Language, Literacy, and Pedagogy in Postindustrial Societies

The Case of Black Academic Underachievement

Paul C. Mocombe, Carol Tomlin

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• eBook ISBN: 9781135124410
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

In postindustrial economies such as the United States and Great Britain, the black/white achievement gap is perpetuated by an emphasis on language and language skills, with which black American and black British-Caribbean youths often struggle. This work analyzes the nature of educational pedagogy in the contemporary capitalist world-system under American hegemony. Mocombe and Tomlin interpret the role of education as an institutional or ideological apparatus for capitalist domination, and examine the sociolinguistic means or pedagogies by which global and local social actors are educated within the capitalist world-system to serve the needs of capital; i.e., capital accumulation. Two specific case studies, one in the United States and one in the United Kingdom, are utilized to demonstrate how contemporary educational emphasis on language and literacy parallels the organization of work and contributes to the debate on academic underachievement of black students vis-a-vis their white and Asian counterparts.

1 Postindustrial Pedagogy in America and the United Kingdom

The constitution of postindustrial capitalist economies is intimately linked to the contemporary phenomenon of neoliberal globalization under American hegemony. “Culture-of-globalization” and the “globalization-as-culture” metaphors represent two sociological approaches to understanding the contemporary postmodern phenomena we call globalization and postindustrialism (1970s–2000s). These two sociopolitical understandings regarding the origins and nature of globalization and postindustrialism, as Kevin Archer and Francis (2007) point out, have “set off a vigorous and at times rancorous debate within the social sciences” (2007: 2). On one side of the debate you have theorists who emphasize the “culture-of-globalization” and argue the idea that “the constitutive role of culture is critical for grasping the continued hegemony of capitalism in the form of globalization…. Culture, they assert is increasingly being co-opted and deployed as a new accumulation strategy to broaden and deepen the frontiers of capitalism and to displace its inherent crisis tendencies” (Archer and Francis, 2007: 2–3). In a word, in the continual hegemonic quest of capitalism to equalize the conditions of the world to serve capital, globalization, in the eyes of “culture-of-globalization” theorists, represents a stage of capitalism’s development highlighted by the commodification of culture in emerging postindustrial economies as a means for accumulating profits from the purchasing and consuming power of a transnational class of administrative bourgeoisies and professional cosmopolitan elites in core, semi-periphery, and periphery nation-states who subscribe to the social integrative norms of liberal bourgeois Protestantism (hard work, economic gain, political and economic liberalism, consumption, etc.).

In other words, the material and symbolic cultural elements of the cultures of the world are commodified by the upper-class of owners and high-level executives of core countries—where finance capital and service jobs predominate—to make a profit or produce surplus-value—given the declining significance of profit from industrial production that have been shipped or outsourced to semi-periphery and periphery nations giving rise to their national bourgeoisies whose cultural practices and tastes have been nationalized—by fulfilling the consumption tastes of the financiers, administrative bourgeoisies, professional classes, and cosmopolitan elites of nation-states throughout the world who control their masses as a surplus labor force for global capital. Globalization, therefore, is the integration of the cultural realm into the commodity chains of the capitalist elites, who homogenize, through the media and other “ideological state apparatuses,” the behavior and tastes of global social actors as consumers thereby homogenizing the cultural practices and tastes of the middle- and underclass peoples of the world in order to generate profit in economies that emerge as post-industrial or service economies.

This “culture-of-globalization” understanding of globalization or the postmodern condition, postindustrial, in late capitalist development is a well-supported position, which highlights, in the twenty-first century, the continued hegemony of capitalism in the form of globalization (Giddens, 1991; Hardt and Negri, 2000; Harvey, 1989, 1990; Jameson, 1984, 1991; Kellner, 1988). This line of thinking, in which theorists point to the underlining drive of globalization as the continuing historical push to socially, economically, and politically (under)develop the rest of the world along the lines, or as a simulacrum, of Western American and European societies to facilitate capital accumulation, began with European colonialism, continued through the “development project” of the Cold War era, and now is embodied in the globalization process under American hegemony. This historical process is highlighted in modernization, development, dependent development, world-systems theories, and contemporarily it is a trend outlined in the theoretical works of postmodern theorists such as David Harvey (1989, 1990) and Fredric Jameson (1984, 1991) who view globalization as postmodern or the cultural logic of capitalist development in core or developed (postindustrial) countries. “Culture-of-globalization” theorists, such as Harvey and Jameson, therefore, view globalization as the new initiative, with the same intentions, replacing the accumulation and modernization project of colonialism and development.

