5.

Postcolonial Literature

The postcolonial text has been considered intertextual in that it represents the interplay of two types of
discourses: colonial and post-colonial. Postcolonialism rises against the Eurocentric culture, offering
redefinitions of both East and West and dealing with such issues as otherness, de-centralisation, ex/centric,
centre/periphery, national identity, vocabularies of power etc.
Theories of postcolonialism focus on a re-evaluation of both native discourse and that of the
metropolis; most of the time reality whether that of the centre or of the periphery is retranslated into a
new cultural code which disturbs, challenges and undermines conventionally accepted interpretations and
questions world-views. Textual boundaries are reinforced by provoking the collapse of the traditional
barriers between high and low culture, by combining political, historical, social, religious and cultural
issues into fragmented, unreliable, kaleidoscopic narrations as those appearing in the works of the Latin
American writers, Indian (Salman Rushdie, Anita Desai, Barathi Mukerjee, Hanif Kureishi), Africa (Chinua
Achebe, Wole Soyinka). Language undergoes the same process of hybridisation by violating grammar and
topic, by revitalising vocabulary, by mixing English and native dialects, by combining idioms and words
with surprisingly new effects. The pidgin language undermines the metropolitan authority offering a hybrid
product resulted from the combination of English and foreign idioms. The metaphorical displacement
operated on meaning is fictionally and linguistically translated through syntactic and verbal dislocations as
well as by means of relativising and questioning social or cultural certainties.
Bill Ashcroft, Gareth Griffiths and Helen Tiffin in their consecrated work The Empire Writes Back
analyse the experience of colonisation as reflected in literary texts which challenge notions of
Eurocentrism, undermine the political assumptions of the centre and emphasise the interconnectedness of
themes and discourses. They follow the development of post-colonial studies from the imperial period
when the colonised lands are more or less fictionally represented in travel accounts, documents and
diaries, fictional, photographic and cinematic appropriation, to the natives literature written under the
imperial licence1 and finally to the so-called post-colonial writing, intertextual by virtue of its
references to a cultural, hegemonic discourse which it undermines and subverts, its sometimes parodic
interpretation of the imperial discourse, its ludic preferences regarding narrative techniques and linguistic
acrobatics. Postcolonial syncretism, eclecticism and inclusiveness have also been considered intertextual
features playing upon re-inscription of history, redefinition of identity and re-evaluation of colonial space
and time.
Edward Said continues Foucault in asserting that no discourse is stable, absolutely true and
autonomous; the way in which Western writings construct the image of the Orient is analysed in the
stereotypes it produces. Well aware that discourse can shape or distort the image of the Other, he deals with
the process of representation as an imagining process which finally becomes a tool of power. His work
Orientalism represents a warning against false representations, against cultural prejudices and stereotypes
exemplifying his theory with false Western representations of the Orient, focusing upon the non-European,
former Western colonies. The East is generally equated to laziness, dirt, irrationality and violence while the
West is endowed with all the qualities that the East is considered to lack. Said offers a model of politicised
contrapuntal reading aware of the duality of the postcolonial discourse and its hybrid result. He considers
that without significant exception the universalizing discourses of modern Europe and the United States
assume the silence, willing or otherwise, of non-European world. There is incorporation; there is inclusion;
there is direct rule; there is coercion. But there is only infrequently an acknowledgement that the colonized
people should be heard from, their own ideas.2
Following the same directions, Homi Bhabha declares himself in favour of a reconstruction of the
subject beyond misrepresentations and stereotypes that he minutely analyses by critically taking into
account an entire apparatus of power. In his critical analysis problems of stereotypical representations are
combined with the awareness of the inherent ambivalence of the postcolonial discourse.
1
2

