The Vulnerability of Imperial Language as a Transformational Tool in Postcolonial Transcultural Discourse

Abstract

This essay reassesses the complex and unending debate on the use of imperial language, particularly English, as a plausible postcolonial transformational asset. Arguing against previously held convictions that imperial language is a cultural capital and marker of dominance or the core of Western cultural representation, the contention of the paper situates imperial language as fragile, non indicative as carrier of Western epistemology and as vulnerable in the hands of the postcolonial writer who uses it to translate and ascertain his cultural identity and epistemology. Different postcolonial writing strategies include such issues as menace, sly mimicry, subversion, appropriation, abrogation and accommodation. English language in its varieties assumes a cosmopolitan character, and is used at times metonymically, that is, including writers’ own language without them necessarily undoing their cultural heritage. The essay concludes that, English is a power-generating metaphor; it is mutually constitutive, engendering both the coloniser and colonised as repositories or sites of power. In this matrix, English is used in the postcolony for cultural transmission and for the alteration of colonial and imperial dominance. Postcolonial writers are not bondsmen, but committed agents in the polyvocality of cultures and other diverse discourses in postcolonial spaces and the ever changing global context.

DOI: 10.5901/ajis.2013.v2n3p71