Yvette Hutchison

While teaching and researching in Theatre & Performance Studies, I am struck by how much and what kinds of knowledge are created and disseminated in and through bodies, alongside discussion (written and oral) to produce discourse invisibly, in unnoticed ways. Since the #Rhodesmustfall movement in South Africa (cf. Garman, 2018), which extended to Oxford in the UK (cf. Williams, 2017), and the University of Amsterdam’s student occupation in 2015, we are seeing increasing student and academic engagements with decolonising curricula (see Baker, 2017; de Jong, Icaza, Vázquez and Withaeckx, 2017; Robbins, 2017). So, how does one undertake decolonising an education system when, as M. Jacqui Alexander argues, ‘the epistemologies, systems and knowledges [that empires] it created continue to define and haunt us (2005, 1). If, as Parker, et al. have argued, these epistemologies render any ‘university as a colonising space that is simultaneously a site for revolutionary transformation’ (2017:234), then this is where we need to start – by critiquing what is taught and how at universities with our students, as these processes define what can/not be known, discussed and practiced.

Parker, et al have suggested that we need to

(a) practise radical openness [bell hooks]: be teachers that are guided by the students’ experiences in the academy;

(b) interrogate research [and teaching] norms as critical sites of entrenched colonising practices; and

(c) create spaces that foster the co-production of knowledge. (Ibid., 235)

In this workshop I am going to share ways in which I use figuration (allegorical representation) and embodied learning to facilitate the active co-production of knowledge with students.

I am going to ask: How can we be open to empire ‘writing back’ (Ashcroft, Griffiths, & Tiffin, 2003), while avoiding falling into the trap noted here:

‘when students of colour, women, or people from the Global South go to graduate school [or university] and begin the path of writing back and decolonising knowledge production, that implicit otherness is often reinscribed upon their bodies and used to discount their lived experience, their words, and their research.’ (Parker, et al., 2017:234)?

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