Reflections on the Tenth Anniversary of the Caine Prize for African Writing

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Notes

1. On the critical role of the English language in resistance literature and in postcolonial writing see Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o, Decolonising the Mind: The Politics of Language in African Literature.

2. For a discussion of ‘whiteness’ as imbricated within a myth of the West see Young, White Mythologies.

3. For further critical exploration of the term ‘The Fetish of “the West”’ see Lazarus, ‘The Fetish of “the West” in postcolonial theory’ in Marxism, Modernity and Postcolonial Studies.

4. Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o's talk focused on ‘Writing Now’ at Wasafiri's twenty-fifth anniversary events entitled ‘Everything to Declare’ on Saturday 31 Oct. 2009 — see ‘Language in Everything to Declare’. See also Decolonizing the Mind.

5. For a fuller understanding of cosmopolitanism in this utopian context see, for example, Appiah, Cosmopolitanism: Ethics in a World of Strangers.

6. For a more detailed history of the Mau Mau and violence, see Odhiambo and Lonsdale, Mau Mau & Nationhood: Arms, Authority & Narration.