Mind and Inferiority: Reflections on ‘English’ as a University Discipline in a Black Context

Abstract

With the apparent liberalisation of laws controlling tertiary education in South Africa, and with the revolutionary challenges to the educational system in the black townships, university English departments have increasingly had to confront problems of identity and definition; the view of literature in educational institutions as the transmission of a received and inherited canonical tradition, a particular privileging of certain kinds of linguistic discourse over others, must be located within a specific social and political history. Unless the discipline embraces the problems of cultural relativism, it will be incapable of contributing to peoples' compassionate alertness to what South African is or might become. English needs to develop empirical methodologies whereby the corrosive implications of subordination might be addressed. The realm of symbolic and signifying practices (which English studies defines as its particular though not exclusive domain) needs to be seen as a site where contestation might happen, where exploration occurs of new and altered social relationships, perceptions of the self and others, and centrally to an awareness of black culture, the complex alternatives of private and public thought. English as a discipline needs greater reflexivity about its place in a multi-cultural, multi-racial society.