinctive featuresof the particular national or regional culture second race-basedmodels which identify certain shared characteristics across variousnational literatures such as the common racial inheritance in litera-tures of the African diaspora addressed by the lsquoBlack writingrsquo modelthird comparative models of varying complexity which seek toaccount for particular linguistic historical and cultural features acrosstwo or more post-colonial literatures fourth more comprehensivecomparative models which argue for features such as hybridity andsyncreticity as constitutive elements of all post-colonial literatures(syncretism is the process by which previously distinct linguistic cat-egories and by extension cultural formations merge into a singlenew form) These models often operate as assumptions within criticalpractice rather than specific and discrete schools of thought in any

discussion of post-colonial writing a number of them may be operat-ing at the same time

NATIONAL AND REGIONAL MODELS

The first post-colonial society to develop a lsquonationalrsquo literature was theUSA The emergence of a distinctive American literature in the lateeighteenth century raised inevitable questions about the relationshipbetween literature and place between literature and nationality andparticularly about the suitability of inherited literary forms Ideas aboutnew kinds of literature were part of the optimistic progression tonationhood because it seemed that this was one of the most potentareas in which to express difference from Britain Writers like CharlesBrockden Brown who attempted to indigenize British forms like thegothic and the sentimental novel soon realized that with the change inlocation and culture it was not possible to import form and conceptwithout radical alteration (Fiedler 1960 Ringe 1966)

In many ways the American experience and its attempts to producea new kind of literature can be seen to be the model for all laterpost-colonial writing1 The first thing it showed was that some ofa post-colonial countryrsquos most deeply held linguistic and cultural traitsdepend upon its relationship with the colonizing power particularlythe defining contrast between European metropolis and lsquofrontierrsquo (seeFussell 1965) Once the American Revolution had forced the questionof separate nationality and the economic and political successes of theemerging nation had begun to be taken for granted American litera-ture as a distinct collection of texts also began to be accepted But it wasaccepted as an offshoot of the lsquoparent treersquo Such organic metaphorsand others like lsquoparentndashchildrsquo and lsquostreamndashtributaryrsquo acted to keep thenew literature in its place The plant and parent metaphors stressed ageexperience roots tradition and most importantly the connectionbetween antiquity and value They implied the same distinctions asthose existing between metropolis and frontier parents are moreexperienced more important more substantial less brash than theiroffspring Above all they are the origin and therefore claim the finalauthority in questions of taste and value

But as the extensive literature of the USA developed different

cutting the ground 15

characteristics from that of Britain and established its right to be con-sidered independently the concept of national literary differenceslsquowithinrsquo English writing became established The eventual consequenceof this has been that lsquonewerrsquo literatures from countries such as NigeriaAustralia and India could also be discussed as discrete national forma-tions rather than as lsquobranches of the treersquo Their literatures could beconsidered in relation to the social and political history of each coun-try and could be read as a source of important images of nationalidentity

The development of national literatures and criticism is fundamentalto the whole enterprise of post-colonial studies Without such devel-opments at the national level and without the comparative studiesbetween national traditions to which these lead no discourse of thepost-colonial could have emerged Nor is it simply a matter of devel-opment from one stage to another since all post-colonial studies con-tinue to depend upon national literatures and criticism The study ofnational traditions is the first and most vital stage of the processof rejecting the claims of the centre to exclusivity It is the beginning ofwhat Nigerian writer Wole Soyinka has characterized as the lsquoprocess ofself-apprehensionrsquo (Soyinka 1976 xi) Recent theories of a generalpost-colonial discourse question essentialist formulations which maylead to nationalist and racist orthodoxies but they do not deny thegreat importance of maintaining each literaturersquos sense of specific dif-ference It is this sense of difference which constitutes each nationalliteraturersquos mode of self-apprehension and its claim to be a self-constituting entity However nationalism in which some partial truthor clicheacute is elevated to orthodoxy is a danger implicit in such nationalconceptions of literary production The impetus towards national self-realization in critical assessments of literature all too often fails to stopshort of nationalist myth

Larger geographical models which cross the boundaries of languagenationality or race to generate the concept of a regional literature suchas West Indian or South Pacific literature may also share some of thelimitations of the national model While the idea of an lsquoAfricanrsquo litera-ture for instance has a powerful appeal to writers and critics in thevarious African countries it has only limited application as a descrip-tive label African and European critics have produced several regional

the empire writes back16

and national studies which reflect the widespread political economicand cultural differences between modern African countries (Gurr andCalder 1974 Lindfors 1975 Taiwo 1976 Ogungbesan 1979)

Clearly some regional groupings are more likely to gain acceptancein the regions themselves than are others and will derive from a col-lective identity evident in other ways This is true of the West IndiesAlthough the Federation of the West Indies failed the english-speakingcountries there still field a regional cricket team Both the West Indiesand the South Pacific have regional universities with a significant inputinto literary production and discussion lsquoWest Indianrsquo literature hasalmost always been considered regionally rather than nationally Therehave been no major studies of Jamaican or Trinidadian literatures asdiscrete traditions A different regional grouping emphasizing geo-graphical and historical determinants rather than linguistic ones hasalso developed to explore lsquoCaribbeanrsquo literature setting literature inenglish from the region alongside that written in spanish french andother European languages (Allis 1982)

Despite such variants on the national model most of the englishliteratures outside Britain have been considered as individual nationalenterprises forming and reflecting each countryrsquos culture The inevit-able consequence of this is a gradual blurring of the distinctionbetween the national and the nationalist Nationalism has usuallyincluded a healthy repudiation of British and US hegemony observablein publishing education and the public sponsorship of writing Yet alltoo often nationalist criticism by failing to alter the terms of the dis-course within which it operates has participated implicitly or evenexplicitly in a discourse ultimately controlled by the very imperialpower its nationalist assertion is designed to exclude Emphasis mayhave been transferred to the national literature but the theoreticalassumptions critical perspectives and value judgements made haveoften replicated those of the British establishment

COMPARISONS BETWEEN TWO OR MORE REGIONS

Theories and models of post-colonial literatures could not emergeuntil the separate colonies were viewed in a framework centred ontheir own literary and cultural traditions Victorian Britain had exulted

cutting the ground 17

INTRODUCTION

More than three-quarters of the people living in the world today havehad their lives shaped by the experience of colonialism It is easy to seehow important this has been in the political and economic spheres butits general influence on the perceptual frameworks of contemporarypeoples is often less evident Literature offers one of the most import-ant ways in which these new perceptions are expressed and it is in theirwriting and through other arts such as painting sculpture music anddance that the day-to-day realities experienced by colonized peopleshave been most powerfully encoded and so profoundly influential

WHAT ARE POST-COLONIAL LITERATURES

This book is concerned with writing by those peoples formerly colon-ized by Britain though much of what it deals with is of interest andrelevance to countries colonized by other European powers such asFrance Portugal and Spain The semantic basis of the term lsquopost-colonialrsquo might seem to suggest a concern only with the national cul-ture after the departure of the imperial power It has occasionally beenemployed in some earlier work in the area to distinguish between theperiods before and after independence (lsquocolonial periodrsquo andlsquopost-colonial periodrsquo) for example in constructing national literary

histories or in suggesting comparative studies between stages in thosehistories Generally speaking though the term lsquocolonialrsquo has been usedfor the period before independence and a term indicating a nationalwriting such as lsquomodern Canadian writingrsquo or lsquorecent West Indianliteraturersquo has been employed to distinguish the period afterindependence

We use the term lsquopost-colonialrsquo however to cover all the cultureaffected by the imperial process from the moment of colonization tothe present day This is because there is a continuity of preoccupationsthroughout the historical process initiated by European imperialaggression We also suggest that it is most appropriate as the term forthe new cross-cultural criticism which has emerged in recent years andfor the discourse through which this is constituted In this sense thisbook is concerned with the world as it exists during and after theperiod of European imperial domination and the effects of this oncontemporary literatures

So the literatures of African countries Australia Bangladesh CanadaCaribbean countries India Malaysia Malta New Zealand PakistanSingapore South Pacific Island countries and Sri Lanka are all post-colonial literatures The literature of the USA should also be placed inthis category Perhaps because of its current position of power and theneo-colonizing role it has played its post-colonial nature has not beengenerally recognized But its relationship with the metropolitan centreas it evolved over the last two centuries has been paradigmatic for post-colonial literatures everywhere What each of these literatures has incommon beyond their special and distinctive regional characteristics isthat they emerged in their present form out of the experience of colon-ization and asserted themselves by foregrounding the tension with theimperial power and by emphasizing their differences from theassumptions of the imperial centre It is this which makes themdistinctively post-colonial

POST-COLONIAL LITERATURES AND ENGLISH STUDIES

The study of English has always been a densely political and culturalphenomenon a practice in which language and literature have bothbeen called into the service of a profound and embracing nationalism

the empire writes back2

The development of English as a privileged academic subject innineteenth-century Britain ndash finally confirmed by its inclusion in thesyllabuses of Oxford and Cambridge and re-affirmed in the 1921Newbolt Report ndash came about as part of an attempt to replace theClassics at the heart of the intellectual enterprise of nineteenth-centuryhumanistic studies From the beginning proponents of English as adiscipline linked its methodology to that of the Classics with itsemphasis on scholarship philology and historical study ndash the fixing oftexts in historical time and the perpetual search for the determinants ofa single unified and agreed meaning

The historical moment which saw the emergence of lsquoEnglishrsquo as anacademic discipline also produced the nineteenth-century colonialform of imperialism (Batsleer et al 1985 14 19ndash25) Gauri Viswa-nathan has presented strong arguments for relating the lsquoinstitutional-isation and subsequent valorisation of English literary study [to] ashape and an ideological content developed in the colonial contextrsquoand specifically as it developed in India where

British colonial administrators provoked by missionaries on the onehand and fears of native insubordination on the other discovered anally in English literature to support them in maintaining control of thenatives under the guise of a liberal education

(Viswanathan 1987 17)

It can be argued that the study of English and the growth of Empireproceeded from a single ideological climate and that the developmentof the one is intrinsically bound up with the development of the otherboth at the level of simple utility (as propaganda for instance) and atthe unconscious level where it leads to the naturalizing of constructedvalues (eg civilization humanity etc) which conversely establishedlsquosavageryrsquo lsquonativersquo lsquoprimitiversquo as their antitheses and as the object of areforming zeal1

A lsquoprivileging normrsquo was enthroned at the heart of the formation ofEnglish Studies as a template for the denial of the value of the lsquoper-ipheralrsquo the lsquomarginalrsquo the lsquouncanonizedrsquo Literature was made as cen-tral to the cultural enterprise of Empire as the monarchy was to itspolitical formation So when elements of the periphery and margin

introduction 3

threatened the exclusive claims of the centre they were rapidlyincorporated This was a process in Edward Saidrsquos terms of consciousaffiliation proceeding under the guise of filiation (Said 1984) that is amimicry of the centre proceeding from a desire not only to be acceptedbut to be adopted and absorbed It caused those from the periphery toimmerse themselves in the imported culture denying their origins inan attempt to become lsquomore English than the Englishrsquo We seeexamples of this in such writers as Henry James and TS Eliot

As post-colonial societies sought to establish their difference fromBritain the response of those who recognized this complicity betweenlanguage education and cultural incorporation was to break the linkbetween language and literary study by dividing lsquoEnglishrsquo departmentsin universities into separate schools of Linguistics and of Literatureboth of which tended to view their project within a national or inter-national context Ngugirsquos essay lsquoOn the abolition of the Englishdepartmentrsquo (Ngugi 1972) is an illuminating account of the particulararguments involved in Africa John Dockerrsquos essay lsquoThe neocolonialassumption in the university teaching of Englishrsquo (Tiffin 1978 26ndash31) addresses similar problems in the settler colony contextdescribing a situation in which in contrast to Kenya little genuinedecolonization is yet in sight As Dockerrsquos critique makes clear in mostpost-colonial nations (including the West Indies and India) the nexusof power involving literature language and a dominant British culturehas strongly resisted attempts to dismantle it Even after such attemptsbegan to succeed the canonical nature and unquestioned status of theworks of the English literary tradition and the values they incorporatedremained potent in the cultural formation and the ideological institu-tions of education and literature Nevertheless the development of thepost-colonial literatures has necessitated a questioning of many of theassumptions on which the study of lsquoEnglishrsquo was based

DEVELOPMENT OF POST-COLONIAL LITERATURES

Post-colonial literatures developed through several stages which can beseen to correspond to stages both of national or regional consciousnessand of the project of asserting difference from the imperial centreDuring the imperial period writing in the language of the imperial

the empire writes back4

centre is inevitably of course produced by a literate elite whose pri-mary identification is with the colonizing power Thus the first textsproduced in the colonies in the new language are frequently producedby lsquorepresentativesrsquo of the imperial power for example gentrified set-tlers (Wentworthrsquos lsquoAustraliarsquo) travellers and sightseers (FroudersquosOceana and his The English in the West Indies or the travel diaries of MaryKingsley) or the Anglo-Indian and West African administrators sol-diers and lsquoboxwallahsrsquo and even more frequently their memsahibs(volumes of memoirs)

Such texts can never form the basis for an indigenous culture nor canthey be integrated in any way with the culture which already exists inthe countries invaded Despite their detailed reportage of landscapecustom and language they inevitably privilege the centre emphasiz-ing the lsquohomersquo over the lsquonativersquo the lsquometropolitanrsquo over the lsquoprovincialrsquoor lsquocolonialrsquo and so forth At a deeper level their claim to objectivitysimply serves to hide the imperial discourse within which they arecreated That this is true of even the consciously literary works whichemerge from this moment can be illustrated by the poems and storiesof Rudyard Kipling For example in the well-known poem lsquoChristmasin Indiarsquo the evocative description of a Christmas day in the heat ofIndia is contextualized by invoking its absent English counterpartApparently it is only through this absent and enabling signifier that theIndian daily reality can acquire legitimacy as a subject of literarydiscourse

The second stage of production within the evolving discourse of thepost-colonial is the literature produced lsquounder imperial licencersquo bylsquonativesrsquo or lsquooutcastsrsquo for instance the large body of poetry and proseproduced in the nineteenth century by the English educated Indianupper class or African lsquomissionary literaturersquo (eg Thomas MofolorsquosChaka) The producers signify by the very fact of writing in thelanguage of the dominant culture that they have temporarily or per-manently entered a specific and privileged class endowed with thelanguage education and leisure necessary to produce such works TheAustralian novel Ralph Rashleigh now known to have been written by theconvict James Tucker is a case in point Tucker an educated man wroteRashleigh as a lsquospecialrsquo (a privileged convict) whilst working at the penalsettlement at Port Macquarie as storekeeper to the superintendent

introduction 5

Written on government paper with government ink and pens thenovel was clearly produced with the aid and support of the super-intendent Tucker had momentarily gained access to the privilege ofliterature Significantly the moment of privilege did not last and hedied in poverty at the age of fifty-eight at Liverpool asylum in Sydney

It is characteristic of these early post-colonial texts that the potentialfor subversion in their themes cannot be fully realized Although theydeal with such powerful material as the brutality of the convict system(Tuckerrsquos Rashleigh) the historical potency of the supplanted anddenigrated native cultures (Mofolorsquos Chaka) or the existence of a richcultural heritage older and more extensive than that of Europe (any ofmany nineteenth-century Indo-Anglian poets such as Ram Sharma)they are prevented from fully exploring their anti-imperial potentialBoth the available discourse and the material conditions of productionfor literature in these early post-colonial societies restrain this possibil-ity The institution of lsquoLiteraturersquo in the colony is under the directcontrol of the imperial ruling class who alone license the acceptableform and permit the publication and distribution of the resulting workSo texts of this kind come into being within the constraints of adiscourse and the institutional practice of a patronage system whichlimits and undercuts their assertion of a different perspective Thedevelopment of independent literatures depended upon the abrogationof this constraining power and the appropriation of language and writ-ing for new and distinctive usages Such an appropriation is clearly themost significant feature in the emergence of modern post-colonialliteratures (see chs 2 and 3)

HEGEMONY

Why should post-colonial societies continue to engage with theimperial experience Since all the post-colonial societies we discusshave achieved political independence why is the issue of colonialitystill relevant at all This question of why the empire needs to write backto a centre once the imperial structure has been dismantled in politicalterms is an important one Britain like the other dominant colonialpowers of the nineteenth century has been relegated to a relativelyminor place in international affairs In the spheres of politics and

the empire writes back6

economics and increasingly in the vital new area of the mass mediaBritain and the other European imperial powers have been super-seded by the emergent power of the USA Nevertheless through theliterary canon the body of British texts which all too frequently stillacts as a touchstone of taste and value and through RS-English(Received Standard English) which asserts the English of south-eastEngland as a universal norm the weight of antiquity continues todominate cultural production in much of the post-colonial worldThis cultural hegemony has been maintained through canonicalassumptions about literary activity and through attitudes to post-colonial literatures which identify them as isolated national off-shootsof English literature and which therefore relegate them to marginaland subordinate positions More recently as the range and strength ofthese literatures has become undeniable a process of incorporation hasbegun in which employing Eurocentric standards of judgement thecentre has sought to claim those works and writers of which itapproves as British2 In all these respects the parallel between the situ-ation of post-colonial writing and that of feminist writing is striking(see ch 5)

LANGUAGE

One of the main features of imperial oppression is control over lan-guage The imperial education system installs a lsquostandardrsquo version ofthe metropolitan language as the norm and marginalizes all lsquovariantsrsquoas impurities As a character in Mrs Campbell Praedrsquos nineteenth-century Australian novel Policy and Passion puts it lsquoTo be colonial is to talkAustralian slang to be everything that is abominablersquo (CampbellPraed 1881154) Language becomes the medium through which ahierarchical structure of power is perpetuated and the mediumthrough which conceptions of lsquotruthrsquo lsquoorderrsquo and lsquorealityrsquo becomeestablished Such power is rejected in the emergence of an effectivepost-colonial voice For this reason the discussion of post-colonialwriting which follows is largely a discussion of the process by whichthe language with its power and the writing with its signification ofauthority has been wrested from the dominant European culture

In order to focus on the complex ways in which the English

introduction 7

language has been used in these societies and to indicate their ownsense of difference we distinguish in this account between the lsquostand-ardrsquo British English inherited from the empire and the english whichthe language has become in post-colonial countries Though Britishimperialism resulted in the spread of a language English across theglobe the english of Jamaicans is not the english of Canadians Maorisor Kenyans We need to distinguish between what is proposed as astandard code English (the language of the erstwhile imperial centre)and the linguistic code english which has been transformed and sub-verted into several distinctive varieties throughout the world For thisreason the distinction between English and english will be usedthroughout our text as an indication of the various ways in which thelanguage has been employed by different linguistic communities in thepost-colonial world3

The use of these terms asserts the fact that a continuum existsbetween the various linguistic practices which constitute english usagein the modern world Although linguistically the links between Englishand the various post-colonial englishes in use today can be seen asunbroken the political reality is that English sets itself apart from allother lsquolesserrsquo variants and so demands to be interrogated about itsclaim to this special status

In practice the history of this distinction between English and eng-lish has been between the claims of a powerful lsquocentrersquo and a multitudeof intersecting usages designated as lsquoperipheriesrsquo The language ofthese lsquoperipheriesrsquo was shaped by an oppressive discourse of power Yetthey have been the site of some of the most exciting and innovativeliteratures of the modern period and this has at least in part been theresult of the energies uncovered by the political tension between theidea of a normative code and a variety of regional usages

PLACE AND DISPLACEMENT

A major feature of post-colonial literatures is the concern with placeand displacement It is here that the special post-colonial crisis of iden-tity comes into being the concern with the development or recoveryof an effective identifying relationship between self and place Indeedcritics such as D E S Maxwell have made this the defining model of

the empire writes back8

post-coloniality (see ch 1) A valid and active sense of self may havebeen eroded by dislocation resulting from migration the experience ofenslavement transportation or lsquovoluntaryrsquo removal for indenturedlabour Or it may have been destroyed by cultural denigration the con-scious and unconscious oppression of the indigenous personality andculture by a supposedly superior racial or cultural model The dialecticof place and displacement is always a feature of post-colonial societieswhether these have been created by a process of settlement interven-tion or a mixture of the two Beyond their historical and culturaldifferences place displacement and a pervasive concern with themyths of identity and authenticity are a feature common to allpost-colonial literatures in english

The alienation of vision and the crisis in self-image which this dis-placement produces is as frequently found in the accounts of Canadianlsquofree settlersrsquo as of Australian convicts FijianndashIndian or TrinidadianndashIndian indentured labourers West Indian slaves or forcibly colonizedNigerians or Bengalis Although this is pragmatically demonstrablefrom a wide range of texts it is difficult to account for by theorieswhich see this social and linguistic alienation as resulting only fromovertly oppressive forms of colonization such as slavery or conquestAn adequate account of this practice must go beyond the usual categor-ies of social alienation such as masterslave freebonded rulerruledhowever important and widespread these may be in post-colonial cul-tures After all why should the free settler formally unconstrained andtheoretically free to continue in the possession and practice oflsquoEnglishnessrsquo also show clear signs of alienation even within thefirst generation of settlement and manifest a tendency to seek analternative differentiated identity

The most widely shared discursive practice within which this alien-ation can be identified is the construction of lsquoplacersquo The gap whichopens between the experience of place and the language available todescribe it forms a classic and allpervasive feature of post-colonial textsThis gap occurs for those whose language seems inadequate to describea new place for those whose language is systematically destroyed byenslavement and for those whose language has been renderedunprivileged by the imposition of the language of a colonizing powerSome admixture of one or other of these models can describe the

introduction 9

situation of all post-colonial societies In each case a condition of alien-ation is inevitable until the colonizing language has been replaced orappropriated as english

That imperialism results in a profound linguistic alienation isobviously the case in cultures in which a pre-colonial culture is sup-pressed by military conquest or enslavement So for example anIndian writer like Raja Rao or a Nigerian writer such as ChinuaAchebe have needed to transform the language to use it in a differentway in its new context and so as Achebe says quoting James Bald-win make it lsquobear the burdenrsquo of their experience (Achebe 197562) Although Rao and Achebe write from their own place and sohave not suffered a literal geographical displacement they have toovercome an imposed gap resulting from the linguistic displacementof the pre-colonial language by English This process occurs within amore comprehensive discourse of place and displacement in thewider post-colonial context Such alienation is shared by those whosepossession of English is indisputably lsquonativersquo (in the sense of beingpossessed from birth) yet who begin to feel alienated within its prac-tice once its vocabulary categories and codes are felt to beinadequate or inappropriate to describe the fauna the physical andgeographical conditions or the cultural practices they have developedin a new land The Canadian poet Joseph Howe for instance pluckshis picture of a moose from some repository of English nurseryrhyme romanticism

the gay moose in jocund gambol springsCropping the foliage Nature round him flings

(Howe 1874 100)

Such absurdities demonstrate the pressing need these native speakersshare with those colonized peoples who were directly oppressed toescape from the inadequacies and imperial constraints of English as asocial practice They need that is to escape from the implicit body ofassumptions to which English was attached its aesthetic and socialvalues the formal and historically limited constraints of genre and theoppressive political and cultural assertion of metropolitan dominanceof centre over margin (Ngugi 1986) This is not to say that the English

the empire writes back10

language is inherently incapable of accounting for post-colonialexperience but that it needs to develop an lsquoappropriatersquo usage in orderto do so (by becoming a distinct and unique form of english) Theenergizing feature of this displacement is its capacity to interrogate andsubvert the imperial cultural formations

The pressure to develop such a usage manifests itself early in thedevelopment of lsquoenglishrsquo literatures It is therefore arguable that evenbefore the development of a conscious de-colonizing stance theexperience of a new place identifiably different in its physical charac-teristics constrains for instance the new settlers to demand a languagewhich will allow them to express their sense of lsquoOthernessrsquo Landscapeflora and fauna seasons climatic conditions are formally distinguishedfrom the place of origin as homecolony EuropeNew WorldEuropeAntipodes metropolitanprovincial and so on although ofcourse at this stage no effective models exist for expressing this senseof Otherness in a positive and creative way

POST-COLONIALITY AND THEORY

The idea of lsquopost-colonial literary theoryrsquo emerges from the inability ofEuropean theory to deal adequately with the complexities and variedcultural provenance of post-colonial writing European theories them-selves emerge from particular cultural traditions which are hidden byfalse notions of lsquothe universalrsquo Theories of style and genre assump-tions about the universal features of language epistemologies andvalue systems are all radically questioned by the practices of post-colonial writing Post-colonial theory has proceeded from the need toaddress this different practice Indigenous theories have developed toaccommodate the differences within the various cultural traditions aswell as the desire to describe in a comparative way the features sharedacross those traditions

The political and cultural monocentrism of the colonial enterprisewas a natural result of the philosophical traditions of the Europeanworld and the systems of representation which this privilegedNineteenth-century imperial expansion the culmination of the out-ward and dominating thrust of Europeans into the world beyondEurope which began during the early Renaissance was underpinned

introduction 11

in complex ways by these assumptions In the first instance thisproduced practices of cultural subservience characterized by one post-colonial critic as lsquocultural cringersquo (Phillips 1958) Subsequently theemergence of identifiable indigenous theories in reaction to thisformed an important element in the development of specific nationaland regional consciousnesses (see ch 4)

Paradoxically however imperial expansion has had a radicallydestabilizing effect on its own preoccupations and power In pushingthe colonial world to the margins of experience the lsquocentrersquo pushedconsciousness beyond the point at which monocentrism in all spheresof thought could be accepted without question In other words thealienating process which initially served to relegate the post-colonialworld to the lsquomarginrsquo turned upon itself and acted to push that worldthrough a kind of mental barrier into a position from which allexperience could be viewed as uncentred pluralistic and multifari-ous Marginality thus became an unprecedented source of creativeenergy The impetus towards decentring and pluralism has alwaysbeen present in the history of European thought and has reached itslatest development in post-structuralism But the situation of margin-alized societies and cultures enabled them to come to this positionmuch earlier and more directly (Brydon 1984b) These notions areimplicit in post-colonial texts from the imperial period to the presentday

The task of this book is twofold first to identify the range andnature of these post-colonial texts and second to describe the varioustheories which have emerged so far to account for them So in the firstchapter we consider the development of descriptive models of post-colonial writing Since it is not possible to read post-colonial textswithout coming to terms with the ways in which they appropriate anddeploy the material of linguistic culture in the second chapter weoutline the process by which language is captured to form a distinctivediscursive practice In the third chapter we demonstrate throughsymptomatic readings of texts how post-colonial writing interactswith the social and material practices of colonialism One of the majorpurposes of this book is to explain the nature of existing post-colonialtheory and the way in which it interacts with and dismantles some ofthe assumptions of European theory In the fourth chapter we discuss

the empire writes back12

the issues in the development of indigenous post-colonial theories andin the fifth we examine the larger implications of post-coloniality fortheories of language for literary theory and for social and politicalanalysis in general

introduction 13

1CUTTING THE GROUND

Critical models of post-colonialliteratures

As writers and critics became aware of the special character ofpost-colonial texts they saw the need to develop an adequate model toaccount for them Four major models have emerged to date firstlsquonationalrsquo or regional models which emphasize the distinctive featuresof the particular national or regional culture second race-basedmodels which identify certain shared characteristics across variousnational literatures such as the common racial inheritance in litera-tures of the African diaspora addressed by the lsquoBlack writingrsquo modelthird comparative models of varying complexity which seek toaccount for particular linguistic historical and cultural features acrosstwo or more post-colonial literatures fourth more comprehensivecomparative models which argue for features such as hybridity andsyncreticity as constitutive elements of all post-colonial literatures(syncretism is the process by which previously distinct linguistic cat-egories and by extension cultural formations merge into a singlenew form) These models often operate as assumptions within criticalpractice rather than specific and discrete schools of thought in any

discussion of post-colonial writing a number of them may be operat-ing at the same time

NATIONAL AND REGIONAL MODELS

The first post-colonial society to develop a lsquonationalrsquo literature was theUSA The emergence of a distinctive American literature in the lateeighteenth century raised inevitable questions about the relationshipbetween literature and place between literature and nationality andparticularly about the suitability of inherited literary forms Ideas aboutnew kinds of literature were part of the optimistic progression tonationhood because it seemed that this was one of the most potentareas in which to express difference from Britain Writers like CharlesBrockden Brown who attempted to indigenize British forms like thegothic and the sentimental novel soon realized that with the change inlocation and culture it was not possible to import form and conceptwithout radical alteration (Fiedler 1960 Ringe 1966)

In many ways the American experience and its attempts to producea new kind of literature can be seen to be the model for all laterpost-colonial writing1 The first thing it showed was that some ofa post-colonial countryrsquos most deeply held linguistic and cultural traitsdepend upon its relationship with the colonizing power particularlythe defining contrast between European metropolis and lsquofrontierrsquo (seeFussell 1965) Once the American Revolution had forced the questionof separate nationality and the economic and political successes of theemerging nation had begun to be taken for granted American litera-ture as a distinct collection of texts also began to be accepted But it wasaccepted as an offshoot of the lsquoparent treersquo Such organic metaphorsand others like lsquoparentndashchildrsquo and lsquostreamndashtributaryrsquo acted to keep thenew literature in its place The plant and parent metaphors stressed ageexperience roots tradition and most importantly the connectionbetween antiquity and value They implied the same distinctions asthose existing between metropolis and frontier parents are moreexperienced more important more substantial less brash than theiroffspring Above all they are the origin and therefore claim the finalauthority in questions of taste and value

But as the extensive literature of the USA developed different

cutting the ground 15

characteristics from that of Britain and established its right to be con-sidered independently the concept of national literary differenceslsquowithinrsquo English writing became established The eventual consequenceof this has been that lsquonewerrsquo literatures from countries such as NigeriaAustralia and India could also be discussed as discrete national forma-tions rather than as lsquobranches of the treersquo Their literatures could beconsidered in relation to the social and political history of each coun-try and could be read as a source of important images of nationalidentity

The development of national literatures and criticism is fundamentalto the whole enterprise of post-colonial studies Without such devel-opments at the national level and without the comparative studiesbetween national traditions to which these lead no discourse of thepost-colonial could have emerged Nor is it simply a matter of devel-opment from one stage to another since all post-colonial studies con-tinue to depend upon national literatures and criticism The study ofnational traditions is the first and most vital stage of the processof rejecting the claims of the centre to exclusivity It is the beginning ofwhat Nigerian writer Wole Soyinka has characterized as the lsquoprocess ofself-apprehensionrsquo (Soyinka 1976 xi) Recent theories of a generalpost-colonial discourse question essentialist formulations which maylead to nationalist and racist orthodoxies but they do not deny thegreat importance of maintaining each literaturersquos sense of specific dif-ference It is this sense of difference which constitutes each nationalliteraturersquos mode of self-apprehension and its claim to be a self-constituting entity However nationalism in which some partial truthor clicheacute is elevated to orthodoxy is a danger implicit in such nationalconceptions of literary production The impetus towards national self-realization in critical assessments of literature all too often fails to stopshort of nationalist myth

