WIMAL DISSANAYAKE
During the past two decades or so, postcolonial theory has emerged as a very powerful and productive mode of inquiry and style of thinking that has begun to inflect the ambitions of diverse academic disciplines ranging from literary studies to political science. In order to understand the true nature and significance of postcolonial theory, we need to come to grips with the concept of postcolonialism on which it is based. At first sight, postcolonialism may appear to be a straightforward concept – it is, after all, what comes after colonialism. However, the apparent simplicity and straightforwardness of the term occludes a complexity of contradictory meanings and is indeed misleading in that it does not pay adequate attention to the idea of neocolonialism. During World War I, 85% of the earth’s surface was under European domination, and after World War II, a process of decolonization was set in motion that resulted in the former colonized countries receiving their independence. However, political independence, such as it is, does not necessarily translate into economic and cultural independence. The way the modern phase of capitalist modernity has begun to unfold across the phase of the earth foregrounds the relentless power and reach of neocolonialism. Hence, if postcolonialism is to become a useful analytical concept, it has, of necessity, to address the issue of neocolonialism. Postcolonialism, if it is to become a heuristically valid and productive concept, needs to retain a strong sense of anticoloniality and oppositionality.
Basically, there are two ways of conceptualizing postcolonialism. The first is as a period marker, as that which follows colonialism, and as I indicated in the earlier paragraph, this is highly problematic and is of limited analytical value. The second is as a style of thinking, a form of imagination, a mode of analytical representation that focuses on issues of epistemology. This second sense, no doubt, contains its own share of problems, but it also focuses on a set of salient issues that merit sustained analysis.
Postcolonial theory grew out of the work on colonialism. There are, to be sure, diverse scholars representing diverse disciplines working on theory associated with postcolonialism such as historians, anthropologists, literary scholars, political scientists, and sociologists. However, the term postcolonial theory is used largely to designate the body of work produced by a certain type of cultural analysts. In this regard, Bart Moore‐Gilbert’s remarks are illuminating. He defines postcolonial theory as:
[W]ork which is shaped primarily, or to a significant degree, by methodological affiliation to French “high” theory – notably Jacques Derrida, Jacques Lacan, and Michel Foucault. In practice, this will mean the work of Edward Said, Gayatri Spivak and Homi Bhabha. It is the “intrusion” of French “high” theory to postcolonial analysis at has perhaps generated the most heated of the many current critical debates, provoking extremes of both approval and disapproval.
(Bart Moore‐Gilbert 1997: 1)
It is in this sense that I wish to employ the term postcolonial theory in this chapter
As a consequence of the formulations and exegeses of Edward Said, Gayatri Spivak, and Homi Bhabha (Robert Young refers to them as the Holy Trinity among postcolonial theorists), the analysis of postcolonial texts and events and processes became heavily inflected by French theory. The approaches and analytical vocabularies of Derrida, Foucault, Lacan, and others, became stock‐in‐trade of postcolonial theoretical investigations. In one sense, this was salutary in that the idea of postcolonialism as a discursive product, textual phenomenon began to be recognized. On the other hand, this move, important as it was, had the effect of introducing a kind of textual idealism and nominalism into postcolonial studies at the expense of material and historical factors. Clearly, this is a deficiency that needs to be redressed.
Said, Spivak and Bhabha have drawn on poststructural theories in their effort to focus on discursive production of colonialism, linguistic constitution of subjectivity, deconstruction of easy binarisms such as colonized and colonizer, dismantling of master narratives of imperialism and the deployment of strategies of subversion such as parody, irony and mimicry. Undoubtedly, these newer emphases introduced newer tropes, topoi, and optics to the study of postcolonialism. At the same time, one sees a tendency to downplay material dimensions of textual production. Here, I am not arguing for some kind of mimetic reflectionism or base‐superstructure model reminiscent of vulgar Marxists. Clearly, we have passed that stage and fully recognize the complexities of cultural representation and redescription. What I am seeking to do is to focus on the compelling need to combine textual analysis with social formations and material imperatives and not imprison oneself in a kind of textual nominalism. In order to appreciate the true nature and significance of postcolonial texts such an effort is vitally necessary.
Postcolonial theory, as one knows it today, is largely the creation of Edward Said, Gayatri Spivak, Homi Bhabha, and their followers. In 1978, Said published his path‐breaking book, Orientalism, which was to exercise a profound influence on the rise of postcolonial theory and the interrogation of colonial texts. Gayatri Spivak was moved to characterize Orientalism as the source book in our discipline. She went on to observe, “The study of colonial discourse, directly released by work such as Said’s, has, however, blossomed into a garden where the marginal can speak and be spoken, even spoken for” (1990: 221). Drawing on the innovative work of Michel Foucault on knowledge and power, Said pointed out that the West discursively produced the orient in order to fortify their hold and dominion over that territory. He pointed out the complex interconnections between the production of knowledge of the orient and the institutions of power and their machinations. “Orientalism,” of course, was not without its deficiencies, and critics such as Homi Bhabha, while lauding Said’s attempt, underlined the fact that there was a certain easy totalization that vitiated Said’s central argument.
