Postcolonial Texts for the High School English Classroom
Rationale and a Resource List
by Eric Spreng
I teach postcolonial theory in my high school literature classes. The theory provides a way to understand how the legacy of colonization has shaped historical and economic realities in our modern world. This can help illuminate contexts for current and relevant issues like racism, structural inequality and globalization.
Postcolonialism is a powerful theoretical approach to teach for social justice.
Students learn to see that history is an argument, not a consensus, not a timeline of events cemented in a textbook. A postcolonial author gives voice to a perspective that has been historically silenced.
This is urgent as colonial representations of colonized peoples have often perpetuated a binary understanding in which colonized peoples are seen as Other, fundamentally different and necessarily inferior to the society of the colonizer.
A postcolonial author tells a story as an insider, reclaiming political agency in the face of historical oppression. The work of postcolonial authors may provide a window into a culture, a worldview, or an experience to which we would otherwise have no access. These works necessarily complicate the dominant narratives and ideologies that would marginalize many of our students and their cultures — ideologies and narratives that are still very much at play in today’s world.
“Until lions have their own historians, tales of hunting will always glorify the hunter.” — African proverb
Postcolonialism, which is often taught at the university level, is a discourse that can — and Deborah Appleman* argues, should — be learned by high school students.
Below is a list of high-interest literary and informational texts that I have found work well in the high school English classroom.
Fiction & Drama
- Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart (Nigeria, 1958)
- Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o’s novel, A Grain of Wheat (Kenya, 1966)
- Bessie Head’s novel, A Question of Power (Botswana, 1974)
- Wole Soyinka’s play, Death and the King’s Horseman (Nigeria, 1975)
- Nurrudin Farah’s novel, Maps (Somalia, 1986)
- Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s novel, Americanah (Nigeria, 2013)
- Diriye Osman’s collection of short stories, Fairytales for Lost Children (Somalia / Kenya, 2013)
- Okey Ndibe’s novel, Foreign Gods, Inc (Nigeria, 2014)
Nonfiction
- Red Jacket’s “Defense of Native American Religion” (1805)
- George Orwell’s essay, “Shooting an Elephant” (UK, 1936)
- Frantz Fanon’s seminal theoretical work, The Wretched of the Earth (Martinique, 1961)
- Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o’s theoretical work, Decolonising the Mind: The Politics of Language in African Literature (to which Achebe responds in his essay, “Politics and Politicians…”; Kenya 1981)
- Edward Said’s Reflections on Exile and Other Essays (Palestine / USA, 2000)
- Ursula K. Le Guin’s essay, “Indian Uncles” (from The Wave in the Mind; USA, 2001)
- Binyavanga Wainaina’s essay, “How To Write About Africa” (Kenya, 2008)
- Chinua Achebe’s collection of essays, The Education of a British-Protected Child (Nigeria, 2009; See especially “Africa’s Tarnished Name”, “Politics and Politicians of Language in African Literature”, and “My Dad and Me”)
- Zadie Smith’s essay, “Speaking in Tongues” (UK, 2009)
- Ta-Nehisi Coates’s essay in the Atlantic, “Acting French” (USA, 2014)
Video
- Chimamanda Adichie’s TED Talk, “The Danger of a Single Story”
- Comedian Aamer Rahman on “reverse racism”
- Lupita Nyong’o’s speech on black beauty and self-love at the Black Women in Hollywood Luncheon
- Jamila Lyiscott’s TED Talk, “Three Ways to Speak English”
- London School of Economics students ask: Why is my curriculum white?
- Chimamanda Adichie’s TED Talk on feminism
Poetry
Works from the following postcolonial poets have proven helpful with my high school students.
- Derek Walcott (Saint Lucia)
- Lorna Goodison (Jamaica)
- Kamau Brathwaite (Barbados)
- W.B. Yeats (Ireland)
- Aimé Césaire (Martinique)
- Léopold Sédar Senghor (Senegal)
Historical / Primary Sources
- Christopher Columbus’s “Letter to Ferdinand of Spain” (anthologized in The Language of Composition)
- King Ferdinand’s “The Requerimiento” (anthologized in The Language of Composition)
- MAP (via Slate): Places Actually Discovered by Europeans
Which texts would you add to this list?
* For more on teaching postcolonialism (and literary theory), see @DeborahAppleman’s influential text, Critical Encounters in High School English: Teaching Literary Theory to Adolescents, which is a tremendous resource for the classroom.
Eric Spreng teaches high school English, Film Studies, and Guitar at the International School of Ouagadougou, in Burkina Faso.
