The empire’s new clothes: making the invisible visible

‘It’s impossible to discuss the British empire in the twenty-first century, or even admit to ignorance or curiosity about it, without getting dragged into this binary consideration. And Lord it is bitter… . At the same time, despite inciting such powerful emotions, empire, bewilderingly, remains untaught in most schools: its absence in my education, it transpires, is typical.' (Sathnam Sanghera, Empireland, 2021)

I’m an English graduate and an English teacher. The literary canon is something I worked hard to become familiar with. As a child growing up with Indian parents in a white Cambridgeshire village, I was at once ostentatiously different and a dedicated conformist. I loved to read and I loved school. I loved all the rules and approval I received as I succeeded at the curriculum. Furthermore, despite being the child of immigrant parents, only in Britain as a consequence of empire, I wouldn’t have described my experience of studying English Literature as exclusionary or even narrow.

The canon was the secret to my academic success and the fact that it consisted mostly of dead white men certainly never occurred to me. I don’t think I’m unusual among teachers and English graduates of my age (mid forties). The literary canon is something that I have invested time and meaning into. Often, as is the case with me, it is a signifier of our own success.

So why, after sixteen years of being a mainstream secondary English teacher, have I had enough?

So much of my experience in teaching English Literature at GCSE has been about absence. It has been about what is not said, not acknowledged, and perhaps most importantly, not rewarded within our exam system. During the course of my teaching of nineteenth century literature, I have often been struck by the paradoxical fact that I am analysing language using an invisible lens. In any attempt to look at literary works using the lens of empire, I feel a little like a magician waving a wand, striving to render visible that which we refuse to see.

Let's take two texts often taught on the GCSE English Literature curriculum in England. Robert Louis Stevenson’s The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde (1886) and Charlotte Bronte’s Jane Eyre (1847). I’m sure I am not the only English teacher who has noticed the anxieties around race represented in both these texts at a time when the British Empire was one of the most powerful in the world.

The character of Bertha Mason in Jane Eyre, the white West Indian wife of Mr Rochester, is certainly described as a heavily racialised character. There is an anxiety around her as a colonised subject. Despite her apparent whiteness, Bertha Mason is racialised as other.

Despite such a colonial reading being relatively common in literary criticism, the exam boards make no mention of empire or race. The exam board OCR in its 2019 GCSE English Literature paper posed a question that might allow candidates to focus on the character of Bertha Mason and apply the lens of empire. Candidates are asked to explore the idea of being trapped. Although the extract focuses on gender, it would certainly be possible to apply the lens of race when exploring the idea of being trapped elsewhere in the novel. However such an interpretation is mentioned nowhere in the teaching materials, the sampler answers or the indicative content in the mark scheme.

Similarly in the novel Jekyll and Hyde, it is entirely plausible to see Hyde as described, with the use of racialised language. However, once again the exam boards do not recognise or acknowledge such a reading. AQA indicates to examiners that the simile in the exam extract ‘like a rat’ can be linked to ‘contemporary ideas of evolution’ and not as Jack Halberstam (1995) suggests, ‘stereotypes of both Semitic and black physiognomies’. AQA suggests that ‘Hyde’s violence’ is linked to ‘primitive urges vs civilised values’ but once again no mention is made of what can clearly be linked to racist stereotypes in the adjective ‘primitive’.

As teachers we have a responsibility to our students. By not addressing the absence of the lens of race and empire, we are arguably contributing and furthering a kind of linguistic colonial rule. Until we are able to interrogate these canonical texts using the lens of race and empire, we will not enable students to make connections between significant events in their own lives and these texts.

As Victoria Elliott (2021) argues, if Shelley’s poem ‘Ozymandias’ is not used to discuss the toppling of statues during the 2021 Black Lives Matter protests in Bristol, then what are we using the poem for? I can see no evidence that students would be rewarded for such a reading and therefore we might hypothesise, considering the pressures on teachers, that these discussions are not always taking place.

Perhaps the scholar Michel Foucault (1981) sums up best my issue with not examining nineteenth century texts in the context of empire and also, why I have had enough! ‘What, after all, is the education system, other than a ritualization of speech… an appropriation of discourse with its powers and knowledges?’

As a teacher, I must carefully consider the language that becomes ritualised in my classroom and my own position of power in shaping this language. The lens of empire and race cannot and should not remain invisible if we aim to decolonise the English Literature curriculum. Surely it’s time to acknowledge what we can all see but cannot call out. It's time to look again at our curriculums and mark schemes. It is time to give the empire some new clothes.

This is an edited excerpt of Shashi Knott's research. If you would like to read more, please feel free to contact Shashi directly.

REFERENCES

AQA (2019) Mark scheme: Paper 1 Shakespeare and the 19th-century novel - June 2019. Available at: https://filestore.aqa.org.uk/sample-papers-and-mark-schemes/2019/june/AQA-87021-W-MS-JUN19.PDF (Accessed: 1 September 2022).
Elliott, V. (2021) Knowledge in English: Canon, curriculum and cultural literacy. Abingdon: Routledge.
Foucault, M. (1981) ‘The Order of Discourse’ in Robert Young, R. (ed) Untying the Text: A Poststructuralist Reader. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul.