Bioregionalism and Global Education
Contention and Confluence
Paper presented at the Fourth Annual Kent State University Symposium on Democracy
In view of the far-reaching impact of globalization, many concerned educators have undertaken critical examinations of the complex and complicated relationship between globalization and contemporary educational policies and practices across national and regional boundaries.1 On the one hand, there has been continuous advocacy for global education, which encompasses varied socially responsive educational programs addressing the adjustment needs of living in an interdependent global village.2 On the other hand, many concerned educators influenced by bioregionalism have made concerted efforts to incorporate “place-based knowledge” into the formal curriculum.3 At first glance, bioregion-based education and global education appear to be incompatible or even incommensurable. After all, global education aims at fostering an awareness of our living “in a cocoon of culture whose circumference equals the circumference of the globe,” as suggested by Lee Anderson.4 In contrast, bioregion-based education stresses the need to preserve local ecological systems and to establish the bond between members of a local community and their “place.”
However, it should be noted that both “the global” and “the local” are conceptual constructs. In reality, there is no irrefutable demarcation between the global and the local. Moreover, while the globalization of the political economy seems to form a global monoculture, the emergence of postmodernism, postcolonialism, and multiculturalism clearly indicates the continuous diversification of human cultures. As Edward W. Soja notes, “all that was local becomes increasingly globalized, all that is global becomes increasingly localized,”5 and the bifurcation of the global and the local appears to be problematic. Can global education aim at raising a global awareness without exploring diverse local cultures, especially the culture(s) of one’s own local community? Can bioregion-based education exclusively focus on preserving one’s local bioregion without addressing global environmental protection, world peace, and universal human rights?
In response to the above questions, I first explore the complicated interplay of local and global environmental concerns. I point out that as culture plays a significant role in shaping bioregional boundaries, bioregion-based education cannot cultivate a meaningful bioregional sensibility without addressing political and economic globalization. Next, I examine the conceptual connections between bioregion-based education and critical global education. Instead of decentering “the great macrostructural dominant group,”6 I argue that the integration of global education and bioregion-based education must attend and attest to diverse subordinate groups’ individual and collective agency in order to facilitate the ongoing “globalization from below.” Finally, I reexamine the inherent epistemic privilege of W. E. B. DuBois’s conception of “double consciousness.” I conclude that concerned educators, like cultural hybrids, metaphorically speaking, must “double” their double-consciousness as they query the dynamic and complex intersections between the global and the local.
Nature and Culture in the Interplay between the Global and the Local
To a large extent, we are living in a global village, as envisioned by Marshall McLuhan.7 Nevertheless, localities do not evaporate in the process of globalization. Popular slogans such as “think globally, act locally,” “local struggles with global support,” and “local problems with global solutions” illustrate the intricate relationship between the local and the global. Thus, Timothy Luke calls our attention to the existence of a “glocal” space where the global intersects with the local.8 The existence and expansion of transnational corporations (TNCs) especially rely on the construction of such “glocal” space. To illustrate, after Sony purchased Columbia Pictures in 1989, Akio Morita made the following interesting remarks: “I don’t like the word ‘multinational.’ I don’t know what it means. I created a new term: ‘global localization.’ That’s our new slogan.”9 While the slogan “global localization” cannot disguise transnational corporations’ endeavors to globalize their market, it still reveals recognition of various local cultures, which continue to thrive and flourish despite the powerful forces of economic globalization.
The dialectic interplay between the global and the local is especially evident in worldwide environmental movements. On the one hand, because the impact of today’s ecological problems such as greenhouse effects cannot be enclosed within a particular region or nation,10 phrases such as “one earth, one family” have permeated mass media. On the other hand, there is no solid and well-established international environmental coalition. In fact, we continue to evidence the tension between developed and developing countries, a not-in-my-backyard mentality, and environmental racism. Bioregionalism, in particular, questions and confronts the continuous globalization of the political economy rather than promote a global environmental coalition. Bioregionalism is neither a monolithic school of thought nor a unified environmental movement. In fact, bioregionalists’ discourses on the concepts of nature and culture tend to be incoherent, ambivalent, and irresolute. Doug Aberley points out that as bioregionalists are committed to decentralism, they are unlikely to form a central committee in order to offer a univocal definition of bioregionalism. Also, bioregionalists are more concerned about reflecting on “the needs and values of living-in-place” than about crafting “a seamless theoretical construction or utopian diatribe.”11 Nevertheless, their divergent perspectives regarding the relations between nature and culture shed significant light on the dialectic interplay between the global and the local.
