The Empire Writes Back

Theory and Practice in Post-Colonial Literatures

Bill Ashcroft, Gareth Griffiths, Helen Tiffin

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2003
• ISBN:
  9781134465040
• Edition: 2
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

The experience of colonization and the challenges of a post-colonial world have produced an explosion of new writing in English. This diverse and powerful body of literature has established a specific practice of post-colonial writing in cultures as various as India, Australia, the West Indies and Canada, and has challenged both the traditional canon and dominant ideas of literature and culture.

The Empire Writes Back was the first major theoretical account of a wide range of post-colonial texts and their relation to the larger issues of post-colonial culture, and remains one of the most significant works published in this field. The authors, three leading figures in post-colonial studies, open up debates about the interrelationships of post-colonial literatures, investigate the powerful forces acting on language in the post-colonial text, and show how these texts constitute a radical critique of Eurocentric notions of literature and language.

This book is brilliant not only for its incisive analysis, but for its accessibility for readers new to the field. Now with an additional chapter and an updated bibliography, The Empire Writes Back is essential for contemporary post-colonial studies.

1 Cutting the Ground

Critical models of post-colonial literatures

DOI: 10.4324/9780203426081-2

As writers and critics became aware of the special character of post-colonial texts, they saw the need to develop an adequate model to account for them. Four major models have emerged to date: first, ‘national’ or regional models, which emphasize the distinctive features of the particular national or regional culture; second, race-based models which identify certain shared characteristics across various national literatures, such as the common racial inheritance in literatures of the African diaspora addressed by the ‘Black writing’ model; third, comparative models of varying complexity which seek to account for particular linguistic, historical, and cultural features across two or more post-colonial literatures; fourth, more comprehensive comparative models which argue for features such as hybridity and syncreticity as constitutive elements of all post-colonial literatures (syncretism is the process by which previously distinct linguistic categories, and, by extension, cultural formations, merge into a single new form). These models often operate as assumptions within critical practice rather than specific and discrete schools of thought; in any discussion of post-colonial writing a number of them may be operating at the same time.

National and Regional Models

The first post-colonial society to develop a ‘national’ literature was the USA. The emergence of a distinctive American literature in the late eighteenth century raised inevitable questions about the relationship between literature and place, between literature and nationality, and particularly about the suitability of inherited literary forms. Ideas about new kinds of literature were part of the optimistic progression to nationhood because it seemed that this was one of the most potent areas in which to express difference from Britain. Writers like Charles Brockden Brown, who attempted to indigenize British forms like the gothic and the sentimental novel, soon realized that with the change in location and culture it was not possible to import form and concept without radical alteration (Fiedler 1960; Ringe 1966).

In many ways the American experience and its attempts to produce a new kind of literature can be seen to be the model for all later post-colonial writing.¹ The first thing it showed was that some of a post-colonial country's most deeply held linguistic and cultural traits depend upon its relationship with the colonizing power, particularly the defining contrast between European metropolis and ‘frontier’ (see Fussell 1965). Once the American Revolution had forced the question of separate nationality, and the economic and political successes of the emerging nation had begun to be taken for granted, American literature as a distinct collection of texts also began to be accepted. But it was accepted as an offshoot of the ‘parent tree’. Such organic metaphors, and others like ‘parent–child’ and ‘stream–tributary’ acted to keep the new literature in its place. The plant and parent metaphors stressed age, experience, roots, tradition, and, most importantly, the connection between antiquity and value. They implied the same distinctions as those existing between metropolis and frontier: parents are more experienced, more important, more substantial, less brash than their offspring. Above all they are the origin and therefore claim the final authority in questions of taste and value.

But as the extensive literature of the USA developed different characteristics from that of Britain and established its right to be considered independently, the concept of national literary differences ‘within’ English writing became established. The eventual consequence of this has been that ‘newer’ literatures from countries such as Nigeria, Australia, and India could also be discussed as discrete national formations rather than as ‘branches of the tree’. Their literatures could be considered in relation to the social and political history of each country, and could be read as a source of important images of national identity.

