The call to decolonize the teaching of premodernity – and especially the European Middle Ages – has assumed increasing urgency lately. As everyone knows, White supremacist and alt-right groups in the United States and Europe have in recent years aggressively weaponized the symbols, histories, material culture, and expressive culture of the European Middle Ages – so as to build a fantasied past of White racial purity and superiority, prelapsarian Christian homogeneity and harmony, and a religiopolitical supremacy that, for these extremists, characterized premodern Europe (Christendom/the Latin West) – in order to make their version of the past the basis of authority for reproducing the past anew in today’s world (see, e.g., Reference KimKim, Reference MiyashiroMiyashiro, Reference Rambaran-OlmRambaran-Olm, Reference PerryPerry).

From the deployment of symbols such as the Nordic god Thor’s hammer and the imperial eagle of the Holy Roman Empire to the celebration of medieval Crusades (the crusader cry, “Deus Vult,” or “God Wills It,” has found new popularity in the twenty-first century) and the eleventh-century settler colonization of North America by Greenlanders and Icelanders (“Hail Vinland!” has nearly replaced “Heil Hitler”), right-wing extremist groups increasingly marshal the cultural legacies of premodern Europe to awaken a specific strain of fantasied nostalgia for the past among majority-White populations, so as strategically to mobilize, channel, and direct public emotions toward militancy and violence in their drive to claim, and reenact, the putative glories and triumphs of the Christian West.

Christian extremist and White supremacist movements thus ironically parallel Islamist and Salafist groups such as Al-Qaeda, the so-called Islamic State, Al-Nusra Front, and others, who are themselves also strategically recalling the past, to urge a renewal of the early days of the Islamic empire under the Prophet Muhammad and the Rashidun (the first four rightly guided caliphs), in order to recreate the seventh-century Islamic Caliphate in the twenty-first century. Islamist nostalgia of this kind is equally alive and virulent in draconian state-sponsored sociopolitical cultures like Saudi Arabia’s and Iran’s, and that animates Turkey’s Recep Tayyip Erdoğan’s devout desire for an Islamist new Ottoman empire of the twenty-first century.

Concomitant with the resurgence of populist extremism, however, are important counterforces.

Among these are the changing population demographics of twenty-first-century societies in the West (these changes being themselves a trigger for White extremism) – transformations that are, in turn, responsible for new and transformed demographics of current and emerging cohorts of students in higher education. Like the societies in which they live, contemporary cohorts of students in higher learning have diversified substantially in terms of their race, class, countries of origin, sexualities and genders, and physical, cultural, and psychosocial composition. And students, more than faculty, are among those who have called for curricular transformations responsive to the exigencies of the day.¹

Medieval studies, an academic field once considered sleepy and “ornamental” by some – a field that has been diagnosed as urgently requiring decolonization because of its entrenched conservatism – has thus been experiencing a wake-up call on several fronts.² In spring 2021, the University of Leicester in the United Kingdom announced an administrative decision to cut medieval authors from its English curriculum altogether, as part of an attempt to decolonize the university’s curricular offerings – a process that renders the university’s medievalists in English obsolete and jobless.³ Suddenly, premodernists who were ignoring sociocultural and political exigencies in the societies where they live and work began to pay attention – because now, it seems, their jobs may be coming undone.

Some premodernists, however – primarily led by those who are part of the antiracist collective, the Medievalists of Color, and allied groups and individuals – have been undertaking the critical teaching of the past now for some years. I have taught a critical canon, and a countercanon, for nearly three decades. In 1994 – long before September 11, 2001 – I began the critical teaching of the so-called holy wars known as the Crusades, followed by premodern critical race courses, courses in critical early global studies, and courses aimed at countering anti-Semitism and Islamophobia. The work I undertake is, of course, contested (see Heng, “Reference Heng and HengWhy the Hate,” “Reference 366HengOn Not Reading,” and “Reference HengBefore Race”).

Another example of such teaching is Dorothy Kim’s “Toxic Chaucer,” a course on the dead White male dubbed the Father of English Literature, and one that confronts head-on the racism, Islamophobia, misogyny, anti-Semitism, coloniality, and classism visible in the Chaucerian corpus.⁴

The pedagogical trajectories, strategies, and curricular offerings I focus on below are thus best seen as distillations and summaries of the kind of work undertaken today by a number of us in a dispersed community of largely premodernists of color working to teach a decolonizing curriculum, a community whose members are profoundly engaged in transforming how the deep past is taught and studied in the twenty-first century academy.

A decolonizing curriculum is a term that fittingly captures the en procès character of the evolving, unfinished pedagogy we undertake. Given that varieties of neocolonialism around the world today are coterminous with and comfortably complicit with postcolonial regimes and conditions, the lesson that decolonizing is a process sans fin – a process that of necessity remains open-ended, urgent, and unfinished – is a lesson that is rapidly, if grimly, learnt.

A decolonizing medieval curriculum is also necessarily en procès – in process and on trial, subject to testing, revision, adaptation, and transformation as needed. Keeping in mind the volume’s focus on English literature, my essay will address the challenges of teaching a critical canon in a decolonizing curriculum that concentrates on English and a few European texts. It will conclude with a coda on countercanonical teaching that decenters Europe altogether by introducing students to a premodern globalism and its literatures that are scarcely cognizant of Europe’s existence at all.

A Critical Canon: Teaching Race, Empire, Class, Gender, and Sexuality in English and European Medieval Literature

I have argued in The Invention of Race in the European Middle Ages and elsewhere that international wars and territorial invasions, slavery and human trafficking, transnational migrations, trade and commerce, pilgrimage, colonization, settlement, all bear witness to a medieval Europe that contained people from everywhere – Jews, Arabs, Turks, “Gypsies,” Africans, Indians, Mongols, steppe peoples and others – and an encounter with the historical and cultural archives of the European Middle Ages refuses the fiction that a singular, homogenous, communally unified Caucasian ethnoracial population existed in an early Europe that was still Latin Christendom. The notion that an all-White Europe existed as a historical fact – and not as a fiction manufactured by centuries of assiduous identity construction – is thus a fantasy of contemporary politics and political factions in the West.

Bioarcheology attests that even in the far northwestern corner of the medieval Latin West, in insular England, there was a sizable population of non-White people. In their pathbreaking study “‘Officially Absent, but Actually Present’: Bioarcheological Evidence for Population Diversity in London during the Black Death, ad 1348–50,” Rebecca Redfern and Joseph T. Hefner’s meticulous analysis of genomic and biomorphic evidence from the graves of the interred in an East Smithfield cemetery in London during the plague years of 1348–1350 finds that fully 29 percent of those interred had African, Asian, or Afro-Eurasian ancestry.

Any teaching of race in texts from the long centuries of the European Middle Ages should thus begin by unmasking the fantasy of an all-White West in an early Europe that was supposedly the opposite of Europe today, a continent containing global populations from everywhere and a diversity of faiths. A variety of archives offer ample evidence.⁵

For instance, medieval archives attest that Jewish communities existed in virtually every country of Europe, intimately ensconced in cities and towns of the heartlands of Christendom (Invention of Race, chapter 2). Islamicate settlements in Andalusian Iberia and southern Italy and Sicily give the lie to the pretense that Muslims in Europe are a recent phenomenon (Invention of Race, chapter 3). Black Saharan Africans were seemingly everywhere in the European Middle Ages – in Roman Britain and medieval England, post-invasion Al-Andalus, in the Holy Roman Emperor Frederick II’s Lucera in Italy, all around the Mediterranean, and according to the abbot of Nogent-sur-Coucy, the crusade historian Guibert, even in northern France (Invention of Race, chapter 4).

The diaspora of the Romani (“Gypsies”) from northwestern India in the eleventh century spread a dark-skinned race of Asians across the face of western Europe. In southeastern Europe, especially Wallachia and Moldavia – territorial polities that later joined to become Romania in 1859 (with Transylvania added at a later date) – Romani became enslaved and supplied servile labor for the monasteries and the boyars, and “Gypsy” became the name of a slave race, till they were finally manumitted in the nineteenth century (Invention of Race, chapter 7).

Human trafficking, a flourishing trade undertaken by many medieval peoples, and at which the Italian republics particularly excelled, also ensured the dispersal of a variety of ethnoraces – Turks, Africans, Arabs, Mongols, Indians, and others – as domestic, military, and commercial labor around the Mediterranean. Reading the archive of slavery, we see that even so-called White Christian Europeans fail to be homogenously “White” people: because young female enslaved persons of all races, deployed predominantly as domestic labor and intruded into households – as historians have repeatedly demonstrated – furnished sexual recreation for their masters and bred new, mixed races.

Higher prices paid for young females of reproductive age, and their disproportionate representation in the slave markets and records of sale, over males, means that an unfathomable number of today’s “White” Europeans (including those White supremacists themselves) have descended from intermixed human DNA, so that future generations of ostensibly White Europeans were less than White (Reference HengInvention of Race, chapter 3).

Scientists have even discovered shared DNA between Native Americans and Icelanders. Among all the ethnoracial groups in the world, the C1e gene element is only shared by Icelanders and Native Americans, a discovery that will not surprise those who teach the Saga of Eirik the Red – one of two surviving Vinland sagas narrating the failed settler colonization of the North American continent half a millennium before Columbus – which tells of the abduction of two Native boys by Greenlanders and Icelanders who, after their defeat by the Native population, forcibly take the Indigenous children back to Europe, teach them Norse, and Christianize them (Invention of Race, chapter 5).

Any critical teaching of premodernity must needs recognize that religion forms the magisterial discourse and knowledge system of the medieval period – just as science forms the magisterial discourse and knowledge system of modern eras – and supplies the formative matrix of race-making in the long centuries of the European Middle Ages. The teaching of medieval literature thus needs an understanding of race that is apposite for the period, and a minimum working hypothesis such as this one:

Racial thinking, racial acts, racial laws, racial institutions, and racial phenomena emerge across a range of registers and crucibles of instantiation in the medieval period: invasion and occupation, nation formation and state formation, political theology, the imperatives of mercantile capitalism, holy war, settler colonization, economic adventurism, empire formation, contact and encounter, slavery, the consolidation of universal Christendom, and epistemological and epistemic change.

Eyewitness crusade chronicles, and accounts of Pope Urban II’s address at the Council of Clermont in 1095, supply ample invasion-and-occupation narratives for in-class analysis of how Muslims were racialized. Robert the Monk’s report of Urban’s address offers up Muslims as an abominable, polluting, infernal race poisoning the Holy Land, torturing and eviscerating Christians, raping women, forcibly circumcising men, and defiling church altars and baptismal fonts with the blood of the victims. In fact, Robert’s account is precisely where the rallying cry of the pilgrim militia of the First Crusade – and popularly parroted today by White extremists – is recorded: Deus vult! God wills it! (Reference HengInvention of Race 114).

The late eleventh-century racialization of an enemy in the killing fields of war births a panoply of twelfth-century ways to dehumanize enemy combatants. St. Bernard of Clairvaux, who cowrote the Rule of the Knights Templar, reassured those who might feel ambivalence toward the killing of fellow humans – an act so contrary to the commandments and teaching of Christ – that to kill a Muslim was not, in fact, to kill a fellow human. Rather than constitute homicide – the murder of a person – slaughtering a Muslim was really malicide, the extermination of incarnated evil. Muslims were not only unspeakably vile, abominable, and accursed, as Urban had said; they were not to be seen as human at all, but as personified evil. In his tract In Praise of the New Knighthood, St. Bernard thus saw no difficulty in calling for genocide to extirpate from the earth these enemies of the Christian name (Reference HengInvention of Race 115).

Religioracial strategies exercised against Muslims ingeniously herded a multiplicity of Near Eastern, Eurasian, and Asian peoples into a single collectivity defined by their religion, Islam, and characterized Islam as founded on lies, with its founding figure of the Prophet as the ultimate liar and heresiarch.

Although a number of names existed for the international enemy that Latin Christendom fought – Ishmaelites or Ismaelites, Agarenes or Hagarenes, Moors, Turks, Arabs, Persians, Ottomans, Mohammedans, or, more pejoratively, infidels, heathens, pagans, and even heretics – the preeminent name by which the enemy was known in the Latin West for centuries was Saracens.

A word of Greco-Roman origin that in late antiquity referred to pre-Islamic Arabs, Saracens streamlined a panorama of peoples – of diverse geographic origins, linguistic communities, and ethnoracial affiliations – into a single demographic defined by its adherence to Islam alone. To the Christian authors of the West, Islam thus became an essence-imparting machine that conferred essential identity. Made over into an instrument of essentialism, Islam raced all Muslim believers into a singular, homogenous whole.⁶

I point out to students – to show them how the past is never completely past but inhabits and troubles the present, rendering the present nonidentical to itself – how the medieval racialization of Islam rapidly reemerged in the twenty-first century, after 9/11, when airport security checkpoints, Western political leaders, and public discourse again began treating Muslims – of all races, nationalities, and linguistic communities – as a singular, undifferentiated whole once more.

The medieval racing of a heterogeneity of Muslims as Saracens also embedded a lie at the heart of the raced identity. The name Saracens is first used by St. Jerome (347–420 ce), the church father who says Arabs took for themselves the name of Saracens in order falsely to claim a genealogy from Sara, the legitimate wife of Abraham, to hide the shame that their true mother, Hagar, was a bondwoman. Islam’s arrival in the seventh century and its rapid succession of territorial conquests then induced a ramification of the fake etymology: Muslims now, not just Arabs, became Saracens.

Attributing the name “Saracens” to the enemy, as a sly act of self-naming by the enemy, is thus not only an ingenious lie, but a lie that ingeniously names the enemy as wily liars, in the very act of naming them as enemies. Herding diverse populations into a single race defined as originating a collective lie, Christian political theology turned on a panoply of lies that aggregated the racial character of Muslims as a collectivity of liars. Half a millennium later, in the nineteenth century, we see Muslims still bearing the name of liars, Saracens, in Walter Scott’s The Talisman.

“Saracens” are everywhere in medieval literature. In English literature, they are depicted as bloody, ruthless, and homicidal, like the mother of the “Sultan of Syria” in Chaucer’s Man of Law’s Tale in the Canterbury Tales, who has everyone slaughtered because her son wants to marry a Christian princess (Heng, Empire of Magic, chapter 4). They are also monstrous Black giants who battle Charlemagne and his elite Twelve Peers in romances such as the Middle English Sultan of Babylon, and in the French epic genre known as the chanson de geste.⁷

Medieval romance, the foremost narrative genre of the European Middle Ages, is rife with “Saracens.” If they are targets for eventual conversion to Christianity, they appear as fair and feisty princesses or martially skilled princes. If they are there to be killed, they appear as hideous, monstrous Black enemies (often giants). In 2003, I argued that the genealogical history of medieval romance is intricately intertwined with the colonial history of the Crusades, and romance is a narrative literature replete with depictions of race and crusader colonization (Empire of Magic, chapter 1).

Two Middle English crusade romances that are excellent to dissect with students are Richard Coer de Lyon and The King of Tars. In Coer de Lyon, the putative hero of the Third Crusade, the English king Richard Lionheart, becomes an unwitting cannibal when his men feed him the stewed head of a “Saracen” boy when he falls ill while on crusade. The narrative presents this as a kindly joke played on their king by his people when the English king’s desire for pork cannot be met, since they are in the Near East.

Richard instantly grows well and strong from his salvific repast, and, on discovering the source of the delicious healing remedy, the English king gleefully decides to eat other Muslims too and hosts a feast where the ambassadors of Saladin (Salah ad-Din Yusuf ibn Ayyub) – the leader of the countercrusade who historically wrested Jerusalem back from the Latin West in 1187 – are served, piping hot, the cooked heads of their freshly killed and plucked relatives, while King Richard himself devours with relish and a hearty appetite his own Muslim head, before their horrified eyes. The Muslim heads are black, with grinning white teeth – a conventional color trope in medieval romances.

An unabashed racist-imperialist-cannibal, the King of England then boisterously announces that henceforth all English Christian men will be cannibals and will consume the territory of Muslims even as they consume Muslims themselves: jubilantly, literary fantasy thus solves a historical problem of supply for Christendom’s invading armies. Literalizing a metaphor of colonization, the trope of cannibalism in this romance marshals the power and dynamics of the joke – first, in the form of a healing ruse visited by his men on Richard, then in Richard’s immediate expansion of the joke into a collective racial-colonial aggression unleashed on the Muslim enemy, whose sons and youths are devoured by a cannibal-king who uses the occasion to define all Christian Englishmen as the cannibal-conquerors of the East.

Teaching Richard Coer de Lyon alongside postcolonial criticism and Freud on the politics of the joke – especially political jokes that draw tight the circle of group identity – and crusader chronicles and letters allows students to unravel intersecting weaves of race, imperialism, colonization, nationalism, and gender and sexual identity in the medieval literature of England. The Richard of Coer de Lyon is also hypermasculine, wielding gigantic phallic weapons, and the text positions sly jokes on how Richard thrusts into his enemy from the rear.⁸

Middle English romances are thus excellent to include in syllabi of colonial texts, since they supply ample examples of how religious conversion can function as cultural capture and cultural imperialism, at a time in Europe’s history – the late fourteenth and fifteenth centuries – when it is clear, after one crusading army after another has failed to recapture Jerusalem, that military-territorial invasions are meeting with no success.

Accordingly, the late Middle English romance called The King of Tars fantasizes the successful conversion and cultural capture of a Black and “loathly” Sultan of Damascus by a fair, white-skinned Christian princess of Tars. The nuptial union of this Muslim sultan and Christian princess births a lump of flesh – without face, bone, or limbs – till, upon baptism, the shapeless lump transforms into the fairest child ever born.

This miraculous transformation arranged by a Christian sacrament persuades the sultan himself to be baptized, whereupon he instantly transforms from Black and “loathly” to White “without taint” – a spectacular performance of race-changing that amply demonstrates, for students, the politics of color in the European Middle Ages. The freshly whitened sultan then becomes a crusading king who slaughters any of his own people who refuse to become Christians too.

When religion is an essential defining factor of ethnoracial identity, successful conversion to Christianity signals racial death: the extinction of an earlier religioracial identity, upon entrance into a new religioracial formation. In literature, of course, a conversion can be confirmed as successful by a sensational miracle pivoting on color and somatic transformation.⁹

When the religious other is transformed into the same, a compensatory victory of sorts is snatched from the failure of geoterritorial military invasions; and, in literature, as in history, the conversion of kings and populations is seen to be best secured by key royal women. Evidently, there are gender-specific roles for women in cultural colonization, and medieval stories of conversion are useful to teach alongside modern colonial literatures thematizing the conversion of native others, and the role of native women subjects, under later, modern, imperial conditions.

That white is the color of Christian sanctity, and black the color of sin, the demonic, and the infernal – as The King of Tars resoundingly demonstrates – is commonplace in medieval theological understanding; and the politics of color are amply displayed in literature and art (Invention of Race, chapter 4). Beyond English literature, German, Dutch, French, and Scandinavian literatures treat with equal enthusiasm the politics of color, religion, and ethnoracial identity.

Wolfram von Eschenbach’s Parzival, arguably the finest romance of the German Middle Ages, plumbs a nexus of economic feudalism, color, and religion, when an opportunistic White Arthurian knight seeks economic gain in Islamic lands, sires a piebald son on a Black queen in the land of the Blacks, Zazamanc, and returns to European Christendom decked in the opulent wealth of the Islamic and Black East, as Zazamanc’s king.

The Middle Dutch Roman van Moriaen follows a Black knight from Moorland who has been Christianized but economically and sociopolitically disenfranchised because his White Arthurian father failed to marry his Black mother, so that the Black knight arrives in Europe seeking redress. In the Middle High German King of Moorland, Christian European knights travel the opposite route of conversionary politics depicted in The King of Tars, by becoming Black when they are seduced by Black women and converted to “heathenry.”

These literary texts highlighting the politics of color can be supplemented in the classroom by medieval art. From the end of the twelfth century and all through the thirteenth – an era of intense anti-Black virulence – the portrayal of sinners, demons, and devils as black is joined by lifelike representations of Black Saharan Africans who are dramatically staged as torturers of Christ and killers of John the Baptist. Generations of Christians in Europe were thus conditioned to see Black African men torturing Christ and slaughtering his saints.

Beyond the Crusades, a course on colonization should also scrutinize what has been called England’s first empire – accomplished with the invasion and occupation of Ireland, Wales, and, less successfully, Scotland. Undertaking the work of colonial ideology, Gerald of Wales’s ethnographic History and Topography of Ireland features lengthy descriptions of the Irish as savage, barbaric, and quasi-human, situating a twelfth-century example of the logic of evolutionary racism wherein colonial masters must tutor conquered natives to enter a civilized future on a timeline with an ever-vanishing horizon (Invention of Race, chapter 1). Paired with Edmund Spenser’s A View of the Present State of Ireland, students can see, in a transhistorical curriculum, England derisively lamenting its primitive, uncivilized, backward, savage Irish subjects across four centuries of English colonial tutelage.

Across centuries of English literature, then, the lesson imparted here to students is that evolutionary racism of the colonial kind pivots on a language of colonialism in which the “not-yet” of an evolutionary logic that seems to promise the attainment of civilizational maturity by a subject population that will guarantee equality with colonial masters becomes a perpetual deferment, a “not yet forever” (Reference Ghosh and ChakrabartyGhosh and Chakrabarty 148, 152).

Across the Atlantic, the settler colonization of North America by Icelanders and Greenlanders narrated in two Vinland sagas – the Greenlanders’ Saga and Eirik the Red’s Saga – furnishes stories of Northern Europeans swindling the Natives of the Americas in trade half a millennium before Columbus. The colonists amass valuable furs, pelts, and skins from the Indigenous and offer in return sips of milk and ever more paltry strips of red cloth. Consequently, the leader of the foremost expedition – Thorfinn Karlsefni – returns to Europe a wealthy man, lionized by the elites of Norway, buys a farm and homestead in Iceland, and – Eirik the Red’s Saga tells us – relates and controls the story of the incursions into Vinland (Invention of Race, chapter 5).

Despite the Vinland sagas’ racing of Native North Americans as naive Stone Age savages with primitive weaponry, however (in pitched battles, Native arrowheads and catapults are up against the Norse colonists’ swords and steel), what is important to emphasize to students is the abject failure of northern Europe’s eleventh-century settler colonists, for all their trade swindles and Europe’s so-called advanced metallurgy.

“Hail Vinland!” is thus a vacuous and hollow rallying cry if, unlike White extremist groups in the United States, you are acutely aware that the Natives thoroughly routed the settler colonists, forcing them to evacuate their settlements and return to Europe with their tails between their legs. Even the abduction and kidnap of the two Native boys, we see, is a compensatory squib resulting from the settlers’ failure to capture or kill the adults who are with the children.

Moreover, when we pair the Vinland sagas with a twentieth-century novella about this failed settler colonialism – The Ice Hearts, authored by a Native American, Joseph Bruchac – or a twenty-first-century Young Adult novel such as Skraelings, coauthored by a pair of Indigeous authors, Rachel and Sean Qitsualik-Tinsley, students gain a countercanonical view of medieval colonization that depicts what the standpoint of the Indigenous themselves might look like.

The vantage point of the Indigenous can also be taught through resistant reading of the dominant narratives in medieval texts. Just as Shakespeareans have taught The Tempest not from the viewpoint of the settler colonist Prospero, but from that of the displaced Indigenous – Caliban and Sycorax – and the enslaved – Ariel – the Old English epic Beowulf can be taught from the perspective of the Indigenous inhabitants in the story, Grendel and his mother, who are portrayed by the text as biblical descendants of the so-called accursed “line of Cain.”

In Beowulf, these fen-and-bog inhabitants are troubled in their ancestral homeland and habitats by the Danes, who are the settler colonists in the poem, and, with their lives disrupted, wreak revenge on the Danish king, Hrothgar, and his retainers at the royal hall, Heorot, the symbolic heart of the territorial incursions. The presumptive heroism of the young titular protagonist, Beowulf, and his later presumptive tragedy as an aged king, assume an altogether-different cast when this epic is taught as a narrative of displacement and land theft.

Finally, a decolonizing curriculum would be incomplete without a substantial component on anti-Semitism, and Europe’s treatment of an internal minority of raced aliens ensconced for centuries in the heartlands of the Latin West in all the major cities and towns: medieval Jews.

Medieval Jews were racialized for their putative somatic differences as well as religiocultural differences. Somatically, Jews were said to give off a special stench from their bodies, to possess a peculiar facial physiology, even to have horns and a tail. Jewish men were said to bleed congenitally from their nether parts, like menstruating women: a fictional blood loss that conveniently fed another fiction, the popular lie that Jews needed the blood of Christian children, whom they putatively mutilated and crucified in reenactments of the deicide of Christ (Invention of Race, chapter 2).

Simultaneously, Jews were also racialized by Christian political theology representing them as God killers, as tormentors of the consecrated host or the Virgin Mary, and as coconspirators of Satan and the Antichrist. At best, they were to be allowed to exist conditionally, according to the Augustinian tradition of relative tolerance, till the last days, at which point they would transform into Christians via conversion and cease to exist as Jews, in a mass extinction of their religioracial identity.

In England, Jews were forced to wear a badge on their chest to set them apart from the rest of the local population; forced to live in cities with a registry by which their livelihoods and economic endeavors could be monitored; forced to hew to a panoply of laws that circumscribed their movements, from the ability to walk in public during Holy Week and the ability to socialize in the homes of Christian neighbors, to the ability to pray at a permissible volume in synagogues.

Imprisoned disproportionately for coinage offenses, periodically slaughtered by mobs, and judicially executed by the state for trumped-up charges of child murder, Jews also had conversionist sermons preached at them, were taxed to the edge of penury, and, once impoverished, were manipulated in a final exploitation that produced their mass expulsion in 1290.

An extraordinary surveillance system – an economic panopticon – was devised by the state to monitor their livelihoods, a panopticon that ramified into sociocultural control well beyond economic rationality, so that by the time of their expulsion, English Jews needed permission to establish or to change their residences and were forbidden to live among Christians, in a segregation of urban geography that suggested the beginnings of the ghetto (Invention of Race, chapter 2).

With just one example – medieval Jews – before our eyes, we thus see how racial formation functioned both biopolitically, religioculturally, and socioculturally in the European Middle Ages, essentializing and defining an entire community as fundamentally and absolutely different, in interimplicated ways.

England has the well-earned distinction, I have argued, of constituting the first racial state in the history of the West (Reference HengEngland and the Jews). Racial politics in England, producing Jews as a raced internal minority through a variety of mechanisms, formal and informal, facilitated the emergence of England as an imagined political community – a medieval-style nation.

As culture, art, literature, architecture, and popular opinion functioned in the service of nation formation, state instruments and apparatuses devised for the surveillance and control of the Jewish population sped the intensification of English state formation. The realization of a totalizing edifice for the intensive sorting, manipulation, and control of Jewish lives and bodies through a panoply of measures thus cumulatively saw the de facto formation of an early racial state in the West.

One skein of English anti-Semitism is summarized in child-murder stories that depict how malignant Jews torture, crucify, stab to death, or nearly behead hapless English children, usually boys at the vulnerable age of seven or eight. The most famous of these child-murder stories is, of course, in Chaucer’s Prioress’s Tale of his Canterbury Tales. This tale can be taught as part of a cluster of child-murder stories that include a thirteenth-century Anglo-Norman ballad, Hugues of Lincoln, set down soon after the so-called murder of a young boy in Lincoln, and Marian miracle tales such as The Chorister (also known as The Child Slain by Jews), featuring a beggar boy with a sweet voice who is killed by a Jew when he sings a Marian hymn.

Chaucer’s skilled retelling of the child-murder story is extraordinary to teach, in part because the story materializes all Jews as Satan’s people, while Christians themselves are raced through a shared blood inheritance as Christians-by-descent. In this retelling, Christians are born, not just made through conversion or baptism, and they share DNA: they are y-comen of Crysten blode (“descended from Christian blood”), as Chaucer’s Prioress’s Tale puts it.

Coda: Beyond England and the West, or Decolonizing the Premodern Curriculum by Teaching the World

The teaching of a critical, revisionary canon is best paired with a countercanonical teaching that shunts aside Western literature altogether.

In 2003, I coined the term, the Global Middle Ages, in devising a spring 2004 transdisciplinary graduate seminar on early globalism, collaboratively taught by five faculty members at the University of Texas, and two visiting scholars. That pedagogical experiment, now nearly two decades old, birthed the Global Middle Ages Project (G-MAP: www.globalmiddleages.org), an international consortium of scholars engaged in research, pedagogy, digital humanities, workshops, and publications on early globalism, as well as a Cambridge University Press Elements series and an MLA volume called Teaching the Global Middle Ages.¹⁰

That history, and the work undertaken by scholars from several disciplines – archaeology and the sciences/social sciences, literary and cultural studies, the arts and humanities, digital and computational studies – is too long to rehearse here. One skein of the work being accomplished does matter, however, for decolonizing literary curricula in the academy today. In the MLA volume Teaching the Global Middle Ages, I argue for teaching an early globalism that uncenters the world through a curriculum of texts wherein every place is the world’s center, and that effectively shunts aside the hegemony of Western literature (“Reference Heng and HengThe Literatures of the Global Middle Ages”).¹¹

The guidelines and texts I offer there are not without shortcomings. The sheer variety of texts, gathered from around the world across several centuries, cultures, and languages, means that translations are essential to the project of pedagogy. Such translations, of course, need not be in Western languages – they might be in Arabic, or Chinese, or Malay, or whatever language is apposite for one’s classroom, wherever one is located in the world. Nonetheless, translation studies have taught us that the politics, epistemologies, and ethics of translation haunt all projects involving translations and must be addressed.

Moreover, these texts are often authored by sociocultural, political, or religious elites – as is common for premodern texts – and are marked by elite, perhaps imperial, interests and perspectives. They may be concerned with the establishment of key non-Western empires, such as the West African empire of Mali (taught through the epic Sundiata), or the Malacca sultanate (taught through the Sejarah Melayu, or Malay Annals).

We may garner precious knowledge of lives lived in Central Asia and on the Eurasian steppe in Ibn Fadlan’s Mission to the Volga, but only through the condescending eyes of an envoy from the Abbasid empire, who assumes the superiority of his own civilization over that of the peoples he encounters. Or an ambassador from the Timurid empire of Shah Rukh, grandson of Timur Lenkh (Tamerlane to the West) – Kamaluddin Abdul-Razzak Samarqandi – gazes with disdain on the “Black, naked savages” of India, despite admiration for the empire of Vijayanagar, in the text known as Mission to Calicut and Vijayanagar.

A monk of Uighur or Ongut ethnicity from Beijing, Rabban Sauma, travels to the lands of the West, all the way to Rome and France, and discourses on Latin Christianity, but his erstwhile travel companion becomes the Patriarch of the Assyrian Church of the East (the “Nestorian” Church), pointing to the fact that these are not underclass accounts, or histories-from-below, but the narrative accounts of political, intellectual, cultural, and religious elites, like the medieval Western literatures they displace.

Fortunately, there are also more demotic records: for example, mariners’ accounts, such as those compiled in Buzurg ibn Shahriyar’s Book of the Wonders of India; merchants’ accounts, in Abu Zayd al-Sirafi’s Accounts of China and India; and, of course, the Thousand and One Nights, a story compendium accumulated over centuries and featuring the exploits of fisherfolk and farmers, women and slaves, urban citizens and merchants (alongside kings, magistrates, jinn, demons, and the like).

In decolonizing pedagogy, a global premodern curriculum will thus need critical strategies not dissimilar to the teaching of a critical and revisionary canon of Western literature. But its advantage, relative to the English and Western canon, is that it unhinges the grip of the West and its literatures avant la lettre.

And today, when students are from everywhere around the world, surely its time has come.

Undergoing Spanish colonization and then forcibly incorporated into the United States following the 1848 Treaty of Guadalupe-Hidalgo, the United States–Mexico Borderlands have been shaped by colonial and anticolonial struggles. As Gloria E. Anzaldúa writes of the Texas–Mexico Borderlands, “this land has survived possession and ill-use by five countries: Spain, Mexico, the Republic of Texas, the U.S., the Confederacy, and the U.S. again. It has survived Anglo-Mexican blood feuds, lynchings, burnings, rapes, pillage” (Reference Anzaldúa112). These waves of colonization in La Frontera – a space encompassing northern Mexico and parts of Texas, New Mexico, Arizona, and California – were driven by the White, settler-colonial desire to appropriate Indigenous land, labor, and resources and by concomitant efforts to maintain the power to enslave diasporic Africans living in the Americas. The effects of this colonial history continue to reverberate in the Borderlands, evident in the deaths, detention, and family separation of migrants and in racial inequality, labor exploitation, and environmental destruction. Colonial power continues to meet resistance in the region, however, as activists work to protect human rights and fight for the sovereignty of Native nations and the self-determination of communities populated predominantly by Black, Indigenous, and Latinx residents.

Borderlands arts and culture contribute to these collective projects by disrupting colonial logics and sustaining the region’s communities, often performing restorative, healing work.¹ In this essay, I explore the decolonial power of two Shakespeare appropriations – Edit Villarreal’s The Language of Flowers (1991), an appropriation of Romeo and Juliet set in Los Angeles during Día de los Muertos, and Herbert Siguenza’s El Henry (Reference Zingle2014), an appropriation of Henry IV, Part I set in postapocalyptic San Diego. Both of these plays fit into the category of Borderlands Shakespeare, a term used to encapsulate a growing body of translations, adaptations, and appropriations that situate Shakespeare within the unique context of La Frontera.² Written primarily by Chicanx and Indigenous playwrights, Borderlands Shakespeare plays engage with Shakespeare’s treatment of issues such as migration, exile, family, sexuality, childbirth, and nature to reflect local concerns. Rather than ceding cultural, linguistic, artistic, or epistemological authority to Shakespeare, though, Borderlands plays such as The Language of Flowers and El Henry interpolate Shakespeare into a web of Indigenous, Chicanx, and Latinx narratives, rituals, languages, and frameworks. They take what they need from Shakespeare, embracing the Chicanx spirit of rasquachismo, defined by Tomás Ybarra-Frausto as an “underdog perspective” of “making do,” a spirit often seen in recycled yard art, adorned low riders, and funky gardens, which “engenders hybridization, juxtaposition, and integration” and favors “communion over purity” (Reference Ybarra-Frausto, del Castillo, McKenna and Yarbro-Bejarano156). In The Language of Flowers and El Henry, Shakespeare becomes part of this repurposed mixture, his plays reimagined to disrupt colonial narratives and to envision decolonial alternatives.

