Studying Commonwealth LiteratureAuthor(s): Ken GoodwinSource: College Literature, Vol. 19/20, No. 3/1, Teaching Postcolonial and CommonwealthLiteratures (Oct., 1992 - Feb., 1993), pp. 142-151Published by: College LiteratureStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/25111994 .Accessed: 13/09/2011 20:04

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NOTES AND COMMENTS

Studying Commonwealth Literature

Ken Goodwin

Goodwin's publications include National Identity (1970), Commonwealth Litera

ture In the Curriculum (1980), A Common Wealth of Words (ed. with Maureen

Freer, 1982), Understanding African Poetry (1982), A History of Australian Liter

ature (1986), The Macmillan Anthology of Australian Literature (ed. with Alan

Lawson, 1988), and Adjacent Worlds: A Literary Life of Bruce Dawe (1988). He

chaired the Association for Commonwealth Literature and Language Studies from

1977 to 1980, and is current convener of a panel assessing standards of university

English teaching in Australia for the Australian Vice-Chancellors' Committee.

In the history of cultural studies, including literary studies, old orthodoxies succumb to the subversive power of discontented and marginalized discourses, which themselves become the new orthodoxies. Yesterday's brash counter-discourse is today's comfortable discourse of power. This article traces some of the concomitants of change from a ruling orthodoxy of British literature to at least the beginnings of a ruling orthodoxy of Commonwealth or postcolonial literature(s), and expresses some skepti cism about the concealed assumptions of both studies. If much of the earlier critical

analysis and promotion of Commonwealth literature took the form of a "writing against" British literature or a counter-discourse to it, this article might be considered

as something of a

"writing against the 'writing against'" or a counter-counter

discourse.

The study of British literature had, of course, once had to fight for its authentic

ity against a previously prevailing orthodoxy that prescribed the study of the European classical languages and literatures. As the proponents of the study of British literature

managed to establish its place in the school curriculum they often defended it by

attacking possible alternatives. They protected themselves, in other words, against the

prospect that their favorite study would itself be displaced. One obvious contender was

the study of American literature. It was rhetorically appropriate for the proponents of British literary study to pretend that the notion of American literature was virtually an

oxymoron or that any such challenge to the newly privileged position of British

literary studies was freakish and brash. Matthew Arnold expressed the new, but

already defensive, orthodoxy when he wrote:

142

I see advertised The Primer of American Literature. Imagine the face of

Philip or Alexander at hearing of a Primer of Macedonian Literature! Are we to have a Primer of Canadian Literature too, and a Primer of

Australian? We are all contributories to one great literature?

English literature * The contribution of Scotland to this literature is far more serious and important than that of America has yet had time to be; yet a "Primer of Scotch Literature" would be an absurd

ity. (177)

It was an ill-informed sneer, surprising perhaps in an author who must have seen many

other articles on American writing in British quarterlies. The comparisons, too, are

false. There had, in fact, been several histories of Scottish literature written by the time

of Arnold's article and later in the same year two more works about Scottish poetry

(both by J. Veitch) appeared. Australian literature had already been the subject of

Frederick Sinnett's The Fiction Fields of Australia (1856) and G. B. Barton's Literature in New South Wales (1866).

But such an attitude was almost as likely to be found in America as in England. Writing of the same decade as that in which Arnold wrote, Fred Lewis Pat tee quoted a

contemporary opinion that

there is no such thing [as American literature], unless the pictorial scratchings of aborigines on stones and birch bark are to be classed as

literary productions. Every piece of literary work done in the

English language by a man or woman born to the use of it is a part of that noble whole which we call English literature. (Graff 211-12)

It was not until the 1920s that American literature was permanently settled in most of the influential universities of the United States as an appropriate part of literary study. It began to appear tentatively as a subject for study in other English-speaking countries at the end of the 1930s.

