The Empire

Writes Back
Bill Ashcroft
Unit I. Writing at the
Margins
• Introduction from The Empire Writes Back [Australia]
• Ngugi Wa Thiongo’s ‘Goodbye Africa’ [Kenya]
• Dambudzo Marechera ‘Black Skin What Mask’
[Zimbabwe]
• Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s ‘The Thing Around
Your Neck’ [Nigeria]
• Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart [Nigeria]
Unit I. Writing at the
Margins
• Overview of contemporary African writers
through multiple short stories and a novel.
• Discussion of Black identity as a colonial and
postcolonial construct.
• Assessing the texts beyond postcolonial issues.
Texts written by these authors are not exclusively
tied to the West.
Postcolonial
Theory
• Post-colonial theory emerged as a
field of studies in the 1960s. Some of
its leading proponents are Edward
Said and Gayatri Spivak. These critics
criticized the representation of non-
Western characters in European
literature. Have you had any similar
experience while reading a book or
watching a series or movie? What
made this character feel wrong to you?
Postcolonial Theory
• Postcolonial critics study the influence of
Western imperialism in colonised nations.
• Colonization does not only involve territorial
domination but, also, discursive strategies by
which the colonial power is legitimized.
• These discursive and social practices establish
Western culture as the norm and others as
marginal or peripheral.
Postcolonial Theory
• The imaginary of the East (natural, irrational
and exotic) is implicitly a reflection of the
West as civilized, rational and logical.
• Critics examine the ways in which a text
reproduces or subverts these ideas.
• E.g.: The idea of the “good savage” still
reproduces notions of non-Europeans as
natural rather than cultural.
The Empire
Writes Back
Bill Ashcroft, Gareth
Griffiths, Helen Tiffin
• They are all Emeritus Professors in the School
of English.
• Bill Ashcroft and Helen Tiffin are Australian,
while Gareth Griffiths is Welsh but lives in
Sydney.
• Founding exponents of post-colonial theory
and the analysis of post-colonial literatures.
The Empire Writes Back
• The Empire Writes Back: Theory and Practice in Post-
Colonial Literatures was published in 1989.
• Multiple critics have claimed it as on one the major
works on postcolonial criticism.
• First major theoretical account of a wide range of
postcolonial texts and their relationship with bigger
issues of postcolonial culture.
The Empire Writes Back:
The Postcolonial
• Literature gives expression to the realities
experienced by colonized people.
• Postcolonial studies are not only concerned with
national culture after independence from an
imperial power.
• Postcolonial refers to all the culture affected by
imperialism from the moment of colonization to the
present day.
The Empire Writes Back:
The Postcolonial
• Studies the effects of European imperialism
on contemporary literatures.
• Recognizes postcolonial literatures in
previously and currently colonized
countries, as well as imperial centres.
• Postcolonial literatures assert themselves by
stressing their differences from the
assumptions of the imperial centre.
The Empire Writes Back:
The Postcolonial
• Postcolonial theory challenges the privileged
position of English as a discipline in the
academy.
• The discipline emerged during the 19th century as
a colonial form of cultural imperialism and
assimilation.
• English became the privileged norm through a
denial of the value of local literatures and
cultures.
The Empire Writes Back
• Why should post-colonial societies
continue to engage with the imperial
discourse? Since all the postcolonial
societies we discuss have achieved
political independence, why is the issue of
coloniality still relevant at all?
The Empire Writes Back:
Language and Appropriation
• The weight of antiquity continues to dominate
cultural production in much of the post-colonial
world.
• Through the literary canon, the body of British
texts still act as a touchstone of taste and value.
• The English of south-east England continues to
be the universal standard.
The Empire Writes Back:
Language and
Appropriation
• Post-colonial literatures developed in stages
corresponding to the creation of national or regional
consciousness.
• The development of these literatures outline a project
of asserting differences from the imperial centre
through language.
• Appropriation involves using the English of the
colonizer, transforming it, and making it ”bear the
burden of cultural experience.”
The Empire Writes Back:
Language and Appropriation
• One of the main features of imperial oppression is
control over language.
• The imperial education system installs a ‘standard
version of the metropolitan language as the norm and
marginalizes all ‘variants’ as impurities.
• The development of independent literatures depended
upon the appropriation of the English language for
new purposes.
The Empire Writes Back: Language and
Appropriation
• I’ve known rivers: • I heard the singing of the Mississippi when Abe Lincoln
went down to New Orleans, and I’ve seen its muddy bosom
• I’ve known rivers ancient as the world and older than the turn all golden in the sunset.
flow of human blood in human veins.
• I’ve known rivers:
• My soul has grown deep like the rivers.
• Ancient, dusky rivers.
• I bathed in the Euphrates when dawns were young.
• My soul has grown deep like the rivers.
• I built my hut near the Congo and it lulled me to sleep.
• I looked upon the Nile and raised the pyramids above it.
• “The Negro Speaks of Rivers” (Langston Hughes, 1921)
The Empire Writes Back:
Place and Displacement
• A major feature of post-colonial literatures is the
concern with place and displacement.
• Crisis of identity that involves the concern with the
development or recovery of an affective relationship
between self and place.
• Colonization entails the denial of a sense of self
through cultural denigration (view of indigenous
culture as inferior) or dislocation (transportation,
enslavement, immigration) or both.
The Empire Writes Back:
Place and Displacement
• Place and displacement, and a concern with the myths of
identity and authenticity are a feature common to all post-
colonial literatures.
• The most widely shared discursive practice within which this
alienation can be identified is the construction of place.
• The gap which opens between the experience of place and
the language available to describe it forms a classic feature
of post-colonial texts. E.g.: Spiritual or religious practices.
The Empire Writes Back:
Place and Displacement
• This gap occurs for those whose language seems
inadequate to describe a new place.
• This occurs to those whose language is systematically
destroyed by enslavement and rendered marginal
by the imposition of the colonizer’s language.
• Post-colonial literatures aim to escape from the
constraints of English as social practice by making
it communicate sense of displacement and
otherness.
The Empire Writes Back

• The alienating process which initially served to relegate the post-colonial

world to the margin turned upon itself and acted to push that world
through a kind of mental barrier into a position from which all experience
could be viewed as uncentred, pluralistic and multifarious. Marginality
thus became an unprecedent source of creative energy (12).
• The Empire Writes Back was published in the year 1989. Think about the
world we live in today. Do you agree with their claim that we live in a
world that celebrates pluralism and cultural diversity?