Larger geographical models which cross the boundaries of languagenationality or race to generate the concept of a regional literature suchas West Indian or South Pacific literature may also share some of thelimitations of the national model While the idea of an lsquoAfricanrsquo litera-ture for instance has a powerful appeal to writers and critics in thevarious African countries it has only limited application as a descrip-tive label African and European critics have produced several regional

the empire writes back16

and national studies which reflect the widespread political economicand cultural differences between modern African countries (Gurr andCalder 1974 Lindfors 1975 Taiwo 1976 Ogungbesan 1979)

Clearly some regional groupings are more likely to gain acceptancein the regions themselves than are others and will derive from a col-lective identity evident in other ways This is true of the West IndiesAlthough the Federation of the West Indies failed the english-speakingcountries there still field a regional cricket team Both the West Indiesand the South Pacific have regional universities with a significant inputinto literary production and discussion lsquoWest Indianrsquo literature hasalmost always been considered regionally rather than nationally Therehave been no major studies of Jamaican or Trinidadian literatures asdiscrete traditions A different regional grouping emphasizing geo-graphical and historical determinants rather than linguistic ones hasalso developed to explore lsquoCaribbeanrsquo literature setting literature inenglish from the region alongside that written in spanish french andother European languages (Allis 1982)

Despite such variants on the national model most of the englishliteratures outside Britain have been considered as individual nationalenterprises forming and reflecting each countryrsquos culture The inevit-able consequence of this is a gradual blurring of the distinctionbetween the national and the nationalist Nationalism has usuallyincluded a healthy repudiation of British and US hegemony observablein publishing education and the public sponsorship of writing Yet alltoo often nationalist criticism by failing to alter the terms of the dis-course within which it operates has participated implicitly or evenexplicitly in a discourse ultimately controlled by the very imperialpower its nationalist assertion is designed to exclude Emphasis mayhave been transferred to the national literature but the theoreticalassumptions critical perspectives and value judgements made haveoften replicated those of the British establishment

COMPARISONS BETWEEN TWO OR MORE REGIONS

Theories and models of post-colonial literatures could not emergeuntil the separate colonies were viewed in a framework centred ontheir own literary and cultural traditions Victorian Britain had exulted

cutting the ground 17

histories or in suggesting comparative studies between stages in thosehistories Generally speaking though the term lsquocolonialrsquo has been usedfor the period before independence and a term indicating a nationalwriting such as lsquomodern Canadian writingrsquo or lsquorecent West Indianliteraturersquo has been employed to distinguish the period afterindependence

We use the term lsquopost-colonialrsquo however to cover all the cultureaffected by the imperial process from the moment of colonization tothe present day This is because there is a continuity of preoccupationsthroughout the historical process initiated by European imperialaggression We also suggest that it is most appropriate as the term forthe new cross-cultural criticism which has emerged in recent years andfor the discourse through which this is constituted In this sense thisbook is concerned with the world as it exists during and after theperiod of European imperial domination and the effects of this oncontemporary literatures

So the literatures of African countries Australia Bangladesh CanadaCaribbean countries India Malaysia Malta New Zealand PakistanSingapore South Pacific Island countries and Sri Lanka are all post-colonial literatures The literature of the USA should also be placed inthis category Perhaps because of its current position of power and theneo-colonizing role it has played its post-colonial nature has not beengenerally recognized But its relationship with the metropolitan centreas it evolved over the last two centuries has been paradigmatic for post-colonial literatures everywhere What each of these literatures has incommon beyond their special and distinctive regional characteristics isthat they emerged in their present form out of the experience of colon-ization and asserted themselves by foregrounding the tension with theimperial power and by emphasizing their differences from theassumptions of the imperial centre It is this which makes themdistinctively post-colonial

POST-COLONIAL LITERATURES AND ENGLISH STUDIES

The study of English has always been a densely political and culturalphenomenon a practice in which language and literature have bothbeen called into the service of a profound and embracing nationalism

the empire writes back2

The development of English as a privileged academic subject innineteenth-century Britain ndash finally confirmed by its inclusion in thesyllabuses of Oxford and Cambridge and re-affirmed in the 1921Newbolt Report ndash came about as part of an attempt to replace theClassics at the heart of the intellectual enterprise of nineteenth-centuryhumanistic studies From the beginning proponents of English as adiscipline linked its methodology to that of the Classics with itsemphasis on scholarship philology and historical study ndash the fixing oftexts in historical time and the perpetual search for the determinants ofa single unified and agreed meaning

The historical moment which saw the emergence of lsquoEnglishrsquo as anacademic discipline also produced the nineteenth-century colonialform of imperialism (Batsleer et al 1985 14 19ndash25) Gauri Viswa-nathan has presented strong arguments for relating the lsquoinstitutional-isation and subsequent valorisation of English literary study [to] ashape and an ideological content developed in the colonial contextrsquoand specifically as it developed in India where

British colonial administrators provoked by missionaries on the onehand and fears of native insubordination on the other discovered anally in English literature to support them in maintaining control of thenatives under the guise of a liberal education

(Viswanathan 1987 17)

It can be argued that the study of English and the growth of Empireproceeded from a single ideological climate and that the developmentof the one is intrinsically bound up with the development of the otherboth at the level of simple utility (as propaganda for instance) and atthe unconscious level where it leads to the naturalizing of constructedvalues (eg civilization humanity etc) which conversely establishedlsquosavageryrsquo lsquonativersquo lsquoprimitiversquo as their antitheses and as the object of areforming zeal1

A lsquoprivileging normrsquo was enthroned at the heart of the formation ofEnglish Studies as a template for the denial of the value of the lsquoper-ipheralrsquo the lsquomarginalrsquo the lsquouncanonizedrsquo Literature was made as cen-tral to the cultural enterprise of Empire as the monarchy was to itspolitical formation So when elements of the periphery and margin

introduction 3

threatened the exclusive claims of the centre they were rapidlyincorporated This was a process in Edward Saidrsquos terms of consciousaffiliation proceeding under the guise of filiation (Said 1984) that is amimicry of the centre proceeding from a desire not only to be acceptedbut to be adopted and absorbed It caused those from the periphery toimmerse themselves in the imported culture denying their origins inan attempt to become lsquomore English than the Englishrsquo We seeexamples of this in such writers as Henry James and TS Eliot

As post-colonial societies sought to establish their difference fromBritain the response of those who recognized this complicity betweenlanguage education and cultural incorporation was to break the linkbetween language and literary study by dividing lsquoEnglishrsquo departmentsin universities into separate schools of Linguistics and of Literatureboth of which tended to view their project within a national or inter-national context Ngugirsquos essay lsquoOn the abolition of the Englishdepartmentrsquo (Ngugi 1972) is an illuminating account of the particulararguments involved in Africa John Dockerrsquos essay lsquoThe neocolonialassumption in the university teaching of Englishrsquo (Tiffin 1978 26ndash31) addresses similar problems in the settler colony contextdescribing a situation in which in contrast to Kenya little genuinedecolonization is yet in sight As Dockerrsquos critique makes clear in mostpost-colonial nations (including the West Indies and India) the nexusof power involving literature language and a dominant British culturehas strongly resisted attempts to dismantle it Even after such attemptsbegan to succeed the canonical nature and unquestioned status of theworks of the English literary tradition and the values they incorporatedremained potent in the cultural formation and the ideological institu-tions of education and literature Nevertheless the development of thepost-colonial literatures has necessitated a questioning of many of theassumptions on which the study of lsquoEnglishrsquo was based

DEVELOPMENT OF POST-COLONIAL LITERATURES

Post-colonial literatures developed through several stages which can beseen to correspond to stages both of national or regional consciousnessand of the project of asserting difference from the imperial centreDuring the imperial period writing in the language of the imperial

the empire writes back4

centre is inevitably of course produced by a literate elite whose pri-mary identification is with the colonizing power Thus the first textsproduced in the colonies in the new language are frequently producedby lsquorepresentativesrsquo of the imperial power for example gentrified set-tlers (Wentworthrsquos lsquoAustraliarsquo) travellers and sightseers (FroudersquosOceana and his The English in the West Indies or the travel diaries of MaryKingsley) or the Anglo-Indian and West African administrators sol-diers and lsquoboxwallahsrsquo and even more frequently their memsahibs(volumes of memoirs)

Such texts can never form the basis for an indigenous culture nor canthey be integrated in any way with the culture which already exists inthe countries invaded Despite their detailed reportage of landscapecustom and language they inevitably privilege the centre emphasiz-ing the lsquohomersquo over the lsquonativersquo the lsquometropolitanrsquo over the lsquoprovincialrsquoor lsquocolonialrsquo and so forth At a deeper level their claim to objectivitysimply serves to hide the imperial discourse within which they arecreated That this is true of even the consciously literary works whichemerge from this moment can be illustrated by the poems and storiesof Rudyard Kipling For example in the well-known poem lsquoChristmasin Indiarsquo the evocative description of a Christmas day in the heat ofIndia is contextualized by invoking its absent English counterpartApparently it is only through this absent and enabling signifier that theIndian daily reality can acquire legitimacy as a subject of literarydiscourse

The second stage of production within the evolving discourse of thepost-colonial is the literature produced lsquounder imperial licencersquo bylsquonativesrsquo or lsquooutcastsrsquo for instance the large body of poetry and proseproduced in the nineteenth century by the English educated Indianupper class or African lsquomissionary literaturersquo (eg Thomas MofolorsquosChaka) The producers signify by the very fact of writing in thelanguage of the dominant culture that they have temporarily or per-manently entered a specific and privileged class endowed with thelanguage education and leisure necessary to produce such works TheAustralian novel Ralph Rashleigh now known to have been written by theconvict James Tucker is a case in point Tucker an educated man wroteRashleigh as a lsquospecialrsquo (a privileged convict) whilst working at the penalsettlement at Port Macquarie as storekeeper to the superintendent

introduction 5

Written on government paper with government ink and pens thenovel was clearly produced with the aid and support of the super-intendent Tucker had momentarily gained access to the privilege ofliterature Significantly the moment of privilege did not last and hedied in poverty at the age of fifty-eight at Liverpool asylum in Sydney

It is characteristic of these early post-colonial texts that the potentialfor subversion in their themes cannot be fully realized Although theydeal with such powerful material as the brutality of the convict system(Tuckerrsquos Rashleigh) the historical potency of the supplanted anddenigrated native cultures (Mofolorsquos Chaka) or the existence of a richcultural heritage older and more extensive than that of Europe (any ofmany nineteenth-century Indo-Anglian poets such as Ram Sharma)they are prevented from fully exploring their anti-imperial potentialBoth the available discourse and the material conditions of productionfor literature in these early post-colonial societies restrain this possibil-ity The institution of lsquoLiteraturersquo in the colony is under the directcontrol of the imperial ruling class who alone license the acceptableform and permit the publication and distribution of the resulting workSo texts of this kind come into being within the constraints of adiscourse and the institutional practice of a patronage system whichlimits and undercuts their assertion of a different perspective Thedevelopment of independent literatures depended upon the abrogationof this constraining power and the appropriation of language and writ-ing for new and distinctive usages Such an appropriation is clearly themost significant feature in the emergence of modern post-colonialliteratures (see chs 2 and 3)

HEGEMONY

Why should post-colonial societies continue to engage with theimperial experience Since all the post-colonial societies we discusshave achieved political independence why is the issue of colonialitystill relevant at all This question of why the empire needs to write backto a centre once the imperial structure has been dismantled in politicalterms is an important one Britain like the other dominant colonialpowers of the nineteenth century has been relegated to a relativelyminor place in international affairs In the spheres of politics and

the empire writes back6

economics and increasingly in the vital new area of the mass mediaBritain and the other European imperial powers have been super-seded by the emergent power of the USA Nevertheless through theliterary canon the body of British texts which all too frequently stillacts as a touchstone of taste and value and through RS-English(Received Standard English) which asserts the English of south-eastEngland as a universal norm the weight of antiquity continues todominate cultural production in much of the post-colonial worldThis cultural hegemony has been maintained through canonicalassumptions about literary activity and through attitudes to post-colonial literatures which identify them as isolated national off-shootsof English literature and which therefore relegate them to marginaland subordinate positions More recently as the range and strength ofthese literatures has become undeniable a process of incorporation hasbegun in which employing Eurocentric standards of judgement thecentre has sought to claim those works and writers of which itapproves as British2 In all these respects the parallel between the situ-ation of post-colonial writing and that of feminist writing is striking(see ch 5)

LANGUAGE

One of the main features of imperial oppression is control over lan-guage The imperial education system installs a lsquostandardrsquo version ofthe metropolitan language as the norm and marginalizes all lsquovariantsrsquoas impurities As a character in Mrs Campbell Praedrsquos nineteenth-century Australian novel Policy and Passion puts it lsquoTo be colonial is to talkAustralian slang to be everything that is abominablersquo (CampbellPraed 1881154) Language becomes the medium through which ahierarchical structure of power is perpetuated and the mediumthrough which conceptions of lsquotruthrsquo lsquoorderrsquo and lsquorealityrsquo becomeestablished Such power is rejected in the emergence of an effectivepost-colonial voice For this reason the discussion of post-colonialwriting which follows is largely a discussion of the process by whichthe language with its power and the writing with its signification ofauthority has been wrested from the dominant European culture

In order to focus on the complex ways in which the English

introduction 7

language has been used in these societies and to indicate their ownsense of difference we distinguish in this account between the lsquostand-ardrsquo British English inherited from the empire and the english whichthe language has become in post-colonial countries Though Britishimperialism resulted in the spread of a language English across theglobe the english of Jamaicans is not the english of Canadians Maorisor Kenyans We need to distinguish between what is proposed as astandard code English (the language of the erstwhile imperial centre)and the linguistic code english which has been transformed and sub-verted into several distinctive varieties throughout the world For thisreason the distinction between English and english will be usedthroughout our text as an indication of the various ways in which thelanguage has been employed by different linguistic communities in thepost-colonial world3

The use of these terms asserts the fact that a continuum existsbetween the various linguistic practices which constitute english usagein the modern world Although linguistically the links between Englishand the various post-colonial englishes in use today can be seen asunbroken the political reality is that English sets itself apart from allother lsquolesserrsquo variants and so demands to be interrogated about itsclaim to this special status

In practice the history of this distinction between English and eng-lish has been between the claims of a powerful lsquocentrersquo and a multitudeof intersecting usages designated as lsquoperipheriesrsquo The language ofthese lsquoperipheriesrsquo was shaped by an oppressive discourse of power Yetthey have been the site of some of the most exciting and innovativeliteratures of the modern period and this has at least in part been theresult of the energies uncovered by the political tension between theidea of a normative code and a variety of regional usages

PLACE AND DISPLACEMENT

A major feature of post-colonial literatures is the concern with placeand displacement It is here that the special post-colonial crisis of iden-tity comes into being the concern with the development or recoveryof an effective identifying relationship between self and place Indeedcritics such as D E S Maxwell have made this the defining model of

the empire writes back8

post-coloniality (see ch 1) A valid and active sense of self may havebeen eroded by dislocation resulting from migration the experience ofenslavement transportation or lsquovoluntaryrsquo removal for indenturedlabour Or it may have been destroyed by cultural denigration the con-scious and unconscious oppression of the indigenous personality andculture by a supposedly superior racial or cultural model The dialecticof place and displacement is always a feature of post-colonial societieswhether these have been created by a process of settlement interven-tion or a mixture of the two Beyond their historical and culturaldifferences place displacement and a pervasive concern with themyths of identity and authenticity are a feature common to allpost-colonial literatures in english

The alienation of vision and the crisis in self-image which this dis-placement produces is as frequently found in the accounts of Canadianlsquofree settlersrsquo as of Australian convicts FijianndashIndian or TrinidadianndashIndian indentured labourers West Indian slaves or forcibly colonizedNigerians or Bengalis Although this is pragmatically demonstrablefrom a wide range of texts it is difficult to account for by theorieswhich see this social and linguistic alienation as resulting only fromovertly oppressive forms of colonization such as slavery or conquestAn adequate account of this practice must go beyond the usual categor-ies of social alienation such as masterslave freebonded rulerruledhowever important and widespread these may be in post-colonial cul-tures After all why should the free settler formally unconstrained andtheoretically free to continue in the possession and practice oflsquoEnglishnessrsquo also show clear signs of alienation even within thefirst generation of settlement and manifest a tendency to seek analternative differentiated identity

The most widely shared discursive practice within which this alien-ation can be identified is the construction of lsquoplacersquo The gap whichopens between the experience of place and the language available todescribe it forms a classic and allpervasive feature of post-colonial textsThis gap occurs for those whose language seems inadequate to describea new place for those whose language is systematically destroyed byenslavement and for those whose language has been renderedunprivileged by the imposition of the language of a colonizing powerSome admixture of one or other of these models can describe the

introduction 9

situation of all post-colonial societies In each case a condition of alien-ation is inevitable until the colonizing language has been replaced orappropriated as english

That imperialism results in a profound linguistic alienation isobviously the case in cultures in which a pre-colonial culture is sup-pressed by military conquest or enslavement So for example anIndian writer like Raja Rao or a Nigerian writer such as ChinuaAchebe have needed to transform the language to use it in a differentway in its new context and so as Achebe says quoting James Bald-win make it lsquobear the burdenrsquo of their experience (Achebe 197562) Although Rao and Achebe write from their own place and sohave not suffered a literal geographical displacement they have toovercome an imposed gap resulting from the linguistic displacementof the pre-colonial language by English This process occurs within amore comprehensive discourse of place and displacement in thewider post-colonial context Such alienation is shared by those whosepossession of English is indisputably lsquonativersquo (in the sense of beingpossessed from birth) yet who begin to feel alienated within its prac-tice once its vocabulary categories and codes are felt to beinadequate or inappropriate to describe the fauna the physical andgeographical conditions or the cultural practices they have developedin a new land The Canadian poet Joseph Howe for instance pluckshis picture of a moose from some repository of English nurseryrhyme romanticism

the gay moose in jocund gambol springsCropping the foliage Nature round him flings

(Howe 1874 100)

Such absurdities demonstrate the pressing need these native speakersshare with those colonized peoples who were directly oppressed toescape from the inadequacies and imperial constraints of English as asocial practice They need that is to escape from the implicit body ofassumptions to which English was attached its aesthetic and socialvalues the formal and historically limited constraints of genre and theoppressive political and cultural assertion of metropolitan dominanceof centre over margin (Ngugi 1986) This is not to say that the English

the empire writes back10

language is inherently incapable of accounting for post-colonialexperience but that it needs to develop an lsquoappropriatersquo usage in orderto do so (by becoming a distinct and unique form of english) Theenergizing feature of this displacement is its capacity to interrogate andsubvert the imperial cultural formations

The pressure to develop such a usage manifests itself early in thedevelopment of lsquoenglishrsquo literatures It is therefore arguable that evenbefore the development of a conscious de-colonizing stance theexperience of a new place identifiably different in its physical charac-teristics constrains for instance the new settlers to demand a languagewhich will allow them to express their sense of lsquoOthernessrsquo Landscapeflora and fauna seasons climatic conditions are formally distinguishedfrom the place of origin as homecolony EuropeNew WorldEuropeAntipodes metropolitanprovincial and so on although ofcourse at this stage no effective models exist for expressing this senseof Otherness in a positive and creative way

POST-COLONIALITY AND THEORY

The idea of lsquopost-colonial literary theoryrsquo emerges from the inability ofEuropean theory to deal adequately with the complexities and variedcultural provenance of post-colonial writing European theories them-selves emerge from particular cultural traditions which are hidden byfalse notions of lsquothe universalrsquo Theories of style and genre assump-tions about the universal features of language epistemologies andvalue systems are all radically questioned by the practices of post-colonial writing Post-colonial theory has proceeded from the need toaddress this different practice Indigenous theories have developed toaccommodate the differences within the various cultural traditions aswell as the desire to describe in a comparative way the features sharedacross those traditions

The political and cultural monocentrism of the colonial enterprisewas a natural result of the philosophical traditions of the Europeanworld and the systems of representation which this privilegedNineteenth-century imperial expansion the culmination of the out-ward and dominating thrust of Europeans into the world beyondEurope which began during the early Renaissance was underpinned

introduction 11

in complex ways by these assumptions In the first instance thisproduced practices of cultural subservience characterized by one post-colonial critic as lsquocultural cringersquo (Phillips 1958) Subsequently theemergence of identifiable indigenous theories in reaction to thisformed an important element in the development of specific nationaland regional consciousnesses (see ch 4)

Paradoxically however imperial expansion has had a radicallydestabilizing effect on its own preoccupations and power In pushingthe colonial world to the margins of experience the lsquocentrersquo pushedconsciousness beyond the point at which monocentrism in all spheresof thought could be accepted without question In other words thealienating process which initially served to relegate the post-colonialworld to the lsquomarginrsquo turned upon itself and acted to push that worldthrough a kind of mental barrier into a position from which allexperience could be viewed as uncentred pluralistic and multifari-ous Marginality thus became an unprecedented source of creativeenergy The impetus towards decentring and pluralism has alwaysbeen present in the history of European thought and has reached itslatest development in post-structuralism But the situation of margin-alized societies and cultures enabled them to come to this positionmuch earlier and more directly (Brydon 1984b) These notions areimplicit in post-colonial texts from the imperial period to the presentday

The task of this book is twofold first to identify the range andnature of these post-colonial texts and second to describe the varioustheories which have emerged so far to account for them So in the firstchapter we consider the development of descriptive models of post-colonial writing Since it is not possible to read post-colonial textswithout coming to terms with the ways in which they appropriate anddeploy the material of linguistic culture in the second chapter weoutline the process by which language is captured to form a distinctivediscursive practice In the third chapter we demonstrate throughsymptomatic readings of texts how post-colonial writing interactswith the social and material practices of colonialism One of the majorpurposes of this book is to explain the nature of existing post-colonialtheory and the way in which it interacts with and dismantles some ofthe assumptions of European theory In the fourth chapter we discuss

the empire writes back12

the issues in the development of indigenous post-colonial theories andin the fifth we examine the larger implications of post-coloniality fortheories of language for literary theory and for social and politicalanalysis in general

introduction 13

1CUTTING THE GROUND

Critical models of post-colonialliteratures

As writers and critics became aware of the special character ofpost-colonial texts they saw the need to develop an adequate model toaccount for them Four major models have emerged to date firstlsquonationalrsquo or regional models which emphasize the distinctive featuresof the particular national or regional culture second race-basedmodels which identify certain shared characteristics across variousnational literatures such as the common racial inheritance in litera-tures of the African diaspora addressed by the lsquoBlack writingrsquo modelthird comparative models of varying complexity which seek toaccount for particular linguistic historical and cultural features acrosstwo or more post-colonial literatures fourth more comprehensivecomparative models which argue for features such as hybridity andsyncreticity as constitutive elements of all post-colonial literatures(syncretism is the process by which previously distinct linguistic cat-egories and by extension cultural formations merge into a singlenew form) These models often operate as assumptions within criticalpractice rather than specific and discrete schools of thought in any

discussion of post-colonial writing a number of them may be operat-ing at the same time

NATIONAL AND REGIONAL MODELS

The first post-colonial society to develop a lsquonationalrsquo literature was theUSA The emergence of a distinctive American literature in the lateeighteenth century raised inevitable questions about the relationshipbetween literature and place between literature and nationality andparticularly about the suitability of inherited literary forms Ideas aboutnew kinds of literature were part of the optimistic progression tonationhood because it seemed that this was one of the most potentareas in which to express difference from Britain Writers like CharlesBrockden Brown who attempted to indigenize British forms like thegothic and the sentimental novel soon realized that with the change inlocation and culture it was not possible to import form and conceptwithout radical alteration (Fiedler 1960 Ringe 1966)

In many ways the American experience and its attempts to producea new kind of literature can be seen to be the model for all laterpost-colonial writing1 The first thing it showed was that some ofa post-colonial countryrsquos most deeply held linguistic and cultural traitsdepend upon its relationship with the colonizing power particularlythe defining contrast between European metropolis and lsquofrontierrsquo (seeFussell 1965) Once the American Revolution had forced the questionof separate nationality and the economic and political successes of theemerging nation had begun to be taken for granted American litera-ture as a distinct collection of texts also began to be accepted But it wasaccepted as an offshoot of the lsquoparent treersquo Such organic metaphorsand others like lsquoparentndashchildrsquo and lsquostreamndashtributaryrsquo acted to keep thenew literature in its place The plant and parent metaphors stressed ageexperience roots tradition and most importantly the connectionbetween antiquity and value They implied the same distinctions asthose existing between metropolis and frontier parents are moreexperienced more important more substantial less brash than theiroffspring Above all they are the origin and therefore claim the finalauthority in questions of taste and value

But as the extensive literature of the USA developed different

cutting the ground 15

characteristics from that of Britain and established its right to be con-sidered independently the concept of national literary differenceslsquowithinrsquo English writing became established The eventual consequenceof this has been that lsquonewerrsquo literatures from countries such as NigeriaAustralia and India could also be discussed as discrete national forma-tions rather than as lsquobranches of the treersquo Their literatures could beconsidered in relation to the social and political history of each coun-try and could be read as a source of important images of nationalidentity

The development of national literatures and criticism is fundamentalto the whole enterprise of post-colonial studies Without such devel-opments at the national level and without the comparative studiesbetween national traditions to which these lead no discourse of thepost-colonial could have emerged Nor is it simply a matter of devel-opment from one stage to another since all post-colonial studies con-tinue to depend upon national literatures and criticism The study ofnational traditions is the first and most vital stage of the processof rejecting the claims of the centre to exclusivity It is the beginning ofwhat Nigerian writer Wole Soyinka has characterized as the lsquoprocess ofself-apprehensionrsquo (Soyinka 1976 xi) Recent theories of a generalpost-colonial discourse question essentialist formulations which maylead to nationalist and racist orthodoxies but they do not deny thegreat importance of maintaining each literaturersquos sense of specific dif-ference It is this sense of difference which constitutes each nationalliteraturersquos mode of self-apprehension and its claim to be a self-constituting entity However nationalism in which some partial truthor clicheacute is elevated to orthodoxy is a danger implicit in such nationalconceptions of literary production The impetus towards national self-realization in critical assessments of literature all too often fails to stopshort of nationalist myth

Larger geographical models which cross the boundaries of languagenationality or race to generate the concept of a regional literature suchas West Indian or South Pacific literature may also share some of thelimitations of the national model While the idea of an lsquoAfricanrsquo litera-ture for instance has a powerful appeal to writers and critics in thevarious African countries it has only limited application as a descrip-tive label African and European critics have produced several regional

the empire writes back16

and national studies which reflect the widespread political economicand cultural differences between modern African countries (Gurr andCalder 1974 Lindfors 1975 Taiwo 1976 Ogungbesan 1979)

Clearly some regional groupings are more likely to gain acceptancein the regions themselves than are others and will derive from a col-lective identity evident in other ways This is true of the West IndiesAlthough the Federation of the West Indies failed the english-speakingcountries there still field a regional cricket team Both the West Indiesand the South Pacific have regional universities with a significant inputinto literary production and discussion lsquoWest Indianrsquo literature hasalmost always been considered regionally rather than nationally Therehave been no major studies of Jamaican or Trinidadian literatures asdiscrete traditions A different regional grouping emphasizing geo-graphical and historical determinants rather than linguistic ones hasalso developed to explore lsquoCaribbeanrsquo literature setting literature inenglish from the region alongside that written in spanish french andother European languages (Allis 1982)

Despite such variants on the national model most of the englishliteratures outside Britain have been considered as individual nationalenterprises forming and reflecting each countryrsquos culture The inevit-able consequence of this is a gradual blurring of the distinctionbetween the national and the nationalist Nationalism has usuallyincluded a healthy repudiation of British and US hegemony observablein publishing education and the public sponsorship of writing Yet alltoo often nationalist criticism by failing to alter the terms of the dis-course within which it operates has participated implicitly or evenexplicitly in a discourse ultimately controlled by the very imperialpower its nationalist assertion is designed to exclude Emphasis mayhave been transferred to the national literature but the theoreticalassumptions critical perspectives and value judgements made haveoften replicated those of the British establishment

COMPARISONS BETWEEN TWO OR MORE REGIONS

Theories and models of post-colonial literatures could not emergeuntil the separate colonies were viewed in a framework centred ontheir own literary and cultural traditions Victorian Britain had exulted

cutting the ground 17

The development of English as a privileged academic subject innineteenth-century Britain ndash finally confirmed by its inclusion in thesyllabuses of Oxford and Cambridge and re-affirmed in the 1921Newbolt Report ndash came about as part of an attempt to replace theClassics at the heart of the intellectual enterprise of nineteenth-centuryhumanistic studies From the beginning proponents of English as adiscipline linked its methodology to that of the Classics with itsemphasis on scholarship philology and historical study ndash the fixing oftexts in historical time and the perpetual search for the determinants ofa single unified and agreed meaning

The historical moment which saw the emergence of lsquoEnglishrsquo as anacademic discipline also produced the nineteenth-century colonialform of imperialism (Batsleer et al 1985 14 19ndash25) Gauri Viswa-nathan has presented strong arguments for relating the lsquoinstitutional-isation and subsequent valorisation of English literary study [to] ashape and an ideological content developed in the colonial contextrsquoand specifically as it developed in India where

British colonial administrators provoked by missionaries on the onehand and fears of native insubordination on the other discovered anally in English literature to support them in maintaining control of thenatives under the guise of a liberal education

(Viswanathan 1987 17)

It can be argued that the study of English and the growth of Empireproceeded from a single ideological climate and that the developmentof the one is intrinsically bound up with the development of the otherboth at the level of simple utility (as propaganda for instance) and atthe unconscious level where it leads to the naturalizing of constructedvalues (eg civilization humanity etc) which conversely establishedlsquosavageryrsquo lsquonativersquo lsquoprimitiversquo as their antitheses and as the object of areforming zeal1

