In his 1974 essay "Colonialist Criticism," Chinua Achebe criticized American and British critics of contemporary African literature

for praising "universality" whenever they sensed its presence: for praising fiction, in particular, that transcended African parochialism, although set in Africa, and dealt with the universally human, even though its characters happened to be Africans. Achebe's point, of course, was that the colonialist critics--by which term he apparently meant all western critics of African literature--didn't really have any conception of the universally human. They said "universal," but they meant, without knowing it, "western," or "like us." "I should like to see," Achebe wrote, "the word universal banned altogether from discussions of African literature, until such a time as people cease to use it as a synonym for the narrow, self-serving parochialism of Europe" (13). What bothered Achebe most was not what the colonialists said or thought but the fact that their criticism "exert[s] an influence on our writers" ("Colonialist" 13; italics added). Good literature, indeed, real literature, had to be universal, and when African writers looked at their continent, past, present, and future, universality seemed in short supply. This vital essence evidently belonged in Europe and was most fully accessible in the European novel. The trick seemed, then, to appropriate what was done there, but African writers wanted to write about Africa, and Africa was not Europe. If not different in a fundamental way--humanity always being fundamentally the same--there were still some differences only a moron could ignore. Nor did Africa want to remain tied to Europe, which had finally dragged herself away politically. To complicate matters, writers would find few African readers, even within their own countries, unless they wrote in the European languages through which, of course, they themselves had found out about the universal. But how does one write about Africa in those languages? In "Colonialist Criticism," Achebe made a promise: "And let no one be fooled by the fact that we may write inEnglish, for we intend to do unheard of things with it" (10). Who can say now, a generation later, whether that promise has been fulfilled?(1) Paradise Lost and Pope's Horatian Essay on Criticism were written in English. English writers who sought to appropriate ancient forms and styles had to do it in English--if they wanted readers. This does not mean that they--these neoclassicists--round themselves in a situation altogether different from that of mid- and late-twentieth-century writers in Nigeria, Ghana, or Kenya. There was a tradition that came from some other place and was genealogically authoritative. One had to follow in it, somehow--appropriating its forms, following its "rules"--to make authentic literature, but this increasingly seemed a quite unnatural and unreasonable course for contemporary writers to follow. Resistance, often quite explicit, to this classical tradition grew throughout the eighteenth century, and its influence eventually withered almost entirely away. The story of this decline has been told many times. There are many ways of accounting for it, but all of them involve a shift in the meaning of the word "universal" from "them" to "US." In An Essay on Criticism, Pope followed tradition in celebrating the "clear, unchang'd, and Universal light" (71) found, above all, in the sublimely instructive Homer, who displayed in his heroes, with the help of this light, the universal human traits that somehow also were this light. The same light shone, if not quite so brightly, in Vergil and Horace. And to be universal is to be everlasting: "Still green with Bays, each ancient Altar stands, / Above the reach of Sacrilegious Hands" (181-82). Only the real thing lasts because all who read it can find themselves there:
See, from each Clime, the Learn'd their Incense bring; Hear, in all Tongues consenting Paeans ring! In Praise so just let ev'ry Voice be join'd, And fill the Gen'ral Chorus of Mankind! (185-88)

