![]() ![]() For the Keele Decolonsing the Curriculum Network, the Enlightenment and its values of liberty and reason must always have a white essence: “the content of the curriculum … continues to maintain a colonial legacy through the presentation of a white, western intellectual tradition as not only superior … but universal”. In order to disrupt inequitable power relations, we thus need different kinds of knowledge.Ĭonsider the assumptions that then rise to the surface. Further, as disciplines from political science to archaeology to mathematics are historically implicated in imperial oppression, they are forever tainted and complicit in racial inequality now, and must be overhauled - or dismantled. Its proponents urge teachers to recognise that knowledge can only ever be a product of power relations, that the Enlightenment tradition is defined primarily by its complicity in empire, and that as a way of thinking and educating, it is culturally specific to a privileged Western overclass. The decolonising movement is a more far-reaching, stark attempt to transform consciousness itself. Neither do decolonisers just say that we should ask questions about where, how or for whom knowledge is produced. These are perfectly capable of being worthy undertakings, entirely compatible with scholarship and a commitment to the truth. It goes beyond the proposal that academic staff widen the range and viewpoint of their reading lists, or teach about racism and empire more. What does it mean to “decolonise” curriculums? “Decolonising” is not the same thing as diversification. And on closer inspection, some of the authors have a colonial problem of their own. But James’s insight, that traditions are copious, and no one’s to monopolise, rarely clutters the manifestos and advisory texts of today’s campus decolonisers. What, then, would James make of the current drive to “decolonise the curriculum” in British universities? We cannot know. As Christopher Hitchens noted, while James “needed no instruction about slavery and ethnocentricity”, he “shuddered at the philistinism that reduces Shakespeare to a ‘white male”’. ![]() For James, history was too full of cross-cultural borrowing in every direction, too full of reinvention, for binary reductionism. Clive Lloyd’s West Indies, with its pace bowlers, struck back against racist condescension by pummelling English batsmen with unapologetic force. Long a garrison sport where Caribbean teams were expected to entertain and lose, it could also be a theatre of revolt. Similar contradictions erupted in cricket, his great love. CLR James shuddered at the philistinism that reduces Shakespeare to a “white male” The Haitian insurgents deployed the empire’s ideals to subvert it. Privileged white men led the Enlightenment and forged empires that unleashed the Middle Passage and genocide, but their ideas contained the seeds of their own critique. His landmark work, Black Jacobins, demonstrated the connected fates of the French and Haitian revolutions. He believed one could draw upon its literature, philosophy and ideas while also revolting against its oppression. James had a complex relationship with the intellectual legacies of the West, or “the Global North”. I only know the struggle of people against tyranny and oppression in a certain political and social setting … It is impossible for me to separate black studies from white studies.” When James - historian of imperialism, Anglophile, cricket connoisseur - was offered a post in “Black Studies”, he responded “I do not know, as a Marxist, ‘Black Studies’ as such. W hose project is “decolonisation”? I s it the work of the colonised, or is it in fact the work, once again, of the colonisers? The Trinidadian Marxist CLR James thought little of the identity politics that preaches anti-racism but demarcates the world into separate, alien races. To get the full magazine why not subscribe? Right now we’re offering five issue for just £10. ![]() This article is taken from the February 2022 issue of The Critic. ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
Details
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |