The King's English and the Mother Tongue

This chapter addresses topical concerns about English as a dominant language in world literature. As a way of focusing the discussion, it pays close attention to the prefatory material of a selection of monolingual English dictionaries, which offer insights about English and its transnational encounters, contacts, and conflicts with other languages and cultures. What threat does English as a world language pose to freedom of expression and to the diversity of human thought? What potential is there for a distinctive literature of resistance and transformation when this literature is written in English, in a former British colony? The chapter explores these questions by revisiting debates from the 1960s about African literature, and then moves on to consider ways in which a few contemporary novels and critical texts in the field of world literature use the dictionary as a theme, or as formal literary-critical device for thinking through questions such as the relation between language, identity, and political transition.