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Curriculum Inquiry

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Deconstructive pedagogy and ideological demystification in post-colonial Pakistan Asma Mansoor & Samina Malik To cite this article: Asma Mansoor & Samina Malik (2016) Deconstructive pedagogy and ideological demystification in post-colonial Pakistan, Curriculum Inquiry, 46:5, 491-509, DOI: 10.1080/03626784.2016.1236655 To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/03626784.2016.1236655

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Date: 07 January 2017, At: 21:18

CURRICULUM INQUIRY, 2016 VOL. 46, NO. 5, 491–509 http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/03626784.2016.1236655

Deconstructive pedagogy and ideological demystification in post-colonial Pakistan Asma Mansoor a

a

and Samina Malikb

International Islamic University, Islamabad, Pakistan; bInternational Islamic University, Islamabad, Pakistan

ABSTRACT

KEYWORDS

With post-colonial Pakistan inheriting the British colonial ideological and governmental apparatus, the English literature curriculum implemented at the university level in Pakistan carried the interpellatory baggage of its colonial past. Our interdisciplinary exploration focuses on using deconstructive pedagogy to demystify and subvert the ideological conditioning of Pakistani students that is done through the English literary syllabi taught at the Masters level in Pakistani universities. These pedagogical practices involve genealogical and deconstructive readings of selected English literary texts taught to students pursuing a Master of English degree at the International Islamic University, Islamabad. These practices involve an activation of deconstructive readings through class discussions to unveil the different hegemonic processes involved in the constitution of docile political subjects. They challenge any authoritative interpretation of canonical texts, creating new meanings by activating the play of trace and differ ence in the rereadings of these texts within post-colonial Pakistan. The class discussions have been transcribed to show how the English literary texts introduced in the colonial era have been extracted out of a Western epistemological closure. In addition, their role in the constitution of colonial and post-colonial subjectivities has been discussed. These discussions raise questions regarding the opaque processes of self-constitution, yet do not aim at re-interpellating the students. They simply revisit the closure within which the students’ thoughts and subjectivities are confined, and open up the progression of thought processes so that the functionality of different viewpoints within different communities may be constantly re-visited to defy ideological colonization.

Educational practices; critical theory; pedagogical orientations; multicultural/ diversity education; language; culture and literacy; student and teacher experiences

In post-colonial societies like Pakistan, ideological colonization has perpetuated itself through the colonial educational apparatus inherited from the British colonial rule. Despite the end of colonial rule, Pakistan has continued with the colonial modalities of governance and its bureaucratic legacy. With the education system serving as an institutional conglomerate within the country’s dispositive or apparatus that blends all institutions and discourses governing the episteme (Foucault, 1972), Pakistan unavoidably inherited the colonial epistemological, racist and ideological biases. In nearly seven

CONTACT Asma Mansoor

[email protected]; [email protected]

© 2016 the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education

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ASMA MANSOOR AND SAMINA MALIK

decades of independence, the Pakistani educational curricula have replicated those modes of ideological colonization or “interpellation” (Althusser, 1971, p. 174) that were prevalent in the colonial era and were subsequently utilized by the state apparatus of the fledgling Pakistan. This was done to perpetuate its respective ideological hegemony in creating “homo docilis” (Downing, 2008, p. 5; italics in original). As Gauri Viswanathan’s Masks of Conquests reveals, Macaulay’s class of intermediary, brown sahibs who were created through education, remain extant in the former colonies, negotiating between brown masters and brown masses. The only difference now is the skin tone of the masters. Therefore, this interdisciplinary study explores how deconstructive pedagogical practices in post-colonial Pakistan may be used as a viable means of demystifying various normative ideological assumptions passed on through curricula handed down from the British era. In order to dilate upon the research objective at hand, our study focuses on how the English literature courses prescribed by Pakistan’s Higher Education Commission (HEC) at the Master’s level are engaged in continuing with a colonial mode of ideological conditioning of the masses. The HEC regulates all university education and curricula in Pakistan. What needs clarification here is that the English literature courses, on which our study is focused, are different from the courses pertaining to literatures in English, such as South Asian literatures in English, African literatures in English, etc. In many Pakistani universities which offer the MA English degree program, the curriculum has been revised to include various literatures in English as well. This was also done in the International Islamic University, Islamabad (IIUI) where this study was conducted. The curriculum revision was done for the re-articulation of a non-Western epistemological framework so that the colonizer/ colonized binary may be re-visited outside a Western ethos. In addition, what makes the IIUI different from universities like the Punjab and Peshawar Universities is that it was never established by the colonizers. Therefore, IIUI, along with some other new universities, found it easier to move away from the pre-colonial curriculum. However, since the Master of English degree program demands the teaching of the chronological development of English literature, it contains subjects that include literary texts ranging from the Medieval to the Modern era. The major universities which offer these courses include The Bahauddin Zakria University, The University of the Punjab, Peshawar University, Beaconhouse National University, Karachi University, the National University of Modern Languages (NUML) and the International Islamic University, Islamabad (IIUI). These universities are scattered across Pakistan. Some of the major subjects that they offer include Drama, Fiction, Prose and Poetry courses, ranging from the Classical to the Modern period as they adhere to the HEC’s course outlines. The teaching methodologies and the course outlines, therefore, have remained a means of not only perpetuating Anglicism in the region, but also of modifying indigenous mental models. Therefore, since the curricula retained a particular colonial ideological outlook that aimed at creating submissive subjects, the pedagogical practices have also become participants in these interpellatory processes. In this context, as teachers, we felt that an alteration in the reading of the texts included in the above-mentioned courses could be used to deflect these interpellatory practices through deconstructive pedagogy. This needed to be done in order to make these courses more relevant to contemporary Pakistan. This idea has been in place in numerous Pakistani universities, as many faculty members are warming up to the notion of moving away from the colonial modes of reading prescribed literary texts. In

