Chapter 2 Literary research after the decolonial turn: towards new praxis

On structures: institutionalisation and the paradox of diversity

It is not an understatement to say that diversity – or the lack thereof – is a concept intrinsically connected to all aspects of literary research; yet it feels like one of its most elusive aspects to tackle. The discipline’s inception as the ‘poor man’s Classic’,³ in tandem with the debut of English in UKHE curricula, speaks of a class divide from its get-go. Class, religion, race and gender are only a few indicators of the lack of diversity at the basis of literary studies. In what follows, I trace this phenomenon through the field’s history and assess its processes with the view to informing a praxis-based decolonial critique.

The institutionalisation of literary studies through the rise of English cannot be overlooked if we are to examine the disciplinary development of the field. Mainstream narratives, such as Terry Eagleton’s Literary Theory: An Introduction,⁴ privilege the development of literary approaches to the concrete aspects of field institutionalisation, which certainly accompanies it. This kind of approach sets up a departure point for literary studies in England, with Matthew Arnold, who occupied the position of Professor of Poetry at the University of Oxford between 1857 and 1867, and his social criticism registered in Culture and Anarchy.⁵ From there, attention shifts to Cambridge and the practical criticism of I. A. Richards, in post between 1922 and 1939, followed by the close reading of F. R. Leavis, appointed as an academic in the institution between 1927 and 1964. Other renditions remain in Cambridge a little longer and offer accounts of the cultural Marxism of Raymond Williams, appointed between 1961 and 1983 and, should one’s scope on literary studies be wide enough to encompass cultural studies, I would hope for a mention of Stuart Hall in Birmingham between 1964 and 1979.

Disregarding the institutional dimensions of these narratives risks obscuring how literary research found a foothold in the university. Though often associated with the origins of English studies, Matthew Arnold’s tenure at Oxford does not mark their beginning, as the discipline only emerged there in 1882, after his departure from the institution.⁶ Arnold’s role as Professor of Poetry was largely honorary and unrelated to English as a formal academic field. Instead, the roots of vernacular literary studies are more accurately traced to London, where a utilitarian ethos supported educating working men. England’s first professorships in English literature were established at University College in 1828 (today’s University College London, UCL) and King’s College in 1831 – with both positions initially held by the same man as he changed jobs – and gained particular popularity among female students. Yet, even this narrative omits crucial developments, such as the rise of English literary studies in colonial India during the 1820s,⁷ or earlier efforts by dissenters of the Anglican establishment across England, Scotland and the American colonies in the late seventeenth century.⁸ Most telling in what they leave out, standard narratives on the history of the field paint a familiar picture for the contemporary reader as religious minorities, colonised peoples and workers, not to mention women, are excluded.

Different takes on the panorama of literary studies in English, using the UK as a case study, will, irremediably and rightfully, be capable of pointing to many more historical omissions than this brief panorama. They could also point to the different ideologies, missions and means taken by each of these beginnings of literary studies, especially on the grounds of how English was conceptualised (rhetoric, philology, literature, history, etc.) or whether we are speaking of belles lettres, criticism or research. All these considered, the point remains. To open literary research to a decolonial critique committed to transformation, literary approaches must be considered alongside historically informed appreciations of the concrete conditions enabling them. In the UK context, literary research’s canonical poiesis gives prominence to developments carried out by its elite – and so-called ancient – universities; situates its beginning between the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries; and excludes the agency of those at odds with state ideology and an elite way of life.