Gayatri Spivak sought to extend and widen the line of inquiry opened up by Said, by drawing on the conceptual resources of Derridean deconstruction, feminism, and Marxism. She was interested in exploring the complex layers of colonial subjectivity and textuality and the problematics of postcolonial representation. If Said’s primary focus was on the Middle East, Spivak’s was on India, and she succeeded to bring into scholarly vision some of the important problems associated with giving voice to the subalterns in India. While many of the scholars associated with postcolonial theory continue to focus on the diasporics and migrants and their experiences, Spivak cautions against a facile equation between diasporics and postcolonials. As she rightly remarked, “the new orientalism views the world as immigrant. It is meretricious to suggest that this is a reminder undervalues the struggles of the marginal in metropolitan space. It is to remember that that struggle cannot be made the unexamined referent for all postcoloniality without serious problems” (Spivak 1990: 228). In other words, Spivak had a much more complex and comprehensive vision of postcoloniality than most other postcolonial theorists.
The third scholar who has significantly enriched and vitalized the field of postcolonial studies is Homi Bhabha. In a series of dazzling essays he sought to delineate the complex relationships that existed between the colonizer and the colonized. It is Bhabha’s conviction that even for the colonizer, the production of the other is by no means straightforward and involves operating in a highly treacherous terrain. Bhabha seeks to read colonial texts as perpetually occupying an ambivalent space and as being unstable and self‐divided, so that reading them itself becomes an exceedingly demanding task. Drawing on the different approaches to psychoanalysis as demonstrated in the writings of Freud and Lacan, Homi Bhabha deploys psychological concepts such as desire, disavowal, mimicry, paranoia, repression, and fetishism as central tools in his analysis of colonial textualities. He has, of course, come in for his own share of criticism by commentators who feel that he has sacrificed material factors and politics for textual complexities.
While this triumvirate of theorists has shaped the field of colonial studies in very significant ways, there have been forerunners whose work is extremely important in understanding the nature of postcolonial theory. The chief among them is the Martiniquian psychiatrist Frantz Fanon, who in the 1960s raised issues of colonial subjugation and distorted mentalities and consciousnesses produced in colonial subjects. He made use of psychological theory to demonstrate the nature of dependency and inadequacy as well as inferiority complex experienced by colonized subjects. He pointed out how colonizers are compelled to perceive themselves as the internalization of the other. Fanon (1986) emphasized the fact that the end of colonialism, if it is to mean anything, must bring about not only political and economic change but also psychological change. Frantz Fanon’s ideas inspired postcolonial theorists such as Homi Bhabha in significant ways. When Bhabha, in commenting on the black skin and white masks of Fanon’s title, says that “It is not the colonialist Self or the colonized Other, but the disturbing distance in‐between that constitutes the figure of colonial otherness – the white man’s artifice inscribed on the black man’s body. It is in relation to this impossible object that the liminal problem of colonial identity and its vicissitudes emerges” (Bhabha n.d.). This is as much a comment on Fanon as it is about his interpretive interests and bent of mind.
There is no doubt that the writings of Fanon, Said, Spivak, Bhabha, and their followers have made a significant contribution to the shaping of the field of colonial studies. However, at the same time, their writings brought with them several problems and dilemmas that need to be addressed. Critics of postcolonial theory maintain that it is too much tied to Eurocentric ideas, most notably poststructuralism, lacks a political vision, pays inadequate attention to questions of history, is far more preoccupied with problems and debates in the metropolitan academe than the stark realities of the colonized countries, displays an elitism especially in the impenetrable prose fashioned by some of the theorists such as Bhabha and Spivak. Let us take the question of politics. Terry Eagleton says that within postcolonial thinking we are, “allowed to talk about cultural differences but not — or not much — about economic exploitation” (1994: 12).
Ella Shohat (1992) makes the point that the term postcolonial as used in Western centers of learning serves to distance more politically relevant terms such as imperialism and geopolitics. Commentators such as Ajaz Ahmad, Arif Dirlik, E. San Juan, Benita Perry, Ngu͂gĩ wa Thiong’o, and Neil Lazarus make a strong case for postcolonial theory to draw on the conceptual resources of Marxism. For example, Aijaz Ahmad, lamenting the fact that postcolonial theorists ignore history, especially the struggle for survival of colonized peoples, makes the following observation:
within this context, speaking with virtually mindless pleasure of transnational cultural hybridity, and politics of contingency, amounts, in effect, to endorsing the cultural claims of transnational capital itself…. It is not at all clear how the celebration of a postcolonial, transnational, electronically produced cultural hybridity is to be squared with the systematic decay of countries and continents, and with decreasing chances for substantial proportions of the global population to obtain conditions of bare survival, let alone electronic literacy and gadgetry.
(Ahmad cited in San Juan 1998: 9)
Here, Ahmad is drawing attention not only to the shallow politics linked to postcolonial theory but also to the deficiencies in highly valorized concepts such as hybridity by postcolonial theorists.
Similarly, San Juan points out the absence of a sense of history and the day‐to‐day problems experienced by colonized peoples in their struggles for instance. If postcolonial theory is to be representative and effective, these problems should be addressed. San Juan makes the following observation: “Postcolonial theory, in brief, can be read as metaphysical idealism masking its counterrevolutionary telos by denying its own worldly interests and genealogy. It occludes its own historical determinacy by deploying psychoanalytical and linguistic conceptual frameworks that take market/exchange relations for granted” (1998: 9–10). He goes on to make the comment that, “lacking the dialectical mediation of the part to the whole that historical materialism considers imperative for theorizing the possibilities for change and the sublation of historically specific contradictions, postcolonial orthodoxy dissolves mediations and generates exactly the predicament that it claims to prevent: the antinomy of transcendentlizing idealism and mechanical determinism” (San Juan 1998: 10).
