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http://csc.sagepub.com Postcolonialism and Globalization in Education

Fazal Rizvi Cultural Studies <=> Critical Methodologies 2007; 7; 256 DOI: 10.1177/1532708607303606 The online version of this article can be found at: http://csc.sagepub.com/cgi/content/abstract/7/3/256

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Postcolonialism and Globalization in Education

Fazal Rizvi
University of Illinois at UrbanaChampaign

In this short article, the author explores the complex relationship between globalization and postcolonialism. He argues that the contemporary processes of globalization are often described in ahistorical terms, whereas much of recent literature on postcolonialism is reduced largely to apolitical analyses of literary texts, disconnected from issues of current and shifting configurations of power. The author argues for the need to understand global processes in education historically and suggests that intellectual postcolonial resources of postcolonialism can be most helpful, but only if postcolonialism is viewed as a political intervention.

Keywords:

globalization; postcolonialism; power; education

Education is deeply implicated in the processes of contemporary globalization. This much has become something of a mantra among educational scholars, even if there is little agreement on the ways in which globalization relates to educational policy and practices. This lack of agreement is partly due to the fact that globalization is a highly contested concept employed to embrace a whole range of academic and popular discourses. It is a concept that is used to describe almost any and every aspect of contemporary life, from the complex contours of contemporary capitalism, to the declining power of the nationstate system, the rise of transnational organizations and corporations, the emergence of a global culture challenging local traditions, and the information and communications revolution enabling rapid circulation of ideas, money, and people. The term globalization does appear to be quite useful in capturing some of the changes that have transformed the world over the past three decades. Yet, such is the all-encompassing nature of its use that its explanatory power has become increasingly questionable. It is not surprising, therefore, that the terms capacity to explain recent educational transformations is, at best, limited. In this short essay, I want to argue that this is partly so because much of the recent theorization of globalization assumes it to be an objective self-evident entity, and does not attend sufficiently to the task of historicizing it, pointing to the hegemonic role it plays in organizing a particular way of interpreting the world. Globalization is often reified, ascribed a range of universal characteristics. Given this approach, educational scholars have taken up the task of understanding its various
Cultural Studies Critical Methodologies, Volume 7 Number 3, 2007 256-263 DOI: 10.1177/1532708607303606 2007 Sage Publications 256
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forms and of inferring its effects on education. In my view, this is a fundamentally misguided way of theorizing the relationship between globalization and education. A better way needs to focus on the politics of naming globalization and on understanding its salience in its specific historical and political contexts. In this task, postcolonial theories can perform a valuable role, not least because they draw attention to the false universalism of globalization and show how contemporary social, political, economic, and cultural practices continue to be located within the processes of cultural domination through the imposition of imperial structures of power. The reification of globalization in educational literature is not hard to find both in neoliberal policy documents advocating reforms designed to meet the socalled imperatives of the emerging global knowledge economy and in the literature critical of these reforms. Michael Apple (2000), for example, argues that it is impossible to understand current educational policy in the United States without placing it in its global context (p. 58). The problem with this formulation is that it makes no attempt to historicize the seemingly ubiquitous idea of the global context. Globalization is assumed simply to exist, rather than being understood as part of a politics of naming. The debate is focused instead on different policy responses. In this way, there is remarkable commonality between those writers who view globalization as unquestionably good, insisting that it brings only benefits to all, and those critics for whom global tendencies necessarily have negative social, political, and economic outcomes. When applied to the developing countries, the hegemonic nature of the idea of the global context becomes even more evident. Joel Samoff (1999) has shown how, through the global diffusion of Western ideas, thinking about education has become almost universal, dominated by a set of imperial assumptions concerning economic progress, with notions of human capital and development becoming part of a broader discourse of capitalist triumphalism. In policy discoursesborrowed by or imposed on developing countriesthe broader processes of economic, cultural, and political globalization are interpreted in similar ways, tending to steer national educational policies into the same neoliberal direction. Samoff (1999) maintains that with few exceptions, the direction of influence is from European core to southern periphery (p. 53). Institutional arrangements, disciplinary definitions and hierarchies, legitimizing publications, and institutional authority reside mostly within the core, with the periphery left simply to mimic the cores dominant discourses and practices. This universalism is implicit in the widely held assertion that the processes of globalization (Burbules & Torres, 2000)
are threatening the autonomy of national educational systems and the sovereignty of the nation-state as the ultimate rule in democratic societies, threatening to weaken educations links to the imperatives of a community, while making stronger its relationship to the requirements of the global economy. (p. 9)