Ashcroft, Griffiths and Tiffin, The Empire Writes Back, p. 5

Said, Overlapping Territories, Intertwined Histories, in Newton, p. 287

An important feature of colonial discourse is its dependence on the concept of fixity in the
ideological construction of otherness. Fixity, as the sign of cultural/historical/racial difference in the
discourse of colonialism, is a paradoxical mode of representation; it connotes rigidity and an
unchanging order as well as disorder, degeneracy and daemonic repetition. Likewise the stereotype,
which is its major discursive strategy, is a form of knowledge and identification that vacillates between
what is always in place, already known and something that must be anxiously repeated. 3
Bhabha treats the duality of the postcolonial discourse in terms of mimicry regarded as the sign of
a double articulation; a complex strategy of reform, regulation and discipline, what appropriates the Other
as it visualizes power.4 In representing difference, authority is challenged and subversed; the signifiers of
colonialism are permanently formed and reformed and stereotypes are equally built and destroyed by
means of ironic parodies or pastiches of imperial discourse. This is a cultural production of meaning
functioning according to some metonymic and metaphoric relations. Bhabha analyses the process of
colonial discourse splitting where a mimetic representation of reality is counterbalanced by a parodic one
that denies reality and mimes it.
Hybridity comes to play an important part within the postcolonial discourse; it plays with
metaphorical and metonymical processes of similarity, contiguity or transfer, between two sets of cultural
values; most of the time this transfer between two cultures is represented by the immigrant personality,
caught in the area of in-betweennes and oscillating between them in an attempt of redefining his national
identity. Homi Bhabha in his analysis of nation as a narrative discourse, Nation and Narration suggests
such novels as Rushdies Midnights Children, Marquezs One Hundred Years of Solitude, Melvilles Moby
Dick, Tolstoys War and Peace as metaphors of the nation. Such novels constructed by means of
metaphorical movements use a certain type of doubleness in writing, consisting in combining a
horizontal movement in space and a vertical displacement in time so that the result should be a
temporality of representation that moves between cultural formations and social processes without a
centred causal logic5. This character of doubleness comes from conflicting demands for definite identity
and historical reform within the colonial discourse and for historical recuperation and redefinition of
identity within the post-colonial discourse; it also comes from the duality established by the permanent
oscillation between vocabularies of imperial power and domination (even if sometimes mimed and
parodied) and subversion and resistance.
Different theorists of postcolonial took into account different aspects of the coloniseds and
colonisers discourses meant to emphasise divergent realities, cultures, languages and political views
Bhabhas works are focused upon the critique of the imperial discourse; JanMohamed, another theorist of
postcolonialism, bases his theories upon the diversity of the coloniseds dicourse and the colonisers
ambiguous attitude towards acceptance or rejection of difference, whether historical or cultural. Peter
Miller and Nikolas Rose speak about the part played by language in the process of conceptualisation and
inscription leading to the governmentalisation of culture 6. Pierre Bourdieu is interested in strategies of
discourse construction stressing the social and cultural cleavage between coloniser and colonised. Homi
Bhabha, Gayatri Spivak and Abdul JanMohamed make a pertinent analysis of colonial and post-colonial
discourses, observing failures and inconsistencies leading to proliferation of fake dichotomies and
inappropriate identities.
Bhabha speaks about a metaphorisation of post-colonialism visible in many of the works coming
from non-English speaking countries. The general tendency is to create new organic metaphors of identity 7
out of the gap installed by baffling the western reader by means of reversed cultural elements, rewritten
myths and legends, by fully using the effects of fragmentation and dislocation. Redefinitions of nation as a
narrative construct are achieved through textual strategies, metaphoric displacements, sub-texts and
figurative stratagems8 which offer ambivalent perspectives upon the conventional dichotomy East - West,
while envisaging the permanent transfer of values between East and West.
3

Bhabha, The Other Question: The Stereotype and the Colonial Discourse, in Newton, p. 293
Bhabha, Of Mimicry and Man: The Ambivalence of the Colonial Discourse, in Rice, p. 235
5
Bhabha, Nation and Narration, p. 293
6
see Thomas, Colonialisms Culture - Anthropology, Travel and Government
7
Young, Colonial Desire: hybridity in theory, culture and race, p. 4
8
Bhabha, op.cit., p. 2
4

