Guest Editorial: Decolonizing English

What?

What does the recent rise in prominence of moves to decolonize the curriculum in English departments across universities in the UK mean for what we teach, how, why, and to whom?

I want to start by thinking about the resistance to these moves to decolonize the curriculum. Some of this opposition is a knee-jerk backlash. In the spirit of Thomas B. Macaulay’s disparagement of non-European texts, there remains a lurking suspicion in Senior Common Rooms across the country that literature from the global south does not “merit” consideration alongside “the classics”. This is rarely articulated so bluntly but instead finds expression, often sotto voce, in claims that proposed reforms provide yet another example of “political correctness gone mad”.

But there is also a more important and legitimate anxiety about the ways in which curriculum reform under the umbrella of “Diversity and Inclusion” policies can be framed in problematic racializing terms. A key critique stems from a consideration of race within wider debates on neoliberal multiculturalism alongside how the logic of racial capitalism reinscribes hierarchies. Such approaches emphasize the pitfalls of understanding race as difference rather than in terms of dominance. Their advocates instead focus on the need to move beyond race rather than stigmatizing difference. For example, in his chapter “Race and the Politics of Recognition”, Chris Chen identifies the underlying conceptual tension between “antiracist political strategies premised upon the affirmation of racial identity on the one hand, or upon what could be characterized as the abolition of the racial order on the other” (Chen, 2018: 932–933). Another influential critique comes from my colleague Paul Gilroy with his long-standing opposition to official forms of race politics and anti-racist politics and his move towards a post-anthropological planetary humanism (Gilroy, 2000, 2004).

However, it is not only academics who have concerns. At King’s College London, where I teach, those students arguing for curriculum reform have a nuanced understanding of the kind of changes they seek. They oppose diversity for the sake of it and a tick-boxing, cosmetic approach. It is not enough to have specialist options on Black and Asian Writing. They also want to see minority voices included in canonical courses on Poetry or Modernism, and moreover to explore how modernity unfolded globally rather than being exported from Euro-American contexts. Our students expect modules on Feminism and Literature to engage with the significant challenge to mainstream Western feminism. They are notably interested in Islamic feminism or postcolonial feminist scholarship’s rising discontent with First World, usually white feminism, especially with its assumptions of a shared marginality centred on gender, but where questions of race, class, caste, language, religion, and location remain relatively unaddressed.

Decolonizing the curriculum must also mean challenging the dominant status of English as the lingua franca in the global marketplace, which continues to result in the study of Anglophone writers in ways that overshadow writing in vernacular languages. Despite the institutionalization of Postcolonial and Comparative Literary Studies for some decades, a cursory glance at British university syllabi indicates that international literature in translation remains scarcely represented. Our classes thus need to consider the “limitations” of writing in English, which is only one strand of many formerly colonized countries’ rich literary and linguistic heritage and is often spoken as a first language by less than one per cent of the population. Although proficiency levels exceed this, access to English remains classed. Anglophone writing within these locations is therefore haunted by questions about the extent to which it is circumscribed within the interests and viewpoints of the privileged. While there is now a greater focus on resident postcolonial writers than in previous years, postcolonial literature is still most often mediated to global readerships and our students through diasporic voices, on whom the status of preferred intermediary has been conferred by Euro-American literary establishments.

Closer to home, 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. Recent research (Nasta, 2002; Ranasinha, 2007; Ranasinha et al., 2012; Sandhu, 2004, among others) continues to be inspired by the pioneering 1980s scholarship of Peter Fryer (1984), Rozina Visram (1986), and Ron Ramdin (1987). Fryer’s Staying Power, Visram’s Ayahs, Lascars and Princes, and Ramdin’s The Making of the Black Working Class in Britain were the first books to disrupt the still persistent myth of a homogenous white Britain prior to the large-scale migrations after the Second World War. The increasing body of work on pre-1945 migration highlights two important considerations for the teaching of contemporary British literature. First, British culture and history has a much longer and more complex multicultural heritage than is usually acknowledged. Second, current debates on citizenship rights, migration policy, what constitutes “Englishness”, and multiculturalism were prompted and anticipated by the presence of colonial subjects within Britain over a century ago. Britain was always “multicultural” even before multiculturalism was theorized: multicultural in terms of a sense of (un)belonging, a redrawing of culturally and racially defined borders and remapping of British identities. Furthermore, we must move beyond tracing the presence of migrant writers, activists, and intellectuals of whatever period and focus instead on their impact. There is a pressing need to document and highlight these thinkers’ remarkable, yet still overlooked formative contributions to national history, to British culture, literature, politics, and identity. Minorities not only engaged with questions of race and racism but also with the broader political and social reforms of their times. Thus, in the early decades of the twentieth century, while minority activists influenced public discourse on issues of empire and race (through, for instance, the India League and other political organizations), they also intervened in the global war effort against fascism or for women’s suffrage, international socialism, and workers’ rights. Indeed, this is a pattern which continues today.