Martin Heideggar claims that modern natural science “dissolved nature into the orbit of mathematical order of world-commerce, industrialization, and in a particular sense, machine technology.”12 Likewise, Lewis Mumford, the proponent of ecoregionalism (an early version of bioregionalism), argues that modern science and technology have enormous power in shaping the international political economy, which in turn appropriates the global ecosystem.13 To Mumford, the modern bureaucratic nation is incapable of resolving the current cultural and ecological crises. Instead, he promotes ecoregionalism to address the need to develop an alternative geography that could integrate culture with nature. In line with Mumford, Gary Snyder, a contemporary bioregionalist, advocates for “Cultural and individual pluralism, unified by a type of world trial council. Division by natural and cultural boundaries rather than arbitrary political boundaries.”14 Seemingly, both Mumford and Snyder recognize the interconnections between nature and culture. To them, modern science, technology, and nation did not develop in a social vacuum; rather, certain cultural values facilitate and sustain the construction of modern science, technology, and nation. At the same time, they appear to regard nature as a normative concept that we need to abide by in order to form an ecologically congenial culture. In Snyder’s own words, what bioregionalists envision is “a planet on which the human population lives harmoniously and dynamically by employing a sophisticated and unobtrusive technology in a world environment which is ‘left nature.’”15
Peter Berg and Raymond Dasmann further promote the idea of “living-in-place,” which means “following the necessities and pleasures of life as they are uniquely presented by a particular site, and evolving ways to ensure long term occupancy of the site.”16 As modern science and technology have disrupted one’s place, Berg and Dasmann encourage us to participate in reinhabitation by “becoming native to a place through becoming aware of the particular ecological relationships that operate within and around it.”17 Elsewhere, Peter Berg also proposes “a bioregional model” that can identify “balance points in our interactions with natural systems, and figures of regulation that can operate to direct or limit activities to achieve balance.”18 Berg’s bioregional model parallels Haenke’s belief in the existence of ecological laws, which we ought to observe in order to establish bioregion-based societies.19 Similarly, Kirkpatrick Sale in his influential book Dwellers in the Land promotes an economics of self-sufficiency within one’s “natural regions.”20
Despite the global impacts of modern science and technology, bioregionalists are more concerned about nature as it exists in their own “region” or “home place.” In Dream of the Earth, Thomas Berry claims, “The Earth presents itself to us not as a uniform global reality but as a complex of highly differentiated regions caught up in the comprehensive unity of the planet itself.”21 Many bioregionalists have made concerted efforts to identify the boundaries of these presumably distinguishable and yet interconnected regions.22 On the one hand, some bioregionalists believe in the existence of “natural” rather than artificial boundaries. For instance, Gene Marshall states, “My local bioregion is a collection of communities within some meaningful boundaries determined by the factors of basic land topography, watersheds, flora and fauna habitats, altitudes, rainfalls, temperatures, and other such factors.”23 Kirkpatrick Sale also wrote that a bioregion is “a place defined by its life forms, its topography and its biota, rather than by human dictates, a region governed by nature, not legislation.”24 On the other hand, some bioregionalists are inclined to consider human culture as they endeavor to map out the bioregional boundaries. For example, David McCloskey claims, “Ecoregional boundaries are natural wholistic “emergents,” that can be identified by looking “to the special ways in which the face of land, tectonic forces below, weather patterns above, the flow of waters, flora and fauna, native peoples, and cultural identities coverage and reinforce one another” (emphasis mine).25
As discussed above, bioregionalists seem to share a common belief that cultural norms should reflect the natural norms that are inherent within one’s biotic community, not vice versa. To many bioregionalists, modern science and technology are nurtured and sustained by ecologically uncongenial cultural values. Moreover, they point out that most historic and contemporary political boundaries do not correspond with natural ecological boundaries. Above all, the formation of today’s urban cities appears to infringe or even contravene bioregional boundaries.26 Urbanization also has contributed to the dislocation of “native” people and the erosion of “indigenous” place-based knowledge. Migrants’ uprootedness and diasporas reflect the fragmented bioregions.27 To the bioregionalists, as political boundaries deviated from natural boundaries, they often only served the purpose of meeting the needs of political and economic elites.28 Thus, bioregionalists advocate for the devolution of power to “native people” in a given bioregion in order to preserve the human culture that is consonant with “the ecological law” or “the bioregional model.” It is clear that bioregionalists are committed to promoting cultural adjustment to natural bioregions. However, it is impossible to validate the existence of pristine bioregions because of constant and continuous reciprocal interactions between nature and culture.29 Shrader-Frechette and McCoy explain:
Knowing that one is acting in accord with nature is often defined as a condition in existence before the activities of humans who perturbed the system. . . . The definition is flawed, however, both because it excludes humans, a key part of nature, and because there are probably no fully natural environments or ecosystems anywhere. Because natural systems continually change, it is difficult to specify a situation at one particular time, rather than another time, as natural. We are unable to define natural in a way free of categorical values.30
As bioregionalists endeavor to reconstruct ecologically uncongenial culture, they also stress human agency in mapping and remapping bioregional boundaries. In other words, the presumably self-evident bioregional boundaries actually are subject to human reasoning and interpretation.
Kirkpatrick Sale claims, “The borders between such areas (bioregions) are usually not rigid—nature works of course with flexibility and fluidity—but the general contours of the regions themselves are not hard to identify by using a little ecological knowledge.”31 Most bioregionalists highly value ecological knowledge that is grounded in indigenous cultural traditions, fostering the recognition of the interdependence between nature and human culture. Nevertheless, the mapping of bioregional boundaries and bioregional planning derive from the science of ecology and has become highly technical at both theoretical and practical levels. Wolfgang Sachs points out:
Ecology is both computer modeling and political action, scientific discipline as well as all-embracing worldview . . . the science of ecology gives rise to a scientific anti-modernism which has succeeded largely in disrupting the dominant discourse, yet the science of ecology opens the way for the technocratic recuperation of protest.32
In fact, bioregional assessment grounded in the science of ecology has emerged as an indispensable measure for managing and restoring ecosystems. Margaret Herring states, “Bioregional assessments integrate a broad range of information about the social, economic, and ecological conditions within a region in order to provide a basis for making decisions and taking action. They are bioregional, which is to say they are ecosystem-based, delineated by natural processes and elements rather than by planning units and political jurisdiction.”33 Yet, professionals trained in bioregional assessment have become aware of “the mismatch between the desire for political certainty and the inherent uncertainty of natural systems.”34 In fact, bioregional assessment and the ensuing bioregional planning are to be determined mainly by a political process even though the delineation of bioregion might be a natural process.
Bioregional assessment and planning are committed to facilitating one’s reinhabitation in one’s home place. Reinhabitation requires concerted efforts to become “native” in one’s bioregion by acquiring ecological knowledge about one’s biotic community. However, to many of the dislocated people in urban areas, the acquisition of political and economic knowledge outweighs ecological knowledge. Instead of inquiring into the local land topography, watersheds, flora and fauna habits, various grassroots environmental organizations have shown greater concerns for the political systems and processes that sanction irresponsible toxic waste disposal in working-class, low-income, and predominantly minority communities.35
The “natives” in the so-called
third world nations are especially keenly aware that the destruction of their
home places is mainly due to colonization and the globalization of the
political economy. While it is essential to revalue and relearn their indigenous
ecological knowledge, a better understanding of the political and economic
dimensions of the global/local assemblage appears to be a more urgent issue. In
“Privacy by Patent: The Case of the Neem Tree,” Vandana Shiva and Radha Holla-Bhar offer an insightful analysis of multinational
corporations’ privatizing the developing nations’ natural resources. In
The “global” in the dominant discourse is the political space in which a particular dominant local seeks global control, and frees itself of local, national and international restraints. The global does not represent the universal human interest, it represents a particular local and parochial interest which has been globalized through the scope of its reach. . . . The “global” must accede to the local, since the local exists with nature, while the “global” exists only in the offices of World Bank/IMF and headquarters of multinational corporations. The local is everywhere. The real ecological space of global ecology is to be found in the integration of all locals. The “global” in global reach is a political, not an ecological, space.39 (emphases mine)
Shiva’s call for “the integration of all locals” echoes the recent advocacy for a “global civil society” that is “a transnational formation of primarily non-governmental organization that is functionally place-based but normatively global.”40 The establishment of a global civil society is based on a commitment to integrate local activism with global networking. Richard Gordon points out,
Globalization in this context involves not the leavening impact of universal processes but, on the contrary, the calculated synthesis of cultural diversity in the form of differentiated regional innovation logics and capabilities. . . . The effectiveness of local resources and the ability to achieve genuine forms of cooperation with global networks must be developed from within the region itself.41
Clearly, the local is a “site both of promise and predicament,” as suggested by Arif Dirlik.42 In response to globalization of the political economy, a nostalgic attempt to preserve or to restore the simplistic and intact past can easily result in futile efforts.43 Instead, it is essential to keep the boundaries of the local open.44 In other words, the local is always situated in the global context. At the same time, interlocking localities shape and form the global. Thus, bioregion-based education as a socially responsible educational reform must attend to the dynamic global and local assemblage. In the following section, I will explore the conceptual connections between bioregion-based education and global education.
