Abstract
One of the most recurrent themes in postcolonial studies has been that of resistance, the rhetoric of which has often matched the aggression of colonial control. But the most effective and resilient form of postcolonial resistance has occurred as colonial subjects actively transformed the discourses and technologies of colonial dominance. By seizing the language of the colonizer and producing a literature in which that global language worked for them rather than against them, colonial writers were able to interpolate dominant systems of readership and distribution. In the former British Empire this led to nothing less than a transformation of English literature itself, and this became the model for the transformation of dominant discourses and technologies, such as history, conceptions of space and place, and modernity.
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Notes
- 1.
This is a quote from the Roman poet Terence from the play “Heauton Timorumenos”: “Homo sum, humani nihil a me alienum puto,” or “I am human, and I think nothing human is alien to me”.
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Ashcroft, B. (2022). Transformation as Resistance. In: Nicolaides, A., Eschenbacher, S., Buergelt, P.T., Gilpin-Jackson, Y., Welch, M., Misawa, M. (eds) The Palgrave Handbook of Learning for Transformation. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-84694-7_31
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