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At the Intersection of Selves and Subject
Bold Visions in Educational Research
Volume 58

Series Editors:

Kenneth Tobin, The Graduate Center, City University of New York, USA
Carolyne Ali-Khan, College of Education & Human Services, University of North Florida, USA

Co-founding Editor:

Joe Kincheloe (with Kenneth Tobin)

Editorial Board:

Barry Down, School of Education, Murdoch University, Australia

Daniel L. Dinsmore, University of North Florida, USA
Gene Fellner, College of Staten Island, City University of New York, USA
L. Earle Reybold, College of Education and Human Development,
George Mason University, USA
Stephen Ritchie, School of Education, Murdoch University, Australia

Scope:
Bold Visions in Educational Research is international in scope and includes books from two
areas: teaching and learning to teach and research methods in education. Each area contains
multi-authored handbooks of approximately 200,000 words and monographs (authored and
edited collections) of approximately 130,000 words. All books are scholarly, written to engage
specified readers and catalyze changes in policies and practices. Defining characteristics of books
in the series are their explicit uses of theory and associated methodologies to address important
problems. We invite books from across a theoretical and methodological spectrum from scholars
employing quantitative, statistical, experimental, ethnographic, semiotic, hermeneutic, historical,
ethnomethodological, phenomenological, case studies, action, cultural studies, content analysis,
rhetorical, deconstructive, critical, literary, aesthetic and other research methods.

Books on teaching and learning to teach focus on any of the curriculum areas (e.g., literacy, science,
mathematics, social science), in and out of school settings, and points along the age continuum (pre
K to adult). The purpose of books on research methods in education is not to present generalized
and abstract procedures but to show how research is undertaken, highlighting the particulars that
pertain to a study. Each book brings to the foreground those details that must be considered at every
step on the way to doing a good study. The goal is not to show how generalizable methods are but to
present rich descriptions to show how research is enacted. The books focus on methodology, within
a context of substantive results so that methods, theory, and the processes leading to empirical
analyses and outcomes are juxtaposed. In this way method is not reified, but is explored within
well-described contexts and the emergent research outcomes. Three illustrative examples of books
are those that allow proponents of particular perspectives to interact and debate, comprehensive
handbooks where leading scholars explore particular genres of inquiry in detail, and introductory
texts to particular educational research methods/issues of interest to novice researchers.
At the Intersection of Selves and Subject
Exploring the Curricular Landscape of Identity

Edited by
Ellyn Lyle
Yorkville University, New Brunswick, Canada
A C.I.P. record for this book is available from the Library of Congress.

ISBN: 978-94-6351-111-7 (paperback)

ISBN: 978-94-6351-112-4 (hardback)
ISBN: 978-94-6351-113-1 (e-book)

Published by: Sense Publishers,

P.O. Box 21858,
3001 AW Rotterdam,
The Netherlands
https://www.sensepublishers.com/

All chapters in this book have undergone peer review.

Cover image by Mavourneen Trainor Bruzzese

Printed on acid-free paper

All Rights Reserved © 2017 Sense Publishers

No part of this work may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted

in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, microfilming,
recording or otherwise, without written permission from the Publisher, with the
exception of any material supplied specifically for the purpose of being entered and
executed on a computer system, for exclusive use by the purchaser of the work.
 TABLE OF CONTENTS

Foreword: Those Blooming Identities, Who Are We Waiting for? vii

Pauline Sameshima

1. Autoethnographic Approaches to an Identity Conscious Curriculum 1

Ellyn Lyle

2. “A Hubris Hiding from Its Nemesis”: Why Does the Affirmation of

Diversity Tend towards the Affirmation of Multiple Identities, and to
What Consequence? 9
David Jardine

3. Tensions and Intersections of Self and Subject: A New-Settler Teaching

an Aboriginal Education Course 19
Lilach Marom

4. Materiality and Subjectivity: Life Stories of Desks 31

Cecile Badenhorst, Aedon Young, Xiaolin Xu, and Heather McLeod

5. On the Practice of Narrative Landmarking: Navigating an Ecological

Identity through Self-Study 41
Carmen Schlamb

6. Integrating Identity Formation and Subject Matter Learning: Math

Concepts as Tools for Identity Exploration 53
Kayla Heffernan, Avi Kaplan, Steve Peterson, and Kristie Jones Newton

7. Intersectional Selves, Texts, and Contexts: Kristeva’s Intertextuality in

Multicultural Pedagogy 63
Wisam Kh. Abdul-Jabbar and Cindy Chopoidalo

8. Writing the Self through Haiku 71

Sean Wiebe

9. Wayfarers of the Inner Landscape: A Feminist Sufi Perspective 79

Samira Thomas

10. Indigenizing Ivory Towers: Poetic Inquiry, Métissage, and

Reconcilia(c)tion87
Kiera Brant, Keri-Lynn Cheechoo, Tricia McGuire-Adams,
Julie Vaudrin-Charette, and Nicholas Ng-A-Fook

v
TABLE OF CONTENTS

11. Exploring the Curricular Possibilities of Pre-Service Teacher

Professional Identity 105
S. Laurie Hill

12. Rhizocurricular Processes of Dis-Identification and Becoming-Citizen:

Provocations from Newcomer Youth 115
Monica Waterhouse and Diana Masny

13. Resolve through Currere 125

Jung-Hoon Jung

14. Identities of Exceptionality: The Giving and Making of Selves in the

Eye of Expectation’s Storm 133
Lissa D’Amour and Jennifer Markides

15. Presentosa Filigrana: Crafting a Metaphor for Authenticity in an

International Teaching and Learning Context 143
Christine L. Cho and Julie K. Corkett

16. From the Edges of Lateness: Finding Our Place in the Curriculum 153
John J. Guiney Yallop and Marni J. Binder

17. Multiculturalism and the Canadian Pre-Service Teacher: Made in the USA? 163
C. Darius Stonebanks

About the Authors 171

vi
 PAULINE SAMESHIMA

FOREWORD
Those Blooming Identities, Who Are We Waiting for?

Shasta daisies radiate

I glow by the tree knowing
Father Christmas is coming tonight
Curriculum is “the site on which the generations struggle
to define themselves and the world …
an extraordinarily complicated conversation”1
in a provocative weave of story and theory2

Our narratives speak to teaching and learning identities as lived curriculum.3

Fostering “self-descriptions” is one way to conceptualize professional
identity.4
Intertextuality suggests an apparatus in which various signifying modalities
intersect and create a place where “enunciation and its denoted ‘object’
are never single, complete and identical to themselves, but always plural,
shattered, capable of being tabulated.”5

A pink sunrise … flowers in the sky6

Ellyn7 looks longingly at the sandbox
where political and social grains construct selfhood
the dust blown effect8
conflates the stern nun’s muddlement

My Grade 1 teacher broke her leg on my first day of school. I am still haunted by
the sound of her pain and the powerlessness I remember. As a timid child with little
social interaction in 1970’s apartheid South Africa, I rarely spoke. I was enrolled
at St. Rose’s Convent because, with Chinese ancestry, I was not allowed to attend
public school in Johannesburg.
The land [is my] teacher.9
I modify existing landmarks, or create new landmarks
through my reconstruction of those initial landmark builds.
I do this by restorying experiences, telling the same story again
but with significant hindsight knowledge and within my current context.10

vii
P. SAMESHIMA

 ister Clare, carrying a heavy projector between the desks, tripped over a stray
S
little brown cardboard school case—all of which were supposed to be tightly
pressed against the sides of our individual wooden desks.11

I remember time passing, my seat hard but slippery. All of us, hands primly folded in
our laps—no one knew what to do, how to get help—were without courage to leave
the room where our mothers left us.
Thinking back through our mothers
and engaging with our identities in relation to the origin
are acts of love.
Love is a way to engage in this complicated conversation.
It is a means of running the course.12
A lost story of ancestry
that keeps reinventing itself
through dreams, blood stream, bones, water,13
multivocal nests of complicity and inheritance.14
Mom, I cannot endure this pain anymore. My brain nibbles my heart. I am
sorry.15

