Rethinking Cultural Diplomacy: A transnational, interdisciplinary perspective, Iowa City, Iowa, February 2, 2011

- [Thais Winkleblack] I would like to extend my sincere thanks to New Pioneer Co-op and to MidWestOne Bank for their generous contribution to support today's programming. I would also like to say a thank you to the University of Iowa's International Programs and the University of Iowa's Honors Program for their continued support. Without our sponsors and collaborators programs like this would not be possible. I would also like to give a plug for WorldCanvass presented by Joan Kjaer who is in the audience today. Thank you, Joan, for making sure that the programming that you are supporting also extends to the Iowa City Foreign Relations Council. Without Joan we would have not necessarily had as quick or direct contact with Renugan and he's going to be speaking on one of my favorite topics today, but, World Canvass, on February 18th, that's at five o'clock in the senate chambers, and Renugan and Ari Samsky will be presenting on the role of anthropology and cross-cultural communications on February 18th. So please join them. At this time I would like to invite Andy Willard to come to the podium and introduce today's speaker, thank you. - [Andy Willard] Thank you. Well good afternoon folks. My name is Andy Willard. I'm the Experiential Learning Director for the University of Iowa Honors Program and it really is a pleasure to introduce Renugan Raidoo, our speaker today. Renugan and I arrived at the University of Iowa, just about the same time four years ago. Renugan has, I suspect, made much more of his time here than I have, although I'd like to believe I've made some good contributions. My first meeting, and I say "meeting" in quotes, with Renugan, was actually on the telephone, when he called up even before, I think, the semester began, or maybe the very beginning of his first semester of his first year, and he wanted to know about how to get involved with the Writing Fellows program, which, for those of you who may not be familiar with it, the University of Iowa has a very nice program called Writing Fellows. It's run by the Rhetoric Department and it's an opportunity for undergraduate honor students to serve as writing tutors for their classmates. Normally this is a position that sophomores, juniors and seniors have, and, in the four years that I've been here, Renugan is the only first-year student who ever raised this question with me. I don't know if he went on and became a Writing Fellow that very first year, but he did become a Writing Fellow, and it wouldn't surprise me, given the initiative he takes and his determination, that, in fact, he may have done that in his first year. At the university, just some basic facts about Renugan. He has majored in chemistry and anthropology in the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences, and he came to Iowa as a Presidential Scholar and won a Goldwater Scholarship while being a student here. And, as you now know, he was named the 20th winner of a Rhodes Scholarship from the University of Iowa. So we actually are very, very proud of him, pleased. But he is joining a list of people. There have been 20 Rhodes Scholars. He is the 20th Rhodes Scholar from the University of Iowa. And, so, congratulations to Renugan. He also was name the University of Iowa Chemistry Student of the Year, both his sophomore and junior years, which, of course, is very much in character with Renugan that he has decided to study anthropology in this life. This is a good sign. It's a good omen. At the university, Renugan has worked with the Global Health Club, a club that actually was founded and supported by the Honors Program. The club raises awareness of global-health concerns and has raised some money for international aid organizations. He's active in Amnesty International. He has tutored for the Iowa Biosciences Advantage Program. He is also the musical director for Intersection, a male a cappella group on campus. And I can tell you already, he will not offer to sing for this group today. He's helped with a group called Bplans for Humanity. This is an organization that has been founded, not just in connection with the India Winterim Programs that are so successful over the last five years, but it was founded by people associated with that group. Renugan has worked with that group as well, facilitating project development for social entrepreneurs and non-profits and, of course, going back to my first introduction to Renugan on the writing, he's helped with them with their writing, it says, as well. At Oxford where Renugan will be moving in a couple months, it seems to me, but it's actually still eight months, nine months, in October, I have no doubt that he will continue to pursue these endeavors in novel circumstances and in different ways and that he will develop new interests while at Oxford and he will pursue them as well with his characteristic creativity, determination and humor. And on that note, I'll turn the podium over to Renugan. Thank you very much. - [Renugan Raidoo] Well that's quite an introduction. Hopefully the speech will be a good followup to that. Thank you, Dr. Willard, for the kind introduction and thank you