This paper takes the privilege of Western values and assumptions over the
culture of colonized societies and, especially, the role of literature in rethinking
issues related to national sovereignty and individual agency, as a possible
starting point to rethink the possibility of erasure of local cultures before
Western homogenizing cultural domination. Initially, the nature of colonialism,
postcolonialism and anticolonialism is discussed, and indexes of nationalism
and culture diversity are located in those cultural clashes: though universal, the
colonizing project was endowed with the perception of a disparate non
monolithic world. The paper proceeds by considering writer and activist Merle
Hodge´s defense of the affirmation of local values, as opposed to the ones
inherited from the political and/or cultural colonization, and by analyzing the
dramatization of the contrast between the loss and the preservation of native
cultural references in face of foreign cultural domination in Paule Marshall´s
novel Praisesong for the Widow.
