Decolonising the Literature Curriculum (Teaching the New English) 3030912884, 9783030912888

Table of contents :
Series Preface
Acknowledgements
Contents
Notes on Contributors
Introduction: Decolonising English
The Purpose of This Book
Contexts to Decolonising the Curriculum
Resistance to Decolonising the Literature Curriculum
Decolonising the Literature Curriculum: Reflections From the Classroom
Conclusion: Challenging Canons and Traditions
Works Cited
Part I: Texts: Decolonising the Literature Canon
Decolonising Pedagogical Approaches to Queer Postcolonial Texts
Introduction
The Limits of Postcolonialism: ‘Representation’ Isn’t Enough
Theorising from the Margins and Intersections
Decolonising, Translated Texts, and Close Reading
The Importance of Students’ Participation in Decolonising
Decolonising Pedagogical Approaches to Gender and Sexuality
Conclusion
Works Cited
Centring Women of Colour: Decolonising the Literature Curriculum with Kamila Shamsie’s Home Fire and Bolu Babalola’s Love in Colour
Introduction: Writing Back to the Canon
Decolonising Muslim Women’s Sexuality in a Hostile Environment: Kamila Shamsie, Home Fire
Positioning Black Women at the Centre of Romance: Bolu Babalola, Love in Colour
Conclusion: Transforming Student Experience in the Diverse Classroom
Works Cited
Smart Latinas Are Latinas: On Teaching Chicana/Latina Young Adult (YA) Literature as Feminist Resistance
On Teaching Chicana/Latina Young Adult Literature to Chicanas and Latinas
Meg Medina’s Yaqui Delgado Wants to Kick Your Ass
Conclusion
Works Cited
“Hard and Rocky” Soil: Decolonising the General Education Introduction to Literature Course with August Wilson’s Fences
Introduction
The Decolonising Project
Teaching in Isolation
Outing Myself in the Classroom
A Note on Required Courses: ENG 200 Introduction to Literature
On Wilson, and Fences
Teaching Fences
Conclusion
Works Cited
Redesigning the Curriculum: Teaching Multicultural Literature in Non-native English-Speaking University Settings in Turkey and Italy
Works Cited
Part II: Contexts: Beyond the Boundaries of Literary Texts
Decolonising Wuthering Heights in the Semi-peripheral Classroom
Introduction: A Semi-peripheral Perspective to Decolonising the Literature Curriculum
Decolonising the Colonial Countryside of Wuthering Heights
“I Am Heathcliff”
Conclusion
Works Cited
‘Culinary Cultures’: Theorising Postcolonial Food Cultures
Decolonising the Curriculum at York St John
Diversification Versus Decolonisation of the Curriculum
Introducing ‘Culinary Cultures’
Unit 1
Unit 2
Unit 3
Conclusion
Works Cited
Suggested Further Reading
A Border-Crossing Teaching Body: Reflections on a Decolonial Pedagogy for Literary Studies in a South African Context
Section 1: Teaching Bodies and Contemplative Practices
Section 2: Contemplative Practices and a Decolonial Pedagogy
Section 3: Case Study CERCO
Section 4: Conclusion
Works Cited
Teaching Academic Literacy in the Co-curriculum: Creating Culturally Safe Spaces
Introduction
A Tale of Two Centres
Case Study I: Reconciliation
Case Study II: Terrorism
The Power of Texts
Cultural Competence Considerations
Conclusion: Decolonising the Co-curriculum
Works Cited
Decolonising the Literary Doctorate
Introduction
Higher Education Context of Decolonising the Doctorate and Language Issues
Decolonising the Literary Doctorate
Action to Change Access, Content, Shape, Focus of the Literary Doctorate
Conclusion
Works Cited
Index

Citation preview

TEACHING THE NEW ENGLISH

Decolonising the Literature Curriculum Edited by

c h a r l o t t e be y e r

Teaching the New English Series Editor Charlotte Beyer School of Education and Humanities University of Gloucestershire Cheltenham, UK

Teaching the New English is an innovative series primarily concerned with the teaching of the English degree in the context of the modern university. The series is simultaneously concerned with addressing exciting new areas that have developed in the curriculum in recent years and those more traditional areas that have reformed in new contexts. It is grounded in an intellectual or theoretical concept of the curriculum, yet is largely concerned with the practicalities of the curriculum’s manifestation in the classroom. Volumes will be invaluable for new and more experienced teachers alike. More information about this series at http://link.springer.com/series/14458

Charlotte Beyer Editor

Decolonising the Literature Curriculum

Editor Charlotte Beyer School of Education and Humanities University of Gloucestershire Cheltenham, UK

Teaching the New English ISBN 978-3-030-91288-8    ISBN 978-3-030-91289-5 (eBook) https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-91289-5 © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed. The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. The publisher, the authors and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, expressed or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature Switzerland AG. The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland

Series Preface

It gives me pleasure to write this, the first preface as the Series Editor for Teaching the New English. I have the privilege of taking over the editorship from Professor Ben Knights, under whose expert and dedicated leadership the series has grown from strength to strength, building up a highly respectable reputation in the UK and internationally, offering scholarly but accessible higher education (HE) pedagogical research and providing a specific focus on English and related subjects. The change of editorship has provided me with the opportunity to take stock of the series. Having taught in higher education for many years and obtained a Senior Fellowship of Advance HE, the constant reflection on and development of teaching and learning strategies fit for purpose and flexible enough to evolve with changing contexts and student needs are central professional priorities of mine. With a background in gender and women’s studies, I situate my work in the context of intersectional analysis and decolonisation, key concerns in contemporary culture and universities. Teaching the New English serves as a vital place to investigate and debate how we teach in and out of the canon and challenge it, while ensuring the vibrancy and contemporaneity of English as a subject. The books in this series examine these and many other pertinent questions currently arising for the subject. Surveying the present higher education landscape, several serious developments give cause for concern but also prompt us to reflect on our agency and influence. English as a subject is facing a number of serious existential challenges to its viability. Universities are widely considering the future and direction of the English subject, in the context of an increased v

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political drive towards STEM subjects and subjects which have a directly vocational approach. English has conventionally not been closely aligned with vocational subjects, but clearly has a wide appeal and offers much creative potential for the individual student in terms of its application and shaping their own future. As the volumes in the series show, English is a vibrant and forward-looking subject which draws on a range of progressive pedagogical approaches and features the best and most innovative research-led teaching. The books in the series reflect the capacity of English and related subjects to challenge, revitalise, inspire and transform. Whether engaging in close textual analysis or the wider contexts beyond the texts, literary study offers a vital space for pedagogical reflection, reassessment and revision. Teaching the New English demonstrates the crucial role of pedagogy in facilitating the transformative power of English and related subjects. Based on the need identified by the English Subject Centre for a series of edited volumes on pedagogical approaches to teaching various subjects and genres within English, Teaching the New English continues to demonstrate its long-term appeal, relevance and resilience. Reflecting emerging trends and discourses, forthcoming volumes in the series explore topics and genres which have hitherto not been covered as well as more traditional topics offering fresh insight. Teaching the New English thus offers pedagogic scholarship informed by experienced lecturers and practitioners dedicated to teaching and to transforming both their students’ experience and the academy. Cheltenham, UK

Charlotte Beyer

Acknowledgements

My grateful thanks go to Professor Ben Knights whose constant support and encouragement in his role as Editor for the Teaching the New English series spurred me on to develop my vision for this book and to complete it. Ben has done so much to raise the profile of pedagogy in higher education, particularly in the subject of English and related disciplines. The success and impressive range of the Teaching the New English series is an enormous credit to his work and to the editors, authors and contributors in the series’ books preceding my own. Ben is truly inspirational, and I cannot thank him enough. I would also like to extend warm thanks and appreciation to editors Molly Beck and Shaun Vigil, to Jack Heeney and to the whole production team at Palgrave Macmillan. Their guidance, advice and support throughout the entire process of writing and producing the book have been key to its successful completion. Thank you also to the peer reviewers of the proposal and manuscript, whose constructive criticism and helpful suggestions both helped me sharpen the arguments in key parts of this volume and foreground the specific focus of the book as a whole. My warmest thanks and gratitude go to all the contributors to this book. Their incisive, wide-ranging and questioning chapters serve as compelling examples of teaching innovation and critical pedagogy in practice as we continue to decolonise the literature curriculum. I am hugely indebted to them, as well as to the scholarship of many critics in the field whose work continues to inspire my own. vii

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ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

I also wish to acknowledge all the students whom I have taught on my various modules over the years, whose generous and thought-provoking insights and contributions have helped shape my own pedagogic practice. Finally, heartfelt thanks to my daughter Sif and husband Stuart for their unstinting love and encouragement from the inception of this book through to its completion.

Contents

Introduction: Decolonising English  1 Charlotte Beyer Part I  Texts: Decolonising the Literature Canon  23  Decolonising Pedagogical Approaches to Queer Postcolonial Texts 25 Shamira A. Meghani  Centring Women of Colour: Decolonising the Literature Curriculum with Kamila Shamsie’s Home Fire and Bolu Babalola’s Love in Colour 45 Charlotte Beyer Smart Latinas Are Latinas: On Teaching Chicana/Latina Young Adult (YA) Literature as Feminist Resistance 65 Cristina Herrera  “Hard and Rocky” Soil: Decolonising the General Education Introduction to Literature Course with August Wilson’s Fences 83 Cheryl R. Hopson

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Contents

 Redesigning the Curriculum: Teaching Multicultural Literature in Non-native English-Speaking University Settings in Turkey and Italy 97 Sebnem Toplu Part II  Contexts: Beyond the Boundaries of Literary Texts  113 Decolonising Wuthering Heights in the Semi-­peripheral Classroom115 Ana Cristina Mendes  ‘Culinary Cultures’: Theorising Postcolonial Food Cultures133 Sarah Lawson Welsh  Border-Crossing Teaching Body: Reflections on a Decolonial A Pedagogy for Literary Studies in a South African Context153 Sam Naidu  Teaching Academic Literacy in the Co-curriculum: Creating Culturally Safe Spaces171 Arlene Harvey and Gabrielle Russell  Decolonising the Literary Doctorate189 Gina Wisker Index205

Notes on Contributors

Charlotte  Beyer, Senior Fellow of AdvanceHE (SFHEA), is Senior Lecturer in English Studies at the University of Gloucestershire, UK. She has written widely on crime fiction, feminism, postcolonialism and contemporary literature. She is the author of Murder in a Few Words: Gender, Genre and Location in the Crime Short Story (2020) and Contemporary Children’s and Young Adult Literature: Writing Back to History and Oppression (2021). Her edited book Teaching Crime Fiction (Palgrave Macmillan, 2018) was shortlisted for the 2019 Teaching Literature Book Award. Beyer’s Mothers Who Kill (Demeter Press, co-edited with Josephine Savarese) is forthcoming in 2022. Arlene Harvey  is an honorary senior lecturer in the School of Education and Social Work, and the National Centre for Cultural Competence at the University of Sydney, Australia. For the past decade, she has worked with colleagues from diverse faculties and units at the university to embed cultural competence into the curriculum and co-curriculum and, more generally, to support students’ learning during their transition into university. She is especially interested in the intersections between cultural competence and academic literacy in assessment design and pedagogy. Her research interests explore these issues, relating communication issues to social justice and equity. Cristina  Herrera  holds a PhD in English from Claremont Graduate University and is Professor and Director of Chicano/Latino Studies at Portland State University, USA. Herrera is an author of two books, includxi

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ing ChicaNerds in Chicana Young Adult Literature: Brown and Nerdy (2020) and multiple co-edited volumes. She has written widely on Chicana/Latina literature and has several forthcoming projects on young adult (YA) literature. Cheryl R. Hopson  is Associate Professor of English and African American Studies at Western Kentucky University, Bowling Green, USA. She is an essayist and a poet and is writing a monograph of twentieth-century novelist, anthropologist and folklorist Zora Neale Hurston. Sarah Lawson Welsh  is an associate professor and Reader in English and Postcolonial Literatures at York St John University, UK. Her publications include The Routledge Reader in Caribbean Literature (1996), Grace Nichols (2007), Rerouting the Postcolonial: New Directions for the New Millennium (2011) and Food, Text and Culture in the Anglophone Caribbean (2019). She is a founding editor and an associate editor of the Journal of Postcolonial Writing (Taylor & Francis). She is working on a new monograph, Caribbean Literature, in the Routledge series Twenty-­ First Century Global Perspectives (2022). Shamira A. Meghani  writes on queer, postcolonial and diasporic literary and film texts and teaches postcolonial and related literature in the Faculty of English, University of Cambridge, UK. Ana  Cristina  Mendes  is Associate Professor of English Studies at the School of Arts and Humanities, University of Lisbon, Portugal. She uses cultural and postcolonial studies to examine literary and screen texts (in particular, intermedia adaptations) as venues for resistant knowledge formations to expand upon theories of epistemic injustice. Her research interests are visual culture, postcolonial theory, adaptation studies and Victorian afterlives (specifically, the global/postcolonial dimensions of Victorianism and its fandoms). Sam  Naidu is a professor in the Department of Literary Studies in English at Rhodes University, South Africa. She is the co-ordinator of the Intersecting Diasporas Research Group. Her main area of teaching and research is literature of migration and diaspora, especially of the African, South Asian and Latin American diasporas. She also teaches and researches crime fiction and is involved in developing a pedagogy for community engagement.

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Gabrielle  Russell is Assistant Director and Education Lead at the University of Sydney’s National Centre for Cultural Competence, Australia. She leads the Centre’s work in progressing a deeper understanding of the theory and practice of cultural competence and has been instrumental in developing effective resources and research to cultivate cultural competence at the personal and organisational levels. Russell is particularly interested in how to facilitate a deeper understanding of transformative ways to learn and work together. Her research interests include the leadership capabilities and organisational structures required to be culturally responsive and to engage ethically and appropriately with diversity. Sebnem  Toplu is Professor of English Literature at Ege University, Izmir, Turkey. She holds a BA in English Linguistics and Literature from Boğaziçi University and an MA and a PhD from Ege University. Apart from numerous articles, her books include Cultural Materialism: Text and Context Relation in Jane Austen’s Works (2001), Diverse Aspects of Italy and Italians in Contemporary British Literature (2001), Fiction Unbound: Bernardine Evaristo (2011) and Life and Literature in Eighteenth Century England (2019). She has been the editor of the journal Interactions between 2002 and 2020. Gina  Wisker supervises doctoral students at the University of Bath; develops supervisors at the University of Tromsø – The Arctic University of Norway; and is Professor Emeritus at University of Brighton where she taught literature. Wisker has written 26 books and 140-plus articles: Key Concepts in Postcolonial Literature (2007); Horror Fiction: An Introduction (2005); Margaret Atwood: An Introduction to Critical Views of Her Fiction (2012); Contemporary Women’s Gothic Fiction (2016); The Postgraduate Research Handbook (2001; 2007); The Good Supervisor (2005, 2012); and Getting Published (2015).

Introduction: Decolonising English Charlotte Beyer

The Purpose of This Book Decolonising the Literature Curriculum offers a timely, accessible and unique examination of pedagogies and teaching methodologies used in decolonising university literature curricula. Discussions of decolonisation, its meanings and implications have become an insistent part of both academic and popular debate, even if these debates are frequently unfairly perceived as controversial. On the one hand, certain media discourses present decolonisation of the curriculum as a danger to the social fabric and the nation’s history;1 on the other hand, factual investigations show 1  Dawn Zinga and Sandra Styres, “Decolonizing Curriculum: Student Resistances to Anti-­ Oppressive Pedagogy.” Power and Education 11, no. 1 (March 2019): 30–50; Doug Stokes, “Universities should resist calls to ‘decolonise the curriculum’.” The Spectator, 18 February 2019. https://www.spectator.co.uk/article/universities-should-resist-calls-to-decolonisethe-curriculum-. Accessed 27 June 2021.

C. Beyer (*) School of Education and Humanities, University of Gloucestershire, Cheltenham, UK e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 C. Beyer (ed.), Decolonising the Literature Curriculum, Teaching the New English, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-91289-5_1

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that decolonisation of the English literature curriculum within the academy remains patchy and inconsistent at best.2 This book seeks to challenge misconceptions and flawed representations of decolonisation, by offering constructive examinations of how decolonisation works as an academic and pedagogical practice in the university classroom, specifically in the context of teaching English literature and related subjects. Decolonising the Literature Curriculum features contributions from higher education settings in the UK as well as internationally, including European countries on the edge of the Global South, such as Portugal, Turkey, and overseas contexts, including USA, Australia and South Africa. This global range of perspectives is an important and unique aspect of the book, enabling examination of pedagogies for decolonising the literature curriculum in a wide range of contexts. These include non-native English-speaking settings, postgraduate study, university writing and study skills centres, as well as undergraduate university degree programmes. The book showcases accessible and theorised practice-based chapters by prominent scholars with recognised university teaching credentials and commitment to decolonising English and related subject areas. This book demonstrates a breadth of pedagogical approaches for decolonisation which shows that academic scrutiny of oppressive structures and organisations has never been more pertinent, not least to undergraduate and postgraduate students who are hotly engaged in debates around these issues. The breadth of the decolonisation project raises vital questions across various academic fields and subjects, including English but also through the natural and social sciences and vocational subjects. However, although decolonising the curriculum has been widely discussed in academia and the media, sustained investigations of decolonising pedagogical practices used in specific subject areas are still lacking, particularly in English and related subjects. This assertion may seem contradictory, given the growth of postcolonial theory in the past 35 years or so. Jason Arday, Dina Zoe Belluigi and Dave Thomas point out that there is a long history of 2  David Batty, “Only a Fifth of UK Universities Say They Are ‘Decolonising’ Curriculum.” The Guardian, 11 June 2020. https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2020/jun/11/ only-fifth-of-uk-universities-have-said-they-will-decolonise-curriculum#:~:text=Only%20 a%20fifth%20of%20UK%20universities%20have%20committed%20to%20reforming,by%20 the%20Guardian%20has%20found.&text=The%20University%20of%20East%20 London,of%20art%20and%20digital%20industries. Accessed 20 June 2021.

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marginalisation and exclusion which decolonisation of the literature curriculum importantly seeks to address and change. They argue that, “[h]istorically, there are discriminatory patterns within universities which continue to point towards a reluctance for ‘gatekeepers’ to open the canon to different bodies and traditions of knowledge.”3 However, despite the proliferation of academic discussions of decolonisation, relatively little scholarly work has been done to date into theorising the pedagogical approaches utilised in pursuit of decolonising English. Important groundbreaking scholarship is now appearing, explicitly using the term “decolonisation” to describe its critical and hermeneutic practice. These works include Ruvani Ranasinha’s incisive article, “Guest Editorial: Decolonizing English” (2019),4 and Shannon Morreira, Kathy Luckett, Siseko H.  Kumalo and Manjeet Ramgotra’s edited volume, Decolonising Curricula and Pedagogy in Higher Education: Bringing Decolonial Theory into Contact with Teaching Practice (2021).5 In the UK, initiatives such as that led by Decolonising the Discipline, a joint initiative by academics at the English Association, the Institute of English Studies, the University of East Anglia, the Postcolonial Studies Association and University English, encourage discipline-wide conversations about decolonisation and English.6 A forthcoming issue of English: The Journal of the English Association on decolonising the English curriculum presents promising opportunities for reflection.7 Wider university sector engagement with decolonising English is to be welcomed, and the more angles on this process of transformation that can be achieved, the more effective it will be. These developments point to the timeliness of this book’s concern with decolonising the literature curriculum, meeting the urgent requirement for a multi-faceted practice-­based consideration of this pedagogical field of enquiry. This book offers that vital critical and pedagogical engagement 3  Jason Arday, Dina Zoe Belluigi, and Dave Thomas, “Attempting to break the chain: reimaging inclusive pedagogy and decolonising the curriculum within the academy.” Educational Philosophy and Theory 53, no. 3 (2021): 301. 4   Ruvani Ranasinha, “Guest Editorial: Decolonizing English.” The Journal of Commonwealth Literature, 54 issue: 2 (2019): 119–123. 5  Shannon Morreira, Kathy Luckett, Siseko H.  Kumalo, and Manjeet Ramgotra, eds. Decolonising Curricula and Pedagogy in Higher Education: Bringing Decolonial Theory into Contact with Teaching Practice (London: Routledge, 2021). 6   Decolonising the Discipline. https://sites.google.com/brookes.ac.uk/decolonising-­ the-­discipline/home. Accessed 27 June 2021. 7  https://academic.oup.com/english/pages/decolonising-english-studies-cfp. Accessed 27 June 2021.

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with decolonisation of English literature and related subjects. Its chapters contribute much-needed theorised practical and classroom-orientated case studies to inform and develop what Arday, Belluigi and Thomas call, “a pedagogically inclusive learning space that fosters a sense of engagement and belonging.”8 It is precisely this crucial and critically targeted focus which this book provides. Decolonising the Literature Curriculum offers pedagogical instruction and examination of reflective practice in literature teaching in universities. The book presents a timely opportunity for in-depth critical examination and engaged pedagogical conversations about both decolonisation of the curriculum and the teaching methodologies employed in pursuit of this aim. This book appears as part of the Teaching the New English series, the chief concern of which is with innovative and progressive pedagogy, teaching and research in English and related disciplines for the twenty-first-­ century undergraduate classroom and beyond. While it would be pertinent to examine strategies for decolonisation in other academic disciplines, such as theology or STEM subjects, such an extended engagement necessarily lies outside the disciplinary scope of this book and its specific focus on English literature and related subjects. There is certainly much capacity for developing more pedagogical research on decolonisation and investigating the variation in strategies in various academic fields. Scholars such as Julie Cupples and Ramón Grosfoguel (eds.) Unsettling Eurocentrism in the Westernized University (Routledge 2019) and Gurminder K. Bhambra, Kerem Nişancıoğlu, and Dalia Gebrial Decolonizing the University (2018) are engaging with this task. However, for the purposes of this book and its remit, the focus is principally on literature and textual study. While this Introduction addresses and examines decolonisation of the literature curriculum, in writing it, I also remain acutely aware of the unevenness and inconsistencies of decolonisation in literature curricula locally and internationally. I am also highly aware of the ways in which decolonisation and diversity may be utilised as marketing tools rather than for the purposes of consciousness-raising and liberation. In their article, “The University Went to ‘decolonise’ and All They Brought Back Was Lousy Diversity Double-Speak! Critical Race Counter-Stories from Faculty of Colour in ‘decolonial’ Times,” Nadena Doharty, Manuel Madriaga and Remi Joseph-Salisbury argue that, “despite the paradox of working under (what purports to be) a ‘decolonial’ agenda, widespread calls to 8

 Arday, Belluigi, and Thomas. “Chain,” 299.

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decolonize our universities have further embedded rather than dismantled whiteness.”9 This book’s specific focus on literature and related fields is vital because of the inconsistencies and gaps in decolonisation in evidence across universities nationally and internationally. Whereas some colleagues situate their pedagogical practice confidently within a shared and explicit collegial decolonisation strategy, others practice decolonisation strategies in isolation within departmental contexts where those debates are mostly absent and where various forms of privilege are regularly enacted. Some universities and departments exploit the vocabulary of inclusivity and decolonisation in what can resemble a cosmetic exercise, rather than undertaking a radical root and branch rethinking of programmes, syllabi and pedagogical practice. This book not only acknowledges but also problematises the uneven progress of decolonisation within Higher Education while offering constructive and practical pedagogical examples of how academic colleagues are successfully decolonising the literature curriculum, producing highly innovative and inspiring learning opportunities for students and creating transformational educational spaces.

Contexts to Decolonising the Curriculum While this book specifically focuses on decolonising the literature curriculum, it is important to outline the concepts and discussions around decolonisation more generally in order to establish some definitions of the term, along with its contexts and usage. The project of decolonisation draws on insights from a wide range of academic disciplines and scholarly thought, questioning and radically challenging dominant discourses and their assumptions.10,11 Although there is not the scope in this book to elaborate on the wider historical and philosophical contexts for the decolonisation projects, this introduction certainly wants to acknowledge the important work in this field which this present book draws on and extends into 9  Nadena Doharty, Manuel Madriaga, and Remi Joseph-Salisbury. “The university went to ‘decolonise’ and all they brought back was lousy diversity double-speak! Critical race counter-­ stories from faculty of colour in ‘decolonial’ times.” Educational Philosophy and Theory 53, no. 3 (2021): 233. 10  Gurminder K. Bhambra, “Postcolonial and decolonial dialogues.” Postcolonial Studies 17, no. 2 (2014): 115–121. 11  Margaret Kohn and Kavita Reddy, “Colonialism,” The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Fall 2017 Edition), Edward N.  Zalta (ed.), https://plato.stanford.edu/ archives/fall2017/entries/colonialism/. Accessed 20 June 2021.

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pedagogical enquiry.12 The 2015 South African Rhodes Must Fall student protests at University of Cape Town were against the use of coloniser Cecil Rhodes’ statue, perceived as a symbol of the persistence of apartheid and colonialism. The Rhodes Must Fall protests provided the impetus for the present decolonisation moves, although of course the history of postcolonial political, cultural, literary and theoretical critique and resistance is much longer. McClure explains that “[t]his led to an expansion of literature focusing upon the decolonisation of the university, which developed upon the longer histories of postcolonial theory and decolonisation.”13 The UK decolonisation movement has produced a range of activities and campaigns among students, academics and university departments. The Why Is My Curriculum White? movement started at University College London, with protests against “the ‘Whiteness’, Eurocentric domination and lack of diversity in the curricula.”14 The National Union of Students’ campaign, entitled “Why Is My Curriculum White?”15 suggests that “while the Arts and Humanities disciplines have the most work to do regarding decolonisation, all subjects have opportunities to reconsider teaching matter.”16 The wider academic community is now examining the need for what Njoki Wamai calls “better representation of non-white cultures in

12  See the following works: Rhodes Must Fall. “Mission Statement.” The Salon 9 (2015): 6–19. Patel, Leigh. Decolonizing educational research: From ownership to answerability. Routledge, 2015. Joseph Mbembe, Achille. “Decolonizing the university: New directions.” Arts and Humanities in Higher Education 15, no. 1 (2016): 29–45. Diversi, Marcelo and Claudio Moreira. Betweener talk: Decolonizing knowledge production, pedagogy, and praxis. Routledge, 2016. Smith, Linda Tuhiwai. Decolonizing methodologies: Research and indigenous peoples. London: Zed Books Ltd., 2021. Bhambra, Gurminder K., Dalia Gebrial, and Kerem Nişancıoğlu. Decolonising the university. London: Pluto Press, 2018. De Jong, Sara, Rosalba Icaza, and Olivia U. Rutazibwa, eds. Decolonization and feminisms in global teaching and learning. London: Routledge, 2018. 13  Julia McClure, “Connected global intellectual history and the decolonisation of the curriculum.” History Compass 19, no. 1 (2021):1. McClure further references Bhambra, Gurminder K., Dalia Gebrial, and Kerem Nişancıoğlu. Decolonising the university. London: Pluto Press, 2018. 14   Kay Hack, Decolonisation of the Curriculum  – a Conversation. Advance HE, 26 May 2020. https://www.advance-he.ac.uk/news-and-views/decolonisation-curriculum-­ conversation. Accessed 27 June 2021. 15  Noha Abou El Magd, “Why Is My Curriculum White?–Decolonising the Academy.” National Union of Students. (2016). https://www.nusconnect.org.uk/articles/why-is-my-­ curriculum-white-decolonising-the-academy. Accessed 27 June 2021. 16  Hack, “Conversation,” n.p.

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the curriculum and in the student and academic population.”17 In their article, “The University Went to ‘decolonise’ and All They Brought Back Was Lousy Diversity Double-Speak! Critical Race Counter-Stories from Faculty of Colour in ‘decolonial’ Times,”18 Nadena Doharty, Manuel Madriaga and Remi Joseph-Salisbury challenge the idea that universities are neutral institutions. Instead, they highlight experiences of racial inequality and practices that embed whiteness and privilege, thus hampering decolonisation. Addressing decolonisation of the curriculum in Britain, Ankhi Mukherjee highlights how elitist constructions of the literary canon uphold normative discourses and privilege, and offers strategies through which the classic can be reclaimed for postcolonial and multicultural literature.19 The chapters in this book investigate a range of decolonisation strategies, taking their starting point in challenging colonial curricula. Anne Kimunguyi defines a colonial curriculum by its unrepresentative, inaccessible, and privileged nature. Unrepresentative, because it selectively constructs teachings which exclude certain, oftentimes, crucial narratives. Inaccessible, because it consequently prevents many of its recipients from identifying with the narratives construed, whilst appealing to a historically favoured demographic. Privileged, because it ensures the continued participation, comfort and flourish of this select group of people, in both an academic and a wider societal context.20

In contrast, Arday, Belluigi and Thomas comment on the urgent “need for a curriculum that encompasses broader knowledges and concepts that drew links between local, national and global histories which are able to reflect the varying diasporas, [but is] absent in the ever-increasing diverse university space.”21 For the purposes of my discussion here, then, Kimunguyi’s inclusive definition captures the spirit and content of this book and its chapters. She establishes that decolonisation is not a static but rather an evolving term, in terms of its meaning and practice. It e­ ncompasses 17  Wamai, “Decolonising the Academy—Towards a Global Movement.” University World News Global Edition, 27 March 2016. https://www.universityworldnews.com/post. php?story=20160524135416842. Accessed 20 June 2021. 18  Doharty, Madriaga, and Joseph-Salisbury. “Diversity double-speak,” 233–244. 19  Ankhi Mukherjee, “‘What Is a Classic?’: International Literary Criticism and the Classic Question.” PMLA 125, no. 4 (2010): 1026–42. 20  Hack, “Conversation,” n.p. 21  Arday, Belluigi, and Thomas. “Chain,” 307.

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the work to include hitherto silenced narratives and texts into the curriculum, as well as rethinking the “educational landscape” which, she argues, “must be met with a dramatic redress.” Kimunguyi concludes that “[f]rom restructuring syllabi, to ensuring diverse staff and students, to changing what we are taught and how we are taught it, these initiatives fall under the umbrella of this wider agenda.”22 The chapters in this book thus address decolonisation of the literature curriculum nationally, internationally and globally. It is clear from these ongoing debates that decolonising the literature curriculum is a vital step in diversifying pedagogy and educational establishments. As we have seen, decolonisation of the literature curriculum thus has a long history through postcolonial criticism and writing; however, for the purposes of this book, the chief focus is on decolonisation of the curriculum as a specific concern and movement which started in the mid-2010s.

Resistance to Decolonising the Literature Curriculum Decolonisation of the literature curriculum has been enthusiastically taken up by many students and academics. It has resulted in much innovative pedagogical practice and academic subject revision and renewal, as the chapters in this book bear rich evidence of. However, it should also be acknowledged that decolonisation has met with, and continues to encounter, considerable resistance—within universities, their departments and subject fields, and more widely in society. Given its potential to radically challenge Western knowledge and education, it is perhaps not surprising that the movement to decolonise the curriculum has resulted in what Daniel Trilling calls a “moral panic.”23 This moral panic has been evident in newspaper and popular media reporting which has frequently distorted and misrepresented decolonisation. The resistance to decolonisation and its critical examination of and challenge to racism can be seen in the right-­ wing backlash against “wokeism.”24 “Wokeism” has been defined as “a  Hack, “Conversation,” n.p.  Daniel Trilling, “Why Is the UK Government Suddenly Targeting ‘Critical Race Theory’?” The Guardian, 23 October 2020. https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2020/oct/23/uk-critical-race-theory-trump-conservatives-structural-inequality. Accessed 20 June 2021. 24  David Theo Goldberg, The war on critical race theory, Boston Review, 7 May 2021. http://bostonreview.net/race-politics/david-theo-goldberg-war-critical-race-theory?fbclid 22 23

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disparaging term for attentiveness to claims for equality and representation from minority groups.”25 The term is frequently used to dismiss decolonisation work in a general way and to mock individuals and groups. The backlash, reflected in the use of terms like “wokeism” and the “war on woke,” is resulting in politically driven attempts to resist decolonisation, discredit multiculturalism and disown the Black Lives Matter movement.26,27 The “war on woke” shows that decolonisation work is not abstract or divorced from real life or everyday concerns, nor is decolonisation work without consequence for the individuals or groups who pursue it—quite the contrary. However, “anti-woke” developments, although potentially detrimental to decolonisation work because they seek to construct and perpetrate misleading and often directly harmful perceptions of decolonisation, cannot and will not halt this vital work from continuing. There is widespread unevenness across the higher education sector in the UK and internationally, in terms of how enthusiastically or even consistently the project of decolonising the literature curriculum is embraced. Despite the initiatives organised under the auspices of Decolonising the Discipline,28 there is by no means a consensus across the university sector in the UK or abroad that the literature curriculum should be colonised or on how it should be accomplished. In a 2020 article in The Guardian, David Batty investigated the resistance to decolonisation in many British universities, stating that both academics and students had highlighted that, in their experience, many universities apparently failed to grasp that, “decolonising the curriculum” went beyond adding black and non-western scholars to reading lists, arguing that reform should involve challenging and remaking the current pedagogy, which was rooted in imperial and colonial ideas about knowledge and learning, at an institutional level.29

=IwAR3Jv2Mb34sqHEnX9MzLwbkRcH09wGRvFgSsHu4LijrBuG3NH0OiwY1Jkx0. Accessed 31 May 2021. 25   “Wokeism,” Macmillan Dictionary, https://www.macmillandictionary.com/dictionary/british/wokeism. Accessed 9 October 2021. 26  Goldberg, “Critical,” n.p. 27  Trilling, “Why,” n.p. 28   Decolonising the Discipline, https://sites.google.com/brookes.ac.uk/decolonising-­ the-­discipline/home. Accessed 29 June 2021. 29  Batty, “Fifth,” n.p.

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Sunny Singh echoes this view in the assertion that attitudes to decolonisation in UK Higher Education largely range from “unconcerned” to “hostile.”30 Similarly, Batty reports that Heidi Mirza noted, “We’ve still got archaic, anachronistic tutors and curricula that’s never changed. I’m shocked at how stark this is.”31 When Cambridge University students asked for the inclusion of more non-white authors and critics to be taught on their English degrees, the resulting media backlash saw leading students targeted by online hate and abuse, and the students’ genuine concern dismissed by government ministers.32 Lottie Hoare cautions against opportunist commercialisation of the term, noting how terms such as decolonising the curriculum and diversity run the risk of being used as “buzz words” in student recruitment and marketing and by institutions wishing to give the impression of inclusivity.33 The resistance to change and transformation in some universities and the reluctance to support practical curricular change reflect the broadly held but unquestioned assumption that established white Western male scholarship is superior in rigour and sophistication.34 The backlash against these specific forms of change demonstrates how highly charged decolonisation is as a cultural project, but also shows how vitally important it is to continue the work. This book critically engages with the diversity of literature curricula nationally and internationally. Far from assuming universality of experience or application, this critical endeavour acknowledges that the literature curriculum varies across nations and individual universities. Some university departments remain highly resistant to decolonisation efforts, meaning that individual colleagues pursuing a decolonisation agenda are isolated and struggling to make an impact institutionally. Other universities not only encourage but actively embed decolonisation through a range of cross-institutional measures as well as within individual academic areas and fields. Important work is being undertaken, including by  Batty, “Fifth,” n.p.  Batty, “Fifth,” n.p. 32  Harriet Swain, “Students want their curriculums decolonised. Are universities listening.” The Guardian, 13 March 2019. https://www.theguardian.com/education/2019/jan/30/ students-want-their-curriculums-decolonised-are-universities-listening. Accessed 20 June 2021. 33  Lottie Hoare, Decolonising the Curriculum: A Conversation. CRASSH Blog, 26 October 2016. http://www.crassh.cam.ac.uk/blog/post/decolonising-the-curriculuma-conversation 34  Hoare, “Decolonising,” n.p. 30 31

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emerging scholars, on decolonising the literature curriculum, as evidenced in Aimee Merrydew’s research project.35 Decolonisation strategies differ depending on the context, and this book acknowledges that, through the inclusion of chapters demonstrating the specific challenges posed by those varying contexts as well as detailing the differing pedagogical strategies academics employ depending on context. The result of this attention to specificity and diversity of practice and experience is, as the book bears out, an emerging nuanced and complex picture of a discipline in process and change. The chapters in this book critically reflect on their own assumptions regarding privilege and position themselves carefully within ongoing debates around decolonisation of the literature curriculum. This book makes a multi-faceted and inclusive contribution to decolonisation of pedagogical practice in English literature and related subjects.

Decolonising the Literature Curriculum: Reflections From the Classroom This book’s contributions to these debates investigate pedagogical, practical and theoretical questions around how we decolonise the literature curriculum. The chapters present case studies of strategies or individual literary texts we use in our own classroom practice, with some chapters focusing on entire modules and undergraduate degree programmes, and other chapters focusing on contexts for learning such as student support departments within universities which draw on literature teaching. In presenting these compelling studies of decolonisation in action, the chapters in this book thus demonstrate how university literature pedagogy reflects “an ever-increasingly diverse and multi-ethnic British population”36 through a curriculum which is up-to-date and open to change and revision. The book’s contents are divided into two themed sections, broadly entitled “Texts” and “Contexts.” The rationale for this structure is to enable those essays whose content and approach chime to generate synergies and encourage the reader to create connections. The opening up and widening out of the literature curriculum to incorporate a focus on debates 35  Merrydew is a research student at Keele University, researching decolonisation and literature; see Aimee Merrydew, “Tackling Inequalities: Building a ‘healthier’ Curriculum through Feminist Reflexivity,” KITE Student Education Conference 2020, University of Keele. 36  Arday, Belluigi, and Thomas, “Chain.”

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or issues outside of literature and the text is emulated through the structural progression of the book, thus illustrating the effects of decolonisation of the literature curriculum. Part I entitled “Texts: Decolonising the Literature Canon” provides focused case studies on decolonisation using specific texts in the undergraduate classroom as part of pedagogical strategies. The chapters in this section do not suggest that a token text can or will serve as a nod to decolonisation on an otherwise unreconstructed syllabus. What the chapters do offer is an exploration of how particular texts or modules present representations through challenging themes and/or textual techniques which promote a challenge to and rethinking of the canon. Through their case studies, these chapters thus evidence how English as a subject can be reimagined and transformed by decolonisation, enabling both diverse academics and student cohorts to engage with the subject and be represented. The chapters in this section of the book focus on specific marginalised narratives in the curriculum and how to bring those narratives into the light and into focus. Shamira A.  Meghani opens the book with her chapter entitled “Decolonising Pedagogical Approaches to Queer Postcolonial Texts.” In her chapter, Meghani reflects on her teaching of queer postcolonial texts, using a range of higher education settings as the context for her scrutiny of decolonising the literature curriculum. Through her incisive examination, Meghani sets the tone for this book’s investigations. She details the various starting points from which students approach and read queer postcolonial literature, insisting on a pedagogical approach which explicitly rejects damaging and one-dimensional stereotypes or exoticisation, utilising literary study to investigate the decolonisation of both sexuality and literature. Asking vital questions about the extent and purpose of decolonisation, Meghani examines the pitfalls and problems arising from decolonising the literature curriculum, particularly if this is undertaken in what she terms an “additive” manner. My chapter, “Centring Women of Colour: Decolonising the Literature Curriculum with Kamila Shamsie’s Home Fire and Bolu Babalola’s Love in Colour,” investigates how contemporary literary works by women of colour can be used as part of an advanced undergraduate English module specifically focusing on decolonisation. In the chapter, I reflect on my experiences and pedagogical practice in relation to teaching two recent works, British-Pakistani author Kamila Shamsie’s novel Home Fire (2017) and black British author Bolu Babalola’s 2020 short story collection, Love

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in Colour, with specific attention to decolonising mythology, sexuality and genre. Drawing on feminist and postcolonial criticism to inform my pedagogy in the contemporary diverse classroom, my chapter demonstrates the crucial role and function literary texts have in challenging the canon and decolonising the literature curriculum, thereby transforming students’ experience of English as a subject. My chapter furthermore addresses the importance of context and module assessment in decolonisation and social justice debates. In her chapter, “Smart Latinas Are Latinas: On Teaching Chicana/ Latina Young Adult (YA) Literature as Feminist Resistance,” Cristina Herrera examines her use of Chicana and Latina young adult (YA) literature on an undergraduate course she teaches, called Contemporary Chicana/Latina Writing. Using specific pedagogical tools, Herrera decolonises the literature curriculum through texts as well as methods. She explains how, on this course, she has found that teaching students with little or no prior experience of analysing literary works how to employ literary analysis from an intersectional perspective opens up their experience of university education and equips them with skills they had hitherto identified as reflective of white privilege. Instead, Herrera recounts how connecting literature teaching and textual analysis to the lived realities and daily lives of her intersectional students serves to demonstrate how changing the syllabus and approach to encompass inclusivity and intersectionality has the capacity to effect profound change. Cheryl R. Hopson contributes a reflective chapter, entitled “‘Hard and Rocky’ Soil: Decolonising the General Education Introduction to Literature Course with August Wilson’s Fences.” Focusing on the use of a specific literary text as an exemplar of curriculum decolonisation, Hopson recounts her experience of teaching black American playwright August Wilson’s 1986 Pulitzer Prize-winning play Fences to students on her Introduction to Literature module, an intensive reading and writing about literature course which forms part of the university’s General Education curriculum. In her essay, Hopson asks pertinent questions about what it means for her as an African American professor and lesbian to address challenging ideas and themes with a predominantly white student cohort. Drawing on her teaching experience through the Trump era, Hopson reflects on the evolution of her own pedagogical practice, relating decolonisation of the literature curriculum to black, feminist, queer, visibility and resistance to heteronormativity.

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The final chapter in Part I,  Sebnem Toplu’s “Redesigning the Curriculum: Teaching Multicultural Literature in Non-­ native English-­ Speaking University Settings in Turkey and Italy”, explores the important question of decolonisation of the literature curriculum in non-native English-speaking settings. Toplu examines issues of curriculum decolonisation and literature from a perspective located on the edge of the Global South, from outside English-speaking countries. Both Toplu’s and Mendes’ chapters are crucial to the investigation of decolonisation of the literature curriculum, positioned as they are on the edge of the Global South and highlighting the processes of navigating cultural and linguistic insider/outsider issues. Toplu’s chapter focuses on pedagogy and classroom experience in relation to teaching British literature on both undergraduate and graduate levels to non-native English language speakers. Toplu demonstrates that her use of innovative approaches to literature teaching and content radically changes students’ perception of Britain, its literature and the conditions for literary and cultural production, and that this enhanced awareness leads to greater student intellectual engagement and satisfaction. The book’s Part II is entitled “Contexts: Beyond the Boundaries of Literary Texts.” This part of the book opens up the examinations of decolonising the curriculum to wider exploration and discussion including contexts beyond the literary texts. The chapters in this section offer exemplars of decolonisation in and beyond literature and the text in ways which are both innovative and exciting. The chapter contents range from consideration of somatic approaches in literature teaching to culinary cultures, decolonisation of whole degrees, fiction into film, university writing centres and decolonising the literature doctorate. These discussions evidence how decolonisation of English, texts and literature can and should be seen in wider contexts within universities and the world at large. The chapters in this section echo the emphasis placed by Kimunguyi on the wider contexts of decolonisation of the literature curriculum and also on the evolution of the term. In her chapter, “Decolonising Wuthering Heights in the Semi-­peripheral Classroom,” Ana Cristina Mendes provides further important insights from the edge of the Global South, from outside English-speaking countries, examining work to decolonise the literature curriculum on the margins of the West. Examining the vital cross-over between fiction and adaptation, Mendes’ chapter demonstrates how adaptation and visual representations can be harnessed to challenge canonical texts in the

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contemporary diverse classroom. Using Emily Bronte’s Wuthering Heights, Mendes analyses three dimensions of adaptation to examine the representation of race and gender inequality in the context of decolonisation. Through this intertextual strategy, Mendes demonstrates how text and visual representation can be used together and in extension of one another in order to radically challenge the canon, decolonise classic literary texts and expose the politics of representation. Sarah Lawson Welsh’s chapter, “‘Culinary Cultures’: Theorising Postcolonial Food Cultures,” presents a fascinating case study of the use of an entire module for decolonising the literature curriculum, focusing on postcolonial food culture. Lawson’s chapter provides a theorised examination of curricular innovation carried out at module level, supported by a broader initiative carried out by her university of teaching across disciplines and addressing global issues in order to decolonise the curriculum. An internationally renowned authority on Caribbean food culture and literature, Lawson’s case study module is explicitly research-led, thereby demonstrating the importance of challenging dominant scholarly paradigms in order to innovate teaching and learning. In the case of Lawson’s module, she specifically teaches literary and non-literary texts on the module, contextualising the study of those texts with a variety of theoretical approaches. The chapter by Sam Naidu is entitled “A Border-­Crossing Teaching Body: Reflections on a Decolonial Pedagogy for Literary Studies in a South African Context.” Inspired by Jacques Derrida’s concept of the “teaching body”, this chapter reflects on Naidu’s position as a teacher of Literary Studies in a post-apartheid classroom. In the chapter, Naidu reflects on her role as a teaching body (an individual teacher who is racially and culturally inscribed) within the global teaching body (the academe), within the discipline, and within the socio-political body. In Naidu’s essay, an innovative somatic approach is underpinned by an engagement with the community which transforms the discipline and the institution, creating an engaged, decolonial pedagogy. In their co-authored chapter, “Teaching Academic Literacy in the Co-­ curriculum: Creating Culturally Safe Spaces,” Arlene Harvey and Gabrielle Russell focus specifically on the work carried out in university writing centres. In these centres and departments, teaching staff often use exemplar literary texts to help students analyse and understand the use and form of academic genres, and associated linguistic features, appropriate to specific disciplinary contexts. However, as Harvey and Russell point out, these

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institutional spaces are not neutral or outside the assumptions and structures which construct and recreate white privilege. In contrast, Harvey and Russell focus on the co-curricular opportunities that exist within such student support centres to create what they term “culturally safe spaces” which are centred on a decolonised approach to texts and the curriculum. In the final chapter, “Decolonising the Literary Doctorate,” Gina Wisker powerfully argues for the need to decolonise the doctorate as the highest intellectual educational achievement in the academy. Drawing on a wide range of critical and pedagogical literature, Wisker centres on the literary doctorate as a contested space and explores strategies for opening up the doctorate to diverse voices and perspectives. This outcome, she argues, will require a higher degree of awareness in supervisors of the politics of knowledge and intellectual endeavour. Wisker demonstrates how the literary doctorate, currently constrained by constructions of canonicity, requires the use of decolonised learning, supervision and examination in order to develop original contributions to knowledge by diverse students’ voices and perspectives. Naturally, the two sections, “Texts” and “Contexts,” share vital concerns in regard to decolonising the literature curriculum. Both are focused on pedagogy and teaching and learning strategies and provide different insights into the approaches taken in various higher education settings, from first-year undergraduate to doctoral level. This wide range of critical reflection provides fresh impetus for decolonising the literature curriculum, consolidating the sense of a growing body of vital pedagogical scholarship developing in this field.

Conclusion: Challenging Canons and Traditions Debates around the decolonisation of the literature curriculum are ongoing and show no sign of abating. Meanwhile, students and staff in the contemporary diverse classroom rightly demand visibility and representation, as Priyamvada Gopal explains, Decolonising the curriculum is, first of all, the acceptance that education, literary or otherwise, needs to enable self-understanding. This is particularly important to people not used to seeing themselves reflected in the mirror of

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conventional learning – whether women, gay people, disabled people, the working classes or ethnic minorities.37

Echoing these debates, Burke and Carolissen note that “[h]igher education has a key role to play in deconstructing the issues connected to contemporary social movements on emergent formations of power. This includes challenging the anti-education, anti-expertise and anti-­intellectual strands of post-truth populism.”38 Practical and teaching-focused discussions around decolonisation are much-needed, and this book meets this requirement by offering insights, experiences, theorised accounts and reflections on processes and outcomes. The chapters in the book present a range and breadth of teaching experience from diverse higher education contexts which ensure that this book has a valuable multi-dimensional impact in the field of pedagogical literature, and makes a vital contribution to evolving debates around decolonisation in English in higher education. As Jason Arday, Dina Zoe Belluigi and Dave Thomas state, “In these racially violent times, decolonising the curriculum becomes of critically important in bringing about fundamental epistemological change within the Academy.”39 The impact of the work we do in English and related disciplines is not necessarily quantifiable. Personal and intellectual growth and transformation are ongoing individual journeys that do not lend themselves easily to reductive metrics. Rather, the longer-term significance of decolonising the literature curriculum will be multi-dimensional and will defy categorisation. As Dan Hicks says in a different but relevant context, about museums and decolonisation, it is not “part of a ‘culture war.’ It’s about keeping them relevant.”40 This realisation has never been more pertinent for teaching English in the academe. These preoccupations are central to the 37  Priyamvada Gopal, “Yes, we must decolonise: Our teaching has to go beyond elite white men.” The Guardian, 27 October 2017. https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2017/oct/27/decolonise-elite-white-men-decolonising-cambridge-university-­ english-­curriculum-literature. Accessed 20 June 2021. 38  Penny Jane Burke and Ronelle Carolissen, “Gender, post-truth populism and higher education pedagogies,” Teaching in Higher Education, 23, no. 5(2018): 543. 39  Arday, Belluigi, and Thomas, “Chain”, 301. 40  Dan Hicks, Decolonising Museums isn’t part of a ‘culture war’. It’s about keeping them relevant. The Guardian, 7 May 2021. https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2021/may/07/decolonising-museums-isnt-part-of-a-culture-war-its-about-keeping-­­ them-relevant. Accessed 31 May 2021.

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Teaching the New English series and its focus on pedagogies and reflective practice. Rohrer cautions against the drive towards rendering diversity and decolonisation harmless and devoid of meaning.41 This book rejects the superficial veneer of neo-liberal marketing speak. What this book does do is meet an urgent need in the academy for a book-length work on pedagogies and reflective practice currently used to decolonise the literature curriculum. The requirement for a practical, case study-based, instructive book is evident and rapidly growing. This book meets those needs. Of course, this book must acknowledge the unique and trying circumstances that have affected its production and the important intellectual and pedagogical work which it documents. The COVID-19 pandemic deeply affected all of our pedagogical practices, forced us to rethink the work we do and how we do it and made us gather in virtual teaching and learning spaces with cohorts of students where we all tried to navigate problems and obstacles exacerbated by digital poverty and inequality in access to resources.42 A book on decolonising the literature curriculum inevitably must acknowledge the ways in which students in particular were impacted by such issues during the pandemic. Digital poverty is a very real and urgent problem which is closely linked to the themes of inequality and discrimination which we analyse in this book in teaching and learning contexts. There is not the scope in this book to explore the implications of the pandemic for decolonised teaching and learning; however, it is clear that pedagogical scholarship is needed on issues such as digital poverty, the ethics of online teaching and learning, online resource capture and availability more generally, to name but a few examples. This book furthermore acknowledges the global difficulties faced by Humanities subjects caused by threats to the sector resulting from the marketisation of higher education, as universities turn towards prioritising subjects and fields which produce what is known as key workers in education and health and social care, along with experts in STEM subjects. Yet, the chapters in 41  Judy Rohrer, “‘It’s in the room’: reinvigorating feminist pedagogy, contesting neoliberalism, and trumping post-truth populism.” Teaching in Higher Education 23, no. 5 (2018): 580. 42  There isn’t the space within this book for an in-depth consideration of the implications of the pandemic on decolonisation. However, research is already emerging on this vital topic, such as Pillay, Ansurie, Martha Khosa, Ayub Sheik, Bridget Campbell, Bheki Mthembu, and Nicholus Nyika. “How Home Contexts of South African University Students Shape Their Experiences of Emergency Remote Teaching and Learning.” Student Success 12, no. 2 (2021).