The incorporation of various other national literatures such as Canadian and

Australian into the curricula of their universities was even more delayed: it is mostly

a

phenomenon of the 1950s or later. The famous manifesto, "On the Abolition of the

English Department," a plea to make African literature central to the literature pro gram, was presented by NgugT, Owuor-Anyumba, and lo Liyong to the University of Nairobi as late as 1968 (see NgugT 145-50). The formal study of one or more Com

monwealth literatures other than the national literature is a phenomenon of the late 1960s and later.

The reasons for the incorporation of Commonwealth literatures into the

"English" curriculum are mixed. One reason might be described as based on literary judgment. The argument goes that there is a body of writing in English from outside the United Kingdom and the United States of America that is worthy of study. The introduction of "literary" qualities into discourse is, of course, almost always character

ized by multi-faceted, ambiguous, and often contradictory principles. If pressed, the

proponents of this argument generally fall back on some autotelically aesthetic (typi

Ken Goodwin 143

cally New Critical), structuralist, moral (typically Leavisite), cultural-production, Marxist, psychoanalytic,

or feminist justification. A second reason, not incompatible with the first, is more obviously based in the

context of the writing. It is that writing can serve a political agenda, typically of anti colonialism and anti-imperialism. This agenda can, of course, also incorporate British

works by interrogating their colonialist assumptions: the main objects here are The

Tempest, Robinson Crusoe, Jane Eyre, Heart of Darkness, Mr. Johnson, and various works

by Rider Haggard, G. A. Henty, Edgar Rice Burroughs, John Buchan, and Edgar Wallace.

A third reason, again not incompatible with either of the first two, is a concern

to displace the literature of Britain from its central place in the tertiary (that is, post

secondary-school) literary curriculum. This is persuasively articulated in the University of Nairobi document previously mentioned.

Neither the first nor the third reason necessarily provides an ideology powerful enough to determine which texts might be studied. Both have a generally nationalistic

and anti-colonialist bias, but unless they are expressive of a Leavisite, New Critical,

Marxist, feminist, or psychoanalytical program they will not easily distinguish between one text and another.

In any case, curriculum development is always a site of conflict between compet

ing demands for limited space, so that even a firm programmatic or thematic commit

ment will not solve every problem of selection. One of the competing demands, in any case, is the resistance by nationalist critics (and perhaps, in a sense, national literatures) to universalist demands, whether those demands are for "literary standards," Marxism,

psychoanalytic criticism, hermeneutics, or feminism. There is a widespread opinion,

particularly in the black English-speaking nations, that such universalist demands are a

barely disguised form of Eurocentrism, that "universal" is the public-relations face of

"European." An example of a vehement proponent of this view is the Nigerian writer,

Chinweizu, notably in the co-authored book, Towards the Decolonization of African Literature.

Various terms have been suggested to replace "Commonwealth literature(s),"

on

the ground that the term is intertwined with political demands that are, in any case, of a moribund kind. "World literature written in English" and "(The) New literatures in

English" have their followings. In critical articles there was a fashion in the 1980s for

"Postcolonial literature(s)." That fashion may persist, though it has come under attack

from African nationalists as emphasizing only a small part of?a political interruption to?the history of their literatures. But whether or not the term persists in general usage, it has a crucial significance in the history of criticism. "Commonwealth litera

ture^)" and its other surrogates seem to refer basically to a field of study, specifically a

body of texts. There may be a political grouping and a political agenda behind the

terms, but they seem to be cognate with "British literature," "Victorian literature," or

"American literature," that is, they seem to denote primarily a body of potential texts

for study. "Postcolonial literature(s)" also has this denotation, but it also represents, in a

way quite different from the alternative terms, a process or a set of reading practices. One can produce a "postcolonial reading" of a text, but hardly a "Commonwealth

literature" interpretation. In this usage, "postcolonial" is cognate not with "Common

144 College Literature

wealth literature" but with "New Criticism," Leavisite practices, structuralism, phe

nomenology, psychoanalytic criticism, feminism, deconstruction, or any other process

of approaching, reading, or interpreting texts.

