12
CHAPTER 1
political solutions that ‘fit’ their social position. This means that political activism has become, in effect, a lifestyle choice.
z z Third, classical ideologies have been subjected to greater critical scrutiny as a result of the trend towards ‘decolonizing the curriculum’. This has been reflected not only in the increasing significance of postcolonialism (see pp. 227–9), but also in the reappraisal of key political thinkers such as Immanuel Kant (see p. 23). Closely associated with Enlightenment thinking and ‘ universalist ’ claims about our rights and obligations, Kant’s
Universalism: The belief that it is possible to uncover certain values and principles that are applicable to all people and all societies, regardless of historical, cultural and other differences.
POLITICAL IDEOLOGIES IN ACTION . . . DECOLONIZING THE CURRICULUM EVENTS: In March 2015, the first protests took place in the student-led Rhodes Must Fall campaign. The campaign was initially directed against a statue at the University of Cape Town that commemorated Cecil Rhodes, the British mining magnate and prime minister of Cape Colony from 1890 to 1896. Although the statue was removed in April 2015, the protest movement spread to other universities, both within South Africa and elsewhere in the world. The Rhodes Must Fall in Oxford campaign called on Oriel College, Oxford University, to take down the statue of Rhodes that sits overlooking the High Street, but this demand was rejected in January 2016. The protesters objected to the statues on the grounds that they glorified a man who was an architect of apartheid and had been deeply implicated in the racist and bloody history of British colonialism. SIGNIFICANCE: The Rhodes Must Fall protests were linked to the wider goal of ‘decolonizing the curriculum’. The term decolonization usually refers to the post-World War II dismantlement of the Europeancolonial empires. Inthis context, however, it refers to the process through which the cultural and ideological legacy of colonial rule is challenged, especially in the realm of education. Commonly called ‘decolonizing the mind’, this involves interrogating the attitudes and assumptions that have sustained racial and civilizational hierarchies and broadening our intellectual vision to include a wider range of perspectives. For many, this requires that the under-representation of people of colour and other marginalized groups in the arena of scholarship is rectified, ending the domination of ‘male, pale and stale’ voices.
Those who argue that the decolonization agenda urgently needs to be applied to political ideologies claim that, as a product of the Enlightenment, ideology is intrinsically a part of the Western intellectual tradition, so separating it from non- Western cultures (Chinese, Indian, African, Islamic and so on). Such thinking is consolidated by the tendency of liberalism to operate as an ideology of Western domination. Not only do liberals insist that their values and institutions are universally applicable, and are therefore destined to prevail worldwide, but significant omissions (such as those about the brutal and exploitative nature of colonial rule and the racist assumptions that this rule was based upon) conceal the darker side of liberal hegemony. Nevertheless, over time, political ideologies have been increasingly effective in giving expression to non-Western (and sometimes anti- Western) views and voices. In the post-WorldWar II period, this was evident in the emergence of African socialism, Arab socialism and Chinese communism. More recently, it has occurred through the rise of, for example, postcolonial nationalism, pluralist multiculturalism (see pp. 237–8) and various forms of religious fundamentalism (see Chapter 12).
Powered by FlippingBook