The Empire Writes Back: Theory and Practice in Post-Colonial Literatures is a 1989 non-fiction book on postcolonialism, penned by Bill Ashcroft, Gareth Griffiths and Helen Tiffin. The Empire Writes Back was the first major theoretical account of a wide range of postcolonial texts and their relationship with bigger issues of postcolonial culture, and is said to be one of the most significant and important works published in the field of postcolonialism. The writers debate on the relationships within postcolonial works, study the mighty forces acting on words in the postcolonial text, and prove how these texts constitute a radical critique of Eurocentric notions of language and literature. First released in 1989, this book had a second edition published in 2002.
The title refers to Salman Rushdie's 1982 article "The Empire Writes Back with a Vengeance". In addition to being a pun on the film Star Wars: The Empire Strikes Back, the phrase refers to the ways postcolonial voices respond to the literary canon of the colonial centre.
Background
The Empire Writes Back: Theory and Practice in Post-Colonial Literatures aims to give a theoretical account of an extensive range of post-colonial texts and how these texts relate to a greater number of issues relating to post-colonial culture. The term “post-colonial” in this book covers all the cultures of nations that have been affected by imperial policies that the extend the rule and power of an empire or nation over foreign countries, or of acquiring and holding colonies and dependencies. Colonialism places the imperial interests over the interests of the dependent states. A process of decolonization has been attempted around colonised states to combat the negative effects of colonisation on national and personal identity. The theoretical process of decolonisation is a major subject that the authors examine.
Post-colonial literature examines countries: African countries, Australia, Bangladesh, Canada, Caribbean countries, India, Malaysia, Malta, New Zealand, Pakistan, Singapore, South Pacific Island countries and Sri Lanka that are widely discussed in this book. The literature of these countries is based on how European nations have dominated and controlled 'Third World' culture and how these countries have reacted to and have resisted those encroachments. They follow the development of post-colonial studies from the imperial period when the colonised lands are more or less “fictionally” represented in travel accounts, documents and diaries, fictional, photographic and cinematic appropriation, to the natives’ literature written under the “imperial licence” and finally to the so-called “post-colonial” writing. The Empire Writes Back considers the intertextually of postcolonial works and authorship by virtue of its references to a cultural, hegemonic discourse which it undermines and subverts, its sometimes parodic interpretation of the imperial discourse, and its ludic preferences regarding narrative techniques and linguistic nuances.
The authors of this book have explained that the task of the book is two-fold. The first task is to find the range and the exact nature of post-colonial scholarship, and the second task is to describe and account for the different theories which have emerged so far.
Overview of Post-Colonial Studies
Post-colonialist literature is an academic study investigating the interplay between two discourses: colonialism (1871) and post-colonialism (1980). During the mid-20th century, a process of decolonisation occurred whereby nations attempted to undo the effects of colonialism, granting its citizens the right to ‘self-determination’. As a result, postcolonial studies started to reflect the decolonisation of nations in theory, referred to as ‘intellectual decolonisation’. Postcolonial literature became centrally about strategically subverting colonisers’ hegemony over the colonised by dismantling Eurocentric discourses.