Whether it is of quite such wide application as these other reading practices does not seem to have exercised the mind of any of its practitioners, though it should have.

There is fairly general acceptance that almost any text can be read in, say, a structuralist or feminist way. A few of the shorter lyrics of Ben Jonson might present obstacles to

Leavisite readings and feminism might have to read masculism and the exclusion of

female signifiers in boys' adventure tales, but on the whole we accept that these

procedures can accommodate any text

(including many non-verbal texts). It is also obvious that a postcolonial reading can be usefully made of Othello and

The Tempest. Defoe's Robinson Crusoe, on almost any reading, must concern colonial

and colonizing attitudes, as must works like Coral Island or Treasure Island. Jane Austen's Mansfield Park contains many codes of the colonial productivity of wealth for

consumption in the English counties. Charlotte Bronte's Jane Eyre with its "mad [West

Indian] woman in the attic" is equally available to feminist and postcolonial readings. A Midsummer Night's Dream, however, though clearly capable of a reading in

terms of class structures, may prove resistant to a postcolonial reading. And what of

works like Oliver Twist, which has three brief references to the West Indies, or David

Copperfield, in which Mr. Micawber is silenced by being exported to Australia? In such

cases, a postcolonial reading would have to concern itself largely with absences that had left virtually no traces in the text. Such readings might be ingenious, but they might also seem perverse or

unproductive. They might consist largely of the critic-reader

working in a "that reminds me" or a "what the author should have said" mode.

This is an area that requires further exploration by postcolonial theorists. What needs to be considered is whether there are theoretical limits to the practice of postcolo nial readings or, in more

specific terms, whether some texts are inherently resistant.

Now an ingenious critic with an extreme anti-objective and extreme relativist view of

the nature of texts might brush aside such a caution. For such a critic any text might seem

capable of being captured in a relativist net, anaesthetized, gutted, and taxidermi

cally injected with an infinite variety of signs. But while thoroughgoing relativism has its attractions (and its simplifications), most critics behave, at least for part of the time, as if they believe that relations must sometimes be not just between other relations but between entities. This position that texts do seem to have irresistible features is not

easily brushed aside by accusations of "essentialism." These features may be contradic

tory, fragmentary, and engaged in contest with each other, but they are treated as if

they are "there," that is, in the text. Various readings can interpret them in various

ways and bring them into all sorts of relationships with each other and with cultural and reading processes external to the written or spoken text, but they have to be assumed to be "there" in the text for this to happen.

This realist or empirical or materialist assumption is widely adopted in practice

by readers and critics of Commonwealth or postcolonial literature. The political nature

of much of the surface of novels from Africa, the West Indies, or India seems to dictate a reading that there is a materialist reference beyond the play of signifiers in the written text. It is also common for postcolonial(ist) critics to assume that certain rhetorical features objectively inhere in texts from colonial and postcolonial countries, features

Ken Goodwin 145

such as mimicry, counter-discourse (or "writing back" to the center),

or irony (see

Ashcroft, Griffiths, and Tiffin). It is largely because of the materialist assumptions that the problems of teaching

a national literature in the country of its origin are substantially different from those

attending the teaching of another country's literature. In the former instance the

culture and its institutions (including those of book-production) are presumably known to teachers and taught. In the second, they

are generally alien. This may,

indeed, constitute a fourth reason for teaching Commonwealth literature: that the

perceptible alienness of another nation's writing might suggest to students the equal alienness of British literature. Stories of cultural misunderstanding between one coun

try and another take little account of whether the "reading" country is imperialist or

postcolonial. The stories, in fact, take on a mythology and institutional quality of their

own, being re-attributed to different people, places, and situations. The Asian or

African student working on Wordsworth mistakes dandelions for daffodils; the

English translator of French West African fiction mistakes fetish icons for water pots; the African student finds "heater" an incomprehensible part of the (textual) furnishings of a (textual) European room; and so on.

