Curriculum Epistemicide: Towards An Itinerant Curriculum Theory 2015024955, 9781138837911, 9781315734781

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Curriculum Epistemicide

Around the world, curriculum—hard sciences, social sciences, and the humanities—has been dominated and legitimated by prevailing Western Eurocentric Anglophone discourses and practices. Drawing from and within a complex range of epistemological perspectives from the Middle East, Africa, Southern Europe, and Latin America, this volume presents a critical analysis of what the author, influenced by the work of Sousa Santos, coins curriculum epistemicides, a form of Western imperialism used to suppress and eliminate the creation of rival, alternative knowledges in developing countries. This exertion of power denies an education that allows for diverse epistemologies, disciplines, theories, concepts, and experiences. The author outlines the struggle for social justice within the field of curriculum, as well as a basis for introducing an Itinerant Curriculum Theory, highlighting the potential of this new approach for future pedagogical and political praxis. João M. Paraskeva is Professor and Chair of the Department of Education Leadership and Program Director of the EdD PhD in Education Leadership and Policy Studies at the University of Massachusetts, Dartmouth, USA.

Routledge Studies in Education and Neoliberalism

Series editor Dave Hill, Anglia Ruskin University, Chelmsford and Cambridge, England The Rich World and the Impoverishment of Education Diminishing Democracy, Equity and Workers’ Rights Edited by Dave Hill

Colonized Schooling Exposed Progressive Voices for Transformative Educational and Social Change Edited by Pierre Wilbert Orelus, Curry S. Malott, and Romina Pacheco

Contesting Neoliberal Education Public Resistance and Collective Advance Edited by Dave Hill

Underprivileged School Children and the Assault on Dignity Policy Challenges and Resistance Edited by Julia Hall

Global Neoliberalism and Education and its Consequences Edited by Dave Hill and Ravi Kumar The Developing World and State Education Neoliberal Depredation and Egalitarian Alternatives Edited by Dave Hill and Ellen Rosskam The Gates Foundation and the Future of US “Public” Schools Edited by Philip E. Kovacs

Hegemony and Education under Neoliberalism Insights from Gramsci By Peter Mayo Female Students and Cultures of Violence in Cities Edited by Julia Hall Neoliberal Education Reform Gendered Notions in Global and Local Contexts By Sarah A. Robert Curriculum Epistemicide Towards an Itinerant Curriculum Theory João M. Paraskeva

Curriculum Epistemicide Towards an Itinerant Curriculum Theory João M. Paraskeva

First published 2016 by Routledge 711 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10017 and by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon, OX14 4RN Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © 2016 Taylor & Francis The right of João M. Paraskeva to be identified as author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Trademark Notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Paraskeva, João M. Title: Curriculum epistemicide : towards an itinerant curriculum theory / by João M. Paraskeva. Description: New York : Routledge, 2016. | Series: Routledge studies in education and neoliberalism ; 11 | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2015024955 | ISBN 9781138837911 | ISBN 9781315734781 (ebk) Subjects: LCSH: Education—Curricula—Philosophy. | Curriculum change— Philosophy. | Knowledge, Theory of. Classification: LCC LB1570 .P258 2016 | DDC 375/.001—dc23 LC record available at http://lccn.loc.gov/2015024955 ISBN: 978-1-138-83791-1 (hbk) ISBN: 978-1-315-73478-1 (ebk) Typeset in Sabon by Apex CoVantage, LLC

To my mother

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Contents

Foreword: Ruthlessness and the Forging of Liberatory Epistemologies: An Arduous Journey

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ANTONIA DARDER

Introduction

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1

The Critical Surge Within the Critical Approaches

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2

Epistemicides and the Yoke of Modernity: Coloniality of Knowledges and of Beings

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3

The Idea of Africa or Africa as an Idea

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4

The Islamic Conundrum: Lost (of) History or History Lost

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5

Oh, Oh, Is He or She European? What a Most Extraordinary Thing . . .

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To Deterritorialize: Working Toward an Itinerant Curriculum Theory

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Toward an Alternative Thinking of Alternatives

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Conclusion: Itinerant Curriculum Theory: A Reiteration

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Index

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Foreword Ruthlessness and the Forging of Liberatory Epistemologies: An Arduous Journey

Colonialism denies human rights to human beings whom it has subdued by violence, and keeps them by force in a state of misery and ignorance that Marx would rightly call a subhuman condition. Racism is ingrained in actions, institutions, and in the nature of the colonialist methods of production and exchange. Political and social regulations reinforce one another. Since the native is subhuman, the Declaration of Human Rights does not apply to him; inversely, since he has no rights, he is abandoned without protection to inhuman forces—brought in with the colonialist praxis, engendered every moment by the colonialist apparatus, and sustained by relations of production that define two sorts of individuals—one for whom privilege and humanity are one, who becomes a human being through exercising his rights; and the other, for whom a denial of rights sanctions misery, chronic hunger, ignorance, or, in general, ‘subhumanity. —Albert Memmi (1965)

Fifty years ago, Albert Memmi posited the preceding critique of the coloniality of power more in his seminal text, The Colonized and the Colonizer. In this critique, Memmi forthrightly calls out the inhumanity of racism and the colonialist praxis, which has deemed subaltern and indigenous populations as subhuman, in comparison to the elite subjecthood of the West. In so doing, Memmi called attention to the cruelty and ferocity of Western imperialism and the counterfeit legitimacy and monopoly afforded the mechanisms of knowledge production that sustain the coloniality of power. Memmi’s ruthless critique challenges an epistemicidal cognitive mode of production rooted in a dehumanizing tautology of objectivity and superiority, engendered by the colonialist apparatus responsible for its formation in the first place. Similarly, Memmi’s stridently criticized, as does João Paraskeva in this book, the hegemonic human rights project of the West. What becomes strikingly obvious is that only through such inquiry can we come to understand how this seemingly benevolent human rights perspective actually functions as a deceptively divisive and obscuring hegemonic device. In Boaventura de

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Sousa Santos’s (2007) analysis, from which Paraskeva draws strength, the modernist thinking that sustains this ideological device can be understood as one that produces an abysmal divide. That is, where the lines of distinction are drawn so tightly as to decree all that lies outside the purview of the colonial apparatus nonexistent, subhuman, or, at best, irrelevant. So much so, that a deeply embedded belief in the subhumanity of the “Other” continues to linger in the Western mind-set of even its most liberal champions. It is not surprising then that after almost 70 years since the United Nations Declaration of Human Rights, the coloniality of power at the root of Western exclusionary thought and it destructive material manifestations tenaciously remain virtually unaltered. Meanwhile, despite all the well-intentioned campaigns and proclamations, the politics of human rights—based, wittingly or unwittingly, on what Paulo Freire (1971) termed false generosity—has failed miserably to transform the underlying colonial apparatus, which remains in full bloom within schools and society. In the process, subaltern epistemological alternatives that challenge the coloniality of power and call for actual structural shifts in power and the redistribution of wealth are readily subjected to the mighty death grip of modernity’s hegemonic forces. Here we find the inseparability and constant historical interplay of an oppressive curricular worldview, which hermetically juxtaposes colonization, cosmological expansion, and material conquest as necessary for human evolution. Against the backdrop of this cultural death grip, Paraskeva rightly claims that nothing short of liberatory ruthlessness can free us from the eugenic dominance of the Western modern Eurocentric epistemological perspective, with its seemingly absolute authority over our lives and over our humanity. Hence, it seems only fitting to begin this brief preface firmly anchored in the radical convention of ruthless critics, squarely including Paraskeva among this laudable tradition of revolutionary scholars. WHY RUTHLESSNESS? At a time like this, scorching irony, not convincing argument, is needed. Oh! had I the ability, and could reach the nation’s ear, I would, to-day, pour out a fiery stream of biting ridicule, blasting reproach, withering sarcasm, and stern rebuke. For it is not light that is needed, but fire; it is not the gentle shower, but thunder. We need the storm, the whirlwind, and the earthquake. The feeling of the nation must be quickened; the conscience of the nation must be roused; the propriety of the nation must be startled; the hypocrisy of the nation must be exposed; and its crimes against God and man must be proclaimed and denounced. —Frederick Douglass (1852)

Why ruthlessness, one might ask? To respond, we can draw from these passionate words of Frederick Douglass, who also reminded us that

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“[p]ower concedes nothing without a demand. It never did and it never will.” As critical educators, activists, and cultural citizens of the world, we are immersed in an unmerciful global struggle for our very humanity, which requires of us an undaunting spirit to painstakingly interrogate with valiant honesty and audacious courage the exploitative evils of advanced capitalism, particularly its current form. We exist in a world where the wiles of neoliberalism are securely bolstered by epistemicides of the free market that overwhelmingly abstract our physical and cognitive existence, deeming us disposable targets of exploitation for the marketplace, undermining the potential for the genuine enactment of human rights. In the process, the dynamic vitality of our lives, our labor, and our dreams are daily usurped by the “money gods” that today rule our planet. In the face of the financial impunity of neoliberalism, what is needed is the ruthlessness of Douglass’s declaration: For it is not light that is needed, but fire; it is not the gentle shower, but thunder! Amid a multiplicity of callous and brazen assaults to our humanity, we can be neither naïve nor cavalier in confronting the overwhelming forces negating the legitimacy of our long-drawn-out historical struggle for social justice. Nor can we pretend that the forces of oppression will readily surrender their unjustly gained authority and material dominance without a battle. Nor can we pretend that the powerful will magically respond favorably to the moral light shed by emancipatory arguments. Instead, Paraskeva asserts that our political praxis must be both epistemologically fierce and deeply anchored in the sensibilities of our subalternity—the only place from which we can truly rid ourselves of the heavy yoke of Western sanctioned tyranny, which has wrought bitter histories of impoverishment, colonization, enslavement, and genocide. With all this in mind, Paraskeva rightly beckons us to recognize that how we perceive and experience the world (individually or communally), how we identify problems and name solutions, and how we locate ourselves in the world are all inseparable to the struggle for cognitive justice. It is so, given that ideological allegiances to particular epistemologies ultimately determine the meanings we construct, how we view our world, how we contextualize our participation, and how we perpetuate individual and collective truths, assumptions, and values, within the contexts of educational curriculum, social movement work, and our quotidian existence. Herein, can be found unexamined assumptions, commonsensical formations and cognitive entanglements directly linked to the coloniality of power that we have internalized, most often through the hidden curriculum of the banking system of education and the culture industry of our profoundly classed, racialized, and gendered society. Hence, to state that epistemologies, indeed have real consequences on the social and material spheres is to critically acknowledge, on one hand, our on-going dialectical relationship with the natural world; and that on the other, that the consciousness we embody unquestionably shapes the contours and scope of our human existence. Accordingly, consciousness is

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not only an epistemological question, but also a deeply material one. It is from here that Paraskeva invites us to ruthlessly problematize and rethink consciousness or to begin anew, by way of our subaltern engagements of Marx’s unfinished political economic project, in an effort to deepen and expand its emancipatory vision, namely, the liberation of our humanity— but only now through the complexity of multi-centered epistemological lenses able to withstand the ever-changing character our cultural formations and political manifestations.

EPISTEMOLOGIES OF LIBERATION I think it only makes sense to seek out and identify structures of authority, hierarchy, and domination in every aspect of life, and to challenge them; unless a justification for them can be given, they are illegitimate, and should be dismantled, to increase the scope of human freedom. —Noam Chomsky (1996)

Epistemologies of liberation that can persistently challenge structures of authority, hierarchy, and domination in every aspect of life must be cultivated, nurtured and embodied within the blessed messiness and unwieldy chaos of everyday life within schools and communities. Paraskeva signals here to curricular epistemologies rooted in a dynamic and multidimensional vision of our humanity, unified only by our collective yearning for freedom and the right to exist unfettered in the midst of our differences. Such epistemologies of cognitive justice aim to unapologetically dismantle the hegemonic myths of the West, potentiated by vapid neoliberal sensibilities that turn equality into insipid sameness and difference into perverse inferiority. Drawing from Santos (2012), Paraskeva suggests that the construction of epistemologies of liberation must be then built upon a four-way logic that defies the annihilating dualism of the West, which deceptively separates human beings from the natural world. As such, the construction of emancipatory epistemologies of inclusion and critique are built on liberatory pedagogical principles that engage the absences, emergences, ecology of knowledges, and intercultural translations absolutely vital to the formation of pedagogical and political movements for emancipatory social change. This is to say that our pedagogy and politics must turn what, until now, had been rendered impossible into the possible; make of the future plural and concrete possibilities that emerge out of actions in the present; assume all human relations and knowledges are informed by both privilege and ignorance; and integrate forms of knowledge construction that allow for “mutual intelligibility among the experiences of the world” (p. 58).

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From this vantage point, we come to critically understand that the particular curricular epistemologies we embrace, enact, and perpetuate in schools and society are never innocent or neutral. Our processes of cognition can either solidify and manufacture the hegemonic rightness and validity of the dehumanizing Western canon or liberate us from its chokehold, opening pathways toward emancipatory epistemologies and ways of life. With this in mind, Paraskeva proposes that we cultivate the epistemological strength and wherewithal to both journey back in time and beyond what Santos (2007) terms the abyssal divide, to shatter the abyssal thinking of coloniality that rigidly obstructs, distorts, or extinguishes the expression of the Other. By so doing, we can also labor to transmute our relationship to our subaltern histories and indigenous knowledges, so that these may better inform our present understanding of the world, in new and liberating ways—ways that can potentially lead us toward greater global cognitive justice. ITINERANT CURRICULUM AND COGNITIVE JUSTICE The struggle for global social justice must, therefore, be a struggle for global cognitive justice as well. In order to succeed, this struggle requires a new kind of thinking, a post-abyssal thinking. Boaventura de Sousa Santos (2007)

Itinerant curriculum theory, as Paraskeva conceives it, is meant to guide us in transforming our labor into a living praxis of global cognitive justice. This entails curriculum driven by emancipatory epistemologies of difference and resounding otherness that provide us the space in which to (re)imagine and transform the rigid, disembodied, fractured, and reductive ideologies that plague our teaching and our lives. Through such emancipatory labor in schools and communities, we open ourselves and our students to new possibilities for working across our differences, as we name, resist, and disrupt old ways of knowing that formerly rendered subaltern lives silent and invisible. Hence, far from being solely an abstract, theoretical, or intellectual endeavor, cognitive justice is governed by critical epistemologies of action that aim to interrupt and dismantle unjust social and material conditions, particularly for those most afflicted by the devastating economic policies of the neoliberal financial class—capitalists par excellence, who have shirked accountability for the brutal consequences of their free market shenanigans, spoils of privatization, speculative schemes, and deregulatory policies, which have permitted them to wreak havoc on a global scale. Key to the process of an epistemological reassertion of subaltern knowing and liberatory possibilities is a dialectically epistemological realm, where the hidden and repressed power of our subaltern epistemologies can be accessed, retrieved, engaged, and utilized pedagogically and politically, in the interest of our humanity. This process also permits us to objectify the

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pull on us by epistemicides imbued with neoliberal ideations that reify our being so that we may simultaneously reimagine new possibilities, through the expansiveness to the field of individual and collective consciousness that this portends. And as Santos (2009) reminds us, “an intensified sense of sharing and of belonging is thereby generated that, if put at the service of struggles of resistance and liberation from oppression, may contribute to strengthen and radicalize the will for social transformation.” Furthermore, to live in the dialectics of beginning anew—being constantly created and recreating—entails the capacity for radical openness, tolerance for ambiguity and complexity, comfortableness with the chaos necessary for not only creativity but for the embodiment of aliveness and genuine expressions of democratic life as well. It is precisely this revolutionary dimension that is stripped away by the hegemonic field of the Western world’s constriction of the universal subject into a supposed objective sameness, made in the image of its own dominant ideation; or its objectification of consciousness as a singular linear phenomenon, legitimated by the narrowing rationality of dualism. Our challenge then is remaining ever aware and grounded in forms of cognitive justice that epistemologically both can stabilize our consciousness, as well as allow us to remain cognitively fluid, supple, and open to change. That is, so that we may more steadily remained both flexible and anchored in an emancipatory vision and praxis, without falling back into those all too familiar abyssal notions and neoliberal suppositions in which we are all, to one extent or another, presently mired. In this light, Paraskeva’s articulation of a dexterous Itinerant curriculum represents a formidable means for the (re)formation of social consciousness, in that it marshals our awareness away from the bankrupt logic of dualism and, instead, makes visible the multiplicity of consciousness, as well as its unfixed and movable nature. For Paraskeva, consciousness is understood as an ever-evolving human process, influenced and experienced through the epistemological lenses that give rise to our naming of the world, as Freire would say, and inscribe it with meaning. Human consciousness, then, is understood here as an unfinished phenomenon, an ever-creative and dynamic cognitive field of possibility, capable of ongoing regeneration and re-creation and from which we can draw a profound sense of radical hope. It is, moreover, through the collective epistemological processes of the subaltern that we can also come to recognize that inherent in the oppression that we have suffered, there also exits a hidden catalytic force for our liberation. This is to say that through our collective struggles against oppression, the fetters that once bound us can become the means for our liberation, in that the collective power of consciousness—or political grace, as I have termed it elsewhere (Darder, 2011)—released by way of the love and solidarity generated by our dialogical labor becomes the catalyst for emancipatory ways of knowing, previously suffocated by the force of recalcitrant epistemicides. Hence,

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consciousness can be understood as both a mediating force from which we envision new possibilities, while epistemologies of liberation serve as creative modes of cognitive navigation. This subaltern political process of collective regeneration then is precisely what can propel us toward Paraskeva’s Itinerant Curriculum—a curriculum informed by its epistemological rupture from the coloniality of power and disaffiliation with hegemonic dogma. In turn, this process liberates our field of consciousness, opening the way for resurgences of subaltern perspectives, new expressions of solidarity, and the powerful regeneration of that political force necessary for transforming the social and material conditions of our present existence—not only in the mind but also in the flesh. And all aim, of course, is at the very heart of Parakeva’s scholarly quest, in that he fully recognizes that overcoming the annihilation of epistemicides can only become a fully salient and credible proposition to the extent that our philosophical and pedagogical efforts facilitate “the social movements and struggles that fight against capitalism and the many metamorphoses of colonialism” (Santos, 2012) and counter the abyssal divide that strips us of our humanity. If we are, therefore, to effectively counter the abyssal divide of the hegemony of the West and also make human differences indisputably at home and accounted for, new and regenerating epistemologies of liberation must be consistently developed and redeveloped through our persistent and ruthless interrogation. As critical subjects, therefore, we are not here to ask permission to launch our epistemological critiques. Nor are we here to tolerate the intolerable. And even less so, are we here to issue apologia for counterhegemonic violations to emancipatory ideals. Instead, we are here to ruthlessly expose, resist, and dismantle the destructiveness of the coloniality of power and brutalities of capitalism that persist, so that we might truly create room in our schools and out communities, as Amílcar Cabral was fond of saying, to dream into being new possibilities and truly inclusive expressions of universal consciousness—built dialectically upon the creative terrain between (unromanticized) subaltern wisdoms and new dynamic and vibrant possibilities, anchored in the present moment in which we are living. There is no question that the post-abysmal terrain of Itinerant curriculum that Paraskeva proposes constitutes indeed a complex and challenging political project, in that it entails navigating dialectically the often murky realm of dominant/subordinate relations of power. Yet, it is precisely by consistently traversing the turbulence of this dialectical tension that we become politically primed to ruthlessly critique oppression in ways that prevent us from inadvertently collapsing back into oppressive binary contradictions, from which we ourselves must constantly struggle to emerge anew. And further, it is only through such sustained labor and unwavering commitment to denounce the epistemological totalitarianism of our times that we can garner together the moral indignation and political will to announce new

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ways of knowing, loving and being—beyond the abyssal divide of recalcitrant racisms and neoliberal devastation. Toward this end, Curriculum Epistemicides: Towards an Itinerant Curriculum Theory offers us political solace, philosophical inspiration, and pedagogical nourishment on this long and arduous journey. Antonia Darder Loyola Marymount University

REFERENCES Chomsky, N. (1996) “Noam Chomsky on Anarchism, Marxism & Hope for the Future” in Red and Black Revolution, N. 2. Accessed from: http://struggle.ws/ rbr/noamrbr2.html Darder, A. (2011) A Dissident Voice: Essay on Culture, Pedagogy, and Power. New York: Peter Lang. Douglass, F. (1852) What to the Slave is the Fourth of July? Rochester, New York. Accessed from: http://en.wikisource.org/wiki/What_to_the_Slave_is_the_Fourth_ of_July%3F Freire, P. (1971) Pedagogy of the Oppressed. New York: Seabury Press. Memmi, A. (1965) The Colonized and the Colonizer. New York: Orion Press. Santos, B. (1999) Porque é que é Tão Difícil Construir uma Teoria Crítica. Revista Crítica de Ciências Sociais, 54, pp., 197–215. Santos, B. (2007) Beyond Abyssal Thinking: From Global Lines to Ecologies of Knowledges. Review Fernand Braudel Center, 30 (1), pp., 45–89. Santos, B. (2009) If God Were a Human Rights Activist: Human Rights and the Challenges of Political Theologies. Law, Social Justice and Global Development Journal (April 1). Accessed from: http://www.highbeam.com/doc/1G1-207350769. html Santos, B. (2012) Public Sphere and Epistemologies of the South. Africa Development, 37 (1), pp., 43–67.

Introduction Itinerant Curriculum Theory For a Ruthless Epistemological Critic of Every Existing Epistemology João M. Paraskeva

Aquino de Braganca: creator of futures, master of heterodoxies, pioneer of the epistemologies of the South. —Sousa Santos (2012)

In If God Were a Human Rights Activist: Human Rights and the Challenge of Political Theologies, written by Boaventura de Sousa Santos (2009a), he brings to the fore a crucial issue in the struggle against the epistemicides for a more just society—and so crucial for the curriculum field—which is the rumble between religion(s) and the historical struggle for human rights politics. Sousa Santos (2009a) rubs political theologies and human rights politics against each other and, in so doing, exposes the contradictions within such rumble, as well as puts forward counter-hegemonic forms of human rights politics—an issue that should be placed at the heart of the educational and curriculum fields as well. This rumble assumes a superior level of complexity with the irreversible end of the hegemony of the Western Eurocentric modern platform (see Dussel, 2000; Galeano, 1997; Mignolo, 2013) in which the full blast of individual autonomies in an outlandish, unethical neoliberal consumerist society (see Bauman, 1998) have put into question the praxis of the common good. Consumerist existentiality, Žižek (2012) adds, fractured society “between pleasure and enjoyment, [that is, while] enjoyment is a deadly excess [placed] beyond the pleasure principle, pleasure [is more] moderate, regulated by a proper measure” (p. 47). Such enjoyment is not an abstract entity in our lives. It does not exist in a social vacuum, and it can be established by force if needed—as history has given painful examples. Enjoyment, as defined by Žižek (2012), crosses the daily lives of our schools, curricula, and teaching in both its form and its content and, in such context, interferes in the definition of the current global philosophy of praxis and colonizes the cognitive terrain.

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‘Enjoyment’, like many other impulses of late capitalism, plays a key role in the current global quasi irreversible crisis, one that, as Lazzarato’s (2011) approach helps us understand, has been framed by a neoliberal economy portrayed as process(es) of subjectification. That is, neoliberal economy, Lazzarato (2011, p. 37) advances, is a “subjective economy” entrapped within the wrangle between ‘creditor–debtor’, a wrangle that relies at the very core of social relations so tangled within the modes and conditions of production. Such a relation(ship) objectively, subjectifies “everyone as a debtor” (Lazzarato, 2011, p. 37) within a finance matrix increasingly dominated by the totalitarianism of the ‘concubinage’ of creditor and debtor. Lazzarato (2011) states that [v]iewing debt as the archetype of social relations means two things. On one hand it means conceiving economy and society on the basis of an asymmetry of power and not on that of a commercial exchange that implies and presupposes equality. On the other hand, debt means immediately making the economy subjective, since debt is an economic relation, which in order to exist, implies the molding and control of subjectivity such that labor becomes indistinguishable from work in the self. (p. 33) Needless to say that such a wrangle between ‘creditor–debtor’ is a power relation—or fuels and it is fueled by power relations paced by ‘deadly excesses (Žižek (2012)—“since it is itself a power relation, one of the most important and universal of modern-day capitalism” (Lazzarato, 2011, p. 30), thus “intensifying the mechanisms of exploitation and domination at every level of society” (Lazzarato, 2011, p. 7). In this sense, the neoliberal economy is not a finance economy but a debt economy. To be more precise, within the complex neoliberal global minotaur (Varoufakis, 2011), “what we call finance is indicative of the increasing force of the relation creditordebtor relation” (Lazzarato, 2011, p. 22). Such subjectification of debt is ideologically cultivated daily (basically there is no existence outside ‘this’ debt), and it needs to be understood as an integral part of the coloniality of power [and of labor, knowledge and of being] (Quijano, 2000a, 2000b) and quite implicated on what counts or not as theologically valid, as well as human rights politics. These colonialities emerged hegemonically with the eruption of Western/Eurocentric dominance framing a colonial mechanism of power and control. As a mechanism (or should one say a mega-mechanism) of the exploitation and domination of modern-day capitalism carbureted by neoliberal policies, the educational and curriculum apparatuses cannot be dissociated from the coloniality of power (Quijano, 2000a). More to the point, neoliberal educational and curriculum policies need to be understood within the context of the coloniality of power. It is produced, and it produces a specific colonial web with the temerity of defining possible and impossible existences and what it has been eugenically defined as ‘nonexistent’ (Sousa Santos, 2014).

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As I examine in great detail in this volume, the coloniality of power produces and reproduces the hegemonic mind of eugenic dominance and control, a hegemonic cult anchored not necessarily on the so-called superiority of the Western modern Eurocentric epistemological perspective but shockingly on the eugenic claim that such epistemological perspective is unique and the only cognitive possible, a cognitive fascism that fertilizes subjectivities. It is this epistemological fascism that structures what Lazzarato (2011) calls ‘subjective economy’. It is within and against this ‘subjectivity’ (one that defines what counts as ‘valid’ and as ‘a right’), following Sousa Santos (2009a), that the battle for counterhegemonic forms of human rights activism and political-theological engagements need to occur. Schools and educators need to intervene in this desideratum. This specific ‘subjectivity’ is utterly connected with a concrete epistemological framework that not only legitimizes such economy as the only one possible—in which agency is a vacuum outside such subjectivity—but also unleashes and institutionalizes a set of ‘links’ and ‘delinks’ of what is considered official/valid or not. To claim that such ‘subjective economy’ plays no role in the way Western Eurocentric modernity has been able to impose— even if sanguinary force is needed—a concrete epistemological cleansing, as well as a rational (and consequently irrational) and theological way of living with the connivance of education and curriculum is profoundly naïve. And naivety is never innocent. Our claim is that the current havoc facing Western Eurocentric modernity is not just an economic dynamic, however. Although economics is a driving force, the truth of the matter is that one cannot be cornered to an economic reductionism ignoring how hegemony rumbles within an ideological terrain in which culture and politics cannot be ignored to accurately understand neo-liberal impulses (Darder, 2012a, 2012b). Such crisis is above and beyond the economic functionalism dictated by the ‘invisible hand’ of the markets all over the centuries; it is an epistemological crisis, and this is why it reaches now a quasi-irretrievable point. The coloniality of power and of being emerged within the 1500s, weaving together four major domains, namely, the struggle for the economic control oriented to produce commodities for the global market; the struggle for the control of authority; the control of gender and sexuality—among other ways through the nuclear family (Christian or bourgeois), and the reinforcing of normative sexuality and naturalization of gender roles; the control of knowledge and subjectivity through education and colonizing the existing knowledges, which is the key fundamental sphere of control that makes domination possible. (Tlostanova & Mignolo, 2012, pp. 44–45) This specific ‘legitimate’ eccentric way of “being(s), and not beying(s)”, (Baker, 2014) produced by such coloniality helps, however, to create, as

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DeCerteau (1998) would felicitously put it, cracks in the system. These cracks have been profoundly fueled by the way Western Eurocentric dominant forces have been able to arrogantly impose a neutral dimension on what counts and not counts ‘as human rights’; in so doing, and under the pure bubble of neutrality, a stormy political philosophy of the praxis of human rights became dominant steadily excluding the massive majority of the oppressed (and, in some cases, almost exterminated) communities. The contemporary examples of the genocide in Rwanda, specific laws ‘thingification’ of women in the Saudi Arabia, and the escalation of the current conflict in Ukraine speak to the scale of my claim. As I examine in this volume, the Western Eurocentric platform is exhausted, unable to resolve its own ‘deadly excesses’ (Žižek, 2012) or its very own issues, let alone the rest. The persistency in maintaining modernist policies in a neoliberal political momentum speaks scale of the contradictions of the Western Eurocentric colonial matrix (Comaroff, 2005). Western Eurocentric epistemological totalitarian impulses have been able to resuscitate old sagas that the world thought had been eradicated. The current Western Eurocentric crisis speaks to the scale of the “agony of capitalism” (Berardi, 2012, p. 51) that shows no margins and/or flexibility. A neoliberal subjective economy implies not just space-less subjectivities; it de-anchored economic power from concrete fixed territories. Berardi (2012) coins such momentum as “capitalism nihilism” (p. 51). He states, The origin of this capitalism nihilism is to be found in the effect of deterritorialization that is inherent to global financial capitalism. The relation between capital and society is deterritorialized, as economic power is no longer based on the property of physical things. The bourgeoisie is dead, and the new financial class has virtual existence; fragmented, dispersed, impersonal. The bourgeoisie, which was once in control of the economic scene of modern Europe, was a strongly territorialized class, linked to material assets; it could not survive without relationships to territory and community. (p. 51) However, on one hand, capitalist nihilism paced by “a permanent economic emergency’ ” (Žižek, 2010, p. 85) drove societies to a world crisis and unleashed a global revolt in which uprisings led by collectives, of which the ‘Occupy movements’ are a graphic example. On the other hand, it also exposes the fragility of most Western modern Eurocentric counterhegemonic perspectives. Žižek (2012) examines how ‘Occupy Wall Street’ ended up exposing a violent silence about the new beginning. While ‘Occupy Wall Street’ and austerity politics made the Left (and some liberals, why not) resituate capitalism as ‘the problem’, after the class, gender, and race purges within its very core, it also shows the need to rethink very carefully about the alternative to the global neoliberal social system in which we live. That is, “now that the taboo has been broken, that we do not live in the best

Introduction

5

possible world, we are allowed, and obliged even, to think about the alternatives” (Žižek, 2012, p. 77). To refuse this is to give credit to the Lacanian statement produced during the 1968 Paris revolt and insightfully brought to the fore by Žižek (2012). Reacting to the Paris revolt of 1968, Žižek (2012) writes that “Lacan famously said: What you aspire to, as revolutionaries, is a New Master. You will get one” (p. 79). Intellectual honesty, not courage, Cabral would say, requires that one pays attention to the contradictions—some of them so functionalist, as we will see in this volume—of the some Western Eurocentric counterhegemonic platforms. It is in this context that one needs to pay attention to Sousa Santos (1999) insightful claim. Why it is so difficult to build a critical theory? The difficulties are not just above and beyond the critical terrain. Some of the most important difficulties exist within the very heart of the critical platform. As he (1999) argues, “in [a] world in which there so much to criticize why it became so difficult to build a critical theory?” (p. 197). In fact, as he claims, “it seems that there is no lack of issues that can promote anger, discomfort, and indignation”. That is, reality is flooded with examples “that would push us to critically question ourselves about the moral nature and quality of our societies, and to seek for theoretical alternatives based on the answers that we urgently need to face such sagas” (Sousa Santos, 1999, p. 199). Western Eurocentric modernity in its dominant and specific counterdominant forms is tout court inconsequential to address global and local needs (Grosfoguel, 2011; Maldonado-Torres, 2003; Mignolo, 2008; Paraskeva, 2014; Walsh, 2012). Within this late coloniality stage paced by neoliberal global matrix of power, the failure of ossified traditional human rights approaches to address what Sousa Santos (2009a) coins as ‘strong questions raised by our times’ is unquestionable. We live in contradictory times, in which “the most appalling social injustices and unjust human sufferings no longer seem to generate the moral indignation and the political will to combat them effectively and create a more just and fair society” (Sousa Santos, 2009a, p. 27). We live in a modern era without modern solutions (Sousa Santos, 1999). He states, It is more and more obvious that our time is not one of strong answers. It is rather a time of strong questions and weak answers. [This] discrepancy seems to be everywhere. Strong questions address not only our specific options for individual and collective life but also the social and epistemological paradigm that has shaped the current horizon of possibilities within which we make our options. Weak answers are those that don’t challenge the horizon of possibilities, the still dominant paradigm; [but] not all weak answers are the same. There are both weak-strong and weak-weak answers. Weak-strong answers represent the maximum possible of a given people. Weak-weak answers take the current paradigm or horizon of possibilities as a given and refuse to admit its historical, political and cultural aims. (Sousa Santos, 2009a, p. 3)

6

Introduction

Needless to say, such rumbles “strong–weak–strong–weak–weak–weak” within the normative yarn ‘religion–human rights politics’ needed to be perceived within the hegemonic, counterhegemonic, and nonhegemonic battles framing the current global momentum in which religion, as usual— or, should one say, religions—plays “a constitutive element of public life” (Sousa Santos, 2009a, p. 6). While religious clashes always played a role in human history—“Catholicism in the European colonial expansion and Islam[ism] in the conquest of Persia (633–656)”—the fact is that “the modern Western resolution of the religious question is a globalized localism, that is, a local solution which by virtue of the economic, political and cultural power of its promoter, ends up extending its range to the entire globe” (Sousa Santos, 2009a, p. 6). In this context, it is crucial to question, as (Tlostanova & Mignolo, 2012) posits, “who speaks for the Human in the Human Rights?” (p. 153). That is, one cannot ignore that “concepts such as Man and Humanity were inventions of European humanists of the fifteen and sixteenth centuries, an invention that served them well for several purposes”. By framing the social sphere within such ontological rumble, Western modernity stripped such rumble from a sanguinary conviviality in which class, race, and gender were the ‘motto’ of such rumble. To be more precise, concepts such as “Man and Human are not categories of thought ontologically embedded in entities that have been conceptualized as Man and Human. Both concepts are relational, and the relations in question are based on racial hierarchies” (Tlostanova & Mignolo, 2012, p. 156), and one definitely needs to add class and gender as well. In this sense, to globalize such “way of beyng” (Baker, 2014) is to conveniently falsify reality, because Man and Human(ity) do not have a spaceless locale of enunciation. In such existence, reality exists as an empty signifier (Laclau, 2011). The tendency to universalize is “an imperial invention that hides its foundation in a relational ontology (i.e., racism [and, one needs to add, class and gender]) and claims that is founded in an essential ontology (humanitas)” (Tlostanova & Mignolo, 2012, p. 156). An alter human rights struggle cannot ignore such ‘localized canons.’ The very idea that the so-called global North is “the place where humanity par excellence dwells” (Tlostanova & Mignolo, 2012, p. 166) is unsustainable nowadays. The very terrain of ‘human(ity)’ is facing a decolonial momentum, one that will found an answer or answers for crucial questions such as “what kind of social, legal, and economic organization is required to ‘secure’ the rights of human beings?” (Tlostanova & Mignolo, 2012, p. 171). Needless to say, these concrete epistemes, because of their very eugenic nature, as I examine in this volume, fertilizes the conditions for the emergence of a full blast epistemology and philosophy of liberation (Dussel, 2013) within the non-Western platform, but also feeds strong uprisings within its very core as examples, such as “PODEMOS” in Spain, Syriza in Greece, and LIVRE in Portugal, overtly corroborate.

Introduction

7

While admitting that the question/answer If God Were a Human Rights Activist is metaphorical and can only be debated in that sense, Sousa Santos (2009a), after dissecting the typology of political theologies (pluralist and revelationist, traditionalist and progressive), overtly claims that another God not only is possible; it is also real, or better framed, it is reality. His approach ends quite powerfully and deserves to be quoted in great length: If God were a human rights activist is, of course, a metaphorical issue, which can only be answered metaphorically. In the logic of this paper, if God were a human rights activist, He or She would definitely be pursuing a counter-hegemonic conception of human rights and a practice fully coherent with it. In so doing, this God would sooner or later confront the God invoked by the oppressors and would find no affinity with this other God. In other words, He or She would come to the conclusion that the God of the subalterns cannot but be a subaltern God. The logical consequence of such a conclusion would be rather illogical from a human point of view, at least as regards the monotheistic religions that provided the background of my inquiry: a monotheistic God making a plea for polytheism as the only solution, if the invocation of God in social and political struggles for progressive social transformation is not to lead to perverse results. The subaltern’s God idea would be that only polytheism allows for an unequivocal answer to the crucial question: which side are you on? I recognize that a monotheistic God pleading for a polytheistic set of Gods and thus for His or Her own sacrificial suicide for the sake of humankind is a complete absurdity. But I wonder if the role of most theologies has not been to prevent us to from confronting this absurdity and drawing the conclusions the reform. As if the logos of God has been all along a human exercise to prevent God from speaking Her or His plurality. (Sousa Santos, 2009a, p. 29) By grasping fearlessly within the rumbling political theologies and human rights politics, Sousa Santos (2009a), not only addresses one of his critique against the inconsequentiality of critical theory—namely, “there is not just only one principle of social transformation, industrialization is not necessarily the engine of progress nor the maternity of development and the fact that the failed promises of modernity became a serious problem without a [modern] solution” (see Sousa Santos, 1999, pp. 202–204), but also he engages in a nonnegotiable position challenging the Western Epistemological platform above and beyond reason. And it is at this very axis that Sousa Santos’s (2009a) approach addresses some of the issues raised by Karl Marx in the middle of the nineteenth century. According to Marx (1843) it was clear the need of “a new gathering point [that must be] thought for the really thinking and independent minds” (p. 12). Before the oddity that we are facing in this third hegemonic phase of capitalism (Arrighi, 2005), and despite the so obvious “inner difficulties seem to be almost greater than the

8

Introduction

external obstacles” (Marx, 1843, p. 13), such ‘ecological point’, to rely on Sousa Santos (2009a) framework, needs to be built and maintained. Such a ‘point’, or a commitment to achieving it, is not dogmatic, yet it is utopian, as Galeano (1997) would argue. On this Sousa Santos (2009a) and many decolonial intellectuals and Marx (1843) walk hand in hand since they not just call for a new trend. They call for a new philosophical and epistemological consciousness, one that clearly understands that “the designing of the future and the proclamation of ready-made solutions of all time it is not [their] affair [and because of that] the task is to engage in a ruthless critique of everything existing [and] ruthless in two senses: The criticism must not be afraid of its own conclusions, nor of conflict with the powers that be” (Marx, 1843, p. 13). This requires, as they are fully aware, that full attention needs to be paid to “the reality of the true human essence” (p. 13). That is, one needs to be fully concerned with “the theoretical existence of man, in other words to make religion, science, etc., objects of our criticism” (p. 13). Contrary to the modern critical theory, “postmodern critical theories understand that critical knowledge starts by the critique of knowledge” (Sousa Santos, 1999, p. 205). That is, “post modern critical theories emerge within marginalized and discredit epistemologies of modernity, the ‘emancipationknowledge’ and not ‘regulation-knowledge’ [and in such an epistemological platform] ignorance is colonialism, and colonialism is the conception of the other as object, and consequently the non-recognition of the other as subject” (Sousa Santos, 1999, p. 205). Knowing that “reason has always existed, only not always in reasonable form” (Marx, 1843, p. 14), this is not an easy task. The struggle for a new gathering epistemological ecological point requires, as Nkrumah (1964) would frame, an alternative philosophical consciencism. The world, as Sousa Santos (2009a) posits, needs to be confronted with a new principle. A principle that, as Marx argues, [w]ill develop new principles to the world out of its own principles. We do not say to world stop fighting; your struggle is of no account. We want to shout the true slogan of the struggle at you. We only show the world what it is fighting for, and consciousness is something that the world must acquire, like it or not. The reform of the consciousness consists only in enabling the world to clarify its consciousness, in walking it from its dream about itself in explaining to it the meaning of its own meanings. (Marx, 1843, pp. 12–13) I am not claiming here that what we are facing is a repackaging of old Marxist platforms. It is precisely the opposite. As we examine in great length in this book, Marxism itself needs to be decolonized. wa Thiong’o (2012) accurately claims that although “Marx was right, he needs to be completed” (p. 22). In a moment paced by the cult of presentism (Pinar, 2004), reforming consciousness is a tough challenge, yet it relies at the very core of Sousa

Introduction

9

Santos’s approach and constitutes one of the pillars in the struggle against the epistemicides. It is the eye of the epicenter of the epistemological earthquake that Sousa Santos and others are creating—a Herculean challenge and a serious and irreversible threat for the dominant and certain counterdominant groups within the Western academia, more and more on bended knee before market desires and needs (Giroux, 2011). Curriculum Epistemicide: Towards an Itinerant Curriculum Theory is heavily influenced by the importance of non-Western epistemological paths in the struggle for a more relevant and socially committed education and curriculum. This is a human rights issue. The volume challenges dominant and counterdominant Western Eurocentric perspectives that have been colonizing the education and curriculum fields in a way that an epistemological cleansing has taken place. The volume challenges educators, community activists, and the community in general to engage in a ruthless critique of every existent epistemology, cutting off immediately any attempt of a single epistemological platform to claim not just a hegemonic position but also a totalitarian one. Curriculum Epistemicide: Towards an Itinerant Curriculum Theory is a call for an Itinerant Curriculum Theory (ICT) as a new curriculum walking (Gros, 2014) and ‘beyng’ (Baker, 2014) a new path that is sentient of the functionalism of both dominant and counterdominant Western Eurocentric positions, of the richness of non-Western epistemological platforms, of the fallacy of the history fabricated by Western Eurocentric dominant and specific dominant traditions, of the fascism of the Western Eurocentric epistemological coloniality that failed, and it failed greatly, not only because of its crude limitations and fallacies but also given the immense power of non-Western epistemological ways of reading and being in the world that always challenge Western Eurocentric dominant position. ICT is a powerful way to win the struggle against the curriculum epistemicides. ICT allows us to begin from the beginning. Dominant and certain counterdominant perspectives need to come to grips with this challenge. Arguably one of the toughest challenges relies within the very core of the counterhegemonic terrain. Although it is a tough challenge, we are probably in the perfect moment to begin from the beginning (see Žižek, 2009). That is, the Leninean conclusive question raised by Ginsberg (2011)—that is, what needs to be done—deserves another answer, a Leninean answer, so well explained by Žižek (2009). We really need to start all over again. Žižek takes a path tracing the way. He deserves to be highlighted. According to Žižek (2009), “when the Bolsheviks, after winning the Civil War against all odds, had to retreat into the New Economic Policy of allowing a much wider scope to the market economy and private property,” Vladimir Ilyich Lenin “uses the analogy of a climber who must backtrack from his first attempt to reach a new mountain peak to describe what retreat means in a revolutionary process, and how it can be done without opportunistically betraying the cause” (p. 43). According to Lenin, the climber

10

Introduction is forced to turn back, descend, seek another path, longer, perhaps, but one that will enable him to reach the summit. The descent from the height that no one before him has reached proves, perhaps, to be more dangerous and difficult for our imaginary traveler than the ascent—it is easier to slip; it is not so easy to choose a foothold; there is not that exhilaration that one feels in going upwards, straight to the goal, etc. One has to tie a rope round oneself, spend hours with an alpenstock to cut footholds or a projection to which the rope could be tied firmly; one has to move at a snail’s pace, and move downwards, descend, away from the goal; and one does not know where this extremely dangerous and painful descent will end, or whether there is a fairly safe detour by which one can ascend more boldly, more quickly and more directly to the summit. (Žižek, 2009, p. 43)