all for the invitation to give this lecture. I greatly appreciate the goals of this organization. I remember coming to some of the ICFRC lectures as a wide-eyed freshman and being inspired by the distinguished scholars, diplomats and international workers who gave talks here. I was actually here just two weeks ago to hear a talk entitled Stunting is No Small Matter, by Dr. Alan Brody. Some of the points that he made about Africa, and, in particular, Malawi, being more complex than we'd like to think, I hope will be reflected in my talk today. I'm quite humbled by the opportunity to address you today as only a senior in college. But I hope that I can explain some key aspects of my own worldview that have developed over the last several years through particular transnational and interdisciplinary tensions. First, as a dual South African and American citizen, who traces his origins back to India, and second, as a student with bachelor's training in both chemistry and anthropology. Around the middle of the 19th century, my ancestors were brought to South Africa by the British to tend the sugar cane fields of KwaZulu-Natal. But five generations later, we have still maintained our languages, our foods, and our traditions. In 2001, my father got a job offer from the University of South Dakota as a professor. Post-apartheid South Africa, while it will always be my home, did not offer the same opportunities to me and my older sister that an education in the United States could. So we packed up our things, said good-bye to our family and moved to South Dakota. To provide some context, Durban, South Africa is a coastal city of three million people in which Sesame Street or is in three different languages. Vermillion, South Dakota is a university town of 10,000 with the racial diversity of a box of white crayons. Don't get me wrong. I don't mean this as a slight on Vermillion. I learned a lot during my time living there and I appreciate all the wonderful friends that I do have in South Dakota. Rather, I intend it as a statement of fact and sort of as a testament to the culture shock that I hope you can imagine I experienced because Vermillion just doesn't have very much racial diversity. On my first day of school in Vermillion in 2001, I realized, during language arts, that, in the two months of arriving in the United States just the day before, I had forgotten some of my school supplies at home. I turned to the girl next to me and asked in my South African accent, "Have you a rubber?" Had I known that I had just asked Shannon for a condom, and not an eraser, her look of horror would have surprised me less. The entire class started laughing at me and our teacher turned very, very, very red. This was my first intensive fieldwork as an amateur anthropologist, although I didn't initially understand it as such. Certainly I was not informed by the wealth of social theory that informs academic anthropology today. But insofar as social cultural anthropology requires a hyper-awareness and appreciation of culture, and investment in participation observation, and a certain critical distance, I was an amateur anthropologist in the seventh grade. I immersed myself completely, learning the accent, which I hope is convincing, learning to play American football, which I'm not very good at, and eating Pop Tarts for breakfast. Yet, this was all in the context of a very different intellectual trajectory. My parents are both physicians and my father has his PhD in neuroscience. Because the University of KwaZulu-Natal, where my father taught, was just around the corner from where I went to school, I often spent the afternoon with my dad, in the electron microscope room, looking at fuzzy blobs that he told me were cells. One of the first puzzles that I ever did was a 3D model of the brain, complete with cranium, in my father's office. My sister and I would sometimes fight over who would get to put certain lobes in. Plus the preserved brains eerily floating in jars in the lab made quite the impression on me as a young boy. Influenced by my parents and my undying love of science and scientific inquiry, I began studying chemistry at the University of Iowa. Over time, however, the hole that science has in the way we think about facts and the production of knowledge, began to trouble me. I came to understand a big difference in the way people experience their worlds, and the way we choose to characterize them. I, and I would venture to say, all of you, do not experience my body as organ systems with certain chemicals creating my experiences. Rather, we have very complex emotions that appear to come, not only from within, but also from the world around us. When something sad happens in our lives, we say we are upset because of the death of a loved one, and not because of changing levels of serotonin. When we have a spiritual experience, we also say it is because of some profound inspiration or insight, and, again, not because of chemicals in the brain. These experience are, in many ways, inexplicable by scientific methods. Larger social phenomena, such as racism, colonialism and gender discrimination, are also inexplicable by positivist methods. I found myself wanting more in my education, so I began studying