WHAT WOULD IT MEAN TO DECOLONIZE THE CURRICULUM?
A new event series at the Lepage Center asks how historical knowledge has been produced.
by Lori Wysong
Decolonization may be familiar to some as a description of twentieth-century political movements that sought to overthrow European empires. But in recent years the word has come to acquire broader meanings in social and cultural debates, addressing concerns across society where the legacies of colonialism may still reside. It’s with that definition in mind that the Lepage Center has embarked on a yearlong examination of what it might mean to “decolonize” the practice of history itself. Our first month-long module of events asked, “What would it look like to decolonize the university curriculum?”
What is decolonization?
The word “decolonization” has a traceable history. In the first event in our series, Dr. Manjeet Ramgotra of SOAS University of London outlined the term’s origins in literature to describe the struggle of Algerians to gain their independence from France, to its continued presence across twentieth century social movements against imperialism. Writing about Algerian resistance to French colonialism, Frantz Fanon famously observed in his 1961 work, The Wretched of the Earth that “decolonisation is always a violent phenomenon.” Though the age of European empire has largely passed (with some lingering exceptions), the process to eradicate colonialist structures of knowledge remains. This form of decolonization is a longer process, which according to Dr. Maghan Keita of Villanova University, who spoke at two of our September events, is a struggle that has spanned history in various manifestations, “a process, not an event.”
Our September events raised important questions about whether decolonization is an active choice or a process we are already in the midst of, and how individuals can choose to participate or not. In the case of university curriculum, professors have choices about what to include in their syllabi and how to present material to students, but there are competing ideas about what decisions should be made.
What would “decolonization” mean for university curricula?
At a basic level, the inclusion of previously marginalized voices is one way to decolonize a course of study. At SOAS, Dr. Ramgotra adjusted her courses to include the perspectives of more women and people of color, e.g. putting the feminist writer bell hooks in conversation with the Greek philosopher Aristotle. Ramgotra noted, however, that “decolonizing goes beyond just changing the content of university curricula and it’s not just about adding different voices; it’s about adding those voices in a way that connects into the debates that are already there.”
For some, though, this additive approach is insufficient. Decolonization also requires questioning the very production of knowledge and even re-learning how to read texts. Dr. Cutcha Risling Baldy, Chair of Native American Studies at Humboldt University, argued that by the time students take her college courses, most of their notions about the world have already been formed. “The years that they internalize the most are third, fourth, and fifth grade.” If what they learn after this point becomes a way of confirming this, she said, “We have to be the ones that are constantly helping students see what’s behind the curriculum.”
Because of our preconceptions, Dr. Risling Baldy believes the inclusion of different voices is inadequate. In her experiences as a professor of Native American Studies, decolonizing classrooms requires teachers to actively empower students to embrace Native knowledge systems and encourage them to “speak up” and “to not apologize for their knowledges.”
Beyond empowering students to share knowledges, Dr. Dan-el Padilla Peralta, Associate Professor of Classics at Princeton University, made the case for actively fighting “epistemicide,” which he defines as the erasure, displacement, or obliteration of knowledges, in particular those produced by indigenous groups. His course at Princeton on “Citizenships Ancient and Modern” initially focuses on the ancient Mediterranean only to go on to question whether this analysis is completely relevant today to understand citizenship. He juxtaposes texts like The Book of Ruth with more recent perspectives on what it means to be a citizen in an attempt not to reproduce existing colonial narratives of belonging. He encourages students not to accept his curriculum at face value, but to explore the motives behind its design.
Decolonizing goes beyond just changing the content of university curricula. It’s about adding voices in a way that connects to existing debates.
Have marginalized voices been erased or hidden in plain sight?
Decolonization may require us to actively change what we teach and reveal the motives behind a syllabus, but our events provoked discussion over the extent to which existing canonical texts should still be taught. Do they, in fact, obscure marginalized voices, or are we merely overlooking voices by how we read these texts?
For Dr. Keita, decolonization is working against elision, or passing over certain voices, rather than simply erasure. There are ways of locating marginalized voices within canonical texts, questioning, for example why The Iliad should be foundational to Western society when it was written in a context before “The West” had meaning. Reexamining currently-used texts makes more sense to him than throwing them out and starting from scratch. Padilla Peralta similarly takes texts that are staples of a discipline and reconceptualizes them by directing the focus “in ways that open up and empower.” In his own work with summer classes for high schoolers, he does this with texts by John Locke and Thomas Hobbes to show how works of theory can “justify settler-colonial forms of exploitation,” he said.
There are other schools of thought which contend that too incremental an approach to decolonization is dangerous. While Padilla Peralta might encourage a re-reading of certain sources, he questions whether the very foundations of curricula, namely academic disciplines and universities as institutions, can survive the project of decolonization. He argues that if we enfold diverse sources only in an attempt to make a discipline like Classics more accessible, termed by Rosa Andújar “happy-faced global classics,” we risk over-emphasizing the universal relevance of classical antiquity and expanding and further institutionalizing colonial knowledge. Padilla Peralta believes that the discipline of Classics is due for a “critical reordering,” as it relies on an assumption that there is a monolithic definition of what is “classic.” “We have to entertain seriously the ethics of allowing Classics in its current form to die,” he argued.
Decolonization may require professors to actively change what they teach and reveal the motives behind their syllabi.
Can the university survive decolonization?
The movement to decolonize the university has a long history that Dr. Ramgotra traced back to the 1968 walkouts in French universities and the 2015 #RhodesMustFall movement, which was launched by students at the University of Cape Town to decolonize education and spread to Oxford University.
Decolonization is not a metaphor; it is a process with real consequences. If followed to its logical conclusion, it would go beyond the curriculum to rethink the foundations of our society, including its educational structures. For those seeking to decolonize, questions remain about whether an institution rooted in a colonial establishment can be salvaged. In the United States, where universities sit on land that in relatively recent historical memory belonged to indigenous peoples, is it possible to truly decolonize the curriculum?
For Dr. Risling Baldy, decolonization can’t take place without returning lands to indigenous people. “I want to remind you that it has already worked,” she said, giving the example of the transfer of Tuluwat Island to the Wiyot Tribe. For Risling Baldy, the best course of action for scholars is to use the resources of the university to promote decolonization without becoming entrenched in the system that employs them. Dr. Padilla Peralta similarly regarded the role of professors as “banditry” (in his words), raiding resources from the university and redistributing them.
But previous iterations of empire complicate these ideas. Dr. Keita noted empires that existed prior to European colonialism, such as the Mayas, Aztecs, and Incas, took land from others before them. So, to whom does university land truly belong? These questions from this past month’s events segue us nicely into questions and histories of land rights and repatriation. If we agree, in principle, that our intellectual spaces are ripe for decolonization, how does that translate into our physical spaces?
Lori Wysong is a 2020–2021 Graduate History Fellow at the Lepage Center for History in the Public Interest.
Upcoming “decolonizing history” events @ the Lepage Center
· “Decolonizing Land: A Conversation with Professor Elizabeth Ellis,” Oct. 7 @ 12:30 p.m. ET
· “Mobilizing Indigenous Histories for Rights and Reparations: A Roundtable Discussion with Professors Doug Kiel, John Maynard, and Tembeka Ngcukaitobi,” Oct. 14 @ 6 p.m. ET
· “Decolonizing Land: A Conversation with Professor Whitney Martinko,” Oct. 21 @ 12:30 p.m. ET
