Interlude: Writing Back

Abstract

“The Empire Writes Back” was a phrase originally used by Salman Rushdie in a newspaper article published in The Times in 1982 as a pun on the movie Star Wars: The Empire Strikes Back. Bill Ashcroft, Gareth Griffiths and Helen Tiffin adopted the phrase “writing back” from Rushdie and defined it as postcolonial writers engaging in the power of imperial discourse, not by writing ‘for’ the center but ‘against’ the assumptions of the center to a prior claim to legitimacy and power. In The Empire Writes Back: Theory and Practice in Postcolonial Literatures (1989), the three authors prescribe the re-appropriation of discourse and history through the rewriting of canonical texts of English literature to the concept of ‘writing back.’ They regard it as a field that is ironic, satirical, subversive and crucially concerned with undercutting, revising, or envisioning alternatives to reductive representations in the colonial mode.