Although the modes of educational governance might indeed be globally converging around the same underlying notions, the problem with this analysis is that it
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appears to assume a largely naturalized view of globalization that is both ahistorical and apolitical. An even stronger sense of this can be found in Currie and Newsom (1998), who suggest that the global convergence of educational policies is an outcome of the structural conditions under which they are developed and that these conditions are anchored in a global economy that shapes the policy options that nationstates have. Currie and Newsom speak of an unstoppable globalization and its tidal wave force, making the relationship between the global context and education appear natural and inevitable. Although it is hard to deny that the changing global context has an effect on educational governance, what this construction fails to show is how this effect occurs and, more broadly, what is the nature of the relationship between the global context and educational change. Often, this relationship is assumed to be self-evident, and the notion of the context itself is not problematized. But, as Taylor, Rizvi, Lingard, and Henry (1997) have pointed out, what counts as the context can be articulated in a variety of different ways, and what is foregrounded as the global context is often ideologically constituted, the acceptance of which already predisposes analysis toward certain solutions. In this way, many critical analyses of globalization are paradoxically complicit with the claims of its empirical reality and historical inevitability found in international business, global politics, and popular media. This complicity is common not only among educational theorists but also in highly influential globalization theories that have sought to examine the changing structural conditions under which contemporary social life is now arranged. Indeed, globalization is a name that is given to the social, economic, and political processes that have, taken together, produced the characteristic conditions of contemporary existence. It refers to the ways in which distant parts of the world have become connected in a historically unprecedented manner, such that events in one part of the world are now able to rapidly produce effects on distant localities. For the first time in history, it is now possible to imagine the world as a single, global space linked by various technological, economic, social, and cultural forces. This general understanding of globalization is shared by most of its major theorists. For example, Giddens (1990) has defined globalization as the intensification of world-wide social relations which link distant localities in such a way that local happenings are shaped by events occurring many miles away (p. 27). Harvey (1989) views it as time-space compression (p. 15), whereas Robertson (1992) has characterized it as the compression of the world and the intensification of the consciousness of the world as a whole (p. 19). In her analysis of global cities, Saskia Sassen (1991) assumes a similar set of attributes to characterize globalization, including increased economic transgression of national boundaries, heightened capital mobility, shift from manufacturing to business and financial services, control of economic activity from a distance, and hierarchical organization of economic activity in a global system of accumulation, command, and movement of international capital. Underlying this characterization is a range of assumptions concerning the logic of global integration, which

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Sassen treats as foundational, adequate for understanding the changing nature of social life and cultural priorities in global cities throughout the world. In an analysis that is perhaps a little less foundational, Castells (1996) also speaks, in relatively naturalistic terms, of the ways in which cultural and political meanings are under siege by global economic and technological restructuring. He represents late modernity as an informational mode of development through which global financial and informational linkages are accelerated, converting places into spaces and threatening to dominate local processes of cultural meanings. He argues that networks make up the new social morphology of our societies, and the diffusion of networking logic substantially modifies the operation and outcomes in the processes of production, experience, power and culture (p. 33). Although these theories focus on different aspects of the logic of globalization, they share a set of epistemological and methodological assumptions. Writing about issues of urban politics, Smith (2001) points out that they each draw our attention disproportionally to the global economy, reified as a pre-given thing, existing outside of thought, whose developmental logic not only explains the development of cities but even determines the subjectivity of their inhabitants, without ever interrogating them about what they are up to (p. 6). In explaining social change, these theories privilege economic over sociocultural and political processes. Smith adds that because such accounts of globalization give scant attention to the discursive and material practices by which people create the regularized patterns that enable and constrain them, these discourses lack an effective theory of political agency, or any other kind of agency (p. 11). Many of these theories of globalization ultimately posit a functional theory of capital accumulation, with its superstructural conceptualization of culture which radically separates economic from cultural practices and subordinates cultural dynamics to economic generalizations (Smith, 2001, p. 11). There is an assumption that it is the timespace compression that causes people, independent of their historical and social location and their will, to experience a sense of insecurity that often expresses itself in the various forms of identity politics. This approach renders a view of culture not as an ever-changing product of human practices but as an expression of the deeper logic of economic imperatives. Such a view fails to come to terms with peoples situatedness in the worldthe situatedness of their knowledge as well as their unique positionality (p. 17). It is largely devoid of historical actors. It also elides the historicity of economic relations. What this analysis suggests, then, is the need to understand contemporary ideological constructions of globalization historically, rather than as a set of naturalized economic processes operating in a reified fashion. Unless this is done, many of the neoliberal ideas that have become popular in recent years will continue to appear as a natural and inevitable response to the steering logic of economic globalization. It will be impossible to recognize the ideology of globalization as historically specific, which serves a set of particular interests on behalf of powerful social forces, namely, the transnational corporate and financial elite. And, it is significant that globalization will appear dissociated from its roots

