The Politics of Global English

Abstract

Writers in England’s colonies and former colonies have long struggledwith the advantages and disadvantages of employing the language of thecolonizer for their creative work, an issue that today reaches beyond theolder imperial trade routes in the era of “global English.” Creative writersin widely disparate locations are now using global English to theiradvantage, with what can be described as post-postcolonial strategies. This essay explores the politics of global English, beginning with a satiricdictionary of “Strine” (Australian English) from 1965, and then lookingback at the mid-1960s debate at Makerere University between Ngugiwa Thiong’o and Chinua Achebe, in which Achebe famously asserted theimportance of remaking English for hi own purposes. The essay then discussesearly linguistic experiments by Rudyard Kipling, who became theworld’s first truly global writer in the 1880s and 1890s and developed arange of strategies for conveying local experience to a global audience. The essay then turns to two contemporary examples: a comic pastiche ofKipling—and of Kiplingese—by the contemporary Tibetan writerJamyang Norbu, who deploys “Babu English” and the legacy of Britishrule against Chinese encroachment in Tibet; and, finally, the Korean-American internet group Young-hae Chang Heavy Industries, who interweaveAfrican-American English with North Korean political rhetoric tohilariously subversive effect.