The Uses and Limits of Archives in Decolonial Curricula

Koretsky, Deanna P., Spelman College

2020-11-17

2020-2029

I am fortunate to teach at an institution that encourages students to read against the grain of the imperialist white supremacist capitalist heteropatriarchal power structures that built, and that continue to inform, most Western academic disciplines.1 Spelman College, a historically Black college for women, emphasizes the critical study of what much of the Western academy still calls difference or otherness as an essential component of all students' education, regardless of personal background or intended course of study. In their first year at Spelman, all students take a two-semester course called African Diaspora and the World, which trains them to read their studies and their lives through the lenses of critical race theory, feminist theory, and African diaspora studies. By the time they step into my classroom, they have already been introduced to the critical vocabulary necessary for thinking about who and what is left out of a field like eighteenth-century British literature. My teaching invites students to think with me with us about the dis/function of disciplinary boundaries and why moving toward decolonial academic practices requires more than simply adding writers of color to our syllabi.

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Studies in Eighteenth-Century Culture

Department of English

Spelman College

http://hdl.handle.net/20.500.12322/sc.fac.pubs:2022_koretsky_deanna_p

http://rightsstatements.org/vocab/InC/1.0/