Global Issues in Language, Education and Development: Perspectives from Postcolonial Countries
304
Global Issues in Language, Education and Development: Perspectives from Postcolonial Countries
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Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781853599521 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Multilingual Matters Ltd. |
| Publication date: | 03/12/2007 |
| Series: | Linguistic Diversity and Language Rights , #4 |
| Pages: | 304 |
| Product dimensions: | 5.85(w) x 8.25(h) x 0.85(d) |
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CHAPTER 1
Language and the Colonial State
The language medium through which knowledge is mediated, generally does not present a problem in Western industrialized societies. Within these contexts, education normally takes place through languages, which are seen as representing 'the national culture or cultural heritage of the country' (Skutnabb-Kangas, 2000: 306). Highlighting the significance of using languages grounded in their cultures and societies in the learning process, Prah argues that:
... in free societies knowledge transfer takes place in the language or languages of the masses; the languages in which the masses are most creative and innovative; languages which speak to them in their hearts and minds most primordially. (Prah, 2002a: 2)
The concept of an inherently 'free' society raised here by Prah, is clearly problematic but, unfortunately, cannot be discussed further here; it lies beyond the scope of this book. Moreover, as is discussed in Chapter 3, the notion of an intrinsically culturally homogeneous (or alternatively, pluralist), linguistically stable metropolitan nation state, implicit in Prah's argument, is contested. What I want to highlight here, is the fact that the importance of using languages that people know, and can relate to in the learning process is significant, not only in relation to skills and knowledge acquisition, but also with regard to language maintenance and cultural reproduction.
In contrast, many developing countries, especially those in Sub-Saharan Africa (SSA), are faced with unresolved questions regarding the choice of language(s) that would best support economic and social development. As is indicated earlier, the significance of language in development lies in the fact that it provides the medium through which skills and knowledge are acquired, and is therefore central to the concept of human resource development. In consequence, the linguistic dilemmas faced by developing countries regarding the choice of language(s) of teaching and learning, have implications for their relative ability to sustain adequate levels of HRD – and, de facto, to accumulate enough 'cultural capital' to be exchanged within an increasingly knowledge-based, highly competitive, international labour market. Moreover, the language medium of teaching and learning is also important in relation to cultural transmission. Language and literature provide the means through which society's historical narrative, and its 'social character' is produced (Williams, 1961). As is argued earlier, this refers to its collective disposition or habitus, beliefs, values and expectations. These, in turn, are produced and reproduced within, and through, the knowledge frameworks, and the philosophical principles that underpin curricula.
Many developing countries have histories embedded in colonialism. Whereas the nation-builders of Europe could build intertextually, and progressively, on the 'cultural, linguistic and patriotic unity' of past empires:
African states are building nations of new identities defined by the boundaries of their colonial past ... Africa's colonial past (...) has left a legacy of multiple identities and a crisis of legitimacy for post-colonial governments ... the relics of colonialism lie deep in African societies. (Paku, 1996: 172)
As can be seen in Chapter 2, this argument can, to a significant extent, also be applied to India and Pakistan. One of the most endurable legacies of colonialism has been its negative influence on the self-concept of colonized societies. Whilst, in most instances, colonialism was imposed through coercion, it was maintained through more subtle hegemonic processes. That is to say, by winning the hearts and minds of colonized peoples through the legitimation in language and literary practices, of the cultural traditions, social norms, values, and beliefs of the 'Mother Country' – indigenous ways of speaking, ways of knowing, and ways of doing in colonized societies across the world, were eroded. This is best described as the shaping of the 'colonial habitus'. Fanon underlines the significance that language played in maintaining colonial cultural hegemony, and the subtle means by which this penetrated the consciousness of colonized peoples:
Every colonised people – every people in whose soul an inferiority complex has been created by the death and burial of its local cultural originality, finds itself face to face with the language of the civilised nation, that is, with the culture of the mother country. The colonized is elevated above his jungle status in proportion to his adoption of the mother country's cultural standards. (Fanon, 1967: 18)
In this construction, the colonialmother tongue became the benchmark against which the relative cultural standards of the colonized were measured – and, in the process, it shaped their aspirations, dreams and desires. As can be seen in the discussion below, and again in Chapter 2, these hegemonic meanings impacted on the ways in which many colonized societies, historically, imagined themselves as a 'nation', and how they have redefined themselves as postcolonial nation-states. Language and discourse played a significant role in securing colonial hegemony; it represented a potent expression of colonial power. Exploring these issues further, the next section discusses some of the ways in which colonized peoples were constructed in social discourse, giving rise to the stereotypes that served as powerful rationale for domination and subjectification.
