English Studies as Creole Scholarship: Reconfiguring the Discipline for Postcolonial Conditions

Abstract

The shifts underway in contemporary social conditions call for a new alignment between the specializations constituting English Studies: namely, literature, applied linguistics, and rhetoric and composition. Postcolonial social movements have generated new language, textual, and literary practices. These developments bring to the fore practices that have always characterized communication, but ignored in English Studies because dominant paradigms have not been sensitive to these practices. Influenced by modernist values, English Studies took on a trajectory that isolated the object of analysis in order to identify the finite rules that capture the core of communicative practices. Postcolonial communicative conditions draw attention to liminalities, flows, and mixtures that require a situated, multimodal, and multisensory understanding of languages and texts, and the plurality of meanings that emerge from a negotiation of diverse contexts. To understand such language practices, students and scholars have to draw from all three specializations and practise a creole scholarship.

Keywords:

• English Studies
• postcoloniality
• applied linguistics
• rhetoric and composition
• literature
• interdisciplinarity

Notes

1. We must note that though these features come out dramatically in recent experimental postcolonial texts, especially as they are facilitated by new technology, features such as multimodality, oral resources, and social functionality have been present in the canonical western texts as well. These features were simply not addressed in traditional texts.

2. Here, again, we must note that multilingual and multimodal features have always been there in writing, and the new literacy practices of postcoloniality help us revisit them for a richer appreciation.