The development of national literatures and criticism is fundamental to the whole enterprise of post-colonial studies. Without such developments at the national level, and without the comparative studies between national traditions to which these lead, no discourse of the post-colonial could have emerged. Nor is it simply a matter of development from one stage to another, since all post-colonial studies continue to depend upon national literatures and criticism. The study of national traditions is the first and most vital stage of the process of rejecting the claims of the centre to exclusivity. It is the beginning of what Nigerian writer Wole Soyinka has characterized as the ‘process of self-apprehension’ (Soyinka 1976: xi). Recent theories of a general post-colonial discourse question essentialist formulations which may lead to nationalist and racist orthodoxies, but they do not deny the great importance of maintaining each literature's sense of specific difference. It is this sense of difference which constitutes each national literature's mode of self-apprehension and its claim to be a self-constituting entity. However, nationalism, in which some partial truth or cliché is elevated to orthodoxy, is a danger implicit in such national conceptions of literary production. The impetus towards national self-realization in critical assessments of literature all too often fails to stop short of nationalist myth.

Larger geographical models which cross the boundaries of language, nationality, or race to generate the concept of a regional literature, such as West Indian or South Pacific literature, may also share some of the limitations of the national model. While the idea of an ‘African’ literature, for instance, has a powerful appeal to writers and critics in the various African countries, it has only limited application as a descriptive label. African and European critics have produced several regional and national studies which reflect the widespread political, economic, and cultural differences between modern African countries (Gurr and Calder 1974; Lindfors 1975; Taiwo 1976; Ogungbesan 1979).

Clearly some regional groupings are more likely to gain acceptance in the regions themselves than are others, and will derive from a collective identity evident in other ways. This is true of the West Indies. Although the Federation of the West Indies failed, the english-speaking countries there still field a regional cricket team. Both the West Indies and the South Pacific have regional universities with a significant input into literary production and discussion. ‘West Indian’ literature has almost always been considered regionally, rather than nationally. There have been no major studies of Jamaican or Trinidadian literatures as discrete traditions. A different regional grouping, emphasizing geographical and historical determinants rather than linguistic ones, has also developed to explore ‘Caribbean’ literature, setting literature in english from the region alongside that written in spanish, french, and other European languages (Allis 1982).

Despite such variants on the national model, most of the english literatures outside Britain have been considered as individual, national enterprises forming and reflecting each country's culture. The inevitable consequence of this is a gradual blurring of the distinction between the national and the nationalist. Nationalism has usually included a healthy repudiation of British and US hegemony observable in publishing, education, and the public sponsorship of writing. Yet all too often nationalist criticism, by failing to alter the terms of the discourse within which it operates, has participated implicitly or even explicitly in a discourse ultimately controlled by the very imperial power its nationalist assertion is designed to exclude. Emphasis may have been transferred to the national literature, but the theoretical assumptions, critical perspectives, and value judgements made have often replicated those of the British establishment.

Comparisons Between Two or More Regions

Theories and models of post-colonial literatures could not emerge until the separate colonies were viewed in a framework centred on their own literary and cultural traditions. Victorian Britain had exulted in the disparateness of its empire, but in representing that empire predominantly as a site of the exotic, of adventure and exploitation, it had defined it as a contrastive element within the British world-view. Differences between colonies were subordinated to their common difference from Britain. Thus the comparative gestures of journals like Black and White (1891–1911) which purported to juxtapose different colonies, never escaped from the metropolitan–colonial axis.

Colonial education systems reinforced this axis by providing in-school ‘readers’ (for example, the Royal Reader Series in the West Indies, or the Queensland Readers in Australia) a normative core of British literature, landscape, and history (Browning's thoughts in exile, Wordsworth's daffodils, Sir Philip Sidney's chivalry) and a sprinkling of colonial adventure which often asserted British values against a hostile physical or human environment (Stanley's explorations, Newbolt's desperate cricketers). It required the aggression of nationalist traditions to break this pattern of inevitable reference to Britain as a standard and to provide space for the consideration of the literary and cultural patterns the colonies shared.

Three principal types of comparison have resulted, forming bases for a genuine post-colonial discourse. These are comparisons between countries of the white diaspora – the USA, Canada, Australia and New Zealand – comparisons between areas of the Black diaspora, and, thirdly, those which bridge these groupings, comparing, say, literatures of the West Indies with that of Australia.