The Conceptual Connections between Bioregionalism and Global Education
As ongoing globalization affects almost every aspect of human existence, “global education” has gained considerable currency in addressing varied issues regarding “the compression of the world” and “the intensification of the consciousness of the world as a whole.”45 Roland Case points out that there are two dimensions of global education: the substantive and the perceptual. According to Case, the substantive dimension focuses on the acquisition of knowledge regarding global systems, international events, world cultures, and global geography, while the perceptual dimension emphasizes the cultivation of open-mindedness, resistance to stereotyping, non-chauvinism, empathy, and so on.46 To Roland Case, “the perceptual dimension is the lens for the substantive dimension.”47 However, proponents of global education do not share a common perceptual lens in determining what types of substantive knowledge are to be included in or excluded from the curriculum. Nor do they ascertain a consensus of unified pedagogical aims and methods for the deliberation of global education. On the one hand, international organizations such as the World Bank or the International Monetary Fund (IMF), national, state, or local governments and some prominent transnational corporations are inclined to promote curricular reform that aims at equipping students with the knowledge and skills necessary to compete in the global market and reap the benefits of economic globalization.48 This approach does not endorse critical inquiries into the causes and consequences of globalization. Rather, it tends to be proactive toward globalization of capitalist economy and leads to the homogenization and standardization of formal and even informal educational curricula and practice.49 On the other hand, there are concerned educators who advocate for global educational programs that embrace multiculturalism, social justice, world peace, and the establishment of ecologically sustainable global communities.50 Although these latter pedagogical aims appear to be unrealistic or even unattainable, they could function as “a regulative ideal” that illumines educational reform in face of the elevation and prevalence of violence and ecological destruction across cultural and national boundaries. Instead of undertaking an empirical inquiry into curriculum planning and the implementation of a critical approach to global education, I, in what follows, will examine the common pedagogical aims of bioregion-based education and the critical approach to global education—a demystification of the modern conception of development and a reevaluation of marginalized cultural traditions.
To a large extent, global education like multicultural education aims at raising students’ awareness of cultural pluralism within and beyond national boundaries. As mentioned before, substantive knowledge about cultural diversity and global interdependence can be instrumental in ensuring the best interests of transnational corporations. The perceptual dimension of the critical approach to global education is to be distinguished from a worldview that is in support of ever-growing global capitalism. Philip McMichael points out that development “is perhaps the ‘master’ concept of the social sciences, and has been understood as an evolutionary movement bringing rising standards of living.”51 In view of the lack of reciprocal interactions between people of developing and developed nations, many concerned educators who develop global education programs have made efforts to incorporate a critical inquiry into the ideological underpinning of the global pursuit of development. Such a critical inquiry aims at unveiling how growth-oriented development has become a conceptual vehicle that allows the developed nations to maintain worldwide hegemony and affluence. It also attests to the limitless evidences documenting that the global pursuit of growth-oriented “development” sustains poverty and contributes to the worsening of ecological problems in third world countries and beyond.52 Instead of denouncing developing nations’ monetary debts to the developed nations, there are increasing acknowledgements of the developed nations’ “ecological debts” to the developing nations. In effect, critical global education endeavors to demystify “development” as an intrinsically good and morally worthy international project. It also acknowledges the interconnections between ecology and economics; that is, “ecology should provide the approach, the framework for an understanding of the interrelationships of social and environmental systems; and economics should provide the means of quantifying those interrelationships in the light of such an understanding, so that decisions on alternative courses of action can be made without undue difficulty,” as suggested by Edward Goldsmith.53 By challenging the global pursuit of development, global education in developed nations represents what John Fien and Jane Williamson-Fien call “a fundamental re-education of the Western public” that has a responsibility to “make this a more peaceful, just and ecologically sustainable world.”54 In developing countries, such a critical inquiry into the constitutive values of growth-oriented development stands for a counterhegemonic effort to reorient ecologically exploitative cultural practices.55
In addition to critiquing the ideological underpinning of development, proponents of critical global education also call for a reevaluation of indigenous cultural traditions in order to shed significant light on the delineation of alternative concepts of development. For instance, in his attempt to offer an alternative concept of development, Phrase Rajavaramuni points out that the word “development” in Thai is phatthana or charoen. Neither refers to material growth in quantity. Instead, the Thai concept of “development” can mean reduction or elimination of unnecessary things in a certain context.56 From this perspective, the pursuit of development entails moral obligation to curb our endless desire for material production and consumption. In line with proponents of critical global education, there is a burgeoning book series that documents, interprets, and disseminates indigenous local knowledge systems. To Ladi Semali and Joe Kincheloe, the editors of the book series: Indigenous Knowledge and Schooling, it is essential and feasible to “use indigenous knowledge to counter Western science’s destruction of the earth. Indigenous knowledge can facilitate this ambitious twenty-first century project because of its tendency to focus on relationships of human beings to both one another and to their ecosystem.”57 Certainly, the reclaiming of indigenous knowledge systems can be easily transformed into the form of commodity in advanced capitalism, as suggested by Frederic Jameson.58 Nevertheless, the emerging field of indigenous knowledge systems could expand the substantive dimension of global education, which would in turn reshape the perceptual dimension of global education.
