VISUAL CULTURAL PRACTICES OF POSTCOLONIAL ELITE SCHOOLS IN GLOBALIZING CIRCUMSTANCES

Abstract

In this article the author reports on the matter of the contemporary management and conservation of histories in the visual domains of three postcolonial elite school sites: Old Cloisters in Barbados, Rippon College in India, and Straits School in Singapore. These schools form part of a 5-year, 9-country study of postcolonial elite schools in globalizing circumstances—a flash point of articulation between these schools and profound change. The article turns on this fundamental fact: that these schools, which are the products of societies marked historically by British colonial and imperial encounters of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries and the first half of the twentieth, are now driven forward by new energies associated with marketization, neoliberalism and globalization as these countries lurch forward unevenly towards a postdevelopmental era. This turn towards neoliberal globalization has precipitated radically new needs, interests, desires, capacities and competitive logics among the middle class and upwardly mobile young and their parents in each of these societies that then press powerfully onto these elite schools, and their cultivated pasts as they reside in school anthems, flags, emblems, banners and rituals of assembly, formal dress and decorum. All of this is taking place in the glow of digitalization as these schools increasingly move online locating themselves in photo and video-sharing websites such as YouTube, Facebook and Flicker as well as websites that each individual school is creating to consecrate school heritage. In what follows, then, the author calls attention to the theoretical significance and practical dimensions of the work that these select schools are doing on their rich heritages and historical archives in response to the new demands of globalization and transforming educational markets.