Decolonising English Studies from the

Semi-Periphery Ana Cristina Mendes

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 Decolonising
English Studies from
the Semi-Periphery
Ana Cristina Mendes
Decolonising English Studies from the
Semi-Periphery
 Ana Cristina Mendes

Decolonising English
Studies from the
Semi-Periphery
Ana Cristina Mendes
University of Lisbon
Lisbon, Portugal

ISBN 978-3-031-20285-8    ISBN 978-3-031-20286-5 (eBook)

https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-20286-5

© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer
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To Rafael and Rui, for all their support over the years, through thick
and thin.
 Contents

Introduction  1
References  29

Part I What Decolonisation Is and Why English Studies

Needs It  35


Decolonising the University: A Turn, Shift, or Fix? 37
Decolonising Factories of Knowledge  47
Portugal’s Semi-peripherality  54
From the Universal to the Situated, Towards Pluriversality  61
References  70


Excavating the Imperial History of English Studies 77
Knowledge, Power, and Selection  79
Literature and the “Globalectical Imagination”  95
References 101


Interrupting How the Literary Canon Is Taught107
Dialogue, Relationality, and Emancipatory Politics 108
Against Deficit and Accommodation Approaches 115

vii
viii CONTENTS

The Aftering and Presentism of the Literary: A Radical Historicist

Approach to the Canon 122
References 133

Part II What a Decolonised Curriculum for English Studies

Can Look Like 139


Beyond Stasis: Intertextuality, Spreadability, and Fandom141
References 168

Adaptation Case Studies: Wuthering Heights and Home Fire175

The Hypertextualities of Wuthering Heights  175
Inter-imperial Encounters in the English Literature Semi-­
peripheral Classroom 175
A Hypertextuality Perspective to Teaching Wuthering Heights  177
“Nelly, Make Me Decent, I’m Going to Be Good” 191
“Always Historicize!” 195
Antigone Among British Muslims—Kamila Shamsie’s Home Fire  202
References 208


Course Descriptions: English Literature (Eighteenth and
Nineteenth Centuries) and English Literature (Twentieth and
Twenty-First Centuries)213
Learning Outcomes 214
Learning-Teaching Methodologies 214
Coherence of Learning-Teaching Methodologies with the Learning
Outcomes 216
Notes on Online and Blended Classroom Learning-Teaching 217
Syllabi Coherence with the Learning Outcomes 219
Conceptual and Methodological Coordinates 219
Historical-Cultural Coordinates and the Politics of “English
Literature” 220
Socio-aesthetic Worldviews and Literary Adaptation 229
The Creative-Critical Multimodal Project 231
 CONTENTS ix

Syllabi for English Literature (Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries)

and English Literature (Twentieth and Twenty-First Centuries) 232
English Literature (Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries) 233
English Literature (Twentieth and Twenty-first Centuries) 235
References 236

Concluding Notes241
References 245

Index247
 About the Author

Ana Cristina Mendes is Associate Professor of English Studies at the

School of Arts and Humanities, University of Lisbon, Portugal, where she
teaches courses in cultural studies, visual culture and adaptation, and
English history and culture. To expand upon theories of epistemic justice,
she uses cultural and postcolonial studies to examine literary and screen
texts (in particular, intermedia adaptations) as venues for resistant knowl-
edge formations. Mendes is the author of Salman Rushdie in the Cultural
Marketplace (2013) and The Past on Display (2013) and editor of Salman
Rushdie and Visual Culture (2012). She is Chair of the ACS-Association
for Cultural Studies (2022-26).

xi
 List of Figures

Decolonising the University: A Turn, Shift, or Fix?

Fig. 1 Rafael Bordalo Pinheiro, John Bull potty, 1890. Red clay glazed.
Rafael Bordalo Pinheiro Museum. (Photo by Pedro
Ribeiro Simões) 59
Fig. 2 Yinka Shonibare, The Age of Enlightenment—Immanuel Kant,
2008. Life-­size mannequin, Dutch wax printed cotton, mixed
media, 75 × 105 × 80 cm. Milwaukee Art Museum. (Photo by
Jason Mandella) 63
Fig. 3 Yinka Shonibare, The Age of Enlightenment—Immanuel Kant,
2008 (detail). (Photo by Jason Mandella) 64

Adaptation Case Studies: Wuthering Heights and Home Fire

Fig. 1 Rex Downing as young Heathcliff. Still from William Wyler’s
Wuthering Heights (1939) 182
Fig. 2 Nelly and Heathcliff in the bathing scene. Still from ITV’s
Wuthering Heights (2009) 193
Fig. 3 Heathcliff’s branded back in the bathing scene. Still from Andrea
Arnold’s Wuthering Heights (2011) 197
Fig. 4 Cathy kisses Heathcliff’s whipping wounds. Still from Andrea
Arnold’s Wuthering Heights (2011) 199
Fig. 5 Cathy caresses Heathcliff’s wounds after the flogging. Still from
ITV’s Wuthering Heights (2009) 199

xiii
 Introduction

“The answer to the question ‘What does it mean to decolonize?’ cannot

be an abstract universal. It has to be answered by looking at other W ques-
tions: Who is doing it, where, why, and how?” (Mignolo 2018, 108).
Using these words by the Argentinian decolonial thinker Walter Mignolo
as stepping stones, this book starts by offering an answer to the question
of what it means to decolonise in the context of the university and the cur-
riculum. Decolonising the university is a project-practice intent on foster-
ing inclusivity in the education system, interrogating institutional,
epistemic, and curricular exclusions based on cultural markers and
discursive-­performative categories such as “race.”1 Decolonising is more
than just selecting a more comprehensive range of teaching materials and
“diversifying” the Eurocentric canon, interrupting that canon to integrate
“alternatives” and “accommodate” “new voices.” “Diversifying,” “accom-
modate,” and “new voices” are some of the recurring terms of the

1
In this book, the inverted commas around “race” are not repeated, but the assumption
of the discursive constructedness of race, where visible marks of difference inscribed on the
skin as “colour” are attached to shifting meanings, is retained nevertheless. See Tucker’s
(2012, 2019) call for historicising racial theory, in particular, for scrutinising the socially
constructed understanding of race as the prevalent (in the sense of default and given) mode
of racial analysis in contemporary culture.

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature 1

Switzerland AG 2023
A. C. Mendes, Decolonising English Studies from the Semi-Periphery,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-20286-5_1
2 A. C. MENDES

decolonising debate, especially in Europe and the US.2 Yet, instead of

challenging and redressing systemic inequalities in education, tokenistic
and nativist approaches to decolonisation as the simple “accommodation”
of “new voices” in global north universities—which promise a quick fix to
the “diversity problem”—end up reaffirming the imbalances decolonisa-
tion seeks to rectify. For decolonisation to work in the university, it requires
context-specific approaches, considering geographical, disciplinary, and
institutional circumstances. To actualise this project-practice in our con-
texts (Shahjahan et al. 2022), first, we need to enact a critique and probing
of the positionality of knowledge. From a geopolitics of knowledge per-
spective, we also have to acknowledge and reflect on our situatedness in
the economics of knowledge. Such acknowledgement is related to how
knowledge is situated within a specific geopolitical context from which it
develops and circulates, often in colonising ways.
Still, we must not presume to agree upon a single meaning of decolo-
nisation; in fact, it is not in keeping with the decolonisation project-­
practice to strive for a single definition. As Noel Gough contends,
“Decolonisation is not a subject and/or object to be constrained by defi-
nition, but a focus for speculation—for generating meanings” (Le Grange
2019). A consensus approach to decolonisation would be self-defeating,
for it would likely re-establish the orthodoxies that decolonisation cri-
tiques. Purposefully, “decolonisation” remains a contested term in the
context of the university and the curriculum, as it covers a heterogeneity
of views, approaches, political projects, and normative concerns guided by
different methodological and epistemological rationales. In this respect,
Eve Tuck and K. Wayne Yang have notably critiqued the academic under-
standing of decolonisation as a metaphor that turns it “into an empty
signifier to be filled by any track towards liberation,” a catch-all term for
any transformative, social justice effort, severed from the radical practice of

2
Shahjahan et al. (2022) comprehensive literature review (mainly published after 2010) on
decolonising the university and the curriculum, across disciplinary fields and higher educa-
tion institutions, observes three major meanings of decolonisation: (1) acknowledging the
political and epistemological limitations of disciplines, canons, and institutions, and ques-
tioning the positionality of knowledge; (2) disrupting disciplines, canons, and institutions;
and (3) accommodating and enabling other epistemological perspectives. As the authors duly
recognise, it needs to be highlighted that this literature review is based on articles and book
chapters published in English, which begs for a consideration of the pre-eminence of the
English language in academia, the economics of publishing, and the non-neutrality of aca-
demic databases.
 INTRODUCTION 3

decolonisation, which for Tuck and Yang needs to be a material, spatial

endeavour first—and must begin with the restoration of and restitution for
Indigenous land and life (2012, 7).3 The pragmatic, material decolonisa-
tion advocated by Tuck and Yang, who forcefully argue against decoloni-
sation becoming a pretext for metaphorisation, differs from more
epistemological forms of decolonisation that concentrate on the inter-
twining of knowledge and power, and how this produces metanarratives
and necessarily limited representations of life-worlds—the primary focus
in this book.
In the epistemological constructivist and historicist framework for
understanding decolonisation I use here, a decolonised curriculum is not
synonymous with an antiracist curriculum, although there are obvious
overlaps in righting epistemic injustice and fighting the violences of colo-
niality. While racism is part of the legacy of western power/knowledge
(Foucault 1980), decolonising the curriculum is ultimately about inter-
rogating knowledge-production means and contexts to correct epistemic
asymmetries, broaden the spectrum of representation, and expand life-­
worlds. This involves decentring and destabilising whiteness as a socially
normative and epistemic ideal issuing from a default, unmarked subject
position. It also considers the power relations in and of the canon. What
happens to the literary text as it becomes canonised? Canonisation can
occur at several inflexion points: when a text enters the university curricu-
lum by being selected and perpetuated as a “core” or “universal” text;
when it enters cultural memory by being adapted to another medium; or
when it enters global fandoms, expanding the networks of the literary
marketplace by inspiring fanfiction (or “fic”). The premise is straightfor-
ward: the more cultural authority is invested in a literary text, the more
adaptations it will invite, and the more it will circulate. A decolonised
perspective attuned to processes of canon-building and circulation allows

3
For example, the notion of “Black poethics” introduced by Denise Ferreira da Silva
(2014) also calls for decolonisation as a corrective to colonial extractivism by recovering
expropriated value. But Silva seeks restitution for extracted value around intellectual and
artistic resources—of “the creative capacity Blackness indexes”; her vision of full decolonisa-
tion entails “a reconstruction of the world, with the return of the total value without which
capital would not have thrived and off which it still lives” (2014, 85; emphasis added). This
radical praxis of decolonisation in a framework of “Black poethics” “requires the setting up
of juridico-economic architectures of redress through which global capital returns the total
value it continues to derive from the expropriation of the total value yielded by productive
capacity of the slave body and native lands” (2014, 85).
4 A. C. MENDES

us to see that specific literary production and reception acts co-occur and
are globally co-implicated. This viewpoint is attentive to the linkages
between several processes and practices, among them: the negotiation of
power relations through representation (whether it is possible to conform
to or to disrupt mainstream assumptions through representation), the
conditions of legibility created by particular conjunctures (Hall 2011),
and how practices of affiliation with content that is actualised in diverse
contexts of use and through specific acts of reception, including current
collaborative rewriting practices in digital platforms, can expand the tradi-
tional genealogies of literary historiography. Here, I am building on the
“circuit of culture” framework (du Gay et al. 1997), developed by mem-
bers of the British Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies (CCCS),
including Stuart Hall. This framework accentuates the connection between
five processes and practices—representation, identity, production, con-
sumption, and regulation—and how the generation and sharing of mean-
ing results from its circulation through language and between multiple
sites, media, processes, and practices within and between life-worlds.
Representation is co-constitutive of the world around us as it constructs
the world, and the world is constructed by it—this is why a decolonising
perspective must enter the university and, broadly, the cultural archive
towards social justice.
A decolonising perspective includes recognising the links between
existing pedagogy and coloniality, the latter understood as the transhis-
torical extension of colonial domination into contemporary times, which
must be continually historicised. To redress those links between our peda-
gogy and coloniality, we must recognise that the structural conditions of
the western academy form its knowledge claims, disciplines and fields, and
its attendant, supporting pedagogies—even (or perhaps significantly)
those that we introduce into our classrooms. These forms of knowledge—
theories and methodologies primarily informed by western intellectual
traditions—and the pedagogies and curricular design that they spawn, all
too often paper over the historical and geopolitical conditions of their
production and even re-enact colonial relations of power and privilege.
Perhaps most importantly, as part of what some might understand as a
pedagogy of redress, we must reckon in the classroom with our role as
active agents in the historical and geopolitical inequalities of knowledge
construction—whether we frame these inequalities as between the global
north and the global south, the West and the non-West, or, in terms of
 INTRODUCTION 5

