Decolonizing the Curriculum

This talk engages with recent debates around decolonization within postcolonial studies, focusing in particular on questions of pedagogy, curriculum, and political education within the university and beyond. Drawing on work done with the Revolutionary Papers project, I show how the digital humanities can offer pathways to construct non-canonical and collaborative comparativist methodologies for scholarship on decolonization and anticolonialism. Echoing critiques of the institutionalization of decolonization that have rendered it a “buzzword”, I reflect on the experience of incorporating digital humanities tools in classroom settings in both global south and global north contexts to analyze the ways in which they can help center “movement thought” – theory as it is shaped within an ongoing struggle, rather than an intellectual exercise that takes place at a remove from practice. In doing so, I explore how the digital humanities can be critically engaged to expand existing scholarly engagement with the archives and canons of anticolonialism. 

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Sara Kazmi is assistant professor of English at the University of Pennsylvania. She is a scholar and translator whose work takes an interdisciplinary approach to the study of anticolonial, left, and oppositional literary production in South Asia and its diasporas. She is also part of the Revolutionary Papers collective, which is a transnational research collaboration exploring 20th century periodicals of left, anti-imperial, and anticolonial critical production.