![Sample our Education journals, sign in here to start your access, latest two full volumes FREE to you for 14 days]({"type":"image" , "src" : "/sda/5932/TOC-Subject-Sample-2021-Education.jpg"})
Abstract
Many educational theoretical approaches to cosmopolitanism tend towards an unconditional appreciation of mobility, diversity and rootlessness. The recent interest of educational philosophy in the rhizome, de-territorialization and diversity contributes to this understanding of cosmopolitanism as movement across a borderless and imperfect world. Without downplaying such insights (and related political education), this article displaces and de-temporalizes them. It takes the form of a parody of the rhizome to view those insights from a different perspective and make them strike a different pedagogical note.
Notes
1. The notes of various commentators.
2. Hallward defines the postcolonial as ‘an open-ended field of discursive practices characterized by boundary and border crossings’ (Citation2001, p. xiv).
3. I am indebted to Zelia Gregoriou for drawing my attention to Kincaid’s book.
4. Hear both sides, hear the other side too.
5. A Small Place was not as well received as other works by Kincaid. The editor of the New Yorker refused to publish it because he felt that the text expressed too much anger and bitterness and this criticism was voiced by many other reviewers. Yet, others praised it amongst other things also for its offering important though difficult truths about the past and present. S. Rushdie in particular praised it ‘as “a jeremiad of great clarity and force that one might have called torrential were the language not so finely controlled”’ (Edwards, Citation2007, p. 8).
6. Kincaid’s depiction of Antigua and Antiguans has attracted criticisms (e.g. King, Citation2002) some of which are interesting and merit attention. Yet, a discussion of this point goes beyond the scope of this article.
7. Even when they do not (e.g. the case of conservative detractors of cosmopolitanism), they incriminate all movement sweepingly and just as uniformly as their opponents celebrate it. Certainly, there are some mediatory or more balanced approaches, but they do not come up here because the aim of the article is not to map all possible positions but rather to target those positions that are the most influential and common. Therefore, caricature is not only inevitable here but it is also purposely employed as it is an important element of parody.
8. To my knowledge, Kincaid has not been discussed in philosophy of education. Her book Small Place is mentioned or discussed only in a couple of educational works that concern geography teaching.
9. ‘For all their differences’ such cosmopolitan celebrities ‘seem to share a harsh questioning of radical decolonisation theory; a dismissive or parodic attitude towards the project of national culture; a manipulation of imperial imagery and local legend as a means of politicising “current events”; and a declaration of cultural “hybridity”—a hybridity claimed to offer certain advantages in negotiating the collisions of language, race and art in a world of disparate peoples comprising a single, if not exactly unified, world’ (Brennan, Citation1989, p. 7).
10. To S. Gauch, Kincaid’s is not a postcolonial project mainly because ‘postcolonial criticism concerns itself with the constitution of and relation between selves and others, with how such distinctions shore up global networks of power that it, postcolonial criticism, seeks to expose, subvert and/or disrupt’ (ibid).
11. The word ‘legacy’ evokes an accomplished past whose works have only been handed down rather than actively experienced as an ongoing reality.
12. In my view, this is not limited to the UK.
13. Some of us (situated as non-native English speakers) feel uncertain about how to write in such proper English and have the impression that we usually fail in our effort.
14. It does so by passing from the descriptive to the prescriptive tout court as it raises the linguistic and cultural fact (of endemic heterogeneity and hybridity) into a promise of redemptive politics (a hybrid world that will respect even cumbersome diversity).
15. This sentence of mine is 70 words and 7 lines long in Times New Roman, 12, double space format.
16. Testing a language to its limits is very different from another sense of language testing. Language testing plays a crucial role in the process of the internationalization of a lingua franca. Language testing ‘is one of the ways in which languages are regulated and language learning imposed. Language tests privilege particular versions of what constitutes language proficiency/expertise and devalue other types and forms of language expertise’ (Makoni & Pennycook, Citation2005, p. 151).
