Dr Tom Sykes, Senior Lecturer in Creative Writing and Journalism, explores Injustice, Discourse and Decolonisation.
What do people really mean when they talk about ‘decolonising universities’? Is it strictly limited to ‘diverse hiring practices’ (Kehinde Andrews) and running ‘unconscious bias workshops’ (Jen Pan) that responsibilise individual behaviours for ‘microaggressions’? Or should we be asking deeper and more complex questions about what we might call the ‘political economy’ of higher education? Should we be concerned by universities’ complicity in racist and neo-imperial oppression through their relationships with fossil fuel companies, the military-industrial complex, armed forces based at home and abroad, and other repressive state apparatuses such as police forces?
In recent years, I have been writing, speaking and reflecting on these issues with colleagues in the Culture and Conflict research group, based here at the university. My interest in this field was spurred by a worldview formed by a decade of research into global conflict, exploitation and inequality, and how these phenomena are (mis)represented, justified and/or concealed in dominant Western literary and media discourses.
My most recent monograph, Imagining Manila: Literature, Empire and Orientalism (Bloomsbury/IB Tauris), uses the theoretical frameworks of Orientalism and cultural materialism to critique three centuries of Western journalism, travel writing and fiction on Manila. One of the study’s major themes is what I dub ‘liberal Orientalism’: the mobilisation of the rhetoric of empathy, aid, justice and equality to vindicate or excise Western imperial interference in the Philippines, from the Philippine-American War (1898-1902) up to more recent economic and military support for the Duterte autocracy.
In my own reportage I have tried to provide a corrective to these problematic constructions of the country. In 2018, I published The Realm of the Punisher (Signal Books) which, according to the Times Literary Supplement, ‘conveys in an affectionate, unpatronizing tone the many layers of injustice that run through the Philippines, and uses interviews and site visits to try to explain the eccentric ways and popular appeal of its more muscular leaders.’
My Philippine focus has led me to create The Migrant’s Journey, a current multidisciplinary research project that tells the stories of Overseas Filipino Workers (OFWs), illuminating their motives for relocating and the challenges facing them, from economic woes to family breakup, discrimination to cultural alienation. Delivered in collaboration with Dr Louis Netter, Senior Lecturer in Illustration at UoP, The Migrant’s Journey is being supported by the Democratic Citizenship research theme here at the university