ABSTRACT
This chapter both ends the first section, ‘Globalizing Education’, and begins the second, ‘Educating the Local’. In relation to the first of these orientations, the chapter offers an allegory of ‘empire’, centred on the Congo as an imperial and neo-imperial object. Why pick on the Congo? No doubt for autobiographical reasons. I taught in Central Africa for 6 years. But much more because it is such a potent symbol of empire, past and present. It is a global object that can resonate across some very different notions of ‘empire’. Butcher calls it a ‘totem for the failed continent of Africa’ (2008, p. 7), while Dunn notes that it is ‘synonymous with savagery’ (2004, p. 136). It is also synonymous with greed. It is significant that clichéd films like Congo (1995) rehearse the polarities of danger and diamonds, primitive and modern, civilized and savage, and can simply call themselves Congo without any fear of confusion. The name stands for all these things in the popular culture; it is sufficiently evocative to avoid any confusion with a travelogue. Congo symbolically brings together both nineteenth-and twenty-first-century imperialisms, and concerns itself with subverting them both. Picking up on the notion of the harlequin, this chapter looks critically to the local in order to subvert the global. Indeed each of the succeeding chapters ‘educates the local’ by re-locating it in the local, arguing in a number of different ways, that the re-localization of educational discourses is a major task for education policy, and also for education research in the twenty-first century. This is not to say that the local-global relation is decided in favour solely of the former: that would simply invert the problem. Instead, new ways of thinking the local alongside, or with, the global have to be envisaged.
