McLaren, John (1990) Making new worlds 5. Lands outside Eden – the case of Africa. UNSPECIFIED. (Unpublished)

Abstract

Contains a discourse on the pattern of development of ‘new literatures’ emerging in African and Asian literature. The writers of the new nations of Africa and Asia are in a quite different political and cultural situation from that of either the settlers of America, Australia and New Zealand, or of the native peoples that the settlers dispossessed and made a minority in their own lands. In Africa and Asia the settlers themselves have always been the minority, but have been able to impose, with greater or less success, their own institutions on the original cultures. In Africa, even national boundaries represent colonial interests rather than indigenous languages, cultures or societies. For the rulers, the land was an object of desire, to be cut up and used for their own purposes. In both Africa and the Indies, a literature of imperialism was produced from the ruling minority by writers like Conrad, Kipling or Maughan. These writers perceive the land as the hostile factor, and deprive the native people of any separate identity, either reducing them to colourful adjuncts of the land or showing them merely as agents of imperial domination.

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