Robert Aman

Bridging the gap to those who lack: intercultural education in the light of modernity and the shadow of coloniality

Academic courses on interculturality have become a rapidly growing discipline in the West, where supranational bodies such as the European Union and UNESCO promote intercultural education as a path towards improved global cultural relations. Through interviews with students who completed a university course on interculturality, this essay investigates the tenets of interculturality and problematises whether this discourse merely reproduces a classificatory logic embedded in modernity that insists on differences among cultures. The argument put forward is that in the analysed context, interculturality tends to reproduce the very colonial ideas that it seeks to oppose. In doing so, interculturality reinforces the collective ‘we’ as the location of modernity by deciding who is culturally different and who is in a position that must be bridged to the mainstream by engaging in intercultural dialogue.

The EU and the Recycling of Colonialism: Formation of Europeans through intercultural dialogue

The present essay focuses on problematizing the European Unions claim that intercultural dialogue constitutes an advocated method of talking through cultural boundaries—inside as well as outside the classroom—based on mutual empathy and non‐domination. More precisely, the aim is to analyze who is being constructed as counterparts of the intercultural dialogue through the discourse produced by the EU in policies on education, culture and intercultural dialogue. Within the Union, Europeans are portrayed as having an a priori historical existence, while the ones excluded from this notion are evoked to demonstrate its difference in comparison to the European one. The results show that subjects not considered as Europeans serve as markers of the multicultural present of the space. Thus, intercultural dialogue seems to consolidate differences between European and Other—the ‘We’ and ‘Them’ in the dialogue—rather than, as in line with its purpose, bringing subjects together.

The Double Bind of Interculturality and the Implications for Education

This paper explores the ways in which boundaries of estrangement are produced in the academic literature assigned for courses on interculturality. As the existence of interculturality is dependent on the ascription of content to culture – since the notion, by definition, always involves more than one singular culture – this essay seeks to provide an answer to the question of what this literature, implicitly or otherwise, defines in terms of sameness vis-à-vis otherness, and thereby to chart the conditions for becoming intercultural. This question is especially important because the self in interculturality has to be, in principle, generalizable: it should signify a position available for occupation by anybody with proper training in this approach. Starting from the assumption that different experiences, languages and identities, already intersect and are indeed already intercultural before being subjected to study under the auspices of ‘interculturality’ as an educational topic, the essay goes on to problematize the way in which interculturality tends to construe sameness and difference along national lines and does little to cater for multiple, as opposed to national, or other unified, identities.

Education and other modes of thinking in Latin America

If the production of knowledge in Latin America has long been subject to imperial designs and disseminated through educational systems, recent interventions —from liberation theology, popular educa ...

Colonial Differences in Intercultural Education: On Interculturality in the Andes and the Decolonization of Intercultural Dialogue

This article pushes for the possibility of alternative ways of thinking about the concept of interculturality depending on where and by whom it is being articulated (the geopolitics and body politic of knowledge). To illustrate this, the focus is shifted away from the policies of the European Union and UNESCO to the Andean region of Latin America where the notion of interculturalidad is not only a subject on the educational agenda but has also become a core component of indigenous social movements’ demands for decolonization. Part of the argument of this article is that interculturalidad, with its roots in the historical experience of colonialism and in the particular, rather than in assertions of universality, offers a perspective on interculturality that relies on other epistemologies. It concludes by arguing that interculturality should be seen as interepistemic rather than simply intercultural.

Why Interculturalidad is not Interculturality: Colonial remains and paradoxes in translation between indigenous social movements and supranational bodies

Interculturality is a notion that has come to dominate the debate on cultural diversity among supranational bodies such as the European Union (EU) and the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) in recent years. The EU goes so far as to identify interculturality as a key cultural and linguistic characteristic of a union which, it argues, acts as an inspiration to other parts of the world. At the same time, the very notion of interculturality is a core component of indigenous movements in the Andean region of Latin America in their struggles for decolonization. Every bit as contingent as any other concept, it is apparent that several translations of interculturality are simultaneously in play. Through interviews with students and teachers in a course on interculturality run by indigenous alliances, my aim in this essay is to study how the notion is translated in the sociopolitical context of the Andes. With reference points drawn from the works of Walter Mignolo and the concept of delinking, I will engage in a discussion about the potential for interculturality to break out of the prison-house of colonial vocabulary – modernization, progress and salvation – that lingers on in official memory. Engagement in such an interchange of experiences, memories and significations provides not only recognition of other forms of subjectivity, knowledge systems and visions of the future, but also a possible contribution to an understanding of how any attempt to invoke a universal reach for interculturality, as in the case of the EU and UNESCO, risks echoing the imperial order that the notion in another context attempts to overcome.

When the Phantom became an anticolonialist: socialist ideology, Swedish exceptionalism, and the embodiment of foreign policy

ABSTRACT The Phantom, an American comic about a superhero of British heritage set in a fictional African country, is held in high esteem elsewhere, regarded as a national institution in Australia, New Zealand and much of Scandinavia. Since the early 1960s, officially licensed scripts have been produced by the Swedish-based scriptwriters of ‘Team Fantomen’ who today remain the major suppliers of adventures to the Phantom comics around the world. This essay suggests that this shift in the scripts’ geographical origin also altered the politics of the comic: in the hands of Team Fantomen, the masked hero is instilled with political doctrines reflected in Swedish foreign policy during the late 1960s and early 1970s. This ideological shift means that the masked hero moves away from the role of colonialist fantasy prevalent in the American scripts to become a supporter of decolonisation, social justice and equality. The Phantom becomes an avatar of democratic socialist ideology, the episodes offering a direct commentary on Sweden’s perception of its own role in the world as a leading proponent of international solidarity.

Genuine multiculturalism: the tragedy and comedy of diversity

Cecil Foster, in his latest opus, is a man on a mission. His quest is to save multiculturalism from multiculturalism – or, as he argues, from the degenerate versions of multiculturalism that share ...