# 15 Decolonizing the Curriculum

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The book, by the way, it's free to download worldwide in perpetuity.
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I love the “in perpetuity”, free to download worldwide and so spread the word.
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Tell your, friends and family anywhere, wherever they happen to be in the world.
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Now, decolonizing literary studies.
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First of all, it requires context specificity so that, to decolonize in New Zealand and Australia, both of which are white settler colonies, it's quite different from decolonizing the United Kingdom metropolitan colonial center, or indeed in Ghana, in Singapore and the United States, which is a land of immigration.
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But it pretends not to be.
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The US is a good case study because of the different layerings.
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The US is a good case study because of the different layerings.
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And so the native populations and then the slavery from Africa and then the white immigrants from Eastern Europe and Italy and Ireland.
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And in each of these came with their own fears, hopes and big ideas, and created traditions of what it is to be hyphenated, to be both American and come from elsewhere.
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And each of them has contributed to the principles of reform of the curriculum, which takes us to the next point, and that is that, Ankhi and I think of decolonization from the perspective of what we call equity seeking groups?
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Now, equity seeking groups would include, basically not just minority groups.
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This is very important to state that this is not merely a book about post-colonial studies.
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And it's easy to think that because both of us work in postcolonialism, the book is about post-colonial study.
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It is much broader than that.
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And you can tell also from the context of the text.
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Now, equity seeking groups would minimally have to include groups such as non-hetero-normative sexual orientations, formerly colonized peoples, women who for ages and ages were subject to the thumb of society Jews and Muslims, among various others.
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What we try to be in the book is that we try to showcase the kinds of concerns of equity seeking groups that are not necessarily racialized.
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So there are lots of equity seeking groups that have fought very hard to free...
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the literary syllabus from narrow forms of thinking.
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So that's the second point - the third point is that there's a distinction to be drawn between decolonial and decolonizing.
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‘Decolonial’ is a term that is prominently associated with certain Latin American scholars.
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[names of scholars] who link it to the discourse of....
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Some of it is foucauldian in a sense, because they tie decolonial thought to the inception of colonialism and the way that the colonial era and they trace this back to the 16th century, it serves to create a series of racial economies and the hierarchization of peoples.
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So when they say we have to be decolonial, which is different from decolonizing, they're really talking about a return or restoration to, to simplify native forms of thought.
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So indigenous, which they claim existed and have been somehow distorted and repressed after the colonial encounter.
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Ankhi and I have a slight nervousness, with the idea that cultures remain pure But really the claim is a-historical that somehow of the 400 years, these indigenous forms of thinking can even be discovered.
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Rather, what we believe is that their reconfigurations - their attachments to other equity seeking modes of thought and so on and so forth, so decolonizing originally was about territorial freedom.
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So we associate post-colonial studies the first set of decolonizing thought was to do with coming to independence of former colonies from the 1960s and, and to many different tributaries and angles to what this meant, what the past meant, the colonial past meant, what the ambiguity towards one's own history meant, because that's another aspect of colonialism, was the ambiguation of attitudes to one's own history, what did all this mean and many, you know, sections or aspects of these questions were taken up in decolonizing.
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The third point I wanted to raise has to do with intersectionality.
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I'm going to illustrate what I mean by intersectionality in a moment, but also interdisciplinary modes of thought.
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So, for example, environmental studies, environmental studies has now taught us that you cannot understand the earth and our debt to it from one perspective, disciplinary perspective, so that, you know, environmental studies is typically multi or interdisciplinary.
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And these modes of interdisciplinarity, forced review or reevaluation of what we do in literature- let me give you a small example, those of you familiar with African literature will have heard of Amos Tutuola Amos Tutuola was a kind of a folklorist.
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And he wrote very fascinating novels.
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And one of them, ‘My Life in the Bush of Ghosts’, the little kid, seven years old, is running away from ghosts he has encountered in the bush.
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These are monsters.
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Really very nightmarish.
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At some point, he's running across a field in the bush, and as he stomps on the ground, the earth start screaming ‘ouch, oh! Oh!’ as he stomps on it.
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So he stops. And he's being chased. “Ouch Ew! Ow! Ooch! Please don’t! Eek, ow!” So afterwards, the boy, the little kid says “can the earth feel like how we feel?” Actually this novel or novella, which was published in 1958, was illustrating a really fascinating principle of interspecies ontologies.
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Interspecies ontologies, and once you think of interspecies ontologies, not just from the perspective of fantasy literature or science fiction.
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We are forced to rethink many of our categories in standard English literary studies.
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So now interspecies ontologies is a big deal in environmental study.
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That's what I mean by intersectional and interdisciplinary approaches to the question of English literature.
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I want to close my remarks by drawing a distinction between decolonizing the syllabus and decolonizing the curriculum.
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Obviously, they're not the same because the curriculum is wider, there are more competing interests and so on.
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Whereas decolonizing the syllabus typically has to do with individual, you know, professor dispositions.
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I'm going to share my own viewpoint on decolonizing the syllabus.
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I said, you know, people who come to study with you are obliged to know everything, to read everything.
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Because the principle that I apply is that my job is to Trigger curiosity, but curiosity, not just about, you know, Achebe. Curiosity about all of English literature.
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And so I treat my course...
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I have a course which I call Introduction to African Literature.
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But that's a complete lie.
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There's nothing introductory about it.
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And the reason why there's nothing introductory about it is that I think of my syllabus for this course as a portal for understanding all of, of, of world literature or all of the curriculum.
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And so in my class, you are as likely to hear of Aeschylus in my classroom on African literature, you are likely to learn of Aeschylus and Sophocles, as you will learn of Shakespeare.
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And in view of [name], you just name it.
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And it's because I think of the courses as interleafing...
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So you are reading, say, Soyinka’s‘Death andn the King's Horseman.’ But Soyinka read Greek tragedy.
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And in fact, you see, vestiges of Greek tragedy on his state, for example, in death and a King's Horseman.
