Postcolonialism and education: negotiating a contested terrain Fazal Rizvia, Bob Lingardb* and Jennifer Laviac aUniversity of Illinois (Urbana-Champaign), USA; bUniversity of Edinburgh, UK; cUniversity of Sheffield, UK Taylor and Francis LtdRPCS_A_189108.sgm10.1080/14681360600891852Pedagogy, Culture & Society1468-1366 (print)/1747-5104 (online)Original Article2006Taylor & Francis143000000October [email protected]

This paper sets the context for those that follow in this special issue of Pedagogy, Culture & Society. In so doing, it provides a brief overview of postcolonialism as theory, politics and practice. It considers postcolonialism’s ambivalent reception amongst differing constituencies, a sign both of desire and danger, as Stuart Hall has put it. Criticisms of postcolonialism have come from both the left and the right and from indigenous scholars as well. In traversing the nature of postcolonialism, the paper considers the work, albeit briefly, of a number of major ‘foundational’ thinkers, namely Fanon, Said, Bhabha and Spivak. The need for a more liberatory rather than conciliatory postcolo- nialism is argued for, as is the need to integrate postcolonialism with an understanding of contem- porary globalization. Postcolonial insights can help overcome the ahistoricity of much globalization theorizing and also its reification. Against this backdrop, the paper then provides a summative account of all of the contributions in this special issue, all of which demonstrate how new cultural practices and policy imperatives in education are linked to colonial and postcolonial formations.

The contested terrain of postcolonialism

The idea of postcolonialism is located within a highly contested political and theo- retical terrain. In recent years, it has been used extensively in a wide variety of ways to ‘name’ the residual, persistent and ongoing effects of European colonization, but it has equally been criticized for deeply politicizing the academy. As Stuart Hall (1996, p. 242) so astutely notes, postcolonialism has become ‘a sign for desire for some and equally for others, a signifier of danger’. On the one hand, it has promised ‘a radical rethinking of knowledge and social identities authored and authorized by colonialism and western domination’ (Prakash, 1994, p. 1475), while, on the other hand, it has been criticized for its complicity with the contemporary structures of global capitalism.

* Corresponding author. Moray House School of Education, The University of Edinburgh, Holyrood Road, Edinburgh EH8 8AQ, UK. Email: [email protected]

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For scholars in disciplines as wide-ranging as literature, history, sociology, anthro- pology, geography and indeed education, postcolonialism makes visible the history and legacy of European colonialism, enabling us to understand how Europe was able to exercise colonial power over 80% of the world’s population, and how it continues to shape most of our contemporary discourses and institutions—politically, culturally and economically. Postcolonialism draws our theoretical attention to the ways in which language works in the colonial formation of discursive and cultural practices. It shows how discourse and power are inextricably linked. Politically, it enables us to provide an account of the ways in which global inequalities are perpetuated not only through the distribution of resources, but also through colonial modes of representa- tion, and in doing this it suggests ways of resisting colonial power in order to forge a more socially just world order. According to Robert Young (2003, p. 2), ‘postcolo- nialism claims the right of all people on this earth to the same material and cultural well-being’; ‘it seeks to change the way people think, the way they behave, to produce a more just and equitable relation between different peoples of the world’ (p. 7).

In contrast, conservative critics, such as Ferguson (2003), see in postcolonialism a commitment to a rampant relativism that has abandoned the western project of reason, truth and progress. They suggest that this relativism necessarily ties judg- ments about particular cultural practices to considerations of power and political interest, making it impossible for us to assess, in some objective and universal fashion, their relative value. But more significantly, they fear what they see as postcolonial- ism’s attempts to undermine western culture itself, arguing that, instead of safeguard- ing the west, the postcolonial humanities have become one of its major enemies, no longer committed to western conceptions of social development and human progress, but to disturbing the order of the world. Postcolonialism has thus become a major source of contention within the so-called ‘culture wars’.

