The Empires Write Back: The Language of Postcolonial Nigerian Literature and the United States of America

Abstract

Abstract This article argues that reading for the vernacular of Standard American English in Nigerian Anglophone literature creates the opportunity to think about how the Englishes of British and American empire have not always been negotiated as singular or sequential, either in postcolonial or global Anglophone world literature. Writing by Buchi Emecheta, Chinua Achebe, and Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie suggests how the appropriation of the language of British colonization has been undercut and abetted by the Anglophone cultural and educational institutions of US empire.