The United States–Mexico Borderlands may initially seem like an unlikely place to find Shakespeare. However, as in many places around the world, Shakespeare’s works have been employed as tools of colonial power in the region, used in schools and theaters to buttress the supremacy of White, Anglo language and culture.³ In the Borderlands, Shakespeare remains associated not only with the English literary canon but also with the US settler state. His works and image seem ever present, but also in some ways alien and alienating. As Ruben Espinosa argues:

Given Shakespeare’s prominence, Borderlands residents have no choice but to interact with his plays, which often supplant Black, Indigenous, and Latinx texts in “English” classrooms. Shakespeare thus proves to be a site of contestation, functioning as a representative of European, Anglo, and/or White hegemony but also as a familiar and malleable set of texts, ideas, and characters that can be incorporated into the region’s mestizaje, a term Rafael Pérez-Torres defines as “an affirmative recognition of the mixed racial, social, linguistic, national, cultural, and ethnic legacies inherent to Latino/a cultures and identities” (Reference Pérez-Torres, Bost and Aparicio25).

As scholars of postcolonial Shakespeare have demonstrated, Shakespeare remains imbricated within colonial histories and structures even as his provocative engagements with questions of power, identity, and language offer generative material through which to interrogate colonial dynamics. As Espinosa contends, “one can scrutinize Shakespeare as being a tool of colonial oppression while simultaneously recognizing that the colonial, postcolonial or neocolonial subject can appropriate that tool for themselves to offer anticolonial perspectives” (“Reference QuaysonPostcolonial Studies” 162). Enacting this principle, plays such as Aimé Césaire’s Une Tempête and Toni Morrison’s Desdemona “write back” to Shakespeare, contesting the racism within The Tempest and Othello. Other works such as Vishal Bhardwaj’s Omkara, Maqbool, and Haider decenter both Shakespeare and his English origin by emphasizing local cultures, languages, and conflicts. As Craig Dionne and Parmita Kapadia suggest, such productions “repossess” Shakespeare (Reference Dionne and Kapadia3), “shattering the notion of the universalist interpretation that privileges Western experience as primary” (Reference Dionne and Kapadia6). Postcolonial and decolonial interpretations, as Jyotsna G. Singh and Gitanjali G. Shahani contend, open Shakespeare’s plays “to competing histories and a plurality of sociopolitical contexts – the marks of the postcolonial condition” (Reference Singh and Shahani127). While reproducing Shakespeare runs the risk of reaffirming his centrality, colonized subjects continue to do so both because his plays, at times, invite anticolonial readings and also because they offer opportunities to negotiate, possess, or transform the White Western canon and, by extension, the forms of power that it represents.

Borderlands playwrights participate in this global phenomenon of Shakespeare appropriation, and their approach is influenced by their specific geographic and cultural position in a region shaped by Spanish and US colonialism and by the modes of decolonial and anticolonial thought arising from it. As Ato Quayson reminds us, “the return to Shakespeare is never only about the Elizabethan contexts in which his plays were first produced. It is also about the familiarity of Shakespeare in terms set by the worlds in which he is being reread” (Reference Quayson45). In the Borderlands, Shakespeare’s resonance is shaped not only by the ubiquity of Shakespeare in schools and theaters, but also by the contemporaneity of the plays with Spanish colonialism in the region and by their use within US colonial projects (as for example, when US troops performed Othello in Corpus Christi during the invasion of Mexico, with Ulysses S. Grant playing Desdemona).⁴ Plays such as The Language of Flowers and El Henry contend with these legacies as they reimagine Shakespeare to empower local communities and to address resonant issues related to Indigenous and Chicanx culture, politics, and relationships.

Theorists, writers, and artists in the United States–Mexico Borderlands have long emphasized the need to survive, to resist, and to think outside of the coloniality that has been imposed on the Americas since Spanish contact. As Anzaldúa writes, “This land was Mexican once / was Indian always / and is / And will be again” (Reference Anzaldúa113). Because of the encompassing nature of coloniality, theorists from this region emphasize the interrelated aspects of decolonialization, which, as Marco Antonio Cervantes and Lilliana Patricia Saldaña write, is a “political, epistemological, and spiritual project” that disrupts ongoing and systemic colonial operations of power (Reference Cervantes and Saldaña86). This project involves advocating for the sovereignty of Indigenous nations and working to return stolen land, while also creating new modes of knowledge and sociality for those who lack direct contact with their Indigenous ancestries. The work of Borderlands thinkers and activists dovetails with that of decolonial theorists such as Anibal Quijano, Walter Mignolo, and Catherine Walsh, whose writings focus mainly on Mexico and Latin America. They share with these theorists a critique of colonial modernity as well as a commitment to multiplicity and to creating pluriversal and interversal avenues that challenge Western universals and create space for alternate ways of knowing and being. As Walsh explains, “from its beginning in the Americas, decoloniality has been a component part of (trans)local struggles, movements, and actions to resist and refuse the legacies and ongoing relations and patterns of power established by external and internal colonialism” (Reference Walsh, Mignolo and Walsh17). Having experienced waves of both external and internal colonialism, Borderlands residents are an important part of this decolonial tradition, and their contributions to it are informed by Chicana feminism and by the knowledge systems of the Indigenous peoples of Mexico and what is now the Southwestern United States.

In addition to Anzaldúa’s well-known discussion of Borderlands consciousness, Emma Pérez’s articulation of the decolonial imaginary is particularly useful for understanding the power of Borderlands cultural production, including Borderlands Shakespeare. For Pérez, the decolonial imaginary is a space of active negotiation, creating a “time lag between the colonial and postcolonial, interstitial space where differential politics and social dilemmas are negotiated” (Reference Pérez6). As Pérez contends, Borderlands culture makers resist ongoing coloniality, forging this “rupturing space, the alternative to that which is written in history” (Reference Pérez6). This space accommodates a plurality of people and cultures, many of whom are oppressed and marginalized within dominant, White institutions. In this way, Borderlands cultural production aligns with the Zapatistas’ decolonial imperative to create “un mundo donde quepan mucho mundos” (a world where many worlds fit). In many cases, it also instantiates what Cathryn Josefina Merla-Watson calls “altermundos,” alternate speculative worlds that, even if dystopian, rewrite the past, present, and future to remind us that “un otro mundo es posible” (another world is possible) (Reference Merla-Watson, Merla-Watson and Olguín355).

In this essay, I situate Edit Villarreal’s The Language of Flowers and Herbert Siguenza’s El Henry within this body of Borderlands cultural production and decolonial thought. Like other Borderlands Shakespeare plays, these works interrogate Shakespeare’s position – as a writer, a set of texts, and a cultural phenomenon – within intersecting colonial histories. Borderlands adapters of Shakespeare rarely lose sight of the fact that the dates of his plays align loosely with those of the Spanish conquests in the sixteenth century, a marker that Latin American decolonial theorists identify as the origin of coloniality/modernity. In addition to its material violence, coloniality imposed new regimes of knowledge. As Quijano explains, the Spanish “repressed as much as possible the colonized forms of knowledge production” while imposing European religion, language, and philosophy (Reference Quijano541). European literature plays a role in this process, not only because discrete texts express White, colonial perspectives but also because the very idea of national literatures originates from colonial aspirations, functioning as a means of showcasing European cultural supremacy. Shakespeare, of course, has played an outsized role in this colonial project, as his plays have been employed in efforts to assert European experiences and epistemologies as universal. As Pérez writes, the work of decolonization involves rereading and retelling Western narratives, “to shift meanings and read against the grain, to negotiate Eurocentricity” (Reference Parisxvii). Borderlands Shakespeare plays perform this vital work.

Both The Language of Flowers and El Henry are set in Southern California, a center of El Movimiento, the movement for Chicano liberation begun in the 1960s that advocated for civil rights, labor rights, and political sovereignty. Both plays critique persisting structures of coloniality, seek to recover Indigenous genealogies, and express decolonial ways of knowing and being in the world. The Language of Flowers emphasizes the material violence of colonization and its linguistic, epistemological, and spiritual consequences. Indigenous languages, mythologies, and rituals persist into the present and future, Villarreal suggests, and they hold the potential to heal colonial wounds if they can be more fully integrated into Chicanx communities. By contrast, El Henry employs dystopian frameworks to trace neocolonial practices that continue to devastate Indigenous and Latinx communities in the United States and throughout Latin America. Siguenza invokes the political construct of Aztlán, the mythical homeland of Chicanxs as well as a potential revolutionary space of reclaimed sovereignty, to assess the limitations and potential of El Movimiento and to chart pathways forward. Both plays thus perform transtemporal and transhistorical work, bringing Shakespeare together with Borderlands art forms, both past and present, to contest colonial histories and to pry open space through which to imagine decolonized futures.

Colonial Violence and Indigenous Futurity in The Language of Flowers

Edit Villarreal’s The Language of Flowers is set in a Mexican American community during Día de los Muertos, or Day of the Dead, a ritual commemoration with deep roots in Mexica spiritual practices in which the deceased return to visit the living. As Jorge Huerta writes, Chicanx drama often “shows a fascination with and respect for the Chicanos’ Indigenous roots” and “affirm[s] the Chicano as Native American” (Reference Huerta and Wilmer182). Participating in this tradition, The Language of Flowers validates Chicanxs’ Indigenous heritage and draws on Mexica epistemologies, practices, and languages to negotiate and resist structures of coloniality and White supremacy. In The Language of Flowers, Mexica beliefs transform the Romeo and Juliet story, as the belief system infusing Día de los Muertos disrupts binary divisions between life and death and permits Romeo and Juliet’s love to endure in the afterlife. Furthermore, Villarreal brings both Mexica belief systems and Shakespeare’s play into contact with the technologies of the colonial state that has imposed militarized borders on Indigenous land and which inflicts harm on Chicanx communities. Through this triangulation, The Language of Flowers explores how myths from earlier periods, both Indigenous and European, might shape the present and provide a means of mitigating its violence.

Villarreal situates Los Angeles within a Pan-American Indigenous history, calling attention to the original inhabitants of the Americas, as well as to broader patterns of voluntary and involuntary migration. In the play’s opening scene, Romeo’s friend Benny, a combination of Shakespeare’s Benvolio and Mercutio, responds to the accusation that he is a “wetback” (1.1), saying:

Benny critiques colonial borders, which deem some people “citizens” and others “illegal.” Whereas the earlier migration of Indigenous people is depicted as peaceful, the play exposes the colonial violence that influences modern migrations. The corridista, a singer of Mexican ballads who replaces Shakespeare’s Chorus, calls attention to these dynamics, explaining that the city is full of “Nicaragüenses y salvadoreños / Guatemaltecos all fleeing from war / Pobres cubanos, también mexicanos / Searching for work for themselves / Bringing their families here to stay” (1.2). While Los Angeles has become a refuge for immigrants, the city can also be harsh and dangerous. As the corridista sings, “But El Lay is not for loving / El Lay is not for love / El Lay is not for dreaming / And El Lay is not for luck” (1.2). This experience is not limited to Latinxs, moreover, and Benny’s closing question, “why can’t we all get along?” references one posed by Rodney King, whose beating by two White police officers and their subsequent acquittal, sparked a series of uprisings. With this line, Villarreal calls attention to experiences of Black residents of Los Angeles, who are subjected to state-sanctioned terror. The violence that pervades the city in The Language of Flowers is thus shown to be a result of intersecting histories of enslavement, settler colonialism, and neoliberal economic policy.

In this play, Romeo and Juliet’s love is doomed not by a feud between their families but by endemic colonial violence and its aftershocks. Interpersonal conflicts do exist, though, between Mexican Americans who assimilate to White norms and those who embrace their Indigenous roots and look toward decolonial futures. Juliet’s father, Julian, is committed to upward mobility, and he hopes to marry his daughter to a young lawyer with “the right credentials” and “the right friends” (2.8) – a stark contrast to Romeo, who is an undocumented immigrant from Michoacán. Contending that “the movimiento is over” (1.2), Julian wants undocumented Mexicans to be jailed or deported. Hypocritically, he has divorced Juliet’s mother because she “had an accent,” and “was pretty but not light enough” (1.13), and he has coerced his Mexican housekeeper Maria into a sexual relationship. He and his associates reject Spanish, seeking to speak without a Mexican accent and objecting when their names are given Spanish pronunciations.

Romeo and Juliet transcend these divisions, however, largely through their embrace of Mexica traditions and the Nahuatl language. When Romeo first meets Juliet, he says in Spanish, “Encantado de conocerle,” to which Juliet responds, “You shouldn’t speak like that. I mean in Spanish” (1.6), explaining later that her father doesn’t want her to learn Spanish. Even as Juliet begins to learn Spanish, however, Romeo and Juliet find a more fundamental connection in “the language of flowers,” a phrase that encapsulates a Nahuatl linguistic genealogy and which signifies a more embodied language of love. Romeo and Juliet meet near a magnolia tree, which prompts Romeo to note, “in México, we call magnolias ‘yoloxochitl.’ Flowers of the heart,” and he later refers to Juliet herself as a yoloxochitl, explaining that “it’s Nahuatl, the language they spoke in Mexico before it was Mexico” (1.13). Romeo’s use of Nahuatl aligns with Villarreal’s emphasis on the Indigenous roots of Día de los Muertos, and the play’s imagery of flowers includes the marigolds, or cempasuchitl, which were sacred to the Mexica and which are traditionally placed on graves during Día de los Muertos to entice souls to return from the dead.

The tragic arc of Romeo and Juliet’s love story is shaped by the sequence of Día de los Muertos celebrations, from Día de los Chicos, commemorating the lives of dead children, to Día de los Difuntos, which commemorates the lives of all the dead but, in this play especially, with added emphasis on adults. The servant Manuel – who is a calavera, or skeleton, but who is seldom recognized as such – comments on Romeo and Juliet’s unusual decision to marry on Día de los Chicos, but notes that the calaveras “have two days to celebrate with them” before they “must die. Again” (1.18). Later, after Romeo has killed Tommy (the Tybalt figure), he bumps into a calavera who notes that it is now el Día de los Difuntos and says, “Yesterday we honored dead children. Today we honor adults. Which one are you?” (2.7). The question resonates, as Romeo and Juliet marry and die on the cusp of adulthood. In keeping with the core belief of Día de los Muertos, the dead are not excised from the play but rather continue to advise and in some cases torment the living, and Benny holds a special place as a spiritual guide to Romeo and Juliet after his death.

Romeo frequently thinks about his experiences in relation to Mexica mythology, and he feels especially connected to Tezcatlipoca, the god of the Great Bear constellation whose name translates as Smoking Mirror and whose worship was important in sacrificial traditions. Romeo invokes Tezcatlipoca’s smoke as a sign of the death and violence that surrounds Los Angeles but also as part of a broader, rejuvenating spiritual cycle. The city, he says, is full of “nothing but hate. You can smell it. The barrio on fire with uzis light as feathers. Tezcatlipoca’s dark smoke burning bright. Brighter than the sun. And nobody sleeps. Even at night” (1.4). He also notes, however, that Tezcatlipoca’s smoke “burns in the eyes of those in love” (1.4), and he imagines his reunion with Juliet as occurring in Tezcatlipoca’s palace. Read in relation to Mexica myth, Romeo, Juliet, and Benny function as sacrifices, but they also live on in the afterlife. While this Indigenous worldview is dismissed by some of the play’s characters, it is fundamental to Villarreal’s appropriation of Romeo and Juliet, compelling an ending in which the lovers are united in the Mexica afterlife.

Indigenous healing practices promise to facilitate Romeo and Juliet’s reunion after Romeo is deported to Mexico, but this happy ending is thwarted by state repression. The drugs that Juliet takes to feign sleep are special medicine “used by curanderos … to cleanse the body and calm the mind” (2.11). As Juliet chews the leaves, Benny’s calavera encourages her to sleep and “dream of justice” (2.15). Although Romeo purchases fatal poison from a curandera, or healer, in Mexico, he has no need for it, as he is killed by gunfire symbolizing the violence of both the militarized border and the streets of Los Angeles, twin forces that are conflated in a rapid succession of images at the end of Villarreal’s play. Upon hearing that Juliet has died, Romeo finds a trafficker to take him across the border, where he sees many calaveras also trying to catch a “ride going north” with “no tickets, no seats, no snacks, no water, no toilets, no cops” (2.21). As they begin to cross into the United States, they are ambushed by a huge figure of Uncle Sam who shoots at them. Romeo explains that he is an American, who speaks English and “has a wife there now,” but Uncle Sam rejects him, shouting, “COWARD! BEGGAR! YOU THINK AMERICA WANTS YOUR KIND?” (2.22). Soon after the ambush, Romeo finds himself in the crypt with Juliet and discovers that he has been shot. Against this backdrop, a calavera laments that “El Lay is dying” and “bleeding from knives, bullets, and rage!” (2.26). This scene suggests that bloodshed in Los Angeles itself results from ongoing colonial repression and cannot be disconnected from the racist violence that Romeo and his fellow migrants face at the border.

Although Romeo cannot reunite with Juliet in life, death brings them peace within the play’s Indigenous worldview, and the calaveras help to facilitate this passage, encouraging Juliet to kill herself and then ushering the lovers into the thirteen heavens of the Mexica afterlife. Romeo and Juliet, “children of Mexico,” are ready to begin their next journey and “become what [they’ve] always been. Flowers and song” (2.26). Amidst Tezcatlipoca’s rising smoke, Romeo and Juliet pledge not to be separated, with Romeo using Spanish and Juliet using English. Beyond merging Spanish and English, though, Romeo and Juliet end the play speaking the language of flowers, the language of the heart and of their Indigenous ancestry. With everyone walking in the direction of the sun, sacred to the Mexica, the calaveras welcome Romeo and Juliet, “Earth flowers, spirits, niños,” into their “Divina casa de flores” (2.26). Although the colonized Borderlands prove too oppressive to sustain Romeo and Juliet’s love, Indigenous frameworks provide a space of union and possibility. By staging this possibility, The Language of Flowers opens decolonial imaginaries that sustain such lifeways, ensuring that they exist not only in the afterlife but in life itself.

As it brings together Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet with the colonial histories shaping the lives of Chicanxs in Los Angeles and with Mexica rituals and epistemologies, Villarreal’s play reconfigures colonial chronologies, geographies, and hierarchies. It thus participates in a Chicanx speculative tradition that, as Merla-Watson contends, “unearths objects, images, symbols, and mythos associated with the primitive and the past and recombines them with those associated with the present and the future, thereby re-seeing colonial distinctions between the past and the future, the human and the nonhuman, the technologically advanced and the primitive” (Reference Merla-Watson, Merla-Watson and Olguín353). The Language of Flowers does not depict Mexica spiritual and linguistic practices as preceding colonial Spanish and Anglo practices but rather as coexisting with them and even superseding them, thus coding Indigenous epistemologies not as premodern or primitive but rather as contemporary and necessary for Chicanx survival. If Shakespeare’s sixteenth-century play remains in circulation, frequently taught in classrooms and performed in theaters, then so too must the Indigenous and Chicanx ways of knowing that colonial power structures seek to suppress. Shakespeare’s plays, Villarreal suggests, can be part of this decolonial project, particularly if – as with all aspects of settler colonial life – they are amenable to critique, revision, and reinterpretation from Indigenous and Chicanx perspectives.

Shakespeare in Aztlán: The Decolonial Politics and Poetics of El Henry

Whereas The Language of Flowers dramatizes the healing powers of Indigenous spirituality, Herbert Siguenza’s El Henry emphasizes the political aspects of decolonization. In this appropriation of Henry IV, Part I, Henry is the son of Chicano gang “king” El Hank. Rather than assuming his role as heir, though, Henry prefers to hang out with Fausto, the play’s Falstaff figure, and his other friends in a local bar. Set in Aztlan City, a postapocalyptic San Diego, California, El Henry explores the successes and limitations of the Chicano Movimiento and reconfigures histories of colonial oppression and political activism to imagine decolonized futures. Aztlán was a key signifier in El Movimiento, a political imaginary encompassing much of what was once northern Mexico and promising a unified homeland for Chicanxs. As Rudolfo Anaya and Francisco Lomelí write, “Aztlán brought together a culture that had been somewhat disjointed and dispersed, allowing it, for the first time, a framework within which to understand itself” (Reference Anaya, Lomelí, Anaya and Lomelíii). In contrast to the aspirations of El Movimiento, the Aztlan City of El Henry has been established not through political revolution or cultural reclamation, but rather through the exodus of White people from regions increasingly populated by Mexican Americans and other Latinxs. Those inhabiting this failed revolutionary space, however, find ways to maintain their cultures, languages, and livelihoods, and their lives bear a resemblance to those of Chicanxs living in barrios that have been abandoned within White-centric neoliberal economies. Similarly, Siguenza infuses Shakespeare with this resilient energy, reimagining Henry IV, Part I’s exploration of political power and intergenerational tension from Chicanx perspectives.

Part of La Jolla Playhouse’s Without Walls series and performed in San Diego’s gentrifying but still largely Mexican American East Village, El Henry incorporates Shakespeare into Chicanx space and into Chicanx political, linguistic, and theatrical lineages. Siguenza explicitly aligns El Henry with Chicanx teatro, a tradition to which The Language of Flowers also belongs. Teatro traces its lineage to El Teatro Campesino, which arose from within the movement of the United Farm Workers (UFW), led by César Chávez and Dolores Huerta, for better pay and working conditions. Founded by Luis Valdez in 1965 on the picket lines of the Delano Grape Strike in Delano, CA, El Teatro Campesino performed scenes, or actos, that used humor and political satire to advocate for the rights of immigrant laborers. Teatro evolved to address a range of political and social concerns and to validate Chicanx identities. Singuenza himself was a founding member of Culture Clash, a theater troupe that adapted teatro to urban Los Angeles and sought to create “theatre of the moment, written and performed first for the people and communities on which it is based, and secondly for a broader audience” (quoted in Reference ZingleZingle 57). This tradition, as Matthieu Chapman observes, shapes El Henry and is strikingly evident in Siguenza’s decision to cast Kinan Valdez and Lakin Valdez, sons of El Teatro Campesino founder Luis Valdez, in the key roles of El Henry of Barrio Eastcheap and El Bravo of Barrio Hotspur (Reference Chapman61–62).

Just as El Henry replaces El Movimiento’s liberatory nationalist image of Aztlán with a more dystopian version, it also updates teatro both for the twenty-first century and for a future potentially characterized by intensifying poverty, disenfranchisement, and environmental disaster. In particular, Siguenza infuses teatro with a cyberpunk ethos, participating in an artistic movement that Catherine S. Ramírez terms Chicanafuturism, a speculative aesthetic that brings “the high-tech and rasquache together” to envision alternate futures (Reference Ramírez, Merla-Watson and Olguínx). As Lisa Rivera suggests, Chicanx cyberpunk art “often flew in the face of the nationalist logics of el movimiento, whose writers and artists largely aimed to recover and preserve a core, essential, and pre-Columbian cultural identity erased by centuries of colonial oppression and exploitation” (Reference Rivera, Merla-Watson and Olguín96). Chicanx cyberpunk and Chicana futurism are less concerned with essential identities than with the ways in which global capitalism has damaged and transformed Indigenous cultures and people. As Rivera writes, cyberpunk illuminates challenges “that are more unique to the new millennium, including the rise of globalization and information technologies and the new hybrid identities made possible by both” (Reference Rivera, Merla-Watson and Olguín96). With its reconfiguration of Aztlán – and its light critiques of the machismo embedded not only within Chicano politics but also within gang culture and in Shakespeare’s Henry IV – El Henry participates in this Chicanx dystopian project. It moves beyond the essentialist, nationalist politics of El Movimiento and envisions modes of Chicanx survival even in the most hostile of circumstances.

While El Henry emphasizes ongoing structures of coloniality, it also celebrates the vibrancy of working-class Chicanx life and art and celebrates the rasquache ethic of “making do” in contexts in which wealth has been hoarded by White elites. As the play begins, audiences learn that White people have, predictably, taken the most valuable resources with them. Channeling the resourcefulness of teatro, which was often performed in union halls and on flatbed trucks, El Henry’s set is comprised of “a collection of trash, old signage, tires and old television sets” with “trash and graffiti along the brick walls” (Prologue). As Fausto welcomes the audience, he emerges from a pile of trash and explains how this situation came about:

El Henry’s Aztlan has arisen through the collapse of the neoliberal, neocolonial order, a collapse that the United States–Mexico border could not withstand, thus allowing Mexicans to join longtime residents of former San Diego. Preceding this collapse, racial capitalism had only become more violent, with its effects felt most acutely in Indigenous communities. For example, audiences learn about a generation of Mexiclops, “one eyed Mexican cowboys” who were born after a nuclear explosion in Oaxaca in 2020. Despite these violent colonial legacies, though, Chicanxs have their own space in Aztlan City, one in which, as Chapman contends, “rasquache becomes a way of life,” with people “repurpos[ing] the garbage left behind into what they need to survive” (Reference Chapman64). Chapman points out, moreover, that Siguenza’s decision to stage Aztlan in a gentrifying neighborhood in San Diego works to “decolonize the land in the colonizers’ minds” by gesturing to both a precolonial past and a postcolonial future, thus exposing the erasures effected by the United States’ colonial land claims (Reference Chapman67). Land often considered by White residents to be simply part of the United States is reframed to highlight ongoing Indigenous presence. El Henry thus challenges the historical processes that colonized the land of the Kumeyaay People and that have displaced many Mexicans and Central Americans, causing them to migrate to the region. Furthermore, through its invocation of Aztlán, the play reveals that this land may not remain in colonial possession forever.

Colonial power structures persist in El Henry’s Aztlan, however, even in the absence of White people. The revolution has been thwarted by respectable “Hispanics” who have taken over the violent apparatuses of the colonial state and make liberal use of its police force. This situation leaves a network of street gangs as the only viable avenue through which Chicanxs can attain power. As Fausto explains:

The Hispanic state has appropriated the Indigenous and activist imagery of El Movimiento: their dollars are called Cesar Chavezes; their city seal looks like a Mayan calendar with the UFW eagle over it; and their slogan is “Gracias, De Colores, Viva La Raza, and God Bless Aztlan” (1.1). However, the Hispanics employ the rhetoric and political strategies of conservative Anglo politicians. When El Henry’s rival El Bravo kills a member of the Hispanic Police, the Mayor declares war on the Chicano gangs. The Mayor’s political philosophy is revealed by her quotation of “the great Anglo leader Ronald Reagan, on whom we Hispanics base our political ideals,” in her statement, “when you can’t make them see the light, make them feel the heat” (1.1).

The Hispanic state seeks to punish El Hank not because he is responsible for killing the policeman, but because he has begun distributing water to the barrios. As El Hank explains, “the Hispanics don’t care if I’m dealing drugs and guns, but once I got into legit water they had to get me on something to put me away” (1.2). Amidst Aztlan’s economic and environmental catastrophe, water has become a prized commodity, horded by elites and replacing “guns and coca” (1.2) in illicit trafficking circuits. In this violent, underresourced world, El Hank facilitates a network in which Chicano gangs profit from prostitution, gunrunning, and drug dealing. But the gangs also play an important role in the community, attaining resources for people who would otherwise be left destitute by the state, lacking access even to clean drinking water. As El Hank explains:

For these reasons, El Henry finally assumes his role in the familia, seeing it as his responsibility to resist colonial power and to ensure Chicanx survival in this postapocalyptic world. He embraces his destined role, fashioning himself as an Indigenous cyberpunk hero, described as both “an Aztec warrior ready for battle” (2.3) and “a brave Cholo warrior of the future!” (2.4).

El Henry’s victory against El Bravo, however, brings not revolution but only a détente, with structural oppression inhibiting true decolonial politics. Henry and his father are able to avoid prison and to vanquish their enemies, but to do so, El Hank must fund the Mayor’s reelection campaign. It initially seems as though El Henry’s reign will be more compassionate than his father’s, but his promise to pardon all the rebels is quickly shown to be a lie as he takes them outside and shoots them instead. El Henry might succeed in establishing water-distribution centers for the barrios, but this work is contingent upon his family’s support for the Reaganite mayor, who polices and impoverishes Chicanx communities. Poverty, Siguenza suggests, engenders violence among Chicanxs, who must compete for the meager resources left to them and who are seduced into colluding with oppressive state power. Such structures of coloniality, El Henry reminds audiences, were also enforced both by the English monarchy rendered in its Shakespearean source and by the governments of Spain, Mexico, and the United States that so greatly influenced the history of California.

Despite its pessimistic ending, though, El Henry offers a hopeful decolonial vision, rewriting a canonical Anglo story within Chicanx contexts to imagine alternate realities. This decolonial project is evident not only in El Henry’s plot and its repurposing of gentrified space but also in the language practices it employs and implicitly validates. Caló, which blends urban Spanish and English, is the dominant language of the play, and this Chicanx vernacular is used throughout El Henry without translation for monolingual Anglos or for Spanish speakers accustomed to more state-sanctioned linguistic registers. Glancing humorously at the play’s deviation from its Shakespearean source, Fausto jokes that the Mexiclops, who primarily speak Spanish, “don’t understand the Queen’s Spanglish!” (1.5). The Anglo theatrical tradition is also satirized in the play, and Fausto is compared to histrionic Shakespearean actors, “those putos that used to do theatre in Balboa park, the Old … English players or something” (1.7). In keeping with the rasquache ethos of Chicanx speculative fiction, El Henry repurposes existing narratives, languages, and practices – those of Shakespeare as well as those of El Movimiento – to write Chicanxs into the future and to inspire humor and joy, even amidst ongoing structures of coloniality.

Toward a Culturally Sustaining Shakespeare Pedagogy

Both The Language of Flowers and El Henry contribute to the decolonial project of the Chicanx speculative arts, which, as Merla-Watson and Ben Olguín demonstrate, “project a utopian spirit through the genre’s capacity for incisive social critique that cuts to the bone of shared pasts and presents” (Reference Merla-Watson, Merla-Watson and Olguín6). As they write, “the Latin@ speculative arts remind us that we cannot imagine our collective futures without reckoning with the hoary ghosts of colonialism and modernity that continue to exert force through globalization and neoliberal capitalism” (Reference Merla-Watson, Merla-Watson and Olguín4). Shakespeare is one such ghost, as his works continue to be mobilized in the interests of coloniality and White supremacy in the United States–Mexico Borderlands. Rather than treating Shakespeare as sacrosanct, Villarreal, Siguenza, and their fellow Borderlands playwrights take what is of use from Shakespeare’s plays, recycling them to meet the needs of their communities. They actively confront colonial power, simultaneously engaging with Shakespeare’s nuanced explorations of political power and “delinking” from colonial canons in order to “build decolonial histories” (Reference MignoloMignolo x). In this way, Borderlands Shakespeare ultimately decenters Shakespeare, incorporating his plays into the hybrid histories, cultures, and languages of the region to create space in which to tell stories of and for La Frontera.

Because of its complex negotiation of – and resistance to – coloniality, Borderlands Shakespeare, like other postcolonial and decolonial appropriations, offers generative approaches from which we might learn as we seek to make English literary studies less colonial. Teaching Borderlands Shakespeare productions has become central to my own work at Texas A&M University–San Antonio, a Hispanic Serving Institution on the Southside of San Antonio, situated near the former Mission Espada on land that was home to the Payaya, Coahuilteca, Lipan Apache, and Comanche Peoples. Many A&M–SA students share these heritages, although their ancestral ties have in many cases been attenuated by the region’s sequential occupations. On our campus, colonial histories are omnipresent, palpable in the lived experiences of students and in the curricula that we teach – particularly when White settlers like me teach Shakespeare, an author often viewed as the pinnacle of the White colonial canon.

Teaching Borderlands Shakespeare – and other Shakespeare appropriations by BIPOC artists – can contribute to our efforts to employ culturally sustaining pedagogy, described by Reference ParisDjango Paris as an approach that honors students’ languages, traditions, and experiences as vital funds of knowledge. Borderlands Shakespeare is rooted in the communities to which many of our students belong, and it prioritizes place-based Indigenous and Chicanx epistemologies, languages, and practices. Reading Borderlands Shakespeare empowers students to do the same and to bring their own cultural, racial, and linguistic knowledges to bear on material often considered White property. Such culturally sustaining practices mitigate the epistemic violence so often perpetrated in English classes, which often implicitly devalue students’ ways of knowing, speaking, and reading. Borderlands Shakespeare plays, moreover, offer methods – for both students and instructors – of engaging with canonical texts and colonial traditions. Guided by the rasquachismo of Borderlands Shakespeare, readers are empowered to decide which aspects of the colonial canon they wish to reject entirely and which they wish to repurpose for their own ends. Shakespeare becomes not an arbiter of personal taste or cultural value, but rather a potential interlocutor, one of many authors whose work may be revised and reconfigured in the interests of articulating decolonial futures.

Black Lives Matter, Rhodes Must Fall, and other movements have reinvigorated the demand to “decolonize” universities across the world. BLM may have originated in the USA in response to the toxic legacy of racial slavery, but the targeting of Black lives that saw the murder of George Floyd is endemic elsewhere. Even here in Scotland, where according to the 2011 census only just over 1 percent of the population is of African or Caribbean descent (compared to 2.7 percent Asian), Shako Bayoh was killed by police in 2015 in depressingly similar circumstances. BLM has shone new light on the ongoing racial oppression of African Americans, Latinx, and other ethnic minorities in “the land of the free.” Of course, the United Kingdom shares a slavery legacy with her former American colonies, even if, as Simon Gikandi has argued, slavery tends to feature as “the political unconsciousness of Britishness” rather than a manifest presence, geographically located as it was “yonder awa” in her American or Caribbean colonies (Reference GikandiGikandi, Slavery; Reference Morris, Benchimol and McKeeverMorris, “Yonder Awa”). The most intensive phase of this crime against humanity coincided with the literary period known as romanticism, although the coincidence was only belatedly acknowledged by scholars of the period.

Britain’s “imperial meridian” (1780–1830) saw the colonial and economic power base shifted from the West to the East Indies, partly in response to abolitionism, as well as the meteoric transformation of an English trading company into the expansionist “Company State” in South Asia (Reference BaylyBayly). Beyond the enslavement of Africans, Britain is also historically accountable for crimes perpetrated in other parts of its global empire, much of it only formally decolonized in my own lifetime. It’s conveniently forgotten that in early nineteenth-century Britain, “everybody has an Indian uncle,” in the words of that archimperialist Thomas De Quincey, “the English opium-eater” (Reference De QuinceyDe Quincey 7:22). Resources extracted from “the East and the West Indies,” as well as southern Africa, southeast Asia, and the settler colonies of Canada, Australia, and Aotearoa New Zealand, underpinned the rise of industry, commerce, and civic institutions and enabled Britain’s rise to paramount global power in the Victorian and Edwardian eras. At a high price not only for colonized peoples, but also for the planet as a whole – as eco-historians Jason Moore and Andreas Malm have argued, the “Capitalocene” (a better designation for our current environmental crisis than the “Anthropocene”) was based on the colonialist “world-praxis” of “Cheap Nature,” the “fossil-imperial metabolism that undergirded the post 1825 development of [the British] empire” (Reference MooreMoore 600; Reference MalmMalm 236). The effects of colonialism and postcolonialism transformed every aspect of life in the UK – including mass migration to the metropolis from the former colonies in the wake of independence, and more recently the ever-more urgent refugee crisis, with accompanying reactionary backlash.

