Cameron McCarthy, "Burnished Ornamentalism: The Social Aesthetics of Postcolonial Elite Schools in Globalizing Circumstances"

This presentation addresses the matter of the management and conservation of histories (“burnished ornamentalism”) in three school sites: in Barbados, India and Singapore respectively. These schools form part of a 5-year, 9-country study of postcolonial elite schools in globalizing circumstances—a flash point of articulation between these schools and profound change. This presentation turns on this fundamental fact: that these schools, which are the products of societies marked historically by colonial and imperial encounters, are now driven forward by new energies associated with marketization, neoliberalism and globalization as these countries lurch forward unevenly towards a post-developmental era.