The reckoning with literary studies’ legacy of elitism, imperialism and racism – its coloniality – may be a fresh memory to readers contemporary to this piece. The last decade has seen a concrete push for change in terms of inclusivity taking place in the Global North driven by student-led movements across the North/South divide seeking to decolonise the academic curriculum at the higher education level. While what may have stayed in collective memory are polemics around universities’ curricular reviews fuelled by waves of protests and activism in the context of the Black Lives Matter movement – often framed by media in sensationalistic terms like ‘replacing Jane Austen by Toni Morrison’ and ‘removing Chaucer’s white Western sonnet from the university curriculum’,⁹ or headlines such as ‘Has “wokeness” killed the English literature degree?’ – the debate went well beyond that.¹⁰ If the depth and breadth of the discussion in the public domain were hindered by media misinformation,¹¹ they still managed to move the issue beyond the point of tokenistic inclusion, not replacement, of what has been termed non-DWM (Dead White Male) authors in literary syllabi. In the words of Sandeep Bakshi, ‘the move to decolonise literary syllabi considers the veritable question of how a work of literature is produced and how we consider it as partaking in a specific reading list. In other words, it pivots on decolonising our methodology of relating to and teaching literature.’¹² Yet, as much as this definition is in keeping with the work left to do to open literary studies to the unlimited possibilities of articulation of human experience through language, it feels like this work is pretty much what literary studies has been doing, at least since the advent of colonial discourse analysis in the late 1970s, evolving later into the postcolonial approach to literatures and cultures. Why not just make the case to continue doing that?

Postcolonial studies has undeniably transformed literary scholarship. Robert Young went as far as saying that its influence now extends across nearly all disciplines in the humanities and social sciences, becoming ‘part of the consciousness of our era’.¹³ Emerging from colonial discourse analysis, most notably Edward Said’s work exposing the colonial logic embedded in cultural artefacts shaped by material structures of empire,¹⁴ postcolonial theory evolved a diverse body of theories that not only identify and critique cultural oppression but also trace aesthetic forms of agency, empowerment and resistance rooted in the imagi-nations of anticolonial movements. Transnational from its inception, reflecting both the global reach of colonialism and the internationalism of its opposition, postcolonial studies challenged the boundaries of Western nationalisms underpinning canon formation in mainstream literary studies. It enriched the field with aesthetics and theories capable of calling hegemonic metropolitan frameworks by their name and created interpretative models now canonical in their own right. Bringing metropolitan traditions into dialogue with literatures from Africa, the Americas, the Middle East, Asia and Oceania reshaped the institutional structure of literary studies, increasingly dissolving boundaries between English departments and those of comparative literature and modern languages.¹⁵

Despite the seismic shift that postcolonial studies brought to literary studies, the debate that decolonial thought has raised is evidence that this subfield of literary studies has enough blind spots to raise the question of whether it has reached its point of stagnation. This question, however, is not new. To some, like Ella Shohat, postcolonial studies was born past its time. In an essay published as early as 1992, she questions the field’s ‘ahistorical and universalizing deployments, and its potentially depoliticizing implications’ and speaks of the contradiction of thinking in terms of ‘post’ when economic and political practices supporting the reincarnation of colonialism into neocolonialism in the longue durée of capitalism were (and are) still present in what was then called the Third and the Fourth Worlds.¹⁶ While this kind of criticism of the field subsided with time and through the cutting-edge work of many scholars who put the postcolonial lens to the service of the causes of the oppressed,¹⁷ the matter never really went away. In her 2004 text ‘The Institutionalisation of Postcolonial Studies’, Benita Parry refined that critique by defining the validity of the postcolonial as critical theory in its commitment to historicisation and political engagement.¹⁸ For Parry, the postcolonial aspect of a literary work lies precisely in its aesthetic registration of life in the context of colonial oppression anchored in the need to maintain exploitative and extractivist production, which historically lay in localised, internationalist activism that was explicitly anticolonial, hence political.¹⁹ By that logic, the postcolonial approach to literary studies will only work as a mode of critique, a set of theories or even a field if it sees culture in relation to, and not separated from, the political and economic realities that define the postcolonial condition.

