Hello, all, Hello, Paul,

Paul, you have helped me to clarify a great deal. You are absolutely 
right in some things, and possibly not in others. You are right in 
pointing out that I need to learn more about postcolonial studies as an 
area of study. I now intend to do so, seriously. You also point out 
that I have only just started on this particular road of experience. 
Yes, I think so too, and, having started, I intend to carry on. Maybe 
we could have done this another way, but maybe some lessons are best 
learnt the hard way. What is very important for me is that good 
learning develops out of good conversations.

Now I'm packed and off to South Africa! Look forward to joining in the 
conversations again when I get back.

Best wishes to all,

Jean

On 19 Jun 2005, at 12:15, Yaqub Paul Murray wrote:

> Jean's response helps me to understand so much.
>
> Principally why i have found it so very difficult to feel safe to 
> emerge
> and share my critical race and postcolonial ideas in the Living
> Educational Theory community in UK. But others things too.
>
> My postcolonial trope is influenced by Robert Young's idea that
> postcolonialism requires a certain 'politics and philosophy'. I am
> influenced in dialogue by Nckeu Nyathi's idea that postcolonialism can 
> be
> described as a certain 'ethics and politics'.
>
> What I am not influenced by is the idea that postcolonialism embraces
> managerial bullying in the workplace and deafness that are 
> non-specific to
> the European colonial project, and its vestige, whiteness.
>
> My humanity is profoundly influenced by the idea that managerial 
> bullying
> is wrong. I have much empathy from fellow human beings who have been
> bullied by an institution's managers. i have and it led to my declared
> redundancy in my College in 1995, which i fought successfully. I have 
> an
> MA in Industrial Relations with three years as a research associate at 
> the
> University of Warwick's Industrial Relations Research Unit attesting 
> to my
> trade union activism, and my research exploration of managerial power
> relations. My research topic, SSRC funded, was to look at the changing
> nature of managerial rewards in the UK during Thatcherism. The sheer
> bullying of people by managers who wanted to maximise their material
> rewards was horrifying. This period of neo-conservative deregulation 
> set
> the scene for the kind of social hegemonic that reinforces the
> managers 'right' to manage, or what is technically referred to in my 
> old
> epistemology as 'managerial; prerogative'. As an AUT member, and branch
> negotiator and activist, I am in the midst of a managerialist 'moment' 
> in
> which our contracts of employment are being modified, crimped and 
> cramped
> unilaterally by a 'trade union non-friendly' senior management group.
>
> As a person brought up by my parents in 1950's East London with a 
> certain
> set of social mores that have mediated through time and space my 
> embodied
> values, I also believe it to be profoundly rude to disregard and be the
> equivalent of 'colour blind' to somebody's disability. I am not as
> surprised as Jean though that people who share a postcolonial discourse
> can be so rude and ignorant of how other people experience this kind of
> oppression.
>
> This year in my College i pioneered an oral and video based 
> examination of
> a student with dispraxia and dyslexia. I came to a decisive moment with
> the disarming help of Kirsty, a student, to take direct responsibility 
> to
> explore my ignorance and uncertainty about students with a disability 
> that
> can affect their learning. I have good friends and colleagues in the
> academy who simply cannot tear themselves away from the lexical form 
> for
> evaluating knowledge. I wanted to know more about whether or not I 
> could
> critically AND compassionately modify my pedagogic practice to take 
> into
> account my students feelings of being terrified by traditional
> examinations, while at the same time affirming my student in her right 
> to
> have her knowledge creating voice heard through the occlusion of her
> dispraxia and dyslexia. In my College more than 1 in 5 of all students
> registered this year has some form of recognised, 'certified' and 
> serious
> learning disability. Generally disability gets enveloped in the term
> dyslexia. With the strange outcome that the impact of disability on
> personal learning, on personal pedagogic practice, and the impact for
> College curriculum practices seems to become disenabled. I'm sure many 
> of
> you will get the gist of what I mean. But disability does seem only to 
> be
> a 'post restant for deeper seated forms of disability that can 
> materially
> affect a human beings ability to frame and articulate their knowledge.