world-system theory, between the core, semi-periphery, and periphery.4

While acknowledging that an ontological distinction between the global
north and global south (a distinction likewise entailed in the use of the
identifiers “West” and “non-West,”5 or what Niall Ferguson [2011] dis-
missed as “The Rest” in his neoconservative eulogy of the West as the
locus of modernity) reinstates the dualisms that I seek to dislodge through-
out this book’s emphasis on cultural cross-fertilisation and interconnected
histories, and that this and related distinctions are forms of conceptual
reification, as concepts, they are still useful for grasping global asymme-
tries of power. In this respect, the “global south” is understood not neces-
sarily in the geographic sense, standing instead as “a metaphor for systemic
and arbitrary human suffering brought about by colonialism and global
capitalism” (Santos 2014, 134). When we think about the decolonisation
of the university and the curriculum in these terms, we must insist on plu-
rality within academia, on polyphony and pluriversality (Mignolo 1995).
We must centre more voices from the global south and the global south
within the global north, from the peripheries and the semi-peripheries of
the world-system, to resist epistemic coloniality in the university more
forcefully (Mbembe 2016, 36).
Relatedly, we must also underscore the importance of the epistemic
decolonisation of the “Westernized university” (Grosfoguel 2015)—in
other words, of the de-westernising of the university, which entails chal-
lenging universalisms and the parochialism of Eurocentricity or western-­
centrism. Through epistemic decolonisation, which reveals the ontological
violence sanctioned by Eurocentric epistemologies in scholarship, this de-­
westernised university can help expose and dismantle colonial power/
knowledge in all its forms. By challenging Eurocentric categories or modes
of inquiry, epistemic decolonisation involves undoing the enduring lega-
cies of colonialism within the structures of global academic knowledge
production as they manifest, for example, in university library acquisitions,
the academic publishing industry, and citation practices (Collyer 2018).
As Paula Moya notes, epistemic decolonisation requires scholars and
teachers to deliberately self-scrutinise our academic practices, asking

4
For world-systems theory, see Rodney (2006), Arrighi (2010), and Wallerstein (2011).
5
The “East” is an all-encompassing term used to refer to the geographical territories that
covered Asia, North Africa, and the Middle East, while the “West” corresponded to the
group of the great European powers, with an emphasis on France and England (before the
Second World War), and later also the US.
6 A. C. MENDES

ourselves questions such as, “Whose scholarship are we engaging with?

Which scholars inhabit our works cited lists? What kind of audience do we
orient our essays toward? Whose books are we taking the time to read and
review? Who do we invite to give talks at our institutions? Who are the
students we mentor and support?” (2011, 90). Moya’s questions show the
importance of inclusive research, teaching, and mentoring towards epis-
temic equilibration, and that decolonisation also requires activism and
advocacy both within and beyond the university.
While the decolonising of the university project-practice has shown the
potential to become a transnational anti-systemic movement, it is plagued
by the same drawbacks that vex other anti-systemic movements. The term
“anti-systemic movement” was coined in the 1970s by Immanuel
Wallerstein to “have a formulation that would group together what had,
historically and analytically, been two distinct and in many ways rival kinds
of popular movement—those that went under the name ‘social,’ and those
that were ‘national’” (2002, 29). Deploying a world-system analysis,
Wallerstein identifies various claimants to anti-systemic status, including
human rights organisations and, more recently, anti-globalisation move-
ments. However, at the turn of the twenty-first century, Wallerstein
warned that “the modern world-system is in structural crisis, and we have
entered an ‘age of transition’—a period of bifurcation and chaos”; as a
consequence, systems are being reinvented and reconstructed all the time,
but always in service of maintaining existing power relationships: “those in
power will no longer be trying to preserve the existing system (doomed as
it is to self-destruction); rather, they will try to ensure that the transition
leads to the construction of a new system that will replicate the worst fea-
tures of the existing one—its hierarchy, privilege and inequalities”
(2002, 37).
As scholars working towards an ethically engaged way of doing global
cultural and literary studies, we must be cognisant of the geopolitics of
knowledge and accountable to the realities and power imbalances of the
world-system, reflecting on our “locus of theoretical enunciation”
(Mignolo 2000, 112). This responsibility relates to the importance of
clarifying to our students the epistemological foundations on which we
ground the theories we teach and the syllabi we design. From my stand-
point, this likewise involves extricating the epistemological entanglements
informing our research and teaching that result from our liminal, semi-­
peripheral positionality in the geopolitics of knowledge. We must attend
to the “positions of enunciation” from which we write or speak (Hall
 INTRODUCTION 7

1996, 211), and the ways in which colonial dynamics are replicated, for
example, in the semi-peripheral educational system. It is crucial that stu-
dents also reflect on the epistemological places they think and speak from,
and how these places impact, for example, their imagination of the
Victorians.
The starting premise of this book is that the history of English studies
and its disciplines, such as English literature, is entangled with the history
of the British empire—it places imperial dynamics at the centre of this his-
tory. We should pause here to reflect on the term “discipline,” as the
instituting of academic disciplines is “part of the problem” of epistemic
inequality (Mignolo 1995, 189). “Discipline” refers to a specific branch of
learning and a discursive way of establishing and disseminating what is
accepted as knowledge. As a discursive formation, it corresponds to the
institutionalisation and organisation of a socioculturally determined body
of knowledge through teaching institutions and curriculum design. Joe
Moran observes that the historical development of disciplinary knowledge
is “not simply an organic consequence of advances in knowledge” and
links the expansion of academic disciplines to “external recognition by
government and business,” “accreditation for future careers,” and, ulti-
mately, “legitimacy and status” (2002, 13). In the case of English studies
and its disciplines, institutional factors and societal demands are at the very
core of their development, as the growth of the field in the nineteenth
century was nurtured by the “desire” of the colonial urban middle classes
to “ascend” socially and act as interpreters for the Crown in British India.
In fact, the roots of international accreditation and global social mobility
tied to the English language can be found in the application of a “down-
ward filtration theory” to educational policy in British India (Zastoupil
and Moir 2000) that would ensure the creation of a class of anglicised,
cultural “go-between” Indians. This professionalised bureaucratic corps of
English-speaking Indian men who acted as government employees in the
British colonial administration was essential to sustain the work of empire
in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. English studies is thus a
nineteenth-century imperial artefact—to decolonise English studies means
recognising the ways in which the work of empire remains unfinished,
including in the dynamics of disciplinarity. The field of English studies that
we know today is not, to return to Moran’s words, “simply an organic
consequence of advances in knowledge” (2002, 13). The entanglement
between the expansion of disciplinary thought and the instrumentality of
academic disciplines under an ongoing colonial matrix of power, and,
8 A. C. MENDES

specifically, the close link forged between the field of English studies (and
its disciplines as discursive formations) and coloniality within the British
empire, means that the category of “English studies” cannot be under-
stood as a neutral branch of learning.
With Henry Giroux, I view teaching as “a transitive act … that trans-
lates knowledge back into practice, places theory in the political spaces of
the performative, and invigorates the pedagogical as a practice through
which collective struggles can be waged to revive and maintain the fabric
of democratic institutions” (2001, 14). I build on Giroux’s idea of the
pedagogical as a performative practice with transformative aims to locate
my arguments in this book principally within cultural studies and its com-
mitment to democracy, social justice, and equity. Although cultural studies
has become an institutional and disciplinary formation in the university,
the philosophical and ethical-political project of cultural studies aims to be
an undisciplined space where the “perspectives from different disciplines
can be selectively drawn on to examine the relations of culture and power”
(Barker and Jane 2016, 7). As an undisciplined disciplinary formation and
project, cultural studies brings to the fore, issues of power and knowledge
to contest generalising, simplifying, universalising, dominating, colonis-
ing, racist, misogynist, and cissexist modes of thought—to combat sexism,
racism, xenophobia, authoritarianism, and threats to democracy.
Cultural studies’ call for undisciplining reflects a particular way of
thinking about scholarly fields and field-formation itself; therefore, as a
methodology, it can be extended to fields such as English studies and
Victorian studies. As Ronjaunee Chatterjee, Alicia Mireles Christoff, and
Amy R. Wong argue in the July 2020 Los Angeles Review of Books essay and
the related special issue of Victorian Studies, the effort to “undiscipline”
the field of Victorian studies—to undiscipline this discursive formation—
corresponds to a desire to revise not only the boundaries and content but
also the approach of our field; as they put it, this entails “develop[ing] a
truly relational thinking that does not stop at engaging scholarship across
fields and disciplines for a richer cross-fertilisation of ideas, but that might
extend into coalition-based politics and activism and a refashioning of aca-
demic structures to better serve the purposes of equity and justice”
(Chatterjee et al. 2020). (Of course, there is irony in the desire to institu-
tionalise a field, such as cultural studies, built on undisciplining knowledge.)
Decolonising the university means fostering imagination as a central
tenet of a critical, conjunctural, and intersectional pedagogy. This
 INTRODUCTION 9

understanding aligns with the nuanced, capacious terms of the Indian

writer Arundhati Roy in her discussion of a critical pedagogy of literature:

Whose colonisation of whom are we talking about? Some countries have

colonised other countries, some cultures have colonised other cultures,
some races and castes have colonised and enslaved others, some languages
have colonised other languages, some religions have eviscerated others,
some ideologies have wiped out others, some genders have dominated and
oppressed others. The categories are infinite, the hierarchies complicated
and intersecting, the project of domination ongoing. (Kureishi et al. 2017)

As Magdalen Gorringe argues on the centrality of a decolonised imagi-

nation to doing the actual work of decolonisation: “the starting point for
genuine change cannot be with good intentions, benevolence and gener-
osity, but instead with wonder, diffidence and humility. The impetus must
arrive not from the desire to teach, but to learn; not to include, but to be
included” (2019, 174). Of course, cultivating a decolonised imagination
in the literature classroom through literature and adaptation is perhaps not
enough to achieve equity and social justice. As Rita Felski writes in Uses of
Literature, the fact “[t]hat works of art cannot topple banks and bureau-
cracies, museums and markets, does not mean … that they are therefore
doomed to be impotent and inert” (2008, 109). Tackling systemic and
deep-rooted inequalities will require sustained effort over time. Indeed,
the decolonising project-practice is not without internal rifts within aca-
demia, as I address in the first part of the book. In English studies, there
is earnest engagement with the goals of decolonisation, but there is also
some degree of caution, and there has been a backlash in some depart-
ments of English. This ambivalence within English studies may be viewed
as a snapshot of broader academic rifts about the turn or shift (or even
“quick fixes”) to a decolonised curriculum.
Putting an imperial logic at the centre—placing empire at the core of
the definition of English studies, in other words, seeing “English studies”
as an imperial artefact from the outset—is key to the theoretical discus-
sions and classroom-oriented case studies of decolonising the English lit-
erature curriculum that I include in this book. Bringing to the table the
critical reflexivity that a semi-peripheral positionality in the world-system
affords, I briefly revisit the history of English studies in Part I of this book,
focusing primarily on British India as a testing ground for the develop-
ment of the field. English studies is an academic field characterised by
10 A. C. MENDES

asymmetry, dichotomy, and hierarchy; its history is necessarily one of cul-

tural legitimation, informed by empire and supporting its logic. The aim
of unpacking its imperial history is to highlight (as others have expertly
done before me) how the colonial frames of reference that shape the insti-
tutional history of English studies as an academic field—including its dis-
courses, knowledge claims, and institutional spaces, such as departments
of English—intersect with the colonial-like logic of the neoliberal univer-
sity, geared as it is towards skills acquisition, knowledge accumulation, and
extractivism. The implication is that the undoing of colonialism and the
dismantling of European empires during the second half of the twentieth
century is not a settled and “finished” work. Instead, by framing it as an
empirical and discursive object of study, empire is re-situated and again
centred as the primary shaping force of contemporaneity, lingering in cul-
tural artefacts such as English studies and the neoliberal university.
The idea of “contemporaneity” here takes the broad sense advanced by
Lauren Berlant, building on Raymond Williams’s concept of “structure of
feeling,” which he described as “characteristic elements of impulse,
restraint, and tone; specifically affective elements of consciousness and
relationships: not feeling against thought, but thought as felt and feeling
as thought: practical consciousness of a present kind in a living and inter-
relating continuity” (1977, 132).6 To borrow Berlant’s words, contempo-
raneity is the time—“our” time—encapsulated in “the neutral space of
living together in calendrical time” where “‘the present’ emerges through
activities of disturbance, debate, remediation, and extension that consti-
tute structures of feeling” (2015, 194). In the essay “What Is the
Contemporary?” Giorgio Agamben begins by defining contemporariness
as “a singular relationship with one’s own time, which adheres to it and,
at the same time, keeps a distance from it. More precisely, it is that