Nonetheless, UK cultural and educational institutions have been slow to address the role of global empire (benignly repackaged as “the Commonwealth”) in the history of “our island nation,” in anything other than nostalgic or even triumphalist terms. Even in more progressive versions of the curriculum, schooling in the UK tends to focus on the American Civil Rights movement rather than historical events nearer at home: leading to David Olusoga’s criticism of “our obsession with American racism … as a diversionary tactic from looking at our own history.” Olusoga recalls history lessons on the Industrial Revolution in his own school in northwest England, which simply ignored “the 1.8 million African Americans who produced the cotton which went into the 4,500 mills of Lancashire. We miss out the linkages between what we think of as mainstream history and what we’ve ghettoised as ‘black history’ – and yet it is just British history” (Olusoga). The same applies here in Scotland – visitors to the UNESCO World Heritage Site at the New Lanark Cotton Mills, for example, learn that millowner Robert Owen was a pioneer of “progressive education, factory reform, humane working practices, international cooperation, etc.,” proving that “the creation of wealth does not automatically imply the degradation of its producers.” Hardly any mention is made of the “cheap nature” that undergirded this industrial miracle, namely that the raw cotton spun in New Lanark was picked by enslaved Africans in Georgia, New Orleans, Trinidad, Jamaica, Grenada, and Guadeloupe. Nor the fact that Owen “consistently endorsed the arguments of slave masters and specifically opposed emancipation in the late 1820’s … repeatedly employ[ing] the time-honoured anti-abolitionist rhetoric that ‘white slaves’ in Britain had it worse than black slaves in the colonies” (Reference Morris, Benchimol and McKeeverMorris, “Problem” 120). The first step in decolonizing the curriculum must be to uncover and square up to the past and continuing legacy of colonialism upon our culture.

Institutional and National Reflections

Priyamvada Gopal has argued that “the university cannot be decolonised independently of society and economy, but it can be a site where these questions are frontally addressed towards wider change, not least in habits of mind … [this] should not be conceived of as a sop to ethnic minorities or a concession to pluralism but as fundamentally reparative of the institution and its constituent fields of inquiry” (Reference GopalGopal 11, 8). As university teachers of literature, we have an ethical responsibility to address these issues in our own areas of practice: institutionally through promoting diversity, equality, and antiracism; and pedagogically, by reflecting on our discipline’s history and future direction, as well as our positionality. In most of Britain’s older universities, the connection with empire is never far from the surface. My own Glasgow “Regius Chair of English Language and Literature” was established by Queen Victoria in 1862 in response to the introduction of competitive examinations for the Indian Civil Service (ICS), in which one-quarter of possible marks were awarded to candidates for proficiency in English language and literature. Thomas Macaulay, the architect of the ICS reforms, believed that English literary education would support “men who represent the best part of our English nation” in the colonies, disseminating “that literature before the light of which impious and cruel superstitions are fast taking flight on the banks of the Ganges … wherever British literature spreads, may it be attended by British virtue and British freedom” (quoted in Reference BaldickBaldick 71). It was feared that young Scottish men lacking the opportunities of an “English” literary education (as well as any of the sense of the “Englishness” that Macaulay confidently promoted) would lose out in the stakes of becoming imperial Britons, given that an ICS career was a jewel in the imperial crown.

The history of Glasgow’s Regius Chair exposes how the birth of our own university discipline of English was underpinned by imperial concerns. Initiated in 1762 with Edinburgh’s Chair of Rhetoric, the rise of university English followed a transperipheral trajectory, crossing the Atlantic from Scotland to the American colonies in the eighteenth century, spreading over the red parts of the world map in the century to come, although only making a late footfall in Oxford in 1892 and Cambridge in 1922. In one sense, the discipline of English literature could be said to be coterminous with the rise (and fall) of the British Empire itself (Reference CrawfordCrawford). That is why, writing in 1968 in postcolonial Kenya, Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o hit the central target when he advocated the “abolition of the English Department.” Ngũgĩ questioned the “role and situation of an English department in an African situation and environment … just because we have kept English as our official language, there is no need to substitute a study of English culture for our own. We reject the primacy of English literature and culture” (Reference Ashcroft, Ashcroft, Griffiths and TiffinAshcroft 439). That was back in 1968: as the editors of the present volume ask: “Why has the discourse on decolonization come after postcolonial thought and theory sprang fully formed from the brow of imperial history in the 1980s and 1990s? … It seems strange to return to the time of decolonization in what, strictly speaking, is the postcolonial era.”

Glasgow University has an overwhelming preponderance of White staff and students, like the city itself, and much remains to be done to improve diversity in a university that aspires to be a global institution. However, to its credit, it has taken a proactive lead in slavery reparation among UK universities. In 2017, it commissioned a report, the findings of which acknowledged that the university historically benefited from wealth derived from chattel slavery estimated to be between £16 and £198 million (2016 values), although this was only a fraction of monies derived from colonial capital in toto, much of it deriving from South and East Asia (University of Glasgow, “Slavery”). The Atlantic port city of Glasgow held a virtual monopoly on the late eighteenth-century tobacco trade, and subsequent commerce in cotton and sugar: and “of all British universities with antecedents in the period of British slavery (c.1600–1838), only [Glasgow] Old College was located in a city that was rapidly transformed whilst closely connected with Atlantic slave economies.”¹ Although it petitioned against the slave trade in 1792, report author Stephen Mullen argued that “the institution was pro-slavery in practice” (Reference MullenMullen 229). Accordingly, Glasgow has committed £20 million to bursaries and studentships in a historic agreement with the University of the West Indies, reported as a reparative justice initiative. These initiatives (following Oxford’s All-Souls Codrington project) were inspired by Brown and Georgetown Universities in the USA, as well as by the Rhodes Must Fall movement in South Africa, driven by the student-led decolonization protests. In turn, they have inspired similar initiatives at Cambridge, Nottingham, Bristol, and Aberdeen universities.²

As part of the new campus development, Glasgow University’s new Learning and Teaching Hub has been named in honor of James McCune Smith (students have already dubbed it “the Jimmy Mac”), an emancipated enslaved person from the USA, who graduated in medicine from the University of Glasgow in 1837. In so doing, he became the first African American to receive a medical degree, an opportunity not open to him in his native country. In 2021, the university launched a “James McCune Smith” doctoral scholarship to provide full funding for Black UK students to conduct research. Welcome as this is, it is only the tip of the iceberg: in 2019, the University’s “Understanding Racism, Transforming University Culture” report uncovered disturbing evidence that half of all ethnic minority students had been racially harassed since beginning their studies at the university, eliciting an apology from the Principal (VC) and a comprehensive action plan to address racial inequality on campus.

Gopal writes pertinently on the importance of attending to historical context in decolonizing universities across the world: “there is no one-size-fits-all formula, no laundry list of action points for universities to table … posing the right question for each context is itself part of the work of intellectual decolonization” (Reference GopalGopal 9). The cultural location of my university is complicated by the current crisis of the British Union: Glasgow’s role as Scotland’s biggest city places it at the heart of the urgent constitutional debate concerning Scotland’s independence from the UK. Now supported by a slim majority of the Scottish population in the wake of the Brexit agreement (62 percent of Scots voted Remain), the “Indy 2 movement” has gathered further strength in response to the current UK government’s curtailment of devolved powers to the Scottish government and the rise of English ethnonationalism and imperial nostalgia. Many of its supporters see Scottish independence as a significant chapter in the ongoing decolonization of the British state: although dominated by a nationalist paradigm, it interprets Scotland as a “civic” rather than an “ethnic” community and is orientated toward independence within the European Union.

The argument that Scots were also “colonized” by England is now discredited, except among a few fringe nationalists: recent work by Scottish historians underline the fact that many Scottish individuals and institutions did extremely well out of the British (never “English”) empire (Reference MackillopMackillop). Historically, the 1707 Act of Union between the two nations opened England’s colonies to Scottish agents and capital, enabling Scotland’s proactive role in the transatlantic slave trade, as well as other forms of colonial exploitation in the Caribbean and South/East Asia. Even if only twenty-seven recorded slave ships sailed from Scottish ports between 1706 and 1766 (compared to 1,500 from Bristol alone), the Atlantic trade, as well as personal fortunes made by Scots merchants, planters, and “sojourners,” had a transformative effect on the Scottish economy and society. The economic benefits were felt more strongly in Scotland than England, Ireland, or Wales, in part because Scotland was poorer than England, with a small but well-educated population well fitted to provide “human capital” for empire (Reference DevineDevine).³ As Sir Walter Scott wrote in 1821, “India is the corn chest for Scotland, where we poor gentry must send our younger sons as we send our black cattle to the south” (quoted in Reference CaineCaine 7). “Deprovincializing” Scotland and embracing independence means accepting historical responsibility for empire, not blaming it on England. So how, I wonder, can Ngũgĩ’s question about the “role and situation of an English Department” apply in an ancient Scottish university, when in stark contrast to Ngũgĩ’s Kenyan students, Scots were beneficiaries rather than victims of British imperialism? The question is especially pertinent to me as a socially privileged Scot, born in Glasgow, whose privilege largely accrued from the profits of “Scotland’s empire.” My grandfather’s ascent into the British middle classes from the ranks of the Orcadian peasantry was enabled by a career in the Imperial Bank of India: my father was born in Tamil Nadu, as well as seeing war service in the Indian army. Many friends and colleagues in Scotland as well as England can trace similarly colonial family backgrounds.

For the last decade and a half, my research has focused on Scottish romanticism (Ossian, Robert Burns, Sir Walter Scott, etc.), on “domestic” travel writing, and more recently on Gaelic literature in the same period, largely unstudied outside Celtic departments.⁴ Until recently, Scottish romanticism was itself marginalized within the English literary canon, despite the central importance of Scottish publishing, critical reviews, novels, and poetry in the period 1750–1850. Therefore, I have my own institutional issues as a professor of “English Language and Literature,” teaching Scottish as well as English romantic writing in an English department, located in a university that also boasts (uniquely) a Scottish Literature department. Scottish language and literature are also taught and studied in Glasgow’s department of English Language and Linguistics, as well as in the Celtic and Gaelic department, but despite some excellent collaborative projects, there is limited traffic between the four departments. Ngũgĩ’s proposal concerning the “English Department” has a distinctive inflection in an institution specializing in Scotland’s literary culture, which spans three Indigenous languages, Scots, Gaelic, and English. A similar story could doubtless be told about other UK universities in Wales, as well as in Ireland, undermining the notion of any unified “English” curriculum on these islands, which postcolonialists often set against an equally monolithic colonial “other,” largely based on the experience of the North American “English Department.”

In the romantic period, the multinational British state was an assemblage of diverse national cultures, in the case of Ireland recently yoked to Britain by military force, after a major uprising in 1798, the year of Wordsworth’s Lyrical Ballads. Saree Makdisi has argued for a program of “Occidentalism” in the case of Georgian England, still too internally heterogeneous to represent a civilizational ideal, which worked by “locating and clearing a space for a white, Western self who could be more effectively counterposed to the Orient out there” (Reference MakdisiMakdisi 26). Studying this kind of internal “uneven development” during the romantic period is perhaps even more urgent in the case of Scotland, Ireland, and Wales, where large segments of the populations couldn’t speak English and identified in widely variable degrees with the British crown and the established churches. It should remind us of the importance of the critical study of “Whiteness” – hardly a normative category in this or any period – in any plan to decolonize the romantic curriculum. One of the great possibilities of postcolonial study is its power to break open silos based on oversimplified national canons, as in the potential for collaborative work in my own university with colleagues in Gaelic, as well as modern language departments engaging with Francophone and Hispanic postcolonial literatures. I regret that in my case this opportunity does not extend to non-European languages such as Persian, Bengali, Hindi, and Swahili, because I have no doubt the future direction of postcolonialism will increasingly challenge the monoglot regime of “global English.”

Rethinking the Romantic Curriculum

After these reflections on positionality, the rest of my essay hazards some proposals for decolonizing romanticism, in terms of canon, cultural geography, and genre. I stress that these are based on my personal research interests, and my experience of teaching romanticism students in Glasgow: other colleagues with other interests and in other locations will have different priorities. They are, first, to “trouble the universalising function” of the White canon by considering “black romanticism” (meaning more than “just add black writer and stir”) (Reference YoungquistYoungquist 5); second, to remap the cultural geography of British and European romanticism in relation to global empire; third, to include the genre of travel writing alongside poetry, drama, and the novel, given its role in establishing what Mary Louise Pratt calls the “planetary consciousness” of European romanticism. My 1992 book British Romantic Writers and the East: Anxieties of Empire sought to rethink romanticism in the light of the pioneering work by the first postcolonial generation of Said, Bhabha, Spivak, Parry, and so on. Engaging with Said’s compelling narrative of the relations between orientalism and colonial power, the book proposed a more anxious, unstable, and contradictory representation of the oriental “other” than Said would allow, in the works of a group of canonical male romantics: Byron, Shelley, Coleridge, and De Quincey.⁵ In the introduction, I wrote that “the internal decolonization of our culture, ethnically heterogeneous and multiracial, as well as European, must proceed by brushing our imperial history against the grain, to adapt Benjamin’s aphorism” (Reference LeaskLeask, British Romantic Writers 12). My focus on Asia excluded considerations of slavery: along with other studies, Simon Gikandi’s Slavery and the Culture of Taste (Reference Gikandi2014) has more recently offered a powerful conceptual framework for placing racial slavery at the heart of literary studies in this period, exposing how the brutality and ugliness of enslavement actively shaped theories of taste, beauty, and practices of high culture, fundamental to European enlightenment and romanticism. Excerpts from Gikandi and other critics would frame seminar readings, as well as offering a revisionist angle on traditional topics such as the romantic imagination.

Despite the impressive body of work on romantic orientalism, colonialism, and slavery published since British Romantic Writers and the East thirty years ago, it is arguable how much that sort of critique has changed the way in which romanticism is taught at university level. One problem is that the voices of BME and other colonized peoples were marginalized in my own book, even as I acknowledge their “subversions” of the imperialist project. I now reflect with interest on my parenthetical statement in the book’s introduction, referring to anticolonial resistance: “(this was largely the work of the colonized peoples who, with the exception of the remarkable Rammohun Roy, are a silent, but informing presence throughout my book)” (Reference Leask2). Maybe the colonized were silent in my 1992 book, but certainly not in history, even in English literary history. In rethinking my romantic canon, I draw inspiration from Aravamudan’s notion of “tropicopolitans” (a term I prefer to “subaltern” in discussing writer/activists), defined as “the residents of the tropics, the bearers of its marks, and the shadow images of more visible metropolitans [who] challenge the developing privileges of Enlightenment cosmopolitans” (Reference AravamudanAravamudan 4).

At the same time, I would argue that “Black romanticism” exists as more than just a Derridean “trace” (or “shadow image”) in the literary archive. For instance, Olaudah Equiano’s Interesting Narrative (Reference Equiano and Caretta1789) has proved one of the most popular and engaging texts that I have taught, a generically hybrid work, part-slave narrative, part-conversion narrative, part-autobiographical memoir, and part-travel account. An instructive dialogue can be set up between Equiano and the Scottish-Jamaican radical Robert Wedderburn’s The Axe Laid to the Root (1817) and The Horrors of Slavery (1824): this also exposes an interesting Scottish connection, given that Wedderburn was only two years younger than Robert Burns, whose coronation as “Scotia’s Bard” saved him from taking employment as a “negro driver” in Jamaica in 1786. Wedderburn’s radicalism also exposes the connections with the Haitian revolution of 1791, which in the annals of colonial romanticism takes on equivalent importance to the role of the French Revolution in canonical romanticism: “Jamaica will be in the hands of the blacks within twenty years,” Wedderburn wrote, “Prepare for flight, ye planters, for the fate of St Domingo awaits you” (Reference McCalmanMcCalman 86). As Joel Pace has suggested, another way of combating the “double consciousness” of conventional literary studies would be to read, for example, West African-born, formerly enslaved Phyllis Wheatley’s Poems on Various Subjects (1773) in relation to verse by canonical romantics, given their concerns with subjectivity, spirituality, and the powers of nature (Reference PacePace 116–18). An equally productive comparison might be with the poetry of White woman abolitionists such as Helen Maria Williams, Hannah More, and Anne Yearsley, all of them aware of Wheatley’s verse in promoting their sentimentalized critique of chattel slavery. Finally, a product of the later years of romanticism, The History of Mary Prince (1831) is a more conventional but equally disturbing narrative, and the first biography (albeit partially ghostwritten) of a Black enslaved woman published in Britain (Reference SalihSalih).

Moving to “the East Indies” is to engage with a very different form of cultural encounter, following the East India Company’s annexation of much of the former Mughal empire, aptly described by William Dalrymple as “the supreme act of corporate violence in world history” (Reference Dalrymplexxxiii). British orientalists such as Warren Hastings and Sir William Jones established hegemonic power in the subcontinent by interpreting and translating Sanskrit culture as (a lesser) equivalent to the legacies of Graeco-Roman civilization in Europe. For all their (relative) cultural sympathy, Jones and his ilk sought to mummify modern India in a timeless Brahminical past, largely ignoring its more recent Mughal history: by contrast, South Asian writers of the romantic period experienced colonial education and institutions as the shock of modernity, stimulating them to reinterpret their own rich cultural traditions. First on my list would be the Indo-Muslim munshi and poet Mirza Abu Talib Khan, whose Persian-language account of his travels in Europe and Britain in 1799–1803 were translated by the Irish scholar Reference StewartCharles Stewart and published in London in 1810, representing one of the first “reverse travelogues” descriptive of Europe written by an Indian author.⁶ Next I would return to the Bengali religious reformer and social theorist Rajah Ram Mohan Roy (as mentioned above, the single colonized voice discussed in British Romantic Writers and the East) and explore the influence of, say, his Translations of an Abridgement of the Vedant (London, 1817) on the ethics and metaphysics of British romantic writers such as Shelley and Bentham. Finally, to explore another cultural exchange, the anglophone poetry of the Eurasian Calcutta teacher Henry Derozio represents an explosive reinterpretation of the “bardic nationalism” of Ossian, Walter Scott, and Tom Moore in the Bengali context, evident in a poem such as “The Harp of India” (1827). Reference ChaudhuriRosinka Chaudhuri’s excellent edition of Derozio’s poetry makes his work readily available for the seminar room.

These represent merely a sample of possible Black or colonized writers of the romantic period to question the notion of “silent subjection.” But just as important is to reappraise the contribution of White writers who were relegated to secondary status in the traditional canon precisely because of their concern with the colonial world, which came to seem ephemeral and meretricious compared to timeless Wordsworthian themes of imagination, nature, and selfhood. As Reference Butler and LevinsonMarilyn Butler indicated many years ago, the best example is Poet Laureate Robert Southey, whose whole literary career was dedicated to reforming and fortifying Britain’s imperial ideology, borrowing largely from the literature of the prior Spanish and Portuguese empires that he had studied so assiduously. In addition to his oriental epics Thalaba and Kehama, I teach sections from his “Mexican” romance Madoc (1805), in which medieval Welsh colonists are pitted against orientalized Aztecs as a blueprint for the colonial annexation of Indigenous peoples. Earlier drafts of Madoc are also connected to the young and radical Southey’s project, shared with the abolitionist Coleridge, of establishing a “pantisocratic” colony in Pennsylvania, subsequently an important influence on contemporary colonial schemes with links to abolition, such as the Sierra Leone settlement (Reference Leask and PrattLeask, “Southey’s Madoc”). Of all the major romantics, Wordsworth seems most resistant to postcolonial reading, as the poet of normative Englishness, organic selfhood, and consolatory nature. Yet Reference Bewellas Alan Bewell and David Simpson have argued, his reflective poems of encounter (with discharged soldiers, dying Indian women, old leech gatherers, solitary reapers) can be seen as paradigms of colonial encounter when “the anthropological other begins at home, indeed right outside one’s front door” (Reference Simpson, De Bolla, Leask and SimpsonSimpson 192). Wordsworth was also a pioneer of ecological thinking, exemplified in a poem like “Nutting,” which provides an opening to considering the massive environmental damage effected by British imperialists from the sugar islands of the Caribbean to the teak forests of Burma. As environmental historian E. A. Wrigley has demonstrated, colonial “ghost acres” rescued metropolitan Britain from the ecological bottleneck of increasing population and dwindling resources, powering the industrial revolution (Reference Wrigley39).

Colonial remapping also shines a light on areas of the traditional canon that have seemed secondary or unimportant, connecting gothic and orientalist tropes: Byron’s Turkish Tales, for example, or the orientalist poems of Shelley and Keats, as addressed in my 1992 study. This could be extended in relation to excellent scholarship on other canonical Reference Sulerifigures. Sara Suleri’s elegant critique of Burke’s rhetoric in the impeachment of Warren Hastings offers a new Indian context for thinking about the aesthetics of the sublime and Burke’s seminal Reflections on the Revolution in France (1790). Reference MakdisiSaree Makdisi’s work has shown the orientalist and imperialist concerns of William Blake and the radical culture of the 1790s, engaging with modernity’s uneven development, and the “occidentalizing” of Britain itself. When teaching Blake, I explore visionary poems of revolution such as America, Europe, and the Song of Los, but also Visions of the Daughters of Albion, its fable derived from James Macpherson’s “Oithona: A Poem” (1762), one of his highly “foreignized” “translations” from ancient Gaelic ballads attributed to the blind bard Ossian but now applied to the modern conditions of transatlantic slavery and Wollstonecraftian feminism. (For all his dissident Jacobite roots in the Highlands, Macpherson himself made a fortune as the London agent of the Nabob of Arcot, and his later career was devoted to theorizing British imperial supremacy [Reference McElroy, Carter and PittockMcElroy].) Said’s Culture and Imperialism (1993) pioneered the “contrapuntal” postcolonial reading of Jane Austen’s Mansfield Park, which along with Austen’s other novels has inspired a spate of excellent criticism of the period’s greatest novelist; meanwhile, Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, now one of the most widely studied novels in the curriculum, has been opened to incisive postcolonial readings by Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, Elizabeth Bohls, and others. The verse romances and novels of Walter Scott have tended to be overlooked by postcolonial critics, although closer scrutiny reveals essential links between Scotland and India in Guy Mannering (1815) or The Surgeon’s Daughter (1827), as well as his influential portrait of multiethnic England in Ivanhoe (1819), or his historical romance of the crusades in The Talisman (1825), with its strangely sympathetic portrait of Saladin. Ian Duncan has proposed that Rob Roy’s primitivism (in Scott’s 1817 novel of the same name), and the comparison of Scottish Gaels to tribal Afghans, represents a key facet of British imperial ideology that promoted a patriarchal primitivism “still structurally present within modernity,” and one that also could account for the brutalities of slavery (Reference Duncan128).

Finally, my third and final proposal would see the consolidation of the genre of travel writing firmly at the center of a decolonized romantic curriculum, alongside poetry, drama, and the novel. I commented above on “tropicopolitan” travel writers such as Equiano, Wedderburn, and Abu Talib Khan, but of course the majority of romantic-period travel books described European journeys to the colonial peripheries.⁷ Here, I draw largely on research published in my 2002 Curiosity and the Aesthetics of Travel Writing, a sequel to Romantic Writers and the East.⁸ The popularity of books of voyages and travels during the “long romantic” decades was second only to that of novels and romances, coterminous with Europe’s colonial expansion in the same period. Travel writing is a form of colonial knowledge: as Linda Tuhiwai Smith writes, “travellers’ stories were generally the experiences and observations of white men whose interactions with indigenous ‘societies’ or ‘peoples’ were constructed around their own cultural views of gender and sexuality” (Reference Tuhiwai SmithTuhiwai Smith 41). But although the “objectivity” of colonial travel writing is mediated by orientalist and imperialist (as well as gendered) paradigms, in the period the genre was to some extent regulated by empirical protocols: as Antony Pagden writes, “however much we may … fabricate rather than find our counter-image, we do not fabricate it out of nothing” (Reference Pagden184). Rather than reading accounts of travelers’ encounters with “the other” as a Manichaean opposition of power and innocence, I prefer Reference ThomasNicholas Thomas’s stress on the contingency (and sometimes confusion) determining the “cultural entanglements” of European travelers in diverse times and places. This was especially the case on the colonial frontier, or beyond the boundaries of colonial rule, where European travelers were in a “weaker” position than the Indigenous people they encountered, often challenging myths of European triumphalism and reminding us that its global paramountcy was never an historical inevitability. At its best, travel writing in this period has a heteroglossic quality that allows the otherwise-silenced voices of Indigenous people to be heard, however mediated: take for example Gikandi’s moving account of the fate of “Nealee,” an enslaved African woman who formed part of a coffle traveling through West Africa to the slave forts on the Gambian coast in 1797. Unlike millions of African slaves, “Nealee’s” testimony survives in the travel narrative of the Scottish explorer and botanist Mungo Park, Travels in the Interior District of Africa (1799), “the sole scriptural witness to this event,” albeit as “a mere trace in the archive of modern identity” (Reference GikandiGikandi, Slavery, ch. 2, “Taste, Slavery and the Modern Self”).

By focusing on the “antique lands” of Egypt, India, and Mexico, my 2002 book sought to shift the cultural focus of romanticism from the classical topography of Rome or Athens, or the gothic ruins of medieval Europe, to the pyramids and temples of tropical high cultures in the colonial zone, which both fascinated and threatened Western travelers. These journeys themselves constitute a variety of romantic historicism, as well as orientalism: as J.-M. Degerando wrote in 1799, “the philosophical traveller, sailing to the ends of the earth, is in fact travelling in time; he is exploring the past; every step he takes is the passage of an age” (quoted in Reference LeaskLeask, Curiosity 46). At the same time, “antique” easily collapses into “antic,” as the material conditions of modernity constantly reassert themselves, exposing the travelers’ anxiety and dependence upon native peoples who mock (and sometimes take advantage of) their sublime obsessions. Thus, the Scottish explorer James Bruce’s hyperbolic account of his discovery of the source of the Nile collapses into bathos as (in a passage of Shandyean irony) he likens himself to Don Quixote, and his toasting George III in Nile water leads the local Agow people to speculate that he has been bitten by a mad dog (quoted in ibid. 79). Italian circus strongman Giovanni Belzoni’s role in the “rape of the Nile,” extracting Egyptian antiquities for his British employers as described in his Narrative of the Operations (1820), is literalized as material engorgement as he tumbles into a mummy pit at Qurna: “I could not pass without putting my face in contact with that of a decayed Egyptian … I could not avoid being covered with bones, legs, arms, and heads rolling from above” (quoted in ibid. 141). Sometimes, oriental ruins elicit a more critical note, as when, visiting the Elephanta Cave temples near Mumbai, Maria Graham notes a hidden ledge behind the statue of Siva “where a Brahmin might have hidden himself for any purpose of priestly imposition” (quoted in ibid. 216). But the enduring anticolonial power of Indigenous antiquities is evidenced in Humboldt’s account of the massive Aztec statue of Coatlicue (“snake-belt”), which he had persuaded the Spanish authorities to disinter for him in 1803. Previously displayed in Mexico City’s university cloisters after its excavation in the late eighteenth century, an Indigenous cult had begun to form around it which threatened colonial authority, remarkable enough considering that Mexicans has been nominally converted to Catholicism for two and half centuries. The Spanish authorities promptly had it reburied (ibid. 278).

Such episodes inspired works of romantic poetry and prose, which can usefully be set on reading lists alongside passages from the travel accounts, providing a new colonial context for romantic lyrics. Examples are Coleridge’s response to Bruce’s Travels in “Kubla Khan,” or Felicia Hemans’s 1820 poem on “The Traveller at the Source of the Nile,” or Shelley’s sonnet “Ozymandias” (1818), inspired by the seven-ton statue of Ramesses II brought by Belzoni from Thebes to London that same year (Reference LeaskLeask, “Kubla Khan”; Curiosity 81–83, 102–28). Another celebrated instance is De Quincey’s orientalist nightmare of immolation in Confessions of an English Opium Eater, inspired by Belzoni’s misadventure at Qurna: “I was buried, for a thousand years, in stone coffins, with mummies and sphinxes, in narrow chambers at the heart of eternal pyramids” (Reference LeaskLeask, British Romantic Writers 227).

Such narratives of travelers’ transactions in the colonial contact zone give life and immediacy to the erased presence of colonial realities in the conventional romantic canon. Although the length and sometimes inaccessibility of romantic travel accounts does raise practical problems for classroom purposes, Reference Bohls and DuncanElizabeth Bohls and Ian Duncan’s excellent anthology Travel Writing 1700–1830 makes many of the texts mentioned above easily available, as does their increasing digital accessibility. Properly selected and edited, these often-long and digressive texts are now increasingly accessible to students of colonial culture and literature. As with my first two proposals for decolonizing the romantic curriculum, travel texts restore a sense of the global interconnectivity of Britain’s colonial and imperial history, allowing citizens of our multicultural society (whether in Scotland or elsewhere in the UK) to recognize themselves in that history and literature and enabling them to better challenge the continuing racial and cultural inequities of the present. Decolonizing the romantic curriculum must be at best a tinkering round the margins, but it’s a start. As Gopal indicates, decolonization remains “a meaningless piety without an extensive enactment of material reparations … to peoples, communities and countries that still struggle with the consequences of very material losses.” But (she paraphrases Jamaica Kincaid), at least it promotes “a more demanding relationship with history and with the world” (Reference GopalGopal 12, 25).

From Decolonization to “Decolonize”

A short essay published in 1963 by literary critic Ruth M. Adams and historian Henry R. Winkler reflects on a course on Victorian England they cotaught at Rutgers University. The course, they tell us, was in direct conversation with the interdisciplinary mission of the newly founded journal Victorian Studies, which in its inaugural issue defined itself as having a “concentration on the English culture of a particular age; and openness to critical and scholarly studies from all the relevant disciplines” (“Prefatory Note” 3). “We wanted to test,” Adams and Winkler write, “how far the literary materials could be used in seeking a balanced and reasonably accurate picture of the era, to investigate what were the possibilities and the limitations of such an approach” (Reference Adams and Winkler100). The syllabus they go on to describe covers topics that are still commonplace in Victorian studies: Chartism, the rise of the middle classes, the critique of utilitarianism, religion, Darwinism, and the tensions between rural and urban life.

Unsurprisingly, no mention is made of the British Empire. What should give one pause is how a course on Victorian England offered in the early 1960s, the heyday of decolonization, could ignore British imperialism. Vast swaths of the world had just, often quite violently, liberated themselves from European colonization, and others were actively struggling for independence. And yet Adams and Winkler appear to have made no connection between events in the Third World and the Victorian century’s most significant achievement: empire. How is it that in the United States in 1962 one could teach Mrs. Jellyby’s “telescopic philanthropy” in the Niger delta and not discuss Nigerian independence? Or teach the casual ellipsis of Pip’s time in Egypt in the conclusion of Great Expectations and somehow not talk about the Suez crisis? How can one talk about Jos Sedley and not discuss the plunder of British India? How does one read Tono Bungay in 1962 and not talk about Kwame Nkrumah?

And yet a course on Victorian England offered at a prestigious American university in the early 1960s, amidst the intensification of American interventionism in places like Vietnam, could be absolutely and effortlessly blind to the simple fact of decolonization and its condition of possibility, imperialism. Such oversights are centuries in the making and remained the norm in Victorianist scholarship until the quasi-institutionalization of postcolonial studies in the anglophone academy in the 1980s and 1990s. In 1985, Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak declared that “it should not be possible to read nineteenth-century British literature without remembering that imperialism … was a crucial part of the cultural representation of England to the English” (Reference Spivak243). Even in the aftermath of Spivak’s essay, Victorian studies made the impossible possible by routinely ignoring the relationship between culture and imperialism. More scandalous has been the field’s complete avoidance of the Subaltern Studies Collective, which was anchored in nineteenth-century British historiography, sociology, and political thought.¹ For decades, it was not only possible but the norm to research what the young Friedrich Engels called “the commercial capital of the world” without talking about where all the money came from (Reference Spivak36).

In stark contrast to the early decades of Victorian studies, and particularly since the “undisciplining” turn in the field’s American circles, today it is entirely uncontroversial to “decolonize” Victorian studies. The slogan “decolonize” and its cognate “decolonizing” have recently proliferated at major conferences, workshops, reading groups, and essay prizes in the American academy. Both generally serve as umbrella terms for antiracist pedagogy, reflections on the Whiteness of the Victorian corpus, and attention to the history of imperialism.² “Decolonize,” no doubt, builds on the gradual increase of scholarship on nineteenth-century British imperialism from the 1990s onward, especially in the last ten years (typically in the key of empire studies, very rarely in the mode of postcolonial studies). But “decolonize” also names an institutional shift in research on empire, one that I would say departs from empire studies and especially postcolonial studies. For Victorian studies is not alone in its embrace of “decolonize.” Over the last decade, there has been an efflorescence of the verb in the American academy and beyond. Surprisingly versatile, “decolonize” and “decolonizing” can be found across a range of discourses, from scholarship on education and literary studies to self-help to social justice to graffiti to TED Talks, and can be applied to a vast array of contexts, including education, ethnography, literature, anthropology, urbanism, the vote, Christianity, mindfulness, everything.³ A category like “postcolonial” could have never dreamed of such popularity.