The homogenization, accumulation, and “modernization” project in European colonialism operated through the establishment of either colonies of settlement, “which often eliminate[d] indigenous people,” or rule, “where colonial administrators reorganize[d] existing cultures by imposing new inequalities [around class, gender, race, and caste] to facilitate their exploitation, wherein an unequal division of agricultural (monoculture) labor was physically and psychologically forced upon the peoples of color the world over to sustain the industrial and manufacturing cultural life of Europeans, while simultaneously disrupting, destroying, and reconfiguring the cultural practices and tastes of the colonized peoples within the binary (structural) logic of the (European) colonizer” (McMichael, 2008: 27). As Philip McMichael (2008: 31) observed of the European colonization process,

From the sixteenth century, European colonists and traders traveled along African coasts to the New World and across the Indian Ocean and the China seas seeking fur, precious metals, slave labor, spices, tobacco, cacao, potatoes, sugar, and cotton. The principal European colonial powers—Spain, Portugal, Holland, France, and Britain—and their merchant companies exchanged manufactured goods such as cloth, guns, and implements for these products and for Africans taken into slavery and transported to the Americas. In the process, they reorganized the world.

The basic pattern was to establish in the colonies specialized extraction and production of raw materials and primary products that were unavailable in Europe. In turn, these products fueled European manufacturing as industrial inputs and foodstuffs for its industrial labor force. On a world scale, this specialization between European economies and their colonies came to be termed the colonial division of labor.

While the colonial division of labor stimulated European industrialization, it forced non-Europeans into primary commodity production. Specialization at each end of the exchange set in motion a transformation of social and environmental relationships, fueled by a dynamic relocation of resources and energy from colony to metropolis: an unequal ecological exchange. Not only were the colonies converted into exporters of raw materials and foodstuffs, but also they became “exporters of sustainability.”

The sociocultural outcome of this exploitative and oppressive socioeconomic military system was a racialized social structural relationship relationally constituted based on the “unequal” colonial division of labor and “unequal” ecological exchanges, which divided the social actors of the world between white, Christian, civilized, and “developed” European colonizers (masters) whose “burden” was to civilize and (under)develop the “undeveloped,” “backward,” non-European, colonized, colored, other, “heathens” (slaves) of the world. This European civilizing of the non-European colored “heathens” of the world initially took place through the Christian churches of the West, whose biblical tenets and metaphysics were used to justify the master/slave relationship of colonialism as well as teach its work ethic, which eventually homogenized the social actions of social actors to benefit the white male power elites of an emerging gendered, racialized, and religious global capitalist world-system that industrially developed the white colonizer, while simultaneously underdeveloping the colored colonized who were systematically forced to become agents of the Protestant ethic in agricultural production.

The end of the socioeconomic military colonial system in the form of decolonization in the twentieth century did not end the colonizer/colonized relational relationship, but gave rise to a new nation-state system of civilization, domination, and exploitation within the hegemony of this emerging gendered, racialized, and religious global capitalism. Decolonization gave birth to what Philip McMichael calls, “the development project.” According to McMichael, “[t]he mid-twentieth century development project (1940s-1970s), an internationally orchestrated program of national economic growth, with foreign financial, technological, and military assistance under the conditions of the Cold War, managed the aftermath of collapsing European and Japanese empires within the idealistic terms of the United Nations and its focus on [national-state] governments implementing a human rights-based social contract with their citizens … to equalize conditions across the world in laying the foundations of a global market that progressively overshadowed the states charged with development in the initial post-World War II era” (McMichael, 2008: 21). Hence, the development project from the postcolonial era to the 1970s emphasized and continued the “unequal” colonial division of labor and “unequal” ecological exchanges within an Americentric dominated capitalist world-system subdivided into three geopolitical segments to benefit capitalist accumulation: the First World, the developed capitalist Western countries plus Japan with America the model for development; the Second World comprised of Communist Soviet blocs; and the Third World comprised of postcolonial bloc of nations.

Whereas under colonialism, as McMichael notes, “[t]he basic pattern was to establish in the colonies specialized extraction and production of raw materials and primary products that were unavailable in Europe. In turn, these products fueled European manufacturing as industrial inputs and foodstuffs for its industrial labor force” (31), in the development phase of postcolonial capitalism, the process was reversed as the First World sought to take advantage of the desire of the postcolonial elites of the Third World to develop their nation-states along the lines of the industrial First World. The basic global pattern was to establish in the emerging postcolonial “Third World” nation-states specialized manufacturing and industrial production sites that were outsourced from the First World. In turn, the outsourcing of these manufacturing and industrial jobs by the First World to take advantage of the urban overpopulation, underemployment, and low-wage economy caused by the de-agriculturalization of Third World countries fueled First World, especially American, agribusinesses that channeled food surpluses, under a “food-aid-regime,” to Third World countries. “In agriculture, the Third World’s share of world agricultural exports fell from 53 to 31 percent between 1950 and 1980, while the American granary consolidated its critical role in world agricultural trade. By the 1980s, the United States was producing 17 percent of the world’s wheat, 63 percent of its corn, and 63 percent of its soybean; its share of world exports was 36 percent in wheat, 70 percent in corn, and 59 percent in soybeans” (McMichael, 2008: 67–68). What developed from this global economic relationship was that Third World industrialization outlined by W.W. Rostow’s stages of development fueled First World economic growth agriculturally and technologically, while underdeveloping some Third World countries, and dependently developing others within the capitalist global world-system, hence recolonizing the Third World as they became indebted given their need to import food to feed their ever-increasing urban populous.