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this book are testament to the thoughtful, intelligent, aware, questioning creative and critical work produced by our undergraduate and postgraduate students in English and related subjects. This work is what energises us and presents clear evidence that literature and related subjects form vital spaces for students in which to experience, to express, to challenge, to rethink and to reimagine. These dynamic student thinkers and writers are crucial to the future of decolonising the literature curriculum, and it is to them that this book dedicates its work.

Works Cited Abou El Magd, Noha. “Why Is My Curriculum White?–Decolonising the Academy.” National Union of Students, 9 February 2016. https://www.nusconnect.org.uk/articles/why-­i s-­m y-­c urriculum-­w hite-­d ecolonising-­t he-­ academy. Accessed 27 June 2021. Arday, Jason, Dina Zoe Belluigi, and Dave Thomas. “Attempting to break the chain: reimaging inclusive pedagogy and decolonising the curriculum within the academy.” Educational Philosophy and Theory 53, no. 3 (2021): 298–313. Batty, David. “Only a Fifth of UK Universities Say They Are ‘Decolonising’ Curriculum.” The Guardian, 11 June 2020. https://www.theguardian.com/ us-­n ews/2020/jun/11/only-­f ifth-­o f-­u k-­u niversities-­h ave-­s aid-­t hey-­w ill-­ decolonise-­curriculum#:~:text=Only%20a%20fifth%20of%20UK%20universities%20have%20committed%20to%20reforming,by%20the%20Guardian%20 has%20found.&text=The%20University%20of%20East%20London,of%20 art%20and%20digital%20industries. Accessed 20 June 2021. Bhambra, Gurminder K. “Postcolonial and decolonial dialogues.” Postcolonial Studies 17, no. 2 (2014): 115–121. Bhambra, Gurminder K., Dalia Gebrial, and Kerem Nişancıoğlu. Decolonising the university. London: Pluto Press, 2018. Borja, Melissa, Russell Jeung, Aggie Yellow Horse, Jacob Gibson, Sarah Gowing, Nelson Lin, Amelia Navins, and Emahlia Power. “Anti-Chinese rhetoric tied to racism against Asian Americans stop AAPI hate report.” Asian Pacific Policy & Planning Council. [Google Scholar] (2020). Burke, Penny Jane, and Ronelle Carolissen. “Gender, post-truth populism and higher education pedagogies.” Teaching in Higher Education, 23, no. 5 (2018): 543–547. Cupples, Julie and Ramón Grosfoguel, eds., Unsettling Eurocentrism in the Westernized University. London: Routledge 2019. De Jong, Sara, Rosalba Icaza, and Olivia U. Rutazibwa, eds. Decolonization and feminisms in global teaching and learning. London: Routledge, 2018. Diversi, Marcelo, and Claudio Moreira. Betweener talk: Decolonizing knowledge production, pedagogy, and praxis. London: Routledge, 2016.

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Doharty, Nadena, Manuel Madriaga, and Remi Joseph-Salisbury. “The university went to ‘decolonise’ and all they brought back was lousy diversity double-­ speak! Critical race counter-stories from faculty of colour in ‘decolonial’ times.” Educational Philosophy and Theory 53, no. 3 (2021): 233–244. Goldberg, David Theo. The war on critical race theory, Boston Review, 7 May 2021. http://bostonreview.net/race-­politics/david-­theo-­goldberg-­war-­ critical-­race-­theory?fbclid=IwAR3Jv2Mb34sqHEnX9MzLwbkRcH09wGRvF gSsHu4LijrBuG3NH0OiwY1Jkx0. Accessed 31 May 2021. Gopal, Priyamvada. “Yes, we must decolonise: Our teaching has to go beyond elite white men.” The Guardian 27 October 2017. https://www.theguardian.com/ commentisfree/2017/oct/27/decolonise-­e lite-­w hite-­m en-­d ecolonising-­ cambridge-­university-­english-­curriculum-­literature. Accessed 20 June 2021. Hack, Kay. Decolonisation of the Curriculum – a Conversation. AdvanceHE, 26 May 2020. https://www.advance-­he.ac.uk/news-­and-­views/decolonisation-­ curriculum-­conversation. Accessed 27 June 2021. Heleta, S., 2016, ‘Decolonisation of higher education: Dismantling epistemic violence and Eurocentrism in South Africa’, Transformation in Higher Education 1(1), a9. https://doi.org/10.4102/the.v1i1.9 Hicks, Dan. Decolonising Museums isn’t part of a ‘culture war’. It’s about keeping them relevant. The Guardian, 7 May 2021. https://www.theguardian. com/commentisfree/2021/may/07/decolonising-­museums-­isnt-­part-­of-­a-­ culture-­war-­its-­about-­keeping-­them-­relevant. Accessed 31 May 2021. Hoare, Lottie, Decolonising the Curriculum: A Conversation. CRASSH Blog, 26 October 2016. http://www.crassh.cam.ac.uk/blog/post/decolonising-­the-­ curriculum-­a-­conversation. Accessed 27 June 2021. Kohn, Margaret and Kavita Reddy, “Colonialism”, The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Fall 2017 Edition), Edward N. Zalta, ed., https://plato.stanford. edu/archives/fall2017/entries/colonialism/. Accessed 20 June 2021. Morreira, Shannon, Kathy Luckett, Siseko H. Kumalo, and Manjeet Ramgotra, eds. Decolonising Curricula and Pedagogy in Higher Education: Bringing Decolonial Theory into Contact with Teaching Practice. London: Routledge, 2021. McClure, Julia. “Connected global intellectual history and the decolonisation of the curriculum.” History Compass 19, no. 1 (2021): 1–9. Merrydew, Aimee, “Tackling Inequalities: Building a ‘healthier’ Curriculum through Feminist Reflexivity,” KITE Student Education Conference 2020, University of Keele. https://www.keele.ac.uk/kiite/curriculumdesignframework/casestudies/aimeemerrydew/. Accessed 20 October 2021. Mukherjee, Ankhi. “‘What Is a Classic?’: International Literary Criticism and the Classic Question.” PMLA 125, no. 4 (2010): 1026–42. Murrey, Amber, “Colonialism”, in International Encyclopedia of Human Geography (Second Edition) 2020, Pages 315–326. https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/B9780081022955108042

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Patel, Leigh. Decolonizing educational research: From ownership to answerability. London: Routledge, 2015. Peters M.A. (2018) “Why Is My Curriculum White? A Brief Genealogy of Resistance,” in Dismantling race in higher education: Racism, whiteness and decolonising the academy, edited by Jason Arday and Heidi Safia Mirza, pp. 253–270. Springer, 2018. Pillay, Ansurie, Martha Khosa, Ayub Sheik, Bridget Campbell, Bheki Mthembu, and Nicholus Nyika. “How Home Contexts of South African University Students Shape their Experiences of Emergency Remote Teaching and Learning.” Student Success 12, no. 2 (2021). Ranasinha, Ruvani. “Guest Editorial: Decolonizing English.” The Journal of Commonwealth Literature 54 issue: 2 (2019): 119–123. Rhodes Must Fall. “Mission Statement.” The Salon 9 (2015): 6–19. https://web. archive.org/web/20180428132039/https://www.jwtc.org.za/resources/ docs/salon-­volume-­9/RMF_Combined.pdf Rohrer, Judy. “‘It’s in the room’: reinvigorating feminist pedagogy, contesting neoliberalism, and trumping post-truth populism.” Teaching in Higher Education 23, no. 5 (2018): 576–592. Smith, Linda Tuhiwai. Decolonizing methodologies: Research and indigenous peoples. London: Zed Books Ltd., 2021. Stokes, Doug. “Universities should resist calls to ‘decolonise the curriculum’”. The Spectator, 18 February 2019. https://www.spectator.co.uk/article/ universities-­ should-resist-calls-to-decolonise-the-curriculum-. Accessed 11 December 2021. Swain, Harriet. “Students want their curriculums decolonised. Are universities listening?” The Guardian, 13 March 2019. https://www.theguardian.com/ education/2019/jan/30/students-­want-­their-­curriculums-­decolonised-­are-­ universities-­listening. Accessed 20 June 2021. Trilling, Daniel. “Why is the UK Government Suddenly Targeting ‘Critical Race Theory’?” The Guardian, 23 October 2020. https://www.theguardian.com/ commentisfree/2020/oct/23/uk-­critical-­race-­theory-­trump-­conservatives-­ structural-­inequality. Accessed 20 June 2021. Wamai, Njoki. “Decolonising the Academy—Towards a Global Movement.” University World News Global Edition, 27 March 2016. https://www.universityworldnews.com/post.php?story=20160524135416842. Accessed 27 June 2021. “Wokeism,” Macmillan Dictionary, https://www.macmillandictionary.com/dictionary/british/wokeism. Accessed 9 October 2021. Zinga, Dawn, and Sandra Styres. “Decolonizing Curriculum: Student Resistances to Anti-Oppressive Pedagogy.” Power and Education 11, no. 1 (March 2019): 30–50. https://doi.org/10.1177/1757743818810565

PART I

Texts: Decolonising the Literature Canon

Decolonising Pedagogical Approaches to Queer Postcolonial Texts Shamira A. Meghani

Introduction The relatively recent call to ‘decolonise the curriculum’ in Britain’s universities is one that has largely been raised by students, sometimes as an imperative taken to faculty or department committees after being developed through collective learning and students’ reflection on absences in their curriculum. Such calls, originating in postcolonial South Africa under the banner of the Rhodes Must Fall movement,1 simultaneously addressed the material contexts for Black South African students, and disproportionate numbers 1  Rhodes Must Fall. “Mission Statement.” The Salon 9 (2015): 6–19. https://web.archive. org/web/20180428132039/https://www.jwtc.org.za/resources/docs/salon-volume-9/ RMF_Combined.pdf and Amit Chaudhuri, “The Real Meaning of Rhodes Must Fall.” The Guardian, March 16, 2016. https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2016/mar/16/ the-real-meaning-of-rhodes-must-fall

S. A. Meghani (*) University of Cambridge, Cambridge, UK e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 C. Beyer (ed.), Decolonising the Literature Curriculum, Teaching the New English, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-91289-5_2

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of white faculty at the University of Cape Town, as well as Eurocentric syllabi. Almost thirty years prior, Ngugi wa Thiong’o argued in Decolonising the Mind (1986) that the prominent role of European languages in African literature perpetuated colonial continuity and diminished the development of African literature in African languages. Literary study in Africa, he argued, ought to prioritise African-language literature. Writing in English and other European languages severed the connection between literary production and the breadth of African communities. Ngugi argued that decolonising in Africa required university literature departments to turn away not just from English language literature, instead, for example, in Kenya prioritising Kenyan literature in the context of African literature, but from their colonial formation and thus re-positioning European texts as comparative rather than central. In this foundational critique he recounts the experience of being cast out of the normative experience of his mother tongue, Gikuyu, into colonial educational paradigms where the use of Gikuyu made a student suspect, and diminished their life chances.2 In teaching African, Caribbean, and South Asian postcolonial texts in the UK, I approach the aim of decolonising literary study by introducing students to contextual material which questions paradigmatically colonial assumptions, categories, and effects. In addition to issues of language I introduce critical approaches to the colonial construction of race, ethnicity, gender, and sexuality. Questioning the normative framing of such categories of analysis enables students to interpret texts in ways that are sensitive to intersectional relations of power and to the production of knowledge. Decolonising involves uprooting colonial framing and re-­ thinking additive approaches to colonial and post-independence oppressions, which position gender and race separately. Contextually, where news of conflict in the global south is often simplified and reduced to issues of identity, or worse, where certain ethnic groups are simply stereotyped as terrorists,3 the colonial order reproduces the idea of violent conflict as almost inevitable. Recognising that students have absorbed colonially informed categories and ordering through the priorities of British culture, the reading of postcolonial literature in English, especially where it addresses race, ethnicity, gender, and sexuality, needs some 2  Ngugi wa Thiong’o, Decolonising the Mind: The Politics of Language in African Literature (Oxford: James Currey, 1986), pp. 10–12. 3  Edward Said, After The Last Sky: Palestinian Lives (New York: Columbia University Press, 1999), 4.

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introduction to the historical contexts through which these categories emerge. This allows students to move towards an understanding of the way race and ethnicity are constituted through gender and sexuality, but also towards an undoing of the normative, divisory function of separated categories. Postcolonial texts have the potential to productively disrupt the colonial cultural order if approaches to teaching avoid reproducing cultural ‘otherness’.4 So, for example, when teaching South Asian Partition literature, or West African literature situated in historical periods of conflict, decolonising means addressing the way that texts negotiate colonial forms of categorising by putatively trans-historical ethnic identity, which if unchallenged tends to situate conflict in the fact of ethnicity itself. Such critical purchase should not, however, be allowed to become a reactive nostalgia for romanticised pre-colonial ethnic harmony. Unsettling the apparently explanatory capacity of ethnicity is especially important for reading textual approaches to gender and sexuality constitutively and historically, rather than through the certainty of colonial paradigms. In the Partition novel Train to Pakistan (1956), Khushwant Singh for example subtly casts the village as the shared source of collective identity, notwithstanding religious diversity, prior to political manipulation. Women’s sexual agency is contrasted with intersecting aspects of quotidian gendered harm in ways that draw attention to the sexual exploitation of young girls, offering socio-political critique from within the text. In Ken Saro-Wiwa’s Sozaboy (1985) the historical contexts for the build-up to war, revealed through the invented ‘rotten English’ of the novel, situate the growth of unrest as context for the construction of masculinity through war, disrupting its expected triumph by eventually positioning Mene beyond his community’s recognition. Decolonising means situating texts not only as literary objects but as sites of resistance to and negotiation with colonial categories. Postcolonial texts focused on queer representation thus benefit from first being introduced alongside texts asking parallel questions. Historicising the colonial production of categories of analysis begins to equip students with the perspectives, tools, and existing bodies of work required to query the structuring of the modern world and the way that 4  Sara Suleri, Meatless Days: A Memoir (London: Flamingo, 1991), 105; Kwame Anthony Appiah, ‘Is the Post- in Postmodernism the Post- in Postcolonial?’ Critical Inquiry, 17:2 (1991), 336–357, 356; Graham Huggan, The Postcolonial Exotic: Marketing the Margins (London: Routledge, 2001).

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writers have engaged with it and offered alternative literary conceptualisations to it. Students leading initiatives to decolonise the curriculum are often aware of the multiple material inequities that have resulted from colonial practices and have observed the way absences in the curriculum that they have studied prevent rather than enable their understanding. The call to work meaningfully on addressing these issues in the teaching of English has sometimes elicited institutional promises that the curriculum will be ‘decolonised’, implying a programme of change that might be successfully concluded. I want to be clear that this cannot be, for a number of reasons, not least the continuous spectre of empire in the UK (and elsewhere), resurrected for any number of nationalist projects as part of a history of national pride, as well as the persistence of cultural imperialism. In the context of competitive university entrance requirements and degree assessments, there can be no claim to be decolonised; systems of humanities education that reward on the basis of what can be recalled during an examination period test very narrowly conceptualised forms of knowledge. More importantly, colonisation itself has not ended, a fact which is easily forgotten in the context of ‘post’ colonial studies taught in European settler-colonial institutions on indigenous people’s lands.5 Newer internal colonisation of indigenous people by the same European colonial methods of capitalist growth, benefitting postcolonial elites, in, for example, South Asia, should recall the material, ideological, and epistemological meaning of ‘decolonising’.

The Limits of Postcolonialism: ‘Representation’ Isn’t Enough It may seem strange that this chapter—broadly considering the teaching of postcolonial literature, culture, contexts, and concepts in Britain— addresses the question of ‘decolonising’ the literature curriculum. One might be forgiven for assuming that the question ‘Why is My Curriculum White?’ would be circumvented by, for example, setting texts from Africa, the Caribbean, and South Asia, or by diasporic writers from those regions, or indigenous writers in settler colonies. Additionally, it is of course true that the study of postcolonial literature has, in very important ways, for 5  Eve Tuck and K.  Wayne Yang, “Decolonization Is Not a Metaphor,” Decolonization: Indigeneity, Education & Society 1 (2012): 1–40.

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decades been the home of decolonising, if any hospitable ‘home’ has been found at all for discussing European colonialism and its deeply penetrating effects in colonial centres as well as former colonies. If a literature student is to encounter the writing of Aimé Césaire, Frantz Fanon, or Ngugi wa Thiong’o, arguably three of the most formative twentieth-century theorists of anti-colonialism and decolonisation, and those asking some of the most challenging, discomforting, and yet necessarily productive questions, it will very likely to be as critical texts on a postcolonial course. Yet, in my experience of teaching across the breadth of UK institutions—Oxbridge, Russell Group, post-92, and distance learning—it is not the case that ‘decolonising’ necessarily guides what might be offered as ‘postcolonial’ curricula. The political initiative of decolonising requires a deep consciousness of the function of racial structures and concepts as well as of racism itself, and their effects in pedagogical contexts. Addressing such fundamental, ongoing legacies of colonisation is a minimum but the ‘diversification’ of primary texts cannot stand in for decolonising. For example, were one to prioritise psychoanalytic feminist criticism with the only text addressing slavery on a postcolonial reading list—perhaps with the intention of approaching trauma—the discussion of racial slavery might fast be displaced by a focus on the more familiar territory of feminism. The aim of decolonising, then, does not just demand attention to the facts of colonial history, but demands a reckoning with the production of the epistemological frameworks used for research and teaching in the context of empire.6 Periods of literary study, geographical frameworks, literary canons, critical approaches and concepts, aesthetic values, genre, and narrative forms have all been shaped by empire and its aftermath, and decolonising would require a radically different approach to teaching, assessment, and what is valued as achievement—all of which are subject to a bureaucratised system of higher education. This presents a problem for the very claim of ‘decolonising’, which is not possible to achieve without a systemic overhaul. As Fanon argued, decolonisation ‘sets out to change the order of the world, [and] is […] a program of complete disorder’.7 Solid principles nevertheless establish an ideal, and if that can be upheld with considerable humility, then, about the very possibility of 6   Linda Tuhiwai Smith, Decolonizing Methodologies: Research and Indigenous Peoples (London: Zed Books, 1999). 7  Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth, trans. Constance Farrington (London: Penguin, 2001), 27.

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decolonising, it is a banner under which to ask difficult and important questions about the afterlife and continuity of colonisation, in an active process of challenging inherited disciplinary values and reordering, re-­ thinking the possibilities of literary study. If the teaching of postcolonial texts is not in and of itself a natural guarantor of decolonising the literary curriculum, it is because the altogether political nature of decolonising stands as a challenge to the hitherto dominant approaches of English literary studies overall, including postcolonial courses that do not necessarily centre the critical and literary legacies of decolonising. In their accounts of postcolonial studies in the academy, Ella Shohat, Benita Parry, and, more recently, Neil Lazarus have critiqued postcolonial studies as effecting a political softening that has served to elide the era of decolonising and turn attention away from its foundational contexts, questions, and concerns. Shohat, for example, drew attention to the ‘rising institutional endorsement of the term “post-colonial” and of post-colonial studies as an emergent discipline’, where she at the time observed resistance to ‘any language invoking issues such as “imperialism and third worldist critique,” [or] “neo-colonialism and resisting cultural practices”’.8 It might be noted here that the pattern of conservatism and displacement that Shohat describes may be observed more recently in certain forms of the turn to world literature in place of postcolonial studies. Parry highlighted that despite postcolonial studies being a project in which the strategies of Marxism, materialism, cultural studies, and realism can be found alongside textualism and poststructuralism, ‘postcolonial criticism has come to be identified as postmodernist in its orientation—an alignment promoted more or less actively by prominent critics in the field’.9 Reflecting on an earlier period, Lazarus argues that an underlying ‘reassertion of imperial dominance beginning in the 1970s’10 propelled the emergence of postcolonial studies which performed the containment and recuperation of the historic challenge from the ‘Third World’ that had been expressed in the struggle for decolonisation in the boom years after 1945. […] The decisive defeat of liberationist ideologies  Ella Shohat, “Notes on the ‘Post-Colonial’,” Social Text 31–32 (1992): 99–113.  Benita Parry, “The Institutionalization of Postcolonial Studies,” in The Cambridge Companion to Postcolonial Literary Studies, ed. Neil Lazarus (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 66. 10  Neil Lazarus, The Postcolonial Unconscious (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011), 9. 8 9

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within the western (or, increasingly, western-based) intelligentsia, including its radical elements—was fundamental to the emergent field, whose subsequent consolidation, during the 1980s and early 1990s, might then be seen, at least in part, as a function of its articulation of a complex intellectual response to this defeat.11

Newer decolonising initiatives, then, re-engage with liberationist ideologies, albeit in very different contexts, and struggle against that earlier critical containment. Other challenges for teaching may be practical. The very breadth of potential texts and histories within postcolonial writing is such that in a single course of elective study—which is typically what is afforded in University English curricula to postcolonial literature—decolonising enquiry may end up being limited by its huge frame. Including authors from or diasporically connected to anywhere that was colonised indicates a vast potential corpus of texts, cultures, and intersecting languages, even if in English curricula that is limited to former British and/ or Anglophone territories. Such regional breadth is compounded by ever-­ expanding contemporary legacies. Negotiating this corpus with a focus on decolonising, including investigating its meaning and legacies for new decolonising initiatives, helps to give reading lists shape. To retain the focus on decolonising, literary texts need to be connected to material and epistemological agendas. For example, ‘Third World’ perspectives must be located not only in their geopolitical locations but also be connected with their ‘keyword’ histories. As Ella Shohat points out, the ‘older, broadly anticolonial paradigm, “Third World”’ was coined ‘by analogy to the third estate (the commoners, all those who were neither the nobility nor the clergy)’.12 Towards the end of her essay Shohat issues a challenge with regard to the use of critical terms indicating commonality: The invocation of the ‘Third World’ implies a belief that the shared history of neo/colonialism and internal [nation state] racism form sufficient common ground for alliances among […] diverse peoples. If one does not believe or envision such commonalities, then indeed the term ‘Third World’ should be discarded.13

 Lazarus, The Postcolonial Unconscious, 9.  Shohat, “Notes on the ‘Post-Colonial’,” 100. 13  Shohat, “Notes on the ‘Post-Colonial’,” 111. 11 12

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The same must be said for the use of the term ‘decolonising’—its challenge is issued with a view to making change in the collective image of those who continue to be dispossessed by the afterlife of the colonial project. What then does it mean to be ‘decolonising’ in Britain, at a time when institutions are under intellectual pressure from students and academics to ‘decolonise’, while simultaneously under pressure to leave national pride in Empire-located institutions undisturbed? A proliferation of shallow uses of ‘decolonising’ and its variants seem to take their cues from ‘diversity’ agendas14 which do not ask the same questions. If ‘decolonising’ in our present is not a task to be ‘achieved’, it is also an approach rather than an ‘off the shelf’ school of literary or critical work. Informed by liberatory thinking, decolonising cannot function adequately as abstract theory. Perhaps its greatest challenge for the postcolonial literature curriculum is that along with reading literary texts, where colonial and postcolonial contexts, themes, and issues surface—including gender and sexuality, to which I will return—a focus on decolonising requires attention to historical contexts, taking seriously contextual particularities and regional knowledge.

Theorising from the Margins and Intersections Decolonising postcolonial studies, then, requires teaching to re-centre the critical and conceptual impetus and ethics emerging from collective decolonising liberationist ideologies and strategies, and to explore the ways in which these can also inform literary analysis. That the frames of analysis for decolonising have historically been limited even within postcolonial courses of study suggests that the influence of hitherto dominant literary critical approaches from across English Studies is an important discussion to have with students. That is to say, ‘decolonising’ as a mode of enquiry will have specific meaning in a postcolonial reading list, given the questions and problems of liberation, the democratic emphasis and historical agency encoded in decolonising, and the need to, as a result of that, situate colonised people as the movers of history as well as its victims and accommodators. For example, George Lamming wrote of West Indians’ ‘innocent’ expectation of welcome in England, the ‘Mother country’, noting that their perception from a distance was not of a country riven with 14  Sara Ahmed, On Being Included: Racism and Diversity in Institutional Life (Durham: Duke University Press, 2012).

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class conflict, which he had observed in Barbados. Viewing that conflict as ‘[b]lack versus black’ he did not recognise it as imperialism until experiencing Britain, commenting: ‘The English themselves were not aware of the role they played in the formation of these black strangers. […] English workers could also see themselves as architects of empire: a form, you might say, of domestic colonisation.’15 Lamming’s account of the move from the confines of a colonial education to that of observer of imperialism from the colonial centre is a theorisation not just of his own experience but also that of ordinary English people locating themselves in a project demanding ignorance and complicity. The effects of prominent, abstract theories of hybridity might need to be located in productive discussions about the way poststructuralist theory has served to distract from recognising decolonising as an ongoing practice of disarming colonial ideology and making change. Such discussions allow students to critically evaluate the relationship between theory, postcolonial texts, and decolonising. Colonisation, in its material, political, and legal restructuring of colonised societies, developed radically new categories of personhood with which to rule and employed existing constructs to new ends, re-narrating their meaning. Thus, issues of race, ethnicity, religion, caste, gender, and sexuality are intimately connected to the work of decolonising. Critical approaches tend to be located within transatlantic cultural and political frameworks, presenting the possibility of re-evaluation and development in relation to the differing contexts of postcolonial and diaspora texts. Relatedly, the theory and critical approaches of postcolonial scholars from non-dominant backgrounds and perspectives should be included in critical and interpretive framing. As the Dalit scholar Gopal Guru has argued, the relationship between theory and experience, and theory and literary representation, is far from settled, and abstract theory may lead to a loss of the ‘discrete and particular’.16 This concurs with the overwhelming impression I gained from hearing indigenous scholars at the Climate Fictions/ Indigenous Studies conference in January 2020 at the University of Cambridge, which is that indigenous creative work is too often read with 15  George Lamming, “Sea of Stories,” The Guardian, October 24, 2002, https://www. theguardian.com/books/2002/oct/24/artsfeatures.poetry 16  Gopal Guru, “Experience and the Ethics of Theory” in Gopal Guru and Sundar Sarukkai, The Cracked Mirror: An Indian Debate on Experience and Theory. New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2012, 108–9.

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the same post-structural criticism familiar across English departments, while indigenous critical work, often addressing settler colonialism, is largely ignored.17 The critical cues from decolonisation’s documenters make very particular connections. As Robin D. G. Kelley notes of Césaire’s Discourse on Colonialism (1955), ‘its recasting of the history of Western Civilization helps us locate the origins of fascism within colonialism itself; hence, within the very traditions of humanism, critics believed fascism threatened’.18 That Césaire’s Marxism was a revision suggests that ‘the anticolonial struggle supersedes the proletarian revolution as the fundamental historical movement of the period’.19 Césaire’s anti-colonial liberation humanism emerges from both criticism of and engagement with European thought, from a perspective intending the ‘overthrow of a racist, colonialist system’ in order to ‘imagine a whole new world’.20 Acquainting students with critical agency grounded in experience is an important aspect of decolonising and forms a foundation for related contemporary questions within postcolonial studies, without which culturalist abstractions can prevail.

Decolonising, Translated Texts, and Close Reading Perhaps the most central question of decolonising literary postcolonial studies is the fundamental one posed by Ngugi: that of the production of postcolonial texts in English, which is after all the primary language in which postcolonial texts are read in UK universities—but about which few searching, conceptually and ethically challenging questions are regularly asked. What does it mean for the language of writing and instruction to dovetail so seamlessly with, for example, the work of African writers? What would it mean to read more texts in translation, and to struggle with the problems of language, beyond the pleasures of linguistic hybridity? These questions may be displaced from English Studies onto the disciplines of Comparative Literature or Modern Language Studies, but such displacement ought to be a concern of decolonising postcolonial literature. It might be noted comparatively that questions of translation are not 17  Evelyn Araluen, “Resisting the Institution”, Overland 227 (2017) https://overland. org.au/previous-issues/issue-227/feature-evelyn-araluen/ 18  Robin D.G.  Kelley, “Introduction: A Poetics Of Anticolonialism” in Aimé Césaire, Discourse on Colonialism, trans. Joan Pinkham (New York: NYU Press, 2000), 10. 19  Kelley, “Introduction: A Poetics Of Anticolonialism”, 10. 20  Kelley, “Introduction: A Poetics Of Anticolonialism”, 10.

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considered beyond the remit of English Studies if they are asked of Old or Middle English. Students able to read texts in their original languages should be encouraged to explore concepts and analyse keywords in their work. This may raise questions of access and privilege afforded to students of diasporic origin, but it is worth considering that the access and privilege of students exposed to colonial English traditions of high culture by the circumstances of their birth go largely uncommented on. Some levelling may be achieved by situating textual work on relevant keywords and concepts within study and assessment. The connections and questions arising from postcolonial writing in translation, as well as from writing in patois and créole, have the potential for decolonising effects across English Studies. Reading in translation brings up its own questions about shared and divergent meaning, which might be explored through keyword terms that are less anthropologically or ‘identity’ focused, than centred on usage across contexts. Edward Kamau Brathwaite drew attention to Caribbean ‘nation language’ and its rhythm, timbre and contours, as distinct from standard British English.21 Such issues of language, knowledge paradigms, and their impacts continue to be taken up in new ways, for example, by Kei Miller in The Cartographer Tries to Map a Way to Zion (2014). Decolonising the study of postcolonial writing should require more attention to the multilingualism in former colonies, and risks to that diversity, as well as the movement between local linguistic and literary contexts and the texts being taught. While this might seem to ask for a leap into ‘new’ languages (though why not?), it is the case that the absorption of critical theory as part of the English literature curriculum is in many ways the learning of a new language; additionally, theory is unquestioningly presented in translation from other European languages. If we ask students to close read with translations of French philosophy and theory, the proposition of reading translations of creative or critical work from Swahili or Urdu with attention to work on keywords should not be understood as an abandoning of close reading, but rather an expansion of the project of attention to detail at sentence level, with attention, too, to the discussion of its limitations. This central skill in literary studies can, through a decolonising approach, be developed further through historicised and contextualised reading—and can carry its approaches back to other parts of the curriculum. Introducing this kind of 21  Kamau Brathwaite, “History of the Voice,” in Roots (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1996), 266.

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parity of practice across undergraduate programmes avoids texts from non-British Isles regions being read through schematic and dehistoricised understandings of culture. Where Ngugi’s Decolonising the Mind insisted that it was necessary for African literary studies to definitively turn away from the influence of colonialism22 and to reclaim the language and literature of African writing in African languages, decolonising in the context of British departments of English literature must also attend simultaneously to their history and location. The impacts of the colonial project, the interconnections, legacies, and responsibilities suggest that decolonising the study of postcolonial literature requires re-thinking how we understand the overlapping and intertwined colonial histories that Edward Said drew attention to in Culture and Imperialism (1993) and how that can involve broadly humanist traditions from formerly colonised regions.

The Importance of Students’ Participation in Decolonising The more recent project of decolonising the curriculum began with student activism, and students remain key agents in this process. Teaching is a collaborative process and formally inviting students into the process of decolonising their learning positions them less in the role of passive ‘consumer’ and more as pedagogically active, and responsible for their intellectual interests in the context of wider decolonising. While set texts serve to introduce literature and critical approaches, ‘the curriculum’ is as much a dynamic of exchange, addressing the problems that students have perceived in their reading and which they want to address in the essays and discussions through which they develop their learning. It is useful to ask students, in advance of their studies of postcolonial literature, what they consider the urgent questions to be: their contributions to a discussion of this kind are instructive, both in revealing their understanding and in revealing their scope of intention. In that ‘decolonising’ is a project of thought that is founded on principles of collective liberation from colonial capitalism, there are useful questions to close with too: how do the students of today pass on the baton to the students of the following iteration of their postcolonial module? What did they think were the most important or central texts for their learning? Did their sense of a transformative education come from primary texts or from how critically  Ngugi, Decolonising the Mind.

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and historically informed they were by contextual material? What connections could they make between the early critical texts of decolonising and epistemological questions about their contemporary reading, their experience, and position? Did they think they were, by reading and studying, in the process of decolonising (or not) and what would they want to pass on to those who studied after them? On the principle of mutuality and collaborative challenges to colonial orthodoxy, what would they hope to see more of? These are not the questions asked on anodyne feedback forms checking on quality assurance. But questions asked with a view to the wider project of decolonising keep in sight how postcolonial texts might make change beyond the curriculum.

Decolonising Pedagogical Approaches to Gender and Sexuality The question of where students begin is an important one, especially given postcolonial texts are largely studied through electives rather than core papers. There are many potential strands that may be followed from the project of decolonising, which would enable students to define and grasp the connections between apparently recent projects and historical ones. Current students often already have some vernacular conceptual familiarity with queerness, either from wider culture or from activism; working towards the aim of decolonising is an opportunity to draw on this existing knowledge and to think about gendered stratifications and forms of gender and sexual dissidence in colonised cultures, which need to be addressed in their own contexts. While understanding that forms of colonial modernity have disrupted traditional structures, positing ‘tradition’ as opposed to ‘modernity’ along the binaries of ‘colonised’ and ‘coloniser’ creates temporal-geographical axes that not only treat modernity as though it has a single ‘western’ definition but also diminish the possibilities for re-­ reading texts for the glimmers of alternative conceptualisations of modernity—those arrested by colonisation. My interests in decolonising the teaching of postcolonial literature and culture stem from my scholarly concerns with the representations of postcolonial cultures as uniquely heteropatriarchal and traditional, and especially hostile to ‘non-normative’ gender and sexuality. Additionally, I am keen to engage students’ existing concerns about gender and sexuality, whether that be to do with sexual violence, inadequate representation, or

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failures in respectful and accepting treatment of queer and transgender people in their own contexts. Students are sometimes equipped with theoretical perspectives on gender and sexuality learned from queer and feminist critical approaches and at other times begin from vernacular theories learned beyond higher education contexts. Decolonising requires guiding students to think critically about the uses of feminist and queer approaches abstracted from quite particular transatlantic colonial contexts. That gender constructs take form and shape in the context of empire and colonialism does not necessarily mean all critical approaches challenging them are liberatory without being situated and reframed for their context of use. Exploring gender and sexuality in the study of postcolonial writing and decolonising makes links between sometimes very different projects of liberation, but also serves to highlight the connections between them, and differences and similarities in their projects of making change. For example, I present students with mid-twentieth-century primary and critical texts written in the context of decolonising movements to give a particular kind of form to questions of culture and nationalism, introducing students to collective struggle, and the terrains over which it has been fought. Questions of identity, ethnicity, and culture are situated in their contexts of anti-colonialism, decolonising, and ensuing change, bringing them out of the conceptual ‘cold storage’ of static ‘culture’ that Fanon critiqued.23 In this way gendered, sexual, and racial embodiments and their meaning can be dislocated from the fixed imaginings of nationality and ethnicity, to be understood as contested and re-made through changing environments, and the reconditioning of material and cultural institutions. Contemporary texts taking up themes of gender and sexuality can then be situated in relation to the struggle to decolonise and its pitfalls, including understanding the role of the native elite in those dynamics,24 as well as in relation to imperial continuities. This is important for enabling students to explore representations of gender and sexuality within contexts of resistance as well as the capitulation to normative Eurocentric categories, taxonomies, and other ways of knowing the body. Contemporary texts can thus be situated through the dynamics of ongoing and unfolding postcolonial politics, including more recent developments in colonial capitalism, to contextualise their impacts on culture and epistemology—albeit that this must be understood as a necessarily limited ‘decolonising’. In  Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth, 197.  Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth, 180.

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conjunction with understanding the consequences of colonial resource extraction and its impacts of displacement and radically changed environments, these kinds of foundations allow students to situate their reading of texts and critical work in dynamic, collective contexts for aesthetic and liberatory values. The textual character of narration, protagonists, and poetic voices can thus be located within more deeply rooted contexts of decolonising. If the material contexts for colonisation are absented from teaching, the continuities and connections between European colonial resource extraction and present-day neocolonial practices, including internal colonisation within post-independence nations, risk receding as factors involved in contemporary cultural and intellectual production. In short, retaining the combination of material, historical, cultural, and epistemological concerns in decolonising gender and sexuality is a necessity for the term to remain meaningful and rooted in its key histories. Through this approach students explore complex issues of identity, relationality, and representation, with histories of the dispossession of land, resources, and knowledge underpinning colonialism’s ways of inserting its various concerns about sexuality. This contextualises iterations of homophobia and transphobia informed by colonial and caste or religious hierarchies inherited in contexts of anti-colonial nationalism and assimilative conservatism. As I have indicated earlier, ‘decolonising’ as a term is informed by a particular critical history; additionally, it is a project that centrally unfolds in contexts of nationhood, in polities that have a colonial form and shape, as well as through democracy and the collective self-­ determination of colonised people. One way to support students in developing the connections between past and present iterations of decolonising is for a course of study to first read texts addressing the breadth of impacts on colonised communities, and the dynamics of decolonising within them, in order that questions about queer and gender-variant representation have a foundation (the same format would work for other enquiries within the framework of decolonising). For example, Ngugi’s novel The River Between (1961) situates gendered rites of passage at the centre of indigenous practices and colonial prohibitions, inviting discussion of practices and symbolism that in the context of resistance become the site of re-­ thinking and the potential for considering new practices. Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart is a text that is interested in the problems of hypermasculinity as resistance to colonialism, depicting forms of heteropatriarchy, but it also represents disruptions to binary gender. Such shared concerns in decolonising contexts situate the dynamics of gender, sexuality, and

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colonialism in their wider complexity, enabling discussions that can develop as continuity rather than situating the contemporary politics of gender and sexual liberation as an accommodation to cultural imperialism. Rahul Rao observes that ‘scholar-activists in India and Uganda […] have argued that the term [queer] can be appropriated and resignified to do useful work in their respective contexts, despite its originally Anglo-­ American provenance’, and reminds us that gender and sexuality can only be understood as co-constituted through ‘categories such as nation, religion, race, class, and caste’.25 Such categories, resulting from colonialism, anti-colonialism, and decolonising, as well as liberal and conservative forces, must be understood in meaning and effect as resulting from complex processes of change.26 An emphasis on decolonising requires that such change be understood in part through projects of self-determination and democratising, rather than accepting conservatism, or claims to it, as necessarily representative of culture. Ama Ata Aidoo’s Our Sister Killjoy, or Reflections of a Black-Eyed Squint, is an invaluable text for critically decolonising heteronormativity in the context of the elite and highly-educated migrants of Ghana and Africa more widely. Aidoo’s ‘killjoy’, Sissie, observes Europe from the position of a critical traveller. Its mixed prose, poetry, and epistolary forms represent same-sex friendship and homophobia, as well as the instabilities of heteronormative romance. The killjoy chooses the challenges of decolonising over the comforts of heterosexual intimacy, asking questions about where the personal and political may meet. More recent textual imaginaries such as Shani Mootoo’s Cereus Blooms at Night, which represents queer experience, transformation, and relationality but does not name sexual and gender-variant identities, can be taught as genealogies of queer decolonising, drawing attention to colonial and caste hierarchies, as well as the way complicity persists and may be resisted. I have suggested that students’ starting points for exploring gender and sexuality may bring a range of vernacular knowledge to their understanding of decolonising; it is important, however, that a romanticising culturalism be resisted. Graham Huggan has recently noted ‘the huge social and cultural changes that have been produced worldwide by the introduction 25  Rahul Rao, Out of Time: The Queer Politics of Postcoloniality (New York: Oxford University Press, 2020), 27. 26  Kennedy, Dane, “Imperial History and Post-colonial Theory,” The Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History 24 (1996): 345–63 at 357–58.

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and proliferation of new technologies’27 which have impacted the role of the popular, and fuelled the rise of celebrity culture, producing a problematic triangulation of ‘exoticism, eroticism, and celebrity’.28 Certainly this particular technological-cultural conjuncture has had an impact on the understanding of non-Western forms of gender and sexuality, creating contexts in which colonialism appears as a singular violator of pre-colonial harmony and unproblematic gender and sexual multiplicities. Such claims are often made in the context of online publishing doing the very important work of providing non-monolithic diasporic cultural spaces, but the suggestion of a ‘sexually liberated’29 pre-colonial past is often a wishful erotic ideal, at risk of self-exoticising. Yet it is also the case that colonial legal frameworks have enabled the production of putatively universal gender and sexual categories, and the reification of identities in that context. Despite this, pre-colonial forms of patriarchy, including systems of caste and other hierarchies dependent on oppressive normatively gendered regimes for their reproduction, cannot be elided, historically or in the present. It is nevertheless the case that gendered structures, and local narratives producing the cultural frameworks around them, contained opportunities for gender variance and same-sex intimacy that, while not to be confused with a ‘liberated’ past, can be understood as a cultural resource for resistance to gender and sexual normativity. It is within these parameters that literary texts consciously and unconsciously represent such possibilities. Arundhati Roy’s The Ministry of Utmost Happiness (2017), a recent text exploring Indian postcolonial state violence against Kashmiris, employs the figure of the Muslim hijra, Anjum, in part as a way to connect intersecting forms of violence: those of colonial legacies and the independent state. In contexts of unending terror, questions emerging from gender variance become writ large in the context of ethnic nationalism, yet the promise of community formed in resistance to the strictures of nation, religion, class, and caste emerges as quietly surviving, present as a form of decolonising practice—an example that I would argue cannot readily be exoticised.

27  Graham Huggan, “Re-evaluating the Postcolonial Exotic,” Interventions 22 (2020), 808–24, at 811. 28  Huggan, “Re-evaluating the Postcolonial Exotic,” 812. 29  Dhaliwal, Sharan, “Happy Pride Month,” Burnt Roti, 2 June 2019, https://www.burntroti.com/blog/happy-pride-month-from-our-editor-in-chief-sharan-dhaliwal

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Conclusion The process of decolonising postcolonial literature curricula must be understood as continuous, without a conclusion, and it should enable us to ask epistemological questions about the normative assumptions of capitalism, liberalism, and conservatism, all of which prevent decolonising in practical terms, and which have begun to substantially impinge on academic freedom in the name of free speech.30 Decolonising, if it is understood as a project of overturning the colonial order, is surely not possible within higher education teaching, even if it is rekindled as an approach within literary postcolonial studies. However, following Shohat, if the term is to be used, teaching should pay serious attention to its substantive challenges.

Works Cited Ahmed, Sara. On Being Included: Racism and Diversity in Institutional Life. Durham: Duke University Press, 2012. Appiah, Kwame Anthony. ‘Is the Post- in Postmodernism the Post- in Postcolonial?’, Critical Inquiry, 17:2 (1991), 336–357. Araluen, Evelyn. “Resisting the Institution”, Overland 227 (2017) https://overland.org.au/previous-­issues/issue-­227/feature-­evelyn-­araluen/ Brathwaite, Kamau. “History of the Voice.” In Roots. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1996. First published in 1984. Chaudhuri, Amit. “The Real Meaning of Rhodes Must Fall.” The Guardian, March 16, 2016. https://www.theguardian.com/uk-­news/2016/mar/16/ the-­real-­meaning-­of-­rhodes-­must-­fall Dhaliwal, Sharan. “Happy Pride Month.” Burnt Roti, 2 June 2019. https://www.bur ntroti.com/blog/happy-­p ride-­m onth-­f rom-­o ur-­ editor-­in-­chief-­sharan-­dhaliwal Fanon, Frantz. The Wretched of the Earth. Translated by Constance Farrington. London: Penguin, 2001. First published 1965. Gopal, Priyamvada and Gavan Titley, “The Free Speech Row at Cambridge will Restrict, not Expand, Expression.” The Guardian, December 18, 2020. h t t p s : / / w w w. t h e g u a r d i a n . c o m / c o m m e n t i s f r e e / 2 0 2 0 / d e c / 1 8 / free-­speech-­row-­cambridge-­restrict-­expression-­minorities-­freedom-­thought 30  Priyamvada Gopal and Gavan Titley, “The Free Speech Row at Cambridge will Restrict, not Expand, Expression,” The Guardian, December 18, 2020, https:// www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2020/dec/18/free-speech-row-cambridgerestrict-expression-minorities-freedom-thought

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Guru, Gopal. “Experience and the Ethics of Theory.” In Gopal Guru and Sundar Sarukkai, The Cracked Mirror: An Indian Debate on Experience and Theory. New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2012. Huggan, Graham. The Postcolonial Exotic: Marketing the Margins (London: Routledge, 2001) Huggan, Graham. “Re-evaluating the Postcolonial Exotic.” Interventions 22 (2020): 808–24. Kelley, Robin D.G. “Introduction: A Poetics Of Anticolonialism” in Aimé Césaire, Discourse on Colonialism. Translated by Joan Pinkham. New  York: NYU Press, 2000. Kennedy, Dane. “Imperial History and Post-colonial Theory.” The Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History 24 (1996): 345–63. Lamming, George. “Sea of Stories.” The Guardian, October 24, 2002, https:// www.theguardian.com/books/2002/oct/24/artsfeatures.poetry Lazarus Neil. The Postcolonial Unconscious. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011. Ngugi wa Thiong’o. Decolonising the Mind: The Politics of Language in African Literature. Oxford: James Currey, 1986. Parry, Benita. “The Institutionalization of Postcolonial Studies.” In The Cambridge Companion to Postcolonial Literary Studies, edited by Neil Lazarus, 66–80. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004. Rao, Rahul. Out of Time: The Queer Politics of Postcoloniality. New  York, NY: Oxford University Press, 2020. Rhodes Must Fall. “Mission Statement.” The Salon 9 (2015): 6–19. https://web. archive.org/web/20180428132039/https://www.jwtc.org.za/resources/ docs/salon-­volume-­9/RMF_Combined.pdf Edward Said. After The Last Sky: Palestinian Lives (New York: Columbia University Press, 1999). First published 1986. Shohat, Ella. “Notes on the ‘Post-Colonial’.” Social Text 31–32 (1992): 99–113. Smith, Linda Tuhiwai. Decolonizing Methodologies: Research and Indigenous Peoples (London: Zed Books, 1999) Suleri, Sara. Meatless Days: A Memoir (London: Flamingo, 1991) Tuck, Eve, and K.  Wayne Yang. “Decolonization Is Not a Metaphor.” Decolonization: Indigeneity, Education & Society 1 (2012): 1–40.

Centring Women of Colour: Decolonising the Literature Curriculum with Kamila Shamsie’s Home Fire and Bolu Babalola’s Love in Colour Charlotte Beyer

Introduction: Writing Back to the Canon Racism and Islamophobia are among the most insidious forms of colonisation in Western cultures. These forms of othering and exclusion are not only reflected but also perpetuated through literary texts, impacting on the literature curriculum and the students and lecturers who engage with it. Furthermore, literary texts from mythology, the classics, and fairy and folk tales are popular cultural narratives which provide enduring motifs and tropes but also embed some of the most stubborn and pervasive

C. Beyer (*) School of Education and Humanities, University of Gloucestershire, Cheltenham, UK e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 C. Beyer (ed.), Decolonising the Literature Curriculum, Teaching the New English, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-91289-5_3

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structures of inequality and colonisation.1 In this chapter I explore my use of contemporary multicultural women’s writing as an integral part of decolonising  the literature curriculum precisely because multicultural women’s writing challenges and reimagines these popular cultural and colonial narratives. Having previously published on the significance of these inherited cultural texts in determining tradition and canon from a teaching and learning perspective, I have incorporated this critique of culturally inherited literary forms and pedagogical strategies for decolonising literature into my current teaching.2 In this chapter, I discuss my experience and pedagogical practice in relation to teaching two recent works, British-Pakistani author Kamila Shamsie’s novel Home Fire (2017) and black British author Bolu Babalola’s 2020 short story collection, Love in Colour, with specific attention to decolonising mythology and genre. In teaching both these texts for the first time in 2020–2021 on my third-year undergraduate English module, called “Literature and Nation,” I foregrounded the importance of decolonisation in both approach and theory, through a (for the vast majority) online delivery due to the COVID-19 pandemic.3 The module is a year-long module, meaning that a range of literary texts was taught. However, for the purposes of this chapter, I want to focus specifically on the vital role which writing by women of colour plays to my decolonising of the literature curriculum. My approach to the texts examined here is grounded in a theorised approach to genre and how revisioning of genre plays a key role in decolonising literature. By e­ xploring 1  Kees W. Bolle refers to myth as “a symbolic narrative” which is “at least partly traditional” and which may feature “accounts of gods or superhuman beings involved in extraordinary events or circumstances in a time that is unspecified but which is understood as existing apart from ordinary human experience.” https://www.britannica.com/topic/myth Bolle, K. W., Smith, Jonathan Z. and Buxton, Richard G.A. “Myth.” Encyclopedia Britannica, November 3, 2020. https://www.britannica.com/topic/myth 2  Charlotte Beyer, “The stuff of legend, or unpacking cultural baggage? Introducing first-­ year English literature and humanities students to foundational literary texts.” Changing English 20, no. 4 (2013): 395–403. Charlotte Beyer, “‘Life Was a State in Which a War Was On’: AS Byatt’s Portrayal of War and Norse Mythology in Ragnarok: The End of the Gods,” in War, Myths, and Fairy Tales, edited by Buttsworth, Sara, and Maartje Abbenhuis, pp. 195–218. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016. Charlotte Beyer, “Reimagining Myth and the Maternal with Ruth Fainlight, Margaret Atwood and Katie Donovan.” Women Versed in Myth: Essays on Modern Poets edited by Colleen S. Harris and Valerie E. Frankel, pp. 50–58. McFarland, Jefferson, 2016. 3  There is not the scope here to examine in depth the issues around online teaching and decolonisation; nevertheless, I wanted to state what the mode of delivery was in this case, as this formed the context for my pedagogical reflections.

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with students how the authors discussed in this chapter use myth, legend, Greek classics, and folklore to decolonise cultural master narratives and create alternative resistant texts, the teaching of such texts serves a vital function in decolonising the literature curriculum. Shamsie’s Home Fire and Babalola’s Love in Colour both contest gender and race inequality through the prism of literary genre. This focus is key to my pedagogical approach to decolonising the literature curriculum. Coming from a Women’s and Gender Studies background academically, my overall concern in pedagogy is with identifying ways to investigate and intervene in gender inequality as it affects students, particularly female students whose participation and performance are impacted.4 As I have shown in my other pedagogical scholarship, teaching contemporary postcolonial women’s writing offers a means of identifying and addressing with students a range of questions regarding patriarchal oppression and intersectionality and their representation in literature.5 I employ feminist and postcolonial perspectives to interrogate literary canons, scrutinise literary and critical texts, investigate the conditions of literary and cultural production, and transform student learning by bringing current and contemporary debates into the classroom. As an older female academic from a non-native English-speaking context, I am familiar with and acknowledge the barriers that academics from marginalised groups regularly encounter in and outside of the classroom, as Rohrer also emphasises, stating that, Women, particularly women of color, as well as gender nonconforming, disabled, younger, and foreign accented instructors often struggle for legitimacy and respect in class. There are plenty of social and culturally constructed barriers ‘in the room’ before we even enter.6

Although white, as a minority academic, I too am affected by the “struggle for legitimacy and respect” in the academy, yet in terms of 4  See also Jordan Kistler. “Class participation marks and gender in the humanities seminar.” Journal of Academic Development and Education 11 (2019): 16–22; and Aimee Merrydew, “Tackling Inequalities: Building a ‘healthier’ Curriculum through Feminist Reflexivity,” KITE Student Education Conference 2020, University of Keele. 5  Charlotte Beyer, “Exploring Postcolonial and Feminist Issues: Rabbit-Proof Fence in a Teaching Context.” Changing English 17, no. 1 (2010): 93–101. 6  Judy Rohrer, “‘It’s in the room’: reinvigorating feminist pedagogy, contesting neoliberalism, and trumping post-truth populism.” Teaching in Higher Education 23, no. 5 (2018): 588

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decolonising the literature curriculum, this is where I focus my energies in order to promote change and increase visibility of diversity. I am aware of the importance of breaking down barriers in higher education and enabling inclusion of students from diverse and/or disadvantaged backgrounds and maximising their academic and cultural potential. My teaching pedagogy, then, is focused on principles of the diverse classroom, which centre on the creation of a safe, enabling, and empowering space for students from diverse social, educational, cultural, and ethnic contexts to explore learning and discover ways of connecting personally and intellectually with the material. Challenging the privilege inscribed in literary canons and transforming students’ experience through engagement with literature are key preoccupations that inform my critical pedagogy and practice. Describing critical pedagogy, Garza and de Jong highlight that it understands learning and engagement with knowledge as political, and part of struggles for emancipation and liberation. The engagement with and interest in pedagogy that decolonial and feminist thought share with one another is rooted in the critique of knowledge production (and its understanding of knowledge as political) that is fundamental to both. (xvi)7

Arday, Belluigi, and Thomas comment on the importance of challenging the white European canon which monopolises the curriculum at present and marginalises students from minority groups.8 Ranasinha echoes this critique, stating that, contemporary British literary and filmic texts by writers from minority backgrounds need to be explored not as a subgenre, but as an integral part of British Literature. That is to say, the de-whitening of British literature needs to be part of a revision of the narrative of the making of modern Britain.9

7  Rosalba Icaza Garza and Sara de Jong. “Introduction: Decolonization and Feminisms in Global Teaching and Learning – A radical space of possibility,” in Decolonization and feminisms in global teaching and learning, eds. by Sara De Jong, Rosalba Icaza, and Olivia U. Rutazibwa, xv–xxxiv. London: Routledge, 2018. 8  Jason Arday, Dina Zoe Belluigi, and Dave Thomas. “Attempting to break the chain: reimaging inclusive pedagogy and decolonising the curriculum within the academy.” Educational Philosophy and Theory 53, no. 3 (2021): 298–313. 9   Ruvani Ranasinha, “Guest Editorial: Decolonizing English.” The Journal of Commonwealth Literature, Vol. 54 issue: 2 (2019): 120.

