A new collection of essays and reviews of ideas and art that advances the decolonial mentality in the Americas.
Category Archives: Book
2013 Human Development Report | Human Development Reports
2013 Human Development Report argues for the economic rise of the South. But how will its cultural values become more influential as well?
Multicultural Knowledge and the University | Other India Press
Multicultural Knowledge and the University | Other India Press.
If universities in Asia, Africa and South America decide to decrease the Eurocentric content of the curricula they follow today in their various departments, what would they substitute it with?
Néstor Gárcia Canclini – Imagined Globalization
Néstor Gárcia Canclini – Imagined Globalization.
A new book by leading Mexican sociologist that “considers how globalization is imagined by artists, academics, migrants, and entrepreneurs, all of whom traverse boundaries and, at times, engage in conflicted or negotiated multicultural interactions.”
Biennials of the South on the Edges of the Global – Third Text – Volume 27, Issue 4
The truth about the resignation of Benedict XVI
One wonders if Esteban Bedoya has some secret hot-line into the Vatican. When he published The Apocalypse According to Benedict in 2008 it seemed an audacious fantasy that Pope Benedict XVI, AKA. Joseph Ratzinger, would ever retire from this highest of worldly offices. Popes don’t retire: they assume the Papal throne at an advanced age and moulder away on the job. One need only think of Benedict’s predecessor, Pope John Paul II, who died at the age of 85, suffering from Parkinson’s Disease and severe degenerative arthritis. By the end of his life John Paul II had survived two assassination attempts and several cancer scares, but his decrepitude was alarming.
In his novella Bedoya has Benedict retire – and so it came to pass. On 11 February 2013, two months’ short of his 86th birthday, the Pope announced his intention to step down, citing “a lack of strength of mind and body”.
Having witnessed the lamentable final years of his friend and ally, John Paul II, one can understand Benedict’s actions, even if had been 598 years since the previous Papal resignation. That was when Gregory XII was forced to resign in order to end the Great Schism which divided the Catholic Church from 1378 to 1418.
The novelty of Bedoya’s story is that the Pope does not resign solely because of declining health. His decision follows a landmark decision that throws the Church into crisis. Those who considered the Pontiff to be an ultra-conservative, now call him “Benedict the Revolutionary”.
Having detonated his bomb the Pope declines the offer of spending his retirement in the Vatican and withdraws to his native Bavaria. The real Benedict has remained in Rome, but with the caveat that his only ‘revolutionary’ gesture was the resignation itself.
The startling parallels between art and life lend a seductive power to Bedoya’s imaginative rewiring of reality. Is it impossible that the real Benedict might have felt the same anxieties about the “crisis of faith” faced by the Church today? The crisis is real enough with the Catholic Church often resembling a vast multinational corporation peddling a medieval view of personal morality. Believers around the world find their faith tested by doctrines seemingly at odds with the circumstances of their lives.
Bedoya’s Pope takes decisive action then resigns while the shock waves are still radiating outwards. He knows there can be no stopping the forces he has unleashed. For the reader this extraordinary scenario has a eerie plausibility. One can believe the real Benedict nurtured similar ambitions which never came to fruition. The author leads us into this state of heightened credulity by presenting the Pope as a creature of flesh-and-blood who talks freely about his childhood temptations, feeling the conflict between his vows to the Church and the pangs of sexual desire.
For the Church the Pope is an immaculate figure whose life and actions can only be exemplary. Bedoya’s version seems much more like a mere mortal – more capable of eliciting our sympathies, less demanding of reverence.
And so we read The Apocalypse According to Benedict as both an outlandish work of fiction and a tale that brings a touch of earthy realism into our views of that otherworldly kingdom, the Vatican. The book dispels the air of professional mystery concocted by the Church and leads us to focus on those greater mysteries contained within the human heart.
Review by John McDonand
Tribal Pacific indigenous responses to development, education and schooling
image
Vanua, Indigenous Knowledge, Development and Professional Support for Teachers & Education
Nabobo-Baba, U. et.al. (2012).Fiji: University of the South Pacific-FALE & Native Academy Publishers. Four Parts, 412 pages. $40.00USD. (Paperback).ISBN: 978-982-01-0886-8.
[Unaisi Nabobo-Baba; Sereima Naisilisili; Samu Bogitini; Tupeni Lebaivalu Baba With Govinda Lingam]
………………………………………………………………………………………………………
The University of the South Pacific (USP), one of two regionally owned universities in the world-the other being the University of West Indies serves its 12 member Pacific Island countries where much of the population live in rural, remote and isolated islands. These “unseen” populace and their realities are necessary to our discourses and debates in education and development. The ideas and philosophies of their ways of life, their struggles, their responses to development needs of the school and of teaching as a profession, must be researched and should constitute an important agenda of research. The Academy in this case the USP must continue to find ways to attend to rural students, schools, teachers and communities in creative ways, The challenges of a regional institution like USP to do so and do so effectively will continue to pose challenges – challenges that are decades old as well as those that are as old as the countries themselves.