Tracing what happened to the commitment to material history in the course of the establishment of postcolonial studies in Anglo-American academia in the 1980s, Parry locates the failure to fulfil its transformative potential at the societal level to its institutionalisation that ‘took place at a time when the linguistic turn was in the ascendant within philosophy and literary theory, and at the moment when cultural studies was in the process of turning its back on its materialist beginnings, operating increasingly with “an essentially textualist account of culture”’.²⁰ Looking at the state of affairs in the field almost a decade later, in a piece titled ‘What is Left in Postcolonial Studies’, Parry responds to Young’s article of the same year, referred to earlier in this piece. She deepens her critique of postcolonial studies’ loss of rigour due to abandoning its commitment to articulate concrete historical and political tensions. At this point, for Parry, ‘postcolonialism effectively became a reconciliatory rather than a critical, anti-colonialist category’.²¹ Her view of Young’s proposition of postcolonialism permeability in the fields of humanities and social sciences is seen as an exaggerated praise lacking fundament as it ‘ignore[s] the meticulous work produced by scholars on the very issues they address—globalisation, Islam, [I]ndigenous peoples, migration’.²² Young’s view of racism and discrimination as the othering foundation of modernity is seen as a refusal to acknowledge the single-modernity paradigm of chiefly economic rather than culturalist drive connecting the peoples of Europe, Africa, Asia and the Americas. Parry recognises postcolonial criticism’s tendency to focus on European agency and self-consciousness to which its (post)colonial other would only serve as a countermodern reference point, ‘which interrupts, interrogates, and displaces its truth claims’.²³

Parry does not disavow postcolonial studies altogether, despite the vehemence of her positions, as in both pieces she recognises that much quality work has been done, including her own. As well as Shohat who later admitted being her own case,²⁴ Parry critiques from within, even though she paints a panorama where approaches embedded in historical materialism like hers are now marginal in the field. Despite its many layers, what this debate shows in the context of my intervention is that the hegemonic postcolonial approach in literary research, popularised by highly cited critics and theorists in the Anglo-American academic circuit, has demonstrated a tangible withdrawal from the political contexts surrounding the literary work in its concrete, historical, worldly existence. This apolitical stance takes root at the same time the field is institutionalised, which makes the time when the aesthetic of the subaltern other gains a seat at the table of hegemonic knowledge the time when their plea for political change effaces from critical view: ‘[t]he postcolonialist shift away from historical processes has meant that discursive or “epistemic” violence has tended to take precedence in analysis over the institutional practices of the violent social system of colonialism’.²⁵

The rise of vernacular literary studies in Britain through the institutionalisation of English was tied to efforts aimed at educating politically marginalised groups: dissenters, colonial subjects and the working class. While these initiatives were far from egalitarian, often serving ideological domination and enacting violence,²⁶ acknowledging the role played by these minoritised groups is crucial for exposing how dominant historical narratives of literary studies marginalise their contributions in favour of developments at elite institutions like Oxford and Cambridge. This erasure is even more pronounced in postcolonial studies, where the incorporation of postcolonial and postimperial literary aesthetics into hegemonic frameworks often obscures their foundational ties to political movements seeking material transformation. The disconnection between mainstream postcolonial criticism and its anticolonial roots has created a critical void that decolonial approaches now seek to address.

The fact that one of the most visible trenches of decolonial epistemic activism is the curriculum of literary studies, attests to the field’s concrete relevance to society at large, moving beyond the isolating metaphor of the academic ivory tower. Not only a result of the discipline’s historic role in building ideological projects of master narratives of nations and empires, the decolonial battle for the curriculum in literary studies speaks of the discipline’s power, as well as its historic role, in deconstructing these very same narratives of nation and empire as has already been shown by postcolonial studies. The anticolonial verve animating literature in the former colonial world crystallised in much of the innovation marking the inauguration of their future national literary systems, captivating scholars and critics across the colonial divide. Literary studies’ privilege is at stake again as a nodal point of aesthetic rendition of empire, liberation and culture – the latter in its broad sense of a way of life – in history, turning it into a battleground for a decolonial activism seeking concrete action.

Despite its commitment to expose, explain and work towards ending coloniality in the aftermath of classic forms of European colonialism, decolonial studies itself is far from an even playing field. The unevenness sustaining the hegemonic mode of capitalist organisation today inevitably taints the production and circulation of these ideas as they rely on space made through their very institutionalisation via the creation of programmes of study, academic positions, journals, conferences and research grants, a process of which this piece is not exempt. As a result, any responsible attempts to pin down the field’s beginnings in terms of time, place and intellectual tradition would require a multilingual, transnational and multimodal effort that far exceeds the constraints of this piece and the skills of this academic. My view of decolonial studies understands it as a pluricentric field rooted in localised concrete activism in terms of political, economic and epistemic rights and whose relation with institutionalised academic discourse can be troublesome.

