Anshuman Mondal and Katherine Baxter
Decolonising the Discipline online talk for the #Englishcreates campaign led by University English.
Anshuman and Katherine reflected on the beginnings of our network Decolonising the Discipline. Anshuman noted: ‘It was a moment in our history where we realise the kinds of privileges in our histories and voices,’ They built upon the Black Lives Matter movement, highlighting the need to create our network, Decolonising the Discipline. Katherine emphasised the importance of moving online during the pandemic, which enabled dialogue between students, academics, and librarians. More recently, they referred to our collaboration with teachers, as many feel the need to be trained on decolonisation. Anshuman recalled our events with schools aimed at equipping teachers with tools to apply their knowledge in the classroom, which is often more restricted than higher education. Katherine added, ‘Decolonising isn’t always or only about marginalised contexts or decentering voices, but it’s also about bringing different lenses to canonical work: taking something that is familiar and looking at it with a different perspective’. They concluded with fantastic suggestions for the network’s future, contributing to the excellent debates in the #Englishcreates campaign by University English. As Anshuman mentioned, “Decolonising brings a new lens but is also the ethos: reading a text is about reading the world.” Follow us on social media and sign up for our newsletter: as our speakers said, everyone is welcome in this journey!
Decolonising the Discipline: Past, Present and Future. #Englishcreates – YouTube
Anshuman Mondal (University of East Anglia) is Associate Dean Research for the Faculty of Arts and Humanities and Professor of Modern Literature, specialising in post-colonial studies. He is the author of Nationalism and Post-Colonial Identity: Culture and Ideology in India and Egypt (RoutledgeCurzon, 2003), Amitav Ghosh (Manchester University Press, 2007), and Young British Muslim Voices, an account of his journey across the UK talking to young Muslims.
Katherine Baxter (Northumbria University) is Professor in English Literature and Deputy Faculty Pro Vice-Chancellor in Research and Knowledge Exchange for the Faculty of Arts, Design and Social Sciences. Her research explores colonial and postcolonial literatures, law and literature, and literary multilingualism. She is particularly interested in how literary genres shaped colonial discourse and the intersections of literature with post/colonial legal administration. She has also published extensively on Joseph Conrad, including work on Conrad’s uses of romance and on Conrad’s engagement with other art forms.
