“Despite years of literary criticism seeking to undo the idea of the inscrutable Other, here we were. . . .”
- Lina Abushouk 20 May 2026
https://africasacountry.com/2026/05/how-to-read-postcolonial-writing
I enjoyed reading this article which I thought offered nuanced, critical, historical, contemporary and relevant insights. Here it is.
"[A]about the enduring metropolitan expectation that writing from the South should sound opaque, excessive, and primitive."
2/
“[H]ow elite, metropolitan #literary institutions have read—and misread—writing from the postcolonial world.”
"the existing formulae for “authentic” postcolonial prose are already so codified that a language model can reproduce them convincingly. In this way, AI does not disrupt literary taste so much as expose its furniture. {...}
Euro-American publishers have a history of misrepresenting colonial and postcolonial writing from the Global South."
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📌 "There is something #worth #pausing over here about what AI actually does when it generates prose. Large language models do not #invent anything. Trained on vast corpora of existing text, they learn to predict what kinds of sentences tend to #follow other kinds of sentences. This means that when an LLM generates “literary” fiction set in the postcolonial Caribbean, it does not reach for #originality"
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“a set of #aesthetic #assumptions so thoroughly #institutionalized that they can be reproduced from #within.”
“This is what the AI controversy ultimately reveals—not a new problem introduced by technology, but an old one made newly legible.”
Artun Faliro