Hogan, Patrick. Empire and Poetic Voice: Cognitive and Culture Studies of Literary Tradition and Colonialism. New York: SUNY P, 2003. 289 pp.

Explores the relation of post-colonization authors to literary traditions.

In Empire and Poetic Voice Patrick Colm Hogan draws on a broad and detailed knowledge of Indian, African, and European literary cultures to explore the way colonized writers respond to the subtle and contradictory pressures of both metropolitan and indigenous traditions. He examines the work of two influential theorists of identity, Judith Butler and Homi Bhabha, and presents a revised evaluation of the important Nigerian critics, Chinweizu, Jemie, and Madubuike. In the process, he presents a novel theory of literary identity based equally on recent work in cognitive science and culture studies. This theory argues that literary and cultural traditions, like languages, are entirely personal and only appear to be a matter of groups due to our assertions of categorical identity, which are ultimately both false and dangerous.

"This is a thoughtful and intense engagement with a series of postcolonial literary texts. Hogan recovers lines of affiliation between these texts and the myths, assumptions, traditions, and works that helped inspire them. He demonstrates that an indigenous text can be just as complicit in the imperial project as any Western text, and that indigenous texts may be as anxious to revise 'native' traditions and views as they are to 'subvert' those of the imposed imperial culture." - Jahan Ramazani, author of The Hybrid Muse: Postcolonial Poetry in English