anthropology. I saw a certain virtue in this discipline that sought to understand human experiences as they are experienced and not as they are in some objective, empirical scientific sense. In the past four years, I've come to terms with my intellectual uncertainty. This is not to say that I've reconciled the highly-critical anthropological framework with the Streicher positivism that governs science. I'm not sure whether they can or even should be reconciled. I think, at the young age of 20, to say that I am intellectually certain of my worldview would betray either a lack of creativity and introspection on my part, or a sad, bleak and simple world. Rather, I mean to say that I have come to appreciate the concurrence of several different ways of looking at the world. And it is this consideration of other disciplines and other ways of knowing that I hope will conform cultural diplomacy in the future. When political scientist Milton C. Cummings coined the term, "cultural diplomacy" he described it as the exchange of ideas, information, values, systems, traditions, beliefs and other aspects of culture, with the intention of fostering mutual understanding. Indeed, this form of diplomacy is preferable to military action at one extreme or cultural exclusivity at the other. I don't need to tell you that the world we live in is an ever-shrinking one. With the growth of the internet and the spread of technology we have entered an age in which the ability to share our cultural experiences is unprecedented. And this is why, more than ever, we need to learn how to understand each other. And I thus come to my first concern with cultural diplomacy. As we know it, cultural diplomacy is about convincing others of the virtues of our culture and understanding the virtues in theirs. This is not done by politicians, necessarily, but, rather, by people we might call "cultural diplomats." Musicians, artists, athletes and others who have a certain hold in our culture and represent what it means to be American. And even every day citizens who travel. Countries go to great lengths to engage in cultural diplomacy. Events such as the Olympic Games and the soccer World Cup represent some of the greatest venues of cultural diplomacy. And nations vie competitively to have the honor of hosting them. South Africa tried exceptionally hard this summer to show the rest of the world that an African nation was capable of hosting an international sporting event like the World Cup. During the memorable opening ceremonies of the 2008 Olympic Games, a story of Chinese history and culture was recounted in a grand spectacle, attesting to the might and power of China's growing economy. The trouble I have with this, and cultural diplomacy in general, is that it focuses on dialogue. Don't misunderstand me. I want to be able to have an open conversation. But focusing on dialogue cripples a true understanding of culture and the views of others. Certainly dialogue is important, but the practice of cultural diplomacy should not be located solely in talking with and understanding other cultures. It requires an understanding of our own culture too. With the same gaze that we use to look at others who we may be trying to understand, we must turn around and look at ourselves and our own situation. And this is, in part, why the term "transnational" appears in the subtitle to this talk. When a professor of mine was explaining the difference between international and transnational in a class, she referred to the way we, at the university, think about internationality. A large part of international programs at the university consists of study abroad. This, however, deals entirely with students going to other countries to study or do internships. Definitely these experiences can be life-changing. I did chemistry research last summer through a program called RISE, Research Internships in Science and Engineering through the or the German Academic Exchange Service. I think I grew, not only as a chemist, but also as a person, during my time abroad. That is not to say that I would not have had an equally as rewarding experience doing an internship in Canada or Wisconsin, or, dare I say, Iowa State. Students do not, however, generally pursue exchange semesters in American universities through international programs. Nor are they encouraged to do so. Consider, also, that American studies does not fall in international programs. Nor does American Indian and Native Studies. Perhaps more illustrative, when we go to cultural-diversity festivals, it is common for the United States not even to get a booth. It is these boundaries between us and others that prevent us from realizing the complexities of our own culture and how that might impact cultural diplomacy. So I chose the word, "transnational." While this may be a somewhat arbitrary distinction, to me it is significant. The term "transnational" suggests a transcendence of borders. A recognition of distinctions, not based on arbitrary lines drawn on a globe, but on substantive differences. It forces us, not only to look at others, but to also look at ever-smaller communities around us, and, ultimately, ourselves. Cultural diplomacy is not truly diplomatic unless we understand, in addition to the