The postcolonial nations had no say in this new “unequal” development paradigm as “decisions about postcolonial political arrangements were made in London and Paris where the colonial powers, looking to sustain spheres of influence, insisted on the nation-state as the only appropriate political outcome of decolonization” (McMichael, 2008: 47). Be that as it may, “[t] his new paradigm inscribed First World power and privilege in the new institutional structure of the postwar international economy. In the context of the Cold War between First and Second Worlds (for the hearts and resources of the ex-colonial world), “development” was simultaneously the restoration of a capitalist world market to sustain First World wealth, through access to strategic natural resources, and the opportunity for Third World countries to emulate First World civilization and living standards” (McMichael, 2008: 45). The “development project,” in this way, as McMichael further observed, continued the hegemony of capitalism, which started with colonialism, through the universalization of a global market system driven by the nation-state and economic growth through agricultural and industrial productions (2008: 46). Globalization (1970s–2000s) is a continuation of this hegemonic capitalist process in a post-communist world.

Globalization under American capitalist hegemony, which would replace the European colonizers after World War II, seeks to dismantle the state-centered exploitation of colonial and development capitalism via the invisible hand of economic (neo)liberalism. “The globalization project (1970s–2000s),” as McMichael observes, “liberalizing trade and investment rules, and privatizing public goods and services, has privileged corporate rights over the social contract and redefined development as a private undertaking” (2008: 21). That is to say, in reestablishing a global capitalist economy through the development project that followed colonialism, the First World was able to indebt Third World countries through an export-oriented industrialization that fueled the wealth of First World agribusinesses, transnational corporations, and their citizens who became consumers, via debt accumulation, of inexpensive manufactured goods from the Third World. Hence, “[e]xport-oriented industrialization fueled rapid economic growth, legitimizing a new ‘free market’ model of development, and in the 1980s this was represented as the solution to the debt crisis [of Third World countries]. Development, which had been defined as nationally managed economic growth, was redefined in the World Bank’s World Development Report 1980 as ‘participation in the world market’” (McMichael, 2008: 117). This global market is controlled and directed by multinational and transnational corporations operating in First World postindustrial cities like the US where high finance banking jobs and low-end service jobs predominate over manufacturing and industrial jobs that have been outsourced to semi-periphery or developing nations. What has developed in turn is a continuation of the tripartite system of the development phase. In the globalization phase, however, what has developed is a tripartite system in which the global economic system parallels Immanuel Wallerstein’s world-systems conception: a periphery group of pre-industrial poor nations whose comparative advantage is agricultural production and tourism; a semi-periphery group of industrial-based nations, i.e., India, Mexico, Brazil, South Africa, and China; and a postindustrial group of core or developed nations led by the US who generate profit by servicing the financial and cultural consumptive needs of a transnational capitalist class, an administrative bourgeoisie, who control and monitor their (US and other core countries) investments in periphery and semi-periphery nations.

In other words, the contemporary (1970 to the present) postindustrial mode of production in developed (core) states like the US is no longer characterized or driven by the industrial means for accumulating capital, which dominated the social relations of production of the last 100 years in core or developed nations; instead, the present globalization condition is driven by postindustrialism (consumerism)—the new means for accumulating capital—and in such “developed” societies like the US is characterized not by the industrial organization of labor, but rather by capitalist finance and service occupations catering to the credit and consumerist demands of a dwindling (transnational) middle class the world over. In short, the rate of economic gain for its own sake or profit has fallen in industrial production due to labor laws (products of the welfare state) and ecological cost in developed countries like the US; hence the practice now among investors operating out of the US and other developed nations is on financial expansion “in which ‘over-accumulated’ capital switches from investments in production and trade, to investments in finance, property titles, and other claims on future income” (Trichur, 2005: 165).

