The trap of ‘decolonising the curriculum’
--
Today I tuned in to a film screening of ‘African Apocalypse’ by Femi Nylander via one of Trinity College’s celebrations for Black History Month. This exploration into the bloody past of the French colonialist Paul Voulet through the Niger region can hardly be called a celebration, but it did renew my eyes to the horrors of European colonialism.
I find artistic depictions, particularly film adaptions, of the colonial period to be sort of hit and miss these days. It’s sort of like, we get it…the Europeans hated African people. They kind of still do. What’s new? But this documentary was different. It didn’t aestheticise the horrors and brutalities of this period. It was honest, raw, and showed the humanity of Africa, specifically Nigerien people, in a way that Hollywood has often failed to do.
During the Q&A session following the film screening, I asked how diversity and inclusion initiatives for youth in the Diaspora play a role in fighting against the ongoing colonial structures and ideologies that persist today. Femi’s response was insightful — diversity and inclusion can only go so far, especially in spaces as white as Oxford and Cambridge. He says that the real work that must be done is the decolonisation of the curriculum.
‘Decolonising the curriculum’ is not a new concept for most students or academics from the past decade. This movement (?) has gained a lot of attention in recent years due to the increased documentation of race-based violence and discrimination, but also a cultural awakening for a lot of students of non-European backgrounds.
At Cambridge, I know that decolonising the curriculum has been an ongoing process and will most likely continue for years if not decades to come. It appears that the ‘powers that be’ are not too fond of the complete divulging of British and wider European history. I don’t blame them. The murders of an estimated 60 million Africans at the hands of these Western powers is no trivial (nor respectable) thing, particularly when it has significantly contributed to the combined £21bil that the institution still enjoys today.
But I digress.
The University has made some attempts to decolonise the curriculum in the more ‘obvious’ humanities/social science subjects such as sociology, anthropology, and politics. There’s still a lot of work to be done in the STEM fields, but that’s a discussion for another day.
Yet, as I think about my own experiences of a ‘decolonised’ curriculum from a linguist’s standpoint, it’s clear to me that this whole thing is a bit of a scam, at least in its present form.
In 1st year, I had no contact with diverse authors in my French literature papers. The FR1 course may have been designed to offer a broad range of artistic experiences from the French literary and film ‘canon’, but it somehow only had one female artist and none of whom were black or PoC.
(As an aside, I find the whole notion of ‘canonical’ works extremely exclusionary and left to me, the term would be trashed altogether. Who even determines what constitutes the literary ‘canon’ anyway?…Yeah, I thought as much.)
The Spanish department made a few strides with the inclusion of two female authors, one a proto-feminist mestiza from Latin America. But again, not enough change to be revolutionary.
It wasn’t until 2nd year that I got some more freedom, particularly with my French literature texts. But even then, the authors who utilised the French language in a way that surpassed the dramatical whims of Corneille or the surrealist artistry of Godard were curtailed by term-time restrictions.
Works from prominent thinkers and writers like Aimé Césaire and Assia Djebar were given minimal attention from the department. It was down to each student to request for these texts to be studied and written about in depth, and even then, this coverage was not guaranteed.
Decolonising the curriculum is in part an important and necessary process, but I feel that once you reach university, a lot of the ideological colonial ‘Britain-first’ damage has been done. It takes an intentional, open-minded and empathetic type of student to seek out the ‘subaltern’ experiences obscured from European and world history. Unfortunately, while it may be nice to think that most students would have this sort of academic approach, experience has shown that people will only do what they have to do.
Personally, if I never pick up a play from Pierre Corneille or read a medieval French text from some old guy who used aliases to obscure his actual identity, it wouldn’t be too soon. Likewise, I doubt a lot of the students in these traditionally ‘white’ subject areas are rushing to read Black or Brown authors for many reasons, one of which may be the fact that they’ve never been taught to pay much attention to what Black or Brown people say or experience.
Perhaps these are some of my own biases speaking. But this is a personal page, so I’m allowed to be biased.
Essentially, I think that decolonising the curriculum is a trap because these universities get to half-heartedly slap some colour and spice into their courses. But they never actually encourage (or oblige) their students to engage with these thinkers and their lived experiences.
We can hypothesise about race, class, and gender theory all we want. But when we neglect to interact with the literature and art of the people who lived these often intersectional realities, it all just becomes performative and redundant.
Forget about decolonising the curriculum — it’s about time we overhaul it completely. And while we’re at it, give students with potential interests in academia (like myself, hello hi) the funding to commit to studying and expanding literature on African, Caribbean, Indigenous and Asian experience and history. Forcing us to love finance and consulting for ‘job security’ is becoming a bit of a drag now, don’t you think?
