Session 10: Place, Pedagogy and Perceptions

5th Global Conference

Friday 9th March – Sunday 11th March 2012
Prague, Czech Republic

Critical Pedagogy as a Reflexive Decolonization Strategy to Challenge Colonization and Immigration Practices that Shape Changing Cultural Identities in a Canadian Context
Jan Clarke
Algoma University, Sault Ste Marie, Ontario, Canada

Cultural identities that are socially constructed by settlers’ practices of colonization, assimilation and multiculturalism shed light on changing cultural boundaries in diverse societies. This paper begins by tracing how colonization and immigration socially construct Canada, not only in large urban areas where recent immigration practices mean diversity is visible but also in remote and rural communities where assimilation of earlier immigrants often living in marginalized ethnic enclaves are sometimes juxtaposed with community healing of First Nations’ communities. Colonization and immigration practices shape cultural identities in a Canadian context; however, there is flexibility to negotiate and claim symbolic, lived, or hyphenated identities that can change. This particular context provides entry points for thinking through cultural identities in ways that make intersections of oppression and privilege visible and open for challenge. This paper then expands these entry points by critical reflection of teaching sociology through the privileged white eyes of an immigrant who takes decolonization as a project of unsettling the settler within. A small university located in a former residential school for First Nations’ children provides a challenging backdrop for using critical pedagogy to address oppression and privilege head on and framed within a local and national context. Critical pedagogy is discussed as a reflexive way of confronting colonization and understanding one’s place in that history while also encouraging a transformative learning environment. Reflection on how to face one’s cultural heritage as colonizers and settlers, as well as acknowledge the struggle of many immigrant experiences, informs the critical pedagogy that makes understanding racialization, migration and identity accessible to a diverse student group. While this paper focuses on Canadian contexts where there are openings to explore new understandings of cultural identities it also offers insights about reflexive decolonization practices that can go beyond this context.

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Which Identity for Place? A Geophilosophical Approach
Laura Menatti
Department of Philosophy, University of Basque Country, Spain

Is it still possible to speak about the identity of place in today’s globalised world? This paper addresses this provocative question by examining and criticizing continental philosophy theories based on the concepts of ‘heimat’ and ‘genius loci’ and by suggesting that the identity of place is strictly connected with post-modern phenomenon of non-place (Augé). In fact, globalised fluxes produce placelessness (the loss of place diversity) as well as new sources and forms of belonging such as tribalism, localism and musealization of evocative places. This new globalised landscape induces the philosopher into elaborating a new concept of place. In this paper I suggest considering place as a qualitative central feature of a multi-faceted rhizomatic net (Deleuze). I refer to the rhizome as a new model of global space which makes it possible to understand the relation between local and global, where places involve a complex and dynamic identity. My ‘geophilosophical’ approach also scrutinizes the meaning of place from an ethical point of view. It questions a mere aesthetical notion of landscape and considers places as a source of meaning for those who dwell and live in it or go through it. The relation between place and those who interact with it, therefore, is both ethical and ontological. The concept of place that I suggest looks at the continuous and dynamic relationship between nature and culture. It also requires to recognize the place as it is perceived and experienced by the insiders and outsiders who interact with its memorial, historical and cultural dimensions. It necessitates a multidisciplinary approach which will permit the understanding of the relationship between the inquisitive and ethical concerns of human beings and the affordances of place. Finally, this paper discusses the Council of Europe’s Landscape Convention as an example of acknowledgement of geophilosophical issues and as a paradigmatic political and ethical model for the globalised place and for today’s human co-existence in a nomadic world.

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Mediating Diasporic Whiteness and Ethnicity in Contemporary South African Art, with Particular Reference to the Work of Penny Siopis
Juliette Leeb-du Toit
University of Johannesburg and University of KwaZulu-Natal, South Africa

Most South African art retains a diasporic aspect, the product of various migrations in the form of pre- and post-colonial settlement, internal displacement and more recently post-democracy immigration. Each community has brought with it specific creative traditions and world views born of its cultural origins, later to be adapted and applied to local contexts and experience. In examining the motivations for and effects of migration by peoples to other geographic and/or culturally distinctive areas, diasporic theory examines ensuing acculturation or resistance to it, the ways in which peoples conceal and reveal their racial, ideological or cultural affinity in their engagement with the recipient nation or geographic realm in which they find themselves. Their presence in South Africa, however, warrants documentation and consideration if we are to complete the archive of diasporic creative encounter in South Africa.

In the last two decades most artists with recent (first generation) diasporic roots working and exhibiting in South Africa have been embraced as part of ‘contemporary’ art in the region. This collective appellation largely ignores or suppresses any distinctive features in their work that might allude to their diasporic origins and practice, and can be said to in effect largely de-historicize their work. Not surprisingly, work by white diasporic South African artists has rarely been considered in terms of its diasporic nature and cultural/racial embeddedness, as their whiteness alone sufficed to ensure their absorption into a mythical, nebulous South Africanness that suppressed their distinctiveness.

In acknowledging their intrinsic difference, some white south African diasporic artists are beginning to foreground their otherness as vital to their self-understanding, their diasporic condition acknowledged as generating multiple perspectives and a double or multiple consciousness. This consciousness results in a diasporic dialogism which occurs when incongruous voices and styles come together, conflated into creolised forms, referred to by Bakhtin as an imaginative heteroglossia. The relationship between the artist, culture of origin, nation and home is often complex in that individuals engage in a process of reflexivity that both engages with yet distances them from both the recipient and original culture of belonging. For Kobena Mercer (2008) this is typically diasporic, as objects, identity and ideas are thrown into flux, to be expressed in a form of self-realisation and subjectivity that defies classification and determinism.

In this paper I consider aspects of the work of South African artist Penny Siopis which has yet to be examined from the perspective of her diasporic origins or whiteness, this despite the fact that yet her references to classical antiquity, Greek religio-cultural ceremonies, trauma, and a narrative of ‘othered whiteness’ have become central themes in her work. Enabling her to adopt a more objective and critical, partly outsider gaze, her engagement with South African social and political trauma and change was marked by an entanglement that decentred and enriched her subjectivity, in keeping with Mercer’s contention that the critical and creative role of estrangement and displacement typically results in such heightened observational and self-reflexive dimensions. In this the diasporic nature of her work also attaches to post-modernity where a decentered and deterritorialized subject results in a heightened originality of vision resulting from partial anonymity and subjectivity.

Siopis revisits her diasporic identity and ‘whiteness’ as a counter to its pending obscurity and absorption into multicultural discursiveness, by exposing such outsider whiteness and its hermetic nature as flawed. Her ‘whiteness’ is also conveyed in her videos and installations that further address notions of impermanence and closure, as she articulates her narrative through the mediated voice of her diasporic grandmother and mother whose destabilising outsider gaze further reminds of closure and silencing. Deconstructed from within, Siopis’ insider gaze further destabilises the trajectory of whiteness by including a parallel historical narrative associated with the marginalised, in so doing further challenging the former centrality and distinctiveness of ‘whiteness’.