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When the election over the big fight is described as full of vitality enters the market space, the market women sing his predecessor.
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But actually the market women are constituted as a chorus.
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The performance is a chorus function, but the chorus function that they perform ebbs and flows in terms of the affirmation and withdrawal of affirmation from him in relation to his choices, so that this choral function, the principle of chorality can be understood in part with reference to the Greeks.
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So if you come to my class to study, you know, Wole Suyinka You have to know something about the Greeks by definition.
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Let me give you one final, you know, illustration.
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Finding Nemo.
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Now I mention Finding Nemo because I have an episode on Finding Nemo coming out on my YouTube channel - I have a YouTube channel to add to my list of sins.
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Now Many of us have either been forced to watch it because of our children, or forced to watch it because of our children.
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So that's the end of this.
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Dory and Marlin, on the East Australian current swimming to Sydney Harbor, where they are hoping to find Nemo and they wake up This is after misadventure in a jellyfish forest with Stanley and so on.
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And Marlin wakes up and sees Dory down below, and Dory is playing hide and seek with some little turtles.
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So they come up and we get Marlin to tell a story.
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Tell us, tell us what happened in.
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Tell us, tell us what happened in.
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Marlin proceeds at first reluctantly, to give an account of the adventures that they had up to that point.
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Luckily, we have seen their adventures.
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Everything that has occurred to Marlin and Dory We have also encountered.
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Now as he tell this story This film shows a kind of recension or retelling of his account through crabs, crabs, swordfish, and then on to dolphins, who retell the story as they go up and down the water.
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And this is picked up by seagulls, who then take the message, this story to Sydney Harbor.
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What is actually happening here is that Marlin is creating an oral narrative of ... for the sea, for the ocean bed.
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This orality... actually, the first time I saw it, I thought, this is what happens in African literature.
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We study orality and literacy all the time.
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This is a form of the production of oral traditions.
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In this case, it is a heroic narrative of all the big things that they have done, except for one crucial detail in the account that he gives.
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He never mentions Dory.
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In fact, this is shocking because, as we know from seeing the film, all the escapades we have managed to get through successfully have been because of Dory's short term amnesia.
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So at the precise moment when in the film it is creating its own internal memory, so it's producing in the film a memory of what we have just seen.
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It erases the...
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sorry, it suffers the short term memory loss and reproduces the amnesia of the disabled character.
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Dory.
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This is a mood of intersectionality because also disability studies.
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But actually you can arrive at this by studying African literature.
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In other words, you can arrive at a thorough critique of Disney by saying... that's what I mean by we are not decolonizing because we are black, we are decolonizing because we love literature of the whole wide world.
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Thank you.
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Thank As was mentioned, apparently I didn't quite realize this: I’m the only, not only the only historian, but the only non literary scholar, in this, wonderful tome.
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First, I want to thank both of, my wonderful editors, understanding editors, for inviting me to be part of the larger project and also this event.
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It's been a real pleasure.
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I'm also, I'm probably the only person in this room who’s not seen Finding Nemo.
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And I will. I will correct that very soon.
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So... interesting...
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I was rereading my chapter, a couple of days ago in anticipation of this evening, and I was very chagrined and pained, to find, on page...
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I'm not sure if I wrote it here...
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a reference I made to the ‘post Trump era’.
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And, you know, it knocked me sideways.
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And I really thought about the kind of I often teach talking about the cyclical nature of what we think we know historically, and then what comes around again and how we have to relearn what we think we knew.
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And we relearn that by having learned new things and knowing better, we hope.
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So I think many of us in our humanities disciplines, many of my colleagues were thinking about how humanities are important in storytelling, in research, integrity and communication in teaching, in inclusivity, in justice.
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So that's something I want to kind of keep reflecting on.
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Now, my essay in the book, uses case studies.
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I found that was easiest way to write it.
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I had a lot of difficulty kind of fitting in to what I wanted to do.
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And now I look back on and I think that should have been so easy because it's so obvious, and I learned so much doing it.
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But the book really speaks to me.
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And then my, my own chapter.
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Sometimes we read our own stuff like, oh, it's terrible.
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And then we read it again and it's like wonderful.
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So who knows what I'll think tomorrow.
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But the, I sort of went with two approaches.
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One was very personal, in the book.
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So I reflect on positionality, teaching philosophy and how we learn over time.
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And then the second was about scholarship.
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And I reflected again on positionality, teaching new scholars and learning from what we do over time.
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I think one of the things that, really struck me is how literary sources intersect quite easily with, the history of medicine, which is my field and perhaps even more pointedly in the history of psychiatry, and even more niche my area of specialism, which is the history of psychiatry under colonialism.
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And, when we work with or write about or teach students to write about these primary sources, we mitigate these problems and the problems of these sources with the use of inverted commas.
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So we say it's a ‘native’ in inverted commas, or we write about ‘tribes’ because that's what was written in these colonial sources.
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In History of Medicine, the ‘leper’, the ‘lunatic’, people being referred to often as their perceived disorder or condition.
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So not the person first.
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The disorder, it becomes the person.
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‘Race’ also in inverted commas.
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So our sources, as historians I think are like your sources as literary scholars, they are language, meaning, metaphor, deception, context, interpretation and translation.
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Not all sources I know.
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In my teaching, and when I was writing about this, not all sources translate as we think they should, or as we hope they will.
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So literature, I found, is good at irony and also satire, history writing, and sort of an adjacent field of museum curation, for instance, and museum studies not so good at irony and satire.
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I'll show you what I mean by that.
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So I wrote about and I also teach with what is now a somewhat notorious cautionary tale in museum practice.
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And this is the Into the Heart of Africa exhibit at the Royal Ontario Museum in Toronto in the late 80s.
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It was curated to be ironic, but it was experienced by the city's black communities as an overwhelmingly uncritical display of racist imagery.
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Now this went on for about ten years, the kind of fallout from this one major national exhibition, only sort of coming to some resolution over a decade later with an apology.
