Decolonial pedagogy and English literary studies: problematics in a Pakistani context

ABSTRACT

We propose a decolonial pedagogy in the teaching of English Literature at the undergraduate level in postcolonial Pakistan. We argue that the English literary texts that are taught in conjunction with different supplementary materials retain a West-centric tilt that requires disbanding. Therefore, we administered carefully designed worksheets. These encouraged marginal thinking across the differential socio-historical canvases that outline the prescribed texts, online lectures, supplementary reading materials and the students’ situatedness. The students used these resources as tools for practising a decolonial hermeneutics. By directing these tools towards their own lived situation, they intervened within the Western means of knowledge production and undid their alterity and historical silencing. By analysing the students’ assignments as sites of decolonial articulation, we propose that decolonial pedagogy can be used to generate an intercultural intellectual solidarity that allows the formerly colonised to rethink themselves in a manner that no longer talks back to the Empire.

KEYWORDS:

• Decolonial pedagogy
• postcoloniality
• epistemic delinking
• marginal thinking
• diatopical hermeneutics

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1. See Pineda et al, ‘On Interculturality and Decoloniality: Sabedores and Government Protection of Indigenous Knowledge in Bacatá Schools’.

2. See Coritna et al, ‘Decolonial Trends in Higher Education: Voices from Latin America’ and Richardson’s ‘Disrupting the Coloniality of Being: Toward De-colonial Ontologies in Philosophy of Education’.

3. Except for the University of the Punjab, Lahore, the other institutions were upgraded to universities after the creation of Pakistan, mostly in the first decade of this century.

4. BS stands for Bachelor of Studies.

5. One lecture was entitled ‘Pride and Prejudice Urdu/Hindi Book Jane Austen’ by Syed Irfan Ali from the University of the Punjab, Lahore. Its link is https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z8OJujjBBuA and was uploaded in 2017. The second lecture, entitled ‘Pride & Prejudice for English Hons & MA(ENG)’ had been uploaded in 2016 on the YouTube channel Classic Way Of Learning by Rahul Sharma. Its link is https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m4R_-i1vVlc.

6. We repeated the same procedure with Mary Shelley’s Fankenstein and Charles Dickens’ Great Expectations and we found comparable results on YouTube.

7. We recommended Tanner’s ‘Introduction’ to Pride and Prejudice as well as Woloch’s chapter entitled ‘Narrative Asymmetry in Pride and Prejudice’ because these articles offered comprehensive critiques of the novel and also engaged in a mutual debate.

8. All the extracts in the boxes are quoted verbatim from the students’ assignments.