Decolonizing English Studies: Editorial

Abstract

It is hardly surprising that English Studies has been at the forefront of debates about decolonizing curricula, pedagogy, and institutional practices in Higher Education. Our discipline scrutinizes which stories we tell, whose experiences are represented and how they are told; but the literature we study comes from a language whose dominance as global lingua franca, and indeed whose evolution into the hybridized, global language of today, issue from the continuing legacies of British and American imperialism. We need to interrogate with renewed clarity those stories we tell ourselves: which histories are foregrounded, and which passed over in silence; whose experiences are represented, and whose disregarded; which figures, which achievements, are valorized, which are forgotten, and which disavowed. This entails not just learning from critical and pedagogical approaches developed by scholars in English Studies, but submitting the institutional–intellectual formation of English as a discipline itself to scrutiny. When we sent out a call for contributions about ‘decolonizing English Studies’, it was shortly after the Black Lives Matter protests that followed the killing of George Floyd, shortly after the statue of Edward Colston, philanthropist at home and slaver abroad, had been deposited in Bristol harbour; it was a moment that brought renewed reflection not only on the persistence of structural racism in our societies, but also on the way we represent and remember our histories and their legacies in our present. As we saw it, the imperative to decolonize was no longer seriously in question, but the meaning and practicalities of what ‘decolonization’ entailed were still up for debate. We were interested, therefore, not so much in arguments for decolonizing—arguments that had already been made compellingly elsewhere—but in providing a snapshot of decolonizing work currently underway in our discipline. The aim of the special issue was thus to provide a forum for colleagues from across the discipline to share reflections from their various perspectives, and for colleagues to report back on initiatives they had been involved in: their successes, their frustrations; the momentum they had built, the obstacles they had encountered. To this end, we invited first-person accounts of teaching, curriculum design, outreach, research, and public engagement, and, given the international readership of English, discussions of what decolonizing English studies means for colleagues in different national, geographical, and linguistic contexts.