The British Empire, The Commonwealth of Nations and Postcolonialism

Members of the group:

● Pintos, David
● Pucheta, Florencia
● Rodríguez, Aldana
● Weller, Fátima
● Wolfart, Florencia

Subject: Literatura de los Países de Habla Inglesa

Year: 4th year

Teacher: Lic. Estrada, Isabel

The British Empire and The Commonwealth of Nations

1. The British Empire was known as “the empire on which the sun never sets”. Explain.
2. Which were the causes for decolonization? Describe.
3. How has the Empire shaped the world? Explain.
4. The Commonwealth of Nations today. Describe its organization, number of members, principles.

Answers:

1- The British Empire was considered as “the empire on which the sun never sets”, which its meaning lies
on the sense of being an idiomatic phrase. It was used to describe the extension of the British territories that
appeared that at least one part of them was always under the sunlight. By the end of the 19th Century, the
British Empire ruled nearly one-quarter of the world’s land surface. In addition, in the early 20th century,
the British Empire covered 10.000.000 square miles and ruled over more than 400 million people, making it
one of the biggest reaches and conquests worldwide.

2- Causes for decolonization:

- World Wars effect: After the World War One it was difficult for Britain to hold on to her Empire.
Britain could not no longer afford an empire as they faced economic problems because of the war
and it realised that its Royal Navy was not as strong as it used to be to protect the whole Empire.

During the Second World War, Africa had an important role in the war effort, contributing with
troops and resources for the Allied soldiers. This, allowed the creation of villages, trade unions and
even organizations which helped them think about their rights as people and felt that they deserved
the chance to rule themselves. Eventually, some of the nationalists in the African colonies started
protesting and rioting against the British. Eventually, independence was given to these colonies as
Britain was not able to deal with this situation due to lack of economy support.

- Independence movements: India was Britain’s biggest and most precious possession, but in the
1930’s and 40’s, the Indian independence movement started working effectively against the British
rule under the leadership of Mahatma Gandhi and other revolutionary leaders. finally, the country
was given its independence in 1947.
3- The British Empire shaped the world in the sense of having a tremendous impact on the political, cultural
and economic organization of the countries around the world. The English language, Christian religion and
Parliamentary democracy can be found in many countries. The majority of former colonies still have some
kind of connection with Britain through the Commonwealth. These are just some ways in which the British
Empire had a lasting effect on world history.

4- The Commonwealth of Nations:

● Organization: The Commonwealth differs from other international bodies. It has no formal
constitution or bylaws. The members have no legal or formal obligation to one another; they are held
together by shared traditions, institutions, and experiences as well as by economic self-interest.
Commonwealth action is based upon consultation between members, which is conducted
conversations in meetings. A high commissioner is sent to the capitals of the other members by each
member country. What is more, a Commonwealth Heads of Government Meeting is held every two
years. In 1965 the Commonwealth Secretariat was established in London to organize and coordinate
Commonwealth activities.

● Number of members: 54 members

Country Date of Commonwealth membership
United Kingdom 1931

Canada 1931

Australia 1931

New Zealand 1931

South Africa 1931 (left in 1961; re-joined 1994)

India 1947

Pakistan 1947 (left in 1972; re-joined 1989)

Sri Lanka (formerly

1948
Ceylon)

Ghana 1957

Malaysia (formerly
1957
Malaya)

Nigeria 1960

Cyprus 1961

Sierra Leone 1961

1961 (Tanganyika in 1961; Tanzania in 1964 upon union with

Tanzania
Zanzibar [member 1963])

Jamaica 1962
Trinidad and Tobago 1962

Uganda 1962

Kenya 1963

Malawi 1964

Malta 1964

Zambia 1964

The Gambia 1965 (left in 2013; re-joined 2018)

Singapore 1965

Guyana 1966

Botswana 1966

Lesotho 1966

Barbados 1966

Mauritius 1968

Nauru 1968 (joined as special member; full member since 1999)