Following Lenin’s ‘to begin from the beginning,’ Žižek (2009) adds that one has the clear sense that Lenin “is not talking about merely slowing down and fortifying what has already been achieved but about descending back to the starting point: one should begin from the beginning, not from the place that one succeeded in reaching in the previous effort” (p. 44). Moreover, according to Žižek, (2009) “this is Lenin at his Beckettian best, foreshadowing the line from Worstward Ho: ‘Try again. Fail again. Fail better’ ” (p. 44). Who will deny the resemblance between Lenin’s Beckettianism and the state of public institutions, such as schools, caused by a crony capitalism that failed miserably in its political project and that persists in using public higher educational institutions in the financialization of capital (see Foster, 2008). Such ‘begin from the beginning’ mentality calls for “a counterhegemonic globalization of the university as a public good” (Sousa Santos, 2008). Such counterhegemonic globalization of the university will challenge the reactive, defensive approach that permeates universities today, particularly in their responses, to the financial crisis. ‘Begin from the beginning’ implies to “face the new with the new, to fight for a definition of crisis, to fight for a definition of University, to reconquer legitimacy” (Sousa Santos, 2008). The new beginning will challenge neoliberal globalization devastating an attack on the idea of a national project, conceived as a major obstacle to the expansion of global capitalism. ICT is arguably one of the best ways to address this concern. ICT also warns about the need to challenge any form of indegenitude or the romanticization of the indigenous cultures and knowledges, and it is not framed in any dichotic skeleton of West–Rest. In fact, it challenges such functionalist forms. Its itinerant dynamic pushes the theorist to a pluri (nonnecessary)–directional path. ICT is a clarion call to challenge curriculum epistemicides by engaging fully in the complex struggle for social and cognitive justice. This is an intergenerational matter of justice. In addition, ICT requires a kind of decolonial Freirean (1980) conscientização or the Nkrumah (1964) consciencism,

Introduction

11

assuming not only that dominant traditional human rights approaches systematically neglected the vitality of the strong questions—or how strong are the strong questions—but also that new possibilities open up for a mutually enriching exchange between counterhegemonic human rights politics and progressive political ideologies. As I examine in this volume, this requires a clear call for an ecology of knowledges (Sousa Santos, 2009a, 2014) and a theory of translation (see Sousa Santos, 1999), that is “an exercise of intercultural translation and diatopic hermeneutics thorough which the reciprocal limitations of alternative conceptions of human dignity can be identified thus opening the possibility of new relations and dialogues among them” (Sousa Santos, 2009a, p. 18; see also 1999, 2014). The theory of translation, Sousa Santos (1999) claims, is quite structural in the post-modern momentum of critical theory. As he (1999) argues, “knowledge-emancipation does not aim a great theory, it aims a theory of translation that works as epistemological support for the emancipatory practices, all of them finite and incomplete, and because of that, only sustainable once interconnected as a web” (pp. 206–207). In debating the theory and the politics of knowing, wa Thiong’o (2012) brings to the fore the notion of globalectics “derived from the shape of the globe” (p. 8). That is, “there is no center, any point is equally a center; Globalectics combines the global and the dialectical to describe a mutually affecting dialogue, or multi-logue [it] embraces wholeness, interconnectedness, equality of potentiality of parts, tension, and motion”. Globalectics, wa Thiong’o (2012) argues, “is a way of thinking and relating to the world particularly in the era of globalism and globalization” (p. 8). ICT is undeniably a call for a new ‘never stable gathering epistemological point.’ While it is so evident that the struggle against the epistemicide is a human rights issue, it also clear that such struggle cannot be fought with old weapons (Latour, 2005). I hope this book helps educators to shed light about the epistemicide that is going on the daily basis in schools and the dangerous of perpetuating the invisibilization of non-Western knowledges from educational and curriculum policies and praxis. One has to admit that this is not an easy task. Unsurprisingly, so much resistance has been raised within the very heart of counterdominant perspective. However, it is possible. Aquino de Braganca examined by Sousa Santos (2012) shows us that a different epistemological ‘walk and beyng’ is real. Sousa Santos (2012) introduces Braganca’s majestic philosophy of praxis, to both Western modern Eurocentric dominant and counterdominant platforms. While the former will react in fear, I cannot imagine why the latter would not embrace it. I would not be surprised if they do not, however. In a piece, Aquino de Braganca Creator of Futures, Master of Heterodoxies, Pioneer of the Epistemologies of the South, Sousa Santos (2012) coins Aquino de Braganca as an integral politician and an unconditional humanist, one that understood very well the common contradictions, weakness, and strengths of the world counter-hegemonic movement, an organic intellectual whose philosophy of

12

Introduction

the praxis articulated like no one else the wrangles of antifascism and anticolonialism. According to Sousa Santos (2012) in Aquino de Braganca, one would find not only “the parallels and common links between those who in Portugal and Europe fought for democracy, and those who fought in colonies against the Portuguese and Western colonialism [but also] the task to build social sciences if free societies [such as Mozambique]”. Aquino de Braganca rejected the notion of truth based just on a bunch of intellectuals (Sousa Santos, 2012). Aquino de Braganca defended that social theories such as Marxism—so crucial in anticolonial struggles—should start within the African reality otherwise would be useless. In a nation that won the war against 500 years of colonial occupation, Aquino de Braganca created the Center for African Studies in Maputo to precisely produce research without researchers. Instead of hiring foreign researchers, Aquino de Braganca built a team of researchers by having individuals do research, individuals who never did research. Government employees, members of the army, students, and community all started studying their families, their histories. All their energies ended up being the engine of a new social science research, emerging in the new independent Mozambique. It is in this context that the center produced studies regarding the Mozambican miners working the gold mines in South Africa. Sousa Santos (2012) frames Aquino de Braganca as the demiurge of the epistemological earthquake: The political, theoretical and epistemological positions of Aquino de Braganca converge towards a constant attitude of dialogue, building bridges, weave knots, seek complementarity, let be surprised by reality, refuse political and theoretical dogmatisms, that is try to understand the new with new ideas. Such valorization of the diversity of the social experience and the desire of not undermining it, combined with his concern in showing that the very realities of nations of the Anti-imperial South have been occulted, devalued or twisted when examined through theoretical frameworks developed in nations of Imperial North and even non-Imperial North (such as Marxism) prefigure an epistemological posture very close to what I have been designated by epistemologies of the south. (p. 40) That the struggle against the epistemicides and the curriculum epistemicides is difficult, but it needs to be done. That it is impossible is a fabricated fallacy. Braganca’s ‘walk and beyng’ is a wake-up call to all of us really committed in the struggle against curriculum epistemicides. It allows one to grasp ICT as a political yarn that works within and beyond the capitalist system or better say against the ‘world system theory’. ICT is also a human rights issue, a challenge to the dichotomy ethics and chaos since it is the ethic of the (needed) chaos. ICT praises the consistency of inconsistencies and foster a reckless philosophy of praxis above and beyond the rumble

Introduction

13

‘being-non-being’; it is a eulogy of ‘beyng’. ICT is à la Marti, ‘an infinite labor of love’ one that perceives that the act of thinking is no just theoretical. ICT works in a never-ending matrix determined and determine by sensations, forces, fluxes, and ‘happenings’, all of which linked and reacting against the modes and conditions of production of the capitalist system. Chapter 1 examines critical wrangles within the critical curriculum approaches. The chapter dissects the contradictions and limitations of counterhegemonic critical approaches. In so doing, the chapter analyzes how counterdominant critical theories were as functionalist as the functionalism they criticized. The chapter also examines the way specific critical pedagogues ended up addressing such limitations, by challenging rusty mechanisms of reproductionist models. In so doing, it calls on radical-critical intellectuals to challenge and to decolonize the totalitarianism of the platform in which most of them operate. Chapter 2, “Epistemicides and the Yoke of Modernity: Coloniality of Knowledges and of Beings”, examines the coloniality of powers and beings and their importance for the curriculum field in the struggle for social and cognitive justice. The chapter examines the clashing dynamics of modernity– colonial world system, dissecting the geopolitics of knowledge and power within what Grosfoguel (2003) and Quijano (2008) call colonial/racist imaginary in the world system. Through this, how such colonialities help foster epistemic privilege and racism is analyzed. I highlight the importance of concepts, such as colonial difference and transmodernity. Such a decolonizing process needs to challenge Western secular epistemicides, destroying millenary geopolitics of power that secularly produced and reproduced a eugenic coloniality of power and being. Chapter 3, “The Idea of Africa or Africa as an Idea”, unveils the tensions between Eurocentrism and African epistemological frameworks. I examine not only how Western Europeans arrogantly viewed and marginalized African epistemologies but also how eugenic colonial knowledge relied on precolonial forms of knowledge and knowing to help sediment the process of psychological dominance. I challenge the reductive view of de-intellectualizing African intellectuals by labeling them as freedom fighters. The chapter challenges the reader to reread Africa with African lenses, and, in doing so, defends that African episteme is not necessarily only the heiress of European epistemes but also there is an important epistemological clash within African epistemological terrain that cannot be ostracized by the West. In addition, the scientificity of such epistemes was secularly dilapidated, alienated, and usurped by Western colonial powers, reducing them to the sphere of voodoo and underdevelopment. Chapter 4, “The Islamic Conundrum”, attempts to illuminate the crucial impact of Asian-Arab cultural and economic development. In so doing, I show how Eastern civilizations showed a greater stage of development to the world, in general, and the West, in particular. I bring to the fore how specific social crucial issues of contemporary societies were already societal

14

Introduction

mottos in the Eastern embryonic civilizations, well before the clashes between colonizer and colonized. In addition, I also unveil how the West has been able to weave a particular narratology that undermines at its best and silences at its worst such a phenomenal legacy. I claim that the struggle against curriculum epistemicides needs to challenge official Western knowledge production, which is a strategy that reinforces the arrogant cult of a globalized society that can have the temerity to be lost in its own history. Chapter 5, “Oh, Oh, Is He or She European? What a Most Extraordinary Thing . . .”, examines what has been coined the pilfering of history. I challenge the Western-centric historiography and epistemological history as well “on which much of the classical and social theory is based” (Frank, 1998, p. 3). I offer substantive evidence not only about the parallels between the ‘East–West’—at least until the end of the nineteenth century—but also how Western dominant groups were able to highjack and stifle certain laudable waves of development in Asian-Afro-Arab civilizations and simultaneously emphasize Western gradual ascendancy based exclusively on Western merits. I also pay attention to the way such official (yet pilfered) history has been produced, reproduced and legitimated by the school systems since at least Von Humboldt—what Chomsky (1992) calls historical engineering— and what I am calling curriculum. Chapter 6, “To Deterritorialize”, suggests a reexamination and reiteration of the ICT, which I coined and conceptualized in Conflicts in Curriculum Theory: Challenging Hegemonic Epistemicides (2011). I make this proposal in response to my constant ideological rethinking of the project, while respectfully sentient of the positive reactions to ICT in previous AAACS (American Association for the Advancement of Curriculum Studies) and AERA (American Education Research Association) in Vancouver and in San Francisco respectively, as well as from colleagues around the world, which was a pleasantly surprise. In doing so, they have helped me reinforce the need to strengthen the commitment of the field in the decolonial struggle against curriculum epistemicides. ICT, as I believe many would agree, indeed introduced and pioneered the struggle against epistemicides. Finally, Chapter 7, “Toward an Alternative Thinking of Alternatives”, examines how the Western Cartesian modernity model, a hegemonic model with its arrogant claim to address global social issues, is not just moribund; it is dead. We claim that modernity’s final sentence was determined partially by modernity itself and its truly totalitarian cult, a cultural and economic napalm that attempted to erase all other epistemological manifestations, which paradoxically ended up being systematically reinforced and strengthened from the belligerent clashes with modernity. I argue that if colonialism is a crime against humanity, and colonialism and imperialism had no existence outside of modernity, then modernity is also not innocent in such crime against humanity. I argue education and curriculum as an integral component in such crime by promoting what Sousa Santos calls abyssal thinking. We challenge the fields dominant and counter dominant

Introduction

15

positions to embrace the struggle against the epistemicides and to move to a post-abyssal position, which is a non-abyssal position. We argue for the need to confront specific Western modern Eurocentric counterhegemonic approaches, such as Marxism, with the decolonial turn, engaging in an ICT, one that best equips us to win the struggle against the epistemicides. This is a nonalienable human right, one that one cannot afford to ignore if we are all concerned with a more just society. How can that be without a just philosophy of praxis? Let’s challenge, as Giroux (2011) claims, the institutionalization of “a collective suicide whose victims will include not only education, but democracy itself” (p. 26).

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS This book is a result of countless interactions with innumerous individuals, institutions, and community organizations to whom I owe a great deal. A word of profound gratitude to Antonia Darder for the constant support, solidarity, and carinho always showed to me and to my work. A profound gratitude to Noam Chomsky. An hour with Chomsky is a moment of intellectual revolution without precedents. In my encounters with him, I have been able to learn great deal regarding the complexities of the dynamics of ideological production and education. Also, many thanks to Henry Giorux, Ramon Grosfoguel, Paget Henry, Donaldo Macedo, Richard Quantz, Boaventura Sousa Santos, and Jurjo Torres Santome. Their influence in my work is beyond words. Also a word of gratitude to my doctoral students in Educational Leadership and Policy at the University of Massachusetts, Dartmouth. The critical environment that we built together has been so responsible for my constant intellectual growth. Also a word of thanks to my wife and my daughter for the constant support and care and for the constant crucial questions that honestly I do not have an answer. Last but not least, especially in moments like this, I cannot forget my parents, whom I owe a great deal. Unfortunately, my mother did not live enough to see so much of our discussions reflected in my writings.

REFERENCES Arrighi, G. (2005) The Long Twentieth Century. Money, Power and the Origins of Our Times. London: Verso. Baker, B. (2014) Braining the Mind or ‘Purely Spiritual Causation’? A HistoricoPhilosophical Analysis of Child Mind as a Scientific Object. Keynote Address, Educational Leadership and Policy Studies Doctoral Program, Department of Educational Leadership, University of Massachusetts, Dartmouth. Bauman, Z. (1998) Globalization. The Human Consequences. London: Blackwell Publishers. Berardi, F. B. (2012) The Uprising. On Poetry and Finance. London: Semitotext(e).

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Chomsky, N. (1992) Chronicles of Dissent: Interviews with David Barsamian, Monroe, ME: Common Courage Press. Comaroff, J. (2005) The End of History, Again? Pursuing the Past in the Postcoloniality. In A. Loomba, S. Kaul, M. Bunzl, A. Burton, & J. Esty (eds) Postcolonial Studies and Beyond. Durham: Duke University Press, pp., 125–44. Darder, A. (2012a) Culture and Power in the Classrooms. Educational Foundations for the Schooling of Bicultural Studies. Boulder: Paradigm Publishers. Darder, A. (2012b) Dissident Voice for Democratic Schooling: Writer Gabriela Roman interviews Radical Educator Antonia Darder. Truthout, September 25. DeCerteau, M. (1998) The Practice of Everyday Life. Berkeley: University of California Press. Dussel, E. (2000) Europe, Modernity and Eurocentrism, Nepantla: Views from South, 1 (3), pp., 465–78. Dussel, E. (2013) Ethics of Liberation. In the Age of Globalization and Exclusion. Durham: Duke University Press. Foster, J. B. (2008). The Financialization of capital and the crisis. Monthly Review, 59 (11). Frank, A. G. (1998) Reorient. Global Economy in the Asian Age. Berkely: University of Camifornia Press. Freire, P. (1980) Conscientização. São Paulo: Moraes. Galeano, E. (1997) Open Veins of Latin America. Five Centuries of Pillage of a Continent. New York: Monthly Review Press. Ginsberg, B. (2011) The Fall of the Faculty. The Rise of the All Administrative University and Why It Matters. Cambridge: Oxford University Press. Giroux, H. (2011) Zombie Politics in the Age of Casino Capitalism. New York: Peter Lang. Gros, F. (2014) A Philosophy of Walking. London: Verso. Grosfoguel, R. (2011) Decolonizing Post-Colonial Studies and Paradigms of Political Economy: Transmodernity, Decolonial Thinking, and Global Coloniality. Transmodernity. Journal of Peripheral Cultural Production of the Luso-Hispanic World, 1 (1), pp., 1–38. Grosfoguel, R. (2003) Colonial Subjects. Puerto Ricans in a Global Perspective. Berkely: University of California Press. Laclau, E. (2011) Emancipação e diferença. Rio de Janeiro. UERJ. Latour, B. (2005) O Poder da Critica. Discursos. Lisboa. Edicoes Pedago. Lazzarato, M. (2011) The Making of the Indebt Man. Amsterdam: Semitoext. Maldonado-Torres, N. (2003) Imperio y Colonialidad del Ser. Paper presented at the Annual Meeting of the Latin American Studies Association in Dallas, Texas, March 29, pp., 1–24. Marx, K. (1978 [1843]) For a Ruthless Critique of Everything Existing. In R. Tucker (ed) The Marx Engels Reader. New York: W.W. Norton, pp., 12–15. Mignolo, W. (2008) The Geopolitcs of Knowledge and Colonial Difference. In M. Morana, E. Dussel, and C. Jauregui (eds) Coloniality at Large. Latin America and the Postcolonial Debate. San Antonio: Duke University Press, pp., 225–58. Mignolo, W. (2013) Introduction. Coloniality of Power and Decolonial Thinking. In W. Mignolo and A. Escobar (eds) Globalization and the Decolonial Turn. New York: Routledge, pp., 1–21. Nkrumah, K. (1964) Consciencism. New York: Monthly Review Press. Paraskeva, J. (2014) Conflicts in Curriculum Theory. Challenging Hegemonic Epistemologies. New York: Palgrave. (Updated Paper Back Edition). Pinar, W. (2004) What Is Curriculum Theory? Mahwah, NJ: Erlbaum. Quijano, A. (2000a) Coloniality of Power, Eurocentrism and Latin America. Neplanta, Views from the South, 1 (3), pp., 533–80.

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Quijano, A. (2000b) Colonialidad del poder y classificacion Social. Journal of World Systems Research, 6 (2), pp., 342–86. Quijano, A. (2008) Coloniality of Power, Eurocentrism, and Latin America. In M. Morana, E. Dussel, and C. Jauregui (eds) Colonialiy at Large. Latin America and the Postcolonial Debate. San Antonio: Duke University Press, pp., 181–224. Sousa Santos, B. (1999) Porque é que é Tão Difícil Construir uma Teoria Crítica. Revista Crítica de Ciências Sociais, 54, pp., 197–215. Sousa Santos, B. (2008) Globalizations. Theory, Culture and Society, 23, pp., 393–9. Sousa Santos, B. (2009) If God Were a Human Rights Activist: Human Rights and the Challenge of Political Theologies. Is Humanity Enough? The Secular Theology of Human Rights, Law, Social Justice and Global Development, 1. Accessed from www.go.warwick.ac.uk/elj/lgd/2009_l/santos Sousa Santos, B. (2012) Aquino de Braganca: Criador de Futuros, Mestre de Heterodoxias, Pioneiro das Epistemologias do Sul. In T. Silva, J. Coelho and A. Souto (Orgs) Como Fazer Ciencias Sociais e Humanas em Africa. Questoes Epsitemologicas, Metodologicas, Teoricas e Politicas. Dakar: CODESRIA/CLACSO, pp., 13–62. Sousa Santos, B. (2014) Epistemologies of the South: Justice against Epistemicide. Boulder: Paradigm. Tlostanova, M. and Mignolo, W. (2012) Learning to Unlearn. Decolonial Reflections from Euroasia and the Americas. Ohio: Ohio State University. Varoufakis, Y. (2011) The Global Minotaur. London: Zed Books. Walsh, C. (2012) ‘Other’ Knowledges, ‘Other’ Critiques Reflections on the Politics and Practices of Philosophy and Decoloniality in the Other America. Transmodernity. Journal of Peripheral Cultural Production of the Luso-Hispanic World, 1 (3), pp., 11–27. wa, Thiong’o, N. (2012) Globalectics. Theory and the Politics of Knowing. New York: Columbia University Press. Žižek, S. (2009) How to Begin from the Beginning. New Left Review, 57, pp., 43–55. Žižek, S. (2010) A Permanent Economic Emergency. New Left Review, 64 (July /Aug). Accessed from: http://newleftreview.org/II/64/slavoj-zizek-a-permanent-economicemergency Žižek, S. (2012) The Year of Dreaming Dangerously. London: Verso.

1

The Critical Surge Within the Critical Approaches

As I was able to examine in Conflicts in Curriculum Theory: Challenging Hegemonic Epistemologies, during the 1970s and 1980s, the curriculum field was swamped by a plurality of scholars exhibiting a myriad of distinct, fundamentally Western, epistemological perspectives (some of them severe) with tremendous repercussions around the world, especially in European and Latin American nations. In fact, this was one of the golden moments for a particular set of critical progressive educators and curriculists. In both the United States and the United Kingdom, the field was confronted with the powerful approaches of Apple (1990), Aronowitz (1989), Bernstein (1977), Giroux (1980, 1981a, 1983), Mann (1968), Pinar (1980), Pinar and Grumet (1976), Wexler (1976), Whitty (1985), Willis (1977), and Young (1971), as well as many others. It was, among other things, the sedimentation of a non-monolithic heavyweight armada engaged in a critique of the educational and curriculum field. Some of them were drawing from the works of Williams and Gramsci, among others, and making the neo-Marxist approach in education more accurate by paying close attention to issues, such as ideology, power, hegemony, identity, discourse; others were trying to go beyond these perspectives; and others were reacting against such platforms, which they saw as trapped within dangerous ideological and cultural compromises and mortgaged to eugenic economic interests. Such tangles need to be put in perspective by returning to the general struggles that emerged in the field at the beginning of the nineteenth century (Kliebard, 1995; Paraskeva, 2007a, 2011a, 2011b; Pinar, Reynolds, Slattery, & Taubman 1995; Schubert, 1980). One thing was quite clear: the field would not be the same anymore. No one can minimize the importance of a theoretical ebb and flow of a particular non-homogenous group of critical intellectuals at the very core of the political, ideological, and cultural debates over school knowledge. Their multidirectional roots extend from the turn of the twentieth century to the present day. To promote a better understanding of the work of this divergent group of critical scholars, I conceptualized, in Conflicts in Curriculum Theory (2011a), a map for charting their theoretical contributions—what I referred to as the critical curriculum river. This metaphor, which is based

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on Vincent Harding’s novel There Is a River, is a methodological tool used to reveal the various critical tributaries that have taken critical curriculum theorists in many different directions. While these critical theorists come from a number of traditions, the river metaphor helps demonstrate how these traditions flow both together and individually in the history of the curriculum field. Although this group of scholars has never occupied a dominant position in the field, it is undeniable how much they have contributed to the struggle for a more just curriculum. In fact, their critical curriculum platforms not only have challenged both dominant and counterdominant positions, but they also have capably edified a great deal of politically coded analyses in the field. One of the most powerful leitmotivs of this critical curriculum river is the struggle for relevant and just curriculum, which can also foster equality, democracy, and social justice. At the forefront of this struggle are the valuable contributions of intellectuals, such as Addams, Apple, Aronowitz, Bode, Counts, Davies, Dewey, Du Bois, Giroux, Greene, hooks, Huebner, Macdonald, McLaren, Rugg, Washington, and Wexler, among others. Also, the works of King Jr., Robeson, Parks, Horton through the civil rights movement, and the Highlander Folk School, as well as the works of Kozol and the so-called romantic critics, have had a profound impact. Grounded in different epistemological terrains, each of these scholars and movements was able to construct sharp challenges to an obsolete and positivistic functionalist school system, despite receiving severe criticism from counterdominant perspectives. This group of scholars within the critical curriculum river dared to show everybody that another curriculum and school system was possible. Each one was, in fact, quite successful in claiming the need to understand schools and curriculum within the dynamics of ideological production. Drawing from common and uncommon but fundamentally Western perspectives, these scholars were able to reframe the education and curriculum debates by bringing a new language to the field, if not precisely to introduce particular concepts. This progressive curriculum owes a great deal to the works of Huebner, Macdonald, Greene, Williams, Gramsci, Freire, and, later, Foucault and others. The field now faced the need to debate and understand concepts, such as hegemony, ideology, reproduction, resistance, transformative pedagogy, hidden curriculum, confl ict versus consensus, identity, power, and discourse. At a later stage, as critical theorists were blasting the field with this new, politically coded vocabulary, race, gender, and sexuality became entangled with class and identity. In the United States, such concepts were quite prevalent in the works of Apple, Giroux, Wexler, Aronowitz, McLaren, and many others, who reclaimed not necessarily the dictatorship of the political but who assumed the political as “the pillar” for the interpretation of curriculum and schools. To claim that we are before a non-monolithic critical curriculum river within the progressive tradition that embodies a political approach towards schools and curriculum not only seems inaccurate and reductive but also minimizes important

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political approaches that could be identified in other progressive perspectives. No serious curriculist and/or curriculogus1 would deny the politicality and advanced approaches presented by Greene, Pinar, and others. Arguably, Pinar’s later work is much more politically coded (the word politically is crucial here) than some of his earlier material.2 However, Apple, Giroux, Wexler, Aronowitz, and McLaren’s approaches pioneered Gramscian concepts, such as hegemony, ideology, common sense, culture, the role of the (organic) intellectuals, which also gives credibility to our claim (Gramsci, 1957, 1971; also Sassoon, 1982). THE HEYDAY OF NEO-GRAMSCIANISM Forming an armada equipped with this new semantic artillery, these ‘neoGramscian’ scholars, especially Apple and Giroux, pushed the critical curriculum field in a different direction. This neo-Gramscian stance had several main elements. The first was a basic understanding of individual relations as something organic rather than mechanical. Second was a view of culture as the foundation of new modes of labor, production, and distribution; hence, the belief that the working class should have agency in both the economic and political fields and that specific cultural elements will lead to the construction of a working-class civilization. Therefore, the aim of the working class is not only to achieve political and economic power but also—and this is important—to gain intellectual power, because the ways are grounded in a complex mosaic of economic, political, and cultural issues. The third element was the need to understand concepts, such as hegemony and common sense, and how they operate in society. Hegemony was perceived as a balance between coercion and consent, and it implied an intricate and complex set of compromises that played a key position within the framework of the state. The final and fourth element was the impossibility of disconnecting homo faber (working man) from homo sapiens (wise man). This is one of the main concerns expressed by scholars both within and beyond the so-called critical progressive curriculum river. It actually fuelled an unfortunately irreparable fracture within the field, despite Pinar’s (1979) several attempts to invite “disenchanted Marxists to participate in the process of definition of the reconceptualization”—attempts that probably deserved a different reaction from critical scholars. I have examined this issue in a previous volume (Paraskeva, 2011a). By simultaneously expanding and complexifying the view of how hegemony operates, neo-Gramscians promoted not only a vision that the cultural, political, religious, and economic beliefs of each individual are a point of both departure and arrival for a specific hegemonic articulation, but they are also a good way to seek a new common sense (see Eagleton, 1994, p. 199). Furthermore, this political perspective clashed irremediably with the reductive and atrophied Marxist dogma of the base/superstructure model,

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something that Gramsci (1971) saw “theoretically as primitive infantilism” (p. 43). For Gramsci(ans) and neo-Gramscians, education was a crucial path not to help the oppressed classes gain more cultural tools but only, and this is important, to build a more powerful political and social consciousness. As I stated elsewhere (Paraskeva, 2004), one should not be naïve in thinking that Apple’s critical hermeneutics—which can be found in works, such as Apple’s Ideology and Curriculum (the towering piece that I coined “Apple’s Trilogy”; see Paraskeva, 2004) and Ideology, Culture and the Process of Schooling—emphasizes a concept, such as hegemony, for no particular reason. In examining “On Analyzing Hegemony,” a chapter from Ideology and Curriculum, one not only sees that Apple takes a huge step beyond issues raised in McLure and Fisher’s (1969) research but also gains a clearer understanding to which he presents a new key to secular social and educational problems. In doing so, Apple introduces to researchers and scholars new lenses as well as windows of opportunity to examine societal issues. This connection of hegemony with the secular reality was also explored in Giroux’s (1981a) initial material in which he claimed that “hegemony is rooted in both the meanings and symbols that legitimate dominant interests as well as in the practices that structure daily experience” (1981a, p. 94; 1980). In addition, he claims that one can perfectly perceive how hegemony functions in the school system by paying attention to (1) the selection of culture that is deemed as socially legitimate; (2) the categories that are used to classify certain cultural content and forms as superior and inferior; (3) the selection and legitimation of school and classroom relationships; and (4) the distribution of and access to different types of culture and knowledge. (Giroux, 1981a, p. 94) Thus, it is crucial to understand that “as the dominant ideology, hegemony functions to define the meaning and limits of common-sense as well as the forms and content of discourse in society” (Giroux, 1981a, p. 94). Secular dominant ideologies, quite structural within the dynamics of ideological production of a capitalist system, created a commonsensical common-sense assemblage that somehow poverty, inequality, class, race, ethnicity, and gender segregation are immutable and inherent and not a consequence of a eugenic system of wealth distribution and unequal power (Darder, 2012a) utterly connected with the modes and conditions of production in which schools and curriculum play a major role. Darder (2011), in her radical take on culture, pedagogy, and power, underlines the importance of hegemony as a praxis within the multifarious project of critical theory and pedagogy. The praxis of hegemony is crucial in order to demystify the asymmetrical power relations and social arrangements that sustain the dominant culture. Hegemony points to the powerful connection that exists between politics, culture, ideology and

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The Critical Surge pedagogy. As such, teachers are challenged to recognize their responsibility to critique and attempt to transform those classroom conditions tied to hegemonic practices that perpetuate the oppression of subordinate groups. (Darder, 2011, p. 208)

In a clear Gramscian way, Darder (2012a) strips the political and economic—although education and curriculum are not innocent—webs camouflaged within a so convenient cultural mudded terrain to show “with the rise of modern science and technology social control has been exercised less through the use of physical deterrents and increasingly through the distribution of an elaborate system which control norms and imperatives” (p. 32). Hegemony plays a major role in McLaren’s (1986) Schooling as a Ritual Performance as well. In trying to understand schooling from the perspectives of cultural and performance, McLaren relies on the concept of hegemony and how particular rituals “reinforce or reproduce the political and economic dominance of one social class over another” (p. 86), and in so doing, he attempts to examine “who benefits most from the [hegemonic] ritual structures and who is marginalized” (p. 83). As Wright (1994) would also claim, the arguments of Apple, Giroux, Aronowitz, Wexler, McLaren, and many others were based on the urgent need to completely change the “game board”—that is, the curriculum platform—to dramatically transform the very idea of schooling and curriculum, and to initiate a new platform for the field of curriculum theory that would have the potential for making schools more relevant in this self-proclaimed democratic society. To accomplish this, one needs to look at the role of ideology within schools and society. Watkins (2001, 2010) states sharply that ideology plays a key role in the nexus of the education and industrial order, because it is “the currency of those dominating the culture, [is] imparted subtly and made to appear as though its partisan views are part of the ‘natural order.’ The dominant ideology is a product of dominant power” (p. 9). However, these changes and views were not accepted by all scholars. Pinar et al. (1995) claim that Wexler “emerged [in the seventies as] the most sophisticated critic on the Left of Apple and Giroux, and quite possibly the most sophisticated theoretician on the Left in contemporary field” (p. 44). Nevertheless, it is impossible to ignore the dominance of Apple and Giroux. As Pinar et al. (1995) argued, [t]he effort to understand curriculum as a political text shifted from an exclusive focus upon reproduction of the status quo to resistance to it, then again, to resistance /reproduction as a dialectical process, then again—in the mid-1980’s—to a focus upon daily educational practice, especially pedagogical and political issues of race, class, and gender. The major players in this effort continued to be Apple and Giroux, Apple through his voluminous scholarship and that of his many students, and Giroux through his prodigious scholarly production. (p. 265)

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Championed by both Apple and Giroux, the turbulent waters of the critical river reached the heyday of (neo-)Gramscianism flooding the educational and curriculum debate with a new language—a critical linguistic turn—to understand the educational phenomenon. Such a zenith will not last, however. The challenges especially from within were devastated. A FUNCTIONALIST COUNTERFUNCTIONALIST CRITICAL FLOW Such prominent leadership would face severe criticism, not only from the dominant tradition but also from the very core of the progressive tradition. For instance, Liston and Zeichner (1987) expressed the urgent need to accurately perceive the meaning of radical or critical pedagogy within the critical education platform. Nor was Wexler (1987) shy in expressing his frustrations, not necessarily with the political approach per se but with the path that the approach had taken. In mercilessly criticizing the emphasis on reproduction and resistance, which made “the new sociology of education historically backward-looking and ideologically reactionary” (p. 127), Wexler claimed there was a need to incorporate poststructural and postmodern tools to better understand schools and curriculum, a juicy epistemological avenue that scholars, such as Giroux and McLaren, did not ignore. Wexler’s claim should not be seen as a detour but as an upgrade of the political. While warning that the challenge of knowledge neutrality has been espoused by right intellectuals as well, Wexler (1976, p. 50) does not devalue knowledge as a political issue per se. Wexler (1976) clearly voices his political space and place arguing that during the 1960s, the purity of science has been put in question because of its promiscuous relation with the military agenda (p. 8). Naturally, not only “Western science begun to lose its meaning [but also one witnessed] a turn from science as the single standard of knowledge in favor of a plurality of equality valid ways of knowing” (Wexler, 1976, p. 8). In sum, Wexler (1976) was not shy in unveiling some of the puzzling limits of the critical theoretical framework. He argued that too much emphasis had been put on the social effects of schooling and not enough on the study of the nature of school knowledge. It seems that to Wexler, the study of school content or knowledge was somehow dangerous for sociologists. Despite the fact that a number sociologists have studied school knowledge, their approach, according to Wexler, is bounded by social images and outdated paradigms. The lack of consensus about what should be taught in the schools highlights the need for a serious debate about curriculum content. Liston (1988), too, is quite clear about the puzzling and unacceptable silences within the critical progressive curriculum river. He argued that the works of a particular radical Marxist tradition within this river (including the works of Apple and Wexler) exhibit a “functionalist approach and have neglected crucial empirical investigations” (p. 15). Such criticism is

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undeniably severe and probably deserves much more attention than received from the field. Oddly, Liston’s claims that particular radical-critical Marxist approaches were criticizing functionalist dominant and counterdominant traditions relied precisely on a functionalist approach. The reactionary impulse of the political (related with the functionalist approach) was, in a way, implicit in Ellsworth’s (1989) interesting critique as well. Ellsworth’s rationale must be contextualized. Before the nationwide eruption of racist violence in communities and on campuses in 1987 to 1988, including the University of Wisconsin (UW)–Madison, Ellsworth took the opportunity to discuss this kind of turmoil in the course Curriculum and Instruction (C&I) 608: Media and Anti-Racist Pedagogies at UW. According to Ellsworth, particular concepts of critical pedagogy, such as empowerment, student voice, dialogue, and even the term “critical,” are representative myths that perpetuate relations of domination. In claiming the need to fight for a pedagogy of the unknowable, Ellsworth (1989) was acknowledging the prominence of the poststructural and postmodern approaches. Ellsworth (1989) argues that, on the basis of her interpretation of C&I 608, “key assumptions, goals, and pedagogical practices fundamental to the literature on critical pedagogy—namely, ‘empowerment’, ‘student voice’, ‘dialogue’, and even the term ‘critical’—are repressive myths that perpetuate relations of domination” (p. 298). Moreover, she claims that our efforts to put discourses of critical pedagogy into practice led us to reproduce relations of dominations in the classroom [discourses that] were ‘working through us’ in repressive ways, and had themselves becomes vehicles of repression. To the extent that we disengaged ourselves from those aspects and moved in another direction, we ‘worked through’ and out of the literature’s highly abstract language (‘myths’) of who we ‘should’ be and what ‘should’ be happening in our classroom, and into classroom practices that were context specific and seemed to be much more responsive to our own understandings of our social identities and situations. (p. 298) Educational researchers, Ellsworth (1989) adds, “who invoke concepts of critical pedagogy, consistently strip discussions of classroom practices of historical context and political opposition. What remains are defi nitions [such as ‘empowerment’, ‘student voice’, ‘dialogue’, and even the term critical] which operate at [a] high level of abstraction” (p. 300). In her belligerent critique over the shortcomings of critical pedagogy, Ellsworth (1989) argues that advocates of critical pedagogy fail to provide a clear statement of their political agendas [and] the effort is to hide the fact that as critical pedagogues, they are in fact seeking to appropriate public resources (classrooms, school supplies, teacher/professor salaries, academic requirements and degrees) to

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further various ‘progressive’ political agendas that they believe to be for the public good—and therefore deserving of public resources. (p. 301) For Ellsworth (1989) it was crucial to ask the question, “What diversity do we silence in the name of liberatory pedagogy?” (p. 299). While acknowledging that radical educational theory and theorists “never adequately escape from an overtly orthodox concern with the relationship between schooling and political economy and as such refused to engage the complex and changing traditions that have informed the diverse formations and projects in which cultural studies has developed” (Giroux, 1992, p. 201), Aronowitz and Giroux (1991) warn about the dangers of understanding critical pedagogy’s political project as uniform and detached all together from the crude realities of daily life. Giroux (1992) challenges Ellsworth’s (1989) reasoning and defends the importance of cultural studies for critical educators. According to Giroux (1992), cultural studies are crucial to educators, because (1) it offers the basis for creating new forms of knowledge, by making language constitutive of the conditions for producing the meaning as part of the knowledge/power relationship; (2) defines culture as a contested terrain, a site of struggle and transformation [offering] the opportunity for going beyond cultural analyses that romanticize everyday life or take up culture as merely the reflex of the logic of domination, [in fact] a more critical version of cultural studies raises questions about the margins and the center, especially around the categories of race, class, and gender; (3) offers the opportunity to rethink the relationship between the issue of difference as it is constituted within subjectivities and between social groups. This suggests understanding more clearly how questions of subjectivity can be taken up, so as not to erase the possibility for individual and social agency; (4) provides the basis for understanding pedagogy as a form of cultural production rather than as the transmission of a particular skill, body of knowledge, or set of values. (pp. 201–202) Giroux (1992) openly challenges radical educators to “learn from the theoretical shortcomings [and] begin to rethink the relationship among difference, voice and politics as a way to strengthen the pillars for a liberatory theory of Border Pedagogy,” calling for us to pay close attention to the cultural politics of language, difference and identity (p. 209). In addition, Giroux (1992) argues that, although language “cannot be abstracted from the forces and conflicts of social history, [that is] the historicity of the relationship between dominant and subordinate forms of language offers insights into countering the assumption that the dominant language at any given time is simply the result of a naturally given process rather than the result of specific historical struggles and conflicts” (p. 203).

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Resisting difference tuned to identity politics “offered a powerful challenge to the hegemonic notion that Eurocentric culture is superior to other cultures and traditions by offering political and cultural vocabularies to subordinate groups by which they could reconstruct their own histories and give voice to their individual and collective identities” (Giroux, 1992, p. 208). Such claims and counterclaims deserve a properly deep and detailed analysis. As some of us are claiming, perhaps a composite approach that incorporates critical and post-structural perspectives, or, as I describe later, a deterritorialized approach is possible and needs to be done in the near future. These scholars not only showed how the field maintained its tradition within a place and time of intense struggles and heated conflicts, but they also unveiled the tensions, clashes, and ruptures within a particular critical curriculum river, in which particular scholars swim and whose source, as I was able to examine elsewhere (Paraskeva, 2011a), needed to be contextualized back at the turn of the nineteenth century. ADDRESSING FUNCTIONALIST COUNTERFUNCTIONALISM FROM WITHIN Despite the severe criticism faced by many critical theorists and critical theory itself, one cannot deny that early in their intellectual development, many critical scholars struggled with both the limits and possibilities of their critical theoretical approaches as a way to analyze social formations. This is visible, for instance, in both Giroux and Apple’s organic intellectualism. However, the construction of a strong critical approach to challenge the contemporary educational hegemonic bloc led some of the elements of such critical river to realize the limitations of their approaches. That is, in criticizing the functionalism of dominant educational theories, they end up falling into a functionalist trap framed by a functionalist counterfunctionalist approach, as previously noted in Liston’s (1988) critique. As I claimed elsewhere (Paraskeva, 2004), in his early intellectual growth, Apple (1990) struggled with both the limits and the possibilities of critical approaches. Although Ideology and Curriculum showed a deep intellectual concern for class analysis and sympathy toward the reproductive approach, one cannot ignore the fact that Apple’s analysis is keenly sensitive to the fact that “reproduction” alone cannot explain the intricate dynamics of schooling. In fact, Ideology and Curriculum opens the door for both Education and Power (Apple, 1995)—I maintain that the two books could be published in a single volume—and Teachers and Texts (Apple, 1986),3 as well as the rest of his vast intellectual work. So, for Apple, the “traditional” critical theoretical tools were clearly insufficient to allow an acute interpretation of social formation and its consequential transformation. Later on, Apple, together with Weis and McCarthy, claims the need to move beyond a reductive platform. Whereas Apple and Weis (1983) called for the need

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to perceive the structure of school’s ideological formation, thus arguing that the cultural sphere was relatively autonomous, McCarthy and Apple (1988) introduced the nonsynchronous parallelist position to promote better understanding of race, class, and gender issues in education. Following this, Apple and Weis (1983) added that “there is a strong relationship between ideology and the knowledge and practices of education. Ideology does have power; it is shown both in what school material includes and in what it excludes. It does position people within wider relations of domination and exploitation. Yet, when lived out, it also often has elements of ‘good’ sense as well as ‘bad’ sense in it” (p. 23). Examining the dynamics of ideological production, Apple and Weis (1983) argue that (1) rather than a unidimensional theory in which economic form is determinate, society is conceived of as being made up of three interrelated spheres—the economic, cultural/ideological, and political; (2) we need to be cautious about assuming that ideologies are only ideas held in one’s head. Nor are ideologies linear configurations, simple processes that all necessarily work in the same direction or reinforce each other. Instead, these processes sometimes overlap, complete, drown out, and clash with each other. (pp. 23–27) That is “ideological forms are not reducible to class” (Apple & Weis, 1983, p. 24), and categories, such as gender, race, age, and additionally ethnicity, “enter directly into the ideological moment” (Apple & Weis, 1983, p. 24). It is indeed “out of the articulation with, clash among, or contradictions among and within, say, class, race, and sex that ideologies are lived in one’s day-to-day life” (Apple & Weis, 1983, pp. 24–25). Each category has “its own internal history in relation to the others [and] it is impossible to completely comprehend class relations in capitalism without seeing how capital used patriarchal social relations within organizations” (Apple & Weis, 1983, p. 25). McCarthy’s slow yet powerful position helped swirl the waters between and within the critical and post terrains. As he (1988a) argues, “as an Afro-Caribbean writer, I find myself, perhaps, permanently, out of sync with racial and social science accounts of the human condition which marginalize third world people [that is] we are simply deprived of structural positions to speak within the new wave strategies of periodization associated with post-modernism and poststructuralism now being forcedmarched into the field” (p. 8). McCarthy (1988b) vehemently reacted against pitfalls of critical perspectives with neo-Marxist impulses by ignoring racism as an endemic reality in pre- and postcapitalist societies, challenging the reductionism of understanding race (and one could add ethnicity) as a mere add-on category. If one wants to understand the dynamics of ideological production that frame preand postcapitalist societies, in general, and education, in particular, class and gender dynamics cannot subalternize race and vice versa (McCarthy, 1988b).