In the vanua (tribe) context, the regional university evidently like the government that pays the teachers and provides the school curriculum must work with and acknowledge vanua processes. Community processes like the vanua processes as in the case of Udu schools mediate how schools, teachers carry out their business. An understanding of the context of the community especially its decision making processes and economic power bases may enhance the academy in its attempt to “reach” rural teachers. This is also true of Government in its attempt to service rural schools and their communities given that local governance processes in Fiji’s 20 year history of military coups, as well as globalisation, pose new possibilities and challenges to teachers and schools in rural and remote places. Advances in ICT is proving to be a solution but can also create further digital divide if care is not taken to address not exacerbate existing disparities among the rich and poor within regions of a country like Fiji and other Pacific islands countries. Begs the question – Must a university heavily subsidise its services in order that its third world clientele get the development “goods” others elsewhere enjoy?. The role of national governments in ICT development and access for its rural communities also come into question here. Perhaps regional alternatives too of access and equity to education and training are needed and may be an agenda for regional leaders’ fora as education has historically been a force for good but it has also been a force that promotes inequity and differential delivery. The future must see us continually asking questions to redress past inequalities and address potential future developments of the same.
Guided closely by post-colonial critiques of knowledge and especially of the attempt worldwide to question the dominance of certain knowledge framings in research and writing, the study conscientiously framed its work given the methodological debates by Smith (1999) and the alternatives to methodologies (Grant and Giddings, 2002). This is to ensure the IK and processes of Fijians and specifically Udu peoples are embraced and acknowledged. The study utilized ethnographic techniques of in-depth interviews, participant observations and document study. The study was guided closely by Fijian Vanua Research Frameworks honouring local wisdoms and processes of knowledges, indigenous to context. This is why the book also highlights iluvatu as metaphor and derivative of Vanua framings to situate its findings and processes in the vanua Cuku (as home of the iluvatu mat) and Udu Point.
Decolonizing research allows us to refine institutional agendas to serve the under-privileged, the “unseen”. Rural and remote places also are places of positive struggles and sheer hard work and determination. Tribal Pacific indigenous responses to development, education and schooling as well as continuous research into our educational practices will provide us new insights into professional development ideas, models and strategies for such “far –away” places. Research such as this provide fresh and deep insights into of teachers, students and school communities we serve especially within the post colonial framings and notions of “voice” and access and equity. Suggestions for policy in educational ICT and teacher development are also highlighted. The book written by organic intellectuals provide as well an interesting perspective in the role women play in school and development of island peoples not often publicly acknowledged. The reflective pieces in the last part by the authors suggest the authors are not only engaging in theoretical masterfully scripted ideas but are effectively persons that live and have come through rural, remote island realities and have made it through schools and makes the book all the more interesting, deeply moving and interesting
Postcolonial Challenges in Education
Coloma, Roland Sintos (ed.) Postcolonial Challenges in Education New York, Bern, Berlin, Bruxelles, Frankfurt am Main, Oxford, Wien, 2009. X, 382 pp.
Postcolonial Challenges in Education traces the palimpsest histories of imperialism and colonialism, and puts to work the catachrestic interventions of anti-imperialist and decolonizing projects. This book functions as a set of theoretical, empirical, and pedagogical challenges to two fields of scholarship. It points out the inadequate attention to issues of education in studies of imperialism and colonialism as well as the relative absence of empire as a relevant category of analysis in studies of education. It brings together many of the world’s leading and emerging scholars who engage with the key debates and dilemmas in postcolonial and educational studies, and ushers in a collective of dissident voices that unabashedly aim to contest and reconfigure the current local-global order.
International Competition to Launch University of the South Pacific Press
In May 2011, the University of the South Pacific will be launching its publishing arm that will be known as the USP Press. The goal of the Press is to publish high quality research and writing on issues related to the Pacific Islands, or the islands commonly known as Melanesia, Micronesia and Polynesia. Toward this end, the University wishes to announce an international competition seeking manuscripts in the following categories:
USP Press Literature Prize ($3000) will be awarded to the overall winner from the following categories.
The winner in each category will receive $1,000.00
- Fiction ($1,000)
- Poetry ($1,000)
- Drama or Screenplay ($1,000)
USP Press Non Fiction Prize ($3,000) will be awarded to the overall winner from the following categories. The winner in each category will receive $1,000.00.
- History, Auto/Biography ($1,000)
- Sciences ($1,000)
- Social Sciences/Humanities ($1000)
- Best Children’s Book ($2,000)
The competition is open to all nationalities and closes on 15 February, 2011.
The prize money will be in American dollars
Each submission must clearly indicate the category in which it is to be considered.
All submissions must be in hardcopy. Online submissions will not be accepted.
All submissions should be addressed to:
The Chair, Board of the USP Press,
Professor Vilsoni Hereniko,
Oceania Centre for Arts, Culture and Pacific Studies,
The University of the South Pacific
Private Mail Bag,
Laucala Campus, Suva, Fiji.
