Bordered Identities in Language, Literature, and Culture

Book excerpt: Cameroon’s composite state of postcoloniality inevitably burdened it with a linguistic and pedagogic culture that changed the eager student into a centripetal mimic of the colonial imagination. Recent events in the country, especially relating to the Anglophone Problem, have spotlighted the need to revisit this space, which has been over-politicised into what Anglophone Cameroonians see as a state of hypnosis. Given the clash between postcolonial consciousness and the globalizing forces of late capitalism, a necessary meeting point had to be negotiated in linguistic and pedagogic contexts, to (re)affirm the identity problematic in Cameroon, and in the interpretation of colonial voices in literary texts. Bordered Identities in Language, Literature, and Culture: Readings on Cameroon and the Global Space offers a variegated reflection on these issues, and simultaneously responds to increasing demands to re-negotiate identity beyond mega frames of Empire, based on contextual data that combine indigenous and globalising imperatives.