Colonial discourse is an apparatus that turns on the recognition and disavowal of racial, cultural, historical
differences. Its predominant strategic function is the creation of a space for subject people through the
production of knowledges in terms of which surveillance is exercised and a complex form of
pleasure/unpleasure is incited. It seeks authorisation for its strategies by the production of knowledges of
colonizer and colonized which are stereotypical but antithetically evaluated. The objective of the colonial
discourse is to construe the colonised as a population of degenerate types on the basis of racial origin, in
order to justify conquest and to establish systems of administration and instruction. (Homi Bhabha in
Nicholas Thomass Colonialisms Culture - Anthropology, Travel and Government)
There is in all nationally defined cultures, an aspiration to sovereignty, to sway and to dominance. In this,
French and British, Indian and Japanese cultures conquer. At the same time, paradoxically, we have never
been as aware as we now are of how oddly hybrid historical and cultural experiences are, of how they
partake of many often contradictory experiences and domains, cross national boundaries, defy the police
action of simple dogma and loud patriotism. Far from being unitary or monolithic or autonomous things,
cultures actually assume more foreign elements, alterities, differences, than they consciously exclude.
(Edward Said, Culture and Imperialism)
Splitting constitutes an intricate strategy of defence and differentiation in the colonial discourse. Two
contradictory and independent attitudes inhabit the same place, one takes account of reality, the other is
under the influence of instincts which detach the ego from reality. This results in the production of multiple
and contradictory beliefs. The enunciatory moment of multiple belief is both a defence against the anxiety
of difference and itself productive of differentiations. Splitting is then a form of enunciatory, intellectual
uncertainty and anxiety that stems from the fact that disavowal is not merely a principle of negation or
elision; it is a strategy for articulating contradictory and coeval statements of belief. (Homi Bhabha,
Locations of Culture)
... The identification of Hybridity with carnivalisation and creolisation as a means towards a critical
contestation of a dominant culture suggest that the threat of degeneration and decay incipient upon a
raceless chaos has been not yet fully redeployed and reinflected. Hybridisation as creolisation involves
fusion, the creation of a new form, which can then be set against the old form, of which it is partly made
up. Hybridisation as raceless chaos by contrast, produces no stable new form but rather something closer
to Bhabhas restless, uneasy, interstitial hybridity: a radical heterogeneity, discontinuity, the permanent
revolution of forms. (Robert Young, Colonial Desire - Hybridity in Theory, Culture and Race)
1. Definition:
The field of Postcolonial Studies has been gaining prominence since the 1970s. Its date is approximately established
by Western academy in 1978, the moment when Orientalism, Edward Said's influential critique of Western
constructions of the Orient, was published. The growing currency within the academy of the term "postcolonial"
(sometimes hyphenated) was consolidated by the appearance in 1989 of The Empire Writes Back: Theory and
Practice in Post-Colonial Literatures by Bill Ashcroft, Gareth Griffiths, and Helen Tiffin. Since then, the use of
cognate terms "Commonwealth" and "Third World" that were used to describe the literature of Europe's former
colonies has become rarer. Although there is considerable debate over the precise parameters of the field and the
definition of the term "postcolonial," in a very general sense, it is the study of the interactions between European
nations and the societies they colonized in the modern period. The European empire is said to have held sway over
more than 85% of the rest of the globe by the time of the First World War, having consolidated its control over
several centuries. The sheer extent and duration of the European empire and its disintegration after the Second
World War have led to widespread interest in postcolonial literature and criticism in our own times.
2. Major Questions:
How did the experience of colonization affect the colonized and the colonizers?
How were colonial powers able to gain control over so large a portion of the non-Western world?
What traces have been left by colonial education, science and technology in postcolonial societies?
How do these traces affect decisions about development and modernization in postcolonies?
What were the forms of resistance against colonial control?
How did colonial education and language influence the culture and identity of the colonized?