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In this chapter I explore how, through the teaching of specific texts from black British and British-Pakistani authors, exclusion and marginalisation are challenged and important steps taken towards decolonising the literature curriculum. I have taught these texts this year both in-person and virtually; therefore my discussion of classroom pedagogy refers to both of these modes. There is not the scope here to expand on an analysis of these differing teaching and learning modes; however, as this academic year of teaching via a blended and then virtual mode has shown, the considerable challenges presented by digital poverty and related problems, plus the intrusion of everyday home life became a part of our shared practice. These aspects of teaching and learning are important considerations in decolonising the classroom, as Burke and Carolissen remind us, “be(com)ing a critical thinking student is tied to gendered, embodied performatives and subjectivities.”10 Foundational texts are metanarratives about families, cultures, or nations, how they came into existence, and the values that inform them. These cultural master narratives form the basis for much of Western culture and literature and impact on the politics of representation in numerous direct and indirect ways. Due to their perceived universal nature, such master narratives of course present a problem for women and minority writers challenging dominant cultural narratives and literary canons. In her 2017 article, “Why We Need to Start Seeing the Classical World in Color,” Sarah E. Bond discusses how perceptions of classical Rome and Greece have been thoroughly whitewashed, ranging from art and sculpture to mythology. She stresses the need to decolonise perceptions and representations of whiteness in relation to foundational cultures and classical narratives.11 She states, “The dearth of people of color in modern media depicting the ancient world is a pivotal issue. [Popular cultural texts] perpetuate the notion that the classical world was white.”12 Bond’s point helps to illustrate the significance of Babalola’s and Shamsie’s recasting of mythology in a teaching context. Studying literature which challenges these ideas and perceptions invites classroom discussion of decolonisation through engagement with the authors’ revisionist 10  Penny Jane Burke and Ronelle Carolissen. “Gender, post-truth populism and higher education pedagogies,” Teaching in Higher Education, 23 no. 5 (2018): 545. 11  Sarah Bond, “Why We Need to Start Seeing the Classical World in Color.” Hyperallergic. June 7 (2017). https://hyperallergic.com/383776/why-we-need-to-start-seeing-the-­ classical-­world-in-color/. Accessed 20 June 2021. 12  Bond, “Classical,” n.p.

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­ ythmaking of Western texts and stories from the Global South. The m range of literary allusions and cultural influences drawn on by Shamsie and Babalola gives their work a wide field of reference. Thus, centring on writing by women of colour serves to change students’ perception of literature, from exclusion by an exclusively white male-dominated Western canon towards inclusion and diversity. My present discussion focuses on identifying those particular themes, concepts, and ideas which inform my teaching of a particular text to decolonise the literature curriculum, examining how women writers of colour reimagine genre in order to place focus on race, gender, sexuality, and intersectionality.13 In my teaching of these texts, we focus on how Shamsie and Babalola situate women of colour at the centre of their narratives in order to recast the conventional plots and narrative structures of original myths and folk tales, and reimagine original myths and foundational narratives through contemporary content and ideas which are relatable in the contemporary diverse undergraduate classroom.14 Critical engagement with multicultural literary texts forms a key feature of decolonisation within the literature curriculum, as well as in generating and sustaining a diverse classroom. Informed by principles and themes derived from critical pedagogy, feminism, and postcolonialism, the critical study of these texts is a key dimension in my module on decolonising literature.

Decolonising Muslim Women’s Sexuality in a Hostile Environment: Kamila Shamsie, Home Fire The appalling Islamophobia and racism that followed in the wake of 9/1115 have meant that academics committed to decolonisation necessarily need to challenge the perpetuation of orientalism, as well as cultural, racial, gender, and religious stereotypes. In teaching literature at university level, this project includes countering stereotypes through a diverse and inclusive curriculum which provides important opportunities for students to engage critically with Muslim and British-Pakistani writing as part of 13  Merja Makinen, “Angela Carter’s The Bloody Chamber and the decolonization of feminine sexuality.” Feminist Review 42, no. 1 (1992): 2–15. 14  See also Andrew Northedge, “Rethinking teaching in the context of diversity.” Teaching in Higher Education, 8, no. 1 (2002): 17–32. 15  Aamer Shaheen, Sadia Qamar, and Muhammad Islam. “Obsessive ‘Westoxification’ Versus the Albatross of Fundamentalism and Love as Collateral Damage in Kamila Shamsie’s Home Fire.” Journal of Research (Humanities) 54 (2018): 151

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their textual studies. Furthermore, introducing students to contemporary British-Pakistani women’s writing serves the vital function of widening the syllabus to include multicultural literature which offers rich and important themes while also providing important pedagogical opportunities to expose the stereotypes which structure and uphold Western culture and the literary canon and dictate the representation and marginalisation of British-Pakistani and Muslim women. Kamila Shamsie is part of a new wave of British-Pakistani writers, reflecting the growth of this genre as a distinct body of literature in much need of increased representation on mainstream literature courses.16,17 Reimagining Sophocles’ play Antigone in a British Muslim setting, Shamsie’s novel Home Fire has a key place in my decolonised pedagogy. Home Fire reimagines the socio-political setting of troubled Greek city Thebes into contemporary post-9/11 and post-Brexit Britain, a culture marred by deep inequalities and divisions, including Islamophobia, and controlled through heavily sanctioned legislation.18 Commenting on Home Fire, Lau and Mendes explain that it engages with new Orientalist representations post-9/11. […] Shamsie’s novel is shaped by the political narratives of the War on Terror and, in turn, responds to the upshot of these new configurations of power, reflecting how the difficulty of making sense of 9/11 exacerbated the Orientalist binary of East and West.19

Shamsie’s intertextual use of the Greek Antigone myth articulates, as Maria Tamboukou argues, “women’s desire to tell their stories as an expression of their will to rewrite their exclusion from oppressive regimes.”20 Commenting on this dimension, Shamsie has stated in an 16  O’Reilly, Elizabeth. Kamila Shamsie—critical perspective. https://literature.britishcouncil.org/writer/kamila-shamsie. Accessed 1 June 2021. 17  Veyret, Paul. “Fractured territories: Deterritorializing the contemporary Pakistani novel in English.” The Journal of Commonwealth Literature (2018): 0021989418808039. 307. 18  Aamer Shaheen, Sadia Qamar, and Muhammad Islam. “Obsessive ‘Westoxification’ Versus the Albatross of Fundamentalism and Love as Collateral Damage in Kamila Shamsie’s Home Fire.” Journal of Research (Humanities) 54 (2018): 158. 19  Lisa Lau and Ana Cristina Mendes. “Twenty-First-Century Antigones: The Postcolonial Woman Shaped by 9/11 in Kamila Shamsie’s Home Fire.” Studies in the Novel 53, no. 1 (2021): 55. 20  Maria Tamboukou, “Antigone Re-Imagined: Uprooted Women’s Political Narratives.” Feminist Theory, (April 2021). https://doi.org/10.1177/14647001211005298. 1.

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interview with Rose that in writing the novel, she “did think about the Empire, and what it meant when the colonizers had to accept the colonized as equal citizens within Britain.”21 It is vital to bring these debates into play in classroom discussions of Home Fire in the context of decolonising literature. Following three orphaned British Muslim siblings who struggle with their relationship to the State after one of them is enticed into becoming a jihadist, Home Fire considers family, nation, and faith in today’s age of terror against the backdrop of Sophocles’ tragedy Antigone. Families portrayed in the novel are, according to Veyret, “the repositories of the repressed wounds of the past and the silent guardians of the archives of the undisclosed tragedies of personal and national history.”22 Shamsie uses myth to create historical links which resonate with individual and collective identities, using the original Greek tragic genre to interrogate the complexity of migrant identities in contemporary Britain.23 These points clearly illustrate the value of teaching this text as part of a decolonised literature curriculum. Teaching Home Fire in a post-Brexit, often culturally divisive environment characterised by discord and inequity, requires sensitivity and acute awareness of the differing ways students are affected by social and cultural pressures. I reflect carefully on any specific preparations and considerations which I have to make for teaching a novel which features debates around terrorism and religious extremism. As a minority academic myself, coming from a non-native English-speaking background, I am constantly aware of the workings and effects of privilege and exclusion. I strive to eliminate such dynamics and mechanisms in both the material I teach and my pedagogy through an inclusive teaching practice which focuses on sensitivity of diversity, exchange, mutual respect and recognition, and acknowledgement of difference. Having previously taught Don DeLillo’s 9/11 novel Falling Man (2007) on my third-year contemporary North American literature module, I am aware of the potential impact of triggering and traumatising content on students, and of the resulting need to manage such content through timely and appropriate trigger warnings, and the need to discuss 21  Rose Jaya Bhattacharji. Interview: Kamila Shamsie on her Bold and Heart-Breaking New Novel, “Home Fire”. 30 August 2017. http://www.jayabhattacharjirose.com/interview-­ kamila-­shamsie-on-her-bold-and-heart-breaking-new-novel-home-fire/. Accessed 1 June 2021. 22  Veyret, “Fractured”, 311. 23  Veyret, “Fractured”, 312.

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topics such as terrorism, political violence, and extremism, with sensitivity and context. In mediating Home Fire on my module “Literature and Nation,” I strive to teach the novel in a sensitive way which will allow us to discuss the content while ensuring that everyone in the room feels supported. My main focus in teaching Home Fire is on the subject of decolonisation through the reimagining of myth, gender, race, and female sexuality. In the classroom, this teaching process revolves around, firstly, situating Shamsie as a contemporary British-Pakistani woman writer and commenting on her use of myth and intertextuality; and, secondly, investigating Home Fire’s representation of Muslim female sexuality. Classroom discussion of defining revisionist mythology forms a key part of analysing the text, as does the examination of Shamsie’s reimagining of myth as a decolonisation strategy. To clarify, revisioning mythology is a strategic revisionist use of gender imagery and a means of exploring and attempting to transform the self and culture, through resisting stereotypes, binary constructions,24 and canonical representations and reimagining those modes of representation to subvert and transform literature, as Lau and Mendes explain, describing Shamsie’s reimagining of the Greek myth of Antigone as a “shrewdly subversive move to tell this immigrant story via a tale so central to the Western canon.”25 In Home Fire, as in Antigone, the story revolves around two sisters and their differing responses to their brother’s act of treason. This conflict is played out against the context of anti-Muslim feeling and the hostile environment. Through its multiple narrative perspectives and storytelling technique, Home Fire serves to illustrate a postcolonial critique of Orientalism. In discussing the novel with students, I define the term, explaining that Orientalism is a worldview which misrepresents and distorts Arab peoples and cultures in contrast to those of the West, implying that Arab culture as the bizarre and dangerous Other.26 Orientalism dates from the period of European Enlightenment and colonisation of the Arab World, providing a rationale for European colonialism based on a self-­ serving history in which “the West” constructed “the East” as extremely 24  John Boyne, “Home Fire by Kamila Shamsie: Provocative Work from a Brave Author.” The Irish Times, 26 Aug. 2017. https://www.irishtimes.com/culture/books/home-fire-by-­ kamila-shamsie-provocative-work-from-a-brave-author-1.3193353. Accessed 1 June 2021. 25  Lau and Mendes, “Antigones”, 54. 26  N.a. What is Orientalism? Reclaiming Identity: Dismantling Arab Stereotypes. Arab American National Museum (AANM), n.d. http://arabstereotypes.org/why-stereotypes/ what-orientalism. Accessed 1 June 2021.

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different and inferior, and therefore in need of Western intervention or “rescue.”27 In class, we discuss Edward Said’s critique along with other critical sources to learn more about Orientalism, situating Shamsie’s novel in the context of this critique. Home Fire’s transformation of classical myth focuses on the politics of representing female Muslim sexuality, challenging stereotypical representations of Muslim women’s sexuality in British media and popular cultural narratives.28 The investigation of myth and Muslim female sexuality reflected in Shamsie’s novel echoes a rise in literary and cultural production by Muslim women, challenging stereotypes which white canonical literary works have tended to perpetuate.29 Shamsie’s novel calls attention to the need to decolonise the representation of Muslim women in British literature. Until recently, male Asian authors such as Salman Rushdie, Hari Kunzru, and Hanif Kureishi dominated the literature syllabus in Britain. While Muslim women’s writing has a long history, particularly in South and West Asia and North Africa,30 it is really the last twenty years which have seen a rise in visibility of literary works written by Muslim women in the English-speaking world. Through representations of the two central female characters, Home Fire explores Muslim women and their sexuality in more complex terms, challenging the Orientalist idea that Muslim women are oppressed by the veil, the hijab, and Islam, and in need of liberation.31 These representations exploit the contradictions inherent in Western Orientalist perceptions of Muslim female sexuality. Through its exposure of Islamophobic media discourses, Shamsie’s novel exposes the use of toxic tropes in popular media and culture. Home Fire thus serves to question and challenge mythologies: classic Western texts and figures such as Antigone as well as more recent culturally constructed myths which continue to perpetuate Orientalism and the othering of Muslim women.  N.a., “Orientalism.”  I am indebted to my former dissertation student, Maryam Shafaq, for treating this subject in her dissertation, “The Representation of Women in Jean Rhys’ Wide Sargasso Sea and Kamila Shamsie’s Home Fire.” (Undergraduate dissertation, University of Gloucestershire, 2020. Unpublished.) 29  Firouzeh Ameri, “Veiled experiences: Rewriting women’s identities and experiences in contemporary Muslim fiction in English.” PhD diss., Murdoch University, 2012. 30  Feroza Jussawalla and Doaa Omran, eds. Memory, Voice, and Identity: Muslim Women’s Writing from across the Middle East. London: Routledge, 2021. 31  Sara Gill, “Representations of Muslim Women in Western Media.” Centre for Feminist Foreign Policy, 29 August 2017. https://centreforfeministforeignpolicy.org/journal/2017/8/24/representation-muslim-women-western-media. Accessed 1 June 2021. 27 28

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Positioning Black Women at the Centre of Romance: Bolu Babalola, Love in Colour Black British romance and popular genre writing have emerged as a key topic in recent years’ popular debates,32 a subject urgently calling for more scholarship. This is one of the reasons why I teach this material on my module, and why readings to support student learning on the module include accessible scholarship, such as blogs and newspaper features, as well as more traditional academic research. On my module on decolonising the literature curriculum, Bolu Babalola’s 2020 short story collection, Love in Colour, forms the basis for students’ investigation of race, gender, sexuality, and genre. Drawing on global myths, folk tales, and legends as the inspiration for her contemporary recastings, Babalola’s writing can be researched and taught as an illustration of literary decolonisation through the complex lens of gender and race. Love in Colour places emphasis on black women as the protagonists in their love stories, in contrast to their objectification and trivialisation in white mainstream romance.33 Bent comments on the lack of black female representation in the romance genre, stating, “Published Black writers within the [romance] genre are lacking as a result of deep-set industry biases. We shouldn’t have to wait for the media and publishing industry to reflect back to us what we need to see.”34,35 Bent further argues that, “Identity and belonging go hand in hand on issues of inclusion within the romance literary scene. There should be a place for diverse narratives of the Black British experience because there are multicultural audiences.”36 Gebrial examines the politics of race and gender in romance fiction, stating that the erasure of black women from the white-dominated genre reflects “who can be loved, who cannot be loved and whose love matters” using the term “racial grammar 32  See, for example, Lisa Bent, “As a romance novelist, it makes no sense to me that Black love stories are anomalies in literature.” The Independent, 30 October 2020. https://www. independent.co.uk/voices/black-love-romance-literature-bhm-racism-jacaranda-books­b1396240.html. Accessed 1 June 2021. 33  Lois Beckett, “Fifty Shades of White: The Long Fight against Racism in Romance Novels.” The Guardian, 4 April 2019. https://www.theguardian.com/books/2019/ apr/04/fifty-shades-of-white-romance-novels-racism-ritas-rwa. Accessed 20 June 2021. 34  Bent, “Anomalies”. 35  Sareeta Domingo, The Black British Women Writing Themselves into Romance Novels. Black Ballad, 23 September 2020. https://blackballad.co.uk/views-voices/black-british-­ women-romance-fiction. Accessed 1 June 2021. 36  Bent, “Anomalies”.

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of desire” to describe that erasure.37 Scholarly research exists on the black American romance as well as creative and critical engagement with classical mythology, as for example in the incisive scholarship undertaken by Walters in her African American Literature and the Classicist Tradition: Black Women Writers from Wheatley to Morrison (2007).38 However, thus far the field of black British authors writing romance is underresearched, despite the fact that myths and narratives perpetrating female oppression in contexts of romantic love often perpetuate oppressive narratives about women of colour. In the classroom, discussion in the group about canonisation and the male-dominated fairy-tale tradition results in students and I together identifying in Babalola what Haase refers to as, “the discovery and recovery of alternative fairy-tale narratives and [...] the identification of the woman’s voice in fairy-tale production.”39 In class, our discussion focuses specifically on the female characters of colour at the centre of these narratives and the significance of this move for the decolonisation of mythology and romance. Based on the story of Pyramus and Thisbe from ancient Mesopotamia, Babalola’s reimagined text “Thisbe” opens with the female protagonist, a young black female student, chanting her daily affirmations of empowerment to herself as she prepares to enter the outside world, with its race, class, and gender inequality. Through the powerful black female figures Thisbe chants about, Babalola produces meaningful and current alternative myths of black women legends whom the students in my class can identify with: You are a queen. You are Lorde, Angelou, Simone, Walker, Hooks, Davis, Morrison, Knowles, Fenty, Robinson-Obama. You will shake the world, you will move the earth, you will be audacious with your essence, you will take up all the space, you will not stay in your lane, you will build new roads.40

Reflecting with students in class on these empowering figures and their re-presentation in this literary context, we focus on the decolonising effect 37  Dalia Gebrial, “Decolonising desire: the politics of love.” Versobooks.com. 13 February 2017. https://www.versobooks.com/blogs/3094-decolonising-desire-the-politics-of-love. 1 June 2021. 38  Tracey Walters, African American literature and the classicist tradition: black women writers from Wheatley to Morrison. Springer, 2007. 39  Donald Haase, Fairy Tales and Feminism: New Approaches (Series in Fairy-Tale Studies). Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2004. Kindle Edition. 40  Bolu Babalola, Love in Colour. London: Headline, 2020. Kindle Edition. 160–161.

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of Babalola’s narrative strategy and her highly effective blending of myth and legend with contemporary popular culture. The original myth, “Pyramus and Thisbe,” presents a tragic story of star-crossed lovers.41 However, in Babalola’s reimagined version, the lovers’ differences are overcome and their affection and mutual respect flourish. The story’s university setting and focus is especially important in terms of illustrating to students that literary study engages with their world and concerns, enabling them to experience what decolonisation might look like translated into their contexts and words. As Walters explains, black women authors’ reimagining of myth draws on contemporary themes, ideas, and debates, thus emphasising the continued social and cultural relevance of these revisionary foundational texts: “the contemporary renditions of the ancient texts engage in a social commentary about issues relative to urban blight, female victimisation, and racial oppression, which contribute to the public discourse of the day.”42 Walters’ point also holds true for Babalola’s stories in Love in Colour which illustrate to students the change of focus which happens through the process of decolonisation and the implication of that for their engagement with literature. Meanwhile, Bent explains that within the literary world […] there is a severe lack of representation across the board. It means the cultural perspectives of these stories aren’t understood, deemed as worthy, or are simply rendered unmarketable. In turn, these biased decisions not only block livelihoods, but they also exclude a plethora of diverse narratives—and published Black writers within the romance genre are lacking as a result.43

The theme of love has a clear decolonising and political meaning for Babalola, who states: “Love is political. It’s a radical act.”44 This specific focus on gender, genre, and the racial politics of romance serves a pedagogical purpose in providing an explicit and centring focus for students’ discussion, reflection, and active participation in decolonising the literature curriculum. Babalola’s decolonisation of the representation of black women is of great significance, as it encourages scholars and students to, 41  Britannica, T. Editors of Encyclopaedia. “Pyramus and Thisbe.” Encyclopedia Britannica, March 27, 2020. https://www.britannica.com/topic/Pyramus. Accessed 20 June 2021. 42  Walters, “Classicist”, 4. 43  Bent, “Anomalies”. 44  Bowler, Danielle, “Babalola’s Love is in the Details.” New Frame, 25 November 2020. https://www.newframe.com/bolu-babalolas-love-is-in-the-details/. Accessed 1 June 2021.

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in Haase’s words, “expand the focus of feminist fairy-tale research beyond the Western European and Anglo-American tradition, and […] to investigate the fairy-tale intertexts in the work of minority writers and performers.”45 Babalola’s revisioning of myth and romantic love is vital, because patriarchal culture perpetuates the idea that women’s art is of lesser value—an important point to make to students, as decolonisation is intersectional and encompasses inequalities of gender and sexuality, as well as race. Engaging students in this type of scrutiny through the use of popular texts by women of colour, such as Babalola’s, is a key strategy in my decolonisation of the literature curriculum. In class, we analyse and discuss themes, characters, narrative strategies, uses of language, and symbolism to compare original versions of myth or folk tale with Babalola’s contemporary reimagining and to reflect on the change of perspective and the impact of revision on issues such as reader inclusivity. Walters’ point here also applies to Babalola, as her Love in Colour “present[s] new stories and new mythologies about Black life from the perspectives of Black women [and] turn[s] to the classics for the freedom to create narratives that offer both victimized and empowered portrayals of women.”46 Thus, classroom discussions of Babalola’s writing back to the elitist white malestream and literary canon form a key part of my decolonisation of the literature curriculum.

Conclusion: Transforming Student Experience in the Diverse Classroom As I mentioned in the Introduction to this book, efforts to decolonise the curriculum are inconsistent and often resisted within individual institutions, departments, and subjects. The significance of an inclusive curriculum which decolonises the canon and makes visible spaces for representation of multicultural realities is a central strategy for decolonisation. Developing teaching and learning strategies for a diverse student body is crucial to my pedagogy. In my teaching practice, I have adapted Northedge’s research on the contemporary diverse classroom and its composition, as well as Bamber and Jones’ research on inclusive learning to my own practice. Northedge’s reflections in particular on encouraging students in their development of an individual voice I have found to be especially enabling  Haase, Fairy Tales and Feminism, n.p.  Walters, “Classicist”, 12.

45 46

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in my own practice, as well as his reminder that debate is not an indication of a crisis of authority but an essential dimension of teaching and learning.47 Examining Shamsie’s and Babalola’s fictions as key texts on my contemporary literature module serves several vital pedagogical purposes. This strategy places the focus on women writers of colour, ensuring that those authors who have previously been excluded from the canon due to intersecting categories of oppression form an integral part of a diversified and inclusive literature curriculum. Decolonising the literature curriculum requires an all-encompassing reassessment of the syllabus and the unconscious bias that underpins the canon. Breaking down the canon and exposing the white privilege behind it is a key strategy in the process of decolonisation I pursue. The use of critical pedagogy alongside feminist and inclusive themes and concepts in classroom discussions underpins my teaching practice, furthering students’ insight into and understanding of privilege, oppression, and transformation, as well as their own impact on and contribution to social and cultural change. Highly positive student feedback on this curricular development shows me that there is a real commitment to and enthusiasm for decolonising the literature curriculum among students. Importantly, my curricular innovations also demonstrate that popular cultural texts, such as tragedy and romance, and the focus on representations by women of colour, appeal to students because of the broader relevance of the themes they treat, the settings they use, and the narratives they convey. I am not suggesting that teaching one or two token texts by women of colour decolonises the literature curriculum. The works by Shamsie and Babalola examined in this chapter form part of a year-long module syllabus which has as its primary focus the decolonisation of literature, approached through the study of a number of key organising themes and texts which implicitly or explicitly address decolonisation. What I have done in this chapter is use specific contemporary texts by women of colour as case studies in decolonising the literature curriculum.48 My assessment strategy on this module has the aim of developing and enhancing students’ written analytical skills, their understanding of social justice debates, and ability to evaluate the role of global literature in effecting resistance and change. Alongside more traditional essay topics focusing on contextualised literary analysis, module essay topics also include a 47  Andrew Northedge, “Rethinking teaching in the context of diversity.” Teaching in Higher Education, 8, no. 1 (2002): 17–32. 48  This is also a point made by Aimee Merrydew.

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creative option and a critical option. Here, students have the opportunity to engage with the politics of representing race, gender, environment, class, and sexuality, either through a creative lens of their own devising or through specifically focusing on critical and scholarly material and evaluating its usefulness for decolonisation and social justice debates. These module assessments thus enable students to gain insight into the role of literature in exploring inequalities and decolonisation,49 enhancing their competence in analytical, creative, and critical enquiry. By investigating both original myths and tales and their modern recastings, through contrasting and comparing these texts and their contexts, students understand the process of decolonisation through literature. They see how oppressive hegemonic discourses within original stories are uncovered, challenged, and reimagined from new, hitherto silenced perspectives, thereby changing and transforming those original narratives. In a post-Trump and post-­ Brexit era blighted by neo-liberalism and the seductions of oppressive ideological discourses, it is vital, as Rohrer states, that progressive higher education teachers actively pursue and practice “a reinvigoration of critical pedagogies that necessarily expose and challenge structural oppression.”50 To me it is crucial that students engage critically with contemporary literary texts which reflect a multicultural society and involve a plurality of perspectives. Enabling this is a key part of my pedagogical practice, thereby ensuring that students experience and engage deeply with diverse writing by women writers of colour in order to experience increased representation and, through that, lay the foundations for decolonisation.

Works Cited Ameri, Firouzeh. “Veiled experiences: Rewriting women’s identities and experiences in contemporary Muslim fiction in English.” PhD diss., Murdoch University, 2012. Arday, Jason, Dina Zoe Belluigi, and Dave Thomas. “Attempting to break the chain: reimaging inclusive pedagogy and decolonising the curriculum within the academy.” Educational Philosophy and Theory 53, no. 3 (2021): 298–313. Babalola, Bolu. Love in Colour. London: Headline, 2020. Kindle Edition.

49  I have also explored this function of literature in my monograph, Contemporary Children’s and Young Adult Literature: Writing Back to History and Oppression. Newcastle upon Tyne, Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2021. 50  Rohrer, “Room,” 576.

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Babalola, Bolu. Love in Colour: Mythical Tales from Around the World, Retold (pp. 160–161). London: Headline, 2020. Kindle Edition. Beckett, Lois. “Fifty Shades of White: The Long Fight against Racism in Romance Novels.” The Guardian, 4 April 2019. https://www.theguardian.com/ books/2019/apr/04/fifty-­shades-­of-­white-­romance-­novels-­racism-­ritas-­r wa. Accessed 28 June 2021. Bent, Lisa. As a romance novelist, it makes no sense to me that Black love stories are anomalies in literature. The Independent, 30 October 2020. https://www. independent.co.uk/voices/black-­l ove-­r omance-­l iterature-­b hm-­r acism-­ jacaranda-­books-­b1396240.html. Accessed 1 June 2021. Beyer, Charlotte Contemporary Children’s and Young Adult Literature: Writing Back to History and Oppression. Newcastle upon Tyne, Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2021. Beyer, Charlotte. “The stuff of legend, or unpacking cultural baggage? Introducing first-year English literature and humanities students to foundational literary texts.” Changing English 20, no. 4 (2013): 395–403. Beyer, Charlotte. “‘Life Was a State in Which a War Was On’: AS Byatt’s Portrayal of War and Norse Mythology in Ragnarok: The End of the Gods,” in War, Myths, and Fairy Tales, edited by Buttsworth, Sara, and Maartje Abbenhuis, 195–218. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016. Beyer, Charlotte. “Reimagining Myth and the Maternal with Ruth Fainlight, Margaret Atwood and Katie Donovan.” Women Versed in Myth: Essays on Modern Poets, edited by Colleen S. Harris and Valerie Estelle Frankel, 50–58. Jefferson: McFarland, 2016. Beyer, Charlotte. “Exploring Postcolonial and Feminist Issues: Rabbit-Proof Fence in a Teaching Context.” Changing English 17, no. 1 (2010): 93–101. Bolle, K. W., Smith, Jonathan Z. and Buxton, Richard G.A. “Myth.” Encyclopedia Britannica, November 3, 2020. https://www.britannica.com/topic/myth. Accessed 1 June 2021. Bond, Sarah. “Why We Need to Start Seeing the Classical World in Color.” Hyperallergic. June 7 (2017). Bowler, Danielle, “Babalola’s Love is in the Details.” New Frame, 25 November 2020. https://www.newframe.com/bolu-­babalolas-­love-­is-­in-­the-­details/. Accessed 1 June 2021. Boyne, John. “Home Fire by Kamila Shamsie: Provocative Work from a Brave Author.” The Irish Times 26 Aug. 2017. https://www.irishtimes.com/culture/books/home-­fire-­by-­kamila-­shamsie-­provocative-­work-­from-­a-­brave-­ author-­1.3193353. Accessed 1 June 2021. Britannica, T.  Editors of Encyclopaedia. “Pyramus and Thisbe.” Encyclopedia Britannica, March 27, 2020. https://www.britannica.com/topic/Pyramus

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Burke, Penny Jane, and Ronelle Carolissen. “Gender, post-truth populism and higher education pedagogies.” Teaching in Higher Education, 23 no. 5 (2018): 543–547. Domingo, Sareeta. The Black British Women Writing Themselves into Romance Novels. Black Ballad, 23 September 2020. https://blackballad.co.uk/views-­ voices/black-­british-­women-­romance-­fiction. Accessed 1 June 2021. Evans, Louise, Bolu Babalola’s Love in Colour. Brizo, 19 December 2020. https://brizomagazine.com/2020/12/21/bolu-­babalolas-­love-­in-­colour/. Accessed 1 June 2021. Francis, Allanah, Lisa Bent on Writing Romance that Centres Black Women. The Voice, 11 December 2020. https://www.voice-­online.co.uk/entertainment/ books/2020/12/11/lisa-­b ent-­o n-­w riting-­r omance-­t hat-­c entres-­b lack-­ women/. Accessed 1 June 2021. Garza, Rosalba Icaza and Jong, Sara de. “Introduction: Decolonization and Feminisms in Global Teaching and Learning – A radical space of possibility,” in Decolonization and feminisms in global teaching and learning, eds. by Sara De Jong, Rosalba Icaza, and Olivia U.  Rutazibwa, xv–xxxiv. London: Routledge, 2018. Gebrial, Dalia. “Decolonising desire: the politics of love.” Versobooks.com. 13 February 2017. https://www.versobooks.com/blogs/3094-­decolonising-­ desire-­the-­politics-­of-­love. 1 June 2021. Gill, Sara. “Representations of Muslim Women in Western Media.” Centre for Feminist Foreign Policy, 29 August 2017. https://centreforfeministforeignpolicy.org/journal/2017/8/24/representation-­m uslim-­w omen-­w estern-­ media. Accessed 1 June 2021. Haase, Donald. Fairy Tales and Feminism: New Approaches (Series in Fairy-Tale Studies). Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2004. Kindle Edition. Iqbal, Nosheen, “Bolu Babalola: ‘It was mortifying meeting Michael B Jordan after my tweet about him went viral’.” The Independent, 20 August 2020. https://www.theguardian.com/books/2020/aug/02/bolu-­babalola-­it-­was-­ mortifying-­m eeting-­m ichael-­b -­j ordan-­a fter-­m y-­t weet-­a bout-­h im-­w ent-­ viral?CMP=share_btn_tw. Accessed 1 June 2021. Jussawalla, Feroza, and Doaa Omran, eds. Memory, Voice, and Identity: Muslim Women’s Writing from across the Middle East. London: Routledge, 2021. Lau, Lisa, and Ana Cristina Mendes. “Twenty-First-Century Antigones: The Postcolonial Woman Shaped by 9/11 in Kamila Shamsie’s Home Fire.” Studies in the Novel 53, no. 1 (2021): 54–68. Makinen, Merja. “Angela Carter’s The Bloody Chamber and the decolonization of feminine sexuality.” Feminist Review 42, no. 1 (1992): 2–15. Merrydew, Aimee, “Tackling Inequalities: Building a ‘healthier’ Curriculum through Feminist Reflexivity,” KITE Student Education Conference 2020,

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University of Keele. https://www.keele.ac.uk/kiite/curriculumdesignframework/casestudies/aimeemerrydew/. Accessed 20 October 2021. Northedge, Andrew, “Rethinking teaching in the context of diversity.” Teaching in Higher Education, 8, no. 1 (2002): 17–32. O’Reilly, Elizabeth. “Kamila Shamsie – critical perspective.” British Council, n.d. https://literature.britishcouncil.org/writer/kamila-­shamsie. Accessed 1 June 2021. Ranasinha, Ruvani. “Guest Editorial: Decolonizing English.” The Journal of Commonwealth Literature, Vol. 54 issue: 2 (2019): 119–123. Rohrer, Judy. “‘It’s in the room’: reinvigorating feminist pedagogy, contesting neoliberalism, and trumping post-truth populism.” Teaching in Higher Education 23, no. 5 (2018): 576–592. Rose, Jaya Bhattacharji. Interview: Kamila Shamsie on her Bold and Heart-­Breaking New Novel, “Home Fire”. 30 August 2017. http://www.jayabhattacharjirose. com/interview-­kamila-­shamsie-­on-­her-­bold-­and-­heart-­breaking-­new-­novel-­ home-­fire/. Accessed 1 June 2021. Shafaq, Maryam. “The Representation of Women in Jean Rhys’ Wide Sargasso Sea and Kamila Shamsie’s Home Fire.” Undergraduate dissertation, University of Gloucestershire, 2020. Unpublished. Shaheen, Aamer, Sadia Qamar, and Muhammad Islam. “Obsessive ‘Westoxification’ Versus the Albatross of Fundamentalism and Love as Collateral Damage in Kamila Shamsie’s Home Fire.” Journal of Research (Humanities) 54 (2018): 150–167. Shamsie, Kamila. Home Fire. London: Bloomsbury Publishing, 2017. Tamboukou, Maria. “Antigone Re-Imagined: Uprooted Women’s Political Narratives.” Feminist Theory (April 2021). https://doi. org/10.1177/14647001211005298 Veyret, Paul. “Fractured territories: Deterritorializing the contemporary Pakistani novel in English.” The Journal of Commonwealth Literature. Vol. 56 no. 2 (2018): 307–321. https://doi.org/10.1177/0021989418808039 What is Orientalism? Reclaiming Identity: Dismantling Arab Stereotypes. Arab American National Museum (AANM), n.d. http://arabstereotypes.org/why-­ stereotypes/what-­orientalism. Accessed 1 June 2021. Walters, Tracey. African American literature and the classicist tradition: black women writers from Wheatley to Morrison. Springer, 2007.

Smart Latinas Are Latinas: On Teaching Chicana/Latina Young Adult (YA) Literature as Feminist Resistance Cristina Herrera

In any given semester, my students will ask me what at first appears to be a straightforward question. “What made you want to study Chicana and Latina literature, Professor?” The question itself is a harmless and valid one, but its response is far more challenging and laden with the complexities of racism, sexism, classism, and the elitism that are entrenched in systems of higher education and societies at large. To answer this question, I typically decide to recall one story, among many from which I could choose, that is seared in my memory, one that, I know, has permanently imprinted itself into my very core. This story, in which I centre personal memory in connection to gender, ethnicity, and class, for me functions as an important moment of Chicana feminist decolonial work, in which I insist to my mainly Latinx student population that sharing from my body

C. Herrera (*) Portland State University, Portland, OR, USA e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 C. Beyer (ed.), Decolonising the Literature Curriculum, Teaching the New English, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-91289-5_4

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and identity destabilises the whiteness of the academy that rejects the knowledges created by people of colour. As one of only two Chicana students enrolled in a prestigious graduate programme in American literature, my graduate education reflected the research interests of my all-white professors. Few writers of colour were present on my graduate exam reading list, and of these writers of colour, only two texts by Chicana/Latina writers were included. I knew early on that I wanted to research Chicana literature, so when it was time to submit my dissertation proposal to my white female adviser, I waited anxiously for days for her to sign, approve, and provide direction. I waited. And waited some more. Until one day, my adviser called me, waking me from a much-­ needed nap, to tell me that she would not sign off on my dissertation proposal unless I altered the topic to her liking. “You can’t write solely on Chicana authors, not unless you compare them to white women writers.” Half groggy, half awake, and not sure I heard her correctly, I remember asking, “what?” then, “why? I don’t understand.” She repeated the dreaded words, confirming that I did hear her correctly all along. After arguing with her on the merits of my topic, we ended the conversation on a bitter note, to say the least, and I was forced to wait several more weeks, where she essentially held my proposal hostage, until I had no choice but to seek out another adviser, this time a sympathetic Chicana scholar from a nearby university who was angered on my behalf and who eventually led me through the dissertation process. Predictably, my students are stunned when I recall this moment to them, and I tell them a fact I always knew, but one in which my former adviser insisted on reminding me of anyway in her refusal to approve a topic that she deemed unworthy of study. By refusing to approve my topic, I tell my students, it is not a “simple” matter of her challenging the merits of my research. My former adviser deemed me unworthy and by extension my entire community. So why do I study and teach this work? Because it affirms my right to exist, when, as my former adviser taught me through her thinly veiled white supremacy, everything around me reminds me that my community, my family, and I have no right to thrive, study, learn, think, and create. When I profess these values to my students, seen through my careful selection of Chicanx and Latinx literature that mirrors their own lived experiences, I embody the Chicana feminist, decolonial work that ruptures the whiteness of the educational curriculum through which my students and I have been taught. These values are informed by the foundational work of Chicana/Latina scholars, who have posed critical

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theories that destabilise longstanding fields of inquiry, such as history, philosophy, and literature, that have erased our communities from the “official” narrative.1 I am a trained literature scholar, holding both undergraduate and graduate degrees in English, but I teach in a Chicanx/Latinx Studies department at a medium- to large-sized public state university in California.2 As an ethnic studies department, our faculty teach a large number of general education courses for students spanning all majors on campus, but I incorporate Latinx literature in virtually every course I teach, especially in a fairly new writing-intensive class I designed that centralises Chicana and Latina literature. For the past two years, I have included Chicana and Latina young adult (YA) literature in an undergraduate course I teach called Contemporary Chicana/Latina Writing. Although the course meets a university writing requirement and thus appeals to students across a wide range of academic majors, including those who have never studied literary works, much less those by Chicana and Latina writers, I teach students the basic skills of critical literary analysis from an intersectional lens. Within this intersectional feminist lens,3 I teach students the hallmark literary device of close reading that pays particular attention to Chicana/Latina identities that are inextricable from their lived realities as sexualised, gendered, and racialised bodies moving within a US landscape that continues to marginalise and oppress women of colour. And because my students, unfortunately, have been taught within K-12 schooling that literature is not the stuff of reality (fiction means “fake,” my students have confessed), I assign and carefully select literature for my classes that demonstrates to students that texts by Latina writers give us ample material with which to dissect very “real” issues, such as structural forms of inequality, violence, (in)visibility, power, and gender identity, among other topics. Needless to say, students leave my class with a markedly different understanding of what literature is and why it matters, and most important, they gain an appreciation for the ground-breaking works penned by Latina writers that demand a more just and compassionate world for all people. Centring my courses around this important body of work by Chicana/Latina writers decolonises not only what students have been taught counts as “real” 1  Scholars like Emma Pérez, María Lugones, Norma Alarcón, and Lourdes Alberto Celis, for example, engage in this crucial feminist decolonial work. 2  At the time of this writing, I taught in California. 3  A term first coined by a feminist legal scholar, Kimberle Crenshaw.

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literature in the mainstream educational curriculum; beyond that, this literature presents Latinx peoples as flesh-and-blood beings who are presented as subjects of their own making. A central tenet of Ethnic Studies is this decolonial work. Without a doubt, one of the texts that have garnered the most enthusiasm from my students is the YA novel, Yaqui Delgado Wants to Kick Your Ass, by the acclaimed Cuban American writer of youth literature, Meg Medina. In this chapter, I will explore this YA text that features an intelligent, smart, and nerdy adolescent protagonist, examining the often robust and dynamic conversations that emerge from teaching this novel to students who have not been introduced to literature of this kind. The novel explores significant themes like bullying and the school systems in the United States that do very little to address the emotional and social impact of bullying on its most vulnerable victims. Many students who plan for future teaching careers are drawn to the novel because it raises questions on harsh disciplinary tactics that our school systems use that disproportionately impact students of colour. For the large number of students who are studying criminology, mainly because of our university’s geographic proximity to state and federal prisons, the novel is eye-opening for its indictment of how these school systems mirror the inherently flawed justice system that often operates on a “three strikes, you’re out” framework. But beyond that, I encourage students to examine some of the other salient issues explored in the novel, namely one of the reasons the protagonist is bullied in the first place. These issues range from the colonial remnants of colourism, as evident in Piddy’s lighter skin which is often the subject of much scrutiny by her peers, to the tense relationship between Piddy and her single mother, Clara, who evades information about Piddy’s biological father. In class conversations, I encourage students to seek out passages that reflect Piddy’s sense of isolation that stems not only from her status as new kid in school but also due to her increasing curiosity about this unknown father whose identity is kept as Clara’s own personal secret. Many students can relate to the fears and anxieties of attending a new school, and for my teachers in training, this novel offers a very realistic glimpse into high school dynamics of space, friendships, and, of course, bullying. As an academically gifted, studious, and light-skinned Latina of Dominican and Cuban descent, Piddy Sánchez defies narrow understandings of what it means to be a Latina teenager, particularly when Latina youth identity has been problematically defined by mainstream and

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popular culture as a social “problem.”4 If we believe what we see online and in the media, we would think all young Latinas are “criminals,” in danger of dropping out of high school and/or on the verge of teenage motherhood. For example, when discussing these damaging stereotypes, I encourage students not only to consider popular films that present Latinas as overtly sexual or criminalised (The Fast and the Furious comes up repeatedly) but to search for online news accounts that discuss Latinx populations. “What stories do these news clips tell?” I ask them. As my students reflect, these stories would suggest that the only narrative by which we can understand Latinxs, especially young Latinxs, is through criminality and sexuality rather than through intellectual curiosity or creativity. A text like Yaqui Delgado, thus, is significant for decolonising pedagogies for how it offers an expansive, subversive, and destabilising mode to interrogate young Latina womanhood. To be sure, issues related to graduation attainment and young motherhood are significant topics that Latinx scholars address, but far too often, this is the only narrative through which Latinas are seen. Fortunately, many of my students, predominantly Latinas, recognise that these are stereotypes, but at times, they admit that they believe there is a grain of truth to these media stereotypes. My students have revealed to me that they have been taught to believe that reading and writing, or excelling at those subjects, are “white” things and have nothing to do with their daily, lived realities and that academic pursuits are the purview of their Anglo peers. As a Chicana feminist scholar, I deliberately include YA texts like Medina’s novel to not only show students the dangers of internalising racist, sexist myths of adolescent Latina identity; but in having my students explore a smart, some would say “nerdy” Latina character like Piddy Sánchez,5 I aim to show my students of colour that Medina is adamantly normalising Latina intelligence as resistance to racist and sexist myths that define Latinas as always deviant or sexualised but never intelligent and academically ambitious. By connecting Piddy’s academic curiosity and 4  I offer an analysis of this theme in greater length in my chapter on Yaqui Delgado. See my co-edited volume, Nerds, Goths, Geeks, and Freaks: Outsiders in Chicanx and Latinx Young Adult Literature (UP of Mississippi, 2020). 5  For the purposes of this chapter, I do not engage in a prolonged discussion of the nerd identity, which I have explored in my study, ChicaNerds in Chicana Young Adult Literature: Brown and Nerdy (Routledge, 2020) and in my co-edited volume, Nerds, Goths, Geeks, and Freaks: Outsiders in Chicanx and Latinx Young Adult Literature (University Press of Mississippi, 2020).

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love of learning as intrinsic, not separate, from her adolescent, Latina self-­ expression, I point to the text’s power as part of the necessary work of decolonising the mainstream curriculum that erases young women of colour as creative and studious subjects. I limit my discussion to one novel, but it is important to note that I routinely teach Chicana YA texts, such as Guadalupe García McCall’s verse novel, Under the Mesquite (2011) and Erika Sánchez’s I Am Not Your Perfect Mexican Daughter (2017), and these class discussions also engage in analyses of gender, stereotypes, ethnicity, and what it means to be academically gifted in a larger social system that refuses to see young girls of colour in this light. In particular, I will argue that we as educators and scholars, in our efforts to decolonise the syllabus, can do so by teaching Chicana/Latina YA literature to adult students to resist and dismantle prevailing ideologies around young womanhood, teenage girls of colour, identity, education, and intelligence. Centring literature by Chicana and Latina young adult writers functions as a feminist, woman of colour counter-­discourse that argues that it is not merely sufficient to “include” works by women of colour in a literature course; instead, by teaching literature by and for Chicana/Latina audiences, I demonstrate in practice what it means to privilege those voices that have too often been reduced to the margins or silenced altogether.

On Teaching Chicana/Latina Young Adult Literature to Chicanas and Latinas A fundamental argument this chapter makes is the juxtaposition between two facts: the rich, vibrant field that is Chicanx/Latinx literature, particularly texts aimed for adolescent readers, with the reality of the historical marginalisation and systemic oppression of this population. As John Morán González and Laura Lomas describe Latinx literature, “In effect, what had been previously considered to be a minor, late twentieth-century subset of U.S. ethnic literature has become a literature that predates and unseats monolingual and Anglo-cultural origin narratives.”6 Latinx literature is hardly a new domain, and writers like Sandra Cisneros and Julia Alvarez, for example, are mainstream, literary powerhouses. But while the Latinx population is the largest ethnic “minority” in the United States, 6  González, John Morán and Laura Lomas, The Cambridge History of Latina/o American Literature (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018), 4.

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and in states like California, where I live and work, that are already deemed a “majority-minority” state, numbers alone do not tell the whole story. For if numbers alone were enough, we would presume that these numbers would translate to power and visibility, but this is certainly not the case, especially if we examine the state of education today. To best understand the significance of teaching Chicana/Latina young adult literature within the current social, political climate in which we find ourselves, we need to examine where myths of Chicana/Latina intelligence abound and where these myths cause the most damage to young people of colour: the classroom. In the introduction to this chapter, I described the challenges of teaching Latina YA literature to students who have rarely, if ever, been exposed to this body of work, through no fault of their own, but rather as a consequence of a deeply flawed educational system in the United States that reproduces our nation’s inequality, as scholar Gilberto Q.  Conchas affirms.7 Simply put, my students live, move, work, and learn within an unequal social system that erases their histories and stories from the educational curriculum on the one hand and, on the other, promotes the ideology that Latinas can only be visible bodies if they perpetuate and maintain common myths around Latinx deviance, “loose” sexuality, and/ or criminality. As a Chicana high school student, I was also flooded with daily reminders from my teachers and environment that I was not cut out for college, that my culture was “backward,” and that I needed to assimilate to mainstream culture if I had any chance of “making it.” My students and I, in our ability to resist these white supremacist ideologies that are entrenched in systems of higher education, embody resilience, forging our own paths when the roads have never been designed for our crossing to begin with. This is because historically, as Chicana educational scholar Angela Valenzuela’s ground-breaking work, Subtractive Schooling: U.S.Mexican Youth and the Politics of Caring, found, Mexican American students have been constructed as “fundamentally lacking in drive and enthusiasm” for education, a racist and classist ideology that suggests that Latinx cultures are somehow deficient.8 Within this deficit perspective, as Valenzuela’s research attests, white supremacy is let off the hook—that is, 7  Conchas, Gilberto Q. The Color of Success: Race and High-Achieving Urban Youth (New York: Teachers College Press, 2006), 75. 8  Valenzuela, Angela. Subtractive Schooling: U.S.-Mexican Youth and the Politics of Caring (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1999), 4.

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this deficit model maintains the ideology that individual cultures and peoples are responsible for educational disparities, negating the role that unequal social structures play in upholding power, opportunities, and privileges for the dominant group. As Nilda Flores-González explains, “schools—in formal and informal ways—hinder the development of academic identities” for some students of colour, including the Latinx children she studied.9 These “deficit standards, as mirrors of the dominant culture from which they emerge, define Chicanx and Latinx communities as incompatible with intelligence and academic success, troubling beliefs that Chicanx students risk internalizing.”10 Teachers, as embodiments of an educational system that narrowly frames Latinx children and their parents as inherently lacking, may perpetuate to their students of colour that higher education, reading, and writing are academic pursuits to which they should not aspire. In light of these troubling facts, what we incorporate into the classroom is incredibly powerful, as we risk maintaining, rather than dismantling, educational disparities; but by engaging with material that empowers and validates the lives of students of colour, we demonstrate to these students that they have histories, experiences, and communities that are worth celebrating. This is at the core of decolonial pedagogy, which structures a classroom with the tenet that our students of colour possess qualities and values learned from their communities and families, even if those knowledges are seldom, if ever, acknowledged as “legitimate.” Although speaking of theatre for young audiences (TYA), theatre scholar Roxanne Schroeder-Arce calls on educators to introduce their students to plays like The Smartest Girl in the World by the Latina playwright Miriam Gonzales. This play, like the text I explore in this chapter, “offers young people a look at youthful Latinx intellectuals who never question their smartness in relation to their identity markers,” serving as “an example of Latinx dramatic literature that offers positive representations of Latinx characters and families and specifically Latinx youth who celebrate their smartness.”11 9  Flores-González, Nilda. School Kids/Street Kids: Identity Development in Latino Students (New York: Teachers College Press, 2002), 12. 10  Herrera, Cristina. ChicaNerds in Chicana Young Adult Literature: Brown and Nerdy (New York: Routledge, 2020), 31. 11  Schroeder-Arce, Roxanne. “The Smartest Girl in the World: Normalizing Intellectualism through Representations of Smart Latinx Youth on Stage.” In Nerds, Goths, Geeks, and Freaks: Outsiders in Chicanx and Latinx Young Adult Literature, edited by Trevor Boffone and Cristina Herrera (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2020), 106.

