Engaging with the cultural ‘other’: The ‘colonial signature’ and learning from intercultural engagements

Simon Hoult

doi:10.14324/ijdegl.12.2.03

Abstract

In this article, the idea of the ‘colonial signature’ is advanced as a potentially pivotal response to triggers that deepen or act as barriers to intercultural learning. From a postcolonial positioning, empirical data is then examined to consider the responses to intercultural-learning triggers of 14 UK-based student teachers on a study visit to India specifically through an analysis of their reflective writing and interviews. Participants’ responses to varied triggers became significant colonial signatures to their intercultural learning. The learning deepened where responses were reflexive and articulated with reference to the global powerbase that underpins study visits to the Global South. Where responses to triggers provoked more shallow comparisons with home, the colonial signatures resulted in closed-down discussion, thus acting as a barrier to further learning. This has implications not only for study visits, but also, more widely, for the approach to global learning.

Highlights

Study visits involving university students, often from the Global North to the Global South, have increasingly become part of the student experience in higher education since the 2010s (Jackson and Oguro, 2017)
This signature acts as a conduit or inhibiter – and, at times, both – to our intercultural learning through some two-way connection between the location of the study visit in the Global South and home in the Global North
I used the narratives to deepen my understanding of the potential of the colonial signature as a feature of intercultural learning

Summary

Introduction

Study visits involving university students, often from the Global North to the Global South, have increasingly become part of the student experience in higher education since the 2010s (Jackson and Oguro, 2017). I propose that our colonial signature is a personally significant response to a signifier of language, symbols, products or other images This signature acts as a conduit or inhibiter – and, at times, both – to our intercultural learning through some two-way connection between the location of the study visit in the Global South and home in the Global North. A colonial signature may be a significant means for study visit participants to relate their experiences to home Such a connection is potentially made in the context of global power differentials between North and South, and as an influence upon the nature of the relationships made with the cultural ‘other’. I am rather more hopeful for the colonial signature than Said, Bhabha and Hook’s view of the median category, notwithstanding the potential for it to become stereotypical Such a signature could be underpinned by fetish, fixity and anxiety, which dupes, provides unreliable readings and disturbs our intercultural learning. Our signatures potentially provide a conduit for readjusting our perceptions of self/‘other’ and epistemological and, perhaps, ontological change

Research methodology

Discussion

Notes on the contributor