The wholesale institutional embrace of “decolonize” should give one pause. As I am sure many chapters in this book note, and as has been noted by others, it would be a gross misunderstanding to mistake the verb “decolonize” for the noun “decolonization.”⁴ The verb is new and emerges out of a middle-class encounter with the complicity between culture and imperialism. This is why it is seemingly possible to “decolonize” everything. The noun, however, is much older, has a closer relationship to the “postcolonial,” and primarily describes anticolonial nationalism and Third Worldist self-determination of the mid-century (though it remains a salient concept for contemporary Indigenous activism and scholarship). If the bourgeois revolutions of the nineteenth century sought to “create a world after its own image” through empire, then decolonization sought (and seeks) to recreate what this image looked like. As Frantz Fanon famously characterizes it in The Wretched of the Earth, decolonization “sets out to change the order of the world,” is an “agenda for total disorder,” and “is an historical process” that “reeks of red-hot cannonballs and bloody knives” (Reference Fanon2, 3). So ambitious is its scope that decolonization reintroduces “man into the world, man in his totality,” not better pedagogical practices or more inclusive syllabi (Reference Fanon62). Fanon, in fact, almost never uses the verb “decolonize” in The Wretched of the Earth, and when he does, he actually uses it to describe the tactics of neocolonialism.⁵ “Decolonizing” is entirely absent in his text. Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o’s classic Decolonising the Mind, to which this volume owes a great debt, also never uses “decolonize” or “decolonizing” other than in the title. Ngũgĩ’s interest, as he states in the conclusion, is in the project of Third Worldist universalism: “This is what this book on the politics of language in African literature has really been about: national, democratic, and human liberation,” and then echoing Fanon’s humanism, “It is a call for the rediscovery of the real language of humankind: the language of struggle” (Reference Thiong’o108). Contemporary calls to “decolonize” Victorian studies have little interest in such rediscoveries, much less the abolition of English departments or conducting research in the languages of the Global South.⁶ To put it perhaps too starkly: while decolonization “reeks of red-hot cannonballs and bloody knives,” “decolonize” reeks of stale conference hotels and online workshops organized by Dean’s initiatives.

I highlight this difference not to trivialize recent calls to decolonize Victorian studies or to downplay the recent increase in Victorianist scholarship on the British Empire, but to emphasize how “decolonize” and decolonization are products of radically different historical conjunctures and should not be run through one another. Their difference is thrown into even sharper relief when one considers how not only were the leaders of decolonization bourgeois intellectuals trained in the Western academy, but they were also complete Anglophiles and Francophiles. As I illustrate in the next section, the leaders and intellectuals of anticolonial thought in the British colonial world never had a problem with Victorianism. They freely utilized, quoted, and valorized the White, conservative patriarchs of nineteenth-century British literature and culture. From the perspective of W. E. B. Du Bois, B. R. Ambedkar, and C. L. R James, “decolonizing” the Victorian canon would be absurd, as it is this very canon – formed with and alongside colonization – that they loved and relied on to theorize the project of decolonization.⁷ They might tirelessly work for the liberation of the colonial world, but they do so oftentimes by way of the writings of Victorians like Thomas Carlyle, Charles Dickens, and Alfred Tennyson. From this perspective, it becomes possible to adapt Spivak’s maxim: it should not be possible to research Victorian studies without remembering that Victorianism was integral to decolonization. The relation between anticolonial thought and Victorianism remains underresearched, even amidst the popularity of “decolonize.”

Indian in Blood, English in Taste

A testament to the successes of Macaulayism, anticolonial intellectuals across the anglophone imperium were well versed in the British canon. In a famous speech in 1941, Rabindranath Tagore discusses the impact of British literature on the early intellectuals of colonial India: “Their days and nights were eloquent with the stately declamations of Burke, with Macaulay’s long-rolling sentences; discussions centered on Shakespeare’s drama and Byron’s poetry add above all upon the large-hearted liberalism of the nineteenth century English politics” (Reference Tagore2). Reflecting on his own formation, Tagore recalls listening to the speeches of John Bright in his youth, “overflowing all narrow national bonds, had made so deep an impression on my mind that something of it lingers to-day, even in these days of graceless disillusionment” (Reference Tagore3). When Jawaharlal Nehru writes (while imprisoned by the British, it is worth remembering) of his education, he praises his teacher Ferdinand T. Brooks, a late Victorian theosophist teacher and follower of Annie Besant. Nehru gives credit to Brooks for his taste in reading: “the Lewis Carroll books were great favorites, and The Jungle Books and Kim … I remember reading many of the novels of Scott, Dickens, and Thackeray, H. G. Wells’s romances, Mark Twain, and the Sherlock Holmes stories, I was thrilled by the Prisoner of Zenda, and Jerome K. Jerome’s Three Men in a Boat was for me the last word in humor. Another book stands out still in my memory; it was Du Maurier’s Trilby; also Peter Ibbetson” (Reference Nehru28).

In a totally different context, but to a similar end, no anticolonial thinker was more devoted to British literature than C. L. R. James. And in Beyond a Boundary, it is Britain’s nineteenth century that James privileges in his reflections on national culture. The conclusion famously narrates what James describes as the West Indies’ entry into the “comity of nations,” but this cannot be done without a detour to those who James describes as the founders of Victorianism: Thomas Arnold, the famous headmaster of Rugby, Thomas Hughes, author of Tom Brown’s Schooldays, and W. G. Grace, the preeminent Victorian cricketer. Indeed, James devotes two chapters of Beyond a Boundary to these figures and digresses toward the Victorians countless times in his text. Rather than his teachers, James credits his parents for his devotion to the English canon, one rather densely populated by nineteenth-century writers. James’s mother “was a reader, one of the most tireless I have ever known. Usually it was novels, any novel. Scott, Thackeray, Dickens, Hall Caine, Stevenson, Mrs. Henry Wood, Charlotte Brontë, Charlotte Breame, Shakespeare … Balzac, Nathaniel Hawthorne, a woman called E.D.E.N. Southworth, Fenimore Cooper, Nat Gould, Charles Garvice, anything and everything, and as she put them down I picked them up.”⁸ His father: “a man of some education he knew who, if not what, the classics were … ‘The Pickwick Papers,’ my father would say, taking up the book. ‘By Charles Dickens. A great book, my boy. Read it.’ And I would buy it” (Beyond a Boundary Reference James16). One book in particular made an impression on the young James: “Thackeray’s Vanity Fair. My mother had an old copy with a red cover. I had read it when I was about eight, and of all the books that passed through that house this one became my Homer and my bible” (Reference James17).⁹ Reflecting on his formal education, in the early days of West Indian independence, it is worth highlighting, James writes:

How is one supposed to “decolonize” such a statement? Or this one: “everything began from the basis that Britain was the source of all light and leading … it was the beacon that beckoned me on” (Reference James30)? In the 1930s, James followed this beacon to England, where he researched and published The Black Jacobins, arguably the founding text of anticolonial historiography.

For someone like James, the Victorian canon was entirely compatible with, indeed necessary for, the project of decolonization. More than being biographically significant, nineteenth-century British literature and culture offered anticolonial thinkers analytical frameworks to conceive the project of decolonization. B. R. Ambedkar begins his lengthy pamphlet on the partition of India by turning to Thomas Carlyle’s The Letters and Speeches of Oliver Cromwell. In the passage Ambedkar quotes, Carlyle is concerned that class conflict in England would erupt in a civil war and laments that the England of the 1840s lacks a heroic figure like Cromwell to lead it to political and social unity: “Awake before it comes to that! Gods and men bid us awake! The Voices of our Fathers, with thousandfold stern monition to one and all, bid us awake!” (Reference Ambedkarii). “This warning” of impending civil war, Ambedkar explains, “applies to Indians in their present circumstances [at the cusp of independence] as it once did to Englishmen and Indians, if they pay no heed to it, will do so at their peril” (Reference Ambedkarii). If the Victorian Sage helps Ambedkar frame his problematic, late Victorian jurists provide him the theoretical backbone for his argument. “No one,” writes Ambedkar, “is more competent to answer [the question of the national unity] than James Bryce” (Reference Ambedkar187). Ambedkar’s ultimate, and rather worrying, advocacy for the partitioning of India along religious lines at Independence comes through, not in small part, the writings of Henry Sidgwick and James Bryce, to whom he turns in discussions of the role of constitutional law, the history of empires, and the impact of secession on the nation state.¹⁰ For these thinkers, political unity, be it nation or imperium, was tantamount, and if it required partitioning off a portion of the body politic, then so be it.

Pan-Africanists from the United States and the Caribbean also turned to nineteenth-century British writers as a field of intelligibility into the project of decolonization and transnational affiliation.¹¹ Marcus Garvey’s writings are indebted to Carlylean hero worship, and Tennyson looms large in the slogan for the Black Star Line: “One God, One Aim, One Destiny” (Reference Garvey and HillGarvey 206–14). Similarly, Victorianism, especially Macaulay and Carlyle, saturates the nonfictional writings of Du Bois (Reference LewisLewis 75). Souls of Black Folk opens each chapter with quotations from nineteenth-century poets, including Tennyson, Byron, Swinburne, and Browning, and Du Bois’s language echoes Carlyle’s ornamentalism and what J. Hillis Miller calls “Carlylese” (Reference Miller304). For Du Bois, the condition of England question illuminates the condition of the African American working class during Reconstruction. Not unlike Ambedkar’s turn to the “hungry forties” of Victorian England, Du Bois argues that “the economic system of the South” is “a copy of that England of the early nineteenth century, before the factory acts, – the England that wrung pity from thinkers and fired the wrath of Carlyle” (Reference Du Bois138). Rather than the English bourgeoisie, it is “the sons of poor whites fired with a new thirst for wealth and power, thrifty and avaricious Yankees, shrewd and unscrupulous Jews” who have emerged as the new “captains of industry” (Reference Du Bois138). The sensibility of this industrial bourgeoisie, like that of the England that Carlyle reflected upon, is anchored in “neither love nor hate, neither sympathy nor romance; it is a cold question of dollars and dividends,” or what Du Bois, directly quoting Carlyle refers to as “the Gospel of Mammonism” (Reference Du Bois138). Eric Williams’s understudied British Historians and the West Indies traces the invention of the Caribbean in colonial historiography. A precursor to Edward Said’s Orientalism, Williams tracks the ways in which historians like Macaulay, J. R. Seeley, Lord Acton, J. A. Froude, and many others invented the Caribbean in their writings. As he sums up, “a century and a half of denigration of the West Indies in British universities have … left their mark on British attitudes to the West Indies … The historical field therefore provides the battleground on which imperialist politics struggle against nationalist politics” (Reference Williams182). For Williams, a critique of colonial historiography such as the kind undertaken in his text is central to the anticolonial project.

Victorian studies, and nineteenth-century British literary studies more generally, has had no time for the simple fact that its archive resonates in the history of decolonization. Even amidst recent calls for the field to better address the demographic homogeneity of its canon and its practitioners, Victorianists have primarily looked to contemporary critical race theory (which typically takes the United States as its site of analysis), not critical race theory’s antecedents in Pan-Africanism and anticolonialism – movements that are proper to the colonized world. Everyone in the field appears to have read Christina Sharpe, while everyone says, countless times and with nervous energy, that they “own The Black Jacobins and have been meaning to read it for years.” What is the basis for this resistance to decolonization – a world-historical process that impacted the majority of the globe – in Victorian studies?

To begin thinking about this oversight and find a way forward, it is important to repeat a fundamental disparity: while anticolonial thinkers could not do without Victorian thought, Victorianist scholarship has easily done without anticolonial thought.¹² For a field so rigorously historicist, it is quite odd that the connections between the archive of Victorian culture and the great thinkers of decolonization have never been substantially pursued. Depending on the audience, such realizations can evoke a sense of moral failure, at which point slogans like “decolonize” and “undisciplining” are always near at hand. In contrast, I want to suggest that these historical oversights have to do with the institutional (and therefore ideological) conception of Victorian studies as a field and its own implication in the culture of American imperialism, both of which must be understood as emerging and developing alongside decolonization in Asia, Africa, and the Caribbean. In what follows, I offer a concise history of the birth of Victorian studies in the United States so as to better understand why it is that a field, perfectly poised to encounter the intimate links between nineteenth-century culture and decolonization, did not do so.

The Invention of Victorian Studies and the Age of American Imperialism

Although the term “Victorian” dates back to G. M. Young’s Victorian Poets (1875), and its usage became increasingly common in the early twentieth century (perhaps most significantly in the title of Lytton Strachey’s Eminent Victorians [1917]), it was only in 1933, with the publication of the annual “Victorian Bibliography” in Modern Philology, that “Victorian” began to take shape as an academic field. In 1940, an important survey by Charles Frederick Harrold observes that “we are, of course, passing through a ‘Victorian’ vogue’” and that “Victorian scholarship is achieving maturity. It will be found that scholarly advance has been irregular. In a field so new, and relatively so recent, as the years between 1830–1900, we must expect much that is tentative, or incomplete, or unsuccessful” (Reference Harrold668). In 1952, the field gained further delineation with the establishment of Victorian Newsletter, which included scholarly articles, book reviews, and bibliographies (“Editorial” 1). But it was in 1957 that the field fully arrived with the formation of the journal Victorian Studies at Indiana University. The Modern Language Association endorsed Victorian Studies and anointed it the home journal for the field when they recommended “Victorian Bibliography” be published there (“Prefatory Note” 3). During these years, Victorian studies groups formed at Cambridge University and the University of Leicester, both of which hailed the journal for galvanizing a range of scholars from numerous disciplines around the Victorian (Reference BestBest; Reference CollinsCollins). From all evidence, the founding of Victorian Studies was a truly generative event in the anglophone academy.

Victorian studies emerged amidst the efflorescence of area studies fields in the United States after the World War II.¹³ Populated by experts in foreign languages, area studies fields were often Cold War knowledge factories of the Soviet Union and the Third World. As Spivak puts it, “Area Studies exhibit quality and rigor (those elusive traits), combined with openly conservative or ‘no’ politics” (Reference Spivak7). Though all scholarly fields are ideological state apparatuses in Louis Althusser’s sense of the term, not all such apparatuses are the same or have the same function, and area studies offered the American state a specific tool for its imperial project. Paul A Bové explains: “Area studies has existed to provide authoritative knowledge to the state, specifically the government and its policy-makers, to enable the state to expand its power and to defend its interests geopolitically” (Reference Bové, Miyoshi and Harootunian207). Cynically, one might think that the Victorian period would be fertile ground for American foreign policy during the Cold War. Nathan Hensley reminds us that “there were at least 228 separate armed conflicts during the [Victorian] period,” and the proliferation of imperial violence during what is commonly referred to as the “age of Equipoise” “suggests that the images we take to characterize the world’s first liberal empire should include not just the middle-class hearth or the democratic ballot box but the war zones and boneyards of England’s global periphery, where mutiny, and its suppression, were all but universal” (Reference Hensley2).¹⁴ It would therefore be reasonable to think that the study of British imperialism in the nineteenth century might prove useful for the United States’ postwar geopolitical interests. But it doesn’t take an insider to Victorian studies to know that research on the Corn Laws, Middlemarch, and Ruskin’s aesthetics have never been especially useful for assassinating democratically elected leaders, staging coups, installing dictators, or obliterating economies, landscapes, and entire societies in the Global South. Rather, the usefulness of Victorian studies for the state might be better understood as complimenting area studies by naturalizing the insularity of metropolitan national culture – the isolation of the domestic from the international – of, as Hensley put it, valorizing the “middle-class hearth” over “extrajudicial killing as everyday life” – a facet of any successful empire. If area studies encouraged expertise in seemingly far-off places, Victorian studies helped naturalize the idea that the study of metropolitan culture could take place without any knowledge of those “far-off” places.

In the United States, for example, the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) was instrumental in producing such a body of provincial knowledge. A rather remarkable essay by Russell Wyland, Deputy Director of the NEH, is straightforward about the US government’s Arnoldian relationship to humanistic inquiry: “Like postwar scholars, Congress had come to regard the civilizing effect of the humanities as protection against anti-democratic forces,” and therefore justified public funding projects like the NEH in the mid-1960s (Reference Wyland11).¹⁵ Wyland notes how Barnaby C. Keeney’s (the first chairman of the NEH) “vision for the Endowment’s ideals of scholarly research could just as easily have been a description of the intellectual project pursued by [Walter] Houghton, [Michael] Wolff, and the early editors” of Victorian Studies (Reference Wyland13). During its first eight years, the NEH funded forty-four fellowships and summer stipends in the field of Victorian studies (only one of which engages with British imperialism). By funding such projects, the NEH provided Victorianists working in the United States the financial resources to organize the field’s archive in the form of bibliographies, nineteenth-century periodicals, editions of primary texts, and the publication of letters and diaries. After proudly mentioning that Lynne Cheney was the NEH’s first Victorianist chairman (in the very years her husband directed wars in Panama and Iraq), Wyland declares that the “NEH can rightly claim credit for building the infrastructure of modern Victorian studies.” Having funded collations such as the diaries of Elizabeth Barrett Browning into one volume, five volumes of Thomas Hardy’s poetry, a volume of Thackeray’s correspondence, and many others, the NEH had effectively produced and made accessible the very archive that was to prove fundamental to scholarship in Victorian studies. This is, of course, what public funding should do. But when done in a metropolitan center like the United States, the implication of such cultural production in the imperial milieu in which it is set is unavoidable. The reproductive quality of such institutional support (again, in the Althusserian sense) is evinced by how, as Wyland celebrates, “Victorian studies can rightly claim credit for the success of the Endowment. The rigor of funded Victorian studies scholars helped set standards for funding, not only for other Victorianists but also for scholars in other emerging disciplines” (Reference Wyland23). Such is “sweetness and light” in the age of American imperialism.

Why, one might ask again, would the collected letters of Thomas Carlyle and Jane Welsh Carlyle be useful to postwar American imperialism? Why would Dickens’s working notebooks ward off the barbarism that threatened American “democratic values”? Is it conceivable that Lynne Cheney’s admiration for Matthew Arnold, who believed in the civilizing effects of culture, impacted Dick Cheney’s decision to bomb Iraq? No, they wouldn’t, and it isn’t conceivable. Wyland’s account suggests instead that it was precisely the field’s avoidance of theorizing the link between culture and imperial politics that rendered it so compatible with an institution like the NEH. Bové notes something similar in the ideological function of American studies: “there was no sense in which the state needed the knowledge produced by American studies for its own executive purposes,” but “rather, it was an instrument of the state” (Reference Bové, Miyoshi and Harootunian211, Reference Bové, Miyoshi and Harootunian212). He goes on to argue that while American studies attended to the cultural heterogeneity of the United States, its resistance to comparative research meant its domain remained thoroughly domestic, rather than the international scope of the culture and politics of postwar America. Victorian studies too seems to have been such an apparatus in the United States, for, by naturalizing the nation state as the privileged domain of humanistic inquiry, the field foreclosed any connection between its object of study and the liberationist struggles of the Third World, both of which are connected rather well by the history of imperialism. As such, it positioned itself as a complement to the interventionist impulses of area studies fields. What is instead produced is scholarship on culture and society, not culture and imperialism (Reference SaidSaid, Culture and Imperialism 14). The field’s usefulness to the state, one might hypothesize, was precisely in not making the connection between civil society and imperialism, thereby offering a vision of a world in which it is possible to read a novel like Daniel Deronda and not think about Palestine.¹⁶

Epilogue for a Preface to Post-Postcolonial Criticism

Four decades after the publication of Adams and Winkler’s “An Inter-Departmental Course on Victorian England,” Victorian Studies published Erin O’Connor’s infamous “Preface for a Post-Postcolonial Criticism.” The essay accuses postcolonial criticism (mostly just Spivak) of appropriating the Victorian novel for the critique of empire, and for having “silenced” and “colonized the critical imagination of the Victorianist,” who otherwise pursued the “unapologetic study of literature as a viable, worthwhile, eminently respectable end in itself” (Reference O’Connor228, Reference O’Connor240). Sarcastic though it is in its characterization, when placed in relation to the early days of Victorian studies, the essay reads as longing to go back to a simpler time, when Jane Eyre was “just” a novel, before the advent of poststructuralism and postcolonial theory. For an essay that looks forward, “Preface” has a strange affinity for the past. It is not especially fruitful to revisit O’Connor’s argument, or the debates the followed, or to show that postcolonial criticism was in fact the exception in Victorianist scholarship and not the overwhelming force she paints it as, or to recount how a “genre’s thematic subtleties, structural indeterminacies, and genuine intellectual rigor” and ideology critique can, in fact, go hand in hand.¹⁷

But it is worth revisiting O’Connor’s essay if only to register how her premise is that the field of Victorian studies existed in isolation from decolonization, and that talk of empire was an artificial insertion into the Victorian art-object by outsiders/theoreticians to the field. My argument in this chapter has been the opposite. Not only was Victorian literature and culture formative to the great theorists of decolonization, but it was also central to how they conceived of and articulated postcolonial liberation. Even the most superficial historicist would have to recognize the salience of this conjuncture. Furthermore, there is good evidence that the very idea of Victorian culture, “English culture of a particular age,” was invented in the United States in negative relation to decolonization. The art-objects that O’Connor is so interested in saving from postcolonial ideology critique were invented as such amidst the Cold War milieu of American imperialism and produced as “civilizing” forces in the crusade against the Third World socialisms (“anti-democratic forces,” as Wyland puts it). Attending to the history of decolonization-as-noun and its rather intimate relation to Victorian culture and society seems to be one way to recover “English culture of a particular age” without isolating culture from imperialism.

In the wake of a spectacular resurgence in racial violence and ethnonationalisms in hitherto-thriving democracies around the world, the project of decolonization has never been more urgent. How might we as teachers of English and world literatures come to terms with the chasm between our decades-long experience of training students in postcolonial and comparative modes of engagement with the world’s literary riches, and the staggering racial divides, unspeakable tribalism, and broken psychic regimes that we witness in the wider world? Given the long history of English literary studies as an inextricable part of imperial governance and as a cultural touchstone until World War II, and its continuing flourishing well into the twenty-first century, the stakes of our intellectual and pedagogical engagement in English departments have scarcely been higher.

Ecumenical perspectives on literature have often emerged in the wake of revolutionary or catastrophic world events. The Napoleonic Wars for Goethe, 1848 for Marx, the colonial partition of Bengal for Rabindranath Tagore, the Russian Revolution for Maxim Gorky and Zheng Zhenduo, the Spanish Civil War for Pablo Neruda and W. H. Auden, Nazi-era Europe for Eric Auerbach and Victor Klemperer, the 1968 uprisings for René Etiemble, and the Israel–Palestine conflict for Edward Said, are well-known historical thresholds. Our turbulent global era after 1989 is no less responsible for the contemporary revival of world literature. The field’s geopolitical backdrop is a series of catastrophes: the proliferation of global conflicts and civil wars with the end of the Cold War, genocides in Bosnia and Rwanda, the spectacular implosion of 9/11, the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, and the violent ravaging of the Middle East by the conjoined interests of the global power elites and fundamentalisms of various hues. In the past decade, a wealth of world anglophone literary scholarship has emerged on classic twenty-first crises such as global terrorism, refugee displacement, environmental degradation, populist authoritarianisms, and climate change (Reference NixonNixon; Reference CheahCheah; Reference GangulyGanguly, This Thing; Reference DeLoughreyDeLoughrey; Reference GoyalGoyal).

Who and what the world is to which world literature refers and is constituted by is a question of deep import to scholars in the field. Theories of world literature have struggled to keep pace with the dramatic reconfiguration of the world since the end of European colonialism, the fall of the Soviet Union, and the resurgence of multipolar ethnonationalisms around the world. One can scarcely miss the disjunction between some recent influential theories of world literature that perpetuate a universalist narrative of European expansion and diffusion and the diversity of global comparatist work that illuminates cartographies of literary world-making across various scales and linguistic zones, and within temporal frames irreducible to European literary history or the capitalist world system. With the global turn in the English curriculum since the rise of postcolonialism in the 1970s and 1980s and the prominence of English as a world language and a translating medium (signposted by the term “global anglophone”), debates about world literature have gained substantial traction in English literary studies.¹

This essay explores the entangled histories of world literature, postcolonial studies, and global anglophone literatures as they shape English studies today. Drawing on my scholarly and pedagogical work, I offer a decolonial understanding of world literature along three axes: historical, cartographic, and linguistic. The historical axis illuminates the imperial backstory of current iterations of world literature in the rise of comparative philology and orientalist scholarship in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. It also pluralizes the temporal framing of world literature by reaching back to medieval and early modern instances of literary worlding in Arabic, Chinese, Latin, Persian, and Sanskrit and situates the current valence of English in a literary longue durée. The cartographic axis highlights literary world-making athwart transregional zones such as the oceanic, the hemispheric, the archipelagic, and multilocal. These crosscut the binaries of Global North and South and resist being situated within a single world system in which non-European worlds invariably appear as belated or derivative or minor. Finally, along the linguistic axis, I explore how the contemporary resonance of world literature and its counterpart, global anglophone, cannot be grasped unless we disaggregate English from imperial models of the past. This paradoxical claim does not disavow the history of English under the British Empire and the rise of America in the post-War era. But it shifts the ground of discourse from under this Anglo-imperial shadow and illuminates new zones of multilingual transculturation.

Historicizing World Literature

Bound by neither a finite and continuous periodicity nor a specific textual object, nor even any consensus about its theoretical ground, world literature poses a challenge for a literary historian of a magnitude scarcely encountered in fields such as romanticism or postcolonialism. One cannot but be struck by the dizzyingly heterogeneous range of scholarly articulations of it. Literary world-making as the travel and diffusion of forms, genres, and textual patterns; as elliptical movement and reception of works in different regions of the globe; as a site of global competitiveness over literary value; as born-translated works that echo other literary imaginaries; as bibliomigrancy and a global pact with books; as intermediate regional constellations between the nation and the globe; as a normative apprehension of the singularity of literary textuality that resists the technomaterialist coordinates of globalization; as an aesthetic and formalist response to globalization, catastrophic global events, and digital hyperconnectivity; as literature of the capitalist world system – there is no dearth of such substantial and compelling accounts of contemporary approaches to world literature. The reemergence of world literature as an ideal in our global era has unsurprisingly also generated contentious and skeptical accounts: world literature as a handmaiden of the forces of globalization; as a posthistorical triumphal narrative of an enforced unification of the world; as an alibi for an appropriative anglophone dominance; and as a translational scandal.

While one is not in doubt about the significance of world as a powerful constellating force in literary studies today, an historian is confronted with the monumental task of “weighing, comparing, analyzing, and discriminating” among this vast array of articulations, to paraphrase Reference Wellek, Damrosch, Melas and ButheleziRene Wellek. In what follows, I offer some insights on a decolonial approach to the history of world literature based on a two-volume editorial project I have recently completed. I also briefly discuss the outlines of a graduate course I teach on world literature and the British Empire.

Having undertaken my graduate studies in English, South Asian literatures, and postcolonial studies in Australia under the mentorship of the Subaltern Studies collective and having since published books in caste and dalit studies, postcolonialism, global anglophone literatures, and world literature in academic presses across the United Kingdom, the United States, and Australia, I am acutely aware of the complexity of navigating multilingual worlds within an anglophone academy. I have recently edited a two-volume Cambridge History of World Literature with forty-eight contributors working across twenty-nine literary traditions (Reference Ganguly2021). Bound by neither a single market nor a single world history of capitalist unification, world literature, in these volumes, is perceived as a transversal and comparative framework for studying myriad literary worlds across history. The project bears little resemblance to the lamentable picture of world literature as “one-world talk” that projects Anglo-global dominance. Prior eras generated republics of letters across vast continental swathes. English, Arabic, Persian, Chinese, Hindi, French, Spanish, Portuguese, Swahili, and Tamil are large transregional literary-linguistic worlds today, albeit each with very different cultural capital. Collectively, The Cambridge History of World Literature offers an account of world literature that is informed by decades of excavation of the origins of modern disciplinary formations in histories of European encounter with civilizations across Asia, the Mediterranean, Latin America, and Africa. It situates the modern origins of “world literature” within a longue durée optic. Arab mapmakers from the tenth century onward were among the first to visualize the globe’s spatial expansiveness as a concept. European mapmakers in fifteenth century built on these cartographic practices. Ancient and medieval trade routes, like the Silk Route, the Mediterranean, and the Indian Ocean, spanned continents and generated corridors of intense linguistic and cultural mixing. The rise of Sanskrit, Arabic, and Persian republics of letters long preceded that of the European Renaissance. The vernacularization of languages and their proliferation through the modern era began toward the end of the first millennium in Asia and Europe. The vernacular languages existed in a robust ecosystem alongside classical tongues – Latin, Sanskrit, Arabic – and generated long periods of multilingual creativity. Oral, graphic, visual, and performative forms marked aesthetic engagement in much of Africa, Latin America, the Caribbean, and the Pacific before European colonization. Such a long historical view of world literature offers a corrective to the historiographical distortion one finds in influential works such as Pascale Reference CasanovaCasanova’s The World Republic of Letters, where the entire literary history of humankind is annexed to the rise of Europe in the sixteenth century. The myriad linguistic resonances of the term “world” – orbis in Latin, kosmos in Greek, Welt in German, vishwa in Sanskrit, duniya in Hindi/Urdu, jahan in Persian, monde in French – are a measure of its philological shaping as an aesthetic and a normative category, one that resists the homogenizing power of the global as it reckons with the plenitude and singularity of literatures from around the world.

World literature in the twenty-first century, the Cambridge History contends, is primed to explore genealogies of world literary formations that not only predate the rise of Europe but are also critically coextensive with it and demonstrably foundational to the very conception of the modern idea of world literature. The adab literary tradition, or belle-lettres in Arabic, with its beginnings in the late Ummayad caliphal court in the eighth century and its consolidation in the early Abbasid period from 750–1256 ce is one such example. A chapter in volume I of the Cambridge History traces the influence of Middle Persian translations of Sanskrit on adab and follows a trail of translations until the sixteenth century of key texts from the Indo-Persianate and Arabic literary worlds into Hebrew, Greek, Latin, and the European vernaculars, including German, Danish, Dutch, Spanish, Italian, and English. One cannot conceive of world literature without calibrating the influence of such medieval and early modern philological endeavors, and their recovery and reconceptualization by European philologists in the nineteenth century (Reference Al Rahim and GangulyAl Rahim). Another chapter tracks the role of East India Company orientalists such as William Jones since the eighteenth century and those of German philologists who mined centuries of literary riches in Sanskrit, Arabic, Persian, and Chinese across a vast swathe of Asia in the company of native scholars. How could Goethe’s idea of world literature have emerged, the author asks, without these colonial philological endeavors that reached him via Fredrich Schlegel and other Weimar philologists (Reference Bhattacharya and GangulyBhattacharya)? Such complex genealogical accounts illuminate pathways toward theories and methodologies of doing world literature that are not invariably circumscribed by the modern nation state, an international competition for global prestige, the capitalist world system, and the European diffusionist model.

How might one bring these insights into the English curriculum? Typically, students in English departments fall back on canonical works by Damrosch, Reference CasanovaCasanova, and Moretti without being aware of the genealogical ground of world literature in the history of empires, and especially the British Empire. In a graduate course I teach on “World Literature, Orientalism, and Empire,” the students explore how the bureaucratic machinery of the British Empire was instrumental in the emergence of key conceptual shifts that became foundational to the nineteenth century idea of world literature promoted by Goethe, Marx, and Engels. The shifts include orientalist scholarship, the rise of philology, the comparatist method, and translational endeavors. The course module covers vast ground spanning early orientalist scholarship between 1757 and 1789 to the towering influence of Sir William Jones’s historical philology on the Indo-European family of languages. We read about the role of the East India Company in generating global circuits of print publication and the promotion of English Literature in colonial education systems across South Asia and Africa. We trace what Srinivas Reference AravamudanAravamudan has called “Enlightenment Orientalism” – a swathe of translational endeavors in European languages of magisterial premodern works in Sanskrit, Chinese, Arabic, Persian, and Tamil. The students begin to see the crosscutting impact of these developments across India, Britain, and Germany as an exciting chapter in the history of world literature (Reference AravamudanAravamudan).

Moving away from stock understandings of translation as contamination or devaluation, or merely a device to exoticize non-European worlds, the students also begin to appreciate the historic role of translation in world literary studies. Scholarly traditions across history have felt the influence of other traditions mainly through acts of translation. The European Renaissance is unthinkable without the discovery of medieval-era Arabic translations of the Greek philosophers Plato and Aristotle. As is the emergence of modern comparative and world literatures without the massive translation enterprises of colonial-era orientalists such as Jones, Schlegel, and Humboldt. The conception of world literature as a global network of intersecting influences has led to a reevaluation of the stature of translation as a foundational practice in the history of literary dissemination. Translation is now widely perceived as a perturbation of the settled economy of two linguistic systems and not a practice of distortion or deformation (Reference Bassnett and DamroschBassnett; Reference VenutiVenuti).

The global reach of English appears in a different light when seen through a comparative and translational lens. Just as we are deliberating today about the global reach of English and its imperial foundations, scholars of ancient and early modern worlds have deliberated on the impact of other world languages such as Greek, Latin, Chinese, Sanskrit, Persian, and Arabic. Conquests, commerce, migration, imperial adventures, and cultural influence have allowed languages such as English, French, Spanish, Arabic, Persian, Sanskrit, Russian, Tamil, and Chinese to have a disproportionate historical influence on literatures around the globe. Ancient and medieval trade routes like the Silk Route and the Indian Ocean spanned continents and generated corridors of intense linguistic and cultural mixing. Sheldon Reference PollockPollock’s work on the rise of the Sanskrit cosmopolis from Afghanistan to Java in Southeast Asia from 300 to 1300 ce traces this phenomenon. Muhsin al-Musawi traces the emergence of an Arabic republic of letters at the confluence of vernacular languages that flourished between the twelfth and eighteenth centuries, and which stretched across southern Europe, the Mediterranean, North Africa, West Asia, and Southeast Asia (Reference PollockPollock; Reference Al-Musawial-Musawi). Today, the influence of English outstrips all others, and the forces of modern history – mercantile capitalism, colonialism, industrialization, the information technology revolution – have played a monumental role in its elevation as a world language and a global medium of translation. Currently, English also exists in a vast ecosystem with eleven other supercentral languages that boast more than 100 million speakers. These comprise Arabic, Chinese, French, German, Hindi, Japanese, Malay, Portuguese, Russian, Spanish, and Swahili.

While acknowledging the unification of the world under a capitalist world system that hoists English as its dominant tongue, world literary approaches allow us to ask generative questions about literary globalism. How have these languages shaped diverse literary cultures in their intermixing with local and regional traditions? How have they been transformed in turn? How does a perspective that engages with older histories and other overlapping linguistic geographies produce a different account of literary evolution? What happens when we explore the use of English as a medium of literary translation instead of as a source language? Questions such as these urge us to pluralize the history of culture-power beyond primordialism, imperial absolutism, language sentiment, and linguistic monism. Comparative and longue durée perspectives on the emergence of literary worlds enable us to grasp the valence of English and anglophone literatures within a multilingual realm of expressive elaboration and spatial dissemination.

