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  • The Language of Postcolonial Literatures: An Introduction
  • Waïl S. Hassan
Ismail Talib. The Language of Postcolonial Literatures: An Introduction. London and New York: Routledge, 2002. vii + 182 pp. Hardcover $75.00, paperback $23.95.

This book undertakes the introduction of newcomers to the field of postcolonial literary studies and to the complex issues and debates surrounding the thorny question of language. It soon becomes clear to the reader, however, that the book is concerned not with "postcolonial literatures" in their multiple languages, but only with Anglophone literatures. In fact, the book tells a success story about the emergence of English from the lowly status of a marginalized dialect in eleventh-century England to a worldwide lingua franca, under the auspices of British, then American, imperialism. Along the way, the story goes, English overcomes various forms of resistance on the part of writers from subjugated societies who promote their endangered oral languages or continue to write in ones with powerful literary traditions, until it finally takes root in postcolonial societies, where it is embraced by prominent (Anglophone) writers.

In fairness to the author, he does not initiate this Anglocentric tendency in postcolonial studies, whereby as Aijaz Ahmed and others have charged, the history and culture of imperialized societies are narrativized in a way that gives a pivotal role to the British empire and to the English language, and effectively sustains the cultural imperialism that the field purports to interrogate. This tendency can be traced back to constructs like "Commonwealth literature," which emerged in the 1940s as the cultural wing of the British Commonwealth and focused at first on literatures from white settler colonies, but later began to include literatures in English from decolonized African and Asian nations. In the 1980s, the embarrassingly imperialist rubric of "Commonwealth literatures" was renamed in some quarters as "New Literatures in English," or as the more radical-sounding "postcolonial literatures" (with or without the modifier "Anglophone"). This effort was crowned with the publication of Bill Ashcroft, Gareth Griffiths, and Helen Tiffin's major text, The Empire Writes Back: Theory and Practice in Post-Colonial Literatures (London: Routledge, 1989), which not only focused on Anglophone postcolonial writing, but further theorized a distinction between standard British English as a metropolitan language, and "english" (spelled in lower case) as its postcolonial mutation, a distinction that at once binds colonizer and colonized in a binary opposition and homogenizes [End Page 310] the multiple ways in which English has been transformed in different (post)colonial settings. Although he does not reference this controversial distinction, Ismail Talib accepts the polarized theoretical framework of The Empire Writes Back, with no more than token acknowledgment of the powerful critiques of its Anglocentrism. Postcolonial studies is a field that should in principle include literatures in all languages used by writers from imperialized societies, without the colonialist hierarchization of languages. It is this assumption that perhaps leads Emily Apter to argue convincingly that postcolonial studies is "tru[e] to the foundational disposition of Comparative Literature" and "quite naturally inherits the mantle of Comparative Literature's historical legacy" ("Comparative Exile: Competing Margins in the History of Comparative Literature," in Charles Bernheimer, ed., Comparative Literature in the Age of Multiculturalism [Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP] 86. See also "Comparative (Post)colonialisms," a special issue of Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and the Middle East 23:1 [2003], edited by Waïl S. Hassan and Rebecca Saunders, which takes aim specifically at the Anglocentrism of postcolonial studies).

Indeed, the author disarmingly writes:

Postcolonial literatures can be defined as literature written by colonized and formerly colonized peoples. This should include literatures written in various languages, and not only in the language of the colonizers. This is the simple definition that will be taken as a starting point. Although the approach here will be to concentrate on the English language, this is not intrinsic to the term postcolonial literature.

(17)

The hesitancy in this definition between "literatures" and "literature" bespeaks a tension throughout the book between multiplicity and multilingualism on the one hand, and homogenizing Anglocentrism on the other. Talib's definition is followed by a section on "Anglocentrism and Eurocentrism," in which Ahmed's critique of the...

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