ABSTRACT
If the hard material of revolution is steel, the stuff of protest is words: words constructed into declarations, manifestos, pronouncements; words selected to reconfigure the present and to shape the future. Just as the Enlightenment of the eighteenth century was a literary dissent from the old order of things, so decolonization was also a literary movement that vigorously protested the imperial order of things. Therefore, decolonization may be considered as much a verbal contest as it was a set of physical confrontations, its setting as frequently the conference hall in a major city as the battleground in the countryside.
