Don’t throw the colonial text out with its ideology!: Recruiting a colonial text to do decolonial work on a university academic literacy course

Since 2015, South African universities have undergone a major overhaul, with students nationwide calling for curriculum reform to introduce texts and approaches that do not perpetuate colonial ideologies. This presented an opportunity to shed untransformed ways of knowing, and recent publications in the region reflect this impetus. It is in this climate, in 2019, that our course, Writing Across Borders, was launched to foster critical literacy practices, exposing students to diverse texts, including a history textbook published in 1909. Our use of this textbook presently could be questioned. We argue, however, that instead of throwing the colonial text out with its ideology, it can be recruited differently to reveal its problematic constructions of race and contradictions. This article models the class discussions around the history textbook, applying a critical discourse analysis lens, which allows for multi-layered analysis, and surfaces asymmetries of power that created the conditions for social injustices in colonial and postcolonial contexts. The analysis demonstrates that meaning does not reside in the text alone, but in how it is used to achieve its decolonial meaning potential, and to invite us all to unlearn our enduring racial biases. It thus offers us pedagogical possibilities by harnessing colonial texts differently.