>
> Kirsty's dialogic relationship with me over a year helped me to ask a
> question of the kind, 'How do i know if i really give a shit about
> Kirsty's sense of marginalisation in the midst of trying to write a
> doctoral thesis about my own colonial marginalisation?'. This was my
> decisive moment in disability this year. I wanted to suddenly dislocate
> myself from my 'ability' to speak for a person with disability. In 
> real,
> practical terms this was a first for me. Of course I had hidden behind 
> my
> liberalism and warrant as a 'hard done by mixed-race male. I now 
> wanted to
> know what it would be like to explore my 'epistemological standards of
> evaluation and assessment' from outside of my comfort in the lexical. 
> So
> my assessment with Kirsty went audio-visual, and through a three way
> dialogue with Kirsty's students friend, James, we actually
> went 'multimedia'. Coincidentally, James also dyslexic, was at the same
> time producing a third year dissertation in part fulfilment of the
> requirement for his BSc Business Studies degree, a multi-media account 
> of
> his learning, explaining and exploring and showing us his 'living
> epistemological standards of judgement' concerning the efficacy of 
> multi-
> media accounts of learning for dyslexic people ...and beyond. Rather
> poignantly, and movingly, James refers to his account as a form of 
> Living
> Educational Theory (Whitehead, 1993) that includes Jack's influence on 
> his
> education, and 'Live Theorising' (Murray, 2005) that includes my 
> influence
> as an educator as James explicitly asks, unlike many doctoral Action
> Researchers and professors, 'how does my whiteness affect the 
> integrity of
> my account?'.
>
> I took that risk of seeing what i don't know and perhaps could 'come to
> know' about 'giving a shit' about disability, learning, pedagogy and
> curriculum.  The decisive moment was marked by a radical shift in my
> imaginative faculty: I imagined how this particular and modest form
> of 'direct action' or critical pedagogic action research could have 
> some
> influence on the social formation of the curriculum in my College.
>
> My Disability officer colleague, John, has been excited by this
> innovation. The first of its kind in the College.  At one level all i 
> have
> done is show how I have taken into (my) account of my practice a 
> student's
> disability in learning, and how this could affect the realization of 
> her
> personhood. For those with a legislative bent, I have demonstrated
> what 'reasonable adjustment' could look like as pedagogic practice.
>
> But the hours it took to do this - preparing, videoing, and then 
> asking a
> colleague to moderate the examination - is most likely in my College 
> to be
> interpreted as an 'un-reasonable adjustment' by the managerialist and
> market rhetoric of cost and added-value.  Paradoxically, since public
> funding, the College has become more focused on costs and marketing and
> less focused on curriculum and personal development of students.
>
> Beyond the 'box ticking' interpretation of this action I also was
> desperate to learn, to understand, to see if my teaching could be
> emancipatory for another human being. Yet I do not  count this 
> pedagogic
> innovation as evidence of my postcolonial praxis. Because it isn't. It 
> is
> evidence of my humanity when encountering the compelling angst and 
> random
> unfairness of my students dispraxia.  Without her relationship of 
> patience
> I may not have budged. Yet, Kirsty is a woman, and disabled and from
> within my first person appreciation of my own marginalisation as Muslim
> and mixed-race, my second person appreciation through dialogue with 
> Kirsty
> opening my eyes to her sense of injustice, and my third person
> relationship with the propositional theories in feminist epistemology 
> that
> are so closely linked to the critical race theorising project of
> performative identity (after Judith Butler), that i was able to 
> overcome
> that my moral muteness in respect of V.I.Lenin's question, What is to 
> be
> done? I answered this in a responsiveness to Kirsty that felt exciting
> though a bit scary because of the unfamiliar territory of disability., 
> How
> would Kirsty feel as i awoke from my slumber and began to refer to her 
> as
> having a learning disability, the first time in three years of working
> with her? I was suddenly recognising her disability as  a marker for a 
> new
> way of relating in learning. Why did this worry me unduly though? How 
> do I
> feel when somebody emerges from their 'colour bind ' slumber and 
> greets me
> in the Mutse Atsi of 'I See You in your colour from my white', as Jack 
> has
> so lovingly and painstakingly done for me.