As discussed above, bioregion-based education reform and critical global education are not logically antagonistic. In fact, the intersection between the globe and the localities is not necessarily a postmodern or late-capitalist cultural phenomenon. To exist as human being, each person must have a body that resides in one place or varied places throughout his or her lifetime. Edward S. Casey points out that “place is the phenomenal particularization of ‘being-in-the-world.’”59 Although political, economic, and cultural institutions have made deliberate efforts to set variant boundaries that shape our ethnic, racial, and national identities, the localization of “place” or “bioregion” cannot conceal that “being-in-the-place” is, in fact, coextensive with “being-in-the-world.” Hence, it is not surprising that varied versions of cosmopolitanism flourished in different historical and cultural contexts. Martha Nussbaum applies the “very old ideal of the cosmopolitan” to “the person whose allegiance is to the worldwide community of human beings.”60 At the same time, ancient or contemporary proponents of cosmopolitanism do not necessarily advocate for the relinquishment of one’s affinity with one’s locality. Paul Rabinow defines cosmopolitanism as “an ethos of macro-interdependencies, with an acute consciousness (often forced upon people) of the inescapabilities and particularities of places, characters, historical trajectories, and fates.”61 Similarly, Martha C. Nussbaum suggests that one can become a citizen of the world without giving up local affiliations. Specifically, one must recognize that one is always surrounded by “a series of concentric circles,” namely the self, the immediate family, the extended family, the local community, the nation, and the world.62 In the same vein of thought, Walter C. Parker, Akira Ninomiya, and John Cogan advocate multidimensional citizenship in order “to capture the personal, social, spatial, and temporal aspects of the citizen identity that are necessary for meeting the challenges of the early 21st century.”63 More specifically,
The personal dimension involves mainly the personal commitment to nurture a citizen identity among one’s other identities and with it a civic ethic characterized by socially responsible habits of mind, heart, and action. The social dimension involves the ability and willingness to work with other citizens in a variety of public settings creating common ground. . . . The spatial dimension refers to the modern requirement that citizens see themselves as members of multiple overlapping communities: local, regional, nation, and global. . . . The temporal dimension means that citizens need to mount simultaneously a past-present-and-future outlook.64
The cultivation of multidimensional world citizenship might appear to be a monumental task. To undertake such a monumental task, it is crucial to recognize how varied binaries (that is, the global versus the local, nature versus culture, and modern universal science versus traditional indigenous knowledge system) regulate and shape our cultural as well as educational practices.
To illustrate, teaching and learning about the “place,” the core of bioregion-based education, can enable one to gain a better understanding of such “a series of concentric circles” and of the multidimensional nature of world citizenship. Ivan Illich notes that modern educational systems in both developed and developing nations are inclined to guide persons “away from their natural environment and pass them through a social womb in which they are formed sufficiently to fit into everyday life.”65 As modern education severs the organic connections between humans and nature, modern schooling also opts to sustain rather than reconstruct our homogenized political and economic systems. Psychologist Richard Borden points out that the “study of ecology leads to changes of identity and psychological perspective, and can provide the foundations for an ‘ecological identity’—a reframing of a person’s point of view which restructures values, reorganizes perceptions and alters the individual’s self-directed, social, and environmentally directed actions.”66 Studying one’s place echoes Arne Naess’s advocacy of ecophilosophy—“a philosophical world-view or system inspired by the conditions of life in the ecospheres.”67 As discussed before, the interplay between culture and nature shapes conditions of human life. Thus, bioregion-based education represents a deliberate effort that can cultivate “a sense of place(s),” thus leading one’s immediate self-identity into the personal, social, spatial, and temporal dimensions of citizen identity.
Furthermore, modern sciences actually originated from place-based indigenous knowledge systems. In his attempt to integrate science and place-based knowledge, Bruce Evan Goldstein argues that the construction of sciences indeed is embedded in culture. Nevertheless, the development of modern sciences has set scientists “apart from everyday social interaction and into a structured, methodologically explicit relationship with technical instruments and the elusive materiality of nature.”68 The training of scientists epitomizes the tendency of homogenized modern schooling to segregate students from their biotic and cultural community. In line with constructivist science, Goldstein points out:
Place-based knowledge cannot be replaced by scientific understanding because place-based knowledge is constantly regenerated through the active participation of the individual (mind and body) with place and culture. Scientific knowledge is also the product of an active relationship between scientists, their tools, and the natural and cultural worlds. But it is not the same subject, the same place, or the same culture. . . . Engaging in place-based science requires that bio-regionalists interact with community members in unaccustomed ways. To accomplish this requires face-to-face encounters between scientists and community members where they can exchange opinions and information, and develop a common base. This public forum should be capable of not only considering data but also negotiating new research methods and procedures.69
All in all, teaching about one’s place is not simply a reactionary effort to counteract the process of globalization.70 Rather, teaching about place involves an effort to reclaim human agency through participatory reevaluation of indigenous cultural values, through inquiry into place-based ecological knowledge, and through the establishment of global community. As a result, learning about one’s place could facilitate one’s appreciation of bio- and cultural diversity at both local and global levels.
