Cross-Cultural Encounters in Amit Chaudhuri’s Afternoon Raag and Yasmine Gooneratne’s A Change of Skies
In: The Politics of English as a World LanguageSearch for other papers by Vera Alexander in
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Abstract
This essay describes the role of the English language in two South Asian novels in English from the 1990s. Both texts contain self-reflexive and highly innovative strategies for reconsidering the hegemonic structures imbedded in the use of English in a postcolonial context. The two novels depict the experiences of South Asian scholars who visit universities in anglophone countries. Close reading of the encounters with diverse Englishes in both novels reveals that both cite colonial stereotypes only to dismantle the authority of the vestigial hegemonic structures represented by the English language. By comparing the two novels, this interpretation stresses common patterns of replacing binary concepts of the use of English with individual, creative hybridizations.