
The Anticolonial Classroom
“For Black folks, teaching--educating--is fundamentally political because it is rooted in antiracist struggle."
-bell hooks, Teaching to Transgress
“The real aim of colonialism was to control the people’s wealth: what they produced, how they produced it, and how it was distributed; to control, in other words, the entire realm of the language of real-life... But its most important area of domination was the mental universe of the colonized, the control, through culture, of how people perceived themselves and their relationship to the world.”
-Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o, Decolonising the Mind
The anticolonial classroom seeks to engage agency, grammars, discourse, and other forms of power in today’s modern-day university classroom. It situates the historical conditions of colonialism and slavery with the agencies of individuals (instructors, students) and those of the institution (administration, structures). This project explores the ways that education, rooted in colonial conditions, persists and pervades today’s teaching instruction. Rather than satisfy ourselves with “progress,” this project challenges us to question our pedagogy and its practices rooted in colonialism.