Was it the principal we ought to look for? Who would go? Who would get out of the
safe desk to console the teacher on the floor? Silence, only a whimpering. Indecision.
The past arrests me now.16
Through her journey of currere, [she] resolves
to make her own “ethical conviction” in engaging with herself.
It seems to be a “mode of subjectivation” … that one freely relates to him- or
herself,
and further, to others and the world … subjectivation of this kind [can been
seen as]
the “aesthetics of existence,” an ethical practice of the self.17
Nomad citizenship, which is akin to improvisational jazz,
where “coherence is generated internally and immanently,
from the bottom up, instead of being imposed in a top-down fashion.”18
Nomads are moved by the immanent and affective relations between individual
bodies and, thus, nomad citizenship is characterized by multiple and constantly
shifting local and global social affiliations and the proliferation of immanent
connections through porous borders and across difference.19
Nomad citizenship has led us to view becoming-citizen as an undetermined,
transformative process … produced through reading, reading the world, and
reading self. … Thus becoming-citizen involves … “dis-identifications from
dominant models of subject-formation [which] can be productive and creative
events.”20

viii
 FOREWORD

Then Sister Clare’s wavering voice, directing Shereen to go to the Grade 2 class
next door to get the teacher. We all already knew Shereen—her name, her jubilance,
fearlessness, shamelessness. The irony was the “naughty” girl saved us all. It was
probably her suitcase.
Professional identity shapes … teaching practices.21
The teacher identity is “relational, negotiated, constructed, enacted,
transforming and transitional.”22
In identity formation, whether it is individual or group, there is the need for a
point of comparison: an “I” compared to ‘“you”; an “us”’ and not “them”; a
‘“self” versus “Other.”23
Unavoidably steeped in the examination of US influence on Canadian education
is the anxiety Canadians feel over cultural domination and an eventual loss of
a unique national multicultural identity.24
Collective identity, which is different from an interpersonal identity that
requires personalized bonds of attachment and a sense of belonging, resides
in a “depersonalized sense of self, a shift toward the perception of self as
an interchangeable exemplar of some social category and away from the
perception of self as a unique person”25
“Dis-identification involves the loss of cherished habits of thought and
representation, which can also produce fear, sense of insecurity and nostalgia.”
There is a real danger of a retreat into nationalism and conservativism or
for self-interested forms of inaction to take hold. Becomings can get botched.
Nonetheless, there also remains the potential for dis-identification to produce
new forms of nomad-citizenship exceeding the nation-state, which may enable
new visions of cosmopolitan community vital to living in a shared global future.26

None of us, on that first day, knew the Principal, Sister Anne, had an office under
the main staircase, the hard steps where students would wait their turn—the same
staircase Catherine and I did our secret pinkie promise every day on our way down
after school.
Understanding Self is a way to understand Other and society.27
Identity is an ongoing project, most commonly an ongoing narrative project.28
“In telling our stories, we enlarge [the] storyline to incorporate and accept
diversity and multiplicity without dilution and conformity.”29

Sister Anne had a strap. I heard the strap was many times worse than the meter stick
I experienced in Standard 2 (Grade 4). We wore white dresses with green trim in
summer and dark pinafores over ironed shirts and ties in winter. When we got the

ix
P. SAMESHIMA

stick, we would stand in a line and hold onto the bottom of our dresses as we bent
over. I don’t remember why I was in trouble, but I was in a line of girls. Forgetting
my sewing kit and kneeling for a 45-minute sewing period was more painful than
the stick.
The subject is the inner life, the lived sense of ‘self’—however non-unitary,
dispersed, and fragmented—that is associated with what has been given and
what one has chosen, those circumstances of everyday life, those residues of
trauma and of fantasy, from which one reconstructs a life.30
“In order to reap the disclosure that lies dormant within our curricular forms, we
must claim them in our familiar daily experience and then estrange ourselves
from them.”31

There’s no doubt that these memories, infused in my first six years of schooling in
an all girls’ convent in Johannesburg, have indelibly rooted in my teaching selves.
In this world where the self-evident is not so evident
there is a need for vulnerability.32
There is an intuitive sense that while opening up our vulnerability,
we also bring strength to the work we do.33
The meaning of phenomena comes together not when a person can distil
the thingness or the isness of thing, but meaning depends on the phenomena
working on, even shaping, the identity of the person.34
We do not know our own souls, let alone the souls of others …
There is a virgin forest in each;
a snowfield where even the print of birds’ feet is unknown.35
Identity is the ongoing intrapsychic phenomenology
of physiological self-organization,
and emotional wellness derived from self-organized harmony
in the smooth mitigation of
“ideal, dreaded, and realistic self-attributes”36
The reflectant mirror, if at odds with activated unconscious self-schemas,
presses conflicted self-conscious self-appraisals and
compromises coherence and a sense of a stable self.37
A strong sense of safety is particularly important
for identity exploration among students.38

Wiebe (Chapter 8), in writing about breaking from metanarratives and an already
constructed social imaginary, suggests from the work of Pinar (2004) that it
is “ourselves who need to break.” The contemporary teacher project then is to
reaggregate and break from our histories of learning so that we might wake to the
ways we can deviate from reproducing the system we wish to change.

x
 FOREWORD

What would it take to transform such a psychic milieu into one where subject-
to-subject mutuality made recognition possible in a way to shift preoccupations
with doing and being done to into enactments of being and being well together?
Benjamin writes of a fundamental paradox:
Only by asserting omnipotence may we discover the other as an outside center
of experience. By destroying the [internal object] other, not literally but in
fantasy, by absolutely asserting the self and negating the other’s separateness
in our minds, we discover that the other is outside our mental powers.
… Winnicott’s concept can be seen as a paradigm for the ongoing oscillations
between omnipotence and recognition throughout life … [If however] a power
struggle is inaugurated … the outcome is a reversible cycle of doer and
done to.39

We craft our own presentosa,

a visual representation of the relationship between identity and praxis40
to write counternarratives in juxtaposition “to the grand narratives of our
times,” to play within “the interval between different cultures and languages,
particularly” within and against colonial contexts, and to merge and blur
“genres, texts and identities.”41
we flow
we flow in the belated river
already hooked on a line
we swim upstream
to loosen the pull
to go where we want
to interpret the world… to change it42

We take on the work of curriculum studies

by conceiving “emergence as the ongoing flow
of our awareness and appreciation of being-in-relation to others, the

environment, the cosmos.43

Parker Palmer (in Lyle) and Rachel Remen (in Wiebe) write of wholeness and
connectedness,
that in bringing the fullness together in our own lives, as educators,
we create spaces for others to become whole.

I get retold and remade by that Raven’s wing-swooping overhead,

by my students’ suffering, my son’s ventures, my language,
my foolishness, even by the work of writing this.44
I say “Yes” to all of my identities.
Were you waiting for us?45

xi
P. SAMESHIMA

NOTES
1
Pinar et al. (1995, p. 848).
2
Ellis and Bochner (2000, p. 713) in Lyle.
3
Badenhorst, Young, Xu, and McLeod, Materiality and Subjectivity.
4
Winslade (2002, p. 35) in Hill.
5
Kristeva (1984, pp. 59–60) in Abdul-Jabbar and Chopoidalo.
6
Wiebe, Writing the Self through Haiku.
7
Lyle, Autoethnographic Approaches to an Identity Conscious Curriculum.
8
Aoki (1993, p. 260) in Lyle. Identity as effect.
9
Marom, Tensions and Intersection of Self and Subject.
10
Schlamb, On the Practice of Narrative Landmarking.
11
See Badenhorst’s (Ch. 4) narrative in Materiality and Subjectivity. Her experience of her desk and
schooling in Johannesburg in the 1970s is familiar. I wonder if the familiarity is feigned by the
knowledge of context for perhaps these memories are more universal than we acknowledge.
12
Thomas, Wayfarers of the Inner Landscape.
13
Vaudrin-Charette, in Indigenizing Ivory Towers.
14
Jardine, A Hubris Hiding from its Nemesis.
15
Kim (2013, p. 1) in Jung.
16
Lee (participant) in Jung.
17
Rabinow (1997, p. xxxi) and Foucault (1983, p. 255) in Jung.
18
Holland (2011, p. 65) in Waterhouse and Masny.
19
Waterhouse and Masny, Rhizocurricular Process of Dis-Identification and Becoming Citizen.
20
Braidotti (2010, p. 411) in Waterhouse and Masny.
21
Hill, Exploring the Curricular Possibilities of Pre-Service Teacher Professional Identity.
22
Miller (2008, p. 174) in Hill.
23
Stonebanks referencing Said (1978), Multiculturalism and the Canadian Pre-Service Teacher.
24
Stonebanks, Multiculturalism and the Canadian Pre-Service Teacher.
25
Wetherell (1987, p. 50) in Jung.
26
Waterhouse and Masny, Rhizocurricular Process of Dis-Identification and Becoming Citizen.
27
Lyle, Autoethnographic Approaches to an Identity Conscious Curriculum.
28
Goodson (2014, p. 4) in Thomas.
29
Sameshima (2007, p. 288).
30
Pinar (2009, p. 3) in Thomas/Jung.
31
Grumet (1978, p. 288).
32
Wiebe, Writing the Self through Haiku.
33
Guiney Yallop and Binder, From the Edges of Lateness.
34
Sean Wiebe, Writing the Self through Haiku.
35
Woolf (2008, p. 104) in Thomas.
36
Horowitz (2014, p. 56) in D’Amour and Markides.
37
D’Amour and Markides, Identities of Exceptionality.
38
Heffernan, Kaplan, Peterson, and Newton Jones, Integrating Identity Formation.
39
Benjamin (1995, pp. 90–91) in D’Amour and Markides.
40
Cho and Corkett, Presentosa Filigrana.
41
McGuire-Adams, Ng-A-Fook, Cheechoo, Vaudrin-Charette, and Brant, Indigenizing Ivory Towers.
42
Pinar (2009, p. 3) in Thomas.
43
Doll and Trueit (2010, p. 175) in Thomas.
44
Jardine, A Hubris Hiding from its Nemesis.
45
Guiney Yallop and Binder, From the Edges of Lateness.

