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By Jeff Pierce, 22 October 2009 15:47

My studies and life are intersecting in a fascinating way. I have no idea if I can articulate how, but here’s a first attempt.

My Studies

Is it weird that I love this book?

A long awaited Amazon shipment arrived last week, and I’ve started reading through material for my Master’s course on Multiculturalism in Education. First up, “English and the Discourses of Colonialism”, by Alastair Pennycook, 1998. A fascinating discussion on how English language and policies in East Asia intersect with colonialism, from an Australian who taught for some time at the universities in Hong Kong.

Sound bite takeaway from the first sixty pages: the past is not so simple, and the present is not so complex.

In Pennycook’s own words on page 29:

“…there is a tendency to view colonial history as a simple tale of old-fashioned bigotries which are very different from the complex liberalisms of the present……[the simple image of the colonizer leads to] an inability to see that discourses of the present may have direct lineages to the colonial past”.

This quote is challenging what I thought I knew and changing what I think about as I walk through the city.

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My Cosmopolitan (Neocolonial?) Life

Lung Wah

Last Friday, I had dinner at Lung Wah Hotel – an institution in the Sha Tin district of Hong Kong. Their specialty, roast pigeon. I ate it by ripping apart the bird with my bare hands. An amazing meal. After dinner I attended an event celebrating Spanish National Day. A live band and over a dozen professional tango dancers performed in a sold out concert hall.

To finish off the night I came home and watched the final episode of Noble House. A young Pierce Brosnan stars in an adaptation of James Clavell’s novel. Horrendously stereotyped Americans, British, and Chinese parade through an amalgamation of key events from the past forty years of Hong Kong history, spouting proverbs and sweeping statements about Asian and Western differences when it comes to love and rivalry.

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Can my own life be that far away from the White Man’s Burden? Am I cosmopolitan or am I just reliving, reenacting, reinforcing the tropes of colonialism? Can I draw a line connecting the recognized evils of colonialism through the admittedly racist and patronizing attitudes of the 20th century to my life and work today?

I don’t know if this is the kind of question that has a clear answer. It is definitely one to reflect on for some time.

A final quote from Pennycook, page 50:

“Thus, although in its language and style we may find nineteenth and early twentieth century writing distant and fairly amusing, I want to argue for the need to take it very seriously and to seek the connections with more recent views on language, culture and race.”

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Coming up – Pennycook writes about how language policies relate to colonial power. I know that will relate in many ways to my work as a teacher at an English medium of instruction school!

Comments (1)

By Jeff Pierce, 20 July 2009 08:58

It’s gotta be said, the stereotype of the Ivory Tower, that academics are lost in their research and out of touch with reality, exists for a reason.

The first week the fact that I was in a completely different realm hit home when I received the following handout:

The Rainbow of Confusion

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After some time to adjust I have found that I enjoy the challenges that this “Ivory Tower” brings with it. But at first there was culture shock.

To be frank, out of the dozen or so professors I have heard speak, a few of them spout out loads of rubbish, or (in American), they are full of bullshit.

But the professors are aware of it. In the first week, we heard the following in a lecture:

“Now when you are using a questionnaire or a survey to get data from students, you need be careful. Sometimes you get invalid results when you have subjects who are cognitively or linguistically challenged…[there is a pause, and then Prof X starts to laugh at herself]…I mean, students who can’t read very well!”

And then Professor Y opened the course on Multilingual and Multicultural Education with a lecture full of crazy new words…”degustation”, “bilinguality”, “equilingualism”, “plurilingualism”, “triskadekalingualism”, etc. (Okay one of those I made up.) But then he recognized how verbose he was being and ironically described it using more of the same sorts of language:

“I don’t speak this way at home to my wife. I am adopting an academic register, using vocabulary that I don’t use outside of this linguistic domain, this context.”

But it can be sort of infectious. At the end of the first week, when I was explaining my research proposal to my classmates, there was the following exchange.

Me: “…so one reason I am concerned about that approach to collecting the data is that it might not be very efficacious.”

Sitting to my right, SC shakes his head, “Huh?”

“It wouldn’t work.”

Does this look as nerdy to you as it does to me? Academia. Sigh. But coming up: the bright side of it.