>
> i needn't have worried at all. Kirsty provided a way of being that 
> enabled
> me to open all of those channels of connectivity, and step out of my
> ignorance, one step at least, and recognise what Gabriel Marcel, the
> Jesuit existential philosopher (whose work I much prefer to that of 
> Martin
> Buber) refers to most exquisitely in dialogic relationship as a  
> "mutual
> availability for what the future holds in store". There is no 
> marketing or
> managerialist standard of judgement to account for the exquisite
> connectivity that I felt, mutually, with Kirsty and her friend, James, 
> as
> we videoed and talked through her examination and coursework through 
> six
> hours, and on three different occasions. I was able to engage and
> appreciate with Kirsty's ideas through conversation, and in video
> reflection in ways that prompted me to see her ideation as of 2.1 
> quality.
> Previously, for me and other academic staff, her work had hovered 
> between
> referral, the doldrums of the 40's, and low 50's in percentage terms. I
> awarded her examination, a resit from the previous academic year, a 
> 64%.
> It felt very deserved.  The most spectacular moment was where James was
> editing some video clips with Kirsty and me, and Kirsty interrupted
> with, 'Wow, Paulus, now I can see why you haven't been able to give me 
> a
> good mark....if I write as I talk in that clip, and I do, then how 
> could
> you understand my meanings?'
>
>  As a College Diversity officer  (appointed, and not self styled, i 
> annoy
> colleagues by referring to my role as 'Diversities practitioner') I can
> understand how my postcolonial values flow through my diversities
> practice.
>
> However, if somebody else wishes to make the claim that my actions
> are 'postcolonial' because they address, quite directly, Don Macedo's
> fascinating definition of a 'colonial education' then fair enough. I
> wouldn't object: but i would object to the point of refusal, to be 
> forced
> to identify with a so-called postcolonial discourse that is socially
> constructed around managerial white-on-white bullying and the
> marginalisation that could come from a disability of deafness.  Who am 
> I
> to have an objection to people couching and addressing postcolonialism 
> as
> the oppression of managerial bullying and disability? Many of the
> constructs of postcolonialism provide insightful metaphor for people 
> who
> are bullied and marginalised in these ways all the better for them to
> articulate their experiences. However, this is not how I approach
> postcolonialism: the 'post' in postcolonialism emanates from the 
> immanent
> interrogation of the European colonial project for understanding the
> distorting dynamics of whiteness today. Also for their impact on the
> social formation of whiteness-centred societies, and for better 
> exploring
> how the destruction of whiteness can be influenced to happen. Taking
> Robert Young's montage approach to postcolonialism, rather than an
> axiomatic definitional approach, Jean is free to present her picture to
> the montage.
>
> As Young puts it rather well,
>
> "The montage has been left as a rough cut that deliberately juxtaposes
> incompatible splintered elements"
>
> I think its good that Jean and i present views on postcolonialism that
> show how we are juxtaposed and incompatible splintered elements as we
> approach our conception and practice of 'non colonialism (Jean) and
> postcolonialism (Yaqub), differently.
>
> However, as I hope to be presenting a thesis in which I seek to explain
> my 'real life' postcolonial critical pedagogy i have taken seven years 
> to
> hone and refine my postcolonial standards of judgement so I am clear 
> about
> them so that other postcolonial practitioners would recognise them as
> belonging within a postcolonial montage. This is the kind of framing of
> understanding I seek: though this is not a call for a dogma of 
> definition.
>
>
> Specific points, Brief responses:
> [1] Jean wrote, "I am a person of colour too. I am officially white and
> white is a colour."
>
> Reading Jean's words I was reminded of Malcolm X's remarks about white
> folk being blue eyed devils. Some are, some are not in my experience. 
