Chapter 3: Whiteness, Postcolonialism, and Embodiment in Comparative Perspective

It is clear that many of the concepts that are central to our understanding of embodied knowledge as noted in chapter one, have specific applicability to discussions of racism, postcolonialism, and globalization. The relationship between self and other, and efforts to categorize, dominate, and objectify otherness, are salient issues that contemporary theorists have discussed at length within these domains. In this chapter, I will review some of the literature commonly found within the fields of critical Whiteness theory and postcolonial theory, linking its applicability to broader notions of embodiment and education within a global perspective. In doing so, the examples derived from the literature will be necessarily selective but representative of the larger themes that characterize these fields.