In a 1999 lecture in Nigeria, Chinua Achebe refrained from reiterating his well-known stance on the legitimacy of writing in English. Instead, he transformed the occasion into a creative-critical performance that posed historical questions about the visionary ideals of literary language shaped by colonial modernity—ideas that continued to unsettle postcolonial states facing a new century. Using Achebe’s lecture as a point of departure, the paper examines two contrasting conceptions of linguistic modernity in colonial West Africa, arguing that these divergent visions provide a productive framework for rethinking the postcolonial language debates that in Stewart Brown’s words, literary studies have “endlessly chewed over.”
Asha Rogers is Associate Professor of Contemporary Postcolonial Literature at the University of Birmingham and the author of State Sponsored Literature: Britain and Cultural Diversity after 1945 (OUP, 2020). In 2025/26 she is on a British Academy Mid-Career Fellowship linked to her next project on the linguistic conditions of postcolonial literature. Her most recent article ‘Preventing World Literature: Keeping African Language Literatures Local’ is published open-access with the Journal of World Literature.
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Associate Professor of Contemporary Postcolonial Literature
Department of English Literature
Biographical and contact information for Dr Asha Rogers, Associate Professor of Contemporary Postcolonial Literature in the Department of English at the University of Birmingham.
