SOURCE: Allen, Richard. “A Post-Colonial World: Look Back in Anger and The Enigma of Arrival.” In Literature and Nation: Britain and India 1800-1990, edited by Richard Allen and Harish Trivedi, pp. 138-53. London: Routledge, 2000.

In the following essay, Allen compares the treatment of British colonial culture in Look Back in Anger to V. S. Naipaul's The Enigma of Arrival.

Introduction

In a famous speech delivered in Africa in 1958 the British Prime Minister Harold Macmillan declared that a ‘wind of change’ was sweeping through the continent. Nationalism in the colonies was no longer something to be contested or absorbed but something to be recognized as simple political fact. For Britain and its colonies the post-colonial world had arrived. Consideration of events before and after 1958 suggests, however, that the adjective ‘post-colonial’ needs to be thought of as applying to a process happening over time rather than to a simple culture-...