Postcolonial pragmatics

Rukmini Bhaya Nair
Indian Institute of Technology Delhi
Table of contents

As I write this essay, the Taliban have taken over the government in Afghanistan after a precipitous US withdrawal from the country. It goes without saying that this marks a major turn in a complex regional history that led President Biden to describe Afghanistan, in a familiar trope, as the ‘Graveyard of Empires’. The allusion is not without Gricean irony since it strongly implies that the US is in fact a modern empire-builder, a de facto colonizer in postcolonial times. Meanwhile, the new Afghan Minister for Education has, in his turn, unequivocally declared: “No PhD degree, Master’s degree is valuable today. You see that the Mullahs and Taliban that are in power have no PhD, MA or even a high school degree, but are the greatest of all.” How, if at all, are these two statements by the President of the ‘most powerful country in the world’ and the Minister of a 21st century nation committed to imposing Sharia Law in its most conservative form about being ‘in power’ connected? In this essay, I suggest that the rubric of ‘Postcolonial Pragmatics’ offers an interdisciplinary framework within which to analyze the longstanding, always fraught, relationship between sociopolitical power and academic scholarship.

Full-text access is restricted to subscribers. Log in to obtain additional credentials. For subscription information see Subscription & Price.

References

Acheraïou, A.
2008 Rethinking Postcolonialism. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Adam, I. and Helen Tiffin
(eds.) 1991 Past the Last Post: Theorizing Post-Colonialism and Post-Modernism. New York: Harvester Wheatsheaf.Google Scholar
Adichie, Chimamanda N.
2003 Purple Hibiscus. Algonquin books of Chapel Hill.Google Scholar
Adiga, A.
2008 The White Tiger. New Delhi: Harper Collins Publishers India.Google Scholar
Ahmad, A.
1994 In Theory: Classes, Nations, Literatures. London: Verso.Google Scholar
1997 “The politics of literary postcoloniality.” In Contemporary Post- Colonial Theory, ed. by Padmini Mongia. New Delhi: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Allott, N.
2010 Key Terms in Pragmatics. New York: Continuum International Publishing Group.Google Scholar
Althusser, L.
1971 Essays on Ideology. London: Verso.Google Scholar
Anchimbe, Eric and Richard W. Janney
2011 “Postcolonial pragmatics: An introduction.” Journal of Pragmatics 43(6): 1451–1459. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Anchimbe, Eric A. and Richard W. Janney
2017 “Postcolonial Pragmatics.” In The Routledge Handbook of Pragmatics, ed. by Anne Barron, Yueguo Gu, Gerard Steen, 105–120. London: Routledge. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Anderson, Benedict R.
1991 Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism. New York: Verso.Google Scholar
Anderson, B. and P. Harrison
(eds) 2010 Taking – Place: Non-Representational Theories and Geography. Farnham: Ashgate.Google Scholar
Anjaria, U.
2020 “Colonialism/Postcolonialism.” In Keywords for India, ed. by Rukmini Bhaya Nair and Peter Ronald deSouza, 30–31. London: Bloomsbury.Google Scholar
Appiah, A.
1991 “Is the post- in postmodernism the post- in postcolonial?.” Critical Inquiry 17(2): 336–357. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
2006 Cosmopolitanism: Ethics in a World of Strangers. New York: W. W. Norton & Co.Google Scholar
Armah, Ayi K.
1988 The Beautyful Ones Are Not Yet Born. London: Heinemann.Google Scholar
Ashcroft, B., Gareth Griffiths, and Helen Tiffin
2002 The Empire Writes Back. 2nd edition. London: Routledge.Google Scholar
Ashcroft, B., Gareth Griffiths and Helen Tiffin
(eds.) 1995 The Post-Colonial Studies Reader. Oxford: Routledge.Google Scholar
Atkinson, J. M. and J. Heritage
(eds.) 1984 Structures of Social Action: Studies in Conversational Analysis. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Auer, P. and Aldo di Luzio
(eds.) 1992 The Contextualization of Language. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Austin, J. L.
1962 How to do Things with Words. Oxford: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Bauman, R. and Joel Sherzer
1975 “The ethnography of speaking.” Annual Review of Anthropology 4: 95–119. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Bennett, B.
