A British postcolonialism

This article focuses on Anglophone writing of a British postcolonial legacy as opposed to writing of a Lusophone, Francophone, Belgian, Dutch, or German legacy. Moreover, this specific phrase of ‘Anglophone writing of a British postcolonial legacy’ is employed in recognition of a move away from the label ‘postcolonial writing’. The article will suggest that recently published texts are engaged in new departures which seemingly appear to be taking us away from the classic ‘postcolonial’ text. Thus, in recognition of these new departures, the terminology used in this article will attempt to better encapsulate the sense of the provenance of the writing and yet at the same time move the terminology ‘forward’, away from the label of the ‘postcolonial’.

This article will present an alternative terminology to ‘Anglophone writing of a British postcolonial legacy’ in some detail, offering the field of ‘World Englishes’ and the creation of its counterpart ‘World Englishes Literature’ to the discussion.

World Englishes

‘World Englishes’ reveals an area of study which concerns itself with the linguistic, socio-cultural and pedagogical aspects of Englishes around the world. This article aims to give importance to an aspect of ‘World Englishes’ which, although related to the linguistic, socio-cultural and pedagogical, is none of these per se. Here we will explore the literary production of World Englishes which draws on these elements of World Englishes noted above, particularly the linguistic and socio-cultural. I will take a moment here to explain how the term ‘World Englishes’ is used here and how I see this in relation to Kachruvian theory, as this theory is central to the debate I present on the literary production of World Englishes, that is ‘World Englishes literature’.

The term ‘World Englishes’ is used here to encompass the notions of ‘new Englishes’ and ‘New Englishes’ (Jenkins, Reference Jenkins2006: 22–3). According to Jenkins (Reference Jenkins2006: 22) ‘new Englishes’ resulted from the first diaspora, which includes the United States, Canada, Australia, New Zealand and South Africa, whereas ‘New Englishes’ (noting the capitalisation) resulted from the second diaspora, which is understood as being a situation where English has been learnt as a second language or has been a language within a wider multilingual selection of languages; such situations would include those where Indian Englishes, Nigerian Englishes, Singaporean or Philippine Englishes are employed. In short, not only is the linguistic production different between a notion of ‘an English’ and ‘English as a Lingua Franca’ (ELF) but the cultural, functional and ideological aspects are also different between the two. (See Tan et al. for further discussion on the difference between EFL and the Englishes of the ‘Expanding circle’, specifically Reference Tan, Ooi, Chiang, Rubdy and Saraceni2006: 84–94, as well as Kachru and Nelson for discussion on EFL versus ESL in an Asian context (Reference Kachru and Nelson2006: 25).)

Jenkins's definition of ‘New Englishes’ and ‘the second diaspora’ (2006: 22–3) may have been influenced by the earlier work of Platt et al. (Reference Platt, Weber and Ho1984: 2–3) who referred to the phenomenon as a ‘New English’ (note the singular). Below are the four defining criteria for a ‘New English’ according to Platt et al.

• – It has developed through an education system. This means that it has been taught as a subject and, in many cases, also used as a medium of instruction in regions where languages other than English were the main languages.

• – It has developed in an area where a native variety of English was not the language spoken by most of the population.

• – It is used for a range of functions among those who speak or write it in the region where it is used.

• – It has become ‘localised’ or ‘nativised’ by adopting some language features of its own, such as sounds, intonation patterns, sentence structures, words and expressions.

Thus the notions of Jenkins's ‘new Englishes’ and ‘New Englishes’ (which supersede Platt et al.'s work) are included in the understanding of ‘World Englishes’ for the purpose of our understanding here.

Kachru's (Reference Kachru1982) model of the Englishes of the world helps to highlight the extent of the meaning of ‘World Englishes’, since Kachru's theory and model of the Englishes of the world demonstrates that the ‘Inner circle’ (although it does include the UK) constitutes the ‘new Englishes’ (that is, the result of the first diaspora according to Jenkins) and the ‘Outer circle’ constitutes the ‘New Englishes’ (that of the second diaspora). Kachru's model also offers a third dimension to the production of Englishes globally, that of the ‘Expanding circle’. In summary Kachru's model (Inner, Outer and Expanding circles) can be taken as wholly representational of what is meant here as ‘World Englishes’ language production. Thus for Kachru the Englishes of the world can be divided into ‘The Inner, Outer and Expanding circles’ and these three roughly correspond to the concepts of English as a native language (ENL), English as a second language (ESL) and English as a foreign language (EFL) respectively. The ‘Inner circle’ includes the United States of America (USA), the United Kingdom (UK), Canada, Australia and New Zealand. The ‘Outer circle’ includes nations such as India, Kenya, Malaysia and Singapore, and the ‘Expanding circle’ includes nations such as China, Egypt, Israel and Japan.Footnote ¹

