Lingua inglese - The empire writes back

The empire writes back

Cutting the ground

Critical models of post-colonial literatures:

• National or regional model [USA first to develop this; Charles Brown first who used British forms>radical alteration]
• Raced based model
• Comparative model (between two or more post-colonial literatures)
• More comprehensive comparative model (hybridity and syncretism) > collision between narrative mode, history, realist mimetic readings of the text.

Three types of comparison forming a base for a post-colonial discourse:

1. Comparison between countries of the white diaspora [US, Canada, Australia, New Zealand]
2. Comparison between countries of the black diaspora [black people claim to have different time-space relations]
3. Comparison between literatures from the West Indies with that of Australia.

Wider comparative models

“Commonwealth literature” aka new English literature, Post-Colonial literature (misleading) differences between writing in English and in an indigenous language.

Language and place

Place and displacement are major concerns of post-colonial people. Is it right to use the imported language over their native one? Two groups of colonies: settler colonies (land occupied by Europeans who dispossessed the indigenous population) > US, Canada, Australia; invaded colonies (colonised but not forced to adopt a different landscape) > India, Nigeria.

Thematic parallels

Between colonised countries like the struggle towards independence, domination, unfamiliar landscape.

Coloniser and colonised

Relationship in any post-colonial area subject to a political, imaginative, social control. Is it possible to decolonise a culture? Some say yes, some say no.

Dominating and dominated

Emblematic US case: the shift from dominated to dominating gave literature greater affinities. Dominated literatures tend to subversion.

Replacing the language

Abrogation and appropriation

Seizing the language in the centre and replacing it in a discourse fully adapted to the colonised place.

• Abrogation > refusal of the categories of the imperial culture with the assumption of a traditional fixed meaning in the words. Vital moment in the de-colonising of a language and the rewriting of English.
• Appropriation > the language is taken and made to ‘bear the burden’ of one’s own cultural experience. In other words, language is adopted as a tool and used in various ways to express widely differing cultural experiences. The post-colonial writer gazes in two directions, and he is the first interpreter of the text.

Glossing

Parenthetic translations of individual words (cross-cultural texts) aka the primitive form of metonymy. Untranslated words: selective lexical fidelity which leaves some words not-translated.