Diversity and Decolonization in German Studies

Regine Criser, Ervin Malakaj, Regine Criser, Ervin Malakaj

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9783030343422
• Topic: Scienze sociali
• Subtopic: Sociologia

This book presents an approach to transform German Studies by augmenting its core values with a social justice mission rooted in Cultural Studies.?German Studies is approaching a pivotal moment. On the one hand, the discipline is shrinking as programs face budget cuts. This enrollment decline is immediately tied to the effects following a debilitating scrutiny the discipline has received as a result of its perceived worth in light of local, regional, and national pressures to articulate the value of the humanities in the language of student professionalization. On the other hand, German Studies struggles to articulate how the study of cultural, social, and political developments in the German-speaking world can serve increasingly heterogeneous student learners. This book addresses this tension through questions of access to German Studies as they relate to student outreach and program advocacy alongside pedagogical models.

© The Author(s) 2020

R. Criser, E. Malakaj (eds.)Diversity and Decolonization in German Studieshttps://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-34342-2_1

Begin Abstract

1. Introduction: Diversity and Decolonization in German Studies

Regine Criser¹ and Ervin Malakaj²

(1)

Department of Languages and Literatures, University of North Carolina Asheville, Asheville, NC, USA

(2)

Department of Central, Eastern and Northern European Studies, University of British Columbia, Vancouver, BC, Canada

Regine Criser

Email: [email protected]

Ervin Malakaj (Corresponding author)

Email: [email protected]

Keywords

GermanGerman StudiesLanguage studiesHumanitiesDiversityDecolonizationCritical pedagogyInclusive pedagogy

End Abstract

1 Decolonization and Diversity

Writing about decolonization as two settler-immigrant scholars creates an irreconcilable tension. Ashwin Manthripragada and Emina Mušanović discuss this tension in detail in their chapter in this volume; however, we want to begin by acknowledging our implication in settler colonialism. Eve Tuck and K. Wayne Yang (2012) define settler colonialism as a form of colonialism in which “settlers come with the intention of making a new home on the land” (p. 5). As immigrants to North America, we are contributing to and benefitting from past and current settler colonialism. Both of our academic institutions are built on Indigenous land: the University of North Carolina, Asheville, on the territory of the Easter Band of the Cherokee, the University of British Columbia, Vancouver, on the traditional, ancestral, and unceded territory of the Musqueam people. Both of our academic institutions also have established formal affiliation with the Indigenous people they have displaced, which manifest for example in the teaching of Indigenous languages and Indigenous studies, the naming of campus spaces in honor of the respective Indigenous people, as well as the participation of elders in important campus events such as commencement. However, neither institution aims to repatriate the colonized land they sit on and so the ultimate aim of decolonization, according to Tuck and Yang (2012), remains and will most like indefinitely remain unfulfilled.

Further, while language classes and degrees in Indigenous studies have been added to the curriculum, they have not replaced or decentered Westernized, colonial ways of teaching and learning. In this regard, too, both of our institutions are implicated in what Tuck and Rubén A. Gaztambide-Fernández (2013) have termed curricular settler futurity, which describes “the continued and complete eradication of the original inhabitants of contested land” in the specific form which such activity takes in the curriculum at institutions of higher learning (p. 80). In publishing a volume that—despite its criticality toward German Studies in its current manifestation at North American colleges and universities—still believes that German Studies is a discipline worth reforming, we have to acknowledge that we are contributing and upholding settler futurity as well.

