ABSTRACT
Early studies of postcolonization writings sought to analyze the methods with which writers from once-colonized regions of the globe respond to, resist, and disrupt imperial ideologies and racial hierarchies by “writing back” to western culture, and how these writings reflect efforts to recover and promote local cultures and histories. Today, scholars acknowledge the impossibility of locating and representing authentic identities and cultures. As Kwame Anthony Appiah notes in “Language, Race and the Legacies,” if there is a “lesson in the broad shape of the circulation of cultures, it is surely that we are all already contaminated by each other” (405). Appiah’s reference to the “circulation of cultures” serves as a reminder that the issues at stake in analyses of postcolonization writings are far more complex than paradigms pitting “the West’s” assertion of dominance against local celebrations of allegedly pure cultures. In addition, by claiming, “we are all already contaminated with each other,” Appiah acknowledges that the circulation, or globalization, of culture has a long history.