Decolonial Cartographies

The question of spatial scale in world literature is as urgent as questions of temporality and historicity. What constitutes viable units of analysis in world literature? How do we conceive of median scales larger than the nation but smaller than the globe that push against notions of a freewheeling globality and that better reflect the multi-scalar and spatially dispersed nature of contemporary literary world-making? What about multilingual nations whose literary worlds cross borders in ways that defy the classic polarization between the Global North and Global South or between the local and the global? An exciting development in world literature is the emergence of literary cartographies such as the oceanic, the hemispheric, the transregional, the archipelagic, and the multilingual-local. Works by Isabel Hofmeyr and Gaurav Desai on the Indian Ocean, Konstantina Zanou on the Mediterranean, Allison Donnell on the Caribbean, Teresia Teiawa on the Pacific, Anna Brickhouse on hemispheric American studies, and Dan Ringgard on Nordic studies are good examples. Francesca Orsini, Karima Laachir, and Sara Marzagora’s comparative project on “significant geographies” and “multilingual locals,” with literatures from northern India, the Horn of Africa, and Maghreb, is another example of decolonial cartographic experimentation. Hemispheric and oceanic approaches have brought literary worlds from the Americas and Europe into meaningful conversation with those from Africa and Asia.

In an advanced-year undergraduate course that I developed a few years ago, entitled “Oceanic Connections: Black Atlantic and Indian Ocean Worlds,” students explore the emergence of the “oceanic” as a powerful paradigm in world literary studies. The fluidity of the ocean as against terrestrial borders gives new meaning to categories such as empire, diaspora, postcolonialism, slavery, settler colonialism, and labor history. Through novels, philosophical tracts, and theories of history, we study the import of the transatlantic slave trade and its entanglement with global histories of modern maritime colonialism found in Indian Ocean worlds. We trace these entanglements through the novels of Barry Unsworth, Fred D’Aguiar, Amitav Ghosh, and Abdul Razak Gurnah. In engaging with the Ibis trilogy of Ghosh and the Zanzibari novels of Gurnah – works traversing the Indian Ocean world from East Africa, the Arabian Peninsula, and the Indian archipelago to the bays and estuaries in the South China Sea – the students become aware of the critical role played by this maritime route in the consolidation of British Empire. Both Ghosh and Gurnah stretch this historiography back to the preimperial phase and write about the centuries-old trading diasporas of Arabia, India, and China that intersected with the history of European maritime imperialism, and also of histories of slavery that precede the transatlantic slave trade.

In teaching oceanic novels such as the Sea of Poppies, River of Smoke, Sacred Hunger, and By the Sea, I invite students to think about the genres these works embed: the classic historical novel and other sea-inspired novelistic and poetic genres, but also thalassography, a branch of oceanic writing that focuses on smaller bodies of water that are populated with habitations intimately connected with oceanic routes; bays, estuaries, rivers, gulfs, and deltas.² After all, much of the action in Ghosh’s Ibis novels, for instance, has aqueous bodies as its backdrop: the Hooghly river, the Bay of Bengal, the Arabian Sea, the Pearl River Delta, and the Hong Kong Bay. The ocean has featured as a setting in any number of classic literary texts from Coleridge’s The Rime of the Ancient Mariner, Melville’s Moby-Dick, and Verne’s Vingt mille lieues sous les mers to Hemingway’s The Old Man and the Sea, Conrad’s Lord Jim, and Walcott’s Omeros. These works are often familiar to advanced-year undergraduates in the United States, and we spend a few minutes in the first seminar sharing perceptions about them. We also discuss the implications of moving from the thematic of the ocean in literature to conceiving the ocean as both a material force in, and a conceptual frame for, literary history. This we realize is a challenge of a different order and scale. The novels of Ghosh and Gurnah, and the vast scholarship on Afro-Asian oceanic histories, for instance, illuminate conceptual frames that can be deployed retroactively to better understand how past systems of globalism have impacted on the making and refashioning of modern literary worlds, such as the late eighteenth to nineteenth-century Franco-British maritime world system.

The relationship between cartography, cognitive mapping, and aesthetic representation is particularly complex in oceanic literary studies. Since the nineteenth century, the Atlantic has featured as the oceanic zone around which modern literary histories have coalesced. English and French literatures led the way and constituted a kind of universal gold standard in the field, or the literary Greenwich meridian, as Pascale Reference CasanovaCasanova puts it. The consolidation of British and French empires across much of the globe from the 1830s to the 1930s coincided with the rise of literary studies as a discipline, first in the colonies, and then in Europe and America. English literature, with its riches from the era of Beowulf to the Victorian period, became the pedagogical norm and was aggressively promoted as a force for cultural transformation in the colonies of Asia and Africa. A vast philological enterprise to master the linguistic and literary riches of Asia, East Africa, and the Arab world (the history of which I briefly revisited above) ran parallel with these developments. Not surprisingly, the North Atlantic, and especially Anglo-French literary historiography, did not intersect with this colonial philological history. And so it remained well into the twentieth century with the rise of America. The victory of the Allies in World War II consolidated a North Atlantic world view as the new universal. This was initiated during the war by the Joint Declaration of Winston Churchill and Franklin D. Roosevelt in Newfoundland on August 14, 1941. The declaration, soon dubbed as the Atlantic Charter, envisioned an Anglo-American alliance that would lay the foundation for a post-War world era of peace based on principles of “sovereign rights and self-government” and the rights of “all the men in all lands.” This declaration subsequently became the legal basis for the Charter of the United Nations in 1945 (Reference Slaughter and BystromSlaughter and Bystrom). These developments channeled the Atlantic imaginary toward imperial and national histories with a triumphalist narrative from “encounter to emancipation between the late fifteenth and early nineteenth centuries” (Reference Armitage, Armitage, Bashford and SivasundaramArmitage 95).

The rise of Atlantic world histories toward the end of the twentieth century complicated this triumphalist political and literary history by drawing attention both to the transatlantic slave trade across the north and south of the ocean and to crosscutting networks of slave and indentured labor across the Indian Ocean after the abolition of slavery. The Atlantic world has featured as a major paradigm in oceanic literary studies since the publication of Paul Gilroy’s path-breaking The Black Atlantic. The making of Euro-America on the back of the slave trade provides a powerful and sobering counterpoint to the triumphant theatricality of Franco-British maritime domination in the same era, while simultaneously connecting literary discourses and literary themes previously understood as territorially and culturally distinct. Black Atlantic studies has revolutionized the way we study the emergence of modern French, British, and American literatures today. In postcolonial and world literary studies, the phrase Black Atlantic has reconceptualized the Atlantic seaboard as the site of the emergence of capitalist modernity as a transnational system. The African slave trade, the American plantation economies, and the industrial world of Europe are seen as inextricably linked, a phenomenon that the students are historically attuned to.

The students in my course are less aware of an equally resonant oceanic world – the Indian Ocean – that lies at the heart of the European maritime expansion from Africa and the Middle East to South and Southeast Asia, a world that Ghosh’s and Gurnah’s novels bring powerfully to the fore. Indian Ocean literary worlds have been disconcertingly absent in conceptions of modern European and world literatures. The history of the slave trade was followed by the history of indentured labor (commonly known as the coolie trade) from India and Malaya to outposts of the British and French Empires, primarily to the Mascarenhas archipelago, the Pacific islands, and the Caribbean. The Indian Ocean trade routes served as the primary conduit for this transportation. Indians, Chinese, Africans, and Arabs commingled in zones that continued to experience the dark memories of the slave trade. Frederic Douglass, the author of the novella The Heroic Slave, wrote in 1871 about his distress at the grim reality of the coolie trade. A century later, the Mauritian poet Khal Torabully articulated a transnational poetics of “coolitude,” drawing on the pan-African “négritude” movement of the 1930s and arguing for the centrality of the sea voyage – as both destructive and creative force – in the recovering of the coolie’s identity and story (Reference Torabully and CarterTorabully and Carter). The opium trade between British India and China is equally crucial to foregrounding the importance of the Indian Ocean in the making of capitalist modernity. Opium was Britain’s solution to the imbalance of trade with China. The British import of Chinese tea, silks, and porcelain in exchange for silver had vastly drained British resources. Aware of the Chinese addiction to opium, the East India Company forced peasants in eastern India to turn to the cultivation of opium. By the beginning of the nineteenth century, the British used the port of Calcutta and the waters of the eastern Indian Ocean to send more than 4,000 crates of opium via third-party traders to Canton. This consignment quadrupled in the years leading up to the Chinese crackdown on the trade in the 1830s and the decade leading up to the First Opium War. The war led to the victory of the British imperial military forces in 1842 and the handover of Hong Kong to the Crown.

The interconnectedness between the Atlantic slave trade and the movement of labor on Indian Ocean trade routes, and the consequent entanglement of literatures of slavery and indenture, are brought to the fore in the early weeks of our coursework. The students read excerpts from works by Gaurav Desai, Isabel Hofmeyr, Enseng Ho, Sanjay Subramanyam, Sunil Amrith, and Nile Green, among others. They become aware of the need for a renewed attentiveness to interconnected print and literary public spheres of the Indian Ocean world from the eighteenth to the mid-twentieth centuries. European imperial incursions in this region can be seen as generating renewed cultural mixing with pre-European worlds. Literature during this period is broadly understood to cover diverse genres in multiple languages including Gujarati, Hindi, Swahili, Arabic, English, and French. Itinerant travelers such as pilgrims, sailors, soldiers, traders, merchants, and administrators have left records of their experiences. Records also exist of prisoners in the penal settlements of Robben Island and the Andamans. The genres range from travel writing, folktales, and letters to poems, testimonies, short stories, and novels. Many of these exist in special collections primarily in South Africa, the United States, the United Kingdom, India, Mauritius, and Madagascar. Extant texts on the Zanzibari Gujaratis such as Gunvantrai’s Dariyalal exist alongside Mia Couto’s Voices Made Night and Zuleikha Mayat’s weekly columns from Durban in Indian Views. Cynthia Salvadori’s three-volume publication, We Came in Dhows, records the movement of Indian traders across the Indian Ocean between the west coast of India and Kenya, and their eventual settlement in East Africa during the colonial era. Memorabilia, photographs, travel narratives, diaries, and memoirs feature in this collection and offer a powerful tableau of Indo-British-African cultural connections. A not-insignificant proportion of this literature finds inflection in the works of contemporary novelists such as Abdul Razak Gurnah, M. G. Vassanji, J. M. G. Le Clézio, and Shenaz Patel.

Much like Deeti in Sea of Poppies, who sees an apparition of the ship Ibis from her landlocked hut in Ghazipur and is filled with fear about what it entails, the students experience considerable trepidation as they dip their feet into the Indian Ocean world and especially the world of Ghosh’s Ibis novels. Despite their readiness to learn about a world from a relatively unknown past, a world they have not encountered in their English Literature classes in the United States, their disorientation is quite serious. They encounter a facet of the global that resists easy translation. The hybrid languages of oceanic mobility in the early nineteenth century, we realize, is lost to generations who have grown up in the age of air travel.

This becomes an opportune moment in our seminar to turn to linguistic experimentation in the novels and their revival of the many lost idiolects of nineteenth-century Asian maritime worlds. The language weave in Ghosh’s Ibis trilogy is truly astonishing, ranging from sea-trading argot like laskari and Cantonese pidgin to Baboo English and Butler English, not to mention the generous sprinkling of various regional Indian tongues such as Hindi, Gujarati, Bhojpuri, and Bengali. The students are especially intrigued by Ghosh’s use of laskari, the extinct idiolect of the lascars, the laboring Afro-Asian underclass on board these ships, and of Cantonese pidgin spoken only by those involved in the Canton trading system in southern China in the first half of the nineteenth century. The entanglement of these tongues with specific bodies of water is brought to the fore through characters like Jodu, Serang Ali, Ah Fatt, Bahram Modi, and his Cantonese mistress. We spend a few minutes in class reading aloud excerpts where exchanges occur in Cantonese pidgin. I share with my students the story of Ghosh’s discovery of a Laskari Dictionary in a library in Harvard that provided him with the impetus to make generous use of this now-extinct vocabulary in his trilogy. Compiled by Lt. Thomas Roebuck in 1811, A Laskari Dictionary of Anglo-Indian Vocabulary of Nautical Terms and Phrases in English and Hindustani was a major inspiration for the novelist, as was Yule and Burnell’s Hobson-Jobson: A Glossary of Colloquial Anglo-Indian Words and Phrases. The students also research the chrestomathy developed by Ghosh as an appendix to the novels. This philological appendix has a narrative about Neel Rattan Haldar, the disgraced Raja of Raskhali, as the reborn lexicographer who makes it his mission to document every possible word used by girmityas, lascars, and their Anglo-Indian masters during their oceanic journeys. This vocabulary, Neel predicts, would make its way into the first major lexicographic project undertaken on behalf of the English Language, namely the Oxford English Dictionary, but which Neel calls the “Oracle.” In the 1840s, the OED was nowhere on the horizon. We see this new Neel as the painstaking lexicographer of a global English before the era of globalization in the final novel of the trilogy Flood of Fire. Ghosh’s brilliant lexicographic excavation bears significant purchase on contemporary debates about English as a world language in the era of globalization.

In brief, the students not only begin to see the Indian Ocean as a powerful archive through which to understand modern literary world making, but also learn to trace lines of intersection with Atlantic perspectives to which they are much more attuned. They also begin to appreciate how the ocean might function as an exciting cartographic frame for a decolonial understanding of world literature. Significantly, they begin to appreciate the embedding of the English language in vast multilingual realms. It is to this multilingual realm of global anglophone worlds that I turn to in the final part of this essay.

Multilingualism and Global Anglophone Worlds

“Decolonizing (the) English,” notes Peter Hitchcock, “is … an allegory of abnegation in which the power to decolonize does not exhaust the power that English confers, but [it] … confounds the process of selving that globalization demands” (Reference Hitchcock751). Just as we need to rethink the language of endings and death in relation to postcolonialism, we might also consider the possibility that global anglophone is much more than an intractable literary monoculture out to extinguish the multilingual provenance of world literature. In recent years, many scholarly works have illuminated the multilingual face of anglophone worlding at different scales. Jeanne-Marie Jackson’s South African Literature’s Russian Soul: Narrative Forms of Global Isolation (Reference Jackson2015) is an outstanding example. What might two regions at a vast geographical, geopolitical, and temporal remove have in common? A literary imaginary, it appears, one shaped by oppressive political circumstances, distance from Western centers of influence, and a lag in participating in transformative world historical events. If the Tsarist reign of terror in nineteenth-century Russia prevented the radical social reforms that transformed Europe, apartheid delayed South Africa’s entry into the history of decolonization. The former produced Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, Turgenev, and Chekhov, the latter Nadine Gordimer, J. M. Coetzee, Njabulo Ndebele, Van Nierkerk, Janet Suzman, and Reza De Wet. Having established a plausible template for comparison, Jackson proceeds to parse the legacy of realism of the Russian masters and its influence on apartheid-era novelists. In the process, Jackson brings to the fore a transcontinental history of literary realism that rarely features in standard scholarly works on realism in the Anglo-American sphere. Her knowledge of realism’s Anglo-American history, combined with her expertise in Russian literature and South African writing (both in English and Afrikaans), enables Jackson to undertake a rich comparative study of this modern narrative form. Multilingual anglophone comparativism can often emanate from places far removed from hegemonic centers of influence.

Equally resonant are works that explore anglophone worlds at the juncture of multilingual cultures in Asia. A recent essay by B. Venkat Mani compares Mauritian Hindi writer, Abhimanyu Unnuth’s novel Lal Pasina (Crimson sweat, 1977) with Amitav Ghosh’s Sea of Poppies (2008). Mani situates Ghosh’s global tour de force alongside an ultraminor literary work written in Mauritian Hindi within an Indian Ocean frame (Reference ManiMani). Both novels bring to life the British empire’s infamous opium trade and the intricacies of forced labor migration in the Indian Ocean after the abolition of slavery. In neither novel is the narrative weight borne by a standard language. Unnuth’s novel is written in Mauritian Hindi that is inflected with Bhojpuri, a demotic version of Hindi spoken by agricultural laborers in eastern India who were transported as indentured laborers to work on British plantations in Mauritius, Fiji, and the Caribbean. French and Mauritian creole also feature in the linguistic weave of this work. Mani uses the term “ultraminor” to describe Unnuth’s novel, for it has only been translated into French nearly three decades after its publication, and no English version exists yet. Ghosh’s novel, while occupying pride of place in the pantheon of anglophone literatures, dethrones standard English, as we saw, and compels the latter to share the stage with fragments from languages such as Hindi, Bhojpuri, Bengali, Gujarati, Tamil, Malayalam, Arabic, Persian, Malay, Cantonese, Mandarin, Portuguese, and French. Patois of seaborne Afro-Asian worlds such as Laskari and Cantonese pidgin feature alongside Anglo-Indian colloquial lingo derived from the Hobson-Jobson. Mani’s comparative approach capitalizes on the obvious disparity of status between the two novels not to mourn the global invisibility of Unnuth’s work, but to make visible its multilingual energy that is on par with Ghosh’s. Mani’s essay channels multilingualism as a structuring and generative force in world literature, while situating English in the realm of the subaltern and the vernacular.

A similar intent informs Akshya Saxena’s book Vernacular English (Reference Saxena2022). Saxena traces the movement of English in postcolonial India across a range of media – print, visual, and sonic – and offers a theory of anglophone vernacular aesthetics that is legible across the nation. English in her reading is woven into the nation’s multilingual and multiregional weave through films, music, billboards, literary festivals, and digital media. Lower castes and neglected regions of the country such as the Northeast deliberately seek out English to counter the political domination of the Hindi. As a medium of desire and empowerment for the nation’s underprivileged, as also a language of upward mobility for the Indian middle class, English in Saxena’s work breathes as a heteronymic language. Ashley Cohen’s project on the Global Indies that crosscuts Atlantic and Indian Ocean worlds, Roanne Kantor’s excavation of Latin American influence on modern South Asian anglophone and Hindi-Urdu literatures, and Duncan Yoon’s project on the aesthetics of speculation in anglophone and francophone African literatures that trace the cultural texture of Chinese capitalist incursion on the continent are other examples of exciting decolonial work in global anglophone studies. Each project situates its anglophone corpus alongside a multilingual spectrum and navigates translational worlds in multiple languages: French, Hindi, Urdu, Spanish, Chinese, Zulu, Swahili, and Igbo.

A less dramatic and more effective means of demystifying the colonial horrors of English – to dispel the anglophone imperial specter so to speak – may be to attend to the ways in which its contemporary manifestation does the work of decolonization as it adapts to and is transformed by diverse literary traditions and cultural worlds, even those that have never been under its thrall. Where our disciplinary field is concerned, English does not invariably erase but is rather woven into myriad literary and linguistic cultures around the globe. In the process, the language itself has been transformed beyond measure. These manifest a logic of culture-power not reducible to English’s colonial history. A recent survey notes that, apart from its 400 million native speakers, more than a billion people know English as a second language, and that it is an official language in more than sixty countries. For most of its life, English was an unabashed importer of words. As the twentieth century came to a close, it became the largest net exporter of words (Reference MikanowskiMikanowski). The multiple cultural contexts of English in South Asia, East Asia, Southeast and Northeast Asia, the non-francophone Africa and the Caribbean, the Russo-Slavic region, Scandinavia, the Indian Ocean Rim, and the Pacific; the emergence of multilingual diasporic enclaves in the advanced capitalist world; the circulation and reception of translated multilingual literary texts in a world radically transformed by information technology; and more generally, a loosening of the isomorphic fit between a nation and its literary culture, all constitute exciting points of entry for a decolonial approach to English literary studies and the curriculum at large in the twenty-first century.

British poetry has cohered, and perhaps always will cohere, around a singular expressive lyric subject – aesthetic values associated with universal experience read as White – as well as with the canonicity of the lyric tradition: its form, fields of reference, poetic craft. Although mainstream, mostly lyric, British poetry has become increasingly racially diverse in the past decades, a lyric mode predicated on Whiteness remains largely unchallenged. British poets of color all too often rely on an aesthetic of self-foreignizing, for example by voicing of outsiderness or by deploying exoticizing markers of “authenticity.” Their poetry thereby leaves the premise of a White lyric universality intact by pointing always to the specific, the local, the personal as other. As I have written elsewhere “a mostly white poetic establishment prevails over a patronising culture that reflects minority poets as exceptional cases – to be held at arms’ length like colonial curiosities in an otherwise uninterrupted tradition extending back through a pure and rarefied language” (Reference ParmarParmar, “Not a British Subject”). More recently, I have argued that “to speak of transcending the self is to engage with the complex problem of the lyric. Lyric forms a zone of contact or conflict. The body of the poet of colour is made visible in the space of the poem; their voice becomes a lyric phenomenon inseparable from their social and racial positioning” (Reference ParmarParmar, “Still Not a British Subject”). Where does the dominant poetic mode in Britain leave the poet of color? What violence might it do to their voice when set against a reader’s expectations? What shapes the way a reader approaches the lyric “I”? From a pedagogical standpoint, rooted in tertiary education, specifically an English Literature degree, these questions are essential for any teacher of poetry to address both in the classroom and, I would argue, for their own reading practices, their own sense of literary value. One significant sticking point for university teachers like myself is the lack of scholarship on contemporary British poetry and race, a dearth that has only very recently been addressed in any significant way.¹ This absence of capacious critical frameworks – from academic criticism to representative anthologies – puts considerable obstacles in the path of everything from course design and delivery to wider issues that come to bear on reading practices around the lyric, namely the perception of an authentic speaker and the expectations of form.

A postcolonial reading of British poetry by non-White authors cannot be prevented from the marginalizing force of an imperial, and therefore inherited, bestowed, or enforced language. And yet it is likely that many contemporary British poets whose ethnic relations to former colonies are at a second- or third-generation remove from British subjects of empire do not consider themselves postcolonial subjects. There are complex differences between poets who migrated to Britain and those who were born in the UK, whose ties are perhaps more tenuous, limited to intergenerational memories at a remove, shared bloodline, cultures, or surnames. Where critical studies of poetry by non-White British writers sometimes shows its failures is in a flattening of discourse about race, abetted by terms like postcolonial or transnational or even “world literature.”² Each term makes little room for the industrious – indeed, the market and material culture are never far away from literary production – interconnectivity of poets in the present. A backward-looking glance over the previous century marks the rootedness of scholars in inceptive moments but does not account for a rapidly changing landscape, mostly because criticism is most comfortable where it is cumulative and stable. Nor are there enough studies of contemporary poetry and race as they intersect with the UK in ways markedly different from the USA, where such studies abound.³ Critical framing of UK poetry often ignores the pressures of racism or xenophobia (even when the work at hand responds to it), the shaping of a reader’s perceptions of the poet and her text as one and of the same and from where this cultural construction emerges, as well as the poet’s own determination of themselves as a subject. It is my intention here to interrogate the readerly gesture, its lyric premise of expression and authenticity, in order to reproach national canons and traditions that privilege the well-crafted lyric poem and its supposed universality. Mobilizing a decolonized reading of the lyric – one that dismantles formal features and a reader’s expectations of an expressive and authentic voice – I will offer finally two examples from my own experience teaching the works of Sarah Howe and Bhanu Kapil. To decolonize the lyric form, one that in its contemporary usage relies on a transposition of the reader onto the “I,” is to acknowledge that at its heart lyric and its assumptions of universality and authentic emotional expression can often be a site of violence and objectification for poets of color. To read lyric poems by non-White poets without an awareness of lyric’s tacit agreement of universality is to ignore the ruptures – and reconciliations – that the form allows.

The Problem of Lyric

The primacy of late twentieth-century British lyric as an expressive mode, offering experience – and from experience some meaningful truth – naturally makes the poem a vehicle for the poet’s life. But what objective reality can the lyric provide? Jonathan Culler’s analysis of the problem of lyric speech acts viewed as fictions might be recounted thus: if New Critical approaches define the lyric “I” as a fictional speaker rather than the poet speaking, then the design of lyric as assimilated truth, too, becomes the realm of fiction. The privileging of the text over the utterance, in Culler’s view, predisposes the reader to a false self, one constructed by language in the moment of lyric’s expression (Reference CullerCuller 105–109):

The dissociation of the poet from the speaker, the primacy of the text over intention by a New Critical model, empties lyric from its formal inception. Culler’s investment in the lyric “I” as determined by form, meaning, and address resists the postures of linguistic determination. But what he returns to the lyric – the intimacy of song, of lyric’s ritual function as a subjective experience both in its own time and in time immemorial – is poetry’s conspicuous dialectic function. A poem needs a reader to give it the force of speech, and the reader is in turn creator of that speaking subject in her listening. It is a mutually constitutive project, more so than in, say, in fiction. But the problem of overidentification between poet and speaker rests lightly on whoever is least conspicuous to a reader. Where there is a disconnect between a perceived reality presented by the lyric subject and its reader, that distance constructs dissonance. This is especially true when the experience conveyed is one that positions itself as other by way of deviating from a transcendent universal subject, which is so often White, middle class, male, even when student readers themselves may not identify as such. Bridging the distance between the speaker’s voiced consciousness and the reader’s own inner consciousness is where lyric does its work. But particularities of identity obstruct this connection, complicate a reading that might otherwise be transposition, and turn it into a perception of that distance between, say, the White reader and the non-White body making itself visible in the lyric space. And yet all lyric reading, regardless of the perceived identity of the “I,” requires the reader to be aware of the constructedness of the speaker’s voice and its seeing (or being seen). Such failed transpositions in the readerly act are among the most challenging to overcome in a teaching context. Before I consider lyric as a poetic mode – the dominant mode, in fact, of poetry taught throughout education for all ages – it is necessary to think more deeply about how British poetry by non-White poets is often framed within critical and educational contexts.

Admittance to the canon of contemporary British poetry for poets of color often comes at a price: legibility, a racial markedness that, for incorporation in an invariably White curriculum, singles itself out as deviating from universality, coded as White. University undergraduate students most often arrive with reading strategies shaped by school and exam syllabi. It is therefore worth briefly noting how inclusive these exams, particularly A-levels, are – and on what terms poets of color are included. Whilst generally in the UK context A-levels are crucial for admittance into undergraduate degrees, there is considerable latitude in options provided by teachers at secondary schools and colleges, and the variations between exam boards mean that there is no one set syllabus. However, what is striking and not altogether surprising is that exam boards’ suggested contemporary poems by poets of color tend to foreground racial otherness, longing, thematic concerns presumably taken for granted as the preserve of non-White writers. One example, “The Wedding” by British Pakistani poet Moniza Alvi, dramatizes a metaphorical mismatch between bride and groom as exile from one’s homeland, a failed romance with the country of arrival which is in this case England. “I expected a quiet wedding / high above a lost city / a marriage to balance on my head / like a forest of sticks, a pot of water” (Reference AlviAlvi 74–75). The bride’s innocence, and indeed ignorance of her betrothed, naturally plays into a cultural stereotype of arranged marriages, one no doubt as familiar to British readers as a rural woman carrying a water jug on her head. The poem’s existence, alongside so many others like it on an A-level syllabus, raises the difficult question of what is edifying about lyric’s claim to authenticity: to present a genuine voice from a White reader’s (and teacher’s) perspective that speaks to the longing of the migrant. An even more thorny question might be what does the lyric poem create in its space of personal expression – transmuted through landscape, sensory detail, experience – that allows for this poem to be written in this way where the poet might be seen to be speaking about the self at a distant remove, a moment of double consciousness? No doubt the poem’s place in the classroom is to exemplify the poet’s own biographical situation and its wider appeal for those in a similar racial positioning as the poet’s presumed cultural background.

A simplistic reading would identify the poet with the speaker, and yet a simplified (what Veronica Forrest-Thomson called in Poetic Artifice “bad naturalisation”) reading is what is called for in the rooting out of the marriage metaphor and unbelonging. The three “I” statements in the poem – “I expected,” “I insisted,” “I wanted” – correspond with silent desire, unrealized hope, and disappointment. This disempowered speaker capitulates to the plural “we,” and the lyric subject is lost, finally, to interpretations of their situation inscribed on racial tropes that translate in a British context as foreign: bathing buffalo, hennaed hands like “roadmaps.” Alvi, who was born in Pakistan but left for Britain as an infant, has spoken about her projected fantasies of a lost homeland standing in for lived experiences (Reference ShamsieShamsie). The complexity of her relationship, as a poet, to her own history does not match the rootedness of the lyric subject who is from elsewhere – for Alvi, the marriage here is perhaps an embodiment of duality, of selves married into one, rather than a migrant’s dashed hopes. But in the context of teaching this poem, it would be neither right nor possible to draw the author’s biography into our reading. The lyric stands alone in its educational purpose as a vehicle for meaning – a meaning predetermined by its being chosen. And the poem’s use of language – a heavily crafted translation of faux naïf sentiments into English that mimics a nonnative speaker, as in for example the lines “The time was not ripe / for us to view each other” – confirms such a reading. The British-Cypriot poet Anthony Anaxagorou describes his own experience learning poetry in sixth form as presupposing an ideal (White, middle-class) reader: “To suggest certain poetries are better aligned with certain readers is to reinstate a conservative and violent rhetoric which assumes there is either a singular/correct way to navigate a poem, or that one must first be trained in knowing how to think about the mechanisms central to poetic logic” (“Reference AnaxagorouAccessibility”). Yet the constructing of an ideal reader – one whose sensibilities and interactions with the world mimic those of a universal experience coded by a privileged majority – underlies the way we teach poetic value, especially in the well-crafted lyric.

In and outside of an educational context, it is hard to divorce our expectations of “I” statements from the voice that formulates this speech act. To do so requires recognizing that the lyric poem inscribes itself into a tradition where the “I” may have no referent in the real world; it necessitates a leap toward fictionalizing that genre that we have inherited wholesale as a vehicle for personal experience and emotion. Unless a lyric situates itself within an imagined persona, through dramatic monologue, a reader will, as Fred D’Aguiar writes of Irish Nigerian poet Gabriel Gbadamosi’s typically English poetry, seek the “burying [of] feeling into sensuous detail which collectively should stand for what the poet thinks and feels” (Reference D’Aguiar, Hampson and BarryD’Aguiar 67). D’Aguiar’s foundational essay on Black British poetry, “Have You Been Here Long?,” tellingly never offers critical distance between the speaking subject and the poet. Perhaps this is largely because the poets he discusses directly reference experiences of discrimination and migration in a time (his essay focuses on poets of the 1970s and 1980s) when the political marginalization of Black people and racialized poets within the wider canon required a direct speaking back to White readers. There is something beguiling and satisfying about this clear identification of the “I” with the poet – it makes use of the full force of expression that lyric has to offer. His readings of Jackie Kay, Linton Kwesi Johnson, James Berry, Grace Nichols, and Kamau Brathwaite, among others, are distinguished by their deeply knowledgeable, attentive ear for dub, reggae, and dialect-inflected poetics. But, as I have explained above, the danger remains, as D’Aguiar alludes to in the conclusion of his essay, that the centering of racial experience in reading these poets categorizes and marginalizes them, as if to suggest that the English language and English-language poetry had not been changed irrevocably in ways to which we do not often enough attend by the cultural imports of writers from across the world. A fuller understanding of lyric’s ability to communicate difference requires a grounding of lyric’s function of address in a social and historical space. As Culler also writes, “a socially oriented criticism can treat the work as its recurrent coming into being in a social space, which is itself in part the effect of that work and always to be constructed by a reading of one’s own relation to it” (Reference Culler301). In other words, the deferral of a text’s objectivity, a return to the lyric’s force of speech and utterance around a speaker and the society it addresses, opens up political possibilities for the text that are crucial to a decolonized reading of lyric poetry.

Reshaping the Syllabus

The common practice of a slow incorporation of “diverse” poetic voices into reading lists, we can agree, is wholly inadequate. When I began teaching in higher education, as one of two people of color teaching literature in my department, the task of filling the contemporary poetry course’s “Black British Poetry” week fell to me. The course, which I have recently taken on and remade entirely, covered British poetry from 1930 to the present, an odd departure point that scooped up late modernists like Auden, Gascoyne, or Bunting or (American-born) H. D.’s Blitz poems in with fellow poets Ted Hughes, Philip Larkin, and Dylan Thomas. Looking back over that first reading list, I see that one mooted version sandwiched Linton Kwesi Johnson between weeks dedicated to Jeremy Prynne and Geoffrey Hill. A few clear pedagogical problems emerge from the course design I inherited, such as the single-author focus, the absence of national, regional, and historical contexts, a disregard for aesthetic, political, and social factors, and, most obviously, the lack of non-White poets (and indeed the few women poets). What such a course offers is an exemplary list, not just examples of British poets, but those who are either seen as unrivaled or broadly representative of the four nations (and linguistic differences) of Britain across twelve weeks of teaching. Where lyric is concerned, attention on one poet and their work – detached from an understanding of, say, the broadly antimodernist strain of twentieth-century British poetry from Georgian poets to the New Generation Poets – reinforces the voice of the poet against the biographical limitations of an author-focused discussion. Anecdotally, it was my experience that students saw “Black British Poetry” week or a week devoted to a seemingly marginalized poet as optional, unnecessary, and even unfairly imposed on a largely White student body. They were less likely to attend lectures they felt were noncanonical. But surely the very structure of a course that would tokenize writers in this way is sending a subliminal signal already, one that undermines their inclusion on merit alone.

How best to reflect the complexity and variations across the UK as well as aesthetic/poetic modes and complex questions of identity? Structuring a course that takes two main presumptions to task – that British poetry can be spoken of as a national tradition in the present and that this it is distinct from other anglophone poetic cultures – was one solution to this conundrum devised by me and a fellow tutor.⁴ Moving away from the use of anthologies, many of which are entirely White or include limited selections of poets of color, was another crucial step. In fact, an opening gambit I enjoyed as part of an introductory lecture was to haul a stack of UK poetry anthologies to class and to scrutinize their tables of contents with students. That, coupled with a selection of poetry magazines from 1930 to the present (and statistical analysis of poetry publishing and poetry reviewing, which remains largely White), prepared our discussions for a critical approach to what had otherwise seemed stable realities.⁵ Practically speaking, lectures and seminars were not apportioned to single authors or groups of authors but divided into three main strands – “nation,” “theory,” and “poetics.” These thematic strands exposed students to issues particular to place, voice, style, and sociohistorical contexts and included race, class, lyric, and antilyric poetics as well as climate crisis and landscape poetry. A natural denaturing of these “strands” occurred: for example, national traditions were exposed as fluid and varied, and race theory supplanted postcolonial approaches and the pedagogical obstacles this analysis presents. Jahan Ramazani acknowledges that postcolonial readings have been seen as “homogenising” and “victim-centred, too colonially-fixated” but maintains that the term postcolonial “continues to be a powerful tool for revealing linkages across regions emerging from colonial rule, even as it avoids dissolving all writers in an undifferentiated globality, heedless of the differentials of power, history, and language” (Reference Ramazani and RamazaniRamazani, “Introduction” 2). In the wider project of anglophone poetry written across national borders, diasporas, and former colonies, the rootedness of power, of English-language educational systems as “producing and sustaining structures of domination” (Reference ViswanathanViswanathan 4), this particular lens is useful. But at the heart of empire, in its hostile environment and its unrelenting Whiteness, an argument could be made that postcolonial literary readings invert the ongoing, persistent domination of linguistic violence. In his book, A Transnational Poetics, Ramazani offers a more fluid paradigm for reading poets whose ties to multiple places cannot be easily resolved through national canons but must be seen as in constant relation and, at times, opposition. Considering poetry by Black British writers from McKay to Evaristo, he offers a utopic vision of variety, in-betweenness, of movement that enables “their creolization of Britain and Britain’s creolization of themselves” (Reference RamazaniRamazani, Transnational 180). Standing in for hybridity, creolization is a cross-cultural term used here to imply a kind of mixing that makes little space for differentials of power (or that, as Ramazani will know, White modernist poets often creolized to shore up that aesthetic dominance). No mode of reading is satisfactory that does not vigorously bring itself up to date – poetry is a fast-changing genre – or face up to present-day social and political realities that shape the contexts in which poetry is produced. The crystallization of critical frameworks and the stasis of the poetry culture they promote can only be avoided by being attentive to change, by seeing the poem not as an isolated event (as the lyric often purports to be) but a line of thinking that points in several directions at once. Would it be possible to teach Linton Kwesi Johnson’s work without the long lens of radical Black activism that stretches to Jay Bernard’s recent book, partly concerning the New Cross Fire, taking into account the archiving of events and of continued experiences of racism, state violence, and police brutality that sit between the two? Yes, but in my view it would not be advisable.