(ed.) 1988 A Sense of Exile: Essays in the Literature of the Asia-Pacific Region. Perth: The University of Western Australia Press.Google Scholar
Benson, E. and L. W. Conolly
(eds.) 1994 Encyclopedia of Postcolonial Literature in English, Vol.1. London and New York: Routledge.Google Scholar
Bhabha, H.
1994 The Location of Culture. London: Routledge.Google Scholar
Bharucha, N. E. and V. Sarang
(eds.) 1994 Indian-English Fiction, 1980–90: An Assessment. Delhi: B.R. Publishing Corporation.Google Scholar
Bhattacharya, B.
1978 A Dream in Hawaii. New Delhi: Macmillan.Google Scholar
Boehmer, E.
1995 Colonial and Postcolonial Literature. Oxford: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Bottomley, G.
1992 From Another Place: Migration and the Politics of Culture. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Brathwaite, K.
1984 History of the Voice: The Development of Nation Language in Anglophone Caribbean Poetry. London: New Beacon Books.Google Scholar
Brennan, T.
1989 Salman Rushdie and the Third World: Myths of the Nation. New York: St. Martin’s Press. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Brown, P. and S. C. Levinson
1987 Politeness: Some Universals in Language Usage. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Castle, G.
2001 Postcolonial Discourses. Malden: Wiley-Blackwell.Google Scholar
Césaire, A.
2000 Discourse on Colonialism. Translated by Joan Pinkham. New York: Monthly Review Press.Google Scholar
Chakrabarty, D.
1992 “Postcoloniality and the artifice of history: Who speaks for “Indian” pasts?” Representations 37: 1–26. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
2000 Provincializing Europe: Postcolonial Thought and Historical Difference. Princeton: Princeton University Press.Google Scholar
Chatterjee, P.
2013 “Subaltern studies and ‘capital.’” Economic and Political Weekly 48(37): 69–75.Google Scholar
Chaudhuri, A.
1991 A Strange and Sublime Address. London: Minerva Paperback.Google Scholar
Chew, S. and David Richards
(eds.) 2010 A Concise Companion to Postcolonial Literature. Chichester: Wiley-Blackwell. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Chibber, V.
2013 Postcolonial Theory and the Specter of Capital. London: Verso.Google Scholar
Chomsky, N.
1975 Reflections on Language. New York: Pantheon.Google Scholar
Chow, R.
1993 Writing Diaspora: Tactics of Intervention in Contemporary Cultural Studies. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.Google Scholar
2014 Not Like a Native Speaker: On Languaging as a Postcolonial Experience. New York: Columbia University Press. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Churbanov, L.
1976 Annotation to Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, The German Ideology , in Karl Marx–Frederick Engels Collected Works: Volume 5: Marx and Engels, 1845–47. New York: International Publishers.Google Scholar
Coly, Ayo A.
2010 Pull of Postcolonial Nationhood: Gender and Migration in Francophone African Literatures. Blue Ridge Summit: Rowman and Littlefield.Google Scholar
Connell, R.
2007 Southern Theory: The Global Dynamics of Knowledge in Social Science. Cambridge: Polity Press.Google Scholar
Coopan, V.
2009 Worlds Within: National Narratives and Global Connections in Postcolonial Writing. Stanford: Stanford University Press.Google Scholar
Cooper, F. and Ann Laura Stoler
(eds.) 1997 Tensions of Empire: Colonial Cultures in a Bourgeois World. Berkeley: University of California Press. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Cortes-Ramirez, E-E.
2014 “Knowledge is power. Francis Bacon’s theory of ideology and culture”. Via Panorâmica: Revista Electrónica de Estudos Anglo-Americanos / An Anglo-American Studies Journal. Série 3, Número Especial: 25–42.Google Scholar
Dabydeen, D.
(ed.) 1985 The Black Presence in English Literature. Manchester: Manchester University Press.Google Scholar
Daiya, K.
2008 Violent Belongings: Partition, Gender, and National Culture in Postcolonial India. Philadelphia: Temple University Press.Google Scholar
Davies, Carole B. and Anne Adams Graves
(eds.) 1986 Ngambika: Studies of Women in African Literature. Trenton, NJ: Africa World Press.Google Scholar
Deleuze, G.
