Postcolonial perspectives on global citizenship education.

This art icle was downloaded by: [ Universit y of California, Berkeley] On: 06 July 2015, At : 04: 50 Publisher: Rout ledge I nform a Lt d Regist ered in England and Wales Regist ered Num ber: 1072954 Regist ered office: 5 Howick Place, London, SW1P 1WG Journal of Language, Identity & Education Publicat ion det ails, including inst ruct ions f or aut hors and subscript ion inf ormat ion: ht t p: / / www. t andf online. com/ loi/ hlie20 Postcolonial perspectives on global citizenship education. by De Oliveira Andreotti, V. , & Mario T. M. de Souza, L. (Eds. ) Usree Bhat t acharya a a Indiana Universit y of Pennsylvania Published online: 12 Nov 2013. To cite this article: Usree Bhat t acharya (2013) Post colonial perspect ives on global cit izenship educat ion. by De Oliveira Andreot t i, V. , & Mario T. M. de Souza, L. 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M. de Souza, L. (Eds.). (2012). Postcolonial perspectives on global citizenship education. New York, NY: Routledge, 246 pp. $133.00 (hard back). Reviewed by Usree Bhattacharya Indiana University of Pennsylvania [email protected] This edited volume brings together a thought-provoking series of transdisciplinary and postcolonial studies on the topical subject of global citizenship education. The core motivation behind the book, according to the editors, is to nurture rigorous, critical, and international voices in the literature examining the notion of global citizenship from an educational research perspective. Global citizenship employs classroom content and/or experience to “bring the world into . . . classrooms” or “send students into the world” (p. 1); the problematization of these twin pedagogical moves that seek the formation of “global subjectivities” is a crucial aspect of the book’s critical agenda. The authors seek to spotlight the ways in which the production of these subjectivities is embedded within larger processes implicated within complicated political and historical pasts and a shifting, globalizing present. The scholarship highlights how, despite the celebration of a universal global culture, global citizenship education taps into enduring dichotomies that organize, frame, and reify understandings about the self and the other. The inattention to the dynamics of power and the creation of knowledge in global citizenship education “often results in educational practices that unintentionally reproduce ethnocentric, ahistorical, depoliticized, paternalistic, salvationist and triumphalist approaches that tend to deficit theorize, pathologize or trivialize difference” (p. 1). Postcolonial theory undergirds the contributors’ rigorous investigation of global citizenship education, where the post in postcolonialism is treated as a sustained questioning, a constant state of becoming. The book configures postcolonial theory as “tools-forthinking rather than theories-of-truth” (p. 2). In sum, the book weaves together interdisciplinary perspectives that engage in in-depth exploration of the notion of difference within global citizenship education and offers theoretical approaches that seek to trouble simplistic analyses and understandings within the field. The book is divided into three parts. Part I contains a selection of chapters that examine the utility of postcolonial theory in understanding global citizenship education. In the first chapter, Karen Pashby begins by providing an overview of core motivations underlying global citizenship education programs. Using the work of scholars such as Chandra Talpade Mohanty, Linda Tuhiwai Smith, Edward Said, Leon Tikly, and John Willinsky, Pashby then applies a Downloaded by [University of California, Berkeley] at 04:50 06 July 2015 358 BOOK REVIEWS framework of decolonization to complicate global citizenship education models, in light of politically steeped matrices of global relationships. David Jefferess, in the second chapter, brings postcolonial theorization to bear on Canadian institutionalized discourse of global citizenship. He critically analyzes policy discourses at the University of British Columbia, “where global citizenship has become a primary mandate of the academic plan” (p. 28), by using the work of scholars such as Nigel Dower and Kwame Anthony Appiah. He finds that these discourses lead to the creation of “the global citizen as a particular subject that is constituted by the ability to act, and specifically to ‘make a better world’ for, rather than with, other” (pp. 28–29). In the third chapter, Colin Wright underscores, while enlisting the work of scholars such as Alain Badiou, Jacques Rancière, and Slavoj Žižek, the violence engendered by the widespread assertion of universalism by many global citizenship education programs. Wright proposes “divisive universalism” (p. 47) as a possible solution to this problem, founded upon the incorporation of and emphasis on critical pedagogies that deeply interrogate notions of universality. Lynn Mario T. M. de Souza, in the final chapter of Part I, explores Brazilian indigenous literacy education policies and initiatives in dialog with broader discourses of national global citizenship education. He demonstrates how theories of “indigenous perspectivism” (p. 73) challenge the reductive, homogenizing, and normativizing educational policy discourses and offer an alternative vision of configuring knowledge. The second part of the book, Critiques of GCE Initiatives: Policies, Campaigns, Study Abroad and Volunteering Schemes, comprises critical investigations into global citizenship education initiatives. Talya Zemach-Bersin’s contribution examines study-abroad schemes to reveal that the type of global citizenship imagined through study-abroad programs is founded upon “a powerful rationale that links the production of U.S.