xii
 FOREWORD

REFERENCES
Grumet, M. (1978). Songs and situations. In G. Willis (Ed.), Qualitative evaluation (pp. 274–315).
Berkeley, CA: McCutchan.
Pinar, W., Reynolds, W. M., Slattery, P., & Taubman, P. M. (1995). Understanding curriculum: An
introduction to the study of historical and contemporary curriculum discourses. New York, NY: Peter
Lang.
Sameshima, P. (2007). Seeing red: A pedagogy of parallax. Amherst, NY: Cambria Press.

xiii
 ELLYN LYLE

1. AUTOETHNOGRAPHIC APPROACHES TO AN
IDENTITY CONSCIOUS CURRICULUM

INITIAL CURIOSITY

My preoccupation with identity began as both a personal curiosity and a quest for
community. Having spent the better part of four decades in the classroom, I have
grown sensitive to experiences that marginalize the teaching and learning self. The
first time I recall feeling subjugated in school was in kindergarten. My teacher, a
well meaning but stern nun, had very particular notions about gender appropriate
behaviour and used her position of power to begin acculturation with unsuspecting
five year olds. Admittedly, I did not understand the scope and gravity of what was
happening then. I only knew that girls were not permitted to play in the sandbox
during free time. The sandbox and its Tonka trucks were the exclusive domain of
boys; girls had to play house and then nap. While I was frustrated by the inequity
and continued to advocate for equal rights during free play, I soon realized that
boys were also restricted by specific rules. This became apparent to me when a
young Asian boy in my class was physically reprimanded and verbally assaulted for
coming to school wearing his mum’s red nail polish. I often wonder if we never saw
him again because he was expelled, or if his parents rejected the rigid system and
withdrew him. I remain hopeful it was the latter.
Bookending K-12 schooling, I once again found myself shut out. I was selecting
courses for my final semester of high school and, having more credits than required
to graduate with honours, I registered for an open course in agriculture (one that is
neither academic nor general). My registration was rejected. I met with the principal
and explained that growing up in a farming community created a tremendous respect
for the land, which I regarded one of my earliest and wisest teachers. I also described
how a course in agriculture supported my growing interest in the ways in which place
and lived experience inform meaningful education. He was unmoved. I left feeling
[a]shamed—shamed for having an agricultural background that was somehow
regarded as less than, and ashamed of myself for capitulating. I recognize now that,
while advisors may be well intended, their misguided coaching of academically
gifted youth away from land-based studies marginalizes both the area of scholarship
and the students interested in it.
Beginning to wake to the schooling machine, I eagerly approached university
expecting a more liberating experience. Instead, I found an inherent distrust of
the personal in favour the public without any consciousness of their connection

E. Lyle (Ed.), At the Intersection of Selves and Subject, 1–8.

© 2017 Sense Publishers. All rights reserved.
E. LYLE

(Nias, 1996). Nonetheless, I slogged through disembodied, decontextualized,

dehumanized approaches to teaching. Once the degree was conferred, I pursued a
career in education hopeful that I might teach differently.
All of this is to say that I’ve long been compelled to raise awareness of the
inextricability of our teaching and learning selves and the subjects with whom and
which we engage. Recognizing the implications for identity, I hope making room
for selfhood in studies will re/introduce authenticity and criticality to our practices.
To this end, I propose autoethnography as uniquely positioned to explore the
intersection of self and subject as well as point to curricular possibilities through
which knowing self augments teaching and learning.

AUTOETHNOGRAPHY

Drawing on the work of Bochner and Ellis (2016), and Ellis, Adams, and Bochner
(2011), I understand autoethnography not only as an approach to research and a
mode of writing, but also as a way of knowing. That is to say that autoethnography is
an epistemological endeavour (Agar, 2006; Greene, Skukauskaite, & Baker, 2016).
Its way of helping us come to knowledge resides in its ongoing encouragement of
interaction between personal and professional selves (Huang, 2015). This process
is twofold: first, it encourages us to look outward and consider the social and
cultural aspects of lived experience; and, second, it requires that we look inward
at the vulnerable self in relation to its cultural context (Ellis & Bochner, 2000).
Approaching inquiry from this perspective allows researchers to create space for the
development of critical reflexivity where impressions of self can be understood in
terms of social contexts (Hickey, 2016).
As Dowling (2006) points out, “reflexivity is a curious term with various
meanings” (p. 7). At its most basic, it refers to the researcher’s consciousness of
her role in and effect on various stages of inquiry. Pulling at these threads reveals
how reflexivity also involves the researcher’s intimate connectedness to both the
act of doing research and its eventual findings. Further, it has deep implications for
“the political and social constructions that inform the research process” (p. 12). This
conceptualization of reflexivity reaches beyond “a narcissistic self-check for bias
conducted during the research process” (McCabe & Holmes, 2009, p. 1519) and
extends reflexivity from the personal to the epistemological.
Like Stets and Burke (2012), I understand reflexivity as central to the process of
negotiating selfhood, and selfhood as central to identity. Considered in the context of
political and social constructions, we negotiate identity based on our interactions
with society and its members. Fluid and dynamic, this process allows us to critique
ourselves as we interact with others. As we move through life, we continually
reconstruct our understandings of ourselves by reinterpreting our experiences from
our new points of view (Bukor, 2011). Thus, identities can be understood as “fleeting,
transitory phenomena created and re-created in response to relevant stimuli” (Jones,
2013, p. 762).

2
 AUTOETHNOGRAPHIC APPROACHES TO AN IDENTITY CONSCIOUS CURRICULUM

Epson (2013) reminds us that, as we negotiate our identities in response to

our interactions, we construct identity in hindsight incorporating past and present
understandings of self with our hopes for our future development. In this way,
individual identity is an expression of the meaning that each of us attaches
to ourselves and a reflection of the meaning that others attach to us. We are
therefore engaged in an ongoing struggle to create a coherent sense of self
within this shifting context as we construct, repair, maintain, and review our
identities. (p. 231)
Through this process, reflexivity provides an avenue for critical researchers to engage
in a constant de/re/construction of identity within various socio-cultural contexts
(Daskalaki, Butler, & Petrovic, 2015). These embodied meanings support critical
consciousness of self/other interactions as well as awareness of how self and self-in-
relation impact writing and analysis (Bochner & Ellis, 2016; Daskalaki et al., 2015;
Ellis et al., 2011). Any discussion of writing and analysis within autoethnographic
approaches would be incomplete without some consideration of the narrative turn
(Bruner, 1990; Mitchell, 1981; Polkinghorne, 1988).
The narrative turn resists empiricism’s unquenchable thirst for value neutrality
and exposes how such pursuits perpetuate social injustice. Rather than mechanistic
prediction and control, narrative seeks to infuse inquiry with humanness by
prioritizing story and making central the importance of identity and lived experience
in social science research (Blair, 2010; Bochner, 1997; Bochner & Ellis, 2016;
Eisenbach, 2016). Said another way, we employ story to understand our experiences
and construct our identities in relation to them.
Identity as a narrative construct holds that individuals develop identity through
the process of incorporating their reassembled past, seeming present, and anticipated
future into an internalized dynamically changing story of the self (Kraehe, 2015;
McAdams, 2001, 2013). Rolling (2010) and Sachs (2005) echo this position in their
claims that narrative processes are integral to the construction of identity because
they allow us to story who we are, what has informed our development, and what
is important to us. This conceptualization is further substantiated by the scholarship
of Czarniawska (2004), Philpott (2011), and Said (2014) who present narrative as
uniquely designed to help us experientially understand ourselves within society. Gee
(2000–2001), Sfard and Prusak (2005), and Zembylas (2003, 2005) focus on the
process of meaning making and position narrative as a powerful analytical tool in
identity inquiries.
Narrative as an analytic tool is generally understood in one of at least two ways:
narrative analysis privileges the storyteller and focuses on the function of the
narrative; narratives-under-analysis privilege the analyst and focus on identifying
patterns of perceptions, beliefs, and actions and then connects them to cultural norms
and anomalies (Bochner & Riggs, 2014; Green, Skukauskaite, & Baker, 2016). In
identity-based inquiries, autoethnography blurs the boundary between storytelling
and storyhearing (Huang, 2015; Maguire, 2006). The blurring is, in part, because

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E. LYLE

the writer and analyst are often one in the same and, in part, because “readers think
with a story from within the framework of their own lives” (Bochner & Ellis, 2016,
p. 219). As we think with the stories we encounter, we continually amend our
understandings in concert with renegotiating identity.