Decolonizing the Lyric

In the T.S. Eliot Prize’s near thirty-year history, only two women of color have won it, Sarah Howe in 2015 for her debut Loop of Jade and Bhanu Kapil in 2020 for her sixth full-length collection How to Wash a Heart. Prize culture’s complex relationship with poetry canons does not in any way guarantee longevity to a book or its author, even if the prize is the most coveted of all, but, like a weather vane, prizes are a useful gauge of present conditions: the direction of public opinion on literary value and its relationship to the empowerment of a (sometimes conservative, sometimes progressive, depending on your sympathies) judging panel. Awarding a prize is never an apolitical gesture. And for teachers of poetry, the visibility of prize-winning books and their sometimes-direct link to educational contexts – with, say, the Forward Prizes for Poetry, which through its foundation disseminates prize poems directly to schools to develop its audiences – makes a critical analysis of their reception in context all the more necessary. It would be foolhardy to offer a rejoinder to lyric reading that ignores its reception in public life and critical culture; such a reading would only reinforce the text’s primacy and the subject’s assumed universality or marginalization based on the poet’s race. Since its publication, I have taught Howe’s book as a way to think through lyric and antilyric poetics on undergraduate and postgraduate poetry courses. Her book as well as Kapil’s employ lyric subjects but in doing so undermine assumptions innate to dominant forms of lyricism, namely authenticity, personal expression, a suspended just-past moment detailed through anecdote and leading to an epiphanic meaningfulness. Both books also introduce a linguistic difficulty either by introducing extratextual reference and allusion or through formal and syntactical complexity. My reading of Kapil’s most recent book is informed by many years of teaching her previous works primarily at postgraduate level. Howe and Kapil offer alternatives to lyric poems that appear to unquestioningly inscribe themselves onto an “I” that coheres around the performance of an “authentic” racial otherness.

In keeping with reading poets in light of their reception as well as their aesthetics, I turn back to Howe’s Eliot Prize win. As I have discussed elsewhere and as Mary Jean Chan details in her essay “Journeying Is Hard,” Howe’s book was almost immediately beset by controversy in the press.⁶ Newspaper reviews and interviews – as well as parodies in Private Eye and the TLS – highlighted Howe’s youth, beauty, Oxbridge pedigree, and her foreignness (she is mixed race, born in Hong Kong but raised in England). The furor over her win and the disquiet from mostly White men that ensued quickly overshadowed the enormous range (subject and style) of Howe’s collection, reducing it to poems about her and her mother’s ethnic background.⁷ The book’s many poems that fall outside of perceived biographical reference were mostly ignored by these critics. Where might the interstices lie between a lyric self that constructs a legible racial experience and an ironic subject that elsewhere takes apart chinoiserie and race in the literary imagination? How might these impulses be read as mutually constitutive of a rejoinder to lyric violence? I read and teach Loop of Jade in light of its determination to decategorize and defamiliarize forms of knowledge, linguistic and material function – where objects and people as much as languages and places disrupt lyric’s arrival at meaning, discarding such an impulse as colluding with the very hierarchies of domination that she seeks to dismantle. Radically rethinking lyric from the inside – in poems that look as though they are driven by personal expression and “I” statements – Howe’s work opens onto categories foundational to how we think of race, nation, and empire.

A critique of taxonomy in language shapes Howe’s book, not least by her quotation and further parody of Jorge Luis Borges’s own parodic “certain Chinese encyclopaedia,” in which animals are divided into fourteen arbitrary categories. Howe takes each category – from “those that belong to the Emperor” to “that from a long way off look like flies” – and skewers their fabulist definitiveness. In doing so, she calls to mind Foucault’s own fascination with Borges’s invented text – set within a wider critique of a universal language – and inevitably questions the relation between the self and other in the space of lyric coherence and unity of voice. Purposefully set among these forgeries of sincerity, Howe’s “autobiographical” poems must be read similarly as constructions of, and thereby an undermining of, lyric authenticity. In the sonnet “(n) that from a long way off look like flies,” the smudge of a dead midge in the binding of an edition of Shakespeare opens onto a father–daughter relationship. The speaker identifies herself as the owner of the book “my undergrad Shakespeare,” and queries whether the fly’s blood is her own, but the lyric “I” does not appear until the end of the poem:

Its sudden wondering, emphasized by the enjambed line – tellingly rhyming “wonder” with “father,” “share” and “Lear” – solidifies the poem’s voice both inconclusively and after much melding. The fly, its blood, the “we” and “our” gives way to an addressee “you” who may be general or yet another way for the “I” to escape being pinned down in the pages of tragedy.⁸ The “affable” father drinks gin and feels his daughter is ungrateful, suggesting of course that the speaker’s father has less affable moments too. This lyric returns at the end of the sonnet, the silent “you” in “tissue” and its thrum in “too” midway through the penultimate line rhythmically separates the fly from the speaker finally in the moment of subject–object distance. But the speaker isn’t “a long way off” from this fly, in all ways she assembles herself and the reader into the same category of animal. Howe is fulfilling Foucault’s own sense here of threatening “with collapse our age-old distinction between the Same and the Other” (Reference FoucaultFoucault xv). Authenticity, too, is under threat with the constant fluidity of positioning, accomplished by the fast-paced move through pronouns, and the fly is finally gendered as female, removable but not removed. The speaker pauses inconclusively as if scraping her own face from its canonical aberration. This is empathy’s “darkening pane,” the mirror made possible by the dim light of lyric’s intimate situation, the half-light of self-recognition in others. But, as Ruth Ling observes, “in all its opacity, Loop of Jade thoroughly denies that any sense of enlightenment or epiphany can be reached through lyric” (Reference LingLing 81).

Readers familiar with British-Indian-American poet Bhanu Kapil’s back catalogue, namely her five previous full-length collections, her performances and pamphlets, will note immediately that her sixth book (the first to be published in the UK) looks very dissimilar to anything she has written before. How to Wash a Heart is a lyric sequence of five interrelated parts, written in very short lines; the main action is concerned with a tense and at times hostile imagined guest–host relationship. “It’s exhausting to be a guest / In somebody else’s house / Forever” (Reference KapilKapil, Heart 4). Conversations between the two women (the host is White, the guest is Brown) are interspersed with recollections or narratives that reveal the guest’s past history of migration from the Partition of India onward to the UK (and the USA). How to Wash a Heart, as Kapil noted in an interview I conducted last year, is intended to be read quickly – in just enough time for a cup of tea to go cold (Reference ParmarParmar, Interview). Kapil and I have coauthored an essay/poem text on the legacy of Partition and lyricism that was published first as a standalone piece in Poetry London (a special issue edited by Sarah Howe) and then as part of Threads, a conversation between me, Kapil, and the British Indian avant-garde poet Nisha Ramayya. In Threads, Kapil and I imagine a fourth space, a radical site of undoing and becoming, beyond our shared three countries of origin and migration, where the nomadic self as lyric subject can untangle themselves from personal and shared histories: “In the fourth space, the memorised pattern has been tugged loose, the yarn or wool or radical fibres on the floor like water.”⁹ Kapil is an expert user of personae: her book Ban en Banlieue is the apex of lyric entanglement with another named figure, Ban, who is a character invoked by the speaker to stand in for a self. Recounting her creation of Ban, Kapil writes that a dream “requires me to acknowledge that my creature (Ban) is over-written by a psychic history that is lucid, astringent, witty. No longer purely mine” (Reference KapilBan 27). A hybrid text written in mainly prose fragments, Ban is a site of generic experiment – first a failed novel then a series of autosacrifices, performances, narrations where the speaker and Ban meet and diverge in a history of racist violence. One that is “no longer purely mine,” the text navigates the readership it addresses and one that it is addressed by the very same readers. By comparison with this book and Kapil’s others, How to Wash a Heart seems beguilingly straightforward. It begins:

The half-question that sets the poem in motion may be “Do you like this?” or “Is it done like this?” It may indeed be “Is this how you wash a heart?” Whichever way we read it, the answer depends on external guidance, knowledge, approval from what I imagine is the host, whether this is the nation state or its native population to whom the immigrant is always cautiously beholden. The invocation of John Betjeman, laureate whom my mother’s generation read in school, sets up this lyric moment of address – asking if the speaker is starting off in the right way. The heart is both metaphor and a physical object appearing in the poem and in the performance (at the ICA in London) that inspires the book, a melting heart of red ice. Emotively, lyric is a kind of cleansing, a purgatory expression that is momentary and complete. It is a washing of one’s heart, a private act made public for an unknown audience. Kapil explains her formal decisions and her use of short lines as a kind of controlled energy. “I’m curious about the forward movement of the sentence when it is curtailed … how do you build emotion in a work? The non-verbal elements of the poem are the place where emotion resides. In this book, it is less about commas or semicolons but the ways the lines are cut. I understand that as syntax” (Reference ParmarParmar, Interview).

As lyric goes, Kapil’s use of the “I” subject position is not straightforwardly demarcated in the poem’s sections describing host–guest interactions. Very often the “I” shifts between the two women so that the acts of violence are reciprocal, and the victim/aggressor dynamic is unified by a desire so intimate that it feels shared, almost erotic. “I want you to touch / my cervix. / I want my dress / Shredded / And my life / Too. […] Whatever you want to do / to me do it” (Reference KapilHeart 38). To consider the violence that the lyric space creates for an “I” who does not stand in for universality is to invite intimacy leading to obliteration. What “I want” and “you want” are bound together by an unspoken agreement not to disrupt the balance of power: to want what the host wants is the guest’s only hope of fulfillment.

To reconcile the lyric subject in this lengthy passage with the former quotation is to always question who is speaking and what truth is being expressed. Truth, after all, is a preoccupation of the expressive post-Romantic lyric poem. Is it that the “I” feels nothing for the host, or is this the host speaking? More interestingly perhaps, “I don’t feel anything” as a standalone line points us back to the host’s assumptions that her guest is subhuman, a kind of animal. Or maybe this is the guest’s refusal to feel emotion for the “you,” for the reader who voyeuristically awaits the emotional payload. Kapil mimics lyric form but undermines its unspoken contract with this reader who, like the host, transposes its desire on the speaking subject who “comes from a foreign place.”

It is certainly possible to reclaim the lyric from textual, political, and social spaces of Whiteness and violence without denaturing its intended purpose. One need not, as a teacher, bury the student in a textual analysis that shuts out a poem’s context, nor should they use a biographical lens to interpret the poem’s meanings. Rather, by choosing poets who challenge the primacy and expectations of lyric, we stand to gain strategies of thinking through poetic language on its own terms, to listen afresh for the multiplicity of the self in all forms of speech.

“In 2190, Albion’s Civil Conflicts Finally Divided Along Norman–Saxon Lines,” states the title of a speculative poem by Trinidadian-British writer Vahni Capildeo (b. 1973), published in their Forward Prize-winning collection Measures of Expatriation (Reference Capildeo2016). Implicitly identified as a Norman invader, “with superior weaponry,” the poem’s first-person speaker addresses a second person interpellated as Saxon: “Soon, you stopped sounding wrong” (Reference CapildeoCapildeo 85). Is this a reference to the historical evolution of Old English into Middle English, with manifold borrowings from Anglo-Norman, or to the tuning of the arrivant’s ear to the addressee’s vernacular? The Norman–Saxon division between “I” and “you” maps onto other distinctions of body type (“thin” and “thick”) and gender (“So far as I was woman,” muses the poet, not quite claiming that identity while addressing their interlocutor as “Young man”) (Reference CapildeoCapildeo 85). Capildeo has noted, too, that “‘2190’ encodes ‘1290’, which was the year of the Jewish expulsion from England; a forced migration not enough remembered” (Reference ParmarParmar, “The Wolf Interview” 59).¹ Such divisions – linguistic, embodied, gendered, and religious – both displace and evoke another, unspoken distinction between non-White and White. As Vidyan Ravinthiran observes of Capildeo’s writing, “this is poetry which enters phenomenologically, with heartbreaking and case-making fidelity, into racial travails” (“Reference RavinthiranMyriad Minded” 169). The final stanza of this poem suggests how ideas of “home” and habits of speech are deployed against racialized immigrants, a long-standing current of British political discourse that would gain force in the run-up to the Brexit referendum over the months following the February 2016 publication of Capildeo’s collection:

Anticipating the script of this “conversation,” the poet satirizes it by deploying imperatives and turning racist clichés into declarative fragments. By the final sentence, it is ambiguous whose words are driving out whom. At once memorable and oblique, the poem conveys how the identities of “Albion” (or Britain) and the English language depend on the presence of outsiders over the past millennium and more.

A selection of Capildeo’s poems were among the final readings I assigned for an upper-level undergraduate course in 2020 on Contemporary Literature, with the theme “Multicultural Britain.” This course attempts to introduce students to the contours of postwar British literature, involving both fiction and poetry, while challenging dominant ways of charting that literary history by centering themes of decolonization, migration, and race. Thus, we read novels by Sam Selvon, Kazuo Ishiguro, and Bernardine Evaristo alongside a range of poetry: Louise Reference Bennett and MorrisBennett’s “Colonization in Reverse” on her fellow Jamaicans migrating to Britain; Philip Larkin’s “The Importance of Elsewhere,” which relies on a contrast between Ireland and England; poetry written in Northern Ireland during the Troubles by Seamus Heaney, Michael Longley, Ciaran Carson, and Medbh McGuckian, who hardly identified as British despite their passports; Carol Ann Duffy’s “Comprehensive,” a dramatic polylogue of immigrant and xenophobic students in an East London school; Linton Kwesi Johnson’s poems, from “Sonny’s Lettah” to “Liesense fi Kill,” protesting decades of anti-Black violence by police; Daljit Nagra’s metapoetic “Kabba Questions the Ontology of Representation, the Catch 22 for ‘Black’ Writers … ” and “Hadrian’s Wall,” commissioned in 2016 by the Mansio project, which moves from the Roman wall constructed “to keep out the barbarous” to ask “Where will our walls finally end?” (“Mansio”; Reference NagraNagra 15). Following on from Evaristo’s Booker Prize-winning Girl, Woman, Other, a polyphonic novel in free verse or what Evaristo terms “fusion fiction” (Reference DonnellDonnell 101), we considered Capildeo along with Sandeep Reference ParmarParmar’s 2015 essay “Not a British Subject: Race and Poetry in the UK,” in order to reflect on how readers’ assumptions about race and aesthetic experimentation might lead to misjudging, or outright excluding, poets of color. Even as my students struggled with Capildeo’s work, they grasped Parmar’s dissatisfaction with the paths laid down by Larkin but also by Nagra’s earlier poetry “voiced in … ‘Punglish,’ a faux parodic mix of English and Punjabi.” According to Reference ParmarParmar, “the singular lyric voice should not merely reproduce poetic sameness through a universal ‘I’ or self-fetishizing difference through a poetic diction of otherness.” Capildeo’s writing, I added, was doing the difficult work of making something new; it warranted the same quality of close, appreciative reading as the now-canonical early twentieth-century modernists. And in a literary field other than that of twenty-first-century Britain, less recognizably modernist poetic procedures, even the cultivation of a seemingly stable “I,” may produce a different force or meaning equally deserving of close reading.

In an editorial in the venerable Journal of Commonwealth Literature entitled “Decolonizing English,” Ruvani Ranasinha writes that her students want to see writers of color “included in canonical courses on Poetry or Modernism” (Reference Ranasinha120), not relegated to the optional edges of the curriculum, and she herself emphasizes that “Britain was always ‘multicultural’” (Reference Ranasinha121). For Ranasinha, “it remains equally important to consider the poetics as well as the politics of postcolonial or minority writings in our teaching” (Reference Ranasinha121). While poetics refers here to writers’ “artistic strategies” across genres (Reference RanasinhaRanasinha 121), what better way to become attentive to poetics than by studying and writing about poetry? Postcolonial poetry, as both a body of poems and a field of critical discourse, furnishes opportunities to foreground anticolonial and antiracist work, whether in “canonical courses” or those devoted to postcolonial literature, without disregarding the aesthetic dimensions of such work. Would it be possible, Ravinthiran wonders, for postcolonial poetry criticism to live with a poem “intensively, combining appreciation – such as world poets rarely receive – with a susceptibility to the cognitions of form, the thinking that is uniquely done in poems and that outgoes simplistic frameworks of mimesis or subversion?” Reference Ravinthiran(“(Indian) Verse” 647). To elaborate some of the thinking that is done in Capildeo’s “In 2190, Albion’s Civil Conflicts Finally Divided Along Norman–Saxon Lines,” for instance, I propose that their poem enacts a decolonizing practice in at least three ways that ramify throughout postcolonial poetry more broadly: (i) it questions the politicized distinctions between outsiders and insiders, (ii) it makes available for poetry undervalued forms of language and definitions of home, and (iii) it embarks on a project of world-unmaking and world-remaking. Highlighting these three modes of practice, this chapter reflects on how university-level aesthetic education and pedagogy might elucidate the decolonizing work of poets and poems. At the same time, it tests the limits of the term “postcolonial poetry” for such decolonizing work.

“Always with a House There Is an Inside and an Outside”: Constructing Postcolonial Poetry

Postcolonial poetry has gained recognition over the past two decades, following the publication of Jahan Ramazani’s The Hybrid Muse: Postcolonial Poetry in English (2001). Although poets had been studied in the contexts of fields demarcated according to national borders (e.g. Nigerian literature), geographic regions (e.g. African literature), or transnational affiliations (e.g. Black literature), Ramazani’s book was the first to name “postcolonial poetry” as a coherent field in its own right. The term tends to adhere to poets of the former British Empire following World War II. As a scholar of postcolonial poetry based in an English department, I follow the primarily anglophone focus of Ramazani’s book and of Rajeev S. Patke’s wide-ranging Postcolonial Poetry in English (Reference Patke2006). However, the appearance of two articles on “postcolonial poetry” in a 2007 special issue of Research in African Literatures on Lusophone African and Afro-Brazilian literatures, both translated from Portuguese, suggests genealogies for the field beyond English and possibilities for comparative research (Reference MataMata; Reference SeccoSecco). From the start, “postcolonial” embeds tensions between emphasizing “peoples from regions of the so-called global South or Third World” and including those oppressed by settler colonialism in the Global North, whether peoples of the Celtic fringe or Indigenous peoples in North America (Reference RamazaniRamazani, “Introduction” 1). As Ramazani acknowledges, “the term ‘postcolonial’ has been criticized for being too political, too homogenizing, too victim-centered, too colonially-fixated, or just premature amid persisting neocolonialisms” (Reference Ramazani2). Objecting in the early 1990s that “the term” both “lures us into a false sense of security, a seeming pastness of a past that is still painfully present” and “endows its principal morpheme ‘colonial’ with an originary privilege,” Nigerian poet and intellectual Niyi Osundare (b. 1947) asked derisively, “When you meet me in the corridors tomorrow, will you congratulate me on my ‘post-colonial’ poetry?” (Reference OsundareOsundare 208). While some scholars find “postcolonial poetry” a valuable framework for building institutional spaces that recognize underrepresented bodies of poetry, some poets wonder whether truly decolonizing the curriculum may entail dispensing with the term.

Having grown up in Canada but moved to the United States for college, I first read postcolonial poetry, marked as such, in a multigenre course in Twentieth-Century British and Postcolonial Literature. There I encountered Derek Walcott’s lyric poems, taught by a scholar who was completing a book, begun as a dissertation advised by Ramazani, about Caribbean poets as the creators of “new world modernisms” (Reference PollardPollard). Eventually, in my first book (Reference Suhr-SytsmaSuhr-Sytsma), I attempted to recast the literary history of the mid-twentieth-century era of decolonization by focusing on anglophone poets from nonmetropolitan sites: Walcott (1930–2017), the tragically short-lived Nigerian/Biafran poet Christopher Okigbo (1930–67), and Seamus Heaney (1939–2013), along with their nationally eminent but internationally underappreciated contemporaries such as Louise Bennett (1919–2006), J. P. Clark (1935–2020), and Michael Longley (b. 1939), many of them linked to each other by other cultural gatekeepers and itinerant intellectuals who had been mostly lost to literary history.

To decolonize the literary curriculum, however, it is not enough to elevate a handful of “great” postcolonial poets, nearly all of them male, to the canon. In an essay published two months after Walcott’s death in March 2017, Jamaican writer Kei Miller (b. 1978) responds to the Trinidadian writer Earl Lovelace (b. 1935) – and through him to Walcott – by reflecting that “his generation of writers, they created a house. And always with a house there is an inside and an outside. We are interested in the outside – in the people you left out. … What of the Syrian-Caribbean writer who could never chant ‘Black Power’? What of the queer Caribbean writer who never felt the freedom of independence?” Reference Miller(“In the Shadow of Derek Walcott” 9). Miller suggests a kind of agonism between different generations of Caribbean poets, yet he implies that Caribbean poetry cannot be circumscribed by agonism with British colonialism or the English lyric tradition. Rather, contemporary poets whom we might identify as postcolonial probe how inequity and injustice remain embedded in localized norms of race, gender, and sexuality – and the language in which these norms are expressed.²

Nor should the United States be exempt from this inquiry. Within the United States, the study of postcolonial literature is still too often understood as the study of the rest of the world. When US-based scholars began to teach and discuss “British Commonwealth Literature” during the 1940s through 1960s, they conceived of it as wholly separate from American literature, even as the CIA was secretly funding the Congress of Cultural Freedom to promote literary initiatives across the Commonwealth as part of the United States’ postwar rivalry with both the waning British Empire and the ascendant Soviet Union (Reference Raja and BahriRaja and Bahri 1156–57; Reference KallineyKalliney). There are, of course, alternate genealogies for postcolonial literary studies in African Diaspora-focused institutions such as the journal Callaloo (est. 1976) (Reference Raja and BahriRaja and Bahri 1166–67). By the time postcolonial studies was finally recognized as a Division of the Modern Language Association, in 2007, “the designation ‘postcolonial,’ initially intended as a largely geographic or geohistorical designation, had grown into a full-fledged approach to all manner of literary, language and cultural studies” (Reference Raja and BahriRaja and Bahri 1179). Yet a risk remains that English departments treat the postcolonial as a catchall term for issues related to canonicity, empire, otherness, and race without engaging squarely with settler colonialism or US empire.³

Poet Natalie Diaz (b. 1978), who “is Mojave, Akimel O’otham and an enrolled member of the Gila River Indian Community” and also identifies as Latinx and queer, notes in an interview that genocidal language about Native people “is still present in our Declaration of Independence” (Reference DiazDiaz, “Natalie Diaz”; Reference RodriguezRodriguez). Her Pulitzer Prize-winning collection Postcolonial Love Poem (Reference Rodriguez2020) challenges readers to ask if or how poetry in the United States might be postcolonial. An epigraph precedes each section of the collection; the first, preceding the title poem, is from Joy Harjo (Muscogee Nation): “I am singing a song that can only be born after losing a country” (Diaz, Postcolonial n.p.; Reference HarjoHarjo 7). Also featured as part of “Living Nations, Living Words: A Map of First Peoples Poetry,” Harjo’s signature project as US Poet Laureate (2019–22), “Postcolonial Love Poem” locates itself in the Mojave Desert. Every line unexpected, the poem unfurls images of war, wounding, and erotic desire:

As in Capildeo’s poem above, the first-person speaker addresses a second person, but here the “you” is less adversary than lover. The poem’s final lines emphasize the possibility for a shared first-person “we”:

As scholar and novelist Daniel Heath Justice (Cherokee Nation) maintains, “in the Americas, colonialism continues; if anything, it has become an assumed part of the sociopolitical fabric that marks any claims to Indigenous political, social, economic, or intellectual sovereignty as being ‘special’ rather than Indigenous rights” (Reference Heath Justice and Quayson492).⁴ In a prose poem – or lyric essay – later in Postcolonial Love Poem, “The First Water Is the Body,” Diaz writes, “What threatens white people is often dismissed as myth. I have never been true in America. America is my myth” (Reference Heath Justice and Quayson47). If Diaz’s poetry is postcolonial, it is so in the sense that it grapples with ongoing American colonialism, even as it turns away from the myth of the United States to the life-giving elements of land and water, the Mojave language, and queer desire.

Postcolonial poetry criticism need not, then, cordon off histories of European empire from those of genocide, slavery, resistance, and survivance in North America. Indeed, the history of the university where I work, a private, predominantly White institution located on land that the Muscogee people were forced to relinquish, involves Indigenous dispossession and slave labor (“Land Acknowledgment”). For those of us in North America, there is no necessary contradiction between advocating for our institutions to reckon with such histories, including pursuing reparative actions toward the descendants of those harmed, and holding space in the curriculum for perspectives from outside North America. Writers have often been ahead of scholars in noticing parallel oppressions and possibilities for solidarity. For instance, poets and novelists from northeast India, who may identify India less as their home than as a colonial state, have found inspiration in Indigenous American and African American writing, as well as anglophone African and Latin American writing (Reference KashyapKashyap).

A matter of departmental decisions about what is required to major in English and which courses are offered, as well as school-wide decisions about degree requirements, the curriculum is also a matter of syllabus design. As I develop syllabi, I want my students to encounter the full breadth of poetry in English – to find poems to which they feel drawn and poets with whom they identify, to develop an informed appreciation for the craft of postcolonial as well as canonical poets, and to grasp the aesthetic, conceptual, and political stakes of these poets’ projects. “We are confronted,” write Ben Etherington and Jarad Zimbler of precedents for decolonizing practical criticism, “with the problem of deciding not only what or whom to read, but also how to read (or listen) … in a way that responds to the distinctive dimensions of verbal arts” (Reference Etherington and Zimbler229). Confronting this problem involves different approaches both at different levels of the curriculum and in multigenre courses in Contemporary Literature or Postcolonial Literature as compared with single-genre courses in poetry. Even so, the most inclusive syllabus or incisive reading practice will not address the fundamental issue that John Guillory identifies in Cultural Capital as “access to the means of literary production” (Reference Guilloryix), including literacy, higher education, and publication. Or as Ranasinha puts it, “access to English remains classed” (Reference Ranasinha120). As a scholar and teacher, I look for ways to acknowledge both how poetry functions as cultural capital within inequitable systems and how poets strive to practice liberation in language.

“This Little Boat / of the Language”: Revaluing Languages, Defining Home

The introductory poetry course I teach involves three movements: it begins with the fundamentals of how poems work, with examples from “Caedmon’s Hymn” to Cathy Park Hong’s “Ballad in O,” moves to how to interpret poems, including through encounters with the drafts of published poems, and culminates with a unit examining postcolonial poetry in global Englishes and in translation from other languages into English. In this third unit, we read poems by Louise Bennett, whose satirical ballads in Jamaican Creole or patois the poetry establishment was slow to recognize as poetry (Reference InnesInnes 230–31; Reference Suhr-SytsmaSuhr-Sytsma 91–92), in conjunction with her radio monologue about “Jamaica Language.” Bennett’s “Bans a Killin” takes to task a fellow Jamaican, “Mas Charlie,” who has sworn to “kill dialec!” (Reference Bennett and MorrisBennett 4). Playing dumb before humorously demolishing his classed linguistic snobbery, the speaker inquires, “Yuy gwine kill all English dialec / Or just Jamaica one?” (Reference Bennett and Morris4). She goes on to point out that if he is against all dialects, he will have to “kill” numerous English, Irish, and Scottish modes of speech, not to mention swathes of the literary canon:

Each era, the poet implies, has witnessed the forging of new, nonstandard idioms for poetry, an experimental tradition that she extends. Having demonstrated her superior learning and logic through the medium of patois, Miss Lou’s final blow is to caution Mas Charlie against dropping his “h” lest he become the victim of his own linguicide. As Janet Neigh observes of a recorded version of “Bans a Killin,” Bennett “draws attention to how everyone (even Mas Charlie) speaks an accented version of English that does not correspond with its written representation” (Reference Neigh169). English does not belong exclusively to any class, nationality, or race – and crafting written renditions of its spoken varieties has long been a productive challenge for poets now considered canonical as much as for those identified as postcolonial.

From questioning how English is defined and valued, we move to reading an English-language collection that draws on another language, such as The Half-Inch Himalayas (1987) by Kashmiri-American poet Agha Shahid Ali (1949–2001), whose poems repeatedly allude to the Urdu ghazals of Ghalib (1797–1869) and Faiz (1911–84), or The January Children (2017) by Sudanese-American poet Safia Elhillo (b. 1990), whose poems incorporate lines in Arabic from the songs of Abdelhalim Hafez (1929–77). Each of these collections meditates, moreover, on experiences of migration accessed through dream and fantasy as well as personal and familial memory. In a riveting conversation with the class in spring 2021, Elhillo explained that the term asmarani, the “dark-skinned” or “brown-skinned” beloved of some of Abdelhalim’s songs with whom the speaker of many of her poems identifies (Reference Elhillov), helped her to name the intersection of Black and Arab. Her choice almost entirely to eschew capitalization owed something to the absence of capitalization in Arabic. At the same time, Elhillo’s “self-portrait with lake nasser,” in which the speaker declares, “there once was a world / & then there was only water,” relates the damming of the Nile to the unmourned loss of the Nubian language: “i call arabic my mother tongue / & mourn only that orphaning” (Reference ElhilloElhillo 44). Having read a pair of recent poems in the form of the ghazal, Elhillo shared that Patricia Smith’s “Hip-Hop Ghazal” and Fatima Asghar’s “WWE” had won her over to this form about obsession and sound even before she encountered Agha Shahid Ali’s ghazals.

Finally, we read translation theory, and I invite students, in preparation for becoming poet-translators themselves, to think critically about the dual-language format of Irish-language poet Nuala Ní Dhomhnaill’s Pharaoh’s Daughter (Reference Nuala1990) and the varied approaches of its thirteen translators. The collection’s title is drawn from its closing poem, “Ceist na Teangan,” translated by Paul Muldoon as “The Language Issue”:

Ní Dhomhnaill, who has referred to this poem as her “final answer to why I write in Irish” (“Reference NualaWhy I Choose to Write” 22), taps into the biblical book of Exodus, in which Moses’s mother places her son in a basket in the river to avoid Pharaoh’s death sentence on Israelite boys, and Pharaoh’s daughter, finding Moses, decides to foster him rather than obey her father’s edict. Even without reading Irish competently or comparing Muldoon’s translation with Ní Dhomhnaill’s own English-language crib of the poem as “The Language Question” (Reference Nuala“Dánta Úra” 45), sharp-eyed students notice the absence of Moses (“Mhaoise”) and the final question mark from the right side of the page, leading to a discussion of Muldoon’s translation strategy. They also notice the layered metaphor, in which the Irish language is likened not to Moses but to the basket. Are those of us who speak English as a primary language being interpellated as Pharaoh’s daughter, the scion of the oppressor in the biblical story, and if so, what kind of responsibility do we bear to Irish and other endangered languages? I try to emphasize, in sum, that as poems revalue denigrated, non-Western, and endangered languages through which their speakers inhabit or pursue a sense of home, poems engage in a decolonizing practice. That such poems may unsettle those of us who feel secure in English as a home tongue might lead us, rather than engaging with texts only in English as is habitual for English departments, to advocate for and contribute to programs that center the study of nondominant languages.

“Maps That Break / Eggs”: Unmaking and Remaking Worlds

Poems can be portals to understanding the world; they can also enact the unmaking of a world tainted by colonialism in order to make new worlds in language. In an undergraduate senior seminar entitled Poetry Worlds that I led a few years ago, students investigated the world-making capacity of poetry in tandem with actual social worlds in which poets have lived and written, from London, England, to Lagos, Nigeria, and from Belfast, Northern Ireland, to Kingston, Jamaica. Having read Una Marson, Bennett, Walcott, and Kamau Brathwaite – poets who grew up, studied, or taught in Jamaica – early in the semester, we read two full collections by poets from Kingston during its second half: Lorna Goodison’s Guinea Woman (Reference Goodison2000) and Kei Miller’s The Cartographer Tries to Map a Way to Zion (Reference Miller2014). In the title poem of Guinea Woman, Goodison (b. 1947), Jamaica’s Poet Laureate from 2017 to 2020, pays homage to her great-grandmother as a dark-skinned African woman. The very next poem, “Nanny,” in the voice of Queen Nanny or Nanny of the Maroons, to whom Goodison referred at a 2018 reading not only as a national hero but as “original Wonder Woman,” “could be seen as paradigmatic of the decolonizing struggle in postcolonial poetry” in that it honors one who literally fought colonial authority (Reference 471GoodisonGoodison, “Poetry Reading”; Reference RamazaniRamazani, “Introduction” 8). Even more than these historical poems, though, my students gravitated toward poems in which Goodison seems to theorize her own experiences with poetry as a decolonizing practice.

