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We propose a decolonial-posthuman pedagogy for contemplating the idea of 'womanness' in postcolonial Pakistan. Since posthumanism disbands anthropocentrism while decoloniality subverts Westcentrisms, we combine them to upend the notions of passivity and muteness attributed to Pakistani women via western feminist discourses. By foregrounding 'womanness' as an ongoing process of self-construction, we enable our undergraduate female Pakistani students of English Literature to rethink their selves as agentic knowing subjects. Through carefully designed activities, our students combined specific decolonial and posthuman theoretics while reading "Frankenstein" as a site wherein their own experiences as Pakistani women could be brought into play. Our approach blended the ideas of Walter Mignolo, Gayatri Spivak and Rosi Braidotti, etc., to posit how Pakistani womanness involves inhabiting other skins so as to raise questions regarding the modes of repression that have historically gone into defining their sense of self.

We propose a decolonial pedagogy in the teaching of English Literature at the undergraduate level in postcolonial Pakistan. We argue that the English literary texts that are taught in conjunction with different supplementary materials retain a West-centric tilt that requires disbanding. Therefore, we administered carefully designed worksheets. These encouraged marginal thinking across the differential socio-historical canvases that outline the prescribed texts, online lectures, supplementary reading materials and the students' situatedness. The students used these resources as tools for practising a decolonial hermeneutics. By directing these tools towards their own lived situation, they intervened within the Western means of knowledge production and undid their alterity and historical silencing. By analysing the students' assignments as sites of decolonial articulation, we propose that decolonial pedagogy can be used to generate an intercultural intellectual solidarity that allows the formerly colonised to rethink themselves in a manner that no longer talks back to the Empire.

With post-colonial Pakistan inheriting the British colonial ideological and governmental apparatus, the English literature curriculum implemented at the university level in Pakistan carried the interpellatory baggage of its colonial past. Our interdisciplinary exploration focuses on using deconstructive pedagogy to demystify and subvert the ideological conditioning of Pakistani students that is done through the English literary syllabi taught at the Masters level in Pakistani universities. These pedagogical practices involve genealogical and deconstructive readings of selected English literary texts taught to students pursuing a Master of English degree at the International Islamic University, Islamabad. These practices involve an activation of deconstructive readings through class discussions to unveil the different hegemonic processes involved in the constitution of docile political subjects. They challenge any authoritative interpretation of canonical texts, creating new meanings by activating the play of trace and difference in the re-readings of these texts within post-colonial Pakistan. The class discussions have been transcribed to show how the English literary texts introduced in the colonial era have been extracted out of a Western epistemological closure. In addition, their role in the constitution of colonial and post-colonial subjectivities has been discussed. These discussions raise questions regarding the opaque processes of self-constitution, yet do not aim at re-interpellating the students. They simply revisit the closure within which the students' thoughts and subjectivities are confined, and open up the progression of thought processes so that the functionality of different viewpoints within different communities may be constantly re-visited to defy ideological colonization.