How do I remain faithful to my voice while contributing to a community of participation? – My account as a Living Theorist of writing my heart out, while retaining my critical compassion as I clarify my meanings in relation to Mark Williams’s Epilogue on Hegel’s Master/Servant ideas in a way that (hopefully) encourages conversation between Je Kan Adler-Collins, Sarah Fletcher, Jack Whitehead and Paulus Murray,

 

in preparation for the September 2004 BERA Symposium on,

 

How are we contributing to a new scholarship of educational enquiry through our pedagogisation of postcolonial living educational theories in the Academy?

 

While writing up my doctoral thesis,

 

Speaking in a Chain of Voices ~ how do I create my postcolonial living educational theory through a self-study of my practice as a scholar-educator?

 

 

Mark William’s Epilogue can be retrieved from http://www.actionresearch.net//mwEPILOGUE.htm

 

 

Should we as postcolonials (with Muslim backgrounds) either join the “successful” master against the “jealous” slave or choose one among equally greedy and power-hungry “masters”? Should we, with Francis Fukuyama, join triumphant secularism and the “progressive” West against defeated religion and “reactionary” Islam? Or should we, with Samuel Huntington, choose one among equally hegemony-seeking civilizations? Should we either secularize Islamic societies or essentialise Islamic civilization; either Christianize Muslim human individuals or Orientalize resistant Muslim culture; either convert the Same or enslave the Other? Mohammed Ben Jelloun, 2002, Agonistic Islam, Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales, Paris, France,

Retrieved from http://social.chass.ncsu.edu/jouvert/v613/agon.htm

 

The master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house.

Audra Lorde

 

 

Overture:

Let me try to share with you all my fourth (re-) consideration of Mark Williams’s epilogue from the grounds of my inclusive consciousness as scholar-educator.

 

This paper has come out of an email I wrote (30^th July) in response to Jack’s email of the 25^th July 2004 inviting us to read Mark’s epilogue in which Mark draws on the Hegelian master/slave dialectic for its liberatory potential.

 

This reference struck me as strange right off. Why is Jack so excited by Hegel’s dialectic of the master/slave relationship when Hegel was racist, and supremacist at a pithy ontological level? This intrigued me. This was sufficient to generate this engaged, self-reflective, and invitational response.

 

I have some scholarly questions and invite you to bring your standards of judgement to bear on them please:

 

 

• How and in what ways does the notion of liberatory potential excite you?
• Why has Mark chosen Hegel’s master/slave dialectic to frame his excitement and awareness of liberatory potential?
• What is it exactly about Hegel’s theorizing that Mark appreciates?
• What are Mark’s standards of judgement in drawing on Hegel’s master/slave dialectic?
• If master/slave subject positions indicate the most extreme form of bondage against which we can imagine more clearly the idea of liberation then why turn to a European philosopher who is Eurocentrist to evoke liberatory potential when first-person slave discourses and propositional postcolonial theories are available, and more authentic?
• How does Hegel’s theoretical construction of master/slave dialectics help us engage with the living praxis of liberation when it is grounded in abstract, conceptual, reasoned ‘spectator truth’ rather than ‘living truth’ (Gabriel Marcel, 1935)?
• Knowing how I pedagogise my living postcolonial educational theory why would Jack imagine that the centrality of Hegel’s master/slave dialectic would excite me?
• How does Hegel’s master/slave dialectic enable me to enhance a Self Study that shows how I am contributing to a new scholarship of educational enquiry through my own growing consciousness of how I pedagogise my living postcolonial theory as a scholar-educator in the Academy?
• How does it help you in the above respect?

 

 

And I also have some educational questions I’d like you to help me with please:

 

• How can I convey my concerns to Jack without being personally and academically critical as I began to be in my July 30^th email?
• I’m wondering what would/will happen if instead of making these kinds of critical comments at the point where I could draw attention to my own creative and original contribution that will help to move people on to see how they could extend their own (postcolonial) learning, I could connect with the openness of the other to learning, and to my immense pleasure in relating this way?
• How can I move away from my original response of the 30^th July which was focusing on the critical, traditional ‘academic’ response, to see my self instead making a wonderfully creative contribution that could connect with people’s openness to learning?
• How can I sustain my imagination in believing that doing this would leave others feeling good about their own achievements and values while drawing them into a creative engagement with my own?
• How can I, through this response, enhance the flow of the influence of my living postcolonial theory as scholar-educator by drawing attention to the creative possibilities that could emerge from an engagement with my thesis and perspectives by other enquiries?

 

As I write this set of questions I can feel the shift that is occurring within me. These questions, while seemingly separate and indicating a duality are actually held as one within my own practice. My e-writing tends to employ the traditional critical academic approach in the first set of ‘scholarly’ questions. In some of my crucial e-writing moments or exchanges I have a strong tendency to focus on the critical. I can see how this can be an antagonistic way of writing and responding that has led to exclusion and severance. I am aware of how this ‘academic’ and very Western way of responding to the ideas of others is embedded in my own psyche, in my own ‘habitus’ of scholarship (Bourdieu, 1979). While, my second set of ‘educational’ questions seem to typify the dialogical warmth in my educative relationships. So why the difference: what happens to my ‘I’ in e-writing? When I cannot see you as I write my ethic is obscured. What happens to appropriate intimacy (Murray, 1998) I wrote about in 1998 at the beginning of my educational enquiry?

 

Here is one explanation for what I believe occurs as I shift from the presence of the other in dialogue, to e-writing that is principally cerebral and I quite literally tend to keep the other in mind, rather than within the touch of my being. I seem to get caught within the ‘habitus’ of ‘Anti-Culture’ epitomized as reductionist abstraction (Rayner, 200??). Through my love and fascination with the propositional form of Postcolonial and Critical Race theorizing I find myself in e-writing exchanges ‘aping’ a western Academic posture.

 

I tend to imagine theory to be sacerdotal. I accord a form of primacy to my beliefs about academic orthodoxy. Arguing the theoretical point becomes ‘temporarily’ more important to me than remaining mune to mutual learning. I lose sight of the other’s openness to learning. Looking back over my ‘archive’ of email exchanges I do see and acknowledge my ‘I’ in living contradiction as my embodied values that imbue my face to face educative relationships with students and (some) colleagues with human warmth and humour are abandoned to the logic of reductionist abstraction from within Aristotelean logic in my e-writing. My emails show how I cleave to an impositional logic leaving little or no space for the other to (want to) respond. Rayner (2004) accounts for the ‘habitus’ of Aristotelean logic very well, and I relate to account of a scholar’s understanding of his own experience to my actions as a scholar:

 

“Every ‘truth’ claim we make is thereby seen as a ‘social construction’ to be rigorously taken apart by discourse analysis – something which I have myself been subjected to when trying to express my thinking about ‘inclusionality’ (Bluehdorn, 2003); cf Rayner, 2003). Although the deconstructive approach is most commonly regarded as synonymous with postmodernism, it is in fact rooted in the very socio-political context of ‘Anti-culture’, which emerges from the excommunicative logic of rationalism (2003, p6 of 15).

 

Now this ‘narrative wreckage’ (Frank, 1995) does not extend to all of my email writing and exchanges. But its possibility is imminent, especially in the overture phase to a potential conversation. In the past I have recurrently subordinated my loving spirit (Okri, 2002) to the critical, even clinical academic posture. I have become lost in and behind my words in so far as my love is occluded by my reason, and this is a loss of my ‘facultad’, a faculty of mestiza consciousness that is to be painfully aware of self with other (Anzaldua, 19??: ?).

 

My susceptibility to antagonism with colleagues is where logos (i.e. the critical gaze in the word as rational analysis) and mythos (i.e. the loving eye of ecofeminism where the story of relationship is life as the unfolding masterpiece of the loving spirit, Okri, 2002) are enmeshed and go to war through me. When e-writing I am able to lose consideration of how my respondent(s) feel about what I write to them and sometimes about them, how they might be feeling about responding to what I write because of the passionately fury I bring to my writing, and whether I am helping the other to feel safe or endangered, ontologically placed at risk, too much to elicit a response. I lose sight and prospect in my educative practice of sustaining open channels of educational influence from one to the other, and back again. I lose my self to the metaphor of the discrete self. I feel myself to be discrete from the other, rather than distinct. I have ample e-mail evidence of those exchanges in which, gradually but recurrently, I lose my love and respect for the other as the distinct, but not discrete, outer aspect of my complex, hybrid and ‘Mixed Race’ self, to paraphrase Rayner’s elegant notion of inclusionality. This reciprocity of influence that I notice exists within my supervisory relationships with students can be likened to Gabriel’s (1935) notion of ‘mutual availability for what the future holds in store’. This reciprocal influence can contribute to the transformation of ‘Anti-Culture’ because my educative practice is a site of both analytical reason and creative hopefulness:

 

“Rationalistic logic in western cultures surfaced in the ideas of ancient Greek philosophers such as Aristotle and Parmenides, culminated in the ‘Enlightenment’ of bacon and Descartes, and became enshrined in the ‘clockwork universe’ of Newtonian mechanics. It is founded primarily on the notion of the separateness and /or separability of things as discrete objects isolated from one another by the ‘nothingness’ of ‘space’ . Correspondingly it severs any connection there might be between what is ‘inside’ and what is ‘outside’ a thing., hence treating the boundaries as fixed limits, and things themselves as independent ‘free agents’ or ‘Newtonian bodies” ( page 3 of 19, The Formation and Transformation of ‘Anti-culture’: from ‘survival of the fittest to ‘thrival of the fitting’, 2004).

 

Writing this I am able to see how I have created and crafted, and perhaps simply reproduced the discrete in the way I work from the grounds of my rationalistic logic as a scholar in my e-writing, in which I subordinate human processes of relational learning to a form of acute and oppressive rationalistic and propositional logic. In these moments I can sense that my e-writing is marked by what Rayner refers to as ‘the absence of presence’ (Introduction to the Complex Self, retrieved August 2004).

 

By taking another look at this phenomenon through an inclusivist lens, I imagine that when I work face to face with my students and colleagues I am able to keep faith with my innate desire to contribute through my educational relationships to ‘sustainable ways of living together’. As I look back over 14 years of some 120 supervised dissertations, both first degree and taught postgraduate Masters, I have the empirical confidence to support my belief in the authenticity of my desire. As an educator I have found this to be crucial in sustaining myself educationally, emotionally and organizationally. The eco-environmental space that I hold with students in my college (i.e. my Masters programme, the Cirencester Action Research Community, the supervision relationship, my modular teaching contributions) seems to be a vital, inductive ‘presence of absence’ or ‘dynamic attractor’ in which space boundaries are regarded (by me, and I hope by students) as pivotal intermediary domains through which inner and outer spatial domains of different intensity (curvature) are both distinguished and coupled together (Rayner, 2004, my emphasis). Thus, the circle of my concern as a scholar-educator ever widens the gyroscopic of its own embrace, and within this momentum and movement my faculty for concern becomes more capacious, and less capricious.

 

My doctoral thesis points to the importance of the scholar-educator stretching into new and reforming facets of consciousness in order to more fully live those values of humanity that are captured in the dictum attributed to William Temple, that ‘moral progress means enlarging the circle of your concern” (Prozesky, 2004).

 

As I re-read my 30^th July email to you all I recognized my ‘I’ as a living contradiction, and I felt personally very uncomfortable and dissatisfied with myself (my self) and wanted to do something to improve my educational awareness by working through this encounter with my ‘I’ in contradiction. I could see how my tendency to enact an excommunicative anti-logic of rationalism was emerging through my writing. Once again I seemed to be subordinating my concern for why Jack was asking me (us) to read Mark William’s ‘epilogue’ to my need to deconstruct Hegel’s master/slave dialectic for its inherent contradictions and weaknesses.

 

I am committed to an educative life project in which I keep in mind the painful and difficult realism of hegemony in social and political, local and global tensions and conflicts, of the abuse of power and authority, of their relationship to social justice, and while keeping these complex dimensions in mind I still choose to focus on Postcolonialism as a possible way of seeing and being that is distinct without being discrete, that brings me closer to realizing my dream of relating to people in a post-racial world through which self and other surrender borders in the “quest for inclusive well-being” (Michael Prozesky, 1999, retrieved 9^th August 2004 from http://www.ethics.unp.ac.za/inaug.htm, and From Creed to Conscience and the Constitution of South Africa (undated) retrieved 10^th August 2004 from http://www.sog.wellington.net.nz/prozesky.htm;

Richard Bawden, http://systems.open.ac.uk/page.cfm?pageid=richardBHome, retrieved 30^th July 2004; and Alan Rayner, a series of papers on Inclusionality, retrieved from http://www.bath.ac.uk/~bssadmr/inclusionality/complexself.htm on the 9th August 1004). Embraced within my quest for inclusive well-being, is my commitment to social justice.

 

From Criticism to Critical Inclusion:

Mark’s use of Hegel’s dialectic seems to leave out an important ontological connection. As a substantive or epistemological claim to knowledge that speaks clearly and accurately of the master/slave dialectic, I find Hegel’s propositions to be

unrealistic and have little correspondence with how master/slave relationships have actually been transformed through globalization (Hardt and Negri, 2000; Urry, 2003) and through the particular and singular story of my Hendricks family.

 

I address my ontological substantive epistemological concerns below (p. 10-15). I attempt to address these in both scholarly and educational ways.

 

In this fourth – and final - iteration I imagine that I can enhance the educational influence of my living postcolonial theory by drawing your attention to the creative possibilities that arise from a critical engagement with Georg Hegel’s master/slave dialectic as I quite literally write my doctoral thesis as a scholar-educator’s Self-Study.

 

In this paper I demonstrate how Self Study is vital for exploring my life as a scholar–educator and how Self Study is helping me towards understanding, appreciating, and personally valuing how I am achieving significant forms of educational productivity (Bernstein, 2000) in my educational work as I,

 

Ø          account for the growth of my knowledge as a scholar-educator (Whitehead 2004)

Ø          get closer to my understanding of how I pedagogise my postcolonial living theory

Ø          surface and explain the deeply embodied meanings that inform my educational and scholarly standards of judgment as a postcolonial scholar-educator

Ø          show how I pedagogise my postcolonial living education theory in the Academy in very different ways to each of you that are not better or worse, but are uniquely appropriate to my “Mixed Race” performative identity

Ø          bring evidence to support my claims that I am contributing to a new scholarship of educational enquiry

Ø          establish through this evidence how I am contributing to a new scholarship of educational enquiry through my facilitation and supervision of a Masters in Management Studies by Action Research, and through my influential contribution to the supervision of more than 120 dissertations in my college since 1991, that I understand as my living postcolonial educational theory

Ø          provide a contribution to the Self Study of Teaching Practice within a tradition that is becoming increasingly well established and influential within the Western Academy (Loughran, Hamilton, LaBoskey, and Russell, 2004).

 

 

Showing How I Love and Respect other as the Distinct, but not Discrete, Outer Aspect of My Complex Self (after Rayner, 2004)

This paper has arisen from my intrigue to understand why Jack considers Hegel’s master/slave dialectic (in Mark William’s epilogue) to be an exciting heuristic for liberatory potential.

 

I recall how curiosity and intrigue about my own ethnic identity ‘got me started’ in scholarship in the 1960’s when I first immersed myself in South African history as a youth.

 

My process of scholarship involves clarifying my understanding of why Hegel’s dialectic is significant per se, as a first step, and then how and in what ways it appeals to Jack in particular, so I can see how this fits with my embodied values, my sense of self, and my postcolonial standards of judgement.

 

Who is the ‘I’ of this self that I have in mind? I imagine myself linguistically as I put words together to depict for you the self I have in mind. This is a linguistic composition of an imagined self that I can convey within my limited faculty for words. While this seems to be an important cognitive construction of self I also recognise my ‘I’ as an ostensive self, a self as being–in-the-world known by what I do, with whom, and how. This is my ostensive or action self that acts in the world, an ‘I’ that is perceived by others without a lexical explanation or depiction as a frame. This is my self that is known by my actions and not my words.

 

Both of these aspects of my self impact my practice. This ostensive self precedes any linguistic structure I may subsequently use to frame an account of my self, or to account for my self theoretically as I reflexively try to imagine my ‘I’ as being-in-the-world. It seems to be possible that I can explore how I know my self as scholar-educator through the self-reflective prism of writing my doctoral thesis as Self Study: and this requires an auto-ethnographic and autobiographical journey takes into account how I pay develop my inner and outer arcs of attention (Marshall, 2001).

 

Recognizing this ontological/epistemological relationship helps me to understand the teleology of my educational work through recognizing who I am, being clearer about who I want to become, and evaluating improvement in my practice of becoming.

 

I am considering Mark’s epilogue from my vantage point as a scholar-educator descended from Griqua and Afrikaner people of South Africa who ‘once were slaves/once were slavers’ (Murray, 2004).

 

I believe that Hegel’s dialectic fails to represent the substantive and historical relationship of master/slave with epistemological and factual finesse. Additionally, Hegel’s dialectic is the abstract and propositional logic of a Eurocentrist. Put in today’s unromantic language, Hegel’s ideas reinforced a racist discourse among European’s of his day that has a contemporary residue in dominant European discourses of the ‘Other’. Hegel’s writing helped to solidify ideas of ‘Same’ and ‘Other’ in European consciousness. On this basis alone I am unable and unwilling to take his master/slave dialectic seriously. But this no longer has to mean that I cannot be mutually available with Mark and Jack as they explore their interest in Hegel’s dialectic with me, and as I mutually support the education of their understandings by offering alternative, critical theories of master/slave dialectics that might be more inclusive of those whose experiences and epistemologies are non-western.