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Such case studies, I know, help us to reflect on what we, imagine a decolonization of practice might look like when teaching about race moving away from, as my field has done, in a chronology of concepts, you know, taxonomies and evolutionary thinking and Darwinism and social Darwinism and 20th century eugenics.
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I mean, it's very easy to kind of have this shorthand of a linear kind of chronology of “oh this is what race meant, and this is why we teach it.” But really, I started to, I found an article, by someone who is now a colleague,[name] and her colleague at the time at Warwick, Mark Hinton.
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And they wrote that, quote,“one of the dangers of teaching histories of race and in particular of racial violence, without considering contemporary racism, is that you can easily end up detaching these historic acts from their legacies in contemporary society, and, most importantly, in the lived experiences of those in the classroom.” Students are not unaware of the need for some reflection on positionality, but I think it's easy enough to lose sight of what this might look like in practice.
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So, another case study that I engaged with and I'm going to refer to like to my chapter one looking at sort of 19th century, depictions of Africa, which is an area that I'm, kind of most interested in or other colonized spaces.
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We might look at the genre of travel writing, and also novels.
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But if we prioritize these texts too rigidly, I think we might be in danger of sort of replicating or missing some of the kind of racist tropes that come back in this sort of cyclical fashion.
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So the skill I think to impart to students is to question disciplinary authority, whether that's history, anthropology or literary studies or literature, by utilizing the skill set from one discipline to critique the other.
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For example, one might look for well-established literary tropes that we sort of internalize.
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I think, those that are dripping with references in my field to tropical rottenness So even within something like modern political science and I, use a particular case study, both in my teaching and it's in the chapter, I'm not going to read, the paragraph.
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It's quite lengthy, but I'll refer to it.
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So this is in a piece of modern political science.
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It's a bit old now, a couple decades old, but it's, still from a very prominent author.
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And he is writing about a slum, so-called called Chicago in Abidjan and he employs a language in this text in this book, and he talks about Chicago like more and more of Abidjan is a slum in the bush, a checkered work of corrugated zinc roofs and walls made of cardboard and black plastic wrap.
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And he talks about gullies of sewage, teeming with coconut palms and oil palms.
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It's ravaged by flooding.
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He talks about the kind of open sewage in this slum.
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He talks about children defecating in the stream.
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Alongside garbage and pigs drowning with mosquitoes.
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Women do washing in the stream.
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He talks about young unemployed men who are, gambling during the day and drinking and robbing houses at night.
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He mentions one man who he met, who he says has four wives and 32 children, not one of whom has made it to high school.
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So that's paraphrasing this particular piece.
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Now, to my mind, this is a medical text.
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It's a pathology.
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It's writing about a pathology.
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We're transported to a slum.
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And yet we’re in the bush he says, I think, let me just kind of wrap up I know I'm sort of out of time.
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So this kind of language, this sort of, engagement with, again, literary tropes that we've internalized, that we all kind of know and think we know.
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But then they hide in plain sight, don't they?
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So we're looking at modern politics.
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We're looking at a book that's called Coming Anarchy, and it's very concerned about the rottenness in the 21st century.
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It's concerned about African children, is concerned about and, disease and disorder moving from one place to another.
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These are tropes that we can see again and again and many works of the branch in the 19th century, earlier.
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And we see it in modern politics in the United States, where I'm from, where this gets taught again and again and the same language is important.
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Now, unfortunately, I don't have time to go into another kind of quite classic case study, which is about Sarah Bardman I’ll wrap it up there.
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Thank you very much for coming.
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And thank you again to the editors for, inviting me to contribute, Ankhi and Ato asked me to do a short chapter on, the history of the idea of decolonizing the English literary curriculum in the Caribbean.
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Which immediately raises the question Ato began with about, The kind of the necessary specificity of, what it means to decolonize and I’ll...
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if I have time briefly to come back to that at the end.
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It also raises the question about the fundamental kind of literary- ness of what we mean by decolonizing the English literary curriculum.
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One of the things that's, most, most was most tantalizing about this as a, as a prospect, as a writer, is that if you, read a lot of anything Caribbean writing, you'll be familiar with the, the, the the idea that the English Literary Classroom is actually a very, very fundamental trope.
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It's one of the key topoi in Caribbean literature.
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It's something that recurs again and again and again.
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This kind of primal scene of subject formation takes place whilst the the subject is, is studying English.
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I'm thinking of [blank][blank] But you can you can open almost any, you know, exaggeration, but you can, you know, a huge number of kind of particularly [blank] from, from the, from the late 20th century can contain this, this scene.
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And Simon Gikandi has written an essay about about why this is, one point he makes is, is that English literary study was a was a kind of key mode, a secular subject formation.
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That's probably quite a familiar idea.
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Another point he makes is about, the mode and purpose of English literary study in the anglo-Caribbean, which is in his, in his view, that it was very fundamentally, oriented towards inculcation.
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Right.
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It wasn't it wasn't trying to teach you...
00:28:38.000 --> 00:28:41.759
kind of ushering you into a world of creativity.
00:28:41.759 --> 00:28:45.680
It wasn't it wasn't viewing you or addressing you as a potential writer.
00:28:45.680 --> 00:28:59.359
It was it was it was viewing you and addressing you as someone Who was to inculcate this, who was to learn this by rote This is a very familiar, familiar story for different parts of the late colonial world.
00:28:59.359 --> 00:29:10.720
Other scholars have spoken about, the, the kind of co- emergence of English literary study with, with British colonization.
00:29:11.920 --> 00:29:22.839
And I think that's a really important point to start with, right, that the English literary study isn't something that kind of happens in England and then and then later is kind of transported to colonial settings.
00:29:23.160 --> 00:29:25.839
It's something that is....
00:29:25.839 --> 00:29:28.960
it co-emerges with the rise of colonization.
00:29:31.200 --> 00:29:51.000
And that if you like, the paradigmatic scene of English literary study, within the English literary record, as I say, is not something that takes place in, English literature in England, it's something that happens in, in, in, in the literatures of formerly colonized world.
