This issue of The English Academy Review foregrounds language education. The English Academy’s mission statement includes the enhancement of language education and literacy teaching in South Africa. Our 2017 International Conference with the theme ‘Decolonial turns, postcolonial shifts and cutlural connections’ had a tripartite focus on literature, literacy and language. The emphasis on language education resonates with contemporary debates on language challenges, low levels of literacy and scholastic achievement, especially in schools that serve the majority of poor children in townships, informal settlements and ghettos. These schools remain dysfunctional with extremely low levels of literacy achievement. A low quality of education in disadvantaged classrooms reinforces an inter-generational cycle of poverty where working-class children inherit the socio-economic standing of their parents, irrespective of their own abilities. Neocolonial attitudes conveniently disguise cultural and ideological assumptions and ignore the economic and social conditions that resulted in the ‘illiteracy’ of the children in the first place. Critical literacy does not view literacy as an independent technical skill but as a practice embedded in socially constructed epistemological principles. The manner in which citizens conceive of knowledge, their identity and their being is rooted in their particular social contexts. Factors that affect the meanings and practices of literacy include the curriculum (ideologies that underpin literacy), teacher–learner interaction, the nature of the literacy being learned and the learner’s position in relation to power.
The second strand in this issue engages with contemporary debates on decolonization in the country. The study of English has always been a densely political and cultural phenomenon, a practice in which language and literature have both been called into the service of the colonial agenda. British colonial administrators in the commonwealth, provoked by missionaries on the one hand and fears of native insubordination on the other, discovered an ally in English literature to support them in maintaining control of the natives under the guise of a liberal education. The #RhodesMustFall and #FeesMustFall movements contested and challenged the neo-liberal political and social history of higher education and held universities to account for their culpability in the colonial project. Calls for change were theorised by using decolonization as a critical frame to re-examine new ways of working with the local academic project. It is evident in the articles included within this strand that the academic, social and political movement of decolonization has evoked a mixed set of reactions from the university community, based on different interlocutors’ vantage point, positionality and intellectual or vested interests. The decolonial humanities are found mainly outside universities – in social, artistic, intellectual and civil society movements. Contributing to those projects is critical for securing progressive and transformative social change. The lack of substantive attention to the lived experience and condition of the marginalized other, the subaltern, is construed as a continuation and reinforcement of colonialism in neocolonialism.
Ashcroft notes in his essay, ‘Borders, Bordering, and the Transnation’ that the distinction between colonized and colonizing, rich and poor nations, democratic and undemocratic, the nation and its others, us and them, holds borders together and should be dissolved. He argues that a borderless world might lead to equality, increase the wealth of the poor, and reduce the wealth of the rich. The hope for a better life that drives increasing numbers of refugees to seek shelter has corresponded to an increasingly hysterical sealing of national borders around the world.
A border is not a thing but a practice, a practice that produces power relationships and establishes inequalities between those who are in and those who are not. Most importantly, perhaps, borders are synonymous with global capitalism and the precarity it constructs. Borders are both a consequence and a production of power relationships. And the process of othering on which they are based is fundamental to the fiction of identity produced within those borders.
Ashcroft considers the function of literature in the transnation, particularly the utopian possbilities it offers to move between the structures of the state. While the transnation – the outside of the state that begins within the nation – may not engage in physical travel, it reveals the utopian possibilites offered by the actual proliferation of national subjects.
The transnation refers to something more than diaspora, since it is both internal and external, and more than cosmopolitanism, because the transnation may include monocultures. It inhabits that ambivalent space between the promise of hegemonic unification offered by globalization and the fragmentation of transnational cultures.
The seeming impossibility of a borderless world is due not only to the spectre raised by the mobility of people, but to the most destructive force of modern times, the force that keeps borders in place: nationalism. Although the article resonates with Homi Bhabha’s view that all nationalisms are a deprivation, Ashcroft extends the thesis by linking nationalism to ethnocentrism, racism, populism, injustice and violence.
Another article that examines matters relating to inequality and injustice is ‘Entangled discourses: Pre-service teachers engage with notions of justice and parity’ by Leila Kajee. She argues that dialogue about race and justice has been used to examine people’s understandings and interactions; however, talking about justice in South Africa necessitates talking about the past, specifically apartheid, which could give rise to feelings of discomfort. Entanglement is a means through which we can draw into our analyses those sites in which what was once thought of as separate—identities, spaces, histories—come together or find points of intersection in unexpected ways:
Entanglement indicates a relationship or set of social relationships that is complicated, ensnaring, in a tangle, but which also implies human foldedness. It works with difference and sameness but also with their limits, their predicaments, their moments of complication.
Matters concerning English as medium of instruction, language policy and translanguaging feature prominently in Colin Reilly’s article on Malawi’s language-in-education policy. The focus is on university education, and the prevailing attitudes which students and staff exhibit towards English in a country with seventeen languages and where English is spoken by a minority of the population. There are interesting attitude shifts from cultural imperatives to use Chichewa to the prestige of using English:
Their use of English and the place of English in their lives is just one aspect of their identity. Their identities are fluid and changing and English is part of that. Some students embrace the opportunity which university accords them, to be able to develop their English skills, to develop ‘that English mental’ thing because it makes them stand out. English is a language of prestige.
Madeyandile Mbelani’s article focuses on curriculum reform and in-service teacher professional development in visual literacy. The use of visual images by way of educational aids for teachers, librarians and media experts is foregrounded as an important vision-competency that a human being can develop by seeing and at the same time having and integrating other sensory experiences. The development of these competencies is fundamental to normal human learning.
When developed, they enable a visually literate person to discriminate and interpret the visible actions, objects, symbols, natural or man-made that he encounters in his environment. Through these competencies, he is able to communicate with others. Through the appreciative use of these competencies, he is able to comprehend and enjoy the masterworks of visual communication. The article argues that when interpreting advertisements during visual literacy lessons, both teachers and learners draw from powerful discourses that are socially acquired. Insights from cultural historical activity theory and the interdependence model of critical liteacy underpin the argument.
Decolonial turns, postcolonial shifts, and cultural connections (the theme of the English Academy’s 2017 international conference) serves as leitmotif in Kasturi Behari-Leak’s article. She offers perspectives on and snapshots of whether we are choreographing new dances for change or marching to an old drum, reproducing ways of thinking, being, and doing that are not inclusive or socially just:
… decolonizing knowledge necessitates shifting the geography of reason to beyond Eurocentric and provincial horizons and producing knowledge beyond strict disciplinary impositions. Through this epistemic disobedience, the decolonizing movement, which aims to make explicit the links between the university and its social, political, and economic links, is revealed as both political and personal.
Marcel Khombe Mangwanda’s ‘Lexical structure as a marker of ideology in Ayi Kwei Armah’s Fragments and Two Thousand Season begins with an examination of vocabulary as a marker of ideology. The argument for selecting modality is that, since modality concerns a speaker’s commitment to a proposition, that is, to a certain representation of the world, then an analysis of modality is likely to reveal worldview, beliefs and commitments to propositions. The article is underpinned by Critical Discourse theory of Norman Fairclough and Teun van Dijk. Drawing on the Bakhtinian theory that considers language as a field of ideological confrontation and insights from Critical Discourse Analysis, this article examines how vocabulary mediates ideologies. The final article in this issue is Fiona Zerbst’s ‘The small man with the big weapon: An examination of representations of the great white hunter in South African English-language poetry’. She contextualizes the ‘legend’ of the great white hunter within the history of sport or trophy hunting in South Africa, from the 1800s to the present. The article examines a selection of South African English-language poems that engage with the great white hunter trope.