1994 [1968] Difference and Repetition. Columbia: Columbia University PressGoogle Scholar
Dennett, D. C.
1987 The Intentional Stance. Cambridge, Massachusetts: MIT Press.Google Scholar
1996 Kinds of Minds: Towards an Understanding of Consciousness. Harper Collins, New York.Google Scholar
Derrida, J.
1996 Archive Fever. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.Google Scholar
Desai, A.
1980 Clear Light of the Day. London: Penguin Books.Google Scholar
Desai, G. and Supriya Nair
2005 Postcolonialisms: An Anthology of Cultural Theory and Criticism. UK: Bloomsbury.Google Scholar
Desai, K.
2006 The Inheritance of Loss. New Delhi: Penguin Books.Google Scholar
Deshpande, S.
1990 The Dark Holds No Terrors. New Delhi: PenguinGoogle Scholar
Diamond, S.
1939 “Marx’s “Ninth Thesis” on Feuerbach.” Science and Society 3(2): 242–244.Google Scholar
Dissanayake, W.
1993 Self and Colonial Desire: Travel Writings of V.S. Naipaul. Bern: Peter Lang.Google Scholar
Drabinski, John E.
2011 Levinas and the Postcolonial: Race, Nation, Other. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Duncanson, I.
2000 “Scripting Empire: The ‘Englishman’ and Playing for Safety in Law and History.” Melbourne University Law Review 24(3): 952.Google Scholar
Duranti, A. and Charles Goodwin
(eds) 1992 Rethinking Context. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Dyson, K. K.
1978 A Various Universe. Oxford: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Eagleton, T.
2007 Ideology: An Introduction. New York: Verso.Google Scholar
Eelen, G.
2001 A Critique of Politeness Theories. Manchester: St. Jerome Publishing.Google Scholar
Fanon, F.
1963 The Wretched of the Earth. New York: Grove Press.Google Scholar
1993 Black Skin, White Masks. London: Pluto Press.Google Scholar
Fetzer, A., and E. Weizman
2017 “Ordinariness and the Media.” Paper presented at the 15th International Pragmatics Conference (IPrA), July 16–21, 2017, Belfast: Pragmatics in the Real World.
Fetzer, A. and E. Weizman
2018 “ ‘What I would say to John and everyone like John is …’: The construction of ordinariness through quotations in mediated political discourse.” Discourse & Society 29(5): 495–513. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Freire, P.
1972 Pedagogy of the Oppressed. New York: Herder and Herder.Google Scholar
Ganapathy-Doré, G.
2011 The Postcolonial Indian Novel in English. Newcastle-upon-Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Press.Google Scholar
Gandhi, L.
1998 Postcolonial Theory: A Critical Introduction. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Gates, Henry L.
(ed.) 1986 “Race,” Writing and Difference. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.Google Scholar
Ghosh, A.
1988 The Shadow Lines. New Delhi: Ravi Dayal.Google Scholar
Gilroy, P.
1987 “There Ain’t no Black in the Union Jack”: The Cultural Politics of Race and Nation. London: Hutchinson.Google Scholar
Goffman, E.
1981 Forms of Talk. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press.Google Scholar
2007 The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life. S.I.: Academic Internet Publishers Incorporated.Google Scholar
Goyal, Y.
2010 Romance, Diaspora, and Black Atlantic Literature. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Grace, D.
2007 Relocating Consciousness: Diasporic Writers and the Dynamics of Literary Experience. Amsterdam: Rodopi. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Grice, Herbert P.
1975 “Logic and Conversation.” In Speech Acts (Syntax and Semantics 3), ed. by P. Cole and J. L. Morgan, 41–58. New York: Academic Press.Google Scholar
1991 Studies in the Way of Words. Harvard: Harvard University Press.Google Scholar
Guha, R.
1999 Subaltern Studies: Writings on South Asian History and Society. New York: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Gumperz, J.
1971 Language in Social Groups. California: Stanford University Press.Google Scholar
1982 Discourse Strategies. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Gurnah, A.
1994 Paradise. London: Hamish Halmilton.Google Scholar
Hall, S.