Take, for example, the scathing criticism that Bolivian sociologist, historian and lifelong activist Silvia Rivera Cusicanqui makes of this ‘ “political economy” of knowledge’ in relation to the decolonial epistemology developed by the Argentinean cultural theorist Walter Mignolo and his collaborators: ‘Walter Mignolo and company have built a small empire within an empire, strategically appropriating the contributions of the subaltern studies school of India and the various Latin American variants of critical reflection on colonization and decolonization’.²⁷ For Cusicanqui, the institutionalisation of these efforts creates ‘[n]eologisms such as decolonial, transmodernity, and eco-si-mía […], and such language entangles and paralyzes their objects of study: the [I]ndigenous and African-descended people with whom these academics believe they are in dialogue’.²⁸ Her assertion warns of decolonial institutionalisation’s danger of alienating knowledge born from contexts of political, economic and cultural struggles from its material political horizon of realisation and explains how it can eclipse the very minoritarian forms of knowledge that it purportedly advocates for: ‘[t]hrough the game of who cites whom, hierarchies are structured, and we end up having to consume, in a regurgitated form, the very ideas regarding decolonization that we [I]ndigenous people and intellectuals of Bolivia, Peru, and Ecuador have produced independently’.²⁹

The consequences of the institutionalisation of decolonial studies assessed by Cusicanqui is just one of the many readings of the decolonial which will, invariably, be rooted in the sociohistoric conditions marking the worldliness of each intervention, including the hegemonic ones. This inscribes the decolonial – be it in decoloniality as theorised by Mignolo’s Latin American prism, decolonisation as seen by Cusicanqui via her experience with Bolivian Indigenous struggles or decolonisation as seen by Nigerian philosopher Olúfẹ́mi Táíwò when looking at the African continent³⁰ – in the fruitful realm of inherent incompleteness of ‘travelling theory’ proposed by Edward Said.³¹ Yet, one fundamental commonality among serious formulations in decolonial thought is a twofold commitment to exposing the continuation of practices that can be traced back to colonialism – or coloniality – and a pledge towards transformative action at the societal level that goes against these legacies. Wide enough to encompass the whole array of experiences of colonialism – direct, indirect, political, economic, cultural, social, biological, etc. – across time and space, the focus on situated forms of coloniality in tandem with a commitment to transformative action in the horizon of a realisable degree of change constitutes a matrix ideally configured to be potentialised by the worldliness of the critic.

Towards a praxis for the literary research method

The institutionalisation of literary, postcolonial and decolonial studies discussed attests to the fundamental relation between our kind of epistemic endeavour and the conditions of production framing academic labour, which constitutes the very reason why literary curricula are an important arena for decolonial action. When the decolonial activist disputes a given curricular choice, they are not necessarily advocating for the abandonment of aesthetics or the very idea of literariness. What they question is the intersection of the principles underlying that choice and coloniality. By doing so, they put in check two major aspects at the root of Western epistemology: the sanctity of the scientific method and the objectivity of the researcher.

