Writing centers need to pay attention to what’s happening at the local level and how it connects to the global level from a transnational perspective.

When we say writing centers use conversation, the question we need to ask is whose conversation and whose idea of collaboration are engaging with in writing center work?

What does it mean to decolonize? Listen to this episode featuring researcher, teacher, poet, and writer, Dr. Nancy Henaku, who helps us unpack terms such as decolonization and transnationalism with a nuanced perspective. As Nancy said, these are big and complex ideas that are not easy to parse out. We hope Nancy’s words encourage you to contemplate these topics in your own contexts.

For listening on your mobile devices, find Slow Agency on Anchor, Apple Podcast, Spotify, and Google Podcasts. Scroll down for a list of resources and the full transcript.

Guest Bio: Dr. Nancy Henaku is a lecturer at the Department of English, university of Ghana, where she teaches linguistics and literature. She uses interdisciplinary perspectives to explore  power and sub alternity  in post-colonial texts and contexts. Her  research areas  include comparative rhetorics, discourse analysis, and multimodal discourse analysis, post-colonial Englishes and semiotics writing studies    and writing center studies, critical theory, intercultural communication, and critical transnational sociolinguistics. Her work has appeared in the African Journal of Rhetoric, companion to African Rhetoric, and a Sweetland Digital Rhetoric collaborative. Nancy completed her doctoral degree in Rhetoric Theory and Culture at Michigan Technological University, where she also served as a consultant of Multiliteracy Center. She has also served as a co-director of the Writing Center at Ashesi University in Ghana. You can learn more about her when you visit her website, nancyhenaku.com.

Resources

Dingo, R. (2018). Speaking well: The benevolent public and rhetorical production of neoliberal political economy. Communication and the Public, 3(3), 232–246. https://doi.org/10.1177/2057047318794964

Inoue, A. B. (2021) Above the well: An antiracist argument from a boy of color. Utah State University Press.

Kubota, R. (2016). The multi/plural turn, postcolonial theory, and neoliberal multiculturalism: Complicities and implications for applied linguistics. Applied Linguistics, 37(4), 474–494.

Mignolo, W. D. (2011). The darker side of Western modernity: Global futures, decolonial options. Duke University Press.

Spivak, G. C. (1988). Can the subaltern speak? in C. Nelson and L. Grossberg (Eds.), Marxism and the interpretation of culture (pp. 271–313). Macmillan.

Transcript

[00:00:00] Weijia Li: Joining us today is researcher, teacher, poet, and writer Dr. Nancy Henaku. Nancy is a lecturer at the Department of English, University of Ghana, where she teaches linguistics and literature. She uses interdisciplinary perspectives to explore power and sub alternity in post-colonial texts and contexts. Some of her research areas include comparative rhetorics, writing center studies, and critical transnational sociolinguistics. Her work has appeared in the African Journal of Rhetoric and a Sweetland Digital Rhetoric Collaborative. Nancy completed her doctoral degree in Rhetoric Theory and Culture at Michigan Technological University. She has also served as a co-director of the Writing Center at Ashesi University in Ghana. You can learn more about her when you visit her website, nancyhenaku.com. Welcome, Nancy.

[00:00:57] Nancy Henaku: Thank you for having me.

[00:00:59] Esther Namubiru: Could you share with us, your background in writing studies and writing center studies?

[00:01:04] Nancy Henaku: I actually started writing center work in 2020. At the time I was, almost done with my doctoral program at Michigan Technological University. I had defended my dissertation and I was supposed to revise it for final submission to the graduate school. Unfortunately, I had to extend for some months and at the same time I was on OPT (optional practical training), so I needed to find something to do. That’s how I ended up in, the Michigan Tech Multiliteracy Center. And I was employed as a consultant, but I was also to work closely with the writing center director at the time on research project. My experience is unique in, in the sense that I came to writing center, very late in my, graduate studies career. And because I was also an international student, I ended up working with, many of the international graduate student who came to the writing center. I worked at the Michigan Tech Multiliteracy Center for about six months, and then after that I moved to Ashesi University, a private university in Ghana, where I served as one of the co-directors of the writing center there. I was supposed to co-direct the writing center and also help create the university’s writing across the curriculum program.

[00:02:38] Currently I work with the University of Ghana, in the English department as a lecturer. and in this role I do not work in the writing center, although we also have a writing center. But although I currently don’t work in the writing center, I still do writing center work outside of writing center institutions.

[00:02:58] I work with colleagues, friends and family members on their writing and I use many of the strategies that we use in writing center spaces in my conversations and collaborations.

[00:03:11] Esther Namubiru: For our listeners who might not be familiar with these concepts at length, could you briefly share with us the difference between neo-colonial and decolonial and post-colonial?