In addition to the numerous deficiencies in postcolonial theory that I alluded to earlier, I wish to focus on one that is not sufficiently well articulated, namely, the perceived inability or unwillingness of postcolonial theorists to deal with the native, vernacular literatures of colonized countries. If postcolonial theory is to become a powerfully productive mode of cultural critique, it is imperative that postcolonial theorists pay greater attention to the writings of indigenous writers in indigenous languages. After all, this is the site in which day‐to‐day struggles of postcolonial subjects are most vividly and authentically reflected, inflected, and refocused. Let us take the case of India. India has produced some of the most well‐known and insightful postcolonial theorists and critics. However, the bulk of their interpretive efforts have been directed toward diasporic writings, writing in English and the works of colonial writers such as Forster and Kipling. These, I daresay, are all important areas for investigation and no one would want to deny this. However, it is equally important that postcolonial theorists pay close attention to the creative works produced in regional languages such as Bengali, Hindi, Telugu, and Tamil. Indeed, it is in this terrain that some of the most significantly vibrant literary works of contemporary India come to life. Except, some critical essays on Mahasweta Devi’s short stories, and a critique of Rabindranath Tagore’s novel Gora by Gayatri Spivak, there is little exciting work done on indigenous writings in India. This surely is a deficiency that needs to be addressed. I am underlining this felt desideratum as a lead‐in to the second half of my essay, which focuses on the work related to world Englishes and the ways in which postcolonial theory could be mobilized to resituate their work and emplace it in a wider discursive horizon.
What I wish to do now is to relate the arc of growth of postcolonial studies to some of the salient issues related to World Englishes. One of the central concepts associated with postcolonial theory is power and this is vitally connected with the interests, agendas, and investments of world Englishes. Michel Foucault has played a central role in shaping the work of such postcolonial theorists such as Edward Said. With the writings of Foucault, the notion of power was invested with a newer weight and resonance, one that has been instrumental in generating much research. According to Foucault, power has to be seen as something omnipresent, and he underscored the fact that the nexus between discourse and power is most compelling. Foucault (1970: 100) said that, “in any society the production of discourse is at once controlled, selected, organized and redistributed according to a number of procedures whose role is to avert its powers and its dangers, to master the unpredictable event.” It has to be pointed out that this avenue of inquiry has great consequences for investigations into world Englishes.
The significance of the notion of power and ideology in making sense of the complexities of world Englishes has been highlighted by a number of scholars in recent times. Braj Kachru (1986, 1992, 2003, 2005) in a number of seminal and innovative essays, has underlined the need to pay close attention to issues related to power and ideology. Robert Phillipson (1992) has called attention to the contemporary phenomenon of English as a world language and a dominant force which encircles power and ideology. We are witnessing the increasingly powerful phenomenon of English as a world language and a dominant force. The promotion of English as a world language by dominant powers and its imbrication with foreign policy are an aspect that attracts Phillipson’s interest. Gauri Viswanathan (1989) explains how the discipline of English came into its own in an age of colonialism and claims that any purposive discussion of the growth of English needs to come to terms with the imperial mission of educating and civilizing colonial subjects in the arts and letters of England. Works of scholars such as the ones I have cited point to the close relationship that exists between postcolonial theory and world Englishes.
The interconnections among power, ideology, and language have spawned a number of subthemes that merits close consideration. The different ways in which creative writers – poets, novelists, short‐story writers, dramatists – have sought to subvert the English language in a gesture if self‐assertion and defiance invite more focused attention. The intricate and convoluted relationships that exist between linguistic imperialism and the new literatures in English provide us with vivid examples if the ways in which power and ideology make their presence felt in verbal textures. Salman Rushdie (1982b: 7) observed that:
Language, like much else in the newly independent societies, needs to be decolonized, to be made in other images, if those of us who use it from positions outside the Anglo‐Saxon cultures are to be more than Uncle Toms. And it is this endeavor that gives the new literatures of Africa, the Caribbean, and India much of the present vitality and excitement.
It is important, in this context, to raise the question, how are the creators of the new literatures in English rising to this challenge? In what ways are their attempts related to questions of power, ideology and postcolonialism? The following two passages from two well‐known Indian born writers, I believe, will help to illustrate more forcefully this nexus. The first is from Raja Rao’s Kanthapura and the second from Salman Rushdie’s The Satanic Verses:
What we find in these two passages is the defiant deployment of the English language. In the first passage, taken from Raja Rao’s novel Kanthapura, the author has made an attempt to use creatively the speech rhythms of Kannada to recreate a characteristically South Indian experience (see Kachru 2005: 137‐154). In the second passage, taken from Rushdie’s novel The Satanic Verses, the author deploys English boldly along with Indian intertextualities (the reference is to the well‐known song in Raj Kapoor’s popular film Sri 420) to communicate a typically nonwestern experience. The important question that needs to be raised here is the following: are these writers victims of English linguistic imperialism? Or are they tactically seeking to stretch the range, tonalities, and discursive spaces of English? Are they, in their distinct ways, undermining or subverting from within the colonizing ambitions of English? These and kindred issues invite thoughtful responses. The topic of power and ideology, then, is one that can prove to be extremely productive in exploring the nature and significance of world Englishes.
