Globalectics Beyond Postcoloniality
Carole Boyce Davies Today there is no longer a Department of English at the University of the West Indies. Instead within the Faculty of Humanities and Education there are departments of literatures and languages, specializing in the teaching of literature; departments of Language, Linguistics and Philosophy, devoted to the teaching of theories of language and a Department of Modern Language and Literature where one can get specialized training in foreign though largely European languages. as they should be. At the Mona Campus, the website of Department of Literatures in English proudly claims the following: Founded in 1950, as the then Department of English, we have produced distinguished alumni who have contributed immensely to Caribbean literary scholarship and creative writing…Although our strengths are primarily in Caribbean literary and cultural studies, the Department of Literatures in English at UWI, Mona offers a wide variety of courses ranging from Medieval and Renaissance Literature to Reggae Poetry. Students are exposed to British and American literature, the literature of postcolonial regions such as Africa, the Caribbean, South Asia, Australia and New Zealand, literary theory, film studies, and creative writing. [http:/www.mona.uwi.edu/] While one cannot create a one-to-one correspondence with Ngugi’s landmark “On the Abolition of the English Department,” co-written with Henry Owuor-Anyumba and Taban lo Liyong in 1968, the fact that that essay appeared in his book Homecoming[i] which included essays on Caribbean and African literature cannot be minimized. Such a discussion would surely have reached the faculty of the University of the West Indies campuses, engaged in similar decolonization tasks. So it is significant that the department identifies its strengths as Caribbean literary and cultural studies as it should be and thereby is realized one aspect of the “Abolition” document which for African universities wanted a focus on African literatures and languages. The extent to which this has been achieved or not achieved at African universities is an issue worth studying in the context of some of the gains and failures of the postcolonial African state. Pages: 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 [i] “Towards the Abolition of the English Department,” Homecoming: Essays on African and Caribbean Literature, Culture and Politics, (London, Nairobi: Heinemann, 1972), |
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 |