Week 10: Jacqui Alexander, “Whose New World Order?

“New World Order” “We have before us the opportunity to forge for ourselves and for future generations a new world order -- a world where the rule of law, not the law of the jungle, governs the conduct of nations. When we are successful -- and we will be -- we have a real chance at this new world order, an order in which a credible United Nations can use its peacekeeping role to fulfill the promise and vision of the U.N.'s founders.”
George Bush – President of the United States 1989-1993
Address to the Nation January 16, 1991<br>

Four ingredients of the new world order were outlined In George Bush’s 1991 State of Union message, he called upon the world to fulfill the long-held promise of a new world order, where brutality will go unrewarded and aggression will meet a collective resistance. The new world order was more narrowly defined in Bush’s speech to the US Congress on 6 March. Here he pleaded for a continuation in peacetime, particularly in the Middle East, of the Allied coalition’s co-operative endeavours in the pursuit of war.
Four ingredients of the new world order were outlined:
Settlement of the Arab-Israeli conflict
Collective security arrangements in the region
Arms control
Reconstruction and development<br>

Jacqui Alexander “In the context of war, the external enemy provides that coherence; the enemy could only be eliminated through violence; only violence could provide protection; only the state who owns the means of violence could provide that protection. Thus protection from the enemy made the use of violence not only plausible but necessary. Ultimately, functionally, the U.S. state marked out a position for itself at the helm of this new world order as protector simultaneously of the interests of the world, the interests of U.S. capital, and the interests of the American people.” (95-6)<br>

Jacqui Alexander “What is the role of the academy in this era of increased militarization? How can we be persuaded to take up the pedagogic imperative of teaching for justice, a project that is fundamentally at odds with the project of militarization, which always already imagines an enemy and acts accordingly to eliminate it. Teaching for justice is at odds with a hegemonic narrative that would foreground in a one-sided manner an ascendant corporate class as the sole agents of history.” (92)
Explain Alexander’s point here in your own words.
Can you think of how this might affect education in schools and university?<br>

The Prevent Agenda Prevent is one of four work strands which make up the government‘s counter-terrorism strategy – CONTEST. The aim of CONTEST is to reduce the risk to the UK and its interests overseas from terrorism.
Prevent – aims to stop people becoming terrorists or supporting terrorism
As the preventative strand of CONTEST, Prevent will:-
Respond to the ideological challenge of terrorism and the threat faced by the UK from those who promote it
Prevent people from being drawn into terrorism and ensure they are given appropriate advice and support
Work with a wide range of sectors (including education, criminal justice, faith, charities, the internet and health) where there are risks of radicalisation which need to  be addressed
What impact will this have on educational institutions?
Will it succeed in curbing the rise of extremism among the youth or will it further stigmatize young Muslims?
Is it discriminatory?
Is it furthering “community cohesion” or weakening it?
What impact will it have on gender issues within communities of students?<br>

Masculine New World Order “Overall, the strategy tapped this latent reservoir of older symbols of the dark Orient while stirring more contemporary mythologies of a treacherous and cruel Arab/Islam “character”. In other words, it offered up to the American people a population that became culturally legitimate to hate. […] Mervat Hatem characterized that dilemma in these terms: “Public repudiation for the Arab ‘other’ meant that only crude choices and definitions were available. One could support the war and in this way prove one’s nationalist credentials as an American. Or one could oppose the war and be identified as un-American/traitor/enemy/Iraqi/Arab… There was no place for the many Arab Americans who simultaneously disapproved of the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait and the U.S. military plans for its reversal.”” (96-7)
Examine Alexander’s contention “the notion of the superior might of a white Western masculinity that would vanquish traditional orientalist masculinity” (96). How can we relate this to Ali’s presentation of masculinity in the novel?<br>

Women in War “A gendered imperative was also at work in the way in which the state moved to provide a greater rationale for war. It positioned itself as “benign patriarch” by generating what Enloe has called the “women-and-children-requiring-protection-by-the-statesman” script. It bypassed combat women soldiers and elite women in military decision-making positions in order to create one of militarism’s major ideological symbols: the feminized victim. Militarism relies on women, but with different intent and with a different settlement.” (98)
Examine the role of women in war.
Is the notion of agency completely colonised?<br>

Feminist Education “Feminism always needs vigilance around these contradictory state constructions, the cultural opposites that the state constructs as a way of maintaining hegemony.” (100)
Examine whether the educated girl has been characterized as a deadly weapon in the War on Terror?
How can education serve a community?
What might a feminist education be?<br>

Women’s Work “the notion of supplementary or incidental wages for women within an assumed heterosexual family both organizes and devalues women’s work.” (104)
Examine the devaluation of women’s work within Ali’s novel.<br>

Desire to Know “women give voice to a deeper, existential yearning: the desire to make themselves intelligible to themselves and to each another, to make domination transparent, and to practice new and different ways of being. In this process there is no opposition between the demands of survival and the needs of time. Rather, the very force of existential necessity propels the desire to know, the desire to make sense of existence. Theorizing, therefore, becomes an existential necessity.” (105-6)
Could we see Nazneen as driven by the desire to know and make herself intelligible?<br>

Teaching for Justice “Teaching for justice must interrogate whether feminism has perhaps bought into the script of an unwieldy state in its continued erasure of the political agendas of poor and working-class people’s struggle. Does this practice travel into the classroom and erase those same histories and the histories of immigrant women from our syllabi? Do our analytic practices turn indispensability into victimhood, thereby reproducing the dominant script that rewrites citizenship in the names of members of the corporate class only? Do we shun socialist projects, or merely introduce them as a failure, merely to shore up a need for capitalism? How do class and privileges of different kinds operate within our own classrooms?” (114)<br>

Political censorship of the curriculum: Michael Gove GCSE reforms English Literature = covert censorship
Of Mice and Men
To Kill a Mockingbird

The ‘other cultures and traditions’ emphasis from previous National Curriculum requirements has been revoked.
Gove required a focus on literature in English by British writers<br>

How would you respond to Alexander’s questions: Does this practice travel into the classroom and erase those same histories and the histories of immigrant women from our syllabi?
Do our analytic practices turn indispensability into victimhood, thereby reproducing the dominant script that rewrites citizenship in the names of members of the corporate class only?
How do class and privileges of different kinds operate within our own classrooms?<br>

Speech and Voice “Teaching for justice would alert “the enemy” in the Gulf was not neatly cordoned off from sexual violence against U.S. women soldiers. Teaching for justice would have us examine the contradictions of a civilization […] Speech and voice have been intimate partners in our analytic preoccupations as feminists.” (115)
Examine the contradictions within Ali’s novel.
Examine the role of speech and voice within Ali’s novel.<br>

Colonialism and Feminism “Colonialism is no stranger to feminism’s political project, either elsewhere or here. Most people’s lives, most women’s lives, have been shaped by colonialism.” (115)
How has Nazneen been shaped by colonialism?<br>

Term 3 Revision Session One revision session will be held in term 3 in week 2.
Essay questions for the second assessed essay are now online.<br>