Focusing on the ‘Inner circle’, where English is the native language (USA, UK, Canada, Australia and New Zealand), we see that although it may be the native language of these countries, other languages are spoken within this ‘Inner circle’. In order to demonstrate how these languages are different from the language in its native country, I will identify them as ‘diaspora community languages’. (See Kalra et al. (Reference Kalra, Kaur and Hutnyk2005) for diverse discussion on notions of ‘diaspora and hybridity’.) In the United States (USA), Spanish and Italian are spoken (and written) as community languages. In the United Kingdom (UK), languages such as Hindi, Punjabi, Gujarati, Bengali, Urdu and Jamaican Patois are spoken (and often also written), all of which I refer to as ‘diaspora community languages’. Numerous other languages of diaspora communities settled from first generation to third or fourth generation in Canada, Australia and New Zealand can also be included here. Moreover, any amalgamation of either a ‘diaspora community language’ or a language per se with the ‘English’ of an ENL country will therefore produce yet another ‘English’. For example, in England, British Asian English is categorised by its own lexemes, phonology and grammar; however, British Asian English shifts and changes dependent on whether the variety of British Asian English is spoken by people of Pakistani origin or of Indian origin. Equally it differs depending on where in the country the variety is spoken (regional accent, grammar and lexemes).

In addition, within the ‘Inner circle’ there are languages which do not fit into the category of being one of Kachru's Inner circle's Englishes (American English, British English etc), or one of the ‘diaspora community languages’ (such as Punjabi). The languages that do not fit into either of these two categories can be defined as being Indigenous languages, although this term can hold its own semantic problems. For the United States of America these languages are (American) Indian languages, for the United Kingdom they are Scots, Welsh or Gaelic, and for the case of Australia and New Zealand there are languages of Aboriginal origins. There are many Indigenous languages that I have not mentioned here and this is because I hope that this brief overview of the language situation(s) in the ‘Inner circle’ has illustrated sufficiently the complexities of Kachru's notion of ‘Inner circle’.

Defining World Englishes literature

It is clear that Kachru's model is helpful in conceiving of the Englishes of the world and accommodates, to an extent, the complex situation of the multi-Englishes of the Inner circle. Can, therefore, this notion simply be transferred to the formation of ‘literary’ uses of World Englishes? My own answer to this question, perhaps curiously, is no. Indeed, I would wish to dismiss the ‘Inner circle’ notion, which is undeniably applicable to language use, as unhelpful in explicating World Englishes literature. When the linguistic voices (of World Englishes speakers) become literary voices (of World Englishes writers), it is my own view that, while Kachru's ‘Outer’ and ‘Expanding’ circles remain useful concepts for an explanation of what World Englishes literature is, this is not so of the ‘Inner’ circle: in my definition, that is, World Englishes literature is never produced from the Inner circle.

The issues at stake in this argument are not simple questions of geography, spatial proximity to the English ‘Standard’, or characteristic linguistic properties: it is more how these matters, in a certain combination, produce varied kinds of writing, some of which I would call World Englishes literature, and some of which I would not (although they are all in play). The lines of this debate have long been drawn up in historic theoretical arguments around colonialism and postcolonialism and the conceptual role played in these debates by the voice of the ‘subaltern’ (Spivak, Reference Spivak, Nelson and Grossberg1988). Likewise, there is often an assumption that writing from the Outer or Expanding circles is likely to be explained by the nature of the ‘gravitational pull’ of the language of the Inner circle. But in my view the multiple features which determine the voice of a World Englishes writer are not defined by the notion of the voice being that of the ‘subaltern’ – whether geographic, linguistic, cultural, ideological, or all of the foregoing. World Englishes writers are less and less interested in their putative subalternity to a former colonial power and more and more interested in what constitutes (often positively) the identity of the culture from within which they write. Similarly, they are less and less likely to worry as to the relation of the English they use to the notionally ‘original’ English of the Inner circle.

I might therefore best encapsulate my definition as follows: Most (but not all) World Englishes literature explores the culture(s) of the country and people from which it is written (these countries belong to Kachru's Outer and Expanding circles); usually the literature employs the English of that place (to a lesser or greater degree); and, moreover, the writer chooses to write in that English over other languages in which she could alternatively write.

This notion of ‘World Englishes Literature’, although somewhat unwieldy, is offered over the use of the terms: ‘World Literatures in English’, ‘World Literature written in English’, or ‘New Literatures in English’ because it recognises and, to a degree, venerates the ‘Englishes’ of the place (cultures) in question as well as the geographies, given the deployment of Kachruvian theory. The resistance against employing the term ‘New Literatures in English’ is due to the use of the word ‘new’ here; the ‘shelf life’ or ‘newness’ of the literature is a very complex one to define and assert in relation to an ever-changing literary scene.