The concept of the public sphere is one that has stimulated the interest of many of the postcolonial theorists. It is indeed a topic that can be pressed into service very productively when examining the effects and impacts of world Englishes. The eminent German social philosopher Jurgen Habermas (1989) highlighted a set of forces and institutions that emerged in the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries in Europe that he considered to be pivotal to the comprehension of societies characteristically democratic in nature. He chooses to call these forces and institutions the bourgeois public sphere.
The most compelling aspect of this formulation, according to Habermas, is the possibility of separating the political dimensions from both the state and civil society and promoting a critical and interrogatory perspective in both spheres. In the view of Habermas, the bourgeois public sphere is crucial to a deeper understanding of democratic and social transformation that took place in Europe in the eighteenth century and the consequent emergence of the nation‐state. According to him, the institutionalized public sphere not only constitutes a web of interests and a site of contestation and oppositionality between state and society, but also a practice of rational‐critical discourse on topics and issues connected to politics in the larger and more inclusive sense of the term. It needs to be pointed out that both social scientists and humanists have chosen to make use of this concept in their research, at times critiquing Habermas for certain limitations and blind spots. English clearly is used, whether in Pakistan or Nigeria or Hong Kong, by the elite who wield considerable power in society. The creative writers from non‐Western countries who deploy English as their preferred and privileged medium of communication are for the most part from the upper strata of society and carry the potential for exercising indelible influence on social tides. Consequently, the concept of the public sphere can be deployed very productively by researchers and scholars of world Englishes. The concept of the public sphere that has made its presence so unmistakably in the writings of postcolonial theorists can be employed fruitfully into investigations of the efficacies and impacts of world Englishes.
In a remarkably prescient essay on the novel The Guide by the Indian writer R. K. Narayan, Spivak (1993b) demonstrates how new literatures in English could be productively explored in terms of the public sphere. She investigates a multiplicity of dimensions of Narayan’s text including his use of English in relation to Indian languages, his use of devadasis (temple dancers) as a vehicle for his narrative about a male protagonist and the ensuing questions of female subjectivity in an unmistakably androcentric society, the class implications of the institution of devadasis, and the way that the novel, an elitist text in English, was translated into a popular text, a Bombay film. Through her careful analysis, Spivak has succeeded in demonstrating the significance if examining English creative writings from Asia, Africa, and the Caribbean in terms of the public sphere. By situating this body of writing in the public sphere, as a means of laying out the complex layers of meaning inscribed in them, we can hope to attain a more profound understanding of such works
Invisible Bodies by A. K. Ramanujan (1997) provides us with another interesting example:
He found three newborn puppies
In a gutter with a mother curled
Around them.
Turning the corner of the street
She found a newborn naked baby
Male, battered, dead in a manhole
With no mother around
Turning the corner of the street
The boy stepped in the junkie
Lying in the alley, covered with flies,
A sniffing his crotch.
Just any day, not only after a riot,
Even among the gamboges maples of fall
Streets are full of bodies, invisible,
To the girl under the twirling parasol
The author has taken pains to locate the poem, which is constructed on the juxtaposition of visibility and invisibility, with all its critical interrogations, within the public sphere, as a way of dramatizing his chosen theme. The way world Englishes and their concomitant creative writings connect with the Habermasian public sphere is indeed another terrain that could be productively mined as we seek to attain a deeper and more nuanced understanding of the dynamics of world Englishes. As I stated earlier, the idea of the public sphere and the interests if world Englishes intersect in interesting ways. The two topics that I have so far discussed in this chapter – the concept of power and the public sphere – are, to be sure, intertwined in significant ways.
Another zone of investigation that merits closer study is the interconnection between English writings and indigenous writings in a given national or cultural context. In countries like India or Singapore or Sri Lanka, literary works continue to be produced in English as well as indigenous languages. Therefore, an exploration into the relationship that is activated between writings produced in English and other native languages can yield interesting results and open up useful pathways of inquiry. In a recent essay, Salman Rushdie (1997: 50), commenting on the current literary scene, made the following claim:
The prose writing – both fiction and nonfiction – created in this period by Indian writers working in English is proving to be a stronger and more important body of work than most of what has been produced in the eighteen “recognized” languages of India, the so‐called “‘vernacular languages.” During the same time; and, indeed, this new and still burgeoning Indo‐Anglian literature represents perhaps the most valuable contribution India has yet made to the world of books. The true Indian literature of the first postcolonial half century has been made in the language the British left behind.
That last sentence points to a problematic situation, that is, vitality connected with the spread of world Englishes and the shadow of colonialism it contains.
Not everyone, of course, would and did agree with the evaluation proffered by Rushdie. However, it is an indisputable fact that during the past 25 years or so, a number of highly gifted Indian writers of fiction have emerged who are capable of exploiting the resources of the English language with remarkable adroitness; it has to be conceded that they have generated a great measure of interest that go far behind the Indian shoreline. Among them, Salman Rushdie himself, as well as Vikram Seth, Amitav Ghosh, Rohinton Mistry, Vikram Chandra, Arundhati Roy, Sashi Tharoor, Amit Chaudhuri, and Kiran Desai deserve special mention.