6
In the article “Structures of Unfeeling: Mysterious Skin,” Berlant draws on Williams’s
“structure of feeling” to advance a way of “think[ing] differently about how to apprehend
the collective affective scene of sense” encapsulated in his idea (2015, 194). Around the first
part of the above quote, Berlant describes the import of Williams’s idea: “Williams’ model
places the historical present in the affective presence of an atmosphere that is sensed rather
than known and enacted, a space of affective residue that constitutes what is shared among
strangers. It indicates a collective experience that mostly goes without saying of something
about belonging to a world … In Williams’ assessment, a structure of feeling is beneath the
surface of explicit life that is collective, saturating atmospheres of held but inexplicit knowl-
edge. An affective common develops through a process of jointly gathered implicitation”
(2015, 194).
 INTRODUCTION 11

relationship with time that adheres to it through a disjunction and an anach-

ronism” (2009, 41; emphasis in original). Our position of liminality is not
only geopolitical but also temporal. To rethink English studies from a
position of temporal liminality, non-coincidence, and “dys-chrony”
(Agamben 2009, 41), one that affords us to discern the contradictions of
the present moment—our “thick present,” in Donna Haraway’s (2016)
formulation, which contains within itself the latencies of the past—is one
of the purposes of this book.
In the late twentieth century, the fundamental attitudes contained
within parody—of a self-conscious, epistemologically engaged irony and
critique towards representations of the past, a refusal of a simple recovery
of the past—were heralded as one of the defining characteristics of the
postmodernist project. The Canadian theorist Linda Hutcheon argued
that parody is “one of the postmodern ways of literally incorporating the
textualized past into the text of the present” (1988, 118), even if the re-­
textualisation as a critical revision of the past corresponds to an “autho-
rized transgression” (1989, 101). For Hutcheon, postmodernist parody is
“a kind of contesting revision or rereading of the past that both confirms
and subverts the power of the representations of history” (1989, 95); it
paradoxically draws attention to “both the limits and the powers of repre-
sentation—in any medium” (1989, 98). Two decades later, Timotheus
Vermeulen and Robin van den Akker have argued that we should talk
about our contemporary moment as “metamodern”—belonging to a new
modernism “characterized by the oscillation between a typically modern
commitment and a markedly postmodern detachment” (2010, 2). A
metamodernist cultural imagination both emerges and departs from the
aesthetic prerogatives of postmodernism, ontologically “oscillat[ing]
between a modern enthusiasm and a postmodern irony, between hope and
melancholy, between naiveté and knowingness, empathy and apathy, unity
and plurality, totality and fragmentation, purity and ambiguity” (2010,
5–6). Metamodernism, as a form of post-postmodernism, seems to
respond to Hutcheon who, in the epilogue to the second edition of The
Politics of Postmodernity, called for a new critical label to account for what
she saw as the demise of the postmodern condition:

The postmodern moment has passed, even if its discursive strategies and its
ideological critique continue to live on—as do those of modernism—in our
contemporary twenty-first-century world. Literary historical categories like
modernism and postmodernism are, after all, only heuristic labels that we
12 A. C. MENDES

create in our attempts to chart cultural changes and continuities. Post-­

postmodernism needs a new label of its own, and I conclude, therefore, with
this challenge to readers to find it—and name it for the twenty-first century.
(2002, 181)

As she defines it in The Poetics of Postmodernism, the postmodern is “a

problematizing force in our culture today: it raises questions about (or
renders problematic) the common-sensual and the ‘natural.’ But it never
offers answers that are anything but provisional and contextually deter-
mined (and limited)” (1988, xi). According to this view, postmodern fic-
tion offers only the deconstruction of absolute truths in, exposing and
denouncing the partiality of any monolithic system, accepting epistemo-
logical antinomies and indeterminations. As Hutcheon noted in The
Poetics of Postmodernism: “Postmodern novels … openly assert that there
are only truths in the plural and never one Truth; And there is rarely false-
ness per se, just others’ truths” (1988, 109). As such, a contradictory
impulse seems to guide postmodern thinking: the politically motivated
desire to weaken any metanarrative that seeks to impose its view, which
operates in tension with the individual’s aspiration to construct a narrative
that allows her to act in the world. In this framework, the political prob-
lematisation initiated by postmodern fiction hence boils down to the
destabilisation and acceptance of its inherent contradictions—a kind of
non-actionable revision of epistemology, one that cannot be applied to the
politics of the “real world”:

the postmodern may offer art as the site of political struggle by its imposing
of multiple and deconstructing questions, but it does not seem able to make
the move into political agency. It asks questions that reveal art as the place
where values, norms, beliefs, actions are produced; it deconstructs the pro-
cesses of signification. But it never escapes its double encoding: it is always
aware of the mutual interdependence of the dominant and the contestatory.
(1989, 157; emphasis added)

Vermeulen and van den Akker characterise metamodernism as a pendu-

lum that swings between “innumerable poles”: “Each time the metamod-
ern enthusiasm swings toward fanaticism, gravity pulls it back toward
irony; the moment its irony sways toward apathy, gravity pulls it back
toward enthusiasm” (2010, 6). Metamodernism is thus characterised by a
pendulum-like, oscillating tension, which accounts for the pull towards
 INTRODUCTION 13

engagement and impotence (and even disaffection). Unlike postmodern-

ism, which “does not seem able to make the move into political agency”
(Hutcheon 1989, 157), metamodernism gestures towards political and
intellectual agency and engagement (at least, when the pendulum swings
in that direction).
How do we avoid the fate Hutcheon describes in a curriculum that
seeks to apply the lessons of literature and literary criticism (including
postmodern literature and literary criticism) to the deeply political project-­
practice of decolonisation? As Hutcheon describes it, postmodernism can
be seen as a decolonising discourse, as strategies of parody, irony, and
deconstruction in general challenge the liberal humanist paradigm by pre-
disposing self-reflexivity through an exacerbated self-consciousness of
western values and their naturalisation as immutable and transcendental,
even universal:

What it [postmodernism] does say is that there are all kinds of orders and
systems in our world—and that we create them all. That is their justification
and their limitation. They do not exist “out there,” fixed, given, universal,
external; They are human constructs in history. This does not make them
any less necessary or desirable. It does, however … condition their “truth”
value. (1988, 43)

A decolonised perspective for English studies and English literature

teaching in the twenty-first century understands the historical and political
events that shaped literary works and the cultural frameworks that led to
their canonisation as “classics.” Attentive to cultural authority and canon
formation in the literary world-system, it reads literature from radical his-
toricist and strategic presentist perspectives. These perspectives recognise
that in a new structure of feeling—a new social experience—the traces of
past power structures linger, and can be revived at unforeseen moments.
At its core, this rethinking of English studies is a postcolonial critique. I
start from the position that, as Robert J. C. Young has it, “the postcolonial
is in many ways about unfinished business, the continuing projection of
past conflicts into the experience of the present, the insistent persistence of
the afterimages of historical memory that drive the desire to transform the
present” (2012, 12). Responding to contemporariness, the task of postco-
lonial critique is forever incomplete and ongoing. The belief in the persis-
tence of the imperial connection in contemporaneity is one of the founding
tenets of postcolonial theory. Despite the dismantling of European empires
14 A. C. MENDES

in the twentieth century, colonial-like inequalities persist, surviving into

the present as systemic onto-epistemological exclusions. Rather than fall-
ing into obsolescence, the task of postcolonial critique is unfinished as
colonial inequalities live on; in consideration of colonialism’s longue durée
(in line with Fernand Braudel’s macro-historical world-systemic approach
[1958]), its legacies are far from over, embedded in the here and now. A
postcolonial perspective attends to the material and geopolitical condi-
tions of literary production and the colonial structures through which
specific geopolitical locations achieved a “natural” centrality in English
studies, established and maintained cultural hierarchies, and extracted and
accumulated various forms of knowledge capital. The concept of postco-
loniality is thus key to the classroom-oriented case studies and syllabi in
this theory-and-practice book, and I use the term in a particular way: not
as a temporal marker but as a critical and descriptive term. Postcolonial
theory is intertwined with decolonial perspectives.7 The work of decolo-
nising involves showing students how colonial attitudes and structures of
power remain alive, flowering into and shaping the present, rather than
treating colonialism as something that happened in the past, something
done and over with.
How do we teach the dynamics of the British empire (such as excep-
tionalism, greatness, and supremacy)—an imperial history inextricable
from the literary text, especially the English novel—without reproducing
them? Perhaps first we must unmake Anglophilia—both the uncritical
Anglophilia that often undergirds students’ interest in this period (read
fascination) and the critical Anglophilia that still characterises certain
British-centred (possibly even English-centred) approaches of Victorian
studies (Courtemanche 2019, 461). A transperiodising (Hayot 2011) and
organic structure-of-feeling approach (Williams 1977, 2001) applied to
the teaching of nineteenth-century literary and cultural artefacts (such as
the novel and the country house) favours un-Anglophilia, or critical
Anglophilia. As Williams defines it, a structure of feeling is, to begin with,
“a set, with specific internal relations, at once interlocking and in tension”
(1977, 132). From the outset, the designation “Victorian,” as a qualifier
and an area marker, is an uneasy one. This designation arbitrarily peri-
odises literature based on the reign of a specific monarch. When it

7
While I would perhaps be expected to add “decolonial studies” in this context, I am wary
of using the term, as Mignolo warns that to speak in terms of “decolonial studies” “will be to
keep decoloniality hostage of modern epistemology” (2018, 106).
 INTRODUCTION 15

underscores the transmission lines of power and how they shape our expe-
riences and affects, a combined structure-of-feeling and transperiodising
framework is also conjunctural; it helps undergraduates more critically
wrestle with their emotional attachment to the literature, history, and cul-
ture they study.
Admittedly, to unmake Anglophilia is a deep affective process that may
encounter resistance from both students and teachers, compounded by
the possibility that Anglophilia is even more present in the culturally colo-
nised peripheral and semi-peripheral classroom. As I develop in Part I,
Anglophilia is present in researching English studies in the semi-periphery,
when “writing and publishing in English [is] an object of academic desire”
(Muller 2021, 1444). Many of the undergraduates arrive at my course on
nineteenth- and twentieth-century British history and culture seemingly
with the exact expectations (even bordering on escapism) as Antoinette
Burton’s students, who “come to modern British history in the U.S. in
search of ‘corsets and crinoline’ … and, as fervently, in search of islands of
whiteness” (2011, 2). At the beginning of the course, students tend to
approach the Victorian era at the affective level, and there is nothing
wrong with that: it does not preclude the affective possibilities of engaging
with a decolonised curriculum of Victorian literature. Those who teach
and research the Victorian era are likely also emotionally attached to (our
imagination of) the Victorians. Yet, it is part of the coursework to redress
this uncritical, fetishising stance; as Burton suggests, the Victorian era
should be thought of and taught in ways that bring the longue durée into
view, that is, “as always already imperial not just implicitly but as part of a
pedagogical metanarrative about the relationship of modernity to the
world-historical phenomenon of colonialism in world history” (2011, 2).
In a decolonised classroom of Victorian culture and culture, we should
rethink our conceptions and affective (dis)attachments to the Victorian
era through the lens of the modernity/coloniality complex (Quijano
2010; Mignolo 2007) to destabilise whiteness as a default, universal posi-
tion of readerly identification. More crucially, contemplating coloniality as
western modernity involves acknowledging that the modernity/colonial-
ity complex is interfaced with forms that respond to and counter this com-
plex, as all power complexes generate resistance, potentially leading to
radical transformation. A decolonised curriculum for Victorian history,
culture, and literature must ask that students critically examine the large-­
scale, multifarious violence of the expansion of the British empire under
Queen Victoria and the aftereffects of this violence in contemporaneity.
16 A. C. MENDES