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2010, the HEC held a meeting of the Curriculum Review Committee that revised the curricula of the Bachelor and Master of English degree programs across Pakistan. Representatives from all major universities attended this meeting. The first author of this paper was a member of this committee. In this meeting, most members recommended that British literature should be taught to Pakistani students in a manner that correlates with their respective context. It is a common practice here that Pakistani teachers refer to local socio-political situations in order to clarify concepts in British literary texts. In this article, pedagogy is conceptualized as a critical and “culturally relevant” (Thiessen et al., 2013, p. 1) mode of teaching that keeps in mind the “intergenerational reproduction of practice” (Luke, qtd. in Thiessen et al., 2013, p. 7) authorized by socially and culturally approved institutions. This form of critical pedagogy is aware not only of the interstices between cultures, but also of the temporal displacements between the colonial and post-colonial times. It focuses on what Luke has termed as “the normative questions” (qtd. in Thiessen et al., 2013, p. 7) that become viable tools of public control and oppression in the hands of the ruling structures. Deconstructive pedagogy, thus, aims at bringing to the fore the fundamental ideological conflicts framing the political and social context of any post-colonial society, allowing the students to re-think their ideological stance (Thiessen et al., 2013, p. 7) as they challenge interpellation through their own socio-cultural lens. Deconstructive pedagogy catalyzes this re-thinking as it fluidly operates across socio-cultural binaries. Therefore, in moving away from the colonial modes of reading, our deconstructive pedagogical approach does not demand a dismantling of the center/periphery binary. Rather, it focuses on subjecting this binary to erasure and leaving it open without re-establishing any ideological and cultural center. This is done so that the formation of subjectivities remains a more liberatory process based upon self-choice and self-responsibility without being assimilated within another hierarchal and exclusionary binary. In this context, the term “liberatory” refers to the subject’s refusal to be constrained within any ideological closure and to be open to numerous possibilities of thought that enable them to freely re-view their placement and roles within the local and global dispositives and to re-think those binaries in a non-hierarchal manner.

The British Literary Inheritance of Pakistan In the Indian Sub-Continent, the institution of education had been a viable tool of erasing the history of the colonized people so that their historical voices were silenced during the British rule. In erasing or displacing any indigenous historical loci, the colonial hegemonic discourse constructed itself as the new locus of meanings. However, even as the colonial mindset was and still remains imprinted on the local topography, the “trace” (Derrida, 1967, p. 9) of the indigene is not de-activated as such, despite having been written over; although the very epistemic framework of the subjects is indeed altered through ideological colonization. This is because those who are in power are able to modify the subjectivities of the subjects through ideological control exercised through education. Even the very definitions of resistance have come to be defined in terms of the psychosocial framework imposed by the colonizer. Nandy (1983) affirms this point in The Intimate Enemy. He argues that colonialism is located in the minds of the natives and prescribes its own modes of resistance by imposing “new social norms and categories” that are intertwined

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in such a way that the ruled resist the rulers “within the psychological limit set by the latter” (p.3). Thus, resistance is co-opted by the dominant culture which is never decentered in both the colonial and post-colonial eras. This notion of the “psychological limit” (Nandy, 1983, p. 3) reflects a “cloture” (Spivak, 1997, p. xli) of meanings within the colonized mind imposed by the colonial masters. Therefore, Spivak’s problematic assertion gains relevance that it is “inaccurate yet necessary” (Spivak, 1997, p. xii) to refer to the British institutionalization of education as the tentative starting point of this argument. This institutionalization needs to be included within our argumentative framework so that it may be re-examined without any of the entities confining themselves within the fixed positions of the center/periphery binary. Resultantly, this deconstructive reading enables a teacher located within a post-colonial context to open up the closure of discursive meanings imposed by the colonizer and to engage with the emerging discursive constructions. The opening up of the closure becomes a pedagogical example of what Spivak has termed ass “affirmative sabotage” (Brohi, 2014) that demands a subversion of a discourse by entering it and turning it around (Spivak in Brohi, 2014). Keeping in mind the position from which one enters a discourse in order to institute a rupture within it, the position “of where I stand” (Simms, 1997, p. 124) as a teacher of the British literary canon in post-independence Pakistan is significant. Pakistan inherited the British literary tradition which has remained pivotal within the constitution of syllabi in Pakistan. If all the syllabi of the English literature courses offered at the Master’s level in the country are compared, they follow more or less similar outlines “with a particular focus on the Greats” (Hashmi, 1997, p. 85). Hashmi writes that English Departments in Pakistan were modeled on the same pattern as Cambridge, Oxford and London Universities, as most faculty members had been trained there, and that the colonial university existed largely to create an unquestioning mind that otherwise possessed the requisite skills. In addition, the pedagogical methods and syllabi also paralleled their practices (Hashmi, 1997). In Pakistan, English was an “elite” (Hashmi, 1997, p. 84) subject, required for induction into the civil services and the bureaucracy (Hashmi, 1997, p. 84; Viswanathan, 1989, p. 3). English was the language of the country’s political elite. Hence, the English literature syllabi here adhered to the structure imposed upon them during the colonial era. As mentioned earlier, some specific courses pertaining to English literature, like Classical Drama, Romantic Poetry and Victorian Novel, remained a consistent feature of the Master’s level degree program in English literature in most Pakistani universities. It is also pertinent to specify here that Pakistan’s 77 years of independence have seen numerous military regimes and weak democratic governments. The 1980s under the Zia regime saw a stringent control over educational institutions and rampant Islamization that curbed dissent and alternative modes of thinking. Due to these political changes, the succeeding governments did institute some changes in the curriculum; however, the general infrastructure remained the same. For instance, during the Islamization of President Zia-ul-Haq, a number of texts like Women in Love, “Leda and the Swan,” and On Liberty were considered to be either too licentious, emancipatory or seditious in their outlook, and were removed from the course outline. Yet, by and large, the course outlines of the specific subjects mentioned earlier remained stagnant. Additionally, being a colonial inheritance, it utilized the same course contents to create an intermediary docile and unquestioning class of English speaking, brown pukka sahibs. Hence, the methods of