17. http://www.web-formulas.com/Formulas_of_Chemistry/Definition_of_Limit_Tests.aspx The aim of such tests in chemistry is to find out the harmful amount of impurities and/or the avoidable/unavoidable amount of impurities.
18. Then again, when is an emphasis exaggerated, what is a right dose and who decides on all this?
19. Regarding the tired, old language and the corresponding thought, consider here Deleuze and Guattari from the Milles Plateaus where traditional philosophical thought becomes homogenized (in my view, in an unwitting confirmation that philosophy has not yet escaped from metaphysical reductions to One) as representing ‘la pensée la plus classique et la plus réfléchie, la plus vieille, la plus fatiguée’ (Citation1980, p. 11).
20. In another instance, when Braidotti describes a feature of the de-territorializing style, i.e., ‘the mixture of speaking voices, or modes’, ugliness re-emerges, yet as an attribute of philosophical language. She states that she deliberately tries ‘to mix the theoretical with the poetic or lyrical mode. These shifts in my voice are a way of resisting the pull toward the cut-and-dried, ugly philosophical language’. And she concludes that ‘that so many women in philosophy still continue to use philosophical language functionally, as a means of “communication,” distresses me’ (Braidotti, Citation1993, p. 4).
21. (De)-(Re)territorialization derives from the Latin ‘terra’, land.
22. Consider here one of its possible dimensions as explained by Braidotti: ‘Transdisciplinarity. This means the crossing of disciplinary boundaries without concern for the vertical distinctions around which they have been organized. Methodologically, this style comes close to the “bricolage”’ and ‘constitutes a practice of “theft” or extensive borrowing of notions and concepts that are deliberately used out of context and derouted from their initial purpose. Deleuze calls this technique “deterritorialization” or the becoming-nomad of ideas’ (Braidotti, Citation1993, p. 4).
23. The body of facts that prove a crime.
24. It is said that ‘the lack of clearly demarcated Indian property rights confounded British settlers, who could not think the itinerant character of Indian communities, whose settlements broke up and reassembled on a different territory as ecological needs required’ (Marzec, Citation2002, p. 152). In my view, this grants the settlers too much innocence. Difference would not have confounded them if their agenda of praeda (booty) had not been set. The lack of a western sense of property rights in the ‘visited’ land provided only the rationalization and pretext.
25. ‘The concept of tabula rasa asserted that indigenous people should be removed and that these people had minimal moral claim to the land’ (ibid).
26. It did so also by suggesting ‘that native people were less worthy of land ownership and thus essentially less human than white settlers’ (ibid). ‘Under the British doctrine of terra nullius, Aboriginal Tasmanians had no right to territory because they were not using the land in a European fashion and had no legal title under British law. Likewise, under the vacuum domicilium doctrine, the California legislature excluded the Yuki from state citizenship and thus legal land ownership. The German government did grant land titles to Hereros, but utilized the “empty” land concept as part of the rationale behind Chancellor von Caprivi’s 1893 claim that “the territory is ours, it is now German territory and must be maintained as German territory”’ (ibid).
27. Divide to rule, divide and conquer: it has a long history of theoretical and practical employment from Caesar down to Machiavelli, Sir Francis Bacon and modern empires.
28. Kant argues against all this in his first Appendix to Perpetual Peace [1795] (Citation1992).
29. The colonial traveller, the tourist, has a rich arsenal of interpretations/rationalizations for effects on the ground of his own doing: ‘while visiting Tasmania in 1836, the Reverend Thomas Atkins attributed the “almost extinct” condition of the Aborigines to the “universal law in the Divine government” that “savage tribes disappear before the progress of the civilized races”’ (cf Madley, Citation2004, pp. 168–169).
30. Palmer was a governor of Cyprus (when it was a British colony) and author of the palmerkratia, the oppressive regime of the late 1930s (ibid).
31. ‘Aphrodite during the 19th and 20th centuries was an expression of colonial desire, the yearning of British and other visitors for some sort of imaginary or idealised beauty’ (Given, Citation2002, p. 4). I am indebted to Zelia Gregoriou for drawing my attention to Michael Given’s work some years ago.
