It is difficult to grasp a ânormalâ, familiar situation as a whole: rather, one reacts with a series of habitual responses, which, although they are reactions, really belong to that situation. History, political theory, sociology can help one to understand that âthe normalâ is only normative. Unfortunately these disciplines are usually used to do the opposite: to serve tradition by asking questions in such a way that the answers sanctify the norms as absolutes. Every tradition forbids the asking of certain questions about what has really happened to you.
Introduction
Identity and its formation is a complex, dynamic, multifaceted construction, shaped by many factors and forces, including culture, belief systems, historical experiences, the political economy, family structures, individual experience, class and status systems operating in a society, and, most importantly, external forces on a society of hegemonic or colonial forms. The influences on identities can be material and physical, emotional and ideational, and conscious and unconscious. For Indigenous peoples and many traditional societies, an ethnic identity is based upon a commitment to culture and community, from which they view and operate in the world (Gambrell 2018), for example, in Ubuntu in a number of sub-Saharan African states (Mukuka 2013).
Identities form within a family, community, or tribe, through rituals and customs, experiences and reflection, and formal, informal, and non-formal forms of education (Mocker and Spear 1982). In more traditional societies and communities, a greater proportion of learning may take place in informal and non-formal settings, regarded as legitimate in such social systems. Identity is influenced by role models and mentors, as well as significant parental and caretaker relationships, and is a construction dependent upon the knowledge and skills one acquires. However, in more industrialised and âmodernâ societies, a far greater proportion of education is allocated to formal settings reflecting the compartmentalisation of social institutions, in contrast to more traditional integrated societies (Berman 1981; Weber 1968). Identity, in turn, is a means through which group structures and social processes, such as authority and leadership roles, are formed, perceived, experienced, and conceptualized (Dube 2010).
In the current globalising age of education, where a few countries like the US, UK, and Australia export their curricula and pedagogy to a large part of the world, there is increasing evidence that the national and cultural identities of local and Indigenous populations attending international educational institutions, or local institutions using foreign curricula, are being altered, undermined, and co-opted through processes resembling colonisation (Spring 2014). Popular culture, also, is a shaping influence of recolonisations affecting identity, values, and character (Atia and Houlden 2019). For some in ethnographic studies, globalisation and its neoliberal policies, grounded in economic values, causes âpostcolonial disordersâ, producing pathologies, suffering, and repression that affect everyday lived experiences as people become detached from their cultural norms (Good et al. 2008; Stromquist and Monkman 2014).
The foundation for a postcolonial critique of identities rests upon a large and multifaceted body of postcolonial literatures, drawing on a broad range of disciplinesâ concepts relevant to the educational context. Many terminologies involved in the postcolonial field, such as postimperialism, neocolonialism, decolonialism, and epistemicide, reflect its multidisciplinary character and diverse perspectives. Nkrumah (1965), in Neo-Colonialism, regards the cultural colonisation through education and other cultural sectors to possibly be the most dangerous phase of imperialism, operating through economic means of which globalised education is a part. Postcolonial and aboriginal critiques have been developing for some time, with early authors like Paulo Freire (1970) and Frantz Fanon (1963/1961) critiquing educational practices and reinstituting traditional values, forms of practice, and knowledge (Guha 1997). Edward Said (1978, 2014) created a significant impetus for expanding postcolonial writing to the Middle East. There are also Western authors who contributed critiques and theories that allow for a more transferable approach to social institutions and how people conceptualise themselves post colonially, such as Pierre Bourdieu (1977, 1993) in his initial anthropological writings, before designing a sociology that carries this influence in a highly transferable interrelated and interdependent set of concepts (field, habitus, capital, power, interests, and strategies). Important also is Foucaultâs (1977) critique of knowledge as an expression of power, and Gramsciâs (1971) concept of the subaltern as a colonised identity.
Postcolonial scholarship has permeated many disciplines and fields of study, raising questions as to their integrity and bias, all of which inform education studies, such as literary criticism (Ashcroft 1989; Lazarus 2004); biographical studies (Du Bois 1903); the subaltern approach to historiography (Chatterjee 1998; Guha 1982; Hickling 2007; Spivak 1988, 1999), and psychology (Duran and Duran 1995; Fernando and Moodley 2018) such as Bhabhaâs (2004) semiotic and psychoanalytic examination of colonial rule through the formation of subalternity. Affected also are the disciplines of political science (Chatterjee 1993); economics (Pollard, McEwan and Hughes 2011; Sanyal 2007), philosophy (de Sousa Santos, 2016); linguistics, especially the politics of English as a dominant international language (Pennycook 2017) and its negative effects as the educational language in non-English environments through power and legitimacy (McKinney 2017); archaeology (Lydon and Rizvi 2010), that is disengaging from its colonial heritage in its knowledge, practices and interpretations; and science and technology (Harding 2011).
There is also an increasing critique of education being used, at school and higher education levels, as an instrument of colonisation, largely through globalisation (Stein and Andreotti 2016; Zajda 2018) influencing many aspects of knowledge and learning, like science education, technology education (Sandoval, 2019), and pedagogical practices (Andreotti 2011). All of these influence and affect the roles and responsibilities of educational administration and leadership and their roles in shaping identities on many levels.