Colonial Discourse and the Shaping of Colonial Hegemony
Discourse is constituted in dual meanings. It 'not only facilitates our understanding of the world, it also limits our perception and understanding of the phenomena around us, including social processes, social institutions and cultural forms' (Kemshall, 2002: 13). It not only provides a particular way of looking at the world, but also frames, or influences, what can, and should be said as well as who is allowed to speak (Pecheux, 1982). Colonial discourse presented a particular view of 'reality' from the perspective of the colonizers. Colonial discourse operated at societal and global level articulated in key defining sites, and was mediated within and through cultural practices such as the mass media, education and other 'discursive processes'. Thus colonial discourse represented a powerful means through which cultural and racial 'truths' about colonized peoples, their languages and cultures were legitimated. The interpretation, and representation of the cultural beliefs, values, experiences, expectations, aspirations, and mores of the colonized, within dominant theoretical frameworks, served to integrate the discursive lives of geographically dispersed peoples having different histories, and social experiences, into a unified and linear narrative centred predominantly on their cultural 'otherness' and racial 'inferiority'. Thus it constructed a homogenized and homogenizing 'truth' discourse (Foucault, 1980), universal in scope.
As can be seen below, this was certainly the case with Orientalist discourse, which constituted ' "the Orient" as a unified racial, geographical, political and cultural zone of the world' (Bhabha, 1994: 71). Similarly, the rich and diverse cultural tapestry throughout Africa, became reduced to homogenizing racially descriptive categories such as the 'natives', 'Negroes', 'Bantu', 'blacks'; the derogatory 'Kaffirs' and 'hotnots', 'boesmans', 'non-Europeans' and 'non-whites' in South Africa.
Colonial discourse also provided the means by which 'truths' about the inherent cultural, social and military supremacy of the 'mother country', were systematically constructed, regulated, and circulated within, and through, sociocultural practices and processes (Foucault, 1980). In French, and British, colonial discourse this was epitomized in jingoistic notions of 'la grandeur de la France' and 'the glory of the British Empire'. For the British, 'the right to rule' was embodied in Rhodes' belief that 'we happen to be the best people in the world, with the highest ideals of decency and justice and liberty and peace, and the more of the world we inhabit, the better it is for humanity' (cited in Morris, 1968: 124). For the French, a self-defined superior 'race', the colonial project represented a mission civilisatrice. Prime Minister Jules Ferry expressed it in this way:
Gentlemen, we must speak more loudly and more honestly! We must say openly that indeed the higher races have a right over the lower races ... I repeat, that the superior races have a right because they have a duty. They have the duty to civilize the inferior races ... (Jules Ferry, 1884: 199; cited in the Internet Modern History Sourcebook, http://www.fordham.edu/halsall/mod/1884ferry.html)
Grounded in power institutions, articulated from particular ideological positions, and obtaining legitimacy from the social position occupied by the definer, colonial discourse represented a configuration of 'power/ knowledge' (Foucault, 1980) par excellence. It constructed a narrative of 'truths' grounded in self-evident, recognizable cultural and 'racial' stereotypes in everyday discourse, producing 'the colonized as a social reality which is at once an "other" and yet entirely knowable and visible' (Bhabha, 1994: 70–71). The power of the stereotype lies in this ambivalence; it describes what is already known and understood and, at the same time, it has to be constantly restated, repeated and renewed. Thus 'Orientals' became 'an object of study, stamped with an (essentialist and exotic) otherness' (Chaterjee, 1986: 36) (information in brackets added). Orientalist scholarship provided the cultural stereotype around which 'scientific truths' about the languages, religions, and cultural ways of life, values and beliefs of the colonized peoples of the East were constructed in social discourse. This was also the case with 'Africanist' scholarship during the 19th century.
