Transcultural Education for Clinical Psychologists, Part #3

Postcolonial Theories

“I think postcolonial scholarship provides a theoretical and historical focus to multiculturalism that makes it attractive to scholars who want to escape the narcissism of mere identity scholarship” Spivak in Hegda & Shome, 2002, p. 271.

“The theoretical base of postcolonial studies also allows for multiplicity to be thought of in a way that is different from just simply the Rainbow Coalition. Within the context of globalization, to be postcolonial seems more appropriate than to be merely metropolitan multicultural. It is a way of dealing with globalization which is after all a fairly recent phenomenon. In order to give globalization historical depth you must move it to postcoloniality” Spivak in Hegda & Shome, 2002, p. 271-272.

Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak’s quotes speak to two of the reasons underlying my proposal for incorporating Postcolonial Theory in a social justice curriculum: (a) the limits of liberal identity politics, and (b) the need to attend to cultural oppression everywhere, particularly now when the politics and economics of globalization are impacting everyone. There are two other reasons, (c) learning from the oppressed, and (d) attending to the psychology of oppression, voiced by Homi Bhabha:

1. "it is from those who have suffered the sentence of history—subjugation, domination, diaspora, displacement—that we learn our most enduring lessons for living and thinking" (p. 172).
   
2. "the affective experience of social marginality—as it emerges in non-canonical cultural forms—transforms our critical strategies. It forces us to . . .engage with culture as an uneven, incomplete production of meaning and value, often composed of incommensurable demands and practices, produced in the act of social survival" (p. 172).

While there is no single uniting definition of what is meant by Postcolonial studies, Homi Bhabha’s elegant introduction captures those elements most relevant to my purpose in this paper:

"Postcolonial criticism bears witness to the unequal and uneven forces of cultural representation involved in the contest for political and social authority within the modern world. Postcolonial perspectives emerge from the colonial testimony of Third World countries and the discourses of ‘minorities’ within the geopolitical divisions of East and West, North and South. . .[their aim is to] intervene in those ideological discourses of modernity that attempt to give a hegemonic ‘normality’ to the uneven development and the differential, often disadvantaged, histories of nations, races, communities, peoples. They formulate their critical revisions around issues of cultural difference, social authority, and political discrimination in order to reveal the antagonistic and ambivalent moments within the ‘rationalizations’ of modernity . . .The postcolonial project, at the most general theoretical level, seeks to explore those social pathologies ‘loss of meaning, conditions of anomie’--that no longer simply ‘luster around class antagonism, [but] break up into widely scattered historical contingencies."

The controversial writings of Fanon, Said, Spivak and Bhabha have decentered European intellectual hegemony in Europe through their criticism of white, patriarchal eurocentrism (Young, 2001). Said extended Foucault’s critique of western epistemic disciplinary power exercised by academic institutions to Orientalism, arguing that European studies of the Middle East had the effect of securing and maintaining western hegemony over the Arabs and Islam (Sharpe, 2005). Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak has revealed imperialism’s “epistemic violence” perpetrated upon colonized women.

Homi Bhabha carried on Said’s poststructural critique incorporating the ‘psychopolitics’ of Antillean Franz Fanon, whose writings demonstrate the unprecedented challenge to understanding unleashed by colonial racism and violence, and convinced one “that the colonial moment of epistemic, cultural, psychical and physical violence makes for a unique kind of historical trauma” (Hook, 2005). Bhabha observed the failure of ideological and discursive approaches “to account for the persistence of racism, its pronounced irrationality, its compulsive qualities, the visceral quality of its hatred, its continuous, seemingly repetitive nature” (Hook, p. 487). Derek Hook suggests that Fanon’s and Bhabha’s application of a psychoanalytic lens to understanding “the vicissitudes of colonial power and its resistances” reflects the hope that these analyses would result in opportunities to intervene “within the life of power” (Hook, 2005, p. 481).

There is a reserved hope that destabilizing the Western canon through resistance could lead to new ways of being that no longer are dependent upon, through accommodation or opposition, imperialist hegemony. For example, Robert Young considers the emergence of postcolonial studies to be “an historical moment of new tricontinental forms of critical analysis and practice” (2001, p.XX) that could lead to the end of western hegemony.