 

Let me be clear that my response to Mark’s choice of Hegel’s master/slave dialectic comes from the ground of my lived experiences (Saukko, 2003) and my living experience. I am a Mixed Race South African-Briton and thus I am the descendant of both master and slave. Speaking from the rootprints of my Hendrick’s family biography, Georg Hegel does not speak to the unfolding master/slave dialectic in South Africa that ultimately metamorphosed into the holocaust of ‘Apartheid’ that powerful governments of the Western world chose to ignore for 45 years of our common humanity.

 

My experience of my family’s dialectics of colour is personal and sexual. The history of slavery, colonialism and ‘Mixed Race’ in southern Africa is material political, ideological, certainly sexual, and most likely erotic (Foucault, 1974:52). The European people from whom we as a family are partly descended found us attractive enough to know sexually inside and outside of marital relationship. Yet these same Europeans found Coloured people with whom they had co-reproduced to be repugnant and repellent and certainly less than human. Living in Britain I have always wondered if there was a recrimination in this hatred of Coloured people because we reminded the Afrikaner of their confused and contradictory feelings about their sexual appetites and their Christian morality. This seems to be a recurrent tension across history and culture for Christians. The recurrent tension I have in mind is beautifully and poignantly explored in Jostein Gaarder’s novella, Vita Brevis (1997). In this dialogue between lovers St. Augustine’s being-in-the-world is represented as a schismatic terrain held in contested tension between his warring sexual aesthetic, which he was desperate to renounce, and his aspiration to spiritual asceticism, which he was equally desperate to sustain.

 

In South Africa this was worked out in terms of a sexual fantasy about the exotic dark-skinned other, and the apartheid racial fantasy of the dark-skinned ‘less than human’ Othered. The discourse of the dominant European class in South Africa was unable to acknowledge the lexical and linguistic possibility of the manifest beauty in Coloured hybridity. A beauty that would not have been possible had not Europeans co-reproduced this beauty with us, the part-African and part-European Other of their fantasies and their nightmares. ‘Apartheid’ became the pathological expression of a European racism that emerged from the master/slave relationship.

 

In my view Hegel’s master/slave dialectic doesn’t even begin to touch the filigree of this (bio/auto-)graphic that emerged from slavery. Hegel’s master/slave dialectics does not begin to address the complexity of subject positions that emerged from this master/slave relationship.

 

I am in one sense the emancipated slave, the liberatory potential that Hegel refers to, but not in the way Hegel proposed. My liberation in Britain was in contrast to my cousins political and economic slavery within apartheid in South Africa, and yet each of us is connected umbilically through our enslaved great-grandmother Griqua.

 

Take it from me, though I also invite you to interrogate my living logic, that Hegel’s dialectic of master/slave has nothing at all of value to say when considered from my vantage point. As diaspora of those colonized, as a decolonized Other in Britain, and as a decolonizing other in educational relationships with students, please appreciate my expression of standpoint theory (Haraway, 1989). It is from the interstices of the colonial/postcolonial weave in my being, my decolonizing soluble standpoint in effect, that I work and perform my educative art as a creatively persistent Postcolonial ‘scholar-educator’.

 

Putting this into a familiar (white) language of the Academy, Georg Hegel’s master/slave dialectic has no ‘dialogical validity’ (Saukko, 2003) as an explanatory theory of the living dialectics of master/slave subject positions experienced by my Hendricks family in South Africa. While I would not wish to generalize from our family experience, I would imagine that many Coloured South Africans, especially those of Griqua origin, could acutely relate to our family experience held as it is within the (psycho-)pathology of apartheid. Yes, I contend that apartheid was an expression of a continuous holocaust in southern Africa of European racism and indigenous dehumanization.

 

As an abstract and conceptual framework devoid of living complexity, though replete with living contradiction, Hegel’s master/slave dialectic would not be acceptable for postcolonial scholars. Nor for me given my ‘Mixed Race’ rootprints, memory and life writing (Cixous and Calle-Gruber, 1997) and my growing postcolonial hunger. Hegel’s master/slave dialectic is firmly rooted in the colonial project. Does this mean that as a scholar-educator I would refuse to draw on Hegel’s master/slave dialectic? No, on the contrary actually, so let me explain myself.

 

As a scholar I would draw upon Hegel to demonstrate his complicity with the ‘habitus’ of his times (Bourdieu, 1979/2000) and his culture, and his European consciousness (or way of knowing). I would invite Mark (and each of us collaborating in the BERA symposium) to consider Hegel’s Eurocentrist provenance.

 

As a scholar I would encourage postcolonial theorists (and Mark) to recognise in Hegel’s theoretical creativity a counterproductive reinscribing of the master/slave subject positions he is trying to understand. My critique of Hegel would be less acute than my critique of Mark’s hasty adumbration of Hegel’s master/slave dialectic as a heuristic for liberation without fully evaluating the predictive capacity of Hegel’s limited theory in terms of the experience of what has happened in the working out of master/slave phenomena since Hegel developed his theorizing on the subject.

 

However, I would try as an educator to mediate my critique by remaining connected to the possibility of Mark’s ‘ignorance’ as a lack of postcolonial awareness that is another indication of the deeply-embedded dynamics of ‘Whiteness (Dyer, 1997) and ‘habitus’ in Western discourse. As an educator I would cleave to this opportunity.

 

As an educator I would try to recognize the implications of this for changing the social formation of Mark’s thinking, because his book will be in a space where it could influence the education of others towards the sensitivities required of postcolonialist scholars.

 

As a scholar- educator I imagine a wonderful educational opportunity to influence the education of a White colleague towards the postcolonial experience of a ‘Mixed Race’ colleague in the Academy in ways that I imagine Mark would find intriguing, valuable, supportive and encouraging of a shift in the language Mark uses to frame his understanding of Hegel’s dialectic.

 

As a scholar-educator I would relate this movement to the language of change as suggested by Watzlawick (1993) when he suggests that we have access to two languages:

 

“There are thus two languages involved. The one, in which for instance this sentence itself is expressed, is objective, definitional, cerebral, logical, analytic; it is the language of reason, of science, explanation, and interpretation, and therefore the languge of most schools of psychotherapy. The other, in which the preceding example is expressed, is much more difficult to define – precisely because it is not the language of definition. We might call it the language of imagery, of metaphor, of pars pro toto, perhaps of symbols, but certainly of synthesis and totality, and not of analytical dissection (p.14/15).

 

As a scholar-educator I would be seeking to speak to Mark from the synthesis of totality rather than analytical dissection and the possibility for separation and abstraction. I am very well aware of my faculty for communicating my analytical dissections of other’s words in my e-mail correspondence that can lead to severance.

 

Though as an educator I relate my approach to my practice to the critical shift in education that I experienced when studying with Professor Keith Sisson at Warwick University, who was my personal tutor and dissertation supervisor (1981/982 - MA in Industrial Relations), and working with him as a research associate, consultant and PhD researcher (1984-87). Keith’s practice seemed to represent the very best of Malcolm Knowles’s idea that the role of educator is helping people to learn rather than ‘educating people’ (1950:6). I drew on this experience and was able to link what I experienced with Keith as a way of respectful, adult, and two-way learning with consequent feelings of worth and competence this evoked for me, with how I felt about working with people as a teacher in the early 1990’s when I finally abandoned a ‘knowledge-led/expert-led’ approach to facilitating learning with my students. Knowles (1950, 1984) outlines andragogic principles of Adult learning that could and should be distinguished from ‘pedagogy’ as a term to describe the approach to learning with and among children or the young. Knowles’s ideas about Adult learning influenced me as I began to border cross between higher education and management development at Bristol Business School (1989-91). I translated the bookish influence (i.e. through Knowles’s ideas in text and propositions) as I practised my practice. Thus I began to grow my confidence and trust in what I have subsequently come to call my originality of mind as a training/learning/educational practitioner. I found myself taking responsibility to translate propositional ideas into group work, development work, and coaching and learning contexts. Working with others in connecting up a spirit, will and focus for learning became my ‘theatre of practice’ where I gave an artistic form or performance artistry to my creatively interactive work. The substance for my work became the spiritual and ethical/moral enterprise attributed to William Temple, as enhancing my own moral progress through enlarging the circle of my own concern. Implicitly at that point in the late 1980’s and 90’s I was beginning to make the connection between purpose and meaning in life and the interconnectivity of my human relationships in learning, searching for understanding, and clarifying in order to improve, to support, to connect and without knowing it, to include. As I included others within my practice of adult learning and management development so I was being included as a relational referent in the learning of others. It was during this period more than any other in my life that education seemed to me to be more a matter of getting along with other human beings than it seemed to be an epistemological challenge.

 

During the late 1980’s and early 1990’s I came across first the idea of experiential learning, which I associated with John Heron through the work of the Human Potential Research Group at Surrey University. I found his explanations very difficult to follow and to understand at first through they rewarded perseverance when I began to apply my understandings in limited ways with groups of civil and public service managers I was facilitating at the Civil Service College (1988-98) in Leadership development for managers. However, at about the same time I began reading Carl Roger’s humanistic and person-centered approaches to learning, and though Rogers was easier to follow and to relate to his ideas did not seem to me to have the practical knowledge applicability of Heron’s ideas to post-experience adult learning and management development groups.

 

So from this dialogical and experiential educational background I warmly embrace Mark’s own understanding and purpose in drawing upon Hegel’s dialectic of master/slave while asking him to imagine what he may have ‘left out’ in making this specific choice. In doing this I imagine that I am acting from the grounds of my embodied values as an educator, and in ostensive terms I’d be engaging with Mark in the ways I try to engage with my students in supervision as a scholar-educator. My practice with Mark would be influenced by the confluence of the above approaches in the form of a creative and interactive synthesis of praxis as scholar-educator.

 

So let’s ask, what kind of theory is Hegel’s master/slave dialectic?

 

I think it is an abstract, conceptual framing that takes us ever further away from the hermeneutics of master/slave dialectics first-hand, and in the first person. Yet this move is entirely representative of a very powerful Eurocentric discourse that has evolved into what we understand today by i) ‘Whiteness’ (Dyer, 1997), ii) ‘vestigial racism’ (Murray 2002, emails with Jack Whitehead), and iii) the kind of ‘stuckness’ that arises from one’s identity investment (consciously or tacitly) in the European ‘habitus’ (Bourdieu, 1979/1986) where one’s subject position does not necessitate any explanation of self in ‘race’ or racialised terms. Why is it that Black, Brown, ‘Mixed Race’ and hybrid peoples seem to need to begin a description of who they are from a standpoint of ‘race’ and ethnicity, while this is not at all the case for White people? This is a telling illustration of what I mean by the dynamics of whiteness, and that vestigial racism that are both at play in whiteness-centered societies such as the UK.

 

Whiteness is not pathology nor yet a conscious way of being racist. Whiteness is a concept used to explain how Western societies assume certain discourses, truths and beliefs as self-evident in ways that are typically tacit and never verbalized by those who most enjoy the benefits, i.e. people whose subject positions are mediated by being white. To enjoy this benefit one need not even explicitly identify as being white; as a beneficiary of the western, European way of being, why bite the very hand that feeds you? For colonized diaspora now living in the UK whose subject position is immensely different there could be very good reason to radically interrogate one’s subject position in the light of ideas of social justice. Whiteness is what Foucault would call a regime of truth. Indeed, it is this very area of postcolonialism and race that seems still to be largely ignored in the growing discourse of Self Study research though Bass (2004, below) confronts this directly and to her credit as a scholar-educator asks why? While Brown (2004) makes the first major breakthrough in the field of Self-Study in her chapter to the International Handbook when she addresses the significance of race and social class for Self-Study and the professional knowledge base of teacher education.

 

I believe that each of these three elements was identifiable in Chris Keeble’s e-mail response to my OBE e-mail, and very likely in the ‘private’ responses of those who empathized keenly with Chris.

 

As I consider Hegel’s master/slave dialectic I seem to be pointing towards a western, European, Enlightenment-construed, and there is no getting away from this truth, white theory. The Academy is dominated by people who reproduce ‘white theory’. By ‘white theory’ I mean the unquestioned use of theories that exhibit Eurocentrism by researchers, scholars, educators and students who are ignorant of constructions of ‘Whiteness’, and who are disinterested, broadly speaking, in understanding how white identity is constructed and predicated on the notion of the Other who is not white. I have experienced this disinterest in my College, in the S-STEP community, and in the Bath Action Research group since 1997 as a form of ignorance that feels like a defensive dynamic of resistance. This quality of ignorance as ‘resistance’ within Whiteness that I have in mind is pervasive. I cleave to the compelling idea of Whiteness as a heuristic for the complex interplay of various forms of racism. Thus, I really appreciate the way that Lis Bass (2004), a Self Study colleague who theorizes and practices diversity, describes resistance and is persistently working with it within the very heart of the S-STEP community:

 

“That is exactly how I’ve felt about the S-STEP discussions – the resistance is incredibly interesting. I find it significant that there is this resistance to theming the next Castle conference around diversity. There was no resistance to the last three themes. If someone’s work wasn’t connected to the theme, he or she understood that it was fine to do whatever they wanted. However, there is resistance here and I am impressed by it. As I left the conference I spoke to a variety of people. Two people purposefully let me know that self-study has nothing to do with diversity. Two other people spoke of how although they find the Castle is a special space – supportive, comfortable, collegial, and interesting - they were not sure they were coming back because sometimes supportive is not enough…My experience with diversity work is that it does raise resistance, defensiveness and a threat to who I am – but it is in just those arenas that I feel I have learned the most that leads me to become a better teacher in a multiracial, multicultural world.” (p.694, Bass, 2004, in Griffiths, M, Bass, L, Johnston, M., and Perselli, V. Knowledge, Social Justice and Self-Study, 651-707, in Loughran, J, Hamilton, M L, LaBoskey, VK, and Russell, T., International Handbook of Self-Study of Teaching and Teacher Education Practices, Kluwer Academic, 2004).

 

However, the educational challenge is to find creative and relevant ways to work with, among, and around these kinds of resistance. I was invited to do so at a Castle conference in 2002 by Lis Bass, and declined. I now wonder what the perceived threat was that I was so defensive about. While I ‘missed an opportunity’ to influence the social formation of S-STEP and probably hasten the completion of my doctoral thesis as well, that episode has an epiphanic dimension as I wouldn’t be in a position to write this paper today with these insights without this episode and my willingness to dwell in this episode to reflexively draw from it all of the learning I can. Reflection alone is inadequate. There needs to be dialogue and collaboration with others. Often these interactions produce what Bass (2004: 694) refers to as ‘stomach churning’ issues that disconfirm, challenge and disrupt beliefs pointing to the risky nature of good self-study.

 

Thus, the pedagogisation of my living postcolonial educational theory requires me to,

 

a) seek deeper understanding of the theoretical basis of this resistance as a defensive ignorance within whiteness so that,

 

b) I can stay with the ‘stomach churning’ moments as they occur, and surf them, not flippantly, but without becoming unhitched from my board, so that,

 

c) I can meld my practice in ways that seek to address the ignorance without alienating students and colleagues, while informing practice through (critical) theory so that my pedagogy is alertly radical, critical and activist (McClaren, 1995)

 

I have achieved this with many students and some colleagues; while I have failed to achieve this with some students, and several colleagues. With my appointment as one of three diversity officers for my College I have come to value the importance of establishing trusting relationships in which an educational diversity practice can take place.

 

There is nothing radical in the substantive nature of the ignorance as resistance in Whiteness that I am describing. What may be radical, and is original for me, is reframing my experience in this way as a scholar-educator whose experience and practice is mediated from a consciousness of what it means for me to be ‘Mixed Race’. To speak of the Academy as white is a truism for me as it might be for a feminist colleague to speak of the university as a phallocentric or male dominated phenomenon. Thus I speak from the other side of the dominant white discourse. This is what I mean when I refer to strengthening my brownly faculty of writing (Rodriguez, 2002). So, for me, Hegel’s dialectic seems to contribute to a sterile account of theory that has no resemblance to practice. I would suggest this to be a distorting theory, an alienating theory, a fundamentally untrustworthy theory, and, of course, the theory of a Eurocentrist person. It is the kind of theory that I would now recognise as a theory predicated upon an ‘excommunicative logic’ (Rayner, 2004) and as a diasporic scholar-educator I know this kind of theory continues to pervade the Academy. However, as an educator I can choose to act upon this recognition by seeing it as the wonderful opportunity to bring my living postcolonial theory as a resource to unpicking and unlocking such theory in ways that enhance the other person’s understanding and perhaps, consciousness. Hegel’s dialectic of master/slave is precisely the kind of theory than enables me to express my own distinctively more sensitized living postcolonial theory that points to the master/slave dialectic, and in this way, as I pick up this challenge as an educator I experience myself “negating the negation” held in Hegel’s own work (Shaw, 2002). The teleological opportunity for me as an educator is in the interlacing of scholarship with educational opportunity: this is the promise of Self Study as a methodology for revealing my practice as a scholar-educator.

 

Within my own family rootprints I have a Griqua African great-Grandmother whose name I do not know. So I will refer to her as my great-Grandmother Griqua.

 

My great-grandmother Griqua was an indentured servant (i.e. a virtual slave in all but name) who worked for a Meneer Van Rhyn, an Afrikaner farmer in the Karoo, in what was at the time of her birth the British Colony of the Cape.

 

During the period of British colonial administration the Griqua were given their own land, and even had a national flag and currency. Because this growth in the expression of Griqua autonomy conflicted with British colonial hegemony of the Cape and its hinterland, the Griqua nation was proclaimed to be an enemy, its leaders were dubbed ‘terrorists’, and lands rented on long and peppercorn rents and leases to Dutch colonial farmers were declared to have ‘passed’ into Dutch-Boer ownership, and the Griqua people were ‘relocated’ in the Eastern Cape. Many of those who chose the mass migration died from starvation and cold. Those who remained became ‘indentured servants’ to those Dutch farmers who were their tenant’s only months before (Ross, 1984)

 

I am writing this paper because my great-grandmother was born to parents who had chosen to defy the instructions of the British colonial administration of the Cape Colony to travel east across the Drakensberg to land ‘annexed’ from the Xhosa. Instead she eventually became part of the economic and social diaspora of Griqua people who hired themselves back to White masters in a return to virtual slavery. I do not know how or why: her story remains lost, irrecoverable in the archaeology of the collective consciousness of slavery and British, European and sadly, white, social injustice to people of dark skins.

