Session Information
Contribution
"For the passion of my eyes": Governmentality and subaltern resistance in the introduction of English Education in Colonial Cyprus, 1878-1901. In her recent book Imagining the Modern: The Cultures of Nationalism in Cyprus, anthropologist Rebecca Bryant (2004) argues that disciplinary mechanisms of surveillance and control were not used by the British colonial administration in Cyprus for purposes of domination and control but were used, instead, by the Greek Schools in order to inculcate patriotic morality and produce national subjects: "in contrast to the individualistic micro-physics of power that Foucault describes, both the enactment of legislation and the forms of surveillance and punishment in Cyprus were written around the assumption of Cypriot's corporate nature." In a critical review of the book, Cypriot sociologist Marios Constantinou (2005) attacks Bryant for co-opting postcolonial theoretical tools and subduing them to the postimperial imaginary of neo-colonialism. Reiterating the same tactics fashioned by Toni Morrison in Reading in the Dark(1993) in order to decolonize the literary imaginary, Constantinou marks out both the non-narrated absences in Bryant's anthropology. "Why," he asks, "did Bryant not survey the sadistic authority and leadership complex of the coloniser in the first place, and then account for the Greek-Cypriot displacement of physical and affective misery toward Turkish-Cypriots? This lapse of critical reason to reflect sufficiently on the mental ruins left behind by colonial tyranny, equipped with inquisitorial psychotechnic apparatuses, puts the colonised continually under erasure." This paper reviews this recent development in order to revisit one of the central debates in postcolonial theory, that is, tracing native voices of anti-colonial resistance in liberation struggles and manifesting their authenticity against the colonial corpus (Bennita Parry) vs. critiquing the "nativist" quest for authentic native voices as a recapitulation of orientalism and anchoring the reading of anti-colonial resistance, instead, in the ambivalence and ruptures of the colonial text (Homi Bhabha, Gayatri Spivak). This paper critiques both Bryant's "exonerative anthropology" and Constantinou's romanticization of nationalist indoctrination and rote memorization of Classical Greek education as "defiant classicism apropos of postcolonial modernity," a stagnant and motionless resistance operating as a reaction-formation to colonial haughtiness and cocksure imperial narcissism."I argue that despite their different readings of Greek nationalist education, both Bryant and Constantinou understand colonial rule as a form of oppressive, systematic and purposive power, exercised from 'above' to 'below' and aiming at cultural assimilation and subordination. To this understanding of colonial rule, I juxtapose a different reading of colonial power based on Michel Foucault latest work on governmentality (Burchell, Gordon and Miller 1991). I focus on the field of English education, with particular emphasis on the introduction of the Teaching of English for voluntary government clerks, during the first two decades of colonial rule. Challenging the national Greek Cypriot "grand narrative" of colonial resistance against the ruler's "demonic" plans for "de-hellenization" and "agglicization" of education, my research in the state archives reveals that Turkish and Greek Cypriots enthusiastically subscribed to the idea of learning English, for the fear of having their temporary posts or opportunities of promotion terminated. My reading focuses particularly on a series of letters exchanged between Cypriot government employees and Colonial administrators before and after the contact of the first official examination in English languages (September 4-5, 1901). In these letters, the "pupils" express the desire to be included among the select few who will attend the English classes the classes (before the exam) or excuse their failure to show up for the examination (as ordered) by pathologizing their oriental culture (in the first case) or by pathologizing their bodies and "pupils" as weak instruments of such an intensive learning. In my reading of these letters I explain how the exercise of colonial power interlocks with the construction of the desiring (and confessing) subaltern subject to produce a network of power relations, what Foucault calls the microphysics of power. Bryant's search for panoptica of surveillance and objectification of the "examined self" fails her to locate this other form of colonial power, the production of subjects through the "conduct of contact" (Deam 1999): the production and articulation of desires, fears and expectations. At the same time, Constantinou's romantic preoccupation with motionless (against assimilation) and immobilizing (for the student's mind) classical education fails him to see other kinds of resistance: the subaltern's ability to describe his/her hailing by these operation of power.Bhabha, H. (1985) Sly Civility. October 34. Bryant, R. (2004) Imagining the Modern: The Cultures of Nationalism in Cyprus (London: I. B. Tauris). Burchell, G. et al. (1991) The Foucault Effect. Studies in Governmentality (Chicago: Chicago University Press). Costantinou, M. (2005) Reckoning with Anthropology's Replotting of Narratives of Liberal Colonialism: A Counter-Narrative of Insurrection Beckoning to the Decolonisation of Reason. Cyprus Review 17.1. Dean, M. (1994) Governmentality: Power and Rule in Modern Society (London: Sage Publications Press.) Gregoriou, Z. (2004) De-scribing hybridity in 'unspoiled Cyprus': postcolonial tasks for the theory of education. Comparative Education 40.2. Morrison, T. (1993) Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination (New York: Vintage). Spivak, G. (1994) Can the Subaltern Speak? in Colonial Discourse and Post-Colonial Theory, ed. and introduction by Patrick Williams and Laura Chrisman (New York: Columbia University Press). Spivak, G. (1999). A Critique of Postcolonial Reason: Toward a History of the Vanishing Present (Boston: Harvard Unpostcolonial criticism and discourse analysis document analysis (state archives) connections between forms of colonial hegemory and forms of governmentality in (a)life-long education and (b) capitalization of the non-knowledge of English in the global economy of higher education Bhabha, H. (1985) Sly Civility. October 34. Bryant, R. (2004) Imagining the Modern: The Cultures of Nationalism in Cyprus (London: I. B. Tauris). Burchell, G. et al. (1991) The Foucault Effect. Studies in Governmentality (Chicago: Chicago University Press). Costantinou, M. (2005) Reckoning with Anthropology's Replotting of Narratives of Liberal Colonialism: A Counter-Narrative of Insurrection Beckoning to the Decolonisation of Reason. Cyprus Review 17.1. Dean, M. (1994) Governmentality: Power and Rule in Modern Society (London: Sage Publications Press.) Gregoriou, Z. (2004) De-scribing hybridity in 'unspoiled Cyprus': postcolonial tasks for the theory of education. Comparative Education 40.2. Morrison, T. (1993) Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination (New York: Vintage). Spivak, G. (1994) Can the Subaltern Speak? in Colonial Discourse and Post-Colonial Theory, ed. and introduction by Patrick Williams and Laura Chrisman (New York: Columbia University Press). Spivak, G. (1999). A Critique of Postcolonial Reason: Toward a History of the Vanishing Present (Boston: Harvard University Press)
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