> It
> was to Malcolm's great strength of humanity that he recanted from that
> awful stereotype before his death. I like the way Dr Maya Angelou 
> refers
> to Malcolm's volta face as an "exquisite courage", and I would dare to
> add, probably an expression of loyalty to humanity.
>
> I tend to become angry with, and my critical gaze reflects the steam of
> frustration when I encounter white people with a 'colour blind' 
> colonial
> hubris.  I have never been angered by a students as i have by Action
> research colleagues who have for a long period adamantly refrained from
> interrogating their whiteness. It is this unchallenged hubris of the
> colonizer that has, in the past, led me to scarification of the other.
> Yes, a kind of inverted 'colonial Othering'. Actually, I see it as an 
> anti-
> colonial liberation struggle! Smile. Allah wakbar, how complacent, 
> liberal
> white platitudes anger me and drive me to distraction as if such 
> hubris is
> a somnambulant propositional theory, unstated, never presented into 
> full
> view for deconstruction, of how 'social things' ought to be that is
> predicated, often without the somnambulant being aware of it, on a 
> white
> supremacist past inflected in a 'here and now' racism. Such hubris!
>
> I don't understand what Jean means by 'officially' white: does this 
> mean
> that people who aren't white lack the legitimate designation
> of 'official'. Of course it is true that 'mixed race' people do lack
> the 'official' designation that attaches to white, as do people of 
> colour
> generally. I know the latest census forms in UK have various 'white'
> categories if this is what Jean is getting at? Otherwise the use of the
> term 'official' is highly ambiguous. Is it meant to be I muse?
>
> In my scholarship and from the grounds of my ontology Jean is white and
> not a person of colour.
>
> If we are taking the 'happy clappy' Rainbow nation approach then, yes, 
>  we
> are all colours on the palette. My white~brown granddaughter is 
> subjected
> to this seemingly colour blind 'happy clappy' rhetoric in school from 
> her
> teacher, while one of the kid's replies, 'I hate the colour brown: it's
> the colour of poo'...white's clean though.'
>
> My response to Jean is that i don't regard her as a person of colour.
> Instead i regard Jean as a self-designating white person. In terms of
> critical race theory 'white' is not a marker for colour. Yet critical
> white studies might offer another explanation. What I think could be 
> most
> humanising is for self-designating white people to explore their
> very 'lack' of racial identity (the concept of 'normal white against 
> which
> people of colour are measured 'off' like a template). It is good to see
> that Jean is perhaps on the verge of contemplating whiteness as a
> subjugating category. It took me three years of doctoral research in 
> which
> I epistemologically wandered without bearings until, with the help of
> Warren Linds (Canada) and Lis Bass (USA) and their informal doctoral
> supervision, i began to orient myself using their suggested 
> propositional
> maps to guide me towards the most appropriate epistemologies for 
> exploring
> racial classification as a subjugating category. Discovering Dyer who
> coined the term whiteness, a gay white cultural studies academic, was
> phenomenal, eye-opening. I listened to the voices within me and at last
> had a way of framing them clearly.
>
> [2] Jean wrote, 'by even talking 'alterity' we are talking 
> colonialism'.
> This is most certainly a stark propositional statement  about what is
> accepted contemporary postcolonial discourse. Of course, all of my live
> experience in the world, and my scholarship, means that I am unable to
> follow Jean's logic: alterity is a marker that is imbricated in 
> discourses
> of the 'Post'. Judith Butler (1992) as a feminist scholar is clear in 
> this
> matter, too, as I heard at her recent appearance at Warwick University.
>
> What is Jean's logic at work here? To me it seems to initially present 
> as
> a linear causal relationship between 'talking alterity' and 
> colonialism?
> My alterity is my difference, my voice, my postcolonialism.
>
> Alterity is an important notion: I follow a Bakhtinian interpretation 
> in
> this matter. As I indicated in my account above, concerning Kirsty a
> student with dispraxia, dialogue is only possible with an 'other'.
