This chapter calls for reimagining multicultural education from the geopolitical location of Asia. Multicultural education in East Asian Pastoral Institute and the Loyola School of Theology, both located within the Ateneo de Manila University, is reimagined, using the hermeneutical lens of coloniality, androcentrism, and patriarchy, which are related to settler colonialism, from the perspectives of the indigenous communities and hierarchy with recourse to the Asian critical feminist theories of two Korean women scholars. The course on leadership has enabled the multicultural community of learners to identity the “lights” and “shadows” in the diverse cultures of their specific contexts while the course on dialogue with indigenous culture and spirituality has encouraged the community of learners to experience epistemic emancipation that enabled them to generate a more context-specific empowering postcolonial theoretical frameworks. More will be done in the future courses to mobilize wisdom and examine settler colonialism for emancipation of the subaltern in Asia.
Top1. 2. Lens Based On Assumptive Presuppositions
All multicultural education programs are laden with assumptions. This section will explain the three interrelated hermeneutical assumptions: coloniality, androcentrism and patriarchy.
Coloniality, Nelson Maldonado-Torres (2007) opines is all-pervasive as it is “maintained alive in books, in the criteria of academic performance, in cultural patterns, in common sense, in the self-image of peoples, in aspirations of self, and so many other aspects of our modern experience” so much so that “as modern subjects we breathe coloniality all the time and every day” (p. 243). Indeed Ashis Nandy (1983) avers, coloniality has captivated the “minds in addition to bodies and it relates to forces within the colonized societies to alter their priorities once for all” and thus “helps the concept of the modern west from a geographical and temporary entity to a psychological category” to the extent that “the west is now everywhere, within the west and outside; in structures and in minds” (p. xi).
The Peruvian sociologist Aníbal Quijano (1992; 2000) has “explicitly linked coloniality of power in the political and economic spheres with the coloniality of knowledge” (cited in Mignolo 2007, p. 451; Quijano 2000; see also Quijano 1992). Walter Mignoli (2007) believes that delinking therefore calls for “fracturing the epistemic hegemony of Western theo and ego-politics of knowledge and of changing the terms of the conversation” (p. 490). At the same time, delinking calls for initiating a “de-colonial epitemic shift” from the much acclaimed universality of a particular geopolitics of knowledge while promoting pluriversality by foregrounding other geo-body politics of epistemologies comprising fields in cultures, economy, ethnics and politics.
In other words, this epistemic shift, Mignolo (2007) opines, facilitates the generation of new intercultural knowledge in the institutions of learning through the “constant double movement of unveiling the geo-political location of theology, secular philosophy and scientific reason and simultaneously affirming the modes and principles of knowledge that have been denied by the rhetoric of Christianization, civilization, progress, development, and market democracy” (ibid.). Furthermore, this process of decolonization calls for a delinking with the rationality that drives neo-liberal capitalism for reasons, Tu Wei-Ming (1994) posits, has “so redefined the insights of the Enlightenment that self-interest, expansion, manipulation, domination, and control have supplanted seemingly innocuous values such as progress, reason and individualism” (p. 24). The hegemony of coloniality offers what Daniel P. Horan (2019) calls the “unacknowledged privilege” and “ethnocentric universality” which “further occludes the existence of the subaltern, the particularly system of marginalization, silencing, and erasure in the very condition for the establishment of a privileged identity” (p. 565).