A particular form of alienness that is likely to be foregrounded in the study of

Commonwealth texts is the very nature of "literature" itself. Students come up against

questions of genre, canon-formation, notions of "high" and of "working-class" or

"people's" literature. Even more specifically, they

come up against the question of

whether all texts have to be written or printed?a germane consideration in the face of the unprinted oral traditions of many countries.

Because these problems hardly affect students studying their own national litera

ture, I shall concentrate on transnational study. From the devising of a curriculum to

the principles and politics of teaching to the teaching methods adopted there is little that can be imported unchanged from the teaching of the national literature.

The commonest kinds of syllabus for Commonwealth literature courses may be

conveniently classified as follows: (a) study of a single country or nation, either in

"literary" terms or more generally in "cultural" terms, (b) a sampling of texts from two or three Commonwealth countries, either within settler or

plantation boundaries

or across them (some courses

seeking to take one national literature like the students'

own and another unlike it), (c) comparative studies of Commonwealth texts in relation to British (or American texts), including concepts such as "re-writing," "re

inscribing," or "writing back" to the earlier texts, (d) thematic studies undertaken

without respect to political boundaries (and sometimes without respect to language boundaries as well).

It is obvious that the depth of study of any national literature varies substan

tially from one of these types to another. Type (b) is particularly likely to be confined to recent (virtually contemporary) texts. It is, indeed, only type (c) that is ever likely to set a text earlier than Olive Schreiner's The Story of an African Farm, and that itself is much earlier than the next frequently used texts, the novels of Mulk Raj Anand.

Irrespective of which type of syllabus is used, students will experience difficulties

either not found or not recognized in their study of other literature courses. There is, of course, still a common

assumption that the study of the literature of one's own

country or of Britain poses few problems. It may be the case, as I have hinted earlier,

146 College Literature

that the more overt problems of studying a Commonwealth literature will have the

peripheral advantage of exposing the problems attendant on all literary study. Kipling's "And what should they know of England who only England know?" ("The English

Flag") may well operate in English studies. There is certainly no doubt that Common

wealth literature raises questions about the political, economic, and cultural contexts of

literature and of literary studies, the whole matter of how a syllabus (with its exclu

sions, absences, and construction of the "literary") comes into being, and the dissolu

tion of conventional canons when they come in contact with Commonwealth

literature.

More generally, the study of Commonwealth literature is likely to come up

against such problems as the concept of authorship (with its opposed extremes of individual creativity and cultural production), the ontological status of the text, the

question of representation (whether semiotic or referential), and the nature of reception

(whether passively receptive or actively creative). These are, of course, problems

applying to the study of any text. But they are sometimes more sharply (if sometimes more naively) raised in relation to Commonwealth literature. The question of whether the writer (particularly in a country struggling towards independence or striving for cultural independence or identity) should be an individual or a community mouthpiece is, for instance, a

particular version of the more general theoretical question of "author

ship." The question of for whom the Commonwealth writer writes is a particular version of the general theoretical question of reception.

There are, however, certain assumptions much more commonly found in the

study of Commonwealth literature (and some national literatures) than elsewhere. One is the notion of there being stages of historic development. In historical studies such notions of teleological striving towards a higher status are commonly derided as

"Whiggish" or "evolutionary." But they are almost unavoidable in any historical

theory that uses change (or even, perhaps, causation)

as a major determinant. Cyclical theories of history (such as those of Spengler, Yeats, or Toynbee) or theories of there

being successive stages in human history (such as enunciated by Marxist theory) carry an implication of rise and fall, growth and decay. In Commonwealth and national

literary studies, however, the rhetoric is commonly only of growth, not of decay, of

development, not of atrophy. Frederick Jackson Turner's Frontier theory is a prime

example. In this theory the Frontier is constantly pushed westward, there is no retreat,

the climb is ever upward. Such a theory is sometimes associated with the growth of children or of trees. In its comparative Commonwealth form it relies on the old Empire

Day rhetoric of Britannia surrounded by her children or on the rhetoric of a British

literary tree with colonial branches. Such rhetoric is often resented as intrinsically occidental in its values: one might think it enshrined something of the scale of values

espoused by Sir James Chettam in Middlemarch ? "the smallest birch-tree is of a higher kind than the most soaring palm" (Chapter 2).

