English: Empowering and/or Entrapping the Periphery

Abstract

For centuries, the English language has been a dominant force in the world’s power dynamics. Although this language was used as a weapon to subjugate the people for cultivating cultural hegemony in the colonial period, it has empowered itself as a medium to furnish a modern, civilized, rational, and educated man in today’s postcolonial world (which is treated as periphery in contrast to Europe that is exhibited as center). In the process of empowering themselves through English, non-native peripheral English speakers are often entrapped in a monolingual world because they reject their native language. Now, a crucial question arises—whether the English language empowers the people of the periphery or entraps them by alienating them from their own culture and land. To address this debate, this article will examine the experiences and perspectives of peripheral writers, particularly from the Indian Subcontinent and the African Continent. Moreover, it will explore how the peripheral voice is raised to write back to the center, using the English language, and attempt to construct peripheral human subjectivity in opposition to psychological distortion. It will also seek to understand the future of the periphery and its people.