A lsquoprivileging normrsquo was enthroned at the heart of the formation ofEnglish Studies as a template for the denial of the value of the lsquoper-ipheralrsquo the lsquomarginalrsquo the lsquouncanonizedrsquo Literature was made as cen-tral to the cultural enterprise of Empire as the monarchy was to itspolitical formation So when elements of the periphery and margin

introduction 3

threatened the exclusive claims of the centre they were rapidlyincorporated This was a process in Edward Saidrsquos terms of consciousaffiliation proceeding under the guise of filiation (Said 1984) that is amimicry of the centre proceeding from a desire not only to be acceptedbut to be adopted and absorbed It caused those from the periphery toimmerse themselves in the imported culture denying their origins inan attempt to become lsquomore English than the Englishrsquo We seeexamples of this in such writers as Henry James and TS Eliot

As post-colonial societies sought to establish their difference fromBritain the response of those who recognized this complicity betweenlanguage education and cultural incorporation was to break the linkbetween language and literary study by dividing lsquoEnglishrsquo departmentsin universities into separate schools of Linguistics and of Literatureboth of which tended to view their project within a national or inter-national context Ngugirsquos essay lsquoOn the abolition of the Englishdepartmentrsquo (Ngugi 1972) is an illuminating account of the particulararguments involved in Africa John Dockerrsquos essay lsquoThe neocolonialassumption in the university teaching of Englishrsquo (Tiffin 1978 26ndash31) addresses similar problems in the settler colony contextdescribing a situation in which in contrast to Kenya little genuinedecolonization is yet in sight As Dockerrsquos critique makes clear in mostpost-colonial nations (including the West Indies and India) the nexusof power involving literature language and a dominant British culturehas strongly resisted attempts to dismantle it Even after such attemptsbegan to succeed the canonical nature and unquestioned status of theworks of the English literary tradition and the values they incorporatedremained potent in the cultural formation and the ideological institu-tions of education and literature Nevertheless the development of thepost-colonial literatures has necessitated a questioning of many of theassumptions on which the study of lsquoEnglishrsquo was based

DEVELOPMENT OF POST-COLONIAL LITERATURES

Post-colonial literatures developed through several stages which can beseen to correspond to stages both of national or regional consciousnessand of the project of asserting difference from the imperial centreDuring the imperial period writing in the language of the imperial

the empire writes back4

centre is inevitably of course produced by a literate elite whose pri-mary identification is with the colonizing power Thus the first textsproduced in the colonies in the new language are frequently producedby lsquorepresentativesrsquo of the imperial power for example gentrified set-tlers (Wentworthrsquos lsquoAustraliarsquo) travellers and sightseers (FroudersquosOceana and his The English in the West Indies or the travel diaries of MaryKingsley) or the Anglo-Indian and West African administrators sol-diers and lsquoboxwallahsrsquo and even more frequently their memsahibs(volumes of memoirs)

Such texts can never form the basis for an indigenous culture nor canthey be integrated in any way with the culture which already exists inthe countries invaded Despite their detailed reportage of landscapecustom and language they inevitably privilege the centre emphasiz-ing the lsquohomersquo over the lsquonativersquo the lsquometropolitanrsquo over the lsquoprovincialrsquoor lsquocolonialrsquo and so forth At a deeper level their claim to objectivitysimply serves to hide the imperial discourse within which they arecreated That this is true of even the consciously literary works whichemerge from this moment can be illustrated by the poems and storiesof Rudyard Kipling For example in the well-known poem lsquoChristmasin Indiarsquo the evocative description of a Christmas day in the heat ofIndia is contextualized by invoking its absent English counterpartApparently it is only through this absent and enabling signifier that theIndian daily reality can acquire legitimacy as a subject of literarydiscourse

The second stage of production within the evolving discourse of thepost-colonial is the literature produced lsquounder imperial licencersquo bylsquonativesrsquo or lsquooutcastsrsquo for instance the large body of poetry and proseproduced in the nineteenth century by the English educated Indianupper class or African lsquomissionary literaturersquo (eg Thomas MofolorsquosChaka) The producers signify by the very fact of writing in thelanguage of the dominant culture that they have temporarily or per-manently entered a specific and privileged class endowed with thelanguage education and leisure necessary to produce such works TheAustralian novel Ralph Rashleigh now known to have been written by theconvict James Tucker is a case in point Tucker an educated man wroteRashleigh as a lsquospecialrsquo (a privileged convict) whilst working at the penalsettlement at Port Macquarie as storekeeper to the superintendent

introduction 5

Written on government paper with government ink and pens thenovel was clearly produced with the aid and support of the super-intendent Tucker had momentarily gained access to the privilege ofliterature Significantly the moment of privilege did not last and hedied in poverty at the age of fifty-eight at Liverpool asylum in Sydney

It is characteristic of these early post-colonial texts that the potentialfor subversion in their themes cannot be fully realized Although theydeal with such powerful material as the brutality of the convict system(Tuckerrsquos Rashleigh) the historical potency of the supplanted anddenigrated native cultures (Mofolorsquos Chaka) or the existence of a richcultural heritage older and more extensive than that of Europe (any ofmany nineteenth-century Indo-Anglian poets such as Ram Sharma)they are prevented from fully exploring their anti-imperial potentialBoth the available discourse and the material conditions of productionfor literature in these early post-colonial societies restrain this possibil-ity The institution of lsquoLiteraturersquo in the colony is under the directcontrol of the imperial ruling class who alone license the acceptableform and permit the publication and distribution of the resulting workSo texts of this kind come into being within the constraints of adiscourse and the institutional practice of a patronage system whichlimits and undercuts their assertion of a different perspective Thedevelopment of independent literatures depended upon the abrogationof this constraining power and the appropriation of language and writ-ing for new and distinctive usages Such an appropriation is clearly themost significant feature in the emergence of modern post-colonialliteratures (see chs 2 and 3)

HEGEMONY

Why should post-colonial societies continue to engage with theimperial experience Since all the post-colonial societies we discusshave achieved political independence why is the issue of colonialitystill relevant at all This question of why the empire needs to write backto a centre once the imperial structure has been dismantled in politicalterms is an important one Britain like the other dominant colonialpowers of the nineteenth century has been relegated to a relativelyminor place in international affairs In the spheres of politics and

the empire writes back6

economics and increasingly in the vital new area of the mass mediaBritain and the other European imperial powers have been super-seded by the emergent power of the USA Nevertheless through theliterary canon the body of British texts which all too frequently stillacts as a touchstone of taste and value and through RS-English(Received Standard English) which asserts the English of south-eastEngland as a universal norm the weight of antiquity continues todominate cultural production in much of the post-colonial worldThis cultural hegemony has been maintained through canonicalassumptions about literary activity and through attitudes to post-colonial literatures which identify them as isolated national off-shootsof English literature and which therefore relegate them to marginaland subordinate positions More recently as the range and strength ofthese literatures has become undeniable a process of incorporation hasbegun in which employing Eurocentric standards of judgement thecentre has sought to claim those works and writers of which itapproves as British2 In all these respects the parallel between the situ-ation of post-colonial writing and that of feminist writing is striking(see ch 5)

LANGUAGE

One of the main features of imperial oppression is control over lan-guage The imperial education system installs a lsquostandardrsquo version ofthe metropolitan language as the norm and marginalizes all lsquovariantsrsquoas impurities As a character in Mrs Campbell Praedrsquos nineteenth-century Australian novel Policy and Passion puts it lsquoTo be colonial is to talkAustralian slang to be everything that is abominablersquo (CampbellPraed 1881154) Language becomes the medium through which ahierarchical structure of power is perpetuated and the mediumthrough which conceptions of lsquotruthrsquo lsquoorderrsquo and lsquorealityrsquo becomeestablished Such power is rejected in the emergence of an effectivepost-colonial voice For this reason the discussion of post-colonialwriting which follows is largely a discussion of the process by whichthe language with its power and the writing with its signification ofauthority has been wrested from the dominant European culture

In order to focus on the complex ways in which the English

introduction 7

language has been used in these societies and to indicate their ownsense of difference we distinguish in this account between the lsquostand-ardrsquo British English inherited from the empire and the english whichthe language has become in post-colonial countries Though Britishimperialism resulted in the spread of a language English across theglobe the english of Jamaicans is not the english of Canadians Maorisor Kenyans We need to distinguish between what is proposed as astandard code English (the language of the erstwhile imperial centre)and the linguistic code english which has been transformed and sub-verted into several distinctive varieties throughout the world For thisreason the distinction between English and english will be usedthroughout our text as an indication of the various ways in which thelanguage has been employed by different linguistic communities in thepost-colonial world3

The use of these terms asserts the fact that a continuum existsbetween the various linguistic practices which constitute english usagein the modern world Although linguistically the links between Englishand the various post-colonial englishes in use today can be seen asunbroken the political reality is that English sets itself apart from allother lsquolesserrsquo variants and so demands to be interrogated about itsclaim to this special status

In practice the history of this distinction between English and eng-lish has been between the claims of a powerful lsquocentrersquo and a multitudeof intersecting usages designated as lsquoperipheriesrsquo The language ofthese lsquoperipheriesrsquo was shaped by an oppressive discourse of power Yetthey have been the site of some of the most exciting and innovativeliteratures of the modern period and this has at least in part been theresult of the energies uncovered by the political tension between theidea of a normative code and a variety of regional usages

PLACE AND DISPLACEMENT

A major feature of post-colonial literatures is the concern with placeand displacement It is here that the special post-colonial crisis of iden-tity comes into being the concern with the development or recoveryof an effective identifying relationship between self and place Indeedcritics such as D E S Maxwell have made this the defining model of

the empire writes back8

post-coloniality (see ch 1) A valid and active sense of self may havebeen eroded by dislocation resulting from migration the experience ofenslavement transportation or lsquovoluntaryrsquo removal for indenturedlabour Or it may have been destroyed by cultural denigration the con-scious and unconscious oppression of the indigenous personality andculture by a supposedly superior racial or cultural model The dialecticof place and displacement is always a feature of post-colonial societieswhether these have been created by a process of settlement interven-tion or a mixture of the two Beyond their historical and culturaldifferences place displacement and a pervasive concern with themyths of identity and authenticity are a feature common to allpost-colonial literatures in english

The alienation of vision and the crisis in self-image which this dis-placement produces is as frequently found in the accounts of Canadianlsquofree settlersrsquo as of Australian convicts FijianndashIndian or TrinidadianndashIndian indentured labourers West Indian slaves or forcibly colonizedNigerians or Bengalis Although this is pragmatically demonstrablefrom a wide range of texts it is difficult to account for by theorieswhich see this social and linguistic alienation as resulting only fromovertly oppressive forms of colonization such as slavery or conquestAn adequate account of this practice must go beyond the usual categor-ies of social alienation such as masterslave freebonded rulerruledhowever important and widespread these may be in post-colonial cul-tures After all why should the free settler formally unconstrained andtheoretically free to continue in the possession and practice oflsquoEnglishnessrsquo also show clear signs of alienation even within thefirst generation of settlement and manifest a tendency to seek analternative differentiated identity

The most widely shared discursive practice within which this alien-ation can be identified is the construction of lsquoplacersquo The gap whichopens between the experience of place and the language available todescribe it forms a classic and allpervasive feature of post-colonial textsThis gap occurs for those whose language seems inadequate to describea new place for those whose language is systematically destroyed byenslavement and for those whose language has been renderedunprivileged by the imposition of the language of a colonizing powerSome admixture of one or other of these models can describe the

introduction 9

situation of all post-colonial societies In each case a condition of alien-ation is inevitable until the colonizing language has been replaced orappropriated as english

That imperialism results in a profound linguistic alienation isobviously the case in cultures in which a pre-colonial culture is sup-pressed by military conquest or enslavement So for example anIndian writer like Raja Rao or a Nigerian writer such as ChinuaAchebe have needed to transform the language to use it in a differentway in its new context and so as Achebe says quoting James Bald-win make it lsquobear the burdenrsquo of their experience (Achebe 197562) Although Rao and Achebe write from their own place and sohave not suffered a literal geographical displacement they have toovercome an imposed gap resulting from the linguistic displacementof the pre-colonial language by English This process occurs within amore comprehensive discourse of place and displacement in thewider post-colonial context Such alienation is shared by those whosepossession of English is indisputably lsquonativersquo (in the sense of beingpossessed from birth) yet who begin to feel alienated within its prac-tice once its vocabulary categories and codes are felt to beinadequate or inappropriate to describe the fauna the physical andgeographical conditions or the cultural practices they have developedin a new land The Canadian poet Joseph Howe for instance pluckshis picture of a moose from some repository of English nurseryrhyme romanticism

the gay moose in jocund gambol springsCropping the foliage Nature round him flings

(Howe 1874 100)

Such absurdities demonstrate the pressing need these native speakersshare with those colonized peoples who were directly oppressed toescape from the inadequacies and imperial constraints of English as asocial practice They need that is to escape from the implicit body ofassumptions to which English was attached its aesthetic and socialvalues the formal and historically limited constraints of genre and theoppressive political and cultural assertion of metropolitan dominanceof centre over margin (Ngugi 1986) This is not to say that the English

the empire writes back10

language is inherently incapable of accounting for post-colonialexperience but that it needs to develop an lsquoappropriatersquo usage in orderto do so (by becoming a distinct and unique form of english) Theenergizing feature of this displacement is its capacity to interrogate andsubvert the imperial cultural formations

The pressure to develop such a usage manifests itself early in thedevelopment of lsquoenglishrsquo literatures It is therefore arguable that evenbefore the development of a conscious de-colonizing stance theexperience of a new place identifiably different in its physical charac-teristics constrains for instance the new settlers to demand a languagewhich will allow them to express their sense of lsquoOthernessrsquo Landscapeflora and fauna seasons climatic conditions are formally distinguishedfrom the place of origin as homecolony EuropeNew WorldEuropeAntipodes metropolitanprovincial and so on although ofcourse at this stage no effective models exist for expressing this senseof Otherness in a positive and creative way

POST-COLONIALITY AND THEORY

The idea of lsquopost-colonial literary theoryrsquo emerges from the inability ofEuropean theory to deal adequately with the complexities and variedcultural provenance of post-colonial writing European theories them-selves emerge from particular cultural traditions which are hidden byfalse notions of lsquothe universalrsquo Theories of style and genre assump-tions about the universal features of language epistemologies andvalue systems are all radically questioned by the practices of post-colonial writing Post-colonial theory has proceeded from the need toaddress this different practice Indigenous theories have developed toaccommodate the differences within the various cultural traditions aswell as the desire to describe in a comparative way the features sharedacross those traditions

The political and cultural monocentrism of the colonial enterprisewas a natural result of the philosophical traditions of the Europeanworld and the systems of representation which this privilegedNineteenth-century imperial expansion the culmination of the out-ward and dominating thrust of Europeans into the world beyondEurope which began during the early Renaissance was underpinned

introduction 11

in complex ways by these assumptions In the first instance thisproduced practices of cultural subservience characterized by one post-colonial critic as lsquocultural cringersquo (Phillips 1958) Subsequently theemergence of identifiable indigenous theories in reaction to thisformed an important element in the development of specific nationaland regional consciousnesses (see ch 4)

Paradoxically however imperial expansion has had a radicallydestabilizing effect on its own preoccupations and power In pushingthe colonial world to the margins of experience the lsquocentrersquo pushedconsciousness beyond the point at which monocentrism in all spheresof thought could be accepted without question In other words thealienating process which initially served to relegate the post-colonialworld to the lsquomarginrsquo turned upon itself and acted to push that worldthrough a kind of mental barrier into a position from which allexperience could be viewed as uncentred pluralistic and multifari-ous Marginality thus became an unprecedented source of creativeenergy The impetus towards decentring and pluralism has alwaysbeen present in the history of European thought and has reached itslatest development in post-structuralism But the situation of margin-alized societies and cultures enabled them to come to this positionmuch earlier and more directly (Brydon 1984b) These notions areimplicit in post-colonial texts from the imperial period to the presentday

The task of this book is twofold first to identify the range andnature of these post-colonial texts and second to describe the varioustheories which have emerged so far to account for them So in the firstchapter we consider the development of descriptive models of post-colonial writing Since it is not possible to read post-colonial textswithout coming to terms with the ways in which they appropriate anddeploy the material of linguistic culture in the second chapter weoutline the process by which language is captured to form a distinctivediscursive practice In the third chapter we demonstrate throughsymptomatic readings of texts how post-colonial writing interactswith the social and material practices of colonialism One of the majorpurposes of this book is to explain the nature of existing post-colonialtheory and the way in which it interacts with and dismantles some ofthe assumptions of European theory In the fourth chapter we discuss

the empire writes back12

the issues in the development of indigenous post-colonial theories andin the fifth we examine the larger implications of post-coloniality fortheories of language for literary theory and for social and politicalanalysis in general

introduction 13

1CUTTING THE GROUND

Critical models of post-colonialliteratures

As writers and critics became aware of the special character ofpost-colonial texts they saw the need to develop an adequate model toaccount for them Four major models have emerged to date firstlsquonationalrsquo or regional models which emphasize the distinctive featuresof the particular national or regional culture second race-basedmodels which identify certain shared characteristics across variousnational literatures such as the common racial inheritance in litera-tures of the African diaspora addressed by the lsquoBlack writingrsquo modelthird comparative models of varying complexity which seek toaccount for particular linguistic historical and cultural features acrosstwo or more post-colonial literatures fourth more comprehensivecomparative models which argue for features such as hybridity andsyncreticity as constitutive elements of all post-colonial literatures(syncretism is the process by which previously distinct linguistic cat-egories and by extension cultural formations merge into a singlenew form) These models often operate as assumptions within criticalpractice rather than specific and discrete schools of thought in any

discussion of post-colonial writing a number of them may be operat-ing at the same time

NATIONAL AND REGIONAL MODELS

The first post-colonial society to develop a lsquonationalrsquo literature was theUSA The emergence of a distinctive American literature in the lateeighteenth century raised inevitable questions about the relationshipbetween literature and place between literature and nationality andparticularly about the suitability of inherited literary forms Ideas aboutnew kinds of literature were part of the optimistic progression tonationhood because it seemed that this was one of the most potentareas in which to express difference from Britain Writers like CharlesBrockden Brown who attempted to indigenize British forms like thegothic and the sentimental novel soon realized that with the change inlocation and culture it was not possible to import form and conceptwithout radical alteration (Fiedler 1960 Ringe 1966)

In many ways the American experience and its attempts to producea new kind of literature can be seen to be the model for all laterpost-colonial writing1 The first thing it showed was that some ofa post-colonial countryrsquos most deeply held linguistic and cultural traitsdepend upon its relationship with the colonizing power particularlythe defining contrast between European metropolis and lsquofrontierrsquo (seeFussell 1965) Once the American Revolution had forced the questionof separate nationality and the economic and political successes of theemerging nation had begun to be taken for granted American litera-ture as a distinct collection of texts also began to be accepted But it wasaccepted as an offshoot of the lsquoparent treersquo Such organic metaphorsand others like lsquoparentndashchildrsquo and lsquostreamndashtributaryrsquo acted to keep thenew literature in its place The plant and parent metaphors stressed ageexperience roots tradition and most importantly the connectionbetween antiquity and value They implied the same distinctions asthose existing between metropolis and frontier parents are moreexperienced more important more substantial less brash than theiroffspring Above all they are the origin and therefore claim the finalauthority in questions of taste and value

But as the extensive literature of the USA developed different

cutting the ground 15

characteristics from that of Britain and established its right to be con-sidered independently the concept of national literary differenceslsquowithinrsquo English writing became established The eventual consequenceof this has been that lsquonewerrsquo literatures from countries such as NigeriaAustralia and India could also be discussed as discrete national forma-tions rather than as lsquobranches of the treersquo Their literatures could beconsidered in relation to the social and political history of each coun-try and could be read as a source of important images of nationalidentity

The development of national literatures and criticism is fundamentalto the whole enterprise of post-colonial studies Without such devel-opments at the national level and without the comparative studiesbetween national traditions to which these lead no discourse of thepost-colonial could have emerged Nor is it simply a matter of devel-opment from one stage to another since all post-colonial studies con-tinue to depend upon national literatures and criticism The study ofnational traditions is the first and most vital stage of the processof rejecting the claims of the centre to exclusivity It is the beginning ofwhat Nigerian writer Wole Soyinka has characterized as the lsquoprocess ofself-apprehensionrsquo (Soyinka 1976 xi) Recent theories of a generalpost-colonial discourse question essentialist formulations which maylead to nationalist and racist orthodoxies but they do not deny thegreat importance of maintaining each literaturersquos sense of specific dif-ference It is this sense of difference which constitutes each nationalliteraturersquos mode of self-apprehension and its claim to be a self-constituting entity However nationalism in which some partial truthor clicheacute is elevated to orthodoxy is a danger implicit in such nationalconceptions of literary production The impetus towards national self-realization in critical assessments of literature all too often fails to stopshort of nationalist myth

Larger geographical models which cross the boundaries of languagenationality or race to generate the concept of a regional literature suchas West Indian or South Pacific literature may also share some of thelimitations of the national model While the idea of an lsquoAfricanrsquo litera-ture for instance has a powerful appeal to writers and critics in thevarious African countries it has only limited application as a descrip-tive label African and European critics have produced several regional

the empire writes back16

and national studies which reflect the widespread political economicand cultural differences between modern African countries (Gurr andCalder 1974 Lindfors 1975 Taiwo 1976 Ogungbesan 1979)

Clearly some regional groupings are more likely to gain acceptancein the regions themselves than are others and will derive from a col-lective identity evident in other ways This is true of the West IndiesAlthough the Federation of the West Indies failed the english-speakingcountries there still field a regional cricket team Both the West Indiesand the South Pacific have regional universities with a significant inputinto literary production and discussion lsquoWest Indianrsquo literature hasalmost always been considered regionally rather than nationally Therehave been no major studies of Jamaican or Trinidadian literatures asdiscrete traditions A different regional grouping emphasizing geo-graphical and historical determinants rather than linguistic ones hasalso developed to explore lsquoCaribbeanrsquo literature setting literature inenglish from the region alongside that written in spanish french andother European languages (Allis 1982)

Despite such variants on the national model most of the englishliteratures outside Britain have been considered as individual nationalenterprises forming and reflecting each countryrsquos culture The inevit-able consequence of this is a gradual blurring of the distinctionbetween the national and the nationalist Nationalism has usuallyincluded a healthy repudiation of British and US hegemony observablein publishing education and the public sponsorship of writing Yet alltoo often nationalist criticism by failing to alter the terms of the dis-course within which it operates has participated implicitly or evenexplicitly in a discourse ultimately controlled by the very imperialpower its nationalist assertion is designed to exclude Emphasis mayhave been transferred to the national literature but the theoreticalassumptions critical perspectives and value judgements made haveoften replicated those of the British establishment

COMPARISONS BETWEEN TWO OR MORE REGIONS

Theories and models of post-colonial literatures could not emergeuntil the separate colonies were viewed in a framework centred ontheir own literary and cultural traditions Victorian Britain had exulted

cutting the ground 17

threatened the exclusive claims of the centre they were rapidlyincorporated This was a process in Edward Saidrsquos terms of consciousaffiliation proceeding under the guise of filiation (Said 1984) that is amimicry of the centre proceeding from a desire not only to be acceptedbut to be adopted and absorbed It caused those from the periphery toimmerse themselves in the imported culture denying their origins inan attempt to become lsquomore English than the Englishrsquo We seeexamples of this in such writers as Henry James and TS Eliot

As post-colonial societies sought to establish their difference fromBritain the response of those who recognized this complicity betweenlanguage education and cultural incorporation was to break the linkbetween language and literary study by dividing lsquoEnglishrsquo departmentsin universities into separate schools of Linguistics and of Literatureboth of which tended to view their project within a national or inter-national context Ngugirsquos essay lsquoOn the abolition of the Englishdepartmentrsquo (Ngugi 1972) is an illuminating account of the particulararguments involved in Africa John Dockerrsquos essay lsquoThe neocolonialassumption in the university teaching of Englishrsquo (Tiffin 1978 26ndash31) addresses similar problems in the settler colony contextdescribing a situation in which in contrast to Kenya little genuinedecolonization is yet in sight As Dockerrsquos critique makes clear in mostpost-colonial nations (including the West Indies and India) the nexusof power involving literature language and a dominant British culturehas strongly resisted attempts to dismantle it Even after such attemptsbegan to succeed the canonical nature and unquestioned status of theworks of the English literary tradition and the values they incorporatedremained potent in the cultural formation and the ideological institu-tions of education and literature Nevertheless the development of thepost-colonial literatures has necessitated a questioning of many of theassumptions on which the study of lsquoEnglishrsquo was based

DEVELOPMENT OF POST-COLONIAL LITERATURES

Post-colonial literatures developed through several stages which can beseen to correspond to stages both of national or regional consciousnessand of the project of asserting difference from the imperial centreDuring the imperial period writing in the language of the imperial

the empire writes back4

centre is inevitably of course produced by a literate elite whose pri-mary identification is with the colonizing power Thus the first textsproduced in the colonies in the new language are frequently producedby lsquorepresentativesrsquo of the imperial power for example gentrified set-tlers (Wentworthrsquos lsquoAustraliarsquo) travellers and sightseers (FroudersquosOceana and his The English in the West Indies or the travel diaries of MaryKingsley) or the Anglo-Indian and West African administrators sol-diers and lsquoboxwallahsrsquo and even more frequently their memsahibs(volumes of memoirs)

Such texts can never form the basis for an indigenous culture nor canthey be integrated in any way with the culture which already exists inthe countries invaded Despite their detailed reportage of landscapecustom and language they inevitably privilege the centre emphasiz-ing the lsquohomersquo over the lsquonativersquo the lsquometropolitanrsquo over the lsquoprovincialrsquoor lsquocolonialrsquo and so forth At a deeper level their claim to objectivitysimply serves to hide the imperial discourse within which they arecreated That this is true of even the consciously literary works whichemerge from this moment can be illustrated by the poems and storiesof Rudyard Kipling For example in the well-known poem lsquoChristmasin Indiarsquo the evocative description of a Christmas day in the heat ofIndia is contextualized by invoking its absent English counterpartApparently it is only through this absent and enabling signifier that theIndian daily reality can acquire legitimacy as a subject of literarydiscourse

The second stage of production within the evolving discourse of thepost-colonial is the literature produced lsquounder imperial licencersquo bylsquonativesrsquo or lsquooutcastsrsquo for instance the large body of poetry and proseproduced in the nineteenth century by the English educated Indianupper class or African lsquomissionary literaturersquo (eg Thomas MofolorsquosChaka) The producers signify by the very fact of writing in thelanguage of the dominant culture that they have temporarily or per-manently entered a specific and privileged class endowed with thelanguage education and leisure necessary to produce such works TheAustralian novel Ralph Rashleigh now known to have been written by theconvict James Tucker is a case in point Tucker an educated man wroteRashleigh as a lsquospecialrsquo (a privileged convict) whilst working at the penalsettlement at Port Macquarie as storekeeper to the superintendent

introduction 5

Written on government paper with government ink and pens thenovel was clearly produced with the aid and support of the super-intendent Tucker had momentarily gained access to the privilege ofliterature Significantly the moment of privilege did not last and hedied in poverty at the age of fifty-eight at Liverpool asylum in Sydney

It is characteristic of these early post-colonial texts that the potentialfor subversion in their themes cannot be fully realized Although theydeal with such powerful material as the brutality of the convict system(Tuckerrsquos Rashleigh) the historical potency of the supplanted anddenigrated native cultures (Mofolorsquos Chaka) or the existence of a richcultural heritage older and more extensive than that of Europe (any ofmany nineteenth-century Indo-Anglian poets such as Ram Sharma)they are prevented from fully exploring their anti-imperial potentialBoth the available discourse and the material conditions of productionfor literature in these early post-colonial societies restrain this possibil-ity The institution of lsquoLiteraturersquo in the colony is under the directcontrol of the imperial ruling class who alone license the acceptableform and permit the publication and distribution of the resulting workSo texts of this kind come into being within the constraints of adiscourse and the institutional practice of a patronage system whichlimits and undercuts their assertion of a different perspective Thedevelopment of independent literatures depended upon the abrogationof this constraining power and the appropriation of language and writ-ing for new and distinctive usages Such an appropriation is clearly themost significant feature in the emergence of modern post-colonialliteratures (see chs 2 and 3)

HEGEMONY

Why should post-colonial societies continue to engage with theimperial experience Since all the post-colonial societies we discusshave achieved political independence why is the issue of colonialitystill relevant at all This question of why the empire needs to write backto a centre once the imperial structure has been dismantled in politicalterms is an important one Britain like the other dominant colonialpowers of the nineteenth century has been relegated to a relativelyminor place in international affairs In the spheres of politics and

the empire writes back6

economics and increasingly in the vital new area of the mass mediaBritain and the other European imperial powers have been super-seded by the emergent power of the USA Nevertheless through theliterary canon the body of British texts which all too frequently stillacts as a touchstone of taste and value and through RS-English(Received Standard English) which asserts the English of south-eastEngland as a universal norm the weight of antiquity continues todominate cultural production in much of the post-colonial worldThis cultural hegemony has been maintained through canonicalassumptions about literary activity and through attitudes to post-colonial literatures which identify them as isolated national off-shootsof English literature and which therefore relegate them to marginaland subordinate positions More recently as the range and strength ofthese literatures has become undeniable a process of incorporation hasbegun in which employing Eurocentric standards of judgement thecentre has sought to claim those works and writers of which itapproves as British2 In all these respects the parallel between the situ-ation of post-colonial writing and that of feminist writing is striking(see ch 5)

LANGUAGE

One of the main features of imperial oppression is control over lan-guage The imperial education system installs a lsquostandardrsquo version ofthe metropolitan language as the norm and marginalizes all lsquovariantsrsquoas impurities As a character in Mrs Campbell Praedrsquos nineteenth-century Australian novel Policy and Passion puts it lsquoTo be colonial is to talkAustralian slang to be everything that is abominablersquo (CampbellPraed 1881154) Language becomes the medium through which ahierarchical structure of power is perpetuated and the mediumthrough which conceptions of lsquotruthrsquo lsquoorderrsquo and lsquorealityrsquo becomeestablished Such power is rejected in the emergence of an effectivepost-colonial voice For this reason the discussion of post-colonialwriting which follows is largely a discussion of the process by whichthe language with its power and the writing with its signification ofauthority has been wrested from the dominant European culture

In order to focus on the complex ways in which the English

introduction 7

language has been used in these societies and to indicate their ownsense of difference we distinguish in this account between the lsquostand-ardrsquo British English inherited from the empire and the english whichthe language has become in post-colonial countries Though Britishimperialism resulted in the spread of a language English across theglobe the english of Jamaicans is not the english of Canadians Maorisor Kenyans We need to distinguish between what is proposed as astandard code English (the language of the erstwhile imperial centre)and the linguistic code english which has been transformed and sub-verted into several distinctive varieties throughout the world For thisreason the distinction between English and english will be usedthroughout our text as an indication of the various ways in which thelanguage has been employed by different linguistic communities in thepost-colonial world3

