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I'm grateful to Zhang Feng for sending me the following quotes.

Ashcroft, Bill, Gareth Griffiths, and Helen Tiffin. The Empire Writes Back. 2nd ed. London and New York: Routledge, 2002.

Introduction (pp. 1-13)

p. 7

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. [¡­] Language becomes the medium through which a hierarchical structure of power is perpetuated, and the medium through which conceptions of ¡®truth¡¯, ¡®order¡¯, and ¡®reality¡¯ becomes established.

pp. 7-8

In order to focus on the complex ways in which the English language has been used in these societies, and to indicate their own sense of difference, we distinguish in the account between the ¡®standard¡¯ British English inherited from the empire and the english which has become the language in post-colonial countries.

p. 8

In practice the history of this distinction between English and english has been between the claims of a powerful ¡®centre¡¯ and a multitude of intersecting usages designated as ¡®peripheries¡¯. The language of these ¡®peripheries¡¯ was shaped by an oppressive discourse of power. Yet they have been the site of some of the most exciting and innovative literatures of the modern period and this has, at least in part, been the result of the energies uncovered by the political tension between the idea of a normative code and a variety of regional usages.

Chapter 1

Cutting the ground: critical models of post-colonial literatures (pp. 14-36)

pp. 14-15

As writers and critics became aware of the special character of post-colonial texts, they saw the need to develop an adequate model to account for them. Four major models have emerged to date: first, ¡®national¡¯ or regional models, which emphasize the distinctive features of the particular national or regional culture; second, race-based models which identify certain shared characteristics across various national literatures, such as the common racial inheritance in literatures of the African diaspora addressed by the ¡®Black writing¡¯ model; third, comparative models of varying complexity which seek to account for particular linguistic, historical, and cultural features across two or more post-colonial literatures; fourth, more comprehensive comparative models which argue for features such as hybridity and syncreticity as constitutive elements of all post-colonial literatures (syncretism is the process by which previously distinct linguistic categories, and, by extension, cultural formations, merge into a single new form). These models often operate as assumptions within critical practice rather than specific and discrete schools of thought; in any discussion of post-colonial writing a number of them may be operating at the same time.

p. 34

In [Wilson] Harris¡¯s formulation, hybridity in the present is constantly struggling to free itself from a past which stressed ancestry, and which valued the ¡®pure¡¯ over its threatening opposite, the ¡®composite¡¯. It replaces a temporal lineality with a spatial plurality.

Chapter 2

Re-placing language: textual strategies in post-colonial writing (pp. 37-76)

p. 37

Abrogation and appropriation

The crucial function of language as a medium of power demands that post-colonial writing define itself by seizing the language of the centre and re-placing it in a discourse fully adapted to the colonized place. There are two distinct processes by which it does this. The first, the abrogation or denial of the privilege of ¡®English¡¯ involves a rejection of the metropolitan power over the means of communication. The second, the appropriation and reconstitution of the language of the centre, the process of capturing and remoulding the language to new usages, marks a separation from the site of colonial privilege.

Abrogation is a refusal of the categories of the imperial culture, its aesthetic, its illusory standard of normative or ¡®correct¡¯ usage, and its assumption of a traditional and fixed meaning ¡®inscribed¡¯ in the words. It is a vital moment in the de-colonizing of the language and the writing of ¡®english¡¯, but without the process of appropriation the moment of abrogation may not extend beyond a reversal of the [p. 38]  assumptions of privilege, the ¡®normal¡¯, and correct inscription, all of which can be simply taken over and maintained by the new usage.

Appropriation is the process by which the language is taken and made to ¡®bear the burden¡¯ of one¡¯s own cultural experience, or as Raja Rao puts it, to ¡®convey in a language that is not one¡¯s own the spirit that is one¡¯s own¡¯ (Rao 1938: vii). Language is adopted as a tool and utilized in various ways to express widely differing cultural experiences.

Chapter 3

Re-placing the text: the liberation of post-colonial writing (pp. 77-114)

p. 77

The appropriation of the english language is the first of a range of appropriations which establish a discourse announcing its difference from Europe. These include the adaptation or evolution of metropolitan practices: for example, genres such as ¡®the ballad¡¯ or ¡®the novel¡¯ or even epistemologies, ideological systems, or institutions such as literary theory. But the appropriation which has had the most profound significance in post-colonial discourse is that of writing itself. It is through an appropriation of the power invested in writing that this discourse can take hold of the marginality imposed on it and make hybridity and syncreticity the source of literary and cultural redefinition. In writing out of the condition of ¡®Otherness¡¯ post-colonial texts assert the complex of intersecting ¡®peripheries¡¯ as the actual substance of experience. But the struggle which this assertion entails¡ªthe ¡®re-placement¡¯ of the postcolonial text¡ªis focused in their attempt to control the processes of writing.

Chapter 5

Re-placing theory: post-colonial writing and literary theory (pp. 153-92)

p. 153

Post-colonial literatures and postmodernism

Post-colonial writing and literary theory intersect in several ways with recent European movements, such as postmodernism and poststructuralism, and with both contemporary Marxist ideological criticism and feminist criticism. These theories offer perspectives which illuminate some of the crucial issues addressed by the post-colonial text, although post-colonial discourse itself is constituted in texts prior to and independent of them. As many post-colonial critics have asserted, we need to avoid the assumption that they supersede or replace the local and particular (Soyinka 1975). But it is also necessary to avoid the pretence that theory in post-colonial literatures is somehow conceived entirely independently of all coincidents, or that European theories have functioned merely as ¡®contexts¡¯ for the recent developments in post-colonial theory. In fact, they clearly function as the conditions of the development of post-colonial theory in its contemporary form and as the determinants of much of its present nature and content.

p. 154

Despite the recognition of this relationship, the appropriation of recent European theories involves a number of dangers, the most threatening of which is the tendency to reincorporate postcolonial culture into a new internationalist and universalist paradigm.

Conclusion: more english than English (pp. 220-22)

p. 220

The contemporary art, philosophy, and literature produced by post-colonial societies are in no sense continuations or simple adaptations of European models. This book has argued that a much more profound interaction and appropriation has taken place. Indeed, the process of literary decolonization has involved a radical dismantling of the European codes and a post-colonial subversion and appropriation of the dominant European discourses.

This dismantling has been frequently accompanied by the demand for an entirely new or wholly recovered pre-colonial ¡®reality¡¯. Such a demand, given the nature of the relationship between colonizer and colonized, its social brutality and cultural denigration, is perfectly comprehensible. But, as we have argued, it cannot be achieved. Post-colonial culture is inevitably a hybridized phenomenon involving a dialectical relationship between the ¡®grafted¡¯ European cultural systems and an indigenous ontology, with its impulse to create or recreate an independent local identity. Such construction or reconstruction only occurs as a dynamic interaction between European hegemonic systems and ¡®peripheral¡¯ subversions of them. It is not possible to return to or [p. 221] to rediscover an absolute pre-colonial cultural purity, nor is it possible to create national or regional formations entirely independent of their historical implication in the European colonial enterprise.

Hence it has been the project of post-colonial writing to interrogate European discourse and discursive strategies from its position within and between the worlds; to investigate the means by which Europe imposed and maintained its codes in its colonial domination of so much of the rest of the world. Thus the rereading and rewriting of the European historical and fictional record is a vital and inescapable task at the heart of the post-colonial enterprise. These subversive manoeuvres, are the characteristic features of the post-colonial text. Post-colonial literatures/cultures are constituted in counter-discursive rather than homologous practices.