How the creations of authors writing in English relate thematically, stylistically, and in terms of the preferred social vision to the body of indigenous writing is indeed a sphere of inquiry that could generate interesting and valuable insights. How do these two sets of writers encounter the imperatives of postcoloniality and articulate their different understandings? How can we productively make use of one set of writing to interrogate the other, given the fact that they both have grown out of the same historical conjuncture and cultural geography? This has also great implications for the teaching of non‐native English writings. In an essay devoted to the work of Rudyard Kipling, Nadine Gordimer, Hanif Kureshi, Rabindranath Tagore, and Mahaswea Devi, Spivak (1993a), proceeding from the premise that the goal of teaching literature is epistemic in that the aim is to transform the way in which objects of knowledge are constructed, makes the observation that:
In the post‐colonial context, the teaching of English literature can become critical only if it is intimately yoked to the teaching of the literary or cultural production in the mother tongue(s). In that persistently asymmetrical intimacy, the topics of language learning, in its various forms, can become a particularly productive site.
(Spivak 1993a: 151)
Here, the English writings produced by speakers of English in Asia and Africa can play a very important and consequential role. Situated as these writings are between two cultural worlds, two thought worlds, the pedagogic function alluded to in Spivak’s essay can be usefully accomplished by investigating deeply, paying close attention to the shifts between cultural registers and the tensions of interlingual dynamics. The special value of world Englishes and their attendant creative writings in linguistic and literary pedagogy has as yet not received the kind of scholarly attention it deserves.
It is abundantly clear that world Englishes, the object of study as well as the concept of analysis, emerged as a consequence of the complex process of globalization and transnationalization that have been set in motion. Therefore, any ontological and epistemological analysis demands that the writings associated with world Englishes be situated at the interface between the global and local. One of the defining features of the modern world is the increasingly complex and multifaceted interaction between localism and globalism. Clearly, this process has been going on for centuries, but its velocity has risen dramatically during the past half a century or so. This interplay is instrumental in the remarkable production of changes in the spaces of economics, politics and culture as newer forms of capital, largely originating in the West, enforce their local visibilities and inflect historically sedimented practices in unforeseen ways. How symbolic forms and ways of associating with western capitalism are transformed, localized, and legitimized in the Third World countries in relation to their historical narratives and changing life worlds is at the heart of the discourse of localism. This discourse is one that is intimately linked to the rise and spread of coloniality and its aftermath.
World Englishes provides us with a vibrant and productive site where cultural articulations of mutual embeddedness of the local and the global are given compelling shape. A fruitful way of apprehending the dialectic between the local and global is through the production of newer localities. When we pause to explore the imbricated narratives of the local and the global, what we are seeking to accomplish, in point of fact, is to focus on the production of the local and the ever‐changing contours in response to the imperatives of the global. It has to be pointed out that the local is never static; its boundaries, both spatial and temporal, are subject to continual change. It is indeed characterized by a web of power plays, agonistic interests, pluralized histories, struggles over polysemous signs, and asymmetrical exchanges.
The local is constantly transforming itself as it strains to reach beyond itself and engage the translocal in its manifold manifestations. What is interesting about world Englishes is that they foreground and give figurality to these processes in compellingly interesting ways. The well‐known American anthropologist Clifford Geertz (1983) is surely right when he underscores the need in social understanding and cultural redescription for a continual tracking between the most local of local details and the most global of global structures in such a way as to bring them into simultaneous view. Deleuze and Guattari (1986) focus on this phenomenon when they refer to deterritorialization where the production of the local is inflected by the nexus if activities taking place elsewhere. What is interesting and noteworthy about the emerging body of writing associated with world Englishes is that it makes available a semiotic space for the articulation of the global imaginary and its formation within the phenomenology of the local. The frameworks of analysis provided by postcolonial theory make the exploration into this phenomenon more constructive.
It has to be recognized that we are living at a moment in history when the local and the global are co‐implicated in unanticipated ways. As a consequence of the phenomenal growth of science and technology, and of the unprecedented proliferation of media and communication, the world is shrinking as never before. And this very shrinkage, paradoxically enough, has had the effect of spawning local narratives and projects with added vitality. Wilson and Dissanayake (1996) have observed a new world‐space of cultural products and national representations which are simultaneously becoming more globalized as a consequence of capitalism moving across borders and more localized, fragmented, into contestatory enclaves of difference coalition, and resistance in everyday life has come into play. The interface of global forms, images, codes, sites, and technologies of transformation with those of local communities, tactics, and symbolic strategies that would confront and challenge them in the production of locality and the making of everyday space is one of the distinctive phenomena of contemporary society. The evolving corpus of writing linked to world Englishes provides us with narratives, repertoires of images, and conceptualities that enable us to make greater sense of the interanimation of the local and the global. Recently developed frames of intelligibility by postcolonial theorists enable us to study these writings with a deepened awareness of the crucial issues related to cultural textuality.
