Defiance through rediscovery

the “Burmese english” memoir, imperial “borders”, and nation-building

Abstract

This article seeks to explore the complicated role that the memoir form of Thant Myint-U’s text, The River of Lost Footsteps, plays in the development of a combined national identity and literature in the context of Burma. The River of Lost Footsteps is read as a literary foray into Burmese sociopolitical history that is focalised through Thant Myint-U’s necessarily personalised lens. Through an exploration of “Burmese english” as a radical linguistic act of reclamation and rediscovery, this polemic comes to the conclusion that an understanding of language as a material pursuit is essential to the process of achieving the self-direction of formerly colonised nations and nation-states. I reach this conclusion by developing an argument that deploys the scope of a distinctively racialised authorial perspective. In doing so, post-colonialism can be construed as a twofold operation; to be postcolonial is to be theorised as such, but it also enacts post-colonialism through language use as a means of resistance against the naturalised imperial project of both past and present.