After the tragic events of September 11, this contention has become increasingly shrill, with the citing of postcolonialism in the US House of Representatives as essentially ‘anti-American’, implicitly contributing to the support of terrorism. According to his testimony to the US Congress, Stanley Kurtz (2003) argued, for example, that under the influence of postcolonial theory, ‘area studies’ have become ‘hotbeds of unpatriotic anti-Americanism’ because they teach students to regard as immoral any attempt to put their knowledge of foreign languages and cultures at the service of American power, which is in itself marked as an illegitimate expression of neo-colonialism. Some neo-conservative critics go even further and suggest that the assumption made by postcolonial theorists that colonial occupation was necessarily evil overlooks the fact that it also brought great benefits to most regions of the world, and that its enlightenment objectives were largely informed by altruism (D’Souza, 2002).

Criticisms of postcolonial theory are not restricted to neo-conservative ideologues, however. It has also been criticized by scholars on the neo-Marxist left who regard it as complicit with the new power structures of global capitalism. Ahmad (1995) and Dirlik (1994) have argued, for example, that in so far as postcolonial theory lacks a clear notion of a telos, it offers no way of critiquing global capitalism, and that its analysis

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travels along the same neo-colonial, transnational routes. Indeed, more pointedly, Dirlik suggests that ‘postcoloniality is designed to avoid making sense of the current crisis and, in the process, to cover up the origins of postcolonial intellectuals in global capitalism of which they are not so much victims as beneficiaries’ (Dirlik, 1994, p. 353, emphasis in original). He argues that the postcolonial celebration of cultural otherness and difference in fact assists transnational capitalism in extending the market reach of its commodities that are increasingly represented as culturally hybrid, and responsive to the needs and desires of the new cosmopolitans. He suggests that, in doing this, postcolonial theory effectively elides the question of how these desires are historically and politically produced, largely in the interests of the global elite.

Inspirations for postcolonial theory

Debates over postcolonialism thus represent genuine disagreements, both theoretical and political; but they also involve a range of conceptual confusions about the scope of its major claims. It is not always clear, for example, what is the main object of post- colonial critique, and how this critique is linked to its normative aspirations. The term ‘postcolonial’ is itself ambiguous between its periodized meaning, its claim to provide a set of literary techniques for analyzing colonial texts, its wider interpreta- tion involving a range of theoretical claims about the legacy of colonialism and its political aspirations about its role in creating a more just and equitable world. At a very general level, the ‘post’ in postcolonialism simply refers to the historical period after the territories and people that had once been colonized became nations in their own right. But this understanding of the (post)colonial is deeply problematic, and is arguably the main inspiration for the emergence of postcolonial theory.

This inspiration is most clearly expressed in the work of Frantz Fanon (1968, 1984), especially in his insistence on what he calls the ‘pitfalls of national conscious- ness’. According to Fanon, independence from colonialism does not mean liberation, and that ‘national consciousness’ often fails to achieve freedom because its aspirations are primarily those of the colonized bourgeoisie, who simply replace the colonial rule with their own form of dominance, surveillance and coercion over the vast majority of the people, often using the same vocabulary of power. Fanon regards as deeply problematic any characterization of colonialism in terms of a binary opposition of colonizer and colonized. Instead, he insists that colonialism may only be understood as a complicated network of complicities and internal power imbalances between groups within the broader categories of colonizer and colonized.

Fanon thus challenges the fixed ideas of settled identity and culturally authored definitions located within the traditions of western rationality. He contends that even after independence, the colonial subjects remain colonized internally, psychologi- cally. Their ways of ‘reading’ the world and their desires are carried across into the desire for ‘whiteness’ through a kind of metempsychosis: ‘their desires have been transposed, though they have never, of course, actually become white. They have a black skin, with a white mask’ (Young, 2003, p. 144). A major strand within recent postcolonial analysis involves attempts to understand such dynamics in the formation

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of the subject, as a basis for refusing the creation of ‘a native’ as necessarily inferior and colonialism’s devalued other.

