Week 10: Jacqui Alexander,
“Whose New World Order? Teaching
for Justice”
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=
xBKbBSUq1W4
The New World Order
• It has been argued that the New World Order is a
neoliberal capitalist project that is not yet complete.
• The term was coined by George H Bush in his 11
September 1990 speech, his rhetoric underscored the
increasing US hegemony and its unilateral role in
determining how the United Nations conducts its
affairs.
• New World Order discourses attempt to reproduce
geopolitical relations of power in bipolar terms “You
are either with us or against us” (George W Bush
2001).
• “a new world order—can emerge: a new era—freer from
the threat of terror, stronger in the pursuit of justice, and
more secure in the quest for peace. An era in which the
nations of the world, East and West, North and South, can
prosper and live in harmony. A hundred generations have
searched for this elusive path to peace, while a thousand
wars raged across the span of human endeavor. Today that
new world is struggling to be born, a world quite different
from the one we've known. A world where the rule of law
supplants the rule of the jungle. A world in which nations
recognize the shared responsibility for freedom and justice.
A world where the strong respect the rights of the weak.
[…] America and the world must defend common vital
interests—and we will. America and the world must
support the rule of law—and we will. America and the
world must stand up to aggression—and we will. And one
thing more: In the pursuit of these goals America will not
be intimidated.”
• Address Before a Joint Session of Congress (September 11,
1990) George H. W. Bush
“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 19891993
• Address to the Nation January 16, 1991
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:
1. Settlement of the Arab-Israeli conflict
2. Collective security arrangements in the region
3. Arms control
4. Reconstruction and development
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)
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?
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?
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?
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-requiringprotection-by-the-statesman” script. It bypassed combat
women soldiers and elite women in military decisionmaking 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?
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?
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.
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?
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)
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
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?
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.
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?
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.