Spelman College, a historically Black liberal arts institution for women in Atlanta, has eliminated its English department and renamed it the department of literature, media, and writing.
“We’ve changed our major curriculum to move away from the colonial legacies associated with English literature,” said department chair Patricia Ventura. “Decolonizing our major means foregrounding how we work with cultural texts from a wide range of places and traditions.”
While traditional “English” classes, such as British and American literature, are still offered, the department no longer structures its undergraduate major’s requirements around national literature traditions. Instead, the curriculum will focus on liberatory analytical approaches that can be applied across all texts and cultural genres.
“We want to broaden the communities that we speak to and study; and we want to emphasize the diasporic texts and media and the roles of Black women, especially,” said Dr. Ventura. “Basically, the new name and major just make more transparent what we do in our classes — that is, we focus on critical thinking and liberatory ideas.”
Hey Spelman College,
It took you 144 years to finally have a modicum of true Black consciousness in order to make this change is nothing to boast about. In all honesty, you should be downright embarrassed that it took this Black establishment finishing school this long. In other words, imagine all of the countless young Black women who were thoroughly miseducated under the guise of the former English Department. My question to Spelman College is will they offering refunds to those students who received a BA degree in English.