Swaziland 1968

Tonga 1970

Samoa (formerly
1970
Western Samoa)

Fiji 1971 (left in 1987; re-joined 1997)

Bangladesh 1972

The Bahamas 1973

Grenada 1974

Papua New Guinea 1975

Seychelles 1976

Solomon Islands 1978

Tuvalu 1978 (joined as special member; full member since 2000)

Dominica 1978

Kiribati 1979
 Saint Lucia 1979

Saint Vincent and the

1979 (joined as special member; full member since 1985)
Grenadines

Vanuatu 1980

Belize 1981

Antigua and Barbuda 1981

Maldives 1982 (joined as special member; full member since 1985)

Saint Kitts and Nevis 1983

Brunei 1984

Namibia 1990

Cameroon 1995

Mozambique 1995

Rwanda 2009

● Principles: The Commonwealth has certain principles, values and aspirations which unite its
members. The following items express the promotion of the development of free and democratic
societies as well as the seek for peace and prosperity.
➢ Democracy
➢ Human rights
➢ International peace and security
➢ Tolerance, respect and understanding
➢ Freedom of Expression
➢ Separation of Powers
➢ Rule of Law
➢ Good Governance
➢ Sustainable Development
➢ Protecting the Environment
➢ Access to Health, Education, Food and Shelter
➢ Gender Equality
➢ Importance of Young People in the Commonwealth
➢ Recognition of the Needs of Small States
➢ Recognition of the Needs of Vulnerable States
➢ The Role of Civil Society

Postcolonialism

1. How do the authors use the term “post-colonial”? Why?

2. What do post-colonial literatures have in common?
3. What connection do the authors suggest between the study of English and the growth of Empire?
4. What did the “privileging norm” of the formation of English studies mean? What was the consequence of
this for those in the periphery?
5. What happened when post-colonial societies attempted to differentiate themselves from Britain?
6. Describe the stages of development of post-colonial literatures.
7. How has the “cultural hegemony” been maintained?
8. Why is control over language one of the main features of imperial oppression?
9. What distinction do the authors make as regards the use of the English language in post-colonial
societies?
10. Why is the concern with place and displacement considered a major feature of post-colonial literatures?
11. What is meant by “dislocation” and “cultural denigration”?
12. Where is a profound linguistic alienation more obvious? Provide examples
13. What do native speakers and colonized peoples need to do?

Answers:

1- The authors use the term “Post-colonial” to refer to 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.

2- The pieces of literature of African countries, Australia, Bangladesh, Canada, Caribbean countries, India,
Malaysia, Malta, New Zealand, Pakistan, Singapore, South Pacific Island countries, Sri Lanka and the
literature of the USA as well are post-colonial literatures. What each of these literatures has in common
beyond their special and distinctive regional characteristics is that they emerged out of the experience of
colonization and supported themselves by foregrounding the tension with the imperial power.

3- The development of English as a privileged academic subject in nineteenth-century Britain came about
as part of an attempt to replace the Classics at the centre of the intellectual activity of nineteenth-century
humanistic studies.
The emergence of English as an academic discipline also produced the nineteenth-century colonial form of
imperialism. Gauri Viswanathan has presented strong arguments for relating the “institutionalization and
subsequent valorisation of English literary study to an ideological content developed in the colonial context,
as it developed in India where British colonial administrators, provoked by missionaries on one hand and
fears of native insubordination on the other, discovered an ally in English literature to support them
maintaining control of the natives under the guise of liberal education.
It can be argued that the study of English and the growth of Empire were connected by the same ideological
climate and that the development of one is intrinsically bound up with the development of the other, and at
the unconscious level, where it leads to the naturalizing of constructed values such as civilization and
humanity which conversely established “savagery”, “native”, “primitive” as their opposite and as the object
of reforming eagerness.

