Decolonizing Literature and Science

In 2015, students at the University of Cape Town began to protest about the presence of a statue of colonialist Cecil Rhodes on their university campus. The ensuing Rhodes Must Fall movement, which called for the decolonization of university education in South Africa, soon spread to the United Kingdom and the United States, where students began to demand changes to both university curricula and wider institutional cultures. The Rhodes Must Fall movement based at the University of Oxford defines their decolonizing mission as being to "challenge the structures of knowledge production that continue to mould a colonial mindset that dominates our present."¹ They cite three ways in which this can be achieved: through "tackling the plague of colonial iconography," "reforming the Euro-centric curriculum," and "addressing the underrepresentation and lack of welfare provision for Black and minority ethnic … academic staff and students."² The Why Is My Curriculum White? Campaign, also in the United Kingdom, has focused on the humanities, in particular on subjects like English, history, and philosophy, with students calling for more recognition of the racial thinking behind some Enlightenment philosophy, and for the expansion of the range of non-Western thinkers studied in the curriculum.³ The call to decolonize has recently also spread to science: in March 2017, Kings College London held a conference entitled "Can Science be Decolonised?" which aimed to "confront Eurocentrism in science and evaluate how colonialism and imperialism have shaped scientific inquiry—and if, or how, its influence can be 'decolonised' by looking at knowledges outside of a western context."⁴ The decolonization movement as a whole questions the integrity of the academy and challenges academics as producers and reproducers of knowledge to consider how that knowledge—and the methodologies adopted for acquiring it—might be exclusionary, exclusive, and indifferent to inequality and justice. Using language that is deliberately confrontational and direct, the movement challenges the more comfortable institutional language of diversity, which, as Sara Ahmed has shown, operates to obscure and deny the possibility of racism, which is instead "treated as a breach in the happy image of diversity."⁵

These calls for what amount to "alternative facts" have occurred at a moment when academic expertise across the humanities and the sciences is coming under attack in the political sphere: in 2016, Donald Trump sought to create momentum in his US presidential election campaign through the denial of the relevance of expert knowledge, while in the United Kingdom, the then justice secretary, Michael Gove, claimed as part of his campaign for Brexit that people in Britain "have had enough of experts."⁶ In response to Trump's election, a worldwide March for Science was held on April 22, 2017; the movement was "inspired by a growing concern about the lack of science in policy and need to speak out"⁷ and called for a "science that upholds the common good, and for political leaders and policymakers to enact evidence-based policies in the public interest."⁸ While the movement seeks to improve the relationship between science, scientists, and the public, it is clear and also understandable that the space for debating the nature of facts might begin to close down in the face of an antiscience political sphere. Thus one of the challenges for decolonization scholars and activists is to make a case for alternative, decolonized forms of knowledge that can be taken seriously and differentiated from the deliberate and misleading denial of scientific fact by the likes of Trump.

What has this to do with literature and science studies? It seems obvious that the current moment in which the nature of scientific fact is being questioned should concern scholars whose work is dedicated to exploring the narrative aspects of science and the relationship between fact and fiction, reality and fantasy. Contemporary literature and science scholarship is far removed from the deconstructionist approaches that prompted the culture wars of the 1990s, the mode of critique that Bruno Latour contends is characterized by the belief that "facts are made up, that there is no such thing as natural, unmediated, unbiased access to truth, that we are always prisoners...