Struggling subjectivities, academic literacies, and the postcolonial predicament

This dissertation examines the postcolonial condition as an interpretive framework for interrogating the writing challenges of students from formerly colonized situations, Studying in U.S. institutions. It takes the view that the writing struggle that Helen Fox and others have observed among these students cannot be fully understood apart from the colonialist structures of power and knowledge, which mediate literacy practices in the postcolonial world. I argue that experiencing literacy as domination contributes to stifled creativity and reduced overall composing confidence, resulting in the incidence of writing struggle and resistance.; Using an interdisciplinary approach that draws on literacy theory, composition pedagogy, colonial history, and postcolonial theory, I demonstrate how Enlightenment ideas about literacy converged with colonialist ideologies of knowledge and power to install restrictive institutional literacies in colonized spaces. My analysis brings together a variety of personal, historical and literary texts, which connect the writing difficulties of formerly colonized students to the colonial dynamic of their subjectification through education.; In Chapter I, I discuss the nature of writing struggle and resistance among nonwestern students studying in the west, in the light of observations that problematize these students as presenting a unique challenge to Composition pedagogy. I argue for students with colonized histories to be recognized as a distinct analytical category in composition studies.; Chapter II discusses the meaning and significance of the postcolonial in the context of theories of literacy. I argue that literacy is as much a social practice as it is an individual affair, and that the political dimensions of this social practice are critical for the type of literacies students develop.; Chapter III discusses how colonial discourse impacts institutionalized literacies in the former British Empire. By reading three postcolonial texts drawn from Africa, the Caribbean, and the South Pacific, I underscore the “literacy in common” diffused by British colonialism, and how the discourse of colonial education produces the colonized subject.; Chapter IV presents and analyzes the Ghanaian experience of colonial literacy in order to exemplify the literacy predicament of students from formerly colonized situations. I emphasize the role of banking education and testing in the production of what I call “restricted literacies.”; As a way out, I propose in the final chapter an approach to writing instruction that combines elements of critical literacy with a therapeutic use of the literacy narrative, within the framework of a mentoring relationship for empowering postcolonial student writers.; By placing the problem of writing struggle and resistance in the historical context of constitutive background experiences, this study opens up fresh possibilities for viewing and approaching the writing difficulties of students damaged by colonialist modes of knowledge and power.