dialogue, the ways that we ourselves are influenced by culture. We are more diverse and complicated than we may sometimes like to think. While this may seem like a minute point to address, it does have far-reaching implications. Consider, for example, the beginnings of the AIDS epidemic in the U.S. Towards the start of the epidemic, statistical analysis produced what some people call the 4-H club, or the 4 H's, not to be confused with the youth-development organization. This was a list of four categories, each beginning with the letter H, of people more likely to spread AIDS. Homosexuals, Haitian immigrants, heroine users and hemophiliacs. There was some statistical validity to this. However, the construction of these categories, some of them drawn along lines of sexual orientation, gender identity, national origin and disease, are, unfortunately, placed within a context of discrimination. While the people in these categories may, statistically, have higher incidences of AIDS, constructing them in such a way only intensified the xenophobia and homophobia that produced these categories in the first place. This is entirely a production of culture. Rather than focus on unsafe practices, the 4-H Club made categories of people the locus of diseases, and, thus, objects of scorn. In understanding this history, that exists in our own culture, it can put the way that we talk about Africa as a whole into better focus. Much of what we here about Sub-Saharan Africa is, sadly, about AIDS. The way we conceptualize AIDS as a dirty disease that is spread by social deviants and outcasts, then has the possibility of changing the way we talk about and relate to an entire continent of people. To give you an idea of how this impacts practices and foreign relations, anthropologist Elisa Sobo did a study of AIDS-related public health measures in South Africa in the early 1990s. In her study, she found that many women continued to have unprotected sex despite being educated about the risks. This was a result of the educators describing condom use as a way to protect against promiscuous partners. To the women in the study, however, this was culturally construed as evidence of a flawed conjugal relationship. Thus, while condom use may be necessary for other women, it was not necessary for those meeting, or wanting to be seen as meeting, gendered cultural expectations of monogamy. Sobo writes, "The ethnographically-informed study "revealed the ultimate inappropriateness and effectiveness "of suggesting that women's partners were disloyal, "as well as its cultural basis." In short, a particular idea of AIDS that was propagated by Western educators, when taken into a different cultural setting, created a misunderstanding that had real health consequences. Attentiveness to the cultural inscription of connecting AIDS with promiscuity may have prevented this misunderstanding. It takes not only an understanding of the South African women being educated, but also a knowledge of how the culture of the international public health workers influenced the way they talked about condom use and AIDS to have an effective educational program. Sandra Hyde, in her book Eating Spring Rice, discusses how epidemiological categories of statistical analysis can even have consequences at home. From her work in China, she showed the categories similar to those in the 4-H Club, when put into public health practice, led to ignorance about AIDS and AIDS prevention in non-target populations, and, similarly, reflected cultural bias. In attending to our own culture and ideas, we not only improve the way we interact with each others', but we may also improve the way we act at home. But to discover our own cultural beliefs and practices, and those of others, it takes a readjustment of our gaze. I think there needs to be a re-programing of how we see and interpret the things we look at. It takes, I believe, a certain amount of cultural and moral relativism. And this is the second problem that I see with the idea of cultural diplomacy. While I never doubt that diplomacy has certain goals in mind, if it is to be an honest cultural diplomacy, those political goals should come second to understanding. A goal-oriented practice says, "I want this group of people to do a certain thing, "allow me certain access to certain information, "trust me and negotiate with me." It does not say, "I want to understand this group "for the sake of understanding." But the latter case is a necessary prerequisite to actualizing the former. If diplomacy is not informed by a genuine interest in helping or understanding someone else or oneself, then it is misguided. Total cultural and moral relativism, which entails a complete suspension of moral and cultural judgment, is something that I do not think is a reasonable way to conduct diplomacy in general. It would be naive, and, I think, morally remiss to say that all cultural beliefs are justified or right. This idea, when taken to the extreme, dissolves into complacency and a disregard for human suffering. And I have no doubt that some people are actually oppressed. Violence, unfortunately, does occur. Nonetheless, I advocate cultural and moral relativism as a way to understand others. Considering information without