Decolonial pedagogy and English literary studies: problematics in a Pakistani context

Abstract

We propose a decolonial pedagogy in the teaching of English Literature at the undergraduate level in postcolonial Pakistan. We argue that the English literary texts that are taught in conjunction with different supplementary materials retain a West-centric tilt that requires disbanding. Therefore, we administered carefully designed worksheets. These encouraged marginal thinking across the differential socio-historical canvases that outline the prescribed texts, online lectures, supplementary reading materials and the students’ situatedness. The students used these resources as tools for practising a decolonial hermeneutics. By directing these tools towards their own lived situation, they intervened within the Western means of knowledge production and undid their alterity and historical silencing. By analysing the students’ assignments as sites of decolonial articulation, we propose that decolonial pedagogy can be used to generate an intercultural intellectual solidarity that allows the formerly colonised to rethink themselves in a manner that no longer talks back to the Empire.