When it comes to specific examples, such theories often set up, as covering any

"developing" national literature, a series of inescapable stages of growth. A very early enunciation of such stages was made by the Peruvian critic Jose* Carlos Mari&tegui in the 1920s:

Ken Goodwin 147

A literary, not sociological, theory divides the literature of a country into three periods: colonial, cosmopolitan and national. In the first

period, the country, in a literary sense, is a colony dependent on the

metropolis. In the second period, it simultaneously assimilates the elements of various foreign literatures. In the third period, it shapes and expresses its own personality and feelings. (190-91)

The application of such a scheme to anglophone colonial and postcolonial writing, is, however, derived from later sources, particularly the francophone conferences and articles of the 1950s and, perhaps most notably of all, the sociological analyses of colonialism by Frantz Fanon. English expressions of the theory date from the 1960s.

An early Australian example is by H. P. Heseltine:

The American scholars have long since marked out the pattern of the progress of their own civilization and literature; and in its

general outlines the pattern seems to be a necessary one in any

situation where a European culture has been grafted onto?through

colonization and conquest?some less advanced society. First of all

there is likely to be a period of imitation of the models provided by the parent civilization; this is likely to be followed by a period of intense and sometimes acrimonious debate between the forces of

nationalism and those which continue to pay homage to the imperial source; for a time nationalism will appear to be triumphant; but as

pre-condition of full maturity, nationalism must suffer rejection and be replaced by a sense of nationhood which is assured and unselfcon scious. (36-37)

A late example of such a schema is that of Horst Priessnitz, who suggests that five

stages of decreasing dependence can be identified; his chief contribution to the debate

is, however, to describe them in terms of their systems of cultural communication

(38-40). This kind of analysis assumes a close association between literary history and

political and economic history (an association that Colmer questions). For that reason, attention is focused (in syllabuses and in critical discourse) largely on prose fiction,

particularly the novel. It is a concentration quite different from that found in fran

cophone and lusophone syllabuses and criticism. The chief reason for the concentration on prose fiction is probably that many Commonwealth novels contain substantial

passages written in a social- or socialist-realist mode that can provide

texts for an

interpretation of literature as a politically (or at least culturally) determined construc

tion. An associated reason may be that the novel, although historically the most

thoroughly European of literary forms, has so few immutable characteristics that it is

peculiarly susceptible to creolization or indigenization without losing its identity or at

least its recognizability. Oral tales and traditions can be incorporated in the form?as in

the novels of Amos Tutuola?without the result seeming "un-novel-like" even to a

reader from an entirely different cultural background. A related reason is that the novel is the form most likely to be directed at and published for a world-wide audience. By

148 College Literature

contrast, poetry, drama, and the fictional tale often seem conditioned by local contexts

and local forms in a way that non-native critics find baffling. They are, furthermore, often published by small publishers with only local distribution, with the result that

they are barely known internationally and are often difficult to obtain in the quantities required for a university course in another country.