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Later on, Apple and Carlson (1998) defended the need for a combined critical–poststructural platform, adding that “Gramscian discourse has highlighted the roles that economic and technological forces as well as ideological struggles played in reshaping the post-Fordist cultural landscape. Foucault’s work focuses our attention on the role of the State and expert knowledge in constructing normalized citizens and subjectivity” (p. 6). Posteriorly, Hypolito (2001) complexified McCarthy and Apple’s (1998) approach by calling for a spiral nonparallelist, nonsynchronous position to better understand class, race, and gender issues in education. Giroux was also responsive to the silences and possibilities of critical theory. In Ideology, Culture and the Process of Schooling, Giroux (1981a) claims that “the task of radical educational theory is to identify and move beyond those classroom structures which maintain an oppressive hidden curriculum” (p. 82). Giroux was actually raising the flag regarding the theory– reality abyss in too many critical approaches, thus subjugating reality to particular theoretical framework completely delinked from the tangible, messy, spontaneous cacophonic daily life in the classrooms. As he (1981a) argues, “while many radicals have used the term ‘hidden curriculum’ to categorize the unstated but effective distribution of norm, values and attitudes to students in classrooms, few have provided more than a one-sided analysis of this important phenomenon” (p. 72). However, to make sense of the hidden curriculum, Giroux (1981a) maintains that schools have to be analyzed as agents of legitimation, organized to produce and reproduce the dominant categories, values and social relationships necessary for the maintenance of the larger society. This should not suggest that schools simply mirror the interests and wishes of the ruling-class. Nor should it be denied that schools have an immense power to manipulate the consciousness and actions of students, and function to pass on selected aspects of the dominant culture. The process of legitimation is clearly much more complex than most radical educators have suggested. (p. 72) The radical core of any pedagogy, Giroux (1981a) argues, “will be found not in its insistence on a doctrinal truth as much as in its ability to provide the theoretical and structural conditions necessary to help students search for and act upon the truth” (p. 86). Moreover, as I examined earlier, Giroux was quite aware that “the perception of hegemony redefines class rule, and also reveals a relationship between ideology and power, which is viewed not simply as one of imposition, but as Foucault points out, a ‘network of relations, constantly in tension, in activity, rather than a privilege one might possess . . . power is exercised rather than possessed’” (p. 25). Giroux later crystallizes the need to pay attention to postmodern and post-structural insights and argues that the reinvigoration of critical theory depends on such a move. For example, in Towards a Postmodern Pedagogy (Giroux, 1996), he summarizes

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the need to overcome the towering vacuums within the very planks of the critical epistemological armada. It is worth quoting him at length: Critical theory needs a language that allows for competing solidarities and political vocabularies that do not reduce the issues of power, justice, struggle, and inequality to a single script, a master narrative that suppresses the contingent, historical, and the everyday as a serious object of study. Critical pedagogy needs to create new forms of knowledge through its emphasis on breaking down disciplinary boundaries and creating new spaces where knowledge can be produced. It is not an epistemological issue, but one of power, ethics, and politics. The Enlightenment notion of reason needs to be reformulated within a critical pedagogy. Critical pedagogy needs to regain a sense of alternatives by combining a language of critique and possibility. Postmodern feminism exemplifies this in both its critique of patriarchy and its search to construct new forms of identity and social relations. Critical pedagogy needs to develop a theory of teachers as transformative intellectuals who occupy specifiable political and social locations—rather than defining teacher work through the narrow language of professionalism. Central to the notion of critical pedagogy is a politics of voice that combines a postmodern notion of difference with a feminist emphasis on the primacy of the political. (Giroux, 1996, pp. 691–695) Giroux is insightfully reaching out to post-structural approaches, not in denial of the political, but precisely to reinforce the political and, in doing so, to strengthen the critical stance. As Giroux (1981a) adamantly argues the U.S. educational left “often appears baffled over the question of what constitutes radical educational theory and practice. Beneath the plethora of pedagogical approaches, that range from deschooling to alternative schools, one searches in vain for a comprehensive critical theory of education which bridges the gap between educational theory on the one hand and social and political theory on the other” (p. 63). The U.S. educational left fractured— analytically speaking—in two major groups, namely, the content-focused and the strategy-based radicals, experiencing severe inconsistencies in their struggle for a more politicized educational phenomenon. That is, while the latter, however, acknowledges “the power of the dominant social order to manipulate students into docile, obedient members of society, [in fact] does little to help them to move beyond a cherry spontaneity” (Giroux, 1981a, p. 66). In contrast, the former “does not move beyond their static notion of knowledge as a set of radical ideas to be transmitted to students” (Giroux, 1981a, p. 68). Education, as Freire (1990) notoriously argues, is subversive. That is, despite its conservative bone framed by a “narrating subject (teacher) and patient listening objects (the students)” (Freire, 1990, p. 71), critical theorists and pedagogues must show the ability to go beyond such deterministic framework without falling into another one. The banking

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concept of education—that, odd as it might be, keeps reinventing itself not just at the curriculum level but also, currently, more than ever before, at the level of teacher preparation programs—that turns students into “containers, into receptacles to be filled by the teacher” denies the fact that “knowledge emerges only through the invention and re-invention, through the restless, impatient continuing, hopeful inquiry human beings pursue in the world, with the world, and with each other” (Freire, 1990, p. 72). In an almost radical sense, Giroux (1981a) argues that knowledge should be viewed as a shared process, a mediation between teachers and students, a creative political exchange that forges commodities and the kind of critical reflection that allows all to be seen as both teachers and learners. Under such circumstances, knowledge is not treated simply as problematic, it becomes the vehicle for teachers and students to discuss its problematic grounding and meaning. Knowledge in this instance becomes situated in ideological and political choices; in other words, knowledge becomes de-reified in terms of both its content and the social context in which it is mediated. (p. 66) Quite sentient of particular natural flaws of liberal and radical intellectuals, Giroux (2001, p. 4) reemphasizes his challenge of the dogmatic trap in which crude radical intellectualism fell. Although some radical intellectuals and educators, Giroux (2001) claims, “do make the relations among schools, power, and society an object of critical analysis, they do so at the theoretical expense of falling into either: a one-sided idealism or an equally one-sided structuralism” (p. 4). That is, “there are radical educators who collapse human agency and struggle into a celebration of human will, cultural experience, or the construction of happy classroom social relations, [as well as] radical views of pedagogy that cling to the notions of structure and domination” (Giroux, 2001, p. 4). A great example of how hegemony and ideology operate in the daily life of schools and society is the recent state, national, and international embarrassments created with the termination of La Raza Studies in the state of Arizona and the new backward—to say the least—evaluation of teachers. In 2010, Arizona Revised Statutes § 15–112 was passed and was used to ban Mexican American Studies (MAS) in the Tucson Unified School District (TUSD).4 According to Tom Horne, who was the current superintendent of public instruction, declared to TUSD to be in violation of the statute, and the charge was supported by his predecessor, John Huppenthal. The MAS program, or La Raza Studies, is mined by the philosophy of a well-known Brazilian communist Paulo Freire, who wrote Pedagogy of the Oppressed, in which, so says Horne, one really understand Freire’s influences from communists such as Marx, Che, Engels, Lenin and that instead of teaching minorities that America is a country full of opportunities for all, we teach them that they are oppressed and that America is a racist country.

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According to Horne (who at the time was running for, and was elected, Arizona attorney general), ethnic studies are revolutionary, and students only realize they are oppressed in such courses, and all this is a pure abuse of the taxpayers’ money. In the annals of the history of America is a law enforcement that prevents people from being violent, aggressive and somewhat tolerant because one day read a book [among many] and realized that they are oppressed (Horne, 2010). The tragedy does not stop here, however. As if this were not enough, the state of Arizona will target the accent of its faculty. Teachers who show a pronounced accent in English (whose English anyway, one would argue) will be penalized and removed from the teaching of the ‘mother tongue’ and might even be sacked (Jordan, 2010). Ethnic studies (i.e., La Raza Studies), ensures Horne, “go against the ideal of Martin Luther King Jr., who in his famous march on Washington, challenged the nation to judge people by their character and not by skin color.” Horne challenged the nation to follow the example of King because, he says, “we are not the person who reveals the color of the skin.” To top it off a substantive part of the population does think that Horne has a point. Basically, the governor of the state of Arizona and Horne limited to succor the ‘thought to oppress the oppressed’. Amid certified genocide, it is said that not all ethnic studies are prohibited. What was prohibited was not necessarily the teaching of particular ethnic group’s heritage group knowledge but precisely what it was called ‘dangerous knowledge’ systematically silenced by mainstream curriculum traditions because of its critical veins and transformative capacity. Certainly Freire could never imagine writing such a perfect oeuvre, and certainly Martin Luther King Jr. could not have had the foggiest idea that his whole social justice ideal—which helped to free millions from oppression and racism—would to be used, years later, to legitimize policies against which the civil rights leader was killed. By anchoring his policy in racist discourse that has a maternity and a context precisely opposite, Horne does nothing more than to act at the level of common sense (in which hegemony operates) domesticating, de-ideologizing, and naturalizing more than a concept, an ideal that stirred the world; in doing so Horne managed to neutralize the historicity of the concept, or, better, giving it, in the act, another historical process. Fortunately, history does not belong to the one who writes it. Indeed, this whole process of domestication and ahistorization, which is basically an attempt to ideologization, is the backbone of the strategy of hegemonic neo-radical centrist movements to control the common sense. This battle has much to do with what goes on in classrooms (form and content), and it is not just a cultural battle (Hall, 1998). It is also economic, and unfortunately, for a long time, the majority of critical theorists downplayed the importance that the financialization of capital has in the context of educational policies and curriculum (Foster, 2008). Nor it is a coincidence that today we are witnessing the resurgence of research in the field of ‘economic policy and education’, an area of research much ignored

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in the curriculum field (Huebner, 1977). Enguita (2008) challenges us to rethink what do ‘we’ mean by ‘economy’, not to clarify its degree of immaturity with regard to categories such as culture but its relative autonomy to the various social, economic, political, and cultural dynamics within the dynamics of ideological production (Apple & Weis, 1983; McCarthy & Apple, 1988). Especially in an age in which education is placed in the axis ‘cost-return’ as a way to combat social economic waste, the economic dimension in educational policies, curriculum, and teacher preparation cannot be minimized. The new evaluation of teachers gives credibility to our concern. If one considers the new teacher evaluation and its request for teachers to provide evidence of cultural sensitivity and respect for differences, one overtly understands how blurred such assessment is. How can one possibly document ‘cultural sensitivity’? Even in the phrasing that can be seen in the Massachusetts new “Educator Evaluation Standards and Indicators of Effective Teaching Practice,” “[c]onsistently uses strategies and practices that are likely to enable students to demonstrate respect for and affirm their own and others’ differences related to background, identity, language, strengths, and challenges”, how can a teacher materialize such complex liquid dynamics to produce an ‘honest’ assessment? Can such dynamics be reduced to a binder of pieces of pedagogical evidence? What does this prove? Giroux (2001) adds to these questions, because what is problematic is that “such views not only argue that history is made behind the backs of human beings, but also imply that within such a context of domination human agency virtually disappears” (p. 4). Such reproductive correspondence theoretical platform collapses into a pale functionalism. Giroux (2001) engages in a conscious self-critique of the vulnerabilities of some radical theoretical tools. In his (2001) examination of Reproduction, Resistance and Accommodation in the Schooling Process, Giroux (2001) and others (see Young and Whitty, 1977) argue that theories of reproduction have exhibited a “one-sided determinism [a] simplistic view of the social and cultural reproduction, and their often a-historical mode of theorizing” (p. 77). He also adds that radical intellectuals, failed “to abstract and develop partially articulated and potentially valuable elements within existing theories of reproduction” (Giroux, 2001, p. 77). According to Giroux, the correspondence and reproduction exhausted narratives, portraying a dangerous deterministic cult that shows an overtly determined model of causality, its passive view of human beings, its political pessimism, and its failure to highlight the contradictions and tensions that characterize the workplace and school [as well as] they do little to provide a qualitatively different level of analysis regarding the relationship between schools, the workplace and the dialectical role these two institutions have to other agencies of social and cultural reproduction. (1981a, pp. 93–94)

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The inadequacy of certain critical tools is crystal clear in Giroux’s (1981a, 2001) reasoning. However, theories of resistance (a) “have not adequately conceptualized the genesis of the conditions that promote and reinforce contradictory modes of resistance and struggle” (Giroux, 2001, p. 102); (b) showed an supreme inadequacy “to take into account the issues of gender and race” (Giroux, 2001, p. 104); (c) minimized the importance of situating “the notion of resistance within specifically political movements, movements that display resistance in the arts and/or in concrete political action” (Giroux, 2001, p. 105); (d) “under-theorized the point that schools not only repress subjectivities but are also actively involved in their production” (Giroux, 2001, p. 105); and (e) “have not given enough attention to the issue of how domination reaches into the structure of the personality itself” (Giroux, 2001, p. 106). In addition to these theories of resistance, Giroux (2001) persists in valuing a “pedagogy informed by a political project that speaks not only to the interests of the individual freedom and social reconstruction, but also has immediate relevance for educators as a mode of viable praxis” (p. 77). In a sentence, critical theory really needs a more comprehensive theory of cultural hegemony. In this context he argues that we need a new direction for radical educational praxis is implicit in the work of a growing number of educational theorists who have helped to strip the correspondence principle of its reactionary trappings while preserving its radical core. Both theoretically and empirically they have attempted to show how the organization, distribution, and evaluation of selected aspects of the culture function as reproductive mechanisms within schools. Moreover, by examining knowledge stratification and its relationship to social stratification they have begun to illuminate the often-subtle political connections between economic power and ideological control (Giroux, 1981a, p. 71). Needless to say, for Giroux (1981b, 2001), this is an ideological battle. However, Giroux (2001) points out the dangers of an ideological frame reduced to an analytical tool (p. 142). That is, although “schools are cultural apparatuses involved in the production and transmission of knowledge” (Giroux, 2001, p. 142), one cannot mince the “distinction between ideological struggle and material struggle” (Giroux, 2001, p. 72). In other words, one cannot confuse the “struggle at the ideological level of meanings, discourse, and representation, with struggles over the concrete appropriation and control of capital, territory, and other such sources” (Giroux, 2001, p. 142). As he argues, it is one thing to talk about the school as a site where confl icting ideologies are fought over, and another issue altogether to view schools as political and economic institutions, as material embodiments of lived experience and historically sedimented antagonistic relations that need to be seized and controlled by subordinate groups for their own ends. (Giroux, 2001, p. 142)

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Freire, in one of his masterpieces, Pedagogy of the Oppressed, raised concerns regarding a dangerous, puzzling sectarianism at the very core of the critical pedagogical approaches. Freire (1985, 1990) saw that as a clear, straightforward incapability of some critical scholars to understand the importance of both the elements of good sense and bad sense in the conservative platform, which, in his view, was an obstacle to the project of emancipation. Clearly, the answer for inequality and social injustice could not be achieved just by looking to the bellybutton of critical pedagogy and ostracizing other epistemological platforms. The real issue is to avoid that critical theory—in their struggle against the functionalist reductionism that fell—slips into an obsolete position. To avoid this, functionalist counterfunctionalism must be relentlessly fought without compromising the commitment to deconstruct the eugenic theory of cultural hegemony. Such battle is indeed an ideological battle, with two clear objectives. On one hand, it is against functionalists in which the counterhegemonic doctrines fell, which paradoxically bestowed the combat against the hegemonic theories of functionalism; on the other hand, it is against the dominant theories of functionalism itself. Somehow, we witnessed a commendable mea culpa and, in a way, a clearly neo-Gramscian attempt to begin from the beginning, not because critical theory failed great, as Žižek (2009) explains so well, but because it is urgent to address new questions of old social problems with new tools. As, indeed, will be seen throughout this book, to begin from the beginning implies totalitarianism still to confront the Cartesian model of modernity. This is, indeed, the great challenge. I will return to this question, in the next chapter. The task is to examine ideology ideologically by struggling “not only with the question of what is it but also with the question of what it is not” (Giroux, 2001, p. 142). Apple (1990) was also sentient of the importance of understanding ideology ideologically. He defines ideology both as a form of false consciousness which distorts one´s picture of social reality and serves the interests of a the dominant classes in society; quite scientific rationalizations or justifications of the activities of particular and identifiable groups; broader political programs and social movements; and comprehensive world views, outlooks, or what Berger and Luckmann have called symbolic universes. (Apple, 1990, p. 20) I previously examined elsewhere (Paraskeva, 2004) that, by defining both ideology by what it is and by what it does, Apple (1990) stresses the fact that we should indeed embrace an analysis that deals with the problem of ideology according to three specific characteristics, namely, “(1) legitimation (the justification of group action and its social acceptance), (2) power conflict (ideology is linked to conflicts between people seeking or holding power) and (3) style of argumentation (a special rhetoric, and a heightened affect,

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mark the argumentation that takes place in the realm of ideology)” (p. 21). As Apple (1990) mentions, categories, such as legitimation, power conflict, and style of argumentation can teach us a great deal, not only over dominant liberal educational traditions but also over education itself as a hegemonic form, because there is a close connection between how language and science are presented and the ‘abstract’ individual action. In fact, according to Apple (1990), ideology does not exist in a social vacuum, something that can be displayed like produce on the shelves of a supermarket, which people can select according to convenience. Conversely, he highlights the need to apprehend its scope and its function; that is, one has to be aware that ideology territorializes a set of meanings, deeply supported by its rhetorical artillery aiming at resources and issues of power. In addition, for Apple (1990), the most accurate way to think of ideology is to pay a close attention to the very concept of hegemony. Conceptualizing this approach to the curriculum field, Apple (1990), based on Wexler, argues that a truthful analysis of the notion of hegemony not only allows us to “weave curricular, socio-political, economic, and ethical analyses together in such a way as to show the subtle connections which exist between educational activity and [specific] interests [but also unfolds] how people can employ frameworks which both assist them in organizing their world and enable them to believe they are neutral participants in the neutral instrumentation of schooling” (p. 22). In a way, as inequality and poverty multiply astronomically, such connections became less subtle, especially for students and teachers. For instance, Massachusetts has begun the new teacher evaluation system in which students see the principal parading around with an iPad and all state-of-the-art technology devices to monitor and evaluate teachers, yet they have to read from books that have no covers and that are missing pages (imagine studying from a book that is missing 20 pages)—consequently, such connections are not that subtle. Or, imagine, during the administration of a high-stakes test required for graduation in Massachusetts, teachers could not even give kids complete dictionaries, so if a kid needed to look up particular words, the teacher needed to find the dictionary that had them because the dictionaries themselves were missing words. These crude wounds become uglier with the current cult of the Common Core, which presents a fallacy of a universal and equal curriculum based on neutrality. As Darder, Baltodano, and Torres (2002) stress in the introduction of their Critical Pedagogical Reader, “Giroux’s work is credited with repositioning the education debates of the ‘New Left’ beyond the boundaries of reproduction theories and the hidden curriculum” (p. 24). In a way, Apple’s and Giroux’s positions demonstrate a credibility check of the accuracy of some of the criticism thrown at critical theory. However, it seems that Giroux was more willing than Apple to engage fully with a vast and complex postmodern and post-structural literature. Despite this difference, both Apple and Giroux allow one to trace a series of discontinuities in their

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intellectual journey; that is, their voyage did not remain fixed in the reproductive approach toward the educational process. Instead, the reproductive approach served as a launching point that allowed them to go beyond reproduction. Arguably, they are more neo-Gramscian than neo-Marxist and their work on ideology, hegemony, and language revealed and created new currents within the critical river. Simply put, critical theory faces severe challenges from deep within its ranks. There is no doubt that the reinvigoration of critical theory depends on its ability to go beyond its own silences, although this is not an easy task. Contemporary works by Andreotti (2013), Au (2012), Baker (2009), Cho (2013), Gore (1993), Lopes (2007), Macedo and Frangella (2007), Paraskeva (2006a, 2006b, 2007a, 2007b), Pedroni (2002), Quantz (2011), Watkins (1993), and others reinforce the pain with. These works posit the need to overcome some of the loose ends of the critical theoretical platform by advancing an inclusive approach that incorporates critical and poststructural dynamics. Pedroni (2002), in a deeper and more detailed analysis, unveiled not only the need to address some puzzling blockages within critical theory but also the possibilities for a collaborative framework, meanwhile noting the importance of paying attention to positive elements of both epistemological spaces. He argued that not only was “neo-Marxism in a need of a post-structural reworking [but also that] post-structural educational research would also benefit from a neo-Marxist reworking” (p. 26). The task was not simplistic in any sense of the word. Relying on Fraser and Fiske, Pedroni (2002) argued that the task at hand was neither a function of juxtaposing the critical with the poststructural nor an effort to “Gramscianize Foucault while Foucaultianizing Gramsci,” but, rather, to precisely and “simultaneously Gramscianize and Foucaultianize our own analyses” (p. 7). The task, Baker (2007) accurately claims, is to master a new wave of research, thus making visible the eloquent silences that were petrified (and sometimes ossified) by secular occlusions. In The Struggle for Pedagogies, Gore (1993) denies any attempt to formulate “a prescriptive guidance.” According to Gore, the best way to deal with the ongoing debates within radical pedagogies (specifically between critical and feminists theories) is to avoid any attempt to map out the entire field of radical pedagogy, as “such aims would be impractical” (p. xiii). Instead, one should “capture the dangers and gaps in the ongoing struggles for radical pedagogies” (p. xiii). An attempt to do just this appears in some interesting and powerful curriculum research platforms emerging in Brazil (Alves, Sgarbi, Passos, & Caputo, 2007; Amorim, 2007; Bellini & Anastácio, 2007; Eyng & Chiquito, 2007; Ferraço, 2007; Garcia & Cinelli, 2007; Lopes, 2007; Macedo & Frangella, 2007; Pessanha & Silva, 2007; Rosa, 2007; Veiga Neto et al., 2007; Vieira et. al., 2007). These scholars argue that the issue clearly is not about claiming a particular fixed critical or poststructural posture or assuming a kind of mixed position but about a move from the critical to the postcritical or the poststructural perspectives. The

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new curriculum research platform or radical pedagogy detours from those platforms without denying them, sliding constantly within those approaches while in the midst of a friendly crossfire. In a way, it goes beyond a composite approach. It is instable in that very position, and it assumes a idiosyncrasy that is sentient of the intricate dynamics of issues, such as hegemony, articulation, emancipation, identity, image, sounds, spaceless, timeless, and the (multiplicity of the) biosocial (multitude) self. In fact, the point is to be aware of assuming any position that is more complex than a hybrid position, one that cannot be atrophied by any claim of hybridity. It is not a hybrid position. Bhabha (1995) helps a great deal here: Hybridity is the sign of the productivity of colonial power, its shifting forces and fi xities; it is the name for the strategic reversal of the process of domination through disavowal (that is, the production of discriminatory identities that secure the “pure” and original identity and authority). Hybridity is the revaluation of the assumption of colonial identity through the recitation of discriminatory identity effects. It displays the necessary deformation and displacement of all sites of discrimination and domination. It unsettles the mimetic or narcissistic demands of colonial power but reimplicates its identifications in strategies of subversion that turn the gaze of the discriminated back upon the eye of power. (pp. 38–39) The point is to assume a posture that slides constantly among several epistemological frameworks, thus giving one better tools to interpret schools as social formations. Such a theoretical itinerant posture might be called a “deterritorialized,” rather than a composite device, as I lay out in Conflicts in Curriculum Theory (Paraskeva, 2011a), where I argued for the need for an Itinerant Curriculum Theory(ist) (ICT), a framework I examine as well. Conceptualizing the field in this way can profoundly help one to more fully grasp concepts, such as hegemony, ideology, social emancipation, and power. When facing the nightmare of the present, as Pinar (2004) puts it, assuming this posture is quite valuable and necessary. Taking this posture is a powerful way not only to challenge the hegemonic way of thinking that gave to the English word a privileged position in scientific writing (Alves et al., 2007), but also—and this is crucial—to challenge and overcome what Gore (1993) accurately denounces as U.S.-centric discourses or, as Autio (2007) put it “curriculum superdiscourses.” This is the case of policies such as the International Leaders in Education Program (ILEP)—a program of the Bureau of Educational and Cultural Affairs of the U.S. Department of State. ILEP is in affi liation with the Civil Society and Media Development (IREX) that has its own interesting list of sponsors, including the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. Popkewitz (2001) did not minimize the strategies used in the production of reason and social progress, stating that “modern empirical methods in

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the social and educational sciences are largely predicated on the eye as giving truth” (p. 245). He maintained that qualitative studies, also, make the discipline of the eye a central repository of truth. Methodological discussions in education, for example, often discuss ethnographies as “naturalistic” studies. Such discussions pose the observation of “natural” events as directly visible through the eye and therefore more truthful than the vicarious methods of surveys. (p. 245) Gore (1993) argues further that “[s]ince the U.S. is the location of much of the critical and feminist pedagogical discourses, one needs to question if that reflects an ethnocentrism or U.S.-centrism that ignores important pedagogical work going on elsewhere” (p. 45). Recently, Au’s (2012) critical reasoning reinforces the ideological card within what he calls “critical re-turn of curriculum studies” (p. 98). Sentient of the shortcuts of traditional counterhegemonic forms, Au (2012, p. 9) challenges Wraga and Hlebowitsh’s (2003) call for a practice without ideological blinders. While expressing serious reservations about the mud surrounding critical and poststructural theories, Au (2012) argues that the revitalization of the field cannot turn its back on the practices that “exist in the context of the complex social, political and cultural relations of the material world,” in sum, within the dynamics of ideological production (p. 9). Another great contribution addressing the shortcomings of the critical terrain was made by a leading contemporary curriculum scholar that challenged the field’s raceless embarrassment, William Watkins. Watkins (1993) not only championed race as the substantive card to understand a capitalist curriculum (quite crucial in the social metamorphosis of the fi nancialization and culturalization of capital), but he also discloses the non-monolithic idiosyncrasies of black curriculum. Such non-monolithisms well espoused in his six orientations regarding black curriculum: functionalism (“fundamentally basic, oral with a substantive emphasis on the folklore” [p. 324]); accommodationism (“a more politically [coded] curriculum [for] a racially segregated industrial nation” [p. 324]); liberalism (“designed to develop the students’ analytical and critical faculties, and to help students become worldly, tolerant, and capable of significant societal participation” [p. 328]); reconstructionism (paced by the commitment with “a collectivist, egalitarian and reformed society” [p. 333]); Afrocentrism (challenging Eurocentric totalitarian epistemes) and black nationalism/separatism (a radical position that challenges the shortcomings of the liberal orientation by advocating the need to return to the source, the motherland, and a cultural revolution that will lead to change). Admitting curriculum as ‘currere’, Taliaferro Baszile (2010) without any euphemisms, argued for autobiography as a counterhistory, or history proper, claiming for a critical race currere, thus echoing,

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McCarthy (1998a), Ladson, Billings, and Tate (2005), among others, challenges against the condition of race within the field. The history of education and its curriculum theory and development since its emergence in the West, in general, and in the United states, in particular, is also the history of the capitalist system, that is, a eugenic history at the very core of capitalism and crucial for the consolidation and development of what Arrighi (2005) calls the three hegemonic periods of the capitalism, the last one being marked by the current neoliberal deluge. Thus, the dynamics of race and ethnicity cannot be marginalized, when applied to the curriculum phenomenon, either as a field of study or as a practice that fills the classroom. Influenced by McLaren’s classic Schooling as a Ritual Performance (1986), Quantz (2011) develops what he calls ritual critique, thus “moving away from the social sciences assumptions embedded in ethnography”; in so doing, he shows his debt to both the humanities and the social sciences “by recognizing that detailing and exploring ritual is as much about the reading of texts as it is about uncovering the patterns of lived culture” (p. 16). Such ritual critique, he stresses, has the potential to “find and illuminate the way in which material power is institutionalized into non-rational practices of our schools and lead us to replace them with new practices designed to celebrate democracy and justice” (p. 19). Thus, ritual critique is an ensemble of a political position that “can uncover the covert processes that construct and distort commonsense” (p. 19). Quantz (2011) brings to the fore a complex mix of rituals—transition rituals, identity rituals, rituals of solidarity, rituals of deference, rituals of respect—to reveal how those often ignored interfere with the dynamics of ideological production in schools. According to Quantz (2011), the biggest obstacle to recognizing the importance of ritual results from a larger problem: The assumption that the most important part of schooling is located in the rational intentions inscribed in the curriculum and pedagogy. Never has rationality been stressed more than under the No Child Left Behind policies that emphasize explicit outcomes, precise numbers, and research based instruction. The assumption that humans act rationally is one of the earliest and most fundamental flaws of much of educational policy. (p. 5) While currently the emphasis has been put in Race to the Top (RTTT) Policies, it would be easy to admit that RTTT is just No Child Left Behind on steroids. Before I move to examining Quantz’s reasoning, it would be wise to contextualize the new evaluation of teachers within the cultural politics of rituals. Teachers need proof with pieces of paper and photos that ‘certain things really happen’. Thus, ridiculous as it might be, teachers, for example, take a picture of the kids saying the Pledge of Allegiance so that it can be used as evidence of certain requirements in the Teacher Performance Assessment

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for new teachers. Reflecting on this in light of the question of (ir)rationality so eloquently raised by Quantz obviously brings forward a myriad of questions, namely how do we define rational, and who does(n’t)? For instance, is it rational to expect a child who has only been learning English for two years to perform at the same level on a standardized test as a child who has been speaking English for 16 years? Or, for a child who goes hungry and does not know whether his father is going to beat him when he gets home to have an equivalent performance as a child who has a safe and warm home to return to every evening? These are the realities that have been rationalized and normalized in today’s schools. The irrational is disguised in a cloak of rationality. What the dominant hegemonic pedagogic tradition wants is a lean, mean and packageable pedagogic environment, not something that pays serious attention to what is naturally messy, spontaneous, unpredictable, and nontechnical. As a way to challenge dominant traditions and to look for “an alternative approach to the problems of critical theory that provided the benefits of post-structuralism without its pitfalls” (p. ix), Quantz and O’Connor (2011) rely heavily on the conceptual legacy of Mikhail Bakhtin (1973), and the so-called Bakhtin Circle, to avoid the ways that dominant and specific counterdominant traditions misrepresent how crucial rituals are to understanding the dynamics of ideological production portrayed in schools and the curriculum (Apple, 1979; Giroux, 1981a, 1992) and to understanding multifaceted dimensions of cultural life in social institutions, such as schools. Quantz and O’Connor (2011) argue that Bakhtin’s concepts of heteroglossia, dialogue, multivoicedness, and carnival are crucial in weaving such a theoretical quilt. Following the rationale of Miami University cultural studies intellectuals, Bakhtin’s notion of heteroglossia recognizes and implies that culture, society, and individuals are constituted by a multiplicity of voices. In other words, the concept of heteroglossia entails not only “multiple dimensions of cultural life [but also concomitantly] legitimates difference of opinion and restores the individual’s voice in the creation of their cultural patterns” (p. 46). It is in this context that one needs to understand the Bakhtin wrangle of language—utterance, a theoretical tussle that recognizes language as “a social process instead of as an individual object” (p. 49). Quantz and O’Connor (2011) argue further that “since meaning can only be constructed in the concrete utterance, language only makes sense as a social concept” (p. 49). They claim that such human utterance not only “is formed within historical constraints” but also exhibits concurrently “a dialogic consciousness that is socially as well as ideologically located within specific material and symbolic realms” (p. 49). While the concept of dialogue helps one to understand the clashes between and within “legitimate and non-legitimate voices” (p. 50), Quantz and O’Connor (2011) stress that the concept of multivoicedness helps one to grasp accurately the “complexity and contradictions that mark the lives of minority group members [and] prohibits a unified individual or a consensual society” (p. 51). In fact, as

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Bakhtin (1973) states, the human being always has “something that only [he or she] can reveal in a free act of consciousness and discourse” (p. 58). Bakhtin’s particular “something” cannot be (un)covered by an “externalized second hand definition” (p. 58). It is in this context that Quantz and O’Connor (2011) highlight Bakhtin’s (1973) use of carnival to understand the less visible dynamics underpinning the oppressed. As they argue, the study of the medieval carnival can provide an example of one site where the non-legitimated voice can find communal expression and establish the potential for legitimation and eventual collective action and suggest carnivalesque possibilities for our contemporary times. Carnival is a public occasion marked by festivity, laughter, licentiousness, excess, and grotesqueness. (pp. 52–53) In fact, Quantz and O’Connor (2011) note that “carnival acts to release social tensions and to permit the formation of nascent counter hegemony [that] contains the conditions necessary for the creation of class consciousness, that is, the social legitimation of silenced voices” (p. 53). In this regard, both Quantz and O’Connor (2011) see carnival as a transformative and revolutionary practice, a victory of laughter over fear, an open defeat of power through “grotesque humor, its emphasis on feasting, defecating, disembowelment, coitus, and other body related actions” (p. 53). It is a democratic, spontaneous, creative, unrepeated set of actions. This multitude of concepts and practices are profoundly important, Quantz and O’Connor (2011) argue, in a Bakhtian way for what they call a “polyphonic ethnographer” (p. 62), or one who understands dialogue as ideological and “listen[s] carefully for evidence of the multivoicedness that characterizes their informants’ consciousness” (p. 63). They (2011) argue further that polyphonic ethnography is crucial when listening to the disempowered, [because one] must listen closely to the multiple voices with which they speak. This is especially true for those ethnographers interested in discovering how the dominant cultures have penetrated the consciousness of the disempowered and given them a voice that leads them to participate in their own oppression. (p. 63) In terms of carnival, Quantz and O’Connor (2011) claim, the polyphonic ethnographer needs to understand how individuals maintain ambivalence “in their ideological communities” and how, by being aware of the contradictions between inward and outward speeches, the polyphonic researcher will “reveal that the high status of the class clown, the ribaldry found in making a fool of a teacher, the decidedly festive atmosphere of school cafeterias serve as carnivalesque moments” (p. 65). The ethnographer, they say,

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needs to reveal where the unofficial consciousness of the carnival in educational leadership and policy and where the medieval carnival in the field of educational and curriculum studies is located. In her systemic analysis on critical pedagogy, Cho (2013) unveils some concerns related with critical education as well. Cho (2013) reveals the following: first, we “need to clarify just what critical pedagogy is, particularly because there is a de-politicize version/view of it” (p. 156); second, ideas, such as social change, social transformation, emancipation, liberation, democracy, equality, diversity and social justice, “have been so contaminated by the right and commercialized by market economy that it is hard to take them a face value” (p. 157); third, “the core issues of education are understood and defined as moral/ethical problems. Critical pedagogy has become, essentially, a moralizing project, or, more specifically, about moralizing individuals” (p. 157); fourth, the real problem of critical pedagogy is not “too much culture and postmodernism but rather their misunderstanding and misuse” (p. 158); fi fth, the focus on the microlevel “loses track of the prize [and] the prize is social change” (p. 159); sixth, critical pedagogy “tends to be underpinned by localist/particularist politics” (p. 159); fi nally, the “tendency of idealism is quite problematic[; that is,] when critical pedagogy concentrates on ideals without presenting concrete pragmatic projects, it can become idealistic, even speculative” (p. 159). As I show in Chapter 7 critical thinking and pedagogies from a Marxist/ neo Marxist perspectives, despite a notorious challenge against the hegemonic dominant traditions, are in the face of a major yet inevitable challenge: the need to decolonize. TO BEGIN FROM THE BEGINNING: THE DECOLONIAL TURN As I have mentioned just previously the claim to “begin anew” (Darder, 2011, p. 188) is not because critical theory and pedagogy failed great (see Žižek, 2009)—although in many areas did it—but because it is urgent to address new questions of old social problems with new tools. In a very Freirean way, Darder (2011) challenges radical intellectuals to consciously assume the need to begin anew a prerequisite to be in a perpetual transformative and revolutionary subject position, one that allows a permanent capacity of the unending reinvention of the self. The task, I claim, is not to begin from the beginning, but to begin from a new beginning, a different one. Andreotti’s Actionable Postcolonial Theory in Education, which won the AERA (American Education Research Association) Division B book award in 2012, challenges such crises by bringing to the fore the need to dig within and beyond two postcolonial theoretical strands—one overtly Marxist and

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the other with poststructural impulses. Drawing from Young (2001) and Spikav (1990), Andreotti’s (2011) postcolonial framework makes a distinction between these two strands: [O]ne leaning toward Marxist historicism (and metanarratives of progress and emancipation) focusing primarily on changing material circumstances of exploitation structured by assumptions of cultural supremacy and on the struggles of liberation of subjugated people; and [the other] a discursive orientation, leaning toward post-structuralism, focusing on contestation and complicity in the relations between colonizers and colonized, and on the possibility of imagining relationships beyond coercion, subjugation and epistemic violence. (p. 17) Needless to say, Andreotti is not claiming a dichotomist reading of the postcolonial. As she argues, the postcolonial strand “more explicitly informed by post-structuralism [sits] in an ambivalent conflicted space between Marxism, postmodernism and identity struggle” (p. 18). However, despite the Western matrix of poststructuralist, postmodernist, and Marxist theories, Andreotti laudably reemphasizes the “indispensable and inadequate” character of Marxism and poststructuralism, as Chakrabarty (2000) so insightfully stated previously. It is undeniable that such strands coexist, but they also determine inner tensions and contradictions intrinsic to the Western ethnocentric hegemonic bloc (Paraskeva, 2011a, 2011b). As I claimed in Conflicts in Curriculum Theory (2011a) and as I have examined in this volume in greater length, the critical progressive curriculum river needs to be responsive, yet it needs to go beyond such clashes, vacuums, screaming silences, and cacophonous debates within and among the critical and poststructural platforms. The task is to fight for cognitive diversity and justice. Curriculum knowledge undeniably was (and still is) a major concern not only for the political projects of Apple and Giroux but also of Bernstein (1977); Bourdieu (1971); Carnoy (1972); Dale, Esland, and MacDonald (1982); Whitty (1985); Young (1971); and Young and Whitty (1977). However, it is also undeniable that little attention was paid to what Wexler (1976) coined as “cognitive pluralism” (p. 50), which is the notion that “the epistemological diversity of the world is [undeniably] potentially infinite” (Sousa Santos, 2005, p. xix). Consequently, we are facing a huge task. As Pinar (2004) argues, “What we teach is at least as important, if not more important, than how we teach” (p. 175). The point is to move beyond questions, such as “what/whose knowledge is of most worth,” despite not having figured out a correct answer, and to fight for (an)other knowledge outside the Western epistemological harbor. Therefore, we need to engage in the struggle against curriculum epistemicides. One needs first to assume consciously that (an)other knowledge is possible and then to extend past the Western epistemological platform, paying attention to other forms of knowledge and respecting indigenous

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knowledge within and beyond the Western space. Needless to say, this fight is only possible precisely because of the advancements, developments, gains, and frustrations experienced by the particular critical approaches edified by Apple, Giroux, and many others both within and outside the critical progressive curriculum river, while within the complex progressive tradition. In fact, the struggle for (an)other knowledge needs to be contextualized in the struggle for curriculum relevance. This is the next big struggle, which, in reality, is a struggle for social and cognitive justice. It is judiciously crucial to emphasize here that curriculum relevance became one of those areas in social sciences with no latitude border and with short longitude dynamic. The struggle for curriculum relevance that is a struggle for social and cognitive justice is not a battle for “college career readiness” as currently espoused by Common Core and reform movements. Human society cannot be so bluntly animalistic to keep feeding such (ir)rationality. It is a commitment to deconstruct the current segregated society and reconstruct a new societal framework based on the common good with all. It is critically transformative. Like Gore (1993), we do not want “to claim or imply a monopoly on pedagogical discourse for the disciplinary field of education. There has been some ‘crossfertilization of ideas on pedagogy among disciplines, especially among Women Studies, Literary Studies and Education” (pp. xiii–xiv). In fact, the days of an epistemological monopoly on education should be over. As will be seen, without laying out any prescription, the future of critical pedagogy relies on this assumption. Any successful strategy needs to be seen as a possible solution to the deaf dialogues, which are fueled by egos that have been permeating the field and forcing it into what might be called its second moribund stage. Pinar’s (2012) latest volume insightfully alerts us to what one would call the wrecked instable spiral of theoretical metamorphoses, involving the primary sectors of scholarship in the U.S. field, namely power, identity and discourse (p. 7). That is, Pinar (2012) adds, “power, identity and discourse are no longer conceptual innovations or provocations precisely due to their taken-for-grantedness” (p. 7). Pinar (2012) acknowledges a process of conceptual exhaustion and “new concepts arise in response to immediate sometimes novel but often recurrent problems, enduring but perhaps now mesmerizing mysteries, and unexpected possibly counter-intuitive facts” (p. 7). I acknowledge the blurred boundaries among these three as well as other sources and provocations of concepts”. Hence, to decolonize is a must, Darder (2011) claims, as “social sciences researchers must acknowledge the colonizing impact of traditional social science research language and methodology which have often perpetuate[d] elitist, authoritarian, fragmented, and hence disempowering notions of poverty” (p. 273). So far, I have exposed some of the main arguments designed by a group of intellectuals engaged in what I have called critical progressive curriculum river (Paraskeva, 2011a, 2011b). I have noted how this group of

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intellectuals working in the critical river introduced in the field important concepts, such as hegemony, ideology, common sense, reproduction, resistance, hidden curriculum, and conflict versus consensus, as a way to challenge the reductive deterministic and functionalist nature of the dominant curriculum tradition. I have argued, however, that the tensions within this river are due to the reductionism of its theoretical arguments incapable of a critical, comprehensive analysis of the complex educational and social phenomenon. I have discussed that in the struggle against the reductive functionalism of the dominant power, the so-called critical progressive curriculum river became flooded with an atrocious functionalism, becoming a kind of functionalist counterfunctionalist and failing to solve explicit theoretical reductionisms and determinisms. However, we also highlight how certain intellectuals within such critical river explicitly consciously assumed the ineffectiveness of the traditional critical model and sought new approaches to strengthen the political analysis of field—although just within the Eurocentric platform. Despite being functionalist counterfunctionalist, one cannot deny the massive crucial contribution made by such a critical curriculum river of intellectuals in the struggle for curriculum relevance towards a more just and democratic society. But it is irrefutable that the struggle for curriculum relevance and social justice needs to be taken to a different level; that is, it needs to be a struggle for social and cognitive justice thus inclusive of nonWestern epistemes—a decolonial struggle. We claim that the struggle for curriculum meaning and relevance—one of the core arguments of this critical progressive curriculum river—end up being an Eurocentric anti-Eurocentric critique, not only failing to pay attention to colossal epistemic thesaurus beyond the Western-European, Christian, white, blue-eyed, heterosexual, male cultural terrain but also producing other epistemologies as nonexistent (see Sousa Santos, 2014). This crude reality was bluntly unlocked and disclosed by some key intellectuals within the very banks of the critical progressive river. Again, Ellsworth (1989) is crucial here: When participants in our class attempted to put into practice prescriptions offered in the literature concerning ‘empowerment’, ‘student voice’, and ‘dialogue’, we produced results that were not only unhelpful, but actually exacerbated the very conditions we are trying to work against, including Eurocentrism, racism, sexism, classism, and ‘banking education’. (p. 298) Moreover, although critical theory and theorists do analyze the lack of students’ voices in practices and structures, they need to value (or use) students’ voices in their research as well and not just speak for the students through their ‘observations’. Ellsworth (1989) argues that certain Western epistemological spheres, such as literary criticism, cultural studies, poststructuralism, feminist studies, and media studies, engaged in a struggle for an ideal

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rational person, which “have been oppressive to those who are not European, White, male, middle class, Christian, able-bodied, thin, and heterosexual” (p. 304). Such an endemic Eurocentric condition not only ends up glorifying a blunt lie—the idea of a Western monolithic episteme, which came out of the blue, somewhere stratospherically, and capable of describing the past and predicting the future by imposing a eugenic present. However, it also engages in a hideous epistemicide by slaughtering other forms of knowledge that are shockingly and unknowingly the pillars of Western epistemological path. The present–future path of curriculum theory cannot avoid a decolonial move, a process that is overtly anticipated and defended by scholars, such as Darder (2012a, 2012b). In a frontal attack to celebratory multiculturalism, Darder (2012a, 2012b) explicitly claims for a “decolonizing theory of biculturalism and cultural democracy” to blast the impact of nefarious colonizing processes by “placing the voices of disenfranchised students of color and their communities at the center of the discourse” (p. 2). In a recent coauthored piece with Yiamouyiannis, Darder argues that the current economic disaster and its lethal consequences to millions of human beings makes ‘decolonizing’ the password in the struggle for social and cognitive justice (Darder & Yiamouyiannis, 2011). In what follows, I examine the precocity of African and Arab epistemological strength, their overwhelming influence and impact in Western epistemological cartography, as well as how the West fabricated a particular vision of history, not only glorifying the West as a superior culture but also as the only one. It goes without saying that schools and curriculum are not innocent devices in such epistemicides. Ellsworth (1989) adds to this, quoting Walkerdine: “Schools have participated in producing ‘selfregulating’ individuals by developing in students[’] capacities for engaging in rational argument. Rational argument has operated in ways that set up as its opposite an irrational Other, which has been understood historically as to province of women and other exotic Others” (p. 301). In an era plagued by internationalization and globalizations fundamentalisms, Baker (2009) shrewdly challenges us to go beyond framed narratives that have been driven by “curriculum history and research as a commonsensical national affair” and along with Munslow (1997) warns us that the very questionability of history or History cannot be compromised (p. 29). Baker (2009, p. xiii) brings to the fore Coronil’s concept of bifocality that allows one to question “whether that love or significance attributed to History or history is a lie ‘moderns’ have been implicitly sold, so that some forms of subjectivity and belonging could be forged and others blocked or forgone”. In the next chapter, I examine how the Western epistemological legacy is profoundly connected in what some scholars call the coloniality of powers and beings, which is essential to understand what we call curriculum epistemicides. Welcome to the decolonial momentum.