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in the European projects of imperialism and colonialism, which continue to shape the lives of people within not only the developing but also the developed world, with a global geometry of power that is inherently unequal. It is this observation that suggests the resources of postcolonial theory to be potentially useful in the study of globalization and education, not least because there is a sense in which postcolonialism and globalization occupy roughly the same conceptual ground. Yet, there has in fact been very little written that takes up the position of postcolonial studies in relation to globalization. In an Encyclopaedia of Postcolonial Studies essay, Szeman (2001) points out that this is partly due to the differences in their disciplinary origins (globalization in the social sciences and postcolonial theory in literary and cultural studies) but may have more to do with the fact that the animating concepts of postcolonial theory, such as place, identity, difference, the nation, and modes of resistance, focus on the particular, and there remains a strong current of universalism in various constructions of globalization, especially as they appear to suggest the emergence of a single homogeneous planetary space. Furthermore, whereas the main impulse of postcolonial theory is deconstructive and libratory, globalization acts as a justification and as an ideological screen for the rapid, global spread of a pernicious neo-liberal capitalism intent on reversing the social gains of the past five decades and in introducing an economic rationality into the public sphere (p. 211). This is not to suggest that postcolonial theory has not also been criticized for its complicity with the new structures of imperial power within the age of global capitalism (e.g., Hardt & Negri, 2000). Indeed, it has been suggested by neoMarxist scholars like Ahmad (1995) and Dirlik (1994) that insofar as postcolonial theory lacks a clear notion of a telos, it offers no way of critiquing global capitalism and that its analysis travels along the same neocolonial, transnational routes as global capitalism. Dirlik goes even further and suggests that postcoloniality is designed to avoid making sense of the current crisis and, in the process, to cover up the origins of postcolonial intellectuals in global capitalism of which they are not so much victims as beneficiaries (p. 353, italics added). He argues that the postcolonial celebration of cultural Otherness and difference has in fact assisted transnational capitalism to extend the market reach of its commodity products that increasingly represent themselves as culturally hybrid and responsive to the needs and desires of local customers. The question of how these desires are historically and politically produced is elided. Now, although there is some truth to Dirliks observations, his arguments appear a little overstated, not least because they suggest a kind of conspiracy theory. However, insofar as postcolonialism is tied to an uncompromising poststructuralism, Dirlik is perhaps correct in claiming that it does not provide any critical tools with which to understand, in postcolonial terms, the contemporary spread of global economic conditions. As Simon During (2000) has suggested, by deploying concepts like hybridity, ambivalence, and mimicryall of which imply the incorporation of the colonized into colonizing culturespostcolonialism has effectively become a reconciliatory rather than a critical, anticolonialist category. During

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argues that a more critical postcolonialism is needed if we are to understand how colonial assumptions remain embedded within the new discourses and practices of globalization, as expressed in the totalizing reach of increasingly flexible forms of capitalism that seek to intensify the convergence of local cultures and societies. But this needs to be done without losing sight of the historical specificity of the ways in which people engage with global relations of power that produce various highly localized expressions of globalization. One of the major achievements of postcolonialism has been its insistence on the cultural dimensions of imperialism and colonialism. It has argued that, far from being secondary to the economics of colonialism, culture must be seen as essential to the production and maintenance of colonial relations. If this is so, then, new analytical strategies are needed to help us understand the economics and cultural politics of colonial legacies without reducing one to another. Without such strategies, it may not be possible to fully describe various continuities and discontinuities between colonialism and globalization. For people living in the developing countries, it is not hard to identify the ways in which globalization is constituted to a large extent by the continuation and strengthening of Western imperialist relations in the period of decolonization and postcolonial nationalisms. Postcolonial histories have amply demonstrated the persistence of global inequalities and the threats to the continued existence of local cultures and traditions by the global consumerist culture anchored in the West. New information and communication technologies have enabled instantaneous circulation of information, ideas, and images, making it possible to conceive of the world as a single space shared by all of humanity. However, the routes of this circulation have hardly been symmetrical and equal. On the contrary, the so-called global culture has by and large reproduced the colonial structures of inequalities, with the postcolonial elite playing a major role in their reproduction. At the same time, however, there are major differences between the current phase of neoimperial globalization and earlier forms of imperial power, which were located at clearly identifiable imperial centers. Deterritorialized logic and circuits of power, on the other hand, characterize contemporary globalization. One of the major insights of postcolonial theory has been its understanding of the dialectical relationship between the colonizers and the colonized. Scholars such as Said (1979) and Bhabha (1994) have shown persuasively how colonizers not only shape the culture and identities of the colonized but are in turn shaped by their encounter in a range of interesting and complex ways. Nor can the colonized people be regarded simply as innocent bystanders in their encounters with the hegemonic processes of colonization. Postcolonialism refuses to treat the colonized as cultural dupes, incapable of interpreting, accommodating, and resisting dominant discourses. And so it is with contemporary global relations, which necessarily involve negotiation of cultural messages, even if this occurs in spaces characterized by asymmetrical power relations. This suggests that relations between global and local are always complicated and ambiguous and require detailed ethnographic case-by-case analyses.