4- A “privileging norm” was crowned at the heart of the formation of English Studies as a template for the
denial of the value of the “peripheral”, the “marginal”, the “uncanonized”. Literature was made as central to
the cultural enterprise of the Empire as the monarchy was to its political formation. It caused those from the
periphery to immerse themselves in the imported culture, denying their origins in an attempt to become
“more English than the English”.
5- The post-colonial societies tried to establish their difference from Britain mainly in language, education
and literature. But all these attempts to dismantle the British culture, literature and language seemed to fail.
Even after such attempts began to succeed, the canonical nature and unquestioned status of the works of the
English literary tradition and the values they incorporated remained potent in the cultural formation and the
ideological institutions of education and literature.

6- Stages of development of post-colonial literatures:

● During the imperial period writing in the language of the imperial centre is produced by a literate
elite whose primary identification is with the colonizing power. The first texts are produced by
'representatives' of the imperial power, for example: gentrifies settlers, travellers, and sightseers.
Such texts can never form the basis for an indigenous culture nor can they be integrated in any way
with the culture which already exists in the countries invaded. Despite their detailed reportage of
landscape, custom, and language, they inevitably privilege the centre, emphasizing the 'home' over
the 'native', the 'metropolitan' over the 'provincial' or 'colonial', and so forth.
● The second stage is about the literature produced 'under imperial licence' by 'natives' or 'outcasts',
for instance the large body of poetry and prose produced in the nineteenth century by the English
educated Indian upper class, or African 'missionary literature'. The producers signify by the very fact
of writing in the language of the dominant culture that they have temporarily or permanently entered
a specific and privileged class endowed with the language, education, and leisure necessary to
produce such works.

Although early post-colonial texts deal with such powerful material as the brutality of the convict system
or the existence of a rich cultural heritage older and more extensive than that of Europe, they are
prevented from fully exploring their anti-imperial potential. The institution of 'Literature' in the colony is
under the direct control of the imperial ruling class who alone license the acceptable form and permit the
publication and distribution of the resulting work. The development of independent literatures depended
upon the abrogation of this constraining power and the appropriation of language and writing for new
and distinctive usages. Such an appropriation is clearly the most significant feature in the emergence of
modern post-colonial literatures.

7- Cultural hegemony has been maintained through canonical assumptions about literary activity, and
through attitudes to post-colonial literatures which identify them as isolated national offshoots of English
literature, and which therefore relegate them to marginal and subordinate positions. More recently, as the
range and strength of these literatures has become undeniable, a process of incorporation has begun in
which, employing Eurocentric standards of judgement, the centre has sought to claim those works and
writers of which it approves as British.

8- One of the main features of imperial oppression is control over language. The imperial education system
installs a 'standard' version of the metropolitan language as the norm, and marginalizes all 'variants' as
impurities. Language becomes the medium through which a hierarchical structure of power is perpetuated,
and the medium through which conceptions of 'truth', 'order', and 'reality' become established.

9- The authors distinguish between the “standard” British English inherited from the empire and the english
which the language has become in post-colonial countries. Though British imperialism resulted in the spread
of a language, English, across the globe, the english of Jamaicans is no the english of Canadians or Kenyans.
Authors proposed a distinction between what is a standard code “English” (the language of the erstwhile
imperial centre) and the linguistic code “english”, which has been transformed and subverted into several
distinctive varieties throughout the world.
10. The concern with place and displacement is considered a major feature of post-colonial literatures
because they seek to develop or recover a relationship between self and place. In other words, postcolonial
literature seeks to build its own identity and authenticity from the mixture of the indigenous personality
(place) and the cultural model imposed by a colonizing power (displacement).
This answer is very clearly stated, well done!

