Globalectics Beyond Postcoloniality
Carole Boyce Davies Still, it is true that at the macro level the University of the West Indies remains, as one of the senior UWI-St. Augustine colleagues reminded me during my year there as a Visiting Professor (2007-8), one of two major institutions (the other being the cricket team) still carrying the name of the Columbian error (West Indies) and the subsequent British colonial fragmentation into a West Indian identity for Anglophone Caribbeans. But, more significantly, the fact that the Nairobi group had presented perhaps the most convincing argument for the decolonization of the study and teaching of literature would have impacted the internal re-structuring of an English department. Indeed, students who read the “Towards the Abolition of the English Department” essay are often surprised that such a construct as a Department of English exists/ed in universities in Africa and in other parts of the colonial world. By these means they are easily made aware of the far reaches of colonialism in the academic context. Additionally, it is not much of a leap to an understanding that a Department of English in Africa or in the United States tends to do the same thing – privileges the teaching of English literatures, creates a hierarchy of what is taught and what the standards are for good literature. Thus one can have still in the United States, several professors and therefore classes studying various periods, authors, genres of English literature, an ongoing struggle for American literatures and perhaps one professor and/or one class in African literature representing the entire continent or one professor teaching Caribbean literature, covering the entire Caribbean; and the extreme but not unusual one professor in some institutions assigned to teach all “post colonial” literatures. Ngugi wa Thiong’o’s ongoing thinking on the nature of knowledge production in the academy worldwide is invaluable. His Decolonising the Mind,[i] also an essential text in the teaching of Black Literary and Cultural Theory in general, provides an extension of Fanonian decolonization, this time in the parallel area of language. It continues to provide the best arguments for how European languages vehicled colonialism and affected the nature of a writer’s thinking and therefore his writing: “The domination of a people’s language by the languages of the colonizing nations was crucial to the domination of the mental universe of the colonized” (Decolonising the Mind, 16). Pages: 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 [ii] Decolonising the Mind. The Politics of Language in African Literature (Trenton, New Jersey: Africa World Press, 1986). |
Essays in this Forum
Break out of the Prison House of Hierarchy!
by Mukoma Wa Ngugi A Globalectical Imagination by Ngugi wa Thiong'o World Literature and the Postcolonial: Ngugi's Globalectics and Glissant's Poetics by Duncan McEachern Yoon “You Are the Prisoner, the Discoverer, the Founder, the Liberator”: Contextualizing Decolonial Paths of Afro-Hispanic Literature in Latin America, Equatorial Guinea and Spain by Elisa Rizo Globalectics Beyond Postcoloniality by Carole Boyce Davies |