The use of these terms asserts the fact that a continuum existsbetween the various linguistic practices which constitute english usagein the modern world Although linguistically the links between Englishand the various post-colonial englishes in use today can be seen asunbroken the political reality is that English sets itself apart from allother lsquolesserrsquo variants and so demands to be interrogated about itsclaim to this special status

In practice the history of this distinction between English and eng-lish has been between the claims of a powerful lsquocentrersquo and a multitudeof intersecting usages designated as lsquoperipheriesrsquo The language ofthese lsquoperipheriesrsquo was shaped by an oppressive discourse of power Yetthey have been the site of some of the most exciting and innovativeliteratures of the modern period and this has at least in part been theresult of the energies uncovered by the political tension between theidea of a normative code and a variety of regional usages

PLACE AND DISPLACEMENT

A major feature of post-colonial literatures is the concern with placeand displacement It is here that the special post-colonial crisis of iden-tity comes into being the concern with the development or recoveryof an effective identifying relationship between self and place Indeedcritics such as D E S Maxwell have made this the defining model of

the empire writes back8

post-coloniality (see ch 1) A valid and active sense of self may havebeen eroded by dislocation resulting from migration the experience ofenslavement transportation or lsquovoluntaryrsquo removal for indenturedlabour Or it may have been destroyed by cultural denigration the con-scious and unconscious oppression of the indigenous personality andculture by a supposedly superior racial or cultural model The dialecticof place and displacement is always a feature of post-colonial societieswhether these have been created by a process of settlement interven-tion or a mixture of the two Beyond their historical and culturaldifferences place displacement and a pervasive concern with themyths of identity and authenticity are a feature common to allpost-colonial literatures in english

The alienation of vision and the crisis in self-image which this dis-placement produces is as frequently found in the accounts of Canadianlsquofree settlersrsquo as of Australian convicts FijianndashIndian or TrinidadianndashIndian indentured labourers West Indian slaves or forcibly colonizedNigerians or Bengalis Although this is pragmatically demonstrablefrom a wide range of texts it is difficult to account for by theorieswhich see this social and linguistic alienation as resulting only fromovertly oppressive forms of colonization such as slavery or conquestAn adequate account of this practice must go beyond the usual categor-ies of social alienation such as masterslave freebonded rulerruledhowever important and widespread these may be in post-colonial cul-tures After all why should the free settler formally unconstrained andtheoretically free to continue in the possession and practice oflsquoEnglishnessrsquo also show clear signs of alienation even within thefirst generation of settlement and manifest a tendency to seek analternative differentiated identity

The most widely shared discursive practice within which this alien-ation can be identified is the construction of lsquoplacersquo The gap whichopens between the experience of place and the language available todescribe it forms a classic and allpervasive feature of post-colonial textsThis gap occurs for those whose language seems inadequate to describea new place for those whose language is systematically destroyed byenslavement and for those whose language has been renderedunprivileged by the imposition of the language of a colonizing powerSome admixture of one or other of these models can describe the

introduction 9

situation of all post-colonial societies In each case a condition of alien-ation is inevitable until the colonizing language has been replaced orappropriated as english

That imperialism results in a profound linguistic alienation isobviously the case in cultures in which a pre-colonial culture is sup-pressed by military conquest or enslavement So for example anIndian writer like Raja Rao or a Nigerian writer such as ChinuaAchebe have needed to transform the language to use it in a differentway in its new context and so as Achebe says quoting James Bald-win make it lsquobear the burdenrsquo of their experience (Achebe 197562) Although Rao and Achebe write from their own place and sohave not suffered a literal geographical displacement they have toovercome an imposed gap resulting from the linguistic displacementof the pre-colonial language by English This process occurs within amore comprehensive discourse of place and displacement in thewider post-colonial context Such alienation is shared by those whosepossession of English is indisputably lsquonativersquo (in the sense of beingpossessed from birth) yet who begin to feel alienated within its prac-tice once its vocabulary categories and codes are felt to beinadequate or inappropriate to describe the fauna the physical andgeographical conditions or the cultural practices they have developedin a new land The Canadian poet Joseph Howe for instance pluckshis picture of a moose from some repository of English nurseryrhyme romanticism

the gay moose in jocund gambol springsCropping the foliage Nature round him flings

(Howe 1874 100)

Such absurdities demonstrate the pressing need these native speakersshare with those colonized peoples who were directly oppressed toescape from the inadequacies and imperial constraints of English as asocial practice They need that is to escape from the implicit body ofassumptions to which English was attached its aesthetic and socialvalues the formal and historically limited constraints of genre and theoppressive political and cultural assertion of metropolitan dominanceof centre over margin (Ngugi 1986) This is not to say that the English

the empire writes back10

language is inherently incapable of accounting for post-colonialexperience but that it needs to develop an lsquoappropriatersquo usage in orderto do so (by becoming a distinct and unique form of english) Theenergizing feature of this displacement is its capacity to interrogate andsubvert the imperial cultural formations

The pressure to develop such a usage manifests itself early in thedevelopment of lsquoenglishrsquo literatures It is therefore arguable that evenbefore the development of a conscious de-colonizing stance theexperience of a new place identifiably different in its physical charac-teristics constrains for instance the new settlers to demand a languagewhich will allow them to express their sense of lsquoOthernessrsquo Landscapeflora and fauna seasons climatic conditions are formally distinguishedfrom the place of origin as homecolony EuropeNew WorldEuropeAntipodes metropolitanprovincial and so on although ofcourse at this stage no effective models exist for expressing this senseof Otherness in a positive and creative way

POST-COLONIALITY AND THEORY

The idea of lsquopost-colonial literary theoryrsquo emerges from the inability ofEuropean theory to deal adequately with the complexities and variedcultural provenance of post-colonial writing European theories them-selves emerge from particular cultural traditions which are hidden byfalse notions of lsquothe universalrsquo Theories of style and genre assump-tions about the universal features of language epistemologies andvalue systems are all radically questioned by the practices of post-colonial writing Post-colonial theory has proceeded from the need toaddress this different practice Indigenous theories have developed toaccommodate the differences within the various cultural traditions aswell as the desire to describe in a comparative way the features sharedacross those traditions

The political and cultural monocentrism of the colonial enterprisewas a natural result of the philosophical traditions of the Europeanworld and the systems of representation which this privilegedNineteenth-century imperial expansion the culmination of the out-ward and dominating thrust of Europeans into the world beyondEurope which began during the early Renaissance was underpinned

introduction 11

in complex ways by these assumptions In the first instance thisproduced practices of cultural subservience characterized by one post-colonial critic as lsquocultural cringersquo (Phillips 1958) Subsequently theemergence of identifiable indigenous theories in reaction to thisformed an important element in the development of specific nationaland regional consciousnesses (see ch 4)

Paradoxically however imperial expansion has had a radicallydestabilizing effect on its own preoccupations and power In pushingthe colonial world to the margins of experience the lsquocentrersquo pushedconsciousness beyond the point at which monocentrism in all spheresof thought could be accepted without question In other words thealienating process which initially served to relegate the post-colonialworld to the lsquomarginrsquo turned upon itself and acted to push that worldthrough a kind of mental barrier into a position from which allexperience could be viewed as uncentred pluralistic and multifari-ous Marginality thus became an unprecedented source of creativeenergy The impetus towards decentring and pluralism has alwaysbeen present in the history of European thought and has reached itslatest development in post-structuralism But the situation of margin-alized societies and cultures enabled them to come to this positionmuch earlier and more directly (Brydon 1984b) These notions areimplicit in post-colonial texts from the imperial period to the presentday

The task of this book is twofold first to identify the range andnature of these post-colonial texts and second to describe the varioustheories which have emerged so far to account for them So in the firstchapter we consider the development of descriptive models of post-colonial writing Since it is not possible to read post-colonial textswithout coming to terms with the ways in which they appropriate anddeploy the material of linguistic culture in the second chapter weoutline the process by which language is captured to form a distinctivediscursive practice In the third chapter we demonstrate throughsymptomatic readings of texts how post-colonial writing interactswith the social and material practices of colonialism One of the majorpurposes of this book is to explain the nature of existing post-colonialtheory and the way in which it interacts with and dismantles some ofthe assumptions of European theory In the fourth chapter we discuss

the empire writes back12

the issues in the development of indigenous post-colonial theories andin the fifth we examine the larger implications of post-coloniality fortheories of language for literary theory and for social and politicalanalysis in general

introduction 13

1CUTTING THE GROUND

Critical models of post-colonialliteratures

As writers and critics became aware of the special character ofpost-colonial texts they saw the need to develop an adequate model toaccount for them Four major models have emerged to date firstlsquonationalrsquo or regional models which emphasize the distinctive featuresof the particular national or regional culture second race-basedmodels which identify certain shared characteristics across variousnational literatures such as the common racial inheritance in litera-tures of the African diaspora addressed by the lsquoBlack writingrsquo modelthird comparative models of varying complexity which seek toaccount for particular linguistic historical and cultural features acrosstwo or more post-colonial literatures fourth more comprehensivecomparative models which argue for features such as hybridity andsyncreticity as constitutive elements of all post-colonial literatures(syncretism is the process by which previously distinct linguistic cat-egories and by extension cultural formations merge into a singlenew form) These models often operate as assumptions within criticalpractice rather than specific and discrete schools of thought in any

discussion of post-colonial writing a number of them may be operat-ing at the same time

NATIONAL AND REGIONAL MODELS

The first post-colonial society to develop a lsquonationalrsquo literature was theUSA The emergence of a distinctive American literature in the lateeighteenth century raised inevitable questions about the relationshipbetween literature and place between literature and nationality andparticularly about the suitability of inherited literary forms Ideas aboutnew kinds of literature were part of the optimistic progression tonationhood because it seemed that this was one of the most potentareas in which to express difference from Britain Writers like CharlesBrockden Brown who attempted to indigenize British forms like thegothic and the sentimental novel soon realized that with the change inlocation and culture it was not possible to import form and conceptwithout radical alteration (Fiedler 1960 Ringe 1966)

In many ways the American experience and its attempts to producea new kind of literature can be seen to be the model for all laterpost-colonial writing1 The first thing it showed was that some ofa post-colonial countryrsquos most deeply held linguistic and cultural traitsdepend upon its relationship with the colonizing power particularlythe defining contrast between European metropolis and lsquofrontierrsquo (seeFussell 1965) Once the American Revolution had forced the questionof separate nationality and the economic and political successes of theemerging nation had begun to be taken for granted American litera-ture as a distinct collection of texts also began to be accepted But it wasaccepted as an offshoot of the lsquoparent treersquo Such organic metaphorsand others like lsquoparentndashchildrsquo and lsquostreamndashtributaryrsquo acted to keep thenew literature in its place The plant and parent metaphors stressed ageexperience roots tradition and most importantly the connectionbetween antiquity and value They implied the same distinctions asthose existing between metropolis and frontier parents are moreexperienced more important more substantial less brash than theiroffspring Above all they are the origin and therefore claim the finalauthority in questions of taste and value

But as the extensive literature of the USA developed different

cutting the ground 15

characteristics from that of Britain and established its right to be con-sidered independently the concept of national literary differenceslsquowithinrsquo English writing became established The eventual consequenceof this has been that lsquonewerrsquo literatures from countries such as NigeriaAustralia and India could also be discussed as discrete national forma-tions rather than as lsquobranches of the treersquo Their literatures could beconsidered in relation to the social and political history of each coun-try and could be read as a source of important images of nationalidentity

The development of national literatures and criticism is fundamentalto the whole enterprise of post-colonial studies Without such devel-opments at the national level and without the comparative studiesbetween national traditions to which these lead no discourse of thepost-colonial could have emerged Nor is it simply a matter of devel-opment from one stage to another since all post-colonial studies con-tinue to depend upon national literatures and criticism The study ofnational traditions is the first and most vital stage of the processof rejecting the claims of the centre to exclusivity It is the beginning ofwhat Nigerian writer Wole Soyinka has characterized as the lsquoprocess ofself-apprehensionrsquo (Soyinka 1976 xi) Recent theories of a generalpost-colonial discourse question essentialist formulations which maylead to nationalist and racist orthodoxies but they do not deny thegreat importance of maintaining each literaturersquos sense of specific dif-ference It is this sense of difference which constitutes each nationalliteraturersquos mode of self-apprehension and its claim to be a self-constituting entity However nationalism in which some partial truthor clicheacute is elevated to orthodoxy is a danger implicit in such nationalconceptions of literary production The impetus towards national self-realization in critical assessments of literature all too often fails to stopshort of nationalist myth

Larger geographical models which cross the boundaries of languagenationality or race to generate the concept of a regional literature suchas West Indian or South Pacific literature may also share some of thelimitations of the national model While the idea of an lsquoAfricanrsquo litera-ture for instance has a powerful appeal to writers and critics in thevarious African countries it has only limited application as a descrip-tive label African and European critics have produced several regional

the empire writes back16

and national studies which reflect the widespread political economicand cultural differences between modern African countries (Gurr andCalder 1974 Lindfors 1975 Taiwo 1976 Ogungbesan 1979)

Clearly some regional groupings are more likely to gain acceptancein the regions themselves than are others and will derive from a col-lective identity evident in other ways This is true of the West IndiesAlthough the Federation of the West Indies failed the english-speakingcountries there still field a regional cricket team Both the West Indiesand the South Pacific have regional universities with a significant inputinto literary production and discussion lsquoWest Indianrsquo literature hasalmost always been considered regionally rather than nationally Therehave been no major studies of Jamaican or Trinidadian literatures asdiscrete traditions A different regional grouping emphasizing geo-graphical and historical determinants rather than linguistic ones hasalso developed to explore lsquoCaribbeanrsquo literature setting literature inenglish from the region alongside that written in spanish french andother European languages (Allis 1982)

Despite such variants on the national model most of the englishliteratures outside Britain have been considered as individual nationalenterprises forming and reflecting each countryrsquos culture The inevit-able consequence of this is a gradual blurring of the distinctionbetween the national and the nationalist Nationalism has usuallyincluded a healthy repudiation of British and US hegemony observablein publishing education and the public sponsorship of writing Yet alltoo often nationalist criticism by failing to alter the terms of the dis-course within which it operates has participated implicitly or evenexplicitly in a discourse ultimately controlled by the very imperialpower its nationalist assertion is designed to exclude Emphasis mayhave been transferred to the national literature but the theoreticalassumptions critical perspectives and value judgements made haveoften replicated those of the British establishment

COMPARISONS BETWEEN TWO OR MORE REGIONS

Theories and models of post-colonial literatures could not emergeuntil the separate colonies were viewed in a framework centred ontheir own literary and cultural traditions Victorian Britain had exulted

cutting the ground 17

centre is inevitably of course produced by a literate elite whose pri-mary identification is with the colonizing power Thus the first textsproduced in the colonies in the new language are frequently producedby lsquorepresentativesrsquo of the imperial power for example gentrified set-tlers (Wentworthrsquos lsquoAustraliarsquo) travellers and sightseers (FroudersquosOceana and his The English in the West Indies or the travel diaries of MaryKingsley) or the Anglo-Indian and West African administrators sol-diers and lsquoboxwallahsrsquo and even more frequently their memsahibs(volumes of memoirs)

Such texts can never form the basis for an indigenous culture nor canthey be integrated in any way with the culture which already exists inthe countries invaded Despite their detailed reportage of landscapecustom and language they inevitably privilege the centre emphasiz-ing the lsquohomersquo over the lsquonativersquo the lsquometropolitanrsquo over the lsquoprovincialrsquoor lsquocolonialrsquo and so forth At a deeper level their claim to objectivitysimply serves to hide the imperial discourse within which they arecreated That this is true of even the consciously literary works whichemerge from this moment can be illustrated by the poems and storiesof Rudyard Kipling For example in the well-known poem lsquoChristmasin Indiarsquo the evocative description of a Christmas day in the heat ofIndia is contextualized by invoking its absent English counterpartApparently it is only through this absent and enabling signifier that theIndian daily reality can acquire legitimacy as a subject of literarydiscourse

The second stage of production within the evolving discourse of thepost-colonial is the literature produced lsquounder imperial licencersquo bylsquonativesrsquo or lsquooutcastsrsquo for instance the large body of poetry and proseproduced in the nineteenth century by the English educated Indianupper class or African lsquomissionary literaturersquo (eg Thomas MofolorsquosChaka) The producers signify by the very fact of writing in thelanguage of the dominant culture that they have temporarily or per-manently entered a specific and privileged class endowed with thelanguage education and leisure necessary to produce such works TheAustralian novel Ralph Rashleigh now known to have been written by theconvict James Tucker is a case in point Tucker an educated man wroteRashleigh as a lsquospecialrsquo (a privileged convict) whilst working at the penalsettlement at Port Macquarie as storekeeper to the superintendent

introduction 5

Written on government paper with government ink and pens thenovel was clearly produced with the aid and support of the super-intendent Tucker had momentarily gained access to the privilege ofliterature Significantly the moment of privilege did not last and hedied in poverty at the age of fifty-eight at Liverpool asylum in Sydney

It is characteristic of these early post-colonial texts that the potentialfor subversion in their themes cannot be fully realized Although theydeal with such powerful material as the brutality of the convict system(Tuckerrsquos Rashleigh) the historical potency of the supplanted anddenigrated native cultures (Mofolorsquos Chaka) or the existence of a richcultural heritage older and more extensive than that of Europe (any ofmany nineteenth-century Indo-Anglian poets such as Ram Sharma)they are prevented from fully exploring their anti-imperial potentialBoth the available discourse and the material conditions of productionfor literature in these early post-colonial societies restrain this possibil-ity The institution of lsquoLiteraturersquo in the colony is under the directcontrol of the imperial ruling class who alone license the acceptableform and permit the publication and distribution of the resulting workSo texts of this kind come into being within the constraints of adiscourse and the institutional practice of a patronage system whichlimits and undercuts their assertion of a different perspective Thedevelopment of independent literatures depended upon the abrogationof this constraining power and the appropriation of language and writ-ing for new and distinctive usages Such an appropriation is clearly themost significant feature in the emergence of modern post-colonialliteratures (see chs 2 and 3)

HEGEMONY

Why should post-colonial societies continue to engage with theimperial experience Since all the post-colonial societies we discusshave achieved political independence why is the issue of colonialitystill relevant at all This question of why the empire needs to write backto a centre once the imperial structure has been dismantled in politicalterms is an important one Britain like the other dominant colonialpowers of the nineteenth century has been relegated to a relativelyminor place in international affairs In the spheres of politics and

the empire writes back6

economics and increasingly in the vital new area of the mass mediaBritain and the other European imperial powers have been super-seded by the emergent power of the USA Nevertheless through theliterary canon the body of British texts which all too frequently stillacts as a touchstone of taste and value and through RS-English(Received Standard English) which asserts the English of south-eastEngland as a universal norm the weight of antiquity continues todominate cultural production in much of the post-colonial worldThis cultural hegemony has been maintained through canonicalassumptions about literary activity and through attitudes to post-colonial literatures which identify them as isolated national off-shootsof English literature and which therefore relegate them to marginaland subordinate positions More recently as the range and strength ofthese literatures has become undeniable a process of incorporation hasbegun in which employing Eurocentric standards of judgement thecentre has sought to claim those works and writers of which itapproves as British2 In all these respects the parallel between the situ-ation of post-colonial writing and that of feminist writing is striking(see ch 5)

LANGUAGE

One of the main features of imperial oppression is control over lan-guage The imperial education system installs a lsquostandardrsquo version ofthe metropolitan language as the norm and marginalizes all lsquovariantsrsquoas impurities As a character in Mrs Campbell Praedrsquos nineteenth-century Australian novel Policy and Passion puts it lsquoTo be colonial is to talkAustralian slang to be everything that is abominablersquo (CampbellPraed 1881154) Language becomes the medium through which ahierarchical structure of power is perpetuated and the mediumthrough which conceptions of lsquotruthrsquo lsquoorderrsquo and lsquorealityrsquo becomeestablished Such power is rejected in the emergence of an effectivepost-colonial voice For this reason the discussion of post-colonialwriting which follows is largely a discussion of the process by whichthe language with its power and the writing with its signification ofauthority has been wrested from the dominant European culture

In order to focus on the complex ways in which the English

introduction 7

language has been used in these societies and to indicate their ownsense of difference we distinguish in this account between the lsquostand-ardrsquo British English inherited from the empire and the english whichthe language has become in post-colonial countries Though Britishimperialism resulted in the spread of a language English across theglobe the english of Jamaicans is not the english of Canadians Maorisor Kenyans We need to distinguish between what is proposed as astandard code English (the language of the erstwhile imperial centre)and the linguistic code english which has been transformed and sub-verted into several distinctive varieties throughout the world For thisreason the distinction between English and english will be usedthroughout our text as an indication of the various ways in which thelanguage has been employed by different linguistic communities in thepost-colonial world3

The use of these terms asserts the fact that a continuum existsbetween the various linguistic practices which constitute english usagein the modern world Although linguistically the links between Englishand the various post-colonial englishes in use today can be seen asunbroken the political reality is that English sets itself apart from allother lsquolesserrsquo variants and so demands to be interrogated about itsclaim to this special status

In practice the history of this distinction between English and eng-lish has been between the claims of a powerful lsquocentrersquo and a multitudeof intersecting usages designated as lsquoperipheriesrsquo The language ofthese lsquoperipheriesrsquo was shaped by an oppressive discourse of power Yetthey have been the site of some of the most exciting and innovativeliteratures of the modern period and this has at least in part been theresult of the energies uncovered by the political tension between theidea of a normative code and a variety of regional usages

PLACE AND DISPLACEMENT

A major feature of post-colonial literatures is the concern with placeand displacement It is here that the special post-colonial crisis of iden-tity comes into being the concern with the development or recoveryof an effective identifying relationship between self and place Indeedcritics such as D E S Maxwell have made this the defining model of

the empire writes back8

post-coloniality (see ch 1) A valid and active sense of self may havebeen eroded by dislocation resulting from migration the experience ofenslavement transportation or lsquovoluntaryrsquo removal for indenturedlabour Or it may have been destroyed by cultural denigration the con-scious and unconscious oppression of the indigenous personality andculture by a supposedly superior racial or cultural model The dialecticof place and displacement is always a feature of post-colonial societieswhether these have been created by a process of settlement interven-tion or a mixture of the two Beyond their historical and culturaldifferences place displacement and a pervasive concern with themyths of identity and authenticity are a feature common to allpost-colonial literatures in english

The alienation of vision and the crisis in self-image which this dis-placement produces is as frequently found in the accounts of Canadianlsquofree settlersrsquo as of Australian convicts FijianndashIndian or TrinidadianndashIndian indentured labourers West Indian slaves or forcibly colonizedNigerians or Bengalis Although this is pragmatically demonstrablefrom a wide range of texts it is difficult to account for by theorieswhich see this social and linguistic alienation as resulting only fromovertly oppressive forms of colonization such as slavery or conquestAn adequate account of this practice must go beyond the usual categor-ies of social alienation such as masterslave freebonded rulerruledhowever important and widespread these may be in post-colonial cul-tures After all why should the free settler formally unconstrained andtheoretically free to continue in the possession and practice oflsquoEnglishnessrsquo also show clear signs of alienation even within thefirst generation of settlement and manifest a tendency to seek analternative differentiated identity

The most widely shared discursive practice within which this alien-ation can be identified is the construction of lsquoplacersquo The gap whichopens between the experience of place and the language available todescribe it forms a classic and allpervasive feature of post-colonial textsThis gap occurs for those whose language seems inadequate to describea new place for those whose language is systematically destroyed byenslavement and for those whose language has been renderedunprivileged by the imposition of the language of a colonizing powerSome admixture of one or other of these models can describe the

introduction 9

situation of all post-colonial societies In each case a condition of alien-ation is inevitable until the colonizing language has been replaced orappropriated as english

That imperialism results in a profound linguistic alienation isobviously the case in cultures in which a pre-colonial culture is sup-pressed by military conquest or enslavement So for example anIndian writer like Raja Rao or a Nigerian writer such as ChinuaAchebe have needed to transform the language to use it in a differentway in its new context and so as Achebe says quoting James Bald-win make it lsquobear the burdenrsquo of their experience (Achebe 197562) Although Rao and Achebe write from their own place and sohave not suffered a literal geographical displacement they have toovercome an imposed gap resulting from the linguistic displacementof the pre-colonial language by English This process occurs within amore comprehensive discourse of place and displacement in thewider post-colonial context Such alienation is shared by those whosepossession of English is indisputably lsquonativersquo (in the sense of beingpossessed from birth) yet who begin to feel alienated within its prac-tice once its vocabulary categories and codes are felt to beinadequate or inappropriate to describe the fauna the physical andgeographical conditions or the cultural practices they have developedin a new land The Canadian poet Joseph Howe for instance pluckshis picture of a moose from some repository of English nurseryrhyme romanticism

the gay moose in jocund gambol springsCropping the foliage Nature round him flings

(Howe 1874 100)

Such absurdities demonstrate the pressing need these native speakersshare with those colonized peoples who were directly oppressed toescape from the inadequacies and imperial constraints of English as asocial practice They need that is to escape from the implicit body ofassumptions to which English was attached its aesthetic and socialvalues the formal and historically limited constraints of genre and theoppressive political and cultural assertion of metropolitan dominanceof centre over margin (Ngugi 1986) This is not to say that the English

the empire writes back10

language is inherently incapable of accounting for post-colonialexperience but that it needs to develop an lsquoappropriatersquo usage in orderto do so (by becoming a distinct and unique form of english) Theenergizing feature of this displacement is its capacity to interrogate andsubvert the imperial cultural formations

The pressure to develop such a usage manifests itself early in thedevelopment of lsquoenglishrsquo literatures It is therefore arguable that evenbefore the development of a conscious de-colonizing stance theexperience of a new place identifiably different in its physical charac-teristics constrains for instance the new settlers to demand a languagewhich will allow them to express their sense of lsquoOthernessrsquo Landscapeflora and fauna seasons climatic conditions are formally distinguishedfrom the place of origin as homecolony EuropeNew WorldEuropeAntipodes metropolitanprovincial and so on although ofcourse at this stage no effective models exist for expressing this senseof Otherness in a positive and creative way

POST-COLONIALITY AND THEORY

The idea of lsquopost-colonial literary theoryrsquo emerges from the inability ofEuropean theory to deal adequately with the complexities and variedcultural provenance of post-colonial writing European theories them-selves emerge from particular cultural traditions which are hidden byfalse notions of lsquothe universalrsquo Theories of style and genre assump-tions about the universal features of language epistemologies andvalue systems are all radically questioned by the practices of post-colonial writing Post-colonial theory has proceeded from the need toaddress this different practice Indigenous theories have developed toaccommodate the differences within the various cultural traditions aswell as the desire to describe in a comparative way the features sharedacross those traditions

The political and cultural monocentrism of the colonial enterprisewas a natural result of the philosophical traditions of the Europeanworld and the systems of representation which this privilegedNineteenth-century imperial expansion the culmination of the out-ward and dominating thrust of Europeans into the world beyondEurope which began during the early Renaissance was underpinned

introduction 11

in complex ways by these assumptions In the first instance thisproduced practices of cultural subservience characterized by one post-colonial critic as lsquocultural cringersquo (Phillips 1958) Subsequently theemergence of identifiable indigenous theories in reaction to thisformed an important element in the development of specific nationaland regional consciousnesses (see ch 4)

Paradoxically however imperial expansion has had a radicallydestabilizing effect on its own preoccupations and power In pushingthe colonial world to the margins of experience the lsquocentrersquo pushedconsciousness beyond the point at which monocentrism in all spheresof thought could be accepted without question In other words thealienating process which initially served to relegate the post-colonialworld to the lsquomarginrsquo turned upon itself and acted to push that worldthrough a kind of mental barrier into a position from which allexperience could be viewed as uncentred pluralistic and multifari-ous Marginality thus became an unprecedented source of creativeenergy The impetus towards decentring and pluralism has alwaysbeen present in the history of European thought and has reached itslatest development in post-structuralism But the situation of margin-alized societies and cultures enabled them to come to this positionmuch earlier and more directly (Brydon 1984b) These notions areimplicit in post-colonial texts from the imperial period to the presentday

The task of this book is twofold first to identify the range andnature of these post-colonial texts and second to describe the varioustheories which have emerged so far to account for them So in the firstchapter we consider the development of descriptive models of post-colonial writing Since it is not possible to read post-colonial textswithout coming to terms with the ways in which they appropriate anddeploy the material of linguistic culture in the second chapter weoutline the process by which language is captured to form a distinctivediscursive practice In the third chapter we demonstrate throughsymptomatic readings of texts how post-colonial writing interactswith the social and material practices of colonialism One of the majorpurposes of this book is to explain the nature of existing post-colonialtheory and the way in which it interacts with and dismantles some ofthe assumptions of European theory In the fourth chapter we discuss

the empire writes back12

the issues in the development of indigenous post-colonial theories andin the fifth we examine the larger implications of post-coloniality fortheories of language for literary theory and for social and politicalanalysis in general

introduction 13

1CUTTING THE GROUND

Critical models of post-colonialliteratures

As writers and critics became aware of the special character ofpost-colonial texts they saw the need to develop an adequate model toaccount for them Four major models have emerged to date firstlsquonationalrsquo or regional models which emphasize the distinctive featuresof the particular national or regional culture second race-basedmodels which identify certain shared characteristics across variousnational literatures such as the common racial inheritance in litera-tures of the African diaspora addressed by the lsquoBlack writingrsquo modelthird comparative models of varying complexity which seek toaccount for particular linguistic historical and cultural features acrosstwo or more post-colonial literatures fourth more comprehensivecomparative models which argue for features such as hybridity andsyncreticity as constitutive elements of all post-colonial literatures(syncretism is the process by which previously distinct linguistic cat-egories and by extension cultural formations merge into a singlenew form) These models often operate as assumptions within criticalpractice rather than specific and discrete schools of thought in any

discussion of post-colonial writing a number of them may be operat-ing at the same time

NATIONAL AND REGIONAL MODELS

The first post-colonial society to develop a lsquonationalrsquo literature was theUSA The emergence of a distinctive American literature in the lateeighteenth century raised inevitable questions about the relationshipbetween literature and place between literature and nationality andparticularly about the suitability of inherited literary forms Ideas aboutnew kinds of literature were part of the optimistic progression tonationhood because it seemed that this was one of the most potentareas in which to express difference from Britain Writers like CharlesBrockden Brown who attempted to indigenize British forms like thegothic and the sentimental novel soon realized that with the change inlocation and culture it was not possible to import form and conceptwithout radical alteration (Fiedler 1960 Ringe 1966)