 

I am dedicating this paper to my unknown Great-grandmother Griqua whose life was not in correspondence with the propositional logic of Hegel’s master/slave dialectic. My filial care as postcolonial ‘son’ is to use my imagination and scholarship lovingly.

 

I have no essentialising, romantic sense of connection with my Great-grandmother. Simply I have that certain knowledge that she experienced that exquisite pain that is the absence of choices. I know she experienced the racism my son has experienced as a professional footballer, one hundred years ‘on’ in a postcolonial Britain. This is the auto-ethnographic signature that joins us across space and time in a longitudinal complicity with colonialism so that my post-colonialism clearly has its roots in the same axiomatic pain that is tweaked by the absence of choices. I work hard, politically and intellectually, to remind my students of their choices, while supporting them to feel ‘safe’ to explore them (I have in mind Lisa Marie, Nceku, Steve and Keith – see ‘Stories’ in my thesis). By taking my Hendricks birth-family as referent for a longitudinal Self-Study of a family descended from master/slave relationships being worked out on an African farm (Olive Schreiner, Andre Brink), in an African city, (Cape Town) and at the colonial center (UK), I can bring a uniquely polyphonic consideration to Georg Hegel’s ‘spectator’ theory of the master/slave dialectic showing it to be seriously flawed. The claim to liberatory potential in Hegel’s dialectic does not follow the earthy, bloody, and sexual actuality of the master/slave dialectic that is the narrative of my Coloured South African birth-family, and my family of ‘Mixed Race’ Britons.

 

As virtual slave to an Afrikaner farming household family, and as sexual slave to the Meneer, Van Rhyn, my Great-Grandmother’s subject position was determined by her economic and physical dependence on her white farm ‘owner/employer’/Master’.

The physical dependence cut in several directions at once, and so my Grandma was the result of this sexual arrangement. For my Grandmother who was the illegitimate and clandestine daughter of that farmer, Van Rhyn, for my Coloured father who left apartheid South Africa in search of his own access to ‘Whiteness’ (Dyer, 1997), for my sons who both despise the alienating dynamics of ‘Whiteness’, I suggest that Hegel’s framework of liberation is merely an abstract, conceptual ‘idea’ expressed in a form of propositional logic that has no capacity for handling the existential filigree held in the seminal and menstrual rootprints of my family’s descent from master and slave. Hegel’s dialectic lacks the blood, phlegm, semen and umbilical pliability of the complex, wondrous, mystical and in some senses ineffable phenomena that can only be explored through a living educational theory account (Whitehead, 1993).

 

This is why I believe that my contribution to postcolonial theory is best expressed, explored, and in part explained as a form a living theory, as a contribution to a Self-Study of my teaching practice, and through the wailing intimacy, the passionate fury, and the becalming immediacy of a first-person perspective. I share Fusco’s spirit of first-person consciousness in her descent from slaves, a descent, which like mine, is from the border-crossing melding of slave and slaver, from the knowledge that in my bodily and intellectual present is the desire of those past to own another human being, something that I find entirely incomprehensible, yet ironically live in its shadow. Fusco seems to inspire to new visual heights of metaphoric and performance ecstasy that poignant pain of slavery that she so well embodies and interrogates from within her performance art, and that is also influential for how I choose to perform my scholarly and educational ‘artistry’:

 

“I have never heard any relative of mine speak of the time when our ancestors were owned by others, but that past wraps itself around the tales of our beginnings…So why would I turn to this childhood memory now? I do so because that story represents my personal link to a very political history of colonialism, and that history has shaped a very specific relationship between mind and body for colonized and enslaved peoples and their descendants…It is historical memory that I live as both a psychic and a bodily experience…My interest in the past, however, is shaped by the exigencies of the present.” (p. xiv/xv).

 

For me Fusco’s words are not merely poetically poignant, or profoundly authentic grounded as they are in her own first-person consciousness of her present performance art held in relationship with her past. Fusco’s words live as a ‘truth’ claim that I quite literally share, and with Fusco I imagine a colleague, a practitioner who is acutely mune to the importance of colonialism, slavery and postcolonialism for her own surviving and thriving as a performance artist. This is the kind of solidarity that I am unable to feel, ever, in my community of practice, and only very rarely with students in my college. Her words and ideation resonate within me because my own slave descent is like a tuning fork that twitches within my being as Fusco’s words strike a chord of solidarity. Most significantly I endorse Fusco’s ideas because her referents are colonialism, slavery and postcolonialism and this seems to be how she wants to attest to the influence and inspiration of these markers for her life project. And I join her in this endeavour. It is this sense of a life-affirming artistic energy, what Bataille refers to as eroticism, the assent to life up to the point of death that attracts me to Fusco’s writing. Through the lens of her understanding conveyed as meaning I am able to embrace my work as a scholar-educator and in doing so see it as an artistic commitment to productive resistance, in the way that Fusco describes here:

 

“Postcolonially defines artists know very well what to avoid and take a strategic approach as to how they present themselves in such a climate in order to survive and thrive. But some of them keep trying to go against the grain, to unleash the demons that others try vehemently to hide. Those are the people I like to write about the most.” (p xv).

 

I imagine that I have been, and I still am one of those people too, as I go against the grain, and through the persistence of my postcolonial writing unleash the demons that others try vehemently to hide, or are blithely unaware of in themselves.

 

This is why I am a professional educator in British higher education with all of the attendant challenges, difficulties and rewards that go with the choice I make. This is why I am diasporic scholar-educator. I draw on my heritage of the slave and slaving diaspora of southern Africa.

 

I am a living postcolonialist because I am presented in my life with choices in such contrast to my great-Grandmother Griqua. I have experienced a presence of choice in ways that were inconceivable to my great-grandmother. In this sense I am the antithesis of her subject position as virtual slave. How I come to be an educator by choice, and a researcher and scholar of my own practice by a later choice is germane to my ‘mixed’ heritage through which the absence and presence of choice both flow in paradoxical ways. But my narrative of emancipation from slavery bears little resemblance to the suggested emancipatory progress outlined within Hegel’s master/slave dialectic. Why then should I be excited by the liberatory potential that Jack believes can be gleaned from the propositional logic of Hegel’s master/slave dialectic? The answer is that I cannot. But what I can be excited by is the opportunity this now presents to me as a postcolonial scholar-educator. Here is a wonderful opportunity to explore my meanings, as I explore Jack’s meanings, as we could explore our meanings, together, in respect of the BERA Symposium title,

 

“How are we contributing to a new scholarship of educational enquiry through our pedagogisation of postcolonial living educational theories in the Academy?”

 

So far in this paper I have been able to point to the new scholarship of educational enquiry I am sustaining in my College and beyond, as I learn to enjoy pedagogising my postcolonial living educational theory as a scholar-educator assenting to the life-affirming energies of immersing myself in the educational choices presented to me. In this case, the presence of a particular choice: to be and see myself as a scholar-educator. I somehow feel my great-grandmother’s sigh of relief as I take my choice to know myself in this particular way. I would now like to provide a glimpse of

the nomadic quality of my journey as a rite of passage, as my coming of age as a ‘scholar-educator’.

Coming of Age as a ‘scholar-educator’

When I entered higher education in 1987 I did not quite imagine that I had so as an act of existential resistance against colonialism and racism. Rather it was a way of life I quite fancied. It seemed to then offer more autonomy, if less material reward, than working for Unilever Ltd as a human resource manager. How things have changed in the space of those 17 years in higher education.

 

My Great-Grandmothers life story impresses upon me the importance of the absence of choices in her life, and the joy I imagine she would feel to see her filial descendant taking his presence among choices seriously in his life, even at the age of 52.

 

I also imagine she would have a deep African laugh at how I have found my way ‘off the farm’, free from the farmer’s bondage, while expressing my choice to educate farmers and their children at the Royal Agricultural College, at the metropolitan centre of colonialism. To paraphrase Knut Hamsun’s Growth of the Soil (1935/1979), and Ashcroft et al’s The Empire Writes Back: Theory and Practice in Post-Colonial Literatures (1989), I bring meaning and purpose to my educational life through the growth that comes from radically ploughing the soil to a new postcolonial tilth; I am the descendant of the colonized and enslaved farm labourer who farms back in a very different key.

 

I seem to retain a sense of the spirit of endeavor in difference that brings us to our Symposium as I continue to practice my writing from the ground of my creative "postcolonial imaginings" (David Punter, 2000).

 

My fourth pass at this paper is also a further contribution to the pedagogisation of my postcolonial contribution to Living Educational Theories (Whitehead, 1993) as a scholar-educator.

 

When writing and teaching the postcolonial within the European ‘habitus’ there is ever present between writer and reader a consummate risk of startled pain, misunderstanding, projection of fear leading to fracture, and most extremely, the danger of severance.

 

I believe this is because the West has appropriated and made its own in quite unique ways the privilege of 'selective amnesia' when it comes to the colonial project. This has a difficult implication to contend with as a postcolonial scholar. Radical postcolonial forms of ‘writing back to empire’ can be construed as unpatriotic, ungrateful, unproductive, looking backwards rather than forwards, and anti-assimilationist. As a postcolonial writer and practitioner, I hope I am found guilty on all of the above counts.

 

I am a non-western Mixed Race Muslim Briton and I do not identify with the western historical project of colonialism and empire, nor yet align myself with the American project of empire and the new world order. I do not express my values of humanity in terms of a sacrosanct form of western individualism that has now reached cult status and which seems to characterize the western zeitgeist. I am communitarian as a Muslim.

 

The selective amnesia I have in mind as a postcolonialist educator seemed evident and familiar in Chris Keeble’s response to my note on the renaming of the OBE. In his note Chris seems to subordinate the dehumanization of the colonial and imperial projects through a eulogy to his father in law, Peter Crews (Chris Keeble, Email, July 2004). In this beautiful, personally moving and loving eulogy Chris presents a compelling account of his father in law’s life without ever touching upon the paradox of colonialism. I see in this the amnesiac faculty: the idea of Western people giving their lives to serve the colonial project without recognizing, appreciating or caring about how their lives contributed to the machinery of colonial oppression and the perpetuation of hegemonic racism within Empire.

 

Those of us who are postcolonialist find this kind of amnesia to be part of the problem of ‘moving on’ as this holds the project of reform back. Forgetting the critical gaze that can be brought to colonialism and empire to see the side that isn’t to do with jingoism and flag waving nationalism, but the destruction of other’s cultures; forgetting the pain and suffering of indigenous peoples under colonialism; forgetting the consequences of colonialism and empire on the subsequent generations of diaspora who perform their identities and renegotiate ‘subject positions’ at the metropolitan center. This forgetfulness is perceived by postcolonialists to be hurtful, insensitive, and disrespectful of our voice in naming that epoch. The contemporary equivalence of that past pain can be seen in the humiliation of the present that is evoked when western white people are unable to accept with an unequivocal ease my view that the project of colonization and empire was a holocaust. Here, I draw on the Statement of the Indigenous People’s Conference regarding ‘holocaust’, September 2000, to which I subscribe as a Griqua descendant (Retrieved from http://www.converge.org.nz/pma/tstat.htm)

 

These features of forgetfulness are indicative of the ‘selective amnesia’ that afflicts the western critical gaze. However, the non-western voice makes its contribution by coaxing a reconstruction of memory in the face of this cultural amnesia, which Bourdieu would recognise, as inherent to the western ‘habitus’. Thus I bring meaning into my educative practice as scholar-educator when my brownly writing serves as a non-western prophylactic to western memory.

 

My ‘I’ is a productive asset to British culture because as the son of a Mixed Race immigrant from an ex-Colony, I help to restore those lost files of memory in a culture and society that is seemingly prone to the amnesia of Whiteness when asked to recall colonialism and empire. My other asset is that as an educator in higher education I have the wonderful opportunity, and telling responsibility, for ensuring that I speak to this amnesia as I work with students.

 

Co-creating and sustaining this eco-environment in a college of higher education,

I have been wonderfully creative in the supervision of student dissertations as I have a) demonstrated originality of mind in remaining lovingly patient of my student’s differences and unique knowledge, and b) exercised my critical judgement as a postcolonial scholar-educator by guiding my students towards ‘spectator’ truth and theories (Burke, 1992, cited by Whitehead, 2004) that support them in making ‘good’ sense for themselves of the pressing hegemonic structures that limit personal agency, while simultaneously keeping in mind my students own unique self-knowledge and the importance of it’s safe delivery into my part of the Academy, and beyond.

 

By eco-environment what I have in mind is quality of communication and relationship between a student and me, gradually developed and sustained over time (usually the time it takes to submit and undergraduate or taught postgraduate dissertation) during which they and I are able to experience a mutuality of ‘fearless speech’ with ‘care of the self’ (Foucault). I know that I am influenced in how I imagine this space and influence it because of my postgraduate training in counselling (Bristol University 1993/95). I am aware of how my varied interests in existential or philosophical therapy (Van Deurzen, 1998) and narrative therapy (Speedy, 2002, Payne 2000), which combine in my experience at the point that a person encounters a pressing need to tell their story of their particular choices in life. I imagine this way of working with another human being to be an eco-environment because it is not a microcosm of the college itself, and instead what is created is a counter-space within the hegemony of the college and how the habitus of the college influences the relationship for working along very impersonal and rational lines, somehow forgetting the spiritual an, social and profoundly personal nature of research enquiry. Within this kind of reasoned wilderness, I imagine the way I work with my students to present something of an anomalous, different, and secluded

windbreak. Because I work in this way I also experience my ‘I’ as a form of living contradiction (Whitehead, 1993). Let me explain the nature of the contradiction that I experience in my (postcolonial) life.

 

By definition I imagine education to be good.

 

However as Kelly and Altbach (1984) explain in the context of the ‘internal colonization’ of Native American’s, that is the control of an independent group by another independent group of the same nation-state, this form of colonization is different to ‘classical colonialism’ but the intent of the ‘colonizers’ is identical.

 

The way the American educational system is structured supports this internal colonization according to Jensen (1984) who asserts:

 

“…the organization, curriculum, and language medium of these schools has aimed consistently at Americanizing the American Indian” (p.155).

 

My ‘I’ experiences itself as a living contradiction in the sense that education has and is being used for political purposes that are oppressive for other people. My embodied values concerning education begin with a personal commitment to the unique and sacred knowledge of the individual. I work to facilitate student confidence in their capacity and faculty for creating knowledge. When I read Jensen, a shock wave flows through my being, disturbing my centeredness in my embodied values concerning the purposes of education and the motives of those who educate. How could one educate, or be complicit in educating a person to abandon her unique and sacred knowledge and when writ large for people to ‘overwrite’ a cultural knowledge as an ethnographic way of knowing. Yet this enables me to remain close to the hegemony of the colonial intent. I recoil at the thought of the manipulation on the grandest of scales down to the individual classroom and teacher, the university seminar. What does it make of a teacher/educator who is complicit in this kind of political corruption of the curriculum? How can I reconcile my embodied values in terms of nation-states that knowingly act in this dehumanizing and anti-educational way?

Putting my feeling this way, a postcolonial education is one that ought to critically explain and compassionately deconstruct the absence of choice (i.e. oppression) as defined by bell hooks (1984) as an expression of European hegemony. This sense of purpose resonates for me as a ‘Mixed Race’ educator descended from the master’s rape of my slave Great-grandmother.

 

I find that this passage alerts me to the growing sense my of my ‘I’ as living contradiction of a postcolonial education in these prolifically racist and neo-colonial times.

 

Being motivated and energized to remove the living contradiction I experience myself finding new and creative forms of expression and engagement for my educative practice (e.g. Redlefsen, Wooding, Nyathi and Phillips).

 

This is my journey to conscientization (Freire, 1972). This is my living postcolonial education theory.

 

I pedagogise my living postcolonial practice from the inside out, from there in the Karoo to here in Bath and Cirencester. I do not wish to be master to my students learning.

 

I have no evidence to suggest that the British university is actively developing curricula and teaching practices that support the cultural decolonization of assumptions concerning the identities of people from previous colonies now resident and or studying in the UK.

 

Meeting this challenge must by definition be an iconoclastic enterprise, and as such, propose alternatives which may initially seem as outrageous as they are unfamiliar and uncomfortable (Bass, 2004). What resources could be drawn upon in meeting this challenge?

 

There is evidence of a tradition in education that suggests that this project is well underway at the level of higher education research. However, whether this is filtering through the educational system in the UK from research paper and knowledge construction into practical actions in the classroom, in the lecture theatre and thesis supervision is more difficult to establish. Looking closely at what evidence is available reveals a concerted effort to bring ‘race’ into educational discourse. Callender (1997) raises the importance of looking at the experiences of black teachers and pupils and in doing so makes the point that there could be an alternative way of being a teacher that is black and is productive and empowering.

 

While Tuhiwai-Smith (1999) makes her position clear enough when she states,

 

‘From the vantage point of the colonized, a position from which I write, and choose to privilege, the term ‘research’ is inextricably linked to European imperialism and colonialism.’ (p.1)

 

From this auspicious departure Tuhiwai-Smith proceeds to explore practical and theoretical approaches to decolonizing our research activities and how we craft and create knowledge. With telling phrases like ‘Imperialism frames the indigenous experience’, Tuhiwai-Smith suggests a very ambitious and radical (in its literal meaning of ‘from the root’) project for decolonizing how knowledge is approached.

