Decolonising English Studies from the Semi-Periphery

ISBN-13: 9783031202858 / Angielski / Twarda / 2023 / 255 str.

Ana Cristina Mendes

Opis

This book investigates how decolonising the curriculum might work in English studies — one of the fields that bears the most robust traces of its imperial and colonial roots — from the perspective of the semi-periphery of the academic world- system. It takes the University of Lisbon as a point of departure to explore broader questions of how the field can be rethought from within, through Anglophone (post)coloniality and an institutional location in a department of English, while also considering forces from without, as the arguments in this book issue from a specific, liminal positionality outside the Anglosphere. The first half of the book examines the critical practice of and the political push for decolonising the university and the curriculum, advancing existing scholarship with this focus on semi-peripheral perspectives. The second half comprises two theoretically-informed and classroom-oriented case studies of adaptation of the literary canon, a part of model syllabi that are designed to raise awareness of and encourage an understanding of a global, pluriversal literary history.

Spis treści

Introduction

Part I What Decolonisation Is and Why English Studies Needs It

Decolonising the University: A Turn, Shift, or Fix?

Excavating the Imperial History of English Studies

Interrupting How the Literary Canon Is Taught

Part II What a Decolonised Curriculum for English Studies Can Look Like

Beyond Stasis: Intertextuality, Spreadability, and Fandom

Adaptation Case Studies: Wuthering Heights and Home Fire

Course Descriptions: English Literature (Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries) and English Literature (Twentieth and Twenty-First Centuries)

Concluding Notes

O autorze

Ana Cristina Mendes is Associate Professor of English Studies at the School of Arts and Humanities, University of Lisbon, Portugal, where she teaches courses in cultural studies, visual culture and adaptation, and English history and culture. She is the author of Salman Rushdie in the Cultural Marketplace (2013) and The Past on Display (2013), and editor of Salman Rushdie and Visual Culture (2012).

Blurb

This book investigates how decolonising the curriculum might work in English studies — one of the fields that bears the most robust traces of its imperial and colonial roots — from the perspective of the semi-periphery of the academic world- system. It takes the University of Lisbon as a point of departure to explore broader questions of how the field can be rethought from within, through Anglophone (post)coloniality and an institutional location in a department of English, while also considering forces from without, as the arguments in this book issue from a specific, liminal positionality outside the Anglosphere. The first half of the book examines the critical practice of and the political push for decolonising the university and the curriculum, advancing existing scholarship with this focus on semi-peripheral perspectives. The second half comprises two theoretically-informed and classroom-oriented case studies of adaptation of the literary canon, a part of model syllabi that are designed to raise awareness of and encourage an understanding of a global, pluriversal literary history.

Ana Cristina Mendes is Associate Professor of English Studies at the School of Arts and Humanities, University of Lisbon, Portugal, where she teaches courses in cultural studies, visual culture and adaptation, and English history and culture. She is the author of Salman Rushdie in the Cultural Marketplace (2013) and The Past on Display (2013), and editor of Salman Rushdie and Visual Culture (2012).