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Texts like these teach students that academic intelligence and Latinx identity are not disparate facets of identity, that intellectual curiosity does not render one “less” Latinx, but it is inherently part of being Latinx. To that end, the literature that young students of colour read in K-12 schooling fundamentally impacts how they may see themselves, their families, and the world around them. For example, as Baxley and Boston explain in their study of YA literature by women of colour, texts that validate their experiences can have profound effects on whether they see themselves as valuable: “For a young reader not to see himself or herself reflected in the pages of [young adult] literature implies the value or level of worth associated with the individual is minimal.”12 Likewise, Sandra Hughes-Hassell reminds us that “we cannot overestimate the power of seeing (or not seeing) oneself in literature.”13 While I was an avid reader as a child and thoroughly loved The Sweet Valley Twins book series especially because I am an identical twin myself, it was not until I arrived to college that I began asking why these books, although I enjoyed them, had almost nothing to do with my life, my family, or community, and my teachers rarely, if ever, assigned books by writers whose lives mirrored my own. This is precisely why just this past academic semester, in March 2020, in what would be one of our final in-person class sessions before the coronavirus pandemic forced universities to transition to virtual teaching, my students were deeply touched when I read a children’s picture book aloud to them—the beautiful, lyrical text, Dreamers, by Yuyi Morales. Although intended for young children, I read the book to my students to demonstrate what it means for a Mexican children’s book author to create a text that humanises the migrant experience. I am the granddaughter of Mexican migrants, and many of my students are the children of migrants or even migrants themselves, so this book is a remarkable declaration of our histories. This message was not lost on one student, who remarked that the “visibly brown bodies on the page” powerfully affirmed her existence in a way that the books her elementary teachers assigned to her did not. Latinx YA and children’s texts offer a decolonial foundation in the classroom, as evidenced by my student’s pride in seeing bodies of colour in print in a powerful, resistant manner. 12  Baxley, Traci P. and Genyne Henry Boston. (In)Visible Presence: Feminist Counter-­ narratives of Young Adult Literature by Women of Color (Boston: Sense Publishers, 2014), 4. 13  Hughes-Hassell, Sandra. “Multicultural Young Adult Literature as a Form of Counter-­ Story Telling.” The Library Quarterly 83, no. 3 (2013), 214.

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Meg Medina’s Yaqui Delgado Wants to Kick Your Ass Although it is a recent publication, Yaqui Delgado Wants to Kick Your Ass has easily become one of my favourite texts to teach, and it is not surprising that a majority of my students choose to explore this novel for their final research papers. The novel is appealing for a number of reasons, but especially for its gripping, raw account of a young girl who is bullied relentlessly, culminating in a final showdown when her abuse is recorded and shared on YouTube for the world to witness her humiliation, a decidedly twenty-first-century element with which my students are all too familiar. To begin our class discussion of Medina’s novel, I engage the class with an exercise that I have found to be enormously helpful to contextualise our analysis of gender, ethnicity, stereotypes, and the importance of creating a positive Latina self-identity, the latter with which the adolescent protagonist struggles throughout the narrative. While this chapter centres the analysis on Yaqui Delgado, I will often adopt a similar exercise when I teach the novels by Guadalupe García McCall and Erika Sánchez, as these texts, like Medina’s, also contribute to crucial interventions to our understanding of Chicana adolescents and their right to academic achievement. I ask students to conduct what they at first interpret as a casual search on Google Images using the terms “Chicana” and “Latina.” Conducting a search within Google Images will yield both images and terms at the top of the screen. After several minutes of scrolling through the images and terms we see on the screen, the discussion begins, and I ask students to describe what they see. Students will comment that they notice a particular emphasis on body parts and the recurring images of beautiful Latina actresses, such as Sofía Vergara or Salma Hayek. Some have expressed frustration that many of the images “don’t show regular or everyday sort of Latinas” with whom they can identify. When I ask them to clarify what they mean by “regular Latinas,” they often will point to themselves and then the screen and remark, “I don’t look like that,” meaning, they do not look like what Google Images suggests Latinas should look like. Without fail, every semester the recurring critique I hear from my students is the disproportionate number of images and terms that portray Latinas and Chicanas as either sexualised or even criminalised. Rarely do images of “regular or everyday sort of Latinas” appear, nor do we tend to see images

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that reflect Latinas as students, like mine, who are pursuing higher education. “Why don’t we see the words, ‘smart’ or ‘student’ that accompany the images?” I ask my students. “Should we be troubled by Google’s interpretation of what it means to be Latina?” I elaborate. My students quickly learn that what they initially believed to be a fun and simple classroom exercise is quite the opposite. For example, one of the terms that frequently appears when one searches “Latina” is “hot,” followed by “sexy.” Interestingly, the terms may change from day to day. I recently discovered, to my disgust but not surprise, that a newer term, “bouncy,” appeared when I searched under “Latina.” While the images by themselves are significant, when we read them alongside the terms, they are even more revealing of what scholar Safiya Umoja Noble documents in her pathbreaking book, Algorithms of Oppression: “On the Internet and in our everyday uses of technology, discrimination is also embedded in computer code, and, increasingly, in artificial intelligence technologies that we are reliant on, by choice or not.”14 As Noble’s research shows, seemingly simple Google searches are far more insidious, exposing the false notion of neutrality. She elaborates: “On one level, the everyday racism and commentary on the web is an abhorrent thing in itself, which has been detailed by others; but it is entirely different with the corporate platform vis-à-vis an algorithmically crafted web search that offers up racism and sexism as the first results.”15 What we see on the screen is not “simply” a matter of random images and terms. So, when I ask my students why it is problematic to read terms like “sexy” or “gangster” alongside images of scantily clad Latinas, I intend to raise their awareness of how apparently casual, everyday searches are intimately tied to a much larger problem of oppression, inequality, and stereotyping that can determine how my students see themselves as people of colour and how others see them, significant findings that Noble documents in her study. In short, Google searches reinforce our larger structural inequality that maintains narrow constructions of Latina identity around criminality and sexuality to deny them real power and visibility, and individuals who challenge these stereotypes may be subjected to violence for falling out of “their place.” This discussion offers a perfect transition to an analysis of Medina’s protagonist, Piddy Sánchez, 14  Noble, Safiya Umoja. Algorithms of Oppression: How Search Engines Reinforce Racism (New York: New York UP, 2018), 1. 15  Noble, Safiya Umoja. Algorithms of Oppression, 5.

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whose victimisation is directly tied to narrow understandings of Latina adolescence and Latinx identity more generally. Early in the novel, Medina describes Piddy’s feelings of being an outsider at her new high school, the terror of which many of my students have said they can relate. Being a new kid at school is terrifying, and Medina deftly captures Piddy’s anxiety, when early in the school year and in unfamiliar surroundings, a classmate informs her that a school bully, the novel’s namesake, has marked Piddy as her latest victim: “Yaqui Delgado hates you. She says you’re stuck-up for somebody who just showed up out of nowhere. And she wants to know who the hell you think you are, shaking your ass the way you do.”16 Piddy’s troubles with Yaqui begin immediately in the novel, and this fact adds to the heightened sense of anxiety that readers may also experience. In other words, readers have no build up to the dread of being marked on a bully’s hit list, and Medina hits us dead-on with this terrifying reality. Further, this passage sets the stage early on for a conversation around Piddy’s arbitrary actions, such as walking to class, that are sexualised, allowing students to connect the Google Images exercise to Piddy’s discomfort at being labelled an “ass shaker,” something to which she has had no choice in constructing for herself. Throughout the novel, Piddy struggles to comprehend why she is targeted by Yaqui and her crew, girls she does not know and with whom she has not previously interacted. Further, this outright confusion she experiences coincides with another entirely unfamiliar reality, the sudden need to vehemently defend and proclaim her Latina identity, something she has never had to do before. As she describes herself, “White-skinned. No accent. Good in school. I’m not her idea of a Latina at all.”17 Piddy instinctively knows that it is not solely her appearance that marks her “not Latina,” but it is appearance and being “good in school” that determine who is identified as Latina.18 This important passage is particularly salient for a class discussion not only on why Piddy is forced to defend her ethnic identity but why academic achievement renders her suspect as well. Piddy is pressured to defend her Latinidad, protesting to a classmate, “‘My last 16  Medina, Meg. Yaqui Delgado Wants to Kick Your Ass. (Somerville, MA: Candlewick, 2013), 2. 17  Medina, Meg. Yaqui Delgado, 6. 18  Herrera, Cristina. “‘These Latin Girls Mean Business’: Expanding the Boundaries of Latina Youth Identity in Meg Medina’s Yaqui Delgado Wants to Kick Your Ass.” In Nerds, Goths, Geeks, and Freaks: Outsiders in Chicanx and Latinx Young Adult Literature, edited by Trevor Boffone and Cristina Herrera (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2020), 122.

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name is Sanchez, remember?’ I finally say to Darlene. ‘My mother is from Cuba, and my dad is from the Dominican Republic. I’m just as Latin as they are.’”19 For Piddy, familial connections to the Caribbean are sufficient to “prove” her Latina heritage, forcing my students to ask the problematic question of who gets to determine one’s ethnicity and how this is defined in the first place. In her former school, Piddy’s ethnic identity is seldom up for discussion, and the sudden attention paid to it within this new school setting demonstrates the rather problematic constructions of race that rely on arbitrary markers of skin colour, facial expression, body shape, even voice, that may be constructed differently as one navigates multiple spaces. Piddy’s appearance, combined with her intellect, implies that she is a “lesser” Latina or indeed not Latina at all. So, if Piddy is not Latina, then what does that make her nemesis, Yaqui? I pose this important question alongside passages such as the following, when Piddy attempts to learn more about Yaqui and her friends: “those girls are a rougher bunch—nothing at all like [her best friend] Mitzi and me.”20 What makes Piddy call them a “rougher bunch”? Does Piddy resort to her own form of stereotyping, perhaps? We can consider another passage, this time when she spots Yaqui and her friends playing handball in a neighbourhood park while she is walking home with her mother: “Their big hoop earrings and plucked eyebrows, their dark lips painted like those stars in the old black-and-white movies, their tight T-shirts that show too much curve and invite boys’ touches. The funny thing is, if I could be anything right now, I’d be just like one of them.”21 Not surprisingly, many of my students will remark that Piddy’s description of Yaqui and her friends reminds them of some of the Google Images. This important connection my students draw between the Google Images, Piddy’s declaration of Yaqui belonging to a “rougher bunch,” along with their plucked, hooped appearance, allows for a closer analysis of how Latina identity is constructed by dominant cultures to define Yaqui as the “real” Latina and Piddy as the “lesser” Latina, problematic constructions that our own communities at times internalise, evident in Piddy’s desire to be “just like one of them”: “Within this troubling racial logic, ‘tough-looking’ girls like Yaqui are easily classified as Latina, while shy and bookish girls like Piddy

 Medina, Meg. Yaqui Delgado, 6.  Medina, Meg. Yaqui Delgado, 6. 21  Medina, Meg. Yaqui Delgado, 56. 19 20

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must prove themselves” to be Latina.22 What often ensues is a lively yet critical conversation on the pain that accompanies racist and sexist stereotypes, and many of my students will share personal examples of times they have been mocked or ridiculed for not meeting unrealistic expectations set forth by the dominant group at large and even among their own communities and families. Teaching this novel every semester with a new set of students and an entirely different class dynamic is exciting, as a new crop of students will undoubtedly contribute their own unique circumstances into the discussion. As I stated earlier, Yaqui Delgado is appealing to my students for its realistic depiction of an urban high school setting, and with the core of the plot revolving around a teenager’s efforts to evade the school bully, the story is both critical and entertaining. But what occurs in a classroom when there are students who are deeply impacted by the text because of their intimate experiences with bullying? In one recent semester, as we were in the middle of a class discussion on how the novel captures Piddy’s frustration, anxieties, and fear in a brand new school, one of my students, a Latina, shared that the novel provided her with insight into what it would be like to be a victim of bullying. She admitted to the class that when she was in high school, she was suspended multiple times for fighting, saying, “I was the bad kid.” I asked her why she referred to herself as the “bad kid,” and she eloquently explained that fighting was the only way she knew to solve personal problems that she was struggling with, and she continued fighting because changing her behaviour would never actually alter how the school administration saw her anyway. In her view, as the “bad kid,” she could never redeem herself in the eyes of the administration that saw her as the “aggressive and angry Latina.” To the rest of the class, she insisted that we examine not only Piddy’s frustration but what it must mean to be Yaqui, to question why Yaqui engages in bullying behaviour. My student’s articulate analysis demands that we ask if Yaqui might believe the false premise that to be a “real” Latina, she must be a bully. Additionally, a number of Latina students have remarked that the term “bully” may be unfairly attached to any young woman of colour, whether or not she engages in Yaqui’s behaviour, as a result of the pervasive stereotype of the angry or “mean” Latina. As my students learn, gendered and racialised stereotypes of “aggressive” women of colour mean that their behaviours and actions are consistently policed and surveilled.  Herrera, Cristina. “These Latin Girls Mean Business,” 124.

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My student’s brave admission to the class brings up a crucial point in the novel: what about Yaqui? For while the novel undoubtedly privileges Piddy’s point of view and experiences (she is the protagonist, after all), readers are left with a troubling ending. Soon after the school principal views the YouTube video that documents Yaqui’s violent attack on Piddy, Yaqui, we presume, is suspended and Piddy is allowed to transition to her former high school before her eventual acceptance to a science magnet school: “While Piddy’s admission to the prestigious magnet school essentially ensures her eventual college placement, the obvious question arises: what happens to Yaqui?”23 The novel does not answer our questions, and there is no tying of loose ends, and my students and I discuss how this deliberate omission by Medina suggests an imperfect ending for Yaqui and a potential future starkly different from Piddy’s. Remarkably, in the very class when my student revealed a deeply personal part of her past, another student shared that she was relentlessly bullied in high school, and the novel validated her experiences in a way her former high school did not. My two students’ commentary on their vastly different experiences in high school culminated in my class, where a Latina YA novel enabled them to speak openly and honestly about the pains of growing up.

Conclusion Chicana and Latina young adult literature is a rich field that teaches young people and adults alike about the realities of living and moving within a landscape that has rarely deemed young girls of colour worthy of telling their own stories. By teaching texts like Yaqui Delgado Wants to Kick Your Ass, I offer my students diverse ways of representing Latina adolescence that resist racist and sexist ideologies around Latina identity and that decolonise mainstream curriculums and classrooms. Centring Latina adolescence as synonymous with creativity, power, and insight, I suggest, must be part of our ongoing project of decolonisation. In addition to the novels I reference, such as García McCall’s Under the Mesquite and Sánchez’s I Am Not Your Perfect Mexican Daughter, the vibrant field of Latina YA literature offers many more texts that scholars should consider incorporating into the classroom that display gifted, talented, and creative Latina characters, including novels like Elizabeth Acevedo’s The Poet X and With the Fire on High, Gabby Rivera’s Juliet Takes a Breath, Isabel  Herrera, Cristina. “These Latin Girls Mean Business,” 126.

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Quintero’s Gabi, A Girl in Pieces, and many more. With these novels, my students learn to embrace the complexity of their identities that they seldom see in popular culture, in the media, or in the texts they read in school. Perhaps most important, I ask my students to examine what it means that descriptors like “smart” and “intelligent” are rarely attributed to young Latinas, using YA literature as a perfect response to this troubling reality. My Latina students, whose very presence in my university classroom reveals their incredible strength and intellect, deserve narratives that portray them in compassionate and validating ways. Smart Latinas are Latinas, I remind them, and it remains a frustrating, constant challenge that seemingly simple statements like that must be expressed in the first place. But this is precisely why literature matters, why YA literature matters, and why narratives written by Latinas matter: to set the record straight, and in doing such, these works dare to imagine a world where Latinas are encouraged to be smart, nerdy, and fabulous.

Works Cited Acevedo, Elizabeth. The Poet X. New York: Harper Teen, 2018. ———. With the Fire on High. New York: Harper Teen, 2019. Baxley, Traci P. and Genyne Henry Boston. (In)Visible Presence: Feminist Counter-­ narratives of Young Adult Literature by Women of Color. Boston: Sense Publishers, 2014. Boffone, Trevor and Cristina Herrera, editors. Nerds, Goths, Geeks, and Freaks: Outsiders in Chicanx and Latinx Young Adult Literature. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2020. Conchas, Gilberto Q. The Color of Success: Race and High-Achieving Urban Youth. New York: Teachers College Press, 2006. Crenshaw, Kimberle. “Mapping the Margins: Intersectionality, Identity Politics, and Violence Against Women of Color.” Stanford Law Review 43, no. 6 (1991): 1241–1300. Flores-González, Nilda. School Kids/Street Kids: Identity Development in Latino Students. New York: Teachers College Press, 2002. González, John Morán and Laura Lomas. The Cambridge History of Latina/o American Literature. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018. Herrera, Cristina. ChicaNerds in Chicana Young Adult Literature: Brown and Nerdy. New York: Routledge, 2020. ———. “‘These Latin Girls Mean Business’: Expanding the Boundaries of Latina Youth Identity in Meg Medina’s Yaqui Delgado Wants to Kick Your Ass.” In Nerds, Goths, Geeks, and Freaks: Outsiders in Chicanx and Latinx Young Adult

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Literature, edited by Trevor Boffone and Cristina Herrera, 116–129. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2020. Hughes-Hassell, Sandra. “Multicultural Young Adult Literature as a Form of Counter-Story Telling.” The Library Quarterly 83, no. 3 (2013): 212–228. McCall, Guadalupe García. Under the Mesquite. New York: Lee and Low, 2011. Medina, Meg. Yaqui Delgado Wants to Kick Your Ass. Somerville, MA: Candlewick, 2013. Morales, Yuyi. Dreamers. New York: Neal Porter Books, 2018. Noble, Safiya Umoja. Algorithms of Oppression: How Search Engines Reinforce Racism. New York: New York University Press, 2018. Quintero, Isabel. Gabi, A Girl in Pieces. El Paso: Cinco Puntos Press, 2014. Rivera, Gabby. Juliet Takes a Breath. New York: Riverdale Avenue Books, 2016. Schroeder-Arce, Roxanne. “The Smartest Girl in the World: Normalizing Intellectualism through Representations of Smart Latinx Youth on Stage.” In Nerds, Goths, Geeks, and Freaks: Outsiders in Chicanx and Latinx Young Adult Literature, edited by Trevor Boffone and Cristina Herrera, 105–115. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2020. Valenzuela, Angela. Subtractive Schooling: U.S.-Mexican Youth and the Politics of Caring. Albany: State University of New York Press, 1999.

“Hard and Rocky” Soil: Decolonising the General Education Introduction to Literature Course with August Wilson’s Fences Cheryl R. Hopson

Introduction This chapter details my attempts at decolonising the curriculum of a required, general education Introduction to Literature course with the use of twentieth-century Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright August Wilson’s play Fences (1986). I use Wilson’s Fences in ENG 200 as an opportunity to discuss past and present situations regarding the life experiences of Black Americans as dramatised in the play. Fences portrays experiences that both Wilson as playwright and the play itself suggest are endemic to U.S. society and culture, that is the treachery of navigating and negotiating life as a Black male subject in a white repressive, capitalist and imperialist nation; a nation with a several centuries’ long legacy of holding Black Americans in

C. R. Hopson (*) Western Kentucky University, Bowling Green, KY, USA e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 C. Beyer (ed.), Decolonising the Literature Curriculum, Teaching the New English, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-91289-5_5

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legal, forced bondage. Neither Fences nor its creator will let readers or viewers forget this national legacy nor that of its continuing impact on African Americans. I teach Fences as a literary work that both engages with and challenges whitewashed ideas of 1950s America as a prosperous period in which all that was required to succeed was a dream, “talent … guile … and [a] willingness and capacity for hard work.”1 Wilson shows through his characterisation of Troy Maxson and Troy’s family and surrounding community how white legal and cultural imperialism structured as well as circumscribed the working-class northern Black family man’s existence, as represented by Troy Maxson, as well as ghettoises the northern Black man geographically and economically. Thus, Fences necessitates creative as well as intellectual engagement with the United States’ history as a slave nation. The play as well necessitates creative and intellectual engagement with the U.S.’s ongoing legacy of dispossession, and oppression of Black Americans. This means then that both students and I alike must engage with and through practice, for example reading, discussion and writing, this legacy and in particular in relation to the life and circumstances of Wilson’s perhaps most famous character, Troy Maxson. Fences centres on a Black family during the post-World War II era, in the north, and during decades commonly considered to be a zenith point in (white) American life, politics and culture. The contradictions within the nation at the time—Fences spans the years 1957–1965—and thus within the characters are apparent from the play’s opening. Fences remains Wilson’s most known if not anthologised and most well-received play. A film adaptation of the play starring leading Black actors Denzel Washington and Viola Davis was released in 2008. Scholar David Sauer (2007) provides that “while set in the past,” Wilson’s plays “nonetheless address current concerns,” such as tracing “the history of individual lives and the unfolding story of the African American community in such a way that present attitudes and values are seen in the context of past experiences.”2 I write from the position of a self-identified queer Black feminist poet, professor and scholar with specialisations in twentieth-century African American and American literatures, and U.S.  Black and Third-Wave 1  August Wilson, Fences in The Norton Introduction to Literature Shorter 13th Edition, ed. Nancy Mays (New York: Norton, 2019) 1230–1281. 2  David K.  Sauer, “Critics on August Wilson,” in The Cambridge Companion to August Wilson, ed. Christopher Bigsby, (London: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 193–201.

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feminism. I have fifteen-plus years of experience teaching on the college level and am recently tenured and promoted. In my reading of Wilson’s Fences, I am indebted to the scholarship of Joseph Ngong Sam (2017) and their assertion that both in terms of aesthetics, and as a dramatist, Wilson is concerned with instances of “educational exclusion” as well as “with literacy,” and always in the context of a/the African American male experience. Sam continues that through his work as a playwright, Wilson “revitalize[s] literature” and in particular for diasporic and U.S.  Black reading audiences.3 In Fences, for example, even as Wilson foregrounds the illiteracy of his protagonist, Troy Maxson, he also and simultaneously foregrounds Troy’s denial of his own, and youngest son, the right to a free college education. That is Fences demonstrates the ways in which Troy is both victim of and a victimiser within a national regime that is legally and culturally white imperialist, and that is also patriarchal at base. Thus, suggests Fences, Troy’s own educational exclusions, which compounded and were surely compounded by his illiteracy, have a direct and felt effect on the lives of his children most especially his sons. The legacy of U.S. bondage in the play is linked to the present and, by degrees, future realities of the descendants of those enslaved. Fences creatively and imaginatively “gathers” so to speak the lives and stories of people, that is characters, who might otherwise be forgotten by (literary) history. With Fences, August Wilson, who in the words of scholar Ladrica Menson-Furr (2009) is “the most celebrated African-American dramatist of the twentieth and early twenty-first century,”4 codifies in albeit imaginative writing what was once word-of-mouth, for example storytelling, and therefore possibly ephemeral. In the spirit of early folklorists of Black culture, the likes of Wilson’s literary predecessor Zora Neale Hurston, with Fences Wilson imagines and codifies aspects of early to twentieth-century African American culture that might otherwise have been lost us. To this end, Fences is a literary work highly suitable for projects engaged in the work of decolonising the curriculum.

3  Joseph Ngong Sam, “The Politics of Educational Exclusion in the Selected Plays of Athol Fugard and August Wilson,” International Journal of English and Literature 8, no. 7 (September 2017): 88, 100. 4  Ladrica Menson-Furr, August Wilson’s Fences (New York: Bloomsbury, 2008): 1.

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The Decolonising Project Scholar Raewyn Connell (2018) writes, “It is essential … that a project of decolonizing curriculum should address conceptual questions as well as content.”5 In this chapter, I ask the following. What does it mean for a queer Black feminist professor and scholar to decolonise a general education, ENG 200 Introduction to Literature curriculum, and to do so in the context of a predominantly white, Midwestern, heterosexual-presenting student body resistant to reading and discussing race/ethnicity, that is Blackness and whiteness, (hetero) sexuality and social and economic class? What does it mean to do so with the aid of a literary work by an African American playwright, set in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, in the 1950s and 1960s, and featuring a working-class African American family man (i.e. August Wilson’s Pulitzer Prize-winning play Fences (1986))? I continue, what are the implications of doing so for my students, for myself, as the one African American, and tenure-track faculty member in my department? Finally, what are the implications of doing so in the context of a national climate such as that of the Trump Era? My thinking throughout this chapter shows the influence as well of scholar Benaya Subedi’s (2013) idea of what they term “the decolonizing approach.”6 Subedi writes that the decolonising approach is one that promotes “an anti-essentialist curriculum that is more nuanced, complex, and that provides contrapuntal readings of world events” or, in the context of ENG 200, what I refer to as multiple and sometimes contradictory readings of a literary work.7 Significant to the decolonising approach, continues Subedi, are analyses of “how social differences and power relationships influence knowledge production”—and, I would add, the reception of knowledge.8 It matters, for example, that I am a visibly African American, femme presenting “out” queer woman professor transmitting knowledge to a largely, though not exclusively, white student body that is ostensibly heterosexual, and via curricular decisions, lectures and discussion, for which I am solely responsible. I know from experience and from students’ confiding in me that many bring to my ENG 200 classroom expectations 5   Raewyn Connell, “Decolonizing Sociology,” Contemporary Sociology 47, no. 4 (2018): 404. 6  Subedi, “Decolonizing the Curriculum for Global Perspectives,” Educational Theory 63, no. 6 (2013): 621–638. 7  Subedi, “Decolonizing the Curriculum for Global Perspectives,” 638. 8  Subedi, “Decolonizing the Curriculum for Global Perspectives,” 638.

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of me as a Black woman, primarily, based on stereotypes early introduced to them, and recycled culturally, nationally and internationally. These stereotypes, whether regarded as “good,” for example “She’s caring, like a mother,” or as “bad,” for example “She seems scary,” shape as well as delimit our interactions as faculty and student. As the professor deciding on curricular choices including reading and writing assignments, that I choose to teach a literary work by an African American playwright and that centres African American characters, matters and is sometimes to the consternation of students unfamiliar with Black faculty, and with African American literature and culture. There is information to be gleaned from students’ discomfort. I am most compelled by students’ honest engagement the literary work under discussion and so my approach to their discomfort as a pedagogue and as a practitioner is to depersonalise and refocus on the goal at-hand, that is the decolonising project. This depersonalisation, combined with in-class open discussion and writing about Fences has proven to be a most generative means of fostering students’ idea about, discussion of and writing on Wilson’s play, and with a reading and analytical eye attuned to the systemic, and social, conditions made apparent in the play. Subedi cautions, “decolonizing practices […] recognize the difficulties of promoting a critical curriculum since schools and society in general resist knowledge that may focus on subaltern or marginalized epistemologies invested in addressing conversations about oppression, racism, and social justice.”9 I teach Wilson with the awareness that there will be challenges, some of which will accrue to student evaluations of me as a professor, and of ENG 200 as a course. Similarly, I teach Fences with the awareness that there we be intellectual, creative, and personal breakthroughs on the part of students and myself, and that show in students and my own writing and thinking about Wilson’s play. For example I once had a Black male student accuse me of bias against Black men, as evidenced in my reading of the character Troy Maxson, in Fences, whom I regarded as then regarded as a failed “hero.” My regard for Troy Maxson was in regard to his failings as a husband and father, primarily. In contrast, my Black male student, who identified by degrees with the character Troy Maxson, was doing a far better job of looking at Troy Maxson not only as a family and community man, but also as a Black man who was once a Black boy alone in the world, and who made a life for himself and his 9

 Subedi, “Decolonizing the Curriculum for Global Perspectives,” 638.

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family, and did so within the cruelty, oppression and constriction of the society and time in which he lived. After discussing the character in detail with the student, who was visibly upset by my reading of Troy as I suspect he thought it suggested something about how I might “read” and approach him as a Black male subject, and after rereading the play and spending additional time with Troy’s character, I came to recognise that the student was correct. I had not allowed the character Troy Maxson the grace that allowed him by his creator, August Wilson. Troy, after all, ascends to Heaven at the play’s end.

Teaching in Isolation In her 1970 essay “The Liberation of Black Women,” the late Black feminist writer, lawyer, and Episcopalian minister Pauli Murray writes, “If anyone should ask a Negro woman in America what has been her greatest achievement, her honest answer would be, ‘I survived’.”10 Though writing forty-plus years in the past, Murray’s statement still holds up. Teaching Wilson’s Fences has made me expressly aware of power relations at play in the classroom that show in students’ varied and various ideas about and responses to my race/ethnicity, gender, class and assumed caste, nationality, sexuality, self-presentation—and the cadence of my voice, even—as it is about my credentials as a professor and scholar of literature. That I continue to survive, morph and thrive in such an environment is a testament to my true love of the work, but also to the practised strength, tenacity, creativity, resilience and resolve of Black women faculty, such as myself, past, present and future—as well as to intelligence, creativity and verve of so many of our students. ENG 200 students communicate that I am for many, regardless of race or ethnicity, their first experience of a Black woman professor. (This means of course then that I am for many of my colleagues their first experience of a Black woman faculty member.) In the twenty-first century, this is the state of affairs on many U.S. campuses. In fact, in general, my white American students communicate that I am their first experience of an African American educator. Similarly, for many students in my ENG 200 courses, I am their first experience of an “out” queer or lesbian professor. Experience and research teach then that any attempt at decolonising 10  Pauli Murray, “The Liberation of Black Women” in Words of Fire, ed. Beverly Guy-­ Sheftall (New York: The New Press, 1995): 186–198.

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curriculum, which, in the context of ENG 200 often means decentring status quo white hegemonic literary and curricular choices, cultural practices, and identity, will be met with resistance and is an ongoing, crucial project. My presence in the classroom alone, and as myself to the degree possible, and in the context of Wilson’s dramatic work is the beginning of the decolonising process in ENG 200 Introduction to Literature.

Outing Myself in the Classroom Sociologist Mignon Moore (2012) writes of “the critical importance of sexuality as an identity as well as a social location that structures individuals’ lives alongside race, gender, and class.”11 Moore continues, “Intersecting oppressions rely on sexuality to mutually construct one another.”12 Teaching ENG 200 and in the context of my current department and university demonstrate for me the veracity of Moore’s ideas of sexuality as both social location and identity that joins with race/ethnicity, class, gender and sex to structure my students, and my own, experiences in the ENG 200 classroom. Thus, and in the context of Moore’s argument, it makes sense that my intersecting identities as Black, woman, queer, professor and scholar and the social locations I embody and/or jettison also show influence on my ongoing attempt at decolonising ENG 200 curricula. For perspective, I grew up in a lesbianphobic family and community. I have laboured to undo the imbibed hatred, distrust of and stigma attached to Black lesbians in particular that I saw and sensed when growing up. As with my attempts at decolonising ENG 200 curricula, I have worked hard at decolonising my mindset and in the context of my sexual identity, and this too is an ongoing process. As one of few “out” gay, queer and/or lesbian faculty on my university campus, and as the only “out” queer Black faculty member at the university, I am well aware of my vulnerable, and visible, state. However, and as Subedi and others provide, those who engage in the decolonising project whether personally, professionally, or both, know they do not do so without risk. We also know that without risk there is no change. In fact, without risk there is not even the possibility of change. We also know that the decolonising project by its

11  Mignon Moore, “Intersectionality and the Study of Black, Sexual Minority Women,” Gender and Society 26, no. 1 (2012) 33–39. 12  Mignon Moore, “Intersectionality and the Study of Black, Sexual Minority Women,” 34.

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very nature is anti-status quo and thus always already an oppositional pedagogical standpoint, and practice.

A Note on Required Courses: ENG 200 Introduction to Literature ENG 200 Introduction to Literature is a general education course with an exclusive focus on enhancing students’ reading comprehension, analysis and writing skills, through an introduction to three genres of literature, that is poetry, fiction and drama. The course is reading and writing-­ intensive, a combination of lecture and discussion, and involves peer review. Students who register for the course do so as business, economics, chemistry, biology, math, nursing, history majors and the like. The majority of students in ENG 200 then have no interest in literary studies or in creative writing. While students overwhelmingly prove unenthusiastic about a required course that is reading and writing-intensive many come to see the benefits of taking a class such as ENG 200. According to scholars Ruth Kaplan and Kimberly O’Neil (2017), required courses provide students with “powerful opportunities … to discover and study authors or areas they might never pursue on their own” and to read and discover “histories and texts that are [or may prove] particularly unfamiliar and challenging.”13 However, because students may regard required courses such as ENG 200 as “unwelcome, irrelevant, or imposed,” and “would not have chosen to be” in the course, students may prove resistant to “and may not want to learn what we have to teach.”14 This suggests to me as a professor and practitioner that the general education ENG 200 Introduction to Literature class is one primed for the practice and process of decolonising curricula—and for at least two significant reasons. First, the number and diversity of students reached in these classes, as many as eighty or ninety, depending on the semester; and second, the diversity of majors makes for a richness of experience and practice for myself and for students alike. Students, through practice, grow in their knowledge and abilities at writing about literature, but also in writing about and discussing literature of which they are not familiar and/or disinterested in. Such

13  Ruth Kaplan and Kimberly O’Neil, “Teaching Required Courses,” Pedagogy 18, no. 1 (2017) 25–30. 14  Ruth Kaplan and Kimberly O’Neil, “Teaching Required Courses,” 26.

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growth reflects in class discussion and in student’s writing and analyses of Fences. In general, students enrolled in ENG 200 are unfamiliar with Wilson’s award-winning play Fences, and many are equally as unfamiliar with African American literature and the African American culture imaged by Wilson in Fences. In requiring students to read Wilson’s play I am as well requiring and inviting them to learn about a tradition of literature, and a large and influential segment of American society about which they generally speaking know little, and are disinclined to read about, engage with and/or study. In teaching Fences, I introduce a general education student body to a canonical African American writer, and work, of which both foreground Blackness or Black identity and decentre whiteness or white identity. I insist on race/ethnicity, gender/sex, sexuality, class and the like as interlocking structures at work in the play and which therefore make explicit a need for a historically grounded, and intersectional, reading and analyses of the play.

On Wilson, and Fences August Wilson (1945–1960) was the preeminent American dramatist of the latter half of the twentieth century. Wilson’s influence can be seen on the American and African American stage, as well as on American, African American and World literary and scholarly canons. Fences centres on the life and experiences of Troy Maxson, a fifty-three-year-old labourer and married father who is an ex-convict, with a chequered past, and a talent at baseball. In fact, it was while serving fifteen years in prison for a botched-­ robbery-­become-murder that Troy learned to play baseball, and on the level of a professional. The play ends on the day of Troy’s funeral in the year 1965. At the time of his death by a heart attack, Troy has been retired from his job first as a garbage collector for the city, then and after petitioning for the position, as the first-hired African American garbage truck driver. The U.S. north traditionally has been associated with freedom and opportunity for African Americans. Fences more than suggests that such an understanding of the United States north, and across decades, is limited at best. Wilson thus begins Fences with a foregrounding of a/the U.S. white hegemonic narrative of national progress with which most U.S. Americans are familiar, and with which many Black Americans are critical of, and by degrees aware. Fences thus begins and ends by demanding that readers, and viewing audiences, subvert as well as interrogate meta-narratives of

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the 1950s in the U.S. as an era of prosperity and legal and cultural democracy for all. Instead, and beginning with Wilson’s production notes which serve to frame Fences, Wilson’s play forwards the premise that what is most true about U.S. American society and from its beginning is that for Black Americans generally, and Black American men specifically, the U.S. is and always has been an oppressive, and white supremacist nation that is fundamentally anti-democratic. This premise I suggest is endemic to Wilson, and to his drama, proves discomforting for some students. Again, however, discomfort is part and parcel to the process of decolonising curriculum.

Teaching Fences Fences demonstrates the shaping and limiting influence of centuries of legal and culturally sanctioned oppression and suppression of African Americans, and African American men in particular, on the life circumstances, choices available to and even emotional engagement of Black men such as the play’s protagonist Troy Maxson. Fences suggests that Troy Maxson is not anomalous to Black experience nor to Black American literature; neither is the spectre of white cultural and legal imperialism, nor its legacy, that is slavery. Set in the middle of the twentieth century, and thus in a historical time, and geographic location, even, foreign to students in ENG 200, teaching the play then requires some set-up on my part. That is just as I would when teaching playwrights William Shakespeare’s Hamlet (c.1600) or Susan Glaspell’s Trifles (1916), for example, in lecture and through discussion I provide students with biographical background on Wilson, as well as literary, cultural and historic context for reading and situating Wilson’s play Fences. Such information might include as an example, information on dramaturgy, as well as on early twentieth-century U.S. Black Southern migration to the North, contemporaneous ideas of gender and sex, as well as some ideas about Black family dynamics, predating and during the 1950s and 1960s. That is I demonstrate and integrate in my lecture, reading and analysis a model of close reading and analysis I expect from students. I recognise that this too is part of the process of decolonising curricula and work to model for students, and to engender substantive rather than surface readings of Fences. To aid in this I develop and present to student’s discussion questions and writing prompts, and engage in in-class reading, analysis and writing with

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students. The discussion questions include and are not limited the following: 1. Why does Wilson preface his play with a competing, and racialised, early twentieth-century national narrative of prosperity, and opportunity for all? 2. What is different about the North such that it allows Troy, a Southerner, to “breathe free, finally”? 3. Why does Troy struggle to maintain healthy relationships with his family, and in particular his wife, brother and two sons? 4. Troy’s family home is located in the poorest section of Pittsburgh. Why is this significant? 5. Consider that Troy’s paternal grandfather was a slave. What might this knowledge convey about Troy’s relationship to his father, and to his brother and sons? 6. Who is Josh Gibson? Who is Babe Ruth? Which name is more familiar to you, and why, according to Fences? 7. Why does Troy use derogatory and racialised language when referring to other African Americans? 8. When did childhood end for Troy? Why does this matter? 9. What is the significance of Troy witnessing his father beat and berate his wife, and Troy’s mother? 10. What is Troy’s obsession with “Mr. Death”? These discussion questions serve a dual purpose. The first is that it insists that the focus of student attention is on the literary work first and foremost. That is in order to know why I am asking the questions posed students have to have a reading knowledge of Wilson’s play. In addition to allowing students to demonstrate their reading knowledge of the play the questions also allow me to assess as best as possible student’s level in terms of reading comprehension, as well as assess their knowledge of African American and American culture. Second to this, the questions through implication demonstrate that any analysis of Wilson’s play is necessarily incomplete without a consideration of Troy’s family legacy, which includes his racial/ethnic inheritance, which itself includes a legacy of enslavement, and of contending with white legal and cultural imperialism. Through such guiding questions, students begin to see that Troy’s problematic behaviour, including a violent temper, is not wholly reducible to a character flaw in Troy, and in particular as a Black man who is working

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class. My pedagogical insistence on a historicised and complex reading of Wilson’s character and play invites students to see Troy more fully as character, which is to say more complexly, and as a literary character in a dramatic work of fiction. This is done in part to reiterate Black feminist theorist bell hooks’ (1994) assertion that African American literature is not sociology; rather, it is literature that is a creative work of fiction and should be read and assessed as such. Through our collective engagement with Fences students and I participate in an ongoing practice of decolonising the curriculum which doubles as a deepening of students and my own analyses, and thus a strengthening of their and my own reading and writing abilities with respect to literature. In the context of the decolonising project, each iteration of the course and each teaching of Wilson’s play show the influence of earlier version of my ENG 200 course taught. This to say I teach and amend and listen and deepen and grow in my awareness of just as students do only I do so as their professor that is as the one leading a/the project of decolonising, and with myself as model. With ongoing practice, and heightened critical and creative awareness, ENG 200 Introduction to Literature students, and I as their professor, grow in our analyses, discussions of and writing about Wilson’s play, and this growth despite the “hard and rocky” soil in which we sometimes find ourselves shows in student discussions, and in their writing and analyses—and in my own. This book chapter itself represents the practice of the decolonising project that is, that it is a practice, and one that is necessarily ongoing.

Conclusion It is impossible to decolonise any curriculum when those who hire faculty, and the faculty member(s) determining curricular choices, prove antithetical or wholly indifferent to such a project. Decolonising the curriculum is as much about curricular choices as it is about the pedagogical standpoint and creative and intellectual compelling of the person at the front of the classroom. It is only when students are able to learn with and from, and engage with differently raced, sexed, classed, abled and the like faculty, and the unique and differentiated pedagogies of this faculty body, that there is the possibility of manifesting different, which is to say a decolonised curriculum. The bottom line is the academy needs more diverse and differently positioned and abled, Black women faculty in particular, and especially in the United States, and this before we or I can say with any certainty what a successful project of decolonising curriculum would look

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like, or entail. Such a venture, like the decolonising approach itself, is necessarily ongoing, worthy and possible. I know this from my own work and life, and from that of my fellow Black women faculty—as well as from feedback from my students. It is for their benefit and our own that this work, challenges notwithstanding, continues.

Works Cited Bigsby, Christopher. “An Interview with August Wilson.” The Cambridge Companion to August Wilson, Ed. Christopher Bigsby, Cambridge University Press, 2007: 202–213. Caywood, Cynthia L., Marily Elkins, Carlton Floyd. “Introduction; Special Issue on August Wilson.” College Literature 36, no. 2 (Spring 2009): ix–xv. Charles, Marie. “Effective Teaching and Learning: Decolonizing the Curriculum.” Journal of Black Studies 50, no. 8 (2019): 731–766. Connell, Raewyn. “Decolonizing Sociology.” Contemporary Sociology 47, no. 4 (2018): 399–407. Glass, Valerie Q. and April L.  Few-Demo. “Complexities of Informal Social Support Arrangements for Black Lesbian Couples.” Family Relations 62 (December 2013): 714–726. Herrera, Andrea P. “Theorizing the Lesbian Hashtag: Identity, Community, and the Technological Imperative to Name the Sexual Self.” Journal of Lesbian Studies 0, no. 0 (2017): 1–16. hooks, bell. Teaching to Transgress: Education as the Practice of Freedom. New York: Routledge, 1994. Kaplan, Ruth and Kimberly O’Neil “Teaching Required Courses.” Pedagogy 18, no. 1 (2017): 25–30. Letzler, David, “Walking Around the Fences: Troy Maxson and the Ideology of ‘Going Down Swinging’”. African American Review 47, no. 2–3 (Summer/ Fall 2014): 301–312. Menson-Furr, Ladrica. August Wilson’s Fences. London: Bloomsburg, 2008. Moore, Mignon. “Intersectionality and the Study of Black, Sexual Minority Women.” Gender and Society 26, no. 1 (2012): 33–39. Murray, Pauli. “The Liberation of Black Women.” In Words of Fire: An Anthology of African American Feminist Thought, edited by Beverly Guy-Sheftall, 186–198. New York: The New Press, 1995. Sam, Joseph Ngong. “The Politics of Educational Exclusion in the Selected Plays of Athol Fugard and August Wilson.” International Journal of English and Literature 8, no. 7 (September 2017): 88–101.

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Sauer, David K. “Critics on August Wilson.” In The Cambridge Companion to August Wilson edited by Christopher Bigsby, 193–201. London: Cambridge University Press, 2007. Subedi, Binaya. “Decolonizing the Curriculum for Global Perspectives.” Educational Theory 63, no. 6 (2013): 621–638. Wesling, Joseph. “Wilson’s Fences.” The Explicator 57, no. 2 (1999): 123–127. Wilson, August. Fences. In The Norton Introduction to Literature, Shorter 13th Edition edited by Nancy Mays, 1230–1281. New York City: Norton, 2019.

Redesigning the Curriculum: Teaching Multicultural Literature in Non-native English-Speaking University Settings in Turkey and Italy Sebnem Toplu

English departments in non-native English-speaking countries such as Turkey aim to educate their students through a variety of modules in order to equip them with a background of historical and cultural developments as well as literature and language proficiency. Thus, our English literature curriculum at Ege University, where I am based, mainly offers mainstream canonical texts as part of this endeavour to teach students about the literature tradition. However, I believe that the undergraduate and graduate modules which I offer decolonise the curriculum by the introduction of British writers of colour. This highly significant inclusion of literature by authors of colour decentralises the essentialist English literary canon, by focusing on the increasingly emerging bicultural and multicultural British writers’ works which address implicit or explicit identity politics in British

S. Toplu (*) Ege University, Izmir, Turkey © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 C. Beyer (ed.), Decolonising the Literature Curriculum, Teaching the New English, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-91289-5_6

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social and cultural life. This chapter explores the opportunities and challenges encountered when decolonising the literature curriculum in a non-­ native English-speaking setting which also enables me to expand students’ knowledge of English literature with political, historical and cultural contexts focused on decolonisation in that I can assess their argumentative essays. I address the classroom strategies I utilise in this endeavour, and reflect on my experience of decolonising the literature curriculum in a non-native English-speaking setting. I thus present strategies for fellow lecturers and practitioners in similar situations, demonstrating possible solutions to issues and challenges encountered, and reflect on the importance and value of this work. In this chapter, I argue that the multiculturalism modules I teach add an important dimension to our students’ perception of English literature, expanding their awareness on diversity and academically inspiring various students for further studies on the topic. I would also like to highlight that, from a pedagogical standpoint besides exploring a decolonised English literature, these particular texts encourage and promote students’ learning to respect racial and cultural differences leading to personal change in their view of themselves and their relations with others. An undergraduate degree in Turkish universities covers four academic years and my multicultural British literature modules are for senior year students. I also had the opportunity to teach courses on British multiculturalism in The University of Modena and Reggio Emilia in Italy to third year students during the first decade of the millennium which also provided me with an overall academic teaching and learning praxis by different levels of students and cultural paradigms. Importantly in this context, this teaching gave me valuable additional experience of decolonising the literature curriculum in a non-native English-speaking setting. I design modules for senior students as elective courses with special attention to the content as well as considering the language sufficiency of the students. Here, my concern is with their learning activity rather than solely covering the curriculum. I do ensure that the texts I set for modules are alternated or revised each term. These decisions are in part dependent on student feedback which I take into account as the feedback reflects whether or not selected module texts are effective in communicating important themes and narratives as well as the authors’ position. Furthermore, as my modules cover recent literary and cultural topics, I specifically include the latest fiction in order to ensure that students are given opportunity to engage with recent cultural and political debates and issues. With regard to my

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teaching strategies, the introduction to these courses in both Italy and Turkey required detailed presentation of historical, cultural and social background of the English society since the students are from different educational and cultural backgrounds. To illustrate, in order to get accepted to most English departments in Turkish universities students must pass the English proficiency exam. If they fail, they must attend English preparation courses for an academic year which causes a difference in language adequacy in class when they are compared to students who had intense English and English literature courses during high school. In Italian universities, though, there is no such rule. Consequently, before examining the literary texts themselves, I provide a series of lectures which examine the history of colonisation, slavery and the Second World War. These lectures form an essential part of teaching multicultural British literature since, as a repercussion of the Second World War, decolonisation had a great impact on the transformation of the British society and culture as well as literature. The Windrush Generation also requires further contextualisation and explanation since many non-native English-speaking students know little about British subjects of former colonies. In the course of these lectures, I also underline that apart from the Caribbean Islands, a considerable part of immigration to Britain in the 1950s was also composed of South Asians. Teaching this material in a decolonised way requires me to optimise the students’ knowledge of contemporary English language use, by introducing specific idioms, colloquial language and contextual background. This has the purpose of increasing the students’ proficiency, but also demonstrates to the students that multiculturalism impacts profoundly on culture, language and literature, as well as on education. Although feminism and women writers are part of the mainstream curricula in our department, the terms “Black British Literature” or “Black British Women Writers” require an introduction to my students. I explain that these terms signify British born second-generation writers who have started to predicate their voices since the 1980s. In this sense, I explore the literary background for diverse writers born outside or in Britain and who were raised with British culture. I likewise underline that the so-called Black British subjects of former colonies who had arrived in their Mother Country were familiar with the culture, language and values yet they have become strangers because they had to confront with hostility. However, I cannot include Sam Selvon’s The Lonely Londoners (1956) for textual analysis due the language barrier. This particular novel presents difficulty in

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learning activities from the pedagogical viewpoint because the narrative voice of this diasporic novel has a specific Caribbean patois with no punctuation, has a lyrical style and mostly episodic narration, inhibiting the non-native English speakers to follow. After having taught this novel for a few years, I now start the module by teaching the writers of 1980s who were born in England. I have elected to do this, because these novels work more effectively for students for whom English is a second language. The novels on my present module syllabus narrate in more standard language and address negotiating bicultural/biracial identities; permeating an English upbringing with racial difference. Alongside the themes of belonging and unbelonging which feature in these novels, the texts also focus on the exploration of roots, a preoccupation which has also come to the forefront in the last decades of the twentieth century. Outlining the context for the historical cultural and literary background I either lecture on or assign as a secondary source Charles Taylor’s Multiculturalism: Examining The Politics of Recognition (1994), suitable for the political stance to emphasise the conceptual significance of decolonising the curriculum. This text is a key source for students learning about British literature and culture and the hierarchies and inequalities which inform canon formation, particularly in terms of the lack of inclusivity which has long characterised the literary canon. The Introduction, penned by Amy Gutmann, highlights the significant veracity that “[p]ublic institutions, including government agencies, schools, and liberal arts colleges and universities, have come under severe criticism […] for failing to recognize or respect the particular cultural identities of citizens”.1 Associating recognition and identity and conceptualising that identity is “persons’ understanding of who they are”, Taylor states that “nonrecognition or misrecognition can inflict harm, can be a form of oppression, imprisoning someone in a false, distorted, and reduced mode of being”.2 Moreover, Taylor maintains that “misrecognition shows not just lack of due respect. It can inflict a grievous wound, saddling its victims with a crippling self-­hatred”, thereby recognition “is a vital human need”.3 Thus, this key text proves vital in providing the lecturer conveying this material to students, whose first language and culture are not English, with sufficient 1  Charles Taylor, Multiculturalism: Examining the Politics of Recognition (Princeton, NJ: Princeton UP, 1994), 3. 2  Taylor, Multiculturalism: Examining The Politics of Recognition, 25. 3  Taylor, Multiculturalism: Examining The Politics of Recognition, 26.