> According to Ashcroft et al, alterity is not simply 'exclusion' it is 
> an
> apartness that stands as a precondition of dialogue where dialogue 
> implies
> a transference across and between differences of culture, gender, class
> and other social categories. I share their view that,
>
> 'the self identity of the colonizing subject, indeed the identity of
> imperial culture, is inextricable from the alterity of colonized 
> others ,
> an alterity determined, according to Spivak, by a process of 
> 'othering'.
> The possibility for potential dialogue between racial and cultural 
> others
> has also remained an important aspect of the use of the word...".
>
> I agree. Thus within the canon of Postcolonial theorising, alterity is 
> a
> key marker of the 'post' that distinguishes postcolonial from earlier, 
> and
> subjugating colonial discourses. This is why Jean's comment really
> confuses me. I feel my theoretical alterity from Jean as a feature of a
> material and discursive location as a non-Western Muslim male. The
> philosophical issue of otherness and difference, inclusion and 
> exclusion
> is a much deeper matter and i'm in touch with the alterity that could 
> be
> imbricated in this, as well. I find Jean has a way of 'appropriating'
> postcolonial languages and syntax, dismissing them lightly, and 
> firmly. I
> feel in this trope, ironically, a colonial twist.
>
>
> [3] Jean wrote, "Postcolonial literatures are (allegedly) literatures
> about non-colonisation - well, this is where I beg to differ. While the
> rhetoric may be in the 'post', the reality is very much in
> the 'colonisation'.
>
> I disagree with Jean. I have seen/read/heard no extant evidence that
> suggests to me that postcolonial literatures are allegedly about non-
> colonisation. I have not read one paper or postcolonial theory that
> suggests this at all. On the contrary it seems. Postcolonial 
> literatures
> are grounded in the European colonial project and its implications of
> identity formation of the Othered: hence my reference in my earlier
> posting to 'subaltern knowledge'. Subaltern knowledge, as I tried to
> explain in my previous posting, is the 'subjugated others' way of 
> talking
> back to colonialism about how the other has experienced a particular
> subjugation. Colonialism was hegemonic, but it was not homogeneous. We 
> all
> experienced European colonialism differently: Nceku as a Black Ndebele
> Nguni Zimbabwean of Zulu origin experienced white European colonialism
> differently to me as a mixed-race descendant of Afrikaner master and
> Griqua slave.  This is a very healthy sense in which alterity most
> definitely is not causally related to colonialism, on the contrary.
>
> I explore "Subaltern Knowledge" as a confluence of first, second and 
> third
> person knowledges of subjugation. Here colonialism is my marker for
> subjugation: a particular and highly focused form of colonialism. A 
> white
> European colonial project projected onto African peoples, the 
> despoliation
> and rape of cultures, languages and ethnicities driven by a Western
> propositional theory that held people of colour as inferior, savage,
> uncivilized un-Christian, dirty and needy of Western disciplining. The
> ideology of discipline that sits behind colonial power relations is
> indubitably capitalism. And in the neocolonial sense, not a lot seems 
> to
> have changed has it?
>
> Anti -colonial writing is to do with the business of non-colonisation, 
> as
> part of the tortuous social and political movement to non-colonized and
> non-colonizing social formations. I imagine that Jean is mistaken in 
> her
> point the more i analyse it, and engage it critically. Hence the now
> famous project reported by Ashcroft and colleagues as 'The Empire 
> Writes
> Back'. The 'moment' the Empire chooses to "write back" the 'Post' of
> postcolonial is instantiated in cultural, ideological and material
> senses.
>
> Postcolonial literatures are not at all 'about non-colonisation' with 
> the
> certainty that statement suggests in language.
>
> I agree with Jack when he suggests there is no postcolonial social
> formation,. This is why i don't try to seek them in these hegemonic 
> times
> of new imperialism and global capitalism (MacLaren and Farahmandpur,
> 2004).
> The 'new world order' of the US (with full European alliance and
> collusion, at the level of state) is neocolonial to be sure. We do 
> seem to
> live in the space of this creative metamorphosis of whiteness, i'm 
> afraid.