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NOTES 1. I made a distinction between “curriculists” and “curricologus”. See João Paraskeva (2005) Dwayne Huebner: Mythography of Curriculum Approach— Acknowledgements and Challenges. Porto: Didáctica. 2. I am not claiming here that Pinar’s earlier material is not important and valuable but precisely the opposite. 3. As I examined elsewhere (2004), these three volumes structured the first part of Apple’s trilogy, a concept quite crucial to understand Apple’s cartography. 4. Although TUSD has three other ethnic studies courses besides MAS, which are in violation of at least Section 3 of the statute, they are not accused of being in violation, nor have they been told that they need to be terminated. Superintendent Horne received complaints only for MAS, “therefore this finding is as to that program alone” (p. 2). The evidence besides the testimony of Huppenthal and Horne seem to be lacking to support this. Even the language of Horne’s report is discriminatory or prejudice writing about a teacher in the ethnic studies program “TUSD teacher named John Ward, despite his name, is Hispanic” (Horne, 2010, p. 4). Mr. Horne’s language is associating that there are certain linguistic markers through names that enable us to label people as being “Hispanic,” which the term Hispanic itself denotes the colonial power/ oppression of the Americas. However, Horne does not seem to care because he also said, “They divide kids by race, they have La Raza studies for the Latino kids, African American studies for the African American kids, Indian studies for the Indian kids, Asian studies for the Asian kids, it’s just like the old south [sic] and they’ve got everybody divided up by race” (emphasis added, KVOA). He does not understand the histories of these ethnicities, which he claims to being helping to educate. Horne clarifies his statements saying, “I think it’s overdue, The Department of Education will now have the authority to put a stop to extremely dysfunctional practices in Tucson Unified School District” (KVOA).

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Hypolito, A. (2001) Class, Race and Gender in Education. Towards a Spiral NonParallelist Non-Synchronous Position. Paper presented at the Friday Seminar, University of Wisconsin, Madison. Jordan, M. (2010) Arizona Grades Teachers on Fluency. The Wall Street Journal, April 30. Kliebard, H. (1995) The Struggle for the American Curriculum: 1893–1958. New York: Routledge. KVOA. (2010, May 2). Bill Passed That Would Ban Ethnic Studies for TUSD. Accessed from: http://www.kvoa.com/ Ladson Billings, G. and Tate, W. (2005) Toward a Theory of Critical Race Theory in Education. Teachers College Record, 97, pp., 47–68. Liston, D. (1988) Capitalist Schools. Explanation and Ethics in Radical Studies of Schooling. New York: Routledge. Liston, D. and Zeichner, K. (1987) “Critical Pedagogy and Teacher Education,” Journal of Education, 169, pp., 117–37. Lopes, A. (2007) Currículo no debate modernidade, pós-modernidade. Associação Nacional de Pós-Graduação e Pesquisa em Educação. Grupo de Trabalho Curriculo. Trabalho Encomendado. Caxambu. Brasil. Macedo, E. and Frangella, R. (2007) Currículo e Cultura: deslizamentos e hibridizações. Associação Nacional de Pós-Graduação e Pesquisa em Educação. Grupo de Trabalho Curriculo. Trabalho Encomendado. Caxambu: Brasil. Mann, J. (1968) Toward a Discipline of Curriculum Theory. Baltimore: The John Hopkins University, The Center for the Study of Social Organization of Schools. (Mimeographed). McCarthy, C. (1988a) Slowly, Slowly, Slowly, the Dumb Speaks. Third World Popular Culture and the Sociology for the Third World. Journal of Curriculum Theorizing, 8 (2), pp., 7–21. McCarthy, C. (1988b) Rethinking Liberal and Racial Perspectives on Racial Inequality in Schooling: Making the Case for non-synchrony. Harvard Educational Review, 58 (3), pp., 265–79. McCarthy, C. (1998) The Uses of Culture. Education and the Limits of Ethnic Affiliation. New York: Routledge. McCarthy, C. and Apple, M. (1988). Race, Class, and Gender in American Education. Towards a Nonsynchronous Parallelist Position. In L. Weis (ed) Class, Race, and Gender in American Education. Albany: State University of New York Press, pp., 3–39. McLaren, P. (1986) Schooling as a Ritual Performance. New York: Routledge. McLure, H. & Fisher, G. (1969) Ideology and Opinion Making, General Problems of Analysis: Bureau of Applied Social Research, Columbia University (poligraphed). Munslow, A. (1997) Deconstructing History. New York: Routledge. Paraskeva, J. (2004) Here I Stand. A Long (R)evolution. Michael Apple and Critical Progressive Tradition. Minho. University of Braga. Paraskeva, J. (2005) Dwayne Huebner. Mitografias da Abordagem Curricular. Lisboa: Editora Platano. Paraskeva, J. (2006a) Desterritorializar a Teoria Curricular. Papeles de Trabajo sobre Cultura, Educación y Desarrollo Humano, 2 (1). Accessed from: http:// www.doaj.org/doaj Paraskeva, J. (2006b) Desterritorializar a Teoria Curricular. In J. Paraskeva (org) Currículo e Multiculturalismo. Lisboa: Edicoes Pedago, pp., 169–204. Paraskeva, J. (2007a) Ideologia, Cultura e Curriculo. Lisboa: Didatica Editora. Paraskeva, J. (2007b) Continuidades e Descontinuidades e Silêncios. Por uma Desterritorialização da Teoria Curricular. Associação Nacional de Pós-Graduação e Pesquisa em Educação, (ANPEd), Caxambu, Brasil.

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Paraskeva, J. (2011a) Conflicts in Curriculum Theory. Challenging Hegemonic Epistemologies. New York: Palgrave. Paraskeva, J. (2011b) Nova Teoria Curricular. Lisboa: Edicoes Pedago. Pedroni, T. (2002) Can Post Structuralism and Neo-Marxist Approaches be Joined? Building Compositive Approaches in Critical Educational Theory and Research. Unpublished Paper, pp., 2 and 6. Pessanha, E. e Silva, F. (2007) Observatório da Cultura Escolar: Ênfases e Tratamentos Metodológicos de Pesquisa sobre Currículo. Associação Nacional de PósGraduação e Pesquisa em Educação. Grupo de Trabalho Curriculo. Trabalho Encomendado. Caxambu: Brasil. Pinar, W. (1979) What Is Reconceptualization? Journal of Curriculum Theorizing, 1 (1), pp., 93–104. Pinar, W. (1980) Life History and Education Experience. JCT, 2 (2), pp., 159–212. Pinar, W. (1979) What Is the Reconceptualization? Journal of Curriculum Theorizing, 1 (1), pp., 93–104. Pinar, W. (1980) Life History and Educational Experience. Journal of Curriculum Theorizing, 2 (2), pp., 159–212. Pinar, W. (2004). What Is Curriculum Theory? Mahwah, NJ: Erlbaum. Pinar, W. (2012) Curriculum Studies in the United States. New York: Palgrave. Pinar, W. and Grummet, M. (1976) Toward a Poor Curriculum. Dubuque: Kendall/ Hunt. Pinar, W., Reynolds, W., Slattery, P. and Taubman, P. (1995) Understanding Curriculum. New York: Peter Lang. Popkewitz, Th. (2001) A Changing Terrain of Knowledge and Power: A Social Epistemology of Educational Research. In R. G. McInnis (ed) Discourse Synthesis. Studies in Historical and Contemporary Social Epistemology. WestPort: Praeger, pp., 241–66. Quantz, R. (2011) Rituals and Students Identity in Education: Ritual Critique for a New Pedagogy. New York: Palgrave. Quantz, R. and O’Connor, T. (2011) From Ethnography to Ritual Critique. The Eloution of a Method. In R. Quantz (ed) Rituals and Student Identity in Education. New York: Palgrave, pp., 45–71. Rosa, M. et el. (2007) Narrar Currículos: Inventando Tessituras Metodológicas. Associação Nacional de Pós-Graduação e Pesquisa em Educação. Grupo de Trabalho Curriculo. Trabalho Encomendado. Caxambu: Brasil. Sassoon, A. (1982) Approaches to Gramsci. London: Writers and Readers. Schubert, W. (1980) Curriculum Books; The First Eighty Years. Landham: University Press of America. Sousa Santos, B. (2005) Democratizing Democracy. Beyond the Liberal Democratic Cannon. London: Verso. Sousa Santos, B. (2014) Epistemologies of the South: Justice against Epistemicide. Boulder: Paradigm. Spikav, G. (1990) Question of Multiculturalism. In S. Harasayam (ed.) The PostColonial Critic: Interviews, Strategies, Dialogues. New York: Routledge, pp., 59–60. Taliaferro-Baszile, D. (2010) In Ellison Eyes, What Is Curriculum Theory? In E. Malewsky (ed) Curriculum Studies Handbook. New York: Routledge, pp., 483–95. Veiga Neto, A. et al. (2007) Grupo de Estudos e Pesquisas em Curriculo e PosModernidade. Universidade Luterana do Brasil (ULBRA) e à Universidade Federal do Rio Grande do Sul (UFRGS). Associação Nacional de Pós-Graduação e Pesquisa em Educação. Grupo de Trabalho Curriculo. Trabalho Encomendado. Caxambu: Brasil. Vieira, J., Hypolito, A., Klein, M. and Garcia, M. (2007) Percurso Teorico Metodologico das Pesquisas sobre Currículo. Associação Nacional de Pós-Graduação e Pesquisa

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em Educação. Grupo de Trabalho Curriculo. Trabalho Encomendado. Caxambu: Brasil. Watkins, W. (1993) Black Curriculum Orientations. Harvard Educational Review, 63 (3), pp. 321–38. Watkins, W. (2001) The White Architects of Black Education. New York: Teachers College Press. Watkins, W. (2010) Response to Ann G. Winfield. The Visceral and the Intellectual in Curriculum Past and Present. In E. Malewski (ed) Curriculum Studies Handbook. The Next Momentum. New York: Routledge, pp., 158–67. Wexler, Ph. (1976) The Sociology of Education: Beyond Inequality. Indianapolis: The Bobbs-Merrill. Wexler, Ph. (1987) Social Analysis of Culture. After the New Sociology. Boston: Routledge & Kegan and Paul. Whitty, G. (1985) Sociology and School Knowledge. London: Methuen. Willis, P. (1977) Learning to Labour. Farnborough: Saxon House. Wraga, W. and Hlebowitsh, P. (2003) Toward a Renaissance in Curriculum Theory and Development in the USA. Journal of Curriculum Studies, 35 (4), pp., 425–38. Wright, E. (1994) Interrogating Inequality. Essays on Class Analysis, Socialism, and Marxism. London: Verso. Young, M. F. (1971) (ed) Knowledge and Control. New Directions for the Sociology of Education. London: Collier-MacMillan. Young, M. F. and Whitty, G. (1977) Society, State and Schooling. London: The Falmer Press. Young, R. (2001) Postcolonialism. A Historic Introduction. Oxford: Blackwell. Žižek, S. (2009) How to Begin from the Beginning. New Left Review, 57, pp., 43–55.

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Epistemicides and the Yoke of Modernity Coloniality of Knowledges and of Beings

This chapter attempts to offer an examination about the coloniality of powers and beings and their importance for the curriculum field in the struggle for social and cognitive justice. I examine the clashing dynamics of modernity– colonial world system, and in so doing, I dissect how it is crucial to understand the geopolitics of knowledge and power within what Grosfoguel (2003) and Quijano (2000a) call colonial/racist imaginary in the world system. Through this, I examine how such colonialities help foster epistemic privilege and racism. I highlight the importance of concepts, such as colonial difference and transmodernity. I argue that (an)other knowledge is possible, and I emphasize the need to decolonize social sciences. Such decolonize process, as we maintain, cannot and will not come just from “the existent philosophies and cultures of scholarship” (Mignolo, 2008, p. 232). It needs to challenge Western secular epistemicides, destroying millenary geopolitics of power that secularly produced and reproduced a eugenic coloniality of power and being, which portrays “epistemology as something ahistorical” (Mignolo, 2008, p. 234). In a moment that our field is laudably vocalizing the need for internationalization and globalization, this is, like never before, a necessary challenge. THE EUGENIC COLONIALITY HERITAGE In Europe, Modernity and Eurocentrism, Enrique Dussel (2000) alerts us to what he calls “the change in meaning of the concept of Europe [a] semantic slippage [that] has been generally overlooked” (p. 465). He explains: First, the mythological Europa was the daughter of a Phoenician king and thus was Semitic . . . What became modern Europe lay beyond Greece’s horizon and therefore could not in any way coincide with the originary Greece . . . [There is a] unilineal diachrony Greece-RomeEurope [that] is an ideological construct that can be traced back to the late-eighteenth-century German Romanticism . . . [In fact,] the single line of development Greece-Rome-Europe is a conceptual by-product of the Eurocentric model. Second, the West consisted of the territories

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Epistemicides and the Yoke of Modernity of the Roman Empire that spoke Latin and this included the north of Africa. The West was opposed to the East, the Greek Empire, which spoke Greek; [at] that time, there was no relevant concept of what would later be considered Europe. Third, beginning in the seventeenth century, Constantinople (the eastern Roman Empire) confronted the steadily growing Arab Muslim world. Here, one should not forget that from that point on the classical Greek world—the one traditionally associated with Aristotle—was as much Arab Muslim as Byzantine Christian. Fourth, the Medieval Latin European world confronted the Turkish Muslim World. Again, Aristotle was a philosopher considered to belong more to the Arab than to the Christian world . . . Aristotle’s writings on metaphysics and logic were studied in Baghdad well before they were translated into Latin in Muslim Spain; then, from Toledo, they arrived in Paris by the end of the twelfth century. Thus Muslim ‘universality’ reached from the Atlantic to the Pacific. Latin Europe was a secondary, peripheral culture and up to this point had never been the ‘center’ of history. This also applied to the Roman Empire, which, given its extreme western location, never became the center of history of the Euro-Afro-Asian continent . . . Fifth, during the Italian Renaissance a novel coming together of heretofore independent cultural processes took place; the western Latin world joined the eastern Greek world, and they subsequently confronted the Turkish world. In turn, the Turks forgot the Hellenistic-Byzantine origin of the Muslim world and thus allowed to emerge the false equation Western = Hellenistic + Roman + Christian. (Dussel, 2000, pp. 465–467)

Europe has nothing to do with the mythological diva fabricated and disseminated by the Western circuits of cultural production. Basically Europe as is, as it has been fabricated, “is indefensible” (Cesaire, 2000, p. 32). Such pastoral continued with the so ‘curricularized’ ‘discovery’ of the Indies, Maldonado-Torres (2012) claims, “represented the veritable emergence of a ‘new world’ one that challenged the then existing sense of time, space, laws, knowledge, and social organization, and that opened up new paths of power, knowledge, and being not only from Europe, but gradually for the largest part of humanity” (p. 1). Within that context, Dussel (2000) stresses that there was the emergence of “the Eurocentric ideology of German romanticism” (p. 466). Such a linear, simplistic, diachronic fallacy—an issue I examine in Chapter 5—is the official, millenary Western narrative. That is, some consider such narrative to be “an ideological invention that first kidnapped Greek culture as exclusively Western and European and then posited both the Greek and the Romans cultures at the center of world history” (Dussel, 2000, p. 468). Dussel (2000) elaborates on two concepts of modernity; one is very Eurocentric, “provincial, and regional” (p. 469). Modernity, in this view,

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is “an emancipation, [a] way out, from immaturity by means of reason, understood as a critical process that offers humanity the possibility of new development” (p. 469). However, Dussel (2000) notes that this first view of modernity is Eurocentric, because it claims an “intra-European phenomena as the starting point of modernity and explains its later development without making recourse to anything outside Europe” (p. 469). The other concept takes modernity to a different level. Modernity is and acts as a world perspective, which suggests “being the center of world history as an essential trait of the modern world. Such centrality is achieved from various perspectives: state, military, economic, and philosophical” (Dussel, 2000, p. 469). Following Dussel’s (2000) reasoning, “there was not [only] a world history in an empirical sense before 1492,” but also it is crucial to examine different stages and metamorphoses in what is commonly, however erroneously, accepted as a monolithic epoch. For example, those metamorphoses initially under the leadership of Spain and Portugal that were later replaced with England and France, attempted to depict “a new paradigm of daily life and of historical, religious, and scientific understanding [to justify] irrational praxis of violence” (Dussel, 2000, p. 472). To overcome such villainous narrative, one needs “to deny the denial of the myth of modernity from an ethics of responsibility” (p. 473). He elaborates, stating, [T]he other denied and victimized side of modernity must fi rst be unveiled as ‘innocent’: it is the ‘innocent victims’ of ritual sacrifice that in the self-realization of their innocence cast modernity as guilty of a sacrificial and conquering violence—that is, of a constitutive, originary, essential violence. By way of denying the innocence of modernity and of affirming the alterity of the other (which was previously denied) it is possible to ‘discover’ for the first time the hidden ‘other side’ of modernity: the peripheral colonial world, the sacrificed indigenous peoples, the enslaved black, the oppressed woman, the alienation of infants, the estranged popular culture: the victims of modernity, all of them victims of an irrational act that contradicts modernity’s ideal of rationality. (Dussel, 2000, p. 473) As I examine later, such ethics of responsibility needs to the problematized within what Walker (2011) classifies as the wrangle ethics of proper and ethics of opacity. That is, epistemology and epistemological battles, as an emancipatory project, must occur without butchering the question of ethics (Walker, 2011). Walter Mignolo (2008) in his Geopolitics of Knowledge and Colonial Difference elaborates on the wrangle of the modern–colonial world system. Modernity, Mignolo (2008) attests, is not a strictly European but a planetary phenomenon, “to which the ‘excluded barbarians’ have contributed, although

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their contribution has not been acknowledged” (pp. 225–226). Mignolo (2008) exposes the distinctions between modernity and world systems: First modernity is associated with literature, philosophy, and history of ideas, whereas the modern world system is associated with the vocabulary of the social sciences. Second, this first characterization is important if we remember that since 1970 both concepts have occupied defined spaces in academic as well as public discourses. Third, modernity (and, obviously, post-modernity) maintained the imaginary of Western civilization as a pristine development from ancient Greece to eighteenthcentury Europe, where the basis of modernity was laid out. In contrast, the conceptualization of the modern world system does not locate its beginning in Greece. It underlies a special articulation of power rather than a linear succession of events. (p. 228) Modernity, Dussel (2013, p. 32) argues, is “the fruit of management of the centrality of the first world system”. As I show in Chapters 4 and 5, the idea of ancient Greece as primeval civilization is problematic. Returning to Mignolo’s (2008) elaboration, the emergence of a commercial circuit in the Atlantic in the sixteenth century produced special articulations of power. Such articulations, the Peruvian intellectual Anibal Quijano (1991) calls ‘coloniality of power.’ The coloniality of power, Grosfoguel (2003) defends, helps one to re-frame the modern world system with the “colonial/race” platform (p. 3). To analyze the power relations within global coloniality and global ideologies, one must understand that coloniality is distinct from colonialism. Grosfoguel (2003) explains: [Coloniality] accounts for the entangled, heterogeneous, and mutually constitutive relations between the international division of labor, global racial/ethnic hierarchy, and hegemonic Eurocentric epistemologies in the modern/colonial/capitalist world system. Coloniality of the world scale, with the United States as the undisputed hegemony over non-European people, characterizes the globalization of the capitalist world-economy today: the old colonial hierarchies of West/non-West remain in place and are entangled with the new so called division of labor. Herein lies the relevance of the distinction between colonialism and coloniality. Coloniality refers to the continuity of colonial forms of domination after the end of colonial administrations produced by colonial cultures and structures in the modern/colonial/capitalist world system. (p. 4) Colonialism and coloniality are indeed two faces of the same coin—the epistemicide. The coloniality debate does not annul or closes the colonial debate; it does not dissolve the debates around colonialism and postcolonalism. Quite the opposite. It makes such analyzes even more powerful, more

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complete. The presence of coloniality is the stitching that transforms the previous fabrics of knowledge, power, and language into the tapestry of the neoliberal empire, while colonialism still cuts and adds new pieces or cuts the old to reform and re-create (Janson, 2014). Castro-Gómez (2008) poignantly adds that “colonialism is not simply an economic or political phenomenon. It possesses an epistemological dimension relating to the emergence of the human sciences as much in the center as in the periphery” (p. 264). As Maldonado-Torres (2007) claims, [c]olonialism denotes a political and economic relation in which the sovereignty of a nation or a people rests on the power of another nation, which makes such nation an empire. Coloniality, instead, refers to longstanding patterns of power that emerged as a result of colonialism, but that define culture, labor, intersubjective relations, and knowledge production well beyond the strict limits of colonial administrations. Thus, coloniality survives colonialism. It is maintained alive in books, in the criteria for academic performance, in cultural patterns, in common sense, in the self-image of peoples, in aspirations of self, and so many other aspects of our modern experience. (p. 243) Coloniality is the memory, the legacy of the colonialism, yet it continues to be reborn through neoliberal hegemony as a pervasive colonial power that has strong epistemological ties. So much so that we may not perceive its power; instead, see our position as one without agency, never realizing how much of the world we do not understand because we lack the language and knowledge (Janson, 2014). COLONIALITY, CONSTRUCTION OF RACE HIERARCHIES, AND POWER Grosfoguel (2003), advances an analysis of the web of a new global division of labor of core-periphery relationships in which “a global racial/ethnic hierarchy of Western and non-Western people, which formed during centuries of European colonial expansion, was not significantly transformed with the end of colonialism and the formation of nation-states in the periphery. The transition from global colonialism to global coloniality transformed the global forms of domination” (p. 6). In addition, Quijano (2008) argues that one of the key features of such new global power with a colonial/modern Euro-centered capitalist face “is the social classification of the world’s population around the idea of race, a mental construction that expresses the basic experience of colonial domination and pervades the more important dimensions of global power, including its specific rationality: Eurocentrism” (p. 181). Race is indeed a mental construction of modernity (Quijano, 2008). Following Quijano (2008), the idea

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of race shows no parallel in history before the colonization of America— a position that raises many concerns within the gender studies field. Social relations, Quijano (2008) stresses, “founded on the category of race produced new historical other’s identities in America—Indians, blacks, and mestizos—and redefined others. Terms, such as Spanish and Portuguese and much later European, which had until then indicated only geographic origin, acquired from then on a racial connotation in reference to new identities” (p. 182). Moreover, “insofar as the social relations that were being configured were relations of domination, such identities were considered as constitutive of the hierarchies, places, and corresponding social roles, and consequently of the model of colonial domination that was being imposed. In other words, race and racial identity were established as instruments of basic social construction” (Quijano, 2008, p. 182). It is needless to mention how such social relations help produced, reproduced, and solidify a particular Western perspective of knowledge. Continuing his analysis, he explains that [a]fter the colonization of America and the expansion of European colonialism to the rest of the world, the subsequent constitution of Europe as a new id-entity needed the elaboration of a Eurocentric perspective of knowledge, a theoretical perspective on the idea of race as a naturalization of colonial relations between Europeans and non-Europeans. Historically, this meant a new way, of legitimizing the already old ideas and practices of relations of superiority and inferiority between dominant and dominated. (Quijano, 2008, p. 183) In fact, Quijano (2008) emphasizes, that “this racial principle has proven to be the most effective long-lasting instrument of universal social domination, since the much older principle—gender or intersexual domination— was encroached on by inferior-superior racial classifications” (p. 183). It is in the context of “the worldwide expansion of colonial domination on the part of the same dominant race that the same criteria of social classification were imposed on all the world population [and as a result] new historical and social identities were produced: yellows and olives were added to whites, Indians, blacks and mestizos” (p. 185). Such dominant race stratification structured not only segregated social relations and a new division of labor but also deliberately contaminated the structure of production, reproduction, and legitimization of knowledge. The invention of such social identities is a blunt evidence of what Grosfoguel (2010) calls “epistemic privilege”: [The] epistemic privilege of the West was consecrated and normalized through the Spanish Catholic monarchy’s destruction of Al-Andalus and the European colonial expression since the late 15th century. From renaming the world with Christian cosmology (Europe, Africa, Asia,

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and later America) and characterized all non-Christian knowledge as a product of pagan and devil forces to assuming in their own Eurocentric provincialism that it is only within the Greco-Roman tradition, passing through the Renaissance, the Enlightenment, and Western sciences that ‘truth’ and ‘universality’ is achieved, the epistemic privilege of Western, Eurocentric, male ‘identity politics’ was normalized to the point of invisibility as a hegemonic ‘identity politics’. It became the universal normalized knowledge. In this way, all ‘other’ traditions of thought were deemed inferior (characterized in the 16th century as ‘barbarians,’ in the 19th century as ‘primitives’, in the 20th century as ‘under-developed’, and at the beginning of the 21st century as ‘anti-democratic’). (p. 30) Epistemic privilege undeniably implies a form of epistemicide with the help of the school and curricula that portrays a twisted image of non-Western geographicalities and histories, a falsified curriculum that offers a homogenized reality, a quite towering ideological trump card within the current Common Core movement. By using race as the welding device of the social relations, modern coloniality’s world system fabricated a raced epistemological thesaurus that wraps dominants and dominates within an official knowledge that acts as if is the only one that has ever existed. Such epistemological eugenicism does not even considered itself a primus inter pares epistemological terrain. There are no pares. It is the only one that has ever existed, which emerged miraculously from Western/European centripetal forces. The way curriculum has been conceptualized, implemented, and evaluated gives credibility to such argument. As a form of cultural and ideological production, Western modern curriculum (and its new Common Core face) is implicated in the dissemination and legitimation of a eugenic totalitarian view. This raced model of world power “was able to impose its colonial dominance over all the regions and populations of the planet, incorporating them into its world system and its specific model of power” (Quijano, 2008, p. 188). In so doing, Western Europe, as the epicenter of this model, arrogantly incorporated and merged “such diverse and heterogeneous cultural histories into a single world dominated by Europe” (Quijano, 2008 p. 188). This process of incorporation, what Quijano (2008) calls “intellectual intersubjective configuration” (p. 188) allowed “all the experiences, histories, resources, and cultural productions [to end] in one global cultural order revolving around European Western hegemony” (p. 189). Adhering to Quijano’s (2008) transmodern decolonized rationale, “Europe’s hegemony over the new model of global power concentrated all forms of the control of subjectivity, culture, and especially knowledge and the production of knowledge under its hegemony” (p. 189). These new space and time of intersubjective interactions of supremacy between Europe and the rest of the planet showed a myriad of compound strategies. As Quijano (2008) states,

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Epistemicides and the Yoke of Modernity [i]n the first place they expropriated those cultural discoveries of colonized peoples that were most apt for developing capitalism to the profit of the European center. Second, they repressed as much as possible the colonized forms of knowledge production, models of the production of meaning, symbolic universe, and models of expression and objectification and subjectivity. Third, in different ways in each case, the Europeans forced the colonized to learn the dominant culture in any way that would be useful to the reproduction of domination, whether in the field of technology and material activity or of subjectivity especially JudeoChristian religiosity. (p. 189)

At the same time, it is crucial to highlight that Europe cannot be seen as a monolithic identity. The other within the West and its knowledge was (and is) also suppressed and delegitimized. Needless to say that, and Quijano (2008) is also insightful in this regard, repression of knowledge “was the most violent, profound and long lasting among the Indians of IberoAmerica, who were condemned to be an illiterate peasant subculture stripped of their objectified intellectual legacy” (p. 189). The same occurred in Africa and in many other places. Western Europe(ans) was able to set up a well-orchestrated “epistemic suppression” (Quijano, 2008, p. 189), using all the mechanisms ‘available’ including genocide. These new universe of intersubjective interactions of oppression was raced coded and profoundly cultural. As Quijano (2008) and others denounced, it was a “colonization of the culture” (p. 189); however, one should not ignore that “race was the basic category” (p. 190) in fermenting the coloniality of power. The coloniality of power relied on the coloniality of being(s). The coloniality of being(s), Maldonado-Torres (2008b) notes, “refers to the process whereby common sense and tradition are marked by dynamics of power that are preferential in character: they discriminate people and target communities. The preferential character of violence can be spelled out by the coloniality of power, which links racism, capitalist exploitation, the control of sex, and monopoly of knowledge and related them to modern colonial history” (p. 220). As we examine the aspects involved in production and reproduction of the coloniality of power, it is important to scrutinize how such coloniality (maybe colonialities) was systematically producing and reproducing (and resisting) based on of either a constant obliteration and extermination of other forms of knowledge beyond the Western/European epistemological framework or the usurping the voices, visions, and feelings, which were not convenient to Western capitalist development processes. Such historical constructions deeply engaged in creating an idyllic version of Western European civilizations, while not hesitating to subscribe genocidal practices; these practices were adorned and masked as natural triumphs for Western civilization in the majority of Western school curricula and school textbooks. Let’s pause a bit here and examine how the Western school

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curriculum compromises the course of history to maintain and transform power relationships. A good way to start digging is to consider Zinn (1999, 2001), Chomsky (1992, 2002), Todorov (1984), and hooks’s (1994) critical analyses of the way Columbus is presented in schools. I also invite Frey Bartolomé de Las Casas (1536–1537, 1552/2008) to the debate as a way to show that Columbus was already facing a lot of criticism during his ‘golden epoch’. Furthermore, I rely on the analyses of James Loewen (1995), Jean Anyon (1983), and Patrick Brindle and Madelaine Arnot (1999). I close this argument by comparing Apple’s insight to Bruno Latour’s (1999) approach. In so doing, I am able to trace and identify unquestionable similarities with the way the history of capitalist colonization has been portrayed, for example, in Portuguese history textbooks. For centuries, Columbus has been portrayed as ‘the’ discoverer, a real hero for Western civilization, and this is the message that dominates U.S. textbooks. However, as Howard Zinn, Noam Chomsky, Tzvetan Todorov, and bell hooks stress, this message is a fallacy. In Legitimacy in History, Noam Chomsky (2002) refutes the Columbus hero concept, arguing that the American continent was really a stage for genocide. As the Massachusetts Institute of Technology–based radical intellectual (2002) claims, “[h] ere in the United States, we just committed genocide. Period. Pure genocide. Current estimates are that north of Rio Grande, there were about twelve to fifteen million Native Americans at the time Columbus landed; [however,] by the time Europeans reached the continental borders of the United States, there were about 200,000 [which means] mass genocide” (p. 135). The shocking reality Chomsky (2002) reveals is “that throughout American history this genocide has been accepted has perfectly legitimate”, notwithstanding the fact that Columbus “was a mass murderer himself” (p. 136). It is precisely this critical challenging of the legitimacy of history that one can trace in the perspectives of both Zinn and hooks. However, whereas for Chomsky (1992) it constitutes a process of historical engineering, for Zinn (1999) and hooks (1994, p. 197), we are embedded in a process of obliteration and a process that tends to perpetuate “white supremacist capitalist patriarchy.” Zinn (1999) views the American past as a gendered history, a history mostly ‘done’ by rich white men. As he maintains, U.S. history is a process of “sort of leaving ‘it’ out,” an insidious process of obliteration in which the schools are not innocents (Zinn, 1999, pp. 47–75). As Zinn (1999) highlights, one can notice this process of obliteration in the way textbooks have portrayed the Vietnam War. To Zinn (1999), this is a “central event for our generation in the US [because] as I’ve often commented, we only dropped seven million tons of bombs on 35 million people” (p. 3), and we only have two insipid paragraphs in the textbooks on the war in Vietnam. It is this process of obliteration that Zinn identifies in the way the Columbus legacy has been reproduced, not only in society at large but also within schooling.

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As Zinn (2001) highlights, Columbus’s history is a history of “masculine conquest” (p. 102). Despite the fact that in the indigenous people greeted Columbus and his armada in a friendly way (as one can document from Columbus’s writing: “they are the best people in the world and above all the gentlest—without knowledge of what is evil—nor do they murder or steal they love their neighbors as themselves and they have the sweetest talk in the world always laughing [they] are very simple and honest and exceedingly liberal with all they have, none of them refusing anything he may possess when he is asked for it”; quoted in Zinn, 2001, p. 99), this attitude was perverted (because Columbus saw the Indians “not as hospitable hosts, but as servants [they] could subjugate [and] make them do whatever we want” (Zinn, 2001, p. 99). Furthermore, the Native Americans could not escape the cruel process of genocide, murder, rape of the women and children who were “thrown to dogs to de devoured” (Las Casas, quoted in Zinn, 2001, p. 101). As one can draw from Zinn’s (2001) words, glorifying Columbus is nonsense, because Columbus’s legacy is one of conquering and subjugating native people. In fact, the very idea of conquering and subjugation suggests an assumption of inferiority of the native Indians. However, it is of utter importance to highlight here that even during the so-called discovery epoch Columbus faced a huge amount of resistance and criticism. In fact, Columbus’s bloodshed colonial ministry was denounced during ‘his own majestic era’ by too many people. On the very front line of such deep and powerful criticisms, one can flag Frey Bartolomé de Las Casas. Las Casas was a great obstacle and a one of the great defenders of the Indian population. Born in 1484 in Seville, Frey de Las Casas opposed vehemently against the butchery of the Indian population before Columbus’s armadas. Notwithstanding the fact that Las Casas knew the need and importance to evangelize the Indian population, the fact is he was totally against the genocide that was perpetrated by Columbus and his army. Las Casas ‘fought’ for a peaceful approach to alienate the Indian population. In one of his crucial treatises De unico vocationis modo omnium gentium ad veram religionem, written in Guatemala, 1536–1537, Las Casas argued over the need to a nonviolent approach to the Indian populations, an approach that would respect their freedom. Las Casas believed that the best way to convert was by ‘persuasion’ and not by the force of a gun, or by violence. In fact, for Las Casas, it would be impossible to evangelize anyone using a strategy based on fear, injustice, and tyranny. Las Casas was so distressed by Columbus’s slaughter policies in the so-called Americas that he felt the need to write another treatise, Brevísima relación de la destrucción de las Indias, published in 1552. According to Las Casas (1552/2008), the way the ‘admirable history of Americas discoveries’ were portrayed hid and silenced the indiscriminate killings of innocent and indefensible populations, provinces, and reigns. Las Casas (1552/2008) descriptions about the quotidian practices of Columbus’s armada is quite deplorable. According to him (1552), the Christians, armed to the teeth, butchered and murdered the native population;

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they invaded the Indian villages, killing women and their little children, pregnant women, and elderly people. In addition, they organized bets over which one was able to gut an Indian ‘in one shot’; they covered the Indians with oil and burned them; they unleash famine and wild dogs to tearing up and eating the Indians like pigs. As Las Casas (1536–1537) questions, what kind of pleasure these miserable men have by murdering millions of human beings? What is the point of raping Indian women and killing their sons? According to Las Casas (1536–1537), those behind the scenes, those who were advising for the need of such genocidal practices, those who send a colonial armada to conquer are much guiltier than anyone else. From such despicable and shameful description, one could honestly think that it is really an insult, not only to carry on claiming Columbus as a hero but also to hide such ‘happenings’ from school content. Indisputably, Las Casas’s explicit position about Columbus’s butchery and colonial entrepreneurship allows one to perceive and understand that both the discovery epoch and the political platform that fueled such epoch was not monolithic. Las Casas (2008, p. 42) argues that the “outrages committed [in the name of the King of Spain] woul fill an entire volume, and when completed [it] would be so crowed with slaughters, injuries, butcheries, and inhuman desolations, so horrible and detestable as would Ague-shake the present as future ages wuth terror” [sic]. Las Casas texts are critical evidence of militaristic and capitalist strategies, yet school textbooks and curriculum programs keep hiding such intricate and powerful tensions. Columbus’s history is based on a racist and a gendered rationale that perpetrated mass genocide. Moreover, and based on Todorov’s (1984) analysis, Columbus demonstrated eugenic arrogance in his contact with the Indians. According to Tzvetan Todorov (1984, p. 35), who based his analysis on a study conduct by Bernaldez of Columbus’s letters, the Indians were portrayed by Columbus as “although physically naked [they are] closer to men than to animals,” one should not minimize the ideological meaning of the word although here. Oddly enough, Columbus was incapable of recognizing a new diversity of languages expressed by the Indians and accepting them as real languages (obviously quite different from Latin, Spanish, or Portuguese). Thus, “already deprived of language [according to Columbus they are also] deprived of all cultural property [by] the absence of costumes, rites, religion” (Bernaldez, quoted in Todorov, 1984, pp. 34–35). This particular race–gender vision of Columbus’s legacy is also made explicit in bell hooks’s (1994) approach. According to hooks (1994), “the nation’s collective refusal to acknowledge institutionalized white supremacy is given deep and profound expression in the contemporary zeal to reclaim the myth of Christopher Columbus as patriotic icon” (p. 198). As she (1994) bluntly remarks, “embedded in the nation’s insistence that its citizens celebrate Columbus’s “discovery” of America is a hidden challenge, a call for patriotic among us to reaffi rm a national commitment to imperialism and white supremacy” (p. 198). According to hooks (1994), this fallacious message is implanted with the

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classroom. The radical critical insight of her (1994) thought deserves to be quoted at length: When I recall learning about Columbus from grade school on, what stands out is the way we were taught to believe that the will to dominate and conquer folks who are different from ourselves is natural, not culturally specific. We were taught that the Indians would have conquered and dominated the white explorers if they could have but they were simply not strong or smart enough. Embedded in all these teachings was the assumption that it was the whiteness of these explorers in the “New World” that gave them greater power. The word “whiteness” was never used. The key word, the one that was synonymous with whiteness, was “civilization.” Hence, we were made to understand at a young age that whatever cruelties were done to the indigenous peoples of this country, the “Indians,” was necessary to bring the great gift of civilization. Domination, it become[s] clear in our young minds, was central to the project of civilization. And if civilization was good and necessary despite the costs, then that had to mean domination was equally good. (p. 199) As hooks (1994) argues, Columbus’s history is one of murder, human atrocities, rape of indigenous woman, and it is precisely this horror that one should not forget and that one “must reinvoke as [we] critically interrogate the past and rethink the meaning of Columbus” (p. 202). hooks (1994) continues by arguing that “in our cultural retelling of history we must connect Columbus’s legacy with the institutionalization of patriarchy and the culture of sexist masculinity that upholds male domination of females in daily life; [that is to say] the cultural romanticization of Columbus’s imperialist legacy includes a romanticization of rape” (p. 203). In fact, as she (1994) bluntly asserts, “white colonizers who raped and physically brutalized native women yet who recorded these deeds as the perks of victory acted as though women of color were objects, not the subjects of history” (p. 203). In this context, hooks (1994) reminds us that “any critical interrogation of the Columbus legacy that does not call attention to the white supremacist patriarchal mind-set that condoned the rape and brutalization of native females is only a partial analysis [because] it subsumes the rape and exploitation of native women by placing such acts solely within the framework of military conquest, the spoils of war” (p. 203). Whether it is ‘historical engineering,’ a ‘process of obliteration,’ or a process that prizes ‘white supremacist capitalist patriarchy,’ the fact is that Noam Chomsky, Howard Zinn, and bell hooks are questioning precisely the kind of knowledge that has become legitimate. In so doing, they are actually challenging the social and political legitimacy of particulars segments of history. In fact, a Chomsky (2002) argues, “there can’t be anything more illegitimate; [that

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is to say] the whole history of this country is illegitimate” (p. 136). Again, Chomsky’s (2002) thought deserves to quoted extensively, A few thanksgivings ago, I took a walk with some friends and family in a National Park, and we came across a tombstone which had just been put in along the path. It said: “Here lies an Indian woman, a Wampanoag, whose family and tribe gave of themselves and their land that this great nation might be born and grow.” Okay, “gave of themselves and their land”—in fact, were murdered, scattered, dispersed, and we stole their land, that’s what we’re sitting on. Our forefathers stole about a third of Mexico in a war in which they claimed that Mexico attacked us, but if you look back it turns out that that “attack” took place inside of Mexican territory. And it goes on and on. So you know what can be legitimate? (p. 136) Noam Chomsky, Howard Zinn, Tzvetan Todorov, and bell hooks are claiming that there is an intentional fallacy based on the erroneous portrayal of Columbus as a hero. In so doing, they basically assert that U.S. society is based on a secular lie that has been reproduced in the school curriculum, through its textbooks, as seen in James Loewen’s (1995) Lies My Teacher Told Me: Everything Your High School History Textbook Got Wrong. In fact, Loewen, a sociologist who spent two years at the Smithsonian Institute surveying twelve leading high school textbooks of U.S. history, also challenges the way Columbus has been presented in school textbooks. As he documents (1995), 1642 is a date included in the twelve textbooks surveyed. However, he (1995) notes that “they leave out virtually everything that is important to know about Columbus and the European exploration of the Americans” (p. 29). Loewen (1995) stresses that Columbus’s legacy is so broad and pivotal that mainstream historians use him to divide the past into epochs, making the Americas before 1642 ‘pre-Columbian’. Notwithstanding Columbus’s insidious motivation, the fact is that “textbooks downplay the pursuit of wealth as a motive for coming to the Americas” (Loewen, 1995, p. 30). Following the same line of thought portrayed by Noam Chomsky, Howard Zinn, and bell hooks, Loewen (1995) argues that “the way American history textbooks treat Columbus reinforces the tendency not to think about the process of domination [when in fact] the traditional picture of Columbus landing on the American shore shows him dominating immediately” (p. 35). Actually, as Loewen (1995) highlights, “Columbus claimed everything he saw right off the boat” (p. 35). However, “when textbooks celebrate this process, they imply that taking the land and dominating the Indians was inevitable if not natural” (Loewen, 1995, p. 35). The fact is that “Columbus introduced two phenomena that revolutionized race relations and transformed the modern world [through] the taking of land, wealth, and labor from indigenous peoples, leading to their

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near extermination, and the transatlantic slave trade, which created a racial underclass” (Loewen, 1995, p. 50). Dussel’s (1995b, p. 9) describes how Western conquest assassinated the Amerindians [and if it] left any alive, they debased them, oppressing them with servitude. They spared woman, to live in concubinage (sexual domination) and children, to be educated in European culture (pedagogical domination). And thus, in the name of the new god (gold, silver, money, pounds sterling, oir the dollar) there have been immolated to the god of nascent mercantilism, the god of economic imperialism, and the contemporary imperialism of the multinational corporations, millions more human beings of the periphery than those the Aztecs immolated to their god Hiitzilopochtlu—to the horrow of civilized, religious-minded Europeans. Columbus’s mark within the Americas is, in essence, one of murder, exploitation, and rape—in a word, genocide. Paradoxically, Western European conquest not only ‘fabricated’ a new god and, in so doing, inaugurated the beginning of the end of Europe because “it deified itself” (Dussel, 1995b, p. 8, but it also feed the conditions for the emergence of a “philosophy of liberation” (Dussel, 1995b, p. 9), whose vitality relied in the capacity of the oppressed to “return to the source” as Cabral (1973, p. 63) would put, as a way of living. As Torres Santomé (1996) reminds us, the official culture in the vast majority of Western countries that is perpetuated through a common curriculum validates specific knowledge portrayed by a masculine world. As Torres Santomé (1996) highlights, a glance over the textbooks allows one to perceive disfiguration, silence, and occultation of the working class. Jurjo Torres Santomé, like bell hooks, argues that textbooks promulgated a biased vision of society that prizes a white middle-class heterosexual blond male. In this context both Jean Anyon’s (1983) Workers, Labor and Economic History, and Textbook Content and Patrick Brindle and Madeleine Arnot’s (1999) England Expects Every Man to Do His Duty: The Gendering of the Citizenship Textbook, 1940–1996 exhibit their pertinence. In an empirical study of seventeen well-known secondary-school ‘approved-foruse’ U.S. history textbooks, Anyon (1983) argues that the content expressed in the textbooks “despite the claim of objectivity serve[s] the interests of some groups in society over others” (p. 37). As the author (1983) stresses, a mark of U.S. textbooks is their “omissions, stereotypes, and distortions” with regard to Native Americans, blacks, and woman, “which reflect the relative powerlessness of these groups” (p. 49). Thus, as Jean Anyon (1983) argues, “the school curriculum has contributed to the formation of attitudes that make it easier for those powerful groups whose knowledge is legitimized by school studies to manage and control society” (p. 49). That is, “textbooks not only express the dominant group’s ideologies, but also

