• Cross-Cultural Studies
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• v.46
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• pp.411-434
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• 2017

With emphasis on various local cultures to confront the Western central culture, Ngugi wa Thiong'o proposes them 'to move horizontally' so as not to repeat the oppressive culture of the West. We need not only dialogues between dominant languages and peripheral languages, but also between marginal languages. With respect to this point, Ngugi thinks that translation itself could be very effective. Ngugi wants to stimulate writing and speaking in marginalized languages and promote translation as a means of making these languages visible. He regards translation as a conversational tool among languages and cultures in the multicultural global community. As is already well known, his determination to write his later works only in his native Gikuyu language has a great meaning in his anti-colonial as well as anti-neocolonial movement. Its proof is his recent effort to cooperate with Jalada Africa. Simon Gikandi criticized the English translation of Matigari as a denial of cultural hegemony of Gikuyu language and its subordination to the global cultural market. However, the concept of 'thick translation', helps us move from Gikandi's doubt of the 'epistemology of translation' to a meaningful strategy of postcolonial translation. Facing some of the scholars' doubts related to his over-stressing language problem, Ngugi points out that the world has managed to function well through translation: the possibility of translation between cultures and translation as a mediating tool for communication nationally as well as internationally. Based on this two-sided solution of translation, he believes that we can overcome the opposition between relativity and universality, center and periphery, and the dominant and the subordinate.

• Cross-Cultural Studies
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• v.42
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• pp.107-129
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• 2016

In modern history, there have been several kinds of continental unions or supranational politico-economic unions in the world, such as the United Nations, the European Union, the Union of South American Nations, the African Union, etc. Modern thinkers proposed many pan-isms on their continental base, for example, Pan-Arabism, Pan-Latin Americanism, Pan-Asianism, Pan-Celtism, etc. What is the most common in these pan-isms is that a continental union would be a politico-economic system to overcome the limits of the modern state-nation and to realize a long and happy relationship between member nations and continents. However, the concept of a supranational union differs from that of cosmopolitanism, in that the former presupposes the common cultural and historical heritage in the concerned region or continent. Ngugi wa Thinog'o' Pan-Africanism implies two keywords that are connected to his concepts such as 'decentralization' and 'African languages.' Pan-Africanism supposes that Africa may gain benefits from the union of African nations under the umbrella of anti-colonial efforts to down size the Euro-American influences. Moreover, using African languages enhances self-reliance and self-imagination among the African people. For in the former colonial regimes, the European colonial languages, such as English, French, or Portuguese, were central to the dissemination of European culture and modernity. Ngugi asserts that the African peripheralized languages could reinstate the African cultural heritage and propose an alternative to the Western modernity.

• Journal of English Language & Literature
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• v.60 no.2
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• pp.193-209
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• 2014

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.