The Politics of Global English

Writers in England's colonies and former colonies have long struggled with the advantages and disadvantages of employing the language of the colonizer for their creative work, an issue that today reaches beyond the older imperial trade routes in the era of "global English." Creative writers in widely disparate locations are now using global English to their advantage, with what can be described as post-postcolonial strategies. This essay explores the politics of global English, beginning with a satiric dictionary of "Strine" (Australian English) from 1965, and then looking back at the mid-1960s debate at Makerere University between Ngugi wa Thiong'o and Chinua Achebe, in which Achebe famously asserted the importance of remaking English for hi own purposes. The essay then discusses early linguistic experiments by Rudyard Kipling, who became the world's first truly global writer in the 1880s and 1890s and developed a range of strategies for conveying local experience to a global audience. The essay then turns to two contemporary examples: a comic pastiche of Kipling-and of Kiplingese-by the contemporary Tibetan writer Jamyang Norbu, who deploys "Babu English" and the legacy of British rule against Chinese encroachment in Tibet; and, finally, the Korean-American internet group Young-hae Chang Heavy Industries, who interweave African-American English with North Korean political rhetoric to hilariously subversive effect.