What are the emergent forms of postcolonial identity after the departure of the colonizers?
To what extent has decolonization (a reconstruction free from colonial influence) been possible?
Are Western formulations of postcolonialism overemphasizing hybridity at the expense of material realities?
Should decolonization proceed through an aggressive return to the pre-colonial past?
How do gender, race, and class function in colonial and postcolonial discourse?
Are new forms of imperialism replacing colonization and how?
Should the writer use a colonial language to reach a wider audience or return to a native language more relevant to
groups in the postcolony?
Which writers should be included in the postcolonial canon?
How can texts in translation from non-colonial languages enrich our understanding of postcolonial issues?
3. Major Theoretical Figures:
Franz Fanon
Black Skin, White Masks (1952)
The Wretched of the Earth (1961)
He mainly deals with the issue of colonization by language with a considerable impact upon one's consciousness:
"To speak . . . means above all to assume a culture, to support the weight of a civilization" (BSWM 17-18). Speaking
French means that one accepts, or is coerced into accepting, the collective consciousness of the French, which
identifies blackness with evil and sin. In an attempt to escape the association of blackness with evil, the black man
dons a white mask, or thinks of himself as a universal subject equally participating in a society that advocates an
equality supposedly abstracted from personal appearance. Cultural values are internalized, or "epidermalized" into
consciousness, creating a fundamental disjuncture between the black man's consciousness and his body. Under these
conditions, the black man is necessarily alienated from himself.
Fanon insists, however, that the category "white" depends for its stability on its negation, "black." Neither exists
without the other, and both come into being at the moment of imperial conquest. Thus, Fanon locates the historical
point at which certain psychological formations became possible, and he provides an important analysis of how
historically-bound cultural systems, such as the Orientalist discourse Edward Said describes, can perpetuate
themselves as psychology. The work of feminists in postcolonial studies undercuts Fanon's simplistic and
unsympathetic portrait of the black woman's complicity in colonization.
Edward Said
Said argues that Orientalism lies in current Western depictions of "Arab" cultures. The depictions of "the Arab" as
irrational, menacing, untrustworthy, anti-Western, dishonest, and--perhaps most importantly--prototypical, are ideas
into which Orientalist scholarship has evolved. Said writes: "The hold these instruments have on the mind is
increased by the institutions built around them. For every Orientalist, quite literally, there is a support system of
staggering power, considering the ephemerality of the myths that Orientalism propagates. The system now
culminates into the very institutions of the state. To write about the Arab Oriental world, therefore, is to write with
the authority of a nation, and not with the affirmation of a strident ideology but with the unquestioning certainty of
absolute truth backed by absolute force." He continues, "One would find this kind of procedure less objectionable as
political propaganda--which is what it is, of course--were it not accompanied by sermons on the objectivity, the
fairness, the impartiality of a real historian, the implication always being that Muslims and Arabs cannot be
objective but that Orientalists. . .writing about Muslims are, by definition, by training, by the mere fact of their
Westernness. This is the culmination of Orientalism as a dogma that not only degrades its subject matter but also
blinds its practitioners."
Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak
According to Spivak, postcolonial studies must encourage that "postcolonial intellectuals learn that their privilege is
their loss". In "Can the Subaltern Speak?", Spivak encourages but also criticizes the efforts of the subaltern studies
group, a project led by Ranajit Guha that has reappropriated Gramsci's term "subaltern" (the economically
dispossesed) in order to locate and re-establish a "voice" or collective locus of agency in postcolonial India.
Although Spivak acknowledges the "epistemic violence" done upon Indian subalterns, she suggests that any attempt
from the outside to ameliorate their condition by granting them collective speech invariably will encounter the
following problems:
1) a logocentric assumption of cultural solidarity among a heterogeneous people
2) a dependence upon western intellectuals to "speak for" the subaltern condition rather than allowing them to speak
for themselves
As Spivak argues, by speaking out and reclaiming a collective cultural identity, subalterns will in fact re-inscribe
their subordinate position in society. The academic assumption of a subaltern collectivity becomes akin to an