1995 “When was the postcolonial’? Thinking at the limit.” In The Post-Colonial Question, ed. by Iain Chambers, Lidia Curti, 1–19. London: Routledge.Google Scholar
Hanks, William F., et al
2019 “Communicative interaction in terms of ba theory: Towards an innovative approach to language practice.” Journal of Pragmatics 145: 63–71. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Hanks, W., S. Ide and Y. Katagirl
2009 “Towards an Emancipatory Pragmatics: Introduction” Journal of Pragmatics 41(1):1–9. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Harrison, N.
2003 Postcolonial Criticism: History, Theory, and the Work of Fiction. Malden: Blackwell.Google Scholar
Hauser, Marc D. et al.
2002 “The Faculty of Language: What is it, Who has it, and How did it evolve?” Science’s Compass 298: 1569–1579. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Herzfeld, M.
1992 The Social Production of Indifference: The Symbolic Roots of Western Bureaucracy Chicago: Chicago University Press.Google Scholar
Huang, Y.
2016 “Pragmatics- Language Use in Context.” In The Routledge Handbook of Linguistics, 205–220. London: Routledge.Google Scholar
Jani, P.
2010 Decentering Rushdie: Cosmopolitanism and the Indian Novel in English. Columbus: Ohio State University Press.Google Scholar
Joseph, J. E. and Taylor, T. J.
1990 (ed.) Ideologies of Language. London: RoutledgeGoogle Scholar
Julien, E.
(ed.) 1986 African Literature in its Social and Political Dimensions. Washington: Three Continent Press.Google Scholar
Kachru, B. B., Y. Kachru and C. E. Nelson
(eds) 2006 The Handbook of World Englishes. London: Blackwell.Google Scholar
Kachru, B. B., Y. Kachru and S. N. Sridhar
(eds) 2008 Language in South Asia. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Kasher, A.
1977 “Foundations of philosophical pragmatics.” In Basic Problems in Methodology and Linguistics, ed. by R. E. Butts and J. Hintikka, 225–242. Reidel: Dordrecht. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Kaur Singh, J.
2008 Representation and Resistance: South Asian and African Women’s Texts at Home and in the Diasporas. Calgary: University of Calgary Press. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Kirpal, V.
1990 The New Indian Novel in English: A Study of the 1980s. Delhi: Allied Publishers.Google Scholar
Kuhn, Thomas S.
1970 The Structure of Scientific Revolutions [Enlarged Second edition]. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.Google Scholar
Leech, G.
1983 Principles of Pragmatics. London: Longman.Google Scholar
Lemelle, S. and Robin D. G. Kelley
(eds.) 1994 Imagining Home: Class, Culture and Nationalism in the African Diaspora. London: Verso.Google Scholar
Levinson, S. C.
1983 Pragmatics. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Loomba, Ania
2005 Colonialism/Postcolonialism. London: Routledge.Google Scholar
Ma, Sheng-mei
2012 Asian Diaspora and East-West Modernity. West Lafayette: Purdue University Press. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Macaulay, T. B.
1886 “A speech delivered in the House of Commons on the 10th of July, 1833.” In The Works of Lord Macaulay Complete, ed. by Lady Trevelyan 8(111): 142.Google Scholar
1935 “Minute by the Hon’ble T. B. Macaulay, dated the 2nd February 1835” http://​www​.mssu​.edu​/projectsouthasia​/history​/primarydocs​/education​/Macaulay001​.htm
Mambrol, N.
2016 “Postcolonialism.” https://​literariness​.org​/2016​/04​/06​/postcolonialism/. Retrieved 15.08.2021.
Marzec, Robert P.
2007 An Ecological and Postcolonial Study of Literature: From Daniel Defoe to Salman Rushdie. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
McClintock, A.
1995 Imperial Leather: Race, Gender, and Sexuality in the Colonial Context. London: Routledge.Google Scholar
Memmi, A.
1965 The Colonizer and the Colonized. Boston: Beacon Press.Google Scholar
Mey, J.
1993 Pragmatics: An Introduction. Oxford: Basil Blackwell.Google Scholar
Mishra, V. and B. Hodge
2005 “What was postcolonialism?” New Literary History 36(3): 375–402. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Moi, T.
