Introduction to ARIEL’s Special Issue on Global Pedagogy Jane Bryce (bio) When I was invited to be the guest editor of a special issue on global pedagogy I had to stop and think about it. “Global” and “pedagogy” are each such complex signifiers, pointing in so many directions at once, that my first reaction was dizziness. In what way could I, an African literature scholar, possibly be qualified to edit a special issue on such a wide-ranging subject? When I thought about it, however, I realized that my own path has been shaped by forces that, while experienced at the time as local, specific, and personal, can in retrospect be described as “global.” I was born to British colonial parents and raised in Tanzania. My early exposure to literature was to children’s classics—The Once and Future King, The Lord of the Rings, Jane Eyre, Enid Blyton, and Biggles—which I read in a setting that had little relationship to Middle Earth or Yorkshire or upper-class English manners. Later, at my English school and university, I was introduced to the English canon; later still, studying for a Ph.D. in Nigeria, I was for the first time confronted with the realization that what I had been taught up to that point did not necessarily apply in my new context and I would have to shed assumptions and expectations about what constituted literary “excellence” and learn to read in a different way. Back in London, I found myself teaching both English and African literature to Japanese students before I took up a post at the University of the West Indies (UWI) and confronted yet another order of difference. On one level it was no accident that I found myself at Cave Hill: the origin of UWI is identical to that of other colonial educational institutions, such as the African universities of Ibadan, Makerere, and Legon, in having started as a college of the University of London. Obafemi Awolowo University, Ile-Ife, where I did my Ph.D., began as a satellite of Ibadan. The first UWI campus at Mona, Jamaica, was, like Ibadan, founded in 1948 to create an educated cadre to serve the colonial [End Page 1] administration. The humanities were therefore conceptualized in both cases as a way of introducing colonial subjects to the superior civilization of their colonial masters. A radical overhaul of this concept (such as I encountered at Ife) was intrinsic to the project of Independence and decolonization, and an important element of this at UWI was the recognition of the centrality of Africa to West Indian history and the construction of a West Indian identity. The introduction of African literature to the literary studies curriculum followed the same logic. But whereas in Nigeria I had been an aspirant and acolyte, learning from both peers and mentors how to read anew, in Barbados I found myself an anomaly in all sorts of ways: a white African in a race-conscious Afrocentric environment; a British expatriate in an ex-colony still deeply affected by colonial habits of deference and submission; an Oxford-educated English lecturer at an institution highly conscious of its decolonizing role in education; an Africanist scholar in a place where stereotypes of African primitivism and savagery alternate with myths of royalty and ancient ties of blood. I became, entirely unexpectedly, a cultural mediator, a deconstructor of negative preconceptions, and a messenger of modernity. If African literature, as read in Africa, is an exploration of cultural and material realities, in my context in Barbados it is a way of unsettling a reader’s comfortable sense of being part of the western world and familiarizing an “Africa” distanced, exoticized, and conscripted for a romantic, ahis-torical, and timeless relationship with the past. When the abstracts started arriving and I read the curricula vitae of the contributors to this issue, I realized how routinely literary scholars in today’s classrooms arrive there by complex routes and are the products of the global pedagogy they practice. Of the ten writers whose work comprises this special (double) issue, five are United States-based. One of these contributors is Indian, one has worked in Kazakhstan, one...
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