It follows that World Englishes literature is not a synonym for postcolonial literature, although many countries with a history of British colonialism produce World Englishes literature. The voice of World Englishes literature is not one that necessarily laments postcoloniality. Rather, World Englishes literature is (as it were) post-postcolonial, and although its writers may remember and even celebrate a defining moment of political independence from a colonising power (as in India in 1947, Nigeria in 1960, Kenya in 1963, or the Philippines in 1946), it also includes a generation of writers who do not.

Anthologising the new departures

This article will now go on to suggest that World Englishes literature, as outlined above, manifests a move ‘beyond the postcolonial’.

The ‘anthologies project’ was initiated in 2008 in order to explore emerging World Englishes literature. To date, the following anthologies have been published: ‘The Spirit Machine’ and Other New Short Stories from Cameroon (Dawson, Reference Dawson2009), ‘Daughters of Eve’ and Other New Short Stories from Nigeria (Dawson, Reference Dawson2010a), ‘Butterfly Dreams’ and Other New Short Stories from Uganda (Dawson, Reference Dawson2010b), ‘Man of the House’ and Other New Short Stories from Kenya (Dawson, Reference Dawson2011) and ‘Black and Whites’ and Other New Short Stories from Malaysia (Daly and Dawson, Reference Daly and Dawson2012). The project involves the researcher sourcing new writing by travelling to the country in question, meeting with writers and researching the situation of Anglophone writing in that specific context. The project is empirical in that it is executed as an ethnographic study – the stories received are treated as data. Each country anthology of new World Englishes literature (short stories between 3,000 and 10,000 words long) goes through a sequence of processes. Firstly, a call for short stories is launched electronically through email lists of writers, writing groups, universities and other relevant organisations. Once enough submissions have been received to demonstrate interest and productivity in Anglophone writing in the country in question, a journey to the respective country is planned in order to meet with the writers who have submitted their work as well as to offer an opportunity for others who have not yet heard of the project to come along and learn about it. Making the journey to the country in question is paramount. The journey is made to meet the writers in order ‘to listen’ and not ‘to tell’. This stance diverges markedly from anthologies compiled using already published (and recognised) literature, as well as anthologies which are compiled from ‘the Western armchair’.

The critical introduction to each of the anthologies benefits from this act of ‘listening’ and, in doing so, aims to present a more accurate portrait of the writing emerging from the country. The visit to the country also allows the researcher (who is also the principal editor) the opportunity to research the history of the place and culture, emerging criticism and contemporary literary events, all of which concern themselves with writing in English. Any discussions with writers, readers, teachers and other interested parties who contribute to the debate on writing in English are audio-recorded in order for the material to be reproduced in a sensitive and accurate manner. The final process is a re-opening of the call for submissions within a limited timescale. The call is reopened because very often, after the visit to the country, writers continue to hear of the project and wish to submit their work. On the editor's return to the UK the selection of entries is made in consultation with a second reader.

New worlds?

The anthologies that have been published to date reveal new trends in writing in English. From these four anthologies (Cameroon, Nigeria, Kenya and Uganda) we can see that although there are differences in both style and content between the two volumes within West Africa (Cameroon and Nigeria) and the two volumes within East Africa (Uganda and Kenya), it is also clear that the writing from both West and East Africa is different (to a lesser or greater degree) from that which has come before in both regions, that which is badged as ‘postcolonial literature’ (see Boehmer, Reference Boehmer2005: 3).

The ‘anthologies project’ suggests that new genres of emerging writing include crime writing, science fiction and fantasy and urban-political narratives as well as new forms of writing, such as innovative techniques of point of view, email narrative and further creativity with ‘voice’.

It is not the case that the genres and issues presented in these works have never appeared before in postcolonial fiction – the works of Pearson and Singer (Reference Pearson and Singer2009), Matzke and Muhleisen (Reference Matzke and Muhleisen2006) and Christian (Reference Christian2001) all demonstrate that the genre of crime writing, for instance, has been in existence since the early days of postcolonial writing – rather, the observation is based more on trends that have not been formally covered at large by writing in English. There is also a strong sense of the Zeitgeist of the country in question being explored through these different genres.

The observations from the ‘anthologies project’ do not suggest that a body of ‘postcolonial fiction’ does not still exist; indeed, many of the manuscripts received for the four African anthologies dealt directly with, or with the legacy of, being a postcolonial nation. However, a significant number of manuscripts across the four countries dealt with issues that have not been formally covered at large by writing in English. It is only the future which will reveal these new directions in full.