Racialization of Asia, Africa, and Americas and the Construction of the Ideal Iranian Citizen: Local and Global Representations of Colonialism, Geography, Culture, and Religious Diversity in Iranian School Textbooks

• In Event: Roundtable Session 29
  In Roundtable Session: Decolonizing Official Knowledge and Social Studies Curriculum in Iran, Africa, Asia, and the Americas

Abstract

This paper deconstructs the 2004 and earlier editions of Iranian school textbooks for how official knowledge about the ideal Iranian citizen, Africa, Asia, and the Americas is represented. I focus on four main educational themes of identity politics, diversity, citizenship, and development. I maintain that these textbooks do not offer holistic, emancipatory, and inclusive accounts of diversity. I argue that school knowledge differentiates between groups and nations through the invocation of racialized, nation-centric, and xenophobic discourses. I highlight the various forms of absent and present discourses and categories of otherness that are employed in simultaneously constructing an image of the ideal citizen and national identity that ends up dominating and erasing these multiple forms of global otherness.

Author

• Amir Mirfakhraie, Kwantlen Polytechnic University