Transnationalism, Education and Empowerment

The Latent Legacies of Empire

Niranjan Casinader

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• eBook ISBN: 9781317425502
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

Transnationalism, Education and Empowerment challenges the prevailing notion that transnationalism is concerned fundamentally with the process of enhanced global population movement that has been allied with modern globalisation. Instead, it argues that transnationalism is a state of mind, disassociated from the notion of 'place, ' that can be observed equally in societies of the past. Drawing on the context of colonial Sri Lanka and the British Empire, the book discusses how education in the British Empire was the means by which some marginalised groups in colonised societies were able to activate their transnational dispositions. Far from being a universal oppressor of colonised people, as argued by postcolonial scholarship, colonial education was capable of creating pathways to life improvement that did not exist before the European colonial period, providing agency to those who did not possess it prior to colonial rule.

The book begins by exploring the meaning of transnationalism, arguing that it needs to be redefined to meet the realities of past and current global societies. It then moves on to examine the ways education was used within the period of 18th and 19th century European colonialism, with a particular emphasis on Sri Lanka and other parts of the former British Empire. Drawing from examples of his own family's ancestry, Casinader then discusses how some marginalised groups in parts of the British Empire were able to use education as the key to unlocking their pre-existing transnational dispositions in order to create pathways for more prosperous futures. Rather than being subjugated by colonial education, they harnessed the educational aspects of British colonial education for their own goals.

This book is one of the first to contest and critically evaluate the contemporary conceptualisation of transnationalism, particularly in the educational context. It will be of key interest to academics, researchers and postgraduate students in the fields of education, the history of education, imperial and colonial history, cultural studies and geography.

1 Transnationalism

Reconfigurations of past and present

A The problematic of past and current intentions

In the modern academic age, the use of the term transnationalism has become almost ubiquitous, a chameleon whose identity has been claimed across multiple variations of use. Adopted by a diversity of disciplines, it has been embraced and interpreted from perspectives that range from the historical through the sociological into the economic and political, as well as the educational. Inevitably, such a variety of perspectives has meant that commonalities in its diverse interpretations have been slow to emerge. However, as this chapter will discuss, there has tended to be a coalescence of definition around several key aspects of transnationalism as a process – primarily, that it is a transactional practice founded on the movement of phenomena across national borders.

Aligned with these definitional parameters is a temporal association, in that the process or phenomenon of transnationalism is often judged as being a modern substantiation or descendant of contemporary globalisation. It is seen to embody and reflect the more complex and intense pattern of connections between places, a feature that has long been viewed as a key contemporary feature of the globalisation process (for example, see Burbules & Torres, 2000; Eckersley, 2007; Giddens, 2003). Consequently, transnationalism is seen as a phenomenon that has emerged as a result of the increased intensity of spatial connections across local, regional and global communities (Vertovec, 2009), fuelled by the more sophisticated and immediate technologies of 21st century communications.

These tightly controlled confines around transnationalism, both of definition and existence, are essentially problematic, because fundamentally they assume that extensive global movement across lines of sovereign control did not exist prior to the end of the 20th century. They also view the movement as being visible, observable and measurable, whether that shift be economic (such as in trade exchanges), social (as with migration) or multi-faceted (as with education). Consequently, the main underpinning contention of this book is that a new reconfiguration of transnationalism is required if we are to fully comprehend its impact on the nature of human society, and that education provides a strong context for the description, explanation and analysis of that conceptual transformation. To do so, however, requires a closer examination of these defining characteristics and the disconnections that they have created.

B Globalisation and transnationalism: Mutual identities?

The reasons for the complexity surrounding the notion of transnationalism lie partly in the broad scope of the disciplines that have commandeered the concept, which range from business through sociology to history, but also in the diffuse nature of the idea itself, the compound and contested nature of which has provoked a high instance of debate. Portes, Guarnizo, and Landholt (1999) and Pries (2004) have all highlighted the fragmented nature of transnational research, along with its lack of analytical rigour and a well-defined theoretical framework, as one reason for the perceived uncertainty. Pries cautioned that, given the considerable growth in the field of transnational studies since the early 1990s, the challenge facing researchers in this field was no longer to establish the existence of the transnational phenomena, but to address the vague and indistinct uses of terms such as transnational and transnationalism with a targeted debate about the concept along with ‘… more explicit and closely defined empirical research … ’ (Pries, 2008, p. 1).