passing judgment can lead to understandings that would otherwise not be realized. Take, for example, the preconceptions that we may have about women in the Islamic world. What we see in newspapers and on television, is that women who wear the head scarf, the burka or the hijab, are oppressed and have their rights taken from them. They're beaten by the men in their families. From the famous cover of last year's July Time Magazine, we think that, across the Muslim world, women have their noses cut off for disgracing their families. As I said before, unfortunately, things like this do happen in the world we live in, and not just in the Muslim world. But when we construct our ideas about large groups of people based on their geographical location, their religion or the color of their skin, we miss out on key aspects of their experiences. I met a girl in Germany who was in the same program as I was. She's actually a Fulbright Scholar from Egypt, and during the break from her graduate MBA program in the United States, she chose to do an internship in Germany. As a young Muslim-Egyptian woman, she wore a head scarf of her own volition. One day, I asked her why she wore the head scarf. She knew that I was raised a Hindu but was not particularly religious and I knew that she was a devout Muslim. She did not speak of how her family required her to wear it or how her religion guilted her into wearing it. She told me that she feels respected when she wears the head scarf. She said that she's confident that when she speaks people judge her only on the content of her ideas and not on her appearance or the way she carries herself. The head scarf, to her, was a symbol of empowerment, personal and intellectual. It was a way for her to feel confident and free to share her thoughts and ideas. When we suspend moral judgment, and listen to the testimony of my Egyptian friend, understand that in many countries, as in our own, women may consider their type of dress appropriately modest, and realize how many times the hijab, burka or head scarf has been used as a way to defy colonial power. We may finally begin to understand that what we thought was always oppressive does, in fact, mean many different things to many different people. By suspending our judgment, and buying into relativism, we allow the testimony of others to inform our understanding, rather than what we see on the outside and our preconceived notions of what that means. Not only are these ideas often untrue, but when we consider that they are used to justify wars and other forms of violence, they can also be incredibly destructive. And, once again, this has implications at home as well as in foreign relations. The indigenous peoples of South Africa have long-used certain plants to induce labor. Among them are the Cape Ash, Ekebergia capensis, the Bush Lily, Clivia miniata, and the Lavender Star flower, Grewia occidentalis. In his PhD thesis, a student of my father's studied the effect that compounds distilled from these three plants had on the contractions of a guinea pig uterus. Despite the fact that the foundations of the study were in ancient local cultural practice, the study showed these practices to be scientifically valid. And this is not the only case of this happening. Many scientists who have chosen not to dismiss local cultural practices as superstition and religious poppycock have shown that local knowledge, while it may not have been created with the same rigor of modern science, can hold a lot of truth. This is not always true, but often is, and is only ever realized by a suspension of judgment. An uncountable number of commercial drugs in use today are products of ethnobotany and many non-Western medical systems, such as Chinese medicine and Ayurveda are incredibly sophisticated. We must hear everything with non-judgmental ears, which brings me to a third point that I feel is important in cultural diplomacy. To whom should we listen? If cultural diplomacy is to actually gain meaningful, honest relationship, it cannot be informed by cultural diplomats alone. Nor can what appears in the press be considered a valid gauge of reality. I think that the testimony of the least privileged in every community is always the most important. Certainly, the testimony of everyone is important. But the best information is collected from the bottom up and not from the top down. When people without complicated political agendas are allowed to speak, they can tell us things that truly give insight into the workings of a culture. Certainly, when one is dealing with diplomacy on a large scale, these sorts of testimonies become difficult to collect. Perhaps academic scholarship can be of use here. But on a smaller, more personal scale, cultural diplomacy should happen through personal relationships. One cannot experience culture in museums or guided tours, in sight-seeing our lonely planet. One organization that I've used to facilitate cultural diplomacy is Couchsurfing.org. Couchsurfing works like this. You create a profile, and when you travel to a different city, you look at the profiles of others in that city. If you need a place to stay, you can request to stay on someone's couch, hence the name Couchsurfing, but you can also elect to