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ideological colonization were passed on from the colonial to the post-colonial dispositive since it adhered to the interests of the Pakistani bureaucracy and political junta which was feudal in outlook and preferred mindless obedience from the masses. Even if education was imparted, it simply aimed at confining the minds of the people within a specific ideological canvas since this made them easier to lead. However, from the 1990s onwards, many universities like the IIUI and NUML moved away from colonial outlines and did introduce courses in literatures in English from various regions, as mentioned earlier. Moreover, the need to re-contextualize the relevance of English literature in post-colonial Pakistan invited a renewed interest. Educational institutions like the IIUI veered away from the traditional New Critical and New Historical modes of teaching literary texts. These modes of teaching had simply remained focused on the thematic and stylistic aspects of the texts, contextualizing them within their specific eras. Traditionally, the teachers would begin with a brief background of the author in addition to the texts’ historical placement, followed by a close reading of the work at hand. However, in the era of President Musharraf (1999–2008), when the judiciary was targeted and militants in Islamabad were attacked by the government, social resistance reached a new height. Citizens became more vocal and politically active. Hence, it became incumbent on educational institutions to produce critically aware individuals who would be able to relate their socio-political environment with their prescribed course contents. In such a context, deconstructive pedagogy thus becomes a viable means of creating such individuals. Since the teaching of canonical literature remains obligatory in accordance with the HEC outline, the need was to use both the teaching and reading of the prescribed literary texts to hermeneutically exceed any ideological fixity prescribed by the government’s bureaucratic and political machinery. In recent years, we have observed that when institutions like the IIUI teach canonical literature, their aim is not to teach the text and its specific historical background to the students per se; they also aim at developing critical thinking skills through the very same texts and to defy any ideological confinement. This is in line with their overarching departmental policies to align the study of English literature with the specific socio-political environment of the students.

Deconstructive Pedagogy in a Pakistani Context In the light of the above argument, deconstructive pedagogy becomes a means of creating critically aware individuals by using colonial texts to demystify the ideological practices used by the contemporary socio-political structures. Thus, in this paper, we explore how deconstruction may be used as a pedagogical tool. In addition, we also look into whether these pedagogical practices can penetrate the opacity of ideology that such curricula develop. Therefore, in this article, our argument delineates the impact of the British Literary inheritance on post-colonial Pakistan and then moves on to highlighting the fivestep model of deconstructive pedagogy that we applied to classroom activities. On the basis of the students’ responses in class, we then analyzed those responses in the light of the theoretical framework underlying this methodology. However, the analysis is delimited to the teaching of two English literary texts only. In order to justify the inclusion of these texts, we collected the outlines of the courses offered in many prestigious universities across Pakistan over the last decade. We noticed that the selected texts were a common denominator throughout the years since all universities adhered to the HEC’s

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prescribed course outlines. This consistent inclusion made us select them as representative, colonial, British Literary texts in post-colonial Pakistan. These two texts were “Ode to the West Wind” by P.B. Shelley and Macbeth by William Shakespeare. These texts were taught to female students pursuing the Master of English literature degree in the Female Campus of the International Islamic University, Islamabad. The reason for choosing only female students is that the IIUI has separate campuses for males and females and the department is also divided along similar lines with female teachers only teaching female students. The students who were subjected to this mode of pedagogy were all Pakistani students of the MA English first semester whose first language was Urdu. They were all in their early 20s with most of them being of Punjabi and Pashtun backgrounds. In addition, Urdu was the first language of most of these students, with many speaking various dialects of Punjabi and Pashto at home. Urdu remains the lingua franca of Pakistan owing to its standing as both an official and national language. While English is another official language, in most rural and urban centers it is only taught for the purposes of reading and writing. That is why most of our students are hesitant to speak in English despite having studied the language for fourteen years prior to their enrollment in the Master of English program during which, in most cases, English was taught through Urdu and using the grammar translation method. While a number of elitist schools do teach their students to think, write, read and speak fluently in English, most of these students do not pursue a degree in English literature from local universities. A number of our students at the IIUI are from the middle class and lower middle class backgrounds for whom a degree in English is a means of social and financial amelioration. Despite these differences, all our students had undergone a similar level of formal education. The teachers were also Pakistanis; hence, they were cultural insiders within the socio-political context where these texts were taught. Apart from being their instructor, the first author of this paper is pursuing a PhD in English literature from the National University of Modern Languages in Islamabad and is a lecturer with 11 years teaching experience at the IIUI. The lesson plans were designed on the basis of her research in post-colonial studies in collaboration with her co-author who has a doctoral degree in Education, a 15 year university teaching experience and is currently a professor heading the Education Department at the IIUI. She is intimately familiar with the political dimensions of the various syllabi implemented in the humanities throughout Pakistan. Despite not being the research supervisor of the first author of this paper, we have collaborated extensively in academics over the last one decade. The major premise behind designing this mode of deconstructive pedagogy was the understanding that if a deconstructive reading of a text could open up the closure of meanings, activating a text as an agent within this dispositive, this approach in teaching would encourage a thinking process that defies ideological confinement. This hypothesis then led to the gradual development of the five-step model of deconstructive pedagogy given in the course of this discussion. On the basis of the lesson plan and the length of the texts under consideration, in some of the preliminary lessons, the students interpreted the texts in the light of the arguments given by the critics canonized in English Literary studies. Once a particular text was covered within that framework, we then proceeded to an open discussion based upon a deconstructive reading of the selected texts. This mode of teaching was done throughout the semester during which the students were


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undertaking the courses of Classical Drama and Classical Poetry which include both Macbeth and “Ode to the West Wind.” Therefore, our paper suggests ways as to how this ideological demystification through deconstructive pedagogy can induce alterations in the subjectivities of the Pakistani students within their respective socio-political network. Since this study is interdiscursive, we have blended the post-colonial discourse and deconstructive theory to demystify this ideological interpellation through the English literature courses at the Master’s Level in Pakistan. This has been done through interweaving deconstructive terms and assumptions provided by Derrida, Spivak, Said and Foucault. This is because these theoretical paradigms provide a lens through which a strategy may be mapped in order to unveil the layers of the ideological subjection of the people of this country through the courses in English literature. One of the reasons for our preference for deconstructive pedagogy is that through it, a teacher’s position is also de-centered. Weise (2008) emphasizes this approach in the following terms: I try, within the strictures of the university structure that employs me, to begin my course by placing my traditional position under erasure, that is, by removing the violence of the one; I am not the authority, I tell them, I cannot approve or disapprove of the writing they will do in my course. It is their peers, their discourse community that will determine the adequacy of their articulations. The students, the heterogeneous many, are the center of the course. (para. 2)

Hence, as teachers teaching colonial English literature in post-colonial Pakistan, our primary job is to simply facilitate in the origination of ideas rather than imposing notions through “homogenizing gestures” (Weise, 2008, para. 7). The teacher initiates the practical task of dismantling centrisms and allowing the students “to interrogate many issues at play in a variety of discourse communities” (Weise, 2008, para 12).