In one of the more recent comprehensive classifications and treatments of transnationalism, Vertovec (2009) argued that the concept is more a product of the early 21st-century, and not the 1990s, reflecting a ‘… widespread interest in economic, social and political linkages between people, places and institutions crossing nation-state borders and spanning the world’ (p. 1). He identified six types of framework within which the term has been used: social morphology, which focuses on the phenomena of migration, diasporas, and ‘transnational communities’ (Vertovec, 2009, p. 5); types of consciousness, or the range of experiences that enable individuals and groups to maintain identity and memory across multiple locations; as modes of cultural reproduction; as avenues of capital; as sites of political engagement; and in the context of a ‘(Re)Construction of ‘place’ or locality’, in which he supports Appadurai’s (1996) conception of transnationalism as reflecting a disconnect between place and personal identity.

One of the advantages of Vertovec’s multi-faceted interpretation of transnationalism is that it takes into account the wider global socio-political changes that were taking place at the time when contemporary globalisation was beginning to emerge as a major economic and social process. The full impact of the decline and the disaggregation of the former Soviet Union had given rise to an impetus towards fully globalised economic activity based on the development of regional and worldwide trade agreements, in contrast to one that was confined to the ideological separations that had persisted for much of the 20th century. As part of this shift, there was a growing celebration as to the perceived success and ‘superiority’ of ‘Western’ economic principles over those of socialism and communism, leading to a surge in a widespread utopian belief in the capacity of the free market, the capitalist system and democratic institutions to become the global norm, using the universal power of the internet ‘… to mitigate inequality both within and across societies and to increase freedom, transparency, and good governance in even the poorest and most isolated countries’ (Appadurai, 1996, p. 2). Whatever the case, ‘transnational’ became the most commonly used term in the US academic world in the late 1980s and early 1990s, particularly in terms of its employment in relation to global flows in commerce and population movement, until ‘transnationalism’ superseded it around 1994 (Saunier, 2009).

Despite its associations with contemporary globalisation, the exact timing of the emergence of transnationalism as an idea within intellectual discourse is predictably nebulous. As Smith and Guarnizo (1998) observed, the phenomena that are often seen an representative of transnationalism are not particularly new, but it was the greater intensity of these activities at a global scale towards the end of the 20th century that saw the concept become more widely used across academic disciplines. Daswani and Quayson (2013) point to this period, and especially the early 1990s, as being the time when critiques of global development theories were growing; transnationalism offered a way forward, and that, therefore,

… just as there are different ways of studying transnationalism (e.g., from above and below, at the borders), there are also multiple ways of being transnational, since transnationalism includes a multiplicity of historical trajectories or pathways that affect people in different ways.

(Daswani & Quayson, 2013, p. 12)

Smith and Guarnizo (1998) suggested that this period also saw a growing convergence between the cultural studies approach – as reflected in the works of Appadurai (1996) and Bhabha (1994) – and the social sciences, such as the transmigration studies of Schiller, Basch, and Blanc-Szanton (1992). In a similar vein, Saunier, as part of a detailed study on the genesis and evolution of the term transnational, identified the rise of globalisation during the 1980s as being coincident with the emergence of terms such as transmigrants, transurbanism, translocality and transnations in the fields of cultural studies and anthropology, contained in new approaches that sought to ‘… qualify, observe, assess and prophesy a new multipolar and multicultural world in the makings in the 1990s … ’ (2009, p. 1053); in other words, the advent of contemporary globalisation provided the foundations on which the intellectual transnationalist discourse could thrive.

C The constants of interpretations

In spite of the contestation around the nature of transnationalism, there are several themes that can be continually identified, even if they are expressed in myriad ways: first, a persistent focus on the idea of the prefix ‘trans-’ in terms of movement; second, a tendency to frame ideas about transnationalism around the restricted parameters of economic activity and migration; and third, the growing association of the concept with the desirability of global citizenship.