In many ways the American experience and its attempts to producea new kind of literature can be seen to be the model for all laterpost-colonial writing1 The first thing it showed was that some ofa post-colonial countryrsquos most deeply held linguistic and cultural traitsdepend upon its relationship with the colonizing power particularlythe defining contrast between European metropolis and lsquofrontierrsquo (seeFussell 1965) Once the American Revolution had forced the questionof separate nationality and the economic and political successes of theemerging nation had begun to be taken for granted American litera-ture as a distinct collection of texts also began to be accepted But it wasaccepted as an offshoot of the lsquoparent treersquo Such organic metaphorsand others like lsquoparentndashchildrsquo and lsquostreamndashtributaryrsquo acted to keep thenew literature in its place The plant and parent metaphors stressed ageexperience roots tradition and most importantly the connectionbetween antiquity and value They implied the same distinctions asthose existing between metropolis and frontier parents are moreexperienced more important more substantial less brash than theiroffspring Above all they are the origin and therefore claim the finalauthority in questions of taste and value

But as the extensive literature of the USA developed different

cutting the ground 15

characteristics from that of Britain and established its right to be con-sidered independently the concept of national literary differenceslsquowithinrsquo English writing became established The eventual consequenceof this has been that lsquonewerrsquo literatures from countries such as NigeriaAustralia and India could also be discussed as discrete national forma-tions rather than as lsquobranches of the treersquo Their literatures could beconsidered in relation to the social and political history of each coun-try and could be read as a source of important images of nationalidentity

The development of national literatures and criticism is fundamentalto the whole enterprise of post-colonial studies Without such devel-opments at the national level and without the comparative studiesbetween national traditions to which these lead no discourse of thepost-colonial could have emerged Nor is it simply a matter of devel-opment from one stage to another since all post-colonial studies con-tinue to depend upon national literatures and criticism The study ofnational traditions is the first and most vital stage of the processof rejecting the claims of the centre to exclusivity It is the beginning ofwhat Nigerian writer Wole Soyinka has characterized as the lsquoprocess ofself-apprehensionrsquo (Soyinka 1976 xi) Recent theories of a generalpost-colonial discourse question essentialist formulations which maylead to nationalist and racist orthodoxies but they do not deny thegreat importance of maintaining each literaturersquos sense of specific dif-ference It is this sense of difference which constitutes each nationalliteraturersquos mode of self-apprehension and its claim to be a self-constituting entity However nationalism in which some partial truthor clicheacute is elevated to orthodoxy is a danger implicit in such nationalconceptions of literary production The impetus towards national self-realization in critical assessments of literature all too often fails to stopshort of nationalist myth

Larger geographical models which cross the boundaries of languagenationality or race to generate the concept of a regional literature suchas West Indian or South Pacific literature may also share some of thelimitations of the national model While the idea of an lsquoAfricanrsquo litera-ture for instance has a powerful appeal to writers and critics in thevarious African countries it has only limited application as a descrip-tive label African and European critics have produced several regional

the empire writes back16

and national studies which reflect the widespread political economicand cultural differences between modern African countries (Gurr andCalder 1974 Lindfors 1975 Taiwo 1976 Ogungbesan 1979)

Clearly some regional groupings are more likely to gain acceptancein the regions themselves than are others and will derive from a col-lective identity evident in other ways This is true of the West IndiesAlthough the Federation of the West Indies failed the english-speakingcountries there still field a regional cricket team Both the West Indiesand the South Pacific have regional universities with a significant inputinto literary production and discussion lsquoWest Indianrsquo literature hasalmost always been considered regionally rather than nationally Therehave been no major studies of Jamaican or Trinidadian literatures asdiscrete traditions A different regional grouping emphasizing geo-graphical and historical determinants rather than linguistic ones hasalso developed to explore lsquoCaribbeanrsquo literature setting literature inenglish from the region alongside that written in spanish french andother European languages (Allis 1982)

Despite such variants on the national model most of the englishliteratures outside Britain have been considered as individual nationalenterprises forming and reflecting each countryrsquos culture The inevit-able consequence of this is a gradual blurring of the distinctionbetween the national and the nationalist Nationalism has usuallyincluded a healthy repudiation of British and US hegemony observablein publishing education and the public sponsorship of writing Yet alltoo often nationalist criticism by failing to alter the terms of the dis-course within which it operates has participated implicitly or evenexplicitly in a discourse ultimately controlled by the very imperialpower its nationalist assertion is designed to exclude Emphasis mayhave been transferred to the national literature but the theoreticalassumptions critical perspectives and value judgements made haveoften replicated those of the British establishment

COMPARISONS BETWEEN TWO OR MORE REGIONS

Theories and models of post-colonial literatures could not emergeuntil the separate colonies were viewed in a framework centred ontheir own literary and cultural traditions Victorian Britain had exulted

cutting the ground 17

Written on government paper with government ink and pens thenovel was clearly produced with the aid and support of the super-intendent Tucker had momentarily gained access to the privilege ofliterature Significantly the moment of privilege did not last and hedied in poverty at the age of fifty-eight at Liverpool asylum in Sydney

It is characteristic of these early post-colonial texts that the potentialfor subversion in their themes cannot be fully realized Although theydeal with such powerful material as the brutality of the convict system(Tuckerrsquos Rashleigh) the historical potency of the supplanted anddenigrated native cultures (Mofolorsquos Chaka) or the existence of a richcultural heritage older and more extensive than that of Europe (any ofmany nineteenth-century Indo-Anglian poets such as Ram Sharma)they are prevented from fully exploring their anti-imperial potentialBoth the available discourse and the material conditions of productionfor literature in these early post-colonial societies restrain this possibil-ity The institution of lsquoLiteraturersquo in the colony is under the directcontrol of the imperial ruling class who alone license the acceptableform and permit the publication and distribution of the resulting workSo texts of this kind come into being within the constraints of adiscourse and the institutional practice of a patronage system whichlimits and undercuts their assertion of a different perspective Thedevelopment of independent literatures depended upon the abrogationof this constraining power and the appropriation of language and writ-ing for new and distinctive usages Such an appropriation is clearly themost significant feature in the emergence of modern post-colonialliteratures (see chs 2 and 3)

HEGEMONY

Why should post-colonial societies continue to engage with theimperial experience Since all the post-colonial societies we discusshave achieved political independence why is the issue of colonialitystill relevant at all This question of why the empire needs to write backto a centre once the imperial structure has been dismantled in politicalterms is an important one Britain like the other dominant colonialpowers of the nineteenth century has been relegated to a relativelyminor place in international affairs In the spheres of politics and

the empire writes back6

economics and increasingly in the vital new area of the mass mediaBritain and the other European imperial powers have been super-seded by the emergent power of the USA Nevertheless through theliterary canon the body of British texts which all too frequently stillacts as a touchstone of taste and value and through RS-English(Received Standard English) which asserts the English of south-eastEngland as a universal norm the weight of antiquity continues todominate cultural production in much of the post-colonial worldThis cultural hegemony has been maintained through canonicalassumptions about literary activity and through attitudes to post-colonial literatures which identify them as isolated national off-shootsof English literature and which therefore relegate them to marginaland subordinate positions More recently as the range and strength ofthese literatures has become undeniable a process of incorporation hasbegun in which employing Eurocentric standards of judgement thecentre has sought to claim those works and writers of which itapproves as British2 In all these respects the parallel between the situ-ation of post-colonial writing and that of feminist writing is striking(see ch 5)

LANGUAGE

One of the main features of imperial oppression is control over lan-guage The imperial education system installs a lsquostandardrsquo version ofthe metropolitan language as the norm and marginalizes all lsquovariantsrsquoas impurities As a character in Mrs Campbell Praedrsquos nineteenth-century Australian novel Policy and Passion puts it lsquoTo be colonial is to talkAustralian slang to be everything that is abominablersquo (CampbellPraed 1881154) Language becomes the medium through which ahierarchical structure of power is perpetuated and the mediumthrough which conceptions of lsquotruthrsquo lsquoorderrsquo and lsquorealityrsquo becomeestablished Such power is rejected in the emergence of an effectivepost-colonial voice For this reason the discussion of post-colonialwriting which follows is largely a discussion of the process by whichthe language with its power and the writing with its signification ofauthority has been wrested from the dominant European culture

In order to focus on the complex ways in which the English

introduction 7

language has been used in these societies and to indicate their ownsense of difference we distinguish in this account between the lsquostand-ardrsquo British English inherited from the empire and the english whichthe language has become in post-colonial countries Though Britishimperialism resulted in the spread of a language English across theglobe the english of Jamaicans is not the english of Canadians Maorisor Kenyans We need to distinguish between what is proposed as astandard code English (the language of the erstwhile imperial centre)and the linguistic code english which has been transformed and sub-verted into several distinctive varieties throughout the world For thisreason the distinction between English and english will be usedthroughout our text as an indication of the various ways in which thelanguage has been employed by different linguistic communities in thepost-colonial world3

The use of these terms asserts the fact that a continuum existsbetween the various linguistic practices which constitute english usagein the modern world Although linguistically the links between Englishand the various post-colonial englishes in use today can be seen asunbroken the political reality is that English sets itself apart from allother lsquolesserrsquo variants and so demands to be interrogated about itsclaim to this special status

In practice the history of this distinction between English and eng-lish has been between the claims of a powerful lsquocentrersquo and a multitudeof intersecting usages designated as lsquoperipheriesrsquo The language ofthese lsquoperipheriesrsquo was shaped by an oppressive discourse of power Yetthey have been the site of some of the most exciting and innovativeliteratures of the modern period and this has at least in part been theresult of the energies uncovered by the political tension between theidea of a normative code and a variety of regional usages

PLACE AND DISPLACEMENT

A major feature of post-colonial literatures is the concern with placeand displacement It is here that the special post-colonial crisis of iden-tity comes into being the concern with the development or recoveryof an effective identifying relationship between self and place Indeedcritics such as D E S Maxwell have made this the defining model of

the empire writes back8

post-coloniality (see ch 1) A valid and active sense of self may havebeen eroded by dislocation resulting from migration the experience ofenslavement transportation or lsquovoluntaryrsquo removal for indenturedlabour Or it may have been destroyed by cultural denigration the con-scious and unconscious oppression of the indigenous personality andculture by a supposedly superior racial or cultural model The dialecticof place and displacement is always a feature of post-colonial societieswhether these have been created by a process of settlement interven-tion or a mixture of the two Beyond their historical and culturaldifferences place displacement and a pervasive concern with themyths of identity and authenticity are a feature common to allpost-colonial literatures in english

The alienation of vision and the crisis in self-image which this dis-placement produces is as frequently found in the accounts of Canadianlsquofree settlersrsquo as of Australian convicts FijianndashIndian or TrinidadianndashIndian indentured labourers West Indian slaves or forcibly colonizedNigerians or Bengalis Although this is pragmatically demonstrablefrom a wide range of texts it is difficult to account for by theorieswhich see this social and linguistic alienation as resulting only fromovertly oppressive forms of colonization such as slavery or conquestAn adequate account of this practice must go beyond the usual categor-ies of social alienation such as masterslave freebonded rulerruledhowever important and widespread these may be in post-colonial cul-tures After all why should the free settler formally unconstrained andtheoretically free to continue in the possession and practice oflsquoEnglishnessrsquo also show clear signs of alienation even within thefirst generation of settlement and manifest a tendency to seek analternative differentiated identity

The most widely shared discursive practice within which this alien-ation can be identified is the construction of lsquoplacersquo The gap whichopens between the experience of place and the language available todescribe it forms a classic and allpervasive feature of post-colonial textsThis gap occurs for those whose language seems inadequate to describea new place for those whose language is systematically destroyed byenslavement and for those whose language has been renderedunprivileged by the imposition of the language of a colonizing powerSome admixture of one or other of these models can describe the

introduction 9

situation of all post-colonial societies In each case a condition of alien-ation is inevitable until the colonizing language has been replaced orappropriated as english

That imperialism results in a profound linguistic alienation isobviously the case in cultures in which a pre-colonial culture is sup-pressed by military conquest or enslavement So for example anIndian writer like Raja Rao or a Nigerian writer such as ChinuaAchebe have needed to transform the language to use it in a differentway in its new context and so as Achebe says quoting James Bald-win make it lsquobear the burdenrsquo of their experience (Achebe 197562) Although Rao and Achebe write from their own place and sohave not suffered a literal geographical displacement they have toovercome an imposed gap resulting from the linguistic displacementof the pre-colonial language by English This process occurs within amore comprehensive discourse of place and displacement in thewider post-colonial context Such alienation is shared by those whosepossession of English is indisputably lsquonativersquo (in the sense of beingpossessed from birth) yet who begin to feel alienated within its prac-tice once its vocabulary categories and codes are felt to beinadequate or inappropriate to describe the fauna the physical andgeographical conditions or the cultural practices they have developedin a new land The Canadian poet Joseph Howe for instance pluckshis picture of a moose from some repository of English nurseryrhyme romanticism

the gay moose in jocund gambol springsCropping the foliage Nature round him flings

(Howe 1874 100)

Such absurdities demonstrate the pressing need these native speakersshare with those colonized peoples who were directly oppressed toescape from the inadequacies and imperial constraints of English as asocial practice They need that is to escape from the implicit body ofassumptions to which English was attached its aesthetic and socialvalues the formal and historically limited constraints of genre and theoppressive political and cultural assertion of metropolitan dominanceof centre over margin (Ngugi 1986) This is not to say that the English

the empire writes back10

language is inherently incapable of accounting for post-colonialexperience but that it needs to develop an lsquoappropriatersquo usage in orderto do so (by becoming a distinct and unique form of english) Theenergizing feature of this displacement is its capacity to interrogate andsubvert the imperial cultural formations

The pressure to develop such a usage manifests itself early in thedevelopment of lsquoenglishrsquo literatures It is therefore arguable that evenbefore the development of a conscious de-colonizing stance theexperience of a new place identifiably different in its physical charac-teristics constrains for instance the new settlers to demand a languagewhich will allow them to express their sense of lsquoOthernessrsquo Landscapeflora and fauna seasons climatic conditions are formally distinguishedfrom the place of origin as homecolony EuropeNew WorldEuropeAntipodes metropolitanprovincial and so on although ofcourse at this stage no effective models exist for expressing this senseof Otherness in a positive and creative way

POST-COLONIALITY AND THEORY

The idea of lsquopost-colonial literary theoryrsquo emerges from the inability ofEuropean theory to deal adequately with the complexities and variedcultural provenance of post-colonial writing European theories them-selves emerge from particular cultural traditions which are hidden byfalse notions of lsquothe universalrsquo Theories of style and genre assump-tions about the universal features of language epistemologies andvalue systems are all radically questioned by the practices of post-colonial writing Post-colonial theory has proceeded from the need toaddress this different practice Indigenous theories have developed toaccommodate the differences within the various cultural traditions aswell as the desire to describe in a comparative way the features sharedacross those traditions

The political and cultural monocentrism of the colonial enterprisewas a natural result of the philosophical traditions of the Europeanworld and the systems of representation which this privilegedNineteenth-century imperial expansion the culmination of the out-ward and dominating thrust of Europeans into the world beyondEurope which began during the early Renaissance was underpinned

introduction 11

in complex ways by these assumptions In the first instance thisproduced practices of cultural subservience characterized by one post-colonial critic as lsquocultural cringersquo (Phillips 1958) Subsequently theemergence of identifiable indigenous theories in reaction to thisformed an important element in the development of specific nationaland regional consciousnesses (see ch 4)

Paradoxically however imperial expansion has had a radicallydestabilizing effect on its own preoccupations and power In pushingthe colonial world to the margins of experience the lsquocentrersquo pushedconsciousness beyond the point at which monocentrism in all spheresof thought could be accepted without question In other words thealienating process which initially served to relegate the post-colonialworld to the lsquomarginrsquo turned upon itself and acted to push that worldthrough a kind of mental barrier into a position from which allexperience could be viewed as uncentred pluralistic and multifari-ous Marginality thus became an unprecedented source of creativeenergy The impetus towards decentring and pluralism has alwaysbeen present in the history of European thought and has reached itslatest development in post-structuralism But the situation of margin-alized societies and cultures enabled them to come to this positionmuch earlier and more directly (Brydon 1984b) These notions areimplicit in post-colonial texts from the imperial period to the presentday

The task of this book is twofold first to identify the range andnature of these post-colonial texts and second to describe the varioustheories which have emerged so far to account for them So in the firstchapter we consider the development of descriptive models of post-colonial writing Since it is not possible to read post-colonial textswithout coming to terms with the ways in which they appropriate anddeploy the material of linguistic culture in the second chapter weoutline the process by which language is captured to form a distinctivediscursive practice In the third chapter we demonstrate throughsymptomatic readings of texts how post-colonial writing interactswith the social and material practices of colonialism One of the majorpurposes of this book is to explain the nature of existing post-colonialtheory and the way in which it interacts with and dismantles some ofthe assumptions of European theory In the fourth chapter we discuss

the empire writes back12

the issues in the development of indigenous post-colonial theories andin the fifth we examine the larger implications of post-coloniality fortheories of language for literary theory and for social and politicalanalysis in general

introduction 13

1CUTTING THE GROUND

Critical models of post-colonialliteratures

As writers and critics became aware of the special character ofpost-colonial texts they saw the need to develop an adequate model toaccount for them Four major models have emerged to date firstlsquonationalrsquo or regional models which emphasize the distinctive featuresof the particular national or regional culture second race-basedmodels which identify certain shared characteristics across variousnational literatures such as the common racial inheritance in litera-tures of the African diaspora addressed by the lsquoBlack writingrsquo modelthird comparative models of varying complexity which seek toaccount for particular linguistic historical and cultural features acrosstwo or more post-colonial literatures fourth more comprehensivecomparative models which argue for features such as hybridity andsyncreticity as constitutive elements of all post-colonial literatures(syncretism is the process by which previously distinct linguistic cat-egories and by extension cultural formations merge into a singlenew form) These models often operate as assumptions within criticalpractice rather than specific and discrete schools of thought in any

discussion of post-colonial writing a number of them may be operat-ing at the same time

NATIONAL AND REGIONAL MODELS

The first post-colonial society to develop a lsquonationalrsquo literature was theUSA The emergence of a distinctive American literature in the lateeighteenth century raised inevitable questions about the relationshipbetween literature and place between literature and nationality andparticularly about the suitability of inherited literary forms Ideas aboutnew kinds of literature were part of the optimistic progression tonationhood because it seemed that this was one of the most potentareas in which to express difference from Britain Writers like CharlesBrockden Brown who attempted to indigenize British forms like thegothic and the sentimental novel soon realized that with the change inlocation and culture it was not possible to import form and conceptwithout radical alteration (Fiedler 1960 Ringe 1966)

In many ways the American experience and its attempts to producea new kind of literature can be seen to be the model for all laterpost-colonial writing1 The first thing it showed was that some ofa post-colonial countryrsquos most deeply held linguistic and cultural traitsdepend upon its relationship with the colonizing power particularlythe defining contrast between European metropolis and lsquofrontierrsquo (seeFussell 1965) Once the American Revolution had forced the questionof separate nationality and the economic and political successes of theemerging nation had begun to be taken for granted American litera-ture as a distinct collection of texts also began to be accepted But it wasaccepted as an offshoot of the lsquoparent treersquo Such organic metaphorsand others like lsquoparentndashchildrsquo and lsquostreamndashtributaryrsquo acted to keep thenew literature in its place The plant and parent metaphors stressed ageexperience roots tradition and most importantly the connectionbetween antiquity and value They implied the same distinctions asthose existing between metropolis and frontier parents are moreexperienced more important more substantial less brash than theiroffspring Above all they are the origin and therefore claim the finalauthority in questions of taste and value

But as the extensive literature of the USA developed different

cutting the ground 15

characteristics from that of Britain and established its right to be con-sidered independently the concept of national literary differenceslsquowithinrsquo English writing became established The eventual consequenceof this has been that lsquonewerrsquo literatures from countries such as NigeriaAustralia and India could also be discussed as discrete national forma-tions rather than as lsquobranches of the treersquo Their literatures could beconsidered in relation to the social and political history of each coun-try and could be read as a source of important images of nationalidentity

The development of national literatures and criticism is fundamentalto the whole enterprise of post-colonial studies Without such devel-opments at the national level and without the comparative studiesbetween national traditions to which these lead no discourse of thepost-colonial could have emerged Nor is it simply a matter of devel-opment from one stage to another since all post-colonial studies con-tinue to depend upon national literatures and criticism The study ofnational traditions is the first and most vital stage of the processof rejecting the claims of the centre to exclusivity It is the beginning ofwhat Nigerian writer Wole Soyinka has characterized as the lsquoprocess ofself-apprehensionrsquo (Soyinka 1976 xi) Recent theories of a generalpost-colonial discourse question essentialist formulations which maylead to nationalist and racist orthodoxies but they do not deny thegreat importance of maintaining each literaturersquos sense of specific dif-ference It is this sense of difference which constitutes each nationalliteraturersquos mode of self-apprehension and its claim to be a self-constituting entity However nationalism in which some partial truthor clicheacute is elevated to orthodoxy is a danger implicit in such nationalconceptions of literary production The impetus towards national self-realization in critical assessments of literature all too often fails to stopshort of nationalist myth

Larger geographical models which cross the boundaries of languagenationality or race to generate the concept of a regional literature suchas West Indian or South Pacific literature may also share some of thelimitations of the national model While the idea of an lsquoAfricanrsquo litera-ture for instance has a powerful appeal to writers and critics in thevarious African countries it has only limited application as a descrip-tive label African and European critics have produced several regional

the empire writes back16

and national studies which reflect the widespread political economicand cultural differences between modern African countries (Gurr andCalder 1974 Lindfors 1975 Taiwo 1976 Ogungbesan 1979)

Clearly some regional groupings are more likely to gain acceptancein the regions themselves than are others and will derive from a col-lective identity evident in other ways This is true of the West IndiesAlthough the Federation of the West Indies failed the english-speakingcountries there still field a regional cricket team Both the West Indiesand the South Pacific have regional universities with a significant inputinto literary production and discussion lsquoWest Indianrsquo literature hasalmost always been considered regionally rather than nationally Therehave been no major studies of Jamaican or Trinidadian literatures asdiscrete traditions A different regional grouping emphasizing geo-graphical and historical determinants rather than linguistic ones hasalso developed to explore lsquoCaribbeanrsquo literature setting literature inenglish from the region alongside that written in spanish french andother European languages (Allis 1982)

Despite such variants on the national model most of the englishliteratures outside Britain have been considered as individual nationalenterprises forming and reflecting each countryrsquos culture The inevit-able consequence of this is a gradual blurring of the distinctionbetween the national and the nationalist Nationalism has usuallyincluded a healthy repudiation of British and US hegemony observablein publishing education and the public sponsorship of writing Yet alltoo often nationalist criticism by failing to alter the terms of the dis-course within which it operates has participated implicitly or evenexplicitly in a discourse ultimately controlled by the very imperialpower its nationalist assertion is designed to exclude Emphasis mayhave been transferred to the national literature but the theoreticalassumptions critical perspectives and value judgements made haveoften replicated those of the British establishment

COMPARISONS BETWEEN TWO OR MORE REGIONS

Theories and models of post-colonial literatures could not emergeuntil the separate colonies were viewed in a framework centred ontheir own literary and cultural traditions Victorian Britain had exulted

cutting the ground 17

economics and increasingly in the vital new area of the mass mediaBritain and the other European imperial powers have been super-seded by the emergent power of the USA Nevertheless through theliterary canon the body of British texts which all too frequently stillacts as a touchstone of taste and value and through RS-English(Received Standard English) which asserts the English of south-eastEngland as a universal norm the weight of antiquity continues todominate cultural production in much of the post-colonial worldThis cultural hegemony has been maintained through canonicalassumptions about literary activity and through attitudes to post-colonial literatures which identify them as isolated national off-shootsof English literature and which therefore relegate them to marginaland subordinate positions More recently as the range and strength ofthese literatures has become undeniable a process of incorporation hasbegun in which employing Eurocentric standards of judgement thecentre has sought to claim those works and writers of which itapproves as British2 In all these respects the parallel between the situ-ation of post-colonial writing and that of feminist writing is striking(see ch 5)

LANGUAGE

One of the main features of imperial oppression is control over lan-guage The imperial education system installs a lsquostandardrsquo version ofthe metropolitan language as the norm and marginalizes all lsquovariantsrsquoas impurities As a character in Mrs Campbell Praedrsquos nineteenth-century Australian novel Policy and Passion puts it lsquoTo be colonial is to talkAustralian slang to be everything that is abominablersquo (CampbellPraed 1881154) Language becomes the medium through which ahierarchical structure of power is perpetuated and the mediumthrough which conceptions of lsquotruthrsquo lsquoorderrsquo and lsquorealityrsquo becomeestablished Such power is rejected in the emergence of an effectivepost-colonial voice For this reason the discussion of post-colonialwriting which follows is largely a discussion of the process by whichthe language with its power and the writing with its signification ofauthority has been wrested from the dominant European culture

In order to focus on the complex ways in which the English

introduction 7

language has been used in these societies and to indicate their ownsense of difference we distinguish in this account between the lsquostand-ardrsquo British English inherited from the empire and the english whichthe language has become in post-colonial countries Though Britishimperialism resulted in the spread of a language English across theglobe the english of Jamaicans is not the english of Canadians Maorisor Kenyans We need to distinguish between what is proposed as astandard code English (the language of the erstwhile imperial centre)and the linguistic code english which has been transformed and sub-verted into several distinctive varieties throughout the world For thisreason the distinction between English and english will be usedthroughout our text as an indication of the various ways in which thelanguage has been employed by different linguistic communities in thepost-colonial world3

The use of these terms asserts the fact that a continuum existsbetween the various linguistic practices which constitute english usagein the modern world Although linguistically the links between Englishand the various post-colonial englishes in use today can be seen asunbroken the political reality is that English sets itself apart from allother lsquolesserrsquo variants and so demands to be interrogated about itsclaim to this special status

In practice the history of this distinction between English and eng-lish has been between the claims of a powerful lsquocentrersquo and a multitudeof intersecting usages designated as lsquoperipheriesrsquo The language ofthese lsquoperipheriesrsquo was shaped by an oppressive discourse of power Yetthey have been the site of some of the most exciting and innovativeliteratures of the modern period and this has at least in part been theresult of the energies uncovered by the political tension between theidea of a normative code and a variety of regional usages

PLACE AND DISPLACEMENT

A major feature of post-colonial literatures is the concern with placeand displacement It is here that the special post-colonial crisis of iden-tity comes into being the concern with the development or recoveryof an effective identifying relationship between self and place Indeedcritics such as D E S Maxwell have made this the defining model of

the empire writes back8

post-coloniality (see ch 1) A valid and active sense of self may havebeen eroded by dislocation resulting from migration the experience ofenslavement transportation or lsquovoluntaryrsquo removal for indenturedlabour Or it may have been destroyed by cultural denigration the con-scious and unconscious oppression of the indigenous personality andculture by a supposedly superior racial or cultural model The dialecticof place and displacement is always a feature of post-colonial societieswhether these have been created by a process of settlement interven-tion or a mixture of the two Beyond their historical and culturaldifferences place displacement and a pervasive concern with themyths of identity and authenticity are a feature common to allpost-colonial literatures in english

The alienation of vision and the crisis in self-image which this dis-placement produces is as frequently found in the accounts of Canadianlsquofree settlersrsquo as of Australian convicts FijianndashIndian or TrinidadianndashIndian indentured labourers West Indian slaves or forcibly colonizedNigerians or Bengalis Although this is pragmatically demonstrablefrom a wide range of texts it is difficult to account for by theorieswhich see this social and linguistic alienation as resulting only fromovertly oppressive forms of colonization such as slavery or conquestAn adequate account of this practice must go beyond the usual categor-ies of social alienation such as masterslave freebonded rulerruledhowever important and widespread these may be in post-colonial cul-tures After all why should the free settler formally unconstrained andtheoretically free to continue in the possession and practice oflsquoEnglishnessrsquo also show clear signs of alienation even within thefirst generation of settlement and manifest a tendency to seek analternative differentiated identity

The most widely shared discursive practice within which this alien-ation can be identified is the construction of lsquoplacersquo The gap whichopens between the experience of place and the language available todescribe it forms a classic and allpervasive feature of post-colonial textsThis gap occurs for those whose language seems inadequate to describea new place for those whose language is systematically destroyed byenslavement and for those whose language has been renderedunprivileged by the imposition of the language of a colonizing powerSome admixture of one or other of these models can describe the

introduction 9

situation of all post-colonial societies In each case a condition of alien-ation is inevitable until the colonizing language has been replaced orappropriated as english

That imperialism results in a profound linguistic alienation isobviously the case in cultures in which a pre-colonial culture is sup-pressed by military conquest or enslavement So for example anIndian writer like Raja Rao or a Nigerian writer such as ChinuaAchebe have needed to transform the language to use it in a differentway in its new context and so as Achebe says quoting James Bald-win make it lsquobear the burdenrsquo of their experience (Achebe 197562) Although Rao and Achebe write from their own place and sohave not suffered a literal geographical displacement they have toovercome an imposed gap resulting from the linguistic displacementof the pre-colonial language by English This process occurs within amore comprehensive discourse of place and displacement in thewider post-colonial context Such alienation is shared by those whosepossession of English is indisputably lsquonativersquo (in the sense of beingpossessed from birth) yet who begin to feel alienated within its prac-tice once its vocabulary categories and codes are felt to beinadequate or inappropriate to describe the fauna the physical andgeographical conditions or the cultural practices they have developedin a new land The Canadian poet Joseph Howe for instance pluckshis picture of a moose from some repository of English nurseryrhyme romanticism

the gay moose in jocund gambol springsCropping the foliage Nature round him flings

(Howe 1874 100)

Such absurdities demonstrate the pressing need these native speakersshare with those colonized peoples who were directly oppressed toescape from the inadequacies and imperial constraints of English as asocial practice They need that is to escape from the implicit body ofassumptions to which English was attached its aesthetic and socialvalues the formal and historically limited constraints of genre and theoppressive political and cultural assertion of metropolitan dominanceof centre over margin (Ngugi 1986) This is not to say that the English

the empire writes back10

language is inherently incapable of accounting for post-colonialexperience but that it needs to develop an lsquoappropriatersquo usage in orderto do so (by becoming a distinct and unique form of english) Theenergizing feature of this displacement is its capacity to interrogate andsubvert the imperial cultural formations