When we examine the novels and short stories of writers such as Arundhati Roy and Aradashri Vakil, we perceive the local‐global interplay not only in the experiences selected for contextualization but also in the very sensibility that shapes the language that is deployed to textualize them. For example, the following passage from Arundhati Roy’s The God of Small Things (1997) illustrates this point:
The interplay between the local and the global and the production of newer localities are important understanding the creative writing associated with the new literatures in English. This interplay also serves to focus attention on the vexed question of nationhood – a question complexly linked to postcoloniality. The new writings in English stand in angular relationship to nationhood and postcoloniality in view of the fact that they employ the ambiguous bequest – the language – of the colonial masters. At the same time, they display the desire to move away from the parochialisms and chauvinism of nationalists. In the works of Salman Rushdie, Amitav Ghosh, and Arundhati Roy, to take three novelists from India, we observe the production of counter‐narratives of nation and the desire to destabilize the ideological strategies by means of which imagined communities are given essentialist identities. The monochromatic homogeneity of the nation‐state and its legitimizing metanarratives begin to be fissured when writers like these strive to enunciate the hopes and experience and modes of being of linguistic, ethnic, and religious minorities. Through these means, they succeed in opening up a representational space from which the hegemonic discourses of the nation‐state can be purposefully challenged and the ideas of cosmopolitanism, and cultural difference can be profitably foregrounded. The discourse of localism and globalism, then, is a topic that clearly invites further exploration in terms of the intentionalities and trajectories of development of the new writings in English. The recent theories of textual production advanced by postcolonial theorists enable us to pursue this topic with vigor and discernment.
Postcolonial studies and politics of culture are vitally interconnected. How cultural objects are produced, how they are studied, and the institutional contexts and processes that facilitate these explorations are clearly imbricated with politics. As a matter of fact, one of the effects of formulations of postcolonial theorists such as Bhabha, Spivak, and Chatterjee has been the politicization and the concomitant desire to challenge the hegemonic power of the nation‐state, multinational corporations, mainstream and entrenched scholarship. Investigations into world Englishes demand that we pay close attention to this dimension as well. Our inquiries into the works associated with world Englishes will benefit greatly by delving more deeply into these imbricated issues.
The political analysis has to take place against the backdrop of colonialism and imperialism. After all, the spread of English in Asia, Africa, and the Caribbean is traceable to these phenomena. And the class from which many of the writers of English in the Third World descend is one that was privileged under colonial rule. John Updike (1997: 156) says that English writers from countries like India where they write against a background of native tongues and traditions that are repressed in the creative effort, risk being enlisted in a foreign, if not enemy, camp, that of the colonizer. Therefore, questions of politics of culture, politics of social location, imperialism, and colonialism, have to be brought into our discussions and analyses of world Englishes. For example, Frantz Fanon (1965: 210) said that “Colonialism is not satisfied merely with holding a people in its grip and emptying the native’s brain of all form and content. By a kind of perverted logic, it turns the past of people, and distorts, disfigures and destroys it.” If this is indeed so, what is the role of writers in English in Asia and Africa as public intellectuals addressing not only the body of indigenous readers but also the wider world outside? How have they confronted and repossessed their respective histories? How have they fared so far? These are questions that are as urgent as they are recondite, and they merit deeper study. A more creative dialogue between world Englishes and postcolonial theory will surely promote such a nurturing dialogue.
Creative writers associated with world Englishes can most often be described as metaphorical selves, in after virtue, a book that has played a pivotal role in restoring ethics to the center of philosophical discourse, Alasdair Macintyre (1981) remarks that selfhood resides in the unity of narration. This is, no doubt, a very productive line of approach. Macintyre, however, does not explore the question of language, which enters so persistently and insistently into the equation – as becomes evident when we pause to examine the work of novelists linked to world Englishes who have endeavored to create a selfhood for themselves through fiction.
Whether we examine the fictional writings of older novelists like Raja Rao, R.K. Narayan, Chinua Achebe, Amos Tutuola, and G. V. Desani, or of relatively younger writers like Salman Rushdie, Rohinton Mistry, Amitav Ghosh, Shashi Tharoor, Arundhati Roy, M. G. Vassanji, and Mongane Serote, the complex relationships between self and narrative, and language becomes evident. These writers are seeking to gain entrance to their multifaceted subjectivities by decolonizing the English language and the sedimented consciousness that goes with it. Many of them regard the English language as the repressive instrument of a hegemonic colonial discourse. They wish to emancipate themselves from its clutches by probing deeper and deeper into their historical pasts, cultural heritages, and the intricacies of the present moment. Through these means, they seek to confront the protean selfhoods of modernity. What is interesting is that these writers are striving to accomplish this liberation through the very language that has in the past shackled them to what can be characterized as an ambiguous colonial legacy. The meeting of World Englishes and postcolonial theory should facilitate the shining of a new light on this area of study.
It is apparent that these writers are constantly crossing and recrossing boundaries both topographical and linguistic so as to capture the complex dynamics of the present historical conjuncture and cultural moment with all its reverberations. Some of them prefer to move back and forth between home and exile, at times interchanging their ontologies. They are exiled from home but at home in the language that overdetermines the exilic experience, and their identities are shaped in the tensional interstices of two cultures. The liminality, in‐betweenness, appears to be a vital marker of postcolonial spaces; writers like Rushdie and Ghosh and Mistry are seeking to textualize its inner trajectories, and the aesthetics of linguistic migrants are vital to a proper understanding of their work. In view of these considerations, these writers may be characterized as metaphoric selves with subversive intents. The phrase metaphoric self contains two senses. First, “metaphor” in its original sense, derived from Greek, denoted the act of carrying across. What these writers are attempting to do is to carry themselves from one cultural topography to another. The second interpretation with which metaphoric self shares a common area of meaning is important in this regard, in that the act of cultural translation is important to their efforts. Second, these writers are seeking to reconstruct and refashion their respective identities through language, more specifically through the instrumentality of metaphoricity. Hence, another area of World Englishes that merits close research attention is what I have characterized as the domain of the metaphoric selves. The theories and frameworks proposed by modern postcolonial theorists can be extremely useful in exploring this domain of interest.