“The Mango of Poetry” begins in the lyric present: “I read a book / about the meaning of poetry” (Guinea Reference Goodison103). The poet confesses, “I’m still not sure what poetry is. // But now I think of a ripe mango,” specifically “one from the tree / planted by my father / three years before / the sickness made him fall prematurely” (Reference Goodison103). Together with the mango, the word “fall” alludes to the biblical account of Eden, in which the first humans bring death into the world by eating from a fruit tree, an association emphasized when the poet returns to “the shortfall // of my father’s truncated years” (Reference Goodison103). After this line, the poem shifts to the conditional mood, as the poet details how exactly she would enjoy this mango “while wearing a bombay-coloured blouse” to allow its juices to “fall freely” on her (Reference Goodison104). The numerous “I’d” and “I would” constructions accentuate the capacity of poems to make a world that does not yet exist, in which the “fall” signifies vitality rather than mortality. The poet then joins the lyric present and conditional in the final stanza:

“Poetry is the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings,” asserted William Wordsworth in his preface to Lyrical Ballads (1800) (Reference Wordsworthxxxiii). Referring to the mango’s juices as “overflowing,” Goodison both literalizes and tropicalizes Wordsworth’s definition, while radicalizing his emphasis, elsewhere in the preface, on poetry as pleasure.⁵ Her quatrain stanzas evoke the ballad stanza, of which Wordsworth made occasional use, but are not fixed to its customary rhyme and rhythmic pattern. Her final line echoes the poem’s eighth line but subtly shifts away from Standard English (“what poetry is”) along the Creole continuum (“what is poetry”) (Reference Goodison103, 104). For Goodison, the mango tree becomes an apt figure for English-language poetry, which, though not indigenous to the Caribbean, metaphorically grows out of Jamaican soil, thanks to a previous generation of Jamaicans, and furnishes sensuous experiences that exceed colonial designs.

It is possible to appreciate Goodison’s “The Mango of Poetry” and also Capildeo’s satire, in their prose poem “Too Solid Flesh,” of the mango as a trope that plays into the mainstream British reception of postcolonial poetry as exotic: “I opened a book and a mango fell out. I opened another, and another mango fell out. … Woman doth not live by mango alone” (Reference Capildeo24). One of the last poems in Goodison’s collection, “Was It Legba She Met outside the Coronation Market?”, presents the ingestion not of a mango but of an eyeball as an image for poetry as a decolonizing practice. The name Coronation Market, like that of Kingston, in which it is located, refers to the British monarchy and thus to colonial history, but Goodison’s poem seeks Afro-Caribbean rather than British precedents for poetic vision. Composed in three free-verse stanzas and the third person, the poem is focalized through a child (a figure of the poet as a young person?) who meets “a crooked man” or “bush doctor” (Reference GoodisonGoodison, Guinea 127). In a trance,

This enigmatic exchange leaves the child “at the crossroads” between human and spirit worlds, which Legba is thought to guard. One of my students queried why this figure from Haitian Vodou would be in Jamaica. One possibility is that Legba authorizes a pan-Caribbean and – through his association with the Yorùbá òrìṣà Èṣù – pan-African lineage for poetry which, crossing colonial borders between former British and French colonies, may be cognizant of the colonial library but does not rely on it. The poem’s final lines offer a finely balanced image: “The child is silent as the ball’s / white weight levitates on the tip of her tongue” (Reference Goodison128). The child’s silence and restraint are all the more potent, given that Goodison’s poetry notably celebrates the liberating potential of Afro-Caribbean women’s speech and taste.

Miller, who disavows Walcott’s influence, names Goodison as one of “the poets whose shadows I’d actually been writing in” (Reference Miller“In the Shadow of Derek Walcott” 8). Miller’s Forward Prize-winning The Cartographer Tries to Map a Way to Zion is not dedicated but “livicate[d]” to “the bredrens and sistrens of ‘Occupy Pinnacle’, still fighting for Zion, still fighting for a rightful portion of land” (Reference Miller4). Formed in late 2013, Occupy Pinnacle sought to preserve the site of a Rastafarian community founded in 1940 by Leonard P. Howell and repeatedly raided by colonial police. Activists “argued that Pinnacle stood as an example of decolonisation many years prior to the 1962 declaration of independence from British rule” (Reference DunkleyDunkley 37). Amplifying the associations among anticolonial, antiracist, and spiritual struggles, the collection juxtaposes Miller’s livication with a pair of epigraphs on the facing page: two stanzas from Bennett’s “Independence” about newly independent Jamaica’s position on the “worl-map” – Miller has recalled that his mother “was a brilliant reciter of poems by Louise Bennett, a dialect poet who stands in Jamaica’s consciousness as our most national of poets” (Reference WachtelWachtel 28) – and two stanzas from a Rastafari chant contrasting the wearisome ever-presence of “Babylon” with the transcendence of “Holy Mount Zion” (Reference MillerMiller, The Cartographer 5).

Early in the collection, “Quashie’s Verse” stands out as a postcolonial ars poetica, like “The Mango of Poetry,” and as a concrete poem resembling a jar. Miller’s poem asks what “measure,” a recurring term in the collection that is relevant for both cartography and prosody, is available for the Afro-Caribbean poet “who can no longer / measure by kend or by / chamma or by ermijja” – measurements from Ethiopia based on individual human bodies rather than standardized units (Reference MillerMiller, The Cartographer 12; Reference BerhaneBerhane). “As emblematic Jamaican Everyman, Quashie is the guttersnipe offspring of slaves and slavery,” explains British-Jamaican poet Karen Reference McCarthy WoolfMcCarthy Woolf (Reference McCarthy Woolf93).⁶ Salvaging this archetype, Miller’s poem treats Quashie sympathetically as a figure of the postcolonial poet, alienated by colonization from his ability to shape poems to “earthenware,” formed by his hands with “no two jars” identical (Reference Miller12). The poem concludes:

The repetition of “nothing” at the line endings casts doubt on the neutrality of the repeated adjective “universal,” which should be heard in scare quotes.

Such questioning – of whose experiences are included in or excluded from definitions of poetry, who is authorized to speak or expected to listen, what kinds of language are considered acceptable, and how worlds are cognitively mapped – is deepened by the twenty-seven-poem title sequence, “The Cartographer Tries to Map a Way to Zion.” Jamaican scholar Reference BaileyCarol Bailey describes the sequence this way: “Miller’s poems capture the postcolonial challenge to the colonial-era land grab in a back-and-forth between a mapmaker who feigns innocence and objectivity and a rastaman who is grounded in folk wisdom, fully aware of colonial dispossessions, and equally well versed in the vernacular strategies available for rethinking the relationship to land.” The students in my Poetry Worlds seminar noticed that the rastaman’s voice is rendered in what Brathwaite named “nation language” – Bailey, following Velma Reference PollardPollard, specifies that “dread talk is a form of nation language” – as well as that the title sequence is intercut both with individual poems and with another, “Place Name” sequence. I pointed out, in turn, how Miller’s poems develop the relationship between rastaman and cartographer as dialectical rather than dichotomous. Compare, for example the openings of poems “vi” and “xiv”: “For the rastaman – it is true – dismisses / too easily the cartographic view” and “But the cartographer, it is true, / dismisses too easily the rastaman’s view” (Reference MillerMiller, Cartographer 21, 34). Far from offering a false balance between colonial and postcolonial points of view, however, the poems examine what is at stake in the inevitable process of trying to know the world and recreate it in language.

Referring in an interview to cartography as a “way of knowing” like language, Miller contends that “every language is partial” (Reference WachtelWachtel 24). He confides, “it was easy for people to think I was the Rastaman in the book, but in my mind I was clearly the cartographer. … How does my education make me see the world, and how do I challenge myself to see other things?” (Reference WachtelWachtel 24). The poems search for ways of knowing that would redress colonial misrepresentation without rejecting mapping wholesale. Inspired by Kai Krause’s “The True Size of Africa,” critiquing Mercator’s projection (Reference MillerMiller, Cartographer 71), poem “vi” amplifies the rastaman’s belief that such European-made maps “have gripped like girdles / to make his people smaller than they were” (Reference Miller21). The next poem, “vii,” submits a more planetary perspective:

This rhetorical question leads, tellingly, from the unmaking of the creatures’ first worlds into a watery world. Here, postcolonial poetry imaginatively models noncoercive forms of belonging that are not defined by the colonial-turned-national borders into the service of which maps are so often pressed.

If the rastaman may underestimate the prospects for decolonizing cartography, poem “xiv” suggests, tongue in cheek, that the cartographer certainly underestimates the rastaman’s ease with institutionally accredited ways of knowing,

Miller, too, has a PhD from Glasgow, although his dissertation focused on Jamaican epistolary practices (Reference Miller“Jamaica to the World”), including verse epistles by Bennett and Goodison, whose “Heartease I” (Reference GoodisonGuinea 32–33) Miller quotes in poem “xix” (Reference MillerCartographer 44). In “xiv,” the rastaman sites (positions) rather than cites (summons) Wynter, the Jamaican writer and critical theorist, whose essay argues “that the systematic devalorization of racial blackness [is], in itself, only a function of another and more deeply rooted phenomenon – in effect, only the map of the real territory, the symptom of the real cause, the real issue” (Reference Wynter115), which is a constrained imagination of “genres or kinds of being human” (Reference Wynter119). Ultimately, the poet’s vocation is to make not just a new map, but a new territory.

The relation between map and territory, concept and material world, becomes an especially acute subject for inquiry at the graduate level. In graduate seminars on poetry, I structure readings around notable poets, but also around what alternative frameworks to the nation – postcolonial, transnational, cosmopolitan, diasporic, global, and/or planetary – might be adequate to twentieth- and twenty-first-century poetry that registers the violence of the Atlantic slave trade, European colonialism, and contemporary migration while inventively refashioning poetic form. A recent multigenre graduate seminar on African Writing and Futurity – the course posed the question, how have African writers imagined not only their place but their time in the world? – concluded with a virtual visit by Motswana poet Tjawangwa Dema. Her collection The Careless Seamstress (Reference Dema2019), which bears cover artwork by the South African artist Mary Sibande, features a number of seamstress figures. Responding to a question about these figures and women’s labor, Dema reflected that sewing was historically gendered, with women being assigned the role of home-makers, men that of heroes or world-makers. As the speaker of the title poem, dealing with her husband’s sexism, declares, “A woman knows the way things puncture and hold” (Reference DemaCareless 21). For Dema, poetry poses the challenge of “world-building” in an economical or brief form, and her experience of “trying to stitch together an entire collection” opened up “entire worlds” (Reference DemaDema, African Writing).

While poets exert some agency over their language and labor, institutional issues with editing and publishing differentially afflict both poets in the Global South and poets of color in the Global North, affecting which poets are included in anthologies aimed at the classroom as well as which individual collections can be assigned. Those of us engaged in university teaching can support presses in the Global North that keep crucial poets in print while also assigning poets whose work is not being promoted or published in the Global North. The digital is no panacea, but the digitization of archival or out-of-print materials and the efflorescence of digital publications across the Global South offer possibilities for our pedagogy beyond what the campus bookstore can order.

Decolonization is a perpetually unfinished business. Even as I have tried here to present the postcolonial less as geography or identity than as critical practice, many geographies and identities vital to the decolonizing work of poetry have gone unmentioned. Whether or not “postcolonial poetry” remains the most efficacious framework, poems and poets will continue to enact decolonizing practices, at least until the thorough reimagining and reordering of “genres or kinds of being human” is effected (Reference WynterWynter 119).

How have scholars and teachers of literature in the anglophone Caribbean understood the task of decolonizing the English literary curriculum? What lessons might this hold for those working both within and – as in my case – very far distant from the Caribbean today? This chapter provides an account first of the nature of English literary study in the colonial Caribbean, and then of Caribbean attempts to decolonize the practice in the later twentieth century. My aim is to analyze the evolving ways scholars and teachers have understood the “coloniality” of the practices they inherited, and the different means by which they have attempted to change them.

English Literary Study in the Colonial Caribbean

Toward the beginning of Erna Reference BrodberBrodber’s 1988 novel Myal, the child protagonist recites Rudyard Kipling’s “Big Steamers” to a visiting Anglican parson at her school in St. Thomas Parish, Jamaica. “The words were the words of Kipling,” we are told, “but the voice was that of Ella O’Grady, aged 13” (Reference BrodberBrodber 5). Ella is a mixed-race child, the daughter of an Irish policeman and his Jamaican housekeeper. Growing up in a rural area, she is bullied by her classmates for her light skin and fair hair. Finding comfort in her studies, she learns from the maps and books her school provides. “When they brought out the maps and showed Europe, it rose from the paper in three dimensions, grew big, came right down to her seat and allowed her to walk on it, feel its snow” (Reference BrodberBrodber 11). Asked to recite “Big Steamers” to the parson, she is undaunted. “She had already been to England several times” in her imagination, and “all she was doing at Teacher’s rehearsals was to open her mouth and let what was already in her heart and in her head come out” (Reference BrodberBrodber 11–12).

Scenes like this give a picture of the colonial nature of literary education in the early to mid-century colonial Caribbean. The set text here, Kipling’s “Big Steamers,” was first published in A School History of England, a 1911 textbook written, as the authors claimed, “for all boys and girls who are interested in the story of Great Britain and her Empire” (Reference Fletcher and KiplingFletcher and Kipling 2). “Big Steamers” is a didactic, question-and-answer poem in which the child questioner learns from the adult respondent about the work of the British merchant navy, crossing the Empire and Dominions. Its message is of a vast world made tame and safe for the child by the bravery and skill of the imperial merchants. The significance of the scene in Myal turns not just on what Ella is reading but on how she is reading it. She has learned it verbatim and is reciting it from memory, such that by a process of “osmosis” Kipling’s words have become her own (Reference BrodberBrodber 11).

British materials, imperial values, rote learning: these are the characteristics many Caribbean writers describe when recalling the colonial literary classroom. Ella O’Grady, attending school in 1913, reads from generic textbooks produced for readers across Britain and its colonies and dominions. Alongside Kipling, she might have encountered Nelson’s series of Royal Readers or the Mcdougall Readers series. Slightly later, from the mid-1920s onward, Nelson’s began to produce their successful West Indian Readers series, written by the colonial schoolmaster Captain J. O. Cutteridge. These later textbooks include more material specific to the West Indies, including lessons on Caribbean flora and fauna, regional agriculture, and local crops. But they also contained extracts and retellings of English literary classics and lessons in art history focused on paintings by British and European artists (Reference Low, van Heijnsbergen and SassiLow, “Empire of Print” 117). Moreover, as Gail Low has shown, the West Indian history they did tell was framed in Eurocentric terms: celebrating Columbus’s “discovery” of the islands and skating over the history of slavery in their celebratory story about the region’s agricultural development (Reference Low, Boehmer, Kunstmann, Mukhopadhyay and RogersLow, “Read” 107).

In the work of many Caribbean writers (as for Ella O’Grady above), the Readers become unwitting objects of fantasy, longing, and projection (Reference Fraser, Fraser and HammondFraser 99). It is clear, however, that these authors, and their characters, read against the grain. In many primary schools, as Carl C. Campbell notes, English classes consisted simply of grammatical drilling and the recitation of poetry (Reference CampbellCampbell, Young Colonials 89). In Naipaul’s A House for Mr Biswas, a novel about literary formation in the late colonial West Indies, literature is studied by copying and repetition, as a route to better comportment, social capital, and exam success. In Jamaica Kincaid’s Annie John, the disciplinary undertone to English literary education is made explicit when the protagonist, Annie, is “ordered to copy Books I and II of Paradise Lost by John Milton” as a punishment for writing satirical comments below a picture of Christopher Columbus (Reference KincaidKincaid 82). As Simon Gikandi has argued, colonial schooling understood the ideal student of literature to be someone who easily absorbed and replicated the insights and values of the foreign text: “A powerful mythology among young colonials was that while they could become accomplished readers, writing was alien to their experiences” (Reference Gikandi and GikandiGikandi xvii). Repetition and inculcation were valorized and tested, not creativity, response, or critique.

For most people in the colonial West Indies, secondary education was the exception not the rule. Despite receiving substantial public funding, the best schools in the British West Indies – including Queen’s Royal College (QRC) in Port-of-Spain, Jamaica College in Kingston, and Harrison College in Bridgetown – were accessible to the general public only through a small and exceptionally competitive scholarship program, and then, only for boys. These were grammar schools in the old British tradition with a deep commitment to a European humanistic and literary education. C. L. R. James’s 1963 memoir Beyond a Boundary gives a portrait. At QRC, he writes, “I mastered thoroughly the principles of cricket and of English literature, and attained a mastery over my own character” (Reference JamesJames, Beyond 31). Among his reading, he lists Virgil, Caesar, and Horace (in Latin), Euripides and Thucydides (in Greek), all thirty-seven volumes of Thackeray held in the school library, Dickens, George Eliot, Shelley, Keats, and Byron, Milton and Spenser. “As schools go, it was a very good school, though it would have been more suitable to Portsmouth than Port of Spain,” he writes (Reference JamesJames, Beyond 37). Associating literary study with “mastery” over “character,” James alludes to the idea that studying English literature might instill a British-derived, masculine-coded form of rectitude. From the later nineteenth century, school certificates were administered by the Cambridge University Local Examinations Syndicates, who adapted to allow West Indian topics and texts only slowly through the mid-twentieth century (Reference Low, van Heijnsbergen and SassiLow, “Empire of Print” 118–19). The Caribbean Examinations Council was finally established only in 1973 (see Reference Low, Boehmer, Kunstmann, Mukhopadhyay and RogersLow, “Read” 108). This, at last, allowed syllabi and examinations to be governed solely from the Caribbean.

The University College of the West Indies was founded in 1948 in a “special relationship” with the University of London. Upon graduation, students received “External” London degrees (“UWI Timeline”). The Department of English was established two years later, in 1950, offering courses for the General degree program and offering its own Honours (or “Special”) degree in English. As a colonial institution, the department offered four papers for the general degree: “Middle English and Early Tudor Literature,” “English Literature 1550–1700,” “English Literature 1800 to the present day” (in practice, this meant “to 1900”), and “Exercises in Critical Appreciation.” In 1963, as an autonomous university in a newly independent region, practical criticism was scrapped, and five new papers were offered. These were: “English Literature, Chaucer to Wyatt,” “Donne to Pope,” “Johnson to Byron,” “The Victorian Period,” and “Shakespeare.” In other words, very little changed. With some minor rearrangements (“Chaucer to Wyatt” became “Chaucer to Spenser”), this structure remained through the 1960s, and the Special Degree syllabus, whilst having a little more variation, followed the same pattern. “We still live under a compulsion,” Edward Baugh wrote in 1970, “to make sure that the students get a comprehensive course in the literature of England, as if we must first seek the heaven of that kingdom” (Reference BaughBaugh 58). A full course in West Indian Literature was made compulsory for the first time for Special Degree students in 1970.¹ The University of the West Indies (UWI) was significant because it was the key institution in which future teachers and professors of English in the West Indies were educated. One common view, discussed below (Reference Baughpp. 479–480), is that it provided institutional continuity or memory, enforcing colonial disciplinary norms and practices well into the postcolonial period. But at the same time, as Glyne Griffith has argued, it provided an institutional site for methodological reflection and critique (Reference Griffith, Dalleo and ForbesGriffith 295). Most of the scholars discussed in this chapter passed through the University of the West Indies as either students, professors, or both. Many published in forums housed at the UWI.

What defined English literary study in the preindependence Caribbean as colonial in nature? I would point first to the limited franchise. For social groups outside the colonial elite, primary education was not universal, secondary education was rare, and university education exceptionally so. Most of the best schools, as we have seen, were reserved for men. Literary education, at primary level, was very limited, and, despite the efforts of some reformers, emphasized the inculcation of exemplary texts at the expense of critique. At both primary and secondary level, literary study was seen to be a conduit of “conduct” (to quote C. L. R. James). At all levels, the texts studied were overwhelmingly English and European, some championing overtly imperialist views, and some containing racist representations. At university level, the rationale of the syllabus was to tell the story of a nation’s – England’s – literary development through time. All of these characteristics would be the subject of the evolving critique I will now trace from the 1960s to the present. All would have stubborn afterlives in the institutions in which these critics worked, the syllabi that they attempted to reform, and even in their own minds and assumptions.

From Enfranchisement to Critique

Two of the larger British Caribbean colonies, Jamaica and Trinidad achieved independence in 1962; Barbados and Guyana followed in 1966. As is well known, the last years of formal colonialism and the first years of independence saw a flourishing of Caribbean letters. The twenty years between the publication of George Lamming’s In the Castle of My Skin (1953) and Derek Walcott’s Another Life (1973) saw the publication of Selvon’s The Lonely Londoners (1956); V. S. Naipaul’s House for Mr Biswas (Reference Naipaul1961) and Mimic Men (1967); Jean Rhys’s Wide Sargasso Sea (1966); Merle Hodge’s Crick Crack, Monkey (1970); Kamau Brathwaite’s Arrivants trilogy (1967–9); and Walcott’s In a Green Night (1962) and Dream on Monkey Mountain (1970). How did this literary flourishing influence the development of literary criticism and pedagogy in the region? One simplistic but conceptually useful distinction would distinguish nationalist approaches that aimed to enfranchise Caribbean writers within existing models of literary value from more radical forms of critique that used Caribbean experience, and Caribbean texts, to query those values. The tension between these two approaches, sometimes in the work of the same critic, and the gradual shift in critical fashion from enfranchisement to critique through the long 1960s, is a helpful map for understanding Caribbean critical trends in the period.

“Take the whole line of them,” C. L. R. James wrote in a Trinidad Guardian magazine feature in 1965, “Jane Austen, Henry Fielding, Samuel Richardson … even Charles Dickens. None of them at twenty-three was so much a master of the novelist’s business as this young man, George Lamming, who has grown up in the West Indies” (Reference JamesJames, “Home” 4). Just as “half-a-dozen West Indian cricketers” were now “acknowledged as people who could hold their own in any department of the game with the greatest historical figures who have ever been,” so it was no longer “unduly nationalistic” to make this claim for the region’s novelists. James’s thoughts about literature and culture were complex and changed through his life, but this article clearly instantiates the “enfranchisement” model. James takes for granted existing understandings of what great literature is and argues that West Indian writers, though historically neglected, meet this standard and deserve attention. James’s argument is that the West Indian literature of the 1950s and 1960s constituted a major new branch in the long tradition of “Western” literature (“we are a Western people,” he bluntly states), one of singular relevance to the contemporary decolonizing world, and to the Caribbean region in particular (Reference JamesJames, “Home” 5).² Just as “Aeschylus wrote at home in his native language for the illiterate people around him,” so writers such as Lamming ought (James believed) to express the West Indian experience authentically, that is – in Lamming’s own phrase – “from the inside” (Reference JamesJames, “Home” 5; Reference LammingLamming 37–38). Many critics of James’s generation localized the correct topic of West Indian literature onto the Romantic concept of the “folk.” The standard was international, the subject matter local, giving the West Indian (James was a federalist, after all) a national literature by which to understand themselves and present their experience to the world. At the university and in schools, this approach called for the dedicated study of West Indian literature as such. “Each nation is interested first and foremost in its own literature,” Edward Baugh wrote, quoting from Louis Dudek; at the University of the West Indies, “the study of West Indian literature should naturally have a central and increasingly important place” (Reference BaughBaugh 56, 59).

Even as Baugh was making this relatively modest proposal however – this essay was first given as a lecture at the P.E.N. Club, Jamaica, in April 1970 – he acknowledged that the demands of student activists on the UWI campus far outstripped the nationalist politics of a generation of scholars now viewed as part of the establishment. Speaking of the “upsurge of questioning and self-examination” now manifesting itself “in all aspects of the university’s life,” he describes the local manifestation of a wider shift (Reference BaughBaugh 49). The historian Kate Quinn has described the “crisis of failed expectations” that developed in postindependence Caribbean states through the 1960s. “Flag independence,” it was felt, had done little to redress the deeper legacies of the colonial era: dependence on foreign countries; racial hierarchies that still valorized White or lighter-skinned people; cultural hierarchies that valorized European norms; and social and economic divisions that continued to disenfranchise the Black poor (Reference Quinn and QuinnQuinn 2). In this climate, a more radical vision of culture and politics was offered by the Black Power movement, which called for a break with colonial patterns of government and administration, economic redress in favor of the poor, and – to quote from Walter Rodney’s famous manifesto – “the cultural reconstruction of the society in the image of the blacks” (quoted in Reference Quinn and QuinnQuinn 2).

The Mona campus of the University of the West Indies, east of downtown Kingston, played an important role in the Black Power protests. A Black Power group had been formed on campus in 1967. When Rodney, a UWI lecturer, was denied reentry to Jamaica by Hugh Shearer’s centrist government in October 1968, students marched toward the office of the Minister of Home Affairs. Although the students, in all likelihood, were not responsible for organizing or inciting the larger protests and riots that spread through Kingston, the campus was seen as a symbolic center and was surrounded by the military during the protests (see Reference Lewis and QuinnLewis 61–67). This was the context in which the university finally moved to increase the representation of West Indian literature on the English syllabus. It also, in Rupert Lewis’s words, led to “the Afrocentric reorientation of performance poetry and dance, and, most obviously, in the black-consciousness messages of the popular music of its day” (Reference Lewis and QuinnLewis 70). These formal and thematic developments in the popular arts, including poetry, did not much impinge on the initially moderate reforms in the UWI English department. Later on, as we shall see, they would.

“The imperial way of seeing has not disappeared with the imperial flag,” wrote Sylvia Wynter, then a lecturer in Hispanic literatures at UWI Mona. “Its manifestations are more subtle; because more subtle, they are more dangerous. It was easier to fight ‘manifest unfreedom’ in 1938 … than to grapple with ‘seeming freedom’ as we must do now” (Reference WynterWynter, “We Must 1” 30). Wynter’s essay “We Must Learn to Sit Down Together and Talk about a Little Culture” was published in the Jamaica Journal in two parts, in December 1968 and March 1969. A crucial expression of, and reflection upon, its cultural moment, it rejected moderate nationalist ideas in favor of a systematic critique of the definition and function of literature and criticism.³ The essay is a review of The Islands in Between (1968), a collection of critical essays on Caribbean literature edited by the English critic Louis James, who had previously taught at UWI Mona. But as its subtitle “Reflections on West Indian Writing and Criticism” suggests, Wynter’s essay extends into a larger meditation. The target of Wynter’s criticism is what she calls the “branch plant” perspective on Caribbean literature, one which “adjusts new experience to fit an imported model” (Reference WynterWynter, “We Must 1” 26). Despite its still-tiny presence in the main undergraduate curriculums, Wynter had noticed that by this point most critical writing in the English-speaking Caribbean, and specifically most criticism of Caribbean literature, was “centred at and diffused from the university” (Reference WynterWynter “We Must 1” 24). In her view, the model of criticism practiced by Louis James, and modeled as exemplary to new scholars at the UWI (she uses the example of Wayne Brown) had imported wholesale from England fundamental assumptions about what literature was, and what constituted literary value, without interrogating them, or their contemporary relevance in the Caribbean.

Wynter’s essay made a distinction between what she called “acquiescent” writers and critics and “challenging” or “revolutionary” ones. In her view, the key error made by “acquiescent” critics was to view “literature” as a “fetish object,” a special category of language-use to be understood and assessed by special, universal “artistic” standards (Reference WynterWynter, “We Must 1” 24). The corollary of this attitude for critics was to view critical activity as disinterested in the Arnoldian sense: dispassionately evaluating literary work against a quasi-objective standard, and without acknowledging one’s own stakes or investments in the judgment formed. For Wynter, this was an error that found its source in European dualist philosophies (the separation of mind and body, intellect and activity) and in the imperial-capitalist commodification of the work of art. Against this, Wynter offered a vision of literature that was purposive rather than aestheticist: literary texts, including critical essays, are means to an end, “not ends in themselves” (Reference WynterWynter, “We Must 1” 24). Their purpose is fundamentally social: literary texts exist for living audiences. And the social purpose that Wynter emphasized was interpretive and epistemic. She called for literature which “reinterpret[ed]” Caribbean life by drawing attention to the economic inequalities and the spurious social and racial hierarchies that permeated the region. To reinterpret the social world in this way, she says, “is to commit oneself to a constant revolutionary assault against it” (Reference WynterWynter, “We Must 1” 24). In this sense, it is important that the two literary forms that most interest Wynter in this essay are the novel and the critical essay: both are seen to share a common critical and interpretive function.

A key word for Wynter in this essay is “awareness.” If literary texts are social performances, speaking from person to person in specific social contexts, then it was important to ask: who is speaking, and why? “I am a Jamaican, a West Indian, an American,” she wrote, “I write not to fulfil a category, fill an order, supply a consumer, but to attempt to define what is this thing to be – a Jamaican, a West Indian, an American” (Reference WynterWynter, “We Must 1” 24). Where you were speaking from, your social position, background, and investments, fundamentally shaped the meaning of what you said. Her objection to Louis James or W. I. Carr was not that they were English but that their writing did not – in her view – reflect on and acknowledge the position from which they spoke. They replicated colonial ideas about literature and literary value unconsciously and attempted to shape readers and students in their image. Instead of this, Wynter argued, writers and critics should understand their own writing, and the writing of others, in their total social and historical context: “Challenging criticism seems to me to relate the books discussed to the greatest possible ‘whole’ to which they belong” (Reference WynterWynter, “We Must 2” 34–35). The “whole” to which both Caribbean and English writers belonged was a world shaped by imperial capitalism and Atlantic slavery. Like Rodney, Wynter saw imperialism as an evolutionary phase in the history of capitalism – “in effect the extended capitalist system” – in which divisions between capital and labor, “exploiters and … the exploited,” had through recent centuries been organized geographically: capital in London; labor drawn from West and Central Africa, and later India and China; the site of production in the West Indies (Reference RodneyRodney, loc. 584).

“With Hawkins’s first raid on Africa, his first Middle passage to the West Indies,” Wynter wrote, “the nature of being an African, the nature of Englishness had changed. In the place of African and Englishman there was now only a relation” (Reference WynterWynter, “We Must 2” 30). For this reason, English, West Indian, and West African literature could only be understood in relation to one another. These observations prefigure a number of the most influential anticolonial theories of the later twentieth century, including Edward Said’s model of “contrapuntal” reading or Paul Gilroy’s writings on Black Atlantic culture. Equally important, when considering the legacy of this essay, was her focus on criticism itself as an interpretive activity on a par with the novel and sharing a common social function. This was evident in what she wrote about, moving seamlessly from novels to critical texts and assessing them both by the same standard of “acquiescent” versus “challenging”; it was evident in how she defined the tasks of writing and criticism; and it was evident in her own style. “I am a Jamaican, a West Indian, an American,” she wrote, making clear both where she was writing from, who she was writing to, and why.

New Forms, New Constituencies

Radical though it was, “We Must Learn” was nonetheless an unfinished project. In that essay, Wynter championed work that, eschewing middle-class enchantment with a European myth of high art, addressed and spoke from within the living culture of the West Indian people. Yet the actual texts she studies are largely novels and essays – prestigious and accepted literary forms. Moreover, they were all by men. This need be no criticism of Wynter – her essay broadly tracks the writers discussed in The Islands in Between – but it does tell us something about West Indian literary culture of the period. Most of the writers to whom literary critics – acquiescent or critical – paid attention in the 1960s were men, working in recognizable “literary” genres. One of the key developments in Caribbean literary study in subsequent decades would be to expand the object of study beyond the traditional literary genres, and to foreground the work of different constituencies of writers.

Moving beyond traditional literary genres, the work of Guyanese critic and UWI professor Gordon Rohlehr was of fundamental importance. On April 7, 1967, whilst completing a PhD on Joseph Conrad at the University of Birmingham, he had given a talk at the West Indian Student Centre in London on “Sparrow and the Language of Calypso.”⁴ It would be published as an essay in the second volume of Savacou in September 1970, and the project it begins would broaden into a series of essays published over the next three decades, culminating in Calypso and Society in Pre-Independence Trinidad (1990) and A Scuffling of Islands: Essays on Calypso (2004). One way of articulating the originality of Rohlehr’s approach is to compare “Sparrow and the Language of Calypso” with Mervyn Morris’s “On Reading Louise Bennett Seriously,” published in the Jamaica Journal in 1967. Both essays are attempts to extend the purview of West Indian literary criticism to popular forms that had hitherto been seen as subliterary: the lyrics of calypsonian Sparrow and the popular performance poetry of Louise Bennett. Morris was one of the critics Wynter had called “acquiescent,” and his argument for the literary significance of Louise Bennett rests on the claim that she wrote what were in fact recognized poetic genres in the English tradition. He compares her work to the satirists of the eighteenth century (Reference Morris72), to the comic librettos of W. S. Gilbert (Reference Morris72), and – most extensively – to the dramatic monologues of Robert Browning (Reference Morris70–71). “I believe Louise Bennett to be a poet,” Morris had written, “and the purpose of this essay is to suggest literary reasons for doing so” (Reference Morris69). By contrast, Rohlehr’s essay, though noting occasional literary parallels, is not fundamentally concerned with making a claim for the literariness or otherwise of Sparrow’s lyrics, but rather with discerning the kinds of “intelligence” and verbal play that characterized Sparrow’s lyrics (Reference Rohlehr89). He describes, for instance, the “essential directionless irony” in Sparrow’s lyrics, “the gift of a normless world” (Reference Rohlehr91). Where Morris had positioned Bennett’s poetry in a lineage with British satirists, Rohlehr emphasizes the contrast between the “merciless invective” of “calypsos of abuse” and the “metropolitan tradition of complaint” (Reference Rohlehr92). Finally, he notes that the ease with which Sparrow’s unforced, idiomatic lines realized the syncopated calypso rhythm might offer a model for a relationship between idiomatic West Indian verse and the demands of poetic meter. Whereas Morris persuades his readers that Bennett’s writing is “poetry” according to a preexisting definition, Rohlehr sees the relation between calypso and poetry as different but overlapping, and mutually porous.

A second key expansion of the object of literary study in the Caribbean has been an increased focus on constituencies of Caribbean writers underrepresented in the Caribbean canon of the 1950s and 1960s, and a new attention to the intersections of gender, race, sexuality, and class in colonial and postcolonial experience. As in earlier decades, critical trends and literary developments reinforced one another. Increased attention to writing by Caribbean women, for instance, emerged at a time when writers such as Jamaica Kincaid, Michelle Cliff, and Lorna Goodison were beginning to gain international prominence. The work of Carolyn Cooper, who was a student of Morris at UWI Mona, combined an enlarged sense of what constituted literature with an enlarged understanding of who wrote it or performed it. Indeed, her work consistently makes the point that elite definitions of what constitutes literature and literary value are commonly predicated on assumptions about the class, race, and gender of readers, writers, and critics.

