Decolonization produced a proliferation, not decline, of literature in colonial languages

Evidence

One of the peculiarities of this era is that with general expansion of schooling and the modern professions in many of the decolonized countries, there has come about not a decline but a great proliferation of literary texts composed and published in those countries but in languages that had been initially imported from Europe, ranging from English to Portuguese. India is now one of the world’s largest markets for the production and dissemination of English-language books, and boasts of several very famous novelists in the language. — Aijaz Ahmad, In Theory, 116

Categorization

• XREF: Contradicts the common assumption that decolonization would mean rejection of the colonizer’s language — parallels debates in Ngugi wa Thiong’o’s work on language and decolonization. — connects to: Decolonized writers transformed English fiction via imported-colonial language — Aijaz Ahmad, In Theory: Classes, Nations, Literatures, 288; the MOC “The Word Is a Fence: Language as Battleground, Property, and Partition”

Related

• Decolonized writers transformed English fiction via imported-colonial language (similarity 0.90)
• English’s colonial literary impact came through genres, not composition (similarity 0.83)
• Postcolonial theory recasts decolonization as a literary-critical rather than political contest (similarity 0.82)
• English literature has shaped the very categories of modern Indian thought (similarity 0.82)
• English shaped Indian literature through imported genres rather than language. (similarity 0.82)
• Colonial language legacies still govern which texts circulate. (similarity 0.81)
• Indian reformers embraced English as a scientific window, not a literary imposition (similarity 0.80)
• English, not any Indian language, forms India’s only unified national literary intelligentsia. (similarity 0.80)
• Post-colonial state expansion deepened rather than reversed colonial language structures (similarity 0.79)
• Indian reformers never rejected English, wanting it only as epistemic access (similarity 0.79)
• French colonial defeats and occupation, not Asian decolonization, radicalized Western literary theory (similarity 0.79)
• Only a materialist-comparatist frame can break the colonial grip on Indian English Studies. (similarity 0.79)
• English in India is simultaneously knowledge production, global connection, and class division (similarity 0.79)
• English is structurally the worst Indian language for conveying India’s oral literature (similarity 0.78)
• Theory’s ideological shifts track the real fortunes of decolonized states (similarity 0.78)