Decolonizing the English Literary Curriculum

Ankhi Mukherjee is Professor of English and World Literatures at the University of Oxford and a Fellow of Wadham College. Her books include Unseen City: The Psychic Lives of the Urban Poor (2021), which has won Columbia University's Robert S. Liebert Award, and What Is a Classic? Postcolonial Rewriting and Invention of the Canon (2014), which won a British Academy prize. She has co-edited A Concise Companion to Psychoanalysis, Literature, and Culture (2024) and edited After Lacan (2018). She is currently writing A Very Short Introduction to Postcolonial Literature (2024). Ato Quayson is the Jean G. and Morris M. Professor of Interdisciplinary Studies and Chair of the Department of English at Stanford University. His books include the 2-volume Cambridge History of Postcolonial Literature (ed.), Tragedy and Postcolonial Literature, and Oxford Street, Accra: City Life and the Itineraries of Transnationalism. He is Editor of the Cambridge Journal of Postcolonial Literary Inquiry and host of Cambridge Contours: The Cambridge Literary Studies Hour. He has also curated Critic.Reading.Writing, a YouTube channel dedicated to themes in the interdisciplinary literary humanities.

Introduction Ankhi Mukherjee and Ato Quayson; Part I. Identities: 1. Decolonizing the university Paul Giles; 2. Decolonizing the English department in Ireland Joe Cleary; 3. First Peoples, Indigeneity and teaching indigenous writing in Canada Margery Fee and Deanna Reder; 4. Decolonising literary pedagogies in Australia and Aotearoa New Zealand Elizabeth McMahon; 5. Gender, sexualities and decolonial methodologies Brinda Bose; 6. Black British literature decolonizing the curriculum Ankhi Mukherjee; Part II. Methodologies: 7. Theories of anthologizing and decolonization Aarthi Vadde; 8. Confabulation as decolonial pedagogy in Singaporean literature Joanne Leow; 9. Marxism, postcolonialism and decolonization of literary studies Stefan Helgesson; 10. Against ethnography: on teaching minority literature Jeanne-Marie Jackson; 11. Orality, experiential learning and a decolonizing African literature at the university of Ghana Kwabena Opoku-Agyemang; 12. Vernacular English in the classroom, a new geopolitics of the ground beneath our feet Akshya Saxena; 13. Reading for justice: on the pleasures and pitfalls of a decolonializing pedagogy Ato Quayson; Part III. Interdisciplinarity and literary studies: 14. Literature, human rights law and the return of decolonization Joseph R. Slaughter; 15. Decolonizing literary interpretation through disability Christopher Krentz; 16. Decolonizing the Bible as literature Ronald Charles; 17. Decolonizing literature: a history of medicine perspective Sloan Mahone; Part IV. Canon Revisions: 18. Decolonizing the literary curriculum of medieval studies Geraldine Heng; 19. The decolonial imaginary of borderlands Shakespeare Katherine Gillen; 20. Decolonizing romantic studies Nigel Leask; 21. Victorian studies and decolonization Nasser Mufti; 22. Decolonizing world literature Debjani Ganguly; 23. Decolonizing the English lyric through diasporic women's poetry Sandeep Parmar; 24. Postcolonial poetry and the decolonization of the curriculum Nathan Suhr-Sytsma; 25. Decolonizing English literary study in the anglophone Caribbean William Ghosh; 26. #RhodesMustFall and the reform of the literature curriculum James Ogude.