IDENTITY

The existing literature tends to explore identity as it relates to society at large, or to group
affiliation identifiable within that society. Identity as a personal construct is an integral
basis of the self who engages in teaching and learning yet it remains in the periphery
of discussions (Bochner, 1997; Eisenbach, 2016; Stets & Burke, 2012). Two seminal
scholars defy this trend. For more than two decades Palmer has made self central in
education arguing that reducing teaching to an exclusively intellectual practice relegates
it to abstraction just the same as making it solely emotional renders it narcissistic:
Intellect, emotion, and spirit depend on each other for wholeness. They are
interwoven in the human self and in education at its best, and we need to
interweave them in our pedagogical discourse as well. (Palmer, n.d., p. 2)
He argues that good teachers weave together self, student, and subject to teach
from an undivided place; doing so, he says, encourages in students, a “capacity for
connectedness” (p. 3). This connectedness, though, is not easily attained for students
or teachers. Exposing the personal in public contexts comes with vulnerability as
it opens us up to speculation and judgment (Eisenbach, 2016). We also fear that it
could turn against us so
we claim the inalienable right to separate the personal and the professional
into airtight compartments…and keep the workplace conversation objective
and external, finding it safer to talk about technique than about selfhood.
(Palmer, n.d., p. 14)
Whyte (2001) shares Palmer’s commitment to whole human approaches to vocation
when he reminds us that, “to have a firm persuasion in our work—to feel that what
we do is right for ourselves and good for the world at exactly the same time—is one
of the great triumphs of human existence” (p. 4). Drawing on ecologies of belonging,
he says that the human soul finds courage in the difficult intimacies of negotiating
identities at the boundaries between self, subject, and other, and challenges us to
“see with the eyes of those who do not quite belong” (p. 172). There, in that space of
fear, hope, wholeness, and unbelonging we will find more liberating approaches to
teaching, learning, and being.

Curricular Possibilities

Recognizing the humanness in teaching and learning and dedicating ourselves to its
place in the curriculum “[disturbs] the landscape that privileges curriculum-as-plan”

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 AUTOETHNOGRAPHIC APPROACHES TO AN IDENTITY CONSCIOUS CURRICULUM

(Aoki, 1993, p. 257). Approaching teaching through the gateway of curriculum-as-

plan is not easily resisted. Even attempts to incorporate identities as lived curricula is
a process often “imbued with the planners’ orientations to the world, which inevitably
include their own interests and assumptions about ways of knowing and about
how teachers and students are to be understood” (p. 258). The conceptualization
of identity as presence resides in modernity’s brokered power relations and, thus,
precludes meaningful critical interrogation. As an alternative to privileging identity
as presence, Aoki recommends conceptualizing identity as effect. From this space,
we are challenged to see identity as something that is dynamically in development
rather than a form already fashioned. “According to this understanding, our identities
as teachers or curriculum supervisors are not so much in our presences; rather, our
identities…are ongoing effects of our becomings in difference” (p. 260).
Aoki’s position is supported in the more recent work of Kamonos-Gamelin (2005)
who insists a “teacher’s role is not to replicate suffocating conditions that stunt
self-awareness and self-knowledge, but to set up conditions that will inspire, that
will literally give breath to students’ visions of themselves as ‘knowers’” (p. 187).
Similarly, MacKenzie (2011) advocates for embracing “the ambiguity of be(com)ing
teacher” so that we are able to “find ourselves amidst a pedagogical chaos and…a
possibility for praxis with/in this space of be(com)ing” (p. 68). Said another way,
embracing this “terrain of uncertainty, we may further find sel(f)ves and other with/
in experience” (p. 72).
The curricular possibilities at the intersection of student, self, and subject reside
in the unwavering conviction that teaching and learning are most meaningful there.
Autoethnography privileges:
…meanings rather than facts, readings rather than observations, and
interpretations rather than findings. Autoethnography gives up any illusion of
producing an unmediated mirroring of reality. Instead, it acknowledges that
all attempts to speak for, write about, or represent human lives are partial,
situated, and mediated. (Bochner & Ellis, 2016, pp. 239–240)
Sometimes referred to as a blurred genre, autoethnography offers a lot of “potential
for opening real or imagined spaces and textual possibilities” (Maguire, 2006, p. 10).
Some of this potential is found in approaching curriculum from a learner-centred
perspective that privileges lived experiences of the students (Cleveland-Innes &
Emes, 2005). In prioritizing lived experience, identity is central as we move from
“planning for teaching in favour of designing for learning” (Cleveland-Innes &
Emes, 2005, p. 91).
Drawing on the work of Baxter Magdola and Chickering and Reisser, Cleveland-
Innes and Emes (2005) propose four curricular commitments to assist teachers who
are eager to embrace a new approach: make content relevant to backgrounds and
experiences; allow for significant divergent experiences among learners; create
encounters with diverse perspectives to challenge existing beliefs and assumptions;
and foster space for students to incorporate diverse value orientations.

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E. LYLE

THOUGHTS AS WE PART COMPANY

Understanding self is a way to understand other and society. Autoethnography

functions as a narrative that critiques the situatedness in this attempt at understanding.
As personal texts imbued with socio-political assumptions, autoethnographic
narratives provide an opportunity for critical interrogations of self with the aim of
deepened consciousness. (Hickey, 2016) Thus, the utility of this approach resides
in its ability to invite each other to view the world from our various perspectives.
In creating resonance, we provoke others to see through our experiences and reflect
critically on their own. In entering into each other’s worlds, “we actively engage in
dialogue regarding the social and moral implications of perspectives” (Bochner &
Ellis, 2016, p. 72).
It must be noted, though, that “for the most part, fundamental change has been
shunned; universities have opted for cosmetic surgery, taking a nip here and a tuck
there, when major reconstruction is required” (Cleveland-Innes & Emes, 2005,
p. 89). Some of the resistance resides in empiricism’s continuing hold on what
is deemed valid knowledge. Some, though, is born of the tendency of particular
autoethnographic inquiries to evidence self-occupation in favour of broader socio-
political possibilities.
Ellis and Bochner (2000) remind us that “a good ethnography is not simply a
confessional tale of self-renewal, it is a provocative weave of story and theory”
(p. 713) with implications for improved cultural understanding and more just
social conditions.

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of Curriculum & Supervision, 8(3), 255–268.
Blair, E. E. (2010). Qualitative educational research: Readings in reflexive methodology and
transformative practice/researching social change: Qualitative approaches. Harvard Educational
Review, 80(3), 417–426.
Bochner, A. (1997). It’s about time: Narrative and the divided self. Qualitative Inquiry, 3(4), 418–438.
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and Francis.
Bochner, A., & Riggs, N. (2014). Practicing narrative inquiry: In P. Leavy (Ed.), The Oxford handbook of
qualitative research (pp. 195–222). New York, NY: Oxford University Press.
Bruner, J. (1990). Acts of meaning. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Bukor, E. (2011). Exploring teacher identity: Teachers’ transformative experiences of re-constructing and
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Czarniawska, B. (2004). Narrative in social science research. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage.
Daskalaki, M., Butler, C., & Petrovic, J. (2015). Somewhere in-between: Narratives of place, identity, and
translocal work. Journal of Management Inquiry, 25(2), 184–198.

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Dowling, M. (2006). Approaches to reflexivity in qualitative research. Nurse Researcher, 13(3), 7–21.
Eisenbach, B. B. (2016). Diving into autoethnographic narrative inquiry: Uncovering hidden tensions
below the surface. The Qualitative Report, 21(3), 603–610.
Ellis, C., & Bochner, A. P. (2000). Autoethnography, personal narrative, reflexivity: Researcher as subject.
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Ellis, C., Adams, T. E., & Bochner, A. P. (2011). Autoethnography: An overview. Forum: Qualitative
Social Research, 12(1), 1–19.
Epson, L. (2013). My affair with the “other”: Identity journeys across the research–practice divide.
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Gee, J. P. (2000–2001). Identity as an analytic lens for research in education. Review of Research in
Education, 25, 99–125.
Greene, J., Skukauskaite, A., & Baker, W. D. (2016). Ethnography as epistemology. In J. Arthur,
M. Waring, R. Coe, & L. Hedges (Eds.), Research methods and methodologies in education.
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Huang, Y. (2015). Integrating reflexivity: Negotiating researcher identity through autoethnography.
Educational Research for Social Change, 4(2), 89–103.
Jones, M. (2013). Traversing no man’s land in search of an(other) identity: An autoethnographic account.
Journal of Contemporary Ethnography, 42(6), 745–768.
Kamonos-Gamelin, A. (2005). The sand diaries: Visions, vulnerability and self study. In C. Mitchell,
S. Weber, & K. O’Reilly-Scanlon (Eds.), Who do we think we are: Methodologies for autobiography
and self-study in teaching. New York, NY: RoutledgeFalmer.
Kraehe, A. M. (2015). Sounds of silence: Race and emergent counter-narratives of art teacher identity.
Studies In Art Education, 56(3), 199–213.
MacKenzie, S. K. (2011). Sel(f)ves breathing: (Re)Encounters with the lived experiences of teacher. Vitae
Scholasticae, 28(1), 65–85.
Maguire, M. H. (2006). Review essay: Autoethnography: Answerability/responsibility in authoring self
and others in the social sciences/humanities. Forum: Qualitative Social Research, 7(2), 1–14.
McAdams, D. (2001). The psychology of life stories. Review of General Psychology, 5(2), 100–122.
McAdams, D. (2013). Narrative identity. Current Directions in Psychological Science, 22(3), 233–238.
McCabe, J. L., & Holmes, D. (2009). Reflexivity, critical qualitative research and emancipation: A
foucauldian perspective. Journal of Advanced Nursing, 65(7), 1518–1526.
Mitchell, W. J. T. (Ed.). (1981). On narrative. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Nias, J. (1996). Thinking about feeling: The emotions of teaching. Cambridge Journal of Education,
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Philpott, C. (2011). Narratives as a cultural tool for experiential learning in teacher education. Storytelling,
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Said, S. B. (2014). Teacher identity and narratives: An experiential perspective. International Journal of
Innovation in English Language Teaching and Research, 3(1), 37–50, 110.
Sfard, A., & Prusak, A. (2005). Telling identities: In search of an analytic tool for investigating learning
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Stets, J. E., & Burke, P. J. (2012). A sociological approach to self and identity. In M. Leary & J. Price
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Whyte, D. (2001). Crossing the unknown sea: Work as a pilgrimage of identity. NY: Riverhead Books.
Zembylas, M. (2003). Interrogating “teacher identity”: Emotion, resistance, and self-formation.
Educational Theory, 53(1), 107–127.
Zembylas, M. (2005). Discursive practices, genealogies, and emotional rules: A poststructuralist view on
emotion and identity in teaching. Teaching and Teacher Education, 21, 935–948.

