English and the colonisation of form

Abstract

Summary This article poses the question whether formal procedures of colonisation generated in the nineteenth century have been reproduced in the adoption, by critics of black South African literature, of the implicit assumption that the received generic forms of “imaginative literature” should form the basis of scholarship and enquiry. The article suggests that the context of “English” and “literature” should be sought in the broader signifying practices of colonialism, and seeks to describe the wider context in which black subjects of missionary teaching were compelled to negotiate identity in terms of a civilising colonialism founded in English as a master‐discourse.