> In this space my live theorising is taking place. This is where I live 
> and
> where i feel myself to be most alive: flitting between the interstitial
> spaces of colonialism and postcolonialism, and as Punter
> suggests, 'transcolonialism' (more on this idea and how it is 
> influencing
> my thesis of postcolonialism, below).
>
> These times are particularly ugly and xenophobic for the undercommons, 
> who
> seem to be at the moment eastern European immigrants and Muslim 
> Britons.
> We are bearing the brunt of this new racist burden with dignity, 
> fortitude
> and integrity.
>
> Instead what seems to be important is to instantiate the 'post' (of
> postcolonial) in creative ways, in radical ways, and in insistent ways 
> as
> we~i, and other postcolonial people try to deconstruct 'postcolonial
> imaginings' as fictions of the new world order (Punter, 2000). I'm
> intrigued by Punters point, that,
>
> 'while we are spending our time examining the 'post', the world has,
> probably malignly, certainly secretly, moved on?'
>
> The implication here according to Punter is that 'perhaps we ought 
> also to
> spend time wondering about what these temporary 'postcolonial' 
> successes
> really amount to in the wider terms of economic, linguistic and 
> cultural
> power. So while Jean is locked into the 'colonial' still - this is her
> space for 'starting' it seems - and in her writing clearly wishes to 
> avoid
> or evade the 'post' in postcolonial, my nomadic live epistemology
> indicates that postcolonialism has moved on. The new imperialism 
> suggests
> this most acutely. This it is that Nimeshe talks about as the 
> challenge to
> the privileging of whiteness in Hollywood movies by the ambiguous 
> person
> of mixed-race; what Beltran talks of as a time in US cinema where
> whiteness is being challenged and decentered; and that Suki Ali seems 
> to
> be talking of as 'Post-Race'. Similarly, Punter imagines
> the 'Transcolonial' as a space where,
>
> "after is never 'after', that there is no true 'aftermath' but only
> twists, skeins, traversings, crossings so of terrains that cannot be
> halted, that continue to ravel and unravel, wind and unwind, in an 
> endless
> parade of territorialisations from which nothing is lost; in terms of
> which everything is lost."
>
> I like this. It points to the fiction of the colonial/postcolonial
> dialectic, and worse yet binary oppositional logic. Start where one 
> wants
> to, being is where it's at.
>
>  [4] Finally, Jean wrote:
> "I do not think we will ever get to 'post' until we get to 'start'
> and 'start' is by starting to recognise ourselves as prone to colonise,
> even through our use of the language of postcolonialism'.
>
>  Well, I'm not sure i'm part of this 'we' that Jean refers to. I made
> a 'start' with colonialism when I recognised how my colonial history
> flowed through the my embodied values of emancipation that i practice 
> with
> students.
>
> I continued from that 'start' with an interrogation of my own 
> colonialism
> as living contradiction when I recognised how I scarified whiteness and
> people who write from whiteness in the Academy, and especially Action
> Researchers who otherwise espouse values of liberty, emancipation,
> individualism and compassion. Those people make me see white'.
>
> This is how i have come to realize my practice as a postcolonial 
> critical
> practice: now I scarify whiteness as part of my praxis. No longer will 
> i
> scarify white people. i disagree assertively, using my reason, my 
> affect,
> and my moral and aesthetic judgements to guide me rightly and prudently
> and with respect for humanity. Yet i have now developed that precision,
> that guile, that fleetness of foot to  scarify whiteness while working
> intimately, lovingly, connectedly, and anti-colonially with white 
> students
> and students of colour without offending their sense of personhood. 