Deconstructive Pedagogy: Defying Ideological Colonization For Edward Said (1993), nations are “narrations” through which emancipatory ideas can be extracted (p. xiii). We take this premise a step forward in post-colonial Pakistan, which is a democracy. Deconstructive pedagogy allows our critically aware students to become participants within the democratic discourse as they are able to re-think the contemporary narratives of nationhood and their political configuration. On these grounds, questions based upon Shakespeare’s Macbeth and Shelley’s “Ode to the West Wind” were designed to initiate a discussion in class as to how a deconstructive pedagogy may be used to demystify the ideological closure imposed by a British literary text within colonial and post-colonial environments. While designing these questions, we had kept in mind the traditional, colonial approaches to teaching these texts in numerous Pakistani universities and colleges. These approaches involve a reading of these texts only within the Western critical canon without re-contextualizing the interpretations in terms of the socio-political and racial contexts of the contemporary Pakistani students. Even a cursory glance at the annotated textbooks prescribed by the HEC’s course outlines supplements this fact. Consequently, in the formulation of our deconstructive pedagogy, our aim has not been to show again how the English literary syllabus was used as an interpellatory tool.

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Our objective is to set this premise in motion instead of simply inverting it. We do not hesitate to acknowledge that this is a heavy-loaded claim. Even if an academic does engage in a subversive or differential reading of a literary text exposing the very mechanisms that lead to socio-political opacity, the centrality of the syllabus is not totally dismantled. This is because the academic needs to circle back to the same colonial text as the “provisional origin” (Spivak, 1997, p. xiii) of his/her argument so that this provisional origin may be dismantled. The support to this methodology is evinced in Of Grammatology. Keeping Derrida’s (1967) own practice in view, our deconstructive pedagogy proceeds in five steps that can be utilized within the pedagogical practices of English literature curriculum in modern day Pakistan. These steps, based upon the deconstructive and post-colonial theories, are enunciated below. Erasing any authoritative interpretation or source of interpretation that may be used in class to inaugurate the decoding of a colonial text within a post-colonial environment such as Pakistan. This erasure of authority also permits a decentering of the teacher as the reservoir of all knowledge and certainties. In accordance with the tenets of deconstruction, viewing language and texts as malleable, open-ended entities creating meanings through the play of the “trace” and “differ ence”1 (Spivak, 1997, p. lxx). Placing language and literary texts both as mediators, agents and objects in multiple, contextual discursive practices Transferring the play of the “trace” and “difference” (Spivak, 1997, p. lxx) to a different spatiotemporal context to open up the creation of new meanings of texts and their contextually variable underlying political substratum Keeping this play of the “trace” and “difference” (Spivak, 1997, p. lxx) contextually open-ended to counter any mode of constraining interpellation that might unwittingly emanate out of such a deconstructive exegesis of literary texts in class.

While designing this model, we kept in mind an important point that Spivak presented in her “Translator’s Preface.” She states that a book or a text is not a stable and continuous entity. When a book is re-read, it is not inherently the same. It is within this difference in interpretation that the meanings of a text are constantly negotiated. The students’ discussions given below are in line with Spivak’s and Derrida’s idea that every re-reading of a book produces a simulacrum of the extremely unstable original idea which is not only variable in itself in the mind of the writer of the work, but is also constantly shifting in the minds of the readers. Therefore, an earlier conceptual outline is sketched, deleted and reconfigured, so that an ongoing interplay of difference is initiated. This idea is diagrammatically presented in Figure 1. We noticed in our class discussions that this interplay of differ ence interscribes the author, the teacher, the student, the text and the socio-political context. Thus, the students generate new meanings through a play of difference that is not only internal to a text but also interacts with the episteme of their society generating malleable meanings and possibilities of thought. It is through this opening up of the possibilities of thought that the counterfoil to ideological colonization may be found and can become a more liberatory thought process. This is because every ideological boundary constrains thought and action. Deconstructive pedagogy thus subjects all boundaries to erasure. In this way, it transcends the ideological perimeters which govern social interpellation through texts. In questioning the selected texts within their own post-colonial


B

A

C

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First reading Dispositive

re-readings

Figure 1. Displacement in meanings through re-readings.

sociopolitical framework, the students present arguments that counter social interpellation. What is important to emphasize here is that in opening up textual meanings within different spatio-cultural and political contexts, the selected texts become both tools and processes (Locke, 2004, p. 14). Additionally, in a class, they become subjects with agency in their ability to constitute meanings as they are being re-configured through the interplay of differ ence in an ongoing hermeneutic process. This hermeneutic process is evident in the students’ classroom discussions given in the next section.

Deconstructive Pedagogy in Post-Colonial Pakistan While designing our deconstructive pedagogical approach, we had to keep Pakistan’s historical and contextual parameters in mind. Pakistan is a country whose history is a palimpsest of numerous foreign multicultural dynasties. Their imprints have experienced “erasure” (Spivak, 1997, p. xiv), as numerous traces have been left which were later written over by the subsequent conquerors through the stylus of power. Therefore, the usage of the deconstructive term “trace” (Derrida, 1967, p. 9) permits a re-analysis of the conventionally accepted view of reality which is institutionally naturalized (Spivak, 1997, p. xiii). It was this opaque naturalization that was the reason behind the Anglicization of the English literature curriculum in the Sub-Continent. Resultantly, English literature as an instrument of hegemony remained pivotal in the colonial enterprise. By controlling knowledge, the colonizers influenced the subjectivities of the colonized since whoever controls the field of knowledge is able to influence subject identities (Foucault, 1994). However, what is familiarly known is not “properly known” (Spivak, 1997, p. xiii); therefore, through re-analysis, a subject can counter the interpellatory practices of the colonizer or the state. Spivak (1997) explains: “In examining familiar things we come to such unfamiliar conclusions” (p. xiv); hence, the supposed truth and the constitution of subjectivities does not remain the prerogative of the dominant order. In the students’ discussions given below, the students do not only re-scrutinize their own subjectivities, they also draw unfamiliar conclusions about the texts in their own contexts. Therefore, their responses show that deconstructive pedagogy permits a re-configuration of the self since it initiates those meaning-making mechanisms which challenge all absolutes. In doing so, they undo the social amnesia imposed upon them by the rigidly confined parameters of their curriculum. As mentioned earlier, when a text is re-read, there is a slight shift within the initial closure of meaning as “in redoubling the closure, one splits it” (Spivak, 1997, p. xii) and a