 

I can attest to the power of imperialism and colonialism to frame the indigenous experience in a most abstract and lived experience sense. My father’s stories were colonial stories. Even from the grounds of one generation removed (South Africa practiced ‘internal colonization’ until 1992 through the repressive and violent anti-democratic system of government called apartheid) I was able in my childhood and youth to feel the pervasive influence of colonialism as an oppression of difference, and as an enforcement of an essentializing notion of identity. It is this childhood experience that frames my appreciation of Butler’s notion of performativity (1992). And it is through the ‘semi-conductor’ of Butler’s theoretical work that I extend my own fascination and liberation through Butler’s ideas to the students whose enquiries I supervise when I recognise them as uniquely enquiring people with a desire to be seen, appreciated, valued for who they are, what they know and how their life course history has shaped their encounters with learning up to the point I meet them in higher education. I meet these students in their performativity, not knowing who and how they come to be, and I do my utmost not to essentialise or ‘fix’ them. Instead I try to ‘speak from just near by’ their performativity, from my own performativity, in ways that provide connection (Trin Minh-Ha, 1992).

 

Because of my nomadic development as a postcolonial scholar I can now see how I had been complicit in my own amnesia as a mirror image of the cultural amnesia within white British society.

 

In my life, often at crucial times in my own development or relationship building, I have forgotten my own brown-white heritage as a scholar-educator. Rather than seeing the wonderful opportunities that can flow from my identity and practice as a scholar-educator who is a performative subject (Butler, 1992) in a whiteness-centered society (Ifekwunigwe, 2001), I have taken the role of combatant, critic, and antagonist. In protecting my fragile sense of ‘Mixed Race’ I have severed relationships with others. At the point that the other seems to have rejected a propositional theory of race or of postcolonialism that has influenced my understanding, or helped me to explore my consciousness of my own racism, I have become impatient, frustrated, angry and then severing. In the gap between my/our lived experiences and the propositional text I have in the past overlooked relationship. The spirit of eco-environment students sustain with me is something I have not been able to migrate into my relationships with colleagues in same way. In this moment of encountering my ‘I’ as living contradiction as I recognise this phenomenon for what it is, I am able to see the implications of the contradiction of my living ‘I’ with you/other.

 

In 2002 my doctoral supervisor, Jack Whitehead, referred to this as my stuckness in a supervision session in which we explored what was happening for me in my research enquiry.

 

I denied and refuted that stuckness, while remaining, without my ability to see this, firmly and resolutely ‘stuck’. How could my critical engagement and intellectual movement through the scholarship of critical race theory and postcolonial theory be equated to stuckness, I wondered? I cited to Jack’s own excitement at the prospect of extending his own cognitive range (Whitehead, 1993).

 

But now I appreciate what Jack might have been ‘seeing’ as my stuckness.

 

I was developing my awareness of critical race theorizing, and postcolonial theorizing through a detailed immersion in texts that produced the kind of theory that followed a form of propositional logic. This brought me to the words, models and theoretical frameworks that for the first time in my life helped me to name my own confusing experiences of my Mixed Race life, especially those experiences that took me more deeply into the liminality of my cultural hybridity where the theoretical formulations seemed to name what it was I was experiencing from a third-person perspective. This made my particular truth seem more like a more generally relatable truth. The nature of this validitation was very helpful in legitimizing what I perceived, experienced and thought as I made sense of my experience. Feeling less solitary in my experience helped me to unearth an unexpected quality of relatability in ‘spectator theory’. Propositional or ‘spectator’ theories strengthened and vindicated me ontologically (and epistemologically) in ways that my community of action research practice, and Self-Study (s-step) did not. In those moments approaching severance that I have referred Postcolonial and critical race theory reassured me that I am distinct but not discrete in my ‘Mixed Race’ consciousness. Interactions with my adopted Mum as a youth were strangely replicated with several key figures in the Bath Action Research group leaving me feeling weird and charlatan because I (pro-)claimed my ‘Mixed Race’ heritage. I can understand why this would be strange for some people. As I have pursued my brownly becoming-in-the–world in incredibly performative ways, I discover that propositional ‘spectator’ theories do not judge me; while those people producing their own living theory accounts often have and still do. By contrast, ‘spectator’ theories seemed also to be ‘speaking theories’, reaching out towards me and inside of me as they translated models, provided metaphors, and offered heuristics for identity construction in ‘race’ and ‘post-racial’ ways. As an action researcher and first person narrative writer I want to appreciate, and truly value the existential support of ‘spectator’ theory.

Recently I have asked my MSc in MS by Action Research students to explore a theory of their choice, and explain to their peer group why they like this theory, what it is they enjoy about it, how their chosen theory speaks to them, and how theory helps them in their learning journey. When they have finished I ask them, “What kind of theory is Clandinnin and Connelly’s theory of narrative inquiry, or Whitehead’s living educational theory? “. This is a particularly demanding question. Asking it in the wrong interpersonal moment could make it feel inquisitional rather than encouraging. I first heard Jack ask this of Jo, my MSc in M by AR student at her viva voce examination this year. As I heard the question it threw me. Goodness knows what it did to Jo. In 13/14 years of supervising students at the RAC and sitting in on viva examinations of taught postgraduate students I hadn’t come across any external examiner asking a student this question. Later, following the viva process, I berated a Jack a little for this question. I felt it was more appropriate for a doctoral candidate. But with the passing of time I’m wondering about my own discomfort and the assumption that was sparked by it. And to give credit to Jack for his influence on my educational practice I now ensure I work this question into the MSc sessions in peer reviews of people’s written work. But Jack’s question had another effect. I began to revisit my theoretical journey, recalling the theorizing that has influenced me positively and productively as well as negatively and counterproductively, and to freshly approach new theories that fascinate, intrigue and confuse me with a question of the kind, ‘what kind of theory is postcolonial theory?’ or ‘what kind of theory is Judith Butler’s theory of performativity?’ and so on. This is a vital question whose purpose is to help me understand how theory influences my choices, how theory influences my disposition, and how theory influences my scholarly and educational standards of judgement.

 

Postcolonial theory tends, for the most part, to follow the precepts of propositional logic, ‘spectator’ theory within the paradigm of externally referenced knowledge (McNiff, 2002).

 

For me these theories in their cold and languid embrace posed no judgements, intimated no personal expectation of me, but instead provided me with tools and metaphors through which I could begin to express some of the most deeply held tacit aspects of my own ‘Mixed Race’ knowing but had hitherto intuitively expressed and been attacked for doing so. These theories helped me to withstand those attacks and at the same time show me how to support my own fledgling personal knowledge. Yet educationally those ‘spectator’ theories were much more supportive of my own emergent knowing than any extant living theory thesis, or Self-Study paper I had read by 2002. Firstly they helped me to become a ‘spectator’ of what was happening to me. By ‘spectator’ I mean I could distance myself sufficiently in order to protect my truth in the face of personal negation. These theories by their very nature spoke to me in ways that confirmed that this is what happens ‘out there’. I am not a realist in methodological and ontological terms. But I am aware of the dynamics of Whiteness (Dyer, 1997). These dynamics affect me in terms of my lived experience, but the dynamics of whiteness affects others too. ‘Spectator’ theory enabled me to feel solidarity and a sense of shared experience in a communitarian sense that living theorists with their eyes set on the ‘individual’ were never able to achieve. My aesthetic for any theory is that it has to enable solidarity: not weaken or undermine it. In this I support the assertion by Ngugi Wa Thiong’o that:

 

“To decolonize our minds we must not see our own experiences as little islands that are not connected with other processes. Postcolonial education must reverse the former reality of education as a means of mystifying knowledge and hence reality” - The Global Education Process, retrieved August 2004 from http://ultrix.ramapo.edu/global.thiongo.html.

 

The spectator truth that Ngugi‘s theory contributes to lavishly, intricately and with profound explicatory value is precisely the quality of theory that gave me strength, provided me with textual solidarity when those in the Bath Action Research group and S-STEP (AERA) responded to me in ways that accentuated in my mind and my being my sense of aloneness, of swimming against the pull of the tide. From theories like Ngugi’s I was able to experience my own self-education (scholarship) as decolonizing. I was able to counter the terrorism of some of the members of the Bath AR group. I resisted responses that made me feel barmy. I was finding my language and extending it to be playfully resistant to colonization. When people in the BAR group told me that I ‘hated’ my white biology, told me that they hoped I was now ‘happy in my ‘Mixed Race’, told me that I had offended them by sending them the ‘Kill Whitey’ chapter in Michael Moore’s Stupid White Men I truly felt that I was being asked to internalize and assimilate notions, motives, ideas that were being ascribed to me, but which did not belong with me. I felt I was being colonized, unblended. I felt I was being caught up in a colonizer/colonized dialectic. When I drew attention to this complex set of mutual interplays I was labeled as ‘angry’ and ‘stuck’ and the label of anger was used as a stick to beat me with. Of course none of this should be read as denial of my stuckness or anger, which I own. I cried. I hurt. I pained in the chains of feeling powerless. I would not let my feelings be known. I became my great-Grandmother locked into her nights of sexual duty to my enslaving Afrikaner great-grandfather. I literally felt fucked with, fucked over, but not fucked up be these people in their responses. And along came ‘spectator theories’ that spoke to me of my particular subject position. I was not here to be fucked over and fucked with: no way. My great-grandmother lived in the painful intensity of absence of choice (bell hooks, 1984). Colonialism is oppression because of this absence of choice that we (diaspora) colonized relate to and know. But I live with a freedom to choose some things and to stake my claim as a choiceful being-in-the-word, and one such choice available to me is how to make use of my choice by making my,

 

“… language stammer, or make it ‘wail’, stretch tensors through all of language, even written language, and draw from it cries, shouts, pitches durations, timbres, accents, intensities”, (Deleuze and Guatarri, 1987),

 

I try to ‘wail’ and shout with the intensity of my great-grandmothers painful incarceration as an indentured–servant on a farm on the Karoo of southern Africa in the years 1896 to 1910. She deserves my anger as my reciprocal obligation to her gift of Griqua.

 

I have discovered that wailing is a part of the grieving process: my bereavement for humanity’s failings more broadly as these are expressed in the hideous specifics of the colonial endeavour. I have grieved for my Griqua ancestors. I have not been able to forgive my Afrikaner ancestors for their part in the violence of colonialism, apartheid and white supremacy. I do not hold with a view that pigment, skin color, facial shape, hair type, the biologic of superiority and inferiority, what I call the pathology of phenotype, has any bearing on the lovability of a human being. By lovability I mean the acceptability of that person in my eyes to share with me the possibility of mutual availability to what the future holds in store for us (Marcel)

 

I find that the postcolonialism‘s boundaries are infinite. Postcolonialism is only limited by the individual daring to stretch her/his language to her experience and her sense making. Postcolonialism is an appropriation of the colonial from the colonizer, and postcolonial scholars and activists can deploy this term for communications among ourselves (i.e. same) and with them (i.e. other), of course. Postcolonial theory is not suggesting a vindictive revenge (Gandhi, 1997) in the form of an assault on Whiteness, or white subject positions, or on people implicated in the colonial process. Though I recognise that Franz Fanon suggests that freedom from colonialism will require violence. Where I might find violence to be appropriate is in the sense of violently using graphic language to awaken from amnesia those who are complacent and sometimes ignorant of the implications of a colonial past for today. This western attitude of complacency seems much more than mere a-historicity. It sometimes feels like a cultivated liberal attitude to refuse, reject and even revise Britain’s colonial and imperial past for fear of it endangering and upsetting an apple-cart of neat and tidy contemporary liberal assumptions and comforts. Postcolonialism in my hands is no respecter of this kind of reactionary disposition; in fact my postcolonialism is unashamedly hateful of such willful liberal practices of the West. It is here that I find myself experiencing my ‘I’ as a living contradictions my very words, so true to my feelings of anger, run counter to my aspiration to work towards a logic of inclusivity in my practice as a scholar-educator.

 

There is no point, I believe, in being caught up within a “Revenger’s Tragedy.

 

In this spirit of reforming ‘Whiteness’, Ken Saro-Wiwa wrote Sozaboy in what he calls ‘rotten English’ and coined terms such as ‘big big English/big big grammar defining this as ‘tedious, erudite arguments or statements in standard English” (retrieved 2004 from http://www/emory.edu/ENGLISH/Bahri/Langugae.html

 

I believe that there is irony, rueful wit, and a certain hybrid acknowledgement in celebrating English as a vehicle for resistance. It has been the vehicle for my resistance. I have accessed all of my “spectator theory” in English; I teach and supervise in English. I am now writing in a deforming, and reforming kind of English. Vizenor (1994) writing about Native American studies writes in one such accent of intensity that resonates for me and I would like to share this as illustrative of my foregoing points:

 

“The English language has been the linear tongue of the colonial discoveries, racial cruelties, invented names, the simulation of tribal cultures, manifest manners, and the unheard literature of dominance in tribal communities; at the same time, this mother tongue of paracolonialism has been a languge of invincible imagination and liberation for many people of the postindian worlds. English…has carried some of the best stories of endurance, the shadows of tribal creative literature, and now that same language of dominance bears the creative literature of distinguished postindian authors in cities…The shadows and language of tribal poets and novelists could be the new ghost dance literature, the shadow of literature of liberation that enlivens tribal survivance.” (p.105-106)

 

In studying social science I have developed insight and understanding of the theoretical protocols of social science. Looking back most of the living theorists I work with are not social scientists and in their concern to distinguish educational theory from social science theory tends to sometimes throw the baby out with the bathwater. Spectator theories of critical ’race’ studies and postcolonial studies are generally third-person theoretical formulations often disconnected from the voices of those whose lived experiences could add a dialogical dimension of validity to the theory, and in this way extend it, and go beyond the ‘spectator theory’ by getting people not only to be spectators of social realities and experiences and the sense that is made about such experience, but also to join in with what counts as theory in the practice of our lives and to bring evidence for this that has ‘dialogical validity’ (Saukko, 2003).

 

Spectator theories have been liberating in their potential for me. Yet, they have also become constraining. I allowed abstract theory, ‘spectator’ truth, to occlude my living theory as an educator losing sight at times of my living truth. This period of stuckness impeded my production of a disciplined account of my practice as a scholar-educator (2004).

 

Becoming stuck within this amazingly potent liberatory field of texts and theories,

I refused to acknowledge how these texts were also getting in the way of my relationships, and how in writing from the explicatory basis of these texts to colleagues, I was alienating them because I was no longer extending to my colleagues the kind of ‘appropriate intimacy’ of respect and educative consideration that I was bringing to my face-to-face relationships. I explore these phenomena in Part two of my thesis where I look at the dialectics of severance and inclusion and show the work I have done to sift through the issues of embodied values, standards of judgement and my pathology of severance. But for now it is sufficient to close this discussion with an insight. I recognise how for about three to four years I abandoned the spirit of my living educational theory in my e-writing, as I brought to my e-relationships and e-writing a new language and syntax that was propositional. I had become propositional within my e-writing as I became less and less aware of how I was attenuating my living theoretical presence in my texts.

 

The fields of critical race theory and postcolonial theory enabled me to name my ‘I’ in different ways, to (re-)claim my ‘I’ from different discursive discourses in my life, from my adopted Mum’s discourse of ‘same as’ through to schoolteachers, and friends in adult life. The most haunting discourse I carry with me is the ‘But you aren’t any different to me’ version. I know friends who like me, care for me, love me actually use this discourse to extend their sense of inclusion to me. To affirm me in recognizing that I am not ‘different’ (to them) because in a whiteness-centered society such as Britain it is understood intuitively if not through the scholarship of propositional theories that ‘difference’ is dangerous, and never more so in my 52 years than now in Blair’s Britain, committed as it is to the American project of global empire as the new world order (Hardt and Negri, 2001). What those people and friends don’t seem to realize is that they are saying what they believe is appropriate to my voice in ways that unblend me (Rodriguez, 2002). From my perspective this is well intended but consequently colonial, where I use the term ‘colonial’ as a metaphor for oppression, the absence of (my) choices. But my privilege as an articulate brownly person is that I have choices: materially and imaginatively, literally and metaphorically. Writing my doctoral thesis is now a material choice, and my thesis submission is directly linked to my supervisor’s sense of ‘stuckness’ as he intended me to grasp it in 2002. Only now I have grasped it too.

 

As if intoxicated with these illuminative and revelatory fields of study, I lost my focus on what my life has been about in intuitively practical ways. I have been sustaining productive and meaningful relationships with adults and young adults since 1987 that have been trying to breathe their own creativities into the constraining curriculum, crafting choice in the constricting frameworks of higher education, and sometimes just trying to name their own condition as a personally meaningful being-in-the-world. In this sense I have been a collaborative and cooperative equal in pilgrimage in numerous ‘we’ relationships. By 2002 I had become so intensely preoccupied with my new syntax for ‘race’ and anti-colonialism I was imagining that those who didn’t share my scholarship, my insights or my normative perspectives were in some way’s my protagonists. Much of my e-writing to colleagues and participants on e-lists became aggressive, angry, thrusting, and disrespectful.

 

As I look back on this without any sense of self-excuse or self-exoneration for my sheer bloody-mindedness, I have become aware that I was in a process of deconstructing and reconstructing my life and sense of identity, while trying to make sense of this within my doctoral research inquiry. Walking on virgin territory of the self, I was trying to express and explain this encounter to others. I became defensive and agitated when somebody was insensitive or crass. I was walking this path for the very first time. What I was living I was experiencing without a manual to guide me. This was a path I hadn’t walked before.

 

How I felt about my deconstructive/reconstructive dialectic, how I perceived my self in relation and in alienation from others, how I triggered my defensiveness, how I became confused and anxious about where this reconstructive process was leading me, and how I sustained my sense of meaning as a professional educator were all seemingly hanging precariously in relation to my transitory self. I have often wondered if my colleagues who judged me had insight to the traumatic quality that accompanied my performative identity work. The literatures of existential and psychodynamic practice are very helpful in this respect. I did not reconstruct my identity as such. Rather I found myself reconstructing how I allowed myself to think, to feel, to imagine, and to intellectualize my identity as brownly, as Griqua, as ‘Mixed Race’, and then as partly brown and partly white, as partly Griqua and partly European, as partly slave and partly slaver, as colonized and colonial, as white with black and white identifications in my life (Murray and Whitehead, 2000).