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basis for introducing ideas and discussions which are central to decolonisation. These preoccupations include topics such as political correctness, the negative effects of colonialism, the significance of multiculturalism and why diversity is needed in the curriculum. I thus employ this key text to explain the dynamics of decolonisation to the students, defining and highlighting the basic concepts of diversity, assimilation and recognition underpinning the contentions in contemporary British multicultural fiction. Teaching in Italy during the academic years 2000–2001 and 2004–2006 provided me with another important opportunity to explore pedagogies for decolonising the literature curriculum in the context of teaching English language and literature to non-native English speakers. In Italy, I taught a module entitled “Multiculturalism in Contemporary Britain Through Literature” at  the University of Modena and Reggio Emilia Department of Language and Culture. Since the students were not literature major students, my teaching strategy was not to rely solely on fiction but to also assign contextual and visual material. I designed a module focused on multicultural literature and decolonisation with introductory cultural background lectures and assigned articles and films for class discussion. I taught Andrea Levy’s essay “This is My England” (2000) in order to demonstrate how she illuminates both the hardship of her parents’ migration and Levy’s own struggles as a British born black woman. This essay was  is a highly effective text for teaching decolonisation and black British themes; I consider it as effective as Levy’s novel Fruit of the Lemon (1999) in conveying these important themes to students in the non-native English-speaking classroom. The essay leads students to brilliant discussions of Levy’s family’s experiences as immigrant colonised subjects and her own confrontation with racism and discrimination in British society, as well as her questioning her own identity and sense of belonging. Visual material used on this module included the film Bhaji on the Beach (1994). This film is highly suitable for the non-English native-­ speaking classroom, since it is not complicated and the topic of generational and cultural conflict among the Asian-British reflects another point of view in terms of discrimination. The film illustrates how British-Asian communities have also been regarded as a racial minority and marginalised within mainstream British culture. Reflecting more broadly on my use of film material on the modules I teach in the non-English native-speaking

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classroom, my inclusion  of films4 on the literature syllabus began to be more frequently requested both by the Italian and Turkish students during the first decade of the millennium since social media was not widespread. Moreover, for the non-native English-speaking students whom I teach, Indian culture is quite unfamiliar and students know relatively little about British-Asian communities and their culture. Therefore, films prove highly effective in providing representations for students which can help them visualise the characteristics of Indian culture relocated in England. I also assign Jane Roscoe’s related article “From Bombay to Blackpool the Construction of Indian Femininity in Bhaji on the Beach” (2000), in order to reinforce the significant issues in the film inviting discussions on ambivalences in the postcolonial sensibilities of the immigrant parents and their second-generation children highlighting major issues which are racism, generation gap and patriarchy. I thus use these key texts and films to investigate and discuss with students specific issues which are central to decolonising the literature curriculum. Teaching texts reflecting on Asian-British experience is one of my primary concerns in decolonising the literature curriculum for non-native English-speaking students. I teach Hanif Kureishi’s essay “The Rainbow Sign” (1997), the film script “My Beautiful Launderette” (1997) along with the film (1985), using these materials to ask questions about the construction of immigrant and multicultural identities. These discussions also focus on the identity crisis which the second-generation immigrants encounter in England. Kureishi’s “The Rainbow Sign” (1997) is a highly personal account of individual  experience exploring social, political and psychological dimensions of his identity formation, justifying Stuart Hall’s assertion that identity is not a finished product but fragmented, culturally constructed and fluid.5 “The Rainbow Sign” therefore serves as a noteworthy text for students, as it reveals the destructive effects of colonisation as well as underpinning significant political developments in England. These texts that I have listed here are all instructive for non-native English-­ speaking students in their exploration of colonial sensibilities and bicultural identities. The teaching of these insights serves a key function in my efforts to decolonise the literature curriculum in non-native English-­ speaking contexts. In teaching Kureishi and British-Asian writing and  Also considering My Beautiful Launderette and Brick Lane.  Stuart Hall, “Who Needs ‘Identity’,” in Identity a Reader, eds. Paul Du Gay, Jessica Evans and Peter Redman (London: SAGE, 2000), 15–30. 4

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identity, I examine with the students both My Beautiful Launderette the film script and the film itself. This detailed focus is useful because the narrative explicitly uncovers what the Pakistani in England withstand facing financial problems, racism, sexuality gender conflict and patriarchy. Although the main theme revolves around homosexual love between a Pakistani and an English man, the film is thought-provoking as a teaching tool for visualising both sides of the problematic: Pakistani immigrants and the British born confronted by racism and violence and the young women oppressed by patriarchy. My Beautiful Laundrette is intersectional and lends itself extremely well to examining British culture as well as British-Asian writing and representation. The visual effect of the film is a valuable support which asserts Pakistani presence in England together with racism and hostility of the host society, thus importantly assisting non-native  English-speaking students to grasp an unfamiliar societal conflict. On my module, I also incorporate several articles which specifically address the issue of decolonisation. Articles I have used include Katherine Hall’s “British Cultural Identities and the Legacy of the Empire” (2001) and Shompa Lahiri “South Asians in Post-imperial Britain: Decolonisation and Imperial Legacy” (2001). These contextual articles serve as selected reading material for the students on my module, as they assist discussions of the historical truth about colonisation and its aftermath from both the coloniser and the colonised perspectives rendering information about why the Africans and the Indians immigrated to England after postcolonialism. In developing the module that I taught in Italy, I started to incorporate Bernardine Evaristo’s Lara (1997) and Andrea Levy’s Fruit of the Lemon  (1999) as part of my teaching British literature and culture to non-native English-speaking students. I consider these texts to be key to decolonising the literature curriculum in that specific linguistic context, and have also introduced them to my module syllabus at Ege University in Turkey, which I will highlight below about my teaching strategy with Turkish students. My “Topics in Multiculturalism” module for the fourth/senior year undergraduates at Ege University encompasses mostly fiction. My decision to focus mainly on fiction is a reflection of Paul Ricoeur’s remarks who states, “Fiction has the power to ‘remake’ reality and, within the framework of narrative in particular to remake real praxis to the extent that the text intentionally aims at a horizon of a new reality that we may call a world” as such, “[i]t is this world of the text that intervenes in the world of action in order to give it a new configuration or (…) in order to

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transfigure it”.6 By the same token Andersen and Nielsen maintain that “[f]iction is a laboratory for the imagination in which different future actions, understandings and decisions are tested”.7 Teaching fiction thus plays a central part on my modules, serving as central pedagogical focal points for decolonisation of the literature curriculum. On my modules in both Italy and Turkey, Bernardine Evaristo’s Lara and Andrea Levy’s Fruit of the Lemon have been indispensable over the years for teaching British Multicultural literature to non-native English-­ speaking students. These novels both explore the identity quest of their protagonists in search of their backgrounds: the eponymous Lara’s in Nigeria and Brazil and Faith’s in Jamaica. Both novels are semi-­ autobiographical, which adds further to the sense of authenticity they convey in portraying these complex experiences. Connerton argues that the phenomenon of learning about the past is a crucial element in social history: “all beginnings contain an element of recollection”, so it is impossible to make a new beginning without a “past recollection” because then the beginning has “nothing to hold on to: in all modes of experience we always base our particular experience on a prior context in order to ensure that they are intelligible at all”.8 The study of these novels which explore personal and collective pasts is therefore highly significant in reassessing the narration of histories and decolonising the literature curriculum. Evaristo’s Lara is a novel-in-verse, polyvocal, temporally non-linear and the language is contemporary and humorous. From a pedagogical perspective, the background information Lara supplies is immensely useful for decolonisation contexts: slavery, colonisation, postcolonialism, the Second World War, the Windrush generation, mixed race children and the identity crisis the second-generation experience. Ambivalence and vulnerability are poignant in Lara’s quest for her identity starting from her childhood in pursuit for her background to reconcile with alterity in a multicultural yet racial domain, providing a panorama of the cultural and personal conflicts, structuring a framework for the rest of the novels to

6  Paul Ricoeur, From Text to Action: Articles in Hermeneutics II (Continuum Impacts, 2008) in Biopolitics in the Anthropocene: On the Invention of Future Biopolitics in Snowpiercer, Elysium and Interstellar, eds. Gregers Andersen and Espen Bjerggaard Nielsen, The Journal of Popular Culture 51, no 3. (June 2018): 10. 7  Gregers Andersen and Espen Bjerggaard Nielsen, The Journal of Popular Culture 51, no. 3 (June 2018): 4. 8  Paul Connerton, How societies Remember (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1989), 6.

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follow. Thereby I lead students to compare the conceptions of slavery, racism and patriarchy in various countries. Although Andrea Levy’s Every Light in the House Burnin’ (1994) and Never Far from Nowhere (1996) also relate the hardships of immigrants and their children confronted by racism in the post-war era, I believe Fruit of the Lemon (1999) is more suitable for teaching purposes since after analysing and discussing Lara, Levy’s Fruit of the Lemon reveals thought-­ provoking parallels and differences. In Levy’s novel, the protagonist Faith experiences a similar trauma to Lara because of racism and the ambivalence it creates for unbelonging to the society she was born in. In both novels, the journey to their homeland serves for both protagonists to attain their lineages in that slavery, colonialism and the postcolonial era are exposed. What distinguishes Levy from Evaristo is that Levy’s is a more reconciliatory narrative voice whereas Evaristo holds a harsher stance towards racism. From a pedagogical perspective, this significant contrast is essential because it can be used to demonstrate how similar backgrounds and racism can be narrated from different perspectives; while Evaristo’s textual activism aims at slavery, Levy’s reconciliatory stance focuses on colonisation and decolonisation of Jamaica. Another module text, Bernardine Evaristo’s Blonde Roots (2008), highlights the atrocities of slavery. Thematically, starting with Lara and continuing with The Emperor’s Babe and Soul Tourists, Evaristo’s fictions have been concerned with the echoes of past in present in terms of slavery and racism; nevertheless Blonde Roots is her first work that focuses entirely on the topic of slavery yet by reversing the parameters and voicing a white slave; her protagonist Doris is English and blonde, and her masters are African and black, thereby the history of slavery is subversively presented by a poignant satire. Utilising diverse narrative techniques such as modern discourse full of anachronisms, bitter satire lightly covered with humour and an entire reversal of spatial, temporal and factual history, Evaristo reverses the conception of race, highlighting instead the persecution committed on humankind by slavery.9 In class, the significant thought-­ provoking themes we examine are atrocities of slavery, the viewpoints of a slave master, the converse psychology between captured and born slaves, patriarchy, gender and betrayal. Hence the bitter satire in Evaristo is crucial in the way that it assists in decolonising the literature curriculum. 9  Sebnem Toplu, Fiction Unbound: Bernardine Evaristo (Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2011), 45–46.

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Andrea Levy’s Small Island, another text I teach on the module, portrays colonised Jamaica, the Second World War and its aftermath in London. This novel provides rare but significant and detailed representations of a white couple as well as a black couple. While Levy uses the Jamaican couple Gilbert and Hortense to reflect the colonial, war and post-war periods in Jamaica and England, she equally portrays a white British point of view through the characters Queenie and her husband Bernard, elaborating in detail the trauma of the Londoners during the time of Blitz. Small Island is pedagogically important for Turkish students from a non-native English-speaking context. The novel provides important information about the Blitz and the Second World War, which is particularly significant because Turkey was not involved in the Second World War. From a decolonisation perspective, Levy’s narrative portrays important topics such as love, betrayal, post-war trauma, sacrifice and racism. Furthermore, broadening the picture and engendering awareness of racial oppression on a global scale, in the novel Levy portrays American segregation and Jim Crow laws, thus contrasting racism in America and Britain. Due to the social and historical information it conveys, Levy’s novel thus plays a prominent role on my modules for decolonising the literature curriculum for non-native English-speaking students. Turning now to consider the use of British-Asian and Arab literature on my modules, I reflect on teaching novels from this context with black British and Caribbean writing on the same module. Examples of novels I use on my modules include Monica Ali’s Brick Lane (2003), Meera Syal’s Life isn’t all ha ha hee hee (1999), Hanan Al-Shaykh’s Only in London (2001), Preethi Nair’s One Hundred Shades of White (2004) and The Colour of Love (2005). These texts can be taught in a way that locates the novels in the same culture of origin, if teaching a year-long module on this material. Alternatively, a shorter module may be divided as such so that decolonisation of literature is also rendered more comparative. Monica Ali’s Brick Lane recounts diasporic married life in Brick Lane, London. What is significant about this novel is that besides portraying the complexities in an immigrant woman’s life it also explores the Bengali Muslim community in Brick Lane from a critical perspective. Born to an English mother and a Bengali father, Monica Ali’s critical views of the immigrant Muslim community and women’s status in her fiction are distinctive from an academic perspective as the text exposes a controversial aspect for Muslim and non-Muslim students. The film adaptation of Brick Lane caused even more controversy in 2007, since the film focused more on

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Nalini’s extra-marital affair with Karim. Both for the book and for the film, Ali was threatened with “large demonstrations, book burnings and thinly veiled acts of violence”.10 Since she is mostly accused of not revealing the “authentic” Bengali, she objects by asking “Who is allowed to write about what? What right does a novelist have to explore any particular subject matter? Who hands out the licences?”.11 Thus, I believe this controversial fiction written by a bicultural writer should be accompanied with the film for the purposes of teaching an intertextual approach. As the novel explores the struggles of the Bengali community in London from within and outside, Brick Lane is a significant novel to cover when decolonising the literature curriculum. Another novel which I teach on my module, Meera Syal’s Life isn’t all ha ha hee hee (1999), uses subversive humour to critically examine family conflicts between the conservative diasporic Indian parents and their daughters. Since Syal is an Asian-British writer this text is illuminating in the sense that it exposes the colonised and now postcolonial immigrant Indian parents who try to hold on to their customs dislocated in London while their children, three young women friends choose three different paths for adapting to British culture. By portraying conflicting cultural and personal values, however, Syal’s fiction is helpful in facilitating my discussions with students about British culture and its complexities. Syal’s novel further serves to challenge the white British literature canon. Hanan Al-Shaykh is a Lebanese novelist who has been living in London since 1982. I include her novel Only in London (translation) (2001) in my syllabus because her multicultural background represents an Arabic perspective. This inclusion of perspectives otherwise marginalised within Western culture is a key motivating factor for me, both in demonstrating how fiction can be used to teach the complexity of British multiculturalism to non-native English speakers, and in decolonising the literature curriculum. Al-Shaykh introduces Arab presence in the metropolis rendering a different approach to decolonising the literature curriculum, contributing to class discussion with a different dimension that is questioning what Englishness is. It is a humorous text analogous to Syal’s Life isn’t all ha ha hee hee in fighting against the dogmas of traditions oppressing Arab diaspora in London. Therefore, Al-Shaykh’s impact on the multicultural 10  Monica Ali, “The outrage economy” accessed May 5, 2020, https://www.theguardian. com/books/2007/oct/13/fiction.film 11  Ali 2007, n.p.

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novels I teach is from a distinct focal point providing a fresh narrative perspective for class discussions. I also include Preethi Nair’s One Hundred Shades of White (2004) and The Colour of Love (2005) on my syllabus alternately, for both these novels explore aspects of Asian-British culture focusing on immigrant Indian parents and their daughters’ search for identity in England. Reclaiming their Indian background and forging it with English culture, Nair’s protagonists invite discussions on assimilated postcolonial Indian parents’ conflict with their British educated daughters. Although some students do not enjoy the substantial discourse on food, some are highly intrigued with it. In The Colour of Love Nair diversely links her protagonist Nina’s mood with her painting and questions whether assessment of art should be related to the personality or origins of the artist which invites a different scope of discussion based on the illustration of the resilience required to survive in an alien and discriminating culture, using art as a means of self-­ expression. Therefore, both novels are suitable for my class discussions because of the opportunities they offer the students for examining  the authors’ use of imaginative language in fiction to portray issues of multicultural identity. From a pedagogical perspective, focusing on discussions of race and discrimination purely from social perspectives only for an entire academic year places unique demands on non-native English-speaking students. The novels included in my undergraduate syllabus for the purposes of their pedagogical significance serve an important function in my endeavour to decolonise the literature curriculum. These novels can be used to create discussion points such as colonialism, slavery, postcolonialism, racism, immigration, gender issues, patriarchy and oppression among many others. Through these discussions, Italian and Turkish students from non-­ native English-speaking contexts deepen their understanding of British multicultural society and literature. This new knowledge helpfully challenges preconceptions about British literature being predominantly white and male, demonstrating instead the complexity of the country’s postcolonial literatures. The study of Nigerian, Jamaican, Indian and Arab contexts through the novels we examine also involves discussion with students about what biculturalism is and how the texts portray it. These discussions importantly serve to qualify the differences and distinctions between differing postcolonial contexts. Thus, while Nigerian and Jamaican contexts retain the effects of colonialism and slavery, Indian contexts reflect traces of colonialism without slavery but with the burden of familial patriarchy. I

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believe the history of slavery and its atrocities create a crucial cultural collective unconscious leading to black writers being more outspoken about racism comparatively. Indians have also been regarded as people of colour leading to racism and marginalisation; however, their patriarchal and conservative cultural structure enables a distinctive narrative voice for the immigrants in diaspora and the British born second generation. These distinctions related to literature and decolonisation are important to establish to students for whom English is not the first language. I also teach a module on a Master of Arts degree, entitled Transnationalism. This module addresses transnational sensibilities and ambivalences within literature, including British multicultural writers, but with a more global scope in the selection of writers and using a comparative angle. My pedagogic objective on this module is to broaden students’ perspectives so that they may research related these topics for their theses or dissertations. Thus, on this module, extending the scope of multiculturalism to a global perspective, I assign writers with different backgrounds for the educational purposes of generating incisive and complex analyses of the texts we study. A key theme in textual analysis is the conflict diasporic individuals experience between the older generation and their cultural background and the expectations and values of the host society. Examining borders and identities through these texts helps us to challenge ideas of nation and nationhood. As we contend in the Introduction to A Fluid Sense of Self: The Politics of Transnational Identity transnational perspective defines “borders as permeable and flexible” by increasing global mobility so the nation-state can no longer serve as primary means of identification in that transnationalism look beyond the boundaries of nations in order to trace the myriad global connections that impact identities.12 Apart from Bernardine Evaristo’s Girl Woman Other (2019) I assign Jhumpa Lahiri’s The Namesake (2004), Mohsin Hamid’s The Reluctant Fundamentalist (2008), Hari Kunzru’s The Impressionist (2003) and Helen Oyeyemi’s Boy, Snow Bird (2018) honing in on postcolonial identity conflicts which arise and processes of decolonisation. To conclude, the objective of university education is to broaden students’ intellectual capacity, and the curriculum should be structured in order to fulfil this goal. Particular challenges and opportunities arise in non-native English-speaking educational settings which require lecturers 12  Silvia Shultermandl and Sebnem Toplu. Eds. A Fluid Sense of Self: The Politics of Transnational Identity (Wien: Lit Verlag, 2010), 1, 13.

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to teach students a variety of subjects, including language proficiency, historical and political contexts, as well as literature and textual studies. Thus, the higher education system in Turkey does not place any obstacles in the path to decolonise the English Studies curriculum. In my endeavour to decolonise the literature curriculum, I am able to offer modules that explore writers and texts from outside the mainstream white British literature canon. The study of these authors and texts thus serve to heighten students’ awareness of the effects of colonialism and increase understanding of the complexities of contemporary multicultural British literature and culture in students. My modules have been quite successful in both countries for students have been intrigued with the fictional but realistic lives of the characters they encounter in novels and films. Both in Italy and Turkey, non-native English language speaking students are empowered through the heightened insight my modules provide. The decolonised literature curriculum which I offer thus has a transformational effect, changing students’ perspective on social and literary relations and equipping them with the critical and analytical tools which they will require as part of a progressive intersectional mindset. I believe over the two decades since the millennium I have been successful in fulfilling this goal by introducing various modules, supervising numerous theses and dissertations, consequently disseminating decolonisation of literature across Turkey. As I have demonstrated in this chapter, decolonising the English curriculum which we use to teach non-native English-speaking students is a vital part of students’ academic and personal growth.

Works Cited Ali, Monica. Brick Lane. New York: Scribner, 2004. Ali, Monica, “The outrage economy,” The Guardian, October 13, 2007, https:// www.theguardian.com/books/2007/oct/13/fiction.film Al-Shaykh, Hanan. Only in London. London: Pantheon, 2001. Andersen, Gregers and Espen Bjerggaard Nielsen. “Biopolitics in the Anthropocene: On the Invention of Future Biopolitics in Snowpiercer, Elysium, and Interstellar.” The Journal of Popular Culture 51, no. 3 (7 June 2018): 1–16. Chadha, Gurinder, director. Bhaji on the Beach. 1994. Film4 Productions. Chandler, David. “Review Essay: Biopolitics.2.0 Reclaiming the Power of Life in the Anthropocene.” Contemporary Political Theory. 19 (2020): 14–20. https:// doi.org/10.1057/s41296-­018-­0265-­9 Connerton, Paul. How societies remember. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1989. Evaristo, Bernardine. Lara. Kent: Angela Royal Publishing, 1997. Evaristo, Bernardine. Lara. Northumberland: Bloodaxe Books, 2009.

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Evaristo, Bernardine. Blonde Roots. London: Penguin Books, 2008. Evaristo, Bernardine. Girl, Woman, Other. London: Hamish Hamilton, 2019. Hamid, Mohsin. The Reluctant Fundamentalist. London: Penguin, 2008. Hussain, Yasmin. Writing Diaspora: South Asian Women, Culture, and Ethnicity. Farnham: Ashgate, 2005. Rascoe, Jane. “From Bombay to Blackpool the construction of Indian femininity in Bhaji on the Beach,” in Shifting Continents/Colliding Cultures Diaspora Writing of the Indian Subcontinent, eds. Ralph J. Crane and Radhika Mohanram (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2000), 197–216. Hall, Katherine. “British Cultural Identities and the Legacy of the Empire,” in British Cultural Studies: Geography, Nationality and Identity, eds. David Morley and Kevin Robins. (Oxford: Oxford UP, 2001a). 27–40 Kureishi, Hanif. My Beautiful Laundrette and Other Writings. London: Faber and Faber, 1997. Lahiri, Jhumpa. The Namesake. London: Harper Collins, 2004. Lahiri, Shompa “South Asians in post-imperial Britain: decolonisation and imperial legacy,” in British Culture and the End of Empire, ed. Stuart Ward (Manchester and New York: Manchester UP, 2001), 200–216. Levy, Andrea. “This is my England” The Guardian, February 19, 2000, https:// www.theguardian.com/books/2000/feb/19/society Levy, Andrea. Fruit of the Lemon. Great Britain: Review, 1999. Levy, Andrea. Small Island. London: Headline, 2004. Nair, Preethi. One Hundred Shades of White. London: HarperCollins Publishers, 2004. Nair, Preethi. The Colour of Love. London: HarperCollins Publishers, 2005. Oyeyemi, Helen. Boy, Snow, Bird. London: Pan MacMillan, 2018. Perfect, Michel. “The Multicultural Bildungsroman Stereotypes in Monica Ali’s Brick Lane”. The Journal of Commonwealth Literature. 43.3 (2008): 109–120. Ricoeur, Paul “From Text to Action: Articles in Hermeneutics II” (Continuum Impacts, 2008) in Biopolitics in the Anthropocene: On the Invention of Future Biopolitics in Snowpiercer, Elysium and Interstellar, Gregers Andersen and Espen Bjerggaard Nielsen. The Journal of Popular Culture. 51 no. 3 (7 June 2018): 1–16. Selvon, Samuel. The Lonely Londoners. London: Longman, 1989. Shultermandl, Silvia and Sebnem Toplu. Eds. A Fluid Sense of Self: The Politics of Transnational Identity. Wien: Lit Verlag, 2010. Hall, Stuart. “Who Needs ‘Identity,’” in Identity a Reader, eds. Paul Du Gay, Jessica Evans and Peter Redman. (London: SAGE, 2001b):15–30. Syal, Meera. Life isn’t all ha ha hee hee. London: Black Swan, 2000. Taylor, Charles. Multiculturalism: Examining The Politics of Recognition. Princeton, NJ: Princeton UP, 1994. Toplu, Sebnem. Fiction Unbound: Bernardine Evaristo. Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2011.

PART II

Contexts: Beyond the Boundaries of Literary Texts

Decolonising Wuthering Heights in the Semi-­peripheral Classroom Ana Cristina Mendes

Introduction: A Semi-peripheral Perspective to Decolonising the Literature Curriculum As Simon During articulates in the review section “Endgame: Can Literary Studies Survive?” of The Chronicle of Higher Education in 2020, we are witnessing a cultural secularisation that “involves a loss of status and perceived functionality on the part of ‘high’ cultural canons and intellectual lineages.” This secularisation warrants, During notes, “the loss of belief in the ethical and intellectual value of the traditional academic humanities disciplines.”1 How does this cultural change tie in with concurrent calls to decolonise the literature curriculum and, broadly, the university? Is it 1  Simon During, “Losing Faith in the Humanities,” Endgame: Can Literary Studies Survive? “The Chronicle Review,” The Chronicle of Higher Education 21 (2020): 21.

A. C. Mendes (*) School of Arts and Humanities, University of Lisbon, Lisbon, Portugal e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 C. Beyer (ed.), Decolonising the Literature Curriculum, Teaching the New English, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-91289-5_7

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possible to fulfil the political purposes served by literature in the absence of a set of shared literary texts in the university curriculum—in other words, if the canon is disputed in the literature classroom? One of the ways out of this conundrum is through the continued inclusion of adaptations of the literary canon in the curriculum—as materialisations of that undying urge to adapt that grows out of a communal acknowledgement of the social, ethical, or political value of the canon, and the political purposes of literature in general. By adapting the canon as a collective archive, presentday threats to democracy can be highlighted, indicted, and countered. In the literature classroom, adaptations (notably, postcolonial adaptations) can further these political aims, standing in line with the aims of a decolonised pedagogy. This chapter grew originally from an exercise in course design: to revise eighteenth to twenty-first centuries English literature syllabi at the School of Arts and Humanities, University of Lisbon, in ways that responded to the changing audiences for English literary studies, in particular, outside the Anglosphere. Structured around the heuristic tools of literary canon, adaptation, remediation, and fandom, those syllabi were premised on the idea that literary pedagogy has political implications in the “real-life” present world. Linked to a praxis of performative pedagogy, adaptations of the literary canon were approached as political acts, writing directly to and against their historical and geopolitical conjunctures, and, because of that, supporting the aims of a decolonised pedagogy. The primary intention of this course redesign was to contribute to decolonising the university curriculum, building on the pedagogical possibilities of questioning the literary canon advanced in collective projects of decolonising the Western archive and challenging the systematic exclusions in a higher education context.2 Adaptation presented clear political possibilities for decolonising the English literature curriculum. Relatedly, I was interested in investigating and testing out the applicability and limits of the idea of decolonising the literature curriculum in an English department (a constitutively Anglocentric department) set in Portugal (a European but semi-­peripheral country in terms of its location in the capitalist world-system3). 2  Achille Mbembe, “Decolonizing the University: New Directions,” Arts & Humanities in Higher Education 15, no. 1 (2016): 29–45; Gurminder K.  Bhambra, Dalia Gebrial, and Kerem Nişancıolu (eds.). Decolonizing the University (London: Pluto, 2018). 3  Immanuel Wallerstein, The Modern World-System, vol. 1 (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2011 [1974]).

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Portugal’s complex semi-peripheral condition can be accounted for by a historical extreme permeability to Anglo-Americanness, amplified by a longstanding alliance with the UK and the country’s location at the Atlantic axis. To describe the specificity of this semi-peripheral location, Boaventura de Sousa Santos deploys images and characters from the British imperial canon, namely Shakespeare’s The Tempest. In the case of Portugal’s “interidentity,” as Sousa Santos terms it, the identity traits of both coloniser and colonised are conflated, caught in a double bind where the “Calibanised Prospero” and the “Prosperised Caliban” cohabit with “European super-Prosperos.”4 To complicate matters, the Portuguese interidentity that Sousa Santos discusses is crucially inter-imperial. Portugal has an imperial backstory of its own, and this backstory allows for addressing in the literature classroom issues of inter-imperiality associated with the entanglements between empires and interdependencies of individuals inhabiting these empires, amplifying the collective, but necessarily situated, decolonising the curriculum project.5 (An example of inter-­imperiality is the political satire of the Portuguese artist Rafael Bordalo Pinheiro [1846–1905] on the Scramble for Africa and the English Ultimatum of 1890 that motivated his patriotic personification of England in the arrogant figure of John Bull. Red clay glazed figures such as the John Bull potty [1890] and spittoon also betray Bordalo Pinheiro’s defence of the ascendency of the Portuguese empire and the Portuguese in Africa.) The dependence on British reference points, such as the use of literary characters from the Shakespearean canon, in Sousa Santos’s framework for explaining Portugal’s semi-peripheral situation has not failed to attract criticism.6 Still, it is precisely this entanglement with—and reliance on— the British imperial canon for understanding Portugal’s cultural positionality that I find productive for thinking through the decolonising of the 4   Boaventura de Sousa Santos, “Between Prospero and Caliban: Colonialism, Postcolonialism, and Interidentity,” Luso-Brazilian Review 39, no. 2 (2002): 17. 5  Laura Doyle, “Inter-Imperiality,” Interventions: International Journal of Postcolonial Studies 16, no. 2 (2014): 159–96; Laura Doyle, “Inter-imperiality and Literary Studies in the Longer Durée,” PMLA 2 (2015): 336–47. 6  For example, Paulo de Medeiros, “Voiding the Centre: Notes Towards a Reconfiguration of Postcolonial Studies,” in Towards a Portuguese Postcolonialism, edited by Anthony Soares (Bristol: University of Bristol, 2006), 27–46; Ana Paula Ferreira, “Specificity without Exceptionalism: Towards a Critical Lusophone Postcoloniality,” in Postcolonial Theory and Lusophone Literatures, edited by Paulo de Medeiros (Utrecht: Universiteit Utrecht, 2007), 21–40.

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English literature curriculum in the semi-periphery. The fault lines others have detected in this Anglocentric perspective resonate with my lived experience in the semi-peripheral English department, an English department in a non-Anglophone country, simultaneously centre and margin. In responding in the semi-periphery to the calls for decolonising the curriculum issued from the centre, are we again reproducing the inequalities of the academic world-system, parroting issues raised in the core countries? Considering the three dimensions of adaptation as (1) act and process, (2) heuristic tool, and (3) political possibility, what can be distinctive about teaching English canonical texts through adaptations in the semi-­peripheral classroom? To begin tackling these two questions, the following sections advance ways to decolonise Emily Brontë’s novel Wuthering Heights (one of the texts included in the course redesign exercise mentioned above) in the undergraduate semi-peripheral classroom.

Decolonising the Colonial Countryside of Wuthering Heights Published in 1847, the action of Wuthering Heights is set in 1801 in the moors of Yorkshire, a geo-historical context that places the reader right in the middle of the “slavery debate” that brought about anti-slavery legislation in the UK, such as the Slave Trade Act (1807) and the Slave Abolition Act (1833), legally terminating enslavement in parts of the British empire. Students’ attention is drawn to the fact that the novel’s protagonist Heathcliff comes to the Heights in Yorkshire from Liverpool, which had become the slave-trading capital of Britain by 1740. The reference to Liverpool, where the farmer Mr Earnshaw finds Heathcliff and decides to adopt him, amplifies the colonial link already established by the novel’s setting in Yorkshire. Moreover, Heathcliff might be “partly modelled on Thomas Anson, the runaway slave of the Sills of Dent,”7 which clarifies that enslavement and other forms of colonial labour exploitation, and this protagonist’s connection to them, cannot be overlooked in the analysis of the novel. (In fact, Emily Brontë and her siblings lived close to the Sills of Dent, a well-known slave-trading family in Yorkshire.) In this respect, the introduction and appendices to the Broadview edition of Wuthering

7  Christopher Heywood, “Introduction,” in Emily Brontë, Wuthering Heights, edited by Christopher Heywood (Peterborough, Ontario: Broadview, 2001), 70.

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Heights edited by Christopher Heywood8 are recommended readings for the course as they allow for an expansion of our focus on the anti-slavery and emancipationist movement in England, and locally in Yorkshire. (Significantly, the cover of the Broadview edition features James Northcote’s 1826 painting Othello, the Moor of Venice, part of the permanent collection at the Manchester Art Gallery, and which was only identified in 1983 as a portrait of the North American Ira Aldridge [1807–67], the celebrated Shakespearean actor who whitened-up to be accepted as a Black actor on the Victorian stage.9) Considering the Yorkshire setting of Wuthering Heights is integral to a decolonised reading of the novel. In the landmark work of cultural studies, The Country and the City, Raymond Williams asks us to reconsider the aura of the “great houses” of the English countryside—houses that inhabit, for example, the pages of Country Life magazine—in light of the “social effect” of that aura regarding its occlusion of rural poverty and a long history of feudal, capitalist, and colonial exploitation. Scrutinising the pervasive notion of the rural idyll and the pastoral, Williams considers how “the extraordinary phase of extension, rebuilding and enlarging” of these houses, “which occurred in the eighteenth century, represents a spectacular increase in the rate of exploitation: a good deal of it, of course, the profit of trade and of colonial exploitation.”10 A decolonising approach to the English countryside represented in the English literary canon asks us to look at this countryside differently—as a “colonial countryside.”11 Following Williams’s appeal, it asks us to stand at any point and look at that land. Look at what those fields, those streams, those woods even today produce. Think it through as labour and see how long and systematic the exploitation and seizure must have been, to rear that many houses, on that scale.12

 Heywood, “Introduction.”  Felipe Espinoza Garrido and Ana Cristina Mendes, “The Politics of Museal Hospitality: Sonia Boyce’s Neo-Victorian Takeover in Six Acts,” European Journal of English Studies 24, no. 3 (2020): 291–94. 10  Raymond Williams, The Country and the City (London: Chatto and Windus, 1973), 105. 11  I am drawing on the name of the “Colonial Countryside” project, led by Corinne Fowler, targeted at primary school pupils and aiming at exploring English country houses’ colonial pasts. 12  Ibid. 8 9

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It also demands students and teachers that we think about how the colonial links of the moors of Yorkshire have remained repressed in classroom readings of Wuthering Heights and screen adaptations of the novel. Racial capitalism13 becomes a focal point in our decolonised analysis of Wuthering Heights, through a consideration of (1) the geo-historical setting of the novel in the “colonial countryside” pre-anti-slavery legislation and (2) Heathcliff’s characterisation in and beyond Brontë’s literary text. In the specific context of the semi-peripheral classroom, located in Portugal, the focal point of racial capitalism enables an inter-imperial perspective by fostering students’ understanding of the British slave trade and its social impact while drawing on their expected previous knowledge of transatlantic enslavement, Portugal’s part in it until abolishment in 1761, and the country’s current double role as a “Calibanised Prospero” and a “Prosperised Caliban” (to use Sousa Santos’s expressions that deliberately deploy an enslavement imagery combined with references to the British imperial canon). As part of examining the geo-historical context of Brontë’s novel in the English literature semi-peripheral classroom, we address this Atlantic imperial connection—the “intimacies” between Europe and Africa, in Lisa Lowe’s description.14 This inter-imperial perspective sets the scene for our analysis of how the character of Heathcliff is introduced and socially positioned to the other characters in the novel, and consequently to the readers of the novel, and then to audiences across its various screen adaptations. Heathcliff’s persona has been created through cultural memory, not only through our representation of a picturesque pre-industrial, picture-postcard Yorkshire in which Brontë lived and set her novel, but also through the accumulation and intersection of Heathcliff fandoms, hearkening back to the vaguely exotic Heathcliffs performed by Laurence Olivier and Ralph Fiennes. Underscoring the racial politics of creating Heathcliff on screen for a decolonised reading of the novel, we look into the cultural persona of Brontë’s character through its visual reimaging in three adaptations of Wuthering Heights: (1) the 1939 film (USA-Samuel Goldwyn Productions/ United Artists), directed by William Wyler, with a screenplay by Charles MacArthur and Ben Hecht; (2) the 2009 two-episode miniseries 13  Cedric Robinson, Black Marxism: The Making of the Black Radical Tradition (Chapel Hill, NC: The University of North Carolina Press, 2000 [1983]). 14  Lisa Lowe, The Intimacies of Four Continents (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2015).

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(UK-ITV), directed by Coky Giedroyc, with a screenplay by Peter Bowker; and (3) the 2011 film (UK), directed and written by Andrea Arnold. The roundedness of the literary character of Heathcliff, a complexity reflected in the long term or “enduring fandom”15 that has surrounded Brontë’s conflicted, tormented protagonist since the publication of the novel, recommends the identification of specific angles of hermeneutic inquiry in the classroom. There are several instances in the novel where Heathcliff’s visible difference is stressed through the various characters’ attempts to classify what is perceived as an outlandish figure. “Misread as a Gypsy, Lascar, castaway, and prince of India and China,” as Heywood writes in the introduction to the novel, Heathcliff “is judged by all who meet him to be a son of Ham, child of the devil, a useful labourer and slave.” Unpacking the several layers of contextual meaning these representations are imbued with and examining how the three Wuthering Heights adaptations translate these representations visually (and aurally) contributes to students’ more profound understanding of nineteenth-century racialisation processes that underpin racial capitalism and the formation of “racializing assemblages.”16 Firmly placing Heathcliff in the colonial countryside and then examining the visual translations of this literary figure and, mainly, the racialising tropes associated with this character across the twentieth century into our century allows for an undoing of his racialisation in support of a decolonised English literature curriculum.

“I Am Heathcliff” A few pages into Brontë’s novel, the adult Heathcliff is presented through the eyes of Mr Lockwood, the new tenant of the Grange and narrator of the story told by Nelly Dean, the housekeeper at the Heights, as “a dark skinned gypsy, in aspect, in dress, and manners, a gentleman, that is, as much a gentleman as many a country squire.”17 “Mr Heathcliff forms a singular contrast to his abode and style of living,” remarks Lockwood, noting the contrast to what he would expect a landlord to look like.18 Despite all the trappings of a gentleman and his attainment of social and 15  Annette Kuhn, Dreaming of Fred and Ginger: Cinema and Cultural Memory (New York: New York University Press, 2002). 16  Alexander G.  Weheliye, Habeas Viscus: Racializing Assemblages, Biopolitics, and Black Feminist Theories of the Human (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2014). 17  Ibid., 96. 18  Ibid., 95–6.

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economic power, he is, first and foremost, “a dark skinned gypsy.” Heathcliff had escaped his miserable circumstances, but not the colour of his skin. Andrea Arnold’s 2011 screen adaptation of the novel, ending with the first generation of Heathcliff characters, stands apart from previous adaptations by casting Black actors for the role of the male protagonist. This casting relies on audiences’ familiarity with earlier screen personas of Heathcliff—and Heathcliff fandom primarily—for what is, in its contrasting ways of representing Heathcliff, a decolonial intervention. For Arnold, this fictional figure corresponds to a white subject in the cultural field of vision on account of a long history of Wuthering Heights screen adaptations, notwithstanding the affordances of Brontë’s text. Arnold’s screen text sets out to redress the past representational injustice of going against the textual clues in the novel: I think the only reason people are surprised [by a Black Heathcliff] is that they’ve just seen white Heathcliffs all the time and I don’t think anyone’s really concentrated on the text … I decided that’s really where the truth was. What really mattered was his difference, his exoticness.19

Arnold was the first filmmaker to foreground the “specific traces of African origin which characterise Heathcliff.”20 Tola Onanuga observes in her review of this adaptation: “Arnold was clearly unwilling to compromise on her vision: she declined to audition well-known actors in favour of open casting calls and at one point even scoured a Romany camp in search of her dark-skinned Heathcliff.”21 This casting of two British actors of Afro-Caribbean descent, Solomon Glave and James Howson, departs from the previous casting of white actors for the role of Heathcliff, such as Rex Downing and Laurence Olivier in Wyler’s 1939 adaptation, Timothy Dalton in Robert Fuest’s 1971 adaptation, Ralph Fiennes in Kosminsky’s 1992 adaptation, and, in television serials, Ken Hutchison in Peter Hammond’s 1978 adaptation, Robert Cavanah in David Skynner’s 1998 19  Steve Rose, “How Heathcliff Got a ‘Racelift.’” The Guardian (November 13, 2011). https://www.theguardian.com/film/2011/nov/13/how-heathcliff-got-a-racelift 20  Christopher Heywood, “Yorkshire Slavery in Wuthering Heights,” Review of English Studies 38, no. 150 (1987): 184. 21  Tola Onanuga, “Wuthering Heights Realises Brontë’s Vision with its Dark-skinned Heathcliff,” The Guardian (October 21, 2011). https://www.theguardian.com/film/filmblog/2011/oct/21/wuthering-heights-film-heathcliff

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adaptation (a co-production of LWT and WGBH Boston), and Tom Hardy (and Declan Wheeldon as young Heathcliff) in Coky Giedroyc’s 2009 adaptation—and even Mike Vogel in MTV’s loose 2003 adaptation directed by Suri Krishnamma. For example, in Wyler’s black-and-white adaptation, the adult Heathcliff is performed by Olivier in heavy makeup and characteristic unkempt hair. Rachel Carroll notes that Arnold’s casting “is significant in a number of ways; it can be understood as exposing and challenging the unacknowledged racial politics of the classic adaptation genre, but also as a gesture of fidelity to the source text which is an implicit critique of leading adaptations of the past.”22 The issues of fidelity and authenticity continue to be critical to adaptations, even if adaptation studies moved on from this issue many years ago towards intertextuality.23 As Carroll goes on to argue, the fidelity and authenticity arguments are frequently rehearsed in the context of “classic” or “canonical” adaptations, where the “absence of non-white actors … perpetuates a misleading vision of Britain’s history and cultural heritage and owes more to a fidelity to culturally constructed and ideologically problematic generic signifiers than it does to a presumed authenticity to period detail.”24 In the classroom, we analyse the pages in Brontë’s Wuthering Heights and the scenes in the 1939, 2009, and 2011 adaptations when Heathcliff comes to his new home in Yorkshire.25 In Wyler’s 1939 adaptation, we examine the dialogue between Mr Earnshaw and his neighbour, Dr Kenneth, when Heathcliff arrives at the Heights: Dr Kenneth: What in the world have you got there? Mr Earnshaw: A gift of God. Although it’s as dark as if it came from the devil. Quiet, me bonny lad. We’re home. Dr Kenneth: He’s a dour-looking individual. 22  Rachel Carroll, “Coming Soon … Teaching the Contemporaneous Adaptation,” in Teaching Adaptations, edited by Deborah Cartmell and Imelda Whelehan (Houndmills, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014), 143–4. 23  Ana Cristina Mendes and Joel Kuortti, “Padma or no Padma: Audience in the Adaptations of Midnight’s Children,” The Journal of Commonwealth Literature 52, no. 3 (2017): 503. 24  Ibid., 145–6. 25  Wyler (dir.) (1939), 00:10:00–00.00.18; Giedroyc (dir.) (2009), 00:18:00–00:29:00; and Arnold (dir.) (2011), 00:00:00–00:05:00. We also analysed the christening scene in Arnold’s adaptation (00:14:00–00:34:00).

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Mr Earnshaw: Aye, and with reason. I found him starving in the streets of Liverpool, kicked and bruised and almost dead. Dr Kenneth: So you kidnapped him. Mr Earnshaw: Not until I spent two pounds trying to find out who its owner was. But nobody would claim him, so I brought him home. We assume that Heathcliff is not a native to England. Most likely, he is a child of the Atlantic slave trade as his skin is dark—though, as Nelly will point out in the novel, he is not a “regular black”26—and his mother tongue is not English. In the novel, Nelly recounts Heathcliff’s arrival: “when it was set on its feet, it only stared round, and repeated over and over again, some gibberish that nobody could understand.”27 (In Arnold’s adaptation, Cathy teaches words in English to her new adoptive brother.) After washing and tidying up Heathcliff when he arrives at the Heights, Nelly tries to convince him that he is handsome despite the colour of his skin and lower-class origins. Heathcliff had confessed to the housekeeper how he wished to look and be like Edgar Linton from Thrushcross Grange, his foil in the novel: “I wish I had light hair and a fair skin, and was dressed, and behaved as well, and had a chance of being as rich as he will be!”28 To calm Heathcliff, Nelly offers a reverse narrative to histories of the Atlantic slave trade: You’re fit for a prince in disguise. Who knows, but your father was Emperor of China, and your mother an Indian queen, each of them able to buy up, with one week’s income, Wuthering Heights and Thrushcross Grange together? And you were kidnapped by wicked sailors, and brought to England.29

In Wyler’s adaptation, this dialogue is reconstructed and transposed to a scene between Cathy and Heathcliff on the moors playing a chivalry game where she knights him: Cathy: You’re so handsome when you smile. Heathcliff: Don’t make fun of me.  Brontë, Wuthering Heights, 150.  Emily Brontë, Wuthering Heights, edited by Christopher Heywood (Peterborough, Ontario: Broadview Press, 2001 [1847]), 129. 28  Brontë, Wuthering Heights, 149. 29  Ibid., 50. 26 27

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Don’t you know that you’re handsome? … You’re a prince in disguise … your father was the Emperor of China and your mother an Indian queen. It’s true, Heathcliff. You were kidnapped by wicked sailors and brought to England. But I am glad. I’ve always wanted to know somebody of noble birth.

In the ITV adaptation, the trope of handsomeness resurfaces, though it loses its critical edge as an indictment of the power inequalities and abuse resulting from colonialism and imperialism, and veers towards the lovers’ doomed affections: Heathcliff: Where do you suppose I am from? Where do you suppose I began? … That horse trader at the fair sensed my wretched beginnings. It’s like a badge I’ll always have to wear. Cathy: Look at you. You’re fit for a prince in disguise. In turn, Arnold’s adaptation of this scene in Brontë’s novel is made to resonate with the possibility that Heathcliff is a child of the Atlantic slave trade. Grooming him in preparation for the Lintons’ visit, after Heathcliff asks Nelly, “I want to be good. Can you clean me up?,” she says: “Look at you. You’re a prince. I bet your mother was an African queen and your father a Chinese emperor. I think somebody must have kidnapped you and brought you to England.” Heathcliff’s backstory as a homeless, dark-skinned orphan who Earnshaw found roaming the streets of Liverpool, ragged and starving, is, of course, significant in terms of the 1840s context Brontë was writing her novel in. Susan Meyer identifies 1769 as the year in which Earnshaw finds the child Heathcliff destitute on the streets of Liverpool, “England’s largest slave-trading port,” accounting for “seventy to eighty-five percent of the English slave trade along the Liverpool Triangle.”30 The economic depression in the 1840s and lack of employment in industrial cities such as Liverpool meant that those who were classified in the late eighteenth century as the “Black Poor”—either Black people of African descent or “Asiatic Blacks” such as lascars31—would be forced into homelessness and 30  Susan Meyer, Imperialism at Home: Race and Victorian Women’s Fiction (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1996), 98. 31  Rozina Visram, Asians in Britain: 400 Years of History (London: Pluto, 2002), 21.

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begging. Lascars would, on occasion, settle in the major British ports cities because they either left their posts on ships on account of the harsh working conditions where they were expected to perform various roles or were left stranded by commanders and destitute in the dockland areas.32 When teaching this historical context (i.e. responding to one of the reading and discussion aims of the course: to understand the simultaneous and co-constitutive relationships between aesthetic form, thematic content, and historical context when reading a literary text), it is essential to underscore that the Christian, “proper” middle-class members of this Yorkshire community, such as Earnshaw’s neighbour, though concerned for the welfare of the “Black Poor” and sympathetic for their deprivation, saw—and feared—them as the “heathen” other. In the classroom, we examine how these ambivalent attitudes towards the “Black Poor” are visually translated in the scene in the ITV adaptation when Heathcliff accompanies the Earnshaw family to chapel for Sunday service and encounters the hostile gazes from members of the parish, many of whom wonder if he is Earnshaw’s “bastard” son. After the service, the priest tells Heathcliff and Earnshaw that the child’s soul is in “greater peril” because he is a “bastard” who has not been baptised. To protect Heathcliff, Earnshaw decides that his family will not attend the Sunday service anymore. Nonetheless, Earnshaw’s benevolence masks the fact that he keeps Heathcliff in the enslaved position of the “favoured protégé of his white patron.”33 In the novel, when he presents Heathcliff to his wife, he wavers between the use of descriptors for Heathcliff such as “as a gift of God” and a child of the devil: “I was never so beaten with anything in my life; but you must e’en take it as a gift of God; though it’s as dark almost as if it came from the devil.”34 The choice of words explicitly highlights the ambivalence apparent in the dialogue above in Wyler’s adaptation. Earnshaw adopts Heathcliff because, as he puts it in Arnold’s adaptation, “It was the Christian thing to do,” considering that “he had no one.” Notwithstanding, his charitable actions remain ambivalent. When Earnshaw has Heathcliff baptised, he does not give him a surname, echoing slaveholding practices.35 The unnamed and unclaimed foundling  Visram, Asians in Britain, 15.  Heywood, “Introduction,” 60. 34  Brontë, Wuthering Heights, 129. 35  Ibid., 150; Humphrey Gawthrop, “Slavery: Idée Fixe of Emily and Charlotte Brontë,” Brontë Studies 28, no. 2 (2003): 114. 32

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roaming the streets of Liverpool—Earnshaw “picked it up and inquired for its owner” but “Not a soul knew to whom it belonged”36—becomes merely Heathcliff at the Heights. Heathcliff is never an Earnshaw by name; he is forever the alien, being taken into this family without actually belonging. While Earnshaw expects Heathcliff to be treated as an equal by his adoptive siblings, such flawed reactions to Heathcliff, of Christian benevolence mixed with Negrophobia,37 embody broader anxieties about not only the “Black Poor” but also the working classes in general, which would resound with the novel’s upper and middle-class readership. In the decolonised classroom, unearthing the colonial and anti-­ Blackness connections in the part of the novel of Heathcliff’s “adoption” into the Earnshaw family—which, in Heywood’s estimation, corresponds to the enslavement phase in Heathcliff’s life, the first of the character’s development towards release38—precludes a reading of Heathcliff’s character based on depoliticised notions of “self.” Heathcliff’s Blackness is seen as a marker of devilishness and inhumanity, reflecting the social propensity to demonise alterity as a threat to the collective. The character’s repeated demonising throughout the literary narrative is intimately linked to his racial marking. Heathcliff’s ethnic indeterminacy creates anxiety in others, a dimension of alterity and exoticness which Arnold amplifies in her adaptation. To highlight this tendency to demonise otherness by the collective presents another entry point into indicting in the classroom current “crises” related to anxieties towards the racially and socially different. In the novel, when Isabella Linton sees the younger Heathcliff for the first time, she reacts with dread: “Frightful thing! Put him in the cellar, papa. He’s exactly like the son of the fortune-teller, that stole my tame pheasant.”39 A moment before, her father, Mr Linton, had calmed his family after they had been rattled by the sounds of a dog barking outside the house: “Don’t be afraid, it is but a boy  – yet, the villain scowls so plainly in his face, would it not be a kindness to the country to hang him at once, before he shows his nature in acts, as well as features?” Heathcliff falls into the stereotype of the vagrant “gipsy” who peeps through the windows of the great house. Mrs Linton realises that their neighbour Cathy Earnshaw had been “scouring the country with a gipsy,” and her husband proceeds to explain who this “gipsy” was: “he is that strange  Brontë, Wuthering Heights, 129.  Heywood, “Introduction,” 64. 38  Heywood, “Introduction,” 60. 39  Brontë, Wuthering Heights, 96. 36 37

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acquisition my late neighbour made in his journey to Liverpool – a little Lascar, or an American or Spanish castaway.”40 (In Arnold’s adaptation, Mr Linton suggests: “We should hang you [Heathcliff] now, before you get any older. Do the country a favour.”) In the classroom, we address how the several racist and xenophobic words used to refer to Heathcliff are vital for constructing the character. Meyer clarifies that the term “gipsy” when Brontë was writing corresponded to “the generic designation for a dark-complexioned alien in England.”41 Terms like “Moor,” “Gipsy,” and “African” were often utilised interchangeably to describe someone with dark skin or who was perceived as a foreigner. If we follow this interpretation, “gipsy” was likely not meant to be taken factually as referring to Heathcliff as a Romani individual but as dark-skinned. We also draw on Carolyn Betensky’s 2019 study on Victorian literary works which are not explicitly concerned with questions of imperial expansion and racial and ethnic supremacy but which display “casual racism,” distinct from the “centripetal racism” of Victorian culture. Betensky draws on her experience of assigning class readings of Victorian texts that contain racial slurs to argue that: Casual racism in Victorian literature and culture is not, was not, a Victorian problem: it is a Victorian studies problem. It’s not that we don’t need to know – or teach – how Victorians understood race or ethnicity but, rather, that such knowledge on its own is inadequate to the task of training our students to think critically about their own historical moment and themselves as historical agents. Apprehending the banality of Victorian racism requires a different approach – one that addresses it in continuity with the banal, too-often unremarked reality of systemic racism in our own time.42

The word “gipsy” as a passing, offhand slur addressed to Heathcliff receives a passing reference in Betensky’s study on the “casual racism” of Victorian novels.43 (Other examples of this “casual racism” noted by Betensky are Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre, Charles Dickens’s Bleak House, George Eliot’s The Mill on the Floss, and Ellen Wood’s East Lynne, and, of the latter, Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, and Wilkie Collins’s The Moonstone.)  Brontë, Wuthering Heights, 141–2.  Meyer, Imperialism at Home, 97. 42  Ibid., 736 (emphasis in original). 43  Carolyn Betensky, “Casual Racism in Victorian Literature,” Victorian Literature and Culture 47, no. 4 (2019): 742–3. 40 41

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The “casual racism” in Brontë’s novel is heightened in Arnold’s screenplay by the unabashed addition of racist insults, notably the weaponised n-word, such as when the resentful Hindley rejects extending the protection that his father had given to the dark child of the devil. On this occasion, he blurts out: “He’s not my brother, he’s a nigger!” which leads to a beating from his father. After Mr Earnshaw’s death, when Hindley returns to the Heights with his wife as the owner of the estate, he warns Heathcliff: “Your choice, nigger. Work or leave.” He must sleep with the animals, “where [he] belongs.” Hindley is the character who treats Heathcliff most inhumanly; he is adamant about reminding Heathcliff that he looks different and shall be treated differently, bordering on the nonhuman, because of it. Hindley’s act of naming Heathcliff a “nigger”— and the possible reasons why the n-word was introduced in Arnold’s screenplay—is analysed in the classroom as more than a perlocutionary language act. Considering the social effects of using the n-word in a twenty-first-century adaptation of a Victorian novel allows for a debate on what the North American literary writer, essayist, and civil rights activist James Baldwin termed “the invention of the nigger” and how this invention is revelatory of specific character traits and the socio-historical context both of the “source” text and its adaptation (for, as Judith Butler reminds us, “performativity has its own social temporality in which it remains enabled”44). The discussion aims to assess the political possibilities of re-­ signifying the n-word—vindicating the slur, gaining power over the word—in the 2020s, or whether the n-word should remain unspeakable to prevent the further entrenchment of abject notions of Blackness in the public consciousness, its reassertion of the trauma of colonial oppression and racial stereotypes foreclosed.

