Section A: Connections/disjunctures between readings for Nov. 1 - from Deb

Colonialism by Glen Turner
AfricaTalks.org Art Gallery
http://192.38.86.252/gallery.htm

It’s interesting to me that both Graham Hingangaroa Smith, a Maori educator, and Robin Kelly, an African American educator, focus on the agency of their respective peoples within a colonial history and contributing to an anti-colonial movement. While Loomba seems to step back and offer an assessment of the meaning and possibility of agency, given the history of colonization. So there are several ways of engaging this material.

First, the question of voice. Smith and Kelly put themselves into the picture, speak of (and for) their ‘people,’ but, like Loomba, they recognize that there are differences within their communities and so resist homogenizing (Kelly especially acknowledges this); they also contend that any anti-colonial actions reflect a mixture of liberatory visions and values that contradict those visions, revealing the impact of colonialism and the internalization of oppression. Loomba doesn’t situate herself explicitly and tends to speak from a distance, in her survey of many struggles, thinkers and debates among them…while offering a genealogy of colonialism and postcolonialism; yet even in so doing, I think she reveals her location as perhaps one of those that Dirlik is referring to (p. 205) as a purveyor of postcolonial theory (even as she critiques it)..because of the “increased visibility of academic intellectuals of Third World origin as pacesetters in cultural criticism.” This was noted by Hisayo in our conversation on Oct. 18, noting that not only have these theories been shaped by Eurocentric thought, but they have also been developed by elites who have left their countries of origin, and who then, perhaps, no longer speak for those contexts, but rather from a place of hybrid, postcolonial identities.


Loomba seems to be wrestling with her own position around Marxism and poststructuralism, and proposes that they not be dichotomoized, that they need each other, that the cultural criticism that sometimes dominates postmodern and postcolonial theory must be coupled with an economic analysis, and anti-colonial struggles must be seen in dynamic relation with the development of capitalism in its newest configurations. Both Smith and Kelly seem to agree here: Smith names the impact of free market economics, privatization, and the commodification of Indigenous knowledge as obstacles to Maori’s development of their own educational system based on values of collective responsibility and cooperation (as opposed to individualism and capitalism associated with capitalism). Kelly also seems to question the ways that some African Americans who advocated emigrating and ‘civilizing’ ‘backward’ African natives also reflected how entrenched they had become in the capitalist system and values. The chapters we will read for next week take this up further by looking at black versions of socialism.

Besides sharing an anti-capitalist and anti-imperialist sentiment, I think the three also offer a similar naming of and engagement of “contradictions” which is where popular education comes in. Loomba refers to Gramsci’s “pessimism of the intellect, optimism of the will” as a way out of the paralysis that some feel with poststructuralism, when it doesn’t seem to facilitate political action (because all action is based on partial knowledge…but what else is there?). Both Smith and Kelly are not hindered by such paralysis, though they do acknowledge contradictions, in particular Kelly. They also see the Indigenous struggle for self-determination and the black struggle for freedom as involving a reclaiming, in some ways, of the past, at least a recovery of values (oftentimes romanticized), that can feed visions of where they want to go. Kelly offers a critical analysis of the ways the UNIA, for example, reinforced gender oppression, but he also considers the ways that current artists, musicians, hip hop and spoken word artists are “reconstructing relationships between human beings across lines of color, gender, generation, and spirituality, and of reconnecting black people to the natural world.” (33) Thus he combines critique with creative engagement; similarly, Smith suggests that the Maori efforts to carve out alternative educational processes, even within the New Zealand school system, are “struggles” which “educate us.” Their words echo the Chilean poet, Pablo Neruda’s manta: “Out of struggle, hope.” It has been my contention that disengaged academics and theorists become cynical precisely because they are disengaged; praxis offers a space for naming, challenging and working within the contradictions, a space for creating in the midst of struggle, a never ending process hegemony and counter-hegemony, of “consent and resistance.”

This, for me, connects to our own pedagogical process within the course. As we start to engage more deeply, see contradictions within our own (and each other’s) positions and actions, we are unsettled...but the questions that emerge and the anger or discomfort from which they emerge are potential sources of new growth, new consciousness, new actions. Echoing Merlau Ponty: “never to consent to being completely comfortable with one’s own presuppositions,” and Foucault that “one must have a distant view, but also look at what is nearby and all around oneself. To be very mindful that everything one perceives is evident only against a familiar and little-known horizon, that every certainty is sure only through the support of a ground that is always unexplored. The most fragile instant has its roots.”

I hope we will be able to discuss this material, and then find our way into seeing how these dynamics play out within our own lives and conversations in the class.