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help to form attitudes in support of their social position” (Anyon, 1983, p. 49). In the same line of analysis, although more focused on the gender issues, Patrick Brindle and Madeleine Arnot (1999) identified three textbook frameworks; these include “exclusionary, inclusionary, and critical engagement” (p. 108). The authors (1999) claim the exclusionary is the most common approach and “exclude[s] both the private sphere and woman from its construction of the political domain” (p. 108) In this set of textbooks, there is clearly “general inattention and lack of interest in the position of women; [actually] it is not unusual for women to receive no attention at all” (Brindle & Arnot, 1999, p. 110). A very small group of textbooks “sought to include women and the private sphere in various different ways” (Brindle & Arnot, 1999: 108). That is, a small minority of texts sought to include representations of women as citizens; however, (with one exception) none of them portrayed women “within the polity of active [agents]” (Brindle & Arnot, 1999, p. 112). In this kind of textbook, women are presented as mere ‘add-ons.’ And finally, there are textbooks with a critical engagement approach in which the women highlighted are both in the private and public spheres. This historical puzzle is profoundly important. At a time, when the educational and curriculum fields hoist the flag of internationalization, we must ask, among other issues, ‘What is the color of flag?’ ‘Whose color?’ or, even better, ‘What is the ideology of that color?’ and ‘How do you solve such historical equations?’ I will return to these issues later in this chapter. Incontrovertibly, the coloniality of power is implicated in epistemic privilege and oppression that is a form of epistemicide blessed through the curriculum enacted in schools. In what follows, I reemphasize how the coloniality of knowledge promotes the elaboration of Eurocentrism as a hegemonic knowledge perspective based on epistemic racism. I appeal and subscribe to the need for intellectual decolonization because the models of the Eurocentric critique of Eurocentrism not only do not cease to be Eurocentric, but, although important, they are also not sufficient to describe the realities beyond the Occidental framework. I end by claiming that another knowledge is possible. HEGEMONIC UNDERTOW OF EPISTEMIC RACISM AND SEXISM According to Grosfoguel (2010) and Maldonado-Torres (2008a), epistemic racism and epistemic sexism “are the most hidden forms of racism and sexism in the global system that we all inhabit, the ‘Westernized/Christianized modern/ colonial capitalist/patriarchal world-system’. Social, political, and economic racisms and sexisms are much more visible and recognized today than epistemological racism/sexism” (Grosfoguel, 2010, p. 29). Nevertheless,

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Epistemicides and the Yoke of Modernity [e]pistemic racism is the foundational form and older version of racism in that the inferiority of ‘non-Western’ people as below the human (non-humans or sub-humans) is defined on their closeness to animality and the latter is defined on the basis of their inferior intelligence and, thus, lack of rationality. Epistemic racism operates through the privileging of an essentialist (‘identity’) politics of ‘Western’ male elites, that is, the hegemonic tradition of thought of Western philosophy and social theory that almost never includes ‘Western’ women and never includes ‘non-Western philosophers/philosophies and social scientists. In this tradition, the ‘West’ is considered to be the only legitimate tradition of thought able to produce knowledge and the only one with access to ‘universality’, ‘rationality’ and ‘truth’. Epistemic racism considers ‘nonWestern’ knowledge to be inferior to ‘Western’ knowledge. Since epistemic racism is entangled with epistemic sexism, Westerncentric social science is a form of epistemic racism/sexism that privilege ‘Western’ male’s knowledge as the superior knowledge in the world today. (Grosfoguel, 2010, pp. 29–30)

Epistemic racism portrayed by Western modernity is at the very core of what Mills (1997, p. 11) coins as “the racial contract”. That is, while political and moral, the racial contract is also epistemological “prescribing norms for cognition to which its signatories must adhere [and] all whites are beneficiaries of the Contract, though some whites are not signatories to it” (Mills, 1997, p. 11). The racial contract prescribes for its signatories an inverted epistemology, an epistemology of ignorance, a particular pattern of localized and global cognitive dysfunctions (which are psychologically and socially functional), producing the ironic outcome that whites will in general be unable to understand the world they themselves have made. (Mills, 1997, p. 18) If one pays close attention to the canon of scholars preferred and emphasized within Western academic disciplines, Grosfoguel (2010) adds “we can observe that without exception they privilege ‘Western’ male thinkers and theories, above all those of European and Euro-North-American males” (p. 30). That is, “this hegemonic essentialist ‘identity politics’ is so powerful and so normalized—through the discourse of ‘objectivity’ and ‘neutrality’ of the Cartesian ‘ego-politics of knowledge’ in the social sciences—that it hides who speaks and from which power location they speak from, such that when we think of ‘identity politics’ we immediately assume, as if by ‘common sense’, that we are talking about racialized minorities” (Grosfoguel, 2010, p. 30). In fact, the “underlying myth of the Westernized academy is still the scientificist discourse of ‘objectivity’ and ‘neutrality’ which hides the ‘locus of enunciation’ of the speaker, that is, who speaks and from what epistemic body-politics of knowledge and geopolitics of knowledge they speak from

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in the existing power relations at a world-scale” Grosfoguel, 2010, p. 20). Within the field of education, in general, and curriculum, in particular, the struggle against the cult of positivism insightfully championed by public intellectuals, such as Giroux (1981a), needs to be taken to another level, one that precisely challenges the tether of Western epistemological platform: Through the myth of the ‘ego-politics of knowledge’ (which in reality always speaks through a ‘Western’ male body and a Eurocentric geopolitics of knowledge) critical voices coming from individuals and groups inferiorized and subalternized by this hegemonic epistemic racism and epistemic sexism are denied and discarded as particularistic. If epistemology has color—as African philosopher Emmanuel Chukwudi Eze (1998) points out so well—and has gender/color—as African-American Sociologist Patricia Hills Collins (2000) has argued—then the Eurocentric epistemology that dominates the social sciences has both color and gender. (Grosfoguel, 2010, p. 30) Undeniably, racism and racial segregation, Mills (1997, p. 93) posits, “have not been deviations from the norm; they have been the norm not merely in the sense of de facto statistical distribution patterns but in the sense of being formally codified written down and proclaimed as such”. Naturally, whites exist in “racial ways while thinking of themselves as acting morally [that is] they experience genuine cognitive difficulties in recognizing certain behavior patterns as racists” (Mills, 1997, p. 93). Such a eugenic episteme “became the universal normalized knowledge” (Grosfoguel, 2010, p. 30). Odd as it might be, not only are epistemic racism and sexism at the very inception and core of Western sciences but so are sciences that reductively “is based on the experience of 5 countries (France, England, Germany, Italy and the United States) that makes only less than 12 percent of the world population. The provincialism of Western Social Science theory with false claims to universality pretends to account for the social experience of the other 88 percent of the world population” (Grosfoguel, 2010, p. 31). Eurocentrism, Grosfoguel (2010) argues, “with its epistemic racism/sexism is a form of provincialism that is reproduced inside the social sciences today” (p. 31). Walsh (2012) asserts that to speak of the geopolitics of knowledge and the geopolitical locations of critical thought is to recognize that in most places in the globe, what continues to predominate are Eurocentric modes of thinking. For Frantz Fanon and Fausto Reinaga, intellectuals whose thought found its base and reason in black struggles in the Caribbean and Africa and indigenous struggles in the Indian America, the hegemony, ‘universality’, and violence of such thinking must be confronted, and a different thought constructed and positioned from the histories and subjectivities of the people. (p. 12)

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There is a theory of communicating vessels, a symbiosis between the coloniality of power and being and Eurocentrism. Following Quijano (2008), the success of Western Europe in becoming the center of the modern world system “developed within Europeans a trait common to all colonial dominators and imperialists: ethnocentrism” (p. 189). The fallacy of Western Europeans as naturally superior needs to be seen as “a mental operation of fundamental importance for the entire model of global power, but above all with respect to the intersubjective relations that were hegemonic, among other reasons because of the production of knowledge” (Quijano, 2008, p. 190). Furthermore, [t]he Europeans generated a new temporal perspective of history and relocated colonized populations, along with their respective histories and cultures, in the past of a historical trajectory whose culmination was Europe. [Thus,] the intersubjective and cultural relations between Western Europe and the rest of the World were codified in a strong play of new categories: East/West, primitive-civilized, magic/mythicscientific, irrational-rational, traditional-modern, Europe-non-Europe. Even so, the only category with the honor of being recognized the other of Europe and the West as ‘Orient’—not the Indians of America and not the Black of Africa who were ‘simply’ primitive. (Quijano, 2008, p. 190) In such imagined modernity and rationality, as I have mentioned before, race was ‘the’ pillar in the entire epistemology that was about to arise; such epistemology was produced as clean, pure, colorless, immaculate, superior, natural—in a word, unique. Without acknowledging this, it is impossible, as Quijano (2008) stresses, to “explain the elaboration of Eurocentrism as the hegemonic perspective of knowledge otherwise” (p. 190). Eurocentrism is anchored in two myths: [First] the idea of history of human civilization as a trajectory that departed from a state of nature and culminated in Europe; second, a view of the differences between Europe and non-Europe as natural (racial) differences and not consequences of a history of power. Both myths can be unequivocally recognized in the foundation of evolutionism and dualism, two of the nuclear elements of Eurocentrism. (Quijano, 2008, p. 190) Framed and fueled by different discourses that stem from the fabricated immaculacy and ingenuity of ancient Greek philosophy and culture, such a myth is wrapped and beautified Eurocentrism as a quasi act of faith, a devotion to pursuit. Although I examine this issue in greater length later on, it is appropriate to flag here that the myth of ancient Greek culture, as Amin (2009) notes,

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“performs an essential function in Eurocentric construct as well as in modern ideology” (p. 166). In fact, modern ideology “was not constructed in the abstract ether and pure capitalist mode of production” (p. 165). Continuing his analysis, Amin (2009) articulates that [c]onsciousness of the capitalist nature of the modern world came relatively late, as a result of the labor and socialist movements and their critique of the nineteenth century social organization, culminating in Marxism. At the moment when this consciousness emerged, modern ideology already had three centuries of history behind it, from Renaissance through the Enlightenment. It had therefore expressed itself as a particularly European, rationalistic, and secular ideology, while claiming a worldwide scope. (p. 165) In addition, Mignolo (2008), following the rationale, put forward by Braudel, Wallerstein, and Arrighi, argues that “the history of Western epistemology as it has been constructed since the European Renaissance runs parallel to and complements each other” (p. 226). That is, the “expansion of Western capitalism implied the expansion of Western epistemology in all its ramifications, from the instrumental reason that went along with capitalism and the industrial revolution, to the theories of the state, to the criticism of both capitalism and the state” (Mignolo, 2008, p. 227). Indeed, there is a resemblance between the Renaissance episteme and the episteme framework tenaciously defended by the so-called curriculum humanists and social meliorists in the United States at the turn of the twentieth century, which I was able to dissect in my earlier volume, Conflicts in Curriculum Theory: Challenging Hegemonic Epistemologies (Paraskeva, 2011a). EUROCENTRIC CULTURALISM The cartography of knowledge that erupted “from Renaissance epistemology [was] grounded on the trivium and quadrivium and strongly dominated by rhetoric and humanities” (Mignolo, 2008, p. 227). Mignolo (2008) adds that “Bacon replaced rhetoric with philosophy, and the figure of the Renaissance humanist began to be overtaken by the figure of the philosopher and the scientist that contributed to and further expanded from European Enlightenment” (p. 227). Bacon emphasized History, Poesy and Philosophy as the towering categories of human rationale having “history has reference to Memory, Poesy to imagination and Philosophy to reason” (Mignolo, 2008, p. 227). As I examined in Conflicts in Curriculum Theory (Paraskeva, 2011a), at the turn of the twentieth century, the curriculum field saw mental discipline, as well as the professed five windows or provinces of the soul, as the dominant pedagogical narrative. Such windows advocated by William Harris (1889, pp. 96–97), namely, arithmetic, geography, grammar, history,

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and literature, were five provinces that would remain the means by which the culture would be propagated and perpetuated to the majority of citizens (Paraskeva, 2011a, p. 31; see also Kliebard, 1995). Then, as I also examined in my previous volume, at the turn of the nineteenth century, a wide, uniform plan of studies was promoted, one in which all the mental faculties would be duly exercised, especially because the (total) perfection of the mind depended on the incessant exercise of its various powers (Paraskeva, 2011a, p. 24; see also Muelder, 1984; Tyack, 1974). Thus, the “mental discipline by which mind-as-muscle could be strengthened” (Beyer & Liston, 1996, p. 3) would not actually depend on the isolated study of mathematics, or on an isolated study of classical languages, but on a perfect symbiosis between “the different branches of literature and science, as to form in the student a proper balance of character” (Silliman, 1829, p. 301). Actually, “the success of each is essential to the prosperity of the other” (Silliman, p. 323). The roots of mental disciplinarism, the most famous doctrine at the end of the nineteenth century (Kliebard, 1995; Paraskeva, 2007a, 2011a, 2011b), “could be traced in some respects to the classical university of the Middle Ages” (Beyer & Liston, 1996, p. 3), with its emphasis on the artesliberales and sermonicales (Paraskeva, 2001). The Yale Faculty Report, for instance, defended classical languages as the guarantors of mental exercise, dictating rigor and discipline by means of recitation and memorization. The intellectual history of the nineteenth century is “marked above all by [such] disciplinarization and [consequently] professionalization of knowledge, that is to say, by the creation of permanent institutional structures designed both to produce new knowledge and to reproduce the producers of knowledge” (Wallerstein et al., 1996, p. 7). Moreover, this disciplinarization of knowledge is not only connected with the division of labor in a capitalist segregated society but also needs to be seen as “an attempt to secure and advance ‘objective’ knowledge about ‘reality’ on the basis of empirical findings (as opposed to speculation). The intent was to ‘learn’ the truth, not to invent or intuit it” (Wallerstein et al, 1996, p. 13). The Renaissance sect or cult of artes liberales and artes sermonicales (see Paraskeva 2001, 2011a, 2011b) that pervades Western educational apparatuses is an integral part of what Amin (2009) calls “Eurocentric culturalism” (p. 156). In turn, if the new world is capitalist (and it is indeed) and is based in particular features of its mode of production, all the social apparatuses are dynamically connected in this web. It is better to say that its existence is only possible while these social apparatuses work to sustain such mode of production and reproduction, affirming itself as a “system founded on eternal truths with a transhistorical vocation” (Amin, 2009, p. 155). In this context, the dominant ideology of the new world fulfills three major functions, namely “(a) obscures the essential nature of the capitalist mode of production, (b) deforms the vision of the historical genesis of capitalism, by refusing to consider this genesis from the perspective of a search for general laws of the evolution of human society. Instead it replaces this

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search with a twofold mythic construct, (c) refuses to link the fundamental characteristics of actually existing capitalism—that is the center/periphery polarization, inseparable from the system itself—to capitalism’s worldwide process of reproduction” (Amin, 2009, p. 155). As is shown later on, such narrative (in which Humboldtianism is not innocent) assembled and run a particular version of history, worshiping and deifying the West(ern), not only by silencing and domesticating genocides as well as quashing ample evidence that, at the minimum, severely puts into question ancient Greece as a white ars magistra. I return to this issue later on when I examine the loss of history. Such epistemological framework, quite towering in the Western epistemological cartography and currently pretty much hegemonic globally, imposed itself as unique global methodological episteme, under a dangerous scientific fallacy that there are no other epistemological dynamics that are scientifically acceptable. The geography of world epistemology is reduced to the Western white space and time—which is basically 20% of the planet. When capitalism, Mignolo (2008) claims, “began to be displaced from the Mediterranean to the North Atlantic (Holland, Britain), the organization of knowledge was established in its universal scope. ‘There can be no others’ inscribed a conceptualization of knowledge to a geopolitical space (Western Europe) and erased the possibility of even thinking about a conceptualization and distribution of knowledge ‘emanating’ from other local histories (China, India, Islam, etc.)” (p. 227). This is profoundly crucial to understand for what I called Itinerant Curriculum Theory (ICT) (Paraskeva, 2011a; 2011b) and its role in the struggle for social and cognitive justice, an issue I examine in Chapter 6. Within this context, Mignolo (2008) insightfully “refers to the changing faces of colonial differences throughout the history of the modern/colonial world-system and brings to the foreground the planetary dimension of human history silenced by discourses centering on modernity, postmodernity, and Western civilization” (p. 229). Grosfoguel (2003) argues that “colonial difference is crucial to geopolitically locate within the forms of thinking and cosmologies produced by subaltern subjects as opposed to hegemonic global designs” (p. 10). Following Mignolo and others, one would claim that the umbilical metamorphoses between coloniality of power and colonial difference is undisputable. That is, both the coloniality of power and the colonial difference(s) form a complex set of non-monolithical spaces and chronos, rubbing against and legitimizing each other. These acts become a punctus (to use Barthes’s concept from Camara Lucida), where oppressed epistemologies and local histories are alienated, ignored, produced as non-existent. This clash—militaristic if need be—between the coloniality of power and the local epistemes imposes an official geography of knowledge. This is not a minor issue. The defense and promotion of a dominant knowledge, which, on one hand, have a racial basis and promote the cult of the superiority of the white race and, on the other hand, are based on

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false pillars and presents themselves as the unique knowledge, are intellectual dishonesty. It is a lie, which unstintingly permeates not only the Western social structure but also the educational apparatuses. In fact, it is the Western school apparatuses, as I have repeatedly argued in other contexts (2007a, 2007b, 2011a, 2011b, 2012) and continue to demonstrate, that have been both the factory and locomotive of a massive secular lie, a lie that is at least 500 years old, a lie that lays on each desk of each classroom, a lie based on an eugenic defense and promotion of dominant Western forms of knowledge. Thus, these questions are legitimated: How many generations were evaluated based on this lie? How many children were severely penalized for not knowing ‘the’ who or ‘the’ what of ‘the lie’? What one does see is the ability to fabricate the social conditions that naturally impose what constitutes the truth as a source of power and control by Western schools, silencing non-Western rivers, on which these “truthful lies” are based? That is, the suppression of other forms of knowledge is a clear and objective form of social fascism. Such an argument is crucial, especially nowadays when the Common Core objectives and assessments cult frame has swamped teachers on how Western influence can be seen in Eastern literature, with no attention to consider how Western literature has been influenced by the East. For instance, those who teach the universal soul as part of transcendentalism necessarily would never recognize and realize the connections to Eastern philosophy that the transcendentalists studied. Maldonado-Torres (2012) stresses how this eugenic system and worldview expresses fundamental tasks, such as “colonial expansion, colonial reconceptualization of physical and human geography, the recreation, intensification, and naturalization of hierarchies of being that divide some humans from others, and the subordination of people and nature to the demands of production and accumulation” (p. 2). In fact, “this is not only colonialism, understood as a political or cultural condition, but coloniality, conceived as a matrix of knowledge, power and being” (Maldonado-Torres, 2012, p. 2). Such a matrix could be referred to as “modernity/coloniality” (Maldonado-Torres, 2012, p. 2). CHALLENGING MODERNITY AND COLONIALITY Before such intricate matrix, our task is to engage systematically in decolonization processes, to disrupt such modernity/colonialities and create a de facto just epistemology. Grosfoguel (2011) raises insightful challenges in this regard: Can we produce a radical anti-systemic politics beyond identity politics? Is it possible to articulate a critical cosmopolitanism beyond nationalism and colonialism? Can we produce knowledge beyond Third World and Eurocentric fundamentalisms? Can we overcome the traditional

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dichotomy between political economy and cultural studies? Can we move beyond economic reductionism and culturalism? How can we overcome the Eurocentric modernity without throwing away the best of modernity as many Third World fundamentalists do? (p. 1) Grosfoguel (2011) elaborates on the clashes within the Latin America Subaltern Studies Group, which occurred in a ‘dialogue’ between the South Asian Subaltern Studies Group and the Latin American Subaltern Studies Group in October 1998. According to him (2011) the members of this study group, who were primarily Latin American scholars from the United States, “despite their attempt at producing a radical and alternative knowledge, they reproduced the epistemic schema of Area Studies in the United States. With a few exceptions, they produced studies about the subaltern, rather than studies with and from a subaltern perspective. Like the imperial epistemology of Area Studies, theory was still located in the North while the subjects to be studied are located in the South” (p. 3). Grosfoguel (2011) highlights his (and obviously others’) frustrations and disappointment with a blunt reproduction of an epistemic coloniality in doing a coloniality critique. The epistemic consequences of the knowledge produced by this Latin Americanist group were very serious, because “they underestimated in their work ethnic/racial perspectives coming from the region, while giving privilege predominantly to Western thinkers” (Grosfoguel, 2011, p. 3). Along with Mallon (1994), Grosfoguel (2011) adds, that this critique [gives] epistemic privilege to what they called the ‘four horses of the apocalypse’ [that is] Foucault, Derrida, Gramsci and Guha. Among the four main thinkers whom they privilege, three are Eurocentric thinkers while two of them (Derrida and Foucault) form part of the poststructuralist/postmodern Western canon. Only one, Ranajit Guha, is a thinker thinking from the South” (p. 3) Such an overwhelming presence of Western (white male) thinkers quite incapable of thinking outside the Western frame of reference or even invite voices beyond their fixed rationale, not only ‘betrayed’ the fundamental mission of the study group but was also a regression on the struggle for epistemic justice a back set that needs to be addressed (see also Mallon, 2012). Grosfoguel (2011) examines such a back set: Among the many reasons for the split of the Latin American Subaltern Studies Group, one of them was between those who read subalternity as a postmodern critique (which represents a Eurocentric critique of Eurocentrism) and those who read subalternity as a decolonial critique (which represents a critique of Eurocentrism from subalternized and silenced knowledges) [Mignolo 2000: 183–186; 213–214]. For those of us that took side with the decolonial critique, the dialogue with the Latin American Subaltern Studies Group made evident the need to epistemologically transcend, that is, decolonize the Western canon and epistemology. (p. 3)

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Grosfoguel’s (2011) claim needs to be taken seriously. The value of critical theory relies in its capacity to decolonize. Such a process requires endogenous and exogenous itinerant messy forces working (spontaneously why not?) consciously and simultaneously. These tensions were also explicit within the South Asian Subaltern Studies Group, which mainly poses, according to Grosfoguel (2011), “a critique to Western European colonial historiography about India and to Indian nationalist Eurocentric historiography of India” (p. 3). However, “by using a Western epistemology and privileging Gramsci and Foucault, they constrained and limited the radicalism of their critique to Eurocentrism. Although they represent different epistemic projects, the South Asian Subaltern School privilege of Western epistemic canon overlapped with the sector of the Latin American Subaltern Studies Group that sided with postmodernism” (Grosfoguel, 2011, p. 3). Despite the tensions and paradoxes (not being non-Eurocentrists, at least, and producing a Eurocentric antiEurocentric critique) such study groups represent a great contribution to the field; they create a crystal-clear understanding for the militants of the decolonial critique about the need to decolonize not only subaltern studies but also postcolonial studies, which was an issue examined by Grosfoguel (2006a, 2006b) in earlier contexts as well. Such a decolonial call is not an essentialist posture. It is not a functionalist fundamentalist anti-European critique. It is an assumption that even critical and postmodern and poststructuralist theories, as shown in Chapter 1, although strong and laudable are not sufficient to disrupt the coloniality of power and being since they are basically an anti-Eurocentric/Western critique from a Eurocentric/Western fundamentalist position. Such decolonial commitment is, in Grosfoguel (2011) words, a commitment to border thinking: It is a perspective that is critical of both Eurocentric and Third World fundamentalisms, colonialism and nationalism. Border thinking is precisely a critical response to both hegemonic and marginal fundamentalisms. What all fundamentalisms share (including the Eurocentric one) is the premise that there is only one sole epistemic tradition from which to achieve Truth and Universality. However, my main points here are three: 1) that a decolonial epistemic perspective requires a broader canon of thought than simply the Western canon (including the Left Western canon); 2) that a truly universal decolonial perspective cannot be based on an abstract universal (one particular that raises itself as universal global design), but would have to be the result of the critical dialogue between diverse critical epistemic/ethical/political projects towards a pluriversal as oppose to a universal world; 3) that decolonization of knowledge would require to take seriously the epistemic perspective/cosmologies/insights of critical thinkers from the Global South thinking from and with subalternized racial/ethnic/sexual spaces and

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bodies. Postmodernism and poststructuralism as epistemological projects are caught within the Western canon reproducing within its domains of thought and practice a particular form of coloniality of power/ knowledge. (p. 4) In this context, Grosfoguel’s (2011) and others’ criticism of the Western/ Eurocentric epistemological totalitarian model (including the Western Left canon) overlaps the issues that I raised in the previous chapter not only about the potential but also about the limits, challenges, and vicissitudes of critical and poststructural models in the field of curriculum. That is, not undoing the merits of critical and poststructural theories as well as ‘political economy and cultural studies’, it is important also to realize how such theoretical frameworks have been and continue to be steps forward toward a decolonization process because such theoretical frameworks although counterhegemonic never stopped being Eurocentric in its anti-Eurocentric criticism. This, as I examine in great detail in Chapter 6, is a future path for the curriculum field, and it is at the core of what I call ICT—Itinerant Curriculum Theory (Paraskeva, 2011a) DECOLONIAL THINKING: COMMITMENT TO DELINKING In an insightful piece, Epistemic Disobedience and the Decolonial Option: A Manifesto, Walter Mignolo (2011) explains some of the interesting outcomes from two crucial meetings. The first one was in May 2004 with Arturo Escobar and el coletivo from the modernity/coloniality project of Duke University and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. They met to examine issues around Critical Theory and Decolonization. Following Mignolo (2011), el coletivo was driven by imperative matters, such as what should ‘critical theory’ aim to be when the damnés de la terre are brought into the picture, next to Horkheimer’s proletarians or today’s translation of the proletariat, such as the multitudes; how can “critical theory” be subsumed into the project of modernity/coloniality and decolonization? Or would this subsumption perhaps suggest the need to abandon the twentieth-century formulations of a critical theory project? Or, would it suggest the exhaustion of the project of modernity? (p. 43) The second one, Mapping the Decolonial Turn, was organized by Nelson Maldonado-Torres and held in Berkeley in April 2005, involving el coletivo modernity/coloniality project and members of the Caribbean Philosophical Association project titled Shifting the Geographies of Reason and with a group of philosophers and Latino cultural critics. According to Mignolo (2011), despite the tensions and consequences such encounters made it clear

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that “while modernity/coloniality are analytical categories of the colonial matrix of power, the category of decoloniality widened the frame and the objectives of the project, the same conceptualization of coloniality that is constitutive of modernity is already decolonial thinking in progress” (p. 44). Mignolo (2011) brings to the fore the importance of the genesis of the decolonial(ity) thinking, which was a concept advanced by Anibal Quijano (1991), in his piece Colonialidad y Modernidad/racionalidad, where he argues for the need to build analytic limits to the Eurocentric hegemonic platform (p. 44). Decolonial thinking, Mignolo (2011) claims, involves a nonnegotiable desprendimento (total, one must emphasize), a decolonial link (p. 3). Following Mignolo’s (2011) examination of Quijano’s reasoning, desprendimento or desprenderse (i.e., delinking) implies epistemic de-linking or, in other words, epistemic disobedience. Epistemic disobedience leads us to decolonial options as a set of projects that have in common the effects experienced by all the inhabitants of the globe that were at the receiving end of global designs to colonize the economy (appropriation of land and natural resources), authority (management by the Monarch, the State, or the Church), and police and military enforcement (coloniality of power), to colonize knowledges (languages, categories of thoughts, belief systems, etc.) and beings (subjectivity). “Delinking” is then necessary because there is no way out of the coloniality of power from within Western (Greek and Latin) categories of thought. (p. 45) That is, one needs to “desprenderse de las vinculaciones de la racionalidadmodernidad con la colonialidad, en primer término, y en definitiva con todo poder no constituido en la decisión libre de gentes libres [extricate oneself from the linkages between rationality/modernity and coloniality, first of all, and defi nitely from all power which is not constituted by free decisions made by free people]” (Mignolo, 2011, p. 45). Thus, delinking “implies epistemic disobedience rather than the constant search for ‘newness’ [and] takes us to a different place, to a different ‘beginning’ (not in Greece, but in the responses to the ‘conquest and colonization’ of America and the massive trade of enslaved Africans), to spatial sites of struggles and building rather than to a new temporality within the same space (from Greece, to Rome, to Paris, to London, to Washington, DC)” (Mignolo, 2011, p. 45). In this sense, decoloniality is “the energy that does not allow the operation of the logic of coloniality nor believes the fairy tales of the rhetoric of modernity” (Mignolo, 2011, p. 46). Decoloniality, blatantly, is not just a call to interrupt the Cartesian model of modernity. It offers a solution of another word, another world. Decolonial thinking is not just about the possibility of another epistemology. It is about the real existence of such non-Western epistemological river. Mignolo (2011) clashes

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with specific critical views that vehemently challenged modernity, however reductively. That is, Mignolo (2011) notion of delinking is not cocooned in the swamp of political economy, as defended by Amin in his Delinking: Towards a Polycentric World. Mignolo’s (2011) decolonial call to delink reacts against (post)modern totalitarian levels of thought that paradoxically ignore the epistemic sphere. In this context, Mignolo (2011) challenges leading poststructuralists such as Foucault, Said, and Spivak, among others, because they built a critique confined to Western frameworks, ignoring the word and the world of crucial non-Western intellectuals. Mignolo’s (2011) call is a call to decolonially delink, a radical delink, one that explodes and implodes the rational pillars of postmodernity and neocoloniality. In Mignolo’s (2011) decolonial consulate, “decolonial thinking emerged at the very foundation of modernity/coloniality, as its counterpoint [and it] is differentiated from post-colonial theory or post-colonial studies in that the genealogy of these are located in French post-structuralism more than in the dense history of planetary decolonial thinking” (p. 46). That is, more than anticapitalist and anticolonialist the very roots of the decolonial are precisely ante-capitalist and ante-colonialist, without being ceased to be anticolonial and anticapitalist. Madina Tlostanova and Walter Mignolo (2012) elaborate over the differences and parallels between postcolonial and decolonial thinking. As they argue (2012) in addressing the limits of postcoloniality, decolonial thinking is not against postcolonialism (p. 31). Precisely the opposite, decolonial thinking brings “forward another option”. After all, both postcoloniality and decoloniality are “two different responses to the five hundred years of Western consolidation and Imperial expansion, [responses] that were [and are] built on different historical experiences, languages, memories, and genealogies of thought” (Tlostanova & Mignolo, 2012, p. 32). They (2012) claim that postcolonial studies “emerged mainly in the US [concerned and focus] with the body politics of knowledge [starting] from the version of history that places the British Empire (or sometimes the French Empire) at the Center of modern colonial history [and all in all postcolonial studies] and theories are connected to the splendors and miseries of French post-structuralism through which colonial experiences in British and India were filtered” (pp. 32–33). However, with decolonial thinking, the focus or the password is desprendimento total, meaning, “to delink from principles and structures supporting the existing system of knowledge and humanities; [decolonial thinking] questions the rhetoric justifying the role of the social sciences and the humanities as well their methodology. [Decolonial thinking] calls into question the disciplinary legitimacy of knowledge and the disqualification of knowledge that does not obey the existing disciplinary rules” (Tlostanova & Mignolo, 2012, p. 32). That is, decolonial thinking is a commitment “to learn to unlearn in order to relearn” (Tlostanova & Mignolo, 2012, p. 32), or, to complexify Linda Smith’s (1999) concept of disciplinary disobedience, it is a call to disciplinary detach. In sum,

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Epistemicides and the Yoke of Modernity [p]ostcolonality presupposes postmodernity, while decolonial thinking and decolonial option are always delinked from modernity and postmodernity. It brings to the foreground a silenced and different genealogy of thought. The decolonial option originated not in Europe, but in the Third World, as a consequence of struggles for political decolonization. And it emerged among ‘minorities’ in the heart of the US as a consequence of the Civil Rights movement and its impact on decolonizing knowledge and being through gender and ethnic studies. (Tlostanova & Mignolo, 2012, p. 33)

As I examined before, decolonial thinking is a nonnegotiable commitment, a way of life framed in a different reading of the word and world. It is not a solution designed for an irremediable, interminably, postponed future. It is concrete and resurfaces from within the belligerent clashes between colonizers and colonized. A utopia of the past materialized in the present. Epistemic disobedience, Mignolo (2011) argues, is not just a contemporary issue although it runs parallel with modernity; it emerged immediately with the institutionalization of coloniality (p. 45). That is, “if coloniality is constitutive of modernity since the salvationist rhetoric of modernity presupposes the oppressive and condemnatory logic of coloniality (from there come the damnés of Fanon), then this oppressive logic produces an energy of discontent, of distrust, of release within those who react against imperial violence” (Mignolo, 2011, pp. 45–46). Tlostanova and Mignolo (2012) claim that decolonial thinking stems from “the sixteen century and cut[s] across the eighteen to the twentieth centuries” (p. 31). Mignolo (2011) unveils the first manifestations of the decolonial turn portrayed by Waman Puma de Ayala and Ottobbah Cugoano, who published, respectively, New Chronicle and Good Government around 1616 and Sentiments on the Evil of Slavery in 1787 (p. 47). Mignolo (2011) adds that these works are decolonial political treatises that, thanks to the coloniality of knowledge, were not able to share the table of discussion with the likes of Machiavelli, Hobbes, and Locke. To reinscribe them today in the genealogy of decolonial thinking is an urgent project. Without this genealogy, decolonial thinking would be nothing more than a gesture whose logic would depend on some of the various genealogies founded by Greece and Rome, and be re-inscribed in the European imperial modernity after the Renaissance, in some of the six imperial languages already mentioned: Italian, Castilian, and Portuguese during the Renaissance; French, English, German during the Enlightenment. Waman Puma and Cugoano thought and opened a space for the unthinkable in the imperial genealogy of modernity, as much in their rightist aspects as in their leftist aspects. (p. 47)

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Mignolo (2011) argues that “Waman Puma and Cugoano opened the doors to an other thinking, to a border thinking, by way of the experience and memory of Tawantinsuyu in the former; and of the experience and memory of the brutal African slavery of the Atlantic in the latter” (p. 48). Decolonial is a commitment to delinking and opening; its foci is not “the doors that lead towards the truth (aletheia), but rather to other places; to the places of colonial memory; to the footprints of the colonial wound from where decolonial thinking is weaved; [that is,] doors that lead to other types of truths whose basis is not being but the coloniality of being, the colonial wound. Decolonial thinking presupposes, always, the colonial difference” (Mignolo, 2011, p. 48). Decolonial thinking challenges the “presumed totality of the gnosis of the Occident” (Mignolo, 2011, p. 48). Mignolo (2011) asserts that “a decolonial turn is the opening and the freedom from the thinking and the forms of living (economies-other, political theories-other), the cleansing of the coloniality of being and of knowledge; the de-linking from the spell of the rhetoric of modernity, from its imperial imaginary articulated in the rhetoric of democracy” (p. 48). It is interesting to notice how for both Waman Puma de Ayala and Ottobbah Cugoano, decolonial thinking relied on Christianity. But it was a reading of Christianity as being equivalent to that of the democracy of the pen and the word of the Zapatistas; [that is,] democracy is not a private property of Western thought and political theory, but rather one of the principles of coexistence, of good living. Such a concept of democracy collides frontally with the concept and form of democracy in the U.S. context that appears almost an antithesis to co-existence. As is shown in the following chapters, “the genealogy of decolonial thinking is un-known in the genealogy of Western European thinking” (Mignolo, 2011, p. 59). Such border thinking will pay due respect to other epistemological forms beyond the Western Eurocentric totalitarian, one that for the past millenary has been produced and reproduced as I have been examining. Such border thinking is a commitment with epistemic justice and with social and cognitive justice. As the report prepared for the National Working Group on Education and the Ministry of Indian and Northern Affairs, Ottawa, Canada, reveals “whether or not it has been acknowledge[d] by the Eurocentric mainstream, Indigenous knowledge has always existed” (Battiste, 2002, p. 4). The task for indigenous academics has been to affirm and activate the holistic paradigm of Indigenous knowledges to reveal the wealth and richness of Indigenous languages, worldviews, teachings, and experiences, all of which have been systematically excluded from contemporary educational institutions and from Eurocentric knowledge systems. Through this act of intellectual selfdetermination, Indigenous academics are developing new analyses and

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In the following chapters, I examine how “Eurocentric thought asserts that only Europeans can progress and that Indigenous peoples are frozen in time, guided by knowledge systems that reinforce the past and do not look towards the future” (Battiste, 2002, p. 4). Also, as is shown later, the idea or the cult “of people not being able to get by without Europe’s theoretical or cultural achievements is one of the most definitive tenets of modernity. This logic has been applied for centuries to the colonial world” (MaldonadoTorres, 2003, p. 5). Such an ideological cult is anchored in a myriad of strategies that have been used to reinforce the myth that regions outside Europe contribute nothing to the development of knowledge, humanities, arts, science, and technology. These strategies include the blind reliance on and citation of Greco-Roman references despite the fact that the Greek alphabet is largely of Syrian/Lebanese origin. The manipulation of dates and demotion in importance of non-European knowledge such as Mayan, Hindu, and Arabic numerals, the concept of zero and algebraic notations, the use of decimals, and the solution of complex equations; the Europeanization of the names of outstanding scientists and their devices, scientific documents, and processes to undermine equal and fair assessment of the global history of knowledge (for instance, a comet identified by the Chinese as early as 2,500 years ago is attributed to Haley); and the classification and trivialization of non-European science and technological innovations and inventions as ‘art’. (p. 227) So far, I have examined the nexus among coloniality of power and being, as well as Eurocentrism. In doing so, I have been able to analyze how coloniality framed as a ‘matrix’ of knowledge, power, and being has been able to design and implement an epistemic race-eugenic tapestry, aiming to perpetuate a totalitarian capitalist social model. Needless to mention is how the educational system, in general, and curriculum, in particular, are both profoundly implicated in such epistemicide. As we have detailed in length elsewhere (see Paraskeva, 2010), the best way for schools to fight for a just and equal society—especially when facing the impact of neo-radical centrist policies and strategies—is to engage in a struggle for what Sousa Santos, Nunes, and Meneses (2007) call epistemological diversity. They argue that there is no such thing as “global social justice without cognitive justice” (p. ix). In fact, by identifying particular forms of knowledge as “official,” schooling participates in what Sousa Santos (1997) called epistemicides—a lethal tool that fosters the commitment to imperialism and white supremacy (hooks, 1994).

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Sousa Santos et al. (2007) astutely claims that the “suppression of knowledge [of indigenous peoples of the Americas and of African slaves] was the other side of genocide” (p. ix). Their argument is worth quoting at length here: Many non-Western (indigenous, rural, etc.) populations of the world conceive of the community and the relationship with nature, knowledge, historical experience, memory, time, and space as configuring ways of life cannot be reduced to Eurocentric conceptions and cultures . . . The adoption of allegedly universal valid, Eurocentric legal and political models, such as the neoliberal economic order, representative democracy, individualism, or the equation between state and law often rests . . . on forms of domination based on class, ethnic, territorial, racial, or sexual differences and on the denial of collective identities and rights considered incompatible with Eurocentric definitions of the modern social order. (pp. xx–xxi) Thus, one cannot deny that “there is an epistemological foundation to the capitalist and imperial order that the global North has been imposing on the global South” (p. ix). What we need, Sousa Santos (2004) argues, is to engage in a battle against “the monoculture of scientific knowledge [and fight for an] ecology of knowledges” (p. xx), which is an invitation to the promotion of non-relativistic dialogues among knowledges, granting equality of opportunities to the different kinds of knowledge engaged in an ever broader epistemological disputes aimed both at maximizing their respective contributions to build a more democratic and just society and at decolonizing knowledge and power. (p. xx) Thus, the fight should be against the coloniality of power and knowledge. In fighting this battle, one will end up challenging particular notions, concepts, and practices relative to multiculturalism that are profoundly Eurocentric, [that] create and describe cultural diversity within the framework of the nation-states of the Northern hemisphere . . . the prime expression of the cultural logic of multinational or global capitalism, a capitalism without homeland at last, and a new form of racism, tend[ing] to be quite descriptive and apolitical thus suppressing the problem of power relations, exploitation, inequality, and exclusion. (pp. xx–xxi) We actually need a multicultural approach that adopts an emancipatory content and direction aimed mainly at the multiple articulations of difference. Thus, we will be allowing for the fruitful conditions of what Sousa Santos (2004) calls the sociology of absences. In other words, what we have

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is a call for the democratization of knowledges that is a commitment to an emancipatory, non-relativistic, cosmopolitan ecology of knowledges, bringing together and staging [of] dialogues and alliances between diverse forms of knowledge, cultures, and cosmopologies in response to different forms of oppression that enact the coloniality of knowledge and power. [We need actually] to learn from the South (since) the aim to reinvent social emancipation goes beyond the critical theory produced in the North and the social and political praxis to which it has subscribed. (Sousa Santos et al., 2007, p. xiv) In fact, it would be a mistake to dissociate Western hegemonic epistemologies from the dehumanizing imperialist and colonialist ideological platforms. As Smith (1999) notes, [i]mperialism and colonialism are the specific formations through which the West came to “see,” to “name,” and to “know” indigenous communities. The cultural archive with its systems of representation, codes for unlocking systems of classification, and fragmented artifacts of knowledge enabled travelers and observers to make sense of what they saw and to represent their new-found knowledge back to the West through the authorship and authority of their representations. (p. 60) Summing up, the fabrication of modernity and its subsequent rationale “produced a perspective of knowledge and mode(s) of producing knowledge that gives a very tight account of the character of the global model of power: colonial/modern/capitalist/Eurocentered. This perspective and concrete mode of producing knowledge is Eurocentrism” (Quijano, 2008, p. 197). Eurocentrism is [t]he name of a perspective of knowledge whose systematic formation began in Western Europe before the middle of the seventeenth century, although some of its roots are, without doubt, much older. In the following centuries this perspective was made globally hegemonic, travelling the same course as the dominion of European bourgeois class. Its constitution was associated with a specific bourgeois secularization of European thought and with the experiences and necessities of the global model of capitalist (colonial/modern) and Eurocentered power established since the colonization of America. It does not involve all of the knowledges of history of all Europe or Western Europe in particular. It does not refer to all the modes of knowledge of all Europeans and all epochs. It is instead a specific rationality or perspective of knowledge that was made globally hegemonic, colonizing and overcoming other previous or different conceptual formations ad their respective concrete knowledge’s, as much in Europe as in the rest of the World. (Quijano, 2000b, p. 549)

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Following Amin’s (2009) notes, Eurocentrism is much more than a vision of ignorance and fear, and it “implies a theory of world history, and departing from it, a global political project” (p. 154). Such a global ideologicalpolitical project “legitimates at one and the same time the existence of capitalism as a social system and the worldwide inequality that accompanies it” (Amin, 2009, p. 156). Eurocentrism is a “Christianophile myth” and antithetical racist construct of Orientalism that (1) removes Ancient Greece from the very milieu in which it unfolded and developed—the Orient—in order to annex Hellenism to Europe arbitrarily, (2) retains the mark of racism, the fundamental basis on which European cultural unity was constructed, (3) interprets Christianity also annexed arbitrarily to Europe, as the principal aspect in the maintenance of European cultural unity, conforming to an unscientific vision of religious phenomena, and (4) concurrently constructs the vision of a near East and the more distant Orients on the same racist foundation, again employing an immutable vision of religion. (Amin, 2009, p. 166) Eurocentrism is the epistemicidum. Orientalism, Amin (2009) argues, is an “ideological construction of a mythical Orient whose characteristics are treated as immutable traits defined in simple opposition to the characteristics of the Occidental world. The image of this opposite is an essential element of Eurocentrism” (p. 175). Eurocentrism is not actually a social theory, Amin (2009) claims. It is, indeed, “a prejudice that distorts social theories” (Amin, 2009, p. 166) thought. In what follows, I examine how modernity has been able to weave a particular vision of history that not only laudably silences non-Western epistemological forms but also deletes any non-Western epistemological fertilizer at the very core of Western epistemological platform. The next chapter illustrates how the Western European epistemological matrix has been vehemently challenged by African intellectuals. Within the struggle against what modernity and post-modernity represents and its own reductionisms and insufficiencies to accurately examine and represent social reality emerged the concept of transmodernity, which is “a real paradigm change that intends to clarify gnoseologic, sociologic, ethical and aesthetic relations” (Rodriguez Magda, 2011, p. 1). Rodriguez Magda (2011) adds that transmodernity would seek a synthesis between premodern and modern position, constituting a model which accepts the coexistence of both, in order to reconcile the notion of progress with the respect for cultural and religious differences, trying to stop the rejection, mainly from Islamic countries to the Western view of modernity. (p. 2) As I have mentioned, before the current globalization and internationalization fever that swamps our field, the struggle for a relevant and just

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curriculum must be a struggle for social and cognitive justice. More than the next momentum of such critical curriculum river, this is the momentum, a commitment to decolonial thinking that will produce not just an accurate and productive self-critique of the insufficiencies of the radical critical model of (post)modernity but will also simultaneously pay attention to the importance of challenging the colonial power matrix that via education and curriculum ferments and fosters epistemicides. Such critical river needs to be sentient of the wor(l)ds behind and beyond the Western epistemological platform, wor(l)ds that are non-monolithic. As I have examined elsewhere (Paraskeva, 2011a, 2011b) and will be shown later as well, a powerful way to do this is to assume a commitment to an itinerant posture and engage in what I have termed ICT. I will return to this issue later. In what follows, I briefly explore some of the most towering tensions within the very marrow of a particular African epistemological vein. I examine the egregious error of the Western epistemological paradigm in minimizing, silencing, and ignoring these epistemological clashes.