00:29:51.079 --> 00:31:16.279
That has all kinds of interesting implications and I think one of the interesting, Ones is that in, in, in the kind of public coverage of the idea of decolonization, it is sometimes assumed that, to decolonize is, if you like, and, and and to, incorporate writers from formerly colonized parts of the world is in some sense to depart from, a notion of, of English literature which is very grounded in tradition, which is grounded in, an idea of the great writers of the past and something that I've tried to say in this chapter, and indeed, in all of most of the work that I've done, is that this is a very grave mistake, because of the history that I just described, of all of the writers in the Anglophone world in the mid to late 20th century, those that were most, conversant with, those that were most engaged with, this idea of the end of the literary tradition or the English literary tradition were colonial writers.
00:31:17.319 --> 00:31:31.079
So if we take the example Ato raised someone like Wole Soyinka if we think of dramatists of this period, who is the writer who is consistently engaging with Euripides with Aeschylus, with Shakespeare?
00:31:31.400 --> 00:31:33.720
Is it John Osborne or is it Wole Soyinka?
00:31:33.720 --> 00:31:35.839
Well, of course it’s Soyinka. Right.
00:31:35.839 --> 00:31:37.960
And that shoots through Soyinka’s work.
00:31:37.960 --> 00:31:59.799
So this kind of co- emergence of English literature as a discipline and a mode of writing that is fundamentally tradition oriented, that constructs the idea of, if you like English literary classicism, to, to speak to some of [blank]’s research interests.
00:31:59.799 --> 00:32:36.720
Seems seems to me a kind of fundamental way of understanding, both anglophone literatures in the mid century, in the late 20th century, but also what we with what we're kind of encountering, what we're grappling with when we when we talk about its coloniality and hence its potential decoloniality The question that seemed pertinent, thinking about this volume was, for this chapter was, was how did Caribbean writers and thinkers encounter that and, and try and respond to it?
00:32:37.160 --> 00:32:57.799
in the years immediately after decolonization, and I sort of looked in detail at what the University of the West Indies was doing, from the point at which, Jamaica and Trinidad would come independence in 1962 onwards And the first question I have is, you know, was there a great upheaval at that point?
00:32:57.799 --> 00:33:04.880
And indeed there was a new syllabus that was that came into being in the University of the West Indies in 1963.
00:33:05.559 --> 00:33:08.519
So I dug around to try and find out what was on it.
00:33:08.519 --> 00:33:30.119
I was wondering if it's going to be, you know, some kind of great radical reimagining of a traditional kind of English literary curriculum and the papers that were required to be taught, were English literature Chaucer to Wyatt Donne to Pope, Johnson to Byron, the Victorian period, and Shakespeare.
00:33:30.119 --> 00:33:38.000
later during the Black Power movement, they revised it, a little bit and they, they, they scrapped one paper and got a new one.
00:33:38.000 --> 00:33:43.319
They changed English literature, Chaucer to Wyatt to English literature, Chaucer to Spencer.
00:33:46.720 --> 00:34:02.319
So, so one of the things I was doing was sort of thinking about, you know, how this how thischanges through the second half of the 20th century, broadly speaking, I tried to sort of group it in into I sort of discerned there were sort of, broadly speaking, three movements.
00:34:03.240 --> 00:34:06.039
One I call enfranchisement.
00:34:06.039 --> 00:34:15.639
So if you start with this Chaucer to Spenser movement, one thing you can do is you can end the story by saying English literature, Elliot to Derek Walcott.
00:34:15.800 --> 00:34:28.760
So you can enfranchise you can maintain your fundamental model of what an English history curriculum looks like and what sort of literary value is and just bring new writers into it.
00:34:30.039 --> 00:34:37.039
And that's something that, broadly speaking, happens in the West Indies in the kind of late 60s into the 70s.
00:34:38.480 --> 00:36:31.440
The second general movement that I kind of, you know, this is a bit a bit schematic, but you could describe would be one of critique, to say, let's step back from this for a moment and try and critique what is taken to be the criteria for literary value and literary education might be, and I associate that particularly with the work of Sylvia Wynter, which I think was particularly kind of, that continues to be extremely influential in carribean literary thought And the third movement that I think you see in the kind of 90s and early noughties is a is is a kind of co extensive movement whereby it's but both object of study is expanding and object of study is expanding not just as to name highly, you know, writers like Derek Walcott that are very kind of recognizable within a, within an existing amount of scholarship, but particularly the movement towards, what we haven't seen is more popular forms in, in, in, in Trinidad, for example, it's particularly scholarly attention to calypso, in Jamaica, that scholarly attention to dancehall, and so to see a, a dual movement where an expanded purview of what it is that you're looking at, is accompanied by an expanded conceptual vocabulary for the way that you're looking at it and the kinds of notions of, If you like aesthetic thinking, that are being, practiced kind of or seen in these artworks and also kind of seen with or with these artworks.
00:36:32.400 --> 00:36:36.039
And I associate that particular with a Jamaican scholar called Caroline Cooper.
00:36:37.800 --> 00:36:39.679
So...
00:36:39.679 --> 00:36:53.119
there is a long, a long history of decolonization, but something that I very much draw attention to is, if you like, the the longe duree of that and the institutional half life that...
00:36:53.119 --> 00:37:09.599
these kind of colonial notions of, of what English literary study is, a kind of kind of seed within, within the institutions of, of post-colonial, the literary scholarship.
00:37:10.159 --> 00:37:13.159
and I’m more or less out of time so I’ll stop there.
00:37:21.400 --> 00:37:26.039
So thank you so much to Aki and Ato for inviting me to be part of this conversation.
00:37:26.119 --> 00:37:39.000
It feels apt because my first encounters with thinking about, these, these theoretical questions and post-colonial studies and the issue of decolonizing the curriculum happened when I was a student at Wadham with Ankhi.
00:37:39.039 --> 00:37:41.159
So it's great to be back.
