Disassembling and Decolonizing School in the Pacific: A Genealogy from Micronesia,

David W. Kupferman. Springer, 2013. 182 pages. ISBN 978-94-007-4672-5 (Hardcover)

By Aaron Padgett
One of the most compelling things about David W. Kupfermans Disassembling and
Decolonizing School in the Pacific: A Genealogy from Micronesia is that it is not just an
impressively well-researched addition to Pacific studies, but also makes an important
contribution to decolonial studies and theory. As the title suggests, Kupfermans empirical focus
is the construction of education systems in the Micronesian islands. Education in Micronesia is
often taken for granted as inherent to the cultures of the islands. Yet, as Kupferman shows, it is
not, and only became a ubiquitous institutional and cultural practice through governmentality
and normalization under Japanese and United States colonial administrations. Kupferman offers
a counter-discourse to the prevailing ideologies surrounding education in Micronesia. Before
going any further into a discussion of his discursive strategies for achieving this goal, however, it
should first be noted how his work moves past a postcolonial approach and adds to decolonial
literature.

For decades, postcolonial studies have provided us critical tools with which to dissect the
concept of modernity, processes of (de)colonization, and our globalizing social worlds.
Postcolonial studies began to gain traction with the publication of Edward Saids Orientalism in
1978. Said and others such as Gayatri Spivak, Frantz Fanon, and Homi Bhabha inspired a
growing number of scholars to build upon their foundations and carry out similar exercises in
various contexts. Further lines of inquiry that sought to understand the formulation of the
colonized Other and the relationship of power between colonizer-colonized were opened up.

Yet as these studies became more multi-faceted in a complex era of global political
decolonization and neoliberalism, a tendency to question the idea of the postcolonial itself grew.

Some scholars Anibal Quijano, Walter Mignolo, Gurminder Bhambra, and Ramn
Grosfuguel among them began to take issue with the notion of the postcolonial as a temporal
and finite period. In short, they suggest that cultures that have been subjected to colonization can
not simply exist in a post colonization period. Decolonizing relations allow the forces of
colonialism and colonization to operate in a variety of newer and more ambiguous forms.
Sometimes these are deliberate or opportunistic actions taken by powerful governments, such as
military interventions and/or occupation of sovereign states. Other times, they may also be
embedded in government or non-profit structures administering development and aid to
materially poor, disadvantaged communities around the world. Scholars like those listed above
call for decolonial thinking to disentangle relations of power in contexts such as these.

While Kupfermans theoretical roots are grounded in the poststructuralist thinking of

Foucault, Baudrillard, Deleuze, and Derrida, he also builds upon the decolonial thinking of
Mignolo. In taking this approach and focusing on an under-researched (but heavily colonized)
region of the world, Kupferman is able to add another dimension to global dialogue(s) on
decoloniality that have predominately taken place in Latin America. At this juncture I will turn
to focus on a few substantive issues taken up by Kupferman.

First, after his initial discussion on where the book fits, Kupferman addresses where he
as a researcher fits. As a self-identified white, Jewish, middle-class male from an upper-

middle class neighborhood north of Chicago" (16), it seems as though Kupferman fully expects
criticism for having no right to research an indigenous setting (possibly due to prior critical
experiences, or because he is an adept reflexive researcher, or perhaps both). Amidst debate on
who has the right to conduct research within particular decolonizing contexts, Kupferman begins
his study by arguing for a repositioning of the binaries of positionality. His argument reveals
that the binaries of insider/outsider, colonized/colonizer, and indigenous/non-indigenous have
failed to be productive, and he thus problematizes the binary logics essentialization of nativeness and non-native-ness.

While Kupferman agrees with Mignolo that communities should write their own histories
and agendas and have the ability to practice political and social sovereignty, he questions what
this means for those who share these goals but do not fit neatly into the binary categories.
Kupferman describes how he comes from particular privileged locations, including the fact that
his introduction to Micronesia was through a volunteer teaching experience. But he also
maintains meaningful interactions with the region of Micronesia outside of his own experience
as a teacher, including his marriage to a native Kosraean and the fact that his children are
enrolled in the Micronesian schooling system. Positionality can reveal to us the issues involved
in approaching research with the insider/outsider lens, yet Kupferman argues that the binary
loses its productivity by not allowing for recognition of the complexities of any persons position
and identity. As a result, Kupferman calls for reflexive positionality to be used in Pacific studies
as a descriptive, rather than evaluative, term, suggesting that how and when one approaches
something is a more important question than who is making the argument. As he admits, he has
never experienced colonization as a Pacific Islander, but the postcolonial time from which he

writes allows him to see how power continues to work through the unfinished business of
colonization" (16).