Lyn Carter in Australia, one of the few educators I have found to apply postcolonial theory to diversity issues in teaching (Carter, 2004; 2005), attributes postcolonial theory the means to:

"construct more complex conceptualizations of cultural difference as hybridized and fluid, always in the making, and recast culturally diverse students’ homogenized identities into multiple, mobile, and provisional constructions, more accurately attune to conditions of living and learning under the indeterminacy of the transforming global world” (Carter, 2004, p. 833).

Carter (2005) appreciates in postcolonial criticism what she perceives to exceed western epistemologies, and the practice of double consciousness as “thinking about how thinking intersects with the disciplinary categories themselves” (p. 917).

The postcolonial attitude implicitly calls for immersing oneself in the world of the other. The critical imperative of postcolonial critique, which is addressed by those of the tricontinents to us in the West, is to suspend one’s hegemonic assumptions and disciplinary methodologies and, in true dialogic presence, open oneself to the other from a position of not-knowing. For example, Obioma Nnaemeka asserts that,

"imperialists and colonists never learn from the colonized: they teach them. They do not ask questions; they manufacture answers in search of questions. Border crossing has its dangers, its seduction, its unpredictability, its humbling moments, but it also has its enriching rewards. Border crossing entails learning about the ‘other,’ but more importantly, it should entail learning from the other. Learning about is a gesture that is often tinged with arrogance and an air of superiority; learning from requires a high dose of humility tinged with civility. Learning about often produces arrogant interrogators; learning from requires humble listeners" (2003, p. 374).

From her experiences as an African feminist, Nnaemeka argues for a postcolonial critique that critique lead to the “clearing” of a dialogic third space between borders, where theory and practice, planning and action coexist. She explains:

"Theorizing in a cross-cultural context is fraught with intellectual, political, and ethical questions: the question of provenance (where is the theory coming from?); the question of subjectivity (who authorizes?); the question of positionality (which specific locations and standing [social, political, and intellectual] does it legitimize?). The imperial nature of theory formation must be interrogated to allow for a democratic process that will create room for the intervention, legitimization, and validation of theories formulated ‘elsewhere.’ In other words, theory making should not permanently be a unidirectional enterprise---always emanating from a specific location and applicable to every location---in effect allowing a localized construct to impose a universal validity and application. I argue instead for the possibilities, desirability, and pertinence of a space clearing that allows a multiplicity of different but related frameworks from different locations to touch, intersect, and feed off each other in a way that accommodates different realities and histories" (Nnaemeka, 2003, pp. 362-363).

Nnaemeka’s words point me to the importance of service learning requirements for multicultural education for social justice and a better world. Humbleness and service, combined with openness and not-knowing are the ontological components of a professional’s integration of a heartfelt engagement in social justice work.

Conclusion

I have tried in this essay to articulate a vision of a multicultural education that fosters the commitment to social justice, nourishes the interest in theory, challenges the comfort zones of unconscious hegemony, insists upon informed action, and embodies dialogic reflexivity. I welcome your comments and suggestions.

Transcultural Education for Clinical Psychologists, Part #2

Curriculum: The Linguistic Turn

The position from which my proposed multicultural curriculum emerges is located in the ideas generated since the “linguistic turn” in the humanities and certain branches within the social sciences, including psychology. For the sake of brevity, I will quote Stuart Hall’s definition. The linguistic turn is,

"[a conviction of ] the crucial importance of language and of the linguistic metaphor to any study of culture; the expansion of the notion of text and textuality, both as a source of meaning, and as that which escapes and postpones meaning; the recognition of the heterogeneity, of the multiplicity, of meanings, of the struggle to close arbitrarily the infinite semiosis beyond meaning; the acknowledgement of textuality and cultural power, of representation itself, as a site of power and regulation; of the symbolic as a source of identity" (Stuart Hall, as cited in Chrisman, 2003, pp. 148-149).

In the following section, I will introduce two interrelated, interdisciplinary, humanities disciplines, Culture Studies and Postcolonial Theories, both of which are legacies of the linguistic turn and could provide conceptual frameworks for multicultural education.