The need for a new politics of reading the Victorian novel and for rec-
ognising it as imaginatively rooted in empire, was made evident decades
ago by two foundational works of postcolonial studies: Gayatri Chakravorty
Spivak’s 1985 “Three Women’s Texts and a Critique of Imperialism,” an
interrogation of Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre, and Edward Said’s “Jane
Austen and Empire” on Austen’s Mansfield Park, published in Culture
and Imperialism (1993, 80–97). Spivak framed her approach to reading
Jane Eyre, and nineteenth-century English literature in general, by under-
scoring that “imperialism, understood as England’s social mission, was a
crucial part of the cultural representation of England to the English”;
when this is overlooked, it only “attests to the continuing success of the
imperialist project, displaced and dispersed into more modern forms”
(1985, 235). Said likewise demonstrated that imperialism and enslave-
ment are unequivocally central as systems of power to the plot of Mansfield
Park. Said’s underscoring of “other histories,” calling for an awareness of
positionality, reference points, and perspectives through “contrapuntal
reading,” was foundational for English studies. “Contrapuntal reading”
means to read “with a simultaneous awareness both of the metropolitan
history that is narrated and of those other histories against which (and
together with which) the dominating discourse acts” (Said 1993, 51;
emphasis in original). In particular, postcolonial adaptations of canonical
texts are apt for contrapuntal readings, for readings that juxtapose differ-
ent types and interpretations of texts to show the plurality of knowledges
and the silences created by canonisation. According to Said, contrapuntal
perspectives allow the reading of “the great canonical texts … with an
effort to draw out, extend, give emphasis and voice to what is silent or
marginally present or ideologically represented” (1993, 66). Spivak and
Said’s theoretical interventions have thus unlocked the expansion of lim-
ited geographical (and pedagogical) imaginations in the area of Victorian
studies and English studies itself.8 They invited a new politics of reading
English literature, and have acted as stepping stones to new approaches to

8
Spivak’s essay quickly brought its own responses, such as Benita Parry’s “Problems in
Current Theories of Colonial Discourse” (1987), challenging Spivak’s contention that
“there is no space from where the subaltern (sexed) subject can speak” (Spivak 1988, 307,
quoted in Parry 1987, 36). For a more recent critical response to Said’s reading of Mansfield
Park, see Fowler 2017a. In general, Spivak and Said’s works inspired many other postcolo-
nial interventions in the 1980s and 1990s, such as Patrick Brantlinger’s Rule of Darkness
(1988), Firdous Azim’s The Colonial Rise of the Novel (1993), Susan Meyer’s Imperialism at
Home (1996), and Ian Baucom’s Out of Place (1999).
 INTRODUCTION 17

cultural criticism, such as Elaine Freedgood’s book The Ideas in Things

(2006), which applied “thing theory” to Victorian studies to read objects
of empire in Victorian novels—the mahogany furniture in Jane Eyre, the
calico curtains in Elizabeth Gaskell’s Mary Barton, and the “Negro-head”
tobacco (a strong black tobacco) in Charles Dickens’s Great Expectations.
The postcolonial critique of the erasure of Britain’s imperial profiteer-
ing in nineteenth-century literature continues to be taken up by various
critics in and outside literary criticism. It reverberates, for example, in Afro
Caribbean artist Sonia Boyce’s two-channel video installation Crop Over
(2007), which premiered at Harewood House, an estate built in the eigh-
teenth century by the Lascelles family, in West Yorkshire, on the outskirts
of Leeds. Crop Over divests the power of the English literary canon, in
particular, the novel and the country house that so often features in it. The
video superimposes the carnivalesque and masquerade performances of
the Crop Over harvest festival in Barbados, which celebrates the end of the
sugar cane season, onto the set of Harewood House. Boyce’s film starts
with a panning shot of the country house grounds. In the still below, the
folk character of the stilt walker Moko Jumbie (“jumbi” is a West Indian
word for a ghost or spirit) negotiates the grounds. He reclaims the formal
garden in Harewood House as his own with his haunting performance,
creolising the landscape of the country estate to remind us of the transat-
lantic “intimacies” (Lowe 2015) of the trading in Barbados and Jamaica in
sugar cane and slaves on which the Lascelles family’s prodigious wealth
was founded. (In this instance, I am deliberately using the term “slaves”
instead of enslaved people to foreground the wealth legacies of enslave-
ment and a prevalent mode of thinking that regarded the enslaved indi-
vidual as a slave-commodity, deflecting attention on the person.9)
As Laurie Kaplan observes, the name of the Lascelles family found its
way naturally into Mansfield Park, considering that, when the novel was
published in 1814, “the Lascelles name would have been recognized by

9
Instead of “slavery,” the term “enslavement” has been progressively used in scholarship,
as the first does not reflect the reality of many peoples’ situation and perpetuates the negativ-
ity of their objectification, instead of allowing for the positivity of a subject position. This
semantic shift underscores the systemic dehumanising in withdrawing the right to freedom
from the other (the enslaved) through a system (enslavement) whose agents are the enslav-
ers. At the same time, though, this shift poses the risk of falling back into another type of
white-saviour-complex objectification and dehumanisation of “the enslaved,” who are
stripped of their own agency, and where “the enslaver” is endowed with subjectivity and
salvaged from the abstraction of stereotype and commodity.
18 A. C. MENDES

Austen’s readers because of its association with sugar plantations in the

West Indies and with the slavery bill in Parliament” (2011, 206); it was no
secret that the foundation of Lascelles family’s wealth was in the transat-
lantic slave trade.10 The family’s ties to Barbados are intimate in more ways
than one: Henry Lascelles’s eldest son Edwin was born in Barbados in
1712, and the money accumulated through the sugar trade allowed the
father to buy in 1738 the ground where the son would later build
Harewood House (between 1759 and 1771). From the manicured formal
garden of Harewood, Boyce’s film takes to a different landscape: the sugar
cane fields in Barbados and a grandiose plantation house lined with palm
trees. Both cultivated landscapes are entangled via the transatlantic slave
trade. (It should also be noted that Boyce’s video installation was commis-
sioned jointly by Harewood House Trust and the National Art Gallery
Committee, Barbados, with financial support from the Arts Council of
England and the Prime Minister’s Office, Barbados.)
Again, Williams’s work supports our decolonising the curriculum when
he wrestles with the coloniality of the English country house in The
Country and the City (1973). In this foundational work in country house
research,11 Williams scrutinises the seemingly unremarked intersections
between the English pastoral and feudal, capitalist, and colonial exploita-
tion. Critiquing “Merrie England”-type attitudes towards the national
past, Williams asks us to reconsider the aura of the “great houses” of the
English countryside—houses that inhabit, for example, the pages of
Country Life magazine—in light of the “social effect” of that aura which
occluded rural poverty and a long history of class and imperial exploita-
tion. Dissecting the notion of the rural idyll and the pastoral, Williams
considers how “the extraordinary phase of extension, rebuilding and
enlarging” of these houses, “which occurred in the eighteenth century,
represents a spectacular increase in the rate of exploitation: a good deal of
it, of course, the profit of trade and of colonial exploitation” (1973, 105).
Williams’s approach, which is a decolonising approach, asks that we look
at the English countryside from a different perspective; it calls us to

10
See the Lascelles Slavery Archive (https://www.york.ac.uk/projects/harewoodslavery/
about.html), a project of the University of York.
11
For more recent research on country houses’ relationship to empire, see Dresser and
Hann 2013; Barczewski 2014; and Finn and Smith 2015.
 INTRODUCTION 19

stand at any point and look at that land. Look at what those fields, those
streams, those woods even today produce. Think it through as labour and
see how long and systematic the exploitation and seizure must have been, to
rear that many houses, on that scale. (1973, 105)

It also demands of us, students, scholars, and teachers, that we consider

how the imperial dimensions of the British countryside—very often the
source of our affection—have remained repressed in our imagination of
the Victorian era.12
As noted earlier, Said (1978) also demonstrates that the novel, imperi-
alism, and Orientalism in the post-Enlightenment period are impossible to
detangle. Said does not advance a clear-cut definition of Orientalism,
pointing instead to its broad scope as a particular western discourse “for
dominating, restructuring, and having authority over the Orient” (1978,
3). To begin pinpointing Orientalism, Said draws on Michel Foucault’s
concept of discourse to “understand the enormously systematic discipline
by which European culture was able to manage—and even produce—the
Orient politically, sociologically, militarily, ideologically, scientifically, and
imaginatively during the post-Enlightenment period” (1978, 3).
Orientalist discourse shaped how the West perceived the “Orient” and
even how the “Orient” viewed itself; it explores the discursive production
of cultural difference and its social formations as ongoing forms of politi-
cal power. Orientalism demonstrates the extent to which post-­
Enlightenment western narratives frame our representations and
knowledge about the “Orient.” In these narratives, the “Orient” is set
against the “Occident”—to define the “Orient” is to determine the
“Occident” by contrast as everything that the Other is not. The “Orient,”
or the “East,” is then, for Said, fully a European construction.13 Srinivas
Aravamudan, revising Said’s theory, argues that Enlightenment Orientalism
“was a Western style for translating, anatomizing, and desiring the Orient,”

12
See the “Colonial Countryside” project, led by Corinne Fowler, from the University of
Leicester, targeted at primary school pupils and aimed at exploring English country houses’
colonial pasts (https://www.nationaltrust.org.uk/features/colonial-countryside-project).
For an examination of rural England’s colonial past via Black and British Asian writers’ cre-
ative responses to this rurality, see Fowler 2017b (on the “rural turn” she argues was inau-
gurated by V. S. Naipaul’s The Enigma of Arrival and continues in the twenty-first-century
writing of John Agard, David Dabydeen, Sene Seneviratne, Tanika Gupta, and Tyrone
Huggins) and Fowler 2020.
13
See also the concept of re-orientalism (Lau and Mendes 2011).
20 A. C. MENDES

through which “European culture was able to manage—and even pro-

duce—both the novel and the Orient politically, sociologically, ideologi-
cally, and imaginatively during the post-Enlightenment period” (2012, 8;
emphasis in original). The concept of Orientalism helps us understand
how specific historical and geopolitical contexts have continuously under-
girded the production of thought on cultural difference and, relatedly, the
exertion of epistemic violence (Spivak 1988) and even epistemicide, or the
extermination of non-western ways of knowing (Santos 2014)—and how
this reflects on the English novel and the novel form itself.
If the foundations of the English novel are built on extractivist,
Orientalist, and colonial grounds, how do we decolonise the form in the
classroom? As Freedgood sees it, we can work towards this goal by not
only analysing the novel’s thematic investment in imperialism—as Spivak
and Said did in their ground-breaking work—but also establishing the
centrality of colonialist extraction and capitalist accumulation and profit to
the novel’s own production. Freedgood asks us to consider how the
extraction of various forms of raw materials that went into the production
of the English novel took place on multiple levels:

physically, in terms of the extraction of materials to make paper and ink, in

earning money to pay for writing and publishing; linguistically, in terms of
the barrage of loans words from Zulu, Hindi, Urdu, various Creoles and
Pidgins, and so on, that populate the novel and gives them “local” color,
and in terms of the things that populate novels and make them seem “real”
or “realistic,” that derive directly from colonial extraction: tea, ivory, muslin,
emeralds, sugar, tobacco, and so on …. (2019, 135)