That Kupferman takes this up towards the beginning of the book is refreshing. Too often
white Western scholars embark on similar research without practicing reflexivity and, in turn,
produce tone-deaf representations of the people or contexts they study. That said, to this reader
Kupfermans offense at times comes across as more of a defense. While this may have been
difficult not to do, it might have been beneficial for Kupferman to go deeper than illustrating the
disempowerment rationale posed by the binaries of positionality. In heading straight towards
criticism against what he views as the reductionist nature of the binaries, he seems to, perhaps
unintentionally, too easily dismiss the value and justification for these criticisms which are also
being spoken from certain decolonizing places, temporalities, and particular discursively formed
identities.

After addressing the problem of binaries and positionality, Kupferman directly takes up
how school and processes of schooling show the productive mechanizations of how colonial
power is embedded in Micronesian societies. His goal is not necessarily to encourage
indigenizing of school curricula or rethinking how to operate schools in Micronesia. Rather,
his point is to unravel how the construction of the school has become an uncontested, essential,
and normal regime of truth that reproduces colonial administrations in Micronesia. Kupferman
invokes Foucaults idea of genealogy to show how these processes emerged through discursive
historical processes, and are simply not natural. In this sense, he shows how development

discourses reinforce Western notions of neoliberal economic development that damage the very
communities that the discourses claim to recognize and help.

The processes which have normalized school and schooling, Kupferman contends, are
not interested in educating Micronesians in the service of political and ethical selfdetermination, but rather they are concerned with the production and legitimation of particular
knowledges and the construction of subjectivities in order to remove those knowledges and
subjectivities from the realm of contestation and contingency" (39). These processes are
maintained through what Foucault termed governmentality, which is a form of power that
amasses governmental apparatuses in order to exercise strategies of power over populations. In
Micronesia, public school and the process of schooling has become one of the most prominent
governmental apparatuses that governs the lived-experience of Micronesian students. According
to Kupferman, this exercise of power limits the conditions of possibility and being for
Micronesian students.

Another example of how Kupferman genealogically traces the normalization of school

and schooling is the construction of the teacher through acts of development volunteering. He
begins by inverting his own experience of teaching in Saipan in the Northern Mariana islands.
Since I share a similar experience of having travelled to the Federated States of Micronesia to
teach in Chuuk for a year, I find Kupfermans critical deconstruction of the teacher fascinating,
useful, and reflective of my own processes of deconstruction.

Kupferman first encountered Micronesia having recently graduated from college at age
22, teaching high school algebra and geometry in Saipan. As he points out, the subjects he taught
alone are puzzling because his bachelors degree is in history, politics, and government.
(Similarly, I taught high school English literature although my degree is in sociology and
sustainable community development.) Kupferman iterates the fact that it would be immensely
difficult, and near impossible, for a 22-year-old native of a Micronesian island group, with less
than a year of work experience out of college, to land a high school teaching job in any American
school district.

Many volunteer groups and organizations work in the islands, but for the purposes of his
study, Kupferman focuses on those that have a primary emphasis on teaching. One organization
that Kupferman discusses is WorldTeach. Through WorldTeach, one qualifies as a teacher if
s/he is a college graduate, a native English speaker, and has completed 25 hours of ESL teaching
experience as either a volunteer or professional instructor. Whats more, WorldTeach connects
with the national ministries of education in the Republic of the Marshall Islands and the
Federated States of Micronesia, which permits WorldTeach to move administrative costs onto the
host country and make volunteering affordable for the volunteer. Kupferman questions this
arrangement because it produces teachers through a discourse that allows young, unqualified
college graduates (in the sense that training as a teacher in cross-cultural contexts is not required)
from any academic field to teach as long as they speak English. But what is more concerning is
how the construction of volunteer programs circulates through development discourses and
normalizes the young, Western, English-speaker as what a teacher should and can be.

