"The West Indian's education was imported in much the same way that flour and butter are imported from Canada. Since the cultural negotiation was strictly between England and the natives, and England had acquired, somehow, the divine right to organise the native's reading, it is to be expected that England's export of literature would be English. Deliberately and exclusively English. And the further back in time England went for these treasures, the safer was the English commodity. So the examinations, which would determine that Trinidadian's future in the Civil Service, imposed Shakespeare and Wordsworth, and Jane Austen and George Eliot and the whole tabernacle of dead names, now come alive at the world's greatest summit of literary expression."
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Brown University facultyDuke University facultyAnthologists20th-century male writersNovelists from Barbados
Original Language: English
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Sources
"The Occasion for Speaking" in The Pleasures of Exile (1960)
https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/George_Lamming
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George Lamming
George William Lamming OCC (born and died in Barbados; 8 June 1927 – 4 June 2022) was a writer and professor.
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