In Decolonization and Feminisms in Global
Teaching and Learning, editors Sara de Jong ,
Rosalba Icaza and Olivia U. Rutazibwa offer a
volume that not only shows how calls to decolonise
universities are strengthened when connected to
feminist perspectives, but also challenges the
individualistic and Eurocentric foundations of many
forms of feminism. This is an important contribution
to debates on how to decolonise places of teaching
and learning, writes Fawzia Mazanderani, positioning
critical engagement with feminist theories as integral
to this process.
This review is part of a theme week published for
International Women’s Day 2019 (#IWD2019),
showcasing and celebrating women’s scholarship
across the social science and humanities. You can
explore more of the week’s content here.
Decolonization and Feminisms in Global Teaching
and Learning. Sara de Jong, Rosalba Icaza and
Olivia U. Rutazibwa (eds). Routledge. 2018.
Find this
book:
Over the last few years, calls to ‘decolonise’ the
academy have gained momentum, with both
students and educators mobilising worldwide to
challenge the structures of their universities and
their disciplinary canons. These calls for
transformation vary widely, from the successful (and
unsuccessful) demands to remove statues of
colonial oppressors from university campuses, to
students recognising that theirs is a largely ‘white’
curriculum, urging them to press for a greater
representation of non-European thinkers in their
courses. It is within this context that Sara de Jong,
Rosalba Icaza and Olivia U. Rutazibwa have edited
a highly relevant resource for both educators and
learners seeking change within the academy. While
varying in terms of their writing style and the
context in focus, each contributing author is
connected by their argument that calls to decolonise
universities, through the re-examination of how
knowledge is produced and taught, are strengthened
when connected to feminist perspectives.
By forging a connection between decolonial and
feminist approaches, the contributors demonstrate
how these two broad churches have both sought to
move away from the (im)possibility of objective and
neutral knowledge production, instead recognising
the connection between the personal and political.
The editors make a sound justification for the need
to incorporate feminisms with decolonialisation,
arguing that if everything goes under the umbrella of
decolonisation, gender and sexuality may be
pushed aside. At the same time, feminist
contributions to critical pedagogy often remain
focused on the emancipation of the white middle
classes rather than recognise the experiences of all
women. This volume calls for ‘feminisms’, drawing
on an expansive range of international cases, that
recognise the different identity intersections of
women. By acknowledging the individualistic
foundations of many forms of feminism, the
contributors demonstrate how we might shift our
thinking to be inclusive of communities whose
foundational beliefs lie in communal understandings
of the world (22). At the same time, the collection
demonstrates how feminist theory remains integral
to the process of decolonisation, given the
gendered and sexualised forms through which
colonialism takes place.
To connect this text with the political struggles that
inspire it, chapters are interspersed with manifestos
and reflection pieces formulated by activists from
across the globe. While this is a welcome release
from the narrow frameworks of academic
expression, venturing outside of circumscribed
vocabulary and style can also be challenging, as
noted by the editors. It raises questions of what to
hold onto, what language to write in and who,
ultimately, to please? I found that the more that the
contributors veered away from conventional research
chapters, the greater the connection made between
movements and struggles in and outside of the
academy, thus demonstrating the manner in which
the identities of ‘educator’, ‘researcher’ and ‘activist’
intersect. By disrupting the conventions of
academic expression, these particular contributions
provided a freshness and a rawness that rarely sees
the light of publication.
Image Credit: (Alec Perkins CC BY 2.0 )
The chapters range from personal, and at times
slightly whimsical, musings to contributions of a
more overtly practical nature. Jess Auerbach’s
chapter, which unpicks decolonising strategies
adopted by the African Leadership University, stood
out as a particularly useful resource for educators
seeking ways in which to transform their pedagogy.
One take-home suggestion is for educators to draw
upon more than just written sources, recognising
that Africa’s long intellectual history has only
recently begun to be recorded through text. A
commitment to assigning non-textual sources of
history could, among other things, mean studying
artefacts, music, advertising, architecture and food
(109). Another strength of the volume is that, by
covering such a wide array of country contexts, it
gives space to predominantly silenced voices, such
as the thinking to have emerged from the Pacific
(11).