REFERENCES Amin, S. (2009) Eurocentrism. New York. Monthly Review Press. Anyon, J. (1983) Workers, Labor and Economic History, and Textbook Content. In Michael Apple and Lois Weis (eds) Ideology and Practice in Schooling. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, pp., 37–60. Battiste, M. (2002) Indigenous Knowledge and Pedagogy in the First Nations Education. A Literature Review with Recommendations. Indian and Northern Affairs. Ottawa. Canada. Beyer, L. and Liston, D. (1996) Curriculum in Conflict: Social Visions, Educational Agendas and Progressive School Reform. New York: Teachers College. Brindle, P. and Arnot, M. (1999) England Expects Every Man to Do his Duty: The Gendering of the Citizenship Textbook 1940–1996. Oxford Review of Education, 25 (1, 2), pp., 103–23. Cabral, A. (1973) Return to the Source. Selected Speeches of Amilcar Cabral. New York: Monthly Review Press. Castro-Gómez, S. (2008) (Post)colonialities for Dummies: Latin American Perspectives on Modernity, Coloniality and the Geopolitics of Knowledge. In M. Mabel, E. Dussel and C. Jauregui (eds) Coloniality at Large: Latin America and the Postcolonial Debate. Durham: Duke University Press, pp., 259–86. Cesaire, A. (2000) Discourse on Colonialism. New York: Monthly Review Press. Chomsky, N. (1992) Chronicles of Dissent: Interviews with David Barsamian. Monroe, ME: Common Courage Press. Dussel, E. (1995b) Philosophy of Liberation. Oregon: Wipf & Stock. Dussel, E. (2000) Europe, Modernity and Eurocentrism, Nepantla: Views from South, 1 (3), pp., 465–78. Dussel, E. (2013) Ethics of Liberation. In the Age of Globalization and Exclusion. Durham: Duke University Press. Eze, E. (1998) Modern Western Philosophy and African Colonialism. In E. Eze (ed) African Philosophy. An Anthology. Oxford: Blackwell Publishers, pp., 213–221. Giroux, H. (1981a) Ideology, Culture & the Process of Schooling. Philadelphia: Temple University Press.

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Grosfoguel, R. (2003) Colonial Subjects. Puerto Ricans in a Global Perspective. Berkeley: University of California Press. Grosfoguel, R. (2006a) From Postcolonial Studies to Decolonial Studies: Decolonizing Postcolonial Studies: A Preface. Review, 29 (2), pp., 141–43. Grosfoguel, R. (2006b) World-System Analysis in the Context of Transmodernity, Border Thinking and Global Coloniality. Review, 29 (2), pp., 167–88. Grosfoguel, R. (2010) Epistemic Islamophobia. Colonial Social Sciences. Human Architecture: Journal of the Sociology of Self-Knowledge, 8 (2), pp., 29–39. Grosfoguel, R. (2011) Decolonizing Post-Colonial Studies and Paradigms of Political Economy: Transmodernity, Decolonial Thinking, and Global Coloniality. Transmodernity. Journal of Peripheral Cultural Production of the Luso-Hispanic World, 1 (1), pp., 1–38. Harris, W. (1889) The Intellectual Value of Tool-Work. Journal of Proceedings and Addresses (National Education Association), pp., 92–98. Hill Collins, P. (2000) Black Feminist Thought. Consciousness and the Politics of Empowerment. New York: Routledge. hooks, b. (1994) Teaching to Transgress. Education as a Practice of Freedom. New York: Routledge. Janson, E. (2014) Where the Sidewalk Ends, the Air Begins: Colonialism and Coloniality in the Age of Liquid Modernity. Paper Presented at the Educational Leadership and Policy Studies Doctoral Program, University of Massachusetts, Dartmouth. Kliebard, H. (1995) The Struggle for the American Curriculum: 1893–1958. New York: Routledge. Las Casas, F. B. (2008) A Brief Account of the Destruction of the Indies. USA: BN Publishing. Latour, B. (1999) Pandora’s Hope. Essays on the Reality of Science Studies. London: Harvard University Press. Loewen, J. (1995) Lies My Teacher Told Me: Everything Your High School History Textbook Got Wrong. New York: New Press. Maldonado-Torres, N. (2003) Imperio y Colonialidad del Ser. Paper presented at the Annual Meeting of the Latin American Studies Association in Dallas, Texas, March 29, pp., 1–24. Maldonado-Torres, N. (2007) On the Coloniality of Being. Contributions to the Development of a Concept. Cultural Studies, 21 (2, 3), pp., 240–70. Maldonado-Torres, N. (2008a) Against War. Views from the Underside of Modernity. Durham: Duke University Press. Maldonado-Torres, N. (2008b) Religion, Conquete et Race dans les Foundation du Monde Modern/Colonial. In M. Mestri, R. Grosfoguel and E. Y. Soum (eds) Islamophobie dand les Monde Moderne. Paris: IIIT France, pp., 205–38. Maldonado-Torres, N. (2012) Decoloniality at Large: Towards a Trans-Americas and Global Transmodern Paradigm (Introduction to Second Special Issue of “Thinking through the Decolonial Turn”). Transmodernity. Journal of Peripheral Cultural Production of the Luso-Hispanic World, 1 (3), pp., 1–10. Mallon, F. (1994) The Promise and Dilemma of Subaltern Studies: Perspectives from Latin American History. American Historical Review, 99, pp. 1491–515. Mallon, F. (2012) Decolonizing Native Histories. Durham: Duke University Press. Mignolo, W. (2000) Local Histories/Global Designs: Essays on the Coloniality of Power, Subaltern Knowledges and Border Thinking. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Mignolo, W. (2008) The Geopolitics of Knowledge and Colonial Difference. In M. Morana, E. Dussel, and C. Jauregui (eds) Coloniality at Large. Latin America and the Postcolonial Debate. San Antonio: Duke University Press, pp., 225–58.

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Mignolo, W. (2011) Epistemic Disobedience and the Decolonial Option: A Manifesto. Transmodernity. Journal of Peripheral Cultural Production of the Luso-Hispanic World, 1, (2), pp., 44–66. Mignolo, W. (2012) Local Histories / Global Designs. Coloniality, Subaltern Knowledges and Border Thinking. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Mills, C. (1997) The Racial Contract. Ithaca: Cornell University Press. Muelder, H. (1984) Missionaries and Muckrakers: the First Hundred Years of Knox College. Urbana: University of Illinois Press. Paraskeva, J. (2001) As Dinamicas dos Conflitos Ideologicos e Culturais na Fundamentacao do Curriculo. Porto: ASA. Paraskeva, J. (2007a) Ideologia, Cultura e Curriculo. Lisboa: Didatica Editora. Paraskeva, J. (2007b) Continuidades e Descontinuidades e Silêncios. Por uma Desterritorialização da Teoria Curricular. Associação Nacional de Pós-Graduação e Pesquisa em Educação, (ANPEd), Caxambu, Brasil. Paraskeva, J. (2010) Hijacking Public Schooling: The Epicenter of Neo Radical Centrism. In S. Macrine, P. McLaren and D. Hill (eds) Revolutionizing Pedagogy: Educating for Social Justice within and Beyond Neo-liberalism. New York: Palgrave, pp., 167–186. Paraskeva, J. (2011a) Conflicts in Curriculum Theory. Challenging Hegemonic Epistemologies. New York: Palgrave. Paraskeva, J. (2011b) Nova Teoria Curricular. Lisboa: Edicoes Pedago. Quijano, A. (1991). Colonialidad y Modernidad/Racionalidad. Perú Indígena, 29 (1), 11–21. Quijano, A. (2000a) Coloniality of Power, Eurocentrism and Latin America, Neplanta, Views from the South, 1, 3 pp., 533–580. Quijano, A. (2000b). Colonialidad del poder y classificacion Social. Journal of World Systems Research, 6 (2), pp., 342–386. Quijano, A. (2008) Coloniality of Power, Eurocentrism, and Latin America. In M. Morana, E. Dussel, and C. Jauregui (eds) Colonialiy at Large. Latin America and the Postcolonial Debate. San Antonio: Duke University Press, pp., 181–224. Rodríguez Magda, R. M. (2011) Transmodernidad: un Nuevo Paradigma. Transmodernity 1.1, pp., 1–13. Silliman, B. (1829) Original Papers in Relation to a Course of Liberal Education. The American Journal of Science and Arts, XV, pp., 297–351. Smith, L. (1999) Decolonizing Methodologies: Research and Indigenous Peoples. London: Zed Books. Sousa Santos, B. (1997) Um Discurso sobre as Ciencias. Porto: Afrontamento. Sousa Santos, B. (2004) A Gramatica do Tempo. Porto: Afrontamento. Sousa Santos, B., Nunes, J. and Meneses, M. (2007) Open Up the Cannon of Knowledge and Recognition of Difference. In B. Sousa Santos (ed) Another Knowledge Is Possible. London: Verso, pp., ix–lxii. Tlostanova, M. and Mignolo, W. (2012) Learning to Unlearn. Decolonial Reflections from Euroasia and the Americas. Ohio: Ohio State University. Todorova, M. (1997) Imagining the Balkans. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Todorov, T. (1984) The Conquest of America. The Question of the Other. Norman: University of California Press. Torres Santomé, J. (1996). The Presence of Different Cultures in Schools: Possibilities of Dialogue and Action. Curriculum Studies, 4 (1), pp., 25–41. Tyack, D. (1974) The One Best System. A History of American Urban Education. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. Walker, C. (2011) How Does It Feel to Be a Problem. (Local) Knowledge, Human Interests and the Ethics of Opacity. Transmodernity. Journal of Peripheral Cultural Production of the Luso-Hispanic World, 1 (2), pp., 104–119.

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Wallerstein, I. et al (1996) Open the Social Sciences. Report of the Gulbenkian Commission on the Restructuring of the Social Sciences. Mestizo Spaces/Espaces Metisses. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Walsh, C. (2012) ‘Other’ Knowledges, ‘Other’ Critiques Reflections on the Politics and Practices of Philosophy and Decoloniality in the Other America. Transmodernity. Journal of Peripheral Cultural Production of the Luso-Hispanic World, 1 (3), pp., 11–27. Zinn, H. (1999) The Future of History. Monroe: Common Courage Press. Zinn, H. (2001) On History. New York: Seven Stories Press.

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Connell’s (2007) approach is a good start to examine the preponderance of non-Western forms of knowledge. By claiming Western sociology as a classed, raced, and gendered science of the new industrial society (Smith, 1999), Connell emphasized the need to pay close attention to indigenous forms of knowledge developed in Africa and within the Arab/Middle Eastern sphere. According to Connell (2007), “sociology developed in a specific social location: among men of the metropolitan liberal bourgeoisie. Those who wrote sociology were a mixture of engineers and doctors, academics, journalists, clerics and a few could live on their family capital” (p. 14). She continues: At the very time Durkheim and his colleagues were building the imperial gaze into their sociology, other French social scientists engaged intellectuals of the Islamic world in dialogue about modernity, colonialism, and culture. In the same generation, Du Bois moved from a focus on race relations within the United States to a strongly internationalist perspective, with particular attention to Africa. In the first half of the twentieth century, black African intellectuals such as Sol Plaatje and Jomo Kenyatta dialogued with metropole through social science as well as political struggle. The mainstream of metropolitan sociology made little use of such contacts; but this other history is also real, and we need to build on it today. (p. 25) It should be highlighted as well that, while in Russia, Bolsheviks were leading a revolution that transformed the world, in southern Africa, the mythic South Africa Communist Party was ferociously challenging slavery with a clarion call to the Bantu race. A call to wake up and win the battle against colonialism and imperialism: Workers of the Bantu Race! Why do you live in slavery? Why are you not free as other men are free? Why are you kicked and spat upon by your masters? Why must you carry a pass before you can move anywhere? And if you are found without one, why are you thrown into

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prison? Why do you toil hard for little money? And again thrown into prison if you refuse to work. Why do they herd you like cattle into compounds, Why? Because you are the toilers of the earth. Because the masters want you to labour for their profit. Because they pay the Government and the Police to keep you as slaves to toil for them. If it were not for the money that they make from your labour, you would not be oppressed. But mark! You are the mainstay of the country. You do all the work, you are the means of their living. That is why you are robbed of the fruits of your labour and robbed of your liberty as well. There is only one way of deliverance for you, Bantu workers. Unite as workers unite! Forget the things that divide you. Let there be no longer any talk of Basuto, Zulu, or Shangaan. You are all labourers. Let Labour be your common bond. Wake up! And open your ears. The sun has arisen, the day is breaking. For a long time you were asleep when the great mill of the rich man was grinding and breaking the sweat from your work for nothing. You are strongly urged to come to the meeting of the workers and fight for your rights. Come and listen to the good news and deliver yourselves from the chains of the Capitalist. Unity is strength. The fight is great against the many pass laws that persecute you, and the low wages and the misery of existence. Workers of all lands unite. You have nothing to lose but your chains. You have a world to win. (South African Communist Party Documents, 1918, p. 2) In this chapter, I attempt to briefly unveil the tensions between Eurocentrism and African epistemological frameworks. In doing so, I examine not only how Western Europeans arrogantly viewed and marginalized African epistemologies but also how eugenic colonial knowledge relied on precolonial forms of knowledge and knowing to help sediment the process of psychological dominance. Furthermore, I examine the crucial tensions within African epistemological framework. I challenge the reductive view of deintellectualizing African intellectuals by labeling them as freedom fighters. Through this, I analyze that the struggle for freedom against colonialism and imperialism was not necessarily conceptually supported by particular Western European frameworks and social movements, such as Marxism. In a sentence, this chapter and this book attempt to affirmatively go beyond the questions raised by Wallerstein et al. (1996)—“Does Africa have a history? Or do only ‘historic nations’ have histories?” (p. 40). The answer proposes that we reread Africa with African lenses, and, in doing so, defends that an African episteme is not necessarily only the heiress of European epistemes but that there is also an important epistemological clash within African epistemological terrain that cannot be ostracized by the West. In addition, the scientificity of such epistemes was secularly dilapidated, alienated, and usurped by Western colonial powers, reducing them to the sphere of voodoo and underdevelopment.

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To reread Africa, or for some to read Africa for the first time, we must not restrict ourselves to Western traditional methods, but consider the rich language and histories that exist beyond the written wor(l)d, as Freire would put it, without running the risk of mythologizing and romanticizing such African wor(l)d(s) (see Fanon, 1963). ORALITY AS A COMMUNAL SOURCE OF KNOWLEDGE In his Contributions to the Sociology of Knowledge from African Oral Poetry, Akiwowo (1986) emphasized the need to understand oral poetry as a major source of knowledge in African cultural-social formations. Western epistemologies arrogantly neglected the importance of a well-established indigenous sociology edified by non-Western and African intellectuals, like Akiwowo, who persistently attempted to “reorient the discipline to the African reality through an integrated system of conceptual schemes, theories, and methodological techniques drawn up in relation to both African and European thought-ways and social practices” (Connell, 2007, p. 90; Akiwowo, 1980). Having the ritual oral poetry of the community and the intricacies connected with oral forms of language as a major source of knowledge, Akiwowo fought for the need to develop an African sociological platform deeply based on African concepts and import those concepts to Europe instead of submitting African sociology to the colonization of Western concepts, which would be completely detached from African sui generis realities. Moreover, North Atlantic metropolitan epistemologies minimized and silenced the important struggles, debates, tensions, and clashes within the very marrow of African epistemologies. Actually, hegemonic science has shown “either a passive inability or an active hostility to recognizing scientific work autonomously produced” (Sousa Santos, 2005, p. xxiii) by non-Western countries. Undeniably, the wrangle between Western and non-Western knowledges cannot be understood as binaries, and it raises ontological issues that needed to be addressed. For example, as Wallerstein and his colleagues (1996) argue, “were the[se] two [epistemological zones] ontologically identical or different?” (pp. 39–40). Akiwowo points to the African Asuwada principle—quite related with oratory as a form of knowledge—as the way to edify meanings and to understand the person and reality. The Asuwada principle is well summarized here by Connell (2007): The unit of social life is the individual’s life, being, existence, or character; the corporeal individual, essentially, cannot continue-in-being without a community; since the social life of a group of individual beings is sustained by a spirit of sodality, any form of self-alienation for the purpose of pursuing a purely selfish aim, is morally speaking, an error or sin; and a genuine social being is one who works daily, and sacrifices

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willingly, in varying ways, his or her cherished freedom and material acquisitions for self-improvement as well as for the common good. For without one, the other cannot be achieved. (p. 91) This was ferociously challenged by Lawuyi and Taiwo (1990), who argued that Akiwowo was trying to base African sociology on Anglo–North American concepts and was not developing any kind of sociological theory in the words of Yoruba, which is not a minor issue (as cited in Connell, 2007, p. 91). If we consider Gyekye’s (1987) argument that “[l]anguage, as a vehicle of concepts, not only embodies a philosophical point of view, but also influences philosophical thought” (p. 29), in fact, language “does not merely suggest, but may also embody philosophical perspectives, every language implies or suggests a vision of the world” (p. 31). In examining a number of crucial scientific sources aiming to build vital themes and concern involving the arguments underpinning Caliban’s Reason, Henry (2000) insightfully emphasizes how in the Yoruba tradition “a wise[man] who knows proverbs can reconcile difficulties” (p. 23). That is, Henry (2000) claims, more than the wrangle between an absolute versus a pure discursive position within Africana philosophies, one needs to perceive how traditional Africa(na) philosophies rely on a religious base without denying the importance of “origin narratives [that] are not arbitrary or superfluous stories” (Henry, 2000, p. 23). Quite the opposite is true. Drawing from Syklvi Wynter’s intellectual posture, Henry (2000) argues that “origin narratives [as] particularly important for the mythopoetics of human self-formation” (p. 24). What is also interesting is how, during the 1960s, Macdonald claimed ‘the mythopoetic(s) as a fundamental base to understand and to do and undo curriculum. Although chances that Wynter, Henry, and Macdonald had some form of interplay are next to nil, it comes as no surprise that they all shared the belief that “the ontogenic needs of the ego are such that its development requires a mythopoetic mapping of the binary oppositional structure of its language onto significant differences in its environment” (Henry, 2000, p. 24). That is, original narratives are indeed a “vital part of the linguistic/discursive infrastructure that complements our biology and makes possible the cultural regulation of behavior that is unique to human orders of existence” (Henry, 2000, p. 23). Thus, African origin narratives need to be seen as “narratives about creative agency of [an] unmanifested spiritual world”. Despite such powerful dimensions, “a cloud of colonial invisibility had descended over African philosophy” (Henry, 2000, p. 21). Yoruba’s philosophy is an organic mix of individuality, community, moral character, and social order (Gbadegesin, 1998). In explaining the socialization processes of a new being, Gbadegesin (1998) unveils how a baby is exposed to the experiences of a large community (“cowives, husband’s mother, stepmother, whole lot of others, including senior sisters, nieces and cousins”) and “the new mother may not touch the child except for breastfeeding” (Gbadegesin. 1998, p. 130). That is, the notion

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“I am because we are; I exist because the community exists” is foundational to Yoruba’s philosophy. HOMOGENEITY AS A FORM OF EPISTEMICIDE Tempels complained that European colonizers never paid attention to the fact that African people had a well-grounded philosophy “that equates being with a vital force of life” (Connell, 2007, p. 98; Tempels, 1945). This idea of a well-established African philosophy is made crystal clear by Hountondji (1976): When I speak of African philosophy, I mean literature, and I try to understand why it has so far made such strenuous efforts to hide behind the screen, all the more opaque for being imaginary, of an implicit “philosophy” conceived as an unthinking, spontaneous, collective system of thought, common to all Africans or at least to all members severally past, present and future, of such-and-such an African ethnic group. (p. 55) It is crucial to notice, however, that European colonizers saw the African world as unequivocally inferior. Ali Abdi (2011, p. 131), relying on P’Bitek (1972) and Cesaire’s (2000) concepts of ‘de-historicizing of the continent’ and ‘destructive captains of colonial industry,’ respectively, argues that some of the most important European intellectuals constructed and subscribed Africa as an inferior idea. Some of the most important European thinkers and philosophers of history, society, and knowledge, such as Hegel, Kant, Hobbes, Hume, Voltaire, Montesquieu, and others, saw Africa and African as a barbaric reality. In his examination on ‘Race and Modernity’, West (1999, p. 83) denounces how towering intellectuals of Western modernity, such as Voltaire, Hume, and Kant, worked on a eugenic rationale. According to these intellectuals the ‘negro race’ not only was different; it was also an inferior race. From these individuals’ viewpoints, “Africa was not [only] interesting from the point of view of his own history [but also Africa] was in a [perpetual] state of barbarism and savagery which was preventing it from being an integral part of the [European] civilization” (Abdi, 2011, p. 13). Conversely, to those (i.e., Europeans) who were more “open minded [and] promoters of liberty and freedom [the] greatest part of the people on the coast of Africa [were] savages and barbarians” (Abdi, 2011, p. 13). Such a eugenic reasoning is also denounced by Ngara (2012, who claims that “Africa was regarded as ‘pure savage’, which was later moderated to ‘noble savage’ as satirized in early Western popular novels such as King Solomon’s Mines” (p. 130). In fact, the ‘noble savage,’ Ngara (2012) adds, derogatorily described the native people’s natural tendency for simplistic (untutored) goodness (p. 130).

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Challenging ethno-philosophical approaches, Hountondji (1976) argues that the idea of African philosophy is based in customs, chants, and myths. Again, we have a hot-button issue here. Gyekye (1987) claims that one “cannot deny that philosophy is a product of culture” (p. 25) and that “African philosophical thought is expressed both in the oral literature and in the thoughts and actions of people” (p. 13). The same sort of claim is overtly denounced by Hamminga (2005): In classical African culture, knowledge is not produced, but it comes, it is given to you by tradition, the ancestors, as heritage. So knowledge acquisition is purely a social matter, a matter of teaching, of being told, “uploaded” (by living, dead, or spiritual powers) only. Like the Greek language, knowledge has nothing to do with sweating or working. (p. 76) As Onyewuenyi (1991) argues, “knowledge and wisdom for the African consists in how deeply he understands the nature of forces and their interaction” (p. 41). Moreover, “the African thought holds that created beings preserve a bond of one with another, an intimate ontological relationship. There is interaction of being with being, that is to say, of force with force. This is more so among rational beings known as Muntu, a term which includes the living and the dead, Orishas, and God” (p. 41). In indigenous Africa, Ngara (2012) advances, “people knew certain information through oral tradition, taboos, initiation rites, and apprenticeships” (p. 130). That is, African ways of knowing (WOK), according to Ngara (2012, pp. 139–143), describes four major complex phenomena, namely, knowing through taboos, knowing through collective wisdom and experience, knowing through faith and knowing through communication, and spiritual wisdom. There are differences between African and Western epistemological terrains. As shown later, in the case of Ubuntu and Ujamaa in South Africa and Tanzania, respectively, African WOK tend to be enacted and conceptualized as circular, organic, and collectivist, rather than linear, unitized, materialistic, and individualistic, as is attributed to Western perspectives. Traditional African thought in its various enacted forms is said to seek interpretation, expression, understanding, and moral and social harmony, rather than being preoccupied with verification, rationalism, prediction, and control as reified through Western scientific norms. (Swanson, 2012, p. 37) In fact, our schools conform to ‘official’ scientific norms and ignore the benefits that African thought could have. This exhibits a dramatic difference within the Western educational apparatuses that officially ignores the social benefits of such circular, organic, and collectivist pedagogy. Thus, what we have is a “more communalist/communitarian philosophy and way of being [an] African worldview and way of being” in an overt clash with

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a Western un-pliable way of reading the wor(l)d. It might not be an outrageous claim “to assert that some scholars in Africa and abroad have only published copyrights of phenomena already known in indigenous cultural wisdom without really advancing the frontiers of knowledge” (Ngara, 2012, p. 139). The sense of collectivism and communalism is remarkable: Fortunately or unfortunately, indigenous cultural knowledge is collectively owned and does not belong to anyone in particular. No one can claim exclusive rights to it as the identities of the original wise thinkers of the past are not known. Hence, no one can challenge anyone for plagiarizing well-known ideas of indigenous cultural heritage. (Ngara, 2012, p. 139) Kaphagawani (1998) claims that Chewa’s people have a conception of knowledge that is profoundly flooded with proverbs, such as Akuluakulu ndi m’dambo mozimila moto (“The elders are rivers where fire is extinguished,” which is a message that is quite the opposite from Western culture, in which being elderly is a passive stage, almost objectified and almost a social abashment, totally dated, if not empty, of any valid knowledge or wisdom); such messages stem from the cultural concept that “the elders have most, if not all, the solutions to any kind of problem; they are live encyclopaedias to which reference can be made for the answers to troublesome questions” (p. 241). Such collectivism is overtly clear in Ngara (2012) examination of African civilization. Describing Zimbabwe’s social weave, Ngara (2012) argues that “grandparents were not relegated into retirement homes of seclusion by virtue of old age pending death but they remained with the family, imparting their acquired wisdom and spiritual and philosophical ideas of their community” (p. 132). In Shona societies, Ngara (2012) notes, “children would congregate at the home of a wellknown storyteller whose services they reciprocated by bringing fire wood” (p. 132). Machel (1985), the Mozambican intellectual independence leader, consciously assumes some concerns with such perspective without certainly minimizing its importance. He argues that “we must be aware that the new generations are growing up in contact with the old generations who are passing on the vices of the past. Our practical experience shows how children and young people in our own centres can be contaminated by decadent ideas, habits and tastes” (p. 28). Machel (1985) continues: No book by Marx ever arrived in my home town, nor any other book that spoke against colonialism. Our books were these elders. It was they who taught us what colonialism is, the evils of colonialism and what the colonialists did when they came here. They were our source of inspiration. (p. x) Paget Henry’s noteworthy Caliban’s Reason helps us to grasp the dissimilarities between Western and Africa(nna) ways of thought. Henry (2000)

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unveils the differences between Habermas (or Habermasianism) and Africana philosophy, by arguing that the former is based on “the one dimensionality of the technocratic reason, and that the explanatory principles are primarily socioepistemic” (p. 178); that is, this one-sidedness is the result of the incorporation of the sciences into everyday life and the absolutizing of their epistemic outlook. In contrast, “[w]ithin the Africana tradition, this exclusionary one-dimensionality has been explained in more socioexistential terms” (p. 178). What we see both from Machel’s and Henry’s exegesis is that we are actually before two well-grounded philosophical ways of reading the wor(l)d, one magnanimously engaged and anchored in “consistently othered African thought and philosophy” (Henry, 2000, p. 179). Returning to Hountondji’s (1976) reasoning, and he accurately counterargues, such ethno-philosophical approaches assume that the African way of thought is something static, immune to change and to transformation, and something that is unacceptable for performing and leading social changes. He concludes that ethno-philosophy is fundamentally a conservative pastoral. Hountondji’s rejection of both Tempel’s and Mbiti’s arguments was based on his belief that it was a profound scientific mistake to build any kind of homogeneity into African thought. In this context, the very concept of African philosophy is an oxymoron. Although Mbiti (1969), in African Religion and Philosophy, criticized Tempel’s (1945) Bantu Philosophy for generalizing the African way of reading the wor(l)d (as Freire would put it), the fact is that he falls into the same conceptual trap. It is impossible, Hountondji (1976) argues, to claim any kind of uniformity in the logic and perception of African people. Appiah (1992) also challenges any attempt to claim African philosophical homogeneity. As he (1992) argues, it is culture, not just race, that shapes and works on people’s identities. Essentially, any proposed homogeneity needs to be seen as a form of cultural politics perpetrated by Western dominance. It reflects the Western scientific dominant discursive views of science. Homogeneity is one form of the epistemicide. Clearly, for Hountondji (1976), Mudimbe (1988), Gyekye (1987), and others, African philosophical thought needs to be seen on a continuum with severe fractures. On one hand, there are those who surrendered their philosophical thought to Western epistemological frameworks (although non-monolithic) and, on the other, are those who struggled to edify nonmonolithic philosophical thought based on African concepts and multiple ways of reading the wor(l)d. This continuum is full of other heated debates among African intellectuals like the tension of differentiating between the individual and the personal. Appiah (1992) is one of the African intellectuals struggling to clarify such tensions. While in a Western plant, [f]ifty identical individual machines [are] operated by 50 individual workers—from the management point of view neither are treated as personal, in Africa even machines quickly acquire their own personal

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The Idea of Africa or Africa as an Idea features, as repairs are not usually made in a standard way. In Africa a machine (car, bus, etc.) can usually be operated only by persons knowing this particular machine personally. (Hamminga, 2005, p. 79; Appiah, 1992)

As Appiah (1992) articulates, the tension between the beliefs that “everything is individual versus every force is personal” is a crucial issue that connects epistemological apparatuses within African daily life. Western epistemological hegemonic dominance has played a significant role in the construction of an Anglo–North American metropolitan global culture. This intentionally silences the existence of a secular solid African epistemological vein, which originated with Pan-Africanism and Negritude intellectual movements, and continued through contemporary Mbeki’s African renaissance, which was based on “cultural change, emancipation of African woman, mobilization of youth, the promotion of democracy; and sustainable economic development” (Connell, 2007, p. 106). Mbeki’s African renaissance, as we will see later on, attempts to “reincorporate and strengthen African epistemologies and Ubuntu within an African post/ colonial/post-apartheid era” (Swanson, 2012, p. 38). This particular renaissance has been profoundly damaged by genocidal events in Rwanda, Congo, and, quite recently, Zimbabwe. As Kebede (2004) argues, “[n]ative rulers starting to think and act like former colonizers make up the substance of African elitism” (p. 157). A NATIONALISTIC IDEOLOGICAL PHILOSOPHY AT THE ROOT OF AFRICAN RENAISSANCE However, this African renaissance is profoundly related to the struggle against what Connell (2007) felicitously called “epistemological disenfranchisement” (p. 109). It is a point of departure for the de-racialization of intellectual production, a cultural scream from the “nothing people” (Aidoo, 1997). Dehumanization has reached a point where the African people “have chosen to live near the rebuilt walls of [their] memory” (Senghor, 1998, p. 3). With the marginalization of African philosophies of and epistemologies, Abdi (2012) argues, “it was not an accident that pre-colonial African systems of learning were also portrayed as essentially useless in contributing to the development of local communities” (p. 12). African (informal) system(s) of education were profoundly important for the colonizers to sustain their cultural and social colonization. The consequence of such cultural colonization is overtly visible in nations such as Kenya. In Kenya, Odiembo (2012) argues, inequalities are the open wound left by colonialism and neocolonialism. A focus on equity, Odiembo (2012) claims, is needed to achieve learning for all—gender and war victims merit more attention. As he (2012) adamantly argues, Kenyans place an extraordinary value on education,

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which is seen as the key to personal and communal success. Villagers often contribute funds through a self-help system known as Harambee (meaning “let us pull together”). In fact, although the majority of African educational programs were quite informal, “there were also selective formal learning programs that should have been advanced as anything else. These programs of education were used for and represented advanced contexts of social and scientific achievements and were operational many years before Africa was extensively invaded and divided up by European powers” (Abdi, 2012, p. 15). As Abdi (2012) astutely claims “one of the main first projects of colonialism was to relegate existing African systems of education and paradigms of social development to the scrap-heap of historia” (p. 15). Thus, colonialism, not just in the African context, as will be seen in the next chapters, “was exclusively psycho-social, cultural, educational, and only after those, political and economic [an ideological battle] to establish once and for all a concretizable psycho-cultural edge for Europeans, their histories, and their achievements” (Abdi, 2012, p. 15). To be fully aware of a well-developed African sociology and philosophy, one must pay attention not only to Kenyatta, Nyerere, Senghor, and Cesaire but also to Cabral, Andrade, Mondlane, and others. As Oruka (1975) and Hallen (2002) note, Cabral, together with Mondlane, Machel, Kaunda, Nyerere, Sekou Toure, Nkrumah, Senghor, Rodney, Cesaire, Amin, and many others, represent the leading figures of what might be called the nationalist-ideological philosophy. Some of them are clearly working within a Marxist ideology, which, as Mudimbe (1994) argues, “seems to be the exemplary weapon and idea with which to go beyond what colonialism incarnated and ordained in the name of capital” (p. 42). As Braganca and Wallerstein (1982, p. iii) claim “national liberation movements do not emerge one fine day out of the mind of some superman or at the instigation of some foreign power. They are born out of popular discontent”. The contradictions “of the capitalist world economy have led to the rise of a network of anti-systemic movements” (Braganca and Wallerstein, 1982, p. v). Cabral (1980), Guinea Bissau’s leading intellectual, whom Freire (2009) epitomized as a pedagogue of the revolution, argues that African people “believe that the material and human wealth of their countries are part of the patrimony of humanity and should be made to serve the progress and happiness of their own peoples in all countries” (p. 27). Moreover, Cabral (1980) argues, national liberation is an act of culture: A people who free themselves from foreign domination will not be culturally free unless, without underestimating the importance of positive contributions from the oppressor’s and other cultures, they return to the upwards paths of their own culture. The latter is nourished by the living reality of the environment and rejects harmful influences as much as any kind of subjection to foreign cultures. We see therefore that, if

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In The Weapon of Theory, Cabral (1969) dares to answer the question, “Does history begin only with the development of the phenomenon of ‘class’ and consequently of class struggle?” (p. 95). Cabral argues that to answer “yes” would be to consider that various groups in Africa, Asia, and Latin America “were living without history, or outside history, at the time when they were subject to the yoke of imperialism—something that we refuse to accept” (p. 95). Moreover, Cabral claims, the toughest battle was “against our own weakness” (p. 91). Cabral (1980) was actually on the frontline, struggling for what he called independence of thought and action: Although independence is always relative, . . . we always acted on the basis of independence of thought and action. We have been capable, and must constantly be more so of thinking deeply about our problems so as to be able to act correctly, to act strongly so as to be able to think more correctly. We must be able to bring these two basic elements together: thought and action, and action and thought. This independence in our thought is relative. It is relative because in our thought we are also influenced by the thought of others. (p. 80) Freire (2009) unveils what he calls Cabral’s praxis based of democratic substantiveness (p. 172). Cabral fought for a “scientific understanding, but never a scientificist one, of reality” (Freire, 2009, p. 184). Such distinction is quite important in our field, where the dominant tradition has been able to secularly build a hegemonic cult of positivism based on a segregated perspective of what counts as science. Although Freire (2009) did not reduce Cabral into a single unified category, he argue that Cabral was a great antipositivist intellectual and Marxist, “who undertook an African reading of Marx, not a German reading of Marx, nor a nineteenth century reading of Marx. He engaged in a twentieth century reading of Marxist Africa” (p. 184). Moreover, Freire (2009) adds that Gramsci and Cabral should be studied together. Freire (2009) argues, “I do not know if Cabral studied Gramsci. He never mentions or makes reference to Gramsci, but not on account of being remiss. He truly did not read Gramsci [however] they are [both] moved culture, without, however, neither one nor the other having hyperbolized culture” (p. 185). Lumumba (1963), the Congolese independence leader, takes the same line of political argument: “Africans are . . . simply Africans, and our policy is positive neutralism”. The perspicacity of his radical Africanization deserves to be quoted at length: History never takes a step backward. We are not communists and we never will be, despite the campaign of destruction and obstruction that

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enemies of our independence have waged throughout the country. We are simply Africans. We do not want to subject ourselves to any foreign influence. We want nothing to do with any imported doctrines, either from the West, from Russia, or from America. The Congo remains the Congo. We are Africans. We want to make the Congo a great free nation. We do not want to escape one dictatorship only to fall in beneath another. We are not what people think we are, because we are a decent people . . . That Africa is not opposed to the West, to the United States, to the Soviet Union, or to any other nation, that Africa has asked only one thing, to be liberated completely so that we may collaborate with the West in total freedom. I am going to be even more specific about my intention in this regard, because there is so much talk about two blocs (the West and the East). The question of these two blocs doesn’t interest us either. What interests us is the human element; we are African and we shall remain Africans. We have our philosophy and our code of ethics and we are proud of them. Africa will tell the West that it wants the rehabilitation of Africa now, a return to the sources, the reinstitution of moral values; the African personality must express itself; that is what our policy of positive neutralism means. Africa will not be divided into blocs, as Europe has been, on the contrary, there will be active African solidarity. We are going to carry out a psychological decolonialization, because the people have been subject to false indoctrination for eighty years. False ideas have been put in people’s heads; they have been told that in order to have money, in order to have enough to eat, they have to work for Europeans. We are going to tell the people that this is not true, that in order to live happy lives, they must get to work and plow the land. That is how things really are. We are aware of the facts. We are going to develop the country ourselves, we have no technical skills, we are going to develop the Congo with our brains, with our hands. (pp. 283–325) The unequivocal commitment to fight colonialism using epistemological African bases arises not as a utopia à la Cartesian modernity but as a praxis, real, daily life experiences without which it would be impossible to stagnate the psychological hemorrhage promoted by colonial genocidal practices and, hence, defeat colonialism. It is, however, undeniable that during the 1960s, as Mudimbe (1994) argues, the vocabulary of criticism of colonial ratio was Marxist, that of the African independences as well as of the nonalignment programs was Marxist. The regimes, the progressive movements, and their leaders were Marxist. Similarly, interlocuteurs valuables (“authorized representatives”) in Africa were Marxist, or, at least, wielded a syntax that had a Marxist aspect; the Africanists who were respected and accepted, both by Africa and by the West, were, more often than not, Marxists, or, at

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The Idea of Africa or Africa as an Idea the very least, Marxist sympathizers. The discipline of the future that attracted or terrorized political economy was Marxist. (p. 44)

Mudimbe (1994) also asserts that the notable Marxist metaphors of “an egalitarian society organized on the basis of economic registers in the service of the betterment of people, of all people, (although) formally brilliant, over the years revealed themselves to be nothing other than deviations of the Marxists projects they were claiming to establish” (pp. 42–43). Obviously, Mudimbe adds, such failures “contrary to the racist clamor, [do] not seem to be solely a failure of African intelligence; indeed one can link these failures to that of Marxist Africanism and its epistemological incoherencies” (pp. 42–43). As I was able to examine in detail elsewhere (Paraskeva, 2004), such failures, if one pays attention to the Mozambican and southern African colonial and anticolonial conundrum, were also due to exogenous conditions, namely, particular predatory foreign policies instituted by Western nations. As shown in Chapter 7, to reduce the anti-decolonial struggle in too many African anticolonial movements to a Marxist based orientation just because Marxism spoke volumes about the secular Western, Eurocentric imperial genocide is intellectually imprudent and an unsustainable overstatement. The struggle against epistemicides forces one to pay attention, not only to multifarious ancient epistemological platforms in Africa, Asia, and Latin America but also to understand the challenges edified by some non-Western intellectuals to Western epistemological frameworks. This is the case not only of Amo,1 a Ghanaian philosopher who, in his second doctoral dissertation, edified a severe critique of the modern French philosopher Descartes (Hallen, 2002), but also of Khoza (1994), who challenged the Western concept formulated by Protagoras that man is the measure of all things. Admitting the validity of such a claim, Khoza (1994; Prinsloo, 1994) argues, omits the possibility of the supranatural in co-determining social events as something peaceful and also silences such tragedies as slavery, holocausts, racism, as well as nuclear and biological wars. It is perhaps not necessary to mention that African philosophers (and, in a way, philosophy) were profoundly important during the Greco-Roman period, a period in which not only African male philosophers were important but also female philosophers whose knowledge was used and obliterated and concomitantly their identities. As Masolo (2004) reveals, Origen, Tertullian, Plotonius, and Hypatia were “the earliest Western female philosophers on record” (p. 51).2 The struggle against epistemicides is also a struggle against the way non-Western knowledge has been ideologically dismissed. However, the “Western”–“nonWestern” framework must not marginalize the systems of power that legitimized dominant forms of knowledge as can be seen in the sciences. Such an ideological strategy was not confined to Africa. In fact, as shown later, the struggle against epistemicides will allow us to highlight and learn how science was powerful in what is considered precolonial India. As Baber (1995)

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documents—and in contrast to hegemonic historian pastorals—medicine, technology, and mathematics were quite developed in precolonial India and heavily based on the Indian way of reading the word and the world. In Chapters 4 and 5, and following the reasoning of Bernal (1987, 2001) and others, I examine a clear imposition of Semitic and Egyptian culture on the Greek (an issue conveniently neglected by mainstream academic discourse), thus raising the question of who can most legitimately write Greek history. In fact, the question of who writes history is a key issue with the African epistemological dynamics particular in relation to power and coloniality. These dynamics are full of struggles in which epistemologies can succumb to Western control. As Smith (1999) declares, “[s]ome scholars have argued that key tenets of what is now seen as Western civilization are based on black experiences and black traditions of scholarship, and have simply been appropriated by Western philosophy and redefined as Western epistemology” (p. 44). As odd as it might be, “indigenous Asian, American, Pacific, and African forms of knowledge, systems of classification, technologies and codes of social life, which began to be recorded in some detail by the seventeenth century, were regarded as ‘new discoveries’ by Western science” (p. 61). The fact is, as Sousa Santos (2005) notes, “in the name of modern science, many alternative knowledges and sciences have been destroyed, and the social groups that used these systems to support their own autonomous paths of development have been humiliated” (p. xviii). To summarize, in the name of science, “epistemicide(s) have been committed, and the imperial powers have resorted to it to disarm any resistance of the conquered peoples and social groups” (p. xviii). Diop (1987, p. 130) argues that even economically Africa was described by ‘especialists’ negatively. That is, “the individual, virtually crushed by the force of nature, was able to produce only what he absolutely needed to survive [that is] no creation, no activity reflecting a society freed from material constrains might be found [on Africa].” Diop (1987, p. 130) adds, that in the Western white eyes and scientific claims, “notions of money, credit, stock market, thrift or accumulation of wealth by individuals belong to a type of commerce connected with a higher economic organization: they could not have been found at the alleged level of African economy”. It is needless to say how eugenic the Western reading of precolonial Africa is because evidence shows a high dynamic of intellectual life during that time. That is, it is odd to subscribe that a society (or societies) engaged in the “study of logic in 973” was depraved of any collective economic and ideological superstructure (Diop, 1987, p. 178). Non-Western societies in Western sociological eyes, “appear economically, politically and culturally incomplete” (Boatca, Costa, and Rodriguez, 2010, p. 1). Moreover, as Atieno-Odhiambo (in Boatca, Costa and Rodriguez, 2010, p. 16) states, the post momentum reinforced an era in which it “became fashionable to think of continents, communities, identitiesm belonging, tradition, heritage, and home as imagines, invented ore created communities. The idea of Africa has been tantalizing to the West since Homer imagined the flight