Postcolonialism inspired by Fanon thus does not simply provide a set of tools for reading colonial texts, but also a way of understanding its ongoing effects. In this way, the Fanonian project is different from that of Ranajit Guha’s (1982), which is more concerned about how histories of nationalism and independence struggles are written in ways that largely ignore the voices of the ‘subaltern’, those many people who did not comprise the colonial elite. Guha calls attention to the ways in which most Indian nationalist accounts have effectively become ‘a sort of spiritual biography of the Indian elite’ (p. 7), because they homogenize the colonized people, and do not explore the conflictual relationship between the elite and subaltern groups. Of course, Guha’s analysis is largely historiographical, and does not consider the question of how the elite historical accounts, of both colonialism and nationalism, continue to have relevance even today, in the continuing subjugation of subaltern groups.

Postcolonialism and its limitations

Guha’s arguments moreover raise the important issue of how it might be possible to recover ‘subaltern consciousness’ when it is largely overlooked in historical represen- tations. In her essay ‘Can the subaltern speak?’, Spivak (1988) acknowledges the ‘epistemic violence’ done upon the subalterns, but insists that any attempt from the outside to ameliorate their condition by granting them collective speech will invari- ably involve the problem of a dependence upon intellectuals to ‘speak for’ their condi- tion, rather than allowing them to speak for themselves. She argues that the assumption of a subaltern collectivity itself risks an ethnocentric essentialism that does not account for the heterogeneity of the colonized body politic. In this way, Spivak is concerned that postcolonial studies might ironically re-inscribe, co-opt and rehearse neo-colonial imperatives of political domination, economic exploitation and cultural erasure through the agency of the First World, male, privileged, academic, institutionalized discourse that classifies and surveys the east in the same measure as the actual modes of colonial dominance it seeks to dismantle.

This is a concern that applies also to Edward Said’s pioneering work on Oriental- ism, which is regarded by many as one of the original inspirations for the develop- ment of postcolonial theory (Kennedy, 2000). According to Said, Orientalism is a style of thought based upon an ontological and epistemological distinction made between ‘the Orient’ and ‘the Occident’. But this is no harmless distinction; it is designed to portray the Orient and its people as necessarily inferior. In this way, Orientalism may be viewed as ‘the corporate institution for dealing with the Orient—dealing with it by making statements about it, authorizing views of it, describing it, by teaching it, settling it, ruling over it: in short, Orientalism as a West- ern style for dominating, restructuring, and having authority over the Orient’ (Said, 1978, p. 17). As a system of representations, Orientalism is a discourse framed by political forces through which the west sought to understand and control its colonized populations.

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From the perspective of theory, the main significance of Said’s discussion of Orien- talism lies not only in his analysis of the complex and vital relationship between liter- ature, politics and culture, but also in his methodological innovation. Using Foucault, he insists that the western textual representation of the Orient is an example of the western ‘will to power’ over others and that it is inextricably linked to the material realities of political and economic domination. However, in presenting this analysis, Said ironically espouses a form of western humanism that accepts as unproblematic a secularist cosmopolitan world-view grounded in western enlightenment philoso- phies. So for all the emphasis Said places on the importance of recognizing difference, he appears to work with a highly abstract and generalized view of humanity and its potential to do good. But this abstraction leads him to say very little, for example, about class and gender factors that affect not only colonial discourses, but also contemporary cultural formations.

Indebted though most subsequent postcolonial theorists are to Said, they have been critical of the universalizing tendencies in his account of Orientalism (Kennedy, 2000). According to Homi Bhabha (1994), for example, colonial discourses are often more ambivalent, and much less resolute, than is implied in Said’s analysis. Bhabha refuses to interpret identity and difference in essentialist terms and conceptualizes them instead in terms of the overlapping, migratory movements of cultural forma- tions across a global division of labor. Highlighting ‘in-between’ categories of compet- ing cultural differences, Bhabha shows how postcoloniality always involves the ‘liminal’ negotiation of cultural identity across differences of race, class, gender and cultural traditions. He argues that cultural identities cannot be ascribed to pre-given, irreducible, scripted, ahistorical cultural traits. Nor can ‘colonizer’ and ‘colonized’ be viewed as separate entities that define themselves independently, an argument similar to that proffered by Fanon. Instead, Bhabha suggests that the negotiation of cultural identity involves the continual interface and exchange of cultural performances that in turn produce a mutual and mutable recognition of cultural difference.

