Syllabi (gradually); The challenge of coalitional consciousness

Hello everyone,

While I have thinking for a long time about sharing at least a few of my syllabi with you, I was overthinking how to do this. Borrowing a leaf out of the book (and website) of a scholar-educator I have recently got to know, I am keeping it simple—and will be posting these on my website. So far I have posted one syllabus—for a Women’s Visionary Poetry and Fiction class I taught in the Fall of 2022: more syllabi to come!

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For interested academics, here are a few questions you can ask to decolonize your curriculum and pedagogy. These questions come from Shannon Morreira and Kathy Luckett at the University of Cape Town: they arise out of and address the context in South Africa. You might need to reflect on and adapt some of these questions based on your context.

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Inevitably, those who view “decolonial” as a modish approach, not as a summons to unlearn colonial logics and mindsets, attempt to flatten the work into a buzzword. They wish to incorporate and assimilate the metaphors of decolonization/decoloniality so they can continue doing the same work as they did before—i.e. to validate their work. They are not so interested in recognizing the architecture of coloniality or whiteness within themselves, or their entanglement with frameworks arising from these forms of practices. Subsuming decolonial processes— resulting in decolonization/decoloniality becoming “anything and therefore nothing in the end”¹—can be a way to alleviate tensions some might be experiencing as they begin to get uncomfortable with the onto-epistemic assumptions their areas of influence, study, and research are built around: a way to recoup a moral claim or fit. Meanwhile, with little emphasis on taking (or asking their white first world peers for) accountability, the emotional labor of articulating the invisible/hidden assumptions falls onto those who have been subordinated in colonial histories/imaginary. In this way, western white scholars are able to maintain the “presumed innocence of whiteness,”² and gaslight the epistemic truths and differences of those from other or nonwestern contexts, while ostensibly still engaging in decolonizing talk they deem acceptable.

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Speaking truth in contravention to entrenched norms carries the risk of exile. Yet:

“Lying is done with words, and also with silence.”—Adrienne Rich

“Being a frontrunner in a lot of this work, people wanna dismiss the truth that I speak as anecdotal. If I don’t have a scientific database, where I can prove that what I’ve experienced is true for so many people then it’s not true. So, the epistemological sea of forgetfulness is when people take truth that hurts, truth that goes to the core of the being, truth that goes to the marrow of the bone and people wanna say, if you can’t prove it scientifically, factually, then it doesn’t exist. So, what I try to encourage people to do is, that kind of truth that stings like a serpent’s tooth, that kind of truth that makes your teeth itch, the kind of truth that causes some people to lose their minds, up in here, up in here. So even when people call your truth a lie tell it anyway. Tell it anyway.”—Dr. Katie Geneva Cannon (link)

“If you are silent about your pain, they’ll kill you and say you enjoyed it.”―Zora Neale Hurston

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Here I pour a libation to keep meaningful connections alive as we move through “complicated conversations.” There is a reason why we are here, now. The gifts of listening, learning, and healing are ours to partake of.

1. Le Grange, L.; Du Preez, P.; Ramrathan, L. and Blignaut, S. (2020). “Decolonising the university curriculum or decolonial-washing? A multiple case study”. Journal of Education, 80, 25-48. DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.17159/2520-9868/i80a02.

2. Chen, J. M. (2017). “The contentious field of whiteness studies.” Journal of Social Thought, 2(1), 15-27. https://ojs.lib.uwo.ca/index.php/jst/article/download/507/294.