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of the Greek gods from Mount Olympus to Africa, there to feast with the blemishless Ethiopians”. African intellectuals and intellectualism were systematically dismissed as such, and indigenous writers are “told that . . . before [they] write about a problem [they] must verify if they have it too in New York, London and Paris” (Achebe, 1989, p. 96). Odd as it might be Western apparatuses of production and reproduction of science have been able to portray Western science as a monolithic objective terrain (a reality that permeates the classrooms in so many nations in the world), a straight, flat claim denounced by Bleichmar, De Vos, Huffine and Sheehan (2009). In Science in the Spanish and Portuguese Empires—1500–1800, Bleichmar and her colleagues overtly expose not only the belligerent conflicts between scientific and religious (i.e., Catholic) cultures but also the wrangles between the pioneers of colonialism and its rival imperial empires in the struggle for the scientific hegemony. Mills (1997, p. 44) contextualizes such dismission, within the complex epistemological dimension which is the “corollary of the preemptive restriction of knowledge to European cognizers which implies that in certain spaces real knowledge (knowledge of science, universals) is not possible”. However, there is scientific validity in cognitive spheres other than the West. As Hallen (2002) stresses, a number of philosophers in and of Africa contend that there are elements to African cognition that are sufficiently unique or distinctive to somehow set it apart. Their major complaints against the so-called universalists is that by placing undue emphasis upon the supposedly common or universal elements of African cognition, these uncommon features are underrated and fail to receive the recognition they deserve and the credibility they merit as alternative pathways to understanding. (p. 35) Moreover, as Mudimbe (1988) argues, it is quite problematic to frame African gnosis in a Western semantic structure. One needs to question whether “African reality is not distorted in the expression of African modalities in non-African languages” and whether African reality has not been “inverted and modified by anthropological and philosophical categories used by specialists of dominant discourses” (p. 186). It is time, Mudimbe straightforwardly argues, to question if we are not in need of an “epistemological shift” (p. 186). Moreover, it might be possible “to consider this shift outside of the very epistemological field which makes [Mudimbe’s] question both possible and thinkable” (p. 186). As Appiah (1992) argues, traditional African cognition bluntly reflects critical, reflexive, and rational indigenous African intellect. As in any other philosophical sphere, Oruka (1990) stresses, a philosophical sagacity is well developed in Africa, a sagacity that produces a particular idiosyncrasy. According to Oruka (1990), one can identify four currents in African philosophy: (1) ethno-philosophy, the work that attempts to describe the

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worldview of a specific African community as a whole; (2) philosophical sagacity, the thought—and action—of rigorous indigenous thinkers (sages) who did not benefit from modern education; (3) nationalistic-ideological philosophy, African intellectuals attempting to create a sui generis new socialist order; and(4) professional philosophy developed and conducted by African philosophical scholars. Having said this, we can now recognize Oseghare’s (1990) position about what African philosophy is and is not. He explains that African philosophy is not “the writings of some black Americans; the negritude movement literature, and ethnological and anthropological works” (p. 252). African systems of knowledge, Abdi (2012) states, expose a particular philosophy of education, a sagacity that “was less doctrinaire than, say the specialized categories of the philosophy of education (e.g. idealism, realism, analytic, or behaviorist), but was based on needs identified for that given situation” (p. 12). That is, “precolonial African philosophies of education were focused on the real lives of Africans, and were not responsive [to] the problematic elaborations of Eurocentrism and the perforce peripheralization of the rest of the world” (Abdi, 2012, p. 12). Irrelevance and inadequacy are important issues here. As Abdi (2012) states, “an education that is not relevant for people’s cultures and needs is an inadequate education” (p. 19). Colonialism, which “lies at the heart of the rise of Europe” (Mills, 1997, p. 35), sucked as much as it could from this humanistic system and dismantled it, making it irrelevant. With the arrival of colonialism came the destruction of African education systems and the distortion of social development schemes in the African space. Colonial program of education were designed and put into place to maximize all possible returns for colonialism, European historians and philosophers of education undertook a very thin, indeed unsustainable in any meaningful way, theorizing excursions that attempted to officially substantiate the demeaning of African epistemologies and philosophies of education. Indeed, colonial education never had, in design or implementation, the interests of the colonized at heart, and even few of the natives were presumably educated, the objective was, at least at the philosophical point of view, to create a corps of locales who were only trained to serve as mediating buffer, the so-called interpreters, between the interests of the metropolis and the ‘illiterate’/’uneducated’ colonized millions. (Abdi, 2012, p. 17–19) African epistemology, Swanson (2012) notes, “has been understood, looked to, drawn on, appropriated, colonized, and commodified in various ways and from different ideological and critical standpoints, and it is a difficult task to provide historiographical authenticity and ideological affirmation without essentialisms, instrumentalisms, and universalisms becomes the modes of discourse production” (p. 34). In a remarkable oeuvre that examines the

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Africana episteme, Henry (2000) argues that, from an African-Caribbean approach, “philosophy is an intertextuality embedded discursive practice, and not an isolated or absolutely autonomous one. It is often implicitly referenced or engaged in the production of answers to everyday questions and problems that are being framed in non-philosophical discourses” (pp. 2–3). That is, following an African-Caribbean perspective, “philosophy is neither an absolute nor a pure discourse. It is an internally differentiated and discursively embedded practice” (Henry, 2000, p. 4). Following Appiah (1992, p. 92) “if the argument for an African philosophy is not to be racist, then some claim must be substantiated to the effect that there are important problems of morals or epistemology or ontology that are common in the situation of those of the African continent”. UNBUNTU AND UJAMAA: THE SPIRITUAL AND THE RETURN TO THE VILLAGES The struggle against curriculum epistemicides will open several paths to grasp (an)other knowledge; to master, for example, how crucial the African philosophy Ubuntu is in terms of an “African view of life and world view, a collective consciousness of African people deeply ingrained in Africans’ own religions, Africans’ own ethical views, Africans’ own political ideologies” (Prinsloo, 1998, p. 41). More than a theoretical framework, Ubuntu is a way of living and “it takes seriously the view that man is basically a social being” (p. 41). From an Ubuntuan platform, “a person is a person through other persons” (Prinsloo, 1998, p. 43; Maphisa, 1994). Unlike Western humanism, which is intellectual, individualistic, and aesthetic, Ubuntu is religious, expansive, transcendental, centrifugal, dynamic, and holistic (Prinsloo, 1998, p. 46). Swanson (2012) argues that Ubuntu is short for an “isiXhosa proverb in Southern Africa. It comes from Umuntu ngumuntu ngbantu, [that is,] a person is a person through their relationship to others” (p. 35). He adds that Ubuntu is recognized as the African epistemology of humanism, linking the individual to the collective through ‘brotherhood’ or ‘sisterhood’. It makes a fundamental contribution to indigenous ‘ways of knowing and being’. With differing historical emphasis and (re)contextualization over time and place, it is considered a spiritual way of being in the broader socio-political context of Southern Africa. This approach is not only an expression of a spiritual philosophy in its theological and theoretical sense, but as an expression of daily living. (Swanson, 2012, p. 36) Ubuntu, Swanson (2012) defends, “is a philosophical thread in African epistemologies focusing in human relations attending to the moral and spiritual consciousness of what it means to be human and to be in a relationship

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with an-Other” (p. 36). In fact, Ubuntu “is borne out of the philosophy that community strength comes of community support, and that dignity and identity are achieved through mutualism, empathy, generosity, and community commitment” (Swanson, 2012, p. 36). In the postapartheid South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC), Swanson (2012) explains that Ubuntu, and not any other Western epistemological tool, was used to address this epoch of apartheid and genocide. Profoundly highlighted and advocated by South African Bishop Tutu, Ubuntu is “the recognition that social, political, and ecological concerns are interrelated” (Swanson, 2012, p. 40). Focusing on Ubuntu in southern Africa’s civilizational processes, Tutu argues for an educational system that fosters “critical questioning minds always ready to ask awkward questions, knowing the difference between ‘authoritative’ and ‘authoritarian’ (Swanson, 2012, p. 40). However, one needs to be careful and avoiding any romanticism of the past. Swanson (2012, pp. 40–41) discloses how Ubuntu, especially the way it was used within the postapartheid South Africa’s TRC ended up promoting a dangerous nationalist ideology. By relying on the analysis of Marx (2002), Swanson (2012) denounces how (a) “Ubuntu was reconstructed inadvertently as Ubuntu for South Africans only”; (b) “shift the problem from the roots and causes of Apartheid to ethics”; (c) “it was the violence in its daily silences and lived forms, not just the gross human rights violations and ghoulish atrocities which became fodder for consumptive audiences, that was not fully addressed by the TRC under the mantra of Ubuntu.” (p. 41) Marx (2002) quoted by Swanson (2012) argues that Ubuntu or—as I would say Ubuntunism—“is increasingly viewed through a nationalist lens [that is] Africanism and Ubuntu are being implemented as a cultural nationalistic rhetoric to sustain a neoliberal status quo, a bureaucracy attuned to conformists national values exempt from critique” (p. 42). Despite such important tensions, it is clear not only how powerful Ubuntu is as an African epistemological phenomenon but also how African civilizations rely on African epistemological platforms to address crude realities, which, odd as it might be, were edified by colonialism. Despite severe reservations, “many believe that it was [the] process guided by Ubuntu that [allowed] the success of TRC, setting itself apart from the tone of the Nuremberg trial and other post-war tribunals” (Swanson, 2012, p. 42). In fact, during one of the biggest mistakes perpetrated by certain African liberation movements in the so-called postcolonial period was not the romanticization of a fantasized past but precisely the submissive adulation of colonial epistemological forms within a postcolonial momentum—a recipe for social disaster. While such approach was basically the rule, which was denounced by many Western and African intellectuals—please note the piece that Paulo Freire (2009) wrote on Amílcar Cabral; also João Rosa’s (2010) piece on the clashes over

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the ‘official’ language in Cape Verde—one cannot deny that some exceptions occur and prove not only the deep consequences of ignoring African epistemological terrains to lead the decolonizing process but also how colonial or neocolonial have been postcolonial by relying not just on colonial epistemological forms but also on forms that actually contributed and fostered colonial power and being. Mignolo (2011a, 2011b, p. 51) helps us great deal in rethinking the position to “which the decolonizing independence movements were reduced”: They were interpreted as processes of imperial liberation: in the nineteenth century, England and France supported the decolonization of the Spanish and Portuguese colonies; in the twentieth century, the United States supported the decolonization of the French and English colonies. In reality, it was a liberation from one empire only to fall into the hands of another, and was supported by independence movements in the name of freedom. The possibility of decolonial thinking was silenced by official interpretations. The complaints of Amílcar Cabral, of Aimé Césaire, of Frantz Fanon, were admired in order to be disqualified; just as the achievements of Patrice Lumumba were celebrated after cutting his body into pieces. To rethink the decolonizing independence movements (in their two historic moments, in America and in Asia-Africa) means to think of them as moments of de-linking and opening within the processes of de-colonizing knowledge and being; moments that were veiled by the interpretative mechanism of the rhetoric of modernity, the concealment of coloniality and, in consequence, the invisibilization of the seed of decolonial thinking. In other words, the decolonizing independence movements were interpreted within the same “revolutionary” logic of modernity, according to the model of the Glorious Revolution in England, the French Revolution, and the Bolshevik Revolution in Russia. To rethink means to de-link the logic of decolonizing independence movements from the bourgeois and socialist revolutions. (Mignolo, 2011b, p. 51) Nyerere’s Ujamaa educational programs in Tanzania—something that the People’s Republic of Mozambique did not follow after independence— were a clear evidence of a different postcolonial move, showing a leader and a social chain to return to the collective nature of African civilization, “changing the aims and outcomes of education [by] encouraging secondary school leaders to return to the village and engage rural and related agricultural programs of community development” (Abdi, 2012, p. 18). Although Nyerere’s Ujamaa educational programs faced severe challenges, namely the foci on an agrarian collective society within a massive capitalist world, it is undeniable that some accomplishments were made. For example, Nyerere’s Tanzania plays arguably the role in the process of independence of Mozambique by supporting FRELIMO (Frente de Libertacao de Mocambique) apparatuses, among those, FRELIMO’s schools not only in Tanzania but

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also in the freedom zones in the north and center of Mozambique. Although Nyerere—also called Mwalimu (i.e., teacher in Swahili)—“did not write formally about education, rather he spoke about the role of education and higher education in particular in many public addresses” (Hatcher and Erasmus, 2008, p. 52), it was quite clear that for Mwalimu, not just education but Ujamaa also places a very personal and collective responsibility “upon the educated to ensure the well-being of other community members” (Hatcher & Erasmus, 2008, p. 53). Mwalimu’s educational philosophy, Hatcher and Erasmus (2008) argue, sought to “(a) increase desire for change (b) increase an understanding that change is possible; (c) equip people to make decisions to improve their society” (p. 52). Relying on Nkulu’s (2005) reasoning as well, Hatcher and Erasmus (2008, p. 52) documented the undeniable similarities between Julius Nyerere and John Dewey: Both reiterate how developing personal capacities can ensure the advancement of society. They both value the importance of personal experience as the bedrock for further skill development, regard knowledge as a common good to be used to make improvements in daily life, and call for social responsibility to be a buy-product of education. Although they lived in two different eras and on two different continents, Dewey and Nyerere articulate the value of education in social and democratic transformation. (Hatcher & Erasmus, 2008, p. 53) Regarding the life in Tanzania and the United States, Dewey and Nyerere were quite “clear on the social role of education and called for education to develop civic minded individuals and professionals [a] role that is equally relevant in times of social transformation and social stability” (Hatcher & Erasmus, 2008, p. 53). Thus, it is no surprise that in a moment that community engagement becomes the buzzword for higher education in the West, in general, and the United States, in particular, “that Nyerere’s vision of higher education for the 21st century could also be regarded as relevant to the West” (Hatcher & Erasmus, 2008, p. 53). Nyerere’s educational vision is well grasped by Nkulu (2005): A rural village had its food supplies depleted and its people began starving. The villagers agreed to pool their meager resources and select a few capable individuals to send as messengers to a distant village to purchase more supplies. Nyerere wanted educated Tanzanians to develop abilities similar to those of the messengers from the village: an awareness of everyday life conditions in their society and the ability to reflect critically and to act upon such conditions for the well-being of many, if not all. (pp. 82–83, quoted in Hatcher & Erasmus, 2008, p. 53) The parallels (not submission or alienation) between Western and African intellectuals and intellectualism are also quite visible in the commonalities

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between Antonio Gramsci and Amílcar Cabral. In a piece that I co-translated with Sheila Macrine and Fernando Naiditch, Freire (2009) claims, I do not know if Amílcar studied Gramsci. He never mentions or makes reference to Gramsci and it is not because he was acting in an incorrect way. He really did not read Gramsci. The works of Gramsci began to be translated when Cabral was fighting, and already in the bushes. I was in exile, when the first books of Gramsci that were translated into Spanish came out. No one can see how both Gramsci and Cabral had very sensible analyses towards culture, without hyper-denigrating culture. They both wrote about culture. One did it arrested in jail, and thinking quite hard. Another writes from the jungle in the bush. I don’t have any doubts that the work of Amílcar, without a few exceptions, (his writings of the youth) was written in the jungle, was written while struggling and fighting and there he was much more of a poet. (p. 185) Freire (2009) defended that “a person like Amílcar Cabral should be studied side-by-side with a person like Antonio Gramsci” (p. 185). The differences between them, Freire (2010) adds, is that Amílcar died possibly older than Gramsci, and he had what Gramsci had not; that is, Amílcar had countless years of war in the bush inside the jungle. Conversely, Gramsci was in jail. Freire (2009) encourages all of us to read Gramsci and Cabral simultaneously a study that has an enormous importance, and it needs to be done by educators. In fact, Freire (2009) notes that one of the things that is lacking right now to educators is exactly an understanding of the ‘politicity’ of both education and pedagogy something that is quite clear in Cabral and Gramsci. Needless to say, how, within the complex terrain of African epistemologies Ubuntu and, as is shown later, Ujamaa need to be understood as integral parts of a collectivist model of societal teaching and learning. It is quite clear, Ngara (2012) stresses, that we have a complex and dominant “African paradigm of knowing in the context in which it informs pedagogy from an African perspective” (p. 130). In other words, “Africans ways of knowing, not only reflect African world views, but they define Ubuntu (Zulu/ Ndebele), unhu (Shona), utu (Swahili)” (Ngara, 2012, p. 42). Such a collective way of learning (a kind of collective cognitivism) makes the individual less individual; that is, “the basic knowledge structures that the typical African child brings to school have been collectively constructed and transmitted through a participatory and collectivist model of learning with a community focus” (Ngara, 2012, p. 131). Within such communalism, “there is a variety of unique and interesting indigenous cultural games, puzzles, and riddles that are available for sharing across the continent to develop children’s language, content, and mathematical skills” (Ngara, 2012, p. 132). Such communalism shows a sharp contrast with Western society. Despite the fact that the Western commonsensical pastoral defends that parents have a responsibility to socialize their children, schools end up

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assuming that social task—rightly so, one must say—because of the inability of the most parents to perform that task. However, with the focus more and more on irrelevant social devices, such as high-stakes testing, schools have been incapable of addressing their responsibility in the socialization and education of youth for the common good. Western education is not about education anymore. It is about training bodies to live in an increasingly cannibalized market-driven society. However, in Africa, education of a child was a collective social responsibility and not just the responsibility of the biological parents (Ngara, 2012). Ujamaa was ‘villagization’. Both Ubuntu and Ujamaa needed to be seen as a new ethic of engagement in society and in schools, and within such a social system, the leverage is on society and not on the cult of the ‘abstractivity’ of the disciplines. It goes without saying that such indigenous ways of knowing “shape the background cognitive structures, knowledges, and beliefs that a typical African child brings to school” (Ngara, 2012, p. 133). THE MILITANT EDUCATORS It is thus hardly necessary to mention the role education plays in this way of living. As we have mentioned before, education was a social sphere quite emphasized by non-Western intellectuals, while precisely in the midst of the struggle against colonialism. Cabral was attentive to the importance of education in the emergence and consolidation of African thought. In fact, creating schools was one of the very first steps that independence movements, like PAIGC (Partido Africano para a Independencia da Guine e Cabo Verde) in Guinea Bissau and Cape Verde (later on PAICV—Partido Africano para a Independencia de Cabo Verde) and FRELIMO in Mozambique, created in liberated areas. More than a space to improve knowledge, schools were seen as a base for the masses to seize power, and teachers and students were militants (Machel, 1979). Moreover, knowledge was the base of comradeship (Machel, 1979). The importance of schools is quite clear in Cabral’s (1980) argument: Set up schools and develop teaching in all the liberated areas. Constantly strengthen the political training of teachers. Persuade parents of the absolute necessity for their sons and daughters to attend school, but organize activity for the pupils in such a way that they can also be useful at home in helping their family. Set up courses to teach the adults to read and write. Combat among the youth, notably among the more mature, the obsession with leaving the country to go and study, the blind ambition to be doctor, the inferiority complex and the mistaken notion that those who study the courses will have privileges tomorrow in our land. Protect and develop manifestations of our people’s culture, respect and ensure for the usages, customs and traditions of our land.

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The Idea of Africa or Africa as an Idea Combat all particularisms prejudicial to the unity of the people. Teach ourselves, and teach others to combat fear and ignorance. Learn from life, learn with our people, learn in books and from the experience of others. Constantly learn. (pp. 242–243)

Mondlane (1978) framed the need for a new education with the need to produce and transform the role of the intellectuals. That is, “in the eyes of the people, education means progress” a progress that needed to be achieved by mastering the “witchcraft of the white man so that it could be used to liberate the people from oppression” (Mondlane, 1978, p. 64) and simultaneously protecting and developing the struggle for freedom “which was the best school on the world” (Mondlane, 1978, 68). In Mondlane (1978, p. 63) eyes, “the intellectuals were a creation of the capitalist society”, and although they are important in the struggle for liberation, they need to assume themselves as revolutionary leaders and consciously defend that “they can get more of an education in the Revolution than is a university”. Undeniably, Cabral argues (1973, p. 51), “the underestimation of the cultural values of the African people based upon racist feelings and upon the intention of perpetuating foreign exploitation of Africans, has done much harm to Africa”. In this context, Cabral (1973, p. 63) claimed that the victory against colonialism was only possible by the return to the source, which was much more complex than a struggle against foreign domination. He states, The return to the source is therefore not a voluntary step, but the only possible reply to the demand of concrete need, historically determined, and enforced by the inescapable contradiction between the colonized society and the colonial power, the mass of the people exploited and the foreign exploitive class, a contradiction in the light of which each social stratum or indigenous class must define its position. When return to the source goes beyond the individual and is expressed through groups or movements the contradiction is transformed into a struggle (secret or overt) and is a prelude to the pre-independence movement or of the struggle for liberation from the foreign yoke (Cabral, 1973, p. 63) Return to the source made Cabral and Cabralism a serious challenge to critical traditional theory, not just because of the inherent complex metamorphosis of such process but also “in the sense that his critical theory is not quarantined to the life-worlds and life struggles of white workers in capitalist societies” (Rabaka, 2014, p. 152). That is, at the heart of Cabral’s critical theory, Rabaka (2014) claims, relied is conscious reading that dominance and oppression were beyond the capitalism system and were determined by a world system that urges for the need of a common theory and praxis of liberation respectful of the idiosyncrasies of the oppressed. Daves (2013) highlighted how Cabral “urges us to develop our theories and strategies by

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directly engaging with the specific economic, political and cultural locations of our struggles” (p. 466). In one of his masterpieces and his educational philosophy, Fazer da Escola uma base para o Povo Tomar o Poder (Making School A Base For The Masses To Take Power), just translated into English by my colleague Joào Rosa, Machel argues for an educational system that fosters democracy, collectivism, and social responsibility and that sees teachers and students as militants. It goes without saying that militants do not have a negative base. Quite the opposite. In Machel’s terms, students and teachers as militants define the real subjects of the educational system engaged, omitted to the construction of the common good. He (forthcoming) argues that [b]eing a militant like being a teacher, does not consist solely of correctly preparing the lessons, explicating clearly the material and correcting justly the exercises. It is evident that this is part of the duty of the teacher, but it is not enough. This is also done by the bourgeois teachers animated by a professional conscience. In his essence, the militant teacher is s/he who through his/her example and teaching contributes to the formation of a new mentality in the student. The militant teacher is for all a point of reference, a permanent illustration of correct behavior. The militant teacher learns from the student and knows how to orient him/her in the synthesis of experience and liberation of initiative. The militant teacher is an active element in the practice of productive work which mobilizes natural resources and furnishes new ideas to man. The militant teacher is conscious of his limitations and opens himself to self-critique and critique; including that of students. The militant teacher possesses in the highest degree the consciousness of belonging to the working class. The militant teacher is combatant for the victory of our values, a gear in the liberation of the creative initiative of students. The definition of the student as militant also manifests itself as necessary. Even though the central task of the student is to study, this in itself does not distinguish him from a bourgeois student. The characterization of the militant student is situated in at the level of objectives and methods of his study. The militant student, in studying fulfills a duty to which he was entrusted by the masses to serve it. In him/her, there cannot exist the mythical obsession of the diploma, the hope of high salaries and privileges, the notion that he is part of an elite of future rulers. Although schools were crucial, Machel (1976) argues, they “need to teach the natives the path to human dignity and the grandeour of the nation that protects them” (p. 10). That is, he (1976) claims, education implied clearly to challenge the production and preparation of the oppressed as submissive mental slaves of capitalism (p. 10). Machel (forthcoming) claims that “teachers should learn amongst themselves. Students should learn amongst

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themselves. Teachers and students should learn from each other. This signifies a constant exchange of experiences at all levels and efforts at each level to synthesize the experiences” (p. 23). Moreover, “collective work, the exchange of experiences, critique and self-critique extends [students and teachers] to the totality of the center and to the lives of each one” (Machel, forthcoming, p. 24). It is, in fact, “through this process that we will be able to obtain a true mutual understanding, an understanding based on common effort, in the demonstration of the practice of values and limitations of each one” (Machel, forthcoming). Democratic education that implies “the democratization of the methods of work, founded in the collectivity of our lives, becomes in this domain an inexhaustible source for the everyday replenishment of our unity, of our brotherly ties of camaraderie” (Machel, forthcoming). Machel’s educational philosophy saw knowledge as the base of societies’ camaraderie and defended a collective model of leadership. Leadership, Machel (forthcoming) argues, “is not and cannot be the monopoly of a group, which decides and imposes orientations. Just as the tallest tree takes roots on the ground and always grows from bottom up, the orientations should arise from the sentiment and consciousness of the base, the vanguard acting as the fertilizer, which strengthens and accelerates the process of affirming consciousness.” In Producers and Students, Machel (1982) connects production as a school “because it is one of the sources of our knowledge, and it is through production that we correct our mistakes” (p. 116), Moreover, he (1982) claims that “practice is not enough, one must also know, study. Without practice, without being combined with force, intelligence remains sterile. Without intelligence without knowledge, force remains blind, a brute force” (p. 117). Scientific studies were hopeless detached from the communities and if not rooted in the struggle of production. “To produce [is] to learn” (Machel, 1982, p. 118), that also allows one to be able to interrupt and destroy colonial historiography, one “that produced its own knowledge of Africa based on the premise of European superiority and the civilization nature of its mission” Boatca, Costa and Rodriguez, 2010, p. 16) In Africa, Nkrumah (2006) argues, under colonialism, “capitalist development led to the decline of feudalism and to the emergence of new class structures” p. 55) and its consequent new division of labor. Such labor stratification determined and determinant in both the production and the modes of production—and related of the value and uses of value of commodities in a Marxist sense—“enable [human beings] to produce more than [they] need for mere survival. Production created a surplus” (Machel, 1976, p. 5) crucial in the equation of the colonial imperial project. As Cabral (1969) argues, the definition of classes within one or several human groups is a fundamental consequence of the progressive development of the productive forces and of the characteristics of the distribution of the wealth produced by the

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group or usurped from others. That is to say that the socio-economic phenomenon ‘class’ is created and develops as a function of at least two essential and interdependent variables—the level of productive forces and the pattern of ownership of the means of production. This development takes place slowly, gradually and unevenly, by quantitative and generally imperceptible variations in the fundamental components; once a certain degree of accumulation is reached, this process then leads to a qualitative jump, characterized by the appearance of classes and of conflict between them. (p. 3) It would be naïve to infer that there were no class divisions in the antecolonial period. As Nkrumah (2006) unveils, class divisions were quite clear before the colonial occupation and genocide. What was new was that with the advent of colonialism, those ante-colonial class puzzles—led by the local tribal chiefs—were not only reinforced and strength but were also taken into a different level with the full blast emergence of a petty bourgeoisie. While the former “became [important] local agents of colonialism” (Nkrumah, 2006, p. 55), the latter was quite connected with the intricacies of the finance and quite crucial in the sustainability of colonialism next momentum: neocolonialism. Cabral (1969) is precious in this regard as well. In challenging the supremacy of class division as the key to understand the colonial formula, Cabral (1969) poses the following question: “[D]oes history begin only with the development of the phenomenon of ‘class’, and consequently of class struggle?” (p. 4): To reply in the affirmative would be to place outside history the whole period of life of human groups from the discovery of hunting, and later of nomadic and sedentary agriculture, to the organization of herds and the private appropriation of land. It would also be to consider—and this we refuse to accept—that various human groups in Africa, Asia, and Latin America were living without history, or outside history, at the time when they were subjected to the yoke of imperialism. It would be to consider that the peoples of our countries, such as the Balantes of Guinea, the Coaniamas of Angola and the Macondes of Mozambique, are still living today—if we abstract the slight influence of colonialism to which they have been subjected—outside history, or that they have no history. Our refusal, based as it is on concrete knowledge of the socio-economic reality of our countries and on the analysis of the process of development of the phenomenon ‘class’, as we have seen earlier, leads us to conclude that if class struggle is the motive force of history, it is so only in a specific historical period. This means that before the class struggle—and necessarily after it, since in this world there is no before without an after—one or several factors was and will be the motive force of history. It is not difficult to see that this factor in the history of each human group is the mode of production—the level of productive

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That is, savage colonialism brutally wiped out the African communalism social fabric, in which “all land and means of production belong to the community [there] was people’s ownership [and] labor was the need and habit of all” (Nkrumah, 2006, p. 13). With the emergence of colonialism communalist socio-economic patterns began to collapse as a result of the introduction of export crops such as cocoa and coffee. The economies of the colonies became interconnected with world capitalist markets. Capitalism, individualism, and tendencies to private ownership grew [and] gradually primitive communialism disintegrated and collective spirit declined. (Nkrumah, 2006, p. 13) Clearly, class-segregated dynamics assumed a paramount role in the struggle against colonialism because colonialism “increased [the] level of productive forces [that led] to private appropriation of the means of production, progressively complicat[ing] the mode of production, provok[ing] conflicts of interests within the socio-economic whole in movement, [thus making] possible the appearance of the phenomena ‘class’ and hence of class struggle, the social expression of the contradiction in the economic field between the mode of production and private appropriation of the means of production” (Cabral, 1969, p. 5). Colonialism clearly created a fractured dichotomous society between the oppressors and the oppressed an explosive dichotomy fueled by capitalism modes of production the pillar of colonial power dynamics. Such framework is visible in Machel’s (1976) critique when he argues that “the existing of exploiting classes, white or black or any other colour, creates an exploitive form of power and state” (p. 16). However, although class was a vital category with colonial state power intricacies, it was not the only one. As Nkrumah (1964) states, “the close links between class and race developed in Africa alongside capitalist exploitation” (p. 27). It is impossible to delink one from the other: Slavery, the master-servant relationship, and cheap labour were basic to it. The classic example is South Africa, where Africans experience a double exploitation—both on the ground of colour and class. Similar conditions exist in the USA, the Caribbean, in Latin America and in other parts of the world where the nature of the development of the productive forces has result in a racist class structure. For race is

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inextricably linked with class exploitation; in a racist capitalist power structure, capitalist exploitation and race oppression are complementary; the removal of one ensures the removal of the other. (Nkrumah, 1964, p. 27) The oppressor–oppressed ‘link’ can only end drastically. As C. L. James (1963) argues, the slaves “like revolutionary peasants everywhere, aimed the extermination of their oppressors” (p. 85). Colonial power saw and fabricated a sociopsychological context that naturalize and legitimize a eugenic fallacy based on the notion that Africans are “an inferior and backward race with primitive customs, and ignorant people who must be educate by the superior and advanced race with all its goods, customs and knowledge” (Machel, 1976, p. 10). Naturally, “the race struggle became part of the class struggle [since] wherever there is a race problem it has become linked with class struggle” (Nkrumah, 2006, p. 27). Race and class issues were not just confined to colonialism. They were explosive within the neocolonial momentum, as well with the ascendency of an indigenous bourgeoisie “aspiring to ruling class status copying the [way] of life of the ex-rulling class [which] in reality they were imitation a race and not a class” (Nkrumah, 2006, p. 25). The same sturdy criticism was flagged by Machel (1976) as well. According to Machel (1976), the struggle against colonialism was also a struggle based on a new concept and practice of power. Such a struggle was not to change the “established black power in place of white power” (Machel, 1976, p. 16). As he argues, the aim of the struggle against colonialism is not to end Africanizing exploitation. The struggle, Machel (1976) argues, is between “the power of the exploiters and people’s power” (p. 16), and one “cannot serve the masses by governing with State powers designed to oppress the masses [that is] to Africanize colonialist and capitalist power would be to negate the meaning of our struggle” (p. 17). Summing up, in both colonialism and neocolonialism, “the question is one of power [and] a State in the grip of neocolonialism is not master of its own destiny. It is this factor which makes neocolonialism such a serious threat to world peace” (Nkrumah, 1964, p. 3). It is clear that the colonial arrogance “to claim a country just by visiting it” (Mondlane, 1978, p. 152) lead colonialism to a profound misinterpretation of the power of African epistemes. Frantz Fanon (1968) was not that wrong when he stated that the twentieth century would be in the history of humankind, not just for the “atomic discoveries and interplanetary explorations [but also] unquestionably [due] to the conquest by the peoples of land that belong to them” (p. 120). The veracity of such claim is certainly due to a complex combination of issues. One of those issues is undeniably the sagacity of Africana episteme. The so-called colonial economic superiority—that was not apyschological as well—was profoundly incapable of deleting Africana ways of reading the wor(l)d. Paradoxically colonialism did everything in its capacity to block any chance of emerging as a

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well-consolidated Africana intelligentsia. The colonial motto “no elite, no trouble,” Nkrumah (2006, p. 38) argues, was actually a subtle, crude reality of genocide perpetrated by colonialism. Nkrumah (2006) states that [i]n Congo in 1960 there was scarcely a qualified Congolese in the country to run the newly independent state, to officer the army and the police, or to fill the many administrative and technical posts left by departing colonialists. (p. 38) Lumumba (1963) was quite sentient of such saga, not just regarding Congo but all African nations struggling against colonialism as well (p. 78). As he states, when he visited Guine (Conakry), “only three of these eighteen ministers have studied at a university; the other have finished high school, held jobs, and acquired certain amount of experience [so] the government has brought in French technicians to help in the field of law, economics, agronomy”, a reality quite plausible for Congo. A radical cut with the past would be unwise because “in many areas we still need Belgium’s experience” (Lumumba, 1963, p. 86). The absence of a strong Africanna quadre was judiciously, yet erroneously, attributed to the colonial imperial circuits of cultural production as a natural consequence of a weak or a lack of any form of an African episteme worth of such name, because of an African notorious lack of development. Walter Rodney and Julius Nyerere, among others, ferociously challenged the colonial fallacy of (under)development. Walter Rodney reverses the issue. In his remarkable work How Europe Underdeveloped Africa, the Guyanese theoretician argues that within the colonial imperial framework, development is not just as a one-side set of processes and cannot be reduced to a eugenic economic equation. Rodney (1973) claims that [m]ore often than not, the term ‘development’ is used in an exclusive economic sense—the justification being that the type of economy is itself an index of other social features. What then is economic development? A society develops economically as its members increase jointly their capacity for dealing with the environment. This capacity for dealing with the environment is dependent on the extent to which they understand the laws of nature (science), on the extent to which they put that understanding into practice by devising tools (technology), and on the manner in which work is organized. Taking a long-term view, it can be said that there has been constant economic development within human society since the origins of man, because man has multiplied enormously his capacity to win a living from nature. The magnitude of man’s achievement is best understood by reflecting on the early history of human society and noting firstly, the progress from crude stone tools to the use of metals; secondly, the changeover from hunting and gathering wild fruit to the domestication of animals and the growing of food

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crops; and thirdly, the improvement in the character of work from being an individualistic activity towards an activity which assumes a social character through the participation of many. The West created a false nexus between development (and concomitantly underdevelopment) and bad government (Adejumobi, 2002). Development or underdevelopment is not something abstract or anchored in a single social dynamic showing the same tendencies diachronically and synchronically. Quite the opposite. In the ante-colonialist and ante-capitalist Africanna societies the pace of development was not one of solid systematic and solid growth. Individual and societal development towards greater freedom, autonomy, and the common good faced a huge step back with the advent of colonialism and the lethal consequences of such capitalist imperial state. African, like Asian civilizations (Amin, 2009), showed significant levels of contextualized levels of development—at the social level and the way societies were communally based toward the common good, this is an undeniable reality—with natural ups and downs typical of every historical process. As Rodney (1973) argues, “Africa, being the original home of man, [was] the focus of the physical development of man as such, as distinct from other living beings”. With the advent of colonial capitalism the entire pace and rhythm of development in Africa—with its natural ups and downs—was not interrupted but wiped out, positively terminated, because of the demands of a colonial imperial project. While during the ante-colonial and ante-capitalist momentum labor and work was in fact the ‘key’ to the betterment or the respublic, with the advent of capitalism, Africanna civilizations were confronted not just with slavery but also with the division of labor and new modes of production. The informal and formal dynamics at the base of society were dramatically altered with notorious ideological and political consequences: Specialization and division of labor led to more production as well as inequality in distribution. A small section of Chinese society came to take a large disproportionate share of the proceeds of human labor, and that was the section, which did least to actually generate wealth by working in agriculture or industry. They could afford to do so because grave inequalities had emerged in the ownership of the basic means of production, which was the land. Family land became smaller as far as most peasants were concerned, and a minority took over the greater portion of the land. Those changes in land tenure were part and parcel of development in its broadest sense. That is why development cannot be seen purely as an economic affair, but rather as an overall social process which is dependent upon the outcome of man’s efforts to deal with his natural environment. (Rodney, 1973, p. 29) The Western commonsensical fabrication of underdevelopment and barbarism—despite the fact that it was in the West that history saw some of

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the major human atrocities from the Inquisition, crossing the Holocaust to the recent Balcanic genocide in Bosnia—was rooted not on an idea of different forms of intellects but precisely on the eugenic idea of no intellect at all from such third-world communities. As Nyerere (1967) vehemently argues, African communities survival relied not only on African epistemological frameworks but precisely on its capacity to preserve them and pass on to future generations, as well. The money and time on passing such forms of knowledge to others ‘are better spent and bring more benefits to our country than the money and great amount of time we spend on other that which we call development’. This is crystal clear in Machel’s (1985) reasoning as well. As he (1985) argues, “we must be aware that the new generations are growing up in contact with the old generations who are passing on the vices of the past. Our practical experience shows how children and young people in our own centers can be contaminated by decadent ideas, habits and tastes” (p. 28). Moreover, the struggle against colonialism was not subservient on any counterhegemonic Western epistemologies. Despite the innumerous avenues of support, solidarity, and influence from the so-called socialist world in the struggle against colonialism, it is undeniable that it was such informal cultural politics of elderly, which allowed the African intellectual leaders to boost their political consciousness. As we have mentioned previously, Machel (1985) argues that “no book by Marx ever arrived in my home town, nor any other book that spoke against colonialism. Our books were these elders. It was they who taught us what colonialism is, the evils of colonialism and what the colonialists did when they came here. They were our source of inspiration” (p. x). Although subservience toward Western counterhegemonic perspectives was clearly not the case, the existence of communality ideological interests cannot be undermined. Nkrumah (1964; 2006), goes actually above and beyond such position arguing that the attitude of Africans “to the Western and the Islamic experience must be purposeful. It must be guided by thought, for practice without thought is blind” (p. 78). Because of a colonial educational system that refused to incorporate African epistemological perspectives (Lumumba, 1963), the survival of African communities relied precisely on its capacity not just to resist colonial epistemologies but simultaneously to continue engaging in reading the word and the (now new colonial) from an African episteme already in place well before the lethal colonial encounter. However, the struggle against colonialism and imperialism occurred within the very core of the imperial powers as well. Christian states, Lumumba (1963) argues, would eventually realize (as they actually did it) “that it is not at all in their interests to use force to perpetuate a policy that is bound to collapse sooner or later despite all their efforts” (p. 92). Looking back to the case of Portuguese colonial empire, it was clear that the struggles lead by anticolonial movements, such as FRELIMO, PAIGC, MPLA (Movimento Popular de Libertacao de Angola), MLSTP (Movimento de Libertação de São Tomé e Príncipe), and FRETILIN (Frente Revolucionária de Timor-Leste Independente), made everyday

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life in its own mainland unsustainable. Such unsustainability led to the socalled carnation revolution in April 25, 1974 (Carvalho, 2014; Spinola, 1974; Veloso, 2012). The imperial cultural politics of misrepresentation of the struggles against colonial empires were no longer efficient. The success of African resistance and counterattack to European colonialism was not expected—that is, it was not on the plans. The empire was lost between the theaters of war in the colonies and the social convolution in the mainland. Such successful African uprisings could be well framed in what Dussel (1995, p. 14) insightfully called “philosophy of liberation”. That is, the old classic ontology of the center dominated by Europe and the United States is under the gun of the oppressed, which is an irrevocable process. A philosophy of liberation, Dussel, 1995, p. 14) claims, “is rising from the periphery, from the oppressed, from the shadow that the light of Being has not been able to illuminate”. That is, he (1995b) continues, “our thought sets out from non-Being, nothingness, otherness, exteriority, the mystery of nonsense. It is, then, a ‘barbarian philosophy’ ” (p. 14). I return to this issue later on when I examine the Itinerant Curriculum Theory. It goes without saying that capitalism imposed a monolithic notion of development, one plagued by deterministic frameworks and irrationalities viciously rapped in class, race, and gender segregation dynamics, the very core of the imperial project. Thus, colonization and civilization constitute an oxymoron. Between the former and the latter is an infinite distance (Amin, 2009). Under the label of underdevelopment, and the urgent need to offer pounds and gallons of civilization, colonialism produced an explosive dialectic ‘decivilizing’ the colonizer and ‘thingificizing’ the colonized. Colonization, Cesaire (2000) states, lives on a boomerang effect on that dehumanizes even the most civilized man; that colonial activity, colonial enterprise, colonial conquest, which is based on contempt for the native and justified by the contempt, inevitably tends to change him who undertakes it; that the colonizer, ho in order to ease his consciousness gets into the habit of seeing the other man as an animal accustoms himself to treating him like an animal, and tends objectively to transform himself into an animal. (p. 41) As a eugenic philosophy of practice(s), colonialism relied heavily on dehumanization, decivilization, and brutalization of the oppressed and colonized as well. Fanon taught great deal in this context. Fanon (1963) examines how the success of colonialism was based on the psyche of the colonized. As he argues, “it is not possible to enslave men without logically making them inferior through and through [and] racism is only the emotional, affective, sometimes intellectuals explanation of this inferiorization” (Fanon, 1964, p. 40). As shocking as it might be, Cesaire (2000) states, what Hitler did was to apply “to Europe colonialist procedures which until then had been reserved exclusively for the Arabs of Algeria, the ‘coolies of India and the

