Understanding Jamaican secondary level textbooks: Coloniality and the battle for space

Abstract (English)

As an anthropologist teaching at the university level in Jamaica, I am concerned about students’ lack of awareness of white supremacy and how it functions at every level and domain of society. An overwhelmingly black nation, Jamaica’s independence from the United Kingdom in the 1960s did not emancipate its citizens from British epistemological dominance. Although many important strides have been made in the education sphere to centre the black and Jamaican point of view, there remains work to be done. In particular, teaching the course Anthropology of Africa for almost twenty years has shown this very clearly: students have displayed unthinking adherence to white supremacist norms which manifests as ignorance of Africa's history and reasons for its contemporary situation, and sometimes scorn of aspects of African culture. My experience in this class was the impetus for a research project scouring the content of secondary level textbooks for evidence of coloniality. Close readings of twenty textbooks show examples of coloniality, some obvious and some less overt. Also apparent is what I call an epistemological tug of war, where perspectives swing between coloniality and a subaltern perspective in the same text, reflecting what has been called the "battle for space” (Nettleford 1993) between the European and the African that has been ongoing since Africans were forced onto the island. This results in a “third space” (Kanu 2003) wherein the margin (Jamaica) and the core (Britain) are enmeshed in complex ways and Jamaicans are sometimes de-centred in their own stories. In this panel concerned with how anthropology can contribute to education, I suggest ways to decolonise Jamaican education, some of which require adherence to anthropological thinking. Finally, this presentation shows how anthropology can be useful in trying to understand and identify mechanisms and machinations of control at the secondary level of education.