Resisting Americanism: The Tall Order of Fostering Transnational Identities and Activism

• In Event: 35.051 - Exploring Pedagogies of Resistance: Auto-Ethnographies on Initiatives to Promote Activism

Abstract

This presentation is based on my teaching of two doctoral seminars entitled Social Justice and Research as Resistance and like most of the presentations in this session I draw from a journal I keep on my teaching.  While both courses also have components that address the US, the objective of this particular paper is to focus on my efforts to foster a transnational sensibility and subsequent student responses to these efforts.  My pedagogy in this regard is motivated by my own involvement in the South Asian peace movement, the transnational Third World women’s movement, and the transnational labor movement. In scholarly terms, I draw impetus from decolonial and postcolonial feminisms (see Asher, 2017) and recent theorizing on transnationalism and pedagogy (see, for instance, Shefer, et al, 2018). Students' learning of the transnational component of the course can be laid out on a continuum: some barely shift from their American identity, others internalize a sense of connection with the global society in all its disparities, others understand how these disparities represent a coloniality of power that are a legacy of colonialism and thereby begin to comprehend how neo-colonialism and persistent imperialism structure these disparities, and then there are a few who develop a transnational identity that understands US complicity with neo-liberalism and imperialism and actually want to either develop career trajectories that involve engaging with these issues or create an activist part of their lives that address these issues.  This has meant that a few students have started to devote their dissertation projects on the effects of neo-liberal policies in various parts of the world, while a few others have become anti-war and anti-capitalist activists.  Of course, there are a couple of students who are doing project in the Third World in order to ‘save them’ as good Americans. These students are especially interested in women’s issues. I will also share the range of somewhat contradictory strategies I utilize, from getting the students to deconstruct their American identity to make them aware of their duties as taxpayers to ask for accountability. My work is of particular significance in that it adds a nuanced account of teaching transnational activism to a slowly evolving body of literature on the topic, especially from a perspective that privileges the global South or the Third World.

Author

• Lubna N. Chaudhry, Binghamton University - SUNY