 

Gradually, from this reconstructive permission that I gave myself to be creative about who I am has emerged my recognition of myself as scholar-educator. By scholar-educator I mean the productive tension that exists between my scholarly critique and my educative humanism (Allender, 2004) through which flows the mediation of my passionate loving warmth and the clinical analytical tendency of my scholarship in ways that are becoming more productive, more disciplined, and more synthesized.

 

Somehow the stuckness that I was exhibiting, that my supervisor was commenting on, and that I was denying can be explained in the following terms: whenever I stumbled into an inter-personal minefield of interpretation, and expression in writing e-mails, I seemed to internalize these as an attack on my deconstructionist autonomy. I internalized them as a critique of my choice to reconstruct how I thought about the self I might be – a Mixed Race, brown with white, Griqua with European self – and that I choose to live in a space of artistic performativity now that I have found my texts, my theories and my own living theory voice.

 

This dialectic of deconstruction/reconstruction was not an entirely new tune, and in fact was a variation on a theme, a fugue of past and present in the face of the future.

 

This struggle taking place in me has always been to nurture the ‘I’ that I wanted to be, needed to be, as a form of reclaiming my body and being from the ‘I’ that I had been oppressed into accepting. I have often looked into the mirror and hated the European face that looked back at me, menacingly. I wanted to be brown. I wanted my father’s jet-black wavy hair. I wanted his high Griqua cheekbones, his leathery brown skin, I desperately wanted to be anybody but the person staring back at me from the mirror. For the first time in my life I am now very happy with the white with brown person who looks back at me in the mirror. I feel very secure ontologically bringing my ‘I’ into learning relationships with students.

 

My idea of self isn’t psychological; rather I use ‘self’ in the sense of naming a space that I occupy and naming a spirituality and flow of cognitions that pass through me when communicating with others. However, psychological models that point to a multiplicity of self influence me. I am able to endorse this multiplicity with Butler’s idea of a performative life (Butler, 1992) that has been so helpful in enabling me to enjoy the sense of movement in my being, rather than the sense of feeling giddy every time I encountered this seismic movement in my being, and vainly attempted to hold everything firm ‘as it was’.

 

Part of my stuckness as I (now) see it, retrospectively of course, is that I lost my educational sense of agonism. I lost sight of the patient love that I bring from the grounds of my Mutse Atsi to my students. With my students an element of my practice of appropriate intimacy (Murray, 1998) is a lovingly patient responsibility to support them in the kind of scholarship they feel they need to understand their educational purpose in the time they are working with me in supervision. I misplaced this value when it came to my colleagues. My love did not extend to them. I subordinated my valuing of exploration through dialogue, and became antagonistic of and towards some co-researchers and some colleagues. There was a period of severing some collegiate relationships. My stuckness disenabled me from being able to grasp this vital moment in my deconstruction/reconstruction dialectic and turn it into an educationally wonderful opportunity for me to demonstrate my practice as scholar-educator. Instead rather than valuing the difference in understanding and perception between us, and work this through educationally, I became a combatant, the antagonist. Not for the first time, nor last, I was experiencing my ‘I’ as a living contradiction as I denied in the production of text (i.e. my e-writing) the values of diversity that I cherish in my being.

 

I am going to be neither inappropriately self-deprecating nor yet confessional. This is not my point at all. What I am trying to frame is a context, a time in my life, a moment of great opportunity. This was a time of personal scholarship that for the first time in my life was not being guided by anybody else’s agenda. I was going out into areas of epistemology unfamiliar to my supervisor, unfamiliar to my peers. I was trying to assimilate my understanding of scholarship while at the same time or with a minimal gap I was trying to impart my personal scholarship among peers, one or two colleagues, and my PhD supervisor. I was struggling to produce texts that were choate, finding ways to outline my ‘newfound’ Postcolonial and Critical Race scholarship that also clarified my understanding in my writing allowing me to convey my meanings crisply and cogently with my peers. This was a rough and tricky transition that gave meaning to my journey of educational enquiry and impetus to my movement into the space from which I am now writing.

 

Imagine the transformation in my life since 1999: a new limitless horizon of texts and literature, a swelling tide of the ideas of others, engulfing my cognition and through a gradual internalization, my consciousness. I was excited, intoxicated and at times confused. I found so much I wanted and needed to say. I would speak it anywhere and with anyone. The indiscriminate way that my I allowed my emergent consciousness to be expressed rather than containing, disciplining, focusing my ideas landed me in difficult e-scrapes. My reconstructive identity felt like an uncontrollable ejaculation of seminal text; a new syntax of ‘Mixed Race’ and postcolonialist theory from the womb of my dark heritage. I brought my emergent consciousness into my communications in penetrative, masculine ways. And thus I remained quite firmly stuck within my consciousness for a very long two years. I reached that point of severance where I was making it clear to many of those around me, ‘do it my way or else swivel’.

 

My knowledge that my biological father is a Coloured South African (Erasmus, 2001) and that my white English birth-mother had two daughters, and was the cousin of my childhood “best friend” Paul Martin, had always been enough for me to mark myself as different.

 

From being called wog, Jewboy, brother midnight at school, to people telling me I look Jewish, Palestinian, Latino, and Greek I have always been given plenty of latitude to perceive myself as ‘Other’.

 

Nobody has ever suggested I look English and this has been a blessing in my view.

 

This intuitive and performative way of knowing my difference had always led me to cross ‘race’ boundaries in my life. Though I use the word ‘cross’, the phenomenon has felt more permeable in that sense of a natural taken-for-granted movement with consummate ease as if the border has no ‘real’ substance. I crossed borders in music, literature, and scholarship; and with Asma my Arab-African wife of 34 years, we brownly blended African WaNeyema, African Griqua, Afrikaner/British, and Arab within the multiplicity of our family as border-crossers, and border-transgressors. Tacitly we now hold a consciousness of Mixed Race that has been spoken, lived, informed and influenced by each of us from the grounds of our lived experiences with both our sons over 28 years. No matter how difficult it could at times be to say who we are, there has never been any difficulty in saying who we are not. We are certainly not white, English and Western. We acknowledge that part of our heritage and politically, socially, and culturally distance ourselves from any conception of ‘popular’ Englishness that has emerged over the past 10 years

 

In 1999 I discovered critical ‘race’ theory and postcolonial studies. Suddenly my entire living heritage, all of the mythos of my family had been given an academic substance. My personal experiences were of the same order of those experiences being theorized and legitimated by the Academy.

 

Since 1999 an emergent new field of study in the Academy known as ‘Mixed Race’ Studies captivated my creative energies as a scholar (Tizard and Phoenix, 1993;

Ifekwunigwe 1999; Erasmus, 2001; Parker and Song, 2001; Rodriguez, 2002; Ali, 2003; Song, 2003; Ifekwunigwe, 2004) and for the first time I have a sense of onto-intellectual belonging, a feeling of ‘home’. In terms of a Self-Study of my teaching I take the view that key to my self-knowledge as an educator in respect of the teaching and educative practice I choose to bring to my students, is my autoethnography (Ellis and Bochner, 2000).

 

It is in this sense that I see postcolonial theorizing, critical race studies and Mixed Race studies and the nature of identity as rootprints (after Cixous) that are longitudinal, embodied, ensnared and that form the pivotal fulcrum of my being-in-the-world as a scholar-educator. The paradox is that I have only very recently chosen to ‘see’ and thus ‘name’ my being-in-the-world as scholar–educator.

 

What do I mean by the term scholar-educator?

 

I entered higher education in 1987 as a teacher of organization studies and human resources management. I had two Masters degrees and a professional practitioner background. In my first two years of employment I completed my first degree by Independent Study at what is now the University of East London achieving a ‘first’.

 

Surprisingly my discovery of this way of seeing and naming my educative practice has helped me to bring a novel, peaceful, serene equanimity to my sense of who I am as a complete (yet imperfect and unfinished) person: complete in Socrates sense of being a unity of one in the many (Phaedrus). My passion is unabated as a person, as a father, as a grandfather, as a husband, and as an educator. My difference now is that my passion has direction, focus, discipline and a sense of purpose that is held for sufficiently long enough and with sufficient clarity and disciplined focus in my doctoral thesis to enable me to not only enjoy the writing of my thesis, but accept my thesis as a statement of where I am, for now. The sense of my thesis as a contribution to something positive, good and hopeful in educational terms is something that I now value in my life. I am ready to place it alongside other living theory theses, and to see my work as distinct but not discrete from the other theses that mine will be alongside.

 

My passion is now a transformed energy that I can harness and control, direct and discipline, enhance and attenuate in order to bring a subtle sensitivity to suffuse my educative practice through my desire to relate to the sacred intelligence and the unique knowledge of the other. This faculty of reaching inwards to get closer to my understanding of my educative practice as an expression of being-in-the-world, reaching outwards, is crucial to effectively conveying my meanings about my embodied values, my standards of judgement as they emerge through my practice over time, my sense of embodied knowledge of where I have emerged from, and my insights to the ways that my performativity of my identity takes the form of continual ebbing, flowing and cyclical movements rather than having a fixed structure or form, that is fluid rather than core, and is existential rather than essential. I endorse from the grounds of my lived experience and my self-knowledge, and accept, Bullough and Pinnegar’s (2004) point in the Handbook of Self-Study in Teaching and Teacher Education Practices that,

 

“The consideration of ontology, of one’s being in and toward the world should be a central feature of any discussion of the value of self-study research.”

 

I bring this consideration of ontology into my valuing of the self-study research of my students on the MSc in Management Studies by Action Research in my supervision, in my Quinquennial Course Review self-evaluation document (Murray, 2004), in my encouragement of my postgraduate students to bring their self-studies to the BERA symposium on practitioner-research at the University of Bath; and most directly and politically in my recent appointment as College Diversity officer for ‘race’, ethnicity, religion and beliefs.

 

Once again, as imagination is crucial to connected understanding I believe, I invite you to imaginate. Try to imagine how it feels for your own sense of performative identity to be a recognized field of study in the Academy. Perhaps feminists have felt this for a long time (Gilligan, 1989). Perhaps gays are enjoying this through queer theory. What is amazing to me is that this field is being developed and shaped by the voices of those whose lived experiences are ‘Mixed Race’ within Britain. This field of study is my autobiographical story, my theory of self, and imbricated within my teaching and educational relationships with students and colleagues. My originality of mind is being able to recognise this, and articulate it in ways that people can see me creating my own Living Postcolonial Educational Theory account .

 

My passion for social justice, scholarship and education (the humanly present and personally available spirituality of exploring options, choices and possibilities) is the very antithesis of oppression, which I take to mean the absence of choices as bell hooks suggests (1984). I despise colonialism because of its violence as an oppressive insistence, without moral constraint, carried out by seemingly educated, civil(-ised) people to deny other people their makers mark of humanity: agency, free-will and choice. The European colonial project was primarily executed within a European provenance and to this extent it was a Christian project, too. Key to Christianity is the religious concept of free-will and while this was a part of the living theory of most Christians in the West, this living theory was subordinated to an abstract, conceptual, normative ‘theory’ that black and brown people were less than human, and thus did not qualify for an extension of free-will to their subject position. Without free will the logical consequence of colonialism is an absence of choices that has persisted through independence to blight the lives of millions of people today who are indigenous to ex-European colonies. This absence of choice is key to the racist Othering of indigenous colonized peoples. This is the nature of the colonial holocaust and that holocaust is reproducing the pattern of absence of choices for millions of people living in ex-European colonial countries the world today:

 

“The fact that various New Zealand commentators, Politicians, media and academics have been outraged by the use of the term ‘holocaust’ and view the term ‘holocaust’ narrowly as being related only to the sufferings of the Jewish people does not alter the reality of many other peoples who have suffered systematic and brutal murder, torture, physical, and mental oppression and extermination as peoples. The limited definition that Pakeha politicians and commentators place on the term’ holocaust’ indicates a denial to face up to the injustice perpetrated on Indigenous Peoples by colonization and therefore an reluctance to find meaningful long term solutions and remedies. Limiting definitions such as ‘holocaust’ is a manifestation of racism. Whether murder, slaughter and dispossession was achieved indiscriminately through a musket, canon, sword, legislation or a gas chamber is irrelevant in defining the term ‘holocaust’….The Conference states that the term ‘holocaust’ is not to be narrowly construed or defined. Indigenous Peoples claim the right to define ‘holocaust’ in a broad sense , encompassing the oppression and systematic extermination of Indigenous Peoples by any means engaged by the Colonial Governments.” –Statement of the Indigenous Peoples Conference regarding ‘holocaust’, Wellington, New Zealand, 8^th September 2000.

 

The Griqua National Conference was a signatory to the historic Statement. When I look to statements of human rights that seem to respect my human values from the grounds of my embodied values it is to such documents, like this and ‘The Universal Declaration of Islamic Human Rights’ (1981) that I turn for ethical inspiration. When I read these documents I renew and revitalize my faith in humanity. I am tired of turning in my life to Thomas Paine, to Alexis de Tocqueville, and I am no longer prepared to turn to the American Declaration of Independence that was crafted during the time that the ‘holocaust’ referred to above was being meted out to Native Americans in a wanton and rapacious barbarism of ‘internal colonization’. I am now discriminating in my choice of ethical referents. Of course, I would not foist these approaches on anybody else. Least of all my students. What I would do as a postcolonial educator is make my own scholarship and growing awareness of options and choices available to my students through a strategy of critical pedagogy in which I would ask my students to become self-reflective about the referents they reflexively turn to explain freedom, justice and equality. This is a very practical exemplar of how I pedagogise my living postcolonial educational theory as an expression of the growth of my educational knowledge (Whitehead, 1993). I would engage my students through a process of question and answer, a dialogical energy, in which silence, patience, exploration and multiple meanings might emerge, uncensored, unabridged, unadulterated, and at time, unabashed. I am producing a CD-Rom file of video footage of one of my Action Masters sessions in which I believe you will be able to glimpse these facets of my practice.

 

As an educator at the Royal Agricultural College I have supervised undergraduate and Masters dissertations of more than 120 white, brown and black students from Britain, China, Greece, Australia, Canada, Germany, Mexico, Pakistan, Uruguay, Angola, Kenya, South Africa, Zimbabwe, Zambia, and Malawi since 1991. I have always carried into those supervisory relationships my intention to presence choice. I believe this is directly related to my own historical awareness that colonialism was a project of oppression from which choice was (and still is) absent for indigenous people. My ontology is that of a person whose very being-in-the-world is shaped and mediated through my own emergent consciousness of my Mixed Race from the age of 12, when I discovered the man I’d known simply as Jack was in fact, my biological father. Yet my ‘racial identity’ isn’t at all biological. My sense of family, of attachment, of belonging, of origin, of diaspora is bio-graphical.

 

So for a period of about 4 years from 1999-2003 I became immersed in the type of scholarship that took me close to the master/slave dialectic that Mark refers to in his epilogue. Though my pilgrimage to the text did not take into account Georg Hegel’s dialectic because of the way racist ideology crept into his philosophical project. I sought out black, brown, colonial and slave writers to turn to in my nomadic scholarship. Tears came from the reservoir of my knowing and feeling when I read Hannah Crafts, The Bondswoman’s narrative (2002), Melton McLaurin’s Celia, A Slave (1991), and Margaret Washington’s edited introduction to Narrative of Sojourner Truth (1993). For me their lived experience of the master/slave dialectic was much more compelling that Hegel’s dialectic that was both perverted by the ideological racisms of his time, and abstracted from lived experience in that his dialectic followed a form of propositional logic unrelated to his own lived experience. As a ‘Mixed Race’ scholar I naturally mistrust any account of the master/slave dialectic that is not grounded in the heritage of slave (Fusco, 2001) as well as slaver.

 

For a postcolonial and Mixed Race scholar there can be no forgiveness for the nature of ideology that gave rise to writing of this kind:

 

“We should note that a larger native population has survived in South America…Some of them have visited Europe, but they are obviously unintelligent individuals with little capacity for education. Their inferiority in all respects, even in stature, can be seen in every particular; the southern tribes of Patagonia are alone more powerfully constituted, although they still live in a natural state of lawlessness and savagery. The religious brotherhoods have treated them in the correct manner, first impressing them by their spiritual authority and then allotting them tasks calculated to awaken and satisfy their needs.” (Eze, 1997, p.115)

 

In this extract Hegel implies that the colonial apparatus is working well, fairly and with a high-minded morality, and with an implicit notion of limited ambition for the indigenous people. As I read this I feel disgusted. I hear these descriptions today in the language of the British National Party and other right-wing racist sympathizers. I have even heard it from students in my classes at the Royal during the 1990’s.

 

When speaking about African’s Hegel is equally disturbing:

 

“Since human beings are valued so cheap, it is easily explained why slavery is the basic legal relationship in Africa. The only significant relationship between the Negroes and the Europeans has been – and still is – that of slavery. The Negroes see nothing improper about it, and the English, although they have done most to abolish slavery and the salve trade, are treated as enemies by the Negroes themselves…Nevertheless, their lot in their own country, where slavery is equally absolute, is almost worse than this: for the basic principle of all slavery is that man is not yet conscious of his freedom, and consequently sinks to the level of a mere object or worthless article. But the distinction between masters and

slaves is a purely arbitrary one. The lesson we can draw from this…namely that the state of nature is itself a state of absolute and consistent injustice…Slavery ought not to exist, as it is by definition unjust in and for itself. This ‘ought’ expresses a subjective attitude, and as such, it has no historical justification. For it is not yet backed up by the substantial ethical life of a rational state. In rational states slavery no longer exists.” (p. 135).

