Colonial Temporality and Writing Education - (New Perspectives on Language and Education) by Xiaoye You & Othman Z Barnawi (Hardcover)

About the Book

This book examines colonial temporality and English writing education by analysing higher educational policies operating in China and Saudi Arabia. It explores the ways temporality shapes the wellbeing and practices of individual writing teachers and the ways they understand, resist and appropriate the temporal orders.

Book Synopsis

This book examines how a colonial matrix of power is established through temporality in English writing education. It offers discourse analyses of higher educational policies that operate in China and Saudi Arabia and then triangulates this data with conversations with writing teachers from representative Chinese and Saudi universities. Drawing on all this data to understand both the structured power relations shaping educational policies and the attendant effects on the writing teachers that inhabit these spaces, the book develops a decolonial comparative method and adopts the concept of "temporal regime" as an analytic lens. It not only attends to the complex and multilayered ways that this regime controls, disciplines and shapes the social wellbeing and professional practices of individual writing teachers, but it also details the various ways that teachers understand, experience, resist, negotiate and appropriate the temporal orders.

Review Quotes

Through illuminating how Western notions of temporality have shaped global educational policies and infrastructures, this book offers new ways to recognize how practices in language and literacy education continue to enact colonial imperatives. Expertly synthesizing their primary research with relevant research in linguistics, composition studies, rhetoric, and ESL, You and Barnawi provide fresh insights for engaged teachers, administrators, and scholars who seek to decolonize literacy education responsibly and effectively.-- "Tony Scott, Syracuse University, USA"

This insightful book examines how colonial and neoliberal temporal regimes - with a particular focus on China and Saudi Arabia - shape English writing education under the influence of the Global North. By revealing how time itself operates as a tool of power, the book is a valuable contribution to postcolonial theory, education and the sociology of time. A recommended read for students, educators, and scholars alike.-- "Filip Vostal, Czech Academy of Sciences, Czechia"

About the Author

Xiaoye You is Distinguished Professor of Foreign Languages at Gannan Normal University, China, and Liberal Arts Professor of English and Asian Studies at Pennsylvania State University, USA. He is an award-winning author and editor of several books, including Writing in the Devil's Tongue: A History of English Composition in China (2010) and Cosmopolitan English and Transliteracy (2016), both published by Southern Illinois University Press.

Othman Z. Barnawi is a Professor of Language, Society, and Education at the Royal Commission for Yanbu Colleges and Institutes, Saudi Arabia. He is the founding editor of the Routledge Global South Perspectives on TESOL book series and the author of TESOL and the Cult of Speed in the Age of Neoliberal Mobility (Routledge, 2020).