ABSTRACT
This chapter considers James Hogg’s treatment of the colonial and ‘subaltern voice’ in a work that Mack does not address in Scottish Fiction and the British Empire: ‘The Pongos: A Letter from Southern Africa’, included in the Altrive Tales. The systems of control that emerged in the literary marketplace were analogous to those used to establish and solidify the British Empire. As Hogg was fashioned a rustic buffoon in several periodicals, despite substantial evidence of his literary expertise, slaves in colonial environments who learned English were often dismissed as mere parrots of their British masters. Hogg was perfectly positioned to sympathize with the colonized rather than the colonizer, despite scotland’s active role in creating and extending the British Empire. ‘The Pongos’ is an epistolary narrative set in a South African settlement populated by British emigrants, native tribes, and communicative orangutans. In ‘The Pongos’, Hogg has an even more specific concern, the role of language in the colonial enterprise.
