Few enjoy the privilege of creating their own identities. Jews, Blacks, Roma, Hillbillies, Witches, and a myriad of others, demonized, erased or eradicated, demonstrate that identities are not necessarily a matter of individual choice. These ostensibly diverse figures do not control their own narratives and are subject to various forms of dehumanization and marginalization . They are defined by stereotypes that generate hate, fear, ridicule or romantic mythologies, sometimes, paradoxically, simultaneously. The author’s research integrates perspectives drawn from myth, literature, religious belief, histories, political ideologies, popular culture, and other sources , from the distant past to the disturbing present, to reveal the pervasive power of bigotry.
This book exposes those dynamics that have created a spectrum of hate from prejudice, through discrimination, towards persecution, exclusion and, in its darkest manifestations, ethnic cleansing, erasure, genocide. These figures, and the spaces they inhabit, are profoundly connected. Their identities are formed by the interaction, or collision, between who they believe they are and how they are imagined to be through the hostility of others. They are invented as pariahs, outsiders who threaten or subvert the imagined cohesion of dominant communities. New imperatives emerge for international higher education. Conventional, simplistic concepts of identity or “culture” distort the unfamiliar environments students will encounter throughout their lives. The insights offered here indicate that a key task is to help students unlearn assumptions, to discard the baggage with which they travel across borders, real and metaphorical. The author deconstructs orthodoxies and demands that attention be paid to those silenced, ignored, dehumanized, victims of cruel myopia and immoral deafness.
Author:
Michael Woolf’s career has been spent substantially in international contexts. Prior to working in education abroad, he completed a PhD in American Studies, taught literature at universities in the UK and Italy, and worked for BBC radio. He has held leadership roles in international education for many years and has published and edited extensively. He received the Peter A. Wollitzer Award (2020) from the Forum on Education Abroad. Pariahs draws directly upon his identity as a Jew born in London in 1947. The Holocaust was rarely discussed but fear of the hostility of others was palpable in landscapes of anxiety.
