Carolyn Cooper | Cornell takes a leaf out of UWI’s book

Last Monday, the online literary magazine, Brittle Papers, published an intriguing essay, ‘Decolonizing the English Department’,written by two distinguished scholars at Cornell University. Professors Carole Boyce Davies and Mukoma Wa Thiong’o assert in their opening sentence that: “A historical change, one that we believe will impact other English departments in the US and the West in general, happened during our first 2020-2021 academic year English faculty meeting.”

The “historical change” was a new name: “from the narrow Department of English, to the more embracing Department of Literatures in English. The name change captures the fact that within the US and globally, there are multiple literatures and many ‘englishes.’” The Cornell initiative may be “historical” for the US, but certainly not for “the West in general.”. It seems as if the professors were not aware of the fact that a ‘global’ university in the Caribbean had long recognised the need to decolonise the English department.

In 1994, the name of the department at The University of the West Indies (UWI), Mona was changed to Literatures in English. Twenty-six years ago! It is decidedly ironic that even well-intentioned academics who engage in the radical process of decolonisation can appear to be perpetrators of cultural imperialism. Putting the US at the centre of a movement for transformation in the West and marginalising institutions like The University of the West Indies!

As reggae icon Burning Spear puts it so precisely in his subversive chanting down of the “damn blasted liar” Christopher Columbus, “Whole heap a mix-up, mix-up/ Whole heap a bend-up, bend up/ Go ha fi straighten out.” It seems as if the Cornell professors, somewhat like Columbus, were discovering and naming a continent of ideas that was already populated. A literary critic in Poland, Bartosz Wójcik, posted on Facebook a photo of the UWI department sign which he took while attending a cultural studies conference in 2008. The name was a revelation. In response to Wójcik’s post, Boyce-Davies arrogantly asserted, “We still see the Cornell decision as having an impact the UWI version did not have.” Original, not version!

TRADE IN INTELLECTUAL PROPERTY

Professors Carole Boyce Davies and Mukoma Wa Thiong’o do acknowledge that the decolonising of the English department began in East Africa at Kenya’s University College of Nairobi. But the narrow focus of their somewhat brittle essay is Cornell. Last Thursday, Aljazeera published a brilliant report by Amandla Thomas Johnson, Rewrite the English department: Lessons in radical decolonization.

Thomas-Johnson highlights a fundamental question: “Can we reimagine the world of literatures in English in a way that puts historically marginalised voices at the centre?” He gives a comprehensive answer in his nuanced account of the evolution of literary studies from the University College of Nairobi, to The University of the West Indies and to Cornell. Another kind of trade route from Africa to the Caribbean to the US! This time, the valued commodity is not brute labour. It’s intellectual property.

Like The University of the West Indies, the University of Nairobi was once a college of the University of London, dominated by expatriates. The Department of English was a bastion of British literature. In 1968, the acting head wrote a paper on proposed developments in the Faculty of Arts that would keep the literature of Britain at the centre of the curriculum. Three lecturers dissented and wrote a truly historical memo, ‘On the Abolition of the English Department’.

Taban Lo Liyong from Uganda, Henry Owuor-Anyumba and James Ngugi from Kenya argued for a Department of African Literature and Languages. They made their manifesto absolutely clear: “This is not a change of names only. We want to establish the centrality of Africa in the department ... . Therefore, after we have examined ourselves, we radiate outwards and discover peoples and worlds around us.”

INFILTRATING ENGLISH

A similar movement was taking place at The University of the West Indies. In 1968, a young Trinidadian scholar came to lecture at Mona. It was Kenneth Ramchand, who had just completed his PhD at the University of Edinburgh. His dissertation became the classic The West Indian Novel and Its Background. Within a month of his arrival, Ramchand took down the sign on his office door that defined him as a lecturer in English. He replaced it with ‘Literatures in English’. A colleague wickedly asked, “You are inventing your own department now?”

By the following academic year, Ramchand established a course in West Indian literature. At about the same time, another Trinidadian, Arthur Drayton, introduced a course in African literature. Like the lecturers at the University College of Nairobi, they knew that our own literature must be at the centre of a plural curriculum. I was fortunate to have been a student in that ovular/seminal West Indian literature class. Half a century later, I still have my treasured essay on Wilson Harris’ Palace of the Peacock. My teacher commended my courage in contending with that difficult novel.

In email correspondence, Ramchand reflected on the role of language in the process of decolonisation he initiated at Mona: “Our struggle was not native language vs English as in Africa. It was recognising that we spoke and wrote West Indian English – just as there were Australian, Canadian, New Zealand Englishes – with ours in an exciting meeting of orality and writing which extended the notion of literariness. We did better than ‘abolishing’ English; we infiltrated it and authorised a subtly interfused linguistic spectrum.” As Ramchand’s brilliant work has so lucidly demonstrated, self-invention is at the root of decolonisation – in literature as in life.

- Carolyn Cooper, PhD, is a specialist on culture and development. Email feedback to columns@gleanerjm.com and karokupa@gmail.com.