Abstract
In their influential book The Empire Writes Back: Theory and Practice in Post-Colonial Literature (1989), Bill Ashcroft, Gareth Griffiths and Helen Tiffin explored, among other issues, the ways in which postcolonial voices have responded to the literary canon of the colonial centre. In particular, they elucidated the counter-discursive strategies used by postcolonial writers to challenge the dominant Eurocentric discourse. In his dual role as academic and creative writer, the Guyanese-born author David Dabydeen has consciously employed what Helen Tiffin has called “canonical counter-discourse”, which involves “writing back” to canonical texts which have contributed to the shaping of Eurocentric ideologies (1987, 22)