just have coffee with them, or get a free tour. Several safety features keep people from abusing this. Personally, I've stayed with someone once in Strasbourg and met up with Couchsurfers in Berlin. While I haven't had many experiences with it, the two that I did have were incredibly rewarding. In Strasbourg, the night before I left, my host asked me, "Do you want to fly with me tomorrow?" Sort of confused, I turned to him and asked, "What do you mean?" "Well," he said, "I'm an amateur pilot "and was thinking of flying tomorrow. "Do you want to come?" Of course I said, "Yes." The next morning, we went to the Strasbourg airfield and got in a plane. We found two castles in the mountains near Strasbourg and circled around them. Then we went in the opposite direction and flew along the Rhine River that forms a border between France and Germany. People are out there who want to share their experiences. We just need to meet them. They help us deconstruct what's been fed to us in the news and in guide books. To experience someone is more than just to learn about them. Even in Iowa City we have people willing to share their experiences in organizations such as the Council for International Visitors to Iowa Cities, or CIVIC. And even if we cannot travel much, the Couchsurfing website is a testament to technology that has the power to connect so many people in so many ways. The internet often gets a bad reputation for being a force of globalization. But I think this is unfair. I won't deny that it has the capacity to promote the ideals of those who created it and use it for certain commercial ends. But it is my impression that not everyone uses it in the same way. As an analogy, take the emoticon. Punctuation arranged to create faces or other objects when using Instant Messenger or writing an email. These have become so ubiquitous that, a few weeks ago, when I checked out a book from the library, someone had actually used emoticons in their marginalia. But the book was about social theory and I actually didn't understand the passage very well, so it was good to know that it made someone else smile. Often, for commonly used combinations, programs like Skype and Instant Messenger, will replace the emoticons with actual icons. In the U.S., most emoticons consist of two, maybe up to four characters. But in Asia, the construction of emoticons has become an art form. Sometimes hundreds of characters, many of which I didn't even know could be typed on a computer, create elaborate pictorial representations of faces and objects. It really is quite astounding to see and I'd encourage you to go online and look at some of the pictures. What I take from this example is that nothing is monolithic. That is, nothing has only one meaning, one significance. While we may think of all the information on the internet as this Western force that turns everyone into consumers or ruins human interaction in our youth, I must emphatically disagree. Certainly, it does provide the same information to many different people. I recall talking to some friends in Germany once, and being surprised when they asked me if I had seen the Harry Potter Puppet Pals video on YouTube before. But to say that this is the only way that technology works, indoctrinating people into acting like us, is, from my experience, absurd. And this highlights my last point about cultural diplomacy. We have, at our fingertips, so many modes of discourse, so many ways to produce and realize culture. There no longer exists a field in which an anthropologist can do fieldwork. History and technology have shattered all hope of any location being purely local. In light of this, we have to look for cultural media in the many technologically-mediated forms that are available to us. One of my favorite examples of cultural diplomacy was actually organized on the internet. The second YouTube Symphony Orchestra will perform this year, on March 20th, at the Sydney Opera House. The orchestra is made up of amateur musicians from all over the world, who submit their auditions over YouTube. I like this first, of course, because it brings so many people together to engage in something that is not focused on their differences, but will necessarily bring them to light. But, more than that, it exposes talent in people that otherwise would have gone unnoticed. It allows amateur musicians to share their musical passions and experiences in a way that is available online to people everywhere. And, if you're interested, the entire concert will be available on YouTube. It may seem, in general, that I'm asking a lot of cultural diplomats. They must be able to make generalizations about cultures, but not ignore the internal diversity. They must not be judgmental at first, but try to combat oppression where it does exist. They must look both at themselves, and at others. I must apologize. All the contradictions are entirely true. This is exactly what I expect cultural diplomacy to do. Culture is messy, messy business. I think a testament to that is the fact that, although entire disciplines are devoted to it, there's no single, acceptable definition of what culture is. Trying to make sense of the mess of culture is difficult and frustrating, but a necessary part of participating