1985 Sexual/Textual Politics: Feminist Literary Theory. London: Methuen & Co.Google Scholar
2009 “ ‘I am not a woman writer’: About women, literature and feminist theory today.” Eurozine 12 June, 1–8.Google Scholar
Mongia, P.
1996 “Introduction.” In Contemporary Postcolonial Theory: A Reader, ed. by Padmini Mongia, 1–18. London and New York: Arnold.Google Scholar
Mukherjee, M.
2000 The Perishable Empire: Essays on Indian Writing in English. New Delhi: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Mukherjee, U.
2010 Postcolonial Environments: Nature, Culture and the Contemporary Indian Novel in English. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Mukundi, P. M.
2010 Preventing Things from Falling further Apart: The Preservation of Cultural Identities in Postcolonial African, Indian, and Caribbean Literatures. London: Adonis and Abbey.Google Scholar
Nair, R. B.
1984 “Fictional selves, empire’s fictions: The poets of John Company”. In Tropic Crucible: Self and Theory in Language and Literature, ed. by C. E. Nicholson and R. Chatterjee, 193–218. Singapore University Press.Google Scholar
1989 “Text and pre-text: History as gossip in Rushdie’s novels” Economic and Political Weekly, May 1989, 1994–1000.Google Scholar
1991 “From Freud to Rushdie: Notes on the interpretation of dreams” Seminar Vol. 348, July 1991, 32–36.Google Scholar
1995 “The pedigree of the white stallion: Postcoloniality and literary history.” In The Uses of Literary History ed. by Marshall Brown, 159–186. Durham: Duke University Press. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
2002a Lying on the Postcolonial Couch: The Idea of Indifference. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press and New Delhi: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
2002b Translation, Text and Theory: the Paradigm of India. ed. New Delhi, London: Thousand Oaks: SageGoogle Scholar
2003a Narrative Gravity: Communication, Cognition, Culture London: Routledge.Google Scholar
2003b “Sappho’s daughters: Postcoloniality and the polysemous semantics of gender.” Journal of Literary Semantics 32(2): 113–35. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
2004 “Guess what Ashraya means? The art of asylum.” C-Fonds Journal, The Hague, Holland, Special Issue on the Positive Aspects of Migration, November, 100–109.Google Scholar
2008 “Language and youth culture”. In Language in South Asia, ed. by Braj B. Kachru, Yamuna Kachru, and S. N. Sridhar, 466–496. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
2009 Poetry in a Time of Terror: Essays in the Postcolonial Preternatural. New Delhi and New York: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
2011a “The nature of narrative: schemes, genes, memes, dreams and screams!” In Religious Narrative, Cognition and Culture: Image and Word in the Mind of Narrative ed. by A. W. Geertz, J. S. Jensen, 117–146. London: Equinox.Google Scholar
2011b “States of reason and reasons of state: Noam Chomsky’s metaphors as a dialogue across disciplines.” Language and Dialogue 2: 266–291. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
2012 “Bringing English into the 21st century: A perspective from India.” In The International Journal of Language, Translation and Intercultural Communication (IJLTIC-1-1) University of Igoumenitsa, December, 103–122.Google Scholar
2013 Mad Girl’s Love Song. New Delhi: Harper Collins.Google Scholar
2015 “Virtue, virtuosity and the virtual: Experiments in the contemporary Indian English novel.” In The History of the Indian Novel in English, ed. by Ulka Anjaria, 251–266. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
2017 “Localopolis and cosmopolis: An Indian narrative.” Special Issue on ‘Cosmopolitanism and Cross-cultural Negotiation’ ed. by Didier Coste in EU-topías. A Journal on Interculturality, Communication, and European Studies 147–159.Google Scholar
2018a “Post-colonialism outsourced.” In Reframing Critical, Literary and Cultural Theories: Thought on the Edge ed. by N. Pireddu, 299–325. New York: Palgrave Macmillan.Google Scholar
2018b “Intending to mean, pretending to be: Reflections on the limits on genre.” In Rethinking Language, Text And Context: Interdisciplinary Research In Stylistics, ed. by R. Page, B. Busse, and N. Nørgaard, 147–163. London: Routledge. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