> This
> has been most recently corroborated by Bayliss, 2005; Staples 2005; 
> Smith,
> 2005; and Nyathi 2000 in their dissertations, and their comments about 
> my
> pedagogic practice. Their dissertations would count, for me, and for 
> them,
> as evidence of my 'live theorising' of my postcolonial critical 
> pedagogy
> that is inclusive and in no way impedes, or decentres the realization 
> of
> their personhood within their learning journey. Funny as this may 
> seem, i
> will travel under the banner of 'postcolonialism' because it is a 
> marker
> for those of us who have 'started' to produce difference discourses of
> the 'post' from our alterity. Yet beyond 'starting' I am already 
> moving to
> a transcolonial space'. I'm thinking of Witi Ihimaera's The Whale 
> Rider,
> 1987 where a father's love of his daughter is challenged by his love of
> ambivalent loves of Maori and Europe. Abdulrazak Gurnah, in his novel 
> By
> The Sea, writes superbly about Western, European colonial hubris. The
> narrator of his novel clearly detests 'colonial education', eloquently
> defined and shaped in ways that i recognise in some British educators
> today, and yet like Gurnah himself, the narrator chooses to leave
> Zanzibar, and make an estranged life in Britain in a 'postcolonial' way
> (like my father left Cape Town, like my partner Asma left Zanzibar, 
> like
> Nceku has left 'colonial' Zimbabwe). this led me to one of those 
> moments
> of epiphany. I mused: does the next generation of the postcolonial 
> born in
> the UK, like me, become part of Punter's 'new wave' of transcolonial, 
> or
> Suki Ali's 'Post-Racial' people? As Nimeshe (2005) and Beltran (2005)
> suggest of multiracial racially ambiguous mixed-race people who are the
> cyborgs of the racial present?
>
> It is this colonial hubris that i wish to prick with the pin of my
> postcolonial praxis: not only is this point of 'post' in my
> postcolonialism, but this is the point of my departure from 
> colonialism,
> my 'starting' point, and the motivation for my movement to
> transcolonial/post-racial spaces, too. My 'i' is not part of Jean's 
> 'we'
> because i have already started in we~i' of Ubuntu with Nceku Nyathi.
> My 'post' started with my adopted Irish Dad's colonial stories of the
> English in the 1950's and 60's, and continued with my bio-Father's
> colonial stories of South Africa from his mixed heritage and alterity
> of 'once were slaves/once were masters'. This is where my 'start' was
> made.
> In embryo, in my mixed maternity and paternity, the  childhood and 
> youth
> of my mixed-up, mixed-race white and black. Though my 'start'  was
> dormant, implicit, tacit, and slow to emerge through the sedimentary
> layers of distorting consciousness laid down by hundreds of years on
> whiteness manifesting as my dislocated consciousness. I have never been
> deaf to the colonial susurrus. This insight is a key aspect of my
> postcolonial thesis explaining my 'real life' as a mixed-race educator
> adapting and morphing a critical pedagogy in the moment the live is 
> being
> wrought.
>
> What Jean wrote makes very clear sense to me. It is a beautiful sense, 
> it
> is the sweet resonance of the once caged bird now singing. Respect 
> Jean.
> Each of us is damaged as Ben Okri suggests and my respect comes from 
> the
> prescience of mutual damage.
>
> Through the sense Jean makes in her posting i feel encouraged and
> motivated to reflect on the sense i'm making for myself.
>
> As Jean writes about 'starting' and denying the existence of the 
> 'post', I
> am much taken by Punter's notion that the 'post' has yet moved on,
> that 'colonial/postcolonial', before/after, cause/effect may be a 
> wholly
> inadequate language for crafting a syntax for addressing the complex
> phenomena of global capitalism and new imperialism. By postcolonial
> critical pedagogy I enfold my commitment to teach against capitalism,
> avidly, with gusto and passion.
>
> I made my 'start' years ago, and i'm rapidly moving on. I do not wish 
> to
> be stuck in the colonial/postcolonial dialectic: instead i want to
> continue making a difference in ways that do not forget the holocaust 
> of
> colonialism but doesn't turn it into an icon in a way that can distort 
> the
> way a nation sees itself and uses it as a reason for terrorising and
> colonising others (such as Israel), that marks the radical insurrection
> that imbricates my meaning of 'post' in my  striving for a Post-Racial'
> future. That future, I suspect, will continue to remain contingent on 
> the
> febrile and yet crucial requirement for 'many more' white people to 
> make
> a 'start' to visibly "treason whiteness" as an expression of
> their 'transcending' loyalty to humanity.
