Re-conquering cultural space: from defying literary shibboleths to redefining linguistic categories

Abstract

I dedicate this paper to the eternal heretic, who rails at the metamorphosis of yesterday's rebellion into today's custom and tomorrow's dogma. Exposing the ulterior agenda of "orientalism" and arguing for "decolonising the mind" were acts of defiance at historic junctures. Post-Said, and post-Ngugi, however, non-native speakers of English continue to produce literature so vibrant in English that it amounts to a re-conquering of the cultural space that the West had always denied to the Rest. The global academic recognition accorded to African and Asian writers as well as the commercial success of Indian writers represents an ironic twist to the earlier canonical exclusion of the literatures of the colonies from the hallowed regions of exalted literature by the West. This triumphant defiance in the use of English compels us to question the linguistic construct of the uniqueness of the native speaker. Postulated during the transition of linguistics from a behaviourist to a cognitivist discipline, this concept has been unjustifiably apotheosised by the TESL/TEFL/TESOL teaching and publishing industry into a dogma that ESUEFL nations have to respect at great cost, and cannot ignore except at great peril, to themselves. I shall try to expose the essential empirical emptiness of this concept.