in a shrinking world. To be comfortable with uncertainty, I think, will be the hallmark of a good cultural diplomat and includes all that I have said today. To me, the study of any subject is only the contextualization of the theoretical paradigms that inform it. A mathematician looks at the Heisenberg uncertainty principle and sees it as the simple result of the fact that the momentum and position operators for a wave function do not commute. A physical chemist looks at the same expression and sees a finite limit to which any spectroscopic technique can provide chemical information. A poet may look at it and see a universe that defies understanding. Still others have presented it as evidence for the existence of God. Just as the Heisenberg uncertainty principle is a proof, a spectrum, poetry and, perhaps, God, we can see people as mathematicians, chemists, poets, theologians, doctors and anthropologists, and, in the rifts between these disciplines, we can learn the most. I'd like to leave you with a story that has provided me with a lot of inspiration. My great uncle, spent several years in prison with Nelson Mandela on Robben Island as a result of his political resistance against the apartheid regime. Although he died when I was young, I remember talks we would have while I sat on his lap. We would rarely talk about his experiences during the struggle, but I remember one thing he would always say about it. One would think that spending several years in jail for your beliefs would harden even the greatest of men. But he said that we cannot judge people in retrospect. We can look at history and critique it and learn from it, but not judge those who participated in it. "Several thousands of years ago," he said, "our ancestors "oppressed tribal communities in southern India, "just as the apartheid regime oppressed us more recently." To hear this was humbling. I could not imagine having the same clarity of thought and compassion as he did. It is this compassion that drives me to discover how others experience their worlds. While we must be cognizant of history, and I certainly hope that that has been salient throughout my talk, we should not try to blame and locate guilt. Compassion, I find, is a far more inspiring reason to want to learn about others, for it respects what it truly means to be human. Thank you. - [Thais Winkleblack] "How would you propose that we, as individuals, "can help others see the importance of cultural diplomacy "and convince them to take initiative?" - [Renugan Raidoo] I think that is a very difficult question because, I mean it's something that, as a student dealing with other students, we definitely have to think about. I think alerting others to cultural diplomacy comes from where I ended my talk, with compassion. My impression is that there are a lot of people who don't like cultural diplomacy, who sort of would prefer to be culturally exclusive and stay within their own boundaries, do so out of a certain defensiveness that, because I think a lot of people think that this push to be multi-cultural and to learn about other cultures, is sort of an opposition to their own culture. And so I think it comes with helping them understand that they also have culture. That we're not just looking for this nebulous thing called culture that exists elsewhere, but it's something that's here too. So really to learn about culture is not only to learn about other people and neglect oneself, but to learn about oneself too. - [Thais Winkleblack] Well, I'll ask you a really easy question first, while I parse through this next question, but, "Having mastered American English, "can you still also speak South African English "and Indian English, or have you had to let those two go?" - [Renugan Raidoo] Well I never actually spoke Indian English, although I sometimes try to do a pretty good job to amuse people. But, yes, I do actually still speak South African English with my parents. It's not really a different language or anything, but the accent is quite different. Maybe in my answer to the next question, I'll try and demonstrate. - [Thais Winkleblack] If you do that, then we won't make you sing. Okay, so the question, I'm not sure if I really understand this question, but, the question, I'm just, so I'm gonna make it my own question. The questioner, though, is trying to point at the idea that there's a lot of discussion about science and math test scores and then, with that preface, is wondering, in terms of comparing ourselves to other countries, such as India and China, whether or not, or how you think that U.S. students are doing on developing a transnational perspective? I mean, does that debate help us see that this idea of transnational that you're talking about? I know. So take it wherever you want. I'll just talk and see where this takes me. So, first of all, I don't think, necessarily, that test scores are a reasonable way to look at us. There was actually an article written by Thomas Friedman in the New York Times just after they announced the Rhodes Scholars. And my name was actually in it because he wrote this article and the crux of the article was that, was about how, in the United States, parents and the internet and technology are ruining us, my