“A Zone of Deep Shadow”: Pedagogical and Familial Reflections on “The Clash of Civilizations”

This paper examines the media coverage of the murder of a young Muslim girl in Mississauga, Ontario in December 2007. We examine how that coverage moved from concerns for a terrible family event to the use of the language of Samuel Huntington’s “Clash of Civilizations.” We explore the nature of this exaggeration that occurs in times of threat and the “hardening” and eventual clashing of identities that can follow. We interweave with these matters considerations of the pedagogical and familial consequences of such identity-exaggeration under threat. We propose that the provisional, negotiated, and casual conviviality of identities that precedes times of threat are cast into what Ivan Illich called “a zone of deep shadow.” We propose, also, that it is this locale of an interdependent, co-determining conviviality of identities that can profitably be the locus of rich and intellectually vital classroom conversations.