Finally, in engaging with a concept and process such as decolonization in our attempt to pursue more equitable and just approaches to teaching and learning in the field of German Studies, this volume “domesticates decolonization,” ostensibly performing “yet another form of settler appropriation” (Tuck and Yang 2012, p. 3). We do not do so lightly and with the full understanding that “until stolen land is relinquished, critical consciousness does not translate into action that disrupts settler colonialism” (p. 19). Following Bhambra et al. (2018), however, we firmly believe that “the Western university is a key site through which colonialism – and colonial knowledge in particular – is produced, consecrated, institutionalised and naturalised” (p. 5) and hence is a key site for decolonization. Additionally, we agree that “colonialism (and hence decolonising) cannot be reduced to a historically specific and geographically particular articulation of the colonial project, namely settler-colonialism in the Americas” (p. 5). Within the field of German Studies in the United States specifically this means that scholars need to attend to two colonial histories: that of the United States and that of Germany. Both of these histories have remained under-researched, particularly with regard to the colonial legacies that continue to shape our institutions, professional organizations, as well as at the German-speaking nations and cultures we teach.

This volume is not focused on decolonization alone, but rather brings together two terms—diversity and decolonization—which, while closely related, are embedded with their distinct etymologies, histories, and scholarly discourses. We want to begin this volume by tracing their pasts as well as outline their current place within Higher Education, Foreign Language Education, and German Studies to mark the ways in which this volume contributes to ongoing discourses and in which it seeks to open new avenues for debates about the future of education, the humanities, and the field of German Studies in particular.

Since the assembled chapters of this volume focus on postsecondary German Studies, we will momentarily paint with broad strokes as we consider the history of the term “diversity.” “Diversity,” as a critical concept to describe demographic difference, has developed from an everyday term denoting variety to a more politically charged and even contested term. In the 1970s, diversity referred “specifically to those differences, primarily in race and ethnicity, that have been the basis of exclusion or segregation or differential treatment in public action and private social interaction” (Diversity 2005, n.p.). Over the past decades, the meaning of diversity has expanded in two ways: first, the term came to include most minoritized and marginalized groups including women, members of the LGBTQIA2S+ community, and people with disabilities; second, diversity has come to signify not only the characteristics of a group but also a process dedicated to creating more heterogeneous working and living environments. It is in the spirit of this second definition that the private sector and Higher Education alike have come to champion diversity as part of their strategic values or missions, emphasizing their commitment (genuine or pretend) to broad inclusion. Unfortunately, this increase in diversity-focused efforts in nearly every sphere of public life is accompanied by a strengthening of political movements dedicated to white supremacy in the United States and around the globe.¹ The success of these movements as exemplified by the electoral gains of right-wing and neo-fascist parties in countries like Germany, Austria, Brazil, or Hungary, as well as by the increase of xenophobic, racist, and antisemitic violence highlight that while diversity has been mainstreamed, its basic tenets are not universally accepted and are, in fact, actively opposed by many.

Diversity as a category of social justice work in the realm of Higher Education has, moreover, lost some of its prowess over the course of the last two decades. As Damani J. Partridge and Matthew Chin have shown, “different kinds of work are being done under ‘diversity’” (2019, p. 206). The “dominant diversity discourses,” which represent initiatives previously used to critique institutions and advocate for inclusion, have been coopted by the administrative processes of the neoliberal university. This has caused a rift “between individual career goals,” institutional interests, “and a broader commitment to social change” (p. 206). That is, diversity work at universities has been operationalized in the service of protecting institutions. As Sara Ahmed has shown, diversity work indeed “can be a way of maintaining rather than transforming existing organizational values” (emphasis in original 2012, p. 57). In some of its worst iterations, diversity initiatives are used to conceal and indeed reproduce whiteness by a process of “adding color to the white face of the organization,” which only “confirms the whiteness of that face” (emphasis in original, p. 151).