Culture Studies

Culture can be conceptualized as a way of life made up of the relationships between all its elements (Golby & Purdue, 1999), or more discursively as “the constant process of producing meanings of and from our social experience, and such meanings necessarily produce a social identity for the people involved” (Fiske, 2000, p. 1). Culture studies seem most interested in understanding how culture is made; how it shapes and is shaped by people various locations and historical settings, its contradictions and its systems of power relations.

Three foci may characterize a critique based on contemporary culture studies. First, it would address the junctures of language, meaning, and power in the construction of cultural meanings and in material practices (Barker & Galasinski, 2001; di Leonardo & Lancaster, 1997). That is, culture studies are in the tradition of poststructuralist thought, which conceives of discourse as the structure through which we perceive reality and views social realities as “organized by signs and meanings patterns in relations of identity and difference” (Seidman, 1997, p. 67). Institutions and social practices are produced by and founded within discursive formations, and are the basis upon which knowledge, values, and norms are justified (Edgar & Sedgwick, 2002). Discourses can and do have hegemonic (repressive) functions. Hegemony, as conceived by Gramsci (2000), is the regulation of social relations by the dominant class through forms of culture. Morag Shiach clarifies:

Gramsci offers us another explanation of the nature of dominant culture. It can be understood as the site of hegemonic representations: those which ‘foster forms of consciousness which accept a position of subordination’. It is also, therefore, a sphere that must be won over by any social group aspiring to social leadership: struggles over definition of culture can thus be seen as struggles for intellectual, moral and philosophical hegemony.” (Schiach 17)

Similarly, sociologist Pierre Bourdieu’s (1984) analysis of the unequal distribution of “cultural capital” (the collection of accepted and esteemed cultural resources) reveals how social hierarchies are reinforced and reproduced in cultural forms. He argues, far from being a neutral expression, cultural consumption is the “means by which [distinctions and differences in social classes] are produced, maintained and reproduced” (Storey, 1999, p. 44). Michel Foucault understands discourse as both “an instrument and effect of power” (Foucault, 1978, pp. 100-101), no matter what one’s social standing is, individuals are both subjects of and subject to discourses. Foucault’s understanding of power as relational rather than material extends the reach of a critique of dominant discourses to resistant “reverse” discourses, the structural necessities of dominant discourses.

Second, a culture theorist is likely to focus in on specific events, intimate relationships, and experiences in relation to their historical contexts, including “changes in production, consumption, technology, and law that set the stage for everyday life” (di Leonardo & Lancaster, 1997) as influenced by Foucault’s geneology of subjectification, which

"focuses directly on the practices that locate human beings in particular ‘regimes of the person’. It does not write a continuous history of the self, but rather accounts for the diversity of languages of ‘personhood’ that have taken shape . . . and the norms, techniques, and relations of authority within which these have circulated in legal, domestic, industrial, and other practices for acting upon the conduct of such persons."

Third, a culture studies critique would incorporate a focus on the co-production of popular culture by consumers, because ideological implications in cultural discourse do not translate automatically into ideological effects. The Italian Marxist, Gramsci (Forgacs, 2000) wrote that, in order for hegemonic forms to be taken in by the subordinated, they had to be chosen, not passively interpolated. Michel Foucault’s theory of power has particular relevance for exploring the boundary phenomenon of popular culture consumption (Foucault, 1978). He conceptualizes power as relations that are immanent in all interrelationships, non-binary and rooted in “local oppositions” and differences (p. 94), “intentional and nonsubjective” (p. 94), and as always co-generative with resistance.

The approach explores the webs of power in both the producers of official and mass discourses and the consumers. Resistance to the oppressive psychological and material effects of the dominant culture for the unprivileged begins with education as critique, as with Friere (2000), including that the persistence of hegemonic power in discourse relies upon everyone’s complicity, and discourse’s multisemic characteristics provides openings for resistance through deconstruction. The culture studies view of the audience has direct relevance for how those of us in the West objectify and erase the Other; we underestimate their powers of resistance because we assume the superiority of our epistemology. The assumed radical potency of Culture Studies lies in the power attributed to making meaning or, to use Foucault’s words, discovering and applying the power of reverse discourses.

