Abstract

The recent resurgence of extreme-right movements and the nationalist turn of many governments across the world have reignited the relevance of discussions within educational philosophy about the teaching of national identity in schools. However, the conceptualisation of national identity in previous iterations of these debates have been largely Western and Eurocentric, making the past theoretical literature about these questions less relevant for post-colonial settings. In this paper, I imagine a new approach for teaching national identity in post-colonial contexts, founded on postcolonial conceptions of identity and in particular, the concept of hybridity. I first develop a postcolonial account of national identity by drawing on Homi Bhabha’s thinking about cultural identity, drawing on his concepts of liminality, splitting, and ambivalence. Then, building on Bhabha's notion of hybridity, I propose a distinction between national identity portrayals as either fixed or malleable. Finally, I demonstrate the implications of such a conceptual distinction on the way that national identity is taught in post-colonial schools; by way of an example, I envision a concrete approach to teaching national identity that views national identity as malleable rather than fixed, set in a hypothetical postcolonial school in the Philippines. By beginning from postcolonial assumptions about national identity, I hope to indicate new directions that the debates about the teaching of national identity in schools might proceed.

摘要

最近极右运动的复苏和世界各地许多政府的民族主义转向重新点燃了教育哲学中关于在学校教授民族认同的讨论的相关性。然而，在这些辩论的前几次迭代中，国家认同的概念化主要是西方和欧洲中心的，这使得过去关于这些问题的理论文献与后殖民环境的相关性降低。在这篇论文中，我设想了一种在后殖民背景下教授民族身份的新方法，它建立在后殖民身份概念，特别是混合概念的基础上。我首先通过借鉴 Homi Bhabha 对文化认同的思考，借鉴他的阈限、分裂和矛盾的概念，对民族认同进行后殖民解释。然后，固定的或可塑的。最后，我展示了这种概念上的区别对后殖民学校教授民族认同的方式的影响；举个例子，我设想了一种教授民族认同的具体方法，这种方法将民族认同视为可塑的，而不是固定的，以菲律宾一所假设的后殖民学校为背景。从关于民族认同的后殖民假设开始，我希望指出关于在学校教授民族认同的辩论可能会进行的新方向。