This discussion of metaphoric selves further relates to two important desiderata of postcolonial studies; first, the need to adopt a more complex and nuanced approach to the interplay of Western and nonwestern cultures; second, the need to problematize the very notion of culture so as to come to grips with its complicated nature. When we discuss some of the more innovative writers connected with world Englishes in terms of metaphoric selves, it is important to bear in mind the fact that we are not talking of West and the rest in terms of the two essentialized and immutable categories. Rather, they are discursive constructions, representational spaces, in which an incessant contestation of meaning takes place. And, like the West, the non‐West is no monolith: there is Africa, Asia, the Pacific, and the Caribbean, and so on, and each of them comprises complex entities. Asia, for example, is not unitary or monolithic any more than the West is. Therefore, it is important that we pluralize the West as well as the non‐West so that these diverse historicities, temporalities, and ideologies that are inscribed in different cultures that constitute the West and the non‐West can be understood more usefully. Here, when we talk of the writers of English in Asia or the Pacific as metaphoric selves, we are not talking of two unconnected entities, whether the West and Asia or the West and the Pacific, but rather of closely connected and mutually constitutive entities. However, the fact is that despite these linkages these are obvious differences, and the cultural spaces and subjective spaces occupied by these writers can only be purposefully understood only in terms of the metaphoricity alluded to earlier. The newer developments in postcolonial theory enable us to pursue these connections more productively.
The second important need is to problematize culture, and the works of the most innovative writers in English in Africa, the Pacific and Asia, and Caribbean countries underline this fact. Their works demonstrate the fact that all cultures are polysemous and hybrid texts, and that the ever increasing interdependence of countries makes it imperative that we abandon the notion of culture as homogeneous and self‐contained, and embrace the idea that that are porous, interactive and dynamic. The newer postcolonial theories urge as to go on this path of inquiry. The notion of culture conceived in terms of symbolic systems located in readily identifiable spaces or territories is being problematized (Dissanyake 1996). Therefore, as these creative writers rightly point out, instead of searching for authenticities of culture, our critical and interrogatory attention should be directed toward the interactions of cultures with others. The ideas of metaphoric selves as concretized in the writings of the authors of new literatures in English serve to draw attention to this need. What these writers point to is the importance of challenging naturalized and taken for granted conceptions of spatialized cultures and investigating the production of difference within commonly shared cultural and textual places. The leading edge of postcolonial theory has much to offer to this reconceptualization and reimagining.
The crossing and recrossing of cultural boundaries by writers of new literatures of English focus on the question of subject‐positions of these writers. From which vantage point do they speak, and to whom? As Asian or African writers functioning as public intellectuals become more and more exposed to Western forces and influences, we need to examine the ways in which they position themselves culturally. Here, concepts such as hybridity, formulated by postcolonial theorists such as Homi Bhabha, can be extremely valuable, if we also bear in mind their limitations. As Bhabha remarks:
It seems to me the only place in the world to speak from was at a point whereby contradictions, antagonisms, the hybridities of cultural influence, the boundaries of nations were not sublated into some utopian sense of liberation or return the place to speak from was through these incommensurable contradictions within which people survive, are politically active and change.
(Bhabha 1989: 67)
Bhabha has advanced the notion that hybridity can be interpreted as unexplored moments of the history of modernity. It is important that terms like hybridity, which were once negatively valorized and carried a pejorative freight of meaning, have now been transformed into positively valorized conceptual spaces from which the intricate interactions between the West and Asia and Africa can be productively explored.
This notion of hybridity has diverse implications for the study of world Englishes. If we are prepared to pluralize this concept and bring it into the equation the asymmetries of power and the play of capital, it could provide us with a fecund theoretical space for mapping the unfolding world of world Englishes. The eminent philosopher Richard Rorty (1991: 51), speaking of Indian and western texts, makes the observation that “the really important texts are the ones that render our old classifications unsatisfactory and force us to think up new ones.” He continues:
My hunch is that our sense of where to connect up Indian and western texts will change dramatically when and if people who have read quite a few of both begin to write books that are not clearly identifiable as belonging to any particular genre, and are not clearly identifiable as either western or eastern. Consider, as an example, the novels of Salman Rushdie. There is no good answer to the question of whether he is an English or a Pakistani novelist, nor to whether shame is a contribution to political journalism or to mythology. Or the Satanic Verses a contribution to Islamic thought or to the novel of manners. Rushdie seems to me to be the sort of figure who has read a lot of books coming from the two sides if the world and is likely to help create a culture within which intellectuals from both sides may and meet and communicate.
(Rorty 1991: 51)
This hybridity manifests itself most vividly in the prose writers from the Third World who use English as a vehicle of creative communication. In the following representative passages, hybridity can be seen to go with a sense of newfound freedom and self‐confidence:
They stepped away from him. Craftsmen assessing their work. Seeking aesthetic distance. Their work, abandoned by god and history, or by Marx, by Man, by Woman, and in the hours to come, lay folded in the floor. He was semi‐conscious, but wasn’t moving (Roy 1997: 293).