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reader escapes following the same trajectory in the reading process. This is shown in Figure 1 above which establishes the foundation of the remaining discussion. Ideological colonization is based upon imposing a closure of meanings wherein human thoughts are confined. However, through a re-reading of texts, the splitting open of the closure of meanings does not merely stand as a challenge to ideological colonization, it also opens up the space for an individual’s “concern with oneself” (Foucault, 1994, p. 93) so that a subject no longer remains a docile citizen. Since the deconstructive theory posits that the first meaning produced in or by the text is displaced by the meaning produced by the subsequent reading, therefore, a text becomes a series of hermeneutics as Figure 1 elucidates. In Figure 1 above, circle A in the center may be taken as the first reading of a text engaged in by a reader or author. In the readings indicated by circles B and C, the meaning is shown to be displaced, indicated by the diagonals. In Derridean terminology, the text is in effect constituted in the differential gap between those readings, indicated by the two-way arrows in the diagram above. Now, if the re-reading was to be done in a post-colonial environment by the formerly colonized readers, the differential gap would increase. Not only would the re-reading constantly displace meanings, but a text, in the Foucauldian terms, would interact with the skein of institutions and discourses in the contemporary malleable dispositive of a post-colonial country like Pakistan. This diagram elucidates the five-step model of deconstructive pedagogy that we have designed and has been given showing how, through the displacement of any originary meaning, all authoritative meanings are displaced. Consequently, as we move from reading A to readings B and C, the texts become open-ended as new meanings are generated in class. This displacement generates a play of differ ence in class as the students’ discussions given below lead to new interpretations of the selected texts. Therefore, in order to illustrate how the trace and difference operate in generating meanings in texts in different contextual environments, we facilitated the class discussions in such a way that it would allow the students to question the very centrisms around which the prescribed texts revolved. In addition, by placing these texts within their own post-colonial socio-political milieu, the students questioned how the centrality of the Western hegemonic order has remained an integral component of contemporary Pakistan. However, the deconstructive pedagogy begins with the teacher allowing his or her own presence as the center of knowledge to be dismantled as they erased any authoritative interpretation as prescribed by the first step of the five-step deconstructive pedagogical process. Hence, upon entering the class, we told our students that despite being teachers, we were also there as subjects conditioned by the government, just like our students. We specified that we were keen to explore how those very textual practices made us all docile citizens. However, in accordance with Derrida’s postulation, our deconstructive pedagogy doubles back to the origin in order to dismantle it. The lesson begins with a traditional exegesis of the prescribed texts based upon the traditional interpretive readings. Subsequently, in class, we moved back to these very same notions in order to question them so that with every re-reading not only the text, but also its critique, was decentered by opening up at both ends. Once the traditional interpretation was over, certain questions were written on the board for the students. These questions were framed while keeping in mind a deconstructive method of reading and re-reading a text so that multivalent


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interpretations could be extracted vis-a-vis the texts’ spatio-temporal transference. These questions were temporally open-ended to allow a concurrent analysis of the text in different contextual frames. The class discussions were recorded and then transcribed. The students’ names have been changed to maintain their privacy. Some of these open-ended sample questions pertaining to Macbeth are 1. Why did these themes of “the king in the image of God” and “treasons capital” (Shakespeare, 1997 p. 115), acquire a greater political importance in British colonial India? 2. How is the identity and role of a subject revolving around the notion of kingship in the play? 3. Identify the binaries around which the play is based. In a colonizer/colonized binary, how does the notion of King or Master expand itself? 4. If the term King is substituted with the term “government” or “dictator,” how would we re-analyze Macbeth’s actions? Would the compulsory maintenance of a hierarchal order still be taken as a universal truth that the text imposes? 5. Identify any prescribed universal truths embedded within the text and see whether and how they are relevant in a Pakistani individual and collective context. 6. How is the notion of Kingship or governmental control still relevant in the British and Pakistani democratic contexts? With such questions initiating the session, the class discussion began with the contextual placement of the texts within the Western epistemological framework at the time of their birth. In the case of Macbeth, themes such as the king being taken in the image of God and any action done against the King being a defiance of the natural order that blocks God’s grace, etc., had already been introduced to the students with reference to the text’s placement within Elizabethan England. In response to the first question pertaining to Macbeth, a student called Maria inquired, “But Bahadur Shah Zafar was the king of India when the British took over. So wasn’t deposing him “treasons capital”? Wasn’t the anarchy that followed also similar in pattern to the one that followed after the murder of King Duncan? So if Macbeth is guilty, so are the British in India.” Another student, Zahra, intervened, “By that analogy the colonized Indians were justified when they rose against the British, just like Macduff was.” Nabeela observed, “Why are we defining ourselves in terms of Macbeth and Macduff, or even Duncan? Aren’t we re-centering the British again by placing them as the privileged standard?” The instructor says, “Okay, that’s a good point. We should explore that. But let me ask three more questions. First, had the kind King been non-White and/or non-British would Macbeth’s act against him still be seen as treasons capital? Second, had it been a non-White subject murdering a white king, how would the interpretation of the narrative be altered? And what if it were a non-White subject murdering a non-White king?” After a thoughtful silence, Nabeela said, “It’s all a matter of privilege. While the colonizers always enforced their place of privilege, I think any non-White ruler would do the same. If we are to speak in Macbeth’s context, with a nonWhite subject killing Duncan it is obvious that all the members of the court would have penalized the non-White subject. Look what happened to Othello, and he didn’t even murder a king! If it were a non-White king murdered by a non-White subject, the outcome

