After Writing Back: Owen Sheers, Welsh Writing in English and the Paradigm of Postcolonial Literature’.

Abstract

This paper will evaluate the work of contemporary Welsh writer Owen Sheers in the light of a number of arguments about Welsh culture, colonial history and postcolonial theory. It will argue that Sheers engages in the practice of ‘writing back’, a practice commonly associated with postcolonial literatures, but does something slightly different with it. His texts The Dust Diaries (2004), Resistance (2007), White Ravens (2009) and The Gospel of Us (2012) ‘write back’ not so much to the imperial powers, but to Wales’s own distant literary traditions in order to rediscover and re-affirm them. That is, Sheers takes the paradigm of writing back from his reading of the anti-colonial literatures of the 1960s and 1970s and uses it in a different context. This reveals that the resources provided by the ‘writing back’ model of postcolonial writing have been fruitful to Sheers as a Welsh writer in the years since Wales received a degree of devolved political autonomy from the United Kingdom as a whole, which has also been a period in which Welsh culture more generally has been attempting to articulate its own voice.To make such a claim is not necessarily to suggest that Welsh Writing in English is a postcolonial literature in any reductive or simplistic sense; but to suggest that some of the practices normally associated with decolonising cultures have provided fertile ideas to Welsh writers as they attempt to express that voice.