The pressure to develop such a usage manifests itself early in thedevelopment of lsquoenglishrsquo literatures It is therefore arguable that evenbefore the development of a conscious de-colonizing stance theexperience of a new place identifiably different in its physical charac-teristics constrains for instance the new settlers to demand a languagewhich will allow them to express their sense of lsquoOthernessrsquo Landscapeflora and fauna seasons climatic conditions are formally distinguishedfrom the place of origin as homecolony EuropeNew WorldEuropeAntipodes metropolitanprovincial and so on although ofcourse at this stage no effective models exist for expressing this senseof Otherness in a positive and creative way

POST-COLONIALITY AND THEORY

The idea of lsquopost-colonial literary theoryrsquo emerges from the inability ofEuropean theory to deal adequately with the complexities and variedcultural provenance of post-colonial writing European theories them-selves emerge from particular cultural traditions which are hidden byfalse notions of lsquothe universalrsquo Theories of style and genre assump-tions about the universal features of language epistemologies andvalue systems are all radically questioned by the practices of post-colonial writing Post-colonial theory has proceeded from the need toaddress this different practice Indigenous theories have developed toaccommodate the differences within the various cultural traditions aswell as the desire to describe in a comparative way the features sharedacross those traditions

The political and cultural monocentrism of the colonial enterprisewas a natural result of the philosophical traditions of the Europeanworld and the systems of representation which this privilegedNineteenth-century imperial expansion the culmination of the out-ward and dominating thrust of Europeans into the world beyondEurope which began during the early Renaissance was underpinned

introduction 11

in complex ways by these assumptions In the first instance thisproduced practices of cultural subservience characterized by one post-colonial critic as lsquocultural cringersquo (Phillips 1958) Subsequently theemergence of identifiable indigenous theories in reaction to thisformed an important element in the development of specific nationaland regional consciousnesses (see ch 4)

Paradoxically however imperial expansion has had a radicallydestabilizing effect on its own preoccupations and power In pushingthe colonial world to the margins of experience the lsquocentrersquo pushedconsciousness beyond the point at which monocentrism in all spheresof thought could be accepted without question In other words thealienating process which initially served to relegate the post-colonialworld to the lsquomarginrsquo turned upon itself and acted to push that worldthrough a kind of mental barrier into a position from which allexperience could be viewed as uncentred pluralistic and multifari-ous Marginality thus became an unprecedented source of creativeenergy The impetus towards decentring and pluralism has alwaysbeen present in the history of European thought and has reached itslatest development in post-structuralism But the situation of margin-alized societies and cultures enabled them to come to this positionmuch earlier and more directly (Brydon 1984b) These notions areimplicit in post-colonial texts from the imperial period to the presentday

The task of this book is twofold first to identify the range andnature of these post-colonial texts and second to describe the varioustheories which have emerged so far to account for them So in the firstchapter we consider the development of descriptive models of post-colonial writing Since it is not possible to read post-colonial textswithout coming to terms with the ways in which they appropriate anddeploy the material of linguistic culture in the second chapter weoutline the process by which language is captured to form a distinctivediscursive practice In the third chapter we demonstrate throughsymptomatic readings of texts how post-colonial writing interactswith the social and material practices of colonialism One of the majorpurposes of this book is to explain the nature of existing post-colonialtheory and the way in which it interacts with and dismantles some ofthe assumptions of European theory In the fourth chapter we discuss

the empire writes back12

the issues in the development of indigenous post-colonial theories andin the fifth we examine the larger implications of post-coloniality fortheories of language for literary theory and for social and politicalanalysis in general

introduction 13

1CUTTING THE GROUND

Critical models of post-colonialliteratures

As writers and critics became aware of the special character ofpost-colonial texts they saw the need to develop an adequate model toaccount for them Four major models have emerged to date firstlsquonationalrsquo or regional models which emphasize the distinctive featuresof the particular national or regional culture second race-basedmodels which identify certain shared characteristics across variousnational literatures such as the common racial inheritance in litera-tures of the African diaspora addressed by the lsquoBlack writingrsquo modelthird comparative models of varying complexity which seek toaccount for particular linguistic historical and cultural features acrosstwo or more post-colonial literatures fourth more comprehensivecomparative models which argue for features such as hybridity andsyncreticity as constitutive elements of all post-colonial literatures(syncretism is the process by which previously distinct linguistic cat-egories and by extension cultural formations merge into a singlenew form) These models often operate as assumptions within criticalpractice rather than specific and discrete schools of thought in any

discussion of post-colonial writing a number of them may be operat-ing at the same time

NATIONAL AND REGIONAL MODELS

The first post-colonial society to develop a lsquonationalrsquo literature was theUSA The emergence of a distinctive American literature in the lateeighteenth century raised inevitable questions about the relationshipbetween literature and place between literature and nationality andparticularly about the suitability of inherited literary forms Ideas aboutnew kinds of literature were part of the optimistic progression tonationhood because it seemed that this was one of the most potentareas in which to express difference from Britain Writers like CharlesBrockden Brown who attempted to indigenize British forms like thegothic and the sentimental novel soon realized that with the change inlocation and culture it was not possible to import form and conceptwithout radical alteration (Fiedler 1960 Ringe 1966)

In many ways the American experience and its attempts to producea new kind of literature can be seen to be the model for all laterpost-colonial writing1 The first thing it showed was that some ofa post-colonial countryrsquos most deeply held linguistic and cultural traitsdepend upon its relationship with the colonizing power particularlythe defining contrast between European metropolis and lsquofrontierrsquo (seeFussell 1965) Once the American Revolution had forced the questionof separate nationality and the economic and political successes of theemerging nation had begun to be taken for granted American litera-ture as a distinct collection of texts also began to be accepted But it wasaccepted as an offshoot of the lsquoparent treersquo Such organic metaphorsand others like lsquoparentndashchildrsquo and lsquostreamndashtributaryrsquo acted to keep thenew literature in its place The plant and parent metaphors stressed ageexperience roots tradition and most importantly the connectionbetween antiquity and value They implied the same distinctions asthose existing between metropolis and frontier parents are moreexperienced more important more substantial less brash than theiroffspring Above all they are the origin and therefore claim the finalauthority in questions of taste and value

But as the extensive literature of the USA developed different

cutting the ground 15

characteristics from that of Britain and established its right to be con-sidered independently the concept of national literary differenceslsquowithinrsquo English writing became established The eventual consequenceof this has been that lsquonewerrsquo literatures from countries such as NigeriaAustralia and India could also be discussed as discrete national forma-tions rather than as lsquobranches of the treersquo Their literatures could beconsidered in relation to the social and political history of each coun-try and could be read as a source of important images of nationalidentity

The development of national literatures and criticism is fundamentalto the whole enterprise of post-colonial studies Without such devel-opments at the national level and without the comparative studiesbetween national traditions to which these lead no discourse of thepost-colonial could have emerged Nor is it simply a matter of devel-opment from one stage to another since all post-colonial studies con-tinue to depend upon national literatures and criticism The study ofnational traditions is the first and most vital stage of the processof rejecting the claims of the centre to exclusivity It is the beginning ofwhat Nigerian writer Wole Soyinka has characterized as the lsquoprocess ofself-apprehensionrsquo (Soyinka 1976 xi) Recent theories of a generalpost-colonial discourse question essentialist formulations which maylead to nationalist and racist orthodoxies but they do not deny thegreat importance of maintaining each literaturersquos sense of specific dif-ference It is this sense of difference which constitutes each nationalliteraturersquos mode of self-apprehension and its claim to be a self-constituting entity However nationalism in which some partial truthor clicheacute is elevated to orthodoxy is a danger implicit in such nationalconceptions of literary production The impetus towards national self-realization in critical assessments of literature all too often fails to stopshort of nationalist myth

Larger geographical models which cross the boundaries of languagenationality or race to generate the concept of a regional literature suchas West Indian or South Pacific literature may also share some of thelimitations of the national model While the idea of an lsquoAfricanrsquo litera-ture for instance has a powerful appeal to writers and critics in thevarious African countries it has only limited application as a descrip-tive label African and European critics have produced several regional

the empire writes back16

and national studies which reflect the widespread political economicand cultural differences between modern African countries (Gurr andCalder 1974 Lindfors 1975 Taiwo 1976 Ogungbesan 1979)

Clearly some regional groupings are more likely to gain acceptancein the regions themselves than are others and will derive from a col-lective identity evident in other ways This is true of the West IndiesAlthough the Federation of the West Indies failed the english-speakingcountries there still field a regional cricket team Both the West Indiesand the South Pacific have regional universities with a significant inputinto literary production and discussion lsquoWest Indianrsquo literature hasalmost always been considered regionally rather than nationally Therehave been no major studies of Jamaican or Trinidadian literatures asdiscrete traditions A different regional grouping emphasizing geo-graphical and historical determinants rather than linguistic ones hasalso developed to explore lsquoCaribbeanrsquo literature setting literature inenglish from the region alongside that written in spanish french andother European languages (Allis 1982)

Despite such variants on the national model most of the englishliteratures outside Britain have been considered as individual nationalenterprises forming and reflecting each countryrsquos culture The inevit-able consequence of this is a gradual blurring of the distinctionbetween the national and the nationalist Nationalism has usuallyincluded a healthy repudiation of British and US hegemony observablein publishing education and the public sponsorship of writing Yet alltoo often nationalist criticism by failing to alter the terms of the dis-course within which it operates has participated implicitly or evenexplicitly in a discourse ultimately controlled by the very imperialpower its nationalist assertion is designed to exclude Emphasis mayhave been transferred to the national literature but the theoreticalassumptions critical perspectives and value judgements made haveoften replicated those of the British establishment

COMPARISONS BETWEEN TWO OR MORE REGIONS

Theories and models of post-colonial literatures could not emergeuntil the separate colonies were viewed in a framework centred ontheir own literary and cultural traditions Victorian Britain had exulted

cutting the ground 17

language has been used in these societies and to indicate their ownsense of difference we distinguish in this account between the lsquostand-ardrsquo British English inherited from the empire and the english whichthe language has become in post-colonial countries Though Britishimperialism resulted in the spread of a language English across theglobe the english of Jamaicans is not the english of Canadians Maorisor Kenyans We need to distinguish between what is proposed as astandard code English (the language of the erstwhile imperial centre)and the linguistic code english which has been transformed and sub-verted into several distinctive varieties throughout the world For thisreason the distinction between English and english will be usedthroughout our text as an indication of the various ways in which thelanguage has been employed by different linguistic communities in thepost-colonial world3

The use of these terms asserts the fact that a continuum existsbetween the various linguistic practices which constitute english usagein the modern world Although linguistically the links between Englishand the various post-colonial englishes in use today can be seen asunbroken the political reality is that English sets itself apart from allother lsquolesserrsquo variants and so demands to be interrogated about itsclaim to this special status

In practice the history of this distinction between English and eng-lish has been between the claims of a powerful lsquocentrersquo and a multitudeof intersecting usages designated as lsquoperipheriesrsquo The language ofthese lsquoperipheriesrsquo was shaped by an oppressive discourse of power Yetthey have been the site of some of the most exciting and innovativeliteratures of the modern period and this has at least in part been theresult of the energies uncovered by the political tension between theidea of a normative code and a variety of regional usages

PLACE AND DISPLACEMENT

A major feature of post-colonial literatures is the concern with placeand displacement It is here that the special post-colonial crisis of iden-tity comes into being the concern with the development or recoveryof an effective identifying relationship between self and place Indeedcritics such as D E S Maxwell have made this the defining model of

the empire writes back8

post-coloniality (see ch 1) A valid and active sense of self may havebeen eroded by dislocation resulting from migration the experience ofenslavement transportation or lsquovoluntaryrsquo removal for indenturedlabour Or it may have been destroyed by cultural denigration the con-scious and unconscious oppression of the indigenous personality andculture by a supposedly superior racial or cultural model The dialecticof place and displacement is always a feature of post-colonial societieswhether these have been created by a process of settlement interven-tion or a mixture of the two Beyond their historical and culturaldifferences place displacement and a pervasive concern with themyths of identity and authenticity are a feature common to allpost-colonial literatures in english

The alienation of vision and the crisis in self-image which this dis-placement produces is as frequently found in the accounts of Canadianlsquofree settlersrsquo as of Australian convicts FijianndashIndian or TrinidadianndashIndian indentured labourers West Indian slaves or forcibly colonizedNigerians or Bengalis Although this is pragmatically demonstrablefrom a wide range of texts it is difficult to account for by theorieswhich see this social and linguistic alienation as resulting only fromovertly oppressive forms of colonization such as slavery or conquestAn adequate account of this practice must go beyond the usual categor-ies of social alienation such as masterslave freebonded rulerruledhowever important and widespread these may be in post-colonial cul-tures After all why should the free settler formally unconstrained andtheoretically free to continue in the possession and practice oflsquoEnglishnessrsquo also show clear signs of alienation even within thefirst generation of settlement and manifest a tendency to seek analternative differentiated identity

The most widely shared discursive practice within which this alien-ation can be identified is the construction of lsquoplacersquo The gap whichopens between the experience of place and the language available todescribe it forms a classic and allpervasive feature of post-colonial textsThis gap occurs for those whose language seems inadequate to describea new place for those whose language is systematically destroyed byenslavement and for those whose language has been renderedunprivileged by the imposition of the language of a colonizing powerSome admixture of one or other of these models can describe the

introduction 9

situation of all post-colonial societies In each case a condition of alien-ation is inevitable until the colonizing language has been replaced orappropriated as english

That imperialism results in a profound linguistic alienation isobviously the case in cultures in which a pre-colonial culture is sup-pressed by military conquest or enslavement So for example anIndian writer like Raja Rao or a Nigerian writer such as ChinuaAchebe have needed to transform the language to use it in a differentway in its new context and so as Achebe says quoting James Bald-win make it lsquobear the burdenrsquo of their experience (Achebe 197562) Although Rao and Achebe write from their own place and sohave not suffered a literal geographical displacement they have toovercome an imposed gap resulting from the linguistic displacementof the pre-colonial language by English This process occurs within amore comprehensive discourse of place and displacement in thewider post-colonial context Such alienation is shared by those whosepossession of English is indisputably lsquonativersquo (in the sense of beingpossessed from birth) yet who begin to feel alienated within its prac-tice once its vocabulary categories and codes are felt to beinadequate or inappropriate to describe the fauna the physical andgeographical conditions or the cultural practices they have developedin a new land The Canadian poet Joseph Howe for instance pluckshis picture of a moose from some repository of English nurseryrhyme romanticism

the gay moose in jocund gambol springsCropping the foliage Nature round him flings

(Howe 1874 100)

Such absurdities demonstrate the pressing need these native speakersshare with those colonized peoples who were directly oppressed toescape from the inadequacies and imperial constraints of English as asocial practice They need that is to escape from the implicit body ofassumptions to which English was attached its aesthetic and socialvalues the formal and historically limited constraints of genre and theoppressive political and cultural assertion of metropolitan dominanceof centre over margin (Ngugi 1986) This is not to say that the English

the empire writes back10

language is inherently incapable of accounting for post-colonialexperience but that it needs to develop an lsquoappropriatersquo usage in orderto do so (by becoming a distinct and unique form of english) Theenergizing feature of this displacement is its capacity to interrogate andsubvert the imperial cultural formations

The pressure to develop such a usage manifests itself early in thedevelopment of lsquoenglishrsquo literatures It is therefore arguable that evenbefore the development of a conscious de-colonizing stance theexperience of a new place identifiably different in its physical charac-teristics constrains for instance the new settlers to demand a languagewhich will allow them to express their sense of lsquoOthernessrsquo Landscapeflora and fauna seasons climatic conditions are formally distinguishedfrom the place of origin as homecolony EuropeNew WorldEuropeAntipodes metropolitanprovincial and so on although ofcourse at this stage no effective models exist for expressing this senseof Otherness in a positive and creative way

POST-COLONIALITY AND THEORY

The idea of lsquopost-colonial literary theoryrsquo emerges from the inability ofEuropean theory to deal adequately with the complexities and variedcultural provenance of post-colonial writing European theories them-selves emerge from particular cultural traditions which are hidden byfalse notions of lsquothe universalrsquo Theories of style and genre assump-tions about the universal features of language epistemologies andvalue systems are all radically questioned by the practices of post-colonial writing Post-colonial theory has proceeded from the need toaddress this different practice Indigenous theories have developed toaccommodate the differences within the various cultural traditions aswell as the desire to describe in a comparative way the features sharedacross those traditions

The political and cultural monocentrism of the colonial enterprisewas a natural result of the philosophical traditions of the Europeanworld and the systems of representation which this privilegedNineteenth-century imperial expansion the culmination of the out-ward and dominating thrust of Europeans into the world beyondEurope which began during the early Renaissance was underpinned

introduction 11

in complex ways by these assumptions In the first instance thisproduced practices of cultural subservience characterized by one post-colonial critic as lsquocultural cringersquo (Phillips 1958) Subsequently theemergence of identifiable indigenous theories in reaction to thisformed an important element in the development of specific nationaland regional consciousnesses (see ch 4)

Paradoxically however imperial expansion has had a radicallydestabilizing effect on its own preoccupations and power In pushingthe colonial world to the margins of experience the lsquocentrersquo pushedconsciousness beyond the point at which monocentrism in all spheresof thought could be accepted without question In other words thealienating process which initially served to relegate the post-colonialworld to the lsquomarginrsquo turned upon itself and acted to push that worldthrough a kind of mental barrier into a position from which allexperience could be viewed as uncentred pluralistic and multifari-ous Marginality thus became an unprecedented source of creativeenergy The impetus towards decentring and pluralism has alwaysbeen present in the history of European thought and has reached itslatest development in post-structuralism But the situation of margin-alized societies and cultures enabled them to come to this positionmuch earlier and more directly (Brydon 1984b) These notions areimplicit in post-colonial texts from the imperial period to the presentday

The task of this book is twofold first to identify the range andnature of these post-colonial texts and second to describe the varioustheories which have emerged so far to account for them So in the firstchapter we consider the development of descriptive models of post-colonial writing Since it is not possible to read post-colonial textswithout coming to terms with the ways in which they appropriate anddeploy the material of linguistic culture in the second chapter weoutline the process by which language is captured to form a distinctivediscursive practice In the third chapter we demonstrate throughsymptomatic readings of texts how post-colonial writing interactswith the social and material practices of colonialism One of the majorpurposes of this book is to explain the nature of existing post-colonialtheory and the way in which it interacts with and dismantles some ofthe assumptions of European theory In the fourth chapter we discuss

the empire writes back12

the issues in the development of indigenous post-colonial theories andin the fifth we examine the larger implications of post-coloniality fortheories of language for literary theory and for social and politicalanalysis in general

introduction 13

1CUTTING THE GROUND

Critical models of post-colonialliteratures

As writers and critics became aware of the special character ofpost-colonial texts they saw the need to develop an adequate model toaccount for them Four major models have emerged to date firstlsquonationalrsquo or regional models which emphasize the distinctive featuresof the particular national or regional culture second race-basedmodels which identify certain shared characteristics across variousnational literatures such as the common racial inheritance in litera-tures of the African diaspora addressed by the lsquoBlack writingrsquo modelthird comparative models of varying complexity which seek toaccount for particular linguistic historical and cultural features acrosstwo or more post-colonial literatures fourth more comprehensivecomparative models which argue for features such as hybridity andsyncreticity as constitutive elements of all post-colonial literatures(syncretism is the process by which previously distinct linguistic cat-egories and by extension cultural formations merge into a singlenew form) These models often operate as assumptions within criticalpractice rather than specific and discrete schools of thought in any

discussion of post-colonial writing a number of them may be operat-ing at the same time

NATIONAL AND REGIONAL MODELS

The first post-colonial society to develop a lsquonationalrsquo literature was theUSA The emergence of a distinctive American literature in the lateeighteenth century raised inevitable questions about the relationshipbetween literature and place between literature and nationality andparticularly about the suitability of inherited literary forms Ideas aboutnew kinds of literature were part of the optimistic progression tonationhood because it seemed that this was one of the most potentareas in which to express difference from Britain Writers like CharlesBrockden Brown who attempted to indigenize British forms like thegothic and the sentimental novel soon realized that with the change inlocation and culture it was not possible to import form and conceptwithout radical alteration (Fiedler 1960 Ringe 1966)

In many ways the American experience and its attempts to producea new kind of literature can be seen to be the model for all laterpost-colonial writing1 The first thing it showed was that some ofa post-colonial countryrsquos most deeply held linguistic and cultural traitsdepend upon its relationship with the colonizing power particularlythe defining contrast between European metropolis and lsquofrontierrsquo (seeFussell 1965) Once the American Revolution had forced the questionof separate nationality and the economic and political successes of theemerging nation had begun to be taken for granted American litera-ture as a distinct collection of texts also began to be accepted But it wasaccepted as an offshoot of the lsquoparent treersquo Such organic metaphorsand others like lsquoparentndashchildrsquo and lsquostreamndashtributaryrsquo acted to keep thenew literature in its place The plant and parent metaphors stressed ageexperience roots tradition and most importantly the connectionbetween antiquity and value They implied the same distinctions asthose existing between metropolis and frontier parents are moreexperienced more important more substantial less brash than theiroffspring Above all they are the origin and therefore claim the finalauthority in questions of taste and value

But as the extensive literature of the USA developed different

cutting the ground 15

characteristics from that of Britain and established its right to be con-sidered independently the concept of national literary differenceslsquowithinrsquo English writing became established The eventual consequenceof this has been that lsquonewerrsquo literatures from countries such as NigeriaAustralia and India could also be discussed as discrete national forma-tions rather than as lsquobranches of the treersquo Their literatures could beconsidered in relation to the social and political history of each coun-try and could be read as a source of important images of nationalidentity

The development of national literatures and criticism is fundamentalto the whole enterprise of post-colonial studies Without such devel-opments at the national level and without the comparative studiesbetween national traditions to which these lead no discourse of thepost-colonial could have emerged Nor is it simply a matter of devel-opment from one stage to another since all post-colonial studies con-tinue to depend upon national literatures and criticism The study ofnational traditions is the first and most vital stage of the processof rejecting the claims of the centre to exclusivity It is the beginning ofwhat Nigerian writer Wole Soyinka has characterized as the lsquoprocess ofself-apprehensionrsquo (Soyinka 1976 xi) Recent theories of a generalpost-colonial discourse question essentialist formulations which maylead to nationalist and racist orthodoxies but they do not deny thegreat importance of maintaining each literaturersquos sense of specific dif-ference It is this sense of difference which constitutes each nationalliteraturersquos mode of self-apprehension and its claim to be a self-constituting entity However nationalism in which some partial truthor clicheacute is elevated to orthodoxy is a danger implicit in such nationalconceptions of literary production The impetus towards national self-realization in critical assessments of literature all too often fails to stopshort of nationalist myth

Larger geographical models which cross the boundaries of languagenationality or race to generate the concept of a regional literature suchas West Indian or South Pacific literature may also share some of thelimitations of the national model While the idea of an lsquoAfricanrsquo litera-ture for instance has a powerful appeal to writers and critics in thevarious African countries it has only limited application as a descrip-tive label African and European critics have produced several regional

the empire writes back16

and national studies which reflect the widespread political economicand cultural differences between modern African countries (Gurr andCalder 1974 Lindfors 1975 Taiwo 1976 Ogungbesan 1979)

Clearly some regional groupings are more likely to gain acceptancein the regions themselves than are others and will derive from a col-lective identity evident in other ways This is true of the West IndiesAlthough the Federation of the West Indies failed the english-speakingcountries there still field a regional cricket team Both the West Indiesand the South Pacific have regional universities with a significant inputinto literary production and discussion lsquoWest Indianrsquo literature hasalmost always been considered regionally rather than nationally Therehave been no major studies of Jamaican or Trinidadian literatures asdiscrete traditions A different regional grouping emphasizing geo-graphical and historical determinants rather than linguistic ones hasalso developed to explore lsquoCaribbeanrsquo literature setting literature inenglish from the region alongside that written in spanish french andother European languages (Allis 1982)

Despite such variants on the national model most of the englishliteratures outside Britain have been considered as individual nationalenterprises forming and reflecting each countryrsquos culture The inevit-able consequence of this is a gradual blurring of the distinctionbetween the national and the nationalist Nationalism has usuallyincluded a healthy repudiation of British and US hegemony observablein publishing education and the public sponsorship of writing Yet alltoo often nationalist criticism by failing to alter the terms of the dis-course within which it operates has participated implicitly or evenexplicitly in a discourse ultimately controlled by the very imperialpower its nationalist assertion is designed to exclude Emphasis mayhave been transferred to the national literature but the theoreticalassumptions critical perspectives and value judgements made haveoften replicated those of the British establishment

COMPARISONS BETWEEN TWO OR MORE REGIONS

Theories and models of post-colonial literatures could not emergeuntil the separate colonies were viewed in a framework centred ontheir own literary and cultural traditions Victorian Britain had exulted

cutting the ground 17

post-coloniality (see ch 1) A valid and active sense of self may havebeen eroded by dislocation resulting from migration the experience ofenslavement transportation or lsquovoluntaryrsquo removal for indenturedlabour Or it may have been destroyed by cultural denigration the con-scious and unconscious oppression of the indigenous personality andculture by a supposedly superior racial or cultural model The dialecticof place and displacement is always a feature of post-colonial societieswhether these have been created by a process of settlement interven-tion or a mixture of the two Beyond their historical and culturaldifferences place displacement and a pervasive concern with themyths of identity and authenticity are a feature common to allpost-colonial literatures in english

The alienation of vision and the crisis in self-image which this dis-placement produces is as frequently found in the accounts of Canadianlsquofree settlersrsquo as of Australian convicts FijianndashIndian or TrinidadianndashIndian indentured labourers West Indian slaves or forcibly colonizedNigerians or Bengalis Although this is pragmatically demonstrablefrom a wide range of texts it is difficult to account for by theorieswhich see this social and linguistic alienation as resulting only fromovertly oppressive forms of colonization such as slavery or conquestAn adequate account of this practice must go beyond the usual categor-ies of social alienation such as masterslave freebonded rulerruledhowever important and widespread these may be in post-colonial cul-tures After all why should the free settler formally unconstrained andtheoretically free to continue in the possession and practice oflsquoEnglishnessrsquo also show clear signs of alienation even within thefirst generation of settlement and manifest a tendency to seek analternative differentiated identity

The most widely shared discursive practice within which this alien-ation can be identified is the construction of lsquoplacersquo The gap whichopens between the experience of place and the language available todescribe it forms a classic and allpervasive feature of post-colonial textsThis gap occurs for those whose language seems inadequate to describea new place for those whose language is systematically destroyed byenslavement and for those whose language has been renderedunprivileged by the imposition of the language of a colonizing powerSome admixture of one or other of these models can describe the

introduction 9

situation of all post-colonial societies In each case a condition of alien-ation is inevitable until the colonizing language has been replaced orappropriated as english

That imperialism results in a profound linguistic alienation isobviously the case in cultures in which a pre-colonial culture is sup-pressed by military conquest or enslavement So for example anIndian writer like Raja Rao or a Nigerian writer such as ChinuaAchebe have needed to transform the language to use it in a differentway in its new context and so as Achebe says quoting James Bald-win make it lsquobear the burdenrsquo of their experience (Achebe 197562) Although Rao and Achebe write from their own place and sohave not suffered a literal geographical displacement they have toovercome an imposed gap resulting from the linguistic displacementof the pre-colonial language by English This process occurs within amore comprehensive discourse of place and displacement in thewider post-colonial context Such alienation is shared by those whosepossession of English is indisputably lsquonativersquo (in the sense of beingpossessed from birth) yet who begin to feel alienated within its prac-tice once its vocabulary categories and codes are felt to beinadequate or inappropriate to describe the fauna the physical andgeographical conditions or the cultural practices they have developedin a new land The Canadian poet Joseph Howe for instance pluckshis picture of a moose from some repository of English nurseryrhyme romanticism

the gay moose in jocund gambol springsCropping the foliage Nature round him flings

(Howe 1874 100)

Such absurdities demonstrate the pressing need these native speakersshare with those colonized peoples who were directly oppressed toescape from the inadequacies and imperial constraints of English as asocial practice They need that is to escape from the implicit body ofassumptions to which English was attached its aesthetic and socialvalues the formal and historically limited constraints of genre and theoppressive political and cultural assertion of metropolitan dominanceof centre over margin (Ngugi 1986) This is not to say that the English

the empire writes back10

language is inherently incapable of accounting for post-colonialexperience but that it needs to develop an lsquoappropriatersquo usage in orderto do so (by becoming a distinct and unique form of english) Theenergizing feature of this displacement is its capacity to interrogate andsubvert the imperial cultural formations

The pressure to develop such a usage manifests itself early in thedevelopment of lsquoenglishrsquo literatures It is therefore arguable that evenbefore the development of a conscious de-colonizing stance theexperience of a new place identifiably different in its physical charac-teristics constrains for instance the new settlers to demand a languagewhich will allow them to express their sense of lsquoOthernessrsquo Landscapeflora and fauna seasons climatic conditions are formally distinguishedfrom the place of origin as homecolony EuropeNew WorldEuropeAntipodes metropolitanprovincial and so on although ofcourse at this stage no effective models exist for expressing this senseof Otherness in a positive and creative way

POST-COLONIALITY AND THEORY

The idea of lsquopost-colonial literary theoryrsquo emerges from the inability ofEuropean theory to deal adequately with the complexities and variedcultural provenance of post-colonial writing European theories them-selves emerge from particular cultural traditions which are hidden byfalse notions of lsquothe universalrsquo Theories of style and genre assump-tions about the universal features of language epistemologies andvalue systems are all radically questioned by the practices of post-colonial writing Post-colonial theory has proceeded from the need toaddress this different practice Indigenous theories have developed toaccommodate the differences within the various cultural traditions aswell as the desire to describe in a comparative way the features sharedacross those traditions

The political and cultural monocentrism of the colonial enterprisewas a natural result of the philosophical traditions of the Europeanworld and the systems of representation which this privilegedNineteenth-century imperial expansion the culmination of the out-ward and dominating thrust of Europeans into the world beyondEurope which began during the early Renaissance was underpinned

introduction 11

in complex ways by these assumptions In the first instance thisproduced practices of cultural subservience characterized by one post-colonial critic as lsquocultural cringersquo (Phillips 1958) Subsequently theemergence of identifiable indigenous theories in reaction to thisformed an important element in the development of specific nationaland regional consciousnesses (see ch 4)