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would depend upon the social standing of the murderer. We see that every day in our society. We have loads of Macbeths in Pakistan, don’t we?” Abeeha raises another point: “I think the universalisms in this text are debatable. Take the law of retribution as a case in point: how many people actually experience retribution for their wrongs, particularly the powerful?” At this point, the debate gets heated up in class, leading to the point where a student named Anabia points out that Macbeth in essence tries to break out of the system that had constructed him, and yet folds back within the same system. As a subject he had endeavored at least to break out of its confines, but as a ruler he becomes the upholder of the same hegemonic order which he had defied earlier. At the end of the class, one student named Hafsa simply says, “It’s so difficult to evade centrisms and their constraints! But what if there had been no center, no Duncan, no government, no colonizer, no bureaucracy: who would we be? Would we be us? If there were no power structures, would we have any subjectivity; would there still be any such constructs as the White or non-White race?” Another student, Warda, said, “Is that even possible, you know, escaping the ground realities we live in?” And the argument goes on. We saw in class that in the re-readings of the selected texts within a malleable contextual environment that crossed cultural, linguistic, ideological, ethnic, temporal and racial barriers, the split in the closure of meanings became a fertile ground for extending the hermeneutic play of a text that defies closure. As the discussion segues from any established canonical interpretation, the students’ questions regarding race and subjectivity make the text more malleable as it becomes an agent, mediator and object during its transfer from one socio-political context to another. Some of the conclusions drawn by the students are that the play Macbeth surreptitiously instills the notion amongst the masses that any action against the monarch would offend a higher heavenly power. In doing so, the question as to how the Indians view the deposing of the Indian king by the usurping white man opens up the play of difference, as the contextual alteration allows the text to become not just a subject but a vehicle for opening up different ideas pertaining to the reason why these texts were introduced in the colonial context in the first place. It also reveals the erasure to which the consciousness of the colonial subjects was subjected through this imposition of standardized versions of so-called “truths”. Thus, the students do not get enfolded within any ideological enclave as the questions they raise energize the play of the trace amongst the different re-readings of the texts. Herein lies the liberatory praxis of our deconstructive pedagogy. Keeping Figure 1 in mind, numerous meanings are constantly generated with every re-reading as the White/non-White binary is re-scrutinized. The original meaning of the text is constantly getting displaced as the text comes in contact with different consciousnesses in different contexts. While the re-readings of the text are used to highlight cultural and racial differ ences, the space between them becomes more permeable and even nonhierarchal. The non-essentializing tendencies that one notices above may initiate post-post-colonial discussions where the gap between the East and the West is reduced. This post-post-colonial discussion could move on from the blame-the-colonizer discourses, particularly in the context of a generation that has not directly experienced political colonialism. Many post-colonial societies have been independent for many decades during which they have had ample time to re-configure their own socio-cultural and political institutions. Post-post-colonialism could address the issue of exorcising the ghost of the colonial past. In addition, the students tend to see universally common behaviors


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prevalent across the cultural divide. This mode of analysis necessitates a re-viewing of the binaristic post-colonial discourse that invariably maintains the center/periphery binary. While this binary is held up for scrutiny, the critique does not merely include the Western critical and philosophical traditions, but also alludes to non-Western philosophical ideological and literary traditions to reflect upon these texts. In addition, no non-Western text or critical tradition has been placed in a superior position since that would be coopting the same imperialist strategies of exclusion. Questions pertaining to altered racial paradigms and power relations as well as the placement of these texts within the Pakistani socio-political context have been raised. This mode of teaching thus allows the textual meaning to be displaced from any constraining center and to engage actively in decoding the interests of the various masters (colonial and post-colonial) in the shaping of subject identities as suggested by Figure 1. In this way, earlier interpretations of the text undergo erasure and an ongoing process of mediation is initiated. Therefore, the same texts may now be used to make the modes of interpellation transparent. Similarly, some open-ended questions on the “Ode to the West Wind” were given to the students before they came to class. The questions are 1. Would Shelley’s notion of change and revolution find relevance in a non-European and non-White context? 2. Would the text have been prescribed by the British colonizers had it been written by a non-British colonized individual in the colonial era? 3. How is the West Wind, as a metaphor of change, only confined to the Western epistemological context? 4. Can Shelley’s idea of the anticipation of inevitable change really be taken as a universal formula for emancipation in all socio-political contexts? 5. Can Shelley’s message be found to be relevant in the context of any political oppression conducted in a Pakistani context? 6. Can Shelley be compared with any Pakistani poet writing in Urdu? If so, do you think that a Pakistani poet can also be granted a similar universalist stature as Shelley? 7. The very canonization of this poem may be seen as a mode of prescribing a specific mode of resistance emanating out of a Western ideological outlook. How was this element beneficial to the colonial and post-colonial masters in the former colonies? Place this exploration within a Pakistani context. In discussing the “Ode to the West Wind,” questions regarding the formation of a British man’s national identity and patriotism have been raised in the light of the text’s spatio-temporal placement at the time of its composition, followed by its placement within colonial India and post-colonial Pakistan. In order to overcome the disjuncture between the spatio-temporal contexts of both the writer and the post-colonial reader, these questions invited an active critique of the axiomatic nature of many statements that stress upon the sanctity accorded to kingship, and question the relevance of such universalisms, whether they are represented by Shelley or Shakespeare. In this discussion, the students questioned the significance of these self-proclaimed universalisms in a colonial context, as to how these were used to develop a sense of subservience within the colonized people in India. One student named Ayesha objected to the images of freedom associated with the West Wind, as the Wind is also taken as a medium of control, merely

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imposing a certain definition of freedom which, inherently, posits the masses as the new hegemonic order. Another student, Rubina, claimed that power is not inherently decentered. A student, named Abeeha, argued that local Pakistani poets writing in English, like Taufiq Rafat, had used the monsoon as a metaphor for freedom. Therefore, that was more culturally relatable than the West Wind. She added that what was important was that the inherent definitions of freedom that Rafat used remained West-centric. From then onwards, the students began to challenge the universalisms present within the text, arguing that not only is the West Wind a symbol of freedom but of a freedom that is inherently a Western construct which might not be applicable in a social context that has not experienced the Enlightenment era of the Western intellectual evolution. A student claimed, “The Enlightenment era was binaristic and hierarchal!” Another student, Nabeela, countered, “But when the Mughals were in power in the Sub-Continent the ruler/subject binary was pretty much enforced! I don’t think it is fair to say that binaristic thought is an inheritance of the Enlightenment ethos! Binaristic thought has dominated all ages of conquest and rule. When the Muslims came to the Sub-Continent, the Muslim/non-Muslim binary governed the era. Weren’t the Arabs colonizers as well?” These questions allowed the text to open up contextually and to raise questions about how history had been presented and how it was lived through the text. In doing so, the students question the universalisms embedded within the text. In this discussion, numerous binaries are displaced as students identify similar exclusionary exercises of power across all cultures. The distinction amongst the center/ periphery, the East/West is blurred. Such questions generate new readings that can liberate thought and self-constitution. They also make the students aware of how different power structures prescribe the modes of resistance as well. For instance, one student, Maria, raised an argument, “What is the big deal about Shelley’s poem? Faiz Ahmed Faiz and Jalib wrote fiery verses that demanded freedom in times of dictatorship in Pakistan? They were revolutionaries too.” Another declared: “Pedestalizing a poet is not unique to British literature. We have pedestalized Dr. Muhammad Iqbal too. If Shelley has been used for ideological control, then the other poets (both English and Urdu) who we are studying or eulogizing may have been used for the same purposes!” A student, named Sidra, said, “Does that mean they displayed no poetic excellence? Is it only politics that raises a writer to a standing of greatness? Can there be no poetry without politics?” The political reasons behind the inclusion of these texts in a Pakistani environment, apart from their chronological placement, were also explored in the process and the binary of the West/ non-West, colonial/Post-colonial was held up to constant scrutiny. A student asked the instructor directly, “Whether I accept the importance of this text or not, I have to read it! So is this poem really decentered? And don’t I still remain mired in the center/periphery binary? I am still a Pakistani girl in a Pakistan that is marginalized by the West. Besides, I am still a student who is being told to see texts in this deconstructive way. So are you really not an authority, Miss?” Another student questioned the message of the West Wind in the light of the failure of the Arab Spring and the peaceful anti-government demonstrations in Pakistan, arguing that the modes of demonstration were “alwaysalready” (Derrida, 1967. p. 66) prescribed. Another said, “So, if there were no centers what would we be? Would there be a possibility for an ‘I’?” These questions do not have easy or definite answers but they lead the students to investigate why and how they have become what they have become. They carry out such