We have much to learn from re-readings of Victorian literature and

reframings of Victorian studies such as Freedgood’s as we teach other
periods in British history and literature marked by the longue durée of
imperial violence and resource extraction and exhaustion. Recent move-
ments intent on challenging structural and representational inequalities in
English studies through a focus on the centrality of empire to British his-
tory, culture, and literature —#Raceb4Race, #ShakeRace, The Bigger 6
Collective, and #BIPOC18—prove this. To meet the political, philosophi-
cal, and ethical challenges of decolonising the disciplines of English stud-
ies, we must acknowledge that empire is central, for example, to the
discipline of English literature, and undergirds processes of canon forma-
tion in the longue durée. In short, we must continuously recognise the
 INTRODUCTION 21

implications of imperialism and colonialism in our scholarship—the

“unfinished business” that postcolonial critique tackles (Young 2012, 12).
Such acknowledgement is central to the pedagogical metanarrative that
Burton (2011) suggests we use to teach modern British history, for it
informs the history of English studies (how we got here), and its future
(how we intend to move forward), and what we would like our students
to take from it into their twenty-first-century world, empowering them to
transfer this increased base of knowledge to new situations beyond the
university syllabus.
What, then, should (or could) the local project be for decolonising
English studies in semi-periphery? About the project-practice of decolo-
nising the curriculum, Kasturi Behari-Leak, the co-chair of the Curriculum
Change Working Group at the University of Cape Town, questions
“whether we are choreographing new dances for change or marching to
an old drum, reproducing ways of thinking, being, and doing that are not
inclusive or socially just” (2019, 59). This question needs to be extended
to the academic world-system. In responding to calls for decolonising the
curriculum from the core countries, decolonising project-practices in the
semi-periphery must ensure that we do not simply parrot the core, thereby
reproducing the systemic inequalities of the academic world-system. The
institutional culture of each department of English allows us to see in new
ways a world-system that continues to rest on the division of centre,
periphery, and semi-periphery, and looking from a semi-peripheral point
of view itself creates new knowledge about the world-system. It is perhaps
also at the semi-periphery that we have more freedom to negotiate new
pedagogies and approaches to disciplines.
To decolonise the way English literature is taught in the semi-­peripheral
classroom, I propose that we think in terms of adaptation—including its
associated meanings of “incorporation,” “appropriation,” “inspiration,”
“translation,” “reinterpretation,” “revision,” “transformation,” “conver-
sion,” “sampling,” “ventriloquising,” “repurposing,” “recycling,”
“remaking,” “retelling,” “re-enacting,” “transforming,” and “reimagin-
ing.” In the ways adaptation is seen and deployed in this book, it can be
an act, a heuristic tool, and a political possibility—this last meaning ties in
directly with the project-practice of decolonising. The literary canon is
constantly adapting and being adapted. In her study on the invention of
the canon through postcolonial rewriting, Ankhi Mukherjee asserts that
the literary canon “renews and transforms, achieves novel combinations,
and fights obsolescence by being constantly on the move” (2013, 4–5).
22 A. C. MENDES

To cite another example, Regenia Gagnier (2018) moves away from the
area marker “Victorian” to examine the global circulation of literature in
the long nineteenth century and how ideas of decolonising the Victorians
intersect with issues of adaptation, and syncretisation. This focus on circu-
lation also aligns with Alexander Beecroft’s (2015) category of “global
literary ecology,” which he sees as the most extreme form of literary circu-
lation.14 Beecroft applies this category to dominant languages such as
English that “escape the bonds of the nation-state” (in fact, it is integral
to the idea of an expanding nation-state through imperialism) and, as
such, nurture the fantasy of a borderless world powered by their use; this
fantasy has it “that borderlessness might create equal access to the literary
world for all, regardless of political status or the position of one’s native
language within the global linguistic ecology” (2015, 36).15
By studying adaptation, and postcolonial adaptation specifically, as one
of the modes through which the English literary canon circulates, we can
expose the mechanisms of canon formation in English. Adaptation—as an
act, a heuristic tool, and a political possibility—connects with processes of
canonisation and institutionalisation (and, relatedly, with the anthologis-
ing of texts and curricular selection), and adaptation is, therefore, the
anchor of the case studies I develop in the second part of this book. While
the case studies are overall concerned with the cultural conditions that
undergird the impulse to adapt, they also focus on adaptations that ques-
tion archival silences towards epistemic justice. The archive creates and is
created by the social fabric of its historical moment. By “archival silences,”
I mean the things that are left out of, or erased from, inherited archives,
which are the foundation of the literary canon. These silences are at their
root structural. As the Haitian anthropologist Michel-Rolph Trouillot
suggests, there are silences and omissions in history as a narrative, pro-
duced by unequal power structures rather than individual historians:
“Effective silencing does not require a conspiracy, nor even a political con-
sensus. Its roots are structural” (1995, 106). These silences emerge from

14
The remaining five categories are (1) epichoric, or local, literary ecologies; (2) panchoric
ecologies; (3) cosmopolitan ecologies; (4) vernacular ecologies; and (5) the national literary
ecology (Beecroft 2015, 33–6).
15
On the notion of “world literary unevenness,” drawing on Casanova (2005) but expand-
ing and revising this theorisation to examine the concept of the vernacular, see the special
issue of Interventions on “Publication, Circulation and the Vernacular: Dimensions of World
Literary Unevenness,” volume 22, issue 3 (2020), especially the introduction (Claesson,
Helgesson, and Mahmutović 2020).
 INTRODUCTION 23

a complex of power structures that “precedes the narrative proper [and]

contributes to its creation and to its interpretation” (1995, 29). Similarly,
Mbembe argues that racialised and racialising discourse—the “pou(voir),
or seeing power, of race”—is enacted through silences: “the persons we
choose not to see or hear cannot exist or speak for themselves” (2017,
111). As a type of archive, the curriculum—embedded in and constituted
by social structures, institutional practices, and conventions—is necessarily
made of silences. Decolonising the curriculum needs to be a two-­
dimensional interrogation process of these silences, comprising an inter-
rogation of the academic curriculum and an interrogation of the
institutional curriculum (Lange 2019, 86–8). There is always a “hidden”
and often overt institutional curriculum in which this and other interroga-
tion processes need to be situated.
The decolonised, cultural studies-grounded methodology for English
studies this book advances is rooted in my experience of teaching and
research in English studies at a semi-peripheral department of English in a
non-Anglophone context. The teaching praxis I lay out is necessarily
framed by the specific institutional culture of my school. The thought
represented in the case studies and the curricular design of the syllabi I
present in this book—“our thought”—is, as Foucault writes in the Preface
to The Order of Things, “thought that bears the stamp of our age and our
geography” (2005, xvi). What I think comes from a position that is both
within the core—institutionally located in a department of English and
enunciated by someone trained in the Euro-American scholarly tradition
and immersed in the European canon of critical thought and the creative
canon of English literature. At the same time, what I think is not entirely
within the core. In other words, the arguments in this book come from a
contingent position in relation to the core: the “where” thoughts are
thought and the “who” thinks these arguments are semi-peripheral, irre-
mediably situated in alterity to the core—the global north academic-­
imperial complex.
Considering Portugal’s condition of semi-peripherality, the who-we-­
are and from-where-we-speak questions that postcolonial studies and
decolonial perspectives tackle have obvious epistemic importance, specifi-
cally in terms of the kinds of knowledge we produce and value in our
research and teaching. As Moya, drawing on the Argentinian Mexican
intellectual Enrique Dussel, puts it:
24 A. C. MENDES

the knowledge we produce is … intimately influenced by how we conceptu-

alize our shared social world and who we understand ourselves to be in that
world … [Our identities] influence the research questions we deem to be
interesting, the projects we judge to be important, the scholars we choose
to read and to cite, and the metaphors we use to describe the phenomena
we observe. (2011, 81)

Moya’s arguments bear on how our identities, positionalities, and cul-

tural locations influence knowledge creation in the classroom. Teaching
must be responsive to where the students learn. My awareness of inhabiting
the complexities of a semi-peripheral location prompted the writing of a
book about what is perhaps the most canonical of fields: English studies.
Therefore, the “I” of this book presupposes a “we” for the lived experi-
ences of teaching British history and culture, as a member of a department
of English, in a country which is non-Anglophone but Anglophilic, semi-­
peripheral but post-imperial, are, to a great extent, shared by many univer-
sity teachers when they encounter students in the English literature
classroom. Following María Lugones, I am thinking in terms of an affilia-
tive, coalitional subject position—what she writes as “I → we,” where the
arrow reflects a shift towards “the transitional quality and dispersed inten-
tionality [or active subjectivity] of the subject” (2003, 227).16 My → our
relation and my → our approach to research and teaching English history,
culture, and literature in the semi-peripheral university are an iteration of
more extensive power relations as they play out in the world-system. This
book sits thus at the intersection between my experiences, political com-
mitments, and the history, culture, and literature researched and taught.
The oscillation I → we represents a subject position that reflects my own
lived experiences as a scholar and teacher at a public university in a semi-­
peripheral country, inflected by institutional demands and a specific loca-
tion in the world-system. To stand entirely outside what is critiqued in the
following pages about the colonial dynamics of English studies, the neo-
liberal university, and systemic inequalities would be untenable.

16
Lugones elaborates her idea of interdependent “active subjectivity” in the introduction
to Pilgrimages/Peregrinajes: “In expressing this sense of intentionality, I am not trying to
explain, but rather am trying to understand with, and in the midst of others, the problems
that I → we encountered on the way to exercising our agency. The understanding of agency
that I propose … is adumbrated to consciousness by a moving with people, by the difficulties
as well as the concrete possibilities of such movings” (2003, 6).
 INTRODUCTION 25

This book intends to be part of an ongoing conversation on disciplinary

futures when it asks: what do the imperial history of English studies and
the future of the field look like when viewed from the perspective of the
semi-peripheral department of English? In answering this question, this
book aims to contribute to rethinking the field of English studies and
field-formation itself. English studies must move beyond its foundational
onto-historical ethnocentrism; its “natural,” hegemonic Anglo-American-­
centred theoretical frameworks need to be decentred. The denaturalisa-
tion of this centrality when the very designation of the field naturally
reinforces it is, of course, not an easy task. The academic semi-periphery
continues to be stunted by the hegemony and pervasiveness of the episte-
mologies of the core Anglo-American academy, through which it still
models and validates knowledge production. If specific epistemologies
become hegemonic through force and consent, hegemony is unstable and
open to being challenged by counter-hegemonic movements (Gramsci
1996; Williams 1977, 111–114). To centre empire as our object of inquiry
is particularly important for the semi-peripheral department of English—
precisely, the department of English, which simultaneously occupies the
centre and margin of English studies. Leon Moosavi writes that scholars in
the global north “need to recognise how we are privileged by coloniality
and even implicated in its enduring structures of inequality” (2020, 333).
Still, different locations have different degrees of this privilege, depending
on their geographical and historical relations to the core countries of the
world-system.
I consider new possible ways of decolonising the curriculum and “depa-
rochialising” the subjects of English studies (Chaka, Lephalala, and Ngesi
2017) from a semi-peripheral location—a location with a dual history of
colonising and being colonised, while at the same time being core and
periphery. For that, from the particular vantage point of the semi-­periphery,
we need to examine the power dynamics within the field of English studies
itself, taking as our central belief Foucault’s contention that “there is no
power relation without the correlative constitution of a field of knowl-
edge, nor any knowledge that does not presuppose and constitute at the
same time power relations” (1977, 27). Deparochialising the subjects of
English studies entails reconsidering imperialist hierarchies and the atten-
dant value systems between core/centre and periphery/margin, which are
a central part of the self-definition of the core/centre (Dussel 1993, 65).
When we examine those hierarchies from a semi-peripheral perspective,
we can see, through a different lens, the invention of epistemic models of
26 A. C. MENDES

difference that produced a set of binary oppositions: first, the fundamental

binary between western and non-western cultures, then the many associ-
ated oppositions it enabled, such as coloniser/colonised, master/servant,
white/black, civilised/savage, and advanced/primitive.