In-between the Global and the Local: Doubling the “Double Consciousness”
At a conceptual level,
the integration of bioregion-based education and critical global education
appears to be a cogent idea. Still, we might caution that the integration not
be confined within a modern liberal framework that tends to inscribe
marginalized groups as a monolithic “Other” while acknowledging and promoting
cultural pluralism.71 Frantz Fanon points out that colonizers are
able to impose intolerable “alterity” and “otherness”
onto the colonized.72 In addition to military and economic
oppression, the imposed alterity leads to distorted
individual and collective identities of the colonized people. It is noted that
interlinking social institutions in the modern industrialized nations have
indeed imposed alterity and otherness onto subaltern
groups in the so-called developing nations. Thus, both bioregion-based
education and critical global education stress the need to decenter
the dominant cultural values and demystify the imposed alterity
of the marginalized groups. “Invisibility” and “marginality” might accurately
characterize the positionality of “others,” but such
an overgeneralization and totalization of “others”
appear to oversimplify the power structure within and beyond educational
institutions. Following Fanon’s thought, Charles Taylor argues that the marginalized
people’s “first task ought to be to purge themselves of this imposed and
destructive identity.”73 But, does the demystification of alterity and otherness eventually lead to a due recognition
and appreciation of cultural diversity? To
This liberal democratic framework
is problematic. First, Charles Taylor’s theory of “recognition” is similar to
John Rawls’ argument that rational human beings have a moral capacity to wear
“the veil of ignorance” in order to recognize one’s and the other’s “original
position.”76 To John Rawls, seeing “differences” could facilitate a
justification of social oppression, whereas unseeing “differences” facilitates
the pursuit of justice. To Charles Taylor, the politics of recognition is to
see through differences in order to attain a due recognition of fundamental
human equality. However, from the standpoint of Marcos Sandoval of the Triquie people of
In view of the limitations of modern liberalism, the integration of bioregionalism and global education must reckon the limitations of an abstract universalism that is devoid of all the particularities. More specifically, as the advocates of bioregionalism and proponents of global education are eager to denounce Western cultural values as contributing factors to all the social ills ensuing from industrialization and global capitalism, they often fail to inquire into how non-Western cultural values might sanction and support growth-oriented development. Without recognizing the diversity of so-called non-Western developing nations in the global pursuit of development, presumably socially reconstructive educational reforms can easily dismiss the persistent resistance movements in societies that divulge the subaltern people’s agency. In other words, the perceptual perpetuation of victimization of subaltern people can lead to the romanticization of rather than the empowerment of marginalized indigenous cultural traditions. In brief, the integration of socially responsive educational reforms must be a delicate and balanced educational endeavor that can acknowledge “‘distinctive cultural and political practices of oppressed people’ without highlighting their marginality in such a way as to further marginalize them.”80 In consequence, raising our multicultural awareness ideally should entail recognition that cultural formation is a dynamic and interactive process,81 and cultural differences are “the product of human work.”82 It follows that the globalization of the political economy is neither predetermined nor unquestionable. Hence, it is possible to reorient globalization; that is, the International Monetary Fund, the World Banks, and numerous transnational corporations need not reign over globalization. Globalization can come from below—“the integration of all locals” as suggested by Vandana Shiva. The postcolonial perspectives that stress differences and asymmetric power relationships are especially helpful in positioning academic discourses in ways that could actively promote continual dialogue across cultural and political boundaries and beyond established traditions.
Divergent postcolonialist perspectives, to a certain degree, share a common acknowledgment of the colonized or marginalized people’s agency in their encounter with hegemonic forces. To Dirlik and Bhabha, oppression and resistance are imbricated in the process of colonization. Thus, it follows that colonization results in cultural hybridization rather than wholesale cultural imperialism.83 In the postcolonial era, ongoing globalization heightens our awareness of the dynamic and interactive nature of cultural formation within international communities. Consequently, hybridity embraces both anticolonial and antiessentialist strategies in confronting and challenging established hegemony. The integration of bioregionalism and global education goes beyond the negotiation of ethnic identities and resolution of ethnic conflicts. If the pursuit of social justice and human equality is the underlying ethical foundation of such an integrated educational reform, then educators must attend to the reciprocal interactions between the interlocking social forces and individual and collective human agencies. Kai Nielsen argues, “Justice is only possible . . . where there are common bonds of reciprocity.”84 In the age of globalization, the pursuit of the common bonds of reciprocity as a process of decolonization must go beyond the center-periphery framework. In other words, it cannot focus exclusively on decentering, what Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak terms “the great macrostructural dominant group.”85 After all, “the great macrostructural dominant group” alone is unable to sustain economic exploitation and ecological destruction at the global level. According to Arif Dirlik, the goal of postcolonialists “is to no less than abolish all distinctions between center and periphery as well as all other ‘binarisms’ that are allegedly a legacy of the colonist ways of thinking.”86 Omnipresence is the very nature of hegemonic apparatuses, but the operation of hegemonic apparatuses can be contextually variegated. Instead of decentering the dominant group or predominant cultural norms, a critical inquiry into the in-betweenness of diverse subordinate groups can prove to be fruitful to question or even subvert the operation of hegemonic apparatus. As mentioned before, the demystification of growth-oriented development tends to focus on the operation process of hegemonic apparatuses and their dreadful consequences. Such discourse not only makes the marginalized groups essential but also renders them powerless victims. In accordance with postcolonial perspectives, the pursuit of development is never one-sided. In addition to developing critiques of the predominant Western cultures, it might be more beneficial to dissect the marginalized groups’ complicity in sustaining or agency in subverting oppressive systems in different cultural settings.87
In the meantime, concerned educators need to avoid both romanticization and normalization of postcolonial perspectives. In particular, the formation of hybridity in both contexts of colonialism and globalization is not based on reciprocal cultural interactions between the dominant and the subordinate groups. Often, only “the selected few” from the marginalized groups are allowed to participate in the project of cultural hybidization. These selected few have emerged as what Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak calls “metropolitan hybridists” whose diasporic location distances them from the other underprivileged subjugated people.88 Furthermore, as hegemonic apparatuses continue to impede hybridization among varied subordinate groups, it is uncertain whether all marginalized people will be able to assume unqualified epistemic privileges as they critique dominant groups’ extensive hegemonic forces that interpellate diverse subaltern groups in varied ways. In other words, it can be illustrative to assume that cultural hybridization can always entail a radical departure from cultural assimilation in the colonial and postcolonial contexts. Without sustaining continuous efforts to demystify the established hegemonic institutions and without the radical human reflectivity that entails auto-criticism, postcolonial cultural hybridization can be reminiscent of cultural assimilation embraced by Western imperialism. Anne McClintock points out that the term postcolonial “metaphorically . . . marks history as a series of stages along an epochal road from ‘the pre-colonial,’ to ‘the colonial’ to ‘the post-colonial’—an unbidden, if disavowed, commitment to linear time and the idea of ‘development,’”89 which still reflects Western cultural hegemony. Similarly, Diana Brydon argues, “When post-colonial theorists embrace hybridity and heterogeneity as the characteristic post-colonial mode, some native writers in Canada resist what they see as a violating appropriation to insist on their ownership of their stories and their exclusive claim to an authenticity that should not be ventriloquized or parodied.”90