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investigations through the displacement of epistemological positions that is presented in Figure 1. This displacement is further augmented with every re-reading of these texts so that meanings are in a state of constant production and erasure as has been envisaged by the five-step model above. The students’ open-ended questions reveal how different modes of interpellation are becoming transparent for them. Thus, as mentioned in the model, both the texts and the students become agents in their mutual interaction. By opening up the possibilities of thought, these students begin to engage in epimeleia heautou which is “the self that creates the subject in its relation to itself through power” (Kelly, 2009, p. 100; authors’ italics). This enables them to see themselves in an ongoing process of mediation with their socio-cultural environment so that they recognize that they need to re-view their subjectivities according to the demands of their dispositive in a democratic and tolerant manner. Thus, through this discursive mediation, they participate in a constructive social alteration. By demystifying the ideological foundation of any text, the students see the matrix of the text, their world and themselves as processual. At the same time, by maintaining a critical distance, they engage in self-evaluation and an ideological exchange. What is also seen is that in opening up the enclosure, meaning is not re-confined. Thus, the texts are not used as tools of interpellation and for constituting subjectivities. The students’ discussions resist any confinement within the range of textual meanings implemented by the hegemonic order. In leaving the meanings open ended within an epistemological canvas composed of malleable discourses, the selected texts become tools for reviewing their world. If a text, introduced in line with a hegemonic agenda, can be used as a tool for framing human subjectivities, then in subjecting it to a deconstructive analysis and demystifying its ideological underpinnings within altering discursive contexts, our students have used them to subvert and challenge these mechanisms of control. In addition, through their discussions they have unveiled the various modes through which a prescribed mode of interpretation creates docile political subjects.

Re-reading English Literary Texts in Post-Colonial Pakistan As suggested by the class discussions given earlier, deconstruction permits a backward and forward reading of a text, a reading that goes back in time and can also go forward into the future. This deconstructive mode of textual reading as a pedagogical tool has been used to transplant a text from one power-based, socio-cultural and political substratum to another. While this did not distort the text in itself, this transplantation did allow the selected texts to interact with multiple other components within a different dispositive. In the post-colonial context, this allowed the unveiling of meanings and the political goals of a text that are relevant to its historical placement and evolution in time within its own civilizational parameters, but also within a different culture and time. Thus, in Spivakian terms, they behave as essentially open-ended “genuinely provisional” origins and conclusions (Spivak, 1997, p. xiii). In opening up these texts at both ends, their participation and transference across multiple discursive boundaries across time and space became a viable tool in our hands as teachers of English literature in a post-colonial context. Hence, the meaning-making mechanism of a British colonial text handed down to a post-colonial dispositive resists being read in the same paradigm as that of a British

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person in Great Britain living at the time when the text was written, or by a colonized Indian reading it in colonial India. This is because the contextual placement of these readers and the contextual displacement of the texts provide them with a greater freedom in de-coding the same text in a different manner. We see a displacement of the “epistemological position” of our students who are “not an intimate product(s) or producer(s) of the specific historical and psychological conditions” of that culture (Simms, 1997, pp. 125– 126). Our deconstructive pedagogical practice with colonial texts utilizes this displacement to demystify ideological colonization. This “disjunction” (Simms, 1997, p. 130), as shown in Figure 1, is the space where we as non-British teachers teaching Classical British literature in a former British colony were able to produce new hermeneutic voices that challenge the “supposedly global theories” (Simms, 1997, p. 130) and authoritative criticisms that were generated through the colonial imposition of the British literature curriculum. Another objective behind the opening up of the enclosure is that if meaning is not reconfined within any enclave, it makes it improbable for the text to be used as a tool of interpellation and constituting fixed subjectivities. In leaving the meanings open-ended within an epistemological canvas composed of malleable discourses, the selected texts have become tools for reviewing the world at large. As stated earlier, if a text introduced in line with a hegemonic agenda can be used as a tool for framing human subjectivities, then in subjecting it to a deconstructive analysis and demystifying its ideological underpinnings within different discursive contexts, our students have questioned and made transparent these mechanisms of control. In addition, through their discussions they have unveiled the various modes through which a prescribed mode of interpretation creates docile political subjects. This demystification of opaque social constructions is the first step towards discarding what Norman Fairclough has termed as the “autonomous subject effect” (1995, p. 44) that makes individuals accept ideology as a self-validating truth. What we also noticed is that this mode of reading initiates a “rupture” (Foucault, 1969, p. 78) within the centuries old meanings extracted from those texts. Through this initiation of new modalities of meanings with a re-reading of texts, the configurations, permutations and modus operandi of power structures across different times and cultures were analyzed within both colonial and post-colonial contexts. Moreover, this approach placed a constant question mark before the colonizer/colonized and center/periphery binaries, constantly holding them up to revision so that neither of the binaries gets fixed within any hierarchal paradigm. This lack of fixity in turn subverts any effort to re-install a new hegemonic order and thus skirts around any mode of stringent ideological colonization that is averse to modification or revision. Another important idea that these class discussions have presented is that the students in post-colonial Pakistan are not blaming the colonizers as they analyze the political practices of their own governments. However, they do bring the era of colonization within their discussions primarily because the colonial systems of governance have remained in place even after the colonies gained independence from the British rule. The ghost of the colonial past continues to haunt Pakistan’s post-colonial present. Since our argument is anchored within the idea of erasure and the play of difference, the ghosts of both the colonial and the pre-colonial past continue to hover between the past and the present. The British colonial curriculum that is still in place in Pakistan does not only function as the ghost of the country’s colonial past, it also brings to light another key aspect of the