1 Borders and State

The centrality of sovereign States to both the actions and processes of transnationalism embodies a psychological anchor for the current interpretation of the concept. Across all its variations, the notion of transnationalism has tended to be viewed in a transactional, geographical sense; that is, it has generally been conceived as involving the movement of phenomena across defined borders from one region of national political control to another. The prefix ‘trans-’ is invariably perceived in literal terms, with transnationalism involving the shifting and movement of various singularities over these political borders, or the ‘… economic, social and political linkages between people, places and institutions crossing nation-state borders and spanning the world’ (Vertovec, 2009, p. 1).

The difficulty with such a constricted perspective is not just confined to its innate contradiction of the element of cosmopolitanism that also imbues transnationalism, one that will be addressed later in this chapter. More importantly, it confines transnationalism to a limited realm, with a reduced emphasis, if any, on the wider social, cultural socio-political context in which these locational shifts occur. Specifically, transnationalism has been interpreted not so much as a concept, but as an actuality, invoking ‘… processes that transcend international borders’ (Faist, 2010, p. 13), encompassing the act of people(s) crossing the political borders of sovereign states, both physically and through the avatars of human-induced activity (Papastergiadis, 2000; Pries, 2008; Vertovec, 2009). If these characteristics hold true, then transnationalism, as has been argued, is a phenomenon that, in its more common interpretation, can only have been observable since the emergence of the modern nation-state in late 19th-century Europe, when the significance of borders as spatial and psychological definers and maintainers of territorial authority gained more socio-economic and political significance. If this is the case, then it follows that transnationalism is a consequence that derived from the forces of Euro-American social, political and economic industrialised growth that was symbiotic with the evolution of the modern sovereign, nation-State. However, such a mono-dimensional interpretation of ‘trans’ both inhibits the intellectual power of transnationalism as an interpretive concept and ignores its inaccurate reflection of reality. With this conceptualisation, its underlying rationale is both limiting and restricted, necessitating a reconstruction of the definition of transnationalism into a form that is more reflective of its complex, multi-faceted nature.

2 Migration and economy

The second constant in the multiple interpretations of transnationalism is that it is centred fundamentally on the movements of people, along with their associated psychological and cognitive states, across defined national borders between regions under different political control. This transition gains a cultural centrality when migration patterns are involved. Transnationalism in this imaginary is framed around a series of re-locations across national borders that are irrevocably accompanied by transfers in cultural identity, capital and economic activity. The locational transfer of people acts also as a key driver in the spatial dissemination of economic activity that is symbiotic with both globalisation and Euro-American market principles (Casinader, 2015; King & McGrath, 2002; Luke & Luke, 2000), diffusing an ideology that highlights the significance of multinational and transnational entities in the organisation of economic production on a cross-border basis (Hoogvelt, 1997). Transnational activity is

… characterised by an expansion and diversification of economic relations, the international population flows have become geographically far more diversified. They are no longer confined to the former channels carrying Europeans to the New World countries of immigration in Australasia and the Americas, nor earlier intra-regional movements in Asia and elsewhere. Many European countries have become receiving rather than sending countries.

(Inglis, 2002, p. 182)

As enunciated by writers such as Inglis (2002), this focus on international spatial transfer arose through transnationalism’s association with the period of the new postcolonial Age of Migration, initiated in the 1990s as part of the drive for globalisation, and through which transnationalism gained integrity as an academic concept. In this context, transnationalist movement is now identified by some (Inglis, 2002; Konno, 2010) as the more accurate and contemporary descriptor of global population shifts than the previous notion of ‘diaspora’ (Konno, 2010). Instead of the one-way demographic diffusion in response to push factors at the point of origin that is at the heart of diasporic shifting, transnationalism emphasises the continuing connection of the shifting individual between their place or location of emergence and their destination of hope. It incorporates the maintenance of this relationship through regular, if not frequent, temporary journeys back to the point of origin, a lifeline that is often observable in later generations, but one that can generate an internal disquiet about identity and belonging. For example, a multi-methods study of youths in New Zealand (Bartley & Spoonley, 2008) explored the experiences and strategies of one-and-a-half generation migrants from Asia in the context of contemporary transnationalism. This particular group, defined as migrant children between the ages of 6–18, were found to not only feel the sense of displacement and the difficulties of cultural adjustment common to all migrants, but also to experience complex layers of ‘in-betweenness’, often resulting in attitudes of ambivalence regarding their future aspirations in New Zealand.

