Thirty-five scholars address a variety of intercultural splits and fissures that have opened up in the English-speaking world. They point out ways and means of responsibly assessing colonial predicaments and postcolonial developments in six regions shaped in the past by the British Empire and still associated today through their allegiance to the idea of a Commonwealth of Nations: North America, The Caribbean, Africa, India, Australia, and New Zealand and the Pacific.The contributors show how a new ethic of literary self-assertion, interpretative mediation and critical responsiveness can remove the deeply ingrained prejudices, silences and taboos established by discrimination against race, class and gender. (From publisher's blurb)