For Bhabha (1994), identity then is always ‘hybrid’, produced performatively in contexts that can be either antagonistic or affiliative. As he says: ‘The social articulation of difference, from the minority perspective, is a complex, on-going negotiation that seeks to authorize cultural hybridities that emerge in moments of historical transfor- mation’ (1994, p. 23). What’s compelling about Bhabha’s argument is that it refuses to view colonial power in some absolute sense, always guaranteed to produce the intended effects in the colonial subjects. Instead, it involves subversion, transgressions, insurgence and mimicry. Bhabha (1994, p. 45) argues that:

If the effect of colonial power is seen to be the production of hybridization rather than the noisy command of colonialist authority or the silent repression of native traditions, then an important change of perspective occurs. The ambivalence at the source of tradi- tional discourses on authority enables a form of subversion, founded on the undecid- ability that turns the discursive conditions of dominance into the grounds of intervention.

In this way, Bhabha appears to give more credit to the colonized subject’s linguistic agency than, for example, Spivak, who seems to foreground the impossibility of

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linguistic subversion. However, what Bhabha is unable to overlook is the fact that the colonized subject’s mode of resistance is itself constrained by the language of the dominant group (McLeod, 2000). And Spivak’s point is also about the capacity, or rather, incapacity, of the powerful to listen to and to hear the subaltern. As Buras and Apple (2006, p. 20) put it: ‘In short, subaltern attempts at representation and the reception of those representations within existing circuits of power are two very different things’.

The notion of hybridity is central to Bhabha’s understanding of resistance to the exercise of colonial power. According to Bhabha, it is in its hybrid forms that colonial knowledge can be re-inscribed and given new, unexpected and oppositional mean- ings, as a way of ‘re-staging the past’. In contemporary contexts, he argues, the processes of hybridization have demolished forever the idea of subjectivity as stable, single and ‘pure’, and have drawn attention to the ways diasporic peoples in particular are able to challenge exclusionary systems of meaning. It is this possibility that enables them to disrupt the exclusionary binary logics upon which discourses of colo- nialism, nationalism and patriarchy depend. This is where postcolonial literature and work of creative arts assume an important task of interrupting received ways of think- ing about the world, and articulating the hybridity and difference that lies within.

Plausible though this argument is, it has been much criticized for its valorization of hybrid cultural forms. While it is true that the contemporary global condition is underlined by much variability, multivocality and the processes of fuzziness, cut-and- mix and criss-cross and cross-overs suggested by the idea of hybridity, it is also the case that the processes of cultural hybridization are never neutral, but involve a poli- tics in which issues of economic and cultural power are central. As Shohat and Stam (1994, p. 213) have argued: ‘A celebration of syncretism and hybridity per se, if not articulated with the issues of hegemony and neo-colonial power relations, always runs the risk of appearing to sanctify the fait accompli of colonial violence’. As a theoretical idea, hybridity is indeed a useful antidote to cultural essentialism, but cannot in itself provide the answers to the difficult questions of how hybridity takes place, the form it takes in a particular context, the consequences it has for particular cultural groups, and when and how particular hybrid formations are progressive or regressive.

Postcolonialism and globalization

This account suggests two main risks associated with postcolonial theory: its reluc- tance to differentiate adequately between different experiences of colonialism and its valorization of postmodernist difference and hybridity. It also points to the impor- tance of locating postcolonial analysis in its contemporary material conditions char- acterized by the global movements of capital, people and ideas that no longer follow the familiar one-way colonial path from center to periphery, but involve more compli- cated flows and networks of power. As Ania Loomba (2005, p. 213) has noted, it is harder now than ever to see our world as simply ‘postcolonial’. Yet, it is more urgent than ever to think about the questions of domination and resistance raised by postco- lonial studies. Globalization has given rise to new transnational networks that imply

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the need to re-think narratives of colonization and anti-colonization. As Hardt and Negri (2000, p. xiii) argue, the contemporary global order has produced new forms of sovereignty, which are better understood in contrast to European empires because they do not rely on fixed boundaries, and are managed through ‘hybrid identities, flexible hierarchies, and plural exchanges through modulating networks of command’.