Postcolonial literature has three main purposes: first, to achieve a moral end in representing peoples; secondly, to critique scholarship and knowledge that carry misrepresentations of colonised communities; and finally, to construct a new and more authentic understanding of cultures and their intellectual and social heritages. Central to these purposes is the recognition of diverse identities â that peoples in all cultures, societies, and nations are able to identify with, and âseeâ themselves in, the values and bodies of knowledge that originate in their own heritages, in contrast to what is often referred to as âknowledgeâ that originates from Western, mostly Anglo-American, countries.
Many parts of the world lie at the intersections of historical and social forces that continue to shape national developments, from traditional leadership and administrative practices through colonial periods, to the current globalised era, including globalised education that constructs the identities of others (Said 1993) through symbolic power and performative practices (Bourdieu 1992). Of increasing concern is the potentially negative impact on national and professional identity in education that shapes nation-building problematically (Bakhtiari 2006; Farazmand and Pinkowski 2006; Zajda, Daun and Saha 2009). Because of differences in culture and social norms, most âWesternâ models of leadership identity formation do not fully apply, and may even be damaging culturally (Burbules and Torres 2000; Spring 2014), reducing the sustainability of national identity and its leadership identity for education.
This chapter explores a number of the postcolonial approaches that have implications for identity formation; the role that educational administration and leadership plays in advancing forms of colonisation, and its potential for supporting decolonisation.
Internationalising Identity through Postcolonialisms and Indigeneity
The Western discussions of educational internationalisation and comparison have tended to produce models that still privilege Anglo-American foundational knowledge supplemented by material from other countries, although some have advanced a more contextually constituted model (e.g., Dimmock and Walker 2005), policy transfer (Dolowitz and Marsh 2000), multiple modernities (Eisenstadt 2000), and equality of cultures (Lumby and Foskett 2016). Contrastingly, views from non-Western parts of the world have adopted positions that have been increasingly critical of Western influences, in part to create spaces within which other knowledge traditions can exist. This section reviews the foundational works of selected authors who have had a significant impact on the reorienting of knowledge and perspectives relevant to identity formation in education, as a critical instrument, through its administration and leadership.
In 1978, Edward Said, a Palestinian--American scholar, published Orientalism, a book that came to have a major influence across and outside of academia. He was interested in exploring why people in Western nations had preconceived notions of people in the Middle East. This was related to his more general concern with how people perceive and understand others who look different from themselves. Through historical analysis of how Western âexpertsâ and other cultural actors represented the history of people in the Middle East, he observed that they created a distorted lens of stereotypes â what he called âorientalismâ. This lens presented all Arabs as not only different from and inferior to Westerners, but also threatening, erasing the diversity and humanity of Arab peoples. Equally importantly, he connected orientalism to centuries of militarised Western imperial, political, and economic interests playing out in the Middle East, such that the cultural representations of Arabs provided ideological support for their containment and destruction by Western powers.
Saidâs work offered a multidimensional, anti-essentialist theory of identity, informed by the goal of finding non-violent solutions for co-existence. Said (2014) observed that âSince the struggle for control over territory is part of ⌠history, so too is the struggle over historical and social meaningâ (331). He argued that the task for critical scholars is to connect both struggles. For his part, he tried to âshow that the development and maintenance of every culture require[s] the existence of another, different and competing alter egoâ (331â2). This involves the ongoing construction of individual, cultural, and national identities:
Each age and society re-creates its âOthersâ. Far from a static thing, then, identity of self or of âotherâ is a much worked--over historical, social, intellectual, and political process that takes place as a contest involving individuals and institutions in all societies.
(332)
Identity construction, then, is a multifaceted, ongoing, interpretive process that occurs at multiple interacting levels, âbound up with the disposition of power and powerlessness in each societyâ (332). This means that identity issues are not merely âacademic woolgatheringâ (332); they have concrete political implications that frequently turn violent, especially when connected to physical territories with resources and historical cultural significance. Saidâs view on identity was to follow Gramsciâs observation, that history deposits in each of us an indeterminate set of traces and marks, with no orderly interpretive guidebook. The interpretive process, then, involves understanding oneself in terms of othersâ histories. For identity, this means understanding oneself in relation to others in a way that one continues to become âsomeone elseâ â that is, to transform a unitary identity into one that includes the âotherâ without suppressing the difference (Said, Jhally and Media Education Foundation 1998). This task should also be a central responsibility of education and those who administer and lead it.
One of the main themes of postcolonialism is the unequal ideational distinctions imposed on colonised populations, such that the colonisers (re)present themselves as better in every way, and, with these manufactured identities, encourage acts of dispossession and cruelty against the colonised (McLeod 2007). Neo-colonialism stems from the criticism that, in many settings where political independence was eventually achieved, the label âpost-colonialâ does not capture the material and ideational realities of the (formerly) colonised peoples. Instead, the term signifies that the shaping of identities under colonisation continues even after the achievement of so-called independence (Murphy 2007). There are always âcontact zonesâ (Stratton and Devadas 2010) in many parts of the world where âcultures meet, clash, and grapple with each other, often in contexts of highly asymmetrical relations of powerâ that persist in the aftermath of colonialism (Pratt 1991: 33). These contact zones are not only in former colonies; they also exist, for example, between diaspora communities and majority cultures in former colonising countries (Hall 1989, 2014).
Two early authors associated with neo-colonialism are Albert Memmi and Frantz Fanon. Memmi, a Tunisian novelist and social critic, was born into a âvexxed and complex cultural positionâ (McLeod 2007: 15) consisting of European-Jewish heritage, growing up in Algiers speaking French and Arabic, being educated in Algiers and in Paris, and was a strong supporter of the independence movement in Tunisia, ...