***

Decolonising English Studies from the Semi-Periphery is structured into two

parts. The theoretical framing in Part I (“What Decolonisation Is and
Why English Studies Needs It”) expands on the arguments presented in
this introduction, engaging with the critical practice of and the political
push for decolonising the university and the curriculum. In delineating a
theory of what decolonising English studies involves and should involve, I
synthesise existing scholarship, widening it through a semi-peripheral per-
spective. Considering the focus on English literature, canonicity, adapta-
tion, and circulation, this means tackling some of the following questions:
How can reception processes in the semi-peripheral classroom be used as
lay methodologies to empower new critiques of the English canon? What
can adaptation do in the English literature classroom? How can adaptation
facilitate encounters with “the other” in the semi-peripheral classroom? Is
it possible for the semi-peripheral classroom to destabilise assumptions
about readership and spectatorship? Would this destabilisation contribute
to decolonising texts, and if so, how? Finally, in what ways would the
answers to these questions invite a reconsideration of learning-teaching
methodologies in situ? These questions drive the attempt to formulate a
theoretical-pedagogical model for a decolonised English studies curricu-
lum that is advanced in this book.
In Part II (“What a Decolonised Curriculum for English Studies Can
Look Like”), to illustrate the decolonising and semi-peripheral perspective
I propose here and bring decolonial pedagogies into practice, I present
two theoretically informed and classroom-orientated case studies of adap-
tation, on Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights (1847) and Kamila Shamsie’s
Home Fire (2017). As case studies, I read these two novels and their adap-
tations in light of how they might be decolonised in the semi-peripheral
classroom. Specifically, the case studies offer an extended theorisation of
the methodological and pedagogical underpinnings of two model syllabi
for undergraduate courses in English literature (from the eighteenth to
the twenty-first centuries) that I also include in the second part of the
book. The syllabi are designed to respond to the changing students’
 INTRODUCTION 27

audiences for English literary studies; they raise awareness of, and encour-
age critical literacy in, English literary history as a global, transnational,
and pluriversal literary history. Besides adaptation, they are structured
around the heuristics of canon, revision/retrovision, remediation, and
fandom as conceptual tools. These courses aim to acquaint students with
the production of knowledge on which a canon of English literature has
been built while at the same time inviting students to deconstruct these
knowledge formations. The syllabi aim to familiarise students with various
theories and methods, balancing the coverage of various texts and modes
of literary analysis types (deployed separately or in conjunction) with a
dialogic dimension. Inevitably, the syllabi I present are inert, static docu-
ments, though they draw on previous teaching experiences outside the
English literature classroom, particularly in teaching British history and
culture. Acknowledging the stasis of these teaching proposals and the
complexity of translating the theoretical wager that guides this book, I
seek to balance two organisational logics in the syllabi—one panoramic
and the other thematic.
As mentioned, both course syllabi share a focus on cultural practices of
adaptation as they impact the global circulation of canonical texts. The
case studies that feed into the syllabi have developed around Mukherjee’s
idea of canonicity as “a changeable attribute, selective yet inclusive,” and,
relatedly, of how “the reading practices of the canon (and the politics of
curriculum formation and publication that congeal around the same)” are
nurtured “through reinventions and hybridizations of the ‘literary’”
(2013, 113). As the object of study we understand as “literature” changes,
the critical tools and modes of analysis must also change. Besides, canon
formation works differently if we think of, for example, the alternative
canon-building that fandom calls for. In this respect, Henry Jenkins writes
of how “Fan interpretive practice differs from that fostered by the educa-
tional system … not simply in its object choices or in the degree of its
intensity, but often in the types of reading skills it employs, in the ways
that fans approach texts” (1992, 18). The threshold for literary scholar-
ship has shifted and widened its purview. It now includes practices such as
scrutinising a manuscript with digital tools (e.g., The Waste Land app
released by Faber, the London publishing house where T. S. Eliot himself
worked for nearly four decades), remixing and “deforming” the “source”
28 A. C. MENDES

text (Sample 2012),17 analysing an author’s live tweets about her writing
process, or reading fanfiction for its canonical intertexts (Busse 2017).
Following Alexandra Edwards’s argument that “The discipline of English
teeters at the edge of a fannish turn” and that it might need “a gentle
push” (2018, 47), the reflections on syllabi design I include here also
grow out of scholarship on literary fandom as an exegetic framework, and
of how it offers heightened, differentiated forms of engaging the literary
text. The case studies on Wuthering Heights and Home Fire help explain
the drive to adapt the “classics,” allowing us to discuss the poietic spread-
ability of a globally circulating western literary canon and consider, in
particular, how this canon is a medium for co-creative postcolonial
intervention.
The syllabi I offer in outline form in Part II, based on the same theo-
retical, methodological, and pedagogical rationale developed throughout
the book and exemplified in two case studies of adaptation, reflect the
enmeshment of cultural theories and literary-critical methods. An “articu-
lation” approach to Wuthering Heights and Home Fire in the decolonised
classroom highlights the interconnection between and linkages across
knowledge production and the discourses of class, race, ethnicity, and
nationality that ground the central conflicts in the novels. “Articulation,”
a key concept in cultural studies, refers to “the process of connecting dis-
parate elements together to form a temporary unity … a linkage which is
not necessary, determined, or absolute and essential for all time; rather, it
is a linkage whose conditions of existence or emergence need to be located
in the contingencies of circumstance” (du Gay et al. 1997, 3). In an inter-
view with Lawrence Grossberg, Hall outlines his “theory of articulation”
as “both a way of understanding how ideological elements come, under
certain conditions, to cohere together within a discourse, and a way of
asking how they do or do not become articulated, at specific conjunctures,
to certain political subjects” (Grossberg 1986, 53). As detailed in the case
studies, discourse simultaneously represents the world and enacts social
relations; it mobilises and constructs conditions of power and privilege,
and undergirds power differentials. It does not merely mirror “reality” or

17
For an example of a “deformance” assignment in the literature classroom, see Paul
Benzon’s instructions to engage with Gretchen Henderson’s book Galerie de Difformité
(2011) (https://hcommons.org/deposits/objects/hc:31040/datastreams/CONTENT/
content). See also Paul Fyfe’s (2011) guidelines for the classroom exercise “How to Not
Read a Victorian Novel.”
 INTRODUCTION 29

underlying ideologies but helps socially constitute them. The theorisation

surrounding those case studies makes the workings of empire and the
modernity/coloniality matrix of power visible. At the same time, an
emphasis on canonicity and circulation allows us to develop critical aware-
ness in the classroom regarding unequal power dynamics in the world-­
system, considering that these case studies come from a specific positionality
outside the Anglosphere.

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London: Routledge.
 PART I

What Decolonisation Is and Why

English Studies Needs It
 Decolonising the University: A Turn, Shift,
or Fix?

While its conceptual and political roots can be traced earlier, the idea of
decolonising the university emerged more prominently in 2015 in South
Africa at the University of Cape Town with the #RhodesMustFall protest
movement. The decolonising project-practice quickly spread through
departments of English and continues to expand in interest and reach—
though we should refrain from describing this movement as “global”
when it mainly refers to the situation in global north universities. In 2020,
the Black Lives Matter protests and related activism opposing racism and
anti-Blackness reignited discussions about how to tackle the colonial-like,
Eurocentric logic of our public higher education institutions. A surge of
conversations about decolonising the university and the curriculum,
including campaigns (such as “Why Is My Curriculum White?” in the
UK), academic events, manifestos, coalitions, and research projects fol-
lowed, supported by extensive research published in the first decade of the
twenty-first century (e.g., Tuck and Yang 2012; Bhambra 2014; Bhambra
et al. 2018, 2020; Doharty et al. 2020; Hendricks 2018; Mbembe 2016;
Ranasinha 2019). However, despite the sense of urgency, there has been
room for scepticism about the effective transformation at the university
level that the decolonising project-practice encouraged, not the least
because of the currency and visibility it swiftly garnered and the institu-
tional “quick fixes” it brought about, especially in global north

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature 37

Switzerland AG 2023
A. C. Mendes, Decolonising English Studies from the Semi-Periphery,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-20286-5_2
Another random document with
no related content on Scribd:
 The B. Virgin and Isaias, from Cemetery of St. Priscilla.

Our Blessed Lady appears principally in the scene of the

Adoration of the Magi. Two, three, or four of these men (according to
the arrangement of the group and the space at the artist’s disposal)
stand in their Oriental dress, presenting their gifts to Christ who sits
on Mary’s knee. Once or twice also the Holy Child appears in His
Mother’s arms, or before her breast, without reference apparently to
any particular event in their lives, but either absolutely alone, or
standing opposite to Isaias, as though presenting in themselves the
fulfilment of his prophecies. One of these paintings in the Catacomb
on the Via Nomentana belongs to the fourth century; but for another
of far higher artistic merit, to be seen in the Catacomb of St. Priscilla,
the most competent judges do not hesitate to claim almost apostolic
antiquity; and the claim is supported by many and weighty
arguments. We cannot, however, discuss them here, for we have
already exceeded the limits we had proposed to ourselves.

The B. Virgin and Magi.

The B. Virgin, from the Cemetery on Via Nomentana.

In conclusion, we will give a slight sketch of the successive phases

in the development of Christian art within the limits of the first three
centuries; for, thanks to De Rossi’s almost microscopic examination
of every accessible corner of subterranean Rome, even this is now
possible. As each of these phases was derived from its predecessor
by a natural sequence of ideas, it is not pretended that they are
separated from one another by strict chronological boundaries which
are never transgressed; yet the characteristics of the several periods
are, in the main, sufficiently distinct to allow of their being followed as
safe guides in determining, at least approximately, the age of any
particular class, or even individual specimen of ornamentation.
We have already seen that primitive Christian art sprung out of an
alliance of ancient forms with new ideas; in its outward physiognomy
it proceeded directly, in point of style and method of execution, from
the school of Pagan decorative art, but it was animated by a new life;
and therefore it began at once to create a pictorial cycle for itself,
taken partly from historical and partly from allegorical materials. At
first the allegorical element greatly predominated. The fish and the
anchor, the lamb and the dove, the shepherd and the fisherman,
may be named as the most prominent examples; and all these
during the first, or, as it has been styled, the hieroglyphic or
ideographic period of Christian art, were characterised by the utmost
simplicity. The principal figure usually stood alone; the fisherman is
catching a fish, or the shepherd is carrying a sheep upon his
shoulders, and nothing more.
In the second period—i.e., from the middle of the second to the
middle of the third century—the Good Shepherd occurs less
frequently, and is represented less simply; he carries a goat, or he
plays his pipe; he stands amid trees in a garden, or in the midst of
his flock, and the several members of his flock stand in different
attitudes towards him, marking a difference of internal disposition.
Other figures also undergo similar changes; different emblems or
different typical histories are blended together, and the result is more
artistic; a more brilliant translation, so to speak, is thus given of the
same thoughts and ideas with which we have been familiar in a more
elementary form from the beginning. This change, or rather this
growth, was in truth only the natural result of time and of the pious
meditation of successive generations of Christians exercised upon
the history of their faith and upon the outward representations of its
mysteries, in which their forefathers had always delighted. The bud
had expanded, and the full-blown flower displayed new beauties—
beauties which had been there indeed before, but unseen. Thus we
meet again with the apostolic fisherman, but the river in which he
fishes is now a mystical river, formed by the waters which have
flowed from the rock struck by Moses. More Bible histories are made
use of; or, if not now introduced for the first time, are used more
frequently—the history of Daniel and of Jonas, the sacrifice of
Abraham, the resurrection of Lazarus, the healing of the paralytic at
Bethsaida, and others. And as all these histories have been
illustrated in the writings of cotemporary Fathers, the monuments
which represent them are of the highest value as an historical
expression of what Christians in those days believed and taught.
Both the writings and the paintings are evidently the faithful echo of
the same doctrinal teaching and tradition.

Glass from the Catacombs, now in Vatican Library.