 

I imagine as you read this that you will, like me, be horrified by the tone of Hegel’s words that consign Black people to a stereotypical absence of rationality a thus ethics.

 

Please think about the implications for how this kind of educationally and politically influential writing and lecturing influenced the thinking of the social formation of Whiteness in Enlightenment Europe.

 

Imagine how white identity was framed as axiomatically superior, Hegel providing the intellectual and socially acceptable ammunition for this. It is not too difficult to reason how the West has embodied racist ideology within its continued construction of the African and indigenous (black and brown) Other, from the outset of one of the most crucial moments of the Enlightenment project.

 

As you read and contemplate Hegel’s ideas, I also imagine that you will be able to appreciate and extend your empathy to my life project as you more fully value the significance that when Hegel lectured and wrote his lectures he had in mind people like Asma, my father, my Great-Grandmother Griqua, my son’s Hassan and Hussam, and my dearest postcolonial friend Nceku Q and his Ndebele family, and Eden Charles, our postcolonial colleague.

 

When we translate what appears to be abstracted and propositional logics back into their ‘true’ living form it becomes easier to dislocate Hegel’s words as a form of ‘spectator theory or truth’ and translocate them forward into the immediacy of people we know and value, people we love, people we imagine we know but have actually only misunderstood and judged, whose blood and history flows in their beings and bodies today, then the odious enormity of Hegel’s words can take on a breathing and palpable form. We can all imagine students we will work with. I can almost imagine that as you read Hegel you can step closer to supporting my ideas, supporting my thesis and perhaps, supporting me as a scholar-educator.

 

How can we let this kind of empathy inform the basis of our BERA symposium?

 

Though there may be one element missing. Perhaps what you will also need is a disciplined doctoral thesis from me explaining how my ontology, my Mixed Race heritage in fact, is the reservoir of my embodied values as I show in the practice of my embodied values over time how they have been transformed into educational standards of judgement that influence the way I bring myself to the other in learning as a scholar-educator who is ‘mutually available to what the future holds in store’ as Gabriel Marcel puts this.

 

However, as an educator and Muslim I think it would be more creative if instead of making the kinds of critical comments that I associate so closely with the ‘habitus’ of the Academy (Whitehead, 2004) I could draw attention to the creative potential of my embodied knowledge that could help to move people on to see how they could extend their own learning. What I have in mind is a more inclusive way of expressing my critical faculty in ways that don’t push people away from my ideas, which connect with people’s openness to learning, that leave people feeling good about their own achievements and values while drawing them into a creative engagement with my own.

 

The act of writing my thesis is an ontological challenge: I have to see my ‘I’ very differently; I have to know and believe in my ‘I’ as scholar-educator. And this requires taking my ‘I’ as scholar-educator seriously through the disciplined production of a creative doctoral thesis that has implications for the ‘I’ of my practice in action. Learning to recognise the mirror image of my ignorance in the ignorance of others without allowing anger to lead me by the nose towards severance has been part of the crucial dialectics of my transforming consciousness over the past seven years of my research enquiry.

 

As I encounter my ‘I’ as living contradiction in that I want to value others while acting in ways that don’t, so I get a grasp of V.I. Lenin’s question ‘What is to be done?’ in a very personal way. Nceku Nyathi has influenced me immensely in this matter through his immersion in Marxist thought and Marxian analysis as a doctoral candidate in postcolonial theory and organization studies at Leicester University.

 

What is to be done is actually addressed through what I am doing in the fourth and final iteration of this paper.

 

I am changing a facet of my behaviour, a tiny shift that has evolved through a seven-year journey of personal awakening. I am sustaining this change in ways that now enable me to appreciate my scholarly artistry as an educational practice of my ‘I’ as scholar-educator with wonderful opportunities.

 

This does sound a bit like Renee’s line about ‘the Madonna with the fallen boobies’ but I think you will get my drift.

 

I am shifting profoundly from antagonism towards agonism as a way of ‘shifting’ my attitude and perception from ‘missed opportunity’ to ‘wonderful educational opportunity’ in ways that enable me to relate with the openness of others to learning (Jack Whitehead, personal email, July 2004).

 

As a Muslim I share Ben Jelloun’s (2002) postcolonial analysis and assertion that Islam is agonistic. By this Ben Jelloun is suggesting that Islam has a long heritage of open, dialogical communion originating in the pre-Islamic Arab collective where there was a social and spiritual predilection for a “question and answer” approach to the pressing issues of the day, including religious issues, known as ta’akus (arguing with one another). In this tradition it seems that Arab Islamic culture shared much with the Greek tradition of agonism. This corresponds closely with Jack’s analysis of dialectical and dialogical forms as important precepts for a logic of educational enquiry (Whitehead, 2004) citing Gadamer and Ilyenkov (but including Bakhtin, Socrates, and Plato) and in making indirect reference to the work of Gabriel Marcel through other authors (Burke 199/Keen 1966, p.873).

 

This early Greek-Arab connectivity helps me to find the energy to support my intuition that Samuel Huntington’s thesis that Christianity and Islam are locked into ‘inevitable’ cultural antagonism is fundamentally flawed.

 

In fact, and with some irony, Huntington seems to represent a new penumbra of fundamentalisms that are so virulent in these so-called postmodern times (Sim, 2003). The relationship between Hellenistic and Arabic thought and culture simply has not been antagonistic; instead there has been a two way flow through gaps in cultural spaces as the early translations of Plato and Aristotle from Greek into Arabic by the philosopher Al-Kindi seem to attest (Russell, 1971). There has been a two-way flow across the geo-spatial and linguistic borders from the earliest of times. The inevitable antagonism thesis has always been spurious and deceitful serving the Roman Church well in bolstering its authority in early medieval times, as today it seems to serve the American empire of new world order.

 

My contribution as a postcolonial scholar-educator is to make my contribution to the tradition of agonistic Islam, while working to sustain relationships with colleagues and students of other religions and belief-systems that are fresh, vital, communicative and shared.

 

After all this is what I’ve actually been very good at doing since coming into higher education in 1987 as part and parcel of the everyday ordinariness of my teaching life.

 

How I enact relational and dialogical communion is another expression of the educative artistry I have in mind. It is an artistic weaving of the wonderfully creative opportunity to contribute to the others learning in ways that transcend the severance of life’s fundamentalisms. Accounting for this is the aim of my seven years Self-Study of my practice as a scholar-educator seen as a nomadic journey inside, then outside, and then among others at intersections of tensions, dialectics and contradictions. Part one of my thesis looks at the dialectics of originality of mind and critical judgement. Part two of my thesis explores the dialectics of severance and inclusion.

 

At times I have imagined this seven years journey as a sign of personal intellectual weakness as my doctoral journey rolled on without a thesis to show for it, until I had a recent dream of joining a caravan crossing a desert. This is my dream.

 

My books were thrown into the sinking sands of a saltpan in order to lighten the cargo carried by the camel that had been wrong footed into the mire. The camel’s rescue depended on the abandonment of my books, and this was a stark practical choice. I remember shouting at the camel, berating it to free itself, my shouts turning to tears of rage and fear as my precious texts, my stock-in-trade, slithered down into the folds of roiling mud, while in inverse gestures, the camel tore its legs free and emerged from the glutinous mire. Strangely in my loss I also found an unexpected emancipation. I knew that I had to free myself from the cloying weight of my “spectator” texts that I carried about with me like a protective carapace, in order to be able to create and craft self-knowledge from the “living truth” of my embodied knowledge. Something had to give in the ambivalent relationship between my book knowledge and my own knowledge.

This dream didn’t suggest to me that ‘spectator’ theories of social truths aren’t fascinating, heuristic and important for knowledge. Or that I imagine them to be defunct. But what the dream did suggest quite clearly is that it is time in my life to move the books out of the way, subordinate them to the production of my own self-knowledge. By doing this I am moving first person ‘I’ theory from margin to center, situating it rightfully alongside traditional forms of theorizing (bell hooks, 1984).

After reading my consideration of Mark’s epilogue I imagine that you will join with me in the ironic tango of the inner living contradiction (Eugene Ilyenkov, 1974) as you reflect on Mark's chosen heuristic of the Master-Slave relationship represented through the lens of Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel's ontology of master and slave.

 

However, rather than presenting this as a form of critique or critical deconstruction of Mark’s intention as I did in my first response, I would rather explore the potential for a very different form of compassionate critique.

 

I’m wondering as I write this iteration if I can ground myself in the quality of relationship that I held with Jack at AERA New Orleans (2000) as I presented our joint paper (Murray and Whitehead, 2000) to an incredibly rapt and engaged audience of S-STEP. In that memory I can recall the sense of educational art giving way in the face of a profound mystery of love that I experience with Asma, my wife, and our family. This quality of relationship is integral to seeing myself as a scholar-educator with wonderful opportunities to provide educational resources for the learning of others. During my presentation at New Orleans, and afterwards talking with AERA participants who were interested in the presentation, I was present in the moment of a wonderful learning opportunity. Our relationship flowed through the space between us so that neither of us was distinct or discrete for a special moment in time. There was no Cartesian split that separated us. In the inclusivity of that moment we experienced, I believe, what Gabriel Marcel (1935/1965) called “a mutual availability for what the future holds in store”. Van Deurzen (1998) conjures up the spirit of this availability clearly when she writes from the grounds of her embodied practice as an existential psychotherapist,

 

“This indicates very clearly how, in true dialogue, I place the emphasis neither on you nor on me, but rather on what binds us together, on the space that we have created between us. What happens between two people who stop hiding from themselves and from the other in such an unreserved encounter is that they come together on the ground that is situated in between them, where they share a common humanity” (1998: 49).

 

Looking back on that morning in New Orleans with Jack, I felt the thrill and frisson of an unknowable postcolonial future teasing us towards what the future holds in store. So what happens then to that memory when I write? What kind of amnesia sweeps away this vital memory of a mutual availability for what the future holds in store as I seem to subordinate this quality of relationship to an abandon in writing that produces the kind of linguistic expression that takes me to a space of antithesis of Marcel’s ‘mutual availability’. It is this phenomena that enables me to write in this amnesiac syntax below,

 

“I also imagine after reading my consideration you may be sympathetic to my insight that Jack has been impetuous (if not mistaken) in endorsing Mark's choice of heuristic so unequivocally.”

 

What I lose sight of here the sacred space between us that Jack and I enjoyed in presenting our paper in New Orleans where we both dared to be mutually available for what the future holds in store. Yet when I bring my critical gaze to the text sundered from the memory of that privileged moment when we were mutually available to Marcel’s sense of the future, and our own sense of what this future could hold open for us, my capacity to fall prey to my own Western intellectual habits illuminates for me the nature of my ‘I’ as living contradiction. And I am motivated to remove the contradiction.

 

But it is worth exhuming for self and other the multiple nature of my ‘I’ as living contradiction.

 

First as a postcolonialist theorist I notice how it is difficult for me to release myself from the powerful thrall of impositional and Aristotelean logic that is so earthily Eurocentric. This logic is not the logic of educational enquiry, though it is the logic of propositional knowledge based on experimentation, proof, and refutation. This is the canon of Western ways of knowing. Exploring this living contradiction enables me to get a clearer understanding of my entrapment within a cultural and educational form of ‘vestigial colonialism’. This ironic facet of acknowledging my ‘I’ as living contradiction enables me to grasp the degree to which my experience of colonialism hasn’t been military or physical, but is cultural. I believe my encounter with my living contradiction is better explored through Bourdieu’s notion of the ‘habitus’ (1979).

 

Secondly, I am aware that when I write I seem to slip out of my brownly way of non-western being in Mutse Atsi (Murray and Whitehead, 2000) into the demeanor of the white, male, competitive Western Academy. I’m reminded at this point of Freud’s attribution to Jean Martin Charcot of the comment,

 

“Theory is fine, but that does not negate what exists”.

 

I agree with Charcot. But on the other hand my criticism of Jack was a clear negation by me of what existed between Jack and me in New Orleans, and what exists between us when we meet. Citing these relationships as evidence of my ‘mutual availability’ is all very well, but what of warrant and validation? How secure is the evidence of insight, not matter how painstakingly crafted? In my doctoral thesis I will be including CD-Rom files of the New Orleans presentation (graciously filmed by Sarah – thank you), the de-briefing excitement we experienced over a Hurricanes and Onion rings by the Mississippi, and a video capture brimming with engagement, availability, hope and humour at Bloomfield road. On their own they are ‘evidence’ without a suitable framing. With my doctoral text they will help me to provide a glimpse into the qualities and embodied values that are present in my face to face relationships. They are agonistic, they are patient, they are thoughtful they are dialogical and they are relational. In these clips there is no sign of my tenancy to severance that I used to prolifically display in my e-writing.

 

And this spirit of mutual availability certainly pre-existed my written comment of last week. I do not experience my ‘I’ as a living contradiction when I extend Marcel’s idea to the purpose of the four of us presenting together at BERA, and a) I sense this quality of mutual availability for what the future holds in store for us at BERA and beyond, and b) I reflect on my comment in my first iteration of this paper as follows:

 

“As scholars who 'claim' to be Postcolonialist within the title of our BERA Symposium, I imagine that you will enjoy the challenge within my consideration of Mark's epilogue. As scholars who, like me, claim to have a 'postcolonialist practice' in the sense of the colonial/postcolonial dialectic I've referred to above, I imagine you will enjoy my consideration.” (Murray, e-mail 30 July).

 

I come to this point of unity with Charcot’s idea that any action precedes the theorizing of that action while recognizing that arriving here has led to my part in severing relationships with colleagues.

 

Thirdly, I recognise that part of my living contradiction is that I value my relationships and I value my writing. Yet, though I hold them in equity of regard, I sustain the spiritual and the sacred in my face-to-face relationships, while allowing my writing to become profane in respect of the sacred relational space when I become angry or passionate. What I have been failing to achieve is my form of writing the sacred (Bailey Gill 1995). It is as if I have been unable to translate the relational moment into a sacred text when I write about critical ‘race’ studies and postcolonialism. By contrast, in my emails to students I am able to sustain my patience and mutual availability into the future: I imagine this to be my ‘educative persistence’.

 

The point here is that it is not on all occasions that I am unable to write the sacred. But on occasions I seem to write as an act of sacrifice (Bataille, 1986) and the feelings evoked by this extract are familiar to me as an occasional writer of severance,

 

“The [sacred] is the revelation of continuity through the death of a discontinuous being to those who watch it as a solemn rite. A violent death disrupts the creature’s continuity: what remains, what the tense onlookers experience in the succeeding silence, is the continuity of all existence with which the victim is now one.” (p.95)

 

There is a profound bifurcation at this point of my being-in-the-world. When I write in severance it is as if I bring about two deaths: the victim with whom I am writing, and my own. What is that seems to die? It seems to me to be the hope of a mutual availability to what the future holds in store. It seems to be a removal of future, and with it hope, purpose, and meaning. So what is it that dies or that I kill? It is the quality of relationship that flows through my life as a scholar-educator with wonderful opportunities to provide educational resources for the learning of others in ways that brings meaning into my life.

 

It is these three facets of my living contradiction that I need to address in this revised paper, which I am writing in parallel with my doctoral thesis, in order to explore the purpose of rewriting this paper.

 

Keeping in mind that I am a scholar-educator and not a ‘critic’ this distinction is now helping me to sustain relationship at the point of severance, as I begin to ‘see’ that my life as scholar-educator enables me to integrate scholarship and education in ways that seem to enable me to seek and find the wonderful opportunities for learning when the move to severance seems likely.

 

This is the point at which my contribution to the wonderful opportunities for learning as a scholar-educator can take place.

 

I find this vision helpful for me to see my educative life as productive, meaningful and hopeful of possibility.

 

This is what helps me to sustain a commitment to others in education, a quality of commitment that is essential for transformative learning (O’Sullivan, 1999).

 

Yet this quality of commitment to the wonderful opportunities for learning is also taking place within a social, political and macro-educational context. So I reason that my commitment is to the future of British higher education more broadly and politically (Barnett, 1990, and 1992), as well as to the development of a logic of educational enquiry that begins with my self-development as a university college educator from the grounds of my embodied theory of my ethical ambition (Whitehead, 2004; Spinelli, 2001; Rowland, 2000; Bell, 2002). In my case this takes the form of a practice that digs deeper to form and reform my understanding of how I pedagogise my living postcolonial educational theory as an educational practice of a mutually available relational self. This is what I have now come to recognise as my ethical ambition (Bell, 2002). This is how I choose to name this aspect of my being-in-the-world. This is my thesis. What is it exactly that is my thesis? My thesis is that I can write this about myself as I see myself in this way and find the words that feel right to write in naming me: writing the sacred thesis, perhaps?

 

A Related and Relatable Aside:

As a postcolonialist, I imagine Q will be interested in how we engage these ideas especially as there is a 'we' that is supposedly preparing for the BERA symposium. 

 

Right now in real time I actually imagine four rather separate 'I's' preparing for BERA.

 

As yet I have no sense at all of what holds us together as 'we' in relation to the Symposium title. Several weeks ago I indicated my standards of judgement about the kind of 'postcolonial solidarity' that I was looking for in the 'we' that my 'I' could be brought to with postcolonial integrity thus enabling my participation in the BERA symposium. But there hasn't been a conversation about this. Let me provide some details.

 

1. On the 18^th June 2004 (nearly two months ago) I wrote an email between us, “So I imagine that first we have to be clear about our different meanings concerning pedagogy, colonial and postcolonial and living educational theory. We have to be clear with others how we are using them (these terms) so we can explain our pedagogisation processes to our peers if asked.

