English Literature Beyond England

The idea

English literature after empire is written far beyond England, and the exam's scope includes it. As colonies won independence, from India in nineteen forty-seven to Nigeria and Kenya, English remained a literary language, sometimes embraced and sometimes refused. In Africa, Achebe's Things Fall Apart, its title borrowed from Yeats, showed Igbo society meeting colonial Christianity, and Achebe called Conrad racist; Soyinka dramatized a colonial ban on ritual; Ngũgĩ turned from English to Gikuyu and argued for decolonizing the mind; Gordimer and Coetzee wrote apartheid and its aftermath. In the Caribbean, Walcott gave Saint Lucian fishermen Homer's names in Omeros; Naipaul wrote Trinidad and alienation; Rhys gave Jane Eyre's Bertha a history as Antoinette; Selvon made creolised English, nation language, a medium for narrative, and Brathwaite studied creole society. In India, Narayan imagined Malgudi, Rushdie made the children of midnight a telepathic nation in magic realism, and Desai and Roy wrote displacement, caste and family. Canada's Atwood imagined Gilead and Munro the stories of small-town Ontario; Australia's White sent Voss into the desert; New Zealand's Mansfield and Adcock carried divided identity to London; Lessing wrote the colour bar in Rhodesia; Zadie Smith wrote multicultural London. Ireland, conquered and planted, can be read as an early case. Critics named the methods: Ashcroft, Griffiths and Tiffin's writing back, Bhabha's hybridity, Said's Orientalism, and the re-reading of Kipling and Conrad. To answer a question on this writing, identify the place and the moment of empire, ask which classic the work may answer, and remember that these works are described, not quoted.