Appropriation

A term used to describe the ways in which postcolonial societies take over those aspects of the
imperial culture – language, forms of writing, film, theatre, even modes of thought and
argument such as rationalism, logic and analysis – that may be of use to them in articulating
their own social and cultural identities. This process is sometimes used to describe the strategy
by which the dominant imperial power incorporates as its own the territory or culture that it
surveys and invades. However, postcolonial theory focuses instead on an exploration of the
ways in which the dominated or colonized culture can use the tools of the dominant discourse
to resist its political or cultural control. Appropriation may describe acts of usurpation in various
cultural domains, but the most potent are the domains of language and textuality. Chinua
Achebe noted that the language so used can ‘bear the burden of another experience’, and this
has become one of the most famous declarations of the power of appropriation in postcolonial
discourse. However, the very use of the colonial language has been opposed by writers such as
Ngugi wa Thiong’o has renounced the language of the former colonizer to write his novel and
plays in Gikuyu. Nevertheless, Ngugi continues to appropriate the novel form itself, and it has
been argued that the very success of his political tactic of renouncing English has relied on his
reputation as a writer in that tongue. Many other non-English-speaking writers who have
chosen to write in English do so not because their mother tongue is regarded by them as
inadequate, but because the colonial language has become a useful means of expression, and
one that reaches the widest possible audience. By appropriating the imperial language, its
discursive forms and its modes of representation, postcolonial societies are able, as things
stand, to intervene more readily in the dominant discourse, to interpolate their own cultural
realities, or use that dominant language to describe those realities to a wide audience of
readers.
Palimpsest
Originally the term for a parchment on which several inscriptions had been made after earlier
ones had been erased. The characteristic of the palimpsest is that, despite such erasures, there
are always traces of previous inscriptions that have been ‘overwritten’. Hence the term has
become particularly valuable for suggesting the ways in which the traces of earlier ‘inscriptions’
remain as a continual feature of the ‘text’ of culture, giving it its particular density and
character. Any cultural experience is itself an accretion of many layers, and the term is valuable
because it illustrates the ways in which pre-colonial culture as well as the experience of
colonization are continuing aspects of a postcolonial society’s developing cultural identity.
While the ‘layering’ effect of history has been mediated by each successive period, ‘erasing’
what has gone before, all present experience contains ineradicable traces of the past which
remain part of the constitution of the present. Teasing out such vestigial features left over from
the past is an important part of understanding the nature of the present.
 An important use of the concept of the palimpsest has been made by Paul Carter in The Road
to Botany Bay in which he demonstrates how ‘empty’ uncolonized space becomes place
through the process of textuality. In short, empty space becomes place through language, in
the process of being written and named.