Paradoxically however imperial expansion has had a radicallydestabilizing effect on its own preoccupations and power In pushingthe colonial world to the margins of experience the lsquocentrersquo pushedconsciousness beyond the point at which monocentrism in all spheresof thought could be accepted without question In other words thealienating process which initially served to relegate the post-colonialworld to the lsquomarginrsquo turned upon itself and acted to push that worldthrough a kind of mental barrier into a position from which allexperience could be viewed as uncentred pluralistic and multifari-ous Marginality thus became an unprecedented source of creativeenergy The impetus towards decentring and pluralism has alwaysbeen present in the history of European thought and has reached itslatest development in post-structuralism But the situation of margin-alized societies and cultures enabled them to come to this positionmuch earlier and more directly (Brydon 1984b) These notions areimplicit in post-colonial texts from the imperial period to the presentday

The task of this book is twofold first to identify the range andnature of these post-colonial texts and second to describe the varioustheories which have emerged so far to account for them So in the firstchapter we consider the development of descriptive models of post-colonial writing Since it is not possible to read post-colonial textswithout coming to terms with the ways in which they appropriate anddeploy the material of linguistic culture in the second chapter weoutline the process by which language is captured to form a distinctivediscursive practice In the third chapter we demonstrate throughsymptomatic readings of texts how post-colonial writing interactswith the social and material practices of colonialism One of the majorpurposes of this book is to explain the nature of existing post-colonialtheory and the way in which it interacts with and dismantles some ofthe assumptions of European theory In the fourth chapter we discuss

the empire writes back12

the issues in the development of indigenous post-colonial theories andin the fifth we examine the larger implications of post-coloniality fortheories of language for literary theory and for social and politicalanalysis in general

introduction 13

1CUTTING THE GROUND

Critical models of post-colonialliteratures

As writers and critics became aware of the special character ofpost-colonial texts they saw the need to develop an adequate model toaccount for them Four major models have emerged to date firstlsquonationalrsquo or regional models which emphasize the distinctive featuresof the particular national or regional culture second race-basedmodels which identify certain shared characteristics across variousnational literatures such as the common racial inheritance in litera-tures of the African diaspora addressed by the lsquoBlack writingrsquo modelthird comparative models of varying complexity which seek toaccount for particular linguistic historical and cultural features acrosstwo or more post-colonial literatures fourth more comprehensivecomparative models which argue for features such as hybridity andsyncreticity as constitutive elements of all post-colonial literatures(syncretism is the process by which previously distinct linguistic cat-egories and by extension cultural formations merge into a singlenew form) These models often operate as assumptions within criticalpractice rather than specific and discrete schools of thought in any

discussion of post-colonial writing a number of them may be operat-ing at the same time

NATIONAL AND REGIONAL MODELS

The first post-colonial society to develop a lsquonationalrsquo literature was theUSA The emergence of a distinctive American literature in the lateeighteenth century raised inevitable questions about the relationshipbetween literature and place between literature and nationality andparticularly about the suitability of inherited literary forms Ideas aboutnew kinds of literature were part of the optimistic progression tonationhood because it seemed that this was one of the most potentareas in which to express difference from Britain Writers like CharlesBrockden Brown who attempted to indigenize British forms like thegothic and the sentimental novel soon realized that with the change inlocation and culture it was not possible to import form and conceptwithout radical alteration (Fiedler 1960 Ringe 1966)

In many ways the American experience and its attempts to producea new kind of literature can be seen to be the model for all laterpost-colonial writing1 The first thing it showed was that some ofa post-colonial countryrsquos most deeply held linguistic and cultural traitsdepend upon its relationship with the colonizing power particularlythe defining contrast between European metropolis and lsquofrontierrsquo (seeFussell 1965) Once the American Revolution had forced the questionof separate nationality and the economic and political successes of theemerging nation had begun to be taken for granted American litera-ture as a distinct collection of texts also began to be accepted But it wasaccepted as an offshoot of the lsquoparent treersquo Such organic metaphorsand others like lsquoparentndashchildrsquo and lsquostreamndashtributaryrsquo acted to keep thenew literature in its place The plant and parent metaphors stressed ageexperience roots tradition and most importantly the connectionbetween antiquity and value They implied the same distinctions asthose existing between metropolis and frontier parents are moreexperienced more important more substantial less brash than theiroffspring Above all they are the origin and therefore claim the finalauthority in questions of taste and value

But as the extensive literature of the USA developed different

cutting the ground 15

characteristics from that of Britain and established its right to be con-sidered independently the concept of national literary differenceslsquowithinrsquo English writing became established The eventual consequenceof this has been that lsquonewerrsquo literatures from countries such as NigeriaAustralia and India could also be discussed as discrete national forma-tions rather than as lsquobranches of the treersquo Their literatures could beconsidered in relation to the social and political history of each coun-try and could be read as a source of important images of nationalidentity

The development of national literatures and criticism is fundamentalto the whole enterprise of post-colonial studies Without such devel-opments at the national level and without the comparative studiesbetween national traditions to which these lead no discourse of thepost-colonial could have emerged Nor is it simply a matter of devel-opment from one stage to another since all post-colonial studies con-tinue to depend upon national literatures and criticism The study ofnational traditions is the first and most vital stage of the processof rejecting the claims of the centre to exclusivity It is the beginning ofwhat Nigerian writer Wole Soyinka has characterized as the lsquoprocess ofself-apprehensionrsquo (Soyinka 1976 xi) Recent theories of a generalpost-colonial discourse question essentialist formulations which maylead to nationalist and racist orthodoxies but they do not deny thegreat importance of maintaining each literaturersquos sense of specific dif-ference It is this sense of difference which constitutes each nationalliteraturersquos mode of self-apprehension and its claim to be a self-constituting entity However nationalism in which some partial truthor clicheacute is elevated to orthodoxy is a danger implicit in such nationalconceptions of literary production The impetus towards national self-realization in critical assessments of literature all too often fails to stopshort of nationalist myth

Larger geographical models which cross the boundaries of languagenationality or race to generate the concept of a regional literature suchas West Indian or South Pacific literature may also share some of thelimitations of the national model While the idea of an lsquoAfricanrsquo litera-ture for instance has a powerful appeal to writers and critics in thevarious African countries it has only limited application as a descrip-tive label African and European critics have produced several regional

the empire writes back16

and national studies which reflect the widespread political economicand cultural differences between modern African countries (Gurr andCalder 1974 Lindfors 1975 Taiwo 1976 Ogungbesan 1979)

Clearly some regional groupings are more likely to gain acceptancein the regions themselves than are others and will derive from a col-lective identity evident in other ways This is true of the West IndiesAlthough the Federation of the West Indies failed the english-speakingcountries there still field a regional cricket team Both the West Indiesand the South Pacific have regional universities with a significant inputinto literary production and discussion lsquoWest Indianrsquo literature hasalmost always been considered regionally rather than nationally Therehave been no major studies of Jamaican or Trinidadian literatures asdiscrete traditions A different regional grouping emphasizing geo-graphical and historical determinants rather than linguistic ones hasalso developed to explore lsquoCaribbeanrsquo literature setting literature inenglish from the region alongside that written in spanish french andother European languages (Allis 1982)

Despite such variants on the national model most of the englishliteratures outside Britain have been considered as individual nationalenterprises forming and reflecting each countryrsquos culture The inevit-able consequence of this is a gradual blurring of the distinctionbetween the national and the nationalist Nationalism has usuallyincluded a healthy repudiation of British and US hegemony observablein publishing education and the public sponsorship of writing Yet alltoo often nationalist criticism by failing to alter the terms of the dis-course within which it operates has participated implicitly or evenexplicitly in a discourse ultimately controlled by the very imperialpower its nationalist assertion is designed to exclude Emphasis mayhave been transferred to the national literature but the theoreticalassumptions critical perspectives and value judgements made haveoften replicated those of the British establishment

COMPARISONS BETWEEN TWO OR MORE REGIONS

Theories and models of post-colonial literatures could not emergeuntil the separate colonies were viewed in a framework centred ontheir own literary and cultural traditions Victorian Britain had exulted

cutting the ground 17

situation of all post-colonial societies In each case a condition of alien-ation is inevitable until the colonizing language has been replaced orappropriated as english

That imperialism results in a profound linguistic alienation isobviously the case in cultures in which a pre-colonial culture is sup-pressed by military conquest or enslavement So for example anIndian writer like Raja Rao or a Nigerian writer such as ChinuaAchebe have needed to transform the language to use it in a differentway in its new context and so as Achebe says quoting James Bald-win make it lsquobear the burdenrsquo of their experience (Achebe 197562) Although Rao and Achebe write from their own place and sohave not suffered a literal geographical displacement they have toovercome an imposed gap resulting from the linguistic displacementof the pre-colonial language by English This process occurs within amore comprehensive discourse of place and displacement in thewider post-colonial context Such alienation is shared by those whosepossession of English is indisputably lsquonativersquo (in the sense of beingpossessed from birth) yet who begin to feel alienated within its prac-tice once its vocabulary categories and codes are felt to beinadequate or inappropriate to describe the fauna the physical andgeographical conditions or the cultural practices they have developedin a new land The Canadian poet Joseph Howe for instance pluckshis picture of a moose from some repository of English nurseryrhyme romanticism

the gay moose in jocund gambol springsCropping the foliage Nature round him flings

(Howe 1874 100)

Such absurdities demonstrate the pressing need these native speakersshare with those colonized peoples who were directly oppressed toescape from the inadequacies and imperial constraints of English as asocial practice They need that is to escape from the implicit body ofassumptions to which English was attached its aesthetic and socialvalues the formal and historically limited constraints of genre and theoppressive political and cultural assertion of metropolitan dominanceof centre over margin (Ngugi 1986) This is not to say that the English

the empire writes back10

language is inherently incapable of accounting for post-colonialexperience but that it needs to develop an lsquoappropriatersquo usage in orderto do so (by becoming a distinct and unique form of english) Theenergizing feature of this displacement is its capacity to interrogate andsubvert the imperial cultural formations

The pressure to develop such a usage manifests itself early in thedevelopment of lsquoenglishrsquo literatures It is therefore arguable that evenbefore the development of a conscious de-colonizing stance theexperience of a new place identifiably different in its physical charac-teristics constrains for instance the new settlers to demand a languagewhich will allow them to express their sense of lsquoOthernessrsquo Landscapeflora and fauna seasons climatic conditions are formally distinguishedfrom the place of origin as homecolony EuropeNew WorldEuropeAntipodes metropolitanprovincial and so on although ofcourse at this stage no effective models exist for expressing this senseof Otherness in a positive and creative way

POST-COLONIALITY AND THEORY

The idea of lsquopost-colonial literary theoryrsquo emerges from the inability ofEuropean theory to deal adequately with the complexities and variedcultural provenance of post-colonial writing European theories them-selves emerge from particular cultural traditions which are hidden byfalse notions of lsquothe universalrsquo Theories of style and genre assump-tions about the universal features of language epistemologies andvalue systems are all radically questioned by the practices of post-colonial writing Post-colonial theory has proceeded from the need toaddress this different practice Indigenous theories have developed toaccommodate the differences within the various cultural traditions aswell as the desire to describe in a comparative way the features sharedacross those traditions

The political and cultural monocentrism of the colonial enterprisewas a natural result of the philosophical traditions of the Europeanworld and the systems of representation which this privilegedNineteenth-century imperial expansion the culmination of the out-ward and dominating thrust of Europeans into the world beyondEurope which began during the early Renaissance was underpinned

introduction 11

in complex ways by these assumptions In the first instance thisproduced practices of cultural subservience characterized by one post-colonial critic as lsquocultural cringersquo (Phillips 1958) Subsequently theemergence of identifiable indigenous theories in reaction to thisformed an important element in the development of specific nationaland regional consciousnesses (see ch 4)

Paradoxically however imperial expansion has had a radicallydestabilizing effect on its own preoccupations and power In pushingthe colonial world to the margins of experience the lsquocentrersquo pushedconsciousness beyond the point at which monocentrism in all spheresof thought could be accepted without question In other words thealienating process which initially served to relegate the post-colonialworld to the lsquomarginrsquo turned upon itself and acted to push that worldthrough a kind of mental barrier into a position from which allexperience could be viewed as uncentred pluralistic and multifari-ous Marginality thus became an unprecedented source of creativeenergy The impetus towards decentring and pluralism has alwaysbeen present in the history of European thought and has reached itslatest development in post-structuralism But the situation of margin-alized societies and cultures enabled them to come to this positionmuch earlier and more directly (Brydon 1984b) These notions areimplicit in post-colonial texts from the imperial period to the presentday

The task of this book is twofold first to identify the range andnature of these post-colonial texts and second to describe the varioustheories which have emerged so far to account for them So in the firstchapter we consider the development of descriptive models of post-colonial writing Since it is not possible to read post-colonial textswithout coming to terms with the ways in which they appropriate anddeploy the material of linguistic culture in the second chapter weoutline the process by which language is captured to form a distinctivediscursive practice In the third chapter we demonstrate throughsymptomatic readings of texts how post-colonial writing interactswith the social and material practices of colonialism One of the majorpurposes of this book is to explain the nature of existing post-colonialtheory and the way in which it interacts with and dismantles some ofthe assumptions of European theory In the fourth chapter we discuss

the empire writes back12

the issues in the development of indigenous post-colonial theories andin the fifth we examine the larger implications of post-coloniality fortheories of language for literary theory and for social and politicalanalysis in general

introduction 13

1CUTTING THE GROUND

Critical models of post-colonialliteratures

As writers and critics became aware of the special character ofpost-colonial texts they saw the need to develop an adequate model toaccount for them Four major models have emerged to date firstlsquonationalrsquo or regional models which emphasize the distinctive featuresof the particular national or regional culture second race-basedmodels which identify certain shared characteristics across variousnational literatures such as the common racial inheritance in litera-tures of the African diaspora addressed by the lsquoBlack writingrsquo modelthird comparative models of varying complexity which seek toaccount for particular linguistic historical and cultural features acrosstwo or more post-colonial literatures fourth more comprehensivecomparative models which argue for features such as hybridity andsyncreticity as constitutive elements of all post-colonial literatures(syncretism is the process by which previously distinct linguistic cat-egories and by extension cultural formations merge into a singlenew form) These models often operate as assumptions within criticalpractice rather than specific and discrete schools of thought in any

discussion of post-colonial writing a number of them may be operat-ing at the same time

NATIONAL AND REGIONAL MODELS

The first post-colonial society to develop a lsquonationalrsquo literature was theUSA The emergence of a distinctive American literature in the lateeighteenth century raised inevitable questions about the relationshipbetween literature and place between literature and nationality andparticularly about the suitability of inherited literary forms Ideas aboutnew kinds of literature were part of the optimistic progression tonationhood because it seemed that this was one of the most potentareas in which to express difference from Britain Writers like CharlesBrockden Brown who attempted to indigenize British forms like thegothic and the sentimental novel soon realized that with the change inlocation and culture it was not possible to import form and conceptwithout radical alteration (Fiedler 1960 Ringe 1966)

In many ways the American experience and its attempts to producea new kind of literature can be seen to be the model for all laterpost-colonial writing1 The first thing it showed was that some ofa post-colonial countryrsquos most deeply held linguistic and cultural traitsdepend upon its relationship with the colonizing power particularlythe defining contrast between European metropolis and lsquofrontierrsquo (seeFussell 1965) Once the American Revolution had forced the questionof separate nationality and the economic and political successes of theemerging nation had begun to be taken for granted American litera-ture as a distinct collection of texts also began to be accepted But it wasaccepted as an offshoot of the lsquoparent treersquo Such organic metaphorsand others like lsquoparentndashchildrsquo and lsquostreamndashtributaryrsquo acted to keep thenew literature in its place The plant and parent metaphors stressed ageexperience roots tradition and most importantly the connectionbetween antiquity and value They implied the same distinctions asthose existing between metropolis and frontier parents are moreexperienced more important more substantial less brash than theiroffspring Above all they are the origin and therefore claim the finalauthority in questions of taste and value

But as the extensive literature of the USA developed different

cutting the ground 15

characteristics from that of Britain and established its right to be con-sidered independently the concept of national literary differenceslsquowithinrsquo English writing became established The eventual consequenceof this has been that lsquonewerrsquo literatures from countries such as NigeriaAustralia and India could also be discussed as discrete national forma-tions rather than as lsquobranches of the treersquo Their literatures could beconsidered in relation to the social and political history of each coun-try and could be read as a source of important images of nationalidentity

The development of national literatures and criticism is fundamentalto the whole enterprise of post-colonial studies Without such devel-opments at the national level and without the comparative studiesbetween national traditions to which these lead no discourse of thepost-colonial could have emerged Nor is it simply a matter of devel-opment from one stage to another since all post-colonial studies con-tinue to depend upon national literatures and criticism The study ofnational traditions is the first and most vital stage of the processof rejecting the claims of the centre to exclusivity It is the beginning ofwhat Nigerian writer Wole Soyinka has characterized as the lsquoprocess ofself-apprehensionrsquo (Soyinka 1976 xi) Recent theories of a generalpost-colonial discourse question essentialist formulations which maylead to nationalist and racist orthodoxies but they do not deny thegreat importance of maintaining each literaturersquos sense of specific dif-ference It is this sense of difference which constitutes each nationalliteraturersquos mode of self-apprehension and its claim to be a self-constituting entity However nationalism in which some partial truthor clicheacute is elevated to orthodoxy is a danger implicit in such nationalconceptions of literary production The impetus towards national self-realization in critical assessments of literature all too often fails to stopshort of nationalist myth

Larger geographical models which cross the boundaries of languagenationality or race to generate the concept of a regional literature suchas West Indian or South Pacific literature may also share some of thelimitations of the national model While the idea of an lsquoAfricanrsquo litera-ture for instance has a powerful appeal to writers and critics in thevarious African countries it has only limited application as a descrip-tive label African and European critics have produced several regional

the empire writes back16

and national studies which reflect the widespread political economicand cultural differences between modern African countries (Gurr andCalder 1974 Lindfors 1975 Taiwo 1976 Ogungbesan 1979)

Clearly some regional groupings are more likely to gain acceptancein the regions themselves than are others and will derive from a col-lective identity evident in other ways This is true of the West IndiesAlthough the Federation of the West Indies failed the english-speakingcountries there still field a regional cricket team Both the West Indiesand the South Pacific have regional universities with a significant inputinto literary production and discussion lsquoWest Indianrsquo literature hasalmost always been considered regionally rather than nationally Therehave been no major studies of Jamaican or Trinidadian literatures asdiscrete traditions A different regional grouping emphasizing geo-graphical and historical determinants rather than linguistic ones hasalso developed to explore lsquoCaribbeanrsquo literature setting literature inenglish from the region alongside that written in spanish french andother European languages (Allis 1982)

Despite such variants on the national model most of the englishliteratures outside Britain have been considered as individual nationalenterprises forming and reflecting each countryrsquos culture The inevit-able consequence of this is a gradual blurring of the distinctionbetween the national and the nationalist Nationalism has usuallyincluded a healthy repudiation of British and US hegemony observablein publishing education and the public sponsorship of writing Yet alltoo often nationalist criticism by failing to alter the terms of the dis-course within which it operates has participated implicitly or evenexplicitly in a discourse ultimately controlled by the very imperialpower its nationalist assertion is designed to exclude Emphasis mayhave been transferred to the national literature but the theoreticalassumptions critical perspectives and value judgements made haveoften replicated those of the British establishment

COMPARISONS BETWEEN TWO OR MORE REGIONS

Theories and models of post-colonial literatures could not emergeuntil the separate colonies were viewed in a framework centred ontheir own literary and cultural traditions Victorian Britain had exulted

cutting the ground 17

language is inherently incapable of accounting for post-colonialexperience but that it needs to develop an lsquoappropriatersquo usage in orderto do so (by becoming a distinct and unique form of english) Theenergizing feature of this displacement is its capacity to interrogate andsubvert the imperial cultural formations

The pressure to develop such a usage manifests itself early in thedevelopment of lsquoenglishrsquo literatures It is therefore arguable that evenbefore the development of a conscious de-colonizing stance theexperience of a new place identifiably different in its physical charac-teristics constrains for instance the new settlers to demand a languagewhich will allow them to express their sense of lsquoOthernessrsquo Landscapeflora and fauna seasons climatic conditions are formally distinguishedfrom the place of origin as homecolony EuropeNew WorldEuropeAntipodes metropolitanprovincial and so on although ofcourse at this stage no effective models exist for expressing this senseof Otherness in a positive and creative way

POST-COLONIALITY AND THEORY

The idea of lsquopost-colonial literary theoryrsquo emerges from the inability ofEuropean theory to deal adequately with the complexities and variedcultural provenance of post-colonial writing European theories them-selves emerge from particular cultural traditions which are hidden byfalse notions of lsquothe universalrsquo Theories of style and genre assump-tions about the universal features of language epistemologies andvalue systems are all radically questioned by the practices of post-colonial writing Post-colonial theory has proceeded from the need toaddress this different practice Indigenous theories have developed toaccommodate the differences within the various cultural traditions aswell as the desire to describe in a comparative way the features sharedacross those traditions

The political and cultural monocentrism of the colonial enterprisewas a natural result of the philosophical traditions of the Europeanworld and the systems of representation which this privilegedNineteenth-century imperial expansion the culmination of the out-ward and dominating thrust of Europeans into the world beyondEurope which began during the early Renaissance was underpinned

introduction 11

in complex ways by these assumptions In the first instance thisproduced practices of cultural subservience characterized by one post-colonial critic as lsquocultural cringersquo (Phillips 1958) Subsequently theemergence of identifiable indigenous theories in reaction to thisformed an important element in the development of specific nationaland regional consciousnesses (see ch 4)

Paradoxically however imperial expansion has had a radicallydestabilizing effect on its own preoccupations and power In pushingthe colonial world to the margins of experience the lsquocentrersquo pushedconsciousness beyond the point at which monocentrism in all spheresof thought could be accepted without question In other words thealienating process which initially served to relegate the post-colonialworld to the lsquomarginrsquo turned upon itself and acted to push that worldthrough a kind of mental barrier into a position from which allexperience could be viewed as uncentred pluralistic and multifari-ous Marginality thus became an unprecedented source of creativeenergy The impetus towards decentring and pluralism has alwaysbeen present in the history of European thought and has reached itslatest development in post-structuralism But the situation of margin-alized societies and cultures enabled them to come to this positionmuch earlier and more directly (Brydon 1984b) These notions areimplicit in post-colonial texts from the imperial period to the presentday

The task of this book is twofold first to identify the range andnature of these post-colonial texts and second to describe the varioustheories which have emerged so far to account for them So in the firstchapter we consider the development of descriptive models of post-colonial writing Since it is not possible to read post-colonial textswithout coming to terms with the ways in which they appropriate anddeploy the material of linguistic culture in the second chapter weoutline the process by which language is captured to form a distinctivediscursive practice In the third chapter we demonstrate throughsymptomatic readings of texts how post-colonial writing interactswith the social and material practices of colonialism One of the majorpurposes of this book is to explain the nature of existing post-colonialtheory and the way in which it interacts with and dismantles some ofthe assumptions of European theory In the fourth chapter we discuss

the empire writes back12

the issues in the development of indigenous post-colonial theories andin the fifth we examine the larger implications of post-coloniality fortheories of language for literary theory and for social and politicalanalysis in general

introduction 13

1CUTTING THE GROUND

Critical models of post-colonialliteratures

As writers and critics became aware of the special character ofpost-colonial texts they saw the need to develop an adequate model toaccount for them Four major models have emerged to date firstlsquonationalrsquo or regional models which emphasize the distinctive featuresof the particular national or regional culture second race-basedmodels which identify certain shared characteristics across variousnational literatures such as the common racial inheritance in litera-tures of the African diaspora addressed by the lsquoBlack writingrsquo modelthird comparative models of varying complexity which seek toaccount for particular linguistic historical and cultural features acrosstwo or more post-colonial literatures fourth more comprehensivecomparative models which argue for features such as hybridity andsyncreticity as constitutive elements of all post-colonial literatures(syncretism is the process by which previously distinct linguistic cat-egories and by extension cultural formations merge into a singlenew form) These models often operate as assumptions within criticalpractice rather than specific and discrete schools of thought in any

discussion of post-colonial writing a number of them may be operat-ing at the same time

NATIONAL AND REGIONAL MODELS

The first post-colonial society to develop a lsquonationalrsquo literature was theUSA The emergence of a distinctive American literature in the lateeighteenth century raised inevitable questions about the relationshipbetween literature and place between literature and nationality andparticularly about the suitability of inherited literary forms Ideas aboutnew kinds of literature were part of the optimistic progression tonationhood because it seemed that this was one of the most potentareas in which to express difference from Britain Writers like CharlesBrockden Brown who attempted to indigenize British forms like thegothic and the sentimental novel soon realized that with the change inlocation and culture it was not possible to import form and conceptwithout radical alteration (Fiedler 1960 Ringe 1966)

In many ways the American experience and its attempts to producea new kind of literature can be seen to be the model for all laterpost-colonial writing1 The first thing it showed was that some ofa post-colonial countryrsquos most deeply held linguistic and cultural traitsdepend upon its relationship with the colonizing power particularlythe defining contrast between European metropolis and lsquofrontierrsquo (seeFussell 1965) Once the American Revolution had forced the questionof separate nationality and the economic and political successes of theemerging nation had begun to be taken for granted American litera-ture as a distinct collection of texts also began to be accepted But it wasaccepted as an offshoot of the lsquoparent treersquo Such organic metaphorsand others like lsquoparentndashchildrsquo and lsquostreamndashtributaryrsquo acted to keep thenew literature in its place The plant and parent metaphors stressed ageexperience roots tradition and most importantly the connectionbetween antiquity and value They implied the same distinctions asthose existing between metropolis and frontier parents are moreexperienced more important more substantial less brash than theiroffspring Above all they are the origin and therefore claim the finalauthority in questions of taste and value

But as the extensive literature of the USA developed different

cutting the ground 15

characteristics from that of Britain and established its right to be con-sidered independently the concept of national literary differenceslsquowithinrsquo English writing became established The eventual consequenceof this has been that lsquonewerrsquo literatures from countries such as NigeriaAustralia and India could also be discussed as discrete national forma-tions rather than as lsquobranches of the treersquo Their literatures could beconsidered in relation to the social and political history of each coun-try and could be read as a source of important images of nationalidentity

The development of national literatures and criticism is fundamentalto the whole enterprise of post-colonial studies Without such devel-opments at the national level and without the comparative studiesbetween national traditions to which these lead no discourse of thepost-colonial could have emerged Nor is it simply a matter of devel-opment from one stage to another since all post-colonial studies con-tinue to depend upon national literatures and criticism The study ofnational traditions is the first and most vital stage of the processof rejecting the claims of the centre to exclusivity It is the beginning ofwhat Nigerian writer Wole Soyinka has characterized as the lsquoprocess ofself-apprehensionrsquo (Soyinka 1976 xi) Recent theories of a generalpost-colonial discourse question essentialist formulations which maylead to nationalist and racist orthodoxies but they do not deny thegreat importance of maintaining each literaturersquos sense of specific dif-ference It is this sense of difference which constitutes each nationalliteraturersquos mode of self-apprehension and its claim to be a self-constituting entity However nationalism in which some partial truthor clicheacute is elevated to orthodoxy is a danger implicit in such nationalconceptions of literary production The impetus towards national self-realization in critical assessments of literature all too often fails to stopshort of nationalist myth

Larger geographical models which cross the boundaries of languagenationality or race to generate the concept of a regional literature suchas West Indian or South Pacific literature may also share some of thelimitations of the national model While the idea of an lsquoAfricanrsquo litera-ture for instance has a powerful appeal to writers and critics in thevarious African countries it has only limited application as a descrip-tive label African and European critics have produced several regional

the empire writes back16

and national studies which reflect the widespread political economicand cultural differences between modern African countries (Gurr andCalder 1974 Lindfors 1975 Taiwo 1976 Ogungbesan 1979)

Clearly some regional groupings are more likely to gain acceptancein the regions themselves than are others and will derive from a col-lective identity evident in other ways This is true of the West IndiesAlthough the Federation of the West Indies failed the english-speakingcountries there still field a regional cricket team Both the West Indiesand the South Pacific have regional universities with a significant inputinto literary production and discussion lsquoWest Indianrsquo literature hasalmost always been considered regionally rather than nationally Therehave been no major studies of Jamaican or Trinidadian literatures asdiscrete traditions A different regional grouping emphasizing geo-graphical and historical determinants rather than linguistic ones hasalso developed to explore lsquoCaribbeanrsquo literature setting literature inenglish from the region alongside that written in spanish french andother European languages (Allis 1982)

Despite such variants on the national model most of the englishliteratures outside Britain have been considered as individual nationalenterprises forming and reflecting each countryrsquos culture The inevit-able consequence of this is a gradual blurring of the distinctionbetween the national and the nationalist Nationalism has usuallyincluded a healthy repudiation of British and US hegemony observablein publishing education and the public sponsorship of writing Yet alltoo often nationalist criticism by failing to alter the terms of the dis-course within which it operates has participated implicitly or evenexplicitly in a discourse ultimately controlled by the very imperialpower its nationalist assertion is designed to exclude Emphasis mayhave been transferred to the national literature but the theoreticalassumptions critical perspectives and value judgements made haveoften replicated those of the British establishment

COMPARISONS BETWEEN TWO OR MORE REGIONS

Theories and models of post-colonial literatures could not emergeuntil the separate colonies were viewed in a framework centred ontheir own literary and cultural traditions Victorian Britain had exulted

cutting the ground 17

in complex ways by these assumptions In the first instance thisproduced practices of cultural subservience characterized by one post-colonial critic as lsquocultural cringersquo (Phillips 1958) Subsequently theemergence of identifiable indigenous theories in reaction to thisformed an important element in the development of specific nationaland regional consciousnesses (see ch 4)

Paradoxically however imperial expansion has had a radicallydestabilizing effect on its own preoccupations and power In pushingthe colonial world to the margins of experience the lsquocentrersquo pushedconsciousness beyond the point at which monocentrism in all spheresof thought could be accepted without question In other words thealienating process which initially served to relegate the post-colonialworld to the lsquomarginrsquo turned upon itself and acted to push that worldthrough a kind of mental barrier into a position from which allexperience could be viewed as uncentred pluralistic and multifari-ous Marginality thus became an unprecedented source of creativeenergy The impetus towards decentring and pluralism has alwaysbeen present in the history of European thought and has reached itslatest development in post-structuralism But the situation of margin-alized societies and cultures enabled them to come to this positionmuch earlier and more directly (Brydon 1984b) These notions areimplicit in post-colonial texts from the imperial period to the presentday

