The popularity of Postcolonial literature has recently been taken the academic world by storm. Works by postcolonial writers like V.S. Naipaul, Chinua Achebe, Sasi Tharoor, Margret Atwood and Sally Morgan are included in the English class curriculum. The teaching of American and British Literature has, not surprisingly, given way to literature from the postcolonial countries like India, S. Africa, Nigeria, Chile etc.

In critical theory Edward Said, Gayathri Spivak and Homi Bhabha are a few familiar names employed to replace the more strictly ordered and empiricist western theorists.

However, there is a persisting tendency to retain the western colonial literature in our classrooms. This exclusion of literature from ‘other’ countries not only makes western literature elitist but also counter-productive to the promotion of global perspective and intercultural literacy (Intercultural literacy is the ability to live in or live with a culture other than one's primary native culture).

The days of the Empire-whether it is the defunct Roman Empire or the disintegrating American Empire- are over and a world devoid of intercultural literacy and the spirit of cultural co-existence can always be in peril.

Bill Ashcroft et.al. in their monumental work The Empire Writes Back, used the term 'postcolonial' to cover all cultures affected by the imperial process from the moment of colonization to the present day.

What is, however, central to the postcolonial literature is the challenge that it poses to the writing of the Empire, that is, postcolonial literature operates as a counter–discourse toward the canonized literary text. One of the methods through which postcolonial writers liberate themselves from imperial control in order to assert their own identity is to "write back to the centre".

Postcolonial literature, thus, is developed through the acts of reading and writing, focusing on history, nationalism, hibridity, language, race and place of the natives. It is however language that figures most, given that as Ashcroft and others put it, "Language is a fundamental site for struggle for postcolonial discourse because the colonial process only begins in language".

The process of language adaptation in postcolonial literature takes two forms, namely, abrogation and appropriation. Abrogation is simply defined as refusal to use imperial culture including its language. The African writer Ngugi Wa Thiong’O is known for the use of abrogation method.

He writes in African language unlike Chinua Achebe, another African writer, who opts for English to reach out and tell the world about the anguish of Africans under colonialism.

Appropriation is, meanwhile, another subversive strategy of appropriating English into local needs. The techniques involved are the use of untranslated words, fusion, interlanguage, syntactic fusion, code- switching etc.

The use of abrogation and appropriation gives the text cultural and local nuances which find no equivalents in colonialist writing. When such postcolonial literature is included in our curriculum, the infallibility that the canonized text enjoyed so far is seriously questioned and even undermined and the former is positioned at par with the latter.

What is the implication of this postcolonial gesture for learners of English (EFL) in Africa? For one thing, it has been said that language teachers are like ambassadors of culture.

As such teachers are accordingly to assume the role of peace–makers, the operation of which often depends on what, why and how they teach their students.

Secondly, while promoting aesthetic and intellectual growth, the teaching of literature for EFL students should encourage learners to participate in globalization and intercultural communication.

(English being no longer a colonial language but a global language must promote a global perspective). Even now the admiration and undue respect for the western literature are very evident in our academic curriculum.

The exclusion of postcolonial literature and the inclusion of the so-called elitist western literature adversely affect the native culture and tradition to the extent that they are considered to be far inferior to the western culture. This trend also hampers the promotion of global perspective and intercultural literacy.

The speed with which change takes place in the global economy, culture and political sphere demands corresponding responses in language teaching. The relatively fast shifting trends in English curriculum worldwide from the past few decades to the present testify to this. English teaching in Africa, being a postcolonial continent, is inevitably involved in the process.

However, rather than making a sudden clean break with the already available curriculum, the suggestion is to include postcolonial literature side by side with the literary canon. To understand the new, familiarity with the old is needed. The contextualized meanings embedded in postcolonial literature encourage students to study the language in order to understand their own situation as members of a postcolonial society.

Even when accompanied with the study of literature of the Empire, the students are also given more exposure to a variety of social, cultural and political issues which help them better understand their own self identity and respect that of the others.

The teaching of postcolonial literature in language classes, if properly facilitated and conducted, will contribute to the understanding of human experience and enable the learners to become increasingly aware of and knowledgeable about today’s world which has long been bereft of peace and harmony.

About The Author
The writer is a teacher at the Faculty of Arts, Seventh of April University, Zawia, Libya. He contributed this article to The Tripoli Post.