and autobiographical fictions dominate explorations of writers' own histories and those of their peoples. External colonizations, such as invasions by colonizing powers as well as continuing imperialist dominations, and internal, that is, mental colonizations, such as through education, are some of the historical factors that account for migrations. British colonizations and empire building resulting in Englishlanguage writers (the empire writing/striking back), as well as contemporary American imperialism and the unnamed American Empire, play crucial roles in the 'chosen' language (English) and location (North America) of contemporary writers. I will also explore some metaphoric resonances of colonization — for instance, of women within patriarchal cultures, of 'minority' groups who must struggle to make spaces for themselves within hegemonic white academic institutions and literary marketplaces.
In part, colonialism and imperialism historically account for migrations of peoples of color into the industrialized North. A multiethnic and polyglot cosmopolitanism pervades this new diaspora visible in contemporary London, New York, Toronto. Today, alliances between colonialist and imperialist forces ensure a continuing imbalance of power and hegemonic control of 'third world' nations by covert colonizations in the guise of international aid agencies, as well as multinational capital, that transcend geographical boundaries and that make it increasingly difficult to hold any single entity accountable for perpetuating poverty in the 'third world.'
In general, material factors and, in particular, the conditions of cultural production — book production, publishing, audience, critical reception — vastly different in 'first' and 'third world' areas, often necessitate migrations. New configurations to the novel as a literary form emerge from this history of postcolonial writers who have moved to the United States or to Britain; who straddle continents, taking on half-year academic positions in United States universities and returning 'home' to Trinidad, Barbados, or India for the other half. Andrew Gurr's analysis that 'the normal role for the modern creative writer is to be an exile' ignores the particular conditions of cultural production that necessitate exile; for instance, neocolonial regimes like the present Kenyan government that threaten lives and -650- practice intellectual repression leave no choice but exile to a writer like Ngugi wa Thiong'o. Gurr also problematically merges the issues of home, identity, and history, as if the finding of 'home' will automatically entail the discovery of 'identity.' These two categories are often in contestation — what one might have to consider 'home' for economic reasons does not necessarily provide an unanguished sense of identity.
As with colonialism, external and internal, exile and expatriation may be experienced in metaphoric and in literal ways: metaphoric exile as undergone by marginal, minority communities, or by women within patriarchal cultures; literal exile for political reasons, as is common for writers from South Africa like Dennis Brutus who lives in the United States, Bessie Head who lived in Botswana until her recent death, Caeserina Kona Makhoere who lives in Britain; expatriation for willing or unwilling subjects, as with children of immigrant parents. Postcolonial writers of certain classes and educational levels who write in English [given a colonial(ist) educational system] experience different kinds of marginalization as cultural workers both inside their 'home' environments and outside, in the economically privileged spaces of Britain and North America. They face conflictual realities of literal and metaphoric exile — inside 'Western' spaces where they and their work are commodified in a marketplace eager, at certain times, to consume 'third world' products; and outside that space, that is, within 'third world' areas where United States domination is present in everyday realities of satellite communications bombarded into living rooms, of International Monetary Fund stranglehold on local economies forcing constant currency devaluations that foster and perpetuate poverty and economic crises. 'Home' assumes a deromanticized and demystified harshness; these are societies deeply under stress where economic crises make daily survival a painful reality.
Postcolonial writers often enter a Western metropolis precisely to make their cultural productions possible. The reasons for migration are various and complex — material and intellectual resources, an audience and critical reception that may not be possible within their 'homes' (places of origin) for political or other reasons. Joseph Brodsky, in an essay entitled
Writers' identities are negotiated along issues of race, gender, class, language, nationality, and, crucially for this group of writers, geography. When racial and ethnic origins differ from those of a majority population in a writer's 'chosen' geographical location, and political and economic positions of power determine which ethnic groups are marginal and which are centered at particular times, writers are caught in the fluctuating and fluid borderlands between majority and minority populations in terms of the themes of their work (which often transport them 'home'), their audience (often outside 'home'), and their sense of belonging and identity.