However, this new order cannot be understood in its own terms, but requires a historical understanding of the kind postcolonialism is able to provide, based on the conviction that contemporary globalization cannot be disassociated from its roots in the European projects of imperialism. These projects continue to shape the lives of people, not only within the developing, but also the developed, world, within the framework of a global geometry of power that is inherently unequal. This argument suggests the need to interpret contemporary ideological constructions of globalization historically, rather than as a set of naturalized economic processes operating in a reified fashion. Unless this is done, many of the neo-liberal ideas that have become hegemonic in recent years will continue to appear as a natural and inevitable response to the steering logics of economic globalization. It will be impossible to recognize this ideology as historically specific, which serves a particular set of interests on behalf of powerful social forces, namely the transnational corporate and financial elite.

This suggests the relevance of the resources of postcolonial theory to the study of globalization, not least because there is a sense in which postcolonialism and global- ization occupy roughly the same conceptual territory. Yet there has in fact been very little written that takes up the position of postcolonial studies in relation to global- ization. Szeman (2001, p. 209) has pointed out that this is partly due to the differ- ences in their disciplinary origins (globalization in the social sciences and postcolonial theory in literary and cultural studies), but may have more to do with the fact that the animating concepts of postcolonial theory, such as place, identity, difference, the nation and modes of resistance, focus on the particular, while there remains a strong current of universalism in various constructions of globalization, especially as they appear to suggest the emergence of a single homogenous plane- tary space. Furthermore, while the main impulse of postcolonial theory is decon- structive and liberatory, globalization ‘acts as a justification and as an ideological screen for the rapid, global spread of a pernicious neo-liberal capitalism intent on reversing the social gains of the past five decades and in introducing an economic rationality into the public sphere’ (Szeman, 2001, p. 211). Bourdieu (2003) has made exactly the same point in his reference to the performative usage of globaliza- tion to mean simply and only neo-liberal capitalism and its capacity to elide other cultural, political and social considerations.

For postcolonial theory to be useful to the analysis of the global processes, then, some of its central concepts need to be revisited. As Simon During (2000, p. 386) has suggested, by deploying concepts like hybridity, ambivalence and mimicry—all of which imply the incorporation of the colonized into colonizing cultures—postcolo- nialism has effectively become a reconciliatory rather than a critical, anti-colonialist category. During argues that a more critical postcolonialism is needed if we are to

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understand how colonial assumptions remain embedded within the new discourses and practices of globalization, as expressed in the totalizing reach of increasingly flex- ible forms of capitalism that seek to intensify the convergence of local cultures and societies. But this needs to be done without losing sight of the historical specificity of the ways in which particular groups engage with global relations of power that produce for them highly localized expressions of globalization.

One of the major achievements of postcolonialism has been its insistence that, far from being secondary to the economics of colonialism, discursive and cultural practices must be viewed as essential to the production and maintenance of colo- nial relations. If this is so then clearly new analytical strategies are needed to help us understand the economics and cultural politics of colonial legacies without reducing one to another. Without such strategies it may not be possible to fully describe the various continuities and discontinuities between colonialism and globalization.

For people living in the developing countries, it is not hard to identify the ways in which globalization is constituted to a large extent by the continuation and strength- ening of western imperialist relations in the period of decolonization and postcolonial nationalisms. Postcolonial histories have amply demonstrated the persistence of global inequalities, and the threats to the continued existence of local cultures and traditions by the global consumerist culture anchored in the west. New information and communication technologies have enabled instantaneous circulation of informa- tion, ideas and images, making it possible to conceive of the world as a single space shared by all of humanity. However, the routes of this circulation have hardly been symmetrical and equal. On the contrary, the so-called ‘global culture’ has largely reproduced the colonial structures of inequalities, with the postcolonial elite playing a major role in their reproduction.