00:37:41.159 --> 00:37:54.440
So I want to reflect on the implications of this book on decolonizing the English literary curriculum in the light of, some work that I've been doing recently, on the literature and history of travel.
00:37:54.440 --> 00:37:59.840
And Sloane mentioned, travel writing is a particularly complex and tricky source.
00:37:59.840 --> 00:38:04.400
Which is exactly the sort of thing I'll be talking about.
00:38:04.880 --> 00:38:15.800
So I'm going to do that by relating the themes of, the book to those of, my project on decolonizing travel studies, which I've been working on with my Warwick colleague.
00:38:16.039 --> 00:38:19.280
[name], who's a historian of early modern diplomacy.
00:38:19.440 --> 00:38:21.320
We both work on the early modern period.
00:38:21.320 --> 00:38:23.920
Him in a kind of historical context.
00:38:23.920 --> 00:38:25.480
Me in a literary one.
00:38:25.480 --> 00:38:33.119
So I'll tell you a bit about the project very briefly before drawing some connections between it and decolonizing the English literary curriculum.
00:38:33.800 --> 00:38:44.960
So for this project on travel studies began with, a symposium which Hido and I organized in 2021 to mark the 175th anniversary of the [Name] Society.
00:38:45.280 --> 00:38:59.119
And the [name] Society is a publication society founded in the 19th century in the kind of peak of British Empire dedicated to the editing and dissemination of accounts of voyages and travels.
00:38:59.360 --> 00:39:07.760
And in the 19th century in particular, it was really invested in emphasizing the connection between travel and colonialism.
00:39:09.000 --> 00:39:18.639
So the purpose of that symposium was to interrogate the entanglements between the field of travel studies and colonialism, and to propose alternative sources and approaches to shape its future.
00:39:19.000 --> 00:39:24.800
We followed up that that symposium with a couple of publications which are on the way.
00:39:24.800 --> 00:39:49.480
And our starting point really was a basic observation that while the, many entanglements between colonialism and practices of travel and travel writing have long been subject to scrutiny, less attention has been paid to the ways in which the categories, methods, and parameters of the academic study of travel have been, and will continue to be shaped by, Eurocentric legacy rooted in the colonial past.
00:39:50.119 --> 00:39:56.639
So in the project, we reflect on the exclusions which have long defined the field of travel studies and travel writing studies.
00:39:57.440 --> 00:40:08.599
And we try to propose alternative insights and perspectives through engagement with and of decolonial thought and recent scholarship on the question of decolonizing.
00:40:08.639 --> 00:40:27.280
So I’ll just mention a few, a few insights that we offer in this project: one is that the Eurocentrism of travel studies means that it tends to define travel travelers and travel writing in ways which privilege Western traditions of travel while excluding or minimizing others.
00:40:28.320 --> 00:40:33.280
We noted, for instance, that the field continues to rely on European languages.
00:40:33.360 --> 00:40:50.000
So even though, there's been lots of great work recently on, non-European traditions of travel and travel writing, we kind of point out that nonetheless, Western travel writing continues to be used as a sort of template against which other traditions are understood.
00:40:51.440 --> 00:41:03.880
We've been really interested in thinking about the kind of multilingual contexts that lots of travel writing emerges from thinking about the, kind of opportunities and challenges that multilingualism offers.
00:41:03.880 --> 00:41:08.960
Whether you're thinking about travel, in a literary or historical context.
00:41:10.519 --> 00:41:25.400
So, what we argue in this project is that the conceptual frameworks through which the study of travel operates often obscure our understanding of, and sometimes limits our access to traditions of travel, which are implicitly designated as marginal or secondary.
00:41:27.320 --> 00:41:47.719
And yet some of the kinds of scholarship we found very useful includes work in indigenous studies, which is doing all sorts of things to do with questions of knowledge and agency, trying to think about how we can look at this writing in different ways, to reconstruct, for instance, the role played by indigenous guides and accounts of indigenous voyaging.
00:41:48.760 --> 00:42:02.400
We've also been really interested in materialist critiques of post-colonial studies, which argue that these bodies of work often do not properly contend with the relationship between colonialism, imperialism and capitalism.
00:42:02.519 --> 00:42:07.840
And that's something that comes up in the, decolonizing the English literary curriculum as well.
00:42:07.840 --> 00:42:21.920
So it's a very broad overview of the project and some of the things we've been thinking about, questions about language, questions about genre and form, questions about knowledge and agency, and the entanglement of colonialism and capitalism.
00:42:23.360 --> 00:42:27.800
And I think I really enjoyed reading on King Arthur's book.
00:42:27.800 --> 00:42:36.719
So many reasons, learnt so much from it But I also found it to be in sympathy with the decolonizing travel studies project in lots of ways.
00:42:37.079 --> 00:42:44.880
It occurs to me both of these projects are interested in examining the relationship between the legacies of colonialism and processes.
00:42:45.119 --> 00:43:01.280
Processes of canon formation, and in trying to reshape these different fields, whether you're talking about English literature or, travel studies to make them more expansive or inclusive, and prepared to not only acknowledge the influence of colonialism, but to move beyond it.
00:43:02.000 --> 00:43:16.119
Both project also insist and I think this has come up in, previous panelist’s contributions as well, that the task of decolonizing means more than just adding, you know, adding more authors to the curriculum or syllabus.
00:43:16.760 --> 00:43:27.559
As the editors put it in their introduction, decolonizing the curriculum involves not just countering the traditional English menu of Shakespeare, Milton or Chaucer with black writers from each country.
00:43:27.559 --> 00:43:34.760
It also involves the introduction of new methodologies for reading literacy alongside [blank] and the breaking of ingrained habits of thought.
00:43:35.679 --> 00:43:44.280
So, in other words, I think what, what this book demonstrates really well, what is at stake is not only what we study, but how we study it.