[00:03:23] Nancy Henaku: So, what’s common to all these expressions is colonial. When we think of colonial, often we think of British imperialism, but it’s not just British imperialism. There were also other local imperialisms. For instance, if you look at the sociolinguistic profile of Ghana, you have to think of, the, colonial, influences of English. But you also have to consider how, for instance, Akan, which is one of the indigenous languages in Ghana, dominates other indigenous languages in Ghana. So the power here becomes layered. And the difference is in the use of the post, the de and the neo. After decolonization, or what we call flag independence in some African context, Africans realized that colonialism didn’t end. New colonialism suggests that colonialism didn’t end. It’s transformed itself so that’s a new kind of colonialism. Kwameh Nkrumah will suggest that, neocolonialism is characterized by some kind of negotiation between the elites and the formerly colonized spaces and colonial powers.

[00:04:36] And in my reading of post-colonial theory, there’s this reference to the decolonial process in terms of flag independence, but post-colonial theory also recognizes that colonialism continues to influence people’s lives.

[00:04:54] And one of the important critiques of post-colonialism comes from Walter Mignolo, who suggests that post-colonial theory was very much influenced by the Western tradition. And the decolonial theory is moving away from this Western tradition to consider influences, ideas, knowledge from the other side of the world. In his tracing of decolonial genealogy, for instance, Walter Mignolo goes to the non-west in tracing decolonial ideas. So, I think in many ways the differences between post-colonial and decolonial are really in location. What’s Mignolo will call the locus of enunciation. Where are you speaking from? Who is influencing your perspective? Are your theoretical underpins influenced by the same colonial thought that you seek to critique?

[00:05:54] Esther Namubiru: Can you share how, you see writing center studies intersecting with decolonization and transnationalism?

[00:06:02] Nancy Henaku: When, people think of transnationalism, they associate it with, what manifests globally and on a larger scale, like the coronavirus pandemic. For me, Transnationalism emphasizes what we call cross border circulations and connections. These movements could take different forms. They could be movement in terms of ideas, people, structures, finances and so on and so forth — what the anthropologist Ajun Ajapi will call scapes — transnationalism highlights for us the links between the local and the global, or how different time spaces influence each other. In that respect, it forces us to recognize that our notions of the nation, of the local are always already entangled with an elsewhere.

[00:07:00] Transnationalism is important for writing center work because think about the circulation of the idea of writing center itself, writing center traditionally has been associated with North America, or it started in the US. But more and more we see writing centers being, being opened in, other places in the Middle East, Africa, and many other places. And to understand the nature of this circulation of writing centers to other places and how these centers are operating, we need to have a transnational perspective.

[00:07:39] But also, um, we need to Think about the connection between transnational perspectives and writing center work and decolonial theory. Decolonial theory helps us to critique what Walter Mignolo refers to as the darker side of Western modernity. And modernity itself always already has a transnational dimension. For example, from a transnational perspective, we can understand the global spread of English from Europe to other parts of the world., but the fact that English is associated with prestige, with progress, raises some important questions about the linguistic aspect of modernity.

[00:08:26] I came to the writing center as a transnational subject. My accent wasn’t the dominant American accent. I came from Ghana, which is a post-colonial nation and an English as a second language country. In that sense, I came to the writing center work as a non-native speaker. And I was also an international student. I came with all of these influences as a post-colonial subject and also as a transnational subject in the writing center space that helped me to think deeply about how decoloniality and transnationalism affect the ways in which we approach the work we do inwriting center spaces.

[00:09:14] Weijia Li: Nancy, we came across your literary analysis of Kwame Nkrumah’s book Consciencism. In your analysis, you propose that Nkrumah has four kinds of decolonial moves, and one of the kinds is called critique of the universalist outlook of western epistemology. What is the universalist outlook of western epistemology?

[00:09:42] Nancy Henaku: A universalist outlook of western epistemology, refers to how provincial ideas, or experiences of, western modernity are presented as universally agreed facts or truths that we all must embody.

[00:10:07] My work on Decolonial Rhetorics is influenced by Walter Mignolo, so I will refer to him often. Mignolo suggests that the universalist outlook of western epistemology is an effort to homogenize the world in ways that creates, epistemic totalitarianism . You pick someone’s historical, provincial, local experience and then you present it almost as if that is true to all experiences. And in that sense, we create the universal. It homogenizes human culture.

[00:10:48] And in the process of homogenizing human culture, other important cultures and experiences are erased and people become alienated from their experiences. So, in Nkrumah’s, Consciencism, he suggests that the whole of the Western philosophical canon, is informed by specific cultural or historical experiences. However, this canon presents these experiences as if they are true to all human experiences. He makes reference to Aristotle and Plato’s concept of citizenship, suggesting that this idea is always already tainted by ideas about who belongs and who doesn’t belong with the implication that citizenship, at least in the Greco Roman tradition, was always already linked to slave labor.

