Global Citizenship

There was a colorful din of Presentix-aided performances inside the classroom when I had asked my students to do an adult version of a show and tell: "Are You Global"? was the rubric under which each student was to do an engaging (and intellectually stimulating) multimedia presentation of whether or not they were global citizens and what did global citizenship mean to them.

The presentations had been reserved for the last two weeks of a class on the "paradoxes" of globalization. Most walked a fine balance between gravity and levity; concepts of citizenship were revisited, tweaked, defended, attacked, and one performance was particularly memorable because of its casual tossing aside of conventions; the young lady proudly claimed to be global, meaning that she has freed herself from shackles of parochial food habits that her mother, an immigrant from Serbia still clings to in their home in Northern New Jersey. "The smell of roasting pork nauseates me, and it's one reason why my dad, who's a native of the U.S. divorced my mom."

Looking back, I think, two things I wanted to highlight, were lost in the beautiful chaos. Borrowing from a wonderful term I had heard the well-known cultural critic, Gayatri Spivak (utter in her speech on the fate of an aesthetic education in the era of globalization), I had said that to become a global citizen one had to begin orienting one's most ethical of thoughts around the "Other". In the 21st century globalization of the self should ideally start by looking not Eastward, or Westward, inward or outward, but "Otherward." Most must have misheard the word as "[In] other words" and so turned glassy eyes toward me. A Glassy eye in my [pedagogical] experience means "I don't get it" with a dash of politeness.

The other thing I said was that the most global of citizens were not the students themselves, well-traveled, multilingual denizens of the privileged class, or I myself, or people like me, but the refugees, not the traditional immigrants, but the refugees, folks who resettle from their home countries to the United States (or elsewhere) out of a complex web of personal motives and historical factors.

This too went unregistered on the templates of their consciousness.