Students in courses concerned with Commonwealth literature will almost cer

tainly encounter certain themes in the secondary literature and perhaps in the class

room. Alienation (in the existentialist rather than the Brechtian sense) or estrangement

(a more recent Marxian and psychoanalytical term) has been identified in various forms of the colonial experience: exile, dislocation, a crisis of identity, hybridization or

biculturalism, mimicry, and the fearful sense of freedom. In some treatments, these

feelings are considered in rather European terms, derived at times from such

nineteenth-century European topoi as the divided soul or Matthew Arnold's notion of

wandering between two worlds. Another theme, identified more recently, is the

parallel between the power relationship of the colonizer to the colonized and that of men to women, the upper classes to the lower, or men to the landscape. The common

topos brought into play here is that of the center and the periphery, with substantial concentration on the economic and spiritual deprivations of marginality. Another,

quintessentially literary, theme is the notion of seizing and colonizing the power of the colonizer's language in order to make it an instrument of emancipation rather than

oppression. The Tempest is commonly the starting text for this kind of discursus. Teachers of Commonwealth literature often comment on the difficulties of

offering their courses. There is, first of all, the struggle to have the subject accepted, which parallels the earlier difficulties surrounding the introduction of American and other national literatures to a British-dominated curriculum. There is the difficulty of

providing an accessible context to literatures of which students are initially ignorant. There are difficulties with forms of language that are unfamiliar or that generate inappropriate connotations. And above all, the most frequently enunciated problem is

with the supply of books.

Book-supply is probably best dealt with through a national text-book supplier or

agent. For anglophone books from the continent of Africa, the African Books Collec tive Ltd. (The Jam Factory, 27 Park End Street, Oxford OX2 2HU, England) is reliable. For Canada, the annual Canadian Studies contains a list of suppliers. For

Australia, New Zealand, India, Malaysia, and most other countries, it is probably best to contact the university bookshop in a large university?preferably one that is known to operate in distance education ("external studies"), and hence is geared to mail orders.

(For Australia I can recommend the University of Queensland Bookshop.) That is, however, of little help in countries with a weak and/or soft currency.

The cost of a single text-book from another Commonwealth country can sometimes constitute a month's salary for an academic. A student has thus no chance of owning

any text-book.

An example involving Australia and India will make this clear. The Macmillan

Anthology of Australian Literature is increasingly used in Australian universities as a basic text, providing about one-half of the books needed for an Australian literature subject (the others being novels and plays). Its Australian price is $39.95. Australian book

prices are high (chiefly because of the smallness of the market), but $39.95 is neverthe

Ken Goodwin 149

less a manageable and acceptable

sum for Australian students. But it is entirely unreasonable for an Indian student. At the present rate of exchange of the Australian

dollar to the Indian rupee that is roughly Rs 800, without allowing for transport costs. Text-books produced in India for other literature courses are in the range of Rs

20-100, and even then students often cannot afford to buy them. The Australian text

book is thus outlandishly expensive. In this impossible situation one is either encouraging students to photocopy

(which may be quite a reasonable solution) or, worse still, one is creating or reinforcing the impression that Australia is just another capitalist economy battening on the Third

World. A suggestion made to me

by an Indian scholar may have more

general applica tion. It is that to overcome this problem

a three-way approach is needed. The Austra

lian Government, Australian publishers, and the universities of India (perhaps represented by the University Grants Commission) should come to an arrangement to

purchase for India a limited copyright enabling production in India of a small number of basic Australian texts. As the Australian publishers would otherwise not sell more

than a handful of copies of any Australian book to India, it seems like a rational

proposition for them. As such a scheme would give a tremendous encouragement to

the study of Australian literature in India, it should be attractive to the Australian Government.

An alternative would be for the Australian Government to provide a substantial

export levy for Australian text-books exported to impoverished and/or "developing" countries. Publishers might sell at less than their normal wholesale price. The Govern

ment might pay freight and a retailer's profit margin. Such schemes require bilateral agreements and even agreements about every title.

There is no simple, centralized answer to the problem, though teachers of Common

wealth literature have sometimes suggested that the Commonwealth Secretariat, the

Commonwealth Institute in London, or the Association for Commonwealth Litera

ture and Language Studies should find one. The fact is that the economies of Com monwealth countries are so

disparate that no global solution is possible.