 Then follows a third period in the history of Christian art, which, if
the first two have been justly compared to its spring and summer,
may itself be certainly called its autumn. It extends from the middle
of the third century to the age of Constantine; and during this period
there is a certain falling off of leaves, accompanied by a further
development of the flower, without, however, any addition to its
beauty. The symbolical element is sensibly diminished; what we
have ventured to call Christian hieroglyphics are almost or quite
abandoned; the parables also are less used, and even the historical
types are represented in a more hard and literal form. If Moses is still
seen striking the mystical rock, the literal or historical Moses is at his
side, taking off his shoes before drawing near to the burning bush; or
the Jews are there, in their low round caps, drinking of the waters; or
if it is desired to keep the mystical sense of the history before the
people, it is deemed necessary to inscribe the name of Petrus over
the head of Moses, as we see in two or three specimens of the
gilded glasses found in the Catacombs, and belonging probably to
the fourth century. Christ no longer appears as the Good Shepherd,
but sits or stands in the midst of His Apostles, or, still more
frequently, miraculously multiplies the loaves and fishes. The fish is
no longer the mystical monogram, “containing a multitude of
mysteries,” but appears only as a necessary feature in the
representation of this same miracle. Lazarus appears swathed like a
mummy, in accordance, as we know, with the fact; but earlier artists
had idealised him, and made him rise from the tomb young, free, and
active. The three children refusing to adore the image set up by
Nabuchodonosor are brought forward, and placed in juxtaposition
with the three wise men adoring the Infant Jesus, suggesting a
comparison, or rather a contrast, very suitable to the altered
circumstances of the times.
This last remark, however, must not be allowed to mislead us. We
must not imagine that the chronological sketch which has been here
attempted of the development of Christian art has been in any way
suggested by a consideration of what was likely to have been its
course in consequence of the history of the Christian society. The
sketch is really the result of a very careful induction from the
laborious researches which De Rossi has made into the chronology
of the several parts of the Catacombs; and if there proves to be a
correspondence between the successive variations of character in
the works of art that are found there, and the natural progress of the
Christian mind or the outward condition of the Christian Church,
these are purely “undesigned coincidences,” which may justly be
urged in confirmation of our conclusion, though they formed no part
of the premisses. We may venture also to add, that the conclusions
were as contrary to the preconceived opinion of their discoverer as
of the Christian world in general. Nothing but the overwhelming
evidence of facts has forced their acceptance; but from these there
is no escape. When it was found that the oldest areæ in the
cemeteries are precisely those that are richest in paintings, and
those in the best style, whereas in the more modern areæ the
paintings are less in number, poorer in conception, and inferior in
point of execution, it was impossible not to suspect the justice of the
popular belief, that the infant Church, engaged in deadly conflict with
idolatry, had rejected all use of the fine arts, and that it was only in a
later and less prudent age that they had crept, as it were,
unobservedly into her service; and as fresh and fresh evidence of
the same kind has been multiplied in the course of the excavations,
a complete revolution has at length been effected in public opinion
on this matter. Even Protestant writers no longer deny that, from the
very first, Christians ornamented their subterranean cemeteries with
painting; only they insist that this was done, “not because it was
congenial to the mind of Christianity so to illustrate the faith, but
because it was the heathen custom so to honour the dead.” If by this
it is only meant that Christians, though renewed interiorly by the
grace of baptism, yet continued, in everything where conscience was
not directly engaged, to live conformably to the usages of their
former life, and that to ornament the tombs of the dead had been
one of those usages—it is, of course, quite true. Nevertheless it is
plain from the history that has here been given, that the earliest
essays of Christian art were much more concerned with illustrating
the mysteries of the faith than with doing honour to the dead.
Our space will not allow, neither is it necessary, that we should
enter at any length into the history of Christian sculpture, since the
same general laws of growth presided over this as over painting. It
must be remembered, however, that sculpture was used much more
sparingly, and did not attain its full Christian development nearly so
soon as the sister art. There was no room for it in the Catacombs
except on the faces and sides of the sarcophagi, which were
sometimes used there for the burial of the dead; neither was it
possible to execute it with the same freedom as painting. The
painter, buried in the bowels of the earth, prosecuted his labours in
secret, and, therefore, in comparative security, without fear of any
intrusion from the profane; but the work of the sculptor was
necessarily more public; it could not even be conveyed from the city
to the cemetery without the help of many hands, and it must always
have run the risk of attracting a dangerous degree of general
attention. We are not surprised, therefore, at hearing that some of
those sarcophagi which are found in the most ancient parts of the
Catacombs seem rather to have been purchased from Pagan
workshops than executed by Christians; those, for instance, on
which are figured scenes of pastoral life, of farming, of the vintage,
or of the chase, genii, dolphins, or other subjects equally harmless.
Sometimes it might almost seem as though the subjects had been
suggested by a Christian, but their Christian character blurred in the
execution by some Pagan hand, which added a doubtful or
unmeaning accessory,—e.g., a dog at the side of the shepherd. On
some others there are real Pagan subjects, but these were either
carefully defaced by the chisel, or covered up with plaster, or hidden
from sight by being turned towards the wall.

Sarcophagus still to be seen in the Cemetery of San Callisto.

 Very ancient Sarcophagus, found in Crypt of St. Lucina.

When, however, in progress of time, all fear of danger was past,

the same series of sacred subjects as are seen in the fresco-
paintings of the second and third centuries is reproduced in the
marble monuments of the fourth and fifth; only they appear, of
course, in their later, and not in their earlier form; often even in a still
more developed and literally historical form than in any of the
subterranean paintings. Thus Adam and Eve no longer stand alone,
one on either side of the fatal tree, but the Three Persons of the Holy
Trinity are introduced in the work of creation and the promise of
redemption. Adam receives a wheat sheaf, in token that as a
punishment for his sin he shall till the ground, and to Eve a lamb is
presented, the spinning of whose wool is to be part of her labour.
Daniel does not stand alone in the lions’ den, but Habacuc is there
also, bearing in his hand bread, and sometimes fish, for the
prophet’s sustenance. To the resurrection of Lazarus the figure of
one of his sisters is added, kneeling at our Lord’s feet, as though
petitioning for the miracle. Our Lord stands between St. Peter and
St. Paul, and He gives to one of them a volume, roll, or tablet,
representing the new law of the Gospel. On the gilded glasses which
belong to the same period the legend is added, Lex Domini, or
Dominus legem dat. The Apostles are distinguished, the one as the
Apostle of the Jews, the other of the Gentiles; and even two small
temples or churches are added, out of which sheep are coming forth;
and over one is written Jerusalem, and over the other Bethlehem.
This is a scene with which we are familiar in the grand old mosaics
of the Roman Basilicas, a further development of Christian art, to
which, as far as the choice of subjects is concerned and the mode of
executing them, the sculpture may be considered a sort of
intermediate step after the decline of painting.

Glass in the Vatican Library.

Representing Christ between SS. Peter and Paul; also Christ as the Lamb, and the
faithful as Lambs—Jews and Gentiles coming from Jerusalem and Bethlehem
(Becle) to Mount Sion, whence flow the four Evangelical Streams, united in the
Mystical Jordan.

We may still further add, that the cycle of scriptural subjects was
somewhat enlarged by the sculptors; at least, we do not know of any
paintings in the Catacombs which represent our Lord giving sight to
the blind, or raising the dead child to life, or healing the woman who
touched the hem of His garment; or His nativity, His triumphant entry
into Jerusalem, or certain scenes of His Passion; yet all these, and
some others besides, may be seen carved on the old Christian
monuments collected in the Lateran Museum at Rome and
elsewhere. The sarcophagus which has the representation of the
Nativity, and with the traditional ox and ass by the manger, has its
own date upon it, a.d. 343; but, as we are not here writing a
complete history of Christian art, it must suffice to have given this
general idea of its earliest efforts both in painting and sculpture.
 CHAPTER VI.
THEIR INSCRIPTIONS.

What student of antiquity, or what merely intelligent observer of

men and manners, is content to leave an old church or churchyard
without first casting his eye over its monumental inscriptions? In like
manner, we think our readers would justly complain if we bade them
take leave of the Catacombs without saying a word about their
epitaphs. And if the study of any considerable number of epitaphs
anywhere is pretty sure to be rewarded by the discovery of
something more or less interesting, how much more have we not a
right to expect from the monuments of Roman Christianity during a
period of three or four hundred years!
And truly, if all these monuments had been preserved and
gathered together into one place, or, better still, had all been left in
their original places, they would have formed an invaluable and
inexhaustible library for the Christian archæologist. This, however,
has not been their lot. Hundreds and thousands of them have been
destroyed by those who have broken into the Catacombs from time
to time during the last thousand years, and drawn from them
materials for building. Others, again, and amongst them some of the
most valuable, have been given to learned antiquarians or devout
ecclesiastics, who coveted them for their own private possession,
and carried them off to their own distant homes, without reflecting
upon the grievous injury which they were thus inflicting upon those
that should come after them. A much larger number have been most
injudiciously placed, even by persons who knew their value, and
were anxious for their preservation, in the pavements of Roman
churches, where they have been either gradually effaced by the
constant tread of worshippers, or thoughtlessly removed and lost
sight of on occasion of some subsequent restoration of this portion of
the church. A few have been more securely placed in the museums
of the Capitol and of the Roman College, in the porticoes of some of
the Roman churches, or in the cloisters of convents. Lastly, twelve or
thirteen hundred were brought together, some eighty or ninety years
ago, in the Library and Lapidarian Gallery at the Vatican—a number
sufficiently great to enable us to appreciate their value, and to
increase our regret that so many more should have been dispersed
and lost.
It is to the sovereign Pontiffs that we are principally indebted for
whatever fragments have been preserved from the general wreck.
As early as the middle of the fifteenth century, Pope Nicholas V.
seems to have entertained the idea of collecting all the lapidarian
monuments of early Christianity which had at that time been
discovered; and both Eugenius IV., his immediate predecessor, and
Calixtus III. who succeeded him, forbade, under heavy penalties, the
alienation or destruction of anything belonging to this class of
monuments. When Leo X., too, appointed Raphael to superintend
the works at the rebuilding of St. Peter’s, he gave him a special
charge that the res lapidaria should not be injured. In later times,
these injunctions became more earnest and more frequent, in
proportion to the increasing number and importance of the
inscriptions that were brought to light. Still nothing practical appears
to have been devised until the reign of Benedict XIV., who appointed
the learned Francesco Bianchini to collect all the inscribed stones
that could be found; and it was he who recommended the long
narrow gallery leading to the Vatican Library and Museum as a
convenient place for their preservation. Even then political and other
difficulties interfered to prevent the execution of the design, so that it
was not until the close of the last century that it was really carried out
by Gaetano Marini, under the orders of Pope Pius VI. It is to be
regretted that he took so little pains to make the most of such
materials as he had. He merely inserted the monuments in the wall,
without giving any indication of the places where they had been
found, or making any attempts to classify them, beyond separating
the few which contain the names of the consuls from those which are
without this chronological note. A small selection has since been
made, in our own day, by De Rossi, in obedience to the orders of
Pope Pius IX., and placed in a gallery of the Lateran Palace,
adjoining the Christian Museum. The arrangement of these
specimens (few as they are, comparatively speaking) makes it a
valuable guide to those who would study this part of our subject to
any profit.
The collections at the Vatican and the Lateran together do not
exceed two thousand. Hundreds of others, recovered by more recent
excavations, have not yet found a suitable home; many have been
left in their original sites. Still it will always remain true that the
number actually in existence is quite insignificant when compared
with those which have been destroyed or lost. A large proportion,
however, even of these have not altogether perished; they were
copied, not always with accuracy, yet with praiseworthy diligence, by
various scholars, even from the eighth and ninth centuries; and since
the invention of printing, similar collections have been, of course,
more frequent. We need not enter into any detailed account of these;
we will say but a brief word even about De Rossi’s collection, for as
yet he has only published the first volume, which contains all the
Christian inscriptions of Rome during the first six centuries, whose
date is indisputably fixed by the names of the consuls having been
appended to them.
Of these, only one belongs to the first century, two to the second,
the third supplies twenty, and the fourth and fifth about five hundred
each. Of this last century, of course, only those which belong to the
first ten years can be claimed for the Catacombs, because, as we
have already seen, they ceased after that period to be the common
cemetery of the faithful. It appears, then, that all the dated
inscriptions of gravestones found in the Catacombs up to the year
1864 do not amount to six hundred: whence some writers have
argued that in the earliest ages Christians were not in the habit of
inscribing epitaphs on their graves. This conclusion, however, is
obviously illogical; for we have no right to assume that the proportion
between dated and undated inscriptions remained uniform during the
first four centuries. If there are only six hundred epitaphs bearing the
names of consuls, there are more than twice as many thousands
without those names; and we must seek, by independent processes
of inquiry, to establish other chronological criteria, which, if not
equally exact, may yet be shown to be generally trustworthy. And
this is what De Rossi has done, with a zeal tempered by caution
which is beyond all praise. It would be impossible to exaggerate,
first, the slow and patient industry with which he has accumulated
observations; then the care and assiduity with which he compares
the innumerable examples he has collected with one another, so as
to ascertain their marks of resemblance and difference; and finally,
the moderation with which he has drawn his conclusions. These vary
in value, from mere conjecture to the highest degree of probability, or
even of moral certainty. In a popular work like this, there is no room
for discussion; we must confine ourselves to a statement of some of
the best ascertained and most important facts, resting upon certain
chronological canons, which a daily increasing experience warrants
us in saying are now demonstrated with palpable and almost
mathematical exactness.
First, then, De Rossi observes it as a notable fact, attested by the
contents of all the Catacombs, that the most ancient inscriptions on
Christian tombs differ from those of the Pagans “more by what they
do not say, than by what they do say.” The language of Christian
epigraphy was not created in a day any more than Christian art was.
There were urgent reasons for changing or omitting what the Pagans
had been wont to use; but the Church did not at once provide
anything else in its stead. Hence the very earliest Christian
tombstones only recorded the bare name or names of the deceased,
to which, in a very few instances, chiefly of ladies, one or two words,
or the initials of words, were added, to denote the rank or title which
belonged to them—e.g., C.F., clarissima femina, or lady of senatorial
rank. Generally speaking, however, there is an entire absence from
these epitaphs of all those titles of rank and dignity with which Pagan
monuments are so commonly overloaded. And the same must be
said of those titles also which belong to the other extremity of the
social scale, such as servus and libertus. One cannot study a dozen
monuments of Pagan Rome without coming across some trace of
this great social division of the ancient world into freemen and
slaves. Yet in a number of Christian inscriptions in Rome, exceeding
twelve or thirteen thousand, and all belonging to centuries during
which slavery still flourished, scarcely ten have been found—and
even two or three of these are doubtful—containing any allusion
whatever to this fundamental division of ancient Roman society. It is
not to be supposed that there was any legislation upon the subject;
not even, perhaps, a hint from the clergy; it was simply the
spontaneous effect of the religious doctrines of the new society,
reflected in their epigraphy as in a faithful mirror. The children of the
Primitive Church did not record on their monuments titles of earthly
dignity, because they knew that with the God whom they served
there was no respect of persons; neither did they care to mention the
fact of their bondage, or of their deliverance from bondage, to some
earthly master, because they thought only of that higher and more
perfect liberty “wherewith Christ had set them free;” remembering
that “he that was called, being a bondman, was yet a freeman of the
Lord; and likewise he that was called, being free, was still the
bondman of Christ.”
We repeat, then, that the most ancient inscriptions on Christian
gravestones in Rome consisted merely of the name of the deceased;
ordinarily his cognomen only, though in some of the very earliest
date the name of the gens was also added; not, we may be sure,
from a motive of vanity, but merely for the purpose of identification.
Large groups of inscriptions of this kind may still be seen in some of
the oldest portions of subterranean Rome; traced in vermilion on the
tiles, as in the Catacomb of Sta. Priscilla, or engraved in letters of
most beautiful classical form, as in the Cœmeterium Ostrianum and
the Cemetery of Pretextatus. The names are often of classical origin;
nearly a hundred instances of Claudii, Flavii, Ulpii, Aurelii, and others
of the same date, carrying us back to the period between Nero and
the first of the Antonines. Very often there is added after the names,
as on Pagan tombstones, such words as filio dulcissimo, conjugi
dulcissimo, or, incomparabili, dulcissimis parentibus, and nothing
else. In fact, these epitaphs vary so little from the old classical type,
that had they not been seen by Marini and other competent
witnesses—some of them even by De Rossi himself—in their original
position, and some of them been marked with the Christian symbol
of the anchor, we might have hesitated whether they ought not rather
to be classed among Pagan monuments; as it is, we are sure that
they belonged to the earliest Christian period; that they are the
gravestones of men who died in the Apostolic, or immediately post-
Apostolic age.
 It was not to be expected, however, that Christian epitaphs should
always remain so brief and bare a record. In the light of Christian
doctrine, death had altogether changed its character; it was no
longer an everlasting sleep, though here and there a Christian
epitaph may still be found to call it so; it was no longer a final and
perpetual separation from those who were left behind; it was
recognised as the necessary gate of admission to a new and nobler
life; and it was only likely, therefore, that some tokens of this change
of feeling and belief should, sooner or later, find expression in the
places where the dead were laid. Amid the almost innumerable
monumental inscriptions of Pagan Rome that have been preserved
to us, we seek in vain for any token of belief in a future life. Generally
speaking, there is a total silence on the subject; but if the silence is
broken, it is by faint traces of poetical imagery, not by the distinct
utterances of a firm hope, much less of a clear and certain belief.
The Christian epitaphs first broke this silence by the frequent use of
a symbol, the anchor indicating hope, carved or rudely scratched
beside the name upon the gravestone. Presently they added words
also; words which were the natural outpourings of hearts which were
full of Christian faith and love. On a few gravestones in those parts of
the Catacomb of Sta. Priscilla already spoken of, we read the
Apostolic salutation, Pax tecum, or Pax tibi; on one in the
Cœmeterium Ostrianum, Vivas in Deo, and these are the first germs,
out of which Christian epigraphy grew.
The epitaphs on the gravestones of the latter half of the second
and of the third centuries are only a development of the fundamental
ideas contained in these ejaculations. They still keep silence as to
the worldly rank, or the Christian virtues of the deceased; they do not
even, for the most part, tell us anything as to his age, or his
relationship to the survivor who sets up the stone; most commonly,
not even the day of his death or burial. But they announce with
confident assurance that his soul has been admitted to that happy lot
reserved for the just who have left this world in peace, that he is
united with the saints, that he is in God, and in the enjoyment of
good things; or they breathe a humble and loving prayer that he may
soon be admitted to a participation in these blessings. They ask for
the departed soul peace, and light, and refreshment, and rest in God
and in Christ. Sometimes, also, they invoke the help of his prayers
(since he, they know, still lives in God) for the surviving relatives
whose time of trial is not yet ended. In a word, they proceed upon
the assumption that there is an incessant interchange of kindly
offices between this world and the next, between the living and the
dead; they represent all the faithful as living members of one Body,
the Body of Christ; as forming one great family, knit together in the
closest bonds of love; and this love finding its chief work and
happiness in prayer, prayer of the survivors for those who have gone
before, prayer of the blessed for those who are left behind. We
subjoin a few examples of the class of epitaphs of which we speak;
and to secure accuracy, we will only give those that we have
ourselves copied from the originals, and which every visitor to Rome
may, therefore, still see if he pleases. The figures which we have
appended to some of these inscriptions denote the column and the
number under which they will be found in the gallery at the Lateran;
the letters k.m. refer to the Kircherian Museum at the Roman
College; and the last four may be seen where they were found, in the
Catacomb of SS. Nereus and Achilles.

