Stephanie Newell (751) says that the postcolonial perspective on literacy and identity tends to be international in its remit. It introduced concepts of identity or models of identity formation that embrace ethnicity, authenticity, mimicry, and revolution as well as a return to conservative traditionalism. The term postcolonial, according to Newell (751), is a challenging one that is difficult to define because some authors use it to refer to the period immediately following the end of colonial rule whereas others use it to embrace the culture of a country that was once colonialized.
One author who uses the term in the latter form is Bill Ashcroft (11) who suggests that postcolonial analysis "rises to engage issues and experiences which have been put out of the purview of metropolitan theory." In essence, Ashcroft (4) asserts that there are many identity models to be found in postcolonial countries that include those based on gender, generation, social class, ethnicity, languages other than English, and geographic location. Ashcroft (3) views the European view of self and identity as set over and against that of colonial societies. His contention is simply that many postcolonial cultures are working to escape from what he calls McWorld via the subaltern's strategy to "interject a wide range of counter-discursive tactics into the dominant discourse without asserting a unified anti-imperial intention, or a separate oppositional purity" (Ashcroft, 47).
He also argues that the postcolonial's subject ability to interpolate gives him or her an empowering type of dialogic transformative agency with neo-imperial cultural hegemony. In other words, Ashcroft (17) maintains that there many different ways of shaping identity in postcolonial society and these ways vary from one locale to another, influenced by the extent to which the postcolonial society either does or does not choose to embrace Westernization.
...