A sub-group of the book-supply problem concerns the availability of reference works. One would hardly think of teaching a British literature course beyond first-year level without recourse to, say, The Oxford Companion to English Literature, The New

Cambridge Bibliography of English Literature, The Oxford English Dictionary, and probably the British Library Catalogue of Printed Books. Yet Commonwealth literature courses are

often taught without the equivalent materials. For Australia, one ought to have The

Oxford Companion to Australian Literature, the Australian National Bibliography, the

Australian National Dictionary, and The Mitchell Library Dictionary Catalog of Printed Books?as well as a host of other reference books and access to online data-bases.

Some teachers will, however, make a virtue of necessity by asserting that the

absence of much secondary material forces students to work harder at understanding the text. A slightly less despairing attitude is to look forward to the provision of more

Commonwealth-wide (rather than individual national) research aids. The Routledge

Encyclopaedia of Commonwealth Literature, a million-word alphabetically arranged guide under the general editorship of three Canadian scholars, Eugene Benson, L. W.

Conolly and G. D. Killam, is scheduled for publication in 1992/3. An Australian

150 College Literature

scholar, Alan Lawson, is the general editor of a projected seven-volume series, Anno

tated Bibliographies of Critical Writings on the Post-Colonial Literatures in English, to be

published by G. K. Hall: its individual volumes will be devoted to the various geo

graphical regions, except for the first volume which will be General, Theoretical and

Comparative Criticism.

It is tempting to revert to the comfortable complacency of believing that Com

monwealth literary study is still in its "infancy." There are, in fact, fewer problems with such a metaphor in this context than there are when it is applied to Common wealth literature itself. Research and study aids do seem to increase at an exponential

rate in most new fields. Perhaps one can be patient but not

complacent about their

supply for Commonwealth literature.

WORKS CITED

Arnold, Matthew. "General Grant." Murray's Magazine January/February 1887. (Rpt. in

The Complete Prose Works of Matthew Arnold 11: The Last Word. Ed. R. H. Super. Ann Arbor: U of Michigan P, 1977.)

Ashcroft, Bill, Gareth Griffiths, and Helen Tiffin. The Empire Writes Back: Theory and Practice in Post-colonial Literatures. New York: Routledge, 1989.

Cesaire, Aime. "Culture and Colonisation." Presence Africaine new

bimonthly series 8/9/10

(June-November 1956): 193-207. Chinweizu. Decolonising the African Mind. Lagos: Pero, 1987.

_. The West and the Rest of Us: White Predators, Black Slavers, and the African Elite. 2nd ed. Lagos: Pero, 1987.

_, Onwuchekwa Jemie, and Ihechukwu Madubuike. Towards the Decolonization of

African Literature. Washington: Howard UP, 1983.

Colmer, John. "Constructing a National Tradition: Myths, Models and Metaphors." Litera

ture(s) in English. Ed. Wolfgang Zach. Frankfurt: Peter Lang, 1990. 119-29. Fanon, Frantz. "Racism and Culture." Presence Africaine

new bimonthly

series 8/9/10 (June November 1956): 122-31.

_The Wretched of the Earth. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1961.

Graff, Gerald. Professing Literature: An Institutional History. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1987.

Heseltine, H. P. "Australian Image: (1) The Literary Heritage." Meanjin Quarterly 21.1

(1962): 35-49.

Mariategui, Jose Carlos. "Literature on Trial." Interpretive Essays on Peruvian

Reality. Trans.

Marjory Urquidi. Austin: U of Texas P, 1971.

NgugT wa Thiong'o. Homecoming: Essays on

African and Caribbean Literature, Culture and

Politics. London: Heinemann Educational Books, 1972.

Priessnitz, Horst. "The Dual Perspective of 'Anglo-Colonial' Literatures and the Future of

English Studies: A Modest Proposal." Literature(s) in English. Ed. Wolfgang Zach. Frankfurt: Peter Lang, 1990. 31-46.

Ken Goodwin 151