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 DAVID JARDINE

2. “A HUBRIS HIDING FROM ITS NEMESIS”

Why Does the Affirmation of Diversity Tend Towards the Affirmation
of Multiple Identities, and to What Consequence?

SECTION ONE

Why do the ideas of multiplicity, diversity, and the arising recognition of a

“multifariousness of voices” (Gadamer, 1989, p. 285) persistently resolve themselves
into talk of multiple identities? Identity has the potential to become sealed off,
separate, and proffered as self-determining and self-defining independently of any
other. Can we not be diverse and interdependent without imagining diversity as a
splay of separate identities related somehow only post hoc? Affirmations of identity
have the potential to make all our relations seem “revocable and provisional” (Gray,
2001, p. 36). It has the potential to be an ecological disaster.
Couldn’t our diversity be articulated by complex networks of dependent co-
arising causes, conditions, interactions, mutual formations, interdependencies,
kinships, and inhabitations, one story inculcated in the other, one voice aroused in
the midst of the wide breaths of the Earth, human and more-than-human? I get retold
and remade by that Raven’s wing-swooping overhead, by my students’ suffering,
my son’s ventures, my language, my foolishness, even by the work of writing this.
In all this unsteady swirl of relations and dependent co-arisings, what is the
attraction of identity and what does it satisfy?

SECTION TWO

Teacher identity. Student identity. Cultural identity. Gender identity. Racial identity.
Religious identity. Linguistic identity. Political-affiliation identity. Personal identity.
Familial. Geographical. Ancestral. Even this list shifts and flows, adds and omits.
Day to day, we mostly experience these matters fluidly unless and until threat,
anger, regret, revenge, suasion, power, violence, and the like arise. Then there is
retraction, figurative or literal wall building, intent on protecting and codifying
(and, often, exaggerating, purifying, and clarifying) this hard won identity from
contaminating interlopers. This movement of retraction occurs no matter the
difference between real and perceived threats.

E. Lyle (Ed.), At the Intersection of Selves and Subject, 9–18.

© 2017 Sense Publishers. All rights reserved.
D. JARDINE

SECTION THREE

Once started, [wars]…tend to take on a life of their own. Identities which had
previously been multiple and casual become focused and hardened [and ensuing
conflicts] are appropriately termed “identity wars.” As violence increases, the
initial issues at stake tend to get redefined more exclusively as “us” against
“them” and group cohesion and commitment are enhanced. Civilization
consciousness strengthens in relations to other identities. A “hate dynamic”
emerges in which mutual fears, distrust, and hatred feed on each other. Each
side dramatizes and magnifies the distinction between the forces of virtue and
the forces of evil and eventually attempts to transform this distinction into
the ultimate distinction between the quick and the dead. (Huntington, 2003,
p. 266)
The mere existence of an alternative mode of being, the presence of which
exemplifies that different identities are possible and thus denaturalizes the claim
of a particular identity to be the true identity, is sometimes enough to produce the
understanding of a threat. [President Bush, in his “with us or with the terrorists”
speech (Bush, 2010) has] manifestly linked American identity to danger (Campbell,
1998, p. 3).

SECTION FOUR

We all know, in varying degrees and in various ways, that language has a life and
sway of its own. Despite well-intended attempts to say, “That’s not what I meant,” the
words I’ve used have sometimes ended up meaning more or different than I meant to
mean, and that excess has been a repeated locale of my own humiliation and regret.
Sometimes this excess can be a great teacher. I’ve found myself unwittingly dragged
into old, buried implications and arguments, old relations, forgotten inheritances,
suppressed lies, new electric charges of insight and uprising, and tangled, unintended
duplicities from which “That’s not what I meant” provided little rescue or relief.
And as with my words, so too my life is often shaped “beyond my wanting and
doing” (Gadamer, 1989, p. xxviii), too long lost, just out of sight of awareness, as if
every turn of a corner occludes the corner now behind my back.
You’re never too old to be humiliated.
I want, here, to meditate on some of the hidden, unintended excess of identity, a
word full of echoes, a word with its own life and times. Samuel Huntington (2003)
and David Campbell (1998) provide hints about how threat, danger, embattlement,
can cause the hardening and reification of identity—witness, for example, Donald
Trump’s recent wall bragging under the guise of fever dreams of rapists and
murderers.
My concern, simply put, is that threat, danger, the pursuit of safety, hardening, and
reification might be an unintended part of the very lure of identity itself, its hidden
nemesis. It is imagined that if only identity could be pinned down once and for all,

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 “A HUBRIS HIDING FROM ITS NEMESIS”

peace would reign (and this uttered with no real consciousness of how pinning down
is already an act of war).
Edward Said (2001) pointedly critiqued Samuel Huntington’s conclusions
regarding clashes of civilizations, but, I believe, something was overlooked:
Huntington … wants to make “identities” into what they are not: shut-down,
sealed-off entities that have been purged of the myriad currents and counter
currents that animate human history, and that over centuries have made it
possible for that history not only to contain wars of religion and imperial
conquest, but also to be one of exchange, cross-fertilization and sharing.
This far less visible history is ignored in the rush to highlight the ludicrously
compressed and constructed warfare that “the clash of civilizations” argues is
the reality. (p. 3)
I suggest that Huntington is not saying that identities are hard and fast (and therefore
that the subsequent clashes are “the [inevitable] reality”. He is pointing out something
easy to miss: “left in peace” (Illich, 1992, p. 16), differences and kinships and
interdependencies flourish and “flower” (p. 17). Under threat, they tend to harden,
thus occluding a “far less visible history” (Said, 2001, p. 3) of interdependence and
interrelatedness, casualness and multiplicity, openness, porousness, vulnerability,
susceptibility. He is pointing to a mechanism (an affliction, Buddhists might call it)
that gets hidden once identity becomes hardened and reified. And this even though,
perhaps especially when, the resorted-to relief is multiple identities.
Glimpsing this mechanism of threat-based retraction into hardened identity
helps me glimpse how identity can be both the effect and the cause of a sort of war
consciousness. It is not only what arises under threat; it is what, once arisen, needs
protection from threat.
Such retraction into separate identities is an act, oddly, of self-clarification and
simplification and has been offered as a benign means of understanding my self
and my place in the world out from under various silencing hegemonies. However,
no doubt, arises my recent, all-too-familiar grief over how making people feel
threatened can be manipulated and utilized politically as a form of social control, of
marketing technique, of spinning a web to a hidden profit.
That is why the most chilling phrase in Huntington’s description is “once started.”
“Once started,” it becomes almost too late to think about identity and how others
might appear. If we feel threatened, they then have to have a hardened identity, too—a
clear one, a declarable one, an exaggerated monster to befit our own threatened, thus
exaggerated and retracted, identity: Muslim Intruders, Gay Activists, Environmental
Crazies:
In light of the seemingly secured enclosures of threat-induced identities, any
suggestion of boundaries being in any way overridden or “permeable” (Smith,
2006, p. 77) becomes understandable only as a security threat. Surveillance,
paranoia, border patrols, increased accountability and monitoring, become the

