ABSTRACT
The appropriation of the english language is the first of a range of appropriations which establish a discourse announcing its difference from Europe. These include the adaptation or evolution of metropolitan practices: for example, genres such as ‘the ballad’ or ‘the novel’ or even epistemologies, ideological systems, or institutions such as literary theory. But the appropriation which has had the most profound significance in post-colonial discourse is that of writing itself. It is through an appropriation of the power invested in writing that this discourse can take hold of the marginality imposed on it and make hybridity and syncreticity the source of literary and cultural redefinition. In writing out of the condition of ‘Otherness’ post-colonial texts assert the complex of intersecting ‘peripheries’ as the actual substance of experience. But the struggle which this assertion entails – the ‘re-placement’ of the post-colonial text – is focused in their attempt to control the processes of writing.
