English Rustic in Black Skin: Post-Colonial Education, Cultural Hybridity and Racial Identity in the New Century

This article is written against the backdrop of deepening xenophobia and ethnic absolutism (forms of ‘racial cruelty’) that have come to dominate human relations between individuals and groups worldwide in the new millennium. Cameron McCarthy argues that these tendencies towards ethnic absolutism and ethnic essentialism have their counterparts in schooling, where debates over identity and the curriculum in the educational field have been clouded by ethnic particularism and dogmatism with enormous consequences for contemporary school youth and their teachers. As an alternative frame of reference, McCarthy attempts to theorize his autobiographical journey from his inauguration in postcolonial education in the British Caribbean and his ultimate displacement to the academy in the United States. McCarthy writes about race relationships in education from the viewpoint of radical instabilities that inform our understanding of identity and subjectivity. He uses the term ‘radical instability’ to underline the expiration of old forms of knowledge about race centered on unreflexive, quantitative, behavioral and fixed strands in social science and education. In doing so, he seeks to offer new understandings of race relationships, which are always contextualized and immersed in forms of experience that exceed the more orthodox academic canon and mainstream curriculum organization, experience and interpretation.