In redressing the postcolonialists’ aforementioned entrapment, it might be important to revisit W. E. B. DuBois’s conception of “double consciousness” in the postcolonial and post–civil rights era. According to DuBois,
After the Egyptian and Indian, the Greek and Roman, the Teuton and Mongolian, the Negro is a sort of seventh son, born with a veil, and gifted with a second-sight in this American world—a world which yields him to true self-consciousness, but only lets him see himself through the revelation of the other world. It is a peculiar sensation, this double consciousness, this sense of always looking at one’s self through the eyes of others, of measuring one’s soul by the tape of a world that looks on in amused contempt and pity. One ever feels his twoness—an American, a Negro; two souls, two thoughts, two unreconciled strivings; two warring ideals in one dark body, whose dogged strength alone keeps it from being torn asunder.91
DuBois’s conception of “double consciousness” emphasizes that the formation of self-perception and collective racial identity is historically situated. The duality of consciousness indicates a fragmented psychic space where marginalized and subjugated people are able to assume epistemic privilege in resisting and reappropriating varied hegemonic apparatuses, such as education and laws. Stuart Hall points out that cultural identity is “not an essence but a positioning. Hence, there is always a politics of identity, a politics of position, which has no absolute guarantee in an unproblematic transcendent ‘law of origin.’”92 Paul Gilroy argues that African Americans’ “true self-understanding” is entangled with a “true understanding” of their collective diasporic “racial identity,” emerging “national” identity in the United States, and boundary-less Pan-African or even universalistic human identity. Thus, we can only locate the “black essence” through “routes” rather than “roots.”93 To a certain degree, DuBois’s conception of double consciousness appears to reflect Hegelian dialectics. After all, the formation of double consciousness is a dynamic and never-ending process striving to remove varied “veils” that inhibit true self-understanding in order to reintegrate one’s consciousness. However, the attainment of true self-understanding does not suggest a consummation of one’s “true” self-identity. Nor could we “fossilize” the essence of any group through the “routes” of identity formation. Just as cultural hybridization “is not the ‘free’ oscillation between or among chosen identities,”94 the “doubling” of one’s consciousness cannot be “free” from critical awareness of one’s vulnerability to and complicity in sustaining the surrounding social systems. Hence, the formation of double consciousness is not simply a cognitive process of constructing a self-identity or ethnic identity. Rather, DuBois’s conception of double consciousness engenders a moral commitment to “learning to learn from below”95 in order to envision a society in which people have the courage to reconstruct its oppressive social hierarchy. Such a moral commitment is a volitional human activity that could beget the “doubling” of one’s double consciousness further. Cornel West remarks:
A sense of history is so very important to allow us to get beyond it. Without confronting it, there is very little chance. A sense of history would serve as the crucial pillar for the kind of public conversation that we need to have about race, class, gender, and sexual orientation. . . . The sense of history ought to be linked to an expansion of empathy . . . something called courage in the form of self-criticism. How do we get beyond simply having the courage of our convictions and actually have the courage to attack our convictions? The only way we can grow and mature is by taking seriously what Socrates said—the unexamined life is not worth living. But then we can add the insight of Malcolm X that the examined life is painful. It hurts. It leaves us vulnerable. And, of course, good teaching is all about unsettling perspectives and unstiffening prejudices and allowing persons to be emancipated and liberated from whatever parochial cocoon they find themselves in at the moment. Each and every one of us is always linked to some parochial cocoon; we are never free. It is a perennial process that takes courage.96
Our courage to foster never-ending self-criticism is the key to demystifying imposed alterity and to unveiling the dynamic process of cultural hybridization and the formation of “double consciousness.” In short, the formation of double consciousness is a nexus of interconnected processes of generating and regenerating dialogical human relationships. Likewise, the integration of bioregionalism and global education is a commitment to facilitating an ongoing cultural dialogue and conversation about coexistence, reconciliation, and hybridization. In other words, the integration of bioregionalism and critical global education is not simply a celebration of marginalized cultural traditions. Concerned educators, like cultural hybrids, must undertake a critical and reflective inquiry into their own pedagogical values—values that shape their understanding of the dialectic interaction between the global and the local.
Conclusion
On the one hand, globalization is conducive to fostering our appreciation of human cultural diversity. On the other hand, globalization sustains rather than challenges Euro-American hegemony. Therefore, globalization provides a useful focal point from which educators can examine the multicultural landscape of education in the new millennium. In particular, there have been constant debates on the perplexing tension between pursuing cultural unity and preserving diverse cultural traditions. Such an either-or bipolar perceptual framework undermines our ability to recognize that the formation of “cultural unity” and “cultural diversity” is always historicized. The above discussion explicates that global education aiming at world peace and global ecological sustainability need not spurn bioregionalism. Likewise, by no means is place-based knowledge circumscribed by parochialism. In fact, by rebalancing modern culture with the biosphere, bioregion-based education can become the key to raising our awareness of global interconnections. The confluence of global education and bioregional-based education indicates the possibility of developing a “global” perspective that is sensitive to the interrelatedness of today’s ecological problems and to the particular needs of local communities.
Notes
1. See Nelly P. Stromquist
and Karen Monkman, eds., Globalization and
Education: Integration and Contestation across Cultures (
2. Lee Anderson, Schooling and Citizenship in a Global Age (Bloomington, Ind.: The Mid-American Program for Global Perspectives in Education, 1979); James M. Becker, ed., Schooling for a Global Age (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1979); Elise Boulding, Building a Global Civic Culture: Education for an Interdependent World (New York: Teachers College, 1988); Barbara Benham Tye and Kenneth A. Tye, Global Education: A Study of School Change (Albany: State Univ. of New York Press, 1992); Carlos F. Diaz, Byron Massialas, and John A. Xanthopoulos, eds., Global Perspectives for Educators (Boston, Mass.: Allyn and Bacon, 1999).
3. Bruce Evan Goldstein, “Combining Science and Place-Based Knowledge: Pragmatic and Visionary Approaches to Bioregional Understanding,” in Bioregionalism, ed. Michael Vincent McGinnis (New York: Routledge, 1999); Gregory A. Smith and Dilafruz R. Williams, eds., Ecological Education in Action: On Weaving Education, Culture, and the Environment(Albany, N.Y.: State Univ. of New York Press, 1999); Frank Traina and Susan Darley-Hill, eds., Perspectives in Bioregional Education (Troy, Ohio: North American Association for Environmental Education, 1995; Madhu Suri Prakash and Gustavo Esteva, Escaping Education: Living as Learning within Grassroots Cultures (New York: Peter Lang, 1998).
4.
5. Edward W. Soja, Postmodern Geographies: The Reassertion of Space in Critical Social Theory (London: Verso, 1989).
6. Jeremy Brecher and Tim Costello, Global Village or Global Pillage: Economic Reconstruction from the Bottom Up (Cambridge, Mass.: South End, 1998).