Knowledge, power and education

At the same time however, there are major differences between the current phase of neo-imperial globalization and earlier forms of imperial power, which was located at clearly identifiable imperial centres. Deterritorialized logics and multidirectional circuits of power, on the other hand, characterize contemporary globalization. One of the major insights of postcolonial theory has been in its understanding of the dialec- tical relationship between the colonizers and the colonized. It has been shown, for example, how colonizers do not only shape the culture and identities of the colonized, but are in turn shaped by their encounter in a range of complicated ways. Nor are the colonized innocent bystanders in their encounters with the hegemonic processes of colonization. Postcolonialism refuses to treat the colonized as ‘cultural dupes’, inca- pable of interpreting, accommodating and resisting dominant discourses. And so it is with contemporary global relations, which necessarily involve processes of negotia- tion of cultural messages, even if this occurs in spaces characterized by asymmetrical power relations. This suggests that relations between global and local are always complex and multidimensional.

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To understand then the relationships between globalization and education, we need to avoid the universalistic impulse at the core of many conceptions of global- ization. Most education occurs at the local level, but localities have never been more connected to outside forces, a fact captured to some extent by the phrase ‘deterritorialization of culture and politics’ (Tomlinson, 2000). However, these forces do not simply exist in some reified fashion, to be simply read off for their implications for educational policy and governance. They need to be understood historically as being linked to the colonial origins of globalization, not in some uniform way but in ways that are specific to particular localities. It is only through this kind of ‘complicated’ or ‘vernacular’ understanding that it will be possible for us to elaborate new modes of imperial power and to devise ways of resisting them in and through education.

Postcolonialism’s contentions surrounding the relationship between knowledge and power are linked directly to education, both as an institution where people are inculcated into hegemonic systems of reasoning and as a site where it is possible to resist dominant discursive practices. In this way, education has a systematically ambivalent relation to postcolonialism. On the one hand, it is an object of postcolo- nial critique regarding its complicity with Eurocentric discourses and practices. On the other hand, it is only through education that it is possible to reveal and resist colo- nialism’s continuing hold on our imagination. Education is also a site where legacies of colonialism and the contemporary processes of globalization intersect. This is amply shown in the work of Arjun Appadurai (1996), which catalogues how ideas, people and money travel across transnational routes through new patterns of commu- nication and consumption.

It is in the context of this intersection that the papers included in this special issue of Pedagogy, Culture & Society explore how the new cultural practices and policy imperatives in education are linked to colonial and postcolonial formations. Common to the papers is a concern with the practices of representation, which are at once inherited, refracted and reconstructed and employed in the service of resistance. Each is concerned to show how contemporary educational practices and systems remain saturated with colonial and neo-colonial ideologies, expressed in ‘subjugated knowl- edges and representational practices’ (Hickling-Hudson et al., 2004), a reality also analyzed by Willinsky (1998) in his account of education at empire’s end. They also recognize the ways in which knowledge production is imbricated with power associ- ated with the contemporary admixture of globalization, the colonial past and the aspired-for postcolonial future (Appadurai, 2001).

Postcolonialism and education: the papers in this special issue

In their paper, Vicki Crowley and Julie Matthews deal with reconciliation in two post- colonial societies, South Africa and Australia. More specifically, they reconnect reconciliation to the project of anti-racism and view it through a postcolonial lens and the idea of postcolonialism as a traveling theory. They also note the specificities of reconciliation and a politics of postcolonialism in these two societies, now also located

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within the cultural and economic flows and dominations of globalization and the preeminence of the USA as the one global superpower committed seemingly to a myopic unilateralism. Within this interesting and wide-ranging analysis, they work with a broad definition of pedagogies, stretching usual considerations well beyond classrooms to public spaces such as malls and museums, which they see as both witness and archive. As Gregory (2004) has observed, remembrance is central to postcolonial political aspirations as well as oppositions. In reconnecting reconciliation as a rallying point within anti-racism in the two societies, they conceptualize recon- ciliation as: a site of pedagogical intervention; a resource for anti-racism, especially when connected to accounts of the colonial past and postcolonial present narrated through ‘affective histories’; and finally reconciliation as an anti-racism strategy. To utilize Said, we might see pedagogies of reconciliation ‘as a kind of public memory’ (2000, p. 503). Crowley and Matthews also reinforce the notion of postcolonialism as a contested terrain in noting that many indigenous Australians see postcolonial theory as another white discourse and prefer to struggle for reconciliation as a precur- sor to such discourses. This is a point also made by Linda Tuhiwai Smith (1999) regarding the attitude of New Zealand Maori to postcolonial discourses. Here we have instances of the struggle of the subaltern to speak for themselves and the contested complexity of postcolonial theory and politics, a reality evidenced in all the papers in this special issue.