On a global scale, the bifurcation defining this current conjuncture is characterized on the one hand by an expansion of industrial production into some (others remain agricultural producers) developing or periphery countries, i.e., the semi-periphery, where the rate of labor exploitation has risen given their lack of environmental and labor laws, devalued labor, and the dismantling of the welfare state; and on the other hand, consumerism of cheaply produced goods and high-end service occupations have come to dominate developed and developing societies as capital in the developed world seeks to incorporate, through the commodification of their cultural identities, the transnational class of elite “others” who administer the overseas assets of capital into their consumption patterns. Archer and Francis (2007: 3) sum up the nature of this position brilliantly,

since the mid-1990s, the application of GATS ([General Agreement on Trade in Services)] has slowly but surely led to a redefinition of culture primarily if not exclusively within the parameters of neo-liberal capitalism. The presumption is that flourishing cultures go hand-in-glove with flourishing capitalism…. This strategic articulation and subordination of culture to the requirements of capitalism is what has been called ‘cultural capitalism’…. This line of thinking is best exemplified by David Harvey … and to a lesser extent by Fredric Jameson … himself. These theorists have launched an unrelenting critique of cultural capitalism as a ‘carnival for the elite’ which enables politicians and policymakers to conceal growing socio-spatial inequalities, polarizations, and distributional conflicts between the haves and the have-nots. This critique is further underscored by their dismissal of culture as nothing more than a tool for economic regeneration through the ‘mobilization of the spectacle’ … because the tourist and entertainment city requires the urban spectacle to reinforce place-marketing and residential development…. In short, for this group, culture is just another commodity available for consumption in the world’s [postindustrial] supermarkets.

“Globalization-as-culture” theorists outrightly reject this socioeconomic position or interpretation underlying the contemporary processes of globalization. They believe “that globalization is marked by the hollowing out of national cultural spaces either consequent upon the retrenchment of the nation state or because culture continues to be a relatively autonomous sphere” (Archer and Francis, 2007: 2). That is, “[f]or the ‘globalization-as-culture’ group … culture is not that easily enjoined due to its inherent counter-hegemonic properties vis-à-vis neo-liberal globalization. Rather, for this group … contemporary globalization is not merely economic, but a system of multiple cultural articulations which are shaped by disjunctive space-time coordinates. In other words, globalization is as much if not more the product of inexorable and accelerated migratory cultural flows and electronic mass mediations beyond the space-time envelopes of the nation-state system and the successive socio-spatial fixes of global capitalism” (Archer and Francis, 2007: 4). In fact, culture, in many instances, serves as a counter-hegemonic movement to (neo)liberal capitalism as a governing “rational” system. This line of thinking is best exemplified in the works of Stuart Hall (1992), John Tomlinson (1999), Homi Bhabha (1994), Edward Said (1993) among many others. For these theorists cultural exchanges are never one-dimensional, and hybridization of culture in many instances serves as a counter-hegemonic force to the homogenization processes of global capital. That is, as postcolonial hybrids in their encounter with their former colonizers dialectically convict the former colonial powers of not identifying with the lexicons of signification of their Enlightenment ethos, the hybrid identity is counter-hegemonic (Bhabha, 1994).

Theoretically, this sociological debate between the advocates of the “globalization-as-culture” and the “culture-of-globalization” hypotheses is a fruitless debate grounded in a false ontological and epistemological understanding of the origins and nature of the (neo)liberal capitalist system that gives rise to the processes of globalization. Both groups ontologically and epistemologically assume that the origins of capitalism and its discursive practice is grounded in the dialectic of reason and rationality, thus drawing on the liberal distinction between capitalism as a public and neutral system of rationality that stands apart from the understanding of it as a private sphere or life-world cultural form grounded in the ontology of the Protestant ethic as argued by Max Weber. For the culture-of-globalization position, capitalist relations of production in the age of globalization are a result of rational rules derived at by global capital to control, direct, commodify, and homogenize other cultural forms or discourses in order to produce surplus-value on a global scale. Just the same, the globalization-as-culture position assumes that cultural forms operate within the systemicity of liberal rational rules that allow them to maintain their cultural forms against capitalist relations of production or as a hybrid form.

Essentially, both schools of thought a...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Halftitle
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Figures and Tables
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• 1 Postindustrial Pedagogy in America and the United Kingdom
• 2 Black American Achievement and Underachievement in America’s Postindustrial Economy
• 3 Black Underachievement in Postindustrial America: Reevaluating the “Burden of Acting White”
• 4 Black British Achievement and Underachievement in Britain’s Postindustrial Economy
• 5 The Writing Performance in English of African Heritage Students in Two Urban Environments: Birmingham, England and Kingston, Jamaica
• 6 Conclusion: Capitalism, Social Class Language Games, and Global Black Underachievement
• Notes
• References
• Index