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D. JARDINE

order of the day as bi-products of the now-purified “identity” of “us” being

increasingly susceptible to “contamination” by “them.” Threat produces a
situation where the very casualness and multiplicity of day-to-day situations
of everyday life becomes identifiable as the cause of threat. (Jardine, Naqvi,
Jardine, & Zaidi, 2012, p. 30–31)
In light of hardened identity, any suggestion of fluidity, casualness, multiplicity,
porosity, diversity, sustainability, and interdependence can become experienced as
the source of threat, however much they are proffered as its relief.
Perhaps even worse for us in the orbit of education, it becomes almost too late
to think about identity because thinking itself becomes cast as a cause of threat.
Opening identity to thinking and interpretation and to all its casual and multiple
interdependencies seems like a breach, a threat, leading, of course, to increased
vigilance and hardening:
Wanting to know something more than the simplistic, threat-induced clarities
about this “us” and “them” become [considered] egregious [or unpatriotic,
or at least suspicious]. Knowledge and its pursuit [which explores those less
visible interdependencies that hardening has occluded] become experienced
as a threat to security (see David G. Smith’s [2006] brilliant “Enfraudening
in the Public Sphere” for more on this point and its telling consequences for
pedagogy). (Jardine, Naqvi, Jardine, & Zaidi, 2012, p. 31–32)
This all has the potential to set pedagogy itself on the road to a state of “perpetual
war” (Postel & Drury, 2003) constituted by paranoia, accountability, and surveillance.
Pedagogy, too, retracts under threat and starts to fall under terrible and atrophying
auspices for knowledge and its cultivation.
I love the poorly educated (Associated Press, 2016).
This story is an old one—clear and brazenly declared identifiers, simple and easy
and unequivocal, get identified with the nature of knowledge itself. Asking after
occluded dependencies and relations just blurs what is in reality clear and distinct.
To know is to identify, codify, and harden into self-containment.
To know a thing is to portion it off from everything else, every contaminating
relation. It is to place it under regimes of surveillance and accountability and
manageability that know no sway or forgiveness. Zero tolerance. On this basis, to
know, then, is to brazenly trumpet without hesitancy or affection:
An adequate knowledge is thoroughly clear knowledge, where confusion
is no longer possible, where the reduction to marks and moments of marks
(requisita) can be manager to the end. (Heidegger, 1978, p. 62)
“The essence of truth,” so this old story goes, “is identity” (Heidegger, 1978, p. 39).
Those who don’t measure up are marginalized, silenced, taught a lesson they’ll
never forget. Identity. Colonialism. Proximity or distance from the norm. One story.
One teller.

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 “A HUBRIS HIDING FROM ITS NEMESIS”

Identity is inherently monotheistic, then? The One True God of my own sovereign
person, people, land, faith?
In this light, the urge towards multiple identities can become like a panoply of
multiple self-identical gods perpetually warring.

SECTION FIVE

Identity: Latin identitas, points to “sameness, oneness, state of being the same,”
(On-Line Etymological Dictionary). Under (real or perceived) threat we,
understandably and often with good warrant, tend to retract into barricaded
protectiveness. A terrible irony here is that the outcome of an occasioned and
warranted retraction becomes ontologized. What is in fact an outcome of threat is
posited as the way things really are: each culture, each person, each gender, each bird
species, each bird pair, the tree each bird sits on…each is separate and independently
existing. Any relations become understood as subsequent to this ontological reality
presumed and formulated under threat.
The affirmation of multiple identities is certainly comprehensible as a
consequence of threats of silencing singularity and exclusion and regimes of
violence. But what if the consequent affirmation of one’s own identity in opposition
to that singularity takes on precisely the error of that which it is trying to overcome?
What if it is precisely the affirmation of identity that is the core of exclusion, the root
of war? What if our casual and multiple selves could be “left in peace,” and thus not
compelled with the same urgency towards the seemingly, relatively safe harbours of
identity? This, to reiterate Illich (1992), is a far less visible history:
War, which makes cultures alike, is all too often used by historians as the
framework or skeleton of their narratives. The peaceful enjoyment of [that
which is not under threat, embattled] is left in a zone of deep shadow. (p. 19)
As Tsong-kha-pa (2002) says of essence, so too with identity: “It is a concealer”
(p. 208). What if the pursuit of identity itself is the root affliction, the root error, and
carries with it, however multiplied, singularity and silence and ecological disaster?

SECTION SIX

This link between identity and threat, identity and reification, identity and the
subsequent suffering of border breaches, links, too, to my interest in Buddhism and
its meditations on the self and its ways:
The true mode of being of a thing as it is in itself, is selfless, for its self cannot
be a self-identity in the sense of a substance. Indeed, this true mode must
include a complete negation of such self-identity. (Nishitani, 1982, p. 117)
In Buddhist thought, this selflessness is not just a selflessness of things, but of my
own very self which experiences such things, the very selves of my students, our

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D. JARDINE

work, our topics of consideration, our multiplicity and diversity. These words, this
breath, the fall air with flecks of snow, September 21, 2016, early morning.
Much of Buddhist thinking and practice is directed towards how, under afflictions
such threat, fear, anger, worry about the future, my sense of self becomes reified
and that self then reifies the world into securable objects that it can control, predict,
and safely and predictably manipulate. This is why the core of Buddhist thinking
speaks about the suffering that arises from a misplaced and reified and false sense
of self-existence (Sanskrit: svabhava). Buddhism speaks of things and selves
being empty (Sanskrit: shunya) of self-existence, and, instead, being dependently
co-arising (Sanskrit: pratitya-samutpada). Buddhism makes an ontological claim
counter to the claims of separate identities: things are all their relations. It speaks
directly against the long inheritance of identity and substance that cascades back
through Rene Descartes’ Meditations on First Philosophy, to Aquinas, to Aristotle’s
Metaphysics: “a substance is that which requires nothing except itself in order to
exist” (Descartes, 1955, p. 255). In this Western lineage of identity, and “on behalf
of the truth of things,” we must “break things apart until they will break no further”
(Jardine, 2012, p. 86).
“The concept of substance [and its consort, identity] is inadequate [and there is]
a radical challenge of thought implicit in this inadequacy” (Gadamer, 1989, p. 242).
There is a forceful experience that comes from stepping away from this spellbinding
lure of identity. Here, then, too, is the urging in Buddhism, one that has a great
kinship to current ecological urgings, that every phenomena requires everything else
in order to be what it truly is:
When we see a phenomenon and clearly understand that the very existence
of it is completely dependent on other phenomena, inseparably related to
them, then at that time our mind is holding the view of dependent arising.
There is no phenomenon [no self, no thing, no breath, no gesture, no
language, no culture, no Raven] which exists independently of others. The
only way phenomena do exist is as interdependently arising. To realize
the full import of dependent-arising, namely that all phenomena are
empty of inherent existence [empty of a self-contained, self-determining,
exclusionary “identity”] is an extremely forceful experience that reorients
one in the very depths of ones being and bestows peace. (Lobsang, 2005,
p. 51)
Again, there is an irony that must be repeatedly noted. Overcoming “the syndrome
of grasping at a self-nature” (Tsong-kha-pa, 2005, p. 182) must be accomplished
through the pursuit of peace (meditative practices as well as the pursuit of wisdom
that studies our arising circumstances in all their dependently co-arising detail) and
what then arises bestows peace. As with what appears inside the circle of threat-
retraction-hardening-increased threat, inside this Buddhist sway (as, I suggest, in
the sway of ecological awareness and hermeneutic pursuits), peace is both cause and
effect, both “the path and the goal” (Gadamer, 1989, p. 180).

14
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travels and discoveries in Northern and

Central Africa, in the years 1822, 1823, and

1824
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Title: Narrative of travels and discoveries in Northern and

Central Africa, in the years 1822, 1823, and 1824

Author: Hugh Clapperton

Dixon Denham
Walter Oudney

Contributor: Robert Brown

J. G. Children
Charles Dietrich Eberhard König
Abraham V. Salamé
N. A. Vigors

Release date: September 29, 2023 [eBook #71754]

Language: English

Original publication: London: John Murray, 1826

Credits: Galo Flordelis (This file was produced from images

generously made available by The Internet Archive and
Yale Univ. Library)

*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK NARRATIVE

OF TRAVELS AND DISCOVERIES IN NORTHERN AND CENTRAL
AFRICA, IN THE YEARS 1822, 1823, AND 1824 ***
Drawn by Major Denham. Engraved by E. Finden.

ALAMEEN-BEN MOHAMMED EL KANEMY.

SHEIKH OF BORNOU.
Published by John Murray, London. Feb. 1826.
 N A R R AT I V E
OF

T R AV E L S A N D D I S C O V E R I E S
IN

NORTHERN AND CENTRAL AFRICA,

IN THE YEARS 1822, 1823, AND 1824,

BY MAJOR DENHAM, CAPTAIN CLAPPERTON, AND THE

LATE DOCTOR OUDNEY,
EXTENDING ACROSS THE
GREAT DESERT TO THE TENTH DEGREE OF NORTHERN LATITUDE, AND FROM
KOUKA IN BORNOU, TO SACKATOO, THE CAPITAL OF THE FELLATAH EMPIRE.
WITH

AN APPENDIX,
PUBLISHED BY AUTHORITY OF THE RIGHT HONOURABLE EARL BATHURST, ONE OF
HIS
MAJESTY’S PRINCIPAL SECRETARIES OF STATE, AND DEDICATED BY
PERMISSION TO HIS LORDSHIP,

B Y M A J O R D I X O N D E N H A M,
OF HIS MAJESTY’S 17TH REGIMENT OF FOOT,

AND

C A P TA I N H U G H C L A P P E RTON,
OF THE ROYAL NAVY,

THE SURVIVORS OF THE EXPEDITION.

