1、Bill Ashcroft, Gareth Griffiths & Helen Tiffin:The Empire writes back. Theory and Practice in Post-colonial Literatures.Londres, Routledge, 1989, 246 p.ExtraitsLe concept et la thorieQuest-ce que les littratures post-coloniales?This book is concerned with writing by those peoples formerly colonized。

2、by Britain, though much of what it deals with is of interest and relevance to countries colonized by other European powers, such as France, Portugal, and Spain. The semantic basis of the term post-colonial might seem to suggest a concern only with the national culture after the departure of the impe 。

3、rial power. It has occasionally been employed in some earlier work in the area to distinguish between the periods before and after independence (colonial period and post-colonial period), for example, in constructing national literary histories, or in suggesting comparative studies between stages in 。

4、 those histories. Generally speaking, though, the term colonial has been used for the period before independence and a term indicating a national writing, such as modern Canadian writing or recent West Indian literature has been employed to distinguish the period after independence.We use the term p 。

5、ost-colonial, however, to cover all the culture affected by the imperial process from the moment of colonization to the present day. This is because there is a continuity of preoccupations throughout the historical process initiated by European imperial aggression. We also suggest that it is most ap 。

6、propriate as the term for the new cross-cultural criticism which has emerged in recent years and for the discourse through which this is constituted. In this sense this book is concerned with the world as it exists during and after the period of European imperial domination and the effects of this o 。

7、n contemporary literatures.So the literatures of African countries, Australia, Bangladesh, Canada, Caribbean countries, India, Malaysia, Malta, New Zealand, Pakistan, Singapore, South Pacific Island countries, and Sri Lanka are all post-colonial literatures. The literature of the USA should also be。

8、placed in this category. Perhaps because of its current position of power, and the neo-colonizing role it has played, its post-colonial nature has not been generally recognized. But its relationship with the metropolitan centre as it evolved over the last two centuries has been paradigmatic for post 。

9、-colonial literatures everywhere. What each of these literatures has in common beyond their special and distinctive regional characteristics is that they emerged in their present form out of the experience of colonization and asserted themselves by foregrounding the tension with the imperial power,。

10、and by emphasizing their differences from the assumptions of the imperial centre. It is this which makes them distinctively post-colonial.(pp. 1-2).Justification du terme.One of the first difficulties in developing a wider comparative approach to the literatures has been that of finding an appropria 。

【The|The empire writes back Theory and practice in postcolonial literatures】11、te, name to describe them. Some early attempts at a name which indicated the world-wide range of English writing never found general acceptance: for example, Joseph Joness word terranglia, which he employed to describe all writing in english throughout the world (Jones 1965). The term Commonwealth l 。

12、iterature which also emerged in the 1960s, although it secured much readier acceptance, nevertheless had geographical and political limitations. It rested purely on the fact of a shared history and the resulting political grouping. In its loosest form it remained a descriptive term for a collection。

13、of national literatures united by a past or present membership of the British Commonwealth. But through its relatively widespread acceptance it opened the way for more rigorous conceptions which also postulated a common condition across all former colonies. For a long while these existed, or coexist 。

14、ed, if sometimes uneasily, under the umbrella of Commonwealth literature.Several attempts have been made to find a politically and theoretically more appropriate name for such literatures than Commonwealth literature (see Tiffin 1983). The limited and pejorative term Third World literatures has been 。

15、 used in some university courses, but the most popular contenders have been new literatures in English and, most recently, post-colonial literatures. Although the first avoids the inclusion of any reference to colonialism, and therefore may be more acceptable nationalists wishing to de-emphasize the 。

16、 colonial past, it is vague and misleading in other ways, implicitly privileging a European perspective in areas like India or Africa, and providing theoretical direction or comparative framework. It also has the disadvantage that it compares the literatures to old literature in English, without all 。

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