Decolonizing (the) English

As soon as I desire, I am asking to be considered. I am not merely here-and-now, sealed into thingness. I am for somewhere else and for something else. I demand that notice be taken of my negating activity insofar as I pursue something other than life; insofar as I do battle for the creation of a human world—that is a world of reciprocal recognitions."

—Frantz Fanon, Black Skin White Masks

The end of the British Empire in the twentieth century (dates abound, but I would like to think it marks something of that day in 1910 of which Virginia Woolf wrote) was a key transformation in human history. Yet, while empires have collapsed under the weight of their arrogant expansion and opposition to the same, they remain messy historical phenomena. The difficulty in understanding such transformation rests not just on the strength of institutional infrastructures that are not packed away with, in this case, the Union Jack, but on the power of the ideologies used to stitch together the imperial episteme that, for better or worse, constitutes the geopolitical unconscious of empire's civilizing pretensions. The obviousness of noting the uneven development between imperial and postimperial conditions is often used to cast doubt on the post in postcolonialism, and with very good reason. Where ideology, for instance, is at stake, the teleology of ends and afters does not seem to do justice to notions of persistence and rearticulation; rather, it underlines the fact that the imprimatur of British Empire itself lives on even in those positions that righteously claim its expiration, including that which begins this paragraph. Admitting the contamination is laudable but not exactly comforting. Anti-imperial and -colonial struggles have smashed the British Empire beyond recognition, but what remains in the unrecognized trace is like the root of a parasitic vine: its nature, like the dialectic, has alternative modes of existence.

My title starkly declares one trajectory of the imperial episteme that lives on (sur-vivre, to borrow from Derrida) in the everyday of cultural exchange. ¹ The history of English and its dissemination is so closely allied to the vectors of British Empire that any battle over English (both as language and as identity) is always already a struggle over the legacies of dominion. However innocent English literature may be, the fact that we also discuss writing in English as Anglophone underlines the history of such contestation. Again, the obviousness of the interrelation falls short of explaining the logic of imbrication, particularly now, when the role of English in a geopolitical unconscious is made coterminous with globalization, or americanization, or the worldly largesse of the northern economic axis, and not with the specific functions of English for the British Empire. The worlds of difference in the two moments that English represents conjoin in any analysis of language and power, and perhaps what follows will fall within the contours of that genre. ² My main aim, however, diverges from a comprehensive account of the fateful collusion of Britishness and brutishness in what English has become. I am not primarily interested here in the intricacies of the linguistic mesh of two moments in English. Instead, I want to consider how decolonizing English not only decolonizes the English, but forestalls the will to power of globalization in the name of English. In 1922 (another great year for symptoms of British Empire and its mise en abîme, for which we would have to analyze The Waste Land and Ulysses in some detail) D. H. Lawrence published a collection of short stories, England, My England. ³ The title story is an anguished reflection on the First World War that yet accentuates the prescience of exile and diaspora in assessing what England has become. Egbert, the "born rose," epitomizes for Lawrence "the living negative of power." ⁴ Indeed, the point of the story is about how Egbert's power, like England's, coruscates in the "abnegation of power" itself. ⁵ By cleaving to the...