Conclusion Building on the global discussions that have recently taken place in English departments,45 more visibly since 2015 with the actions of the Rhodes Must Fall movement, the exercise in course redesign on which this chapter drew began by reflecting on how the epistemological, methodological, and pedagogical preoccupations of the decolonising the curriculum 44  Judith Butler, Excitable Speech: A Politics of Performance (New York: Routledge, 1997), 40. 45  For example, Ruvani Ranasinha, “Guest Editorial: Decolonizing English,” The Journal of Commonwealth Literature 54, no. 2 (2019): 119–23.

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movement could be expanded and translated to universities and English departments outside the Anglosphere, specifically, in the semi-periphery. In the semi-peripheral English literature classroom, a focus on racial capitalism allows for an inter-imperial perspective concerned, more broadly, with the intersections, continuities, and disruptions between the British imperial project and other European imperialities such as the Portuguese. The exercise in course design introduced the heuristic tools of the literary canon, adaptation, remediation, and fandom—possibly opening the courses to critique for being too focused on adaptation and rewriting, which by design contributes to reinforcing the centrality of the Victorian canon. In line with a decolonised pedagogy, the working premise is that adaptation is an especially generative heuristic tool in the English literature classroom for, on the one hand, illuminating neglected archives and, on the other, grappling with the calls for a return to nationalist master narratives. Historical contextualisation of the Victorian novel alone—usually limited to clarifying in the English literature classroom that the meanings the Victorians attributed to race and racism are different from “ours” both temporally and geopolitically—is not enough to decolonise the curriculum. Betensky argues for a “strategic presentist” approach that asks “that we think not only about the object of analysis (i.e., texts of Victorian provenance) but also about the specific outcomes we wish to achieve under the peculiar conditions of our present.”46 This attention to empire also speaks to the link between colonialism and fascism in response to the rise of proto-fascisms today. In particular, the syllabus for nineteenth-­ century English literature, which included as one of its primary texts Wuthering Heights, wanted to rethink how the teaching of English literature in the semi-periphery could meet the critical demands of the contemporary moment, such as responding to an alarming normalisation of white nationalism in Europe.

Works Cited Betensky, Carolyn. “Casual Racism in Victorian Literature.” Victorian Literature and Culture 47, no. 4 (2019): 723–51. Bhambra, Gurminder K., Dalia Gebrial and Kerem Nişancıolu (eds.). Decolonizing the University. London: Pluto, 2018.

 Betensky, “Casual Racism in Victorian Literature,” 739.

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Brontë, Emily. Wuthering Heights. Edited by Christopher Heywood. Peterborough, Ontario: Broadview Press, 2001 [1847]. Butler, Judith. Excitable Speech: A Politics of Performance. New  York: Routledge, 1997. Carroll, Rachel. “Coming Soon … Teaching the Contemporaneous Adaptation.” In Teaching Adaptations, 135–156. Edited by Deborah Cartmell and Imelda Whelehan. Houndmills, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014. Doyle, Laura. “Inter-imperiality and Literary Studies in the Longer Durée.” PMLA 2 (2015): 336–47. Doyle, Laura. “Inter-Imperiality.” Interventions: International Journal of Postcolonial Studies 16, no. 2 (2014): 159–96. During, Simon. “Losing Faith in the Humanities.” Endgame: Can Literary Studies Survive? “The Chronicle Review.” The Chronicle of Higher Education 21 (2020): 20–4. Ferreira, Ana Paula. “Specificity without Exceptionalism: Towards a Critical Lusophone Postcoloniality.” In Postcolonial Theory and Lusophone Literatures, 21–40. Edited by Paulo de Medeiros. Utrecht: Universiteit Utrecht, 2007. Garrido, Felipe Espinoza and Ana Cristina Mendes. “The Politics of Museal Hospitality: Sonia Boyce’s Neo-Victorian Takeover in Six Acts.” European Journal of English Studies 24, no. 3 (2020): 283–99. Gawthrop, Humphrey. “Slavery: Idée Fixe of Emily and Charlotte Brontë.” Brontë Studies 28, no. 2 (2003): 113–121. Heywood, Christopher. “Introduction.” In Emily Brontë, Wuthering Heights, 18–90. Edited by Christopher Heywood. Peterborough, Ontario: Broadview, 2001. Heywood, Christopher. “Yorkshire Slavery in Wuthering Heights.” Review of English Studies 38, no. 150 (1987): 184–198. Kuhn, Annette. Dreaming of Fred and Ginger: Cinema and Cultural Memory. New York: New York University Press, 2002. Lowe, Lisa. The Intimacies of Four Continents. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2015. Mbembe, Achille. “Decolonizing the University: New Directions.” Arts & Humanities in Higher Education 15, no. 1 (2016): 29–45. Medeiros, Paulo de, “Voiding the Centre: Notes Towards a Reconfiguration of Postcolonial Studies.” In Towards a Portuguese Postcolonialism, 27–46. Edited by Anthony Soares. Bristol: University of Bristol, 2006. Mendes, Ana Cristina and Joel Kuortti. “Padma or no Padma: Audience in the Adaptations of Midnight’s Children.” The Journal of Commonwealth Literature 52, no. 3 (2017): 501–18. Meyer, Susan. Imperialism at Home: Race and Victorian Women’s Fiction. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1996.

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Onanuga, Tola. “Wuthering Heights Realises Brontë’s Vision with its Dark-­ skinned Heathcliff.” The Guardian. October 21, 2011. https://www.theguar dian.com/film/filmblog/2011/oct/21/wuthering-heightsfilm-heathcliff Ranasinha, Ruvani. “Guest Editorial: Decolonizing English.” The Journal of Commonwealth Literature 54, no. 2 (2019): 119–23. Robinson, Cedric. Black Marxism: The Making of the Black Radical Tradition. Chapel Hill, NC: The University of North Carolina Press, 2000 [1983]. Sousa Santos, Boaventura de. “Between Prospero and Caliban: Colonialism, Postcolonialism, and Interidentity.” Luso-Brazilian Review 39, no. 2 (2002): 9–43. Visram, Rozina. Asians in Britain: 400 Years of History. London: Pluto, 2002. Wallerstein, Immanuel. The Modern World-System, vol. 1. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2011 [1974]. Weheliye, Alexander G. Habeas Viscus: Racializing Assemblages, Biopolitics, and Black Feminist Theories of the Human. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2014. Williams, Raymond. The Country and the City. London: Chatto and Windus, 1973. Wuthering Heights. Directed by Andrea Arnold. UK: Film4/UK Film Council, 2011. Wuthering Heights. Directed by Coky Giedroyc. UK: ITV, 2009. Wuthering Heights. Directed by William Wyler. USA: Samuel Goldwyn Productions/United Artists, 1939.

‘Culinary Cultures’: Theorising Postcolonial Food Cultures Sarah Lawson Welsh

This chapter reflects on the theory and practice of using food studies to teach across global spaces on a staff research-led, undergraduate option ‘Research Now: Culinary Cultures’ as part of a larger programme of embedding decolonisation of the curriculum in Literature Studies at York St John University. The core aims are to: • equip final year students with the necessary research skills to make effective critical interventions in the study of literature, • prepare students for post-graduate or professional fields, • develop students’ insight into the importance of active research on the development of the discipline, • develop skills in reflective writing as a means to engender critical self-­reflexivity and • (university-wide) introduce students to global perspectives and prepare students for global citizenship.

S. Lawson Welsh (*) York St John University, York, UK e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 C. Beyer (ed.), Decolonising the Literature Curriculum, Teaching the New English, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-91289-5_8

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‘Culinary Cultures’, which takes global foodways and food histories as its focus, is deliberately interdisciplinary and draws on literary and non-­ literary texts and multiple theoretical approaches (e.g. literary and cultural studies, cultural geographies, postcolonial theory, ‘follow the thing’ methodologies1), in order to introduce students to a wide range of concerns pertaining to food narratives. It also, crucially, encourages students to make real-life connections to wider concerns such as migration, interculturation, transnationalism, globalisation and decoloniality. In planning and teaching this strand, I draw upon Mexican food studies scholar Meredith E. Abarca’s view that ‘food can function as a medium of understanding existing theories and creating new ones’,2 providing a more concrete way to engage with difficult and sometimes abstract ideas. Taking philosopher Lisa Heldke’s theory that food is a ‘thoughtful practice: a cognitive process inseparable of practice’3 Abarca posits (after bell hooks), an ‘engaged pedagogy’4 based on the ‘critical analysis of food activities [in] food narratives’. This can be undertaken within different courses (Literary Studies, Literary Theory, Women’s Studies) but always connects the personal and social dimensions of food and brings together theory and practice (e.g. in students’ reflective practice) to develop what Abarca terms a ‘food consciousness’. For Abarca, as for myself, food narratives are ‘food-­ centred texts that frame the design of my undergraduate courses…where food is the focal point of theoretical discussions’ and can include ‘personal stories, those of students’ and those found in culinary memoirs, images and passages kneaded into the pages of literary works (novels, poems, short stories, autobiographies); food moments that move the plot or provide the setting in films; food representations in popular culture and advertisements…scholarly materials from the interdisciplinary field of Food Studies’.5 This chapter suggests some teaching strategies which can be used as part of an engaged pedagogy which acts to decolonise the Literature Studies curriculum.  One example is sugar, the commodity which shaped the modern Caribbean.  Meredith. E.  Abarca, “Food Consciousness: Teaching Critical Theory Through Food Narratives.” In Food Pedagogies, ed. by Rick Flower and Elaine Swan (London: Routledge, 2015), 215. 3   Heldke, “Foodmaking as a Thoughtful Practice”, “Foodmaking as a Thoughtful Practice.” In Cooking, Eating, Thinking: Transformative Philosophies of Food, eds. Deane W. Curtin, Lisa M. Heldke, Indiana U.P., 1992. 214. 4  bell hooks, Teaching to Transgress: Education as the practice of freedom. New  York: Routledge, 1994. 5  Abarca, “Food Consciousness,” 216. 1 2

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Decolonising the Curriculum at York St John Our first-year syllabus at York St John includes a mandatory module, ‘Canonicity’, which focuses on breaking down the concept of the literary canon, and asking students to problematise what can be considered ‘great and good’ literature. Another introductory module, ‘Theorising Literature: Identity and Power’ works to give students the critical vocabulary to talk about race, ethnicity, colour, religion, gender, sexuality, disability and questions of nationhood and national identity. Even on core skills modules, the majority of short primary and secondary texts set are by writers of colour. This is a quite deliberate decentring of the ‘whiteness’ of the curriculum. We set this curriculum in order to ‘normalise’ cultural diversity in the texts which students encounter from the very outset of their university study and to ensure that every student has the chance to ‘see themselves’ in the texts, voices and critical approaches studied across the module. In their second and third years, students can choose modules such as ‘Writing the Caribbean’ which disrupts the idea that the Caribbean is ‘out there’ and separate to ‘Britishness’ and to British literature by showing how the two have always been globally, culturally and historically connected or ‘From Harlem to Hip-Hop’, a module which traces the development of African American literature and culture from the Harlem Renaissance up to Beyoncé’s Lemonade. Other modules that seem to follow a ‘traditional’ and ‘canonical’ syllabus work to challenge and destabilise the past as a ‘safe space’ of white privilege. Britain—and British literature—was always a transnational, multicultural space and the study of the past—as well as the contemporary—is more accurate, relevant and vital when we understand that ‘canonical’ literature does not reflect the reality of the historical world any more than it does in our present world. Whilst our students have the opportunity to read ground-breaking work from a wide range of contemporary writers of colour, we foreground the fact that decolonisation does not only occur in contemporary writing—nor should it affect only the primary texts studied. Students also engage with scholars and critics of colour, exploring how the system that produces literary value must also change in order for those values to be properly critiqued, widened and reconsidered. Importantly, our modules do not exclude more canonical writers. However, we ensure that our students are encouraged to read canonical works with an understanding of their literary merit and the social, cultural and political dynamics which

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have historically safeguarded and perpetuated the dominance of these voices and the ways in which contemporary authors, critics and our students may question and interrogate this process. It is crucial to consider how the canon is read and studied, as well as what else is read alongside ‘expected’ texts. Whilst we don’t think students be able to demand what is on their University reading lists, we do believe that we should be willing, as academics, to engage in a meaningful dialogue with our students about what should and should not be included, and why.6

Diversification Versus Decolonisation of the Curriculum Diversification and decolonisation of the curriculum are interrelated projects but each has a different scope and aims. The former is welcome but is frequently uneven and/or does not go far enough. Diversification can become a largely performative gesture (both individually and institutionally) which is tokenistic and superficial, a box-ticking exercise which does nothing to address the deeper issues of systemic racism and other entrenched biases and inequalities which can affect how students are able to be and thrive (or not) in academic spaces. Such historical biases also determine whose knowledge and perspectives are viewed as normative and which individual ‘knowledge producers’ are privileged within the academy. Decolonisation of the curriculum, by contrast, is predicated on the fact that English Studies itself (and the polyvalent and contested language upon which it is based) emerged as a colonially constructed discipline and the recognition that the English curriculum still (re)produces colonial biases. ‘Coloniality prevails in [many of] our institutions and English remains the largely unquestioned medium of learning’.7 The decolonising process requires a more radical approach to making changes, changes which are genuinely deconstructive and sustainable over a longer term. Decolonising involves scrutinising our pedagogies as well as our reading lists: the curriculum constitutes not just what is taught but crucially how it is taught also. In this respect, decolonising the curriculum can be seen as 6  This section is based on a blog post for the YSJU Literature blog and was jointly authored by Dr Anne-Marie Evans and myself. https://blog.yorksj.ac.uk/englishlit/whats-going-on-­ demystifying-decolonising-the-curriculum/ My thanks to Dr Evans for allowing me to reproduce extracts here in an edited format. 7  Kathy Luckett, Advance HE webinar on Decolonizing the Curriculum, March 2020.

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just the start of a larger, much more radical process of decolonising the academy. Basil Bernstein’s (2000) theories on the curriculum are useful here. Bernstein takes Latin America decolonial theory and applies these concepts to the politics of knowledge transmission—who decides what is knowledge? Who legitimises it? Bernstein understands pedagogic discourse as divided between institutional discourse (e.g. the curriculum) and regulative discourses—the values, practices way of being/moral values which underpin discourse. One is the content of curriculum, the other the deeper practices and politics of knowledge underpinning it. This chapter focuses on both.

Introducing ‘Culinary Cultures’ ‘Culinary Cultures’ starts from the premise that making food and storytelling are intimately linked cultural practices which can tell us much about each other. Indeed, both often use a shared critical vocabulary (plot, production and consumption) and they both depend on an audience of sorts (i.e. you tell a story to/cook for someone). Food connects us to identity in some intimate and important ways and the module offers students opportunities to think about food and narrative in relation to the body, class, gender, ethnicity, caste and religious/spiritual beliefs, as well as showing how food links us to ‘home’ and how food travels diasporically and globally. The module also affords opportunities to think about recent debates about ‘tradition’, ‘authenticity’ and ‘cultural appropriation’ and how such terms are used and contested in relation to food through some specific case studies. ‘Culinary Cultures’ is divided into three main units of study: 1. In weeks 1–3 key concepts and methodologies in food studies are introduced, using a selection of short texts (essays, short stories and poems) as case studies. These include extracts from Poetry on a Plate (2004), and The Virago Book of Food (2006). Peter Jackson and the CONANX group’s Food Words (2015) is used to set short reading suggestions on key terms relevant to the texts/s and issues discussed each week and students are asked to make notes in advance of class. This provides a consistent, current and internationally based theoretical core to the module, alongside other set primary and secondary materials. Rick Flowers and Elaine Swan’s Food Pedagogies (2015) is a useful starting point for teachers new to this area.

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2. In weeks 4–7 we start to think about specific literary texts: Margaret Atwood’s The Edible Woman (1969) and Vietnamese-American Monique Truong’s The Book of Salt: A Novel (2003) and more complex representations of food and food-related issues. Although Atwood is undoubtedly a canonical writer, this first novel with its clear second-­wave feminist, white North American context, provides a useful starting point from which to launch critical discussions about food, gender and sexuality which are then usefully problematised by The Book of Salt. Truong’s novel explores food, bodies and queer sexuality through the historiographic lens of a fictionalised account of real-life modernist writer Gertrude Stein and her partner Alice B.  Toklas and their (differently) queer cook, the imaginary Binh. Rather than seeing Binh simply as the racialised ‘other’ who rather crudely represents the ‘dark side of modernity’—as much a constituent of the Stein-Toklas domestic household as of the larger Euro-American project of modernity—Truong explores the complex imbrications of race, class, sexuality and desire in her characters through a hauntingly beautiful novel about exile, migration, memory and desire. This is a challenging novel which significantly complicates the mainly white and heteronormative exploration of bodies, food and desire in Atwood’s late 1960s novel; it also opens up for discussion, wider issues of orientalism and ‘the exotic’, eurocentrism, transnational travel and the complexities of ‘home’ for the postcolonial and/or transcultural subject. 3. Weeks 8–12 constitute a case study of Caribbean foodways and food narratives. It includes a selection of extracts from texts of different genres including Barbadian writer Austin Clarke’s culinary memoir, Pigtails and Breadfruit (1999), Trinidadian novelist Sam Selvon’s A Brighter Sun (1952). A research-informed case study of British-­Caribbean celebrity chef and entrepreneur, Levi Roots and his Reggae brand and issues of cultural appropriation in Jamie Oliver’s 2018 ‘Jerkgate’ completes this unit of study. Seminars provide the main discussion-focused basis for teaching on this module and are specifically structured to develop students’ abilities to articulate individual perspectives, debate interpretations and participate in the creation of a research community. Occasional short lectures feature, but the main emphasis is on shared active learning and the seminar format. Private study is the primary mode for this module, through which the student learns to develop skills of independent research and apply the

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general skills of literary analysis to the specific field of the research strand. In particular, they are encouraged to keep a regular reflective journal which is then used to write a reflective commentary as part of the final assessment.

Unit 1 In the first week, students are introduced to the interdisciplinary area of food studies and the specific study of food and literature. As an introductory activity I ask students to look at selected poems/short extracts in clusters thematically organised around kitchens, cooking as ‘magic’ and cross-cultural food encounters. I also introduce the use of Food Words as module reader and ask students to note: • How useful the term is for researching food and literature? • Does it relate to any of the module texts? How? • What are its limitations? • What further questions do you want to ask? • How far are the examples/case studies from different cultures? What difference does this make? In the next class we start to map some foundational ideas in food studies. I ask students to read and make notes on Mary Douglas’ classic sociological study, ‘How to Decipher a Meal’ (1971), alongside Roland Barthes’ iconic essay on food, gender and French cultural identity ‘Steak and Chips’ from Mythologies (1957) and extracts from Pierre Bourdieu’s Distinction (1984). Keywords for student research from Food Words include cooking, eating and taste. I present a short lecture introducing the field of food studies, its origins and some key terms and methodologies, including selected theoretical writings on food of Claude Levi-Strauss, Roland Barthes and Pierre Bourdieu on cultural capital. The lecture includes several ‘stop and discuss’ moments and ends with small group work on specific extracts, including a wonderfully provocative piece on the politics of ‘chip butties’ (French-fry sandwiches) from British cookery-writer Nigel Slater’s Real Fast Food (1993); this enables students to apply and debate in a more concretised form, some of the ideas raised in the extracts from Levi-­Strauss, Barthes and Bourdieu.

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We also look at the role of food and memory from a literary perspective by undertaking a workshop activity on Proust’s famous ‘madeleine moment’ from the first section of his long autobiographical work, À la recherche du temps perdu (1913–27). Close analysis of this extract is paired with students’ own ‘madeleine moments’ as a holistic teaching strategy. This facilitates discussion of the importance of food, affect and memory and the possible value of auto/biographical approaches that can be integrated into the study of food and also prepares students for the study of a ‘culinary memoir’ later on the module. In the final week of the unit, we focus on the research questions: • What does it mean to study food? • What kind of methodologies are used? • What are the links between food and literature and is there a shared vocabulary? Students research keywords materialities and practice and we think about ways we can use these new key terms in our study on the module. They also read and make notes on African American critic, Doris Witt’s essay ‘From Fiction to Foodways’ (2007) as a way of opening up discussion of food in a culturally different context and starting to think about the global ramifications of food, not only in the black diaspora but in general. Witt’s essay is useful not only for its fascinating case studies of African American cookbooks (another genre we discuss on this module) but for its incisive proposals for an intersectional methodology, one which can be modelled and used in other contexts too. It is quite deliberately placed early on in the module to counter the Eurocentrism of theoretical sources used so far and to show that BAME producers of knowledge are equally important. It is not just primary texts which need our scrutiny but the theories and practices which we put into action in literary studies.

Unit 2 In this unit we focus on specific literary texts and consider how food, consumption and the body are connected, as read through a number of critical-­theoretical frames. There are two classes on each novel, the first of which is centred on disordered eating and the body in The Edible Woman. Students read and make notes on keywords, body plus another from appetite, anxiety, consumption, convenience and advertising, and are

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tasked with reporting back on these terms in class. A seminar worksheet is used to focus discussion starting from Margaret Atwood’s own comment on her writing: The body as a concept has always been a concern of mine…I think that people very much experience themselves through their bodies and through concepts of the body which get applied to their own bodies. Which they pick up from their culture and apply to their own bodies.8

A warm-up exercise asks students in small groups to make a spider diagram or word cloud to collect all the words which they associate with the word ‘Body’ and to share with the group in discussion. They then look at all or a selection of the following extracts from The Edible Woman and consider what do they have to say about food/eating/consumption/the body/(dis)embodiment/American culture (are these issues universal?): • Chapter 1, Marion and the Seymour surveys (18–20) ‘I had begun to peck…their opinions asked’. plus, chapter 3 (25–27) ‘when I had climbed down…has something happened?’ • Chapter 4 Marion’s visit to Clara and Jo’s for dinner • Chapter 6 Marion meets Duncan on door-to-door ‘Seymour survey’ (48) to end of chapter ‘He rubbed one of his eyes…’ • Chapter 17 Marion and Peter go out for dinner (the steak scene) Students are then asked to critically engage with extracts from different kinds of writing on bodies and disordered eating and to link these insights to the novel. The extracts include one from Susan Bordo’s Unbearable Weight ([1993] 2002) on anorexia nervosa which reads the illness as part of a larger (gendered) mind-body dualism in western societies and as culturally constructed rather than simply pathological. In this extract, Bordo locates the illness within: a dimension of protest against the limitations of the ideal of female domesticity (the ‘feminine mystique’ Betty Friedan called it) that reigned in America in the 1950s and early 60s – the years when most of their mothers were starting homes and families [and] the era during which women had been fired en masse from the jobs they had held during the war and shamelessly propagandized back into the full-time job of wife and mother. 8

 Margaret Atwood, Conversations (London: Virago, 1992) 187.

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Bordo argues that the anorexic is terrified and repelled, not only by the traditional female domestic role – which she associates with mental lassitude and weakness – but by a certain archetype of the female: as hungering. Voracious, all-­ needing and all-wanting. It is this image that shapes and permeates her experience of and her hunger for food as insatiable and out of control, which makes her feel that if she even takes one bite, she won’t be able to stop.9

This can be paired with an extract from the more recent How to Be a Woman (2011) by feminist journalist Caitlin Moran in which Moran argues we need to demythologise the ‘furiously overloaded word…Fat’ and ‘to be able to…talk about what it is, and what it means, and why it’s become the big topic for Western women in the twenty-first century’.10 Anticipating The Book of Salt, students are asked to research keywords sex, gender and emotion from Food Words and to think about how they can be linked to Atwood’s novel with a particular focus on the characters of Marion and Duncan as differently gendered ‘disordered’ eaters. Students choose a secondary source on this text from recommended critical reading and write a short annotated bibliographic entry, summarising the argument and evaluating its usefulness for a reading of the novel. The next two classes focus on The Book of Salt (2004). This intriguing novel is in part a fictionalised account of the real-life experiences of American modernist writer Gertrude Stein and her lover, the writer Alice B.  Toklas, in France during the early decades of the twentieth century. Stein was already an established and revered modernist writer who entertained transnational writers, entertainers and artists such as T.S.  Eliot, Ernest Hemingway, Charlie Chaplin, Matisse and Picasso at her Paris ‘salon’. From 1908, when she went to live with Stein in Paris, Toklas acted as Stein’s muse, domestic support and secretary and was central in establishing Stein as a literary personage. Both women loved to eat and to entertain and both wrote about cooking and food. Stein had published a fascinating book of prose poems called Tender Buttons in 1914 which includes a section on different foods. After Stein’s death Toklas published a celebrated cookbook, the Alice B. Toklas Cookbook (1954) to raise urgent 9  Susan Bordo and Leslie Heywood, Unbearable Weight: feminism, Western culture, and the body (Berkeley and London: University of California Press), 102. 10  Caitlin Moran, How to Be A Woman (London: Random House, 2011), 110.

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funds to save Stein’s collection of paintings. Contemporary Vietnamese-­ American writer Truong draws on these intertextual sources and introduces a fictionalised queer Vietnamese in-house cook in her novel, based on a line in the Cookbook, mentioning the hiring of a Vietnamese cook: ‘[He] came to us through an advertisement that I had in desperation put in the newspaper…: “Two American ladies wish …”.’ In so doing, she brings new readings of food, culture, migration and sexuality into play. In preparation students research keywords kitchens, work and gourmet and the lives and writings of Stein and Toklas. Key research questions include: • What kind of writers were they? • What was their attitude to food and eating? (A keyword here is gourmet.) • How should we read Toklas’ cookbook and how does it combine literature and food? • What do you make of Stein’s modernist prose poems in Tender Buttons (1914)? • Why do you think Truong chose these real-life figures as source materials for her novel? • What does The Book of Salt have to say about the connections between food, cooking and art/writing? A worksheet focuses class discussion onto a series of textual locales and concerns. The first set of questions on intertextuality, food and writing (and food writing) requires students to discuss the questions above in small groups, based upon their preparatory research into the lives and writings of Stein and Toklas. A second question asks students to engage with a critical reading of Toklas’ cookbook in terms of the role of intertexts and the linked themes of hunger and desire in Toklas’ cookbook. For this, I use a short extract from Sarah Garland’s article ‘A Cookbook to Be Read. What About It?’ (2009) in which she argues: Toklas’s highly involved, expensive and often impractical recipes provide a meditation on wider and more complex desires than just bodily hunger, particularly at the time of Toklas and Stein’s stay in occupied France and after Stein’s death in 1946….The paper finds antecedents for both the quality of ‘obstinate and homely shrewdness’ in Stein and Toklas’s texts in the

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brusque and authoritative women’s voices captured in nineteenth century cookbooks and suggests that through the fetish status of the nouns in both recipes and in poetry Gertrude and Alice use the reciprocal making and writing of food to articulate, represent and direct desire.11

How far is this a useful way to thank about the link between hunger and desire, food and sex in The Book of Salt (and its intertexts)? Another task is to compare ‘Murder in the Kitchen’ an extract from Toklas’ cookbook on the killing of a pigeon with the equivalent passage in Truong’s novel (chapter 7, 64–70). I get students to discuss the main differences? Who narrates? What is the effect? Another class focuses on food, sex desire in relation to the characters of Binh, himself a queer postcolonial subject, as he moves (and cooks) across different cultures. Students prepare keywords exotic, foodscapes, time and memory and read the introduction to Graham Huggan’s The Postcolonial Exotic (2001). They are also asked to consider: • What is the function of the Vietnamese cook, Binh, in the novel? How is he represented? • How does the novel connect food, appetite and sex? • How does it navigate cultural difference and exoticism? • What is the role of time, space and memory in this novel? Guided by a worksheet, students are asked to think about the relationship between Toklas and Stein in terms of the interrelatedness of the term ‘appetite’ to food and sex. Drawing upon ideas from Said’s Orientalism (1978) and Huggan (2001) they are also asked to think about the ways in which the novel positions Binh as a colonial and queer intersectional subject. Oppression and power are experienced by Binh very differently in different locations (Saigon, Paris) and this is significant. Who has agency and who is able to resist being dominated or overpowered by others in the novel? We consider the role of sex and food as they relate to Binh’s (and other characters) state of exile and longing in The Book of Salt. Some specific passages which can be used to focus discussion include:

11  Abstract for Sarah Garland, “‘A Cookbook to be read. What about it?’: Alice Toklas, Gertrude Stein and the Language of the Kitchen”, Comparative American Studies 7 (2009): 34–56.

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• The significance of salt in the title. Opening pages and main themes of novel? • Binh’s culinary resistance (19) • Erotics of relationship between Stein and Toklas conducted through food (27) • Binh starts affair with Chef Bleriot at Governor General’s house in Saigon (62–3), Bleriot’s relationship with Binh (123) ‘the rules he set for me….Never saw’. Comment on different kinds of power relation operating here. • Link between Binh’s cutting (self-harm), mother and cooking (72–3). How should we read the split blood in his mistresses’ meal? • Meal Binh plans for lover Marcus Lattimore (Sweet Sunday Man) (77–9, 149–50) food and stories linked ‘I cook for him, and he feeds me, that is the true nature of our relationship’. (213) • Binh and man on bridge/Ho Chi Minh bond over meal at Chinese restaurant (96–9) • Dr Chauffeur’s advice on ‘curing’ Binh’s homosexuality (128). Link to spices. Traces of racist and sexologist discourses • Binh reflects on his otherness and identity (142) • Food and language (11–12, 19, 34) the beef and ‘pear not pear’ (pineapple) (211) • Pigeon scene (218)—how it links to earlier passage on dying birds (67–8) and Binh’s mother having been given ‘wings’ in death (230) We then undertake an exercise on food and sex in popular cultural texts from Warren Belasco’s Food: The Key Concepts (2008). It’s possible to teach this in different ways but I ask students to find passages on food and sex in popular culture to bring to class for discussion.

Unit 3 Leaving the study of non-Western texts to the end of a module can signal a hierarchy of privileged texts within the curriculum. However, on this module I deliberately teach a range of short Caribbean texts last, as they build upon and help to critique what has come before. I give a lecture introducing key issues in Caribbean foodways based on my own research and discuss research planning, research ethics and research methodologies (including oral history and ethnography) using the case study of my ‘Kitchen Talk’ oral history project conducted in Barbados in 2018.

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Students prepare keywords space and place, race and ethnicity and read a series of critical sources including chapter 1 of Hannah Garth’s Food and Identity in the Caribbean (2013), the introduction to Sarah Lawson Welsh’s, Food, Text and Culture in the Anglophone Caribbean (2019) and her chapter, ‘Caribbean Cravings’ (2018a). To discuss the idea of food as intimately linked to identity, we focus on extracts from two Caribbean texts. The first, Pigtails and Breadfruit (1999) (named after two classic Caribbean dishes), is a ‘culinary memoir’ of a 1930s childhood and life ‘through food’ by Barbadian-Canadian writer, Austin Clarke. The text examines the role of food in forging identity, the role of female figures in Clarke’s (culinary) life and other ways in which food and creativity are linked in the Caribbean and its diaspora. With close focus on the first chapter, I ask students to think about: • The genre of life writing and its main characteristics. • How Clarke uses his ‘culinary memoir’ to link foodways and food memories to race, ethnicity, class, gender, nation and ‘tradition’? • What is culinary ‘tradition’? • Significance of subtitle ‘Rituals of Slave Food’? • How does this text complicate the idea of a single Caribbean cuisine? A Brighter Sun (1952) is an early novel by Indo-Caribbean writer Sam Selvon, in which he traces the adulthood of his protagonist Tiger amidst a time of great change for his native island of Trinidad during WWII. The novel features some striking scenes of eating, feasting and fasting, including a Hindu wedding feast and a special meal put on specially for his American employers by Tiger and his wife. We think about cross-cultural confusions of the latter scene and the ways in which (racial, religious and cultural) identity is coded in terms of food practices. Preparatory reading includes the keywords class, tradition and authenticity as well as Arjun Appadurai’s ‘How to Make a National Cuisine’ (2008) which focuses on the role of printed cookbooks in the standardisation of an ‘Indian’ cuisine and Chapter 5 of Bob Ashley et al., Food and Cultural Studies (2004) on ‘The National Diet’. In the final part of the unit, we consider the contested nature of the terms ‘tradition’ and ‘authenticity’ through the cookbooks of BritishCaribbean celebrity cook and entrepreneur Levi Roots and the issue of cultural appropriation through selected products by British celebrity chef Jamie Oliver. Students prepare keywords celebrity cooks, convenience

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and globalisation and read Chapter 11 of Bob Ashley et al. (2004) on TV Chefs, Sarah Lawson Welsh, ‘Cooking Up a Storm’ (2014) and ‘Why Jamie Oliver’s Jerk Rice Is a Recipe for Disaster’ in The Conversation (2018). The case study on Roots encourages students to consider the commodification of diasporic Caribbean food culture and unravel the complex local and the global forces at play in the marketing of food products and cookery writing as ‘authentically’ Caribbean. Questions include: • Does the Reggae Reggae phenomenon reflect a welcome trend in deterritorialising ethnic foods in Britain as part of a new ‘culinary cosmopolitanism’ or should it be read as a less helpful reification of ‘ethnic’ food? • Roots constructs a version of Caribbean cuisine which travels well in the global marketplace, but in doing so, does he overwrite the geographical variables and historical complexities of Caribbean foodways with a new homogeneity and new constructions of ‘authenticity’? • What does it mean to be ‘authentic’ in culinary terms? How are ideas of ‘home’ and ‘culinary tradition’ mobilised in Reggae Reggae Cookbook (2008)?

Conclusion This chapter has shown how a module which offers a research-informed, cross-disciplinary introduction to food and narrative, centred around world texts across a range of genres, can offer some strategies for decolonising the curriculum, as part of a longer and more sustained process. As the student authors of a 2017 blog post ‘Decolonising SOAS12: What’s All the Fuss About?’ remind us: ‘Decolonising the curriculum’ can mean many things and is not something that happens overnight; it requires a sustained and serious commitment within the institution and across the sector.13

 School of Oriental and African Studies.  Decolonising SOAS np https://www.soas.ac.uk/blogs/study/decolonising-­curriculum­w hats-the-fuss/#:~:text=First%2C%20’decolonising%20the%20curriculum’,about%20 how%20the%20world%20is.&text=Second%2C%20’decolonising%20the%20 curriculum’,how%20they%20write%20about%20it 12 13

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To answer those who ask ‘why now?’ or seek to critique the newly energised wave of decolonising activity in our current moment: We might remind ourselves that contestations over the politics of knowledge are as old universities themselves, and in this sense the present student campaign is itself a manifestation of that fusty academic tradition – to challenge received wisdom, to ask questions about society and to generate the insight needed to change the world.14

Works Cited Abarca, Meredith. E. “Food Consciousness: Teaching Critical Theory Through Food Narratives.” In Food Pedagogies, edited by Rick Flower and Elaine Swan, 201–222. London: Routledge, 2015. Appadurai, Arjun, “How to Make a National Cuisine.” In Food and Culture, second edition, edited by Carole Counihan, and Penny Van Esterik, 289–307. London and New York: Routledge, 2008. Archer, Jayne Elisabeth et al. eds, Food and the Literary Imagination. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014. Ashley, Bob et  al., Food and Cultural Studies. London and New  York: Routledge, 2004. Atwood, Margaret. The Edible Woman. McClelland and Stewart, 1969. Atwood, Margaret. Conversations. London: Virago, 1992. Voski Avakian, Arlene, and Barbara Haber eds, From Betty Crocker to Feminist Food Studies. Amherst: U. Massachusetts Press, 2005. Balirano, Giuseppe, et  al. eds, Food Across Cultures: Linguistic Insights in Transcultural Tastes. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2019. Roland Barthes, “Steak and Chips.” In Mythologies, translated by Annette Lavers. London, Paladin, [1957], 1972. Belasco, Warren. Food: the key concepts. London: Bloomsbury, 2008. Bernstein, Basil. Pedagogy, symbolic control and identity. London: Rowman and Littlefield, 2000. Beushausen, Wiebke et al. eds, Caribbean Food Cultures: Culinary practices and consumption in the Caribbean and its Diasporas. Germany: Transcript-­ Verlag, 2014. Bordo, Susan, and Leslie Heywood, Unbearable weight: feminism, Western culture, and the body. Berkeley and London: University of California Press, 2003.

 Decolonising SOAS n.p.

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Bourdieu, Pierre. Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste. Cambridge, M.A.: Harvard U. Press, 1984. Brien, Donna Lee, and Lorna Piatti-Farnell eds, The Routledge Companion to Literature and food. London and New York: Routledge, 2018. Cairns, Kate, and Josee Johnston, Food and Femininity. London: Bloomsbury, 2015. Cheng, Julia, “Queering Lists: culinary and literary modernism in The Book of Salt”, MELUS 44, no. 3 (2009): 91–111. Clarke, Austin. Pigtails and Breadfruit. Toronto: Random House, 1999. Leo Coleman ed, Food: Ethnographic Encounters. London: Bloomsbury, 2011. Counihan, Carole, and Penny Van Esterik eds, Food and Culture. London and New York: Routledge, 2018. Counihan, The anthropology of food and body: food, meaning and power. New York: Routledge, 1999. Crowley, Helen, and Susan Himmelweit eds, Knowing Women. London: Polity Press, 1994. Delderfield, Russell. Male Eating Disorders. Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2019. Douglas, Mary, “How to Decipher a Meal”, Daedalus (Winter 1972): 61–82. Flowers, Rick, and Elaine Swan eds, Food Pedagogies. London: Routledge, 2015. Foulston, Jill ed, The Virago Book of Food – The Joy of Eating. London: Virago, 2006. Garland, Sarah, “‘A Cookbook to be read. What about it?’: Alice Toklas, Gertrude Stein and the Language of the Kitchen”, Comparative American Studies 7 (2009): 34–56. Garth, Hannah. Food and Identity in the Caribbean. London: Bloomsbury, 2013. hooks, bell. Teaching to transgress: Education as the practice of freedom. New York: Routledge, 1994. Heldke, Lisa, “Foodmaking as a Thoughtful Practice.” In Cooking, Eating, Thinking: Transformative Philosophies of Food by Deane W.  Curtin, Lisa M. Heldke, Indiana U.P., 1992, 203–29. Huggan, Graham. The Postcolonial Exotic: Marketing the Margins. London and New York: Routledge, 2005. Sanchez Grant, Sofia, “The Female Body in Lady Oracle and The Edible Woman”, Journal of International Women’s Studies 9, no. 2 (2008): 77–92. Jackson, Peter, and the CONANX group, Food Words: Essays in Culinary Culture. London: Bloomsbury, 2015. Jovanovski, Natalie, Digesting Femininities. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2018. Lupton, Deborah. Food, the body and the self. London: Sage, 1996. Lawson Welsh, Sarah. Food, Text and Culture in the Anglophone Caribbean. London and Washington: Rowman and Littlefield, 2019. Lawson Welsh, Sarah, “Caribbean Cravings: Food and Literature in the Anglophone Caribbean.” In The Routledge Companion to Literature and Food. London and New York: Routledge, 2018a.

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Lawson Welsh, Sarah, “Why Jamie’s Oliver’s Jerk Rice is a Recipe for Disaster”, The Conversation, 2018b. https://theconversation.com/jamie-­olivers-­jerk­rice-­is-­a-­recipe-­for-­disaster-­heres-­why-­101879 Lawson Welsh, Sarah, “‘Cooking Up a Storm.’ Performing Cross-cultural culinary discourse: The Case of Levi Roots.” In Caribbean Food Cultures, edited by Wiebke Beushausen et al. Germany: Transcript Verlag, 2014: 153–174. McWilliams, Ellen, “Margaret Atwood’s Canadian hunger artist: postcolonial appetites in The Edible Woman”, Kunapipi 28, no. 2 (2006): 63–72. Moran, Caitlin. How to Be a Woman. London: Random House, 2011. Orbach, Susie. Fat is a Feminist Issue. London: Paddington Press, [1978] 1984. Orbach, Susie. Susie Orbach on Eating. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 2002. Parks, Emma, “You are What you Eat: The Politics of Food in the Novels of Margaret Atwood”, Twentieth Century Literature 43, no.1 (2011): 349–268. Poetry Society, Poetry on a Plate: A Feast of Poems and Recipes. Cambridge: Salt, 2004. Posman, Sarah, and Laura Luise Schultz eds, Gertrude Stein in Europe. London: Bloomsbury, 2017. Proust, Marcel. Remembrance of Things Past, volume 1. Translated by Scott C K Moncrieff. London, [1913] 1922. Rowe, Martha. Taste: the infographic book of food. London: Aurum Press, 2015. Said, Edward. Orientalism. New York: Pantheon Books, 1978. Sceats, Sarah. Food, Consumption and the Body in Contemporary Women’s Fiction. Cambridge: CUP, 2004. Selvon, Sam. A Brighter Sun. London: Alan Wingate, 1952. Sen, Sharmila, “Indian Spices across the Black Water.” In From Betty Crocker to Feminist Food Studies, edited by Arlene Voski Avakian and Barbara Haber. Amherst: U. Massachusetts Press, 2005: 185–199. Shahani, Gitanjali G., Food and Literature. Cambridge: CUP, 2018. Slater, Nigel., Real Fast Food. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1993. Toklas, Alice B. Alice B. Toklas Cookbook. New York: Harper and Brothers, 1954. Truong, Monique. The Book of Salt: A Novel. Houghton Mifflin, 2003. Truong, Monique, “Interview with Monique Truong”, Diacritics, 2013. Watson, James L., and Melissa L. Caldwell, The cultural politics of food and eating: a reader. Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 2005. Wilk, Richard. Home Cooking in the Global Village. London: Bloomsbury, 2006. Witt, Doris, “From fiction to foodways: Working at the Intersections of African American Literary and Culinary Studies.” In African American foodways, edited by Anne Bower, Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 2007: 101–25. Xu, Wenying. Eating Identities: Reading Food in Asian American Literature. University of Hawaii Press, 2008.

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Suggested Further Reading Unit 1: Archer et al. eds (2014), Ashley et al. (2004), Belasco (2008), Lee Brien and Piatti-Farnell eds (2018), Counihan et  al. eds (2018), Rowe (2015), Shahani (2018), Watson and. Caldwell eds (2005). Unit 2: Delderfield (2019), Lupton (1996), Orbach (1984) and (2002), Sceats (2004), Sanchez Grant (2008), McWilliams (2006), Parks (2011), Cairns (2015) and Jovanovski (2018). Posman et al. eds (2017), Shaughnessy (2001), Stein ([1954] 2000) and (1914). Xu (2008) and Cheng (2019), Balirano et al. eds (2019), Counihan and Van Esterik eds (1999), Coleman (2011) and the 2013 Diacritics interview with Monique Truong. Unit 3: Beushausen et al. eds (2014), Lawson Welsh (2019) and (2018a), Wilk (2006), Balirano et al. eds (2019) and Sen (2005).

A Border-Crossing Teaching Body: Reflections on a Decolonial Pedagogy for Literary Studies in a South African Context Sam Naidu

Inspired by Jacques Derrida’s concept of the “teaching body”,1,2 this chapter reflects on my position as a teacher of Literary Studies in a post-­ apartheid classroom in South Africa. I consider my role as a teaching body (an individual teacher who is racially and culturally inscribed) within the discipline or corpus (another type of body), which in turn operates within 1  Jacques Derrida, “Where a Teaching Body Begins and How It Ends,” in Revolutionary Pedagogies: Cultural Politics, Instituting Education, and the Discourse of Theory, ed. Peter Pericles Trifonas (New York & London: Routledge, 2000), 85. 2  Jacques Derrida, “Teaching Body,” 83–112.

S. Naidu (*) Department of Literary Studies in English, Rhodes University, Makhanda/Grahamstown, South Africa e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 C. Beyer (ed.), Decolonising the Literature Curriculum, Teaching the New English, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-91289-5_9

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the global teaching body (the academy), and, of course, this academy is situated within a specific local, but also a more general, transnational, socio-political body. Informed by the experience that teaching and learning involve a variety of bodies that journey together or, to put it more pointedly, teachers and learners travel together within bodies of knowledge, and through social bodies, I contemplate how these sometimes perilous journeys are navigated and how new terrain is discovered. In recent times, by paying attention in this way to the embodied experience of teaching and learning, a new kind of “contemplative practice”3 has been developed to better suit the needs of a contemporary South African higher education Literary Studies curriculum. Following Derrida, I recognise that there is “no neutral or natural place in teaching”.4 Therefore, I nurture a decolonial pedagogy consisting of, among other elements, “contemplative practices”5 for the teaching of Literary Studies. This decolonial pedagogy aims to resist persistent colonial discourses, questions power dynamics, celebrates difference and fosters mindfulness of the embodied dimension of teaching and learning. Emphasis is placed on the crossing of real and figurative borders to do with: race and other socially constructed categories; the discipline of Literary Studies; the parameters of the institution; a metropolitan conceptualisation of the academy; and divisions and discriminations in the wider society. A key theorist of transnationalism, Avtar Brah, focuses on “multi-­ locationality across geographical, cultural and psychic boundaries”.6 In this decolonial pedagogy the concept of multi-locationality is similar to hybridity. A student is mobile and is understood to be comprised of varying, at times contradictory, affiliations and positions. To navigate and negotiate this multi-locationality or hybridity, a student needs to recognise the value of boundaries or borders that define and protect but also needs to develop the agency to cross certain borders when required. Another aspect of this pedagogy is responsiveness to the community. A number of scholars emphasise the imperative to cross conceptual and institutional borders, and constantly rethink the internal and external

3  Daniel P. Barbezat and Mirabai Bush, Contemplative Practices in Higher Education (San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 2014), xi. 4  Derrida, “Teaching Body,” 85. 5  Barbezat and Bush, Contemplative Practices, xi. 6  Avtar Brah, Cartographies of Diaspora (Oxford: Routledge, 1996), 194.

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relationships of the university.7 Teaching that crosses the borders of the academy to engage with the community transforms the discipline and the institution, and creates what Byrne calls “The Engaged Institution”,8 echoing bell hooks’s views about an “engaged pedagogy”.9 To elucidate, I present a case study of my short course—Community Engagement Reading Club Orientation (CERCO)—which utilises methods derived from yoga to create a “contemplative practice” that fosters a mindful, multilayered awareness of ourselves as teaching and learning bodies. To conclude, the chapter considers how this decolonial pedagogy tackles the vast inequalities and deep fractures in our society and effects transformation through developing in students the ability to cross borders.

Section 1: Teaching Bodies and Contemplative Practices While Jacques Derrida’s contribution to Philosophy, specifically his theory of deconstruction, is widely studied and critiqued by scholars across a range of disciplines, here I am concerned mainly with his thoughts on teaching and the relationships amongst individual teaching bodies, their disciplines, their institutions, and the academy. In “Where a Teaching Body Begins and How It Ends”, Derrida reveals his own troubled identity as a teacher and his uneasy relationship with his primary discipline (Philosophy), his various institutions and France’s national educational policy. He identifies and defines various bodies in the context of higher education, and describes how they interact to create a “complex and conflictual matrix of powers and interests that structure the historico-­ ideologico-­politico-institutional field of pedagogy”.10 When in 1992 a proposal to award him an honorary doctorate at Cambridge University was met with particularly virulent attack from scholars across the globe, 7  Sioux McKenna and Chrissie Boughey, “Argumentative and Trustworthy Scholars: The Construction of Academic Staff at Research-Intensive Universities,” Teaching in Higher Education 19, no. 7 (2014): 825–834; Yusef Waghid, “Knowledge Production and Higher Education Transformation in South Africa: Towards Reflexivity in University Teaching, Research and Community Service,” Higher Education 43 (2002): 457–488. 8  J.  V. Byrne, “Taking Charge of Change: A Leadership Challenge for Public Higher Education,” Higher Education Management 11, no. 1: 69–79. 9  bell hooks, Teaching to Transgress: Education as the Practice of Freedom (New York: Routledge, 1994). 10  Simon Wortham, The Derrida Dictionary (London: Continuum, 2010), 10.

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Derrida averred that the controversy arose because his work, as part of a wider deconstruction project, questioned “the fundamental norms and premises of a number of dominant discourses, the principles underlying many of their evaluations, the structures of academic institutions, and the research that goes on within them”.11 What Derrida’s theory of a teaching body prompts is similar questioning of one’s simultaneously and necessarily complicit and critical relationship with one’s students, discipline, institution, the academy and social context. It is this awareness of oneself as a teacher functioning within a matrix of systems, influences and discourses that is so crucial to the development of a decolonial pedagogy. The development of my own pedagogical practice stems from this awareness of my immersion within an institution established in a colonial context, and my avowal of a discipline which is perceived as one of the primary sites of “colonialist cultural control”.12 Acknowledging the complicity of English literature and of the English language in colonialism is for me a deconstruction project which opens within. English Studies itself – the place of colonial management – a cognitive space in which the subject-to-be-educated reads the effects of ideology in both personal and political dimensions, and finds within that space […] something that functions as a ‘room for manoeuvre.’13

Derrida’s theory of a teaching body inspires me to occupy that room for manoeuvre, and by extension, my students, as learning bodies, are invited into that space of imbricated complicity and critique. As Simon Wortham explains, Derrida “establishes the relations of the teaching body (of both the professor and the faculty corps vis-à-vis the national body or bodies) to the classroom and its students”, he confronts us “with actual bodies, physical conditions, and the highly determined spatial configuration of a certain place” and points out that “there could never be a single teaching body […] so homogenous and self-identical as to reduce or neutralize within itself all the tensions and contradictions which in fact got to make it up”.14 First, what is derived from the theory of a teaching body is the understanding of oneself as an individual physical 11  Jacques Derrida, “Honoris Causa: ‘This is also Very Funny’,” in Points: Interviews, 1974–1994 (New York: Stanford University Press, 1995), 409. 12  Stephen Slemon, “Teaching at the End of Empire,” College Literature 20.1 (1993): 153. 13  Slemon, “Teaching,” 159. 14  Wortham, Derrida Dictionary, 10.