Transcultural Education for Clinical Psychologists, Part #1

I will now propose a transcultural expansion to diversity training in which I hope to integrate the critical dialogism of Paulo Friere (2000) and Ignacio Martín-Baró (1994), with the more recent ideas appearing under the label of "postcolonial".

Pedagogy

This section on pedagogy is curriculum-wide proposal. It is crucial that liberation pedagogy not be marginally located only in certain courses, typically those concerned with minorities, such as a required diversity course, but rather should be both the norm in the majority of courses and linked to the establishment of public community dialogue events. Boyle-Baise and Gillette (1998) urge us to prioritize pedagogy in multicultural education, which would include providing “an intellectually safe, respectful place for learning, a place to share personal knowledge, agree to disagree, experiment with new ideas, and wrestle with contested issues…(p. 23). They suggest that educators involve themselves in “encouraging student-generation of knowledge, creating democratic teaching and learning communities, pursuing cultural critique, and fostering activism that makes a difference” (Boye-Baise & Gillette, 1998, p. 23).

In order to address issues of social justice, training in multicultural diversity must be grounded in processes of conscientization. Ignacio Martín-Baró said, “the task of the psychologist must be to achieve the de-alienation of groups and persons by helping them attain a critical understanding of themselves and their reality” (p. 39), and “can only be realized through dialogue” (p. 42). His proposal for a liberation psychology included three elements: (a) focus on serving the needs of the poor rather than on preserving the status of the discipline, (b) view knowledge as something that is created by thinking with the oppressed rather than for them, and (c) recognize that knowledge is informed by taking action in real life for social change, through “a new praxis” (Martín-Baró, 1994, pp.27-28). He warned:

"Thus, to acquire new psychological knowledge it is not enough to place ourselves in the perspective of the people; it is necessary to involve ourselves in a new praxis, an activity of transforming reality that will let us know about what is but also what is not, and by which we may try to orient ourselves toward what ought to be" (Martín-Baró, 1994, pp.28-29).

Conscientization refers to a process of developing critical awareness of contradictions in one’s economic, political and social world, which is followed by action to undue oppressive social structures. Conscientization’s most distinctive feature is its critical attention “to how power and meaning are employed in the construction and organization of knowledge, desires, values, and identities” (Giroux, 1992, p. 52). To my mind, a commitment to conscientization in the training of clinical psychologists for social justice would mean that each learning context (classroom, supervision, advising, collaboration) would involve the co-examinination of power and meaning, as suggested by Giroux, in combination with creative engagement in envisioning and enacting alternatives, however local.

In order to facilitate Paulo Freire’s process of conscientization, there would be instructor-supported dialogic opportunities for engaging students in uncovering and reducing those power differences in their own learning situation (Freire, 2000). Faculty would bear the responsibility of creating an atmosphere that would foster students’ capacities to criticize and affect both the nature and processes of their education, which means a greater commitment from faculty to view education holistically. As bell hooks (1994) explains, in “progressive, holistic education, ‘engaged pedagogy’ is more demanding than conventional critical or feminist pedagogy. For, unlike those two teaching practices, it emphasizes well-being” (p. 15). I would say that engaged pedagogy emphasizes and models “being,” and that an educator embodies specific characteristics of dialogue: an immediacy of presence, openness to unanticipated consequences, willingness to be surprised, vulnerability (openness to being changed, persuaded), belief in human interdependence, and genuineness (Cissna & Anderson, 1994).

I am proposing that an engaged pedagogy founded on dialogue, as described above, that is facilitated and modeled by the teacher, parallels our educational objective: that students feel morally committed to engaging in the dialogic process of multicultural awareness as a practice for social justice. The structural demands for dialogue to occur do not reflect our current social or academic order. Necessary conditions for dialogue are fair and equal access to speech, listening, and decision-making without retaliation (safety). Only when these conditions are met can optimal conditions for dialogue, such as openness, curiosity, reflexivity, occur. Therefore, a teacher will implement basic formal structures and ground rules to build in safety for students. In addition, she will perform a practice of “dialogic reflexivity” (Hawes, 1997) as part of the course’s commitment to conscientization. Dialogic reflexivity is an explicit engagement in “reflexive critique” of oneself, the particular context of hierarchical power relations, the institutionalization of these power relations, and “the multiple, shifting ways in which power is exercised and contested in and across each of these domains.

