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Time to decolonise
Understanding the USC
academics who want to
‘decolonise’ the curriculum.
By Loren Smith
‘W
ho Put the Post in
Postcolonial?’
A 1998 review bearing
this title was published in the journal
NOVEL: A Forum on Fiction. Its author,
Chadwick Allen, an American professor
of English, begins by interrogating the
various scholarly iterations of the term
‘postcolonial’. There’s the one-word variety.
Then there’s the hyphenated version
(post-colonial), the bracketed one ((post)
colonial), and a different word altogether
(paracolonial).
Allen contends that they signify
confusion over the term’s meaning: Are
we really sure we have culturally moved
beyond colonial times?
Twenty years on, Catherine Manathunga
remains doubtful. So sceptical is the
professor of education research at the
University of the Sunshine Coast (USC)
that she wishes for the ‘decolonisation’
of university curricula. This will involve
deconstructing Western-centric material, as
well as intentionally highlighting Indigenous
voices. A simplistic example of this is the
debate around Australia Day (or, as some
refer to it, Invasion Day). The Western
narrative is one of colonisation, whereas
the Indigenous one is about invasion. The
truth is that it is both, at once, depending
on the perspective taken.
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where Northern (European or North
American) theories and knowledge are
tested and applied.
“So it’s a very unequal geopolitical reality
in terms of knowledge that’s supported by
the university curriculum.”
That’s why Manathunga was
dismayed when the idea for the Ramsay
Centre for Western Civilisation was first
floated.
“The idea that our current universities
aren’t studying Western knowledge
is an absolute fallacy,” she said. “Our
universities are fundamentally based on
Western knowledge. We have only made
small inroads into understanding other
civilisations, since the 1970s.”
TO DECOLONISE, FIRST
DECONSTRUCT
Nowhere is colonisation more stark
than in South Africa. In Bloemfontein and
Johannesburg to deliver seminars recently,
Manathunga provided context: “Issues of
decolonising the curriculum are absolutely
front and centre in current student politics
and university management concern in
South Africa, because of the #FeesMustFall
and #RhodesMustFall campaigns. There
are ongoing student protests happening in
many South African universities.
“The issue of decolonising the curriculum
and valuing knowledge from the Global
South, particularly from African sources
of knowledge, is a really hot topic there
in ways that I don’t think it is in Australia,
unfortunately.
“A lot of my colleagues and I have
been making arguments about the
importance of decolonising the university
curriculum in the Australian context for
many decades.
“By decolonising the curriculum,
we’re talking about, first of all, inclusion
of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander
knowledge. But we’re also talking about
including diverse cultural knowledge:
the different communities that make up
Australian society – not at all the kind of
Anglo-Celtic society that a lot of policy
developers continue to imagine it is.”
Particularly in the sciences but also in the
humanities, she says Western knowledge
continues to be privileged. “Raewyn
Connell made the very strong argument
that neocolonial operations of power
continue to exist, where the North gets
to propose knowledge and theory, and
the South gets to be the giant laboratory,
In South Africa, some students are calling
for the full-scale dismantling of Western
thought in universities. Manathunga
opposes this.
“While I understand the anger behind
these calls, they do not allow us to identify
how colonial power has occurred,” she said.
“We actually need to deconstruct the
Western canon rather than to remove it,
in order to understand the ways in which
unjust conditions, which continue into
the present, have been created, in terms
of what knowledge is valued and what
knowledge isn’t valued.
“Unless we do this, the effects of it
remain unresolved.”
What are its effects?
According to Manathunga, a significant
one is a ‘deficit discourse’, in which the
weaknesses, rather than the strengths,
of a minority culture are emphasised.
An Australian example of this is the ‘gap’
discourse around Indigenous Australians.
“My approach is to regard Indigenous
culture as a fundamental creative resource
that can be respectfully drawn upon in
education,” she said.
To that end, she is co-leading a new
Transcultural and Indigenous Pedagogies
Research Group at USC, where her
co-director, Associate Professor Maria
Raciti, is an Kalkadoon-Thaniquith/
Bwgcolman Aboriginal woman.
“I think if we don’t address the status quo,
then we end up perpetuating the unequal
conditions that exist in schools and in
health and across a whole range of social
indicators. And there’s a lot of evidence to
suggest that.”