This article records tradition as it has been passed down and reported. Its sources are not yet part of the atlas's verified catalogue.
Postcolonial literature was never one national tradition wearing different names; it names a shared set of concerns, national identity, resistance to cultural imperialism, race and belonging, gender, and a writer's own relationship to an inherited colonial language, across writers who otherwise have very little in common. Wole Soyinka, the Nigerian playwright who won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1986, wrote from a West African tradition steeped in Yoruba drama and myth. Derek Walcott, the Caribbean poet who won the same prize in 1992, wrote out of Saint Lucia's mixed African, European and Indigenous inheritance in a voice closer to epic than to Soyinka's theater. Ngugi wa Thiong'o, writing from Kenya, went further than Achebe's defense of English, eventually choosing to write fiction in his native Gikuyu rather than English at all, treating the language choice itself as part of the field's central argument. Behind the writers stood a theorist, Edward Said, whose critical work gave the field much of its vocabulary for describing how colonial power had shaped not just territory but representation itself. What unites this field with many flags is less a shared style than a shared subject: what a literature does with the aftermath of an empire.