LONDON:
JOHN MURRAY, ALBEMARLE-STREET.

MDCCCXXVI.
 LONDON:
PRINTED BY THOMAS DAVISON, WHITEFRIARS.
 TO

THE RIGHT HONOURABLE

THE EARL BATHURST, K.G.

HIS MAJESTY’S PRINCIPAL SECRETARY OF STATE FOR THE COLONIES,

THIS VOLUME,
CONTAINING

AN ACCOUNT OF THEIR DISCOVERIES

MADE UNDER THE AUSPICES OF HIS LORDSHIP,

IS INSCRIBED,

WITH THE GREATEST RESPECT AND GRATITUDE,

BY HIS OBLIGED AND FAITHFUL SERVANTS,

THE AUTHORS.
 P R E FA C E .

By the death of Dr. Oudney, it has fallen to the lot of Captain

Clapperton and myself to render an account to the public of our
expedition into the interior and central parts of Northern Africa. The
sudden departure of my surviving companion, on a second mission,
has necessarily thrown the greater part of the burden on myself. I
believe, however—for I have not seen any of his papers—that
Captain Clapperton, during the lifetime of Dr. Oudney, made but few
remarks himself beyond the construction of the chart of our route,
from daily observations of the latitude, and of lunars for the
longitude, whenever favourable opportunities occurred; but,
subsequently to the death of his travelling companion, which
happened at an early stage of their journey into Soudan, a journal of
his proceedings and remarks appears to have been regularly kept;
and this, together with other documents connected with that journey,
were left at his departure in the hands of Mr. Barrow, with a request
that he would see them through the press.
It may naturally enough be asked, Why something more than a
short excursion to the westward of Mourzuk, and a few notes, do not
appear from the pen of Dr. Oudney in the present volume? I can only
answer the question by the fact, that the only papers placed in my
hands consist of “An Itinerary from Mourzuk to Bornou;” and “An
Excursion to the Westward of Mourzuk;” neither of which have been
deemed fit for publication in extenso, from their imperfect state, and
containing very little beyond what will be found in my own journals. I
have, however, printed in foot notes such parts of them as have
been pointed out to me. Not a paper of his, to my knowledge, has
been lost or destroyed; and I can only account for the unsatisfactory
state in which they have been found, from the circumstance of his ill
health, which became extremely precarious from the moment of our
departure from Mourzuk, where he had caught a cold, which settled
on his lungs, and never left him. On our arrival at Kouka, and
frequently afterwards, he experienced so many attacks of fever, that
there appeared little hope of his surviving to return to England, which
was indeed his own opinion; and when he set out on his last journey
towards Soudan, he was so exhausted, and in a state so unfit for
such an undertaking, that he fell a martyr to his zeal very soon after
his departure, though, had he remained at Kouka, the melancholy
event would not, in all probability, have been prolonged many days.
My own expeditions in various parts of Bornou, in Mandara, and
Loggun, and the two fruitless attempts I made to complete the tour of
the great lake Tchad, will be found to occupy a considerable portion
of the volume; and being made in countries, and among a people
unknown to Europeans,—many of them even by name or report,—it
is hoped that observations, faithfully and circumstantially minuted
down at the time and spot, will not be found tedious or uninteresting
to the reader.
It will, perhaps, be thought by some, that I have been more minute
than necessary in the account of our journey across that tremendous
desert which lies between Mourzuk and Bornou, and which,
generally speaking, is made up of dark frowning hills of naked rock,
or interminable plains, strewed in some places with fragments of
stone and pebbles, in others of one vast level surface of sand, and,
in others again, the same material rising into immense mounds,
altering their form and position according to the strength and
direction of the winds. But, even in the midst of this dreary waste,
towns, villages, wandering tribes, and kafilas, or caravans,
sometimes occur to break the solitude of this dismal belt, which
seems to stretch across Northern Africa, and, on many parts of
which, not a living creature, even an insect, enlivens the scene. Still,
however, the halting places at the wells, and the wadeys or valleys,
afford an endless source of amusement to the traveller, in witnessing
the manners, and listening to the conversation, of the various tribes
of natives, who, by their singing and dancing, their story telling, their
quarrelling and fighting, make him forget, for a time, the ennui and
fatigue of the day’s journey.
 As for the rest, I have to trust to its novelty, for its
recommendation to the public, rather than to any powers of writing,
which I pretend not to possess; and it is now a source of great
satisfaction to me that, under all my difficulties, and they were not
few, I was able to adhere to the resolution I set out with, of recording,
at the end of each day, the occurrences, however trifling, that had
taken place.
To Sir Robert Ker Porter, my friend since the days of boyhood, I
am indebted for having perfected several drawings, with his
experienced pencil, from my hasty, but yet faithful sketches, of the
people and scenery of Central Africa. His eye was nearly as familiar
as my own with the picturesque objects they display; and, indeed, all
who are acquainted with the published narrative of his Researches
amongst the Remains of Ancient Persia and Babylonia, might readily
recognise the same hand, in these his spirited delineations of African
costume and character.
DIXON DENHAM.
Albany, London,
Jan. 1st. 1826.
 Map of the Travels and
Discoveries made in Northern
& Central Africa, by Dr.
Oudney, Major Denham, &
Captn. Clapperton, R.N. in the
Years 1822, 3, & 4.

J. & C. Walker Sculpt.

(Large-size)

Published as the Act directs Feby. 1826,

by John Murray Albemarle Street London.
 CONTENTS.

Page
Introductory Chapter.—From Tripoli to Mourzuk xi
Excursion to the Westward of Mourzuk xliii

MAJOR DENHAM’S NARRATIVE.

Chap. I.—From Mourzuk to Kouka in Bornou 1
Chap. II.—Kouka 67
Chap. III.—Expedition to Mandara 99
Chap. IV.—Excursion to Munga and the Gambarou 149
Chap. V.—Rainy Season at Kouka 181
Chap. VI.—Excursion to Loggun, and Death of Mr. Toole 226
Chap. VII.—Journey to the Eastern Shores of the Lake Tchad 248
Supplemental Chapter on Bornou 314

CAPTAIN CLAPPERTON’S NARRATIVE.

Prefatory notice to the Narrative, by John Barrow
Sect. I.—From Kouka to Murmur, where Dr. Oudney died 1
Sect. II.—From Murmur to Kano 34
Sect. III.—From Kano to Sackatoo, and Residence there 67

APPENDIX.
No. I.—Translation of a Letter from the Sheikh Mohammed El Kanemy 139
No. II.—Translation of a Letter from an African Chieftain 140
No. III.—A Letter from Yousuf, Pasha of Tripoli, to the Sheikh of Bornou 141
No. IV.—A Letter from the Pasha of Tripoli 143
No. V.—A Letter from the Sheikh of Bornou to the Sultan of Kanou 144
No. VI.—A Letter from the Sheikh of Bornou to the Sultan of Hoossa 145
No. VII.—A Letter from the Chieftain Mohammed Gamsoo 146
No. VIII.—A Document relating to the Death of Mungo Park 147
No. IX.—A Letter from the Sheikh of Bornou to Captain Clapperton 148
No. X.—A Document made at the Court of Justice of Bornou 149
No. XI.—Translation of Letters and Documents received from the Sheikh
of Bornou concerning Mr. Tyrwhit’s Death 151
No. XII.—Translation of an Arabic MS. 158
No. XIII.—A Narrative of the first Battle of Kadawee 167
No. XIV.—The Song of Mohammed-Alameen ben Mohammed El Kanemy 171
No. XV.—Translation of an extempore Arab Song 173
No. XVI.—Translation of the Song of the Fezzanneers, on Boo
Khaloom’s Death 174
No. XVII.—Bornou Vocabulary 175
No. XVIII.—Begharmi Vocabulary 179
No. XIX.—Mandara Vocabulary 180
No. XX.—Timbuctoo Vocabulary 181
No. XXI.—Zoology 183
No. XXII.—Botany 208
No. XXIII.—Letter to Major Denham on the Rock Specimens 247
No. XXIV.—Thermometrical Journals 262
 L I S T O F P L AT E S .

