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Chapter Six examines Heinemann Educational Book's African Writers Series, the preeminent literary institution of anglophone Africa. Critics have repeatedly asked whether the series is fundamentally imperialist - because of its links to the metropolitan publishing industry - or anti-imperialist - because it gave voice to so many politically engaged writers. This chapter, by contrast, places the series in the context of global changes in English studies. In the US and in metropolitan Britain, the series seemed to be participating in the fragmentation of the discipline: the breakup of Leavis's Great Tradition and the incorporation of minority writers into the canon. In Africa, however, it is possible to read the series as a part of an expansion and consolidation of English language and literary studies. How the series managed this apparent contradiction is the main topic of the chapter.

Chapter Three examines the influence of FR Leavis, architect of the Great Tradition, on the thinking of Kamau Brathwaite and Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o, two of the leading theorists of postcolonial literature. The chapter argues that Leavis's emphasis on a "living language," as he called it - that is, his belief that a robust spoken dialect is the basis of any great literary tradition - would be rearticulated by Brathwaite and Ngũgĩ in their calls for vernacular literature. The chapter goes on to discuss the close but fractious connections between the English department and postcolonial literature, arguing that Leavis's complex professional relationship with the discipline was one of his major bequests to postcolonial studies.

Chapter One examines the relationship between metropolitan and colonial writers at midcentury. It discusses the BBC as a model of a metropolitan cultural institution that promoted collaboration between metropolitan intellectuals and their colonial counterparts. It argues that aesthetic autonomy was a key modernist doctrine that facilitated cooperation across the racial divide. Black, colonial writers, this chapter contends, were instrumental in explaining the relevance of modernist aesthetics to a decolonizing world, using the concept of aesthetic autonomy to insist that the sphere of high literature could transcend the injustices of a colonial system based on racial discrimination.

Chapter Seven examines the evolution of Jean Rhys's long and unusual career. In the 1920s and 30s, Rhys was a typical member of the expatriate artist community of the Left Bank. In the 1940s and 50s, however, she disappeared, staging an improbable comeback in the 1960s, culminating in the release of Wide Sargasso Sea and the republication of her earlier fiction. In those intervening years, however, a number of high-profile Caribbean writers had come to the attention of metropolitan critics and audiences. This chapter situates Rhys's changing depictions of racial difference in this long context, exploring the subtle continuities and equally subtle differences between her interwar fiction and her postcolonial writing.

The conclusion contrasts two literary institutions - the Booker Prize and the Caribbean Artists Movement - to reflect on the difference between postcolonial literature and global literature in English. There are fine but important differences between these two categories, most noticeable in the types of cultural institutions associated with them. Both the Caribbean Artists Movement and the Booker Prize emerged in the late-1960s, attempting to capitalize on the surge of interest in writing from former British colonies. Their different methods of promoting their interests, this chapter argues, can tell us a great deal about the ultimate fate of modernist writing in the contemporary era.

Chapter Four examines the BBC's role as a major patron of Caribbean writing in the 1950s and 60s through Caribbean Voices, a weekly literary program. Using extensive archival sources, this chapter argues that the BBC served both imperialist and anti-imperialist agendas at the same time. Although the BBC, through its overseas programming, was designed to maintain a cultural empire of English speakers, Caribbean writers used the organization for their own purposes, allowing them to subtly criticize metropolitan dominance. Additionally, important "Windrush" writers such as George Lamming, VS Naipaul, and Sam Selvon parlayed their experience at the BBC into concrete professional opportunities in London.

Chapter Five assesses the impact of development discourse on the literary institutions of the period. At midcentury, the idea of economic development was crucial for managing the transition from imperial governance to national autonomy, especially in Africa. A case study of Amos Tutuola and his experience at Faber and Faber illustrates that metropolitan publishers began the 1950s with high hopes for cultivating African talent and audiences along high modernist lines, only to be disappointed by the fact that colonial intellectuals had a different understanding of what development could accomplish. This treatment goes on to examine how the discourse of development frames Tutuola's first two novels, The Palm-Wine Drinkard and My Life in the Bush of Ghosts, which the chapter reads as implicit criticisms of late colonial development models.