The uses of the English language, of the novel form, of literary styles and cinematic techniques, demonstrate a blending, at times happy, at other times conflictual, of indigenous cultural memory with Western education and location. Brodsky's generalized remark that 'an exiled writer is thrust, or retreats, into his mother tongue' is hardly true for postcolonial writers who come into the West, most of them inculcated in a colonial(ist) educational system and a Western literary tradition, and who write in English. Of course this reality is full of conflicts. Brodsky's exiled writer is 'invariably homebound…excessively retrospective [and since s/he feels] doomed to a limited audience abroad, he cannot help pining for the multitudes, real or imagined, left behind.' For postcolonial writers, the opposite is true — they often move away from 'home' in order to find an audience.
Economic and political expediency at different historical times forcibly transported, or 'welcomed,' peoples of color — African, Chinese, Japanese, Filipino, Chicano, and, more recently, Caribbean, Vietnamese, South Asian — into North America. 'Minority' groups range from United States citizens, African Americans, or thirdgeneration Japanese and Chinese Americans, to newer immigrants (noncitizens) of color driven to the United States for professional and economic reasons. In Britain, ex-colonials from Asia and Africa, after -652- fighting on the allied side during World War II, were 'invited' into the Mother Country for labor. The struggles that these Black Britishers (as peoples from Asia, Africa, the Caribbean, in solidarity, describe themselves), first-generation migrants or second-generation immigrants, face in creating spaces for themselves in contemporary Britain are explored by writers like Salman Rushdie, Hanif Kureishi (of Indo-Pakistani origin), Joan Riley (Jamaican-British), Joan Cambridge and Beryl Gilroy (Guyana-British), and Merle Collins (Grenada-British), among others. In the United States, writers like the Filipino Bienvenido Santos undertake a personal and literary search for 'home'; South Asian Meena Alexander, Padma Perera, and Bharati Mukherjee delve into the complex parameters of expatriateimmigrant-citizen; Japanese-Canadian Joy Kogawa uncovers the racism faced by her family and her people in Canada during World War II; Chinese-American Maxine Hong Kingston writes novels that blend autobiography and fiction in intergenerational explorations of identity between two cultures. Other writers who share this hyphenated identity are Tobagan- Canadian Marlene Nourbese Philip; Jamaica Kincaid (Antigua-United States); Barbadian-African American Paule Marshall; Michelle Cliff (Jamaica-United States); Opal Palmer Adisa (Jamaica-United States); and Trinidadian Earl Lovelace, who divides his time between the United States and Trinidad, as does St. Lucian Derek Walcott.
As these writers negotiate their own and their characters' identities on the borderlands among immigrant, expatriate, and citizen, they bring new dimensions to the contemporary novel in English through a genre that may be called the immigrant novel or the cosmopolitan novel. In speaking of the writer, it is important to note that one is leaving out other types of workers. The writer as cultural worker is more privileged certainly than a working-class population that crosses borders: for instance, Mexicans coming into the United States to work in kitchens and on farms, or Indians and Pakistanis 'welcomed' into oil-rich Middle East countries for menial labor, or IndoUgandan- Britishers who when expelled from Uganda entered the M/Other Country.
Both in their novelistic explorations and in their personal histories, writers like Salman Rushdie whose racial origin and whose geographical location are at variance exemplify a paradoxical reality of be-653- longing and not- belonging (Rushdie's example, as he remains under British government protection, is particularly ironic and mediated), of a kind of self-colonization in their use of the colonizer's language, of a search for identity, audience, constituency. Their work has given new configurations to a literature of exile that has been a prominent part of twentieth-century English literature, for example, non-English writers like James Joyce and Samuel Beckett. Novels of postcolonial expatriates and exiles represent the conflictual realities of geography, location, and language, the myth and reality of a return 'home,' the search for intellectual spaces with their 'chosen' exile and/or expatriate 'homes.'
Physical acts of conquest and aggression constitute only one aspect of colonial aspirations; mental colonizations perpetuated in a colonizer's language, education, and cultural values are often more devastating and resilient. One can trace a historical trajectory from the British Empire and its particular imperialist weapons like