1. Pax tecum, Urania, xviii. 17.

2. Spes, Pax tibi. xviii. 20.
3. ΥΓΙΕΙΑ ΖΗΣΕΣ ΜΕΤΑ ΙΣΤΕΡΚΟΡΙΟΥ
ΤΟΥ ΛΕΓΟΜΕΝΟΥ ΥΓΕΙΝΟΥ ΕΝ ΤΕΩ. xix. 23.
4. ΦΙΓΟΥΜΕΝΗ ΕΝ ΕΙΡΗΝΗ ΣΟΥ ΤΟ ΠΝΕΥΜΑ. ix. 28.
5. Lais cum pace. Ispiritus in bonu quescat. ix. 15.
6. Susanna vivas in Deo. xx. 30.
7. Semper in D. vivas, Dulcis anima. ix. 5.
8. Regina, vivas in Domino Zesu. ix. 17.
9. Bolosa, Deus tibi refrigeret quæ vixit annos xxxi. ix. 12.
10. Amerimnus Rufinæ ... Spiritum tuum Deus refrigeret. ix.
13.
11. Refrigera Deus anima Ho.... ix. 14.
12. Kalemere Deus refrigeret spiritum tuum
Una cum sororis tuæ Hilare. k. m.
13. Lucifere ... meruit titulum
 Inscribi ut quisqui de fratribus legerit roget Deu
Ut sancto et innocenti spirito ad Deum suscipiatur. ix.
10.
14. Anatolius filio benemerenti fecit
Qui vixit annis vii mensis vii diebus xx
Ispiritus tuus bene requiescat
In Deo. Petas pro sorore tua. viii. 19.
15. Aurelivs agapetvs et aurelia
Felicissima alvmne felicitati
Dignissimæ qve vicsit anis xxx et vi
Et pete pro celsinianv cojvgem. viii. 21.
16. Pete pro parentes tvos
Matronata matrona
Qve vixit an. i. di. Liii. viii. 18.
17. ΔΙΟΝΥϹΙΟϹ ΝΗΠΙΟϹ ΑΚΑΚΟϹ ΕΝΘΑΔΕ
ΚΕΙΤΕ ΜΕΤΑ ΤΩΝ ΑΓΙΩΝ ΜΝΗϹΚΕϹΘΕ
ΔΕ ΚΑΙ ΗΜΩΝ ΕΝ ΤΑΙϹ ΑΓΙΑΙϹ ΥΜΩΝ
ΠΡΕΥΧΑΙϹ ΚΑΙ ΤΟΥ ΓΛΥΨΑΤΟϹ ΚΑΙ ΓΡΑΨΑΝΤΟϹ. k. m.
18. Gentianvs fidelis in pace qvi vix
It annis xxi menns viii dies
Xvi et in orationis tvis
Roges pro nobis qvia scimvs te in ☧. (Vatican Gallery.)
19. ΔΗΜΗΤΡΙϹ ΕΤ ΛΕΟΝΤΙΑ
ϹΕΙΡΙΚΕ ΦΕΙΛΙΕ ΒΕΝΕΜΕΡΕΝ
ΤΙ ΜΝΗϹΘΗϹ ΙΗϹΟΥϹ
Ο ΚΥΡΙΟϹ ΤΕΚΝΟΝ Ε....
20. Victoria refriger
Isspiritus tus in bono.
21. ... vibas in pace et pete pro nobis.
22. ΖΗϹΑΙϹ ΕΝ ̅Κ̅Ω ΚΑΙ ΕΡΩΤΑ ΥΠΕΡ ΗΜΩΝ.

1. Peace with thee, Urania.

2. Peace to thee, Spes.
3. Hygeia, mayest thou live in God with Stercorius, who is (also)
called Hyginus.
4. Beloved one, may thy spirit be in peace.
 5. Peace with thee, Lais. May thy spirit rest in good [i.e., God].
6. Susanna, mayest thou live in God.
7. Sweet soul, mayest thou always live in God.
8. Regina, mayest thou live in the Lord Jesus.
9. Bolosa, may God refresh thee; who lived thirty-one years.
10. Amerimnus ... to Rufina, may the Lord refresh thy spirit.
11. Refresh, O God, the soul of ...
12. Kalemere, may God refresh thy spirit, together with that of thy
sister Hilare.
13. Lucifera ... deserved that an epitaph should be inscribed to
her, that whoever of the brethren shall read it, may pray
God that her holy and innocent spirit may be received to
God.
14. Anatolius set this up to his well-deserving son, who lived
seven years, seven months, and twenty days. May thy
spirit rest well in God. Pray for thy sister.
15. Aurelius Agapetus and Aurelia Felicissima to their most
excellent foster-child Felicitas, who lived thirty-six years;
and pray for your husband Celsinianus.
16. Pray for your parents, Matronata Matrona, who lived one year
and fifty-three days.
17. Dionysius, an innocent child, lies here with the saints: and
remember us, too, in your holy prayers, both me who
engraved and me who wrote [this inscription].
18. Gentianus, one of the faithful, in peace, who lived twenty-one
years, eight months, and sixteen days: and in your
prayers make petition for us, because we know that thou
art in Christ.
19. Demetrius and Leontia to their well-deserving daughter
Syrica. Remember, O Lord Jesus, our child.
20. Victoria, may thy spirit be refreshed in good [i.e., in God].
21. Mayest thou live in peace and pray for us.
22. Mayest thou live in the Lord and pray for us.

It would be easy to fill several pages with inscriptions of this kind;

but enough has been produced to impress upon the reader a fair
idea of their general character. They abound on the monuments of
the second and third centuries; but after that date they fade out of
use, and are succeeded by a new style of epigraphy, colder and
more historical. Mention is now made of the exact age of the
deceased, and of the length of his married life, not as to years only,
but as to months, and sometimes even as to days and hours; of the
day of his death also, more commonly of his burial, and, in a few
instances, of both. To record the day of the burial (depositio) was
creeping into use before the end of the third century; from the middle
of the fourth, it became little short of universal; and in this century
and the next, mention of the year also was frequently added. During
this period, the phrase in pace became general, as a formula to be
used by itself absolutely without any verb at all. In old Christian
inscriptions in Africa, this phrase frequently occurs with the verb vixit;
in which case the word pax is undoubtedly used in the same sense
in which Tertullian, St. Cyprian, and other ecclesiastical writers
employ it, as denoting peace with God to be obtained through
communion with the Church; and in a community distracted by
schisms and heresies, as the African Church was, such a record on
the tomb of a Christian is intelligible and important. Not so in Rome;
here the purport of the thousands of greetings of peace has
reference to the peace of a joyful resurrection and a happy eternity,
whether spoken of with confidence as already possessed, or only
prayed for with glad expectation. The act of death had been
expressed in earlier epitaphs under Christian phrases:—Translatus
de sæculo; exivit de sæculo; arcessitus a Domino, or ab angelis;
natus in æternum; or, much more commonly, Deo reddidit spiritum;
and this last phrase had come into such established use by the
middle of the third century, that the single letter R was a recognised
abbreviation of it. But, in the second half of that century, and still
more frequently afterwards decessit was used in its stead; and in the
fifth century we find this again superseded by Hic jacet, pausat,
quiescit, or requiescit.
Complimentary phrases as to the goodness, wisdom, innocence,
and holiness of the deceased came into fashion about the age of
Constantine, and in later times were repeated with such uniformity
as to be quite wearisome; we see that they were simply formal and