Grant program: Disrupting Colonialism through Teaching: An Integrated Seminar Series and Grants Program

Grant recipient: Margaret Linley, Department of English

Project team: Melissa McGregor, research assistant

Timeframe: May 2020 to September 2021

Funding: $5,994

Course addressed: 

ENGL 833 - Studies in Nineteenth-Century Literature
ENGL 434 - Topics in the Victorian Period

Description: My project seeks to place postcolonial studies, Indigenous studies, and environmental studies in dialogue with Victorian and settler colonial studies to address the particular and distinctive ways in which colonialism operates and persists in places such as Canada. I aim to take up the task of denaturalizing settler colonialism in the Victorian studies classroom by uncovering settler colonial paradigms within British metropolitan and settler colonial literature, recovering the historical experience of Indigenous peoples in white settler nations that emerged during the 19th century, attending to processes and effects of dispossession and violence entailed in colonialism, and challenging ongoing tendencies toward disavowal or conceptual displacement of this history.

I understand this endeavor as decolonizing because in placing settler colonial, postcolonial, Indigenous, and environmental studies in dialogue with Victorian studies, students can develop critical perspectives on indigenizing and disrupting colonialism and explore indigenous and dissenting approaches, strategies, or techniques in Victorian literature. Most importantly, students can explore why and how cultural history still matters today.

Questions addressed:

• At the outset of the course, how do students understand the relationship between settler society and colonialism? How do they understand the relationship between settler society and the natural environment?How do students’ perceptions change during the course?
• In what ways do students understand the relationship between literature and colonialism as an ongoing structure?
• In what ways do students engage colonial literature critically, without embarrassment or disavowal, especially Canadian colonial literature? In what ways do students recognize without affirming the complexity of colonialism within settler society?
• In what ways do students respond to Indigenous literature and perspectives in the Victorian literature class, especially in relation to imperial and settler writing? In what ways does this comparative approach affect students’ understanding of what counts as literary? What are student responses to 19th c Indigenous writing and to contemporary perspectives and methodologies on settler society and environmental consciousness?

Knowledge sharing: I plan to participate in a round table discussion in my department on disrupting colonialism through pedagogy in late fall 2020. My project is part of our department’s larger plans to indigenize our curriculum through our teaching methods and through the cultural materials we teach.

Beyond the university, I am the lead organizer of the international North American Victorian Studies Association conference in Vancouver in November 2021 on the theme of “Unsettling Victorians.” Many papers at this conference will address ways of unsettling and indigenizing Victorian studies through pedagogical practice. The ideas and practices of my project are connected to this conference, which colleagues at SFU in English and beyond can attend.