Earlier this week my mind flashed back to a post-graduate module I took on ‘Discourses of the Other’. It was an intense course – 3 hours a day for 3 weeks and to some extent it’s really where my academic interest in racism and discrimination took its first flight.
In a way it was a typical university seminar – we were given readings or films and then we discussed them as group. The teacher actively wanted the participants, especially the white male members of the class (including me), to be challenged; to de-centre themselves and, I guess on reflection, re-centre themselves afterwards. It was an uncomfortable and profoundly challenging course for me; being faced with the experiences of people I called my friends, but who, it became clear, I knew little of how they experienced the world, what they kept silent in our other classes.
Fast forward to today and my idea to write post on decolonising as de-centering. At first I thought, “great idea”, but as the outline germinated over the day, I realised that idea, to some extent at least, already a priori constructs the centre from a white/British/Coloniser* perspective rather than a pluralistic/colonised one. I.e.: in framing decolonisation as de-centering of the subject I am also erasing the reality of the centre. I am guilty of that which I am trying to challenge through my research.
And yet…I feel that de-centering is a useful term here, albeit one that I’m not sure how exactly I might use it and which needs parsing.
It depends perhaps on what we understand as the centre.
Isn’t it in fact that the centre is itself already de-centered and what we are faced with is the task of recognising this? And that what decolonisation – of education, of the mind, of power – is about is rewriting the history of the centre?
Is decolonisation a process of de-centering to understand – or recognise** the other/Other – or is decolonisation more about de-centering to acknowledge the subject as pluralistic, and with many stories to tell?
Put another way: are we talking of a subject de-centering itself in order to better understand the non-centre, or of a subject that needs to acknowledge itself as already de-centered?
In an interview for her latest book Priyamvada Gopal, who the idea for this project is indebted to, says that decolonising education is about “understanding mythologies and undoing mythologies”.***
For Gopal, decolonisation is about:
…having access to information and narratives which reframe our understanding of how to relate to other peoples, other countries and other cultures
If we were to leave her words at this juncture, I think this points to decolonisation as the subject de-centering itself, away from dominant narratives of Empire, in order to understand others. But she goes on to say:
That’s a question that can be asked regardless of what your cultural background is, it’s a question young black and British Asians and Asian Britons can ask themselves, it’s also a question that young white British people can ask themselves… “what have we inherited in terms of stories about the empire and how can we think about it differently?”
Taken as such, it can then be reframed as the centre doing work on itself – these are, after all, people of the centre (if, as I do, we take Britain as our deictic centre-subject for this research; the here, the we, the us). But it should be remembered, indeed it should be the starting point, that this centre is not an homogenous one. Those who make up the centre – the present day one, not the stuff of myths, not, the purely white one – have different levels of senses of belonging, different experiences, different levels of acceptance and acceptability.
So, is the centre-subject a country? Or an individual? Or both? Given that I generally look at public sphere discourses in my work and the role of national identities, I guess my work will tend towards theories that understand it as the former.
These Empire mythologies that Gopal talks of have become more prominent in political and public discourse since Brexit (although, spoiler alert they never really went away, despite what liberal Britain would love to claim – more on that next time). They work to draw the centre back in on itself – they blind the centre to alternative narratives – narratives from the outside, vitally that already exist on the inside but which are repressed, suppressed, silenced.
Comments and suggestions welcome – especially reading material.
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Notes:
* (or maybe we don’t even have to choose our noun, we can go with “White, British coloniser”)
** I mean here recognition in Charles Taylor’s sense. Taylor (1994, 30-35) argues that there exists the conditions in which attempts to be recognised can fail. “This failure to be recognised (or the refusal by others to recognise) as an equal participant in an on-going dialogue of identity construction, can distort and oppress an individual’s identity to the extent that a negative image of the self becomes internalised” (Bennett 2018, 43). This means that minorities begin to see themselves through the same mental models and discursive practices as those misrecognising them. The one-to-be-recognised is limited by the discursive practices of the subject-centre so that its identity is forced into the discourse of the recogniser (Bingham 2001, 90). So, the conversation, or the parameters of the conversation between the self and the other has begun prior to any meeting because of the location of the meeting (inside the centre, or at least in a transnational public sphere dominated by the centre).
*** This seems to tie in nicely with a critical approach to discourse analysis (CDS), which I use in my research. Wodak (2011, 52) writes that the aim of CDS is “to demystify discourses by deciphering ideologies”. She goes on to write: “How does the naturalization of ideology come about? Which discursive strategies legitimate control or ‘naturalize’ the social order? How power is linguistically expressed? How are consensus, acceptance and legitimacy of dominance manufactured?…Who understands a certain discourse in what way and with what results?” (Wodak 2011, 53-54)
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References:
Bennett, Samuel. 2018. Constructions of Migrant Integration in British Public Discourse: Becoming British (London: Bloomsbury)
Bennett, Samuel. 2019. “Values as tools of legitimation in EU and UK Brexit discourses”, in: Veronika Koller, Susanne Kopf, and Marlene Miglbauer (eds.) Discourses of Brexit. London: Routledge,17-32.
Bingham Charles. 2001. Schools of Recognition: Identity Politics and Classroom Practices. Lanham: Rowman and Littlefield
Gopal, Priyamvada. 2019. Interview: Insurgent Empire: Anticolonial Resistance and British Dissent, Verso. https://www.versobooks.com/blogs/4362-insurgent-empire-anticolonial-resistance-and-british-dissent-priyamvada-gopal
Taylor, Charles. 1994. “The Politics of Recognition”, in: Amy Gutmann (ed),
Multiculturalism: Examining the Politics of Recognition. Princeton : Princeton
University Press, 25-73.
Wodak, Ruth. 2011. “Critical Linguistics and Discourse Analysis”, in: Jan Zienkowski, Jan-Ola Ostman and Jef Verschueren (eds.), Discursive Pragmatics. Amsterdam: John Benjamins, 50-70.
Colonial Forgettings 