Decolonization and Metaphor: Edward Said, Geopolitics, and Teachers as Amateur Intellectuals

• In Event: Toward Decolonizing and Culturally Responsive Pedagogies

Abstract

In an insightful essay claiming that decolonization is not a metaphor, Tuck and Yang (2012) argue that colonialism’s material, territorial nature is obscured when decolonization is deployed as a linguistic or discursive convenience. This established, colonialism and its unseating through a decolonial pedagogy, saturates every aspect of colonial society, including metaphor. In other words, the regime of metaphor available in a colonial state are by and large part of the colonial enterprise. As used here, metaphor is not only a rhetorical device or literary conceit but the proper relationship between material reality and its representation. Thus, a decolonial pedagogy must come to terms with this relation and decolonization is precisely that form of education that reconstitutes a student’s learning and subjectivity regarding the practice of representation. Beginning with the now classic text, Orientalism (1979), Edward Said’s work is a powerful example that synthesizes metaphor and materiality, which avoids reducing discourse to vulgar materialism and the material to the status of a trope within linguistic idealism. This presentation extends the work on culturally relevant pedagogy (e.g., see Geneva Gay, 2000) by highlighting the offerings of Said’s decolonizing methodology (having been credited with inaugurating postcolonial analysis, notwithstanding). Extending Giroux’s (1988) project to reconstruct “teachers as intellectuals,” Said’s urging turns us toward “teachers as amateur intellectuals” when he redefines intellectuals as educators against the imperial project of expertise, the hallmark of orientalist discourse. As such, decolonization entails taking a critical look at the will to expertise that enabled colonial writers to obscure their geo-political conditioning in exchange for problematic claims (sometimes with the help of “science”) about universal knowledge regarding places like the Orient. As amateurs and novices, teachers as decolonial intellectuals are key agents in forging a new relationship with metaphor currently underdeveloped in culturally relevant pedagogy.

Author

• Zeus Leonardo, University of California - Berkeley