2020 “Figuring it out: Old modes and new codes for multimodality, technology and creative performativity in 21st century India.” In Performing Metaphorical Creativity, ed. by L. Hidalgo Downing and B. Kraljevic Mujic, 311–342. Amsterdam: Benjamins.. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
2021 “Caged childhoods? Human capabilities, migrating cosmopolitanisms and educational experimentation.” In Migrating Minds: Theories and Practices of Cultural Cosmopolitanism, ed. by D. Coste, C. Kkona and N. Pireddu, 247–260. New York: Routledge. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
2022  New technology, language and gesture in contemporary Indian political discourse. In The Psychology of Democracy: Of the People, For the People, By the People, ed. by A. Weinberg, 195–228. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Nair, R. B. and Peter R. deSouza
(eds.) 2020 Keywords for India: A Conceptual Lexicon for the 21st Century. London: Bloomsbury Academic. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Nasta, Susheila
(ed.) 1991 Motherlands. Black Women’s Writing From Africa, the Caribbean and South Asia. London: The Women’s Press.Google Scholar
Ngũgĩ wa Thiongʼo
1986a Decolonising the Mind: The Politics of Language in African Literature. London: J. Currey.Google Scholar
1986b Petals of Blood. Oxford: Heinemann.Google Scholar
Nkrumah, K.
1966 Neo-colonialism: The Last Stage of Imperialism. New York: International Publishers.Google Scholar
Nuttall, S.
2009 Entanglement: Literary and Cultural Reflections on Post-Apartheid. Johannesburg: Wits University Press. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Ojwang, D.
2013 Reading Migration and Culture: The World of East African Indian Literature. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Okri, B.
2003 The Famished Road. London: Vintage.Google Scholar
Onyeoziri, Gloria N.
2011 Shaken Wisdom: Irony and Meaning in Postcolonial African Fiction. Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press.Google Scholar
Parry, B.
1996 “Resistance theory/ theorising resistance or two cheers for nativism.” In Contemporary Postcolonial Theory: A Reader, ed. by Padmini Mongia, 84–109. London and New York: Arnold.Google Scholar
Pratt, M. L.
1977 Toward a Speech Act Theory of Literary Discourse. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.Google Scholar
1992 Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and Transculturation. New York: Routledge. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Rescher, N.
2014 The Pragmatic Vision: Themes in Philosophical Pragmatism Plymouth: Rowman and Littlefield.Google Scholar
Rombes, N., H. Culik, and J. A. Howard
1997 “Otherwise: An editorial welcome.” Post-Identity. Minneapolis: University of Michigan Press.Google Scholar
Roy, A.
1997 The God of Small Things. New Delhi: Penguin Books.Google Scholar
Rushdie, S.
1981 Midnight’s Children. London and New York: Jonathan Cape.Google Scholar
Sacks, H.
1985 “On doing ‘being ordinary’”. In Structures of Social Action: Studies in Conversation Analysis, ed. by J. Atkinson and J. Heritage, 413–429. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
1992 Lectures on Conversation. New York: Wiley-Blackwell.Google Scholar
Sacks, H., Emanuel A. Schegloff and Gail Jefferson
1974 “A simplest systematics for the organisation of turn-taking for conversation.” Language 50(4): 696–735. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Sahgal, N.
1999 Rich Like Us. New Delhi: Harper Collins.Google Scholar
Said, Edward W.
1978 Orientalism. New York: Pantheon Books.Google Scholar
1994 Culture and Imperialism. New York: Vintage Books.Google Scholar
Sangari, K. and Vaid, S.
1989 Recasting Women: Essays in Colonial History Kali for Women. New Delhi.Google Scholar
Schiffrin, D.
1994 Approaches to Discourse. Oxford: Basil Blackwell.Google Scholar
Schipper, M.
(ed.) 1989 Beyond the Boundaries: African Literature and Literary Theory. London: Allison and Busby.Google Scholar
Searle, J. R.
1969 Speech Acts: An Essay in the Philosophy of Language. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Searle, John R.
1975 “The logical status of fictional discourse.” New Literary History 6(2): 319–332. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Senft, G.
