Decolonizing the Argumentative Essay
As part of settler Canadian universities’ current drive to examine and undo our own colonialism and racism, we’ve been slowly opening our course assessments up to new ways of thinking and writing, new possibilities for how students can demonstrate learning. As a white cis-het female settler instructor, born of British and German peoples in the territory covered by the Robinson Huron and Upper Canada treaties and currently living and teaching on the ancient and unceded lands of peoples of the hən̓q̓əmin̓əm̓-speaking nations, I have both a place in the old power structures and a responsibility to expose and contest the harms I and people like me have done and continue to do.
As a faculty member in the Department of English, I have always asked my students to produce argumentative essays. Over more than three decades of teaching, I’ve added more and more non-traditional assessments to my courses, but they’ve always been supplements to that argumentative essay. Now I’m questioning our centring of particular kinds of academic writing, just as I’m questioning our centring of particular (kinds of) literary texts.
For those of you who are perhaps less familiar with literary studies as a discipline, the argumentative essay comes in two versions: 1) non-research, which means using evidence from literary texts (primary sources), often with some support from criticism or historical context (secondary sources) but not with a focus on that; and 2) research, which means having roughly equal evidence from primary and secondary sources, putting a text into a wider and significant context. In either case, the academic writer uses evidence to support an argument, an original stand on one or more literary works, saying something new and significant. I’ve always taught this as What-How-Why: here’s What I claim to be true about this text, which is my thesis; here’s How I know that to be true, my evidence; and here’s Why my reader should care about that, my conclusion. There’s a lot of “I” in this process, as the writer presents my idea, my stand, me trying to persuade you the reader. I have to work hard to convince Canadian undergraduates that they need to have their own ideas and not just repeat what others have said. And that they should use “we” to talk about what their readers would likely agree on, but “I” to talk about how their own work is different from others’. Now I’m rethinking this placing of individual power at the centre of the essay—but I don’t want to go to a place of passive verbs without subjects and vague statements! Instead, I want to emphasize community and relationship in the English essay. In what ways do the student writers’ relationships with their cultures and social groups affect their readings of their primary texts? And I want to emphasize the student writer’s relationship with their readers, as it relates to their purpose in writing the paper.
The English essay has, at its core, two elements it shares with settler academic genres in other disciplines as wide-ranging as Biology or Sociology — a question of interest and verifiable evidence that answers that question. Our verifiable evidence has for more than fifty years been direct quotations from reputable editions of literary texts, quotations and paraphrases of previously published articles and monographs by other scholars working with the same or comparable texts (or theorizing about literature in general), and facts and opinions drawn from historical documents and/or mainly-European historians’ accounts of socio-historical contexts. Readers need to be able to find and check our sources, verifying what we say and checking that we haven’t misrepresented those sources. Personal opinion is not something we generally encourage, except as a teaser or a rhetorical gesture to help persuade the reader of our purpose or conclusion. Our question is often along the lines of “what makes this text different from others in the genre or by that author?” or “why is this text an important one for people to read?” or “what does this text tell us about the moment and culture that produced it?” Again similarly to other academic disciplines, we discourage emotional language and privilege logic and rationality. We applaud those who question ideology and critique hegemonic power structures. The most important part of an English essay is its conclusion: writers must give their readers not just an answer to the essay’s question but also a “so what?” Why should our readers care? What difference will it make to their lives? How should they change their thoughts or behaviour as a result of reading our literary analysis?
At this moment (Oct 2022), I don’t feel that having a question to answer is detrimental to attempts to decolonize the argumentative essay as a genre or make it more inclusive. But I do think we need to welcome new kinds of questions! I’m fine with acknowledging our sources—we as writers need to give credit to those whose stories we tell and work we build on. But I’d like the English essay to be open to evidence from oral history, from reader responses, from surveys and interviews. I want my students to continue critiquing hegemonic power, though I am less happy about the desire to force our readers to change and would prefer to have conclusions that invite readers to be part of a community of change.
However, I am having more and more difficulty insisting on my students’ essays being logical, rational, and unemotional. Sometimes the authors of the texts we study move beyond logic and rationality in order to achieve their ends, and almost always they embody emotional responses. Why should writing about literature not acknowledge the emotion, the spirituality, the inexplicable nature of the essay writer, who is as human as the literary author? Why shouldn’t an essay be or include a story of its own? … Now I feel as if I’m edging toward Derridean deconstruction, in which we do not put literature and criticism into a binary and hierarchical relationship but question the academic distinctions between them. And I’m OK with that, with the caveat that I still want my students’ essays to be readily comprehensible (as Derridean criticism rarely is).
Of course, I'm not the first person to suggest we need to decenter settler/colonial/Western values and rules for academic writing from university courses! For other reading, I offer as a starting place Asao B. Inoue's "Habits of White Language" handout.
Now, what will I say today in conclusion? Do I intend to remove the argumentative essay from my assessments? No, but I don’t want it to be the be-all and end-all of assessment in English courses, and I do want to see what we can do to decenter the genre from its logic and rationality, from its dislike of the personal even while it promotes the original, and from its forceful attempts to persuade and to change people. I invite you, if you are or will be teachers, to be willing to open up the essay as a form and reward those student writers who push its boundaries. I invite you, if you are or will be students in literature classes, not to see the argumentative essay as a set of hoops to jump through to get a mark, not as a strange, restrictive, and harmful thing, but as an exploration of your own relationship to a literary text that can challenge the status quo and settler colonialism. The word “essay” means attempt, so let’s see it as part of our attempts to change and grow.