Just as was the case with the matter of diversity, it turns out that issues of method and objectivity were also at the heart of the constitution of the field as an academic discipline in the Western model of the university. In a 2018 article titled ‘The Debate with Method in the History of Literary Studies’, literary scholar Mark Hewson argues that ‘[t]he decisive problem for literary studies […] was programmed from the outset, with its entry into the university, and its conception of itself as a research discipline’ whose methodological standardisation clashed with established forms of practical criticism, anchored in aesthetic value and centred on the figure of the critic.³² This chapter of disciplinary history is now effaced from view with the subsiding of the argument into the sublative victory of the research paradigm, due – in great part – to the critic’s devising of methods such as close reading to ‘show that seriousness and rigor are not the exclusive possession of scholarship’.³³ Hewson’s recovery of the debate does a great job of exposing the tension between objectivity and subjectivity that lies at the intersection between the premise of methodologically rigorous, hence reproducible and systematic, quest for knowledge and the very relational nature between literature and the subjectivity of the critic. As he explains, ‘[t]he diverse critiques of method-based research in literary studies converge toward the claim that the literary work depends for its existence on the reading: as such, it does not have the status of an object, available for a progressive work of knowledge and verification’ given that ‘literature itself has no objective reality; it is only real when there is a critical discourse that gives it existence; without such a discourse, there can be texts or fictions, novels, poems or plays, but no literature’.³⁴ As such, the decolonial pressure affects literary studies because of our discipline’s role in the realm of ontology. Given that the literary object is not initially given prior to the ontological gesture of a critical tradition that establishes the literariness giving rise to literature as an object of inquiry,³⁵ the processes encapsulated in our work make it into a pivotal frontier of coloniality: a place where it can be both enacted and opposed.

Hewson’s focus on the importance of method in the poiesis of literary studies restores the relevance of the critic in the field, echoing the 1983 work of Edward Said in The World, the Text and the Critic. Said’s experience in a North American academia speaks of the professionalisation of the literary critic through a high degree of specialisation entailing a ‘very precise division of labour’ that saw critical work divorced from the reality of the world,³⁶ retreating into disembodied notions of textuality. Conceived as ‘the somewhat mystical and disinfected subject matter of literary theory’,³⁷ Said saw textuality as ‘the exact antithesis and displacement of what might be called history’.³⁸ Despite writing at one of the highest points for theory in the history of literary studies, it was the critic that Said saw as the main historical agent in the process of reconnecting ‘texts and the existential actualities of human life, politics, societies, and events’ and of making theory travel across cultures.³⁹ In its capacity of grounding theory, critics’ critical consciousness works as a ‘sort of spatial sense, a sort of measuring faculty for locating or situating theory’ and whose job is ‘to open it [theory] up toward historical reality, towards society’.⁴⁰

The agency of the critic is, thus, one of the most significant loci for a decolonial praxis capable of further unlocking the potential for transformative change in literary studies. The battle over the objectivity of method at the genesis of the field’s institutionalisation, professionalisation and specialisation of culture studies attests to our discipline’s unique position in the coloniality frontier, as a broker capable of both promoting and countering it. In our ontological gesture of creating literature through reading cultural artefacts as literature, we critics, aware of the worldliness of our own views and values, act upon the world by validating as culture the aesthetic formations of stories where those at the margins of society can recognise themselves as subjects in their historical agency. Elevated to the same subjective positions as those occupying hegemonic positions in society, those relegated to the other side of the colonial difference can better oppose processes of dehumanisation subjacent to their commodification in capitalist modes of production. In this context, the critic’s action can transcend the type of critical consciousness conceived by Said, as a binding agent between text and/in history, to achieve the liberatory potential of critical consciousness conceived in Paulo Freire, whose objective is to liberate from oppression. In a context marked by the maintenance of coloniality, a decolonial literary praxis is one centred on the agency of the critic, whose worldly reading is aware of its processes. In our field, this implies localising the worldviews underlying methods and material conditions shaping the structures within which we develop our labour.

From action to reflection, and from reflection upon action to a new action

A decolonial praxis in literary studies is not only dedicated to the worldling of literature but is also committed to transforming literary tradition when it comes to its own coloniality. This demands a critical reading equally capable of instating a text as literature and of tracing how the admission of that text interacts with the coloniality of a given literary tradition. It is by honouring a principle of praxis that is pledged to an action aware of its aim and process – understood in the literary context as a method and material structure – that the critic’s ontological gesture can live up to the drive for change that distinguishes the decolonial literary research. Like what happens in the relationship between teacher and student described by Paulo Freire regarding the transformative potential of critical pedagogy in the process of adult literacy, the study of non-hegemonic literary aesthetics should be a dialogical process that transforms text in literature as much as it transforms the critics’ attitudes towards their disciplines and their labour. Seen in these terms, the challenge involved in the decolonial critical endeavour becomes clearer, and any attempts to conceive ways forward for this praxis call for a candid appreciation of its extent.