2014 Understanding Pragmatics. Oxford and New York: Routledge. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Shohat, Ella
2006 Taboo Memories, Diasporic Voices. Durham: Duke University Press. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Singh, Jaspal K.
2009 Indian Writers: Transnationalisms and Diasporas. Bern: Peter Lang.Google Scholar
Smith, C. and D. Cuckson
(trans.) 2002 Karl Marx: “Theses on Feuerbach.” Marxists Internet Archive.Google Scholar
Snow, C. P.
1961 The Two Cultures. New York: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Soyinka, Wole
1990 Myth, Literature and the African World. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Sperber, D., and Deirdre Wilson
1986 Relevance: Communication and Cognition. Oxford: Blackwell.Google Scholar
Spivak, Gayatri C.
1988 “Can the subaltern speak?” In Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture, ed. by Cary Nelson and Lawrence Grossberg, 271–313. Urbana: University of Illinois Press. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
1990 “Post-structuralism, marginality, postcoloniality and value.” In Literary Theory Today, ed. by Peter Collier and Helga Geyer-Ryan, 219–239. Cambridge: Polity Press.Google Scholar
Stratton, F.
1994 Contemporary African Literature and the Politics of Gender. London: Routledge.Google Scholar
Suleri, S.
1992 The Rhetoric of English India. Chicago: Chicago University Press. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Sunder Rajan, R.
1992 The Lie of the Land: English Literary Studies in India. New Delhi: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Tharoor, S.
2018 Why I am a Hindu London: C. Hurst & Co.Google Scholar
Thieme, J.
(ed.) 1996 The Arnold Anthology of Post-Colonial Literatures in English. London: Arnold.Google Scholar
Thurner, Mark
2011 History’s Peru: The Poetics of Colonial and Postcolonial Historiography. Gainesville: University Press of Florida. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Trinh, Minh-Ha
1989 Woman, Native, Other: Writing Postcoloniality and Feminism. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.Google Scholar
Trousdale, R.
2010 Nabokov, Rushdie, and the Transnational Imagination: Novels of Exile and Alternate Worlds. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Tsaaior, James T.
2013 African Literature and the Politics of Culture. Newcastle-upon-Tyne: Cambridge Scholars.Google Scholar
Vanderveken, D.
1990 Meaning and Speech Acts. Oxford: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Varughese, E. D.
2012 Beyond the Postcolonial: World Englishes Literature. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
2013 Reading New India: Post-Millenial Indian Fiction in English. London: Bloomsbury.Google Scholar
Vausudevan, R.
2020 “Bollywood”. In Keywords for India, ed. by Rukmini Bhaya Nair and Peter Ronald deSouza, 80–82. London: Bloomsbury.Google Scholar
Veit-Wild, F.
2006 Writing Madness: Borderlines of the Body in African Literature. Oxford: Currey.Google Scholar
Venn, C.
2006 Postcolonial Challenge: Towards Alternative Worlds. London: Sage.Google Scholar
Verschueren, J.
2012 Ideology in Language Use: Pragmatic Guidelines for Empirical Research. Cambridge: Cambridge University PressGoogle Scholar
Viswanathan, G.
Masks of Conquest: Literary Study and British Rule in India. New York: Columbia UP 1989.Google Scholar
Walonen, Michael K.
2011 Writing Tangier in the Postcolonial Transition: Space and Power in Expatriate and North African Literature. Burlington: Ashgate.Google Scholar
Walters, Wendy W.
2005 At Home in Diaspora: Black International Writing. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.Google Scholar
Whitlock, G. and D. Carter
(eds.) 1992 Images of Australia: An Introductory Reader in Australian Studies. St. Lucia: University of Queensland Press.Google Scholar
Wilentz, G.
1992 Building Cultures: Black Women Writers in Africa and the Diaspora. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.Google Scholar
Williams, P. and Laura Chrisman
(eds.) 1993 Colonial Discourse and Post-Colonial Theory. London: Harvester Wheatsheaf.Google Scholar
Yacoubi, Y.
2012 The Play of Reasons: The Sacred and the Profane in Salman Rushdie’s Fiction. Bern: Peter Lang. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Young, R.
1990 White Mythologies: Writing History and the West. London: Routledge.Google Scholar