These excerpts display hybridity and self‐confidence in bending the English language for the purposes the respective authors have in mind. The passage by Rushdie foregrounds some of the characteristics that I have been referencing. In this novel, Midnight’s Children, the author has succeeded in pulling together a great deal of history, fabulation, folklore, wit, and humor, and social and political analysis to produce a portrait of India that is many sided and intricate in a way that those writers who are imprisoned within commonly established colonial discursivities could not hope to achieve. A serious dialogue between World Englishes and postcolonial theory will have the beneficial impact of illuminating these complex issues.
Rushdie aims to challenge and subvert the ruling colonial discourses and their attendant signifying practices using a number of semiotic and representational strategies. First, he deploys the English language with a self‐assured irreverence a calculated iconoclasm that has the effect of exploding the cultural containment and domestication that had been in place for so long. He writes against the deeply ingrained stereotypes perpetuated by the colonizers by artfully manipulating English and thereby decolonizing it. Second, like Chinua Achebe before him, but in a more purposive way, he has mined the repertoire of techniques and styles associated with oral narratives. Literary critics have rightly drawn attention to certain parallelisms and commonalities of interest between Rushdie on the one hand and Gunther Grass, Gabriel García Márquez, and Laurence Sterne on the other; however, they have not adequately recognized the importance of oral narratives in his art of storytelling. By imaginatively utilizing traditional narrative forms, Rushdie is able to reappropriate and repossess fictional discourse that had come under the influence of regimes of colonial authority. Third, in his fiction, Rushdie succeeded in refocusing on the idea of literature as performance – witty, humorous, clever, fantastic, and interactive. This is indeed an area in which scholars of World Englishes and postcolonial studies can join hands in a common pursuit of analysis. As a consequence of this distinctive line of development of English fiction and the way in which it assumed the role of containing the cultural other within its narrative discourses, the idea of performativity which is at the base of traditional Indian narrative lost its hold on popular imagination. Rushdie sought to reinvigorate this aspect in his stories, as Raja Rao has done in Kanthapura. The art of oral narrative and the idea of performance are closely linked, and Rushdie (1991: 48) makes the following observation:
Listening to this man reminded me of the shape of the oral narrative. It’s not linear. An oral narrative does not go from the beginning to the middle to the end of the story. It goes in great swoops, it goes in spirals or loops, it every so often reiterates something that happened earlier to remind you, and then takes off again, sometimes summarizes itself, it frequently digresses off into something that the story‐teller appears just to have thought of, then it comes back to the main thrust of the narrative…. It seemed to me in fact it was very far from being random or chaotic, and that the oral narrative had developed this shape over a long period, not because story‐tellers were lacking in organization, but because the shape conformed very exactly to the shape in which people liked to listen, that in fact the first and the only rule of the story‐teller is to hold the audience; if you don’t hold them, they will get up and walk away. So everything that the story‐teller does is designed to keep the people listening more intently.
It is to Rushdie’s credit that he has succeeded in recapturing some of these auditory imperatives in his art of written narrative. Postcolonial theorists are increasingly engaging the issue of oral and written narratives.
Fourth, Rushdie, in contradistinction to a writer like Naipaul, makes a conscious and determined effort to draw on the inherited storehouse of traditional imaginative and speculative imaginings – myths, fables, allegories, cosmologies. In his hands, this move becomes an instrumentality at the service of enlarging the discursive boundaries of English fictional narration and unsettling some of the restrictive colonial signifying practices. The final outcome of these efforts is to engender, in the memorable words of Nietzsche (1986), a “rival will” and a newer cultural space wherein the ontological complexities of the other could be given nuanced and forceful articulation. All these distinguishing features of his writing can and should be understood in relation to his imaginative and bold use of language. His works of fiction are important in the ways in which he clears a path out of the restrictive and distorting influences of colonial discourse by devising and putting into circulation newer rhetorical and representational strategies. Rushdie has been able to destabilize existing codifying schemes and signifying practices, thereby shifting the reference point in the binary analytic of colonial discourse. This aspect of the work of Rushdie as well as of the other newer novelists writing in English in the Third World deserves careful scrutiny.
In this chapter, I have tried to focus on what I think are a number of topics that are integral to the work of postcolonial studies and which could be examined in terms of the interests and investments of World Englishes. Clearly, my list is more suggestive than exhaustive, and one can, to be sure, add more to it. As we go about this task, it is important to keep in mind a distinction between two types of cultural readings – expository reading and interventionist reading. In expository reading, careful attention is paid to the elucidation of themes, styles, techniques, forms, rhetorical registers, and so on, but without any intention to subvert the analytical framework within which analysts have operated for so long. In interventionist readings, on the other hand, there is a calculated attempt at self‐empowerment, subverting the ruling analytical protocols, foregrounding ideology, and explicating the ways in which textual production is intimately related to institutional determinations. In our explorations into world Englishes, what we need to promote is perceptive interventionist readings which would have the salutary effect of reshaping the current literary and intellectual discourses which bear the imprint of colonial hegemony. This indeed constitutes a vital element of the postcolonial theorists’ research agenda.
A serious dialogue between scholars of World Englishes and postcolonial theory is urgently needed. There are two primary issues that need immediate addressing. The first is the inquiry into the nature of cultural production in postcolonial societies. There are a number of subthemes embedded in this. The second is the use of the English language for creative purpose by postcolonial writers. English, which was the instrument of colonial domination, has now to be used as an instrument of liberation. This paradoxical situation contains many interesting twists and turns that heed to be explored fully.