Decolonization, similar to diversity, describes a goal and a process at once. The term originally defined the process by which formerly colonized countries reclaimed independence from colonial powers, thereby creating numerous new nation-states. While the majority of these moves toward independence took place in the 1970s, not surprisingly “the aftershocks of decolonization are still widely felt” (Betts 2012, p. 34). One of the reasons for the continued impact of decolonization and arguably colonization is that current ideologies and practices of power, for example capitalism and globalization, as well as institutions which govern our daily lives, for example schools, universities, courts, are still very much rooted “in histories of colonialism” (Asher 2009, pp. 67–68). Furthermore, decolonization is closely intertwined with the theoretical approaches of postmodernism and postcolonialism, which critiqued and developed models to decenter and deconstruct the presumed superiority of Western culture as well as the dominance of Eurocentric perspectives inside and outside the academy (Betts 2012, p. 34). While postcolonialism made important strides toward the inclusion of traditionally excluded voices and perspectives, Leela Gandhi in her groundbreaking introduction to Postcolonial Theory (1998) remarks,

what postcolonialism fails to recognise is that what counts as ‘marginal’ in relation to the West has often been central and foundational in the non-West. […] Despite its good intentions, then, postcolonialism continues to render non-Western knowledge and culture as ‘other’ in relation to the normative ‘self’ of Western epistemology and rationality. (pp. ix–x)

Decolonization, as a theoretical approach, then seeks to move beyond inclusion and, instead, toward “challenging the master narrative, centering non-Western ways of knowing and learning” (Parker 2016, p. 164).

The desire and need for seeing and thinking about the world in non-Westernized ways has triggered protest movements at institutions of Higher Education around the globe. While a two-day conference in February 2010 in the Ethnic Studies Department at UC Berkeley about “Decolonizing the University: Fulfilling the Dream of the Third World College” is among the first comprehensive scholarly interventions in the twenty-first century that sought to decolonize the institutional setting of the university, the Rhodes Must Fall movement at the University of Cape Town in March 2015 initiated a more widespread response. The student protests at Cape Town originally focused on the removal of the statue of colonial icon and imperialist C.J. Rhodes, but they ultimately ushered in a wave of protests demanding the decolonization of universities throughout South Africa and beyond. Based on their experience and work with the protest movement at the University of Cape Town, Shannon Morreira and Kathy Luckett (2018) have developed a set of questions aimed at helping faculty “unearth some of the norms, assumptions and everyday practices that are taken for granted and which may be entangled in the ‘hidden curriculum’” (n.p.). The set of ten questions they introduce ranges from considerations of curriculum design to instructor positionality to assessment and includes questions such as: “What principles, norms, values and worldviews inform your selection of knowledge for your curriculum?,” “How does your curriculum level the playing fields by requiring traditional/white students to acquire the intellectual and cultural resources to function effectively in a plural society?,” and “For whom do you design your curriculum? Who is your ideal, imagined student and what assumptions do you make about their backgrounds, culture, languages, and schooling?” (Morreira and Luckett 2018, n.p.). This comprehensive list of questions emphasizes that the aftermaths of colonialism impact every part of the university, from what we teach, how we teach it, and to whom. The most important point here being that the purview of decolonization reaches into the domain of Higher Education.

Rhodes Must Fall Oxford was one of the first protest movements in the global north inspired by the events in Cape Town. Starting in the Fall of 2015, a group of students set out to “decolonise the space, the curriculum, and the institutional memory at, and to fight intersectional oppression within, Oxford” (RMF Oxford, n.p.). The protests at Oxford followed on the feet of the UK’s National Student Union’s campaign, “Why is my curriculum so white?,” which in the fall of 2014 demanded that institutions “minimise Euro-centric bias in curriculum design, content and delivery” (studentsunionucl​.​org). The demands for decolonization both in South Africa and in the UK are triggered by an increasingly diverse student body that takes issue with the century-long lack of representation of some histories and some systems of knowledge in the curriculum as well as the continued influence of colonial pasts shaping university life inside and outside of the classroom. Notably, these movements make an explicit distinction between decolonization and diversity and are particularly critical of their institutions’ efforts toward diversification. As Rhodes Must Fall Oxford argues: “Working towards decolonisation instead of ‘diversification’ leads to the democratisation and transformation we would like to see” (rmfoxford, n.p.). These movements then take issue with the additive approach of diversification that aims to infuse the existi...