Similarly, the transnational education experience of a second generation of Japanese immigrants in the 1930s was the focus of a multi-method study by Konno. Japanese migrants to the United States began arriving from the late 19th century. Many of these migrants considered it necessary for their children to temporarily return to Japan for a suitable Japanese education. In the language of Vertovec’s typology of transnationalism (1999), Konno (2010) explored how the transnational consciousness of both the first and second generation Japanese was influential in pursuing second-generation education in Japan. This transnational consciousness was evident in the struggles the second generation experienced around their sense of identity and sense of belonging to two nations:

These hardships served to intensify their ambiguous and transnational consciousness. Even before leaving for Japan, they had already held a degree of multiple self-identifications that linked them to different nations, either feeling proud of, or forced to cope with, their Japanese ancestry at the same time as being treated by other Americans as second-rate citizens. Once in Japan, however, they not only learned that they were foreign in their ancestors’ land but also rediscovered their American selves in the process of tackling discrimination by the Japanese and trying to overcome cultural differences.

(Konno, 2010, p. 110)

A common factor in the one-and-a-half generation migrants was the simultaneous tug-of-war between the country of origin, and that of residence. The complex and sometimes troubling ways the two are jostled in considerations of ‘home’, belonging, identity and fealty overshadowed other settlement factors (Bartley & Spoonley, 2008, p. 70). These transnational migrants, unlike their ancestral diaspora, are still embedded in their places of departure, maintaining roots that may extend to interests in property, commerce and even politics, as well as personal relationships. They ‘… may not have an either⁄or orientation, choosing to forego an assumed primacy of loyalty and attachment to one place or the other, and rather may simply be living simultaneously in both locations, neither absolutely here nor there, now or in the future’ (Bartley & Spoonley, 2008, p. 64). Consequently, whilst the term ‘diaspora’ is now often used to refer to a community or group, transnationalism has become more employed in the context of more complex migration phenomena (Faist, 2010).

3 Global cosmopolitanism and cultural identity

The movement of people across national borders that is reflected in multifarious forms of migration is not a new global phenomenon, but one of the consequences of globalisation has been the increased capacity for greater numbers of people to relocate themselves in different parts of the world, either temporarily or permanently. It is the volume, rate and frequency of the current movement that differentiates it from previous eras of global migration. In addition, the major difference between diasporic movement and transnational shifting of people is that, whereas the former is more likely to be caused by centrifugal forces that have driven people away from a point of origin, transnational movement involves a greater degree of choice and attraction at the point of destination combined with a connection to the location of the past. The ability and capacity of individuals to ensconce this pattern of spatial and cultural renewal has been enabled by positive economic conditions that have provided people with the financial resources to build such movement into the mainstream of their life patterns, along with the developments in global transfer technologies that have made the costs of air travel within reach of a wider range of people from a broader socio-economic spectrum. The defining characteristic of these indentured connections is the dualisation of cultural identity within those who are shifting, maintaining and nurturing a constant and deep connection with both poles of cultural origin and ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• List of figures
• Foreword
• Preface
• Acknowledgements
• 1 Transnationalism: reconfigurations of past and present
• 2 Education and transnationalism
• 3 The British Empire: an imaginary of dualities and contradictions
• 4 Education in pre-colonial Sri Lanka: pre-conceptions and suppositions
• 5 Colonial Sri Lanka: religion, sovereignty and the education of Empire
• 6 Movements of mind and body: a transnationalist story
• 7 Re-imagining transnationalism: trans-spatiality and implications for teaching, learning and beyond
• Index