00:43:45.079 --> 00:44:10.559
And what the book also shows is that this question of how is a broad and diverse one, as the editors put it, any response to the ongoing legacies of colonialism and to all kinds of global upheaval demands new modes of analysis that are at once conceptual, philological, translational, textual, generic, and more specifically decolonizing and the chapters in the volume, test out and theorize these new modes of analysis.
00:44:10.760 --> 00:44:13.360
You've heard a couple of examples already.
00:44:13.360 --> 00:44:22.400
I just wanted to briefly mention a few, which specifically helped me think through some of the questions Hido and I have been grappling with in the Travel Studies project.
00:44:22.920 --> 00:44:30.679
So one thing that we've, thought about a lot in the travel Studies project has to do with editing and kind of politics and editing, travel writing.
00:44:31.039 --> 00:44:32.480
Which accounts do you edit?
00:44:32.480 --> 00:44:33.679
How do you address them?
00:44:33.679 --> 00:44:44.599
How do you, how do you sort of present these accounts in terms of the editorial apparatus how do you go about defining travel writing at all?
00:44:45.519 --> 00:44:59.440
So for that reason, I really appreciated the insights of, the chapter on theories of anthologizing and decolonization, which talks about how anthologies are widely used in the teaching of English, but often under theorized.
00:45:00.280 --> 00:45:15.280
I was really persuaded by her arguments that we shouldn't think about anthologies as kind of impenetrable monuments as things to think with, and I think along the lines of[name] was talking about as well in his discussion of the his history of curricula.
00:45:16.599 --> 00:45:21.559
I really appreciated the chapter on First peoples indigeneity and teaching indigenous writing.
00:45:22.039 --> 00:45:39.119
I was particularly struck by the contrast that the chapter drew between Enlightenment Thinking, which sees, a kind of opposition between nature and culture, as opposed to indigenous at the seams, which as they put it, give land an ontological and epistemological importance.
00:45:39.119 --> 00:45:49.280
That is absent in Western culture, I think speaks to what Ato mentioned earlier as well to do with sort of interspecies ontologies.
00:45:49.280 --> 00:45:58.000
And that's something I think some of the work we found most exciting, intensive rethinking travel writing, is work which is thinking about non-human mobilities.
00:45:58.000 --> 00:46:04.760
And what might it mean if we think about animals as actors in history of travel, or even the landscape itself?
00:46:04.880 --> 00:46:23.360
If you think about land, especially in the context of climate change, as something that is itself moving, undergoing change, I will say enjoying the discussion, in quite a few different chapters of the book on orality, something Ato touched on in his discussion of Finding Nemo.
00:46:24.920 --> 00:46:31.960
And yeah, that really spoke to things we're thinking about again in relation to, trying to rewrite the history of travel.
00:46:31.960 --> 00:46:37.639
So that there's less focus on the printed text and more inclusive of, say, oral testimonies.
00:46:37.639 --> 00:46:46.760
Another really interesting example we've been thinking about is, early modern Chinese travel writing, which often took the form of poetry inscribed on the landscape.
00:46:47.599 --> 00:47:09.079
So again, completely different from the sort of printed book, yeah Last chapter I wanted to mention before I wrap up is, Jean Marie Jackson's Against Ethnography, where she really grapples with categories like African literature and minority literatures and mixed case, as her title suggests, against reading African literature in ethnographic terms.
00:47:09.639 --> 00:47:18.039
As you can imagine, that's, really apt for the kinds of questions we're thinking about as well, in terms of the links between travel writing and ethnography.
00:47:18.559 --> 00:47:23.079
How do you read this kind of literature without replicating its colonizing gestures?
00:47:23.960 --> 00:47:25.559
I'll wrap up there, but just, Yeah.
00:47:25.559 --> 00:47:27.360
I could go on - it’s such a wonderful book, thank you.
00:47:33.559 --> 00:47:37.760
Thank you. For my brief comments I have three sets of thank yous.
00:47:37.760 --> 00:47:40.239
The first is to our wonderful Warden, Robert Hannigan.
00:47:40.239 --> 00:47:43.800
Thank you for encouraging us to do this and for the introductions.
00:47:44.280 --> 00:47:55.320
Thank you very much to Julie Hage, development director, and Barnaby Norman, in the development office, you are ninjas really in how you can stage things so effortlessly.
00:47:55.320 --> 00:47:59.280
And finally, a note of thanks to my wonderful predecessor, Robert Young.
00:47:59.880 --> 00:48:02.519
This moment we are having, Robert is of your making.
00:48:02.519 --> 00:48:03.920
Thank you.
00:48:03.920 --> 00:48:06.880
So I have divided up my brief comments into three parts.
00:48:06.880 --> 00:48:07.880
Why now?
00:48:07.880 --> 00:48:11.480
Why Zadie Smith, on whom I have a chapter, and finally, why English?
00:48:11.920 --> 00:48:51.199
So through these, as the oft cited, passage from Conrad's Heart of Darkness goes, the meaning of an episode lies not inside like a kernel, but outside enveloping the tale which brought it out only as a glow brings out a haze, meaning glows to the tale like a haze waiting for the searchlight of the critic to unravel its dark lies in what has famously called this critical method delayed decoding, the interpretive gap between impression and understanding, whereby an outcome is depicted before the cause of that outcome is satisfactorily presented.
00:48:51.840 --> 00:49:13.719
Conrad withholds naming the sense impression or explaining its meaning until later, when models boat is attacked just below contestation, for example, inexplicable actions surrounding him, the Pullman stretching himself flat on the deck without even taking the trouble to haul his phone in, or the fireman ducking his head, seem to be related to sticks.
00:49:13.719 --> 00:49:16.719
Little sticks flying about thick.
00:49:17.039 --> 00:49:25.320
It's only when Marlow has finished attending to his duty as captain, and managed the next snag that he can finally decode the logistics.
00:49:26.000 --> 00:49:40.960
arrows, by Jove, we will make sure that I use this term from Conrad studies to explain why the discourse on decolonization has come after post-colonial literature and theory seemed to spring fully formed from the brow of imperial history.