11-According to the Oxford learner's Dictionary, dislocation is a state in which the usual organization of
something is disturbed and does not work or continue in the normal way. that is why the term is used in the
description of postcolonial societies. A valid and active sense of self may have been eroded by dislocation,
resulting from migration, the experience of enslavement, transportation, or 'voluntary' removal for
indentured labour. Or it may have been destroyed by cultural denigration, which is the conscious and
unconscious oppression of the indigenous personality and culture by a supposedly superior racial or cultural
model. The dialectic of place and displacement is always a feature of post-colonial societies whether these
have been created by a process of settlement, intervention, or a mixture of the two. Beyond their historical
and cultural differences, place, displacement, and a pervasive concern with the myths of identity and
authenticity are a feature common to all post-colonial literatures in english. (Ashcroft, Griffiths and Tiffin
1989)
Including a dictionary definition was a good initiative, well done!

12-The alienation of vision and the crisis in self-image which this displacement produces is as frequently
found in the accounts of Canadian 'free settlers' as of Australian convicts, Fijian-Indian or Trinidadian-
Indian indentured labourers, West Indian slaves, or forcibly colonized Nigerians or Bengalis. Although this
is pragmatically demonstrable from a wide range of texts, it is difficult to account for by theories which see
this social and linguistic alienation as resulting only from overtly oppressive forms of colonization such as
slavery or conquest. That imperialism results in a profound linguistic alienation is obviously the case in
cultures in which a pre-colonial culture is suppressed by military conquest or enslavement. So, for example,
an Indian writer like Raja Rao or a Nigerian writer such as Chinua Achebe have needed to transform the
language, to use it in a different way in its new context and so, as Achebe says, quoting James Baldwin,
make it 'bear the burden' of their experience (Achebe 1975: 62). Although Rao and Achebe write from their
own place and so have not suffered a literal geographical displacement, they have to overcome an imposed
gap resulting from the linguistic displacement of the pre-colonial language by English. This process occurs
within a more comprehensive discourse of place and displacement in the wider post-colonial context. Such
alienation is shared by those whose possession of English is indisputably 'native' (in the sense of being
possessed from birth) yet who begin to feel alienated within its practice once its vocabulary, categories, and
codes are felt to be inadequate or inappropriate to describe the fauna, the physical and geographical
conditions, or the cultural practices they have developed in a new land.

13- Native speakers and colonized people need to escape from the implicit body of assumptions to which
English was attached, its aesthetic and social values, the formal and historically limited constraints of genre,
and the oppressive political and cultural assertion of metropolitan dominance, of centre over margin (Ngugi
1986). This is not to say that the English language is inherently incapable of accounting for post-colonial
experience, but that it needs to develop an appropriate usage in order to do so (by becoming a distinct and
unique form of english). The energizing feature of this displacement is its capacity to interrogate and subvert
the imperial cultural formations.

Bibliography:
 ● Ashcroft Bill, Griffiths Gareth, Tiffin Helen. 2002. The Empire Writes Back: Theory and Practice in
Post-Colonial Literatures. Postcolonial web.
http://www.postcolonialweb.org/poldiscourse/ashcroft3f.html
● BBC. (s.f.). Bitesize. Obtenido de The British Empire through time:
https://www.bbc.co.uk/bitesize/guides/zf7fr82/revision/1
● The Commonwealth. (s.f.). The Commonwealth. Obtenido de Our history:
https://thecommonwealth.org/about-us/history
● The Editors of Encyclopaedia Britannica. (06 de 04 de 2020). Encyclopaedia Britannica. Obtenido
de https://www.britannica.com/place/British-Empire/Dominance-and-dominions
● The Editors of Encyclopaedia Britannica, Adam Augustyn. (s.f.). Encyclopaedia Britannica.
Obtenido de https://www.britannica.com/topic/Commonwealth-association-of-states

Your work is very well organised, accurate and it shows you’ve read a lot, so I congratulate you on that.
The fact that you´ve included the bibliographical references is definitely a plus and I encourage you to keep
working in such a neat way.
Carrying out this kind of works definitely takes time and effort and the fact that you managed to work
together as a team given the physical distance restraints denotes your commitment and responsibility.
Well done!