 

2. On the 18^th June Jack replied, ‘I like the idea of clarifying our different meanings as we focus on our symposium.”

 

3. On the 21^st June I wrote, “So I would like an agreement between us to have a collective statement for our symposium which is a clear statement of honesty, humility and attribution to the field of intellectual research scholarship we are dipping into when we use the terminology of colonial, decolonizing, and postcolonial, for example. I'm happy to make this statement for me, and would be delighted to include us all in the statement.
   
   So I share Leila Gandhi's notion that 'post (no hyphen) colonialism' marks me
   as someone who identifies closely with the idea that postcolonialism
   kicked-off with the moment that colonialism appeared as a project.”

 

I'm now wondering what may be needed for us to be able to have the kind of postcolonial (-ist) conversation that could achieve this outcome?

 

A changing conversation (Shaw, 2002) from which could flow a kind of postcolonial solidarity that would provide a shared platform for our BERA symposium without limiting or constraining any one of us in terms of our particular take. 

 

Jack refers to this tellingly in his chapter of the s-step International Handbook. Citing Somekh and Thaler (1997, p.158) Jack points to how these authors stress the importance of participatory research, “in which dialogue and discussion between the participants are central to the process of defining commonly accepted research questions (the we questions). I agree with their point that to succeed in this difficult endeavour, of breaking down established routines of interaction and what, in effect are taboos established by the culture and traditions of the group, it is essential to have an understanding of the multiple nature of the many selves involved.” (p. 897).

 

In the writing I’ve shared between us I have persisted in holding open an invitation, in various different ways, both simply and enquiringly, to craft a joint statement of agreement as a marker of solidarity for our postcolonial purpose as we present at the BERA symposium.

 

Concerned with my sense of a 'postcolonial warrant' within the BERA community, I proposed some common ground in a 'we' agreement that confirmed 'our' joint view that the Western, European, White colonial and imperial projects were an unmitigated disaster and holocaust. But perhaps my concern with a ‘postcolonial warrant’ has been off-putting. Perhaps instead of framing my need for participation quite so strongly within a sense of postcolonial warrant and solidarity, I could have imagined the importance of Dadd’s (1998) use of ‘we’ questions cited by Jack in the same chapter,

 

“If we choose to write together with those we support, what challenges do we face as we attempt to represent a partnership ethic in collaborative publications. How is a collaborative text composed? How do we handle differences of perspective, meaning, style, preferred genre? How is the ‘final say’ achieved? What processes do we establish to ensure the most democratic and representative end texts possible? (p.50).

 

Researching and presenting with Nceku Q I wouldn't find these questions so pressing, so necessary to ask, as I believe that our postcolonial 'we' would be tacit yet axiomatic in our relationship.

 

In the Critical Race Theory paradigm the axiological position is given primacy over critical race ontology, and critical race epistemology (Scheurich, retrieved August 2004, from http://www.edb.utexas.edu/faculty/scheurich/proj7/details.htm)

 

By paradigm I mean a representation of a world view that defines the nature of the world, the individual’s place in it, and the range of relationships to that world and its parts (Guba and Lincoln, 1994, p.107). Kuhn (1962) uses paradigm to refer to a matrix of interwoven commitments, beliefs, norms, methods, protocols, and typical outlooks, shared across and within a bounded discipline. I first came across the term paradigm in my Research Methodology seminars with Professor John McCauley at Sheffield Hallam, when I studied full time for my Msc in Organization Development in 1983/84.

The idea of a critical race axiology is truly important for our ability to be able to present together at the BERA Symposium it seems to me. In the past I know I would have couched that statement in the unwritten aura of ‘threat’; but not now.

 

Axiology according to Scheurich involves the values, ethics, and belief-systems of a philosophy/paradigm. Within critical race theory, axiology is the paradigm’s leading influence on research studies. Critical race theory’s axiology is composed of two elements: equity and democracy. This –perspective sees immense systemic racial inequities in housing, the legal system, employment and the educational system. Cornerstone beliefs of the critical race theory are that racism is an ‘endemic facet of life in our society and that neutrality, objectivity, colorblindness, and meritocracy are all questionable constructs’ (Pizarro, 1998, p. 62). Western civilization is built around reproducing inequity, not creating it, for the non-dominant races. Now this seems pretty unequivocal to me. This axiology is one that I ‘see’ and can relate to. It resonates but it also describes my family experience. The above quote insinuates a substantial difficulty in influencing the social formation of Whiteness, for example. While it also helps me to cleave to ‘Whiteness’ (Dyer, 1998) not as a manifestation of ‘stuckness’ but as a political heuristic for framing the context in which my practice as a diasporic scholar-educator is taking place.

 

None of the above means that shouldn’t strive as educators (and as scholars) to address the questions raised by Dadd’s above, which are excellent questions. But keeping Dadd’s questions in mind as creatively and openly engage with Scheurich’s notion of axiology could mean that in order to check the leaves we shouldn’t need to pull up the tree to examine the roots. I say this because I can recognise in Dadds statement the element of choice to write together with those we support. While in Scheurich’s ideas of axiology I recognise that there ought to be an axiological disposition to Postcolonialism that brings us together in participation and collaboration as Educational Action Researchers, despite our marvelous differences.

 

I wonder if in digging this deeply I am contributing to a conjoint ‘text’ (in the widest sense of text by the way, to include video, performance art and so on) for the BERA Symposium. A text that each of us believes in wholeheartedly. A text our BERA audience has to read and write into as a credible performance of the ‘postcolonial’. What I’m unclear about is what it is that each of us is covenanting to support. Of course I feel that I am supporting the growing discipline or field of studies known as ‘Self Study’. I am aware that I am hoping to make a contribution that we could publish from the BERA symposium that shows how self-study action researchers are becoming participatory across disciplinary and cultural borders, “in the sense that concerns and enquiries are shared with others.” (Jack, 2004, p.897).

 

I think this could enhance Jack’s RAE output, it could support Sarah, Je Kan and me in completing our theses, and it could support each of us in bringing enhanced meaning into our educative practices, and our relationships.

 

But what I am unable to evaluate without your helpful responses is the degree to which we are clear about our axiological position as presenters of postcolonialism while respecting our distinct but not discrete axiology as individual educational action researchers who are contributing to postcolonial theorizing and practice in British education as we also contribute to a new scholarship of educational enquiry through our pedagogisation of postcolonial living educational theories in the Academy.

I exclude Jack from this comment in the light of his attractive statement, which encourages me to get closer to his relational influence as my PhD supervisor and friend when he writes,

 

“It could be that the loving eyes of s-step researchers will also engage more fully with post-colonial educational projects in the growth of educational knowledge…”

 

And then when he cites from a text that I shared with him about Coloured South African identities,

 

‘With the construction of whiteness having been a colonial project, discriminatory and racist, the ethical imperative – necessary participation in a liberatory project – is that of affiliation with Africa. Coming to terms with these facts is one of the most important and difficult challenges for coloured people. Coloured black and African ways of being do not have to be mutually exclusive. There are ways of being coloured that allow participation in a liberatory and anti-racist project. The key task is to develop these. (Erasmus, 2001, p 16).’ “

 

By selecting this particular citation for his chapter in the International Handbook of Self-Study (2004) I am able to feel a secure and steadfast axiological solidarity with Jack that can carry me into and through the BERA Symposium. I imagine you will feel my delight as you read this. I imagine many things as I wonder what you may be feeling as you read this paragraph.

 

Re-composing this section of the paper by drawing on the framing of the participatory leitmotif in Jack’s chapter in the ‘Handbook’ is to show how the postcolonial artist as scholar-educator produces a creative ‘text within a text’, a kind of mis en abime.

 

My plea is for the retention of individual integrity(s) in choosing the approach that each of us wants to take as an individual while also including a statement that honours the integrity of those dehumanized within the colonial and imperial project. 

 

As a 'we' acknowledgement of the material historicity of the colonial project, I believe this would establish our warrant with our audience.   

 

Without a 'we' statement on this axiom of postcolonial solidarity I am unable to satisfy my standard of judgement in respect of my ethic, my warrant as a postcolonial scholar and practitioner, and thus my integrity in bringing my ideas to the BERA symposium with 'postcolonial' in the title. Without that statement I imagine that I would experience my ‘I’ as scholar-educator as a living contradiction. A very healthy function of severance is the motivational desire to cut myself off from that which is causing contradiction. That said, I agree with Mohammad Ben Jelloun (2002) when he suggests that when he suggests the importance of an ‘agon’ community of argument and disputation, boast and competition of ideas.

 

But then I take that as read: if Living Educational Theory, or Appreciative Inquiry, or Critical Management Studies, or DNA were in the title of our Symposium I'd imagine that my work would have to address that field of scholarship from within the canon of that field of scholarship. I find myself imagining why this would be different and more difficult when 'postcolonial' is in the title. At this point I feel like I am going backwards into previous encounters. For the purpose of this piece of writing I want to resist this lure.

 

As I wrote several weeks ago I imagined that each of you could empathize with my aspiration to have a conjoint warrant as Postcolonial theorists presenting at a prestigious (and influential) BERA symposium.  In the way that my invitation has been ignored, I have to say that what I imagine has changed considerably.

 

My concern now is no longer to invite us to agree a platform from which we can hold a common statement about postcolonialism. Though without a common statement I would be unable to share a common symposium platform: the sheer raw emotion evoked by that degree of living contradiction would disenable me from being productive, from being present and from giving myself over to Marcel’s notion of mutual availability. The emotional strain would be too great for me and I would turn to care of the self as a contingency in this situation.

 

I would not present myself to a BERA audience to talk about pedagogising living postcolonial theory if we are unable to share a material, historical, political and cultural agreement on postcolonialism as a holocaust sustained by the European west that was also racialised. I persist in this view because of what I perceive to be the political capital involved in this postcolonial enterprise: the possibility and opportunity to influence the education of this particular social formation, among many, at a time in British social history when racism, xenophobia and Islamaphobia are being socially tolerated. If we are flaky in respect of our approach to ‘postcolonialism’ then the valence of our ideas and message will become desiccated, too. If we are flaky in respect of our participatory quality in this BERA symposium I think our potential to influence could be attenuated.

 

By stating this I held implicit the possibility that we could contest and differ from my suggestion, too, in the spirit of Punter's ideas here,

 

"The postcolonial is a field in which everything is contested, everything is contestable, from one's reading of a text to one's personal, cultural, racial, national standpoint, perspective and history. This is as it should be, but that contestation will nevertheless remain sterile unless it begins and continues on the basis of certain openness, a beckoning but unassuageably thirsty openness..."

 

It is such openness that I have been sustaining in my e-writings shared between us since the beginning of June. Over the past two years I've established my métier in this respect. No longer am I gulled into fracture and severance (self-destruct) at the fractious and risky point of 'speaking fearlessly' (Foucault) into Whiteness.

 

I'm in this discourse for the long haul and it is this haul that helps me to identify my own sense of subject position as a postcolonial Muslim Mixed Race ‘scholar-educator’.

 

Postcolonial Theory is the kind of theory that tolerates and nurtures multiplicity of subject positions; and subject positions that have to be negotiated in the shadows of colonial/postcolonial dialectics.

 

I've noticed that 'the postcolonial' is only ever imagined to be the discipline and praxis of the 'Othered' by the 'Same' who carry that form of “vestigial racism" (Murray, 2001/02) that manifests in (some) western people in uninterrogated and/or amnesiac ways.

 

Postcolonialism also speaks and includes the subject positions of White identities that exist within the colonial/postcolonial dialectic in Europe. Therefore, colonial/postcolonial dialectics is every bit as ‘relevant’ and ‘appropriate’ to white western people who are performing their identities and subject positions in contemporary societies as it is for non-white people. And it is in the metropolitan capital of empire that such dialectics need to be worked out given that, and I assert this with some trepidation in the space of this group of people, the colonial empires were almost exclusively European in provenance.

 

As a scholar-educator claiming to be Postcolonialist within the title of our BERA Symposium, I imagine that you, like me, will enjoy the challenge within my consideration of Mark's epilogue.

 

As scholars who, like me, claim to have a 'postcolonialist practice' in the sense of the colonial/postcolonial dialectic I've referred to above, I imagine you will enjoy my consideration of Mark’s paper for its immanent critique and for my reformed approach to its qualities.

 

However, scholars who don't share my axiom for Postcolonialism may feel uncomfortable, irritated, perhaps even encounter deep inner tensions when they read my consideration. I imagine that could include one or two of us.

So here goes then.

 

My (Re-)Consideration of Mark's Epilogue:

Mark's epilogue seems to be Eurocentric because it draws on Hegel’s master/slave dialectic without showing any imaginative empathy for how this might be perceived by indigenous peoples and those who “once were slaves” (Murray, 2004). What of the other writers on the master/slave relationship? What of non-western writers on the master/slave experience? What of a Postcolonial awareness of Hegel’s dialectic? These are the questions that spring to mind when I read Mark’s epilogue.

 

Given the subject matter of the master/slave dialectic that is reinscribed in the colonial/postcolonial dialectic I experience Mark's choice as a significant error in judgement from my postcolonial perspective.

 

In my first response I moved into a form of typical western critique of Mark’s judgement (and Jack’s implicit support for it) without feeling, albeit with plenty of thinking.

 

On reflection, and having seen this in myself, I have stepped back from the tenor of that critique and into a scholar-educator response where I focus on the wonderful opportunities in Mark’s choice of Hegel’s ideas. Rather than being critical of Mark and criticizing his judgement, I would like to know how and why he drew upon Hegel solely, and perhaps, overlooked the possibility that alternative epistemologies of master/slave relationship may serve his cause rather better, and invite a larger audience to feel included within his choice of framework. This is a very important consideration for a living postcolonial scholar-educator: to actively hone one’s scholarship to seek references that aren’t culturally loaded, or conversely have the appeal of cultural familiarity. A living postcolonial educator would keep his student audience in mind in this way, I believe, by looking for opportunities to develop in my own educative practice sensitivity to references that could attract and repel. I am doing this as a matter of course in my writing these days.

 

So my first response to Mark’s epilogue is a very white, western, male, Aristotelean response: it comes from the Cartesian approach to evaluating truth where there is right and a wrong, and where good theory cannot hold any form of contradiction as adumbrated by Karl Popper.

 

But in this, my fourth and final response, I’m finding a brownly non-western way of connecting with Mark’s epilogue. Gloria Anzaldua likens this kind of ‘shift’ in consciousness from standing on one side of the river bank throwing stones at the Gringo’s, which is a deeply ingrained habit of exclusion, to a new and more redemptive consciousness of stepping over towards the Gringo’s and showing them how relationship can be done properly, from within a new mestiza consciousness, or what I might call a language of Mutse Atsi, or brownly inclusion. This is not to suggest that inclusion is solely or properly a brown(-ly) matter. Clearly it isn’t. Instead I am simply laying claim to my brownly consciousness as an act of undermining the presumptive authority of the Western canon. That same western canon, by the way, that oppresses women, that oppresses gays, that oppresses white academics who wish to create theory in new and exciting post-propositional logics that require border-crossing; and that has long oppressed indigenous people through colonization and empire. By using the term oppression, I have in mind bell hooks explication of this term in her book Feminist Theory: from margin to center (1984) where she asserts,

 

“Being oppressed means the absence of choices. It is the primary point of contact between the oppressed and the oppressor. Many women in this society do have choices, (as inadequate as they are) therefore exploitation and discrimination are words that more accurately describe the lot of women collectively in the United States. Many women do not join organized resistance against sexism precisely because sexism has not meant an absolute lack of choices.” (p.5)

 

I understand the colonial project as an overwhelming absence of choice.

 

Now I hold to my postcolonial perspective because nothing Mark has written is sufficiently compelling to budge me from it. But now I hold my view ever so lightly rather than tightly in that sense evoked by Jack (2004) where he writes,

 

“I cannot accept/judge something as educational, without approving it. My judgments that something is educational draw on my embodied values. This is not to deny that others have different values in defining what constitutes something as educational.” (p. 878).

 

I can relate to Jack’s perspective as I imagine our Symposium and I replace ‘educational’ with ‘postcolonial’. I particularly feel the presence of my own meaning of embodied values in this context. My embodied values concerning the master/slave relationship and the prospect of emancipation and liberation is first and foremost a menstrual flow through my consciousness coming directly from my Griqua Great-grandmother. This is my inherent point of reference, not Georg Hegel’s propositional and conceptual logic. In terms of Jung’s typology I know master/slave relationships of bondage through my living methodology as a Particular Humanist, Conceptual Humanist, and Conceptual Theorist through the integrative faculty of my relative preferences for Intuition, Feeling, Thinking and Sensing (Jung, 1971, Psychological Types).

 

But what is the significance of the error that I perceive Mark to have made given my embodied values and my life experience?

 

One dimension of the significance I have in mind is Jack's cited association with the epilogue. I originally wondered if Jack had any association with Mark's substantive work on Hegel, and his selection of Hegel as an exemplar of the logic of the master/slave tension? If Jack has been influential in this regard then I would see this as a ‘critical moment’ in which I can choose to see myself as a scholar-educator with a wonderful opportunity to provide the educational resource of my postcolonial perspective, supported by scholarship, to bring a strengthening to Jack’s awareness of how his excitement for Mark’s Epilogue could have taken his eye off of the postcolonial perspective. I could be mistaken in this of course.

 

But now as I recompose my original text, I can bring a different quality of imagination to my wondering. I can see how Jack is primarily motivated to forge connection with Mark William’s through his book. The symbiosis of influence and relationship is at work here for Jack, I suspect, and my original critique missed this entirely. Well, it would of course: it was critique. It was about closing down rather than inviting openness to possibility. Now I imagine that Jack could have ‘difficulties’ of an intellectual kind with Mark’s use of Hegel’s master/slave dialectic.