ethnocentric extension of Western logos--a totalizing, essentialist "mythology" as Derrida might describe it--that
doesn't account for the heterogeneity of the colonized body politic.
Ngugi wa Thiongo
Ngugi wa Thiong'o, a Kenyan writer of Gikuyu descent, began a very successful career writing in English before
turning to work almost entirely in his native Gikuyu. In his 1986 Decolonising the Mind, his "farewell to English,"
Ngugi describes language as a way people have not only of describing the world, but of understanding themselves.
For him, English in Africa is a "cultural bomb" that continues a process of erasing memories of pre-colonial cultures
and history and as a way of installing the dominance of new, more insidious forms of colonialism. Writing in
Gikuyu, then, is Ngugi's way not only of harkening back to Gikuyu traditions, but also of acknowledging and
communicating their present. Ngugi is not concerned primarily with universality, though models of struggle can
always move out and be translated for other cultures, but with preserving the specificity of his individual groups. In
a general statement, Ngugi points out that language and culture are inseparable, and that therefore the loss of the
former results in the loss of the latter:
[A] specific culture is not transmitted through language in its universality, but in its particularity as the language of a
specific community with a specific history. Written literature and orature are the main means by which a particular
language transmits the images of the world contained in the culture it carries.
Language as communication and as culture are then products of each other. . . . Language carries culture, and
culture carries, particularly through orature and literature, the entire body of values by which we perceive ourselves
and our place in the world. . . . Language is thus inseparable from ourselves as a community of human beings with a
specific form and character, a specific history, a specific relationship to the world. (15-16)
Homi Bhabha
Along with Edward Said and Gayatri Spivak, Homi Bhabha has helped create the field of Post-Colonial theory. His
seminal works, "Nation and Narration" (1990) and "The Location of Culture" (1994), bring Deconstruction and
Psychoanalysis into a politically and culturally charged arena. The result is a discipline that addresses the nature of
hybrids and that is itself a hybrid. Tackling the history of nations and colonies from the perspective of the "liminal
spaces" between dominators and dominated, Homi Bhabha insists that all cultural identity is essentially and
originally hybrid. By "liminal space, Bhabha means the site of conflict, interaction, and mutual assimilation that
every encounter between cultures involves. Cultures and nations, for Bhabha, do not construct themselves out of
their own essence; they do so through interactions with other cultures. Thus cultural identity is always and already a
conglomeration of differences; traces and traits of the Other make up the identity of the self; and no cultural
meaning is separable from its originally multi-cultural production.
4. Key concepts
The Orient signifies a system of representations framed by political forces that brought the Orient into Western
learning, Western consciousness, and Western empire. The Orient exists for the West, and is constructed by and in
relation to the West. It is a mirror image of what is inferior and alien ("Other") to the West.
Orientalism is "a manner of regularized (or Orientalized) writing, vision, and study, dominated by imperatives,
perspectives, and ideological biases ostensibly suited to the Orient." It is the image of the 'Orient' expressed as an
entire system of thought and scholarship.
The Oriental is the person represented by such thinking. The man is depicted as feminine, weak, yet strangely
dangerous because poses a threat to white, Western women. The woman is both eager to be dominated and strikingly
exotic. The Oriental is a single image, a sweeping generalization, a stereotype that crosses countless cultural and
national boundaries.
Latent Orientalism is the unconscious, untouchable certainty about what the Orient is. Its basic content is static and
unanimous. The Orient is seen as separate, eccentric, backward, silently different, sensual, and passive. It has a
tendency towards despotism and away from progress. It displays feminine penetrability and supine malleability. Its
progress and value are judged in terms of, and in comparison to, the West, so it is always the Other, the conquerable,
and the inferior.
Manifest Orientalism is what is spoken and acted upon. It includes information and changes in knowledge about
the Orient as well as policy decisions founded in Orientalist thinking. It is the expression in words and actions of
Latent Orientalism.

Margins/Outside
Spivak's work explores "the margins at which disciplinary discourses break down and enter the world of political
agency" (SR). She interrogates the politics of culture from a marginal perspective ("outside") while maintaining the
prerogatives of a professional position within the hegemony. Through deconstruction she turns hegemonic narratives
inside out, and as a third world woman in a position of privilege in the American academy, she brings the outside in.
(Hence Outside in the Teaching Machine [1993]). These contradictory positions have led her to develop the notion
that the center is also a margin, more like the center line on a road than the center of town. "This is the classic
deconstructive position, in the middle, but not on either side" (de Kock interview). This reconfiguring of the "center"
(or re-centering, perhaps) also changes the position and status of the margins: no longer outside looking in, but an
integral, if minor, language.