The next section will argue for the inclusion of postcolonial theories as an important expansion of multicultural training for clinical psychologists, beginning with a brief introduction to some of the ideas most relevant for professional psychology.

Training Clinical Psychologists for a Mulitcultural World

If there could be professional psychology training programs in which the explicit commitments to social justice, where the unpacking and critiques of the values, assumptions, and practices (Prilleltensky & Nelson, 2001) in psychology were incorporated into in their curriculum, what would they look like? What would such programs contain, both in their coverage of theories and research and in their transformative practices (praxis)? I could begin at any number of points, but for now I will consider the competency of Diversity.

Multicultural Education for Social Justice

. . . multiculturalism is about social justice, cultural democracy, and equity. (Sue, Carter, Casas, Fouad, Ivey, Jenson, et al., 1998, p. 5)

In this section, I will begin by introducing some criticism of the current state of multicultural education, the thrust of which is that what began as a transformative endeavor has become controlled and diluted affirmation. I will then emphasize the importance of liberation pedagogy as praxis for social justice. The last two sections recognize the necessity of acknowledging the linguistic turn in theories of oppression and the transformative potential of postcolonial criticism for our contributions in a globalized world.

Critique of contemporary multicultural education

Multicultural education, envisioned at its inception during the 1960s civil rights movement as “an effective counter-hegemonic strategy to reverse centuries of racialized domination in the United States” (Baltodano, 2006, p. 123) has failed to achieve its goal. Baltodano mourns that,

"what began as a politically inspired counterhegemonic movement was gradually appropriated and soon became merely another mainstream policy, more and more defined by the interests of the dominant class. . .Consequently, the institutional and social policies of the multicultural project stagnated, leaving untouched the complex economic conditions that transformed the welfare state of the 1960s to the transnational, global economy of the 21^st century. (2006, p. 124)"

Stephen May (1999) concurs that multicultural education has not resulted in significant improvements for minority students, has not effectively altered majority students’ racism, nor replaced “the inherent monoculturalism of school practice;” further, multicultural education has seemed to have little or no impact on our society’s racial inequities (p. 1). The failure of multiculturalism, according to some, was its oversimplification of social power relations, its “deracialized” conceptualization of education, “an educational approach which reifies culture and cultural difference, and which fails to address the central issues of racism within society” (May, 1999, p. 2). In addition, there has been little “substantive change in the structure of teacher education and in the attitudes of teachers toward cultural diversity” (Baltodano, 2006, p. 124).

On the other hand, there are problems related to a program based on race-oppression alone. For one thing, the focus on color reinforces the binary dimension of black and white, and is thus requires a perpetual bond with its uniformly constructed oppressor. There is also the likelihood that the privileging of race obscures other potentially involved marginal subjectivities, such as gender, class, and religion (May, 1999, p. 2).

The Critical Pedagogies, as articulated by Paolo Friere, Henry Giroux and Peter Mclaren, have introduced a non-racist, theoretically sophisticated, transformative model they have linked to

"wider issues of socio-economic and political inequality. The ongoing ravages of late capitalism-particularly on the poor and the marginalized-are increasingly being addressed and contested by critical multicultural educators, again most notably in the US. . .In the process, the inexorable globalization of capital, its effects on the economies of nation-states, its links with historical and contemporary forms of racism and colonialism, and its impact on the changing nature of work and patterns of employment are also being critically examined."

The critical multiculturalists influenced by Freire and others have been criticized for their failures to effective link their theories to actual educational programming or policies.

Finally, all of the above have stayed within the boundaries of specific western nationalities, addressed themselves to “national markets with their own particular historical and ideological emphases. Little, if any, reference is made to developments elsewhere and attempts to build a cross-national perspective have been extremely rare” (May, 1999, p. 5). In my next post, I propose a shift to a transcultural education for clinical psychologist of the 21^st century.