 

Because I am now imagining a new creative path to figuring out what is happening here, I can also see how Jack is connecting with Mark’s openness to learning in a way that leaves Mark feeling good about what he has achieved in producing this epilogue and his values in doing so. While my critique undermines this entire sense of connectivity that Jack is fostering, and in fact first time around I don’t even see it. This is the callous face of severance carried in traditional, male, white, western academic ‘colonial’ critique. And I have internalized this for so long. What I see happening here in this self-reflective re-composition is a process of de-colonizing of my self from the grip and thrall of the (traditional) Academy.

 

As I read Mark’s epilogue the flawed Hegelian dialectic is still writ large; my concern that Mark doesn’t seem to have ‘imagined’ the possibility of extant postcolonial accounts of the master/slave dialectic and that these might be more appropriate still vexes me. But I am able to see through my account of my own blindness (pages 2-5 above) to what could be Jack’s purpose in relating warmly to Mark’s inclusion of the master/slave aspect of Hegelian dialectic. And in doing this I can get much closer to human warmth in the expression of my embodied values of scholarship and of education as I get closer to what I imagine to be Mark’s ‘blind spot’. This blind spot doesn’t anger me, or frustrate me: it is my educational opportunity to draw on my postcolonial scholarship, and my commitment to an educative practice as I bring my ‘I’ as scholar-educator as a caring postcolonial resource to Mark’s learning, our learning, and my learning. Mark’s blind spot is the inversion of my own, surely?

 

In this way I can show how my response in this paper meets Marshall and Reason’s model of the research process as being for them (the western Academy and those who perpetuate Sheurich and Young’s [1997] notion of ‘epistemological racism’); for us (this ‘we’ that is meant to be collaborating together for the BERA symposium); and for me as I create a Living Theory account of my own postcolonial practice as a Self-Study of the scholar–educator, and in so doing contribute to a ‘new scholarship’, as Zeichner refers to the self-study of our teacher practice, of educational enquiry.

 

By reframing Mark’s choice of Hegelian dialectic and Jack’s excitement I can see that these choices are indicative of a form of amnesia, but also point to Scheurich and Young’s (1997) assertion, which parallels my experience in the Bath Action Research group and S-STEP communities, that scholars of ethnic and cultural backgrounds outside the dominant culture:

 

“…must learn and become accomplished in epistemologies that arise out of a social history that has been profoundly hostile to their race and that ignores or excludes alternative race-based epistemologies” (p.143)

 

Prior to 1999 I did not have access to the kind of writing, theorizing and thinking that expressed in theoretical and practical terms the same critical racial ontological, axiological and epistemological positions that I was tacitly aware of knowing and feeling and imagining. These new theories, and papers like Jim Scheurich’s that originated from critical theory and critical pedagogic traditions in educational enquiry, have inspired me to find my own voice and to create my own Living Theory account of my postcolonial educative practice.

 

Without the ‘ironic legitimacy’ provided by this alternative and out of mainstream theorizing I struggled to believe in what I tacitly held to be my ‘living truth’. Through a combination of ‘spectator truths’ formulated as theory, and through increasingly self-aware (if not self-study) papers about the experience of those with culturally different worldviews of knowledge being listened to in the academy, I would become very angry when I couldn’t express my self. As I accessed this new theorizing I would use it to beat up on those who had not had my Damascene experience of a new critical race scholarship. In this moment I would forget; I would become amnesiac. The forgetfulness associated with my (our) own habits of scholarship.

 

As a scholar-educator I have to work with students in new ways of thinking, in new forms of expression, in entirely new areas of knowledge and scholarship for them. I do find ways of expressing my care and responsibility for scholarship and education through patience, fidelity, tact, care, humour and I sustain this without becoming oppressive.

 

In this fourth – and final- response I hope that I have grounded my self in the quality of relationship that I feel in Asma’s loving warmth of humanity and her love for our family. This will enable me to revitalize how my response to Mark’s epilogue can be educational rather than traditionally academic.

 

Let me see if I can realize this wonderful opportunity to bring my self as a postcolonial scholar-educator resource for our learning.

 

Foremost as a living postcolonial scholar-educator I would ask why turn to Hegel for an axiom pertaining to the master/slave relationship when his writing is replete with indications of his own racism?

 

A second aspect that is significant in Mark's choice of Hegel is that while he could be authoritative on the 'master' dimension as a European, and most illuminating indeed on the dimension of slave exclusively (and excludingly) from the subject position of master, I cannot imagine how Hegel would have had anything but ignorant antipathy towards the slaves own accounts of their experience. Indeed he even closes this possibility off in suggesting that African, American and Asian people lack the consciousness of self and history to be considered human at all. As only humans have consciousness, the African/American/Asian people who were enslaved within colonialism, would not be conscious of their pain, humiliation and oppression. They could not produce a narrative of their experience. In fact they were culturally (and therefore spiritually?) unproductive, but very productive physically with the application of European/western organizing protocols.

Hegel’s lectures contain what I experience as racist references to “non-European peoples - Americans, Indians, Africans and Asians - are less human than Europeans because, to varying degrees, they are not fully aware of themselves as conscious, historical beings” (Eze, 1997: 109).

 

Now to my third aspect of significance: for a view on the master/slave dialectic as one characterized by dehumanizing violence from the ‘lived experience’ of the subject position of 'once were colonized, once were slaves', I imagine reference to Cesaire, Cabral, Du Bois, Fanon, Castro, Fusco, Ahmad, San Juan, Anzaldua, Minh-Ha, and the quintessential work of Said, Bhabha and Spivak who in turn draw upon Foucault, Derrida and Lacan, becomes essential. Why not turn to those writers whose work beckons us to the non-western canon of speaking truth to power about the master/slave dialectic, rather than to Georg Hegel whose truth is precisely the truth of racist, European power. Hegel is so interminably implicated in the Western canon that taking his ideas as the starting point for defining the master/slave dialectic is as ludicrous as taking neo-liberal economic analysis as the sole departure point for economic theory.  

 

My educational point here, held in that sense of a mutual availability for what the future may hold for Jack and me, and us, is that I want to influence Jack’s education [and yours] in respect of the incongruity for me as a postcolonialist of being presented with Hegel’s conceptualization of master/slave bondage when so many more authentic, non-racist commentators are available. These commentators would in my opinion have more invitational and inclusive appeal than Hegel, whose ideas lead me as a postcolonialist towards the severing action in closing my eyes, and removing my brownly faculty of patience and tolerance. My intention in this recomposed writing on this subject is to find ways to share this with Jack (and us all) from the grounds of the loving warmth of humanity and love that I bring to my relationships with Asma and my family and that permeate my educative practice. Rather than the icy blast of critique, I would like to bring the warm glow of the quality of relationship that Jack and I repeatedly craft and extend so that we can explore Jack’s unequivocal excitement for Mark’s epilogue, in a way that I don’t quite frankly, and Jack’s belief that this epilogue would excite us in our conjoint Symposium in which we present (and I imagine thus see ourselves) as postcolonial educators.

 

Putting this in another way: I want the critical edge in my writing to be subordinated thoroughly to that quality of inclusivity that I show in my face-to-face encounters.

 

Mark doesn't make his colonial/postcolonial boundaries clear enough for me. I would like to have been able to explain where I am coming from in relation to Mark’s epilogue. This is crucial to explain. Because it seems to me that I need to be aware, and to make Mark aware of how I read his epilogue from the perspective of the ‘epilogue I would have liked mark to write’ rather than allowing myself to enter an engagement with the epilogue that Mark has actually written. This is the problem of critique: it is often a vehicle for working out the paper one would have preferred to have read, or would have liked to have written themselves rather than engaging with what has been written from the author’s perspective. That said I would still like to have Mark’s explanation for choosing Hegel as a commentator on the master/slave relationship.

 

I would like to ask Mark if he feels vindicated in his choice of Hegel given the array of non-western writers who can speak differently about the master/slave relationship and concept of bondage.

 

I would also want to know if Mark believes Hegel’s abstract conceptualization has any correspondence with emancipatory practices and experiences of the colonized, of the enslaved, of those who have been indentured?

 

Of course I can see how the consciousness of impositional logic works to destroy others to affirm its own position, and how organization replicates master/slave dialectics in ‘forcing others to be our slaves’. But I fail to see the evidence in the contemporary world for the emancipatory and liberatory potential of options 3) a) and b) in Hegel’s framework.

 

Former slaves in the contemporary globalized world encounter more creative forms of Western enslavement and neo-colonialism. The new world order is the hegemony in which this takes place and Hegel’s work doesn’t begin to touch this truth. Old colonial spaces are newly enslaved by the boundaryless fluidity of globalized capital, while nation-state boundaries of Western countries become tighter and more rigid. The former slave is too busy fighting her own death. Starvation and massacres like that taking place in the Darfur region of Sudan at the moment plays to the political ambitions of the West. Where do we see today Hegel’s notion of the liberating possibility of freely recognizing the former master within interdependent economic, political, social and cultural cooperation as equals working itself out? Well, we don’t of course.

 

As I write this I feel the delightful tension of traditionalist critique held within the constrained and caring love of Marcel’s ‘mutual availability’. This is the nature of the world in which we, as living postcolonial theorists, are crafting our educative practice(s). This world doesn’t accord with Hegel’s notion of a ‘liberating possibility’. In engaging with Mark’s epilogue and his purpose in writing it, we should be mune to the challenges to our reason and experience that Mark’s epilogue represents.

 

So I imagine as a postcolonial theorist that Mark's Epilogue is addressed in 'some way' to me. 

 

Jack patched the three of us into Mark’s epilogue and this action alone heightens my postcolonial imagination and curiosity. I took the impression that Jack wanted me (us) to read Mark’s epilogue from a postcolonial gaze and to see something in it of relevance for our conjoint project. What is it that jack wanted us to see that I could be failing to see? At least in the spirit of our BERA symposium title and purposes, I feel that I should be open to the invitation and the hope in Jack’s invitation to read Mark’s epilogue. As postcolonialism and living theories are the glues that bind us in our Symposium, I would now want to reform my paper as a contribution to an exploration of a wonderful educative possibility. So here goes.

 

During the period 1822-8 Hegel produced a series of Lectures on the Philosophy of World History.

 

Imagine Hegel's pre-eminent situation within the social formation of Enlightenment scholarship; his sheer ability to impress and to influence his audiences, those likely to write and publish and to contribute to influential social, political and academic discourses of the day.

 

Hegel argues in this series of lectures, from what must be called a 'philosophical' point of view, that non-European peoples - Americans, Indians, Africans and Asians - are less human than Europeans because, to varying degrees, they are not fully aware of themselves as conscious, historical beings (Eze, 1997: 109).

 

What am I meant to make of Georg Hegel’s words? What could any postcolonialist make of Hegel’s words?

 

Now at this point I wonder why Jack is so excited by Mark’s Epilogue because it draws on Hegel the racist? My first reaction is to anger. But why, and I wonder who I am angry with? I suppose I am angry with my self for expecting so much and being let down. But how realistic is this? Why should I hold Jack responsible to my expectations in this way? Do I expect more of a friend and trusted eminent colleague, to see the kind of blemish on Hegel’s work that I do? But this is to assume that my postcolonial perspective on Hegel is the only one available.

 

As a scholar-educator I need to understand difference in terms of perspective and insight and assumption. This keeps open the possibility of talking about what it is that keeps us from agreement or consensus.

 

As I read this I imagine what 'they' of this phrase, the ‘they’ whom I love so deeply would make of such specious rant? What does Nceku Q think, feel and imagine as he reads this. [I now know. Nceku has given me feedback. His doctoral programme, which I hope to be attending from this September, has weekly political science and philosophy groups that explore ideas relevant to postcolonial theorizing. A recent academic working on a Palestinian NGO framed her enquiry in terms of “institutional theorizing” and ‘discourse analysis’. Through the agonistic commitment of the group, expressed by Q’s doctoral supervisor, they interrogated the established organisational theory academic in terms of why she had neglected to imagine that Postcolonial Theory would have been a most suitable theoretical perspective for her context and locale. It is this spirit of ‘immanent critique’ that continues to resonate for me. Somehow I contrast its opposite as the theoretical flaccidity of the Bath Monday group. I then unfairly project my anger and frustration onto that group. However, my projection of anger should not veil the underlying validity of my concern: that the group is anti-theoretical and thus is not a helpful place for many doctoral students. I speak in this way from the grounds of my own experience. Q’s feedback was clear: Hegel is not a likely source for exploring master/slave dialectics for postcolonial’s. I hope this helps me to convey my meanings to us all.]

 

As I read those words I imagine what my Griqua Grandma would have made of them?  As I read this I cringe with shame when I know very well what some of my English relatives would make of Hegel's confirmatory tone! As I read this I can imagine after 35 years of partnership what Asma makes of those words and my guilt rises that I've asked her to commit her life of work and relationship in Europe among such axiomatic and fundamentalist ideas. Reading those words I imagine what my sons make of them, and sadly know the answer, and in the spirit of the unknowable possibility of future I imagine my beautiful grandchildren and wonder what they will make of living within a Europe whose rationality and consciousness has been marked so indelibly by this kind of 'shitty philosophizing'. Hegel is not a shitty philosopher per se and I shall make my logic as clear in my thesis as I have tried to do in this email.   

 

The incalculable and unspoken damage that Hegel has done for sowing the seed of racist superiority within the epoch of the embedding of Enlightenment in the West is awesome. And Hegel is not alone among his peers. 

 

David Hume wrote, "Negroes...naturally inferior to the whites', in his paper 'Of the Populousness of Ancient Nations'.

 

Immanuel Kant wrote, "This fellow was quite black...a clear proof that what he said was stupid', in his paper 'On the Different Races of Man'.

 

It was as if there was a community of philosophical practice among these Enlightenment scholars of the Western Academy that was indelibly racist.

 

Perhaps very little has actually changed.

 

But at least writing my thesis into this Academy is one more step towards the demise of that particular canon. For I am writing to bury Hegel, not to praise him. How can I refer to these people as the fathers of my thought: they are anything but that for anything other than that for a non-western scholar-educator. These men are not my intellectual or founding philosophical fathers. They are unable to speak of ‘liberatory and emancipatory’ possibilities available to my biological father given his experiences of apartheid and then of British racism as a brown Mixed Race man. This is living postcolonial philosophy in an altogether different paradigmatic hue.  

 

Yes, the postmodern French scholars will appear in my citations for my thesis; but never will I cite - other than for the purposes of criticizing - the work of this heinously white European community of racist philosophical practice. My canon is non-western: this is the measure of my coming of age as a scholar and educator, a claim that is an axiom of my doctoral thesis. Can you imagine the originality of mind and critical judgement required to make this statement AND substantiate it dialectically in one's thesis? Yes, I do believe that you can   

 

Now move beyond imagining this possibility and into the text itself: a British scholar-educator's contribution to an alternative, fluid, non-core and non-western text 

 

The scholar as contributor to a non-western canon; the extent of my knowledge is held in my conscious articulation of who I am and who I am not as scholar and educator. My practice of critical pedagogy is the pedagogisation of my own living postcolonial theory. The ultimate severance of slave from master.

 

I disagree with Hegel's point about the slave emerging emancipated. It is far too abrupt, discrete, and this is simplistic. There is rather an emergence of freedom over time that isn't linear but stutters, that is tentative, and that moves at different speeds across different fronts for different peoples, and for different experiences of colonization and independence. Above all postcolonial emancipation and liberatory potential has been altered irrevocably in the wake of the Recolonization of Iraq (Ali, 2004). And I call this fitful, unequal, globalising emergence from the master/slave relationship 'postcolonialism'; from which I aspire to a Post-Race inclusive humanity.

 

This is where my scholarship as an educator is pointing me, and in turn I point other educators to this possibility through writing and sharing my doctoral thesis of my scholarship as an educator. 

 

By harking back to Hegel, Mark's statement in respect of the master-slave dialectic seems to me to be a gross missing of the point of it all.  Firstly, I implicitly distrust Georg Hegel. Secondly, I can't imagine that Hegel's analysis was anything other than an analysis of pre-capitalist modes of economic and cultural subject positions in Europe given his Eurocentricity to which I've alluded above, and thus his analysis wasn't in any sense an 'inclusive' beckoning of the emancipation and liberation of the 'master-slave' subject positions that were at that time (and beyond) propping up the European colonial and imperial projects in Africa and Asia.  As we know, postcolonialism is a contested theoretical theatre: or should be. So this cannot be the end of this story.

 

Mark's epilogue does not speak to me as a compellingly powerful statement about the liberatory potential from the master-slave relationship in terms of my educational standards of judgement as a living postcolonial educator.

 

So as a living postcolonial scholar-educator I want Mark and Jack to know why I am less than enthusiastic about Mark’s Epilogue (as it stands) from my perspective as a postcolonial thinker, but I can see how his emancipatory and liberatory project has a clear resonance in our common humanity, and it is this that I would like to be open to.

 

Mark’s question resonates for me here,

 

“Can one talk of these values in a doctoral thesis and thus join a body of people whose task it is to support such endeavours? That is our hope.”

 

I think this is a good, wholesome and credible hope to guide by. I think that my paper and my emergent doctoral thesis hold the kinds of values that are central to the process whereby (my) consciousness recognizes other consciousnesses. I show in this paper how in do this in ways that are not held in an impositional, oppressive, and totalizing logic, and that contributes to a new scholarship of educational inquiry as I pedagogise my living postcolonial theory as an educative practice of the self as a scholar-educator working within the inclusive of relationship with others. In this my thesis will be a contribution to the quest for inclusive well-being (Prozesky, 1999).

 

Coming to see how my thesis is a wonderful contribution that can connect with people’s openness to learning is crucial to my development as a living postcolonial scholar educator. By ensuring connection instead of the severance of critique I could leave others feeling good about their own achievements and values while drawing them into a creative engagement with my own living postcolonial achievements and values as a scholar–educator.

 

Mark's epilogue can be found by following,

http://www.actionresearch.net//mwEPILOGUE.htm

 

4^nd iteration August 10th, 2004 – Paulus J M Murray