Enwhitenmen’ and The Woman of Colour — a roundtable on The Woman of Colour (1808) : pedagogic and critical ap-proaches (Roundtable)

• Main Author: Jarvis, J. Ereck
• Other Authors: School of Humanities
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Published: 2021
• Subjects: Humanities::Literature::English
• Online Access: https://hdl.handle.net/10356/148548
• Institution: Nanyang Technological University

Recently, in teaching undergraduate and graduate courses in eighteenth- and nine-teenth-century British literature at Northwestern State University of Louisiana, I reg-ularly refer to Enwhitenmen’, a term I fashioned, though I deny any claim to its orig-ination or ownership. The pun marks the maintenance of patriarchy and the development of white supremacy implicit in Enlightenment: the equation of “Universal reason” and “specific European logic . . . form[s] part of the unspoken epistemological matrix of European superi-ority, the Enlightenment’s legacy, a conflation that helped secure the hierarchical racial order of the imperial world.”1 I connect persistent racist colonizing influences of Enlightenment to my classroom by noting that university—our institution’s type, part of its name—gestures at “Universal reason” and that, for example, literary study at our school is almost exclusively in English (primarily British or American). I foreground the past racism of, say, Macaulay’s 1835 minutes on education as legacy of Enwhitenmen’ in its assertions that dialects of India “contain neither literary nor scientific information” and that “a single shelf of a good Euro-pean library was worth the whole native literature of India and Arabia.”2 Yet, I reenact Ma-caulay’s ideas institutionally and disciplinarily; I reinscribe the faux universality of English. Perhaps my use of Enwhitenmen’ as a critical term playfully invokes and promotes code-meshing, the espousal of multidialectalism particularly through the intentional blending of dialects in formal and informal speech to “reduce language prejudice and promote the power of language as opposed to the codes of power.”