9 Making Space for Inclusive Teaching: Two Ways of Decolonizing the Syllabus

Decolonization of education has become an important concern for both students and teachers today. According to the Library and Cultural Services of the University of Essex, decolonization refers to “identifying colonial systems, structures and relationships, and working to challenge those systems” (par. 1). It involves a paradigm shift in the way non-white cultures are imagined and understood. It encourages persons with marginalized identities to claim space within the dominant discourse. We argue that decolonizing North American education is partly about resisting the privileging of Western ideas, values, and texts over all others, and partly about offering students and teachers an actively inclusive space that supports diverse perspectives. We consider how moves towards resistance and inclusivity could play out in one particular aspect of teaching English Literature: challenging the canon.

The term “canon” in English Literature refers to the collection of literary works that are believed to be of great and lasting cultural and aesthetic value. This set of texts is understood to meet agreed-upon standards of literary excellence. The works of William Shakespeare, James Joyce, Charles Dickens, and William Wordsworth, among other authors studied in first-year English Literature courses, are usually included in “the canon.”

The canon of English Literature, for many decades, was haunted by the ghosts of colonialism and was complicit in a systematic process of exclusion. Texts valued as canonical often presented white, dominant-group, male, cis-hetero, non-disabled characters as complex, significant, and worthy of attention. Many canonical texts othered or contained negative representations of racialized, Queer, female, non-cisgender, or working-class characters. For instance, Shakespeare’s play The Tempest centred white male characters like Prospero and Ferdinand, while othering–even demonizing–Caliban, a character who has been read as a racialized or Indigenous person.

There is an implicit assumption among supporters of the traditional canon that all students have the literary awareness, the knowledge of the historical contexts, cultural cues, and norms, and the ability to relate to the socio-cultural settings and characters that make the study of canonical texts especially rich and meaningful. But courses that focus on the canon have made some students who identify with the negatively represented (racialized, working-class, Queer, female) characters feel a sense of discomfort, otherness, or exclusion.

Historically, the marginalized student who identified with what was represented as otherness in the canonical text was put in the position of having to alter their understanding to suit the milieu of the classroom. The emotional and intellectual labour involved in adjusting their understanding in this way often created a sense of alienation–a feeling that the course and its texts did not reflect them, offer them role models, or echo their cultural voices. In other words, the labour of belonging in this space fell to the marginalized student. As Nicole Ineese-Nash noted, this labour in turn reinforced a “system that we [had] all just accepted as being the singular truth, when actually there are multiple truths” (qtd. in Sloan, par. 6). Today, students, scholars, and teachers increasingly acknowledge that the canon of English Literature needs to be challenged if the discipline is to be welcoming to diverse students and readers. There are two ways of enacting this challenge: the first is to decolonize the syllabus by including texts centering identities and groups neglected in the traditional canon; the second is to teach canonical texts differently, against the grain, through an inclusive lens.

What would a decolonized syllabus look like? It could give equal weight to canonical texts and newer texts that address similar themes. For instance, West Side Story has been read as an adaptation of Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet that makes the classic play socially relevant to twentieth and twenty-first century audiences.^[1] We could go beyond the North American literary world to find other examples of responses to canonical texts, or texts on similar themes. For instance, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s non-canonical Half of a Yellow Sun, set in Nigeria, could be taught as a response to Charles Dickens’s canonical Tale of Two Cities and could be read side by side with it. Vishal Bhardwaj’s film Haider, set in Kashmir, India, reconfigures Shakespeare’s Hamlet within the geopolitical realities of India-occupied Kashmir. The translocation of Shakespeare’s work into a space that the playwright himself could not have imagined offers new meaning-making avenues. Bhardwaj’s Haider offers a distinct perspective on the themes in Hamlet: a perspective that invites viewers to engage with India’s complex and deeply troubled history with Kashmir. Instead of reading Shakespeare or Dickens exclusively in their own social and literary contexts, placing their work in today’s world by reading such adaptations widens their relevance while introducing multiple voices and perspectives into Literature courses. What this introduction of less-heard voices into the conversation means for students from dominant groups is that they have an opportunity, as Spivak put it, to “learn how to occupy the subject position of the other” (121). This transfers part of the labour of creating an inclusive space from marginalized students to students from culturally dominant groups.