No. Page
1. Alameen ben Mohammed El Kanemy, Sheikh of
Bornou, Frontispiece

2. Part of the Stony Desert, to face page xvi

3. Castle at Mourzuk, from Mr. Ritchie’s Grave xxi
4. Woman of Sockna xxvii
5. Vignette, Arabs Meeting xlii
6. View of the Bahr Mandia lviii
7. Castle, and Salt Lake at Tegerhy 5
8. Anay Tibboo Country 17
9. Kanemboo Marketwoman,—Unmarried Woman of Soudan 46
10. Body Guard of the Sheikh of Bornou 64
11. Reception of the Mission by the Sultan of Bornou 79
12. Shouaa Women, kingdom of Bornou 94
13. Arrival at Mora, the capital of Mandara 111
14. Mandara Musicians 123
15. Plan of the Pass of Hairy, Mandara mountains 127
16. Attack on Musfeia 133
17. Vignette, Manner of Roasting Fish 148
18. The River Gambarou, or Yeou, near Lada 152
19. Favourite of the Seraglio, accompanying a Military Expedition 163
20. Kanemboo Spearman,—Munga Bowman, in the service of the Sheikh
of Bornou 166
21. Abdel Gassam, a Felatah from Timbuctoo—A Bornouese on a
Journey 177
22. Vignette, Kanemboo Night Watch 180
23. Hut, and Carpenter’s Shop 201
24. Vignette, Plan of Kouka 225
25. Fishing Boats on the River Shary 229
26. River Shary, from the Walls of Kussery 235
27. Vignette, Negresses Pounding Corn 247
28. A Loggun Lady—Funha of Maffatai—Abdelahi of Mandara 259
29. Hager Teous, or the Footstool of Noah 261
30. Sketch of the Lake Tchad 266
31. Lancers of the Sultan of Begharmi 279
32. Manner of Fishing on the River Yeou 284
33. Encampment near Woodie 289
34. Ghirza, south face of Building 305
35. Frieze on do. ib.
36. Town of Sangeia, in Houssa 36
37. Natives of Soudan 54
38. Vignette, Plan of the Town of Kano 56
39. A Reduction of Bello’s Map of Central Africa 109
40. Appendix—Fennecus Cerdo 183
41.
Arms and Armour of Central Africa, brought home by Major Denham,
42.
—Three Plates.
43.
44. General Map of the Routes of the Travellers.
 INTRODUCTORY CHAPTER.

BY MAJOR DENHAM.

FROM TRIPOLI TO MOURZUK.

Previous to any knowledge I had received of the intentions of

His Majesty’s government to follow up the mission of Mr. Ritchie and
Captain Lyon, I had volunteered my services to Lord Bathurst to
proceed to Timbuctoo, by nearly the same route which Major Laing is
now pursuing. I learnt, in reply, that an expedition had been planned,
and that Doctor Oudney and Lieutenant Clapperton, both of the
navy, were appointed; and with these gentlemen, by the kindness of
Lord Bathurst, I was, at my request, associated. My companions left
London before me; but, as soon as ready, I lost no time in
proceeding in the packet to Malta, where I found that they had left
the island for Tripoli nearly a month before. By the kindness of
Admiral Sir Graham Moore, Sir Manley Power, Sir Richard Plasket,
and Captain Woolley, commissioner of the dock-yard, all my wants
were amply supplied; and judging that the assistance of a shipwright
or carpenter might prove of essential use, and being allowed by my
instructions to engage any one, at a reasonable salary, who might
choose to volunteer to accompany the mission, William Hillman,
shipwright, a man of excellent character, immediately offered his
services, on an agreement that he should receive 120l. a year so
long as he should continue to be employed.
I embarked in the Express schooner, which the admiral lent me for
the purpose, and, on the 18th November, after three days’ sail,
arrived at Tripoli, and found my two companions at the house of Mr.
Consul Warrington, anxiously expecting my arrival. Of this gentleman
it is not too much to say, that by his cheerful and good humoured
disposition, his zeal, perseverance, and extraordinary good
management, we owe, in a great degree, that influence which
England possesses with this government far beyond that of any
other of the Barbary powers. The English name, in fact, is of such
importance in Tripoli, that there is scarcely a point to carry, or a
dispute to settle, in which the bashaw does not request the
interference of the British consul: and to him, indeed, is, in a great
degree, owing the origin and success of the late mission. He stated
broadly to the government at home, that the road from Tripoli to
Bornou was as open as that from London to Edinburgh; which, with a
small allowance for Oriental hyperbole, was found to be true—
witness the journey of my lamented friend Lieutenant Toole, and also
of Mr. Tyrwhitt, the latter laden with valuable presents.
But this is not all: the British flag has a peculiar power of
protection, and the roof of the English consul always affords a
sanctuary to the perpetrator of any crime, not even excepting
murder; and scarcely a day passes that some persecuted Jew or
unhappy slave, to escape the bastinado, does not rush into the
court-yard of the British consulate for protection. A circumstance
occurred in returning from one of our excursions, which shows in
what high estimation the English character is held in Tripoli. A poor
wretch, who, for some trifling offence, was sentenced to five hundred
bastinadoes, having, while on his way to receive the sentence of the
law, contrived to slip from the custody of his guards, fortunately met
with the child and servant of Doctor Dickson, a most respectable and
intelligent English physician practising in Tripoli: the condemned
wretch, with wonderful presence of mind, snatched up the child in his
arms, and halted boldly before his pursuers. The talisman was
sufficiently powerful: the emblem of innocence befriended the guilty,
and the culprit walked on uninterrupted, triumphantly claiming the
protection of the British flag.
But the following proves still more strongly to what extent the
influence of the British flag might be carried.—Since the reduction of
the refractory Arabs to submission, no chief had received such
repeated marks of kindness and attention from the bashaw, as
sheikh Belgassam ben Khalifa, head of the powerful tribe of El Gibel.
At the particular request of the former, sheikh Khalifa had quitted his
tents and flocks, resided in the city, and was high in his prince’s
confidence—fatal pre-eminence in Barbary states!—and had been
presented, but a few months before, with one of the most beautiful
gardens in the Minshea. Returning from the castle after an evening
of music and dancing in the bashaw’s private apartments,
Belgassam kissed the hand that had signed his death-warrant, and
took his leave. At his own door a pistol-shot wounded him in the arm,
and on entering the skiffa, or passage, a second entered his body.
The old sheikh, after his slave had fastened the door, staggered to
his carpet, and then, in the arms of his wife, proclaimed his assassin
to be his own nephew, sheikh Mahmoud Belgassam Wildé
Sowdoweah. The work being, however, but half done, others rushed
in, and seven stabs put an end to his sufferings, notwithstanding the
screams of his wife, who received two wounds herself, in
endeavouring to save her husband. The poor old man was almost
instantly buried, and the three persons who had undertaken the
murder fled to the British consulate for protection. Early the next
morning, however, the consul despatched his dragoman to give the
bashaw notice, “that the murderers of Khalifa would find no
protection under the flag of England.” The bashaw said, “he was
shocked at the murder, and regretted the assassins having taken
refuge in the consulate, as it was a sanctuary he could not violate,
particularly as he understood they meant to resist, and were well
armed.” Our consul replied, “that the bashaw was at liberty to send
any force he pleased, and use any means he thought best, to drag
them from beneath a banner that never was disgraced by giving
protection to assassins.” The minister also came and expressed the
bashaw’s delicacy; and it was evident he did not expect such would
be the conduct of the consul: he was, however, peremptory, and the
bashaw dared not seem to favour such an act of villany. It was
sunset before he decided on taking them away, when about sixteen
of the chosen people of the castle entered the consulate, and the
wretches, although provided with arms, which they had loaded,
tremblingly resigned themselves, and were, in less than an hour,
hanging over the walls of the castle.
On a day appointed we waited on the bashaw. After passing the
court-yard, crowded with guards, and several groups of Arabs in the
passages and ante-rooms playing at cards or dice, we were
introduced to the audience chamber, where the bashaw, sitting
cross-legged on a carpet, supported by his two sons, and attended
by armed negroes, received us kindly, ordered us to be served with
sherbet and coffee, and expressed himself in the most favourable
manner on the subject of our mission, which he promised to forward
in safety into the interior of Africa. He invited us to join him in a
hawking party. The cavalcade, consisting of about three hundred,
altogether presented so novel an appearance, that I shall endeavour
to give some description of our morning’s amusement. The bashaw
was mounted on a milk-white Arabian, superbly caparisoned, with
saddle of crimson velvet richly studded with gold nails, heavy stirrups
of the same, and trappings of embroidered cloth hanging down on
each side nearly to the horse’s fetlock joint; he was preceded by six
chaoushes, or officers, also mounted and richly caparisoned, armed
with long guns, swords, and pistols, and a white silk barracan thrown
loosely and gracefully round their bodies. His highness was
supported on each side by a favourite black slave, whose glittering
vest, light bornouse, and white turban, formed a pleasing contrast to
the costume of the Arabs. We proceeded in a westerly direction; and
on arriving at the desert, parties of six and eight dashed forward,
with the rapidity of lightning, several hundred paces, fired,
immediately halted in a most surprising manner, and with loud cries
rushed back again to the main body, when instantly the same
ceremony was repeated by another party. Their superior skill in the
management of their horses is really beautiful; and the way they
manœuvre their long musket, by repeatedly spinning it over their
heads at full speed, has a most picturesque effect. Near the
bashaw’s person rode Sidy Ali, his third son, although second in
succession, in consequence of the banishment of the eldest; he also
was attended by his particular guard of Arabs, distinguished not only
by their superior and determined appearance, but by their figured
muslin bornouses. Sidy Ali is the bashaw’s favourite son, and is
particularly handsome, although what we should call too fat, and is
said to resemble very much what the bashaw was at his age: he is
allowed great privilege and liberty, which is indeed proved by his
saying, the other day, to his father, “I shall succeed you as bashaw.”