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colonial modes of interpellation still in place here. The reason why the ghost of the colonial past continues to haunt our present is to remind all parties involved to address the “symbolic debt” that persists “beyond physical expiration” (Zizek, 1991, p. 23) of colonialism in the region. Yet, it is not only the colonial past that functions as a ghost haunting the country’s present. The native culture, which had been erased by the inscription of the colonial historical narrative over it, also operates as a ghost or a trace that does not merely demand its inscription within the text of history, but also an ongoing re-inscription in the context of the contemporary socio-political scenario of post-colonial Pakistan. Therefore, when British literary texts are taught in the former colonies, multiple ghosts, narratives and memories vie with each other to create new meanings (Zizek, 1991). Not only that, since the ghost of the colonial past has not been completely exorcised, it continues to influence the minds of many people in the former colonies. However, the class discussions presented in this paper also reveal a new aspect regarding this influence. While colonial modes of education had created “desubjectivized” (Mullen, 2014, p. 51) subjects, the same policy is at work in Pakistan today in creating docile political subjects or zombies who are silenced into obedience. The contemporary socio-political institutions in Pakistan encourage this desubjectivization of people through ideological control. As seen above, deconstructive pedagogy invokes the history and facts deleted from the collective unconscious so that the ideologically produced “living dead” (Mullen, 2014, p. 54) no longer remain mired in subalternity as they become living individuals re-inscribing “forgotten histories connected to racism, colonialism and exploitation” (Brioni, 2013, p. 169). The students in our class thus become active speaking agents in the interstitial spaces between the multiple pasts that haunt the present (Brioni, 2013, p. 169). Thus, they rise out of an assumed subalternity and articulate themselves, as they hear silent voices. In doing so, the students do not berate the colonizers; however, they do engage in a critique of their current institutions that continue to perpetuate the very colonial modes of interpellation. What comes to the fore is the failure of the colonized nations to exorcise the ghost of colonialism. Deconstructive pedagogy may allow the students to think in terms of the present time when the colonized people have had ample time to revive their own history and silenced voices. It thus becomes a starting point for initiating a post-postcolonial mode of critical reading. This is further consolidated by the fact that the repeated blending of the selected texts within different contexts and the play of the trace and difference opened up meaningmaking mechanisms, as we have elucidated in Figure 1. While the questions were inaugurally delimited to the West/non-West binary, the discussions that emerged out of this binary raised issues pertaining to race. They also looked into how both the colonial and post-colonial dispositives engaged in a race-based political domination in different times and contexts. Hence, in challenging the original binaries, the discussions in class have been used as a mode of what Spivak has termed as “affirmative sabotage” (Brohi, 2014) to question the very constructed nature of these binaries in both contexts. Through an altered modality of reading, these texts demystify the political interests that underlie the education system in Pakistan. Since deconstruction inherently defies closure, concealing and effacing notions in the very process of their production, deconstructive pedagogy does the same. In raising questions, it defies the perimeters which define our subjectivities and our relationships with the web of power relationships surrounding us. Therefore, this

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pedagogy re-visits the closure within which our thoughts are confined. The process does not involve a total destruction of all centers but an open and candid re-evaluation of the processuality of those centers in framing subjectivities. Moreover, this mode of teaching and learning creates frangible centers that collapse and lead to new frangible centers, so that the process of thought goes on unhindered. Through this deconstructive pedagogy, the aim is not to find definite answers, but to identify the points of view that are relevant to the students’ context and their functionality within their communities. This provides an interesting groove for analysis since all former colonies have undergone varying political developments in their respective contexts. The analysis of the displacement of meanings of colonial English Literary texts in different post-colonial contexts could provide a space for further research as to how the colonial texts may be used to engage in post-post-colonial analysis of the forms of ideological interpellation that has taken place through them and how the essentialist categories may be dismantled. In addition, the notions of subalternity and marginality also come under a revisionary scrutiny thorough this pedagogical approach. This is because the students’ discussions given above function within the spaces that exist among multiple thought loci, preventing any of the loci to become a violent, hegemonic monolith. This ensures the progression of thought and the re-consideration of our roles as social citizens as we demystify ideological colonization in post-colonial Pakistan.

Note 1. In Derrida’s Of Grammatology, the idea of the trace refers to the originary non-origin that is in a state of constant erasure. It is through its constant erasure as a signifier that it activates meanings and displaces any fixity in the sign and its relation with the signified. In displacing this fixity, the trace operates within this distance among signs, creating more meanings. According to Derrida, “The trace is in fact the absolute origin of sense in general. Which amounts to saying once again that there is no absolute origin of sense in general. The trace is the difference which opens appearance [l'appara^ıtre] and signification” (1967, p. 65; italics in original). In Derridean terminology, the terms trace and difference overlap. If the trace is the signifier that is under constant erasure, difference is the meaning that is not only different but also open-ended, hence, it is perpetually deferred. In its deferment, difference evades any enclosure. In Of Grammatology, difference is defined as “defers-differs [di f f ere]” (1967, p. 69; italics in original). In our paper, difference is the open-ended space that is created as meanings are displaced with every reading.

Disclosure statement No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes on contributors Asma Mansoor is a lecturer in the Department of English at the International Islamic University, Islamabad, Pakistan. She is currently working toward the PhD degree in English literature. Her research papers have been published in international journals including the New Writing: The International Journal for the Theory and Practice of Creative Writing, the South Asian Review and Palgrave Communications.


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Samina Malik is the chairperson of the Department of Education. Her areas of study and specialization are teacher education and learning technology. She has been published in numerous international journals including Gender and Education as well the Journal of Law and Psychology.

ORCID Asma Mansoor

http://orcid.org/0000-0001-9039-5023

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