generation. And his proof of this was listing half of the names of the Rhodes Scholars, except he just chose all the ethnic-sounding names, and so, naturally, my name, not being a very Midwestern one, appeared there. I think this is unfair in many ways because it doesn't speak to the true skills that I think my generation is developing. A lot of people are doing research on how, for example, video games and participation in internet communities, are just different forms of learning. And I don't necessarily think that math test scores, while, in a conventional sense, are very important, in the future will be. To address this, maybe there was second part to that question, about how American students are doing in becoming transnational, I don't know. I'm inspired every day by my, by my fellows here at university, especially by a number of students who are in the audience today and who I have in class, because a lot of them do make concerted efforts to be transnational and to travel. Actually I know a lot of people who also use Couchsurfing and, so, I see a thumbs-up at the back of the room. And I think it's mostly young people on websites like that. And sharing cultural experiences through the internet, while we may not see a lot of students traveling, a lot of students watch YouTube. You'd be surprised at how much more time we spend on YouTube than homework. And so I'm very proud of the way that my classmates and other students are trying to pursue transnational goals. - [Thais Winkleblack] Well I do invite the questioner to come up and rephrase that question if we didn't get to the heart of what you were asking. To close, with a final question, I'd like to go back to exactly what you discussed in your presentation, and that idea of beyond just learning about other cultures, also reflecting upon our own culture. And this questioner says, "So, what would you say, then, to people who say "that the United States has 'no culture'"? - [Renugan Raidoo] I think this is wrong. I hate to be so blunt. But, I think this is a common misconception. And, I think it comes out of history. For a long time, we have sort of defined race as in opposition to whiteness. So, people are black or Indian, or Chinese because they are not white. So when we have discourses in this setting, we get to a point in which whiteness becomes unmarked and, eventually, whiteness, I guess, translated into Americanness. And so we come to a situation which this is an unmarked category. So, all these other things are cultural because they have these extra bells and whistles. But I don't think that that's the way things work. And that's an important part of being transnational because, I actually read a very good article for a class a few weeks ago, that was, I think it was from a feminist journal, and it was called, oh, it was about how American whites have chosen to deal with guilt. At the end of the article, she said that all attempts at dealing with what they call, or with what the people she interviewed called "white guilt" sort of failed. They ended up not being very good, because they were either sort of motivated by this guilt and a want to rectify the wrongs of the past. But, rather, she said, that constructing American identity, by ways that do not juxtapose it against black identity, or Indian identity, is the only way that we get people to actually be activists. It's the only way that we get people to make meaningful change. Because if we understand ourselves, not in opposition to others, but ourselves as sort of essential units, then we can try and be transnational. So that's what I was getting at in my talk and I hope that addressed the question of Americans not having culture. - [Thais Winkleblack] Thank you. To the final two questions, please come up and talk to Renugan 'cause I'm sure he'd be happy to answer your questions. But, because that ends on such a perfect note based on his presentation, I am going to stop us there. On behalf of the Iowa City Foreign Relations Council, I want to thank Renugan for his presentation, and I would also like to thank our sponsors, the University of Iowa's International Programs, the University of Iowa's Honors Program, New Pioneer Co-op and MidWestOne Bank, for their generous support. Normally, we're the ones that feel that our speaker is benefiting by receiving the ever-so-coveted Iowa City Foreign Relations Council mug after their presentations, but I think, in this case, we'll feel hopeful that you might be displaying this mug somewhere in a prominent place anywhere you might be in the United States and beyond, so thank you, Renugan. A huge thank you to you for taking the time to address us and we hope we see you at the Iowa City Foreign Relations Council again, and I hope that I see all of you at the Iowa City Foreign Relations Council again. If you enjoy listening to this program on the radio or through our wonderful collaborators here, through cable TV, and you'd like to send us a contribution, you know we would never say, "No," so, please do so. 335-0351 is our telephone number. Again, that new website address is internationalcorridor.org, so please visit us there. Before you leave us today, please do remember to return your name tags. Thank you, and we are adjourned.