Kupfermans analysis continues with autoethnographic reflection on his own narrative.

After obtaining a master's degree in education and gaining years of teaching experience in the
United States he returned to the region of Micronesia. This time, he was working for the College
of the Marshall Islands (CMI). In 2006, CMI began an accreditation process to re-envision the
colleges vision statement. At this point Kupferman had become the acting dean of academics
and was present at all accreditation meetings. Kupferman recalls that the CMI president would
begin meetings by questioning, '"What kind of college do you want?"' (47). In response,
Kupferman retorts, '"Do you want a college?"' (47). The presidents question, Kupferman argues,
assumes college to be a self-evident institution in the Marshall Islands. Asking whether or not a
college is wanted in the first place challenges the notion that ontologies of education should not
be questioned. Underscoring his broader point that educational institutions have been a
component of extending colonial administration in the region, Kupferman aims to formulate
options for how education be done through rethinking educational institutions and processes.

In other areas of the book, Kupferman explores more instances of educations

normalization and narrativization of the student throughout Micronesia. Among these is the
case of Lee Boo, the first Micronesian exchange student to Great Britain. In this section,
Kupfermans methodology recalls Saids literary criticism in Orientalism. He points out how the
history of Lee Boo is only known and understood through British writer George Keates
descriptions of the Palauan student the information of which had been relayed through
Antelope ship captain Henry Wilson. Whats more, Kupferman takes on the memorialization of
Lee Boo in the form of a statue outside Palau Community College. Here Kupferman borrows
from Baudrillard and theorizes the statue as simulacrum, a monument intended to universalize

education and its cultural and racial effects to onlookers who then turn to simulate what the
statue represents. As it is, the statue of Lee Boo is white and in the dress of an ideal
Enlightenment era male.

Elsewhere, Kupferman provides a deconstructive reading of a travelogue written by a

former WorldTeach volunteer in the Marshall Islands. In this section Kupferman shows how the
author of the travelogue uses racialized language to string together descriptions of his
Marshallese students as purely physical and animalistic beings. Despite the construction of the
volunteer teacher as an ideal type of expert, the travelogue writer goes on to admit that he had
no experience to draw upon in his classroom to teach lessons. He was, in fact, relieved that he
was teaching at a bad school, allowing him to assume that locals would hold him to a lower
standard. In this example, Kupferman strikingly shows how the teacher is an apparatus of
power that functions on difference and othering. When applied in other contexts, Kupfermans
analysis might also be transposed to demonstrate how such processes continually transform other
institutions in Micronesia such as government and family.

Kupferman makes a good argument for how theory is one of the greatest tools we have to
analyze the very real effects of development discourses on peoples lives. He also makes good
use of theory itself, and his own theorizing adds much to debates on decoloniality and
decolonization. However, it would have been beneficial to see Kupferman make use of some
theory outside the Western canon. I realize that this point may fall into the binaries of
positionality which he critiques, but there is much to be missed by not digging deeper into
indigenous theoretical critiques as well. Kupfermans methodological approach is often based

around methods such as literary and cultural criticism, staples of postcolonial studies. Data from
interviews or participant observations in schools might tell us even more about the nature of
education and decolonization in Micronesia. It would also allow a discursive space from which
participants could become co-authors in research with Kupferman. This would have multiple
benefits, such as being more inclusive of indigenous representation, as well as possibly allowing
his self-reflexivity to come across as less defensive.

In the books conclusion, Kupferman traces the genealogy of contemporary development

discourses to Harry Trumans inaugural speech in 1949. In this speech, Truman not only laid out
the Third World as the geographic space that was in need of being developed, but he also
initiated the construction of the idea of development. Kupferman shows throughout his work that
development is itself a fairly recent development. Disassembling and Decolonizing School in
the Pacific de-forms the ontologies of school and schooling, demonstrating a more productive
starting point than reforming educational institutions under the auspices of development
discourses. This opens up a space from which the region can be re-envisioned and furthers the
conversation on how more meaningful decolonial transformations might be made possible in our
postcolonial moment. This work is an important stepping stone for opening up disruptive spaces
of conversation. Kupferman has produced an empirically and analytically resilient work that is
essential to studies of the Pacific, Micronesia, globalization, development, and decoloniality.