Decolonized writers transformed English fiction via imported-colonial language

Evidence

One of the peculiarities of this era is that with general expansion of schooling and the modern professions in many of the decolonized coun- tries, 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. Heinemann, the English publishing company, has a fat list of authors and books from Africa and the Caribbean; one, Wole Soyinka, who writes exclusively in English, has been canonized with the Nobel Prize. It is fair to say, I think, that these writers born in other global spaces - Rushdie and Ghosh, Armah and Achebe, Lamming and Harris, nor to speak of dozens of others, especially from South Africahave altered the traditional map of English fiction beyond recognition. — Aijaz Ahmad, In Theory, 288

Categorization

• ADDENDUM: Connects to the reader’s library holdings in the postcolonial canon — The Reluctant Fundamentalist, Things Fall Apart, The Namesake — as concrete instances of this thesis.
• XREF: connects to: English shaped Indian literature through imported genres rather than language. — Aijaz Ahmad, In Theory: Classes, Nations, Literatures, 1182; Reader positions determine what Indian English fiction can signify — Donna Landry and Gerald MacLean, The Spivak Reader: Selected Works of…, 1963; Decolonization produced a proliferation, not decline, of literature in colonial languages — Aijaz Ahmad, In Theory: Nations, Classes, Literatures, 116 (+5 more)

Broader Connections

• Colonial language can be repurposed into a new anticolonial literary language #expands (0.90) — Aimé Césaire, Discourse on Colonialism, 284
• Decolonization produced a proliferation, not decline, of literature in colonial languages #corroborates (0.82) — Aijaz Ahmad, In Theory, 116
• Surrealism served colonized writers as a weapon against colonial language #qualifies (0.80) — Aimé Césaire, Discourse on Colonialism, 287
• English’s colonial literary impact came through genres, not composition #qualifies (0.78) — Aijaz Ahmad, In Theory, 521
• Colonized writers can use colonial tools without being defined by them #expands (0.75)