[Week 4 Talk] The Question of Decolonization: Academia’s Political and Pedagogical Limits
The meditative dénouement of the conversation, however, involved a certain uncertainty as to the praxis of decolonization. While accessibility, diversity, and repatriation serve as the cornerstones of any decolonizing politic, Richardson and Hessell contended that perhaps, ultimately, there is no decolonizing certain institutions or nation-states. The academy, as an example, can create coursework schema and scholars that pursue the resituation of colonized fields into indigenous studies, but in many ways, decolonization is about the preclusion of further loss. That of course does not begin to suggest that there is not significant and important work to do and meaningful results to gain, but it does frame decolonization in a particular political light – one of limits if also of great depths.
Though digital humanities “have not [yet] escaped the traditional canon by turning to new methods of publication” (Earhart 314) – instead reinstituting the same theoretical and pedagogical mentalities that govern traditional academic work – its potential remains to pursue “the abandonment of the ideal of high [read: colonized] culture […] as a unifying force” (Bolter 233) in its democratizing and acephalous possibilities.
Works Cited
Bolter, Jay David. Writing Space: The Computer, Hypertext, and the History of Writing.
Houghton Mifflin, 1991.
Earhart, Amy E. “Can Information Be Unfettered? Race and the New Digital Humanities
Canon.” Debates in the Digital Humanities, edited by Mark K. Gold, UMN P, 2012, pp. 309-32.