In my research for a 2024 piece on As Telefones [The Telephones] by Angolan-Portuguese author Djaimilia Pereira de Almeida, I could appreciate some of the challenges for a decolonial critique. The novel explores a thirty-year telephone relationship between a mother and daughter separated by migration from Angola to Portugal. Narrated from the fragmented perspective of the daughter, sent as an infant to live with her aunt in Lisbon for improved living conditions, the story unfolds through a fractured coming-of-age shaped by sporadic connections with her mother and heritage. Critics widely interpret the novel as a poignant depiction of the Afro-diasporic experience in Portugal, emphasising its textual engagement with subjectivity disintegrated by migration and maternal separation, with the telephone serving as a prosthetic to bridge this divide. Others adopt a more explicitly decolonial lens, highlighting the narrative’s challenge to the Portuguese postcolonial canon through its focus on marginalised historical memories. However, such interpretations often stop short of addressing the structural processes through which that canon is constituted.

While efforts to grant visibility to works like As Telefones are crucial for positioning them within hegemonic literary canons, they fall short of decolonising those canons when they ignore their structural entanglement with coloniality. As I argued in my piece on As Telefones, ‘the decolonial potential of [Pereira de Almeida’s] work is frequently cited in relation to the Portuguese literary canon, the Portuguese imperial legacy, or a very specific type of peripheral experience – that exclusive to Black people whose heritage is in former Portuguese African colonies – hence recentring the very coloniality such interpretations of her work intend to dislodge’.⁴¹ In this instance, a genuinely decolonial reading must attend to how coloniality is produced within the canon itself. This entails recognising that the presence of minoritised structures of feeling is instrumental to coloniality, insofar as their aesthetic value lies precisely in their colonial difference. Such a reading must also transcend the binary of colonial difference embedded in canonical formation that perpetuates colonial structures. More challengingly, a decolonial reading that embraces a decolonial praxis must relinquish the liberal impulse for inclusion that remains complicit in coloniality’s meritocratic illusion and its capacity for co-optation.

Curiously, my reading of the book went in a very different direction. What struck me was its refined aesthetic treatment of the telephone as a failed prosthetic for late-twentieth-century subjective disconnection within the context of the Black diaspora in Europe. The narrative’s engagement with the history of the medium – particularly through diegetic references to Walter Benjamin’s Berlin Childhood Around 1900,⁴² written just before the catastrophic instrumentalisation of technology in the Second World War and his suicide – offered a powerful lens on the entanglement of Black diasporic experience and European modernity. My analysis thus focused on Pereira de Almeida’s depiction of the failure of twentieth-century communication technologies to fulfil their liberatory promise of bridging distances. There, the Black experience worked as a powerful catalyst for the experience of migration and the shifting dynamics of the international division of labour in the longue durée of the capitalist world-system. The piece was never meant to be a decolonial reading of the work, but rather one that dialogued with the idea of hypercontemporaneity that guided the volume The Hypercontemporary Novel in Portugal: Fictional Aesthetics and Memory after Postmodernism, where it was inserted.⁴³

Yet, the contradictions that I observed in the well-intentioned decolonial readings of the book prompted me to reassess the decolonial potential of my own critical approach. The focus on As Telefones’ meticulous intertextuality with a wide European tradition to assess the failed liberatory promise of technology in the context of capitalist progress released the work from the confines of postcolonial Portuguese literature. Trapped there, where it can only live as an index of Portuguese imperialism and colonial difference, As Telefones has little by way of a chance to destabilise any hegemonic tradition – literary or otherwise. Seen in its connection with a European tradition of discourses of technological betrayal – usually centred on the voices of men to the North of the continent – the narrative serenely inscribes the necessity of the perspective of the African migrant in the longue durée of modernity. In the book’s contemporary setting, the portrayal of the African woman severed from her heritage and of the African mother separated from her offspring both echoes the transgenerational trauma of objectification and commodification of the transatlantic trade of enslaved African people and reforges the wilfully forgotten ties between migration now and then. In doing so, the novel exposes the coloniality embedded in modernity’s discourse without recentring it. Ultimately, the narrative’s aesthetic exploration of intersubjective crisis mediated by technology transcends the specificity of Black experience, articulating a human condition – akin to Benjamin’s – while remaining intersectionally grounded.