How could we teach the canon differently? In teaching a canonical text, an instructor could unpack what it means in an intersectional context, addressing realities of race, gender, class, and other forms of social privilege. Coined by Kimberlé Crenshaw, the term “intersectionality” refers to ways in which an individual occupies multiple spaces of identity (associated with multiple kinds of privilege or discrimination). For example, a person can be both Queer and racialized (i.e., doubly marginalized); a person can be white and female (privileged in one way, marginalized in another). An intersectional framework allows teachers and students to address the multiple sites in which a text anchors itself, and lets each reader forge a relationship with it based on their identities. We can read canonical texts against the grain, which often means deliberately looking at them from marginalized perspectives. For example, using a postcolonial lens to read Jane Austen can help us see aspects of her work that mainstream critics do not highlight. Edward Said, in his pioneering work of postcolonial criticism titled Culture and Imperialism, points out that the English world of Austen’s Mansfield Park depends for its existence and wealth on a plantation in Antigua, which is barely acknowledged in the text (Said 102-15). As Ursula Lindsey notes, Said urges that we read “the historical power dynamics embedded in the story and the individual lives that Austen dramatizes so brilliantly” together, not separately (par. 3). The literary reading of character, plot and style and the postcolonial perspective inform each other, furthering the student’s understanding of the text’s social and ethical complexity.

Reading canonical texts in this critical, resistant way offers generative possibilities for learning about lived global histories while engaging readers’ diverse positionalities. Teaching canonical texts through an intersectional lens and deliberately including non-canonical texts in the syllabus challenge dominant belief systems and help us engage with realities that are often unexamined or disregarded in English Literature courses. The labour of decolonizing the syllabus and teaching “multiple truths” is active, tiring, and continuous. The key is quiet and ongoing resistance.

Works Cited

Adichie, Chimamanda Ngozi. Half of a Yellow Sun. Alfred. A. Knopf, 2006.

Austen, Jane. Mansfield Park. 1814. Project Gutenberg EBook, 2022, www.gutenberg.org/files/141/141-h/141-h.htm#link2HCH0048.

Bhardwaj, Vishal, director. Haider. UTV Motion Pictures / VB Pictures, 2014.

Crenshaw, Kimberle. “Mapping the Margins: Intersectionality, Identity Politics, and Violence against Women of Color.” Stanford Law Review, vol. 43, no. 6, 1991, pp. 1241-1299, https://doi.org/10.2307/1229039.

Dickens, Charles. A Tale of Two Cities. 1859. HarperCollins Publishers, 2010.

Lindsey, Ursula. “Edward Said’s Double Vision.” The Point, 15 August 2021,

thepointmag.com/criticism/edward-saids-double-vision/.

Said, Edward W. Culture and Imperialism. Alfred. A. Knopf / Random House, 1993.

Shakespeare, William. The Tempest. Shakespeare’s Comedy of The Tempest. 1610. Edited by William James Rolfe, American Book Company, 2016.

—. The Tragedy of Romeo and Juliet. 1597. Edited by Barbara A. Mowat, Paul Werstine, Michael Poston, and Rebecca Niles, Folger Shakespeare Library. www.folger.edu/explore/shakespeares-works/romeo-and-juliet/read/. Accessed 2 May 2024.

—. The Works of Shakespeare: The Tragedy of Hamlet. 1603. Edited by Edward Dowden, Methuen, 1899, archive.org/details/tragedyhamlet01dowdgoog/page/n10/mode/2up.

Sloan, Will. “Decolonizing the Classroom is More than Just a Checklist.” TorontoMet Today, Toronto Metropolitan University, 30 Jan., 2018, www.torontomu.ca/news-events/news/2018/01/decolonizing-the-classroom-is-more-than-just-a-checklist/.

Spielberg, Steven, director. West Side Story. 20th Century Studios, 2021.

Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty. The Post-Colonial Critic: Interviews, Strategies, Dialogues. Edited by Sarah Harasym, Routledge, 1990, pp. 113-132. https://doi.org/10.4324/9780203760048.

University of Essex Library and Cultural Services. “What is Decolonisation?” Decolonising the Library, 26 Sept. 2024. library.essex.ac.uk/edi/whatisdecolonisation#:~:text=Decolonisation%20involves%20identifying%20colonial%20systems,working%20to%20challenge%20those%20systems. Accessed 15 October 2024.

Wise, Robert, and Jerome Robbins, directors. West Side Story. United Artists, 1961.