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body operating within a complex matrix. Second, an awareness of the physical body or bodies which inhabit a space jointly is facilitated. Third, the tensions and contradictions which constitute one as a teaching body are exposed and consequently confronted. The result of such a series of revelations and confrontations is not so much the resolving of tensions and contradictions as it is the introduction of new teaching methods and the establishing of new disciplinary skills and knowledge. These innovations, at best, address and engage with these tensions and contradictions in order to serve the needs of South African learners, whose deep history is coloured by the trauma of apartheid and whose recent history is shaped by the disruptions of the #FeesMustFall and #RUReferenceList protests of 2015 and 2016. In 2015 a national student movement known as Rhodes Must Fall began when a statue of Cecil John Rhodes, racist colonialist and entrepreneur, was desecrated at the University of Cape Town. This movement strongly critiqued the colonial heritage of South African universities. At the same time students protested against planned increases in fees (Fees Must Fall), high fees already being a barrier to higher education for the majority of students who are poor and black. Both movements gained momentum, overlapping at times. The year 2016 also saw the start of a nationwide student protest again sexual violence. This movement began at Rhodes University when students published on social media the names of alleged perpetrators (RUReferenceList). These social movements or protests, which “express critique of social inequalities, colonial epistemologies, oppressive pedagogies, bureaucratic management in and financial exclusion from universities”15 have had a profound impact on higher education in South Africa and beyond. At the time, some scholars, such as Dirk Postma, noted that of key significance would be the response of educators and educational researchers to the actions and voices of the students.16 After the initial disruptions, violence and trauma, a process of transformation began and is ongoing. Policies, curricula, fee systems and pedagogies have undergone significant transformation as a result of these social movements, although a lot remains to be done, especially at the level of pedagogy and curriculum.

15  Dirk Postma, “An educational response to student protests. Learning from Hannah Arendt,” Education as Change 20.1 (2016): 1. 16  Postma, “Educational Response,” 1.

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In simple, practical terms Derrida’s concept of the teaching body helps me to position myself as a teacher within this context: I am a teaching body (an individual teacher, racialised and gendered of a particular age and class), within the discipline or corpus (which existed in South Africa for many decades as a hangover of a particular colonising, civilising mission on the part of British settlers), within the global teaching body (the increasingly corporatised and under-funded academy), within the socio-political body of post-apartheid South Africa (with its deep racial and class rifts and scourge of sexual violence). As a teaching body acting in this complex matrix of often deeply disquieting and disruptive influences and contexts, I need to take a critical stand, and make considered choices about my role as a teacher in a particular moment, institution and community. One of the choices I have made is to align my teaching with my research, which is explicitly about the experiences of border crossing, that is, the research subject is literature of migration and diaspora. This literature examines how migrants deal with being displaced. These themes of being “othered” or dislocated, of dealing with difference, strangeness and historical injustices reflect the core sentiments articulated by the student protests of 2015/2016 and inform what and how I teach in the classroom. Attempting to facilitate overlap between students’ own experiences and the subject matter of the literature is imperative for a decolonial pedagogy. Another choice I have made since the nationwide student protests is to introduce contemplative practices into the classroom. Contemplative practices, in my view, set the tone for a particular teaching-learning experience. They create a pause, an opportunity for silence and acute awareness of the self and of the other, with their differences and difficulties, in a shared space. For me, it is about teacher and learner momentarily shifting the focus from an epistemological quest to an ontological exploration— the subject contemplating their body and the bodies of others, recognising the complex, holistic nature of subjectivity, respecting the self and other, being cognisant of intentions and boundaries, harnessing the courage to question delineating, defining and sometimes limiting borders, and then, if required, crossing those borders. This “thinking outside of the box” or border crossing is, I argue, a fundamental constituent of the learner-as-agent in their own education. According to Barbezat and Bush, contemplative practices certainly include meditations, but are not all meditative in the traditional sense […]. They include both simple and complex concentration practices

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that sometimes require periods of calm and quiet and sometimes sustained analytical thinking. The critical aspect is that students discover their own internal reactions without having to adopt any ideology or specific belief. They all place the student in the centre of his or her learning so that the student can connect his or her inner world to the outer world. Through this connection, teaching and learning is transformed into something personally meaningful yet connected to the world.17

Crucial here is the emphasis that Barbezat and Bush place on the student’s own discovery and development of knowledge through personal, internal realisations. The suggestion that knowledge can be devoid of ideology or belief, however, is not viable because students at a university are required to develop their initial reactions and responses to say a literary text in accordance with certain disciplinary and institutional protocols. Ultimately, a student of Literary Studies is expected to produce a piece of critical writing which conforms to very strictly regulated academic conventions for purposes of assessment. To begin a teaching-learning experience, though, with a contemplative practice, affects how learners will receive, respond to and develop knowledge and, therefore, contemplative practices such as meditation, music and singing, journal-writing, dance, storytelling and yoga, arguably, enhance the teaching-learning experience and promote an awareness of the process as being an embodied one. Sometimes practical issues arise when time or space is limited. It is important to be innovative and adaptable in the face of such challenges. Moreover, one needs to be agile with the curriculum when one adopts such a pedagogy. Another issue which arises has to do with student non-­ compliance or objection based on the grounds of preference, or religious and cultural difference. It is therefore ethically imperative that contemplative practices are not mandatory. What is crucial here is that the philosophy behind the contemplative practice is explained and understood so that students who differ or dissent can determine their own form of contemplative practice in order to foster awareness of self and others as fellow learning bodies. In a more general sense, Barbezat and Bush argue that the rationale behind using contemplative practices in higher education is based on the “belief that bringing contemplative practice into the academy would have pedagogical and intellectual benefits and that contemplative awareness can  Barbezat and Bush, Contemplative Practices, 6.

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help to create a more just, compassionate and reflective society”.18 Certainly, the hope is that a heightened receptivity to the learning experience and an increased awareness of and respect for difference will lead to greater reflection, compassion and commitment to social justice. Most important is that the pause and the slowing down lead to introspection, that is “the mental art of attending carefully to what is occurring within, often in response to an activity, theory or text”.19 Contemplation and introspection at the start of a class are offered not as opponents but as precursors to analytical thinking, which is reified in academic institutions. When offered in the middle or at the end of the class, a contemplative practice can also enable “students to relate their learning directly to their lives and act in ways they value, deepening their study of the material they are studying”.20 At times of unrest and disruption and in its aftermath, contemplative practices are not simply reactionary but transformative, allowing new ways of teaching, learning and relating in the classroom.

Section 2: Contemplative Practices and a Decolonial Pedagogy My experience of the student protests of 2015 and 2016, particularly of the RU Reference List protest and its aftermath, revealed to me the necessity for an engaged, decolonial pedagogy which was responsive and transformative by crossing disciplinary, institutional, communal and even political borders as a teacher. But how does one develop a decolonial pedagogy within such a complex matrix of teaching bodies? Responding directly to students’ trauma through the introduction of a contemplative practice was the first step. This contemplative practice is derived from yoga21 and involves stilling the mind and body, that is, practising mindfulness at the beginning of a class or whenever it is required for  Barbezat and Bush, Contemplative Practices, xii.  Barbezat and Bush, Contemplative Practices, 21. 20  Barbezat and Bush, Contemplative Practices, 201. 21  Yoga is different from stretching or other kinds of fitness because it explicitly connects the movement of the body and the fluctuations of the mind to the rhythm of the breath. Connecting the mind, body and breath helps to direct attention inward to the cultivation of awareness. Hatha yoga promotes flexibility and strength of both body and mind, contributes to vitality, cultivates balance and calms the mind. It alleviates stress and creates a welcome feeling of wholeness and deep relaxation. And it clears the mind, leaving openness to new and creative ideas. See Barbezat and Bush, Contemplative Practices, 168. 18 19

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the purposes of allaying anxiety, nervousness, aggression or distress. Students are requested, not mandated, to stand up and step away from their seats and desks. They are guided into the “mountain position” in order to gain physical stability and then they are asked to close their eyes and focus on their breathing. This leads to a quietening of the mind and the slow, deep breathing is calming while honing focus. A series of simple and easy yoga postures (asanas) follows to increase blood flow and oxygen in-take. Students are asked to reflect on their own sensory experiences, emotions, physical pains and pleasures, and then to become aware of other bodies in the room. This awareness should be respectful and non-­ judgemental. Finally, students are asked to assume a position or do a movement of their choice which best expresses their current state of being (this state of being encompasses physical, mental and emotional conditions). After this five- to ten-minute contemplative practice, formal learning continues and we turn to the literary text, theory, critical reading, debate or issue that we are studying. During the COVID-19 pandemic, these practices have been maintained. The need for such contemplative practices has increased due to the anxiety, fear and isolation caused by the pandemic. Now, however, the five- to ten-minute contemplative practice is conducted via Zoom and students perform their movements in their own, personal spaces which are shared online. Students are guided to ground themselves through breathing and movement before a class commences. They are not compelled to keep their video cameras on but for the purposes of connection with other bodies and solidarity they are encouraged to do so. Due to the poverty and consequent lack of consistent technical access to online learning platforms, many students are not able to keep their video cameras on or use Zoom at all. This has been a major challenge for this specific decolonial pedagogy. To address this problem, written learning materials provided emphasise such points as time management and holistic well-being. Introducing a contemplative practice is one of the ways that borders are crossed. Initial responses to the introduction of a contemplative practice range from surprise and incredulity, to resistance and reluctance to participate, with most students falling into the category of enthusiastic about a break in routine. The border between formal, analytical or rational learning and physical, embodied, emotional and intuitive learning is not so much transgressed as it is utilised as a bridge to link the two. In addition, the borders between individuals in the class are breached through facilitating compassionate awareness of others, that is, of fellow learners or peers.

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Differences are noted as necessary and unavoidable (just as Structuralist theory indicates that discerning difference is a requisite for the construction of meaning using a system of signs) but they need not be the basis for discrimination. What the students come to understand intellectually through engagement with a body of knowledge (the theory of Structuralism) is now understood personally and bodily. As Barbezat and Bush put it, while “most contemporary education separates mind from body and thought from physical sensation, movement practices integrate the two”.22 An engaged or decolonial pedagogy, which is cognisant of a Derridean matrix of teaching bodies, recognises the borders between discrete but interconnected bodies and attempts to cross them. Ann Cooper Albright utilises “physical mindfulness” as a contemplative practice, and she notes that for her it evokes “the interconnected realms of embodied knowledge and critical thinking. I use it to underscore the psychic implications of one’s physical being-in-the-world.”23 Integrating different forms of knowledge and appreciating social, cultural or biological differences within the group, starting with awareness of the self as different, are some of the benefits of a decolonial pedagogy which includes contemplative practices. Thereafter, students are ready to cross further borders in the literary texts they study: geographical borders as they read about other regions and places, even beyond the planet, if they are studying science fiction; temporal borders as they read about different historical periods or even a speculative future; cultural borders; borders to do with gender, class, religion, age, sexuality, education level, depending on the text. Reading always requires readers to inhabit the consciousness of the characters in a text. In the teaching of transnational literature, the exigencies of migrant characters who also cross various borders are therefore more empathetically understood. Although not all students will identify with migrant characters or write about the literature in a lucid, critical manner, the general effects of such a decolonial pedagogy are enhanced receptivity and engagement on the part of students. Taking time to centre oneself, to see oneself and others, and to be seen and recognised, are crucial stabilising methods in a time of disruption and turbulence, and these methods also enhance the practice of reading literature. In the following section, the

 Barbezat and Bush, Contemplative Practices, 159.  Quoted in Barbezat and Bush, Contemplative Practices, 159.

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significance of this decolonial pedagogy for community engagement, volunteerism and service learning is discussed. Of significance here is how such a decolonial project can transform the teaching-learning experience of the classroom, the discipline, the institution, the academy and the wider socio-political context. The contemplative practice described above is aimed at creating new awareness of differences. These same differences were once the basis for an iniquitous system of subjugation and oppression in South Africa, a system known worldwide as apartheid. When students protested against the high cost of tertiary education and the often inappropriate, colonial curricula they were subjected to in 2016, they were expressing their frustration and anger at an unjust social system that has its roots in colonialism and apartheid. A decolonial pedagogy then has to have a multi-pronged approach: the trauma of the students needs to be addressed; and the social injustices of an enduring, pervasive system also need to be interrogated through the knowledge and skills of the discipline. A decolonial pedagogy which deploys contemplative practices in conjunction with subjective reading and formal, analytical disciplinary methods can effect transformation, if transformation is understood to involve all the bodies described by Derrida in a collective and long-term process of re-articulation. As Yusef Waghid argues, when “one transforms society from, say, the inequities of the present to a ‘more just and equitable society’ one responds to a future one wishes to achieve through an ongoing process of rethinking – a process of change from one form to another”.24 Starting with an alternative awareness of difference and a positive re-articulation of difference certainly constitutes a significant phase of such a process. A decolonial pedagogy, which incorporates contemplative practices which are designed to promote healthy subjectivities and inter-subjective relations in the classroom and beyond, is therefore arguably transformative. As Harvey and Knight point out, at “its core transformation refers to the ongoing change in the way educators and students approach the acquisition of knowledge and skills and relate them to a broader context”.25 Introducing contemplative practices into a Literary Studies curriculum is a significant and complimentary change to the way in which disciplinary knowledge and skills are acquired. But crossing the border between the  Waghid, “Knowledge Production,” 458.  Lee Harvey and Peter Knight, Transforming Higher Education (Suffolk: St Edmundsbury Press, 1997), 12. 24 25

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institution and the “broader context”, that is, wider society and the immediate community, is also a crucial amplification of the discipline. When students cross disciplinary and institutional borders to volunteer for community engagement projects they are directly and materially addressing the issues of social justice that they studied through the lens of literature. A decolonial pedagogy with contemplative practices serves also to enable such student volunteers to cross borders, as they are better able to relate to learners younger than themselves with often very different socio-­ economic circumstances and educational conditions.

Section 3: Case Study CERCO In conceiving of a decolonial pedagogy, I have come to realise that, as a teaching body, I need to zoom out to include not only my classroom, my department and faculty, my discipline and institution and the academy we belong to, but also the broader society that encompasses us all. While broader social issues always feature in a Literary Studies curriculum as themes derived from a text, a decolonial pedagogy overtly, in terms of methods of teaching as well as curriculum content, strives towards a paradigm in which “universities and communities become jointly responsible for social change”.26 Clearly understood within the discipline is the notion that “imaginative literature is both a repository and a reflection of images and themes in society as well as a crucial part of a dynamic cultural process in which meaning is created and contested”,27 but the challenge is to harness this tool for transformation while working outside of the parameters of the discipline. Not only do young learners in the community need to participate in a reading culture but many of the students who enrol at university and become community engagement volunteers have not had this opportunity to read imaginative literature as part of an integrated, comprehensive primary and secondary education. It is for these reasons that I initiated and developed a short course (CERCO) to orientate and equip student volunteers to be effective participants in a reading club by introducing them to some general scholarship about reading clubs and to context-specific anecdotal knowledge  Waghid, “Knowledge Production,” 458.  Susan Danielson, “Reconnecting the Disconnect: Exploring the Links Between Literary Studies and Community Service,” in Community-Based Learning and the Work of Literature, ed. Susan Danielson and Ann Marie Fallon (Bolton: Anchor, 2007), 232. 26 27

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about reading clubs in primary and secondary schools in the Makana District where Rhodes University is situated, in the Eastern Cape province of South Africa. CERCO also equips student volunteers with relevant pedagogical and administrative skills. The specific teaching method employed for CERCO is the workshop method and it incorporates contemplative practices throughout the two days of intensive workshops which kick-start the course. This is an integrative teaching practice because it draws from knowledge of my discipline and from almost three decades of personal, practical experience of working in reading clubs in this community. CERCO needs to be creative and experimental, to some extent, because of the diversity of the student body (students are from various disciplines, faculties and levels of study). Many students do not have any experience of reading clubs and some have never worked with young children before. Some student volunteers may be postgraduates, but most are straight out of secondary school and have just commenced their tertiary education. For the latter, the adjustment to life on campus in an extremely impoverished and semi-rural part of the country is already a challenge and community engagement work, as appealing as it appears at first, can be extremely daunting. Once student volunteers have signed up with the university’s Community Engagement Division and received basic training in volunteerism from it, they attend CERCO workshops for two whole Saturdays. After two days of workshops, they begin their practical sessions, that is, they travel to schools in the “townships” of Grahamstown/Makhanda to run reading clubs in partnership with teachers from the schools. Each reading club has a student leader and I co-ordinate, intervene, guide and support the different reading clubs, working usually with the student leaders or the teams of students assigned to a specific club. Student leaders submit evaluation reports regularly and the group communicates on a weekly basis using social media such as WhatsApp. After three terms of volunteering, the CERCO group re-convenes to discuss their experiences, reflect, share knowledge, write self-evaluative essays and provide critical feedback on CERCO and volunteerism in general. Students who complete all tasks, practical and academic, receive certificates of competence from the institution. Underlying this pedagogical structure is the principle that “community service projects generally invite students to test presumptions and methodologies [.…] As a result, service-learning can propel them to an advanced level of interpretation that resists dualistic

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thinking and neatly packaged theories.”28 CERCO students arrive with various presumptions about community engagement, based often on outmoded notions of “charity”. One of the main aims of CERCO is to inculcate in students the understanding that “effective engagement with communities requires do[ing] things with others rather than for them”.29 Therefore, the course, which combines workshops about theory and methodology with practical sessions, prompts them to question their own subjectivity and role as a volunteer, their relationships with the learners and community partners, the practice of reading and the concept of a reading club, and even the purpose and value of a university. CERCO workshops begin with a contemplative practice. Aiming to facilitate clarity, security and border crossing, students are guided through a series of asanas beginning with the mountain position and ending with free movement. First, awareness of self is fostered and then awareness of others in the room, in the university, town, wider community and so on, is encouraged. During the free movement phase of the practice students are asked to imagine being a school learner who struggles to read or a school teacher who has forty unruly ten-year-olds in their classroom. Students are encouraged to share anecdotes about their own reading experience and explain what reading means to them personally. Not only is this contemplative practice beneficial in preparing student volunteers (who, being from different disciplines and years of study, do not know each other) for the tasks to follow and for the teamwork of the year ahead, it also equips them with a very valuable pedagogical tool which they can deploy at reading club. This contemplative practice then transitions to theoretical discussions about reading, ethical debates about volunteerism and reading clubs, role-playing, reflection, oral presentations and peer feedback, in order to create integrated practical/analytical knowledge. Role-playing, which begins in the contemplative practice, is a key teaching method allowing students to act out various reading club scenarios in preparation for their roles as student volunteers. Another form of contemplative practice concerns the assessment task of writing reflective essays. Before writing the essays, students pause to silently contemplate their own 28  Kara Mollis, “Servicing Reading: Community Work and the Revaluation of Literary Study,” in Community-Based Learning and the Work of Literature, ed. Susan Danielson and Ann Marie Fallon (Bolton: Anchor, 2007), 48. 29  Barbara Jacoby and Associates, Service-Learning in Higher Education: Concepts and Practices (San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 1996), 8.

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reading club session plans and the session plans of their peers. Then they provide oral feedback to the class which comprises crucial material for the reflective essays which they thereafter write in class. Deviating from the individual, removed writing exercise, this contemplative, communal writing practice creates “assignments and class-time exercises that allow students to inhabit their writing [and] help them discover and explore insights into the disciplines and themselves. Contemplative writing practices help reclaim the sacred art of writing, deepening students’ understanding of stimulating their insight and creativity.”30 Built into the workshop are regular, immediate evaluation exercises in which students can reflect on their own performance as well as the efficacy of CERCO. CERCO, therefore, is a direct response to the need to transform our curricula to develop new types of knowledge and skills, and to bridge gaps between the institution and the broader community. It is also a method to develop greater understanding of self and empathy for the other. With this short course students are taught basic skills on how to foster a reading culture amongst young learners, learners are taught the valuable, life-­ altering skill of reading, and teachers are aided in the formal teaching they do by enhanced reading skills amongst their learners. Such symbiotic learning is achieved when a decolonial pedagogy including contemplative practices and border crossing is employed in a course such as CERCO and then transplanted by the student volunteers to the reading clubs across the district.

Section 4: Conclusion How does this decolonial pedagogy tackle the vast inequalities and deep fractures in our society to effect transformation? To begin, by realising and appreciating that I am a teaching body that operates within an ever-­ widening space of concentric bodies, I am able to position myself as a teacher of Literary Studies in a post-apartheid classroom in South Africa. Then, in a social sense and, moreover, in a physical embodied sense, this awareness has led to my incorporating contemplative practices into my teaching in order to address the socio-political exigencies of the current student body. These contemplative practices are aimed at: calming and centring students through mindfulness; drawing attention to the self-­ other dialectical; positively re-articulating difference, such as racial  Barbezat and Bush, Contemplative Practices, 110.

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difference; and equipping students to cross physical as well as cultural, conceptual, imaginative, disciplinary and institutional borders. Such a decolonial pedagogy is particularly effective in teaching postcolonial and transnational literature, but it also extends the discipline of Literary Studies to incorporate community engagement volunteer development and service learning. This amplification of the discipline can lead to “a form of ‘transformational learning,’ a specific type of learning that ‘involves changing fundamental assumptions’”.31 For example, contemplating one’s own position in society enables better understanding of the suffering of a migrant who experiences xenophobia, or reflecting on one’s own reading practices, may facilitate more empathetic relations with young learners who join a reading club. Contemplative practices introduce to a decolonial pedagogy a balance of varying types of knowledge, and a personal agency to the learning experience, by encouraging mindfulness, which “opens the mind and gives space for new understanding. It is the essential contemplative practice for the academy and, not surprisingly, the practice most widely incorporated into higher education.”32 Finally, I have come to see how such a decolonial pedagogy foregrounds the resistance of tenacious colonial discourses, questions power dynamics in the classroom, institution and society, and critically celebrates hybridity and difference. Although not all of my students have crossed national borders, they frequently “cross cultural and psychic boundaries”33 in my classroom: crossing from youth to adulthood, their childhood homes to university, from the university to the community where a different kind of symbiotic learning occurs, or imaginatively from one culture, gender or era to another within the fictional world of a literary text. Through these journeys of teaching and learning, a decolonial pedagogy which utilises contemplative practices emphasises how we, as bodies, are in a process of growing or “becoming”, a process we call “education”, and recognises that this is a collective, shared process predicated on ethical, compassionate relations with the other.

31  Janet Eyler and Dwight E.  Giles, Where’s the Learning in Service-Learning? (San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 1999), 4. 32  Barbezat and Bush, Contemplative Practices, 98. 33  Brah, Cartographies, 194.

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Works Cited Barbezat, Daniel P. and Bush, Mirabai. Contemplative Practices in Higher Education. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 2014. Brah, Avtar. Cartographies of Diaspora. Oxford: Routledge, 1996. Byrne, J.V. “Taking charge of change: A leadership challenge for public higher education.” Higher Education Management 11, no. 1 (1999): 69–79. Danielson, Susan. “Reconnecting the Disconnect: Exploring the Links Between Literary Studies and Community Service.” In Community-Based Learning and the Work of Literature edited by Susan Danielson and Ann Marie Fallon, 231–241. A.M. Bolton: Anchor, 2015. Derrida, Jacques. “Honoris Causa: ‘This is also very funny’.” In Points: Interviews, 1974–1994, 409–413. New York: Stanford University Press, 1995. Derrida, Jacques. “Where a Teaching Body Begins and How It Ends.” In Revolutionary Pedagogies: Cultural Politics, Instituting Education, and the Discourse of Theory, edited by Peter Pericles Trifonas, 83–112. New York and London: Routledge, 2000. Eyler, Janet and Giles, Dwight E. Jr. Where’s the Learning in Service Learning? San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 1999. Harvey, Lee, and Knight, Peter. Transforming Higher Education. Suffolk: St Edmundsbury Press, 1997. bell hooks, Teaching to Transgress: Education as the Practice of Freedom (New York: Routledge, 1994). Jacoby, Barbera and Associates. Service-Learning in Higher Education: Concepts and Practices. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 1996. McKenna, Sioux and Boughey, Chrissie. “Argumentative and Trustworthy Scholars: the Construction of Academic Staff at Research-Intensive Universities.” Teaching in Higher Education 19, no. 7 (2014): 825–834. Mollis, Kara L. “Servicing Reading: Community Work and the Revaluation of Literary Study.” In Community-Based Learning and the Work of Literature, edited by Susan Danielson and Ann Marie Fallon, 46–62. A.M.  Bolton: Anchor, 2007. Postma, Dirk “An educational response to student protests. Learning from Hannah Arendt,” Education as Change 20.1 (2016): 1–9. Slemon, Stephen “Teaching at the End of Empire,” College Literature 20.1 (1993): 152–161. Waghid, Yusef. “Knowledge Production and Higher Education Transformation in South Africa: Towards Reflexivity in University Teaching, Research and Community Service.” Higher Education 43 (2002): 457–488. Wortham, Simon M. The Derrida Dictionary. London: Continuum, 2010.

Teaching Academic Literacy in the Co-curriculum: Creating Culturally Safe Spaces Arlene Harvey and Gabrielle Russell

Introduction Australian universities have been increasingly focused on access and equity for Indigenous, first-in-family, low socio-economic status, non-English speaking background and special needs students.1 Due to ongoing disparities in Higher Education pathways and outcomes for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander students in Australia, many universities have been working to ensure Indigenous students have access to higher education and that our universities provide an environment in which they can be 1  Andrew Harvey, Catherine Burnheim and Matthew Brett, (Eds.) Student Equity in Australian Higher Education: Twenty-Five Years of A Fair Chance For All. Singapore: Springer, 2016.

A. Harvey (*) • G. Russell University of Sydney, Sydney, NSW, Australia e-mail: [email protected]; [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 C. Beyer (ed.), Decolonising the Literature Curriculum, Teaching the New English, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-91289-5_10

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successful and feel culturally safe.2 Australian universities have also become increasingly ‘internationalised’, with student cohorts drawn from diverse cultures, a trend seen in many countries around the world.3 An important aspect of supporting students, especially those from diverse cultural and linguistic backgrounds, is ensuring they acquire the academic skills required to successfully complete their studies.4 In Australia, central ‘learning centres’ or designated staff members within faculties are often tasked with providing co-curricular, and sometimes curricular, support to students to help them develop their academic literacy5 and their ability to produce the texts required for their discipline-based assignments.6 In the co-curriculum, teachers often have to identify exemplar texts that cater to the needs of students from a wide range of disciplinary contexts. While the appropriateness of such texts with respect to how they can help students develop academic literacy has been studied,7 less attention has been paid to the choice and use of texts in the co-curriculum from the perspective of cultural competence and cultural safety. In this chapter, therefore, we explore issues related to the choice of texts in the co-­ curricular classroom and describe collaborative efforts between staff from our university’s Learning Centre and the National Centre for Cultural 2  Universities Australia and Indigenous Higher Education Advisory Council. Best Practice Framework for Indigenous Cultural Competency in Australian Universities. Universities Australia: Canberra, ACT, 2011. https://www.universitiesaustralia.edu.au/uni-­ participation-­quality/Indigenous-Higher-Education/Indigenous-Cultural-Competency-­ Framework/Indigenous-Cultural-Competency-Framework#.VbS5eGAdJFI. Accessed 3 November 2020. 3  Svenja Bedenlier, Yasar Kondakci and Olaf Zawacki-Richter. “Two Decades of Research into the Internationalization of Higher Education: Major Themes in the Journal of Studies in International Education (1997–2016)”. Journal of Studies in International Education, 22.2, 2018, 108–135. 4  Christopher Klinger and Neil Murray. “Tensions in Higher Education: Widening Participation, Student Diversity and the Challenge of Academic Language/Literacy”. Widening Participation and Lifelong Learning, 14.1, 2012, 27–44. 5  Simon Evans, Ariana Henderson and Sally Ashton-Hay. “Defining the Dynamic Role of Australian Academic Skills Advisors”. Higher Education Research & Development, 22 May 2019. 6  Kate Chanock, Craig Horton, Mark Reedman and Bret Stephenson. “Collaborating to Embed Academic Literacies and Personal Support in First Year Discipline Subjects”. Journal of University Teaching & Learning Practice, 9.3, 2012, 1–13. 7  David McInnis and Bronwyn James. “Critical Discourse Analysis in Academic Writing Pedagogy: More Reflexive Considerations”. Quaderns de Filologia. Estudis Lingüístics XI, 2006, 160.

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Competence (NCCC) to make our pedagogy more culturally competent. While our reflections are based on our experience in the Australian higher education context, we believe they are applicable in other Western contexts where coloniality of the academy continues to dominate.

A Tale of Two Centres Collaboration between the authors of this chapter began with the introduction in 2015 of a revised suite of six graduate qualities as part of our university’s Learning and Teaching policy. One of these was ‘cultural competence’, the introduction of which was part of an Indigenous strategy that had led to the establishment of the National Centre for Cultural Competence (NCCC) in the previous year.8 The role of the NCCC is to provide guidance, advice and resources to support staff and students in developing their cultural competence understanding and practice.9 The implementation of the cultural competence graduate quality has involved embedding it in all degrees across all faculties and schools, the initial emphasis of which has been on Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander perspectives. This is a logical starting point for an Australian institution such as our own, which is exploring what it means to be a truly inclusive Australian University, but which also has a complex history including an embedded coloniality within its disciplinary knowledge systems and practices. One of the authors of this chapter, Gabrielle, joined the newly established NCCC in 2014. The other author, Arlene, had been working, since 2011, in the university’s Learning Centre which provided academic language and learning support to students in all faculties and schools.10 In 2015, the Deputy Vice Chancellor Indigenous Strategy and Services encouraged us to collaborate on a project to explore the interconnections between the ‘cultural competence’ and ‘communication’ graduate 8  While the NCCC’s approach to cultural competence includes a recognition of the diversity of human identities, knowledges and experiences, it sits within the Deputy Vice Chancellor Indigenous Strategy and Services portfolio. 9  Juanita Sherwood and Gabrielle Russell-Mundine. “How We Do Business: Setting the Agenda for Cultural Competence at the University of Sydney.” In Indigenous Pathways and Transitions into Higher Education: Policies and Practices, edited by Jack Frawley, Steve Larkin and James Smith, 133–150, Singapore: Springer, 2017. 133. 10  The Learning Centre was disestablished in May 2021 and replaced with a new model for providing learning support for students.

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­ ualities. The complementarities between these quickly became clear: in q helping teachers to embed Indigenous cultural competence and communication into their curricula, we were both working within a co-curricular ‘Thirdspace’.11 In a journal article that describes this collaborative work, we explored the interconnections between not only the cultural competence and communication graduate qualities, but the whole suite of qualities, attempting to disentangle the role that each plays in the development of cultural competence as related to Indigenous peoples, cultures and perspectives.12 The NCCC continues to emphasise the process of critical self-reflection as it encourages University staff to enhance our pedagogy and professional practice. A willingness to see ourselves as ‘less than expert’ is transformative, offering new perspectives on our pedagogy and relationships with people from other cultural backgrounds. In the following sections, we share two case studies on the choice and use of texts in co-curricular academic literacy workshops where we believe the text choice inadvertently led to a culturally unsafe learning environment for students by reinforcing cultural stereotypes and systemic oppression.

Case Study I: Reconciliation Early in our collaboration Arlene sought feedback from Gabrielle about a text that was being used in a Learning Centre essay writing course. Many of the class activities over the four workshops were based on an essay 11   Arlene Harvey, Gabrielle Russell and Eliot Hoving. “Modelling Interdisciplinary Collaboration to Build Cultural Competence”. Journal of Academic Language and Learning, 10.1, 2016, A101–17. As we noted in this publication: “Although we utilise different academic languages to talk about our theories there is significant commonality in the concepts around culture and language. The work in both our areas tends to be founded on a social constructivist epistemology that emphasises the relationship between knowledge, communication and social structures; views language as operating within contexts of culture; adopts critical stances toward knowledge; and is concerned with power, identity and ideology.” See also Alex Kostogriz. “Teaching Literacy in Multicultural Classrooms: Towards a Pedagogy of ‘Thirdspace’”. The Annual Conference of the Australian Association for Research in Education. Brisbane: December 2002. https://www.aare.edu.au/data/publications/2002/ kos02346.pdfhttp://www.aare.edu.au/publications-database.php/3529/teaching-literacy-­ in-multicultural-classrooms-towards-a-pedagogy-of-thirdspace. Accessed 2 November 2020. 12  Arlene Harvey and Gabrielle Russell. “Decolonising the Curriculum: Using Graduate Qualities to Embed Indigenous Knowledges at the Academic Cultural Interface”. Teaching in Higher Education, 23, 2018, 1–20.

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question and a constructed essay exemplar. The topic of the essay was ‘reconciliation’, and students were asked to adopt a position as to whether, and how, this process had brought benefits to Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Australians. To give some context, reconciliation has been on the Australian national agenda since the 1990s and was a recommendation from a Royal Commission into the disproportionate number of deaths of Aboriginal people in custody and which highlighted the impacts on Aboriginal people of ongoing marginalisation and colonisation, including higher rates of incarceration.13 The aim of the exemplar essay was to illustrate how to analyse an assignment question, develop an essay structure based on an analytical framework, produce an argument using appropriate academic evidence, and recognise and use the lexico-grammatical strategies needed to achieve these. The position taken in the exemplar essay was that significant progress had been made towards reconciliation, and many benefits had accrued to Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples in the social and cultural areas. The thesis also addressed legal and political areas, with the writer noting that more work was needed before the promise of reconciliation could be more fully realised. The writer, however, had chosen to ignore some of the most challenging areas of disparity—to Arlene, such a positive account of reconciliation did not capture the ongoing injustices: significant health disparities, over-representation in the justice system, lower educational access and outcomes, and racism. The thesis position, supporting arguments and evidence were written from a ‘settler’ perspective and failed to address alternate evidence. The students who attended this essay writing course typically came from a wide range of academic disciplines across the university and were also diverse with respect to their cultural backgrounds. As a pedagogic tool, the text was considered useful by the teachers in the centre to illustrate this academic genre to novice essay writers and provide an opportunity for class discussion and exploration of this important academic genre, including variations across disciplines. Yet, Arlene came to view this essay question and exemplar text through quite a different lens when she was 13   Gabrielle Russell-Mundine and Graeme Mundine. “Daring to Speak the Truth: Deconstructing and Re-constructing Reconciliation.” Te Mauri  – Pimatisiwin Journal of Indigenous Wellbeing, 1.1, August 2016, 83–96. 86. According to the organisation Reconciliation Australia (https://www.reconciliation.org.au), the aim of reconciliation is to “[promote] and [facilitate] reconciliation by building relationships, respect and trust between the wider Australian community and Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples”.

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asked to present a truncated version to a cohort of undergraduate Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander students entering university. In this class, the reaction of many of the students to the topic, text and arguments seemed to be one of indifference rather than engagement. One of the students, however, revealed himself during the limited discussion to be a passionate advocate for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples’ rights, and his reaction to the text was very negative. Non-Indigenous students had raised similar concerns in past workshops, prompting interesting critical discussion in the class. Without a deeper reflection about what she felt was specifically inappropriate, Arlene decided to use a different topic with the Indigenous cohort in the future. Later, Arlene took the opportunity to discuss the matter with Gabrielle, who affirmed her concerns. While Gabrielle saw the essay as mostly ‘inoffensive’, in that the arguments and evidence were not overtly racist, it did encapsulate ongoing concerns about reconciliation whereby the ‘dominant political discourse focuses on the perceived success of reconciliation and remains resistant to accepting the more difficult aspects of Australian history’.14 Gabrielle posed an important question: Whose voices were being heard in this text? While the sources may have seemed reputable and reliable from the perspective of a non-Indigenous teacher with limited knowledge of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples’ perspectives, these were  nonetheless non-Indigenous authors and organisations that many Indigenous scholars would identify as inappropriate sources of knowledge. The essay was yet another example of non-Indigenous ‘experts’ drowning out the voices and experiences of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples. Decolonising includes critical analysis of ‘how the curriculum acknowledges and creates space for the voices and knowledges of Indigenous peoples’,15 which requires teachers to attune themselves to questioning authorship and their own limits of understanding and biases, including what they consider to be academic texts and who has cultural authority.

 Russell-Mundine and Mundine, 84.  Lesley Le Grange. “Decolonising the University Curriculum”. South African Journal of Higher Education, 30.2, 2016. 9. 14 15

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Case Study II: Terrorism Another workshop provided an opportunity to reflect on how text selection can impede a decolonisation agenda; in this case, by reinforcing stereotypes and unconscious bias and contributing to the racist burden and lack of safety experienced by a particular group of people. The aim of this workshop was to introduce new postgraduate coursework students to the types of literature they would need to use as evidence in various coursework assignments, with an emphasis on essays and reports. The ‘texts’ in this case were an essay question and associated recommended reading list. These were used in two consecutive activities in which students were asked to classify each source, decide on how relevant each might be to answering the essay question and identify and analyse the key concepts in the titles. The essay question was from media and international politics and asked students to investigate the role of publicity in terrorist acts. While most of the readings were about media and terrorism, in general, several focused on more specific types and acts of terrorism (9/11, beheadings and nuclear terrorism). Arlene had taught this workshop several times previously to diverse groups of students, who reported finding the session helpful in enhancing their understanding of the academic literature. On one occasion, the class included a male student whose name and appearance suggested that he was from a Middle Eastern country, quite possibly from a Muslim background. In the first part of the workshop, the student had been relaxed, engaged and actively participating in the class discussion. However, from the first ‘media and terrorism’ activity onwards, he became increasingly quiet and looked irritated. Arlene felt certain it was the terrorism topic that had caused his reaction but had been at a loss as to how to deal with this during the class so continued to focus on the academic literacy aspects of the activities, albeit somewhat self-consciously  as she approached the second activity. Because the learning objectives of the workshop were on sources of evidence and how to identify and analyse key concepts, rather than the topic itself or even critical thinking, she felt a critical discussion about the topic of terrorism would have been gratuitous and could possibly have increased the student’s discomfort if she didn’t handle it well. At the end of the workshop, Arlene felt she had not dealt with the situation appropriately and decided to further explore this critical incident. She turned to a trusted Muslim academic colleague from a different faculty whose own teaching and research specialisation was decolonisation of

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the curriculum. As she walked to his office for their meeting, she noted the front page of the Daily Telegraph on the newsstand, with its images of Muslim men and its headline warning of possible terror threats in Australia. Over coffee, Arlene’s colleague confirmed her instinct that it was problematic to view Muslim people as an opportunity for students to engage in ‘critical discussions’ about challenging topics, especially when critical thinking is not the focus of the class. A starting point such as this, he argued, is inherently harmful, although starting a critical conversation and leaving issues unexamined can be equally damaging. Why are representations of Muslim people always so negative, he asked. Where are the positive representations? They discussed whether most teachers are equipped to deal with such situations when they arise; the answer was that they are not. If the media and terrorism question had been raised in a relevant discipline, such as ‘conflict and peace studies’, would it have been as potentially harmful? In the co-curricular context, with workshops taught by any number of teachers, such a de-contextualised text seemed to be inviting harm. Soon after, Arlene removed this topic from the workshop and replaced it with one chosen in collaboration with a faculty teacher whose specialisation was inclusive education. As well as ensuring that future iterations of the workshop did not reinforce biased and negative representations, Arlene modelled a decolonising approach which included self-reflective practice, consultation with appropriate colleagues, and the addition of a more inclusive text less likely to cause harm.

The Power of Texts Much of the academic language and learning support for students in Australia has been influenced by two main approaches. The first is Genre-­ based Pedagogy, which is based on Systemic-Functional Linguistics and its emphasis on language as a system for making meaningful choices in specific socio-cultural contexts.16 The second approach is Academic Literacies, which views ‘[t]he literacy practices of academic disciplines … as varied 16  For the seminal texts, see: James R.  Martin, English Text: System and Structure. Amsterdam: John Benjamins, 1992. M.A.K. Halliday and Ruqaiya Hasan, Language, Context and Text: Aspects of Language in a Social-Semiotic Perspective. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989. The foundations for Systemic-Functional Linguistics are  outlined in M.A.K. Halliday and Christian M.I.M. Matthiessen, Halliday’s Introduction to Functional Grammar. Routledge: Abingdon, UK, 2014.

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social practices associated with different communities’.17 Less text-focused than the genre approach,18 Academic Literacies pays  more attention to ‘epistemological issues and social processes including power relations among people and institutions, and social identities’.19 In language teaching, texts offer teachers and students an opportunity to  ‘work together sharing, disputing and creating meanings’.20 ‘Powerful texts’ alert  students to the valued text-types that serve to enact power and ideology in our institutions.21 Illuminating the power and ideology embedded in texts allows hidden curricula to be revealed. Unchallenged, these hidden curricula can perpetuate and repeat dominant and ongoing colonial discourses. Yet, what constitutes a powerful text from one perspective can be disempowering in other ways. As teachers, we need to be aware of the impact our chosen texts can have on students. McInnis and James have criticised what they view as an over-reliance on texts in our co-curricular practice and describe the ‘curatorial’ role of teachers: If text exemplars or models are used as the centre piece of pedagogy, even if augmented by commentary and other kinds of writing exercises, then those who choose texts for inclusion in such pedagogy are playing a curatorial role, a curatorial role in which selecting, analysing and evaluating academic texts plays a significant role in authenticating and valuing certain kinds of writing and devaluing others.22

17  Mary Lea and Brian Street. “The ‘Academic Literacies’ Model: Theory and Applications”. Theory into Practice, 45.4, 2006, 368. 18  Caroline Coffin and Jim Donohue. “Academic Literacies and Systemic Functional Linguistics: How Do They Relate”. Journal of English for Academic Purposes, 11, 2012, 64–75. 19  Lea and Street, 228. 20  Peter Mickan. “Text-Based Research and Teaching from a Social Semiotic Perspective: Transformative Research and Pedagogy”, In Text-Based Research and Teaching, edited by Peter Mickan and Elise Lopez. London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2017. 25. 21  Mickan, 30. See also James R. Martin, “Close Reading: Functional Linguistics as a Tool for Critical Discourse Analysis”. In Researching Language in Schools and Communities: Functional Linguistic Perspectives, edited by Len Unsworth. London: Cassell, 2000. 275–302. As noted by Mickan, “In our language use we are finely attuned to the appropriateness of texts to topic or to what is going on at a particular time, to the participants, and to the choice of discourse—spoken or written, formal or informal”, 19. See also Ruqaiya Hasan, “Towards a Paradigmatic Description of Context: Systems, Metafunctions, and Semantics”. Functional Linguistics, 1, 2014. 1–54. 22  McInnis and James, 160.

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Texts, and teachers’ commentaries on them, therefore, reveal the teacher’s own perspective on the world, which is often  left ‘uncritiqued’.23 McInnis and James’s challenge to academic literacy teaching, however, can be extended to include a critical examination of our text choices from the perspective of cultural competence, cultural safety and decolonisation. The two cases described earlier raise critical questions about the choice of texts in co-curricular pedagogy. One issue is that the ‘content’ of these texts is not the primary focus of our teaching, as it is in the curriculum. In the co-curriculum, content tends to be subjugated to our desire to illuminate how assignment genres are ‘put together’—their functional stages and linguistic features (as in the ‘reconciliation’ case) or the processes, such as analysis and critique, that inform the writing of the text (as in the ‘terrorism’ case). Nonetheless, our co-curricular texts are not content-free zones, and the danger is that in placing most of our emphasis on the ability of these texts to illustrate thinking and writing strategies, we may fail to recognise the impact their content can have on our students, and this can reinforce harmful representation and dominant tropes as well as fail to assist students to engage in their own decolonising practice. At the same time, our texts need to be ‘interesting’ enough to engage students from diverse disciplines; that is, they are usually chosen because they are ‘topical’ or ‘newsworthy’24 or, at the very least, not boring and impenetrable. Yet, today’s interesting topic may be tomorrow’s controversy—for example, issues related to shifting political alliances, globalisation or vaccines highlight that academic literacy support resources and pedagogies  may not change as rapidly as socio-cultural and political contexts. Our texts, therefore, need to be future-proofed, where possible, with frequent updating within the bounds of feasibility. The further danger in co-curricular pedagogy is that in focusing too much of our attention on the disciplinary diversity of our students, we may fail to appreciate their cultural diversity, and indeed, our own. That is, we all see texts through our own personal lenses, positioning and world views, which are  quite often invisible to us.25 This is why open conversation and seeking out experts from other areas is essential, as noted in our case studies; such case studies offer an opportunity to reflect on less-than-ideal experiences and  McInnis and James, 163.  Mickan, 26. 25  Robin Di Angelo. What does it Mean to be White? Developing White Racial Literacy. New York: Peter Lang, 2012. 23 24

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to consider these from an academic literacy perspective that is more explicitly informed by cultural competence, cultural safety and decolonisation.

Cultural Competence Considerations At an individual level, cultural competence encapsulates attitudes and behaviours that help staff and students to work cross-culturally in respectful, ethical and self-reflective ways in their institution and broader society to ensure they can contribute to creating safe environments that embrace cultural diversity.26 The reconciliation case study highlighted the difficulty of using a text which presents one point of view, crucially, a non-Indigenous point of view of a highly political issue. For non-Indigenous students in classes where the text was used, it is not likely that they would have a  negative response to the text itself unless they had already developed a critical understanding of the complexities of the reconciliation dialogue. A lack of response from non-Indigenous students, coupled with no critical conversation in the class, would reinforce the implicit bias contained in this text. For Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander students, however, it is equally likely that the text, and discussion, would make the classroom an unsafe space. This was also the case in the terrorism case study, where the student’s observable behaviour changes suggested that the text had caused disconnection and discomfort. It is the social and political context within which we are operating that makes both cases potentially offensive, reinforcing narratives about particular groups. Individual students should not have to bear the burden of pointing out issues to the teacher; nor is it for the teacher to determine whether a text is safe to use in a particular classroom, based on observations about people’s cultural identity, which may be inherently biased. It is Arlene’s reflection of feeling uncomfortable about using this text with Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander students which highlights the fact that if a text needs to be changed depending on who is in the room, it is unsafe to use. These cases also raise issues related to whose voices are being heard, and the implicit biases contained in the texts. Authors need to be

26  Cultural competence extends to all cultural identities and explicitly aims to remove harm caused by racist, sexist, classist, ableist (physical or mental), homophobic and ageist views.

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self-reflective about their positioning and authority to speak.27 As the purpose of the case study workshops was on academic literacy practices, there was no opportunity to discuss the topic itself, thus leaving important issues untouched and unresolved, even though it was observable that they caused discomfort. When Arlene asked about the pedagogic history of the reconciliation text, one of the justifications given for its inclusion was that the workshop had been developed with input from Aboriginal students. This raises several questions: Who are appropriate people to consult under such circumstances? In what way was the consultation undertaken? How were power differentials dealt with? In setting up the consultation process, how did the academic address and mitigate power issues emanating from their role and social positioning? Arlene’s approach to her colleague to discuss issues related to the ‘terrorism’ text could also have been problematic due to the cultural burden imposed on our colleagues by being called upon to be the ‘expert’ or the voice on all things Indigenous or Muslim related. In this case, the colleague’s academic expertise positioned him as an appropriate authority, which mitigated against the burden of relying on him for advice. Ideally, academics should seek to become  more attuned to the complexities involved in ensuring texts are ‘safe’ and by doing our own work and working from a position of informed understanding and acknowledgement of our own limitations. The case studies illustrate the consequences of a lack of cultural competence evident in culturally unsafe  text choices.28 Culturally safe texts and places do not ‘diminish, demean or disempower the cultural identity and well-being of an individual’.29 Cultural safety moves beyond cultural competence by ensuring measures are taken to address racism in all its

27   Gabrielle Russell-Mundine. “Reflexivity in Indigenous Research: Reframing and Decolonising Research?” Journal of Hospitality and Tourism Management, 19.7, 2012, 2–3. 28  Robyn Williams, 1999, 213, cited in Maryann Bin-Sallik. “Cultural Safety: Let’s Name it!” The Australian Journal of Indigenous Education, 32, 2003, 21–28. 21. Cultural safety is defined as: “an environment that is spiritually, socially and emotionally safe, as well as physically safe for people; where there is no assault challenge or denial of their identity, of who they are and what they need. It is about shared respect, shared meaning, shared knowledge and experience of learning together”. 29  Maryann Bin-Sallik. Guidelines for Cultural Safety, the Treaty of Waitangi, and Maori Health in Nursing and Midwifery Education and Practice. Wellington: Nursing Council of New Zealand, 2002. 9. Boughey, Chrissie and McKenna, Sioux. “Academic Literacy and the Decontextualised Learner.” Critical Studies in Teaching and Learning, 4.2, 2016, 1–9.

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forms.30 However, cultural safety is multi-layered and challenging for educators to achieve; as Nakata states, academics’ decisions in course design are not just educational or intellectual, they are also political.31 Surfacing these dimensions is a necessary aspect of cultural competence although this process comes with potential pitfalls. For instance, a teacher may hold a political view that seems ‘socially just’ to them but if one or more students in the classroom holds a culturally informed and different view, how is this to be addressed safely in the classroom? Teachers need to be able to model how to be culturally competent and how to respond appropriately if someone in a classroom has been inadvertently ‘triggered’. When and how to have conversations with colleagues can be just as challenging, especially if colleagues do not agree that particular texts are culturally unsafe for students or are sceptical about the potential for harm. While we have identified, in the previous discussion, the need for teachers to develop their own  cultural competence, we also  appreciate that there has been too much focus on the role of individuals32 and a failure to adequately address the societal dimension of institutional racism. Cultural safety involves recognising the ‘negative attitudes and stereotyping of individuals because of the ethnic group to which they belong’,33 and this should occur in the wider teaching and learning environment of our universities. Identifying negative attitudes and stereotyping requires us to pay critical attention to our understanding of harm, which should be interpreted more widely: does a particular practice harm the ‘target’ only or contribute to harm more broadly?34 Safe texts may be those that not only do no harm but aim to do good and assert a different narrative. However, we need to be aware that seemingly ‘neutral’ texts, that is, those carefully chosen to avoid harming any group of people, may still not be culturally safe. The Reconciliation text is an example of such an attempt at 30  Judith Rochecouste, Rhonda Oliver and Debra Bennell. “Is there Cultural Safety in Australian Universities?” International Journal of Higher Education, 3.2, 2014, 153–166. 31  Martin Nakata. “Difficult Dialogues in the South: Questions about Practice in Special issue. South-South Dialogues: Global Approaches to Decolonial Pedagogies.” The Australian Journal of Indigenous Education, 47.1, 2017, 1–7. 4. 32  Sandra Richardson, Tracey Williams, Annette Finlay and Marrilyn Farrell. “Senior Nurses’ Perceptions of Cultural Safety in an Acute Clinical Practice Area.” Nursing Praxis in New Zealand, 25.3, 2009, 27–36. 33  Nick Polaschek, 1998, 453, cited in Rochecouste, 153. 34  Juanita Sherwood. “Who is Not Coping with Colonization? Laying out the Map for Decolonization.” Australasian Psychiatry, 17.1 (Supplement), 2009, S24–S27.

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­ eutrality—trying to do good by choosing a text deemed to be of general n interest and reporting a seemingly positive narrative but actually doing harm. To do good would involve promoting positive representations of groups that are often presented negatively and stereotypically, thereby disrupting dominant narratives. But to do good means more than this: culturally appropriate texts are written by, and cite, members of particular groups whose voices are not ordinarily heard. The political nature of the act of choosing texts and sources of knowledge must be recognised, as must the need to be transparent about who is identifying what is ‘good’ and why. Discourse is not neutral, it is ‘powerful in determining what can and cannot be considered “truth” and influencing group and individual relationships accordingly’.35 In the Australian context, a ‘deficit discourse’ about particular groups, particularly Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people, dominates and focuses on a ‘narrative of negativity, deficiency and failure’.36 Deficit discourse perpetuates unchallenged and often deeply held attitudes and stereotypes towards groups who do not fit into the schema of the dominant Western knowledge system. Such deficit characterisations contribute to an ongoing negative impact on people’s wellbeing and sense of  self  and  identity. As explored in our two  case studies, embedded knowledge systems can be subtle and invisible to the teachers choosing texts, but they are never subtle and invisible to the people who are subject to deficit discourses that reduce their rich and complex identities to neat and digestible stereotypes for Western consumption. The challenge for teachers is how to move from harm, to positive representations and decolonisation.