-American global citizens to the fashioning and maintenance of US military, economic and cultural supremacy throughout the world in an age of globalization” (p. 90). Zemach-Bersin argues that a historically and politically responsive global citizenship education will problematize the “ways in which claiming global citizenship is not an alternative to empire, but a form of empire” (p. 101). Next, Paul Tarc considers global citizenship education as a recasting of the old international education model and examines Oxfam’s (2006) Education for Global Citizenship: A Guide for Schools in order to shed light on the neoliberal desire to intervene by making a difference. Nancy Cook’s study applies feminist and postcolonial theory in order to examine the ideologies of White “Western” women living in Gilgit (Pakistan) and to illuminate the vestiges of colonialism embedded within discourses of global citizenship among development volunteers. In the succeeding chapter, Nick Stevenson critically investigates the “Make Poverty History” campaign to complicate ideas about justice and democracy within global citizenship education conversations. He mobilizes the work of Franz Fanon, Paolo Freire, and Guy Debord to illuminate the ways in which their scholarship, while not without limitations, suggest ways of achieving global citizenship that circumvent dominance and oppression. Next, Ali A. Abdi and Lynette Shultz focus on the “false promise” or “absence” (p. 159) of citizenship realities in Africa and its implications for global citizenship education. They complicate the understandings of citizenship, which, they assert, are undergirded by Western conceptualizations of the same, a move the authors see as “counterliberating” (p. 170). They recommend decolonizing strategies that would afford greater agency for African people. Part III contains the sharpest pedagogic focus, exploring programs and initiatives that reimagine global citizenship education in new ways. Lisa Taylor’s case study draws on student narratives in a Social and Global Justice Education course from a small liberal arts college in Canada. The Downloaded by [University of California, Berkeley] at 04:50 06 July 2015 BOOK REVIEWS 359 course inspires preservice teacher trainees to make an epistemic move from “instrumental” to, what Deborah Britzman configures as, “difficult” learning methods and to create curricula that attempt “to learn from rather than about the Other” (p. 177). Su-ming Khoo examines the implications for global citizenship education within the university context. Khoo conducts a postcolonial analysis of two crucial ruptures in the historical trajectory of an Irish university and illuminates higher educational consequences for the present historical moment. Vanessa de Oliveira Andreotti, Cash Ahenakew, and Garrick Cooper offer a strong critique of the epistemic violence engendered in notions about universal knowledge, invoking the work of Māori, First Nations, and postcolonial scholars to frame their argument. They offer a different perspective on the process of knowledge production, illustrating one that is more open to difference, and show its implications for global citizenship education. As the review above indicates, this edited volume brings together a variety of interesting and fresh perspectives, interrogating the notion of global citizenship education from a variety of theoretical stances. The text will be useful for researchers working in the fields of global citizenship education, study abroad, and international education contexts. The book is ambitious in scope but does manage to interrupt the larger reductive discourses that proliferate global citizenship education discourses. One important aspect that the book does not sufficiently interrogate, however, is the construct West; that term, as well as global North and South are used without sufficient explanation or questioning of what analytical purchase, if any, they offer (for more on this line of critique, see Bhattacharya, 2011). Additionally, the analysis of global citizenship discourses sometimes appears largely one-sided; in Zemach-Bersin’s paper, the positive effects of study abroad in the development of newer identities, for example, remains underexplored. Furthermore, in the chapter by Ali Abdi and Lynette Shultz, we are told that the Russian empire is “mistakenly known as the Soviet Union” (p. 160) and the oppressive political system that took root in Greece was “misnamed ‘democratic’ ” (p. 160) without any explanations as to why these are misnomers. Apart from these issues, however, the book offers an important scholarly contribution to the examination of global citizenship education. REFERENCE Bhattacharya, U. (2011). The “West” in literacy. Berkeley Review of Education, 2(2), 179–198. Wyman, L. T. (2012). Youth culture, language endangerment and linguistic survivance. Bristol, UK: Multilingual Matters, 303 pp. $49.95 (paperback). Reviewed by Yongsu Park University of Pennsylvania [email protected] Yup’ik is an indigenous language that is spoken by Central Alaskan Yup’ik Eskimo, commonly referred to as Yup’ik. This book is about language shift, social change, and Yup’ik speakers’ efforts to keep their heritage language. Navigating multidimensional aspects of language