Outside literature again: the decolonial force of the ‘crisis’ in the humanities

Seminar summary

One of the roots of the discipline of English literature is its use as a colonial technique for managing colonial subjects. The study of literature was intended to create, in the words of Macauley’s Minute ‘a class of persons, Indian in blood and colour, but English in taste, in opinions, in morals, and in intellect.’ As the discipline has negotiated changes in coloniality, university structures, and neoliberal education, English departments have been placed under erasure. Disingenuous university managers have claimed that cutting humanities programs is a response to students’ interest in decolonizing the university, but could the crisis in the humanities be an opport.

How to attend this seminar

This seminar will take place on Wednesday 10 January at 12pm.

We welcome you to join us online.

This seminar is free to attend with no need to book in advance.

Speaker bio

Dr Mrinalini Greedharry

Dr Mrinalini Greedharry is a humanities scholar who has recently been given refuge at Essex Business School. Her main research interest is in the ways that the study of literature is theorized, practiced, and organized from its origins in the Anglophone empire as a means of colonizing Brown and Black subjects to its contemporary transformation into a means of decolonizing both former colonial and metropolitan citizens. She is currently working on a book about the past and future of postcolonial literary studies.

Mrinalini's work is underpinned by curiosity about how epistemological frameworks preserve, maintain, and normalize relations of unequal power. Her work on psychoanalytic theory, for example, investigates how colonial assumptions about subjects continually overlook questions about culture and racialization. On the other side of the epistemological encounter, she is deeply interested in how Black and Brown writers produce theories of the world themselves through lite-writing, auto-ethnography, and auto theory.