Decolonise Our School of Arts, Languages and Cultures

The concept of race is inherently associated with colonialism and coloniality. It is an integral part of the coloniser/colonised dynamic that continues to manifest itself in everyday, interpersonal interactions. In order to conceptualise the pervasive presence of race within the colonial endeavour it is essential to contextualise the origins of race within the period of European expansion. It is, for instance, well established that, ‘for centuries, Europeans attempted to make sense of human diversity, classifying people by how they differed from themselves’.[1] The categories that were subsequently produced paved the way for the production of a racial hierarchy which, within the colonial context, involved the ‘systematic negation of the other person and a furious determination to deny the other person all attributes of humanity’.[2] The heavily intertwined, and oftentimes interdependent, relationship between race and European, colonial history becomes increasingly undeniable the more one delves into the wealth of research on the subject. With this relationship in mind, it is clear that a successful and sustainable effort to ‘decolonise’ our University must involve the creation of an exhaustive and unflinching approach to race.

With this in mind, I write this piece to urge The University of Manchester’s School of Arts, Languages and Cultures (SALC) to follow The University of Leeds’ example in establishing the trailblazing module ‘Race, Writing and Decolonisation’, which will be offered to first-year undergraduate students embarking on an BA English Literature degree from as early as September 2020. As Dr Brendon Nicholls (incoming module leader and one of many staff members who worked on its creation) took the time to explain to me, this interdisciplinary module will veer away from ‘the conventional one-novel-a-week format’ in order to encourage ‘students to read in a slower paced, culturally reflective and multi-dimensional way’.[3]  

As the modules on our English Literature syllabus adopt increasing numbers of non-white authors in a commendable effort to address the strikingly monolithic list of white, predominantly male, perspectives that literature students spend most of their time analysing, it’s worth considering the extent to which the introduction of Black, Asian and ‘Minority Ethnic’ authors acts as a short-term ‘plaster’ over the wound that is racial inequality in the curriculum and in Britain more broadly too. In an effort to cultivate a more sustainable approach to interrogating racially-based bias, our University should offer the entire SALC student body the opportunity to enrol onto a school-wide, interdisciplinary programme that is dedicated to race, its socially-constructed origins and the various ways in which it impacts the lives of those who occupy racialised bodies. Whether that be offered to students in their first-year, as is the case in Leeds, or to those seeking to focus their studies on the history of race and its long-term impact in their second and third years, the introduction of School-wide module (as opposed to a discipline-specific module for English Literature students, for example) would demonstrate would demonstrate the SALC department’s passionate commitment toward decolonising our University environment.

As well, enabling students to develop an awareness of the racial hierarchy of which they are a part, a critical race module that allows students to develop a critical approach to the race also addresses a particularly British problem, in that it provides individuals with a judgement-free space in which to discuss race within an academic framework and to develop the linguistic tools with which to continue these discussions beyond the classroom throughout their future lives. Not only will the introduction of a critical race module benefit racially-minoritised students/students of colour, for those who have been racialised as white and thus have had the opportunity to be ignorant to white supremacy and the workings of race and racism, the cultivation of a critical academic approach to race will facilitate reflective interrogation of internalised racial prejudices and enable these students to have a more comprehensive understanding of the world around them. This is a necessary first step on the path to achieving an equal, multi-racial community at our University, and more widely too. Moreover, for those students of colour/racially-minoritised students - who have been racialised as ‘non-white’ according to perceived differences of skin tone, hair texture and so on - a critical race module will enable them to critically interrogate the discrimination/racism that they may have experienced with unrelenting persistence throughout their lives and the biases and/or racialised patterns of thinking they may have internalised too.

To conclude, I would like to re-emphasise that the introduction of a critical race module across departments in SALC at The University of Manchester will provide students with an understanding of the deep-seated, historical framework in which UK-based students inevitably reside.

Written by Dinu Ratnasinghe

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[1] Daniel G. Blackburn, ‘Why Race is Not a Biological Concept’, in Race and Racism in Theory and Practice, ed. by Berel Lang, (Lanham, Boulder, New York and Oxford: Rowman and Littlefield Publishers Inc., 2000), pp. 3-27 (p. 18).

[2] Cheryl Temple Herr, ‘The Color of Schizophrenia’, in Postcolonial Whiteness: A Critical Reader on Race and Empire, ed. by Alfred J. López, (New York: State University of New York Press, 2005), pp. 137-54 (p. 138).

[3] Brendon Nicholls, Email to the Author, 04 July 2020.