The task of this book is twofold first to identify the range andnature of these post-colonial texts and second to describe the varioustheories which have emerged so far to account for them So in the firstchapter we consider the development of descriptive models of post-colonial writing Since it is not possible to read post-colonial textswithout coming to terms with the ways in which they appropriate anddeploy the material of linguistic culture in the second chapter weoutline the process by which language is captured to form a distinctivediscursive practice In the third chapter we demonstrate throughsymptomatic readings of texts how post-colonial writing interactswith the social and material practices of colonialism One of the majorpurposes of this book is to explain the nature of existing post-colonialtheory and the way in which it interacts with and dismantles some ofthe assumptions of European theory In the fourth chapter we discuss

the empire writes back12

the issues in the development of indigenous post-colonial theories andin the fifth we examine the larger implications of post-coloniality fortheories of language for literary theory and for social and politicalanalysis in general

introduction 13

1CUTTING THE GROUND

Critical models of post-colonialliteratures

As writers and critics became aware of the special character ofpost-colonial texts they saw the need to develop an adequate model toaccount for them Four major models have emerged to date firstlsquonationalrsquo or regional models which emphasize the distinctive featuresof the particular national or regional culture second race-basedmodels which identify certain shared characteristics across variousnational literatures such as the common racial inheritance in litera-tures of the African diaspora addressed by the lsquoBlack writingrsquo modelthird comparative models of varying complexity which seek toaccount for particular linguistic historical and cultural features acrosstwo or more post-colonial literatures fourth more comprehensivecomparative models which argue for features such as hybridity andsyncreticity as constitutive elements of all post-colonial literatures(syncretism is the process by which previously distinct linguistic cat-egories and by extension cultural formations merge into a singlenew form) These models often operate as assumptions within criticalpractice rather than specific and discrete schools of thought in any

discussion of post-colonial writing a number of them may be operat-ing at the same time

NATIONAL AND REGIONAL MODELS

The first post-colonial society to develop a lsquonationalrsquo literature was theUSA The emergence of a distinctive American literature in the lateeighteenth century raised inevitable questions about the relationshipbetween literature and place between literature and nationality andparticularly about the suitability of inherited literary forms Ideas aboutnew kinds of literature were part of the optimistic progression tonationhood because it seemed that this was one of the most potentareas in which to express difference from Britain Writers like CharlesBrockden Brown who attempted to indigenize British forms like thegothic and the sentimental novel soon realized that with the change inlocation and culture it was not possible to import form and conceptwithout radical alteration (Fiedler 1960 Ringe 1966)

In many ways the American experience and its attempts to producea new kind of literature can be seen to be the model for all laterpost-colonial writing1 The first thing it showed was that some ofa post-colonial countryrsquos most deeply held linguistic and cultural traitsdepend upon its relationship with the colonizing power particularlythe defining contrast between European metropolis and lsquofrontierrsquo (seeFussell 1965) Once the American Revolution had forced the questionof separate nationality and the economic and political successes of theemerging nation had begun to be taken for granted American litera-ture as a distinct collection of texts also began to be accepted But it wasaccepted as an offshoot of the lsquoparent treersquo Such organic metaphorsand others like lsquoparentndashchildrsquo and lsquostreamndashtributaryrsquo acted to keep thenew literature in its place The plant and parent metaphors stressed ageexperience roots tradition and most importantly the connectionbetween antiquity and value They implied the same distinctions asthose existing between metropolis and frontier parents are moreexperienced more important more substantial less brash than theiroffspring Above all they are the origin and therefore claim the finalauthority in questions of taste and value

But as the extensive literature of the USA developed different

cutting the ground 15

characteristics from that of Britain and established its right to be con-sidered independently the concept of national literary differenceslsquowithinrsquo English writing became established The eventual consequenceof this has been that lsquonewerrsquo literatures from countries such as NigeriaAustralia and India could also be discussed as discrete national forma-tions rather than as lsquobranches of the treersquo Their literatures could beconsidered in relation to the social and political history of each coun-try and could be read as a source of important images of nationalidentity

The development of national literatures and criticism is fundamentalto the whole enterprise of post-colonial studies Without such devel-opments at the national level and without the comparative studiesbetween national traditions to which these lead no discourse of thepost-colonial could have emerged Nor is it simply a matter of devel-opment from one stage to another since all post-colonial studies con-tinue to depend upon national literatures and criticism The study ofnational traditions is the first and most vital stage of the processof rejecting the claims of the centre to exclusivity It is the beginning ofwhat Nigerian writer Wole Soyinka has characterized as the lsquoprocess ofself-apprehensionrsquo (Soyinka 1976 xi) Recent theories of a generalpost-colonial discourse question essentialist formulations which maylead to nationalist and racist orthodoxies but they do not deny thegreat importance of maintaining each literaturersquos sense of specific dif-ference It is this sense of difference which constitutes each nationalliteraturersquos mode of self-apprehension and its claim to be a self-constituting entity However nationalism in which some partial truthor clicheacute is elevated to orthodoxy is a danger implicit in such nationalconceptions of literary production The impetus towards national self-realization in critical assessments of literature all too often fails to stopshort of nationalist myth

Larger geographical models which cross the boundaries of languagenationality or race to generate the concept of a regional literature suchas West Indian or South Pacific literature may also share some of thelimitations of the national model While the idea of an lsquoAfricanrsquo litera-ture for instance has a powerful appeal to writers and critics in thevarious African countries it has only limited application as a descrip-tive label African and European critics have produced several regional

the empire writes back16

and national studies which reflect the widespread political economicand cultural differences between modern African countries (Gurr andCalder 1974 Lindfors 1975 Taiwo 1976 Ogungbesan 1979)

Clearly some regional groupings are more likely to gain acceptancein the regions themselves than are others and will derive from a col-lective identity evident in other ways This is true of the West IndiesAlthough the Federation of the West Indies failed the english-speakingcountries there still field a regional cricket team Both the West Indiesand the South Pacific have regional universities with a significant inputinto literary production and discussion lsquoWest Indianrsquo literature hasalmost always been considered regionally rather than nationally Therehave been no major studies of Jamaican or Trinidadian literatures asdiscrete traditions A different regional grouping emphasizing geo-graphical and historical determinants rather than linguistic ones hasalso developed to explore lsquoCaribbeanrsquo literature setting literature inenglish from the region alongside that written in spanish french andother European languages (Allis 1982)

Despite such variants on the national model most of the englishliteratures outside Britain have been considered as individual nationalenterprises forming and reflecting each countryrsquos culture The inevit-able consequence of this is a gradual blurring of the distinctionbetween the national and the nationalist Nationalism has usuallyincluded a healthy repudiation of British and US hegemony observablein publishing education and the public sponsorship of writing Yet alltoo often nationalist criticism by failing to alter the terms of the dis-course within which it operates has participated implicitly or evenexplicitly in a discourse ultimately controlled by the very imperialpower its nationalist assertion is designed to exclude Emphasis mayhave been transferred to the national literature but the theoreticalassumptions critical perspectives and value judgements made haveoften replicated those of the British establishment

COMPARISONS BETWEEN TWO OR MORE REGIONS

Theories and models of post-colonial literatures could not emergeuntil the separate colonies were viewed in a framework centred ontheir own literary and cultural traditions Victorian Britain had exulted

cutting the ground 17

the issues in the development of indigenous post-colonial theories andin the fifth we examine the larger implications of post-coloniality fortheories of language for literary theory and for social and politicalanalysis in general

introduction 13

1CUTTING THE GROUND

Critical models of post-colonialliteratures

As writers and critics became aware of the special character ofpost-colonial texts they saw the need to develop an adequate model toaccount for them Four major models have emerged to date firstlsquonationalrsquo or regional models which emphasize the distinctive featuresof the particular national or regional culture second race-basedmodels which identify certain shared characteristics across variousnational literatures such as the common racial inheritance in litera-tures of the African diaspora addressed by the lsquoBlack writingrsquo modelthird comparative models of varying complexity which seek toaccount for particular linguistic historical and cultural features acrosstwo or more post-colonial literatures fourth more comprehensivecomparative models which argue for features such as hybridity andsyncreticity as constitutive elements of all post-colonial literatures(syncretism is the process by which previously distinct linguistic cat-egories and by extension cultural formations merge into a singlenew form) These models often operate as assumptions within criticalpractice rather than specific and discrete schools of thought in any

discussion of post-colonial writing a number of them may be operat-ing at the same time

NATIONAL AND REGIONAL MODELS

The first post-colonial society to develop a lsquonationalrsquo literature was theUSA The emergence of a distinctive American literature in the lateeighteenth century raised inevitable questions about the relationshipbetween literature and place between literature and nationality andparticularly about the suitability of inherited literary forms Ideas aboutnew kinds of literature were part of the optimistic progression tonationhood because it seemed that this was one of the most potentareas in which to express difference from Britain Writers like CharlesBrockden Brown who attempted to indigenize British forms like thegothic and the sentimental novel soon realized that with the change inlocation and culture it was not possible to import form and conceptwithout radical alteration (Fiedler 1960 Ringe 1966)

In many ways the American experience and its attempts to producea new kind of literature can be seen to be the model for all laterpost-colonial writing1 The first thing it showed was that some ofa post-colonial countryrsquos most deeply held linguistic and cultural traitsdepend upon its relationship with the colonizing power particularlythe defining contrast between European metropolis and lsquofrontierrsquo (seeFussell 1965) Once the American Revolution had forced the questionof separate nationality and the economic and political successes of theemerging nation had begun to be taken for granted American litera-ture as a distinct collection of texts also began to be accepted But it wasaccepted as an offshoot of the lsquoparent treersquo Such organic metaphorsand others like lsquoparentndashchildrsquo and lsquostreamndashtributaryrsquo acted to keep thenew literature in its place The plant and parent metaphors stressed ageexperience roots tradition and most importantly the connectionbetween antiquity and value They implied the same distinctions asthose existing between metropolis and frontier parents are moreexperienced more important more substantial less brash than theiroffspring Above all they are the origin and therefore claim the finalauthority in questions of taste and value

But as the extensive literature of the USA developed different

cutting the ground 15

characteristics from that of Britain and established its right to be con-sidered independently the concept of national literary differenceslsquowithinrsquo English writing became established The eventual consequenceof this has been that lsquonewerrsquo literatures from countries such as NigeriaAustralia and India could also be discussed as discrete national forma-tions rather than as lsquobranches of the treersquo Their literatures could beconsidered in relation to the social and political history of each coun-try and could be read as a source of important images of nationalidentity

The development of national literatures and criticism is fundamentalto the whole enterprise of post-colonial studies Without such devel-opments at the national level and without the comparative studiesbetween national traditions to which these lead no discourse of thepost-colonial could have emerged Nor is it simply a matter of devel-opment from one stage to another since all post-colonial studies con-tinue to depend upon national literatures and criticism The study ofnational traditions is the first and most vital stage of the processof rejecting the claims of the centre to exclusivity It is the beginning ofwhat Nigerian writer Wole Soyinka has characterized as the lsquoprocess ofself-apprehensionrsquo (Soyinka 1976 xi) Recent theories of a generalpost-colonial discourse question essentialist formulations which maylead to nationalist and racist orthodoxies but they do not deny thegreat importance of maintaining each literaturersquos sense of specific dif-ference It is this sense of difference which constitutes each nationalliteraturersquos mode of self-apprehension and its claim to be a self-constituting entity However nationalism in which some partial truthor clicheacute is elevated to orthodoxy is a danger implicit in such nationalconceptions of literary production The impetus towards national self-realization in critical assessments of literature all too often fails to stopshort of nationalist myth

Larger geographical models which cross the boundaries of languagenationality or race to generate the concept of a regional literature suchas West Indian or South Pacific literature may also share some of thelimitations of the national model While the idea of an lsquoAfricanrsquo litera-ture for instance has a powerful appeal to writers and critics in thevarious African countries it has only limited application as a descrip-tive label African and European critics have produced several regional

the empire writes back16

and national studies which reflect the widespread political economicand cultural differences between modern African countries (Gurr andCalder 1974 Lindfors 1975 Taiwo 1976 Ogungbesan 1979)

Clearly some regional groupings are more likely to gain acceptancein the regions themselves than are others and will derive from a col-lective identity evident in other ways This is true of the West IndiesAlthough the Federation of the West Indies failed the english-speakingcountries there still field a regional cricket team Both the West Indiesand the South Pacific have regional universities with a significant inputinto literary production and discussion lsquoWest Indianrsquo literature hasalmost always been considered regionally rather than nationally Therehave been no major studies of Jamaican or Trinidadian literatures asdiscrete traditions A different regional grouping emphasizing geo-graphical and historical determinants rather than linguistic ones hasalso developed to explore lsquoCaribbeanrsquo literature setting literature inenglish from the region alongside that written in spanish french andother European languages (Allis 1982)

Despite such variants on the national model most of the englishliteratures outside Britain have been considered as individual nationalenterprises forming and reflecting each countryrsquos culture The inevit-able consequence of this is a gradual blurring of the distinctionbetween the national and the nationalist Nationalism has usuallyincluded a healthy repudiation of British and US hegemony observablein publishing education and the public sponsorship of writing Yet alltoo often nationalist criticism by failing to alter the terms of the dis-course within which it operates has participated implicitly or evenexplicitly in a discourse ultimately controlled by the very imperialpower its nationalist assertion is designed to exclude Emphasis mayhave been transferred to the national literature but the theoreticalassumptions critical perspectives and value judgements made haveoften replicated those of the British establishment

COMPARISONS BETWEEN TWO OR MORE REGIONS

Theories and models of post-colonial literatures could not emergeuntil the separate colonies were viewed in a framework centred ontheir own literary and cultural traditions Victorian Britain had exulted

cutting the ground 17

1CUTTING THE GROUND

Critical models of post-colonialliteratures

As writers and critics became aware of the special character ofpost-colonial texts they saw the need to develop an adequate model toaccount for them Four major models have emerged to date firstlsquonationalrsquo or regional models which emphasize the distinctive featuresof the particular national or regional culture second race-basedmodels which identify certain shared characteristics across variousnational literatures such as the common racial inheritance in litera-tures of the African diaspora addressed by the lsquoBlack writingrsquo modelthird comparative models of varying complexity which seek toaccount for particular linguistic historical and cultural features acrosstwo or more post-colonial literatures fourth more comprehensivecomparative models which argue for features such as hybridity andsyncreticity as constitutive elements of all post-colonial literatures(syncretism is the process by which previously distinct linguistic cat-egories and by extension cultural formations merge into a singlenew form) These models often operate as assumptions within criticalpractice rather than specific and discrete schools of thought in any

discussion of post-colonial writing a number of them may be operat-ing at the same time

NATIONAL AND REGIONAL MODELS

The first post-colonial society to develop a lsquonationalrsquo literature was theUSA The emergence of a distinctive American literature in the lateeighteenth century raised inevitable questions about the relationshipbetween literature and place between literature and nationality andparticularly about the suitability of inherited literary forms Ideas aboutnew kinds of literature were part of the optimistic progression tonationhood because it seemed that this was one of the most potentareas in which to express difference from Britain Writers like CharlesBrockden Brown who attempted to indigenize British forms like thegothic and the sentimental novel soon realized that with the change inlocation and culture it was not possible to import form and conceptwithout radical alteration (Fiedler 1960 Ringe 1966)

In many ways the American experience and its attempts to producea new kind of literature can be seen to be the model for all laterpost-colonial writing1 The first thing it showed was that some ofa post-colonial countryrsquos most deeply held linguistic and cultural traitsdepend upon its relationship with the colonizing power particularlythe defining contrast between European metropolis and lsquofrontierrsquo (seeFussell 1965) Once the American Revolution had forced the questionof separate nationality and the economic and political successes of theemerging nation had begun to be taken for granted American litera-ture as a distinct collection of texts also began to be accepted But it wasaccepted as an offshoot of the lsquoparent treersquo Such organic metaphorsand others like lsquoparentndashchildrsquo and lsquostreamndashtributaryrsquo acted to keep thenew literature in its place The plant and parent metaphors stressed ageexperience roots tradition and most importantly the connectionbetween antiquity and value They implied the same distinctions asthose existing between metropolis and frontier parents are moreexperienced more important more substantial less brash than theiroffspring Above all they are the origin and therefore claim the finalauthority in questions of taste and value

But as the extensive literature of the USA developed different

cutting the ground 15

characteristics from that of Britain and established its right to be con-sidered independently the concept of national literary differenceslsquowithinrsquo English writing became established The eventual consequenceof this has been that lsquonewerrsquo literatures from countries such as NigeriaAustralia and India could also be discussed as discrete national forma-tions rather than as lsquobranches of the treersquo Their literatures could beconsidered in relation to the social and political history of each coun-try and could be read as a source of important images of nationalidentity

The development of national literatures and criticism is fundamentalto the whole enterprise of post-colonial studies Without such devel-opments at the national level and without the comparative studiesbetween national traditions to which these lead no discourse of thepost-colonial could have emerged Nor is it simply a matter of devel-opment from one stage to another since all post-colonial studies con-tinue to depend upon national literatures and criticism The study ofnational traditions is the first and most vital stage of the processof rejecting the claims of the centre to exclusivity It is the beginning ofwhat Nigerian writer Wole Soyinka has characterized as the lsquoprocess ofself-apprehensionrsquo (Soyinka 1976 xi) Recent theories of a generalpost-colonial discourse question essentialist formulations which maylead to nationalist and racist orthodoxies but they do not deny thegreat importance of maintaining each literaturersquos sense of specific dif-ference It is this sense of difference which constitutes each nationalliteraturersquos mode of self-apprehension and its claim to be a self-constituting entity However nationalism in which some partial truthor clicheacute is elevated to orthodoxy is a danger implicit in such nationalconceptions of literary production The impetus towards national self-realization in critical assessments of literature all too often fails to stopshort of nationalist myth

Larger geographical models which cross the boundaries of languagenationality or race to generate the concept of a regional literature suchas West Indian or South Pacific literature may also share some of thelimitations of the national model While the idea of an lsquoAfricanrsquo litera-ture for instance has a powerful appeal to writers and critics in thevarious African countries it has only limited application as a descrip-tive label African and European critics have produced several regional

the empire writes back16

and national studies which reflect the widespread political economicand cultural differences between modern African countries (Gurr andCalder 1974 Lindfors 1975 Taiwo 1976 Ogungbesan 1979)

Clearly some regional groupings are more likely to gain acceptancein the regions themselves than are others and will derive from a col-lective identity evident in other ways This is true of the West IndiesAlthough the Federation of the West Indies failed the english-speakingcountries there still field a regional cricket team Both the West Indiesand the South Pacific have regional universities with a significant inputinto literary production and discussion lsquoWest Indianrsquo literature hasalmost always been considered regionally rather than nationally Therehave been no major studies of Jamaican or Trinidadian literatures asdiscrete traditions A different regional grouping emphasizing geo-graphical and historical determinants rather than linguistic ones hasalso developed to explore lsquoCaribbeanrsquo literature setting literature inenglish from the region alongside that written in spanish french andother European languages (Allis 1982)

Despite such variants on the national model most of the englishliteratures outside Britain have been considered as individual nationalenterprises forming and reflecting each countryrsquos culture The inevit-able consequence of this is a gradual blurring of the distinctionbetween the national and the nationalist Nationalism has usuallyincluded a healthy repudiation of British and US hegemony observablein publishing education and the public sponsorship of writing Yet alltoo often nationalist criticism by failing to alter the terms of the dis-course within which it operates has participated implicitly or evenexplicitly in a discourse ultimately controlled by the very imperialpower its nationalist assertion is designed to exclude Emphasis mayhave been transferred to the national literature but the theoreticalassumptions critical perspectives and value judgements made haveoften replicated those of the British establishment

COMPARISONS BETWEEN TWO OR MORE REGIONS

Theories and models of post-colonial literatures could not emergeuntil the separate colonies were viewed in a framework centred ontheir own literary and cultural traditions Victorian Britain had exulted

cutting the ground 17

discussion of post-colonial writing a number of them may be operat-ing at the same time

NATIONAL AND REGIONAL MODELS

The first post-colonial society to develop a lsquonationalrsquo literature was theUSA The emergence of a distinctive American literature in the lateeighteenth century raised inevitable questions about the relationshipbetween literature and place between literature and nationality andparticularly about the suitability of inherited literary forms Ideas aboutnew kinds of literature were part of the optimistic progression tonationhood because it seemed that this was one of the most potentareas in which to express difference from Britain Writers like CharlesBrockden Brown who attempted to indigenize British forms like thegothic and the sentimental novel soon realized that with the change inlocation and culture it was not possible to import form and conceptwithout radical alteration (Fiedler 1960 Ringe 1966)

In many ways the American experience and its attempts to producea new kind of literature can be seen to be the model for all laterpost-colonial writing1 The first thing it showed was that some ofa post-colonial countryrsquos most deeply held linguistic and cultural traitsdepend upon its relationship with the colonizing power particularlythe defining contrast between European metropolis and lsquofrontierrsquo (seeFussell 1965) Once the American Revolution had forced the questionof separate nationality and the economic and political successes of theemerging nation had begun to be taken for granted American litera-ture as a distinct collection of texts also began to be accepted But it wasaccepted as an offshoot of the lsquoparent treersquo Such organic metaphorsand others like lsquoparentndashchildrsquo and lsquostreamndashtributaryrsquo acted to keep thenew literature in its place The plant and parent metaphors stressed ageexperience roots tradition and most importantly the connectionbetween antiquity and value They implied the same distinctions asthose existing between metropolis and frontier parents are moreexperienced more important more substantial less brash than theiroffspring Above all they are the origin and therefore claim the finalauthority in questions of taste and value

But as the extensive literature of the USA developed different

cutting the ground 15

characteristics from that of Britain and established its right to be con-sidered independently the concept of national literary differenceslsquowithinrsquo English writing became established The eventual consequenceof this has been that lsquonewerrsquo literatures from countries such as NigeriaAustralia and India could also be discussed as discrete national forma-tions rather than as lsquobranches of the treersquo Their literatures could beconsidered in relation to the social and political history of each coun-try and could be read as a source of important images of nationalidentity

The development of national literatures and criticism is fundamentalto the whole enterprise of post-colonial studies Without such devel-opments at the national level and without the comparative studiesbetween national traditions to which these lead no discourse of thepost-colonial could have emerged Nor is it simply a matter of devel-opment from one stage to another since all post-colonial studies con-tinue to depend upon national literatures and criticism The study ofnational traditions is the first and most vital stage of the processof rejecting the claims of the centre to exclusivity It is the beginning ofwhat Nigerian writer Wole Soyinka has characterized as the lsquoprocess ofself-apprehensionrsquo (Soyinka 1976 xi) Recent theories of a generalpost-colonial discourse question essentialist formulations which maylead to nationalist and racist orthodoxies but they do not deny thegreat importance of maintaining each literaturersquos sense of specific dif-ference It is this sense of difference which constitutes each nationalliteraturersquos mode of self-apprehension and its claim to be a self-constituting entity However nationalism in which some partial truthor clicheacute is elevated to orthodoxy is a danger implicit in such nationalconceptions of literary production The impetus towards national self-realization in critical assessments of literature all too often fails to stopshort of nationalist myth

Larger geographical models which cross the boundaries of languagenationality or race to generate the concept of a regional literature suchas West Indian or South Pacific literature may also share some of thelimitations of the national model While the idea of an lsquoAfricanrsquo litera-ture for instance has a powerful appeal to writers and critics in thevarious African countries it has only limited application as a descrip-tive label African and European critics have produced several regional

the empire writes back16

and national studies which reflect the widespread political economicand cultural differences between modern African countries (Gurr andCalder 1974 Lindfors 1975 Taiwo 1976 Ogungbesan 1979)

Clearly some regional groupings are more likely to gain acceptancein the regions themselves than are others and will derive from a col-lective identity evident in other ways This is true of the West IndiesAlthough the Federation of the West Indies failed the english-speakingcountries there still field a regional cricket team Both the West Indiesand the South Pacific have regional universities with a significant inputinto literary production and discussion lsquoWest Indianrsquo literature hasalmost always been considered regionally rather than nationally Therehave been no major studies of Jamaican or Trinidadian literatures asdiscrete traditions A different regional grouping emphasizing geo-graphical and historical determinants rather than linguistic ones hasalso developed to explore lsquoCaribbeanrsquo literature setting literature inenglish from the region alongside that written in spanish french andother European languages (Allis 1982)

Despite such variants on the national model most of the englishliteratures outside Britain have been considered as individual nationalenterprises forming and reflecting each countryrsquos culture The inevit-able consequence of this is a gradual blurring of the distinctionbetween the national and the nationalist Nationalism has usuallyincluded a healthy repudiation of British and US hegemony observablein publishing education and the public sponsorship of writing Yet alltoo often nationalist criticism by failing to alter the terms of the dis-course within which it operates has participated implicitly or evenexplicitly in a discourse ultimately controlled by the very imperialpower its nationalist assertion is designed to exclude Emphasis mayhave been transferred to the national literature but the theoreticalassumptions critical perspectives and value judgements made haveoften replicated those of the British establishment

COMPARISONS BETWEEN TWO OR MORE REGIONS

Theories and models of post-colonial literatures could not emergeuntil the separate colonies were viewed in a framework centred ontheir own literary and cultural traditions Victorian Britain had exulted

cutting the ground 17

characteristics from that of Britain and established its right to be con-sidered independently the concept of national literary differenceslsquowithinrsquo English writing became established The eventual consequenceof this has been that lsquonewerrsquo literatures from countries such as NigeriaAustralia and India could also be discussed as discrete national forma-tions rather than as lsquobranches of the treersquo Their literatures could beconsidered in relation to the social and political history of each coun-try and could be read as a source of important images of nationalidentity

The development of national literatures and criticism is fundamentalto the whole enterprise of post-colonial studies Without such devel-opments at the national level and without the comparative studiesbetween national traditions to which these lead no discourse of thepost-colonial could have emerged Nor is it simply a matter of devel-opment from one stage to another since all post-colonial studies con-tinue to depend upon national literatures and criticism The study ofnational traditions is the first and most vital stage of the processof rejecting the claims of the centre to exclusivity It is the beginning ofwhat Nigerian writer Wole Soyinka has characterized as the lsquoprocess ofself-apprehensionrsquo (Soyinka 1976 xi) Recent theories of a generalpost-colonial discourse question essentialist formulations which maylead to nationalist and racist orthodoxies but they do not deny thegreat importance of maintaining each literaturersquos sense of specific dif-ference It is this sense of difference which constitutes each nationalliteraturersquos mode of self-apprehension and its claim to be a self-constituting entity However nationalism in which some partial truthor clicheacute is elevated to orthodoxy is a danger implicit in such nationalconceptions of literary production The impetus towards national self-realization in critical assessments of literature all too often fails to stopshort of nationalist myth

Larger geographical models which cross the boundaries of languagenationality or race to generate the concept of a regional literature suchas West Indian or South Pacific literature may also share some of thelimitations of the national model While the idea of an lsquoAfricanrsquo litera-ture for instance has a powerful appeal to writers and critics in thevarious African countries it has only limited application as a descrip-tive label African and European critics have produced several regional

the empire writes back16

and national studies which reflect the widespread political economicand cultural differences between modern African countries (Gurr andCalder 1974 Lindfors 1975 Taiwo 1976 Ogungbesan 1979)

Clearly some regional groupings are more likely to gain acceptancein the regions themselves than are others and will derive from a col-lective identity evident in other ways This is true of the West IndiesAlthough the Federation of the West Indies failed the english-speakingcountries there still field a regional cricket team Both the West Indiesand the South Pacific have regional universities with a significant inputinto literary production and discussion lsquoWest Indianrsquo literature hasalmost always been considered regionally rather than nationally Therehave been no major studies of Jamaican or Trinidadian literatures asdiscrete traditions A different regional grouping emphasizing geo-graphical and historical determinants rather than linguistic ones hasalso developed to explore lsquoCaribbeanrsquo literature setting literature inenglish from the region alongside that written in spanish french andother European languages (Allis 1982)

Despite such variants on the national model most of the englishliteratures outside Britain have been considered as individual nationalenterprises forming and reflecting each countryrsquos culture The inevit-able consequence of this is a gradual blurring of the distinctionbetween the national and the nationalist Nationalism has usuallyincluded a healthy repudiation of British and US hegemony observablein publishing education and the public sponsorship of writing Yet alltoo often nationalist criticism by failing to alter the terms of the dis-course within which it operates has participated implicitly or evenexplicitly in a discourse ultimately controlled by the very imperialpower its nationalist assertion is designed to exclude Emphasis mayhave been transferred to the national literature but the theoreticalassumptions critical perspectives and value judgements made haveoften replicated those of the British establishment

COMPARISONS BETWEEN TWO OR MORE REGIONS

Theories and models of post-colonial literatures could not emergeuntil the separate colonies were viewed in a framework centred ontheir own literary and cultural traditions Victorian Britain had exulted

cutting the ground 17

and national studies which reflect the widespread political economicand cultural differences between modern African countries (Gurr andCalder 1974 Lindfors 1975 Taiwo 1976 Ogungbesan 1979)

Clearly some regional groupings are more likely to gain acceptancein the regions themselves than are others and will derive from a col-lective identity evident in other ways This is true of the West IndiesAlthough the Federation of the West Indies failed the english-speakingcountries there still field a regional cricket team Both the West Indiesand the South Pacific have regional universities with a significant inputinto literary production and discussion lsquoWest Indianrsquo literature hasalmost always been considered regionally rather than nationally Therehave been no major studies of Jamaican or Trinidadian literatures asdiscrete traditions A different regional grouping emphasizing geo-graphical and historical determinants rather than linguistic ones hasalso developed to explore lsquoCaribbeanrsquo literature setting literature inenglish from the region alongside that written in spanish french andother European languages (Allis 1982)

Despite such variants on the national model most of the englishliteratures outside Britain have been considered as individual nationalenterprises forming and reflecting each countryrsquos culture The inevit-able consequence of this is a gradual blurring of the distinctionbetween the national and the nationalist Nationalism has usuallyincluded a healthy repudiation of British and US hegemony observablein publishing education and the public sponsorship of writing Yet alltoo often nationalist criticism by failing to alter the terms of the dis-course within which it operates has participated implicitly or evenexplicitly in a discourse ultimately controlled by the very imperialpower its nationalist assertion is designed to exclude Emphasis mayhave been transferred to the national literature but the theoreticalassumptions critical perspectives and value judgements made haveoften replicated those of the British establishment

COMPARISONS BETWEEN TWO OR MORE REGIONS

Theories and models of post-colonial literatures could not emergeuntil the separate colonies were viewed in a framework centred ontheir own literary and cultural traditions Victorian Britain had exulted

cutting the ground 17