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(Kumagai), and volunteers’ own anticolonial critiques (Li), creating various types of subjectivities.
Through these analyses, we open up new fields of inquiry, asking: How does the discourse of culture and interculturality interpret, mobilize, and manage affect, and to what end? What kinds of belongings are being created? Does the notion of the interculturally competent global citizen suggest a new kind of belonging, to a world imagined community? If so, how is affect mobilized and managed to create this new kind of community? What light is shed through this process, and what shadows are cast?
Encounter with Cultural Difference: Power and Affect
Encounters with difference have been analyzed extensively in colonial contexts. Edward Said (1978) argues that Orientalism, a style of thought based upon a distinction made between the “Orient” and the “West,” shows a prevalent way of knowing the cultural Other in the context of relations of power. With an assumption that the Orient cannot represent itself, the West gained authority over the Orient by making observations about it, making statements about it, authorizing views of it, and teaching about it. At the same time, the West defined itself in contrast to the Orient. Said argues that this is how cultural domination operates.
In these colonial relations of power, people of the non-West were displayed in zoos, freak shows, circuses, and museums as spectacles (Fusco 1995). These exoticized people embody the audience’s anxieties about the cultural Other while also affirming the spectators’ mastery over them (Koritz 1997). Such exhibitions helped forge a special place for nonwhite peoples and their cultures in the Euro-American affective imagination, as also discussed by Rink with the case of Hottentot Venus (this volume). The legacy of this colonial exoticism remains in the present day, especially in the form of various “cultural performances” by ethnic minorities (Fusco 1995) but with added implications (Doerr 2008, 2009).
Analyzing imperial travel writing, Mary Louise Pratt (1992/2008) argues that discourses in eighteenth-century Europeans’ travel writing on non-European places “produced ‘the rest of the world’ for European readerships” (4, emphasis in original) and constructed “the imperial order” for these readers, nurturing in them a sense of ownership, entitlement, curiosity, adventure, and moral fervor about their colonies. Debbie Lisle (2006) argues that today’s travel writing carries this legacy in two intertwining visions: colonial visions that resuscitate the hierarchy by which the dominant Western writer judges the “less civilized,” and cosmopolitan visions that distance themselves from the legacy of empire by celebrating cultural difference yet impose a universal standard by which to judge others, as well as creating an illusion that “globalization” has produced a world where everyone can move freely. Both visions presume aforementioned natural differences between cultures marked by stable boundaries, ignoring the relations of power that structure, mobilize, and mark such differences. Lisle argues that the reemergence of travel writing hinges on its ability to let readers reimagine clear-cut, contained, stable differences, thus alleviating the anxieties of globalization.
These works on colonial relations analyze affect toward the cultural Other—desire and fear, longing and disdain, and surrender and control—as emerging in and perpetuating power relations. In this volume, we will look at some cases in which affect is mobilized and managed in relations of power when students and volunteers encounter the cultural Other. Rink’s chapter discusses students’ exoticization of the African continent. Jakubiak’s chapter portrays contours of affect that simultaneously distance and connect volunteers to those receiving their service. Li’s chapter compares different ways volunteers working in the rural areas and urban areas frame themselves to the locals in the context of (neo)colonial relations between the United States and the Marshall Islands. We also look at cases where there is no clear-cut status differential, such as when American study abroad students visit European countries with varying degrees of romanticization of the destination (Taïeb et al., Doerr), or when historically hierarchical relations become more complex, when American study abroad students visit Japan (Kumagai). We then examine how affect is mobilized and managed and new subjectivities get constituted as they intersect with study abroad practitioners’ intent, more specific relations between countries, and discourses of schooling.
Analyzing cases where relations of power are explicit and apparent and cases where such relations of power are more ambiguous, we extend the question of affect and the constitution of otherness to a wider frame of cultural Others, to the question of border crossing more generally. Especially, border crossing in general and between those in less-visible relations of power have not been approached yet in the field of the anthropology of affect; this volume can offer new insight in that area.
This volume further asks what happens when the encounter with the Other is interpreted in terms of “intercultural education” or experiential learning through “immersion,” as we discuss in the next section.
Learning and Affect
Affect has been examined in the field of education from various angles. Some focus on the classroom, for example, discussing how peer dynamics can produce emotions like alienation, embarrassment, or belonging (Doerr and Lee 2012, 2013; Frekko 2009; Krashen 1998; Yamasaki 2011). Others examine the role of affect in out-of-class learning, such as how culturally specific categories of affect are passed on in linguistic socialization of young children (Schieffelin and Ochs 1987) and how interactions with the “native speakers” of the language outside the classroom, the cultural capital of the target language, and the language-learners’ investment in the social position they wish to occupy—such as mother-figure or immigrant—play a crucial role in the language-learners’ desire to learn and speak the language (Heller 2003; McEwan-Fujita 2010; Pierce 1995; Whiteside 2009).
Another line of research focuses on the management of affect in education, particularly in advanced capitalism. Lynn Fendler (1998) argues that the rhetoric in current US education suggests the need for reflective teachers with understandings of critical and culturally relevant pedagogy and character education. These emphases point to new types of things that are teachable. Besides intellect and disciplined behavior, motivation and attitudes—desire for education—have become something that teachers aim to teach. Love, pleasure, feelings, wishes, fears, and anxieties—in other words, “soul”—all became teachable and things that educated subjects should have. The educated subject that critical pedagogies aim to create is a subject with a desire for social justice and moral commitment to democracy (Fendler 1998).
Similarly, the idea that study abroad can create global citizens with “intercultural competence” involves believing that it is possible through education to bring into being particular attitudes, such as openness and willingness to interact with cultural Others. This process involves work on the self, and reinterpretation of one’s own affect and that of others through new kinds of educative processes. As will be detailed in Chapter 2 of this volume (Taïeb and Doerr), affect and learning have been discussed for many years in the literature on study abroad in terms of the practical issues involved in making “intercultural learning” smooth and helping students adjust to the destination. The focus of discussion moved from handling “culture shock” and its discomforts to include how these can be turned into learning experiences, how to improve students’ openness to and understanding of others, and how to increase students’ confidence and ability to navigate new environments. More recently, the field has developed new ways of thinking about emotions, with the emergence of the idea of fostering “emotional resilience” in students, and an increasing fine-tuning and development of the process of transforming affect from discomfort and fear into “intercultural competence” and “cultural self-awareness.” Study abroad research takes these approaches for granted and thus has not approached them as objects of examination and analyses.
Chapters in this volume contribute to a broadening of how affect and learning can be viewed in these fields. As mentioned above, first we do so by problematizing and analyzing the ideology of globalism prevalent in higher education generally and in study abroad in particular. The ideology is linked to the desire to be “interculturally competent” (though the two are not identical). The search for “intercultural competence”