32. The sun shines upon us all. Petronius, Satyricon 100.
33. Bernhard von Bülow. http://de.wikisource.org/wiki/Deutschlands_Platz_an_der_Sonne.
34. ‘In a word: we do not expect anyone to stand in the shadow, but we also demand our own place in the sun’ (my translation).
35. The terra nullius principle according to Locke: ‘As Much Land as a Man Tills, Plants, Improves, Cultivates, and can use the Product of, so much is his Property. He by his Labour does, as it were, inclose it from the Common’ (Locke, Citation1988, sect. 32).
36. Nor is it a multi-ethnic-state. To deserve this name, a state must have the uncoerced consent of the concerned ethnē and their common identification with the constitution. Though a nation-state may have the potential of developing into a multi-ethnic-state on grounds of the democratic allegiance of ethnic and other minorities within it, the empire by definition violates rights over territory in ways that prevent democratic identification or allegiance.
37. Neither the rise of the nation-state was uniform nor did it uniformly produce distinct, separate and national languages, and some languages were not national but imperial. Lack of such nuance perpetuates colonial discursive hegemony.
38. Consider this along with many other such instances discussed by Donaldo Macedo: for example, ‘We conveniently fall into historical amnesia by forgetting the English re-education camps designed primarily to yank Native Americans' tongues. Native American children were taken from their parents and sent to boarding schools with the primary purpose of cutting them off from their “primitive” languages and “savage” cultures’ (Macedo, Citation2000, p. 20).
39. Surely not; yet consider the following connection: ‘contemporary Africans, for example, are erased from images of African “wilderness” and safari destinations in the same way as they have been consistently dehumanized and deterritorialized over the past 400 years. They are continually erased from tourism projects. Some ecotourism operators maintain the traditional conception of “other lands” as terra nullius, so tourists can follow A. A. Milne’s lead in Pooh: “There is nobody else in the world and the world was made for me”’ (d’Hauteserre, Citation2004, p. 242).
40. See, for instance, Nagel (Citation2005).
41. This is one of the reasons why, according to Leuchtenburg, mainly conservatives criticized the Spanish-American war in 1898 and its conquests and too few progressives were outspoken against the war—and this only when the consequences of the war were in plain view (Citation1952, 486).
42. Focused on the gender struggle as they are and led astray by facile and simplistic accounts of Euripides as misogynist, feminist and other discussions of Euripides’ Medea have totally overlooked the availability of the text to other political readings related to conquest, migration, expansion and masculinist rational egoism. The possibility of such an alternative reading is only indicated here as I cannot pursue it for reasons of space.
43. And it is in a complex relation with ongoing de-territorialization: capital ‘can deterritorialize what was once intrinsic or peculiar to a territory, placing it within the universal flow of the global economy. This is the logic of the enclosure act: The privatization of land ostensibly marks the land with the different signatures of individual owners, but what supersedes and enables this individual parceling is the deterritorialization of land so that it can become first and foremost a commodity that increases the universal (providential) flow of capital—giving also unchecked legal support and priority to the entrepreneurial “free-willed” citizen of empire’ (Marzec, Citation2002, p. 152).
44. ‘Between 1562 and 1807, when the slave trade was abolished, British ships carried up to three million people into slavery in the Americas. In total, European ships took more than 11 million people into slavery from the West African coast, and European traders grew rich on the profits while the population of Africa's west coast was devastated’ (Saul, Citation2009, p. 1).
45. Horace, Odes, I. 3 [In vain a prudent god separated the lands by the dissociating sea].
46. After light, darkness: I have reversed the word order of the original phrase which reads: post tenebras lux.
47. For instance, some of the continuities that fascinated the colonial traveller were that ‘priests wore the same conical caps in the Iron Age and the 19th century’ and ‘Kataklysmos, the supposed birthday of Aphrodite is still celebrated in modern Cyprus’ (Given, Citation2002, p. 13).
