Postcolonial Novelists and their Global Public

The rapid process of globalization is producing a global literature, which demands fewer culture-specific references and easy translatability, especially to and from English, the global language. There are many forms of resistance to this process, or indeed of resistant accommodation. Post-colonial writing, for example, purports to affirm minority cultures directly in their own version of English in a strategy often described as “cultural translation”, though whether this is more accommodation than resistance is a moot point. Other writers who prefer to continue working in minority languages simply ignore the problem of translatability and insist on the preservation of culture-specific elements, linguistic and stylistic. Inevitably they pay a high price for this, since even when their work is translated, its circulation is usually limited. The English book market is not enthusiastic about translations and it is hardly surprising that more and more bilingual authors who want to go global write directly in English.