Cooper had written her PhD on the poetry of Derek Walcott at UWI in the mid-1970s. Yet in a series of essays written through the 1980s, many of which were published in the Jamaica Journal, Cooper wrote what she would retrospectively see as a both a development from and an inversion of the work she had done as a doctoral student (Reference CooperCooper 13–14). Published as a book in 1993 called Noises in the Blood, these essays both build a connected historical argument and can be read as a record and index of an emerging critical method. Beginning with the observation that “one culture’s ‘knowledge’ is another’s ‘noise,’” Cooper – as Rohlehr did with Trinidadian calypso – examines a range of Jamaican popular texts for the intelligence or “knowledge” therein (Reference Cooper4). Beginning with transcriptions (by White historians) of bawdy songs or dramatic monologues, supposedly sung by enslaved women, Noises in the Blood analyzes the performance poetry of Louise Bennett, Jean “Binta” Breeze, and Mikey Smith, the oral histories of the Sistren collective, the lyrics of Bob Marley, and the dancehall lyrics of Josey Wales, Lovindeer, and Shelly Thunder. One of Cooper’s most important ideas is that oppositions between “high” and “low” cultural forms, “scribal” and “oral” texts, “culture” and “slackness” (the vulgarity or indecency associated with dancehall and bacchanal) are better understood as mutually constitutive relationships. In Josey Wales’s “Culture a lick,” a parodic morality song calling for the deportation of “Slackness” from Jamaica, the chorus figures “Slackness in di backyard hidin’, hidin’ from Culture” (quoted in Reference CooperCooper 147). What is suggested by the metaphor, and the song, is that “Slackness” and its traditional spaces (the carnival, the dancehall) exist in a parodic, fugitive relationship with “Culture,” and that “Culture” in Jamaica is itself an invention of those anxious not to be associated with what was vulgar or slack. For Cooper, oral texts “contaminate” the valorized scribal texts of Jamaican literature either by drawing them closer to the verbal habits of vernacular speech, or – conversely – by inciting them to veer away, protesting too much (Reference Cooper3).

The subtitle of Noises in the Blood is Orality, Gender, and the “Vulgar” Body of Jamaican Popular Culture. Looking at oral texts, Cooper suggests, forces us to engage with their embodied contexts, and the racialized and gendered contexts in which they are performed. “Vulgar,” for Cooper, is a complex word. It can mean common or ordinary; it can denote vernacular speech, the spoken language of the people; it can denote impoliteness; and it has connotations of sexual flagrancy or crudeness. Uses of the word “vulgar” in the Jamaican context show how poverty, vernacular speech, and sexuality have become associated with one another, as much for those who celebrate as for those who criticize cultural expressions perceived as vulgar or slack. Throughout the book, Cooper focuses on the pragmatic meaning of vulgar expression, both in the sense of nonvalorized and vernacular, and in the sense of self-expression that foregrounds crude or sexual topics. Louise Bennett’s poetry, for example, unashamedly foregrounds “the amplitude of the speaker’s body,” which in turn acts as a “figure for the verbal expansiveness that is often the only weapon of the politically powerless” (Reference Cooper41). “The raw sexism of some DJs,” Cooper writes in her chapter on dancehall, “can … be seen as an expression of diminished masculinity seeking to assert itself at the most basic, and often only level where it is allowed free play” (Reference Cooper165). Cooper repeatedly emphasizes the vernacular eloquence of invective or derisory speech, “throwing words” (Reference Cooper6) or “tracings” (Reference Cooper41), as an index of racial, gendered, and economic disenfranchisement. The eloquence of the vernacular and its impropriety and crudeness cannot be understood separately from one another, she suggests. In this way, Cooper’s criticism, by broadening its object of study, critiques the colonial association of literary study with rectitude and good conduct and shows the assumptions about class and gender that were implicit in it.

Conclusion

Writing in 1993, at a time of growing interest in the literatures of the formerly colonized world, Carolyn Cooper warned of the danger that “our literatures can become appropriated by totalising literary theories that reduce all ‘post-colonial’ literatures to the common bond(age) of the great – however deconstructed – European tradition” (Reference Cooper15). Taking my prompt from this, this chapter has looked at the history of literary scholarship in the Caribbean itself as it addressed itself to the task of decolonization. I have shown how innovations in literary scholarship arose in response to concrete colonial legacies in the region’s educational institutions. In the process, I have offered a more detailed analysis of a number of texts that had a key influence on the process of literary decolonization, and which I have found particularly illuminating in my own reading. The story I tell is of course selective – though not, I hope, arbitrary – and readers may find much that they would add or argue about. My hope is that it offers a useful map for how the complex concept of decolonization has been parsed by scholars and teachers in practice.

While researching this chapter, three larger methodological trends became apparent that – for me, at least – seem helpful for thinking about research and teaching today. First, this chapter has shown the decolonization of English literary study in the Caribbean as a project that unfurled in conversation, through time. Asking students to compare the different and evolving critical approaches of three committed anticolonialists, such as Mervyn Morris (in “On Reading Louise Bennett, Seriously”), Gordon Rohlehr (in “Sparrow and the Language of Calypso”), and Carolyn Cooper (in “Slackness Hiding from Culture”) reframes the task of decolonization not as a series of doctrines to be learned, but as practice of critique. Knowing, for example, that Morris, one of Wynter’s “acquiescent” critics, was also a valued teacher and influence for Cooper, laying the groundwork for her studies of Bennett and others, is to frame the conversation as one of collaboration. It is to foster an attitude of critical scrutiny and openness toward different viewpoints, including one’s own.

Secondly, Sylvia Wynter’s work poses a series of questions that we might ask of ourselves and ask students to reflect on. What are the largest systems or “wholes” of which the text I am reading forms a part? Where do I stand within that whole, and in relation to the text I am studying? How does attending to Caribbean literature and history inflect, alter, or expand the larger literary-historical or theoretical stories implicit (or explicit) in my research and study?

The final methodological point I would draw attention to is related to this. Through this chapter we have seen the symbiotic evolution of literature and criticism: how reading practices respond to new works, or genres, and how critical ideas feed back into literary development. Sensitive readers are always in principle attentive to how texts, readers, and genres invite us to engage with and handle them. Yet whatever our literary background, there will always be times when, encountering new types of text, we are pulled up short. Why does this text not fit the model I was expecting or meet the expectations I unconsciously carry with me from elsewhere? As Wynter says, practices of reading and evaluation are never objective, nor universally applicable. In a literary classroom, whether we are reading the allusive metrical inventions of Walcott, or the lyrics of Josey Wales, we might ask ourselves, or our students, to make explicit the tacit expectations we have of specific authors, texts, or genres in order to understand, situate, and provincialize them. Reading the work of Rohlehr and Cooper, we see a model of a dynamic critical intelligence at work, asking itself constantly, “How is this text inviting me to engage with it?” and stretching, adapting, expanding to account for the different pragmatic worlds, the different types of verbal invention or “intelligence” (Rohlehr’s word) at play. Of course, some texts will still disappoint. Cooper’s work has great fun with the subpar performance poets who, consciously or unconsciously, “exploit the low expectations and ignorance of … the perversely ‘liberal,’ patronising art establishment” in the UK (Reference Cooper71). Nonetheless, the practice of reading these critics model – flexible and responsive to the texts themselves, alive to its own assumptions and expectations – seems to me worth studying, imitating, and passing on.

The #RhodesMustFall movement that preoccupied the public imagination at universities in South Africa foregrounded not only the legacy of British colonialism in South Africa and especially the Cape, but also the place of Imperial statues in former British colonies. The protests, which took place between 2015 and 2017 crystallized around the statue of Cecil Rhodes, which continued to loom large in one of Africa’s foremost institutions, the University of Cape Town (UCT). The protests brought back not just memories, but also a lingering presence of the Empire through its architecture and, in this instance, its monuments, and with it a discursive culture or a colonial discourse that continues to pervade educational institutions such as the University of Cape Town. Cecil Rhodes statue worked like a semiotic system, with layered meanings. In its more basic form, it signified a celebration of a historical figure from a specific historical moment with its entire troubled legacy. It signified a specific understanding of the past whose traces could be seen in the present, while drawing attention to that connection between these two zones of history as if they were inseparable. However, there was also a much deeper meaning, more insidious than what we could readily glean from the surface symbol itself. The statue clearly signified a great deal more, and that is not to suggest that the literal signification was less significant. The point is that a closer and deeper reading of the statue revealed a complex network of spatial and ideological codes of signification, which pointed to what is clearly a system of a surreptitious authority and power that we can only feel and experience in our daily encounters. A closer look at the statue pointed to subtle layers of power at work – a stark reminder of an imperial authority that we cannot ignore. For example, its location at the university, the center of intellectual knowledge, but one whose history speaks to a historical network of imperial patronage and a production of an exclusionary discursive knowledge, was not lost on many, especially its Black students. With its towering figure and a sweeping imperial gaze over the city of Cape Town, one could not help but notice the positioning of this imperial authority, the architect of British imperialism at the southern tip of Africa.

Monuments, Stephen Slemon has reminded us, are not just historical, they are monuments to history (Reference SlemonSlemon 4). There is no doubt that the architects of Cecil Rhodes’s statue intended it to be an important signpost in South Africa’s imperial history. It was deliberately positioned “to construct the category of ‘history’ as the self-privileging inscription of the coloniser, but also to legitimate a particular concept of history” (Reference Slemon4–5). Like most monuments, “it signified history as the record of major events, the inscriptions of great men upon the groundwork of time and space” (Reference Slemon5). Cecil Rhodes was “a gift” to South Africa, cast in both bronze and stone, for posterity, but one that also signaled the banishment of colonized cultures. Thus, to inscribe Rhodes into history meant that the colonized history and cultures – their everyday practices – had to remain silenced. The point is that the semiotic system that the colonizer imposes through monuments such as that of Cecil Rhodes sets the terms of engagement and the ultimate limits of expression that the colonized are allowed to possess. And this has very little to do with the agency of the colonized or the lack thereof, it is just that the terms of speaking have already been predetermined by a discursive system that the colonized have been hailed into. As Slemon observes, “there is no gaze outside that of the coloniser, no angle of vision that opens to a future other than that which the statue, as a monument to History, inscribes – unless, of course, it is that of the viewers” (Reference Slemon5–6).

What does it mean to say that there is no gaze outside that of the colonizer, unless it is that of the viewers? A response to this question requires an understanding of the limits of complicity by the colonized when they are drawn into a semiotic field triggered by a monument like that of Rhodes. It is to understand that this complicity is neither benign nor absolute in the sense of it being facile or totalizing. In the first instance, the viewers have to be part of the colonizer’s gaze to understand it, and to participate in it actively. Secondly, it is their knowledge of Western modes of representation that enables them to grasp the hidden meanings of the statue, in the way that the students of UCT did. In other words, it takes an understanding of how the discourse of colonialism works to understand both its more obvious ideological enactment and its deeper signification processes.¹ I am suggesting here that those who have been hailed into the discourse of colonialism understand its violence most. As Foucault puts it, discourse is “a violence we do to things”; it is a “diffuse and hidden conglomerate of power”; and as a social formation, it works to constitute “reality” not only for the objects it appears passively to represent but also for the subjects who form the coherent interpretive community upon which it depends (Reference Young and YoungYoung 48). According to Foucault then, discourse, and this would apply to colonial discourse too, designates those discursive practices that work to produce and naturalize the hierarchical power structures of the imperial enterprise. Hulme complicates this further by suggesting that discourse also serves, “to mobilise those power structures in the management of both colonial and neo-colonial cross-cultural relationships” (Reference HulmeHulme 2).

The nature of contestation by students at UCT revolved around what Foucault refers to as “violence we inflict on things.” Foucault’s reference to violence inflicted on “things” is instructive here, especially in the context of the Empire, where violence was not only directed at humans, but also the totality of the colonized environment. In Africa, it was violence directed at its total ecological system and a devious separation of the human from nature through a Cartesian logic. If Rhodes’s statue at the University of Cape Town was offensive to most students, it was because it represented what Rob Reference NixonNixon, in a different context, refers to as “slow violence” – a systemic annihilation of colonized subjects and their spaces – their institutions and their systems of knowledge. It is not because they were incapable of a nuanced translation of this symbol of imperialism, or simply unable to grasp what Anne Coombes has characterized as supplementary meanings that monuments often bring to the fore with the passage of time – as they travel across history.² As one listened to the narratives of students, it became evident that the statue was a trigger, if not an eloquent reminder, of an institutional culture that several generations of Black students have endured in silence, with occasional outbursts, since 1994, when the university truly opened its doors to Black students. It was also a reminder of forms of subliminal racism that have continued to inform not just the neoliberal universities, but also the world of work – especially the corporate world – which this new generation of students, who had all along assumed that they had been hailed into a modern system that their parents could only dream about, would soon discover was a façade. Perhaps more importantly, it was a deliberate attempt to subvert those codes of recognition that had been normalized over the years in their institution and to establish the presence of cultural heterogeneity and difference as a push against a dominant discourse and epistemic unilateralism in knowledge production. It was the struggle to reclaim representational strategies and to create the conditions for their possibilities – for their realization.

Here are post-Uhuru or postapartheid youth, the born frees as we call them in South Africa, staging their pain and rage around a monument, but in a manner that even their liberators like Mandela could not bring themselves to do. What the monument uncovered for these students was painful traces of the colonial, apartheid, and a dreadful postcolonial moment, all rolled into one political nightmare – urgently in need of change. In a sense, the #Rhodes Must Fall movement pointed to a radical reconstruction of memory as a site upon which the intractable traces of the past are felt on people’s bodies, in their landscapes, landmarks, and souvenirs. Indeed, it uncovered how it is felt in their everyday lives and routines, in their daily encounters and entanglement, in their lecture halls – a tough moral fabric of their social relations – whether at institutions of learning or at work. The movement redirected our attention to the urgent need to rethink our understanding of the force of memory, its official and unofficial forms, its moves between the personal and the social postcolonial transformations.

How else would we be able to explain this most improbable irony, that a hundred or so years ago Rhodes, in being buried in the Matopos hills in Zimbabwe, was “twinned” with Mzilikazi, the founder of the Ndebele kingdom that Rhodes’s British South African Company conquered. Almost exactly a hundred years later, Rhodes is now “twinned” with Nelson Mandela, with the creation of the Mandela–Rhodes Foundation, a partnership between the Rhodes Trust and the Mandela Foundation. Reflecting on the irony, Paul Maylam remarks during Rhodes memorial lecture at Rhodes University in 2002:

Daniel Herwitz, writing on “Monument, Ruin, and Redress in South African Heritage,” has suggested that controversies around heritage symbols, such as Rhodes’s statue, “are often responses to a world of ruin” (Reference Herwitz232) – perhaps the pain and despair, poverty and squalor in the townships and squatter camps – often juxtaposed in close proximity to the townships – the gigantic malls of South Africa, that have become the new monuments of power and opulence. Herwitz is drawing attention here to the persistence of apartheid spatial arrangements – its ruins – in which squalor, depravation, and extreme poverty are placed in stark juxtaposition to opulence. If Rhodes’s statue was a marker of imperial power and capital, the gigantic malls that have come to define the face of South Africa are the new monuments – markers of a neoliberal market economy that serves as a trigger for resistance to old colonial monuments and all that they stand for in the new South Africa.

If I have lingered on the controversy around the #Rhodes Must Fall movement, it is because it allows us, as a layered semiotic figure of meaning, to understand the insidious nature of the imperial master code and how complicated the challenges to its authority are, and that they are likely to take multiple paths across history. It offers an important window into various institutional structures, political and cultural, that colonial discourse authorized, and I want to argue that one such important institution was the English syllabus within the British colonies. The debate around the Rhodes statue opens up a range of issues that are pertinent to our engagement with the English curriculum in South Africa. Like the Rhodes monument, the English Literature syllabus in South Africa has stood as a colossus – a cultural edifice that has been so central in shaping what canonical literature really is in the imagination of many, within and outside the academy. It was always the bedrock of imperial values and history – a purveyor of norms and values against which the colonized other had to be judged. The English Literature syllabus, more than any other discipline, was so central to the definition of what it meant to be or not to be an enlightened colonized subject, and this understanding would continue to hold sway within the academy for several years to come. To be a learned person, at least within the colony, one had to show not only a mastery of the English language, but also a mastery of the great English writers.³ Outside the English tradition, there was no literature, and there was no culture. What this implied was a persistent attempt to silence Indigenous narratives and voices, right into the independence period. The irony of course is that even as colonialism was having a huge impact on its idea of Englishness internally in England, as Simon Reference GikandiGikandi has demonstrated in Maps of Englishness, the variables within British colonies remained largely constant. On a recent anniversary of Shakespeare, the BBC reported that the English writer was more widely known among high-school children in India and South Africa as in the United Kingdom itself.⁴

One can therefore understand and sympathize with the passion of resentment that the statue of Rhodes unleashed among the students at the University of Cape Town. After all, what Rhodes figured at both a literal and an allegorical level found expression in what was taught in the lecture halls. Rhodes’s gaze found its most eloquent performance in the lecture rooms and in the discursive knowledge formations that continued to frame everyday meanings and relationships of students and their lecturers. Significantly, a close examination of the Literature syllabus at the University of Cape Town at the height of #Rhodes Must Fall in 2015 showed nothing close to what one would regard as a transformed curriculum, carrying, as it should, the weight of African literature. Up until 2018, the pace of change had been so slow that one could hardly claim that a student would graduate in the department of English with a sound grasp of African literature. For example, before 2018, African Literature and Language Studies I and II and English Literary Studies I and II, taught in the first and second years, were often paired, and students had to choose between African or English streams. Given the dominant history of the English-language syllabus at high school, in which the canonical texts were privileged, the African-language stream had very little chance of succeeding. Students understandably flocked to the English stream because that is what they had been exposed to.⁵

When change eventually came, it was neither a thoroughgoing study of African literature nor a centering of African literature at the heartbeat of its curriculum. It was cloaked behind some esoteric and some undifferentiated course titles that served to diffuse any situational and contextual approach that should enable a better understanding of a literary province or culture. Instead, one came across courses such as “Image, Voice, Word”; “Cultures of Empire, Resistance and Postcoloniality”; “Literature and the Work of Memory”; “Movements, Manifestos and Modernities.” Running through all these courses was an attempt to provide a world scope in terms of the texts studied, at times with authors and texts sitting so uneasily that one wondered what the motivation or the endgame was. I can understand the idea behind all these attempts to “deprovincialize” the curriculum and push for a comparative approach that is less driven by context of production, but more by theoretical considerations and conceptual approach. The danger with this approach is that it continues to center the West, since various modes of reading some of the issues signaled in the course titles are underpinned by Western notions of genre, and Western-derived critical-theoretical models, which are often deployed indiscriminately when talking about concepts such as memory, postcoloniality, and image, among others. Postcolonialism, a popular rubric in framing a number of literature courses here in South Africa, is not without its flaws, as critics such as Ato Quayson and McLeod have pointed out (Reference QuaysonQuayson; Reference McLeodMcLeod). It ends up, as McLeod writes, “[creating] a ghetto for literature from once-colonised countries within English departments and degree schemes” (Reference McLeod249). The courses become readings into ideas as opposed to a sustained grasp of texts and how these help us to voyage into specific contexts of production and how literature really works in Africa to colonize meaning – to offer us a window into those competing cultural and political facets of Africa. Instead of students having a sustained experience of African literature, the literature itself is driven underground, and a smattering of texts are eclectically thrown into courses that are largely thematically or conceptually driven. Take for example the University of Cape Town’s senior undergraduate course titled “Movements, Manifestos and Modernities,” which brings together Steve Biko’s I Write What I Like, Alice Walker’s Meridian, Maryse Conde’s Land of Many Colours and Nanna-Ya, and Virginia Woolf’s A Room of One’s Own. Although the course works through the broad rubric of what it calls “the history of literary and cultural studies,” it is nevertheless difficult to understand what motivates the choice of these writers and texts, which are random and eclectic, even when one appreciates the political and cultural capital of these texts independent of each other.

To be fair, the English Department at the University of Cape Town, unlike many in the region, has moved away from a conservative structure, which ensured that African literature courses were ghettoized. Next door at the University of the Western Cape, allegedly leftist leaning and closely associated with the antiapartheid struggle, African literature only appears in a course called “Africa and the World” at second-year level. The English-language syllabus remains at the core of the courses taught from second year through to third year. At the center of its syllabus, it continues to retain courses such as “Romanticism and 19th Century Fiction”; “Renaissance Studies,” which privileges the English and European Renaissance; “Post-Colonial Literature and Postmodern Fiction,” the latter largely driven by theory and again with J. M. Coetzee’s Foe as the only text from the continent of Africa taught in the course. With a few exceptions, a schizophrenic character runs through a number of courses taught in most of the English departments in South Africa that are seeking to disavow the colonial tradition, while continuing to cling to the core aspects of the same tradition. Of these, it is the Literary Studies in English at Rhodes University that offers one of the most radical departures from the English canon, and perhaps the most comprehensive study of what would pass as strong streams of African literature. The syllabus is evenly balanced, with courses on African and English traditions at undergraduate level and distinct courses at postgraduate level that focus on early modern to Romantic literature, world literature, and African literature. Thus, throughout undergraduate and postgraduate levels, African literature remains one of the core streams that constitute literary studies at Rhodes University. With the exception of Fort Hare University, with courses organized around genre and regional and Black diasporic movements such as the Harlem Renaissance, most departments of English remain highly schizophrenic in their content and choice of texts. In their anxiety to placate the authorities and to signal a specific gesture toward curriculum diversity, they display contradictory literary poles without being mindful of coherence. A decolonized curriculum amounted to a facile tokenism, in which a syllabus gets sprinkled with Black or Brown writers, women writers, and gay writers – a deeply flawed nod at diversity, which at times lacked the intellectual principles that undergird a coherent and serious curriculum design.

The schizophrenic impulse behind curricula innovation could be explained in terms of the mixed constituencies that that these departments continue to serve. On the one hand, we have a traditional cohort of students, who are predominantly White, but who also include a section of the Black elite for whom English without Shakespeare and the Great Tradition is incomplete – they push back at any attempts to bring about curriculum transformation. On the other hand, we have a cohort of Black students who are insisting on asserting a new identity through the literatures they read and are demanding change now. Both groups are not hegemonic and quite often are not certain about the nature of what ought to be retained in the old order and what needs to be introduced in the new order. The push-and-pull situation has proved to be counterproductive for genuine curriculum reform, as curriculum creators strive to please these competing constituencies. The end result is what can hardly be described as a decolonized English curriculum, but the result of competing interests ranging from the interests of those senior faculty who are not prepared to let go of their old practices, and a new but energetic cohort of scholars who are seeking change but remain at the mercy of the senior scholars who see transformation as a threat to their own careers. That they also minister to a divided constituency of students and parents, often split along racial and class lines, does not help the situation.

What the above scenario points to in relation to the movement of ideas is compelling: that, although it is important to register an awareness of the lingering presence of a colonial discourse, it is equally important to understand that the authority of the imperial culture could only find force within the limits of those shifting boundaries of accommodation and resistance that the Empire generated. It is in that sense that I seek to argue that, important as the “Fallist” movement was in the imagination of many South Africans, and in spite of the ripples it caused within the continent and beyond, it was never the inaugural moment of the decolonial turn.⁶ We have to understand decoloniality as a process and perhaps a much more protracted one when it comes to curriculum change in a discipline such as English with so many competing interests. If one wants to see glimmers of change and challenges to the English Literature syllabus, then one has to look elsewhere – far from the mainstream sites of scholarship and the academy.

A number of important issues are worth flagging here in relation to my observation above. The struggle for a distinct voice within the broad terrain of culture and specifically with reference to the English Literature syllabus has a long history in South Africa as it does in the rest of the continent. These struggles took different routes, ranging from a basic reactivation of the traditional resource base, as Ato Quayson reminds us (Reference QuaysonStrategic Transformations) or simply in the preservation of oral forms. It also took the route of translating received stories and inventing new narratives that are different, even if sometimes mimicking those received templates linked to colonial tutelage, or simply insisting on writing in Indigenous languages, not English. What distinguished these initiatives was that common goal to restore agency to the colonized subjects in a cultural domain dominated by the English language and literature. My point is that the struggle to have control over what constitutes the content of literature in South Africa and the broader cultural terrain has captured the imagination of colonized subjects for decades, especially among the Black intelligentsia. The English dominance was always challenged from the margins of the academy even when it continued to hold sway in a number of English departments in South Africa.

One of the main challenges to the unassailed position of English language and literature in South African universities and high schools was a notable presence of African Languages departments in most universities, which offered not just basic language teaching of isiZulu, isiXhosa, and Sesotho, among others, but also taught literatures in these languages. And although most of these departments were underresourced and often ghettoized, with no substantive lecturer-track positions other than that of tutors, it was a tacit admission – even if grudgingly – that Indigenous cultural streams needed to be acknowledged in their own right. As a result, South Africa remains one of the very few countries on the continent of Africa where Indigenous languages have a long history of presence within the academy. So in its eagerness to perpetuate some form of “tribal nativism,” the Apartheid regime, by encouraging the teaching of African languages literatures, ended up establishing a visible presence of cultural heterogeneity and difference against the backdrop of a dominant colonial discourse. It was an act of “nibbling” at resilient English dominance in South Africa, as Francis Reference NyamnjohNyamnjoh, would have it in a different context.

One of the ways in which African writers in general and a number of South African writers in particular engaged in this process of decolonizing English was through the act of translating canonical texts and Western classics. In The Translator’s Invisibility, the critic Venuti decries the hegemony of the English language and Anglo-American cultural values and advocates a translation practice of foreignization, namely “resisting dominant values in the receiving cultures so as to signify the linguistic and cultural differences in the foreign text” (Reference Venuti18). What Venuti is challenging here is the Anglo-American idea of translation as domestication, in which a foreign work is assimilated into the values and hierarchies of the receiving culture and made to read as if it were an “original” in the target language, effectively rendering the act of translation and the translator invisible. For Venuti, translation is a political act, and in translation practice, one has to see the potential to destabilize cultural hierarchies and interrogate cultural norms in the receiving culture.

Foundational South African writers such as Sol Plaatje, Oscar Dhlomo, and AC Jordan, among others, were adept at the kind of translation that Venuti describes here but often pushed a line that combined a strong reliance on European genres with a powerful and assertive attitude on issues of race and culture. They were also able to placate the authorities, whose power alone allowed them access to a voice in print, even as they asserted their differences from that power. Their texts were not simply working to resist and dismantle, mimic and assimilate Western modes of self-writing without any intervention or aesthetic agency, but rather they set out very deliberately, and regardless of whether they were writing in English or Indigenous African languages, to develop a new language. It was a new grammar of writing that was neither strictly Western nor traditional. It was something new in which a creative evocation of an Indigenous resource base played a part as much as received modes of self-inscription did. These writers were also deeply concerned with the project of translation, not simply of the African world to Europe, but equally a translation of the Western world and their classics. As I have argued elsewhere, “part of it was to demonstrate that the European classics they were keen to translate could travel and inhabit spaces that had been designated as the other, because the assumption was that the European classics could not be carried and processed (that is, not assimilated) by receiving cultures and local languages” (Reference Ogude, Peterson, Mkhize and XabaOgude, “Foundational Writers” 30). Significantly, in their endeavor to appropriate these texts into local contexts, they went for the Western canon, especially plays of Shakespeare such as Julius Caesar, Othello, and Macbeth, among others – subjecting them to the tyranny of local languages and idioms. These forms of translation that I outline here marked important moments of subversion and intrusive challenge to the supremacy of English-language culture.

A gradual “nibbling” at the resilience of English in South Africa also started from within English departments in South Africa among the leftist-leaning and feminist scholars who could not articulate their ideas with any form of coherence and ideological certainty without taking recourse to some form of African literature in their syllabus. This shift took different forms at different universities. In some, it found expression within an omnibus course going under the title of “World Literature” that drew its content from a cross section of continents and subcontinents, such as India, the Caribbean, and African American literatures, but without abandoning some of the core English texts. In others, it took a selective focus on some of the canonical writers in Africa, such as Chinua Achebe and Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o. As early as the late 1970s to the 1980s, one could come across a sprinkling of African literary texts, largely those from the leftist-leaning writers such as Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o. When I arrived in the South African academy in 1991, Ngũgĩ’s texts such as A Grain of Wheat and some of his collection of essays such as Decolonizing the Mind were already present in the syllabus of many English departments.⁷ In a rare gesture of recognition, as early as 1989, one of the leading South African journals of literature, English in Africa, had dedicated a special issue to Ngũgĩ’s works. Of course, the White liberal left within the South African academy were much more comfortable with Ngũgĩ’s Marxist and class approach to issues than with, say, Chinua Achebe, whose works often drew attention to the lingering presence of Whiteness and race issues.⁸ This shift would grow into full-fledged courses in African literature in a number of English departments in South African universities. This acknowledgment was nevertheless undermined by the fact that African literature was never a core elective and was often paired with English courses such as Shakespeare and the Victorian Novels, much to the detriment of African literature courses that remained totally unknown to the students. For students, Black and White, who had never encountered African literature at high school, the introduction of African literature at university level was an anomaly, and, without deliberate coaxing, the courses never stood a chance of enlisting high numbers. The students went for what they knew and what they had been told counted in the study of English over the years. As a result, the incremental introduction of African literature was stillborn right from the start, and it would never take off because there were no incentives for choosing it as a course. It continued to carry little to no premium within the academy and in the inherited intellectual horizons of the students. The usual rejoinder that “students, including African students, never liked African literature” has been used to sustain an exclusionary system that continued to privilege the English syllabus way into the third decade of South Africa’s democratic dispensation.

This discussion would be incomplete without the mention of one exceptional example in which a nibbling at the English curriculum would decidedly assume the form of centering African literature and related streams of Black diaspora literatures and local narratives drawn from its oral and popular cultural traditions. The African Literature department at the University of the Witwatersrand started as a division of the Comparative and African Literature Department. The South African writer and critic Es’kia Mphahlele in 1983 founded the division that soon grew into a fully established department just a few years after his return from exile. It now stands as one of the very few departments that is singularly focused on the teaching of African literature and other related streams that speak to those literatures produced by peoples of African descent in North America and the Caribbean. Significantly, the department emerged at one of the leading liberal institutions in South Africa – the University of the Witwatersrand – an institution that boasted a strong English department, but one that until recently hardly taught African literature except for a few texts by White South Africans such as Alan Paton, Olive Schreiner, and more recently, J. M. Coetzee. I recall that in 1988 when I applied to do my PhD at the department, the head of department politely informed me that they did not teach African literature and that they had referred my application to the African Literature Department, then headed by the founding professor, Es’kia Mphahlele.

I single out the African Literature department here for three reasons. First, for the creative and bold approach that it took in implementing a syllabus that was grounded in a rich staple of modern African literature. It covered novels, plays, and limited poetry, starting with foundational writers right through to contemporary writers. Secondly, it was unapologetic in seeking to provide a panoramic view of African literature, while at the same time drilling into regional trends and a rich mix of thematic clusters. It touched on topics such as “Gender and Writing in Africa,” “Performing Power in Post-Independence Africa,” “Love in Africa,” “Memory, Violence and Representation in Africa,” and “Contemporary Trends in African Literature,” among others. It also focused on regions, especially on “Literatures of the Black Diaspora.” Finally, the department was one of the first to take full advantage of a cultural studies approach⁹ as an interdisciplinary, transdisciplinary, and sometimes counterdiscursive field that allowed for content that moved beyond the narrowly conceived disciplinary boundaries and their dominant ideologies. In the process, the department was able to extend the province of imagination and to encourage a deliberate engagement with other zones, adjacent to literature, such as popular music, media, and other oral sources akin to the Indigenous resource base. The department would argue for the need to study African literature in relation to its hinterlands and to pay attention to grassroots intellectual traditions, in a context where African literature continued to be annexed by international trends. The idea was to foreground unknown or hidden intellectual patterns in the broad area of African literature and cultures. The study of popular literature and cultures offered a challenge to postcolonial literary theory, in its multiple variants, which until recently was the prism through which scholars both here and abroad encountered the literature and intellectual history of the continent. Postcolonial theory, for example, tended to homogenize the literature of the continent or reduced it simply to one of the binary logics of opposition and resistance. Significantly, in privileging the imaginative capacity of literature and the creative arts broadly, the department also foregrounded the social and moral function of literature and related forms of cultural production, which Ato Quayson has termed “calibrations” to denote a kind of reading that draws links between the literary-aesthetic, social, cultural, and political domains (Reference QuaysonQuayson, Calibrations, xii). The true impact of the African Literature department at the University of the Witwatersrand has to be measured against its excellent tradition of mentorship at the postgraduate level. It has produced some of the finest scholars of African literature and cultures, who continue to be dispersed across a number of English departments here in South Africa and beyond, playing that role of challenging Englishness through some of the most striking subversive maneuvers and political interventions in the ongoing reconstitution of the English literature syllabus.

The lesson to be drawn from this continuing experiment at the African Literature department is not so much that Englishness was constantly being reconfigured. That the English syllabus was unstable and its boundaries of control shifting is now obvious. My point is that the colonized cannot continue to be seen as victims of Englishness and imperial poetics as certain strands of #Rhodes Must Fall implied. Rather, through a constant struggle and as Simon Gikandi reminds us, “in inventing itself, the colonial space would also reinvent the structure and meaning of the core terms of Englishness” (Maps Reference GikandiXVIII), including ways in which the English canon are read, even if we think these are not radical enough. It is a case of change in permanence, very similar to the readings of the Rhodes statue as a semiotic figure, whose meanings were contingent not simply on those ascribed to it by the colonizer, but also the colonized subject’s disruptive readings. The privileging of African literature is therefore a challenge to the very supremacy of English. The second lesson that we glean from the African literature experiment is that a certain amount of African literature content is needed to register its overlapping territories and rich diversity. It is not enough to use African literature texts as some deus ex machina, for a conceptually driven course, which fails to embed it in a curriculum as a serious subject in its own right. Third, it is not enough to teach African literature, important as content is, if method and theoretical protocols in themselves are not decolonized, because there is always the danger of sliding into a nativist approach that valorizes anything African and Black, while closing off other streams of literary and cultural knowledge. The flipside of this argument is of course the persistent trend to want to teach African literature but do so through the lenses of Northern theories as if these are neutral implements for cutting knowledge, and as if African literatures in themselves do not have the force of offering theoretical insights. A productive reading of African literature, especially if it has to offer a formidable challenge to Englishness, must see it as a site of reflection and praxis. I believe the one thing that the African Literature department at the University of the Witwatersrand has done so well over the years is to posit African literature as a site of reflection and struggle, and always in an ongoing tension with other cultural streams emanating from within and outside our borders. In conclusion, one has to agree that #Rhodes Must Fall, with all its fault lines,¹⁰ has been important in forcing the institutions of higher learning to take curriculum transformation in all disciplines in the humanities and social sciences seriously. The effects of challenging colonial discourse may be slow and painful along the way, but acts of formidable refusal like the one enacted by the #Rhodes Must Fall have been critical in destabilizing the canonical position of English literature here in South Africa and beyond.