Jennifer Lavia, in her paper ‘The practice of postcoloniality: a pedagogy of hope’, takes up the debate that was resuscitated in the Caribbean at the turn of the twenty- first century by Caribbean academics about what are the requirements of the region for the new millennium and locates some of the main themes of these debates within the context of educational practice. Arguing for a pedagogy of hope, Lavia locates her argument within the context of postcoloniality as an aspiration and argues for educa- tional practice that is inextricably linked with the historical, political and cultural experiences of the region. Issues of identity and representation are central aspects of the discussion in which the Caribbean is viewed as a diaspora, where the resources for rethinking and reclaiming development reside. In addressing educational practice in light of the Caribbean problematic, Lavia notes that defining the Caribbean is an essential part of the problematic, because it is a region of transplanted peoples in which translation, as a process of postcoloniality, has produced unique ways of being and seeing the world. One of the effects of the postcolonial condition therefore is that of Creolization. She uses four narratives to highlight the dilemmas and complexity of negotiating the colonizing effects of imperial schooling and these narratives provide apposite examples through which issues of subalternity are discussed (see also Apple & Buras, 2006). Lavia claims that for the subaltern to speak for themselves requires a process of what Freire refers to as ‘conscientization’. In this light, she argues that the teacher, as subaltern professional, becomes socially aware by engagement in a practice of critical professionalism. In this paper, Lavia illustrates that the postcolo- nial aspiration for education requires consideration of practice as the convergence of philosophical and methodological endeavors in which the personal, collective and professional can be understood as political.

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Bob Lingard and Kentry Jn Pierre, in their paper ‘Strengthening national capital’, provide a postcolonial analysis of the lifelong learning policy contained within the Education Sector Development Plan: 2000–2005 and Beyond of the small Caribbean island nation, St Lucia. They work with Robert Young’s conception of the postcolo- nial as an aspirational politics with both activist and theoretical elements. They conjoin this conception of postcolonial as aspirational politics with Bourdieu’s conception of national capital, an as yet indicative rather than fully developed concept within the Bourdieuan framework. The influence of conditionalities imposed by donor agencies on educational policy development and the content of educational policy in the small nations of the Global South are recognized as a central policy element of the contemporary postcolonial condition. This is a condition in which resi- dues of the colonial past continue to haunt realities of the postcolonial present and in which these residues are rearticulated in the context of the contemporary asymmetri- cal flows and power relations of globalization. Their analysis shows the multiple determinations of the Education Sector Development Plan. It also demonstrates successful mediation of donor agency conditionalities achieved through the astute politics of the major policy players, which utilized extensive nationwide consultation, cross-sector coverage and a lengthy time frame to strengthen national capital in the process of policy production in education. However, their analysis also demonstrates the colonial residues which remain in the stress in the lifelong learning policy on human capital to the neglect of social and cultural capitals, and in the deafening silences in relation to indigenous knowledges and the lingua franca, kwéyòl. In a sense, their analysis also demonstrates the pressing need to deparochialize educa- tional research so that research in the Global South is more than simply the applica- tion of theories from the Global North to the empirical realities of the Global South (Appadurai, 2001; Lingard, 2006). Rather, there needs to be a speaking back to such theory.

