Abstract
This article considers how postcolonial narratives written partly in the firstperson
plural collective voice reflect recent critical developments in postcolonial studies
rather than echoing the outmoded “writing back” paradigm. Even colonial texts
such as Joseph Conrad’s The Nigger of the “Narcissus,” according to narratologists the earliest
example of extensive we-narration to which postcolonial authors respond, dramatize
the inherent multiplicity of the self rather than writing into being an opposition
between a colonial “we” and a colonized “other.” Early postcolonial we-narratives
such as Ngu˜gı˜ wa Thiong’o’s A Grain of Wheat, this essay suggests, also display
a narrative “we” that transgresses the conventional postcolonial center/periphery
paradigm. Here the first-person plural voice becomes a marker of multidirectional
inclusions and demarcations, equally highlighting the internal fragmentation of the
collective “we.”