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There are, thus, deep homologies between postcolonial studies and the critical study of globalization. As Szeman (2001) has noted,
Both of these concepts exist at the intersection of imperialism, capitalism and modernity, and both deal with the effects and consequences of the unequal relations of power between different sites on the globe, as these are articulated economically, politically, and especially culturally. (pp. 215-216)

Postcolonialism points to the inherent dangers in the analyses of contemporary cultural practices, which are overdetermined by global capitalism and regard globalization as historically inevitable. It views culture as pivotal to understanding the nature of contemporary reality characterized by the expansion of global cultural interconnections, which, even if they are powered by economic forces, need to be located in particular localities and interpreted through particular geometries of power, in the dialectic between the local and the global. As Fredrick Jameson (1998) has noted, the global present is defined by the becoming cultural of the economic and the economic of the cultural (p. 60). To understand, then, the relationship between globalization and education, we need to avoid the universalistic impulse at the core of many conceptions of globalization. Most education occurs at the local level, but localities have never been more connected to outside forces, a fact captured to some extent by the phrase deterritorialization of culture and politics. However, these forces do not simply exist in some reified fashion, to be simply read off for their implications for educational policy and governance. They need to be understood historically as being linked to the imperialist origins of globalization, not in some uniform way but in ways that are specific to particular localities. It is only through this kind of complicated understanding that it will be possible for us to elaborate new modes of imperial power and to devise ways of resisting it in and through education. References
Ahmad, A. (1995). The politics of literary postcolonialism. Race and Class, 36(3), 3-19. Apple, M. (2000). Between neoliberalism and neoconservatism: Education and conservativism in a global age. In N. Burbules & C. Torres (Eds.), Globalization and education: Critical perspectives (pp. 54-71). London: Routledge. Bhabha, H. (1994). The location of culture. London: Routledge. Burbules, N., & Torres, C. (Eds.). (2000). Globalization and education: Critical perspectives. London: Routledge. Castells, M. (1996). The rise of the network society. Oxford, UK: Blackwell. Currie, J., & Newsom, J. (Eds.). (1998). Universities and globalization: Critical perspectives. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage. Dirlik, A. (1994). The postcolonial aura: Third World criticism in the age of global capitalism. Critical Inquiry, 20, 348-367.

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During, S. (2000). Postcolonialism and globalization: Towards a historicization of their interrelations. Cultural Studies, 14(3), 378-396. Giddens, A. (1990). Consequences of modernity. Palo Alto, CA: Stanford University Press. Hardt, M., & Negri, A. (2000). Empire. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Harvey, D. (1989). The condition of postmodernity. Cambridge, MA: Blackwell. Jameson, F. (1998). Notes on globalization as a philosophical issue. In F. Jameson & M. Miyoshi (Eds.), The cultures of globalization (pp. 3-24). Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Robertson, R. (1992). Globalization: Social theory and global culture. London: Sage. Said, E. W. (1979). Orientalism. London: Penguin. Samoff, J. (1999). Institutionalizing international influence. In R. Arnove & C. Torres (Eds.), Comparative education: The dialectic of the global and the local (pp. 51-90). Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield. Sassen, S. (1991). The global city: New York, London and Tokyo. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Smith, M. P. (2001). Transnational urbanism: Locating globalization. Oxford, UK: Blackwell. Szeman, I. (2001). Globalization. In J. Hawley (Ed.), Encyclopaedia of postcolonial studies (pp. 210-222). Westport, CT: Greenwood Press. Taylor, S., Rizvi, F., Lingard, B., & Henry, M. (1997). Education policy and the politics of change. London: Routledge.

Fazal Rizvi is a professor in educational policy studies at the University of Illinois at UrbanaChampaign where he directs its Global Studies in Education program. His current research interests include theories of globalization and culture, internationalization of higher education, and the global mobility of students.

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