In her paper, ‘Infinite rehearsal of culture in St Catherine Jamaica: heritage as tourist product, implications for Caribbean pedagogy’, Beth Cross draws upon her experience of conducting ethnographic field work when she visited schools in Jamaica during the Heroes Week celebration. At the heart of her investigation is a concern for the paradoxical nature of culture and the ways in which this phenome- non takes on a decidedly difficult discourse filled with tensions and contradictions in the Jamaican context. As a researcher, Cross highlights the complexities of the research process in a setting in which performances and rehearsals convey multiple meanings and interpretations, being contradictory and contested, yet co-existing and expressed as a paradoxical framework for philosophical and methodological inquiry. Cross raises important and urgent questions about the tensions and contradictions between policy and practice, citing, for example, the limited success of school reform initiatives like Peace and Love in Schools (PALS), that are aimed at promoting a pedagogy of non-violence, yet in school environments where corporal punishment remains as the preferred strategy for maintaining student discipline. Using a critique of the tourism curriculum to generate unity within the article, Cross interrogates the tensions between values perpetuated by stereotypical notions of tourism and the

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lived experiences of the Jamaican youth. Cross examines the ways in which culture and tourism provide contested values and dynamics that are expressed through these performances and rehearsals. Drawing upon Wilson Harris’s notion of ‘rehearsal’, Cross questions the practice of decontextualized, uncritical approaches to learning about one’s own culture in which performing for the ‘tourist’ becomes more impor- tant than examining the values that underpin the performances. Cross is also concerned with the philosophical images that are expressed through performances and rehearsals as in the case for Heroes Week on the one hand and the PALS program for non-violence on the other hand. She juxtaposes these two pedagogical approaches to tourism education and cultural expression and poses critical questions about the multiple interpretations they generate in relation to self and national iden- tity. Cross proposes an emancipatory role for curriculum in which she argues for a postcolonial project that embraces coherence between education and cultural policy and that facilitates individual creativity and social transformation.

Julie Kaomea in her paper provides a critical postcolonial account of elementary Hawaiian history textbooks, Hawaiian studies curricula and Hawaiian studies class- room conversations. The analysis demonstrates the continuation of the colonial myth of colonization liberating indigenous women from patriarchal indigenous men. In aspiring to a different historiography, Kaomea constitutes what we might in a postco- lonial way call a hybrid or Creole methodology, achieved through the synthesis of a Foucaultian approach to genealogy with a traditional Hawaiian approach. She calls this ‘counter-genealogy’. This counter-genealogy challenges, as with Foucaultian genealogy, the totalizing discourses of colonialism and their tyranny. She thus traces a different narrative of the experience of Hawaiian women in colonial Hawai’i. In locating these other narratives, she suggests that colonialism as a discourse worked rhizomatically not monolithically. Hawaiian women did speak and continue to speak; the subaltern can speak, but often their voice is not heard. On the basis of her analysis and counter-genealogies, Kaomea implores curricula developers, policy-makers and teachers to seek out these counter-genealogies so as to reconstruct the experience of schooling for all students, including descendants of both the colonized and coloniz- ers. She quotes the novelist James Baldwin on this point: ‘If I am not what I’ve been told I am, then it means you’re not what you thought you were either’. This paper illus- trates the significance of hegemonic school knowledges and challenges to them in postcolonial societies and politics.

The final piece in this special issue is an essay review by Pat Sikes of an edited book by Kagendo Mutua and Beth Blue Swadener on research and the postcolonial, Decolonizing Research in Cross-cultural Contexts. This is a collection which explicitly states its indebtedness to Linda Tuhiwai Smith’s (1999) Decolonizing methodologies: research and indigenous peoples, which asserts that research is one of the dirtiest words amongst indigenous peoples. Sikes also draws on Tuhiwai Smith’s work and notes the powerful impact it had on her teaching in the Caribbean and in respect of her teaching of research methodologies to all students. The book under review and Sikes’s essay serve to remind us of the ‘colonizing tendency of the act of research’, its capacity for othering rather than presencing, to use Homi Bhabha’s word, and the

Postcolonialism and education 261

need to deparochialize research, as Arjun Appadurai (2001) has put it, in any effec- tive move towards the postcolonial and strong internationalization. As noted already and as suggested in the papers in this special issue, questions of epistemology will also need to be to the fore in such a politics, including considerations of indigenous epistemologies.

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