One of the most important early works in the first category is J.P. Matthews’ Tradition in Exile which offers a comparison between poetry in Canada and Australia in the nineteenth century. Tradition in Exile investigated significant similarities and important national and regional differences and though, as the title indicates, it still alluded to the imperial connection, its investigations of developmental parallels occasioned by the transplantation of the english language and traditions into other areas of the world laid the foundations for later studies which would perceive the imperial–colonial relationship as disjunctive rather than continuous. For example, a number of essays in McDougall and Whitlock (1987) which focus on Canada and Australia; Jones (1976) which considers important literary–political similarities between the USA and Australia, and Kirkby (1982) which argues for the importance of the American, rather than the British, influence on contemporary Australian poetry. W. H. New's recent Dreams of Speech and Violence (1987), for instance, suggests, through an exhaustive study of the short story in Canada and New Zealand, that these two post-colonial literatures’ relation to Britain is subversive rather than filiastic, counter-discursive rather than a continuing expression of the original imperial discourse.

Other critics like Moore (1969), Ngugi (1972), Griffiths (1978) concentrate on similarities between writing within the Black diaspora, comparing the literatures of African countries with those of the West Indian nations and/or with Black American writing (see p. 29).

Less frequently, comparisons have been drawn between countries or regions across Black and white diasporas – Dorsinville's Caliban Without Prospero (1974) which deals with the literatures of Quebec and the Black diaspora (see p. 32), and, more recently, comparisons of Australian convict and West Indian slave literature (Mcdonald 1984). Such studies, because they can deal in greater detail with two or three areas, form important bridges for the discourse of post-colonialism which deals with all areas, both Black and white.

The ‘Black Writing' Model

Another grouping which traverses several of the literatures from post-colonial societies is ‘Black writing’. This proceeds from the idea of race as a major feature of economic and political discrimination and draws together writers in the African diaspora whatever their nationality – African Americans, Afro-Caribbeans, and writers from African nations. The African characteristics of the model are important, for although the classification might be extended to include, for instance, Polynesian, Melanesian, or Australian Aboriginal writing (and even writing by whites about Africa or India as an antagonistic term), this extension has never been enthusiastically embraced by critics outside the African diaspora. Even where the idea of Black writing has worked well, in comparing and contrasting Black American writing with that from Africa or the West Indies (Baker 1976; Barthold 1981), it overlooks the very great cultural differences between literatures which are produced by a Black minority in a rich and powerful white country and those produced by the Black majority population of an independent nation. This is especially so since the latter nations are often still experiencing the residual effects of foreign domination in the political and economic spheres.

Despite these qualifications, race-centred critiques of Black writing and of writing by Europeans about Black societies have been influential within post-colonial discourse. The concept of Négritude developed by the Martinican Aimé Césaire (1945) and the Senegalese poet and politician Leopold Sedar Senghor (Senghor 1977) was the most pronounced assertion of the distinctive qualities of Black culture and identity. But in making this assertion it adopted stereotypes which curiously reflected European prejudice. Black culture, it claimed, was emotional rather than rational; it stressed integration and wholeness over analysis and dissection; it operated by distinctive rhythmic and temporal principles, and so forth. Négritude also claimed a distinctive African view of time–space relationships, ethics, metaphysics, and an aesthetics which separated itself from the supposedly ‘universal’ values of European taste and style. The danger was that, as a result, it could easily be reincorporated into a European model in which it functioned only as the antithesis of the thesis of white supremacy, a new ‘universal’ paradigm.

Wole Soyinka makes precisely this point in his analysis of Négritude in Myth, Literature and the African World:

Négritude, having laid its cornerstone on a European intellectual tradition, however bravely it tried to reverse its concepts (leaving its tenets untouched), was a foundling deserving to be drawn into, nay, even considered a case for benign adoption by European ideological interests.

(Soyinka 1976: 134)

As Soyinka perceives it, this is inevitable given that Négritude embraces the essential binary nature of the western philosophical tradition.

Sartre … classified this colonial movement as springing from the intellectual conditioning of the mother culture; he rightly assumed that any movement founded on an antithesis which responded to the Cartesian ‘I think, therefore I am’ with ‘I feel, therefore I am’ must be subject to a dialectical determinism which made all those who ‘are’ obedient to laws formulated on the European historical experience. How was he to know, if the proponents...