Yet perhaps the greatest contribution this book has
to make is that, if read carefully enough, it forces
the reader to make decolonisation a ‘personal
journey’, recognising the elements of colonial and
patriarchal thinking that they may have inadvertently
internalised and reproduced (71). As a teacher who
works within a university department that
(somewhat) recognises the need to problematise
knowledge production, I was reading this book at
the same time as teaching about movements to
decolonise education. Shortly after one of my
seminars, I opened the page to Roselyn Masamha’s
‘Post-it Notes to My Lecturers’ and read her
comment on how, when students ‘make ill-informed
derogatory comments that reinforce stereotypes, not
challenging these suggests collusion’ (147). This
was my cue to have a flashback to my own
attempts at diplomacy earlier that same day, when I
had politely suggested to a student that their view
that colonisers had brought ‘logic,’ ‘medicine’ and
‘infrastructure’ to the colonies should be contested.
Yet by suggesting that they should be contested, I
didn’t contest them with sufficient detail; I simply
hoped someone else would. No one did. Are my
own nervous desires to cultivate freedom of
expression helping to reproduce what I have often
discovered to be the racist, and sexist, status quo?
I think they probably are, and I am grateful to de
Jong, Icaza and Rutazibwa for helping me realise
that.
The powerful, yet troubling, recognition that ‘the
master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s
house’ ( Audre Lorde) raises the question of whether
our learning and teaching has been so influenced by
an understanding of education as a civilising
mission that our curriculums in their current
condition cannot be saved; they must be
reimagined (100). The question of which tools to
use to ‘dismantle the master’s house’ is significant
in every contribution of this book. Rutazibwa, who
considers the relationship between teaching
international development and the survival of the
sector itself (158), eloquently addresses this issue.
In her chapter, Rutazibwa observes how:
as long as we institutionally keep
offering international development
studies as a career path that intertwines
students’ financial and personal
investments, as well as our own careers,
it is very unlikely, however critically and
pedagogically soundly we engage with
coloniality in class, that it will magically
dissolve… (158)
While international development is a particularly
pertinent example of a discipline that retains echoes
of a colonial mentality, Rutazibwa raises a question
that applies across disciplines: how much is our
research invested in the continuation of the world as
it is? She then takes this a step further by asking:
how much of our careers are dependent on our
deconstructive work only? (172). Rutazibwa’s
chapter illustrates how any engagement with the
content of our curriculums must also concern itself
with the question of whether, in an increasingly
neoliberal university, it is possible to garner
institutional support to review their foundations.
Like most conversations centred on decolonising
knowledges, the nature of the arguments presented
in this volume remains often rhetorical, rather than
explicitly focused on praxis. It would be valuable if
a subsequent publication oriented itself explicitly
around the measures that particular institutions or
activists groups are taking to decolonise ways of
understanding and being in the world. Given the
strong link between the extractive industries and
colonialism, and the relationship between gender
justice and climate justice, an additional publication
would be even more valuable if it considered the
relationship between the crises that are facing both
our ecologies and our academies.
While this collection might have greater impact if it
oriented itself more towards practice, it serves as
an important contributor to debates concerned with
how to decolonise spaces of learning and teaching.
Moreover, it raises the important point that
discussions regarding decolonisation benefit from
an engagement with feminist approaches. For any
teacher who has aspirations to transform their own
pedagogy, this volume serves as a reminder of how,
while the academy has the potential to nourish new
ideas, it can equally serve as a space where
colonial, patriarchal oppressions are reproduced. As
such, any attempt to transform teaching practices
cannot occur without continual personal reflection.
Fawzia Mazanderani is a Teaching Fellow in the
School of Global Studies at Sussex University. She
has a background in Social Anthropology (The
University of Cape Town), The Anthropology of
Development (SOAS) and International Education
(Sussex). Read more by Fawzia Mazanderani .
Note: This review gives the views of the author, and
not the position of the LSE Review of Books blog, or
of the London School of Economics.
No comments:
Post a Comment