7. Marshall McLuhan, The Global Village: Transformations in World Life and Media in the 21st Century (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1989).
8. Timothy Luke, “Placing
Power/Sitting Space: The Politics of Global and Local in the
9. Interview with Akio Morita, Newsweek, October 9, 1989, 66.
10. Richard Benedick, Ozone Diplomacy: New Directions in Safeguarding the Planet (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard Univ. Press, 1991).
11. Doug Aberley, “Interpreting Bioregionalism: A Story from Many Voices,” in Bioregionalism, 13, 36.
12. Martin Heidegger, The Question Concerning Technology and Other Essays, trans. William Lovitt (New York: Harper and Row, 1980), 63.
13. Lewis Mumford, The City in History: Its Origins, Its Transformations, and Its Prospects (New York: Harcourt, Brace and World, 1961).
14. Gary Snyder, “Four Changes,” in The Environmental Handbook, ed. Garrett De Bell (New York: Intext, 1970), 330–401.
15. Ibid.
16. Peter Berg and Raymond Dasmann, “Reinhabiting
17. Ibid.
18. Peter Berg, Figures of Regulation: Guides for Re-Balancing Society with Biosphere (San Francisco, Calif.: Planet Drum Foundation, 1982), 103.
19. David Haenke, Ecological Politics and Bioregionalism (Drury, Mo.: New Life Farm, 1984).
20. Kirkpatrick Sale, Dwellers in the Land: The Bioregional Vision (San Francisco, Calif.: Sierra Club, 1985).
21. Thomas Berry, Dream of the Earth (San Francisco, Calif.: Sierra Club, 1988), 168.
22.
23. Gene Marshall, “Step One: Mapping the Biosphere,” in Boundaries of Home, 55.
24.
25. David McCloskey, “On Ecoregional Boundaries,” in Boundaries of Home, 56.
26. Daniel Deudney, “The Philadelphian System: Sovereignty, Arms Control, and Balance of Power in the American States-Union, circa 1787–1861,” International Organization 49 no. 2 (Spring 1995): 191–228.
27. Mitchell Thomashow, “Toward a Cosmopolitan Bioregionalism,” in Bioregionalism, 120–32.
28. Aberley, “How to Map Your Bioregion: A Primer for Community Activists,” in Boundaries of Home, 80
29.
30. Kristin Shrader-Frechette and Earl D. McCoy, eds., Method in Ecology: Strategies for Conversation (Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1994).
31. Sale, “Principles of Bioregionalism,” in The Case against Global Economy and for the Turn toward the Local, ed. Jerry Mander and Edward Coldsmith (San Francisco, Calif.: Sierra Club, 1996).
32. Wolfgang Sachs, ed., The Development Directory (London: Zed, 1992), 30.
33. Margaret Herring, introduction to Bioregional Assessments: Science at the Crossroads of Management and Policy, ed. K. Norman Johnson, Frederick F. Swanson, Margaret Herring, and Sarab Greene (Washington, D.C.: Island, 1999), 1.
34. Ibid., 7.
35. Clene Krauss, “Women of Color on the Front Line,” in Debating the Earth: The Environmental Politics Reader, ed. John S. Dryzek and David Scholosberg (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1998), 493–503.
36. Vandana Shiva and Radha Holla-Bhar, “Privacy by Patent: The Case of the Neem Tree,” in The Case against Global Economy and for the Turn toward the Local, eds. Mander and Coldsmith, 146–59.
37. Ibid.
38. Leslie Sklair, Sociology of the Global System (New York: Harvester/Wheatsheaf, 1991), 76.
39. Vandana Shiva, “The Greening of the Global Reach,” in Global Ecology: A New Arena of Political Conflct, ed. Wolfgang Sachs (London: Zed, 1993), 149–50.
40. Ibid.
41. Richard Gordon, “Globalization, New Production System and the Spatial Division of Labor,” in The Division of Labor—Emerging Forms of World Organization in International Perspective, ed. Wolfgang Litek and Tony Charles (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 1995), 181–207.
42. Arif Dirlik, “The Global in the Local,” in Global/Local: Cultural Production and the Transnational Imaginary, ed. Rob Wilson and Wimal Dissanayake (Durham, N.C.: Duke Univ. Press, 1996), 22.
43. Bryan Turner, “A Note on Nostalgia,” Theory, Culture, and Society 4, no. 1 (1987).
44. Dirlik, “The Global in the Local,” 22.
45. Mike Featherstone, Scott Lash, and Roland Robertson, eds., Global Modernities (London: Sage, 1995), 40.
46. Roland Case, “Key Elements of a Global Perspective,” Social Education 57, no. 6 (1993): 318.
47. Ibid.
48. Joel Spring, Education and the Rise of the Global Economy (Mahwah, N.J.: Lawrence Erlbaum, 1998).
49. James Tooley, The Global Education Industry: Lessons from Private Education in Developing Countries (London: Institute of Economic Affairs, 1999); Philip W. Jones, World Bank Financing of Education: Leading, Learning, and Development (London: Routledge, 1992); John W. Meyer and Francisco O. Ramirez, “The World Institutionalization of Education,” in Discourse and Comparative Education, ed. Juergen Schriewer (Bern, Switz.: Peter Lang, 1999), 111–32; Roger Dale, “Globalization and Education: Demonstrating a ‘Common World Educational Culture’; or, Locating a Globally Structured Educational Agenda?” Educational Theory 50, no. 4 (2000), 427–48.
50. Jan L. Tucker and Peter J. Cistone, “Global Perspective for Teachers: An Urgent
Priority,” Journal of Teacher Education 42, no. 1 (1991): 3–10; Barbara
Barnes, Learning Architecture for the 21st Century (Glendale, Calif.:
Griffin, 1998); Louise Boyle Swiniarski, Mary-Lou Breitborde, and Jo-Anne Murphy, Educating the Global
Village: Including the Young Child in the World (Upper Saddle River, N.J.:
Merrill, 1999); Susan C. Brown and Marcella L. Kysilka,
Applying Multicultural and Global Concepts in the Classroom and Beyond (Boston.