[00:11:49] In relation to writing center work, much of what we do in writing center spaces are also influenced by universalism. it’s important that we pay attention to critique of universalism. Mignolo suggests that universalism is discursive, it’s constructed. It’s a vision. And this vision is constructed through language and other semiotic moods. At the same time, universalism defines which linguistic practices are acceptable or not. For instance, in writing center work, there is a lot of emphasis on conversation and collaboration. However, whose conversation and whose idea of collaboration are we engaging with? In writing center spaces, we are working with a certain ideology of neutrality, of linguistic objectivity, multilingualism, multiliteracy, multi-modality. These ideas are often used in ways that actually fit neatly into a certain, um, model of linguistic homogeneity. And that’s because many writing centers exist to ensure that people become proficient in academic literacy. And if we want to, make people proficient, in academic literacy, it also means that certain aspects of the linguistic cultures of the people who come to writing center are somehow rendered less useful in writing center spaces. Hi there. It’s Esther. If you’re liking what you hear, please leave us a review and subscribe. It helps us and it helps others find this podcast. Thank you.

[00:13:59] Anna Habib: What do you see as the usefulness of a translingual approach and orientation in writing center spaces?

[00:14:18] Nancy Henaku: I connect translingualism to transnational studies, writing studies, writing center scholarship, rhetorical scholarship and so on. And I will respond from a post-colonial perspective because that’s where I’m located currently.

[00:14:35] Much of the transnational work that’s happening in the US is also very colonial in the sense that it’s transnational in relation to the US so that sometimes other forms of transnational practices are erased. So, I want to be very careful here, translingualism is very important from a decolonial perspective because decolonial theory emphasizes pluriversalism, it’s a response, to the homogenous ideas in, the western epistemological traditions. But We want to highlight translingualism in, north American Writing Centers, if you look at the scholarship, you would notice that much of it is about English in relation to other languages, and yet there are so many languages in the world and in some people’s experiences, English doesn’t even play a very important role. What we need to do is to also decolonize our ideas of translingualism, right? We need to constantly ask ourselves, whose translingualism are we using, and how does our idea of translingualism also reinforce colonialist linguistic projects?

[00:16:01] But also understand that translingualism cannot be divorced from neoliberal projects, it’s commodification of diversity, right? It’s a very complex issue that I don’t think we can unpack here, but the point I’m trying to make here is that translingualism I think presents us with some very important de-colonial possibilities. But we must always ask ourselves the location from which we are constructing our notions of translingualism and whether these ideas of translingualism are reproducing colonialist ideas.

[00:16:46] Anna Habib: Do orientations like anti-racism actually disrupt? Are they doing decolonial work?

[00:16:53] Nancy Henaku: Based on observations that I have made about neoliberalism, I think that there is something very interesting happening with the construction of race in neoliberal times. Many times, when we look at racism and racist ideologies, we want to focus on the body, the white body, right? of course there’s also, Scholarship on the construction of whiteness as an idea. But neoliberalism complicates that because some scholars have talked about new whiteness and some of these notions of new whiteness is move beyond the corporeal, beyond phenotypical features. Some of these new Whitenesses, are associated with accents, right? Asao Inoue suggests that you don’t have to be white to actually perform, white language practices. And although he doesn’t necessarily mention neoliberalism in that paper, If I remember correctly, I think that you can actually understand what he’s trying to say when you take a neoliberal view in the sense that in under, neoliberal context, we have now created, a construct of what it means to speak well, and I’m referring specifically to Rebecca Dingo’s work on speaking well.

[00:18:17] So there is a rhetorical construct on what it means to speak well in contemporary times and irrespective of who you are, if you are black, if you’re white, if you’re disabled, and so on and so forth. If you can appropriate this linguistic practice, then you are invited into partake in, I would say, the opportunities that neoliberalism presents. That does not mean that old school racism and racist ideologies are no longer important. The point I’m trying to make is that they have become even more complicated, and you need to do much more work to unmask these transformations. Right? It requires that we are highly critical and that requires interdisciplinary work in writing center studies.

[00:19:18] Anna Habib: Thank you. I was just reading this article the title is The Multiplural Turn Post-Colonial Theory and Neoliberal Multiculturalism: Complicities and Implications for Applied Linguistics. One of the arguments is that our emphasis on multi pluralism, multilingualism, translingualism is very deeply tied to neoliberal ideologies. For example, translingualism as a liberatory orientation, who’s liberated by that orientation? A lot of people outside of the Western context have real material needs for example, English. When we say that, let’s do away with English as the language of prestige, which I think ideologically many of us do believe in, the material implications for so many people is that that is in fact disempowering. So we have to be very careful about where these conversations fit in within this neoliberal reality.