Of course, not everyone was learned in the sense that Pope meant. "Half-learn'd Witlings," he complained, were as "num'rous in our Isle, / As half-form'd Insects on the Banks of Nile" (40-41). The light did not shine for such as these. And why so numerous? Perhaps not all of them could justly be called half-learned. Would Pope call an African who does not enjoy Trollope half-learned? How about an African who does not enjoy Shakespeare? It is hard not to ascribe universality to the writers one's culture prizes. But there are a lot of things to learn and what one learns in one cultural sector--the political, for example--may affect how one learns in another. Eighteenth-century Britons, cultural historians seem to agree, were learning how to be British, to be British nationalists--as Africans today have been learning to be nationalists (if they don't become something better). The process of developing "nation-ness" entails firmly situating an Other, in requiring an "otherness." And that works, at least in the short run, against the premise of the universal. Today, several decades after Achebe's "Colonialist Criticism," postcolonial writing in the developing nations still resists the assumptions and practices of the literatures exported from the metropoles during the colonial period. This resistance is a complicated matter, and it is no exaggeration to say that conflict has raged intermittently among many postcolonial writers regarding how it can or should be carried out and how far it might go. Much eighteenth-century writing in English, including work that does not directly allude to the classics, is also postcolonial, with Greece and Rome as the cultural metropoles. These the writers resisted, with varying degrees of purposiveness, and the resistance was political in a broad sense, was nationalistic. It was neither uniform nor consistent, and it employed two tactics, appropriation and abrogation, whose mutual relationship is never very clear--as contemporary postcolonial writers have learned in their time (Ashcroft 38-39). Every postcolonial work is a site of struggle, with a past that the writer wishes to "other," but not completely other, and with a present that is unsatisfactory because it seems so perilously new. Today, one would look to the novel as the vehicle for this ambivalent and bifold struggle; among the eighteenth-century forms, mock-epic is that in which it occurs most openly--if we look for it. That is what I propose we do. I propose that mock-epics, even the majority of them now considered sub-literary, become fully invested with life when read as postcolonial literature. A political unlikeness shall now be considered. To be sure, eighteenth-century Britain lacked a history of political domination by Greece and Rome. There were no Greek or Roman sahibs that needed displacing, while postcolonial writers in former European colonies could hardly help being affected by the circumstances accompanying the physical departure or removal of an alien ruling class. That this is a significant difference I need not say, but it does not alter the fact that a nation needs a language. In Imagined Communities, Benedict Anderson emphasizes that "the nation is conceived in language, not blood" (47). And this language should be a "print-language" (74), Anderson says, so writers, literary people, have a very important part to play, extending beyond "culture" in its narrow sense, in building nation-ness. In Europe, "Speakers of the huge variety of Frenches, Englishes, or Spanishes ... became capable of comprehending one another via print and paper" (47). This is all very well, but these print-languages were then exported to other parts of the world where they remained, as printlanguages, after the French, English, or Spanish had themselves departed. The "myth of centrality embodied in the concept of a `standard language'" therefore remains (Ashcroft 87). The problem, of course, is that this language, with its spurious centrality or universality, so obviously becomes alien once the sahibs leave. Those who remain could write in an indigenous language, make that the nation's "print-language," but this approach does not seem satisfactory to most writers in the developing nations today (Achebe,

"African Writer"). Or one can somehow change the way one employs the metropolitan language. When used differently from the way it is used in England, write Ashcroft et al., "English becomes english" (87), no longer a standard language, but a medium one can use for one's own purposes, unrestrained by a tradition that came from someplace else. With english, presumably, one can then go about creating an authentic national literature, ultimately obtaining "seizure and control of the means of interpretation and communication" (Ashcroft 97). Decolonization is then complete. The authors of The Empire Writes Back seem to have no doubt that this is happening in the former British colonies. Obviously, people are trying to do it. It seems mistaken, though, to assume that it is the language itself they are trying to change, as "English becomes english" implies. Experiments have been made in that direction; as part of its nativist

Reclaiming the Past

Recovering submerged histories is instrumental in counteracting colonial cultural hegemony and its persistent attempts to erase the past that subject peoples had prior to the epoch of colonial rule. In Toni Morrison's novels reclaiming the past is a necessary condition of subjectivity since it restores a voice and history to those who were deprived of the awareness of both. In other words, it is a restoration of subjectivity. In a postcolonial context, reclaiming the past means more than a linear or literal recording of historical facts. Rather the process of redeeming a past requires that victim of oppression recover their effaced traditions and exhume previously buried communal memories. To enable this process, the oppressed have rallied together and acknowledged their emotional devastation and physical wounds. ^ Chapter Oneexplicates the importance that Morrison's novels The Bluest Eyes and Song of Solomon give to the process of past reclamation and traditional recovery: thus, a means of empowering black women against the oppressive institutions of a white culture and its impositions of white images on black girls. Chapter Two analyzes the literary and rhetorical mode in Beloved which defies historical definition, especially when the victims of slavery bind together and excavate memories of colonial oppression. By talking about the past, the oppressed will break the traditions of silence that denied their presence in history. Chapter Three investigates the issues of transitoriness evident in Morrison's novels Jazz, Sula and Tar Baby . In these three narratives, tradition is crucial in overcoming the effects of emotional affliction that resides within travelers who leave their old home to settle elsewhere. According to the narratives, to annul the emotional pain that results from leaving one's place of origin, migrants must sustain a fixed sense of identity through their recognition of the traditions and values of the old home. However, to be able to relate to origins, people need not confine themselves to the domain of home. Especially in Sula, Morrison insists that traditions should not fix us to one place. To keep traditions alive, we do not need to adopt the ghetto mentality that confines us to one locale. ^

This is again a term from Gramsci. In The Modern Prince and The Prison Notebooks Gramsci describes the subaltern classes as those subordinated by hegemony excluded from any meaningful role in a regime of power. Gramsci himself has workers in mind, but the term has also been used to describe other groups who are excluded and do not have a position from which to speak--for example peasants women. Gramsci further notes that "the subaltern classes, by definition, are not unified and cannot unite until they are able to become a 'State'".
Subaltern: