With all the good work being done on decolonizing syllabuses, I have begun to think about decolonizing postcolonial studies. Unfortunately, this only occurred to me recently thanks to a peer review of my most recent forthcoming article in NaKaN: A Journal of Cultural Studies. The reviewer wrote “Il me semble que la bibliographie est parfois un peu prévisible et qu’il manque certains articles/chapitres/livres plus récents de personnes haïtiennes. On pense par exemple à « The Haitians: A Decolonial History » de Jean Casimir. Le point de vue de la critique haïtienne est en effet très peu présent.” In sum, I had used many traditional and well-respected sources on the topic, but had failed to include, other than the novels I cited, perspectives of scholars from the actual place. This took me down the road of reading Casimir’s book, which I probably should have done much sooner! Casimir reminds us that “colonial empires were an accident of history,” and he “invites readers to place Haitians at the center of their thinking and to recognize the role of external influences without getting distracted by their [external] logic and the norms derived from that logic.” I think it also goes without saying that such approach is valuable regardless of the geographic subject of our research. Check out Casimir’s book here ! And, btw, the globe pictured here is not upside-down.
Decolonizing things
This is such a great point! In a related vein, I read another friend’s recent post about “academic incest” in which all her close advisors and peers within her research seem to know one another personally and use the same secondary texts on their course syllabi because they were products of the same institutions. I think it’s easy to become so insular because it takes more work to find sources that are closer (geographically, personally) to our areas of research. Perhaps it’s not true for every field, or even for everyone in our own, but the academic seems to feel smaller than it should.
Interesting and so true! I recently read two very similar articles (both excellent pieces!) by two colleagues, and it was interesting to look at their works cited. One with whom I shared a dissertation director had a bibliography very similar to mine. The other had a completely different set of resources, despite the fact that the articles were on the same topic.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sm3BlY-O5To
La mosquée Hassan II en Maroc