Classical racism pervasive during this period, formed an unquestioned, taken-for-granted part of scholarly discourse centred on the intrinsic superiority of the Europeans throughout history (Blaut, 1993). Accordingly, within the knowledge frameworks of 19th century scholarship, the 'miracle' of European development grounded in colonial empire was ascribed to the 'innate' racial and, therefore, cultural and linguistic superiority of the European 'race'. It is no surprise therefore that 'the vocabulary of classic nineteenth-century imperial culture is replete with such words as "inferior" or "subject races", "subordinate peoples", "dependency", "expansion", and "authority" ' (Said, 1993: 8). Certainly, the image of uncivilized, lazy, and ignorant indigenous peoples within the colonies was a potent one. In his book The History of British India, James Mill (1820), repudiating stories telling of the existence of ancient Indian and Chinese civilizations, expressed the view that:
Both nations are to nearly an equal degree tainted with the vices of insincerity; dissembling, treacherous, mendacious, to an excess which surpasses even the usual measure of uncultivated society. Both are disposed to excessive exaggeration with regard to everything relating to themselves. Both are cowardly and unfeeling. Both are in the highest degree conceited of themselves, and full of affected contempt for others. Both are, in the physical sense, disgustingly unclean in their persons and houses. (James Mill, 1820; cited in Larrain, 1989: 25)
The pivotal position that the stereotype occupied in colonial discourse, ultimately, provided legitimacy to 'the discursive and political practices of racial and cultural hierachization' (Bhabha, 1994: 67). The views of liberal intellectuals, represented here by Mill, served to legitimate not only discourse meanings but, ultimately, also colonial processes and practices of domination and subordination. At the heart of colonial discourse was the need to construct the 'subject-nation', 'to construe the colonized as a population of degenerate types on the basis of racial origin, in order to justify conquest and to establish systems of administration and instruction' (Bhabha, 1994: 70). Driven as it was by a predatory colonial state, the good that came from colonialism can only be seen as having taken place 'by default, by the iron law of unintended consequences' (Mazrui, 1980: 41). Colonialism was not neutral, either as an ideology, or as a political or economic project, nor was it altruistic in its governance of the colonies.
Discourse also does not operate in a linear way; rather, it represents a multidimensional and dynamic social practice having discursive effects. For example, since these beliefs of cultural and 'racial' superiority pervaded societal hegemonic cultural consciousness throughout Western Europe, they were evident also in the thinking of major intellectuals such as Karl Marx who referred to the 'hereditary stupidity of the Chinese', and Engels who supported the US invasion of Mexico, and 'the snatching of California from the lazy Mexicans, who did not know what to do with it' (cited in Larrain, 1989: 57). Hegel argued that:
It is characteristic of the blacks that their consciousness has not yet arrived at the intuition of any objectivity, as for example, of God or the law, in which humanity relates to the world and intuits its essence ... He (the black person) is a human being in the rough. (Hegel, 1975: 138)
Similarly, Weber referred to the 'hereditary hysteria of the Indian' and the genetic incapability of Africans to do factory work, as against the rational thinking and decision-making capability of the European (cited in Blaut, 1993).
At the same time, it is important to recognize that discourse is also constituted in discontinuities, inconsistencies, contradictions, ambiguities and ambivalences. Bhabha provides an example of the ambiguity in the representation of black people in colonial discourse:
... the black is both savage (cannibal) and yet the most obedient and dignified of servants (the bearer of food); he (sic) is the embodiment of rampant sexuality and yet innocent as a child; he is mystical, primitive, simple-minded and yet the most worldly and accomplished liar, and manipulator of social forces. (Bhabha, 1994: 82)
These ambiguities presented no problem within the grand narrative constructed around the colonized, the main purpose was the social construction of racial 'otherness', of inferiority, and therefore deserving of either being 'saved' or 'colonized/subjugated'. In this discourse the colonized is objectified.
Discourse meanings are also not static or uncontested; they exist in tension. Anglicists and Orientalists, policy makers in India, and Africanist scholars as well as missionaries in Africa during the 19th century, for example, argued from competing positions regarding the relative value of local cultures and languages. Despite these differences, they did have a shared understanding of, and belief in, the intrinsic superiority of British culture, and the importance of English language and literature to the civilizing mission of the colonial government.
In order to examine some of these issues further, the rest of the chapter focuses on Macaulay's Education Minute (1835), and the 'Scramble for Africa' consolidated at the Congress of Berlin (1884–1885), as two distinct historical moments in which the self-concept of colonized nations was formed, and some of the complex issues that surround language relations in many postcolonial countries, have their origins. The next section examines the political project of British colonialism in India, the dynamics that it generated within Indian society, and the policy strategies adopted with regard to language in education during different periods of colonial rule.
(Continues…)
Excerpted from "Global Issues in Language, Education and Development"
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Copyright © 2007 Naz Rassool.
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Table of Contents
Part 1 Language Diversity in Development DiscourseIntroduction
Chapter 1: Language and the Colonial State
Chapter 2: Postcolonial Development, Language and Nationhood
Chapter 3: The Global Cultural Economy: Issues of Language, Culture and Politics
Chapter 4: Language in the Global Cultural Economy: Implications for Postcolonial Societies
Part 2 Case Studies
Chapter 5: Language and Education Issues in Policy and Practice in Mali, West Africa, by Maggie Canvin
Chapter 6: Language and Literacy Issues in South Africa: Policy and Practice? by Kathleen Heugh
Chapter 7: Contemporary Issues in Language, Education and Development in Pakistan by Naz Rassool and Sabiha Mansoor
Part 3: Globalization and Linguistic Diversity
Chapter 8: Postcolonial Perspectives: Major Issues in Language and Development in the Global Cultural Economy