Colonizing Curriculum Analyzed Through Absurdity, Satire, and Par/Desi Tenets: A Transnational, De/colonial, Global Perspective

• In Event: South Asians in/and America: Engaging Solidarities, Specificities, and Intersections in Educational Research in Troubled Times

Abstract

Purpose
A colonizing curriculum is one where ideas of the Empire proliferate and take effect into consciousness and in the lives of colonized subjects. This colonizing curriculum can exist in once colonized nations as well as in settler colonized states, never stable, always responsively morphing into exaggerated oppressive stances so that an agenda of erasure of heritage, cultural and ancestral knowledge, self-oppression, and discipline and surveillance is maintained. In this paper, I explore the influence of a colonized curriculum using de/colonial, transnational, South Asian ontoepistemologies.

Perspectives
Since 2005, I have been writing de/coloniality (Author, 2005) with a slash because it denotes a movement between surviving and resistance, imagination of a utopian state of freedom and engaging in anti-oppressionist actions in the present. De/coloniality then creates productive tentacles of tensions that can be mapped and traced into possibilities (Author, 2018). To engage in this form of tracing, I crafted an ontoepistemic framework (Author, 2019) grounded in South Asian sensibilities, which I termed as Par/Des(i) to denote the movement, tension, and fluidity between one’s relationship to the parochial home state (Des or Desh) and the migrated land (Pardes) and all its associated oppressive and liberatory agendas. Desi refers to people of South Asian heritage, who migrated to various parts of the world, whereas Pardesi refers to those whose heritage is not connected to South Asia. Par/Des(i) tries to explore the blurred space between these binaries, liminalities, and the (im)possibilities produced in movement between multiple states of consciousness. I created six tenets to explore the (im)possibilities of Par/Des(i) ontoepistemologies, which are:
i) Re-membering desh (or des)
ii) Par/Des(i): The more desirable Other?
iii) Home as permanently deferred
iv) Beloved and problematic communities
v) Commodification of multiculturalism and diversity
vi) Communal healing as our priority.

These ideas are originally influenced by the works of Mohanty (2004), Anzaldúa (2015), and Smith (1999/2012, 2005) where centering one’s cultural agenda remained the primary goal. However, for this symposium, I specifically focus on a de/colonial children’s literature author, Sukumar Ray (1921/2018), from India, whose subversive liberatory agenda was grounded in satire that had whimsy, playfulness, absurdity, and imagery.

Methods
Using the tenets of Par/Desi framework applied to one of Sukumar Ray’s poems, Bapuram Shapure, (Bapuram, the Snake Charmer), I analyze the anatomy of a colonizing curriculum in the poem, within the colonizing educational structure in India, and put such colonization in dialogue with the colonizing curriculum in educational research in the U.S. In doing so I conduct a historiography of oppression and make the interconnected anatomy of privileges visible nationally, transnationally, and globally.
Significance
Using a Par/Desi framework, I demonstrate the role of national, transnational, and global colonizing curriculum in our consciousness and materiality. Thus, the argument can be made that if our oppression is interconnected, so should our liberation be, forging solidarities with other communities with similar agendas. Such agendas need not be formed only through resistance but also through utopian imagination of absurdity, play, and whimsy, something that is spirit nurturing instead of spirit draining.

Author

• Kakali Bhattacharya, University of Florida