Proscribed Fictions: The Place of Colonial and/or Racist Literature in Curricular Decolonisation

This project responds to a practical problem faced by members of the module production team on the new English MA (A893). As part of the design of preliminary skills material, the module team chose Joseph Conrad’s fiction of the colonial Congo, Heart of Darkness (1899), as a set text. Heart of Darkness is a canonical novella of European Modernism and has an exemplary, varied critical secondary literature, making it an excellent postgraduate teaching text. 

As a literary work of its period, set largely in Africa, Heart of Darkness is often read as being highly critical of aspects of colonial rule in the Belgian Congo. At the same time, however, it represents West African people in variously reductive and derogatory ways, and the narrator uses the N-word ten times during the narrative. Consequently, the book has been the subject of protracted debates amongst critics (since at least the 1970s and 80s) over Conrad’s ‘racism’, debates which have included interventions by major African writers and postcolonial theorists. 

The call to decolonise the curriculum has been defined with some care at the Open University: 

‘A curriculum provides a way of identifying the knowledge we value. It structures the ways in which we are taught to think and talk about the world. As education has become increasingly global, communities have challenged the widespread assumption that the most valuable knowledge and the most valuable ways of teaching and learning come from a single European tradition. Decolonizing learning prompts us to consider everything we study from new perspectives. It draws attention to how often the only world view presented to learners is male, white, and European. This isn’t simply about removing some content from the curriculum and replacing it with new content – it’s about considering multiple perspectives and making space to think carefully about what we value. Decolonizing learning helps us to recognize, understand, and challenge the ways in which our world is shaped by colonialism. It also prompts us to examine our professional practices. It is an approach that includes indigenous knowledge and ways of learning, enabling students to explore themselves and their values and to define success on their own terms.’ 

Open University (2019) ‘Innovating Pedagogy 2019. Exploring new forms of teaching, learning and assessment, to guide educators and policy makers. Report, January 2019, page 3 

While these insights are nuanced and warn against a simple ‘removal or replacement’ logic, at a basic level decolonising the curriculum has been interpreted by Literary Studies scholars to mean improving the curricular visibility of positive canonical literary works by BAME authors (who are seen as representative of the aforementioned new non-European perspectives), an aim reaffirmed by a number of writers and public commentators. This is a call that OU English module production teams have taken seriously, and the aforementioned new MA English module (A893) includes set texts by BAME writers, including C.L.R. James, Ngugi Wa Thiong’o and Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie as well as Anita Desai and Kamila Shamsie. However, as historically wide-ranging modules like A893 must also cover periods of colonial expansion and deal necessarily with literary works that engage with contemporary attitudes, a more difficult associated question is how to handle potentially offensive colonial and / or racist fictions, such as Heart of Darkness, as part of the wider process of curricular decolonisation. 

The ‘Proscribed Fictions’ project asks two inter-related research questions: 

(RQ 1) How do our students at L3 and on postgraduate modules currently respond to the teaching of colonial and / or potentially racist literary works? Do students feel excluded or offended by such works and are there particular aspects of such texts — the representation of African or African American trauma or suffering, the use of particular terms, the avowal of race theory — that are particularly problematic? Clearly the engagement with Black and minoritizes students on these subjects – through the questionnaires – will have to be sensitive and guided by SRPP and HREC approvals. 

And (RQ 2) if we are to retain such texts in our teaching material (alongside better overall representation of BAME authors), how can we present and teach them in a way that improves students’ learning experience and enhances diversity awareness? How can white academics change their practice to include multiple perspectives on set textual material? Do we need to provide supplementary material that addresses these issues when we work with ‘proscribed’ texts? How far can we integrate forms of critical race theory into our teaching? These are issues that colleagues across FASS (in History, English & Creative Writing and Art History) are likely to face increasingly as they incorporate EDI best practice into module production, but they are also particular to English & Creative Writing where curricular design is shaped by the question of not only which set texts to include but also which to exclude. 

These research questions bear on a problem that faces all literary scholars working in solidarity with the BLM and Decolonise the Curriculum movements: the issue of how the curriculum can be decolonised without damaging ideals of critical inquiry, transparency and debate, especially in the case of literary texts that arguably improve our understanding of the systematic enslavement and underdevelopment of Africa by Europeans. (It is also relevant for our postgraduate level English students who might themselves be teaching in schools and facing similar questions in their own pedagogy.) A significant associated question, raised as part of our production process on A893, is whether providing too much supplementary ‘framing’ of such material might encourage BAME students to be offended or uncomfortable with the learning material.