Conclusion: Decolonising the Co-curriculum In our context, cultural competence is seen as taking a decolonising turn when it is used to interrogate the dominance of Western ways of thinking, teaching, and  writing in our university and to understand how this 35  William Fogarty, Melissa Lovell, Juleigh Langenberg and Mary-Jane Heron. Deficit Discourse and Strengths-based Approaches: Changing the Narrative of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Health and Wellbeing. Carlton South: The Lowitja Institute, 2018. 2. Discourse can be defined as ‘systems of thoughts composed of ideas, attitudes, courses of actions, beliefs and practices that shape reality by systemically constructing the subjects and the worlds of which they speak’. Sean Kerins, 2012, 26, cited in Fogarty et al., 2. 36  Cressida Fforde et al. 2013, cited in Fogarty et al., 2.

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dominance has worked to ‘universalise European thought and reason as the ideal and global human system of thought’.37 In this chapter, we have interpreted cultural competence as including those practices that align with Sefa Dei’s approach: decolonization as a knowledge consciousness about identity, sense of place, location, the ways we produce and legitimize knowledge and social existence, as well the climates, environments and social organizational aspects of education as broadly defined is significant to my project of ‘decolonizing the academy’.38

Developing a knowledge consciousness about our own positioning and bias and how we are producing and legitimising specific forms of knowledge has utmost relevance in our context. From the macro level of education policy to the micro level of individual text choices, decolonising is an ongoing agenda that seeks to disrupt the dominance of Western European thought. In this chapter, we have highlighted our experience in teaching in the co-curriculum to advocate the importance of critically self-reflecting on our own practice to ensure that what we communicate to students through our text choices and pedagogy ensures a culturally safe environment. In doing so, we model cultural competence for other staff and for our students.

Works Cited Bedenlier, Svenja, Kondakci, Yasar and Zawacki-Richter, Olaf. “Two Decades of Research into the Internationalization of Higher Education: Major Themes in the Journal of Studies in International Education (1997–2016).” Journal of Studies in International Education, Vol. 22, No. 2, 2018. 108–135. Bin-Sallik, Maryann. “Cultural Safety: Let’s name it!” The Australian Journal of Indigenous Education, 2003, Vol. 32, 21–28. Bin-Sallik, Maryann. Guidelines for Cultural Safety, the Treaty of Waitangi, and Maori Health in Nursing and Midwifery Education and Practice. Wellington: Nursing Council of New Zealand, 2002.

 Nakata, 5.  George J. Sefa Dei. “Decolonizing the University: The Challenges and Possibilities of Inclusive Education.” The Journal of the Society for Socialist Studies, 11.1, 2016, 23–6. 28. 37 38

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Boughey, Chrissie and McKenna, Sioux. “Academic Literacy and the Decontextualised Learner.” Critical Studies in Teaching and Learning, 2016, Vol. 4, No. 2, 1–9. Chanock, Kate, Horton, Craig, Reedman, Mark and Stephenson, Bret. “Collaborating to Embed Academic Literacies and Personal Support in First Year Discipline Subjects.” Journal of University Teaching & Learning Practice, 2012, Vol. 9, No. 3, 1–13. Di Angelo, Robin. What does it Mean to be White? Developing White Racial Literacy. New York: Peter Lang, 2012. Evans, Simon, Henderson, Ariana, and Ashton-Hay, Sally. “Defining the Dynamic Role of Australian Academic Skills Advisors.” Higher Education Research & Development, 2019, 22 May. Fogarty, William, Lovell, Melissa, Langenberg, Juleigh and Heron, Mary-Jane. Deficit Discourse and Strengths-based Approaches: Changing the Narrative of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Health and Wellbeing. Carlton South: The Lowitja Institute, 2018. Fforde, Cressida, Bamblett, Lawrence, Lovett, Ray, Gorringe, Scott, & Fogarty, Bill. (2013). “Discourse, Deficit and Identity: Aboriginality, the Race Paradigm and the Language of Representation in Contemporary Australia.” Media International Australia, Vol. 149, No. 1, 162–173. Halliday, M.A.K. and Matthiessen, Christian M.I.M. (4th edition) Halliday’s Introduction to Functional Grammar. Abingdon, UK: Routledge, 2014. Halliday, MA.K. and Hasan, Ruqaiya. Language, Context and Text: Aspects of Language in a Social-Semiotic Perspective (2nd edition). Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989. Harvey, Arlene and Russell, Gabrielle. “Decolonising the Curriculum: Using Graduate Qualities to Embed Indigenous Knowledges at the Academic Cultural Interface.” Teaching in Higher Education, 2018, Vol. 23, 1–20. Harvey, Arlene, Russell, Gabrielle and Hoving, Eliot. “Modelling Interdisciplinary Collaboration to Build Cultural Competence.” Journal of Academic Language and Learning, 2016, Vol. 10, No. 1, A101–17. Hasan, Ruqaiya. “Towards a Paradigmatic Description of Context: Systems, Metafunctions, and Semantics.” Functional Linguistics, 2014, Vol. 1, No. 9, 1–54. Klinger, Christopher and Murray Neil. “Tensions in Higher Education: Widening Participation, Student Diversity and the Challenge of Academic Language/ Literacy.” Widening Participation and Lifelong Learning, 2012, Vol. 14, No. 1, 27–44. Kostogriz, Alex. “Teaching Literacy in Multicultural Classrooms: Towards a Pedagogy of ‘Thirdspace’.” Paper presented at the Annual Conference of the Australian Association for Research in Education, Brisbane. 2002. http://

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www.aare.edu.au/publications-­d atabase.php/3529/teaching-­l iteracy-­i n-­ multicultural-­classrooms-­towards-­a-­pedagogy-­of-­thirdspace Lea, Mary and Street, Brian. “The ‘Academic Literacies’ Model: Theory and Applications.” Theory into Practice, 2006, Vol. 45, No. 4, 368–377. Martin, James R. “Close Reading: Functional Linguistics as a Tool for Critical Discourse Analysis.” In Researching Language in Schools and Communities: Functional Linguistic Perspectives, edited by L.  Len Unsworth, 275–302. London: Cassell, 2000. Martin, James R. English Text: System and Structure. Amsterdam: John Benjamins, 1992. McInnis, David and James, Bronwyn. “Critical Discourse Analysis in Academic Writing Pedagogy: More Reflexive Considerations.” Quaderns de Filologia. Estudis Lingüístics, 2006, Vol. XI, 159–174. Mickan, Peter. “Text-Based Research and Teaching from a Social Semiotic Perspective: Transformative Research and Pedagogy.” In Text-Based Research and Teaching, edited by Peter Mickan and Elise Lopez, 15–35. London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2017. Nakata, Martin. “Difficult Dialogues in the South: Questions about Practice in Special issue. South-South Dialogues: Global Approaches to Decolonial Pedagogies.” The Australian Journal of Indigenous Education, 2017, Vol. 47, No. 1, 1–7. Richardson, Sandra, Williams, Tracey, Finlay, Annette and Farrell Marrilyn. “Senior Nurses’ Perceptions of Cultural Safety in an Acute Clinical Practice Area.” Nursing Praxis in New Zealand, 2009, Vol. 25, No. 3, 27–36. Rochecouste, Judith, Oliver, Rhonda and Bennell, Debra. “Is there Cultural Safety in Australian Universities?” International Journal of Higher Education, 2014, Vol. 3, No. 2, 153–166. Russell-Mundine, Gabrielle and Mundine, Graeme. “Daring to Speak the Truth: Deconstructing and Re-constructing Reconciliation.” Te Mauri – Pimatisiwin Journal of Indigenous Wellbeing, 2016, Vol. 1, No. 1, August 2016, 83–96. Russell-Mundine, Gabrielle. “Reflexivity in Indigenous Research: Reframing and Decolonising Research?” Journal of Hospitality and Tourism Management, 2012, Vol. 19, No. 7, 1–6. Sefa Dei, George J. “Decolonizing the University: The Challenges and Possibilities of Inclusive Education.” The Journal of the Society for Socialist Studies, 2016, Vol. 11, No. 1, 23–61. Sherwood, Juanita and Russell-Mundine, Gabrielle. “How We Do Business: Setting the Agenda for Cultural Competence at the University of Sydney.” In Indigenous Pathways and Transitions into Higher Education: Policies and Practices, edited by Jack Frawley, Steve Larkin and James Smith, 133–150, Singapore: Springer, 2017.

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Sherwood, Juanita. “Who is Not Coping with Colonization? Laying out the Map for Decolonization.” Australasian Psychiatry, 2009, Vol. 17, No. 1 (Supplement), S24–S27. Universities Australia and Indigenous Higher Education Advisory Council. Best Practice Framework for Indigenous Cultural Competency in Australian Universities. Canberra, ACT, Universities Australia, 2011. https://www. universitiesaustralia.edu.au/uni-­participation-­quality/Indigenous-­Higher-­ Education/Indigenous-­C ultural-­C ompetency-­F ramework/Indigenous-­ Cultural-­Competency-­Framework#.VbS5eGAdJFI

Decolonising the Literary Doctorate Gina Wisker

Introduction What is a doctorate and what is a doctorate in literature or literary critical practice? Who produces it and who is it for? How can we question and consider any change to the highest, deepest, largest probably most theorised and often most constrained form in which we and our doctoral students work to contest knowledge and produce new knowledge? That description evokes simultaneously a long, hard research and writing journey which tests you in your thinking and articulation, leading often to as much or more anxiety than creative wonder because it is also a test of self and mystifying in its conceptualisation and production. It sounds dull, overlong, costly as well as a pinnacle of achievement widely recognised by “the establishment,” and sometimes one’s family and community. For this intriguing mix of reasons, it must be decolonised, transformed to be a vehicle for questioning and upsetting exclusivities, opening up visions and expression, testing the established thinking, focus, format, the limitations on what is studied, what is created, who by and with, about what and in

G. Wisker (*) University of Bath, Bath, UK e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 C. Beyer (ed.), Decolonising the Literature Curriculum, Teaching the New English, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-91289-5_11

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what shape and form, shattering silences, redefining, contesting and constructing new knowledge. Arguing for decolonising the doctorate, Sioux McKenna emphasises its role “for the public good” individual and knowledge development. She warns of the damage of ignoring historically silenced knowledges, seeing the doctorate as a dynamic, creative place for challenging established knowledge, since “[t]he very nature of knowledge building is cumulative and transnational. But if we do not critically consider our knowledge inheritances, we may well legitimate the powerful of the past without making use of those knowledges that have been side-lined.”1 McKenna moves beyond decolonising knowledge, content, to consider the broader curriculum, the need for supervisors to develop different practices, and for doctoral students to build communities, engaging in project groups and embracing interdisciplinary work. When decolonising the doctorate, the curriculum, knowledge content, focus, research and writing practices, supervision and examination are all reconsidered. Catherine Manathunga (20112;20143; 20184), considering decolonising supervision and doctoral forms, speaks of supervisors supporting students’ use of varied textual, visual and creative forms, including personal and community stories, parables, poetry, dance, performance and artwork, and encouraging time-­ maps to locate and share intellectual cultural histories and geographies. We see this in the examples excerpted below. Researching across boundaries of knowledge and forms of expression is important for the contestation of outdated and the construction of new thinking, creating and articulating new knowledge. Much of the work on decolonising the doctorate uses higher education theory, research and practice, is located in and focuses on the social sciences, considering diversity, communities, social justice. Scientific research and thinking, doctorates in the sciences, now receive (more) attention and respect with their 1  Sioux McKenna, “Unmasking the Doctorate,” University World News, Africa Edition, 21 April 2017, https://www.universityworldnews.com/post.php?story=2017042113152878 (accessed 18 June 2021) 2  Catherine Manathunga, “Moments of Transculturation and Assimilation: Post-colonial Explorations of Supervision and Culture,” Innovations in Education & Teaching International 48, no. 4 (2011): 367–376. 3  Catherine Manathunga, Intercultural Postgraduate Supervision: Reimagining Time, Place and Knowledge (London: Routledge, 2014). 4  Catherine Manathunga, “Decolonising the Curriculum: Southern Interrogations of Time, Place and Knowledge,” SOTL in the South 2, no. 1 (2018): 95–111.

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power to identify, name and tackle viruses and climate change. Their creativity and productivity depend in a large part on the inclusion of international researcher perspectives and practices and, for dealing with the Anthropocene, indigenous worldviews and practices. In decolonising the literary doctorate, we can learn from international and indigenous theories and practices and from the research thinking and practices of other disciplines. This chapter combines across disciplinary writing boundaries of higher education and literary critical practice and is personally influenced in its inception by two quotations. A student co-researcher, focusing on the curriculum, exposed the one-way, exclusive, problematic process of conforming when she said of the adaption necessary to blend in in higher education: “We have to change, the curriculum remains the same.”5 Postcolonial poet Merle Collins furthers the argument about curriculum, seeing historical stories of power as colonial lies when in “Crick Crack Monkey” she writes of instead prioritising alternative, African-originated, female perspectives and tales: Tales of hunting will always Glorify the hunter… Until the lioness Is her own Hiss-torian6

Each contests focus and forms in the curriculum. Collins, building on Achebe’s work, suggests changes of perspective, focus, voice. This speaks directly into the context to decolonise the literary doctorate, the histories and texts on which it builds, the changing landscapes and mindsets it validates, the voices and forms it enables and empowers.  SARiHE, The South African Rurality in Higher Education project (ESRC and NRF funded), ran from 2017 to 2020 with 72 student co-researchers and others from the universities of Rhodes, Fort Hare, Johannesburg, Bristol and Brighton. https://sarihe.org.za 6  Merle Collins, “Crick Crack Monkey,” in Because the Dawn Breaks: Poems Dedicated to the Grenadian People (London: Women’s Press, 1985). The proverb says the money breaks his back when he lies. 5

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The literary doctorate works with the laboratory of the mind, history, the world and with words. It has the power to identify, characterise, express and tackle problems of human thinking, creativity and interaction with other humans and the living world. Mindful of relationships between knowledge and power, it can be a vehicle for diverse voices, histories, and for creativity and change in thinking, form and subsequent action. We are reminded of Chinua Achebe on the achievement of novelists: “It is the storyteller who makes us what we are, who creates history. The storyteller creates the memory that the survivors must have – otherwise their surviving would have no meaning.”7 Salman Rushdie sees the novel as active, “the only [form] that takes the ‘privileged arena’ of conflicting discourse right inside our heads. The interior space of our imagination is a theatre that can never be closed down; the images created there make up a movie that can never be destroyed.”8 Focusing on gender and power, Angela Carter demands the questioning and destruction of tired, old, wrong-­ headed thinking: “I am all for putting new wine in old bottles, especially if the pressure of the new wine makes the old bottles explode.”9 The highest academic level, doctoral work and writing, is influential, crucial. It also contests, and tells stories, and in some decolonised doctorates, as with those of creative writing, storytelling is part of the thesis. The doctorate should not be exclusive, concentrating on only the established familiar values of white, northern, western, heterosexual male establishment and perspectives or there will be little exploration and contestation, little creativity. It should be a laboratory for powerful creative thinking and from that an instigator for change. Decolonising the literary doctorate involves several different perspectives and active steps. It started or starts for many of us with a focus on postcolonial reading practices and on postcolonial literatures, contexts, the politics expressed within them and the politics of their production and dissemination. Wider reading is always a good way to start for a literary scholar, and work with postcolonial literature has increasingly recuperated and encouraged the writing, publication, sharing, reading, exploring, critiquing and appreciation of texts from different postcolonial contexts, 7  Chinua Achebe, Interview with Bill Moyers, in Bill D. Moyers, Betty S. Flowers, Mary Ann Glendon, A World of Ideas: Conversations with Thoughtful Men and Women about American Life Today and the Ideas Shaping Our Future (New York Doubleday, 1989). 8  Salman Rushdie, Is Nothing Sacred? (New York: Granta Books, 1990), 13. 9  Angela Carter, “Notes from the Front Line,” in On Gender and Writing, ed. Michelene Wandor (London and Boston: Pandora Press, 1983), 69.

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while simultaneously enabling informed re-readings of more canonical texts from eras and locations of imperial and colonial power. Jean Rhys’ The Wide Sargasso Sea (1966)10 brought colonialism into view, through the imported, silenced, imprisoned, mad figure of Bertha/Antoinette, exposing colonialism’s disempowering of subaltern peoples, its hidden financing of the industrial revolution, grand country houses, entitled lifestyles. Culturally inflected textual critical practice from the 1970s–1990s onwards, engaged in changing mindsets about what literature is, its origins and forms. The literary curriculum in universities also changed and with it the range of authors and issues to research and write on. Now, Margaret Atwood’s respectful research among indigenous First Nations people in Northern Canada and Aboriginal Australians in Northern Australia feeds directly into her historical and speculative fiction as informed literary and cultural activism, working towards sustainability and ecological balance. Fuelled by the Black Lives Matter movement, contemporary decolonised writing by diverse authors is more widely available in forms including blogs, podcasts, performances online, interweaving oral and written storytelling with a range of literary forms, including novels, drama, poetry. Researching and writing about work by diverse authors with a decolonising focus enables doctoral students in literary studies to decolonise thinking, reading, approaches and critical practices and sometimes the shape of the thesis.

Higher Education Context of Decolonising the Doctorate and Language Issues We focus here on some of the issues of knowledge, power, access and expression entailed in decolonising the literary doctorate, building on arguments for decolonising the curriculum more generally. I share interview responses with doctoral students in South Africa and Australia, and short case studies, examples of decolonised literary studies work from New Zealand, South Africa and Australia that I have directly experienced through examination, exploring questions, problems, contexts, collaborations, forms of knowledge creation and of expression.

 Jean Rhys, The Wide Sargasso Sea (London: Andre Deutsche, 1966).

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The “#FeesMustFall” movement in South Africa (2017–)11 was followed by worldwide waves of response, including insistence on decolonising the curriculum at the University of Cambridge, UK, which began with a focus on the undergraduate curriculum including literature, questioning how knowledge grows out of and plays into power. In South Africa, the DHET policy framework (July 2018)12 argues university teachers as curriculum designers and implementers must work from an understanding of the interplay between knowledge and power, questioning what knowledge, whose knowledge, who and what is served through the selection and prioritisation of knowledge in the university curriculum, and how such knowledge is taught. This is aimed largely at undergraduate curricula but serves as a wake-up call to the doctorate, one of, if not the most entrenched, as well as the highest accredited, expressions of knowledge creation in the university. The doctorate is expensive on time, effort and money, valued as a mark of achievement and, possibly, a recognised, empowered research and practice-based lever for change. Decolonisation of the curriculum needs to take place at every stage, from early schooling through to and beyond the doctorate, into university senior management structures and governmental decision-making, globally. Doctoral students, now diverse in origins and intentions, can themselves be agents for change in what they choose to research, how it is researched, articulated, what outcomes and social, personal, political change it can inform. Decolonising the doctorate is a necessary step to changing hierarchical structures of what counts as knowledge and its expression, influencing positive changes for social justice and the public good from actioning such knowledge.13 Knowledge creation is a change agent, an agent for social justice. South Africa visibly recognises the importance and power of doctoral research knowledge to transform behaviours, processes, practices and the implementation of values at scientific, professional and personal levels. It ties knowledge creation directly to the nation’s economic success while 11  The “#FeesMustFall” movement (also called “fallist”) began in 2017  in South Africa and initially campaigners sought removal of higher education fees, also campaigned for better pay for university manual workers and decried outdated colonialism histories and practices, toppling statues and protesting. 12  South African Department for Higher Education and Training (DHET). 2018. 13  Gina Wisker, Gillian Robinson, and Brenda Leibowitz, “The Purpose and Impact of Postgraduate Knowledge,” Studies in Graduate and Postdoctoral Education 10, no. 3 (October 2019): 160–172.

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supporting its sharing and implementation for the public rather than the private good. It is critical that access to, creation and effects of the doctorate are informed by and part of the processes of decolonisation. The theorising behind this often invisible power of knowledge, the decluttering and refocusing involves re-balancing, re-prioritising and fundamentally recognising as equal, valued, rich and to be supported and enabled the many different ways in which research knowledge can be constructed, what counts as its subjects, objects and forms of expression. None of this enriched development takes place (if it does) in a financial or political vacuum. In considering decolonisation of the doctorate globally, we highlight the contested intent and developments resulting from globalisation, and the underlying differences between colonialism and coloniality. In the first a grand intention of global valuing and sharing (of goods, wealth, knowledge) deteriorates into competition and hierarchies, and in the second, despite the historical ending of colonialism as a driven activity, practices of inequality persist. Globalisation does not solve problems of global inequalities of the funding and prioritisation of knowledge, rather it has been harnessed as a money making project, a way for the Northern hemisphere, the Western, US- and European-originated forms of knowledge to take priority.14 Confusion between colonialism and coloniality also underpins a false hope of new equalities in higher education, exposed by Ndlovu-Gatsheni and Chambati,15 who characterise “the invisible vampirism of technologies of imperialism and colonial matrices of power that continue to exist in the minds, lives, languages, dreams, imaginations, and epistemologies of modern subjects in Africa and the entire global South.” The relationship between language and knowledge access are other issues to consider with decolonising the doctorate. Focusing on English, the language rather than literature, Chaka et al.16 discuss the Africanisation of curriculum or knowledge in South African higher education (Jansen, 14  Marijk van der Wende, “Opening up: Higher Education Systems in Global Perspective,” Centre for Global Higher Education working paper series, Working paper no. 22 (June 2017). https://www.researchcghe.org/perch/resources/publications/wp22.pdf. Accessed 16 June 2021. 15  Sabelo J Ndlovu-Gatsheni and Walter Chambati, Coloniality of Power in Postcolonial Africa: Myths of Decolonization (CODESRIA, 2013). 16  Chaka, Chaka, Lephalala, Miriam, Ngesi, Nandipha, “English studies: Decolonisation, Deparochialising Knowledge and the Null Curriculum,” Perspectives in Education 35, no. 2 (UV/UFS, 2017): 208–229.

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201717; Mbembe, 201618; Maringe, 201719) recognising Frantz Fanon’s (1961) The Wretched of the Earth,20 as important to decolonisation scholars. They argue that renewed calls for the transformation and decolonisation of South African higher education must be viewed in relation to historical protests against blockages to epistemological access: the introduction of Bantu education, 1955; the 1976 Soweto school uprisings against Afrikaans as the medium of instruction; Steve Biko’s work in the Black Consciousness movement (Biko, 1987).21 More currently the 2015–2016 university #FeesMustFall student movement, begun as a protest against fees, led to the toppling of colonial statues and a demand for the dismantling of the remnants and ongoing effects of colonisation. As Mbembe comments: Calls to “decolonize” are not new. Nor have they gone uncontested whenever they have been made. We all have in mind African postcolonial experiments in the 1960s and 1970s. Then, “to decolonize” was the same thing as “to Africanize”. To decolonize was part of a nation-building project.22

Emmanuel Mgqwashu23,24 notes relationships between language, thinking and access to higher learning perspectives, and Letsekha25 reminds us that transformation and decolonisation are not identical,26 while  Jonathan Jansen, As by Fire: The End of the South African University (Tafelberg, 2017).   Achille Mbembe, “Decolonizing Knowledge and the Question of the Archive” (2016). Available at http://wiser.wits.ac.za/system/files/Achille%20Mbembe%20-%20 Decolonizing%20Knowledge%20and%20the%20Question%20of%20the%20Archive.pdf. Accessed 7 August 2017. 19  Felix Maringe, “Transforming Knowledge Production Systems in the New African University,” in Knowledge and Change in African Universities: Re-Imagining the Terrain, eds. Michael Cross and Elizabeth Ndofirepi (Rotterdam: Sense Publishers, 2017), 1–18. 20  Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth (New York: Grove Press, 1961). 21  Steve Biko, Steve Biko 1946–1977: I Write What I Like: A Selection of His Writings, ed. Aelred Stubbs (London: Heinemann, 1987). 22  A. Mbembe, “Decolonizing Knowledge,” n.p. 23  Emmanuel Mgquashu, “Literate English for Epistemological Access: The Role of English Studies,” Alternation 15, no. 2 (2008): 301–328. 24  Emmanuel Mgqwashu, “On Becoming Literate in English: A During- and Post-­ Apartheid Personal Story,” Language Learning Journal 37, no. 3 (2009): 293–303. 25  Tebello Letsekha, “Revisiting the Debate on the Africanisation of Higher Education: An Appeal for a Conceptual Shift.” The Independent Journal of Teaching and Learning, 8 (2013): 5–18. 26  Chaka, Chaka, Lephalala, Miriam, Ngesi, Nandipha, “English Studies,” 208–229. 17 18

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Maldondo-Torres systematically engages theory with interventions.27 Calls to decolonise, starting in the 1960s, often focused on a sense of either or the dismantling28 and replacement of European knowledge by African knowledge.29 There is another move, (re)-imagining an alternative academic model.30 Decolonisation of the doctorate, as that of higher education is linked to epistemological access and a key to that access is language, for all disciplines and particularly for literary studies, where language underpins thought and articulates contestatory response and creation. The moves for decolonisation of English language and literature in India led to replacing English textbooks and literature texts accompanied by a preference for language rather than literature teaching.31 Other moves to appropriate English for local needs were seen as a nativisation of English. In Nairobi, Ngūgı ̆ wa Thiong’o and colleagues responded to suggested changes in the English curriculum by arguing there for a focus on African history and African literature, leading to Ngūgı ̆ wa Thiong’o’s decision to write and publish in his own language.32 When students undertake literary doctorates, their language constraints and choices are often a point for discussion. Universities are not decontextualised, neutral powerhouses of knowledge creation, rather they are affected by and affect history, politics, social change. A decolonised curriculum for the doctorate, including the literary doctorate, probably begins in the global South, where those who find themselves unheard and unseen urge for access, but its changes when achieved should also be global. Epistemological access is an issue for doctoral students among others and research into decolonisation focuses also on the lurking deadly issue of epistemicide, the murder, the death of forms of knowledge and their expression, whether this is wilful or through 27  Nelson Maldondo-Torres, “Thinking through the Decolonial Turn: Post-Continental Interventions in Theory, Philosophy and Critique – An Introduction,” Transmodernity 1, no. 2 (2011): 1–15. 28  Bill Ashcroft, Gareth Griffiths, Helen Tiffin. The Post-Colonial Studies Reader (London, New York: Routledge, 1995). 29  Jonathan Jansen, As by Fire, 159–163. 30  Jonathan Jansen, As by Fire, 159. 31  Paromita Chakravarti, “Decolonising and Globalising English Studies: The Case of English Textbooks in West­Bengal, India,” English in Education 42, no. 1 (2008): 36–52. 32  Ngugi wa Thiong’o, Decolonising the Mind: The Politics of Language in African Literature (London: James Currey. 1986).

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blindly following unquestioned, old-fashioned custom. However, focusing on epistemicide and issues of lack of epistemological access could both encourage a deficit model of student engagement in higher education at every level and drive the notion of “decontextualized learners,”33 where concerns for language ignore the students’ social, historical and cultural context.

Decolonising the Literary Doctorate Decolonising the literary doctorate starts with the text and with our reading practices bringing textual, political, critical practices into view. It benefits from the radical, literary, textual practices of the 1930s and 80s, a focus on literature, teaching, politics and the rise of postcolonial literatures in syllabuses and the foregrounding of texts such as Achebe’s Things Fall Apart (1966),34 which deliberately rewrite the histories of colonisation and imperialism from the perspective of subject peoples suddenly now made the actual subject rather than the object of the texts. However, changing the content is only a start because it is all too easy at every level to decide that next year will look at something else. A decolonised literary doctorate might start with those texts that caused students and academics to see things differently, read literature differently, see that literature was expressed differently but it will also change much else. Decolonising the doctorate takes literary critical practices, their focus, the choice of texts and ways of reading to the foreground of doctoral students’ work. We ask questions about how we conduct our research, with what critical perspectives and methods we conduct it, what are the research objects and subjects, how do we write about it and what are the differences in the work focused on, questions engaged with and doctoral response produced? What are the differences, the developments, the enrichments of the research practices and processes which the decolonised literary doctorate could offer and how can an individual doctoral student pursuing a decolonised literary doctorate ask questions differently, of different texts from different contexts, of different literary and related expressions of languages of ideas? Can the decolonised literary doctorate initiate different forms of thesis, deconstructing traditional norms of the thesis format itself and so 33  Chrissie Boughey and Sioux McKenna, “Academic Literacy and the Decontextualised Learner,” CRISTAL 4, no. 2 (2016): 1–9. 34  Chinua Achebe, Things Fall Apart (London: Heinemann, 1958).

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producing, for example, a palimpsest thesis, one mixing critical, personal, storytelling, creative voices rather than an exegesis a standard exploration that merely changes its object or subject? Should the decolonised research and knowledge construction work be expressed differently, constructed differently in order to engage with, explore, embody different thinking practices, different worldviews, so the research, questions asked, writing practices, the shape and expression of the thesis are decolonised, recognising indigenous forms of expression. Experimentation with research subjects, methods, and presentation formats influenced by ways in which knowledge is constructed and conveyed in different knowledge cultures, can all feed into a decolonised literary doctorate. A first step is (re-)reading with fresh critical eyes both traditional texts and culturally diverse texts originating in contexts enabling contestation with colonialism, and drawing on diverse traditions of expression. Development and legitimation of different forms of expression in the literary doctorate is an act of political imaginative power because it shifts an entrenched process, perspective, practice and form of expression- the thesis bound up in a large black book with gold lettering. It opens up a myriad of possibilities for different shapes, different forms of expression and different perspectives on different subjects and objects. The next consideration is that while the literature curriculum might change, ways in which students are taught or supervised and staff mindsets might not.

Action to Change Access, Content, Shape, Focus of the Literary Doctorate Decolonising the literary doctorate is fuelled by the liberating politicising of texts which underpin postcolonial writing and critical practice. It develops with asking questions about who is writing from whose perspectives, in which form, in which language and how doctoral students and other researchers can explore and construct texts, their modes of expressing different perspectives and worlds through words and other forms. It changes our research practice, research subjects and objects and the ways in which we write about or express our responses. Some of the examples I look at here come from Maori, Aboriginal and some from South African doctoral students, asking how they have been able to change what they do, what they look at, how they work with it and how they express their work. The most radical examples tend to have creative practice, community and

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personal narratives at their core alongside literary critical practices. Decolonising the literary doctorate means that its curriculum, shape, research approaches, forms of expression, the objects, subjects and voice will also change and so will our supervisory practices. At the heart of this is not just a deconstruction of the forms of the literary doctorate, the modes of research, it involves constructing and enacting engagement with decolonised practices. The choice of texts in this scenario would include culturally contextualised forms of expression: song, image, personal and community storytelling, fable, published and unpublished poetry. The focus of decolonised literature doctorates, critical processes and practices often involve history, politics and relationships to the land. Students in New Zealand who come from Maori and Pasifica backgrounds not only write about related contextualised topics and texts but often also write in a Pasifika language or te reo Maori, influenced by Maori culture (Kaupapa Maori), so that examiners need to be able to read the text written in that language about their own issues in context. Aboriginal Australian literary theses might well also be using Aboriginal languages but those I have come across are written in English using some Aboriginal words. For these as literary doctorate work by other indigenous students (First Nations Canadians, Zulu etc.) the individual often brings together the voices of the elders as well as the literary texts, the personal and community voices around the doctoral students who formed their thinking and writing and the concerns of which they write, including their family members and the broader community. Often, there is a mix of personal narrative, cultural history stories as well as a focus on whatever literature is being researched, critiqued, explored and expressed. It is important to change the focus, the object, subject, change the process, the forms of expression and the supervision practices, change the language and ensure that the recognition and the power which comes from the doctorate endures. Higher education critics suggest that decolonising is not so straightforwardly a matter of building on top of or replacing one set of critical voices with another, rather opening up the field, the voices. This echoes Guyanan/ Trinidiadian/Jamaican/Canadian Afrofuturist author Nalo Hopkinson, who argues that it is necessary to challenge and modify established forms and voices as well as produce and develop something different from that of the Northern Western shape and focus of writing. In the introduction

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to So Long Been Dreaming (2004)35 she responds to a friend’s question about her work: What do you think of Audre Lorde’s comment that massa’s tools will never dismantle massa’s house? In my hands massa’s tools don’t dismantle massa’s house – and in fact I don’t want to destroy it so much as I want to undertake massive renovations – then build me a house of my own.36

She seeks change, challenging old constructions and constructing new. This also applies to the literary doctorate curriculum, its content, focus, shape and voice. There are individuals, systems and practices in place to support, recognise and celebrate some of these new builds.37 In their decolonised literary doctorates, students might well combine across disciplines, and might or might not make central the issue of decolonising. In work I have examined, doctoral authors theorise their work using both Western/Northern and Southern/Eastern theorists, explaining readers’ preconceptions about their work, often including or focusing on their own background, family and experiences and sometimes developing methodology which blends the indigenous with the conventional to decolonise methodology, forms of expression, and the arguments and stories they produce.

Conclusion Higher educational doctoral learning, supervision principles and theorised practices are usefully brought to bear when considering the literary doctorate. Returning to McKenna, we can see that the doctorate is (or should be) a crucible for change: “The doctorate is where the challenging conversations are happening. We’re working at the frontiers of the field, we are 35  Nalo Hopkinson and Mehan Uppinder, “Introduction,” in So Long Been Dreaming: Postcolonial Science Fiction & Fantasy (Vancouver: Arsenal Pulp Press, 2004). 36  Hopkinson and Uppinder, “Introduction,” 7. 37  Susan Carter, Debra Laurs, Lisa Chant, Ema Wolfgramm-Foliaki, Jen Martin, Teresia Teaiwa and Rawinia Higgins, Research Report Supporting Doctoral Writing: He ara tika mā ngā kaia ̄rahi. Funded by Ako Aotearoa (National Centre for Tertiary Teaching Excellence) (2016). Northern Hub. Available, with accompanying guide for practice, at https://ako. ac.nz/assets/Knowledge-centre/rhpf-N66-Giving-feedback-on-doctoralwriting/8a6d40bd0b/REPORT-Supporting-Doctoral-Writing-He-Ara-Tika-Ma-Nga-­ Kaiarahi.pdf

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producing original ideas, concepts, research tools. It’s the ideal place for us to be questioning whose knowledge is legitimated, and what potential silenced knowledges might have for us.”38 Challenge to and disruption of established knowledges and the constraints of disciplinary and cultural silos, of established research practices and forms of articulation are first essential steps in decolonising the doctorate. In decolonising the literary doctorate, we question, open out and diversify the subjects of study, the culturally inflected voices which we read and hear, and our modes of research and writing. The problematising of established critical perspectives on the literature of the canon is often a first step. Engagement with the personal, culture, imagination and language and its creation, study, critique inform our work. Like lab scientists, we need many different culturally inflected perspectives and voices to decolonise the literary doctorate, extend, open out who can undertake it, what we can focus on, and how, what we can treat as objects and subjects of study. We disrupt disciplinary boundaries as well as those of geographies, histories and minds. We also enrich and change how we critique, explore, write, create literary critical expression, what forms this can be in and consider how, once literary doctorates are transformed, they can be shared so they can influence imaginations, worldviews and lead to positive change.

Works Cited Achebe, Chinua. Interview with Bill Moyers, in Bill D. Moyers, Betty S. Flowers, Mary Ann Glendon, A World of Ideas: Conversations with Thoughtful Men and Women about American Life Today and the Ideas Shaping Our Future. New York: Doubleday, 1989. Achebe, Chinua. Things Fall Apart. London: Heinemann, 1958. Ashcroft, Bill; Griffiths, Gareth; Tiffin, Helen. The Post-Colonial Studies Reader. London, New York: Routledge, 1995. Biko, Steve. Steve Biko, 1946–1977: I Write What I Like: A Selection of His Writings ed. Aelred Stubbs. London: Heinemann, 1987. Boughey, Chrissie and McKenna, Sioux. “Academic Literacy and the Decontextualised Learner.” CRISTAL 4, no. 2 (2016). 1–9. Carter, Angela. “Notes from the Front Line,” in On Gender and Writing, ed. Michelene Wandor. London and Boston: Pandora Press, 1983. Carter, Susan; Laurs, Debra; Chant, Lisa; Wolfgramm-Foliaki, Ema; Martin, Jen; Teaiwa Teresia & Higgins, Rawinia. Research Report Supporting Doctoral  Sioux McKenna, “Unmasking the Doctorate.”

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Writing: He ara tika mā nga ̄ kaia ̄rahi. Funded by Ako Aotearoa (National Centre for Tertiary Teaching Excellence), 2016. Northern Hub. Available, with accompanying guide for practice, at https://ako.ac.nz/assets/Knowledge-­ centre/rhpf-­N 66-­G iving-­f eedback-­o n-­d octoral-­w riting/8a6d40bd0b/ REPORT-­Supporting-­Doctoral-­Writing-­He-­Ara-­Tika-­Ma-­Nga-­Kaiarahi.pdf Chaka, Chaka, Lephalala, Miriam, Ngesi, Nandipha, “English studies: Decolonisation, Deparochialising Knowledge and the Null Curriculum.” Perspectives in Education 35, no. 2 (2017). 208–229. Chakravarti, Paromita. “Decolonising and Globalising English Studies: The Case of English Textbooks in West Bengal, India.” English in Education 42, no. 1 (2008). 36–52. Collins, Merle. “Crick Crack Monkey,” in Because the Dawn Breaks: Poems Dedicated to the Grenadian People. London: Women’s Press, 1985. Fanon, Frantz. The Wretched of the Earth. New York, Grove Press, 1961. Hopkinson, Nalo, and Uppinder Mehan. “Introduction.” So Long Been Dreaming: Postcolonial Science Fiction & Fantasy. Vancouver: Arsenal Pulp Press, 2004. Jansen, Jonathan. As by Fire: The End of the South African University. Tafelberg, 2017. Letsekha, Tebello. “Revisiting the Debate on the Africanisation of Higher Education: An Appeal for a Conceptual Shift.” The Independent Journal of Teaching and Learning 8 (2013). 5–18. Maldondo-Torres, Nelson. “Thinking Through the Decolonial Turn: Post-­ Continental Interventions in Theory, Philosophy and Critique  – An Introduction.” Transmodernity 1, no. 2 (2011). 1–15. Manathunga, Catherine. “Moments of Transculturation and Assimilation: Post-­ Colonial Explorations of Supervision and Culture.” Innovations in Education & Teaching International 48, no. 4 (2011). 367–376. Manathunga, Catherine. Intercultural Postgraduate Supervision: Reimagining Time, Place and Knowledge. London: Routledge, 2014. Manathunga, Catherine. “Decolonising the Curriculum: Southern Interrogations of Time, Place and Knowledge.” SOTL in the South 2, no. 1 (2018). 95–111. Maringe, Felix. “Transforming Knowledge Production Systems in the New African University.” In Knowledge and Change in African Universities: Re-Imagining the Terrain, eds. Michael Cross and Elizabeth Ndofirepi. Rotterdam: Sense Publishers, 2017. Mbembe, Achille. “Decolonizing Knowledge and the Question of the Archive,” 2016. Available at http://wiser.wits.ac.za/system/files/Achille%20 Mbembe%20-­% 20Decolonizing%20Knowledge%20and%20the%20 Question%20of%20the%20Archive.pdf. Accessed 17 June 2021. McKenna, Sioux. “Unmasking the Doctorate.” University World News, Africa Edition, 21 April 2017, https://www.universityworldnews.com/post. php?story=2017042113152878. Accessed 17 June 2021.

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Mgqwashu, Emmanuel. “Literate English for Epistemological Access: The Role of English Studies.” Alternation 15, no. 2 (2008). 301–328. Mgqwashu, Emmanuel, M. “On Becoming Literate in English: a During – and Post  – Apartheid Personal Story.” Language Learning Journal 37, no. 3 (2009). 293–303. Ndlovu-Gatsheni, Sabelo J. and Chambati, Walter. Coloniality of Power in Postcolonial Africa: Myths of Decolonization. CODESRIA. 2013. Rhys, Jean. Wide Sargasso Sea. London: Andre Deutsche, 1966. Rushdie, Salman. Is Nothing Sacred? New York: Granta Books, 1990. SARiHE, The South African Rurality in Higher Education project. https:// sarihe.org.za Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty. The Post-colonial Critic: Interviews, Strategies, Dialogues. London: Routledge, 1990. Wa Thiong’o, Ngugi. Decolonising the Mind: The Politics of Language in African Literature. London: James Currey, 1986. van der Wende, Marijk. “Opening up: Higher Education Systems in Global Perspective.” Centre for Global Higher Education working paper series, Working paper no. 22, June 2017. https://www.researchcghe.org/perch/ resources/publications/wp22.pdf (Accessed 17 June 2021)

Index1

A Academic communication, 180 Activism, 36, 37, 105, 193 Adolescence, 76, 79 America, 84, 88, 106, 141 Analysis, v, vi, 13, 26, 27, 32, 49, 59, 67, 69n4, 74, 75, 77, 78, 90, 92, 93, 99, 109, 118, 120, 130, 134, 139, 140, 176, 180 Apartheid, 6, 157, 163 Assessment, 13, 28, 29, 35, 59, 60, 108, 139, 159, 166 Atlantic slave trade, 124, 125 Australia, 2, 171, 172, 178, 193 B Babalola, Bolu, 12, 45–60 Black British, 12, 46, 49, 55, 56, 99, 101, 106 Black Lives Matter, 9, 193

Body, 3, 15, 16, 27, 38, 51, 58, 65, 67, 71, 73, 74, 77, 86, 91, 94, 137, 138, 140, 141, 153–168 Border crossing, 15, 153–168 Britain, 7, 14, 25, 28, 32, 33, 48, 51, 52, 54, 99, 106, 118, 123, 135, 147 British-Pakistani, 12, 46, 49–51, 53 Brontë, Emily, 15, 118, 120–123, 125, 128, 129 Bullying, 68, 78 C Caribbean, 15, 26, 28, 35, 77, 99, 100, 106, 134n1, 135, 138, 145–147 Case study, 4, 11, 12, 15, 59, 137–140, 145, 147, 155, 164–167, 174–178, 180–182, 184, 193

 Note: Page numbers followed by ‘n’ refer to notes.

1

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 C. Beyer (ed.), Decolonising the Literature Curriculum, Teaching the New English, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-91289-5

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INDEX

Challenge, v, vi, 2, 7, 8, 11, 12, 14, 15, 19, 30–32, 37, 40, 42, 46, 49, 50, 54, 60, 71, 75, 80, 84, 87, 95, 98, 107–109, 135, 148, 159, 161, 164, 165, 180, 182n28, 183, 184, 200, 202 Change, v, 3, 10, 11, 13, 14, 17, 28, 29, 32, 33, 37, 38, 40, 48, 50, 57–59, 75, 89, 98, 115, 135, 136, 146, 148, 163, 164, 180, 181, 189, 191, 192, 194, 197–202 Chicana, 13, 65–80 Class social, 70, 86, 89 teaching and learning, 49 Co-curriculum, 15, 171–185 Community engagement, 163–166, 168 Contestation, 148, 190, 192, 199 COVID-19, 18, 46, 161 Creative writing, 90, 192 Creativity, 69, 79, 88, 146, 167, 191, 192 Critical pedagogy, 48, 50, 59, 60 Critical reflection, 16 Cultural competence, 172–174, 173n8, 180–185, 181n26 D Decolonised pedagogy, 51, 116, 130 Deficit discourse, 184 Diaspora, 7, 33, 107, 109, 140, 146, 158 Discussion, 1, 3, 5, 7, 14, 17, 29, 32, 33, 35, 36, 39, 40, 49, 50, 52, 53, 56–59, 69n5, 70, 74–78, 84, 86, 87, 90–94, 101–103, 107, 108, 126, 129, 134, 138, 140, 141, 143–145, 166, 175–177, 181, 197 Diversification, 29, 136–137

Diversity, 4, 5n9, 6, 10, 11, 18, 27, 32, 35, 48, 50, 52, 90, 98, 101, 135, 165, 173n8, 180, 181, 190 Drama (genre), 90 E Engaged pedagogy, 4, 134, 155 English departments, 34, 97, 99, 116, 118, 129, 130 Environment, 38, 39, 50–54, 60, 71, 88, 171, 174, 181, 182n28, 183, 185 Essay assessment, 59, 166 Ethics, 18, 32, 145 Ethnicity, 26, 27, 33, 38, 65, 70, 74, 77, 86, 88, 89, 91, 128, 135, 137, 146 Evaluation, 87, 156, 165, 167 Evaristo, Bernardine, 103–105, 109 Exemplar texts, 172, 175 Experimentation, 199 F Family, 49, 52, 66, 72, 73, 78, 84, 86–89, 92, 93, 101, 107, 118, 126, 127, 141, 189, 200, 201 Feedback, 37, 59, 95, 98, 165–167, 174 Feminism, 29, 48n7, 50, 85, 99 Folk tale, 45, 50, 55, 58 Food studies, 133, 134, 137, 139 G Gender, v, 15, 26, 27, 32, 33, 37–41, 47, 50, 53, 55–58, 60, 65, 67, 70, 74, 88, 89, 91, 92, 103, 105, 108, 135, 137–139, 142, 146, 162, 168, 192

 INDEX 

Genre, vi, 13, 15, 29, 46, 47, 50–52, 55, 57, 90, 123, 138, 140, 146, 147, 175, 179, 180 Group work, 139 H Hamid, Mohsin, 109 Home Fire, 12, 45–60 Humanities, 18, 28, 46n2, 115 Hybridity, 33, 34, 154, 168 I Identity, 26, 27, 35, 38–41, 52, 55, 66–70, 69n5, 72, 73, 75–77, 79, 80, 89, 91, 97, 100–102, 104, 108, 109, 117, 137, 139, 145, 146, 155, 173n8, 174n11, 179, 181, 181n26, 182, 182n28, 184, 185 Interdisciplinary, 134, 139, 190 Intersectionality, 13, 47, 50 Intertextuality, 53, 123, 143 Italy, 14, 97–110 J Justice, 13, 59, 60, 68, 87, 160, 164, 175, 190, 194 K Kureishi, Hanif, 54, 102 L Latina, 13, 65–80 Levy, Andrea, 101, 103–106 Literary adaptation, 116, 130

207

Literary doctorate, 16, 189–202 Literature canon, 12, 107, 110 Love in Colour, 12–13, 45–60 M Marginalisation, 3, 49, 51, 70, 109, 175 Medina, Meg, 68, 69, 74–79 Module, 11–13, 15, 36, 46, 50, 52, 53, 55, 59, 60, 97, 98, 100, 101, 103–107, 109, 110, 135, 137–140, 145, 147 Multicultural literature, 7, 14, 51, 97–110 Muslim, 41, 50–54, 54n29, 106, 177, 178, 182 Mythology, 13, 45, 46, 49, 53, 54, 56, 58 N Nair, Preethi, 106, 108 Nation, 1, 10, 31, 35, 39–41, 49, 52, 71, 83, 84, 92, 109, 146, 194 Non-native English speakers, 100, 101, 107 Normativity, 41 Novel, 12, 27, 39, 46, 51–54, 68–70, 74, 76, 78–80, 99–101, 104–108, 110, 118–122, 124–130, 134, 138, 140–146, 192, 193 O Online learning, 161 Oppression, 26, 47, 56, 57, 59, 60, 70, 75, 84, 87–89, 92, 100, 106, 108, 129, 144, 163, 174

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INDEX

Oral presentation, 166 Orientalism, 50, 53, 54, 138, 144 Oyeyemi, Helen, 109

Q Queer, 12, 13, 25–42, 84, 86, 88, 89, 138, 143, 144

P Pakistani, 46, 49–51, 53, 103 Patriarchy, 41, 102, 103, 105, 108 Pedagogy, vi, 1, 2, 4, 8, 9, 11, 13–16, 18, 47–52, 47n6, 48n8, 58–60, 69, 72, 94, 101, 116, 130, 134, 136, 153–168, 173, 174, 178–180, 185 Peer, 68, 69, 90, 161, 166, 167 Perspective, 2, 13, 14, 16, 27, 31, 33, 34, 38, 46, 47, 53, 57, 58, 60, 71, 89, 103–110, 115–118, 120, 130, 133, 136, 138, 140, 172–176, 179–181, 191, 192, 196, 198, 199, 202 Play (genre), 13, 17, 46, 51, 52, 72, 83–88, 91–94, 104, 106, 143, 147, 174, 179, 194 Poetry, 40, 90, 144, 190, 193, 200 Political, vi, 6, 27, 29, 30, 33, 40, 48, 51, 53, 57, 71, 98, 100–102, 110, 116–118, 129, 135, 156, 160, 175, 176, 180, 181, 183, 184, 194, 195, 198, 199 Portugal, 2, 116, 117, 120 Postcolonial, 2, 6–8, 12, 13, 15, 25–42, 47, 53, 102, 105, 107–109, 133–148, 168, 191, 192, 196, 198, 199 Postcolonial adaptation, 116 Postgraduate, 2, 19, 165, 177 Project, 2, 5, 9–11, 28, 30, 32, 33, 35–40, 42, 50, 79, 85–89, 94, 116, 117, 130, 136, 138, 145, 156, 163–165, 173, 185, 190, 191n5, 195, 196

R Race, 5n9, 15, 26, 27, 33, 40, 47, 50, 53, 55, 56, 58, 60, 77, 86, 88, 89, 91, 104, 105, 108, 128, 130, 135, 138, 146, 154 Racism, 8, 29, 31, 45, 50, 65, 75, 87, 101–103, 105, 106, 108, 109, 128–130, 136, 175, 182 Reflection, v, vi, 3, 8–11, 17, 25, 46n3, 57, 58, 103, 153–168, 173, 176, 181 Reflective practice, 4, 18, 134 Research thinking, 191 Resistance to decolonisation, 8–11 Revision, vi, 8, 11, 34, 48, 58 Rhodes Must Fall, 6, 25, 129, 157 Romance, 40, 55–59 S Semi-periphery, 118, 130 Sexuality, 12, 13, 26, 27, 32, 33, 37–41, 50–55, 58, 60, 69, 71, 75, 86, 88, 89, 91, 103, 135, 138, 143, 162 Shamsie, Kamila, 12, 45–60 Short story, 12, 46, 55, 134, 137 Slave trade, 120, 124, 125 Social justice, 13, 59, 60, 87, 160, 164, 190, 194 Somatic, 14, 15 South Africa, 2, 15, 25, 153, 157, 158, 163, 165, 167, 193, 194, 194n11

 INDEX 

South Asia, 28 Stereotype, 12, 50, 51, 53, 54, 69, 70, 74, 75, 78, 87, 127, 129, 174, 177, 184 Student experience, 58–60 Syal, Meera, 106, 107 Syllabus, 12, 13, 51, 54, 59, 70, 100, 101, 103, 107, 108, 130, 135, 198 T Teaching body, 15, 153–168 Textual analysis, vi, 13, 99, 109 Tradition, 3, 16–19, 34–37, 46, 56, 58, 91, 97, 107, 137, 146–148, 199 Turkey, 2, 14, 97–110 U Undergraduate, 2, 4, 11–14, 16, 19, 36, 46, 50, 54n28, 67, 97, 98, 103, 108, 118, 133, 134, 176, 194

V Violence, 37, 41, 53, 67, 75, 103, 107, 157, 158 W “War on woke,” 9 Women of colour, 12, 45–60, 67, 70, 73, 78 Women’s writing, 46, 47, 51, 54 Writing centre, 14, 15 Wuthering Heights, 14, 15, 115–130 X Xenophobia, 168 Y Young adult literature, 70–73, 79 Youth, 68, 72, 168

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