C1 Reading Test – Cultural Memory & Postcolonial Narratives

Read the passage (≈380–420 words) and choose the best answer (A–D).

“Cultural memory” refers to how communities remember through shared stories, rituals, and archives—not simply as a record of the past, but as a resource for imagining futures. Postcolonial narratives intervene in this process by revising who gets to speak and what counts as evidence. Where official histories often compress empire into dates and treaties, novels, memoirs, and films restore texture: the taste of rationed sugar, the quiet bargaining at a checkpoint, the sound of a borrowed language fitting awkwardly in one’s mouth. These details are not “extras”; they are the grain of experience that state documents typically flatten.

Yet recovery is not the same as reversal. Some works reject the fantasy of returning to a pre-colonial purity. Instead, they dwell on hybridity—the creoles, code-switching, and mixed religious calendars that empire produced. Hybridity is not celebrated as a tourist spectacle, but examined as a condition that both enables invention and leaves scars. The text may linger on a grandmother’s proverb that survives translation, and on another that won’t, reminding readers that loss is part of continuity.

Form matters as much as theme. Postcolonial writers often fracture linear time, making a trial echo a myth or a childhood scene interrupt a parliamentary debate. Such structures dramatize how memory functions: recursive, contested, never entirely finished. Footnotes may argue with the narrator; a glossary might withhold definitions, forcing readers to inhabit partial comprehension—the very position colonial subjects occupied in schools that punished their accents.

Ethics enters here. When authors write in a global language for global markets, they face pressure to explain their worlds to distant readers. Too much explanation risks domesticating strangeness; too little can harden into gatekeeping. The most self-aware texts stage this dilemma openly: they show a character translating for another while refusing to translate for us, thereby exposing translation as labor with politics attached.

In this sense, postcolonial narratives do not offer closure but literacy: a way to read power in archives and in silences, to hear the argument inside a proverb, to see how a borrowed map redraws a coastline. Cultural memory, then, is not a museum cabinet—it is a workshop where past and present fabricate futures, sometimes with mismatched tools.