00:49:41.480 --> 00:49:47.159
A delayed decoding is why we revisit the indeterminate time of decolonization.
00:49:47.719 --> 00:49:56.840
Simon Gikandi has evoked the temporality of the interregnum to speak of decolonization and the lives of subjects stranded in time, as it were.
00:49:56.840 --> 00:50:08.960
Speaking of Chinua Achebe’s arrow of God Gikandi points out that it is not usually read as a classic work of decolonization because it was written after the end of formal colonialism in Nigeria in 1960.
00:50:09.480 --> 00:50:38.360
However, the novel is not about the failed promise of a post-colonial state first descending into civil war. Arrow of God Gikandi argues, is instead about the crisis of decolonization, about how late colonialism came to shape and trouble the culture of the modern, even as it sought to reconstitute African society as an impoverished version of identities and histories that had already been questioned in Europe.
00:50:39.400 --> 00:50:44.440
So decolonizing the English literary curriculum addresses this crisis of the present.
00:50:44.840 --> 00:50:53.000
One of the crises of the present for this volume was the return of Rhodes must Fall to Oxford after the death of George Floyd on May 25th, 2020.
00:50:53.840 --> 00:50:57.239
Now you know that I was born and grew up in an erstwhile economy.
00:50:57.239 --> 00:51:01.400
My landscape would be flat if we got rid of all of horrible history's relics.
00:51:02.920 --> 00:51:04.239
But that is the point.
00:51:04.239 --> 00:51:26.079
In a new world order, you can ignore, museumize, or even laugh mouthlessly at the “no dogs, no Indians” sign, you have the aid of distance and forgetting not the case for the death of George Floyd forces us to confront systemic bonds of subjection, which derive every day from Western colonialism and its law of race.
00:51:27.119 --> 00:51:49.599
In an article titled Brutal Cycles, [name], once a Rhodes Scholar himself, talks about the discreet removal in 2016 of a painting of George Nathaniel Curzon from the dining hall in Balliol College, Oxford. [name] was the Viceroy of India, who oversaw one of its major famines in 1899 and presided over the 1905 partition of Bengal.
00:51:50.159 --> 00:52:00.159
Krishna hadn't heard of a public protest and assumed therefore, that this had been a quiet swap, I suppose, he writes, this is how colonialism works.
00:52:00.679 --> 00:52:03.440
Taking without saying please or thank you.
00:52:03.440 --> 00:52:06.320
Giving back less than is owed.
00:52:06.320 --> 00:52:09.320
Less than is bought without saying sorry.
00:52:11.519 --> 00:52:31.639
Oxford's decision in 2021 to not take down the statue of Rhodes, a white supremacist who used his Oxford degree, earned over eight years to consolidate his position in the Cape Parliament and the branding of Rhodes must Fall as censorship and cancel culture by the right made it imperative to sustain quieter revolutions elsewhere in the University.
00:52:33.159 --> 00:52:46.280
Decolonizing is the term used for the process of countries in Asia and Africa, who began in the 1940s to free themselves from Western rule. [name] saw decolonization as a program of complete disorder.
00:52:46.760 --> 00:52:51.360
It brings with it, it says in The Wretched of the Earth a new language and a new humanity.
00:52:52.000 --> 00:52:59.880
It is not the instrumental violence of colonialism reversed, but one that promises to entirely dismantle the racist worldview.
00:53:00.320 --> 00:53:03.320
And this alienates the colonized individual.
00:53:04.360 --> 00:53:14.679
Fanon's version of decolonization is not an oppressed people recovering the national identity, but a collective attempt to dismantle the very psychological foundations of colonial rule.
00:53:15.559 --> 00:53:27.719
The return of decolonization as a theory and practice signals that we are yet to make full sense of the afterness of the violence of colonialism visited on literatures, languages, cultures, and ontologies.
00:53:28.239 --> 00:53:34.320
We wonder, as [name] does, if decolonization is nothing but a fantasy without substance.
00:53:34.400 --> 00:53:37.039
“Was it?” And I'm quoting [name] here.
00:53:37.039 --> 00:53:43.719
“Was it ultimately only a noisy accident, a crack on the surface, a little chink on the outside.
00:53:44.119 --> 00:54:00.800
A sign of a future bound to go astray?” As has been said before, decolonizing the curriculum is often interpreted to be a tokenistic inclusion of minority authors or a nagging contextualization of literature in the history and afterlives of colonialism and Atlantic slavery.
00:54:01.159 --> 00:54:20.039
What it is really about is a critical, cosmopolitan plurevearsalism as [name] writes in his chapter in our volume As [name] states in the introductory pages of playing in the dark about her project of extending the study of American literature into a wider landscape.
00:54:20.920 --> 00:54:33.880
I want to draw a map, so to speak, of a critical geography, and use that map to open as much space for discovery, intellectual adventure and close exploration as did the original charting of the New World.
00:54:34.360 --> 00:54:37.360
But without the mandate of conquest.
00:54:37.760 --> 00:54:42.480
So our book is about charting a new critical geography without the mandate of conquest.
00:54:42.960 --> 00:54:49.480
The book has four sections, and I want to sort of give a very quick shout out to all the people who are not here.
00:54:49.599 --> 00:54:50.960
Who made the book.
00:54:50.960 --> 00:54:58.960
So the four sections are identities, interdisciplinarity, methodologies, and finally coming revisions.
00:54:59.239 --> 00:55:00.960
And these are not divisions.
00:55:00.960 --> 00:55:05.360
My essay, for instance, has overlaps with [name’s] chapter on African literature.
00:55:05.920 --> 00:55:09.719
Black British literature is not black identity, mine argues.
00:55:09.920 --> 00:55:15.320
While she says don't mine African literary texts for their ethnographic insights.
00:55:15.320 --> 00:55:36.119
One thing we didn't want to lose sight of in this discussion of decolonizing are the other terms in the title, namely English, literary, and curriculum[name’s] chapter in the identity section does just that, providing an overview of the English Department in Ireland as it evolves from a colonial system to the modern international university.
