I. 4.

1
Literary Studies
The History of the New
Literatures in English

4 The New Literatures in English

4.1 The History of the New Literatures in English
4.2 Global Englishes: Colonial Legacies, Multiculturalism, and New Diversity
4.3 The Concept of Diaspora
4.4 Globalization
4.5 Anglophone Literatures
4.6 Conclusion

4.1 | The History of the New Literatures in English

The New Literatures in English are not that new
altogether. They have emerged from processes of
colonization that transformed large tracts of the
world from the late fifteenth century onwards, and
some of them can trace their beginnings to the
nineteenth or even late eighteenth century, when
English, Irish or Scottish settlers in the Caribbean,
Canada or South Africa first began to create an
‘overseas literature,’ and enslaved or colonized
people first began to reflect on their current situa-
tion and future perspectives utilizing the medium
of what was then ‘the colonizer’s tongue.’ Other
literatures in English are indeed new, sometimes
startlingly so: as distinct literary fields, West Afri-
can literature in English emerged in the 1950s,
East African literature in English in the 1960s, in-
digenous writing in Canada, Australia and New
Zealand in the 1970s, and Black and Asian British
Literature in the 1980s. All of these new literatures
in English have—in remarkably diverse ways—
been shaped by experiences of colonization and
their legacies, and all of them have—to varying
degrees—moved beyond the original colonial ma-
trix to remake the forms and functions of English
as a global language and to engage with a wide
variety of political, cultural and literary contexts in
various parts of the world. If colonialism and its
aftermath mark the nexus from which the new lit-
eratures have emerged, their current trajectories
are defined by complex transcultural networks
and the negotiation of sociocultural diversity in an
increasingly globalized world.
While the scope and significance of the new lit-
eratures in English thus clearly extend far beyond
their colonial, anticolonial and postcolonial di-
mensions, there are nevertheless sound reasons to
begin a survey of these literatures with an over-
view of the historically widely divergent experi-
ences of colonialism. Not only are the histories of
these literatures inextricably entangled with these
colonial experiences, but different types of colo-
nial regimes have also given rise to different
post-independence societies, which in turn have
shaped the divergent paths which the new litera-
tures have followed. Even the English language
that at first sight seems to provide a pragmatic
common denominator has been moulded by these
colonial experiences and their legacies into a glob-
ally interlinked network of Englishes: today it is no
longer only Britain and the USA, but some 70
countries throughout the world that are “divided
by a common language” (George Bernard Shaw).
The new literatures in English have been deci-
sively shaped by three main types of colonial expe-
rience: plantation slavery (as in Britain’s ‘New
World’ colonies in the Caribbean, and in Indian
Ocean locations such as Mauritius), European set- Countries in which English
tlement (as in Canada, Australia and New Zea- is an official language.
land, but also in African countries such as Kenya, In most of these countries,
Zimbabwe or South Africa), and colonial con- anglophone literatures
quest (as in South Asia and most of the territories have emerged, even where
acquired by Britain during the late nineteenth cen- English is not the first lan-
tury ‘Scramble for Africa’; see the map in section guage for the majority
I.2.5.1). Although these colonial experiences often of the population.

M. Middeke et al. (eds.), English and American Studies

© Springer-Verlag GmbH Germany 2012

163
 I. 4.1
Literary Studies
The New Literatures
in English
Timeline: The British Empire
1600 East India Company founded (for trade rather than colonization)
1607 Jamestown settlement starts British colonization of America;
Britain participates in transatlantic slave trade
1757 Battle of Plassey makes East India Company the dominant politi-
cal force on the subcontinent
1763 Peace of Amiens eliminates France as colonial rival
1788 Colonization of Australia, mainly with convicts
1877 Queen Victoria crowned Empress of India; Britain participates in
‘Scramble for Africa’ in late nineteenth century
1914 British Empire at its zenith, comprises 20 % of world’s population
1931 Statute of Westminster: Virtual independence of ‘White Domin-
ions’
1947 India becomes independent; Partition
1949 ‘Commonwealth of Nations’ replaces ‘British Commonwealth’
1960s Most British colonies in Africa and the Caribbean become inde-
pendent
blended into each other within the larger history
of “overlapping territories and intertwined histo-
ries” (Said 3) brought into being by the British Em-
pire, they nevertheless gave rise to distinct social,
cultural and linguistic patterns that transformed
large parts of the world and generated powerful
legacies, some of which have remained in place
long after the global demise of colonialism.
Plantation slavery. Historically speaking, these
patterns can all be traced back several centuries to
the very beginning of the colonial enterprise. From
the late fifteenth century onwards, Europe’s colo-
nial interests were directed not only to the ‘New
World,’ but also to Africa and Asia; in terms of their
repercussions in global history, Bartholomew Diaz’
journey around the Cape of Good Hope in 1487 and
Vasco da Gama’s sea voyage to India in 1498 were
no less consequential than Christopher Columbus’s
‘discovery’ of the Bermudas in 1492. When Britain
entered the global struggle for colonial power in the
Loading plan of a ship late sixteenth and early seventeenth century, first to
transporting slaves from contest and later to supplant the hegemony of Por-
Africa to America tugal and Spain, the first two colonial global play-
164
ers, it embarked both on conquest (e.g. by wresting
Jamaica from the Spanish in 1655) and on settle-
ment (e.g. of Barbados in 1624). Yet, from the
mid-seventeenth century onwards, plantation slav-
ery began to replace earlier patterns of European
settlement in Britain’s New World colonies; by the
eighteenth century, the Triangular Trade between
Britain (manufacturing cheap industrial goods and
weapons), Africa (providing slaves) and the New
World colonies (producing plantation goods such as
tobacco, cotton and sugar) was well established,
and millions of enslaved Africans had been trans-
ported to the New World in what became known as
the Middle Passage. Modern plantation slavery
gave rise to social regimes based on brutal oppres-
sion on the one hand and covert resistance on the
other. It also engendered a world-wide struggle for
its abolition (resulting first in the abolition of the
slave trade in 1807 and later in the abolition of slav-
ery within the British Empire in 1834). Its most sig-
nificant legacy today consists in long-standing pro-
cesses of creolization that gave the lie to colonial
visions of order as well as racist fantasies of purity,
and produced a new mixed breed of people, cul-
tures, religions and languages that has remained a
constitutive feature of areas such as the Caribbean
to the present day.
European settlement emerged as the dominant
form of colonization in other parts of the world.
When Britain emerged victoriously from its global
contest with France for colonial hegemony in South
Asia, the Americas and the Pacific after a protracted
series of wars in the eighteenth century, the stage
was set for an unprecedented influx of settlers from
England, Scotland and Ireland to Canada (which
had originally been explored and settled by the
French), Australia and New Zealand during the
nineteenth century. European settlers claiming ‘pio-
neer’ status soon outnumbered and displaced the
original indigenous populations in these colonies,
most blatantly in Australia, where the notorious
‘terra nullius’ doctrine negated some 50,000 years
of aboriginal settlement and became the corner-
stone of a vicious racism that plagued Australian
society far into the twentieth century and beyond.
From the mid-nineteenth century onwards, these
colonies (later designated as ‘White Dominions’)
edged their way towards national integration and
independence from a colonial power that had
learned its lesson from the American Revolution
and avoided snubbing its remaining settler colo-
nies; by the early twentieth century they had devel-
oped nationalisms of their own and finally became