For some years now, research (especially, but not only, at the intersection of postcolonial studies and book history) has uncovered testimonies of interracial contact and revealed networks and relationships of creative exchange and collaboration, as well as, at times, fervent dissent. All of this prompts a revision of national history through a reimagining and remapping of the place of minorities within it. Our teaching similarly needs to foreground minority writers’ interaction with their British counterparts. As the title of Clare Wills’ excellent recent study, Lovers and Strangers: An Immigrant History of Post-War Britain (2017) makes clear, this is not a solely ghettoized presence as it has been depicted in exhibitions, documentaries, and museums in the past. Nor is it a separate, segregated history, but always part of a broader, economic, political, and social landscape. Our courses then must place, for example, black and Asian figures not as part of isolated “minority traditions”, but within the developing context of the historically local movements and cross-cultural milieus in which they found themselves. These include the synergy and intersections between global feminism and anti-colonialism, black, Indian, and Irish cultural nationalism, as well as leftist politics and literature. Several courses across the country are beginning to think afresh about how we position and frame key writers such like Olaudah Equiano. This pioneering writer is being examined in terms of his maritime travels in courses on travel writing rather than solely in terms of his relation to slave narrative.

At the same time, it remains equally important to consider the poetics as well as the politics of postcolonial or minority writings in our teaching. This requires a major consideration or reconsideration of the artistic dimensions of themes, thoughts, and language in this body of work. Writers from minority backgrounds — especially those who came to the fore during the political upheavals of the 1980s — have felt their work is overdetermined by the expectation to respond to diversity. Even if they steadfastly reject the “burden of representation”: the assumption that minority artists speak for the entire community from which they come; even as they refuse to be pigeon-holed as “ethnic” writers confined to issues of race, their artistic strategies can be overshadowed by political concerns in teaching that tend to mine these texts for sociological insights. Elleke’s Boehmer’s new book Postcolonial Poetics (2018) engages with this vital issue, as does Nicholas Harrison’s Postcolonial Criticism (2003).

For whom?

Ideally, all students benefit from a broader, more inclusive curriculum. Reforms are not simply about addressing the demands of those students from minority backgrounds who want to see their heritage reflected in our teaching. That means — to return to my point about specialist, optional courses — that to effect real change, diverse perspectives need to be included in foundational, compulsory modules at undergraduate level. In her influential book Why I’m No Longer Talking to White People About Race (2017), black British feminist Reni Eddo-Lodge speaks powerfully of the gulf of emotional disconnect that she argues some white people display when a person of colour articulates their experiences of racism. In other words, she is alert to those who refuse to accept the existence of structural racism and its symptoms. This is where our teaching has a role to play: perhaps we can harness the power of literature to bridge the gulf of the emotional disconnect she rightly identifies. From my own experience, teaching a range of students at Oxford, Brunel, and now at King’s, I have come across many students from diverse ethnic backgrounds who are prepared to confront their own privilege and prejudices. They do see or begin to see who benefits from their race, who is affected by negative stereotyping of theirs, and on whom power and privilege is bestowed — not just because of their race, but also their class, gender, and sexuality. But we need to consider all our students’ experience of being in the classroom. So, for instance, my courses at King’s tend predominantly to attract students from minority backgrounds. There is some deconstruction of white privilege within the seminars which is healthy and relevant for both the minority and white students present, but I feel as a teacher that this needs to be carefully negotiated through an intersectional approach that does not only focus on race to the exclusion of class, gender, sexuality, and disability. We also need to cultivate an awareness of the limitations of reading texts through the prism of identity politics alone. At a recent seminar on this subject at King’s, Paul Gilroy eloquently argued for an agonistic humanism, suggesting that both within and outside the classroom “we need to be less interested in who and what we are, and more concerned with what we can do for each other” (2018: n.p.).

To close with the question raised at the outset: why do we need to decolonize the curriculum? At this time of resurgent, narrow nationalism and intolerance, when the very idea of multiculturalism is under siege globally, the task of amplifying our students’ understanding of pressing and pertinent issues of migration, multiculturalism, equality, and “belonging” seems more important than ever: these questions have never been more contested.