00:55:36.679 --> 00:55:50.960
In the methodology section, Elizabeth McMann provides pedagogical strategies for decolonizing literary studies in Australia and New Zealand, with guidelines drawn from Aboriginal authors and indigenized pedagogies.
00:55:52.119 --> 00:56:01.159
The strategy is philosophical as well as pragmatic, relating to transcription, transcription, archiving, methods of research and citation.
00:56:01.559 --> 00:56:09.960
In the interdisciplinarity section, Christopher Krenz argues that postcolonial and disability studies are and should always be aligned in their interrogation of power.
00:56:09.960 --> 00:56:19.280
Ronald Charles decolonizes the Bible as literature, demonstrating how the Book of Revelation has been wrongfully used to subjugate Haitian Christians.
00:56:19.920 --> 00:56:24.599
Finally, in the coming revisions, I'm only exempting the current company here.
00:56:25.320 --> 00:56:27.440
Finally in the coming revisions section.
00:56:27.440 --> 00:56:44.199
We have experts in different fields of literary study tackling specific pedagogical challenges, the teaching of pre-modern literature, especially in the European and Middle Ages with the counter-canonical or Shakespeare as a site of cultural contestation in the US Mexico borderlands.
00:56:44.199 --> 00:56:54.000
And we know what, how those borderlands are going to be [blank][name] talks about the multilingual provenance of global Anglophone goals.
00:56:54.320 --> 00:57:01.719
Just as [name] in a different section, had spoken about English as a vernacular, not a language of power and dominance.
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[name] in his magisterial overview of romantic studies, dwells on his own title of Regius Professor at the University of Glasgow, established by Queen Victoria in 1862.
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In response to the introduction of competitive examination for the Indian Civil Service, in which one quarter of possible marks were awarded to candidates for proficiency in English language and literature, we look at a wide variety of genres and forms across the sections.
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Poetry, anthology, fiction, short story, autobiography, performance and also Instagram Live sessions.
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So very quickly by Zadie Smith.
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So my chapter is focused on Zadie Smith novels and short stories which see imperialism embedded in the education system.
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Its foundations built into language, literature, intellectual traditions and different brow elevations of Anglo-American culture.
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In her new novel, The Fraud, set in 1870s England, the protagonist, Mrs.
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Tucci, has a theory that England was an elaborate alibi.
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Nothing real happened in England, only dinner parties and boarding schools and bankruptcies.
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Everything the English really did and really wanted, everything the desired and took and used and discarded, all of that they did elsewhere.
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in that traffic between England and elsewhere, in the dysphoric epistemologies, with recognizable forms and new forms that arise in between, I look at the decolonizing charge of Smith's world.
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Smith is not fitting Black British writing against a writing that is not delimited by the qualifier white.
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There are no pieties associated with the fact of blackness.
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In fact, she balks at the fetishization of black writers.
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Zora Neale Hurston had a difficult life and died in poverty.
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But Smith makes a case for her greatness that supersedes crude identity politics, including the notion that black women are the best readers of black women writers.
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Hurston is my sister and Baldwin is my brother.
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And so is Kafka, my brother, and Nabokov's, and Wolf my sister and Emit and Ozick, she states, finally, and very quickly, why English?
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The word curriculum is derived from the Latin word curare, meaning run, chop, gallop, hasten speed, travel, or rapidly flow.
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The concept of the curriculum is a unique, almost self-cancelling aggregate of dynamism and stasis in that the running, chopping and galloping, speeding and slowing of its route word happens along fixed pathways or ruts.
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The curriculum is, of course, to be adhered to.
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Just as race champions would be disqualified from the competition if they went off the beaten tracks.
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The Oxford English Dictionary lists 1633 as the year in which the latin term appears in the context of the university, a word associated since then with the processes of qualification and classification of a sequential education in our collaborative title, decolonizing the English literary curriculum, we have evoked at every stage the relevant history of the section of the literary curriculum we have been addressing, including the allowable innovation built into its prescriptions.
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Innovative possibilities that could be disciplined and policed before the new became credentialized as the normative with English, there is also the jumping of literature, language and ethnicity.
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You teach English to the English?
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I've been asked at checkpoints.
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This is a product of confusion and the study of English literature in an international frame, made increasingly possible by the noncurricular energies of post-colonial, comparative and world literatures and literary criticism enables literary studies to promote language studies as active culture media, not looking at languages ethnographically, not simply focusing on the languages of Latin Christian literatures.
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Our philological home is the earth, it can no longer be the nation Eric Auerbach has famously said.
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But John Kennedy points out...
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and his cultural capital, that canonicity is not just a transmission of value, but a transmission of social relations.
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The curriculum is both the form and the practice of the canon.
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Decolonizing the curriculum entails not only generating lists of non-canonical works that can be gobbled up by and as the canon, but challenging and rearranging the educational institutions.
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And there are several ways, several ways in which we have collectively done this, examining canonical books as well, literary texts circulating as translations and reworkings, amplifying the unlived underlives of excluded books and great books alike.
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New genres and critical traditions, finding new theoretical toolkits drawn from anti-colonial thought.
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I began my comments with the idea of a delayed decoding, implying that, like [name], we are yet to make full sense of the aftermath of the violence of colonialism.
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Ours is an ongoing effort to reconcile the long memory of English language and literature with salutary shocks of change.
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This common cause has succeeded in running perspectives from Africa, Australia, altera New Zealand, the Indian subcontinent, North America and East Asia, and across generations of scholars at different career stages in a wide variety of higher education institutions.
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Through the lens of decolonization, we have looked at issues of human rights, disability, and mental health discourse, the unfreedom of gender and sexuality, the relationship between the classic and the vernacular of major and minor literatures.
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We are an allied but non-identical group, as you can see here.
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This volume represents the process of going off the beaten track for the English literary curriculum as we articulate how it can or ought to travel in our post-colonial and global world.
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Thank you.