In the end, I recast my own reading of As Telefones as ‘a decolonial approach’. The reasons, however, have only become clear to me in the process of developing the reflections that gave way to the present chapter. As I write this, I realise the Freirean praxis at work on my critical gesture, as the committed critical action that I took in my 2024 piece on Pereira de Almeida’s work has generated a reflection aware of its aim and process that has taken the form of the present text, which is now ready to engender further – hopefully transformative – action. In this reflection of my path towards a decolonial literary praxis, I should not forget to consider the impact of worldliness in my approach to that narrative. Different from the critics who had produced decolonial appreciations of As Telefones at the time, I do not identify as Portuguese nor work within that academic sphere. Freer from the urge to transform that literary tradition whose excluding principles do not confront me on an everyday basis, my approach is perhaps imbued with a privileged weightlessness that releases my gaze to more easily find the potential of the work beyond the context of Black Portuguese identities. Perhaps the fact that I, too, am a Black woman living as an immigrant, away from home and in touch with my mother only through the use of technology, is part of a worldliness conducive to my connection to the narrative at a human level.

All this considered, while my positionality has probably had something to do with my take on the work, I do not believe that the potential for a decolonial praxis is tied to any specific coordinates in terms of a critic’s positionality. Instead, my view is that any critic can produce a decolonial intervention so long as their critical action relies on the awareness of the decolonial aim and critical process bounded by its historicity and materiality. This relates to Hewson’s historicisation of literary studies’ struggle at the intersection between the subjectivity of the critical ontological gesture and objectivity of the Cartesian method, whose rigour relies on a decontextualised, standardised and reproducible mode of knowing. Such historicisation evokes the work of Said on critical consciousness and worldliness that guide the ontological gesture of the critic who transforms texts into literature. Together, and as I hope this text has demonstrated, these aspects attest to the intrinsically fertile ground that literary studies are to grow the seeds of truly transformative change through literary praxis. All we need is the courage to embrace the power of our own agency and the responsibility for our choices.

Notes

1.   Paulo Freire, The Politics of Education: Culture, Power, and Liberation (Bergin & Garvey, 1985), p. 44.

2.   Djaimilia Pereira de Almeida, As Telefones (Relógio D’água, 2020).

3.   D. J. Palmer, The Rise of English Studies: An Account of the Study of English Language and Literature from its Origins to the Making of the Oxford English School (Oxford University Press, 1965), pp. 10–11.

4.   Terry Eagleton, Literary Theory: An Introduction (University of Minnesota Press, 2008).

5.   Matthew Arnold, Culture and Anarchy (Oxford University Press, 2006).

6.   D. J. Palmer, ‘English’, in The History of the University of Oxford: Volume VII: Nineteenth-Century Oxford, Part 2 (Oxford University Press, 2000).

7.   Gauri Viswanathan, Masks of Conquest: Literary Study and British Rule in India (Columbia University Press, 2015).

8.   Palmer, The Rise, pp. 1–14; Miller, Thomas P., ‘Where Did College English Studies Come From?’, Rhetoric Review, 9.1 (1990), pp. 50–69.

9.   Craig Simpson, ‘Universities Drop Chaucer and Shakespeare as “Decolonisation” Takes Root’, Telegraph.co.uk, 2022.

10.   Claire Alfree, ‘Has “Wokeness” Killed the English Literature Degree?: With Universities Starting to Axe the Course, the Subject That Helped Shape Britain’s Sense of Itself is in Crisis’, Sunday Telegraph, 1 December 2024, p. 13.

11.   Leon Moosavi, ‘ “Woked Up the Bum” and Other Moral Panics About Academic Decolonisation in the British News Media’, Comparative Education, 61.3 (2025), pp. 1–17.