Subaltern
Spivak achieved a certain degree of misplaced notoriety for her 1985 article "Can the Subaltern Speak?:
Speculations on Widow Sacrifice" (Wedge 7/8 [Winter/Spring 1985]: 120-130). In it, she describes the
circumstances surrounding the suicide of a young Bengali woman that indicates a failed attempt at selfrepresentation. Because her attempt at "speaking" outside normal patriarchal channels was not understood or
supported, Spivak concluded that "the subaltern cannot speak." Her extremely nuanced argument, admittedly
confounded by her sometimes opaque style, led some incautious readers to accuse her of phallocentric complicity, of
not recognizing or even not letting the subaltern speak. Some critics, missing the point, buttressed their arguments
with anecdotal evidence of messages cried out by burning widows. Her point was not that the subaltern does not cry
out in various ways, but that speaking is "a transaction between speaker and listener" (Landry and MacLean
interview). Subaltern talk, in other words, does not achieve the dialogic level of utterance.
Ethnicity
Exile & diaspora
Hegemony
Centre vs. Periphery
Colonialism & Imperialism
For postcolonialism, "colonialism" revolves around a number of strategic reinterpretations. First, colonialism goes
beyond the simple process of creating colonies. It is more effectively appreciated through the way it leads to the
movement of peoples across the world, the ensuing sense of dispossession and displacement by large numbers of
them, and the continuing legacy manifested in the way "sovereign" political communities emerged at the end of the
second world war. While European colonialism first took place in the form of settlement colonies, this was enough
to constitute the starting point of postcolonialism Settlement meant a number of things:
the displacement of native populations and the inculcation of a European worldview on them;
the exile of white settlers such as through the transportation of convicts;
the transplantation of other non-native peoples through slavery and indentured labour.
These forms of diaspora hinged around cascading levels of marginality and perceptions of the relations between
centre and periphery. For instance, while white settlers felt rejected and inferior to their kin in the motherland, they
retained alternative hierarchical structures in their colonies based on racial, gender, and class divisions. Hence for
the people affected by colonialism, the type of postcolonial culture they produced varied markedly.
While it is important to think of colonialism as part of the experience of creating real or physical colonies, the
effects of colonization have had much more profound legacies that do not go away even when the a given colony
has moved on to a different form. On the one hand colonialism cannot "officially" end because there can be no
reversion to pre-colonial societies. In effect what passes -- in a rudimentary way -- as the end of colonialism has
often been recognized as sovereignty or the gaining of independence. But the communities that result are already
grossly distorted, forged through the transmigration into its borders as consequence of colonialism. On the other
hand colonialism has also become more manichean, reappearing in one form as neo-colonialism, while also
persisting in the discourse used in these societies. For example, critics who stress on the latter point see imagination,
language, culture, and even the mind as still colonized by the West. These are important assertions to make because
they raise the issue of how far a subject can truly distance himself or herself from the totalizing embrace of colonial
discourse.
AFRICA
Chinua Achebe (Nigeria)
Buchi Emecheta (Nigeria)
Nadine Gordimer (South Africa)

Doris Lessing (South Africa)

Ngugi wa Thiongo (Kenya)
Ben Okri (Nigeria)
Wole Soyinka (Nigeria)

SOUTH ASIA
Anita Desai (India. USA, UK)
Kiran Desai (India)
Salman Rushdie (India, Pakistan, UK, USA)
Rohinton Mistry (India)
Amitav Ghosh (India)
Arundhati Roy (India)
Sara Suleri (Pakistan, USA)
Kamila Shamsie (Pakistan)
Michael Ondaatje (Sri Lanka)

AUSTRALIA
Peter Carey
David Malouf
CARIBBEAN
Wilson Harris (Guyana)
George Lamming (Barbados)
V. S. Naipaul (Trinidad)
Jean Rhys (Dominica)
Derek Walcott (St Lucia)

Discussion of Midnights Children

The nature of Indian culture has always been multiplicity and plurality and mingling. Indians have always been good
at taking from whoever comes in... to assimilate the elements that are interesting and to reject the rest. So Indian
culture is not purist (11)
To pickle is to give immortality, after all; fish, vegetables, fruit hang embalmed in spice-and-vinegar; a certain
alteration, a slight intensification of taste, is a small matter, surely? The art is to change the flavour in degree, but not
in kind; and above all (in my thirty jars and a jar) to give it shape and form - that is to say, meaning. (I have
mentioned my fear of absurdity).
One day, perhaps, the world may taste the pickles of history. They may be too strong for some palates, their smell
may be overpowering, tears may rise to eyes; I hope nevertheless that it will be possible to say of them that they
possess the authentic taste of truth... that they are, despite everything, acts of love. (444)
What I wanted, one of the things I did try a lot in this novel to do is a progression from the kind of language of
Midnights Children which was an attempt to allow more voices into English, if you like, an attempt to allow more
ribbons, and therefore more thoughts, more kinds of things into English then Id noticed there But I also wanted
to try and make in this (SV) a language or way of speaking or combination of ways of speaking, while I
characterised to myself as having a great degree of fluidity, so that you could move between different sorts of
language at great speed without it seeming to be a problem. And parallel to that, that you could move with equal
speed between different sorts of writing or different kinds of emotional meanings. (Reder 99)