The global spread of English has resulted in the emergence of a diverse range of postcolonial varieties around the world. Postcolonial English provides a clear and original account of the evolution of these varieties, exploring the historical, social and ecological factors that have shaped all levels of their structure. It argues that while these Englishes have developed new and unique properties which differ greatly from one location to another, their spread and diversification can in fact be explained by a single underlying process, which builds upon the constant relationships and communication needs of the colonizers, the colonized, and other parties. Outlining the stages and characteristics of this process, it applies them in detail to English in sixteen different countries across all continents as well as, in a separate chapter, to a history of American English. Of key interest to sociolinguists, dialectologists, historical linguists and syntacticians alike, this book provides a fascinating new picture of the growth and evolution of English around the globe.

How English has become a language of the people in India—one that enables the state but also empowers protests against it Against a groundswell of critiques of global English, Vernacular English argues that literary studies are yet to confront the true political import of the English language in the world today. A comparative study of three centuries of English literature and media in India, this original and provocative book tells the story of English in India as a tale not of imperial coercion, but of a people’s language in a postcolonial democracy. Focusing on experiences of hearing, touching, remembering, speaking, and seeing English, Akshya Saxena delves into a previously unexplored body of texts from English and Hindi literature, law, film, visual art, and public protests. She reveals little-known debates and practices that have shaped the meanings of English in India and the Anglophone world, including the overlooked history of the legislation of English in India. She also calls attention to how low castes and minority ethnic groups have routinely used this elite language to protest the Indian state. Challenging prevailing conceptions of English as a vernacular and global lingua franca, Vernacular English does nothing less than reimagine what a language is and the categories used to analyze it.

Colonial and Postcolonial Literature is the leading critical overview of and historical introduction to colonial and postcolonial literary studies. Highly praised from the time of its first publication for its lucidity, breadth, and insight, the book has itself played a crucial part in founding and shaping this rapidly expanding field. The author, an internationally renowned postcolonial critic, provides a broad contextualizing narrative about the evolution of colonial and postcolonial writing in English. Illuminating close readings of texts by a wide variety of writers - from Kipling and Conrad through to Kincaid, from Ngugi to Noonuccal and Naipaul - explicate key theoretical terms such as 'subaltern', 'colonial resistance', 'writing back', and 'hybridity'. This revised edition includes new critiques of postcolonial women's writing, an expanded and fully annotated bibliography, and a new chapter and conclusion on postcolonialism exploring keynote debates in the field relating to sexuality, transnationalism, and local resistance.

Involuntary associations : "Postcolonial Studies" and "World Englishes"--Grammars of living break their Tense : world Englishes and cultural translation -- English in the conversation of mankind : world Englishes and global citizenship -- Declarations of linguistic independence: the postcolonial dictionary -- Writing after the end of empire : Composition, community, and creativity -- Slow reading : the opacity of world literatures -- Conclusion : English remains, englishes remain

About the book: Postcolonial English Literatute that has gained wide currency as a theoretical as well as critical approach to postmodernist literature in English owed much to writings of Chinua Achebe and Nadine Gordimer who were the trendsetters. Since then it has been growing in rapid number and many writers alongwith theorists like Edward Said, Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, Bill Ashcroft and Homi K Bhabha from across the globe have started writing their theory as well as literature. Writers from Africa and the Caribbean, South Asia, mostly from Indian subcontinent, New Zealand, England and Ireland are taking interest in this area of study. Now the area of postcolonial English literature has become so broad and ever-expanding that the task of encompassing it in an anthology has become a tough work. Still the present anthology is an endeavour from the part of authors and contributors to comprise the ever-widening area of postcolonial English literature into twenty one well written chapters of different perspectives which the authors hopefully see serve the window through which the glimpses of many unexplored regions of this area of study will be caught.

In Postcolonial Ecocriticism, Graham Huggan and Helen Tiffin examine relationships between humans, animals and the environment in postcolonial texts. Divided into two sections that consider the postcolonial first from an environmental and then a zoocritical perspective, the book looks at: narratives of development in postcolonial writing entitlement and belonging in the pastoral genre colonialist 'asset stripping' and the Christian mission the politics of eating and representations of cannibalism animality and spirituality sentimentality and anthropomorphism the place of the human and the animal in a 'posthuman' world. Making use of the work of authors as diverse as J.M. Coetzee, Joseph Conrad, Daniel Defoe, Jamaica Kincaid and V.S. Naipaul, the authors argue that human liberation will never be fully achieved without challenging how human societies have constructed themselves in hierarchical relation to other human and nonhuman communities, and without imagining new ways in which these ecologically connected groupings can be creatively transformed.

Passionate allegiances to competing theoretical camps have stifled dialogue among today's literary critics, asserts Françoise Lionnet. Discussing a number of postcolonial narratives by women from a variety of ethnic and cultural backgrounds, she offers a comparative feminist approach that can provide common ground for debates on such issues as multiculturalism, universalism, and relativism. Lionnet uses the concept of métissage, or cultural mixing, in her readings of a rich array of Francophone and Anglophone texts—by Michelle Cliff from Jamaica, Suzanne Dracius-Pinalie from Martinique, Ananda Devi from Mauritius, Maryse Conde and Myriam Warner-Vieyra from Guadeloupe, Gayl Jones from the United States, Bessie Head from Botswana, Nawal El Saadawi from Egypt, and Leila Sebbar from Algeria and France. Focusing on themes of exile and displacement and on narrative treatments of culturally sanctioned excision, polygamy, and murder, Lionnet examines the psychological and social mechanisms that allow individuals to negotiate conflicting cultural influences. In her view, these writers reject the opposition between self and other and base their self-portrayals on a métissage of forms and influences. Lionnet's perspective has much to offer critics and theorists, whether they are interested in First or Third World contexts, American or French critical perspectives, essentialist or poststructuralist epistemologies.