For enquiries, write to
hereniko_v(at)usp.ac.fj
Southern Theory – picking up the gauntlet
Raewyn Connell’s book Southern Theory has attracted a great deal of attention in the field of sociology. As an example of the use of ‘South’ within a particular discipline of knowledge, it is worth reflecting on the responses. It has won awards and been the subject of many conference sessions, but it has also engendered some interesting critical responses.
Kerry Carrington Journal of Sociology 2008; 44; 301
Carrington welcomes Connell’s book, but faults it for a perceived sense of pessimism about change, alleging a debt to Gramsci’s concept of hegemony. But the review also reveals problems in the way the concept of South is received. Despite the broad concept of South to include countries of the Global South such as India, Carrington reduces it to a question of hemisphere:
Southern Theory provides the next generation of social scientists from societies of the southern hemisphere the intellectual foundation to break with the self-deprecating dynamic of replicating he globalizing social science produced in the northern hemisphere.
Crain Soudien and Carlos Alberto Torre British Journal of Sociology of Education 2008; 29, Issue 6; 719-725
Soudien and Alberto are quite fulsome in their praise.They describe the text as ‘profoundly generative’ and claim that ‘Southern Theory is a key text for the period in which we are living.’ Within their own South African context, they use Connell’s text to highlight the neglected work of Ben Kies. They claim that his 1953 lecture ‘The Contribution of the Non-European Peoples to World Civilisation’ is now worth revisiting.
Saïd Amir Arjomand ‘Southern Theory: an Illusion’ European Journal of Sociology 2008; 49; 546-549
Arjomand’s review is the most critical. He takes Connell to task for claiming a commonality between heterogeneous forms of knowledge emerging from Africa, Middle East, South Asia and Latin America. He argues that such a commonality cannot exist without a shared community of scholars. In the end, he defers to a single global community of sociology to pursue these questions. Nonetheless, he does acknowledge the contribution of Southern Theory towards a more representative discipline.
The creation of this new republic of social knowledge could be the work of generations, and one would need to integrate Northern and Southern theory. Our concern should not be with the ethnic identity and geographical location of social scientists and public intellectuals, but with comparisons of the concepts used to understand the phenomena and developmental patterns of the metropolitan and peripheral regions of the world. And we would need an enormous growth in the institutional infrastructure for the production of social knowledge in the global South. Along this long road ahead, Southern Theory should be considered the first milestone.
Catrin Lundström Acta Sociologica 2009; 52; 85
Lundström’s review is positive, though laced with various concerns. She does question the position of the author herself, as the synoptic point of view that can made the connections between disparate voices, who themselves are caught in their own concerns. This challenge awaits alternative ‘southern theories’ emerging from the countries that Connell looks to. Despite the focus in Southern Theory on gender, Lundström makes the point that the theorists it includes are almost all men. And she sees a risk that the North/South division too easily inherits the previous division of First/Third World.
Robin Peace New Zealand Geographer 2009; 65 Issue 1, 84-85
While Peace makes certain criticisms:
- too much focus on sociology rather than other social sciences
- missing some important women scholars
- lack of reference to the renaissance of indigenous knowledge in Aotearoa/New Zealand
…she recognises the difference it makes:
It stimulated me to recognize the elisions and gaps in the knowledge that I take for granted, and to think differently about the global constructions of sociological knowledge… It places ‘southern’ names on the ‘northern’ lectern…names that embody rich insight and people who make strong knowledge claims but whose voices are most often a whisper, an echo or a silence in contemporary social science…a challenging and necessary book.
Nathan Hollier Australian Journal of Political Science 2008; 43 Issue 2, 368-9
Southern Theory is a breakthrough book – for Raewyn Connell and for Australian and international social science… This text could also be seen as the latest step in her career-long attempt to identify the social, political and intellectual conditions in which a genuine, that is, genuinely democratic, dialogue might take place. Southern Theory should revolutionise understandings of the history, function and proper practice of social theory.
Responses to Southern Theory include not only formal reviews. Where do you put a book like that? In the Carlton bookshop Readings it was placed in the Indigenous section, rather than Theory. At the University of Melbourne library, it is given the keyword ‘Social sciences – Southern Hemisphere’, for which it is the only entry. Will there come a time when ‘Southern’ can become a subject heading, like ‘Western civilization’?
image
Generally, the reviews reflect a positive welcome for Southern Theory to the discipline of sociology. But there are issues to be dealt with. There is the question of balance, particularly in gender. But perhaps most challenging is the question of how ‘southern theory’ is to constitute itself as a field of discourse, so that it engages the very voices its seeks to ‘uncover’. That’s not just a challenge for Raewyn Connell, but for her readers as well.
Finally, as Lena Rodriquez from University of Newcastle remarks on the book’s Amazon page, Raewyn Connell ‘throws down the gauntlet.’