Decolonizing English Literature Departments At Arab Universities

Abstract

Education in the Arab world is in need of a revolution, and this revolutionary transformation is inevitably and intricately linked to the production, ordering, and dissemination of revolutionary, anti-colonial knowledge. This article emphasizes the urgency for decolonizing education, specifically English literature departments at Arab universities. Many thinkers have documented the connection between literature, culture, and imperialism on the one hand (Gauri Viswanathan’s Masks of Conquest, 1989 and Edward Said’s Culture and Imperialism, 1993) and literature, culture, and resistance on the other hand (Fanon, Kanafani, Cabral, Said, and others who wrote about zero point epistemology). While there have been some decolonization efforts in different parts of the world, even at Ivy League institutions (Cornell University, for example), Arab universities ironically maintain a very rigid, government accredited English and American literary curriculum with no attempt or intention at decolonizing these colonial era curricula. This article interrogates the aims behind maintaining a purely English (and American) literary curricula, especially as the Arab region continues to undergo the most violent and aggressive forms of Western intervention, which has led to massive destruction of Arab state infrastructures, the loss of Palestine in 1948, the dissolution of the social fabric of Arab societies and thousands of deaths in the past two decades. Against this destructive Western agenda, a constructive, awareness raising impulse embedded in a literature/culture of resistance is in order. It is high time that Arab universities decolonize their English literature departments, a necessary transformation that entails, to quote the title of an essay by Walter D. Mignolo, “Epistemic Disobedience, Independent Thought and Decolonial Freedom” (2009).