Untitled - witz cultural

345THE POLITICS OFHYPERTEXTis by changing these assumptions (for example, our notion of identity) thatwe will transform our communicational activities" (Applied. Grommatology,147). We may add that the use of communications technology is also a concretizationof certain political assumptions. In particular, hypertext embodiesassumptions of the necessity for nonhierarchical, multicentered, openendedforms of politics and government.HyPertext and PostcolonialLiterature, criticism, and Theory 'Postcolonialiteratures, criticism, and theory have numerousimportant relations both to hypertext as a medium and toas a theoretical paradigm' These connections rangefruert;>rtfrom the cultural applications of this new computing technologyto the use of the hlpertext paradigm within postcolonial theory.First of all, hlpertext in its most commonly encountered form, the WorldWide Web, provides a particularly important way for the empire to write back.As Susan Nash Smith has shown in her work on Azerbaijan, former coloniesuse the Internet as a means of defining and communicating a newly recreatedidentity. In essence, the smallest country with access to the Internet canspeak for itself in ways impracticable if not virtually impossible in the worldof print. Take the example of Zimbabwe. When I went to Harare in August1997 with Gunnar Liestsl and Andrew Morrison of the University of Oslo tohelp set up a local website and discuss educational applications of the Web, Idiscovered that not only did Zimbabwe have a rich postcolonial literature,quite different from that of, say, Nigeria, but it also had its literary critics.Nothing particularly surprising here, perhaps, except that like so muchscholarship and criticism produced by citizens of former colonies, it remainedunknown to European and American postcolonialists because it never enteredthe distribution channels for printed books and periodicals outsideAfrica. In other words, Zimbabwe had its own literary critics who could writeabout their countryS literature, but there was litde chance of postcolonialscholars in the West ever reading their essays.Since I had already begun to create a section about Zimbabwe in my PostcolonialLiterature and Culture Web, I obtained permission from RinoZhuwarara, chair of the department of English at University of Zimbabwe, toinclude his substantial "Introduction to Zimbabwean Fiction in English,"which I divided into ten sections for its appearance on the web, and at the sametime Anthony Chennells contributed his "Rhodesian Discourse, RhodesianNovels and the Zimbabwean Liberation War." Sometime later. Irene Staunton.then publishing director of Baobab Books, donated both her essays on the literaryaftermath of Zimbabwe's seventeen-year civil war andher Mothers ofthe