48. ‘Following this logic, tourists go to Bavaria for the Alps, Neuschwanstein, Mozart, lederhosen, and beer halls; anti-tourists go to Bavaria for those things plus a trip to Dachau’ (Bowman & Pezzullo, Citation2009, p. 196). A question here might be: ‘By naming such tourist practices ‘dark’, might we not be contributing to the already-formidable body of criticism and popular opinion that attributes only vulgar, base, or superficial motives to tourists?’ (ibid, p. 190). Bowman and Pezullo deny this charge as concerns their own use of the ‘dark’ in important and complex ways that go beyond the scope of this article.
49. Let similar things take care of similar things. Likes are cured by likes.
50. Compare the above with the following: ‘for Braidotti, one of the historical tasks of feminist as nomad is to “restore a sense of intersubjectivity that would allow for the recognition of differences to create a new kind of bonding, in an inclusive (i.e. nonexclusionary) manner”. Braidotti calls this process a collective “becoming polyglot” in which feminists can “become fluent in a variety of styles and disciplinary angles and in many different dialects, jargons, languages”, so that their unity is based, not on a universalized image of sisterhood, but on a recognition of complexity’ (Gedalof, Citation1996, p. 191).
51. ‘Accursed hunger for gold’. Virgil, Aeneid, 3, 57. This verse has been used by a series of thinkers from Seneca to Toni Negri. Karl Marx employs the phrase in Notebook 2 of Grundrisse (https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1857/grundrisse/ch04.htm) and also in the Capital. Marx praised McCulloch for writing that the inextinguishable passion for gain, the auri sacra fames, will lead capitalists’ (1, 153, n. 2). This verse is also the title of a polemical essay J. M. Keynes wrote in 1930 against central bankers of his day (it is included in his Essays in Persuasion [2009]). Max Weber’s use of the verse and his ethnological and essentialist associations in The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism are worthy of separate and deconstructive discussions which are beyond the scope of this article.
52. In some cases, the role of the colonial power created a situation that can be described by paraphrasing a well-known Nietzschean aphorism: Can a people be tragic? To perish under a burden one can neither bear nor throw off? The case of those under former colonial rule.
53. On the terms ‘thin’ and ‘thick’ cosmopolitanism see Dobson (Citation2006), but here I twist their meaning.
54. Literally, the tears of/for things. Virgil, Aeneid, 1461. The rest of the verse, ‘et mentem mortalia tangent’: and the mortal things touch the mind.
55. I have not coined these ‘ugly’ words. I have borrowed them from tourist studies, specifically, from Bowman and Pezzullo (Citation2009, p. 189).
56. Bathic adj.—pertaining to depths, especially of sea. http://www.kokogiak.com/logolepsy/ow_b.html#bathic. Notice the etymological connection to the aesthetic term ‘bathos’.
57. Compare here: ‘Sarkozy and his speechwriter place “the real tragedy of Africa” elsewhere: in the fact “that the African has not sufficiently entered history”’ (Stoler, Citation2008, p. 211).
58. Let the reader beware.
59. Let us be aware here of the fact that policies through which natives’ relation to their languages was attacked were imposed not only by the colonial UK, Kincaid’s constant target, but also by USA, Kincaid adopted place. Consider here Macedo’s description of such a case of imposition: ‘If it were not for the colonial legacy, how could we explain the U.S. educational policies in the Philippines and Puerto Rico? English was imposed as the only language of instruction in the Philippines while the imposed American text-book presented American culture not only as superior, but as a “model par excellence for the Philippine society”’ (Macedo, Citation2000, p. 16).
60. For a vehement critique of this movement see Macedo (Citation2000).
61. If translation is taken at face value, a colony is a second copy of the original located somewhere on the globe. Therefore, ‘colonialism’ refers to ‘the acts of settling down a colony elsewhere on the map’ (ibid).
62. ‘The “bilingual” colonizer may participate in far more insidious forms of imperialism than the “monolingual” colonizer’ (ibid).
63. And the fixed can find itself in a complex dialectic with the averted gaze, as fixity and fixation entail lack of engagement with anything outside a specific optics.