>
> I think professors have the privilege from, and the responsibility to, 
> the
> community for their situation/location in the university to use their
> influence to 'continue this revolution'. In a complex alterity of 
> spaces I
> can see how this has been started by three of the greatest educators 
> ever,
> who happen also to be white - Paulo Freire, Peter MacLaren, and Jack
> Whitehead.
>
> Boyer cites discovery and integration as two of the four projects of 
> the
> university. More white professors need to make a 'start' with those two
> facets, creatively, critically and compassionately, in moving towards 
> the
> disintegration of whiteness. I believe Jean has 'started'. If Jean 
> doesn't
> want to call this 'postcolonialism' and see herself in a space of
> the 'post' that's her choice, too.
>
> Though i have no desire or intention to contribute to discourses
> constructed in this way, and from within my standards of postcolonial
> judgement would have some difficulty in legitimating such discourses.
>
> What i would say in response to Jean's posting is that, for me,
> postcolonialism is an expression of my loyalty to humanity. And here i 
> see
> a similarity with Jean's position because she seems to be expressing a
> loyalty to humanity, too.
>
> I rather enjoyed the moment this time last June at Bath University when
> Jean made the bold statement, 'I believe that Postcolonialism has a 
> part
> to play in Action Research (my recollection of the spirit, rather than 
> the
> precision of recall of Jean's actual words). In the moment of Jean's 
> words
> my heart skipped a beat as my colonized soul danced, my decolonizing 
> hope
> floated, and my postcolonial being was vindicated.
>
> Many of us share and practice values of democracy, inclusion, freedom 
> and
> they are most certainly important in providing an underpinning support
> to 'postcolonialism'. But they are also important underpinning values 
> of
> many virtues, too; and many other social movements and critical
> discourses. As a postcolonial scholar my interest - and responsibility 
> -
> is to identify those other qualities, apart from values, which can be
> slippery and ephemeral, that are particularly relevant for postcolonial
> praxis. And i have in mind ethic, moral virtue, politics and a 
> philosophy
> of self, other and inclusion, which extend beyond embodied values alone
> while remaining connected to them, of course.
>
> I like it where Robert Young suggests,
>
> "A lot of people don't like the term 'postcolonial': now you may begin 
> to
> see why. It disturbs the order of the world. It threatens privilege and
> power. It refuses to acknowledge the superiority of western cultures. 
> Its
> radical agenda is to demand equality and well-being for all human 
> beings
> on this earth."
>
> This moves me toward those kinds of mores that motivate and guide
> postcolonialism.
>
> At the crux of my approach to postcolonialism, that which supports my
> postcolonial standing (understanding), is my association of
> postcolonialism as a refusal to acknowledge the superiority of western
> cultures.
>
> This is why I am also committed to challenging what I experience as the
> appropriation of the term 'postcolonial' and 'colonial' by Western 
> people
> who also wish to delimit it, decenter it from discourses of critical
> theory, and temper and tame it to a more generic meaning of values that
> are not inscribed with race, whiteness and the historical reality of 
> the
> oppressive nature of the European colonial project. As a person 
> descended
> from the indigenous Griqua of Southern Africa I also include 
> restorative
> justice for indigene within my practice and understanding of the
> postcolonial.
>
> I also believe it is not necessary to give specific definitions to the
> practice of postcolonialism. As I said in my posting in response to 
> Jean,
> postcolonialism is more a montage as Robert Young suggests than it is a
> set of unified principle. This disposition allows for the 
> border-crossing
> alterity much beloved of Gloria Anzaldua's new mestiza consciousness 
> that
> is indios, mexicana, lesbian, American academic, daughter, sister and
> friend.
>
> As a postcolonial scholar, i find myself in the space of the 'post' 
> within
> the meanings i use in this posting, and in my previous posting.
> Postcolonialism does seem to be a notoriously unstable term....in 
> this, it
> seems to me, it's in the felicitous company of 'Action Research'
> and 'Living Educational Theory'.
>
> Songa Mbele