Welcome to Week 4

[Music] hello everybody welcome to week four my name is madhu krishnan i’m professor of african world and comparative literature at the university of bristol i’m maria nicole i am the director of part-time programs in english literature and community engagement at the university of bristol in the department of english so in week four we’ll be exploring decolonization from the perspective of the arts and humanities we begin by thinking about what it means to decolonize the arts and humanities and whether it’s enough to simply think about decolonization or do we need to be broader and even more radical in our thinking especially through the idea of redistribution and what that might mean our next section looks at the ways in which literature literary and cultural studies have been instituted as part of projects of imperialism exploring strategies and practices that might enable us to move away from the origins to consider how the study of literature and culture can provoke new forms of knowledge creation and engagement as citizens we then turn to the discipline of history to consider questions around knowledge production and reparative justice we’ll think about how certain narratives of history become dominant and pedagogical tools that can subvert this we’ll also think about the question of the archive and how we unearth types of knowledge that lie outside of official institutions or structures in the final section of this week we turn to modern languages exploring their relationship to area studies and imperial knowledge we also interrogate the modern in modern languages to explore what it means and who it describes finally we think about some of the ways in which our access to language and culture determines the way we engage with the world and some of the ways we can work against or through in teaching research and learning you