51. Philip McMichael, “Globalization: Myth and Realities,” Rural Sociology 61, no. 1 (1996): 26.
52. See William Savitt, ed., Teaching Global Development, (Notre Dame, Ind.: Univ. of Notre Dame Press, 1993) and Vincent D’Oyley, Adrian Blunt, and Ray Barnhardt, eds., Education and Development: Lessons from the Third Word, (Calgary, Alberta: Detselig1994); Gerald L. Gutek, American Education in a Global Age (Prospect Heights, Ill.: Waveland, 1993).
53. Edward Goldsmith, A Blueprint for Survival (London: Tom Stacey, 1972), 13.
54. John Fien and Jane Williamson-Fien, “Global Perspectives in Studies of Society and Environment,” in Studying Society and Environment: A Handbook for Teachers, ed. Rob Gilbert (South Melbourne: Macmillan, 1996), 129; C. A. Bowers, Education, Cultural Myths, and the Ecological Crisis: Toward Deep Changes (Albany: State Univ. of New York Press, 1993).
55. Ashis Nandy, “Cultural Frames for Social Transformation: A Credo,” Alternative 12 (1987): 113–23.
56. Surichai Wun’gaeo, “Religion and the Civilization Process: The Case of Thailand’s Buddhism in a Comparative Perspective,” in Senri Ethnological Studies No. 29: Japanese Civilization in the Modern World, ed. Tadao Umesao, Helen Hardacre, and Hirochika Nakamaki (Osaka: National Museum of Ethnology, 1990), 113–20.
57. Ladi Semali and Joe Kincheloe, foreword
to The Heartbeat of Indigenous Africa: A Study of the Chagga
Educational System, by R. Sambull Mosha (
58. Frederic Jameson, “Postmodernism, or the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism,” New Left Review 146 (1984): 53–92.
59. Edward S. Casey, Getting Back into Place: Toward a Renewed Understanding of the Place-World (Bloomington: Indiana Univ. Press, 1993), xv.
60. Martha Nussbaum, “Patriotism
and Cosmopolitanism,” in For the Love of Country: Debating the Limits of
Patriotism, ed. Joshua Cohen (
61. Paul Rabinow, “Representations Are Social Facts: Modernity and Postmodernity in Anthropology,” in Writing Culture: The Poetics and Politics of Ethnography, ed. James Clifford and George E. Marchus (Berkeley: Univ. of California Press, 1986), 258.
62. Nussbaum, Cultivating Humanity (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard Univ. Press, 1997), 60.
63. Walter C. Parker, Akira Ninomiya, and John Cogan, “Educating World Citizens: Toward Multinational Curriculum Development,” American Educational Research Journal 36, no. 2 (1999): 127.
64. Ibid.
65. Ivan Illich, Toward a History of Needs (Berkeley, Calif.: Heyday, 1978), 76–77.
66. Richard Borden, “Ecology and Identity,” in Proceedings of the First International Ecosystems-Colloquy (Munich: Man and Space, 1986), 1.
67. Arne Naess, Ecology, Community, and Lifestyle, trans. David Rothenberg (New York: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1989).
68. Goldstein, “Combining Science and Place-Based Knowledge: Pragmatic and Visionary Approaches to Bioregional Understanding,” in Bioregionalism, 157.
69. Ibid., 162.
70. David Harvey, “Between Space and Time: Reflections on the Geographical Imagination,” Annuals of the Association of American Geographers 80 (1990): 418–34.
71. Charles Taylor, “The Politics of Recognition,” in Multiculturalism: Examining the Politics of Recognition, ed. Amy Gutmann (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton Univ. Press, 1994).
72. Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth, trans. Constance Farrington (New York: Grove, 1968).
73. Charles Taylor, “The Politics of Recognition,” in Multiculturalism, 26.
74. Ibid., 37.
75. Kwame Anthony Appiah, “Cosmopolitan Patriots,” in Cosmopolitics: Thinking and Feeling beyond the Nation, ed. Pheng Cheah and Bruce Robbins (Minneapolis: Univ. of Minnesota Press, 1998), 97.
76. John Rawls, A Theory of Justice (Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap, 1971).
77. Prakash and Esteva, Escaping Education, 4.
78. Gayatri
Chakravorty Spivak, “The
New Subaltern: A Silent Interview,” in Mapping Subaltern Studies and the
Postcolonial, ed. Vinayak Chaturvedi
(
79. Ibid., 472.
80. Maxine Greene, “The Passions of Pluralism: Multiculturalism and the Expanding Community,” in Freedom’s Plow: Teaching in the Multicultural Classroom, ed. Teresa Perry and James W. Fraser (New York: Routledge, 1993), 187.
81. Cornel West, “Marxist Theory
and the Specificity of Afro-American Oppression,” in Marxism and the
Interpretation of Culture, ed.
82. Edward Said, “Identity, Authority, and Freedom: The Potentate and the Traveler,” Transition 54 (1992): 4–18.
83. Dirlik,
The Postcolonial Aura:
84. Kai Nielsen, “Global Justice,
Capitalism and the Third World,” in International Justice and the
85. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, “Can Subaltern Talk?” in Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture, 333.
86. Arif Dirlik, “The Postcolonial Aura:
87. Aihwa Ong, Flexible Citizenship: The Cultural Logics of Transnationality (Durham, N.C.: Duke Univ. Press, 1999), is especially helpful for us to gain a better understanding of the previously colonized and marginalized people’s individual and collective agency in the expansion of global capitalism.
88. Spivak, “The New Subaltern,” 331.
89. Anne McClintock, “The Angel of Progress: Pitfalls of the Term ‘Postcolonialism,’ Social Text 31–32 (1992): 85.
90. Diana Brydon, “The Whie Inuit Speaks: Contamination as Literary Strategy,” in Past the Last Post: Theorizing Post-colonialism and Post-modernism, ed. Ian Adam and Helen Tiffin (New York: Harvester/Wheatsheaf, 1991), 195.
91. W. E. B. DuBois, “The Souls of Black Folk,” in Three Negro Classics (New York: Avon, 1965), 214–15.
92. Stuart Hall, “Cultural Identity and Diaspora,” in Identity: Community, Culture, Difference, ed. Jonathan Rutherford (London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1990), 226.
93. Paul Gilroy, The Black
94. Lisa Lowe, Immigrant Acts (Durham, N.C.: Duke Univ. Press, 1996).
95. Spivak, “The New Subaltern,”333.
96. Cornel West, “A Grand Tradition of Struggle,” English Journal (July 2000): 43–44.
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