[00:20:22] Nancy Henaku: If you work in, our English as a second language context, you see it every day students come to the writing center looking for linguistic opportunities. And they are asking, how can the writing center help me make use of their linguistic opportunities out there? And many of these students do not have the kind of opportunities that other people located in the West have, and yet they are also aware of the post-colonial implications of trying get access to the English language.

[00:20:54] So for us in Accra, Ghana, post-colonial work is not just academic. It’s people’s everyday experiences. When the students come to writing center spaces, they are always already aware of the colonial dimensions of their linguistic practices. But they also know that they have to take advantage of certain ways of languaging in order to have, access. And when they come to writing center spaces, they are looking for some way to have access to some linguistic opportunity out there.

[00:21:29] Esther Namubiru: The word student is monolithic. If you’re talking to a student from South Africa versus a student from Ghana versus a student from Uganda, they’re going to have unique experiences because the context in which they are experienced colonialism differently from other spaces. The way that we negotiate colonial history is different. That also means that the way that we negotiate decolonization is different.

[00:21:54] Nancy Henaku: Is Esther I think there’s a very important point because a lot of the times we think that decolonization is this one thing, but decolonization could be different things for different groups based on their own historical relationships with the Colonial Project. But also, people think that, oh, we have to do decolonial work, and then it’ll all end. You have to constantly do it because power keeps morphing in different ways in response to, new development.

[00:22:24] Currently neoliberalism is complicating the ways in which we analyze and, experienced power in everyday life. But you’re right, the Decolonial projects and the post-colonial or the colonial project manifest in different ways, and it’s important that we pay attention to these differences.

[00:22:59] Anna Habib: What advice would you give center administrators thinking about starting a writing center or sustaining their writing center given decolonization?

[00:23:09] Nancy Henaku: I would say, engage with critical interdisciplinary scholarship. Don’t just limit yourself to writing center scholarship. I know that writing center scholarship is complex but take a look at what Applied linguists are saying. Look at sociolinguistics, colonial and post-colonial linguistics and also transnational, studies because once you read what is happening in these fields, it’s helps you to situate the Writing Center work in a broader global context beyond the very local spaces.

[00:23:43] And I say that ideas of writing center safe space is based on who is coming to the writing center. We actually don’t know about the experiences of those who are not coming to the writing center. And we don’t know why they’re not coming to the writing center because in my mind, a writing center should be for everyone. I’m referring specifically to university writing centers. If everyone in the university is coming to the writing center, the writing center should be full. But writing centers are not always full. In fact, writing center spaces are often smaller compared to other spaces.

[00:24:19] and writing center workers have to visit classes to encourage people to use the writing center. If communication is everyone’s business, then all of us should be moving to the center. Why are other people not moving to the center?

[00:24:35] As writing center directors, we have to consider what is happening outside of what we have constructed as a safe space. Those who work in writing centers, those who visit writing centers for help, are all shaped by experiences outside of writing center walls.

[00:24:54] And these experiences impact how they see writing center work and their relations with writing centers. But also when people come to writing centers, they don’t just come with your writing or their language, they also come with their bodies. And these bodies and languages are impacted by external structures of power. To understand the history of these bodies and these languages, you need to go outside of the writing center, pay attention to the politics that’s happening outside of the writing center. Think of in South Africa, #FeesMustFall, or the Roma’s four movement, or the Coronavirus Pandemic, the Death of George Floyd, all of these incidences highlight the need for us to pay attention to what is happening outside. We shouldn’t be too comfortable in our safe space. A writing center director should try to get its center paying attention to the stories or the culture of their center and the people in them are part of a larger story happening outside of the writing center.

[00:26:03] Weijia Li: Nancy, is there anything that we didn’t ask?

[00:26:06] Nancy Henaku: So first of all, thank you for having me. I keep saying that I’m located in Accra, Ghana, and it’s important I keep repeating that because often, when you’re located outside of North America, it’s very difficult to, get your perspectives represented in, the conversations within the fields. My university has a writing center and, we also have a writing center in Ashesi University where I was previously employed and there are a number of writing centers on the African continent. I hope that you will engage with, the scholars and workers in these contexts. So keep up the good work by inviting more people from the margins.

[00:26:48] Esther Namubiru: That’s it for today’s episode. We’d like to thank Emmanuel Mubiru for providing us our theme song and podcast co for providing us the songs Top Hop and Raining Again. If you’d like to learn more about this episode or any of the episodes in Slow Agency, please visit our website at wlnjournal.org/blog.