12.   Sandeep Bakshi, ‘Towards the Unmaking of Canons: Decolonising the Study of Literature’, in Doing Equity and Diversity for Success in Higher Education: Redressing Structural Inequalities in the Academy, ed. by Dave S. P. Thomas and Jason Arday (Springer International Publishing, 2021), pp. 117–26 (p. 124).

13.   Robert J. C. Young, ‘Postcolonial Remains’, New Literary History, 43.1 (2012), pp. 19–42 (p. 22).

14.   See both Edward Said’s Orientalism (Pantheon Books, 1978) and Culture and Imperialism (Vintage, 1993).

15.   Anna Bernard, Decolonizing Literature: An Introduction (Polity Press, 2023), p. 4.

16.   Ella Shohat, ‘Notes on the “Post-Colonial”’, Social Text, 31–2 (1992), pp. 99–113 (p. 99).

17.   Benita Parry, ‘The Institutionalization of Postcolonial Studies’, in The Cambridge Companion to Postcolonial Literary Studies, ed. by Neil Lazarus (Cambridge University Press, 2004), pp. 66–80 (pp. 71–3).

18.   Parry, ‘The Institutionalization’, pp. 71–3.

19.   Parry, ‘The Institutionalization’, pp. 71–3.

20.   Parry, ‘The Institutionalization’, p. 74.

21.   Benita Parry, ‘What is Left in Postcolonial Studies?’, New Literary History, 43.2 (2012), pp. 341–58 (p. 342).

22.   Parry, ‘What is Left’, p. 343.

23.   Parry, ‘What is Left’, p. 354.

24.   Emanuelle Santos, Patricia Schor, Robert Stam and Ella Shohat, ‘Interview with Ella Shohat and Robert Stam: “Brazil is Not Travelling Enough”: On Postcolonial Theory and Analogous Counter-Currents’, Portuguese Cultural Studies, 4.1 (2012), pp. 13–40.

25.   Parry, ‘The Institutionalization’, p. 75; emphasis in the original.

26.   Terry Eagleton, Literary Theory: An Introduction (University of Minnesota Press, 2008); Viswanathan, Masks of Conquest.

27.   Silvia Rivera Cusicanqui, ‘Ch’ixinakax Utxiwa: A Reflection on the Practices and Discourses of Decolonization’, The South Atlantic Quarterly, 111.1 (2012), pp. 95–109 (pp. 98, 103).

28.   Cusicanqui, ‘Ch’ixinakax Utxiwa’, p. 102; emphasis in the original.

29.   Cusicanqui, ‘Ch’ixinakax Utxiwa’, p. 103.

30.   Olúfẹ́mi Táíwò, Against Decolonisation: Taking African Agency Seriously (Hurst Publishers, 2022).

31.   Edward W. Said, The World, the Text, and the Critic (Harvard University Press, 1983).

32.   Mark Hewson, ‘The Debate with Method in the History of Literary Studies’, Comparative Literature Studies, 55.1 (2018), pp. 23–46 (p. 24).

33.   Hewson, ‘The Debate with Method’, p. 38.

34.   Hewson, ‘The Debate with Method’, p. 43.

35.   Hewson, ‘The Debate with Method’, p. 39.

36.   Said, The World, p. 2.

37.   Said, The World, p. 3.

38.   Said, The World, pp. 3–4.

39.   Said, The World, p. 5.

40.   Said, The World, pp. 241–2.

41.   Emanuelle Santos, ‘Of Technology and Lost Connections: A Decolonial Approach to As Telefones by Djaimilia Pereira de Almeida as a Hypercontemporary Novel’, in The Hypercontemporary Novel in Portugal: Fictional Aesthetics and Memory After Postmodernism, ed. by Ana Paula Arnaut and Paulo de Medeiros (Bloomsbury, 2024), pp. 141–56 (p. 144).

42.   Walter Benjamin, Berlin Childhood Around 1900, trans. by Howard Eiland (Harvard University Press, 2006).

43.   Arnaut and de Medeiros, The Hypercontemporary Novel.

References