Ways of Reading Third Edition - Martin Montgomery, Alan Durant, Nigel Fabb, Tom Furniss, Sara Mills 2007

6.6 Post-colonial writing in English
Unit 6 Language and place
Section 2 Language variation

In many Anglophone post-colonial societies (such as India, Pakistan, Anglophone Africa, the Philippines, Malaysia, the Caribbean and many other places) the idea of using English at all in creative writing remains contentious. Some influential writers (such as the Kenyan novelist and dramatist Ngugi wa Thiong’o (b. 1938)) have argued that using the former colonial language merely reinforces the power of emerging neo-colonial elites at the expense of developing a self-confident and emancipated local or national literature. Other writers have argued that the linking function of a language like English enables different communities (including different African communities) to become more aware of each other. In this view, using English in literary and other contexts may open up new possibilities for redefining relations between communities in a way that would be impossible if they remained separated by walls of linguistic difference.

In some post-colonial writing in English, dialect is viewed as a kind of anti-language, or mode of expression deliberately adopted to mark it off from dominant traditions of writing that are being rejected. In other cases, the argument for using dialect is made in terms of authenticity, and an aspiration to give a true representation of the writer’s identity (see Unit 14, Authorship and intention). Dialect contrasts - as well as individual varieties - vary from place to place, however; and the new forms of dialect spelling and code-switching to be found in such writing are likely to be read differently as they circulate beyond the region or country in which the variety being represented is actually used.