Note: This post is a repost of an earlier post I did for a university module (Modernism and Empire).  I intend to tidy up and expand on it at some point in the near future, but for now, I would like to hear your thoughts about both the post and the topic in general.

In Black Skin, White Masks (1952), the noted post-colonial intellectual Frantz Fanon uses the language of the colonizer (French in his case) to present the case about language as an instrument of imperial ideological domination. Like Joyce, and like many post-colonial intellectuals and writers from Acebe to Edward Said, he faces the paradox of needing to present the state of his land, the case of his people and culture in a language that does not belong to him. In Joyce’s case, he fights that paradox by, among other things, calling into question the Englishman’s own command of language. The word ‘tundish’ comes to mind; in A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, the professor thinks that it is an Irish word, when in truth it is as English a word as words can be (Seamus Heaney in his notes mentions that ‘tundish’ is in fact a mid-Elizabethian word). The slave knows the master’s language better than the master. Ellis from Burmese Days would not have stood for this; “We shall have to sack [the native butler] if he gets to talk English too well,” he says.

And yet English can itself be termed a ‘colonized’ language. It has roots in both Germanic languages and Latin, with a liberal helping from latter-day French and German, not to mention Hindi, Mandarin, Chinese, Malay, and a whole host of other languages. English is probably unique in this among imperial languages. Is it truly ‘colonized’, or does the very act of borrowing transforms the word into another instrument of ideological domination? ‘Anime’ in its native Japanese context refers to any animated work, including 3D modelling; in English it has come to mean cell-shaded animation from Japan or done in ‘the Japanese style’. Is this an ideological stereotyping, or is this a simple case of borrowing from another culture? Is the act of ‘borrowing’ in language ever free of power implications? These are questions that I have yet to come up with answers for.