Cornell University has changed the name of its “Department of English” to the “Department of Literatures in English”, as part of its anti-racism and “decolonization efforts.”
Last November, faculty in the Department voted to change the school’s name, a change that Cornell’s board of trustees has now approved.
Cornell University spokeswoman Abby Butler says the name change is part of “decolonization efforts” inspired by universities around the world. Professor Kate McCullough said that the rebranding would help to avoid the “conflation of English as a language and English as a nationality.”
Faculty made dubious claims about English Departments supposedly promoting colonialism. Professor Caroline Levine — who supported the name change — claims that the “British Empire invented English as an academic discipline as part of a dedicated effort to persuade Indian subjects to view England as a culture superior to their own and so to acquiesce to English rule.”
“The connection between literary studies and political power is nothing new, and as our society has grown more plural, so has our literature,” she wrote in the department’s newsletter. “Today, as our own historical moment is prompting us to reflect seriously on long histories of racism in culture and institutions, it seems important to recognize the many writers of color around the world who are producing literatures in English.”
Levine cites Gauri Viswanathan’s Masks of Conquest, which claims “that the curricular study of English can no longer be understood innocently of or inattentively to the imperial contexts in which the discipline first articulated its mission.”
Decolonization efforts have also occurred at other colleges. Two years ago, instructors at Bates College suggested redesigning many math courses to focus on “colonialism and privilege.” The instructors argued that an introductory calculus course should “situate race, white supremacy, colonialism, power, and privilege centrally and attend to them throughout the course.” These instructors falsely believed that colonialism made Africa poor.
In reality, colonization made Third World countries more economically advanced, as the father of modern Liberia, William Tubman, noted. Tubman, who served as Liberia’s president from 1944 to 1971, pointed out that Liberia was economically poorer than its neighbors because it had not had “the benefits of colonization.” Colonization of Africa made it more agriculturally and economically productive and eventually curbed slavery. Colonization also abolished barbaric practices like suttee (the burning of widows on their husbands’ funeral pyres) in India. Most people in many pre-colonization African societies were slaves: For example, the slave population accounted for more than two-thirds of the total population of the Songhai Empire. That empire was the successor of the similarly heavily-enslaved Mali Empire celebrated in progressive high-school textbooks, whose most famous leader, Mansa Musa, went on a pilgrimage to Mecca with an entourage of 12,000 slaves to cater to his every desire.