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‘nigger’s in Africa” (p. 36). What is dangerous is how such dehumanizing practices are so connected with the cultural politics of memory lost. That is, Memmi (1991) argues, within the social processes of ‘thingificizing’ and brutalizing, the colonized “loses memory,” not just because of a biological effect but also precisely socio-psychological because “memory is not purely a mental phenomenon” (p. 103). More to the point, just as memory of an individual is the fruit of his history and physiology, that of a people rests upon its institutions. Now the colonizer’s institutions are death or petrified. He scarcely believes in those which continue to show some signs of life and daily confirms, their ineffectiveness. He often becomes ashamed of these institutions, as of a ridiculous and overaged monument. (Memmi, 1991, p. 103) The struggle against the epistemicide implies a non-negotiable position against eugenicism but above all against “the repercussions of [such eugenics] at all levels of sociability” (Fanon, 1964, p. 36). This will help one to understand not only the rumble between race and culture but also that fact that, while race is not the totalitarian category that fuels the wrangle colonizer–colonized, it is arguably one of the “crudest element[s] of the colonial structure” (see Fanon, 1964, p. 32). The success of anti-colonial struggles heavily relied on the strength of African epistemologies that refuse to surrender and to subjugate to the colonial power matrix and simultaneously challenge and destroy the psychological impact of colonialism by continuous strategies of demolishing the colonial mind-set that persistently view African ways of understanding an perceiving the social context not exactly as inferior but actually as nonexistent (Sousa Santos, 2014) because of the incredible incapacity of Western episteme logic to admit any epistemological framework beyond the Western Eurocentric platform. Respecting and relying of African epistemologies was undeniable an ideological position, a political statement, a matter of social emancipation. Samora Machel (forthcoming) unveils this accurately: Our political ideology is the result of the combat of the laborious masses explored by their emancipation and was tempered in the armed political struggle of our people against colonialism, imperialism and exploitation for the conquering of and edification of Popular Power. Each victory that we reach, each weakness that we note, find their foundation in the way that we have made the popular masses assume and live out the ideology. (p. 27) While African communalism and welfare fundamentally based on African epistemological perspectives was raped and silenced because of colonial invasions, it is undeniable that true independence, that is, a true victory against colonialism, Nkrumah (1964) argues, requires “a new harmony [that needs to be] forged, an harmony that will allow the combine[d] presence of

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traditional Africa, Islamic Africa and Euro-Christian Africa, so that this presence is in tuned with the humanistic principles underlying African society” (p. 70). That is, a “new ideology is required, an ideology which can solidify in a philosophical statement, but at the same time an ideology which will not abandon the humanistic human principles of Africa” (Nkrumah, 1964, p. 70). According to Nkrumah (1964), such an ideology will be born out of the crisis of the African conscience, a philosophical consciencism [that will give] the theoretical basis for an ideology whose aim shall be to contain the African experience of Islamic and EuroChristian presence as well as the experience of the traditional African society, and by gestation, employ them for the harmonious growth and development of that society. (p. 70) Nkrumah (1964) is actually putting forward a drastic social revolution that would be impossible without an intellectual revolution, a revolution in which African “thinking and philosophy are towards the redemption of society” (p. 78). Thus, such a philosophy should “find its weapons in the environment and living conditions of the African people [it is] actually from those conditions that the intellectual content of our philosophy must be created” (Nkrumah, 1964, p. 78). Needless to mention the role that education plays in such humanistic principle. After all, he (1964) argues, “practice without thought is blind, and thought with practice is empty” (p. 78). Fanon’s (1968) argues for the importance of a kind of critical nationalism, one that fosters cultural differences and antagonisms that are at the very root of the real and needed African subjective consciousness. Fanon’s approach or better say ‘critical Fanonism’ helps here great deal. That is, it is through education that the oppressed and colonized will understand and challenge that the dynamics of the (the so-called new industrialization) will rely on them as (disposable) ‘parts’ of a new mode of production within a system that can only exists by producing massively oppressed bodies and minds. That is, the oppressed and colonized will be “shocked to find that s/he continues to be the object of racism and contempt” (Fanon, 1964, p. 39). That is, it is through education that the oppressed and colonized African people not only run away from any mythologized past—so dear for the new elites (Fanon, 1968)—but also will engage on the possibility and the ‘utopistics’ (Wallerstein, 1998) of the Africa to come, one that “people [are] impatient to do, to play, to say” (Fanon, 1964, p. 179). The task, Cesaire (2000) reminds us, is to “go beyond the past” (p. 52). DECOLONIZING: BETWEEN ETHICS PROPER AND ETHICS OF OPACITY The cry to revolutionize education, Rukare (1971) argues, does not imply that the African educationalist has to adopt everything that is contained in

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the surviving African culture(s) . . . [This] is not “an end in itself, it is but a necessary means in the process of rediscovering our identity” (p. 286). However, such a cry implies forceful processes of decolonization, as I have mentioned before, which is a new ethical engagement and a huge task given the lethal consequences of both colonial and postcolonialism, or, better to say, neocolonialism. In fact, we never had a postcolonial momentum. A real postcolonial momentum would require a fully completed decolonial process, which never occurred. The anticolonial processes were interrupted by neocolonialism. And, as Sankara (2007) claims, one of “the greatest difficulty [in Africa] is the neocolonial way of thinking” that creates serious obstacles to any revolutionary form to survive (p. 177). One of the other greatest difficulties is imperialism: As a revolutionary I understood what imperialism was in theoretical terms. But once in power, I discover other aspects of imperialism that I hadn’t know[n]. I have learned, and I think that there are still other aspects of imperialism to discover. There is quite a difference between theory and practice. It’s in practice that I’ve seen that imperialism is a monster— a monster with claws, horns, and fangs—that bites, that has venom, and is merciless. A speech is not enough to make it tremble. No. Imperialism is determined, it has no conscience, it has no fear. (Sankara, 2007, p. 178) Violence as a social construction crosses an ethical terrain, which dangerously produces ethics as a social construction as well used and abused at the mercy of those who control and benefit from the colonial system. The link between the ethics terrain and questions related with epistemologies is examined by Walker (2011). According to Walker (2011), “the recourse to ethics in pursuit of an emancipatory project of knowledge holds out the possibility of unmasking and ‘denouncing all myth, all mystifications, all superstitions’ that inhere in a disciplinary and disciplining logic of our contemporary categorization and organization of knowledge, particularly in the North Atlantic academy” (p. 108). It reminds us, Walker (2011) adds, “that the question of epistemology cannot be approached without critical attention to the question of ethics, particularly for those projects that claim to be emancipatory” (p. 108). Drawing from the rationale presented by Deleuze, Badiou, and Brown, Walker (2011) unveils the wrangle between ethics proper and ethics of opacity. That is, [e]thics proper is a discourse derived from a rigorous, vigilant, and militant theoretical site of struggle. Such struggles are not merely over ‘values,’ but rather expose the “conflicts in which [groups, formations, and classes] express their means of reproducing the very struggle that creates them—and finds emancipatory expression in their practices of resistance, pleasure, and authority.” Ethics thus rendered is transformed into a critical terrain that fields the necessary interrogatory practices

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that question the normative assumptions and methodological presuppositions in raising a critical consciousness in the ongoing battle of challenging the disciplinary dictates and epistemological demands of the modern organization of knowledge. The ethics of opacity operates from a similar position as announced by Alain Badiou [that is] Ethics does not exist. There is only the ethics of (of politics, of love, of science, of art). Such an ethical understanding seeks to temper the imperial strategy of traditional ethics, particular ethical formulations, traditions, and prescriptives that gather under the logics and technologies of coloniality. (pp. 108–109) Thus, as Walker (2011) insightfully argues, “the ethics of opacity establishes a critical movement, [produces] an ethical demand that speaks to and is founded upon a responsibility to interrogate hegemonic epistemological production, and calls into question traditional formulations and rehearsal of ethics proper and radically calls into account those ‘radical’ formulations of emancipatory theoretical projects, i.e. scientific Marxism, dogmatic theology, Western democracy, and the host of ‘post-’ prefixed theoretical formulations” (p. 109). In addition, he (2001) claims that the ethics of opacity “is more than an accusation regarding the actions and behavior of the oppressive cultures; it goes to the heart of the issue. It is an accusation regarding the world view, thought structures, theory of knowledge, and so on, of the oppressors” (p. 109), making it quite crucial to demystify colonialization and decolonization. Decolonization is a massive challenge given not only “the consequence of the entrenched exploitation of Africa through networks of global trade and power [but also] the dehistoricized and continued stereotypical objectifying images of an African dystopia that project rampant poverty, corruption and conflict” (Swanson, 2012, p. 38). Although decolonizing processes have been “perceived as devoid of hope from Western standpoints” (Swanson, 2012, p. 38), it is undeniable that there is a growing African collective consciousness that refuses the contemporary neocolonial momentum demanding a turn from the status quo. Former United Nations secretary Kofi Anan “espoused a tri-epoch conception of Africa postindependence, [that is] (1) decolonization, (2) civil war and (3) the age of authoritarianism” (Swanson, 2012, p. 38). While I do agree with the last two, I vehemently disagree with the first. There is no such thing as decolonization. Because colonialism was bravely defeated by African peoples who were led by powerful grassroots liberation movements, African nations, which are geometrically divided according to European interests, saw themselves in an intricate process of neocolonialism. To say it crudely, there were never a full postcolonial moment, because there was never a decolonial stage. However, decolonization is a must, and the task, in Cabral’s terms, is to return to the source. It is thus crucial to understand, Bernasconi (1997) argues, that “the existential dimension of African philosophy’s challenge to Western philosophy in general and

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Continental philosophy in particular is located in the need to decolonize the mind” (p. 191). The oppressor and the oppressed both need to be committed to decolonizing the mind. That is, such commitment is at least as important for the colonizer as it is for the colonized. While for Africans decolonizing the mind, takes place not only in facing the experience of colonialism, but also in recognizing the precolonial, which established the destructive importance of so-called ethnophilosophy, for Europeans, necessitates an encounter with the colonized, where finally the European has the experience of being seen as judged by those they have denied. The extent to which European philosophy championed colonialism, and more particularly helped to justify it through a philosophy of history that privileged Europe, makes it apparent that such a decolonizing process is an urgent task for European thought. (Bernasconi 1997, p. 192) However, as previously stated, decolonization must first be first examined through the deliberate actions of the oppressor in which the knowledge of the oppressed was dismissed or destroyed. As Abdi (2011) argues, “with the marginalization of African philosophies of education and epistemologies, it was not an accident that pre-colonial African systems of learning were also portrayed as essentially useless in contributing to the development of local communities” (p. 12). For example, Western colonial domination through the production, reproduction, and legitimization of knowledge and what is considered ‘official’ knowledge always belittled the possibility of any African epistemology capable of functioning as a societal glue for African civilizations. This is overtly clear in the Western incapability to understand the importance and scientificity of local forms of medicine and its criticality within African civilizational structure, as well as conceptual epistemes profoundly important to understand colonial saga. Africans did not need to rely on Western epistemological platforms to understand, challenge, and defeat colonial genocide, exploitation, rape, and exploitation. Walker (2011) brings to the fore the classic The Race for Theory: For People of Color Have always Theorized from the late black feminist intellectual Barbara Christian, who argues that Africans always belligerently challenged oppression and exploitation “but in forms quite different from the Western form of abstract logic” (p. 111). That is, Christian (quoted in Walker, 2011) stresses, “how else have [Africans] manage to survive with such spiritedness the assault on our bodies, social institutions, countries, our very own humanity?” (p. 111). Bogue (2003), Gordon (2000), and Walsh (2012) documented how the unacceptable depreciation of the intellectual production of people of color, “has to do, in large part, with the generalized perception that such thought is simply derivative of experience, which in the case of blacks is tied to slavery, colonialism, racism, and other social phenomena” (p. 14).

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The assault is on the spirit on experience, which are both forms of knowledge that are devalued or dismissed by dominant Western knowledge under the cult of positivism that purports a Eurocentric view of science. We must begin to question what counts as science as part of the unraveling of the ethics of opacity and a deepening understanding of the colonial power of legitimization and delegitimization of knowledges. ANOTHER MEDICINE IS REAL(ITY) Claiming an emancipatory understanding of health and medicine, Maria Paula Meneses (2008) exposes the wrangle of ‘scientific white forms of medicine’ versus ‘traditional forms of medicine,’ in essence, a clash between ‘Western colonial forms of knowledge and ‘other forms of knowledge.’ Drawing from the analysis of Ngubane (1981), Meneses (2008) argues that “in several studies produced in Africa, the act of situating the ‘others’ knowledge becomes the key moment in the production of a relationship of inequality; from this standpoint, pre-modern forms of healthcare are characterized, en bloc as traditional therapies, frequently of only local relevance” (p. 352). Meneses (2008) challenges vehemently the production and reproduction and final sentence attempted to the so-called traditional forms of medicine. The way traditional forms of medicine have been described and defined show a colonial eugenic perspective underpinning the cultural politics of health that denies the sociohistorical, economic, cultural, and political conundrum, underlying the development of knowledge about health (Meneses, 2008). Forms and practices of traditional knowledges are “legitimate knowledge, with a status that is conferred on them by the considerable number of patients that seek traditional doctors” (Meneses, 2008, p. 352). Within such a struggle between ‘scientific white forms of medicine’ versus ‘alternative forms of medicine,’ Meneses (2008, p. 353) questions the epistemicide “to which these forms of knowledge about health have been subject,” as well as the supercilious eugenic social authority that is engaged in what Apple (1979) called in other contexts the cultural politics of labeling. Meneses (2008) is quite insightful here: What is alternative medicine? Alternative in relation to what and whom? What should be considered? What should be considered legitimate knowledge? Legitimate in whose eyes? For knowledge to transform itself into solidarity, which guarantees the liberty and equality of each culture, it is necessary to give that ‘other’ culture the status of subject. Who is the ‘other’, the one that produces and preserves other forms of knowledge? (p. 353) Whose alternative? Who defines? As Meneses (2008) argues, “in a world where the hegemonic imposition of scientific knowledge is widely present,

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but in contest with other forms of knowledge, one of the main battles concerns what needs to be known (or ignored) how to represent this knowledge, and for whom” (p. 356). It is interesting to notice is how colonial powers appropriated and colonized indigenous forms of knowledge about health. Relying on the work of other scholars, Meneses (2008) clarifies the convenient blurb created around traditional medicine and witchcrafts (p. 356). The fabrication of the ‘other’ as a body with no knowledge is one of the most acute strategies of the coloniality of power and being. In Mozambique, Meneses (2008) claims, “the search for a definition of traditional medicine beyond the evident diversity and heterogeneity of therapeutic practices, has to be inscribed in the social order, resulting from the process of the colonization of knowledge itself” (p. 356). Meneses (2008) adds that “therapeutic knowledges and practices are then being fragmented according to the classification systems of modern science” (p. 356). That is, “such compartmentalization of knowledge allowed the colonial system to appropriate the pharmacological principles of various products used by local therapist, as is shown in various records of Portuguese scientists working in Mozambique” (Meneses, 2008, p. 356). Moreover, the struggle over what constitutes as science needs to be seen within what Henry (2000) calls a consistent Western economic and cultural policy that othered African epistemes (p. 179). Following Fanon, Gordon, Sekyi-Out, and Wynter’s rationale, Henry (2000) claims that “the othered African had been transformed into the irrational and hence ‘phobogenic’ possibility that the rational Western must struggle to suppress [because] to be othered is to be liminalized or associated with the chaos category of the reigning system of order [to be] othered is to be the victim of a ‘projective nonseeing.’ It is to be made to disappear phenomenologically [summing up] the othering of Africans [resulted] in categorical structures of heterogeneity that repudiated all communicative paradigms of reciprocal recognition and mutual understanding” (p. 179). If philosophizing means to reflect than it is eugenic to deny the African epistemological thesaurus. It is an epistemicidium; it is a crime against humanity. The social-biological conditions that surround the so-called first Western philosophers—Thales of Miletus, Diogenes de Laertius, Plato, Aristotle, and others—were no different from so many African intellectuals. Omoregbe (1998) teaches a great deal here. It is not just in the Western world, Omoregbe (1998) argues, “that [men] reflect on the fundamental questions about human life or about the universe”: [that is] “men of the Western world were not the only people blessed with rationality, with intelligence, with thought, with the instinct of curiosity” (pp. 4–5). Africa and Africans are not an exception to such rule, and even the difference between African and Western philosophies modes of transmission and preservation— although tough for Africans—should be emphasized (Omoregbe, 1998). Although this may be tough for Africans, because, as Omoregbe (1998) claims, “the fact that the philosophical reflections of African thinkers in the

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past were not preserved or transmitted by written accounts [and that] these philosophers remained unknown to us, [this] does not mean that it does not exist” (p. 5). This philosophical thesaurus was not only able to be preserved and transmitted through “mythologies, formulas of wise-sayings, traditional proverbs, stories and especially religion” (Omoregbe, 1998, p. 5), but also its survival shows a high-profile cultural capital. This capital has been capable of flourishing, despite more than five centuries of systematic eugenic policies. As Diop (1974, p. xiv) argues, “ancient Egipt was a Negro civilization”. In fact, one of the origins of Egyptian civilizations was “the black bantu African world” (Dussel, 2013, p. 6). Reason, Marc Ela (2014, p. 47) was born within the black people in Africa, despite the tendency of associating the Pericles miracle to the Greek miracle, that is, “humanity is reduced to a space—time of the Greek world, in which, ‘spontaneously’ emerged a kind of spontaneously generation, a brilliant civilization that owen nothing to any other people of the planet”. As Elungo (2014) argues, there is a being within the African philosophy. In fact, if philosophy and ideology are mechanisms based and rooted within the wrangle ‘logic’–ilogic’, to defend that there is no previous period before such a wrangle is profoundly eugenic. Our self-proclaimed ‘logic–ilogic’ momentum would be always described by future millenary societies as shockingly pre–logic–ilogic. As I examined previously, more than a clear intent to falsify history (Diop & Dieng, 2014), there is an attempt to portray Africa as historyless space and time. The question that needs to be asked, as Henry (2000) so eloquently did, is, “What is the anthropological significance of the Western project?” (p. 278). Henry (2000), Omoregbe (1998), Wiredu (1991), and others, while not ignoring the importance of such a question, argue that now is the time to go beyond talking about African philosophy and to actually start doing it. Curriculum does have a key role in this matter. In addressing the question, we need to go beyond Africana philosophy as a countercolonial practice (see Eze, 1998). While it was/is such, it is also more than that. Well before the first white feet touched African soil, African people were philosophizing, engaging in an understanding of the world, wrangling with (ir)rationality and spirituality. In a way, if Africanna philosophies were a countercolonial practice, Western philosophies were counter-Africana practices (and arguably counter-Western philosophies). Through this assumption, we consciously pay homage to the existence of a well-structured epistemological terrain already in place that was devastated due to Western thirst for wealth in order to maintain a eugenic social equation. African(na) epistemologies, Henry (2000) laudably argues, not only crosses “ontological, existential, and ethical discourses [but also are] concerned with the problem of knowledge and with regulating the human production of true statements” (p. 41). To claim that such intellectual tapestry was nonexistent and only occurred after white feet walked for the first time on African land is what we would call the cultural politics of intellectual denial, that perpetrated systematic genocide, consciously subscribing curriculum epistemicides.

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NOTES 1. Anton Wilhelm Amo (1703–1765). 2. Origen (AD 354–430), Tertullian (ca. AD 155–240), Plotonius (AD 354–430), and Hypatia (ca. AD 370–415).

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4

The Islamic Conundrum Lost (of) History or History Lost

Islam is not only one of the key forces in opposition to which Western identity was forged, since it seems to also continue to represent the pass history of the West. —Sayyid (2004, pp. 65–66)

The struggle against Western hegemonic epistemological paradigms will also bring to the fore the importance to study the incommensurable intellectual legacy of the Asian-Arab world. Through this, we see and feel a rich heritage that needs to be incorporated into school curriculum. In this chapter I attempt to illuminate the crucial impact of Asian-Arab cultural and economic development. In so doing, I show how Eastern civilizations showed a greater stage of development to the world, in general, and the West, in particular. I bring to the fore how specific social crucial issues of contemporary societies were already societal mottos in the Eastern embryonic civilizations, well before the clashes between colonizer and colonized. In addition, I also unveil how the West has been able to weave a particular narratology that undermines, at its best, and silences, at its worst, such a phenomenal legacy. I claim that the struggle against curriculum epistemicides needs to challenge official Western knowledge production, which is a strategy that reinforces the arrogant cult of a globalized society that can have the temerity to be lost in its own history. RELIGIOUSLY SUBTRACTING HISTORY We need to pay attention to the Asian-Arab puzzle, which has been edified by Western dominant circuits or cultural production (see Johnson, 1983). Within the Asian-Arab matrix, one needs to pay attention to overly specific complex issues, including democracy, epistemology and the interpretation of Arabic/Middle Eastern epistemologies, the interplay between Islam and ideology, the relationship between religion and science/technology as well as between rights and freedom. These issues and others cannot be understood with just Western ontological and epistemological tools, which secularly have

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been producing a particular tapestry of history (Morgan, 2007) that either undermines or denies the existence of other forms of episteme(s) before and beyond the Western hegemony. It is not at all true that the Asian-Arab civilizations suffered from a huge deficit of cultural and economic development at the time of the initial belligerent confrontations between West and East. The Western hegemony that was imposed gradually and genocidally, especially since the Renaissance, has huge contours of complexity and requires analysis that should counteract both the romanticization of the facts and the domestication of concepts. The historical processes resulting from the pugnacious clashes between East and West point to another history, a history that has been systematically subtracted and withheld from the school curriculum and reduced to a praise of a glaring fallacy based on the cultural and economic Western superiority. For instance, talking with high school teachers in New England, one concludes that school curriculum portrays the history of Puerto Rico in a way that shows how the United States “saved” Puerto Rico and how “Communist Cuba” is dangerous. Yet, while discussing the novel In the Time of the Butterflies, students knew next to nothing about the Cuban Revolution or Las Marisposas. The invisibilization of the non-Western epistemologies is not a ceased history but one with a present legacy of oppressed epistemologies, demonstrating the power of hegemony. Thus, it is crucial to understand Western epistemological supremacy beyond its “internal inventiveness and the virtues of its unique entrepreneurial spirit” (Abu-Lughod, 1989, p. 18). To understand Western modern hegemonic position, Abu-Lughod (1989) argues, requires a thoroughgoing examination “of the world economy of the thirteen century [that it] contained no single hegemonic power [and it] provides contrast with the world system that grew out of it” (p. 4). Drawing from a myriad of sources (Ekholm, 1980; Mann, 1986; Schneider, 1977; Wolf, 1982), Abu-Lughod (1989) states that [b]efore Europe become one of the world economies in the twelfth centuries, when it joined the long distance trade system that stretched through the Mediterranean into the Red Sea and Persian Gulf and into the Indian Ocean and through the Strait of Malacca to reach China, there were numerous preexistent world economies. There was no inherent historical necessity that shifted the system to favor the West rather than the East, nor was there any inherent historical necessity that would have prevented cultures in the eastern region from becoming the progenitors of a modern world system. (p. 12) More than the differences are the similarities that emerge from such embryonic clashes amongst Asian, Arab, and Western rudimentary forms of capitalism. These resemblances reveal unequivocally an Asian-Arab civilization much more advanced culturally and economically in certain Western social spheres. The similarities are quite palpable in the invention of money and

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credit, mechanisms for pooling capital and merchant wealth (Abu-Lughod, 1989, p. 16). While in certain Asian, Arabian, and Western terrains one could have “recognized currencies [as] a sine qua non of international trade” (Abu-Lughod, 1989, p. 15; see also Udovitch, 1970), it is undeniable that (a) paper money was introduced in China as early as in T’sang times (ninth century) even though paper money did not appear in Europe until centuries later, (b) [credit mechanisms] were also highly developed in the Middle East and China long before they become critical to business transactions at the fairs of Western Europe, (c) in the Middle East, there were elaborate techniques for pooling capital through partnerships or for apportioning profit on the basis of formulas that return a certain percentage to the merchant advancing the goods and another percentage to the partner who accompanied the goods and saw to their disposition at the point of sale. (Abu-Lughod, 1989, pp. 15–16) As Morgan (2007) argues, “this one-way transfer of Muslim styles, ideas and technologies into Europe [ran] over 800 years [but] too often that strand of technology transfer [was] deemphasized in favor of the strands of conflict between two faiths” (p. 26). In fact, “European lure to Muslim technology and intellect, and fear of Muslim power and religion, would mark the relationship between Europeans and Muslims all the way into the Renaissance and beyond” (Morgan, 2007, p. 33). Such would the reality until the sixteenth century “when a Eurocentric rewriting of history would expunge the greatness of the Muslims’ golden ages and exclusively credit Europeans for creating modern mathematics, astronomy, medicine, science, technology, statecraft, and a humane pluralistic society” (Morgan, 2007, p. 33). I will return to this issue shortly. There is undeniable evidence that the Asian-Arab civilization exhibited a substantive and sustained level of development. A myriad of sources document, or documented, such millenary evidence in various ways. Morgan (2007) tells us a story of an Iraq family in the post-Saddam Hussein epoch, the al-Madinas. On his way to work one day, Ali al-Madina, a working-class Iraqi “with a good job, more specifically, a job repairing bridges and highways damaged by the invasion and, increasingly by insurgents”, saw an abandoned box of old books (Morgan, 2007, p. 45). He randomly grabbed the top book that happen to be Baghdad’s Golden Age—a volume that is not related with the majestic Hussein epoch. While Ali al-Madina was waiting for a taxi, he started reading. The book, written and published by the Historical Society of Baghdad on May 3, 1915, was dedicated “to the memory of the glorious and wise Caliph Abu Jafar Abdullah al-Mamun of the Abbasid House, born in the Muslim year of 164 A.H. (A.D. 786) and dead 47 years later” (Morgan, 2007, p. 46). The author elaborates on this: Under the leadership of al-Mamun, Baghdad rose to become the center of world learning and the heart of the Arab Golden Age. His House of

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The differences were bluntly evident too. If the similarities reveal a developed Eastern civilization in relation to the West, the differences are perceived in a different way, that is, the distinct power they both show in the thirteenth and sixteenth centuries. Abu-Lughod (1989) adds to this: The difference was that in the thirteenth century Europe lagged behind the Orient, whereas by the sixteenth century she had pulled considerably ahead. The question to be asked, particularly if one rejects the facile answer that Europe had unique qualities that allow her to. My contention is that the context—geographic, political and demographic—in which development occurred was far more significant and determining than any internal psychological or institutional factors. (p. 18) Thus, “Europe pulled ahead because the Orient was ‘temporarily’ in disarray” (Abu-Lughod, 1989, p. 18). That is, “the Black Death that spread in China all the way to Europe [and] the progressive fragmentation of the intervening overland trade route regions that had been unified by Genghis Khan during the first half of the thirteenth century [had] been subdivided by its successors” (Abu-Lughod, 1989, pp. 18–19) by the end of the century. The Black Death spread fastest “among the most mobile elements of the society, the army” (Abu-Lughod, 1989, p. 183). In addition, Abu-Lughod (1989) argues that Western colonial concepts, such as “discovery(ies),” run counter (to) history (p. 19). While Western textbooks glorify the Portuguese sea travels as discoveries, the fact is that Arab navigation manuals “had charted [such] waters long before, [and] the coastline, albeit in the reverse order from east to west, is described in such detail in the manuals that one cannot doubt the prior circumnavigation of Africa by Arab/Persian sailors” (Abu-Lughod, 1989, p. 19; see also Tibbetts, 1981). The historical trajectories of Roger and Francis Bacon in the thirteenth and sixteenth centuries, respectively, unveiled by Abu-Lughod (1989), shows not only how complex the East–West conundrum was but also how reductive it is to praise Western culture as an unpolluted apparatus that decimated the Eastern civilization and imposed a kind of Western cultural totalitarianism (pp. 20–24). Arguably, in the magisterial attempt to colonize the East, the West ended up being colonized. Although the two have lived in different historical moments (the former in the heyday of Islamic culture, the latter

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in the zenith of Western culture), by looking carefully into the path of both, one clearly perceives not only the difficulties and embarrassments of the major project of the West—which was to Christianize the East—but also a concern with the epistemologies quite latent in the Eastern territories. On one hand, both the size and the non-monolithism of the population and cultures in non-Christian world(s) “made the Crusade impossible” (AbuLughod, 1989, p. 22). In fact, such period, Morgan (2007) stresses, “as in all parts of the world, is shaken by political struggles, coups, and assassinations, and resentments and vendettas occasionally break into a civil war” (p. 18). However, such social quarrels and assimilations “also begin to produce a unique hybrid culture, a nominally Arabic but diverse and rich merger with the literacy and opulence of Persia, and the learning and styles of Byzantium, along with the echoes of Greece and Rome” (Morgan, 2007, p. 18). On the other hand, such non-monolithic dimension propelled a powerful cultural apparatus. Roger and Francis Bacon were quite sentient of such cultural power. Abu-Lughod (1989) adds that [i]n 1257 [Roger Bacon] wrote to the Pope Clement IV, appealing to him to set up a grand project—an encyclopedia of new knowledge in the natural sciences. The impact of translations from Arabic on his thinking cannot be ignored. Roger Bacon was fully aware of [an important literature] and in his letters to the Pope he stressed the need to supplant wars and crusades by teaching and preaching. Francis Bacon [wrote] in 1605 Advancement of Learning [that] was a plan to reorganize the study of natural sciences, but then such sciences were indigenous. (pp. 22–23) Roger Bacon actually “hoped to reform European education by incorporating the knowledge that was available in these ‘higher’ civilizations” (Abu-Lughod, 1989, p. 21). The Arab civilizational development was thus unquestionable. This high stage of development does not arrive by chance. There was a whole dynamism grounded in a particular social mechanism that would naturally create great economic and cultural development. It was a society extremely open to the world, as indeed can be seen by the influence of numerous Asian and European civilizations. In fact, as Marquand (2011) documents in the sixteenth century “when Europeans were burning heretics at the stake, Akbar, the great Mughal emperor of northern India, used to hold interfaith dialogues between Muslims, Hindus, Christians, Parsees, Jews, and Jains” (p. 4). PIONEERING SOCIAL AND COGNITIVE ADVANCEMENTS The native roots of Islamic intellectualism and rationalism, Morgan (2007) asserts, “can be traced to the writings of Muslim thinkers as early as the sixth and seventh centuries, long before Greek influence arrived. The concepts

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of ilm (knowledge) and aql (reason, human intelligence, wisdom) occur frequently in the Qur’an as well as in early Muslim writings” (p. 52). Morgan’s X-ray deserves to be quoted in length: In the eighth and ninth centuries, Islam dynamically evolves a multitude of cosmological, philosophical, and ethnic influences, bringing countless new perspectives into its fold. This cultural shock wave rapidly diversifies Islamic culture and thought into a rich mosaic of ideas. It will not be until the tenth century that this diversity will settle down into a more familiar Shiite and Sunni schools that will survive into modern times. At the time when al-Mamun’s caliphate begins, there are at least several dozen trends and schools of thought. And all of these schools overlap in some way and cross-fertilize each other. They include the traditionalists (some of whom will later be defined as the Sunnis), the Shiites (some of whose ideas influence the Abbasid ideology), the fuqaha (a rising class of erudite legal scholars on Islamic law) and the mutakallimum. The latter are theological scholars who turn to ancient philosophy to articulate and strengthen their ideas. (p. 52) The Islamic world “built the world’s first teaching hospital” (Morgan, 2007, p. 56), as well as one of the very first centers of rationalist learning, “The Persian Academy of Gundeshapur in present-day Khuzestan province” (Morgan, 2007, p. 55). Gundeshapur, or the House of Wisdom, has “drawn a dazzling array of thinkers” (Morgan, 2007, p. 56). Such a house is the ultimate institution, which can be the foundation for a society based on reason and invention, for a world empire of faith filtered through the lens of reason. His scientific center will contain an observatory, a hospital, a library, and research programs in rhetoric and logic, metaphysics and theology, algebra, trigonometry, geometry, physics, biology, medicine and pharmacology . . . These subjects and other academic research will not be pursued by specialists operating in separate compartments of knowledge. No . . . In these early times, the scholars see all these studies and phenomena as mosaic windows into a much larger connected reality, which is God’s universe. More importantly, these men do not see as their purpose to force their scientific research to fit a preconceived notion of the universe directed by theology. Instead, they see that their mission is to try to understand the complexity of creation, as hard or even as impossible as it might be to do. (Morgan, 2007, p. 60) Islamic advancements towards the West are quite clear too in the traces in the current Western territories, once clearly Islamic fortifications, as is the case of the current Spanish city of Cordoba, for example. By the eleventh century, Morgan (2007) documents, Cordoba as “the most advanced city

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in Europe with a population of half a million, boasting some 300 baths, 300 mosques, 50 hospitals, and a high public literacy expressed in the libraries, public and private, with more books than in all the rest of Europe” (p. 69). In fact, Fakhri (2004) argues, “the beginning of philosophical speculation in Islam coincided with the founding of the Abbasid caliphate in the eighth century [and] rival principality was set up in Spain by the only surviving Umayyad prince following the overthrow of the Umayyads in 749” (p. 267). Umayyad Spain “was able to write one of the most brilliant cultural chapters in the whole history of Islam and to serve as a bridge across which the Greco-Arab learning passed to Western Europe in the twelfth century” (Fakhri, 2004, p. 267). Abu Bakr Muhammad (b. al-Sayigh), “better known as Ibn Bajah [and] the first major figure in the history of Arab-Spanish philosophy, [was born] in Saragossa [and] later moved to Seville and Granada [dying] from poison at Fez in 1138” (Fakhri, 2004, p. 269). Such undeniable powerful reasoning promotes the legitimacy of the following question: “Did the West rise or did the East fall?” (Abu-Lughod, 1989, p. 260). This is not a minor issue, especially for those who consciously assume the need to fight for epistemological justice. Unfortunately, as Goody (1996) argues, arrogantly “the rise of the West has often been associated, by Westerners, with the possession of a rationality not available to others,” which is a profoundly problematic claim (p. 11). As Morgan (2007) asserts, and as is shown later, “foreign scholars witting centuries later will oversimplify [and] perpetuate the misrepresentation that Islamic rationalism comes exclusively from Greek sources, and that misrepresentation will continue into the 21st century” (p. 52). Although there is an indisputable existence of numerous translations and translators of Greek classical works by Islamic scholars, it is also not less true that such scholars were not ordinary translators. They were, in most cases, leading intellectuals who dedicated themselves to hard work of translations of other works beyond the Arab epistemological terrain with a single purpose: to enrich the already-rich Arab episteme. Fakhri (2004) argues that the greater translators, most of whom were Syriac-speaking Christians of the unorthodox Nestorian and Monophysite communions, were not mere translators or servile imitations of Greek or other foreign authors. Some of them, such as Hunain (d. 873), and Yahia b. ‘Adi (d. 974) are credited with a series of important scientific and philosophical works. (p. xxiv) While Hunain’s research interests were “chiefly medical and scientific, Yahia’s research interests were more focused on theological and philosophical issues” (Fakhri, 2004, p. xxiv). Ibn al-Khammar (d. 970), Yahia’s great student, wrote the famous treatise Agreement of the Opinions of the Philosophers and the Christians addressing issues regarding reasoning and revelation (Fakhri, 2004, p. xxiv). There are multiple irrefutable evidences— albeit cleverly relegated to oblivion—about the intellectual, cultural, and

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technological strength of both pre-Islamic and Islamic epochs. Already in the pre-Islamic period—for lack of a better word—the signs of such intellectual development were massive. In his History of Islamic Philosophy, Magid Fakhri (2004) examines the beginnings of systematic philosophical writings at the end of the eighth century and the beginning of the ninth century. Following Fakhri’s (2004), Abu Yusuf Ya’qub (b. Ishaq al-Kindi) is considered the first Arab philosopher. Al-Kindi was a member of the Kindah tribe, a tribe that also “gave to the Arabic literature one of its greatest figures, the poet-prince Imru’l-Quais” (Fakhri, 2004, p. 67). Fakhri (2004) adds that [s]ome authorities even mistakenly ascribe to him the translation of ‘numerous philosophical’ works, no doubt on account of his role in revising or paraphrasing several philosophical treatises. Nevertheless, al-Kindi’s contribution to the nascent philosophical and theological movement in the ninth century Islam and his endeavors to counter the natural aversion of his co-religionists to the reception or assimilation of foreign concepts and methods entitle him to a place entirely his own in the history of philosophical thought in Islam. (p. 67) Although most of his work has been lost, the remaining work exposes al-Kindi profoundly focused to a multiplicity of issues, such as “logic, metaphysics, arithmetic, spherics, music, astronomy, geometry, medicine, astrology, theology, psychology, politics, meteorology, topography, prognostics and alchemy” (Fakhri, 2004, p. 68). Al-Kindi was “the fi rst systematic philosophical writer in Islam [and] one of the great advocates of applying the rational process to reveal texts” (Fakhri, 2004, p. 68). Fakhri (2004) examined his conception of the nature and scope of philosophy and the manner in which it differs from other disciplines: Philosophy [is] “the knowledge of the realities of things, according to the human capacity,” and first philosophy or metaphysics, more specifically, [is] “the knowledge of the First Reality, which is the Cause of every reality.” Metaphysical knowledge, al-Kindi explains, is the knowledge of the causes of things. To the extent we know the causes of an object, our knowledge is nobler and more complete. These causes are four: the material, the formal, the efficient (or moving) and the final. Philosophy is concerned with the four questions also, since . . . the philosopher inquires into “the whether, the what, the which, and the why”; or the existence, the genus (or species) the differentia, and the final cause of things. Thus whoever knows the matter knows the genus, whoever knows the form knows the species, as well as the differentia which it entails; and once the matter, form, and the final cause are known, the defi nition, and eo ipso, the reality of the defi niendum are also known. (p. 71)

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What is at stake here is more than a pale search for truth alone. Al-Kindi is focused on many different ways to read the truth. This demand for multiple paths (inclusively beyond the pre-Islamic and Islamic epistemological platform) to interpret the truth not only shows an acquiescence of truth as a social construction; also, he highlights the existence of a solid and welldefined Islamic epistemological terrain, seeking a strong position based on this interface with the West. According to Fakhri (2004), al-Kindi was sentient of the importance of all precedent philosophers and scholars of the so-called Arab world (p. 71). As al-Kindi claimed, “[w]e owe great thanks to those who have imparted to us even a small measure of truth, let alone those who have taught us more, since they have given us a share in the fruits of their reflection and simplified the complex questions bearing on the nature of reality” (p. 71). Praising his pre-Islamic and Islamic ancestors, al-Kindi clearly acknowledges the existence of a pre-Islamic and Islamic autonomous line of thought, but he seeks to expand the search for understanding the truth and of the world by entering in dialogue with Western epistemological frameworks. Our aim, al-Kindi claims, “should be to welcome truth from whatever source it has come ‘for nothing should be dearer to the seeker after truth than truth itself’ ” (Fakhri, 2004, p. 72). The task is “to begin by setting forth the views of our predecessors as readily and as clearly as possible, supplementing them where it is necessary, according to the norms of our own language and times” (Fakhri, 2004, p. 72). Also, al-Kindi stresses that human knowledge shows different channels (i.e., the channel of sense and experience, the channel of rational cognition) that are intertwined in the way the individual recognizes its path to the truth. In fact, al-Kindi defended that “to each science pertains a particular type of proof” (Fakhri, 2004, p. 74). That is, whereas in “metaphysics and mathematics we seek demonstration (burhan), in the subordinate sciences, such as physics, rhetoric, and history, we look for assent, representation, consensus, or sense perception” (Fakhri, 2004, p. 74). After making a clear distinction between material and immaterial entities, which corresponded “to the twofold division of philosophy into physics and metaphysics (or as [he] calls hyper-physics)” (Fakhri, 2004, p. 73), al-Kindi engaged in the nature of such hyper-physics, examining “some of the cardinal themes with which this ‘divine science’ is concerned” (Fakhri, 2004, p. 74), namely, the Eternal, the Eternal Being, the notion of infinity, and the complex terrain of ethics. The fi rst principle of all things is “what he [al-Kindi] sometimes calls the Eternal, sometimes the True One. This One he defi nes as that which cannot be conceived not to exist or to have a cause for its being other than itself” (Fakhri, 2004, p. 74). Such a “[n]ecessary [and] uncaused being [is] unchanging and indestructible since change in general and destruction in particular result from the supervention upon the subject of the common contraries, such as hot and cold, moist and dry, sweeter and bitter, which

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belong to the same genus” (Fakhri, 2004, p. 74). The Eternal “is not in a genus, it is susceptible to change or destruction”. Such Eternal cannot cease ‘to be being’, “it cannot change into a more perfect being, on the one hand, or into a less perfect being, on the other” (Fakhri, 2004, p. 74). It exists in a state of permanent excellence that can never be exceeded. Al-Kindi’s concern with the concept of infinity is not detached at all from his notion of eternal being. His concept of infinity “applies to time, motion, and magnitude generally[; however,] his interest was not inspired by idle theoretical considerations” (Fakhri, 2004, p. 74). Al-Kindi’s focus on infinity arose “out of his theological concern with such crucial problems such as the demonstration of God’s existence, the possibility of creation ex-nihilo, the ultimate cessation and destruction of the world at the behest of God” (Fakhri, 2004, p. 74). Al-Kindi’s was also interested in ethics. Following Fakhri’s (2004, p. 94) assertions about al-Kindi’s rationale, moral excellence was not an impossibility, and it was quite towering to any philosophical zeal, which is “moral fortitude, and abnegation are set out in noble philosophical terms” (Fakhri, 2004, p. 94). Fakhri (2004) claims that al-Kindi, and other philosophes, such as al-Farabi and Ibn Sina, wrangles exhaustively within the dialectic “philosophy/dogma” (p. 210). Whereas the first “went so far as to espouse the cause of dogma almost unconditionally and sought to erect a compact intellectual edifice on the foundation of dogma” (Fakhri, 2004, p. 210), the latter “tried hard to lessen the effect of such cleavage by emphasizing the areas of agreement and the common concerns of philosophy and dogma” (Fakhri, 2004, p. 210). Al-Kindi’s work cannot be seen isolated, however. The (pre-)Islamic world(s) were living an impressive dynamic cultural and scientific atmosphere with the help of the so-called patrons. Already in the ninth century, Fakhri (2004) argues that the (pre-)Islamic world was witnessing “a genuine scramble for philosophical and scientific material, in which well-to-do patrons vied with the Caliphs themselves” (p. 9). In fact, most of the “literary disciplines that Arabs cultivated, such as belles lettres, verse writing, and narrative, the philosophical and scientific output was dependent on the generosity or interest of wealthy patrons” (Fakhri, 2004, p. 9). While one can document a great number of patrons (which actually testifies a great intellectual dynamism), namely, Umayyad Khalib (b. Yazid), Abu Ja’far Muhammad (b. Musa), the Banu Munsu family, and the Barmakid family, undeniably, Al-Ma’mun “was the greatest patron of philosophy and science in the whole checkered history of Islam” (Fakhri, 2004, p. 10). Needless to say, all of them were more than mere patrons because they “not only boast vast wealth, but true intellectual brilliance” (Fakhri, 2004, p. 10). Al-Ma’mun’s work crossed issues of power, the state, theology, Islamic society, all of them debated in his salons “with unusual boldness [shedding] much light on the intellectual preoccupations as well as the general climate of opinion prevalent at that time” (Fakhri, 2004, p. 10).

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Whereas Al-Ma’mun’s was the great patron, Hunain (b. Ishaq) was “by far the foremost figure in the history of the translation of Greek philosophy and science” (Fakhri, 2004, p. 12). Fakhri (2004) explains: Hunain’s activity makes a decisive stage in the history of translation. A new preoccupation with greater accuracy made it necessary either to retranslate current philosophical and scientific texts or to improve upon already existing translations by a close scrutiny of the original text. [The] measure of Hunain’s accuracy can be gauged by the fact that he made numerous translations of many of the works he cites in an epistle he wrote in 856. For instance, he states that as a young man of twenty he made a Syriac translation of Galen’s treatise ‘On the Order of Studying his Own Works (π. της ταξεως τϖν ιδιων βιβλιω) from a mediocre Greek copy. However, twenty years later, he says: ‘Having acquired a number of Greek copies of this work, I carefully collated them together, until I had in my possession one sound copy, which I further collated with the Syriac version and corrected it. I then retranslated it for the second time’. And this, he adds significantly, ‘has been my wont in everything I have translated shortly after into Arabic for Abu Ja’far Muhammad b. Musa [his patron]. (pp. 12–13) Translation was, as we can see, a serious and meticulous intellectual process. Translating was writing another book, interpreting the originals, questioning, taking the arguments of the original to another level. As one overtly recognizes already in the pre-Islamic and Islamic periods, scholars were severely concerned with issues that would also dominate the research agenda of the West centuries later. Morgan (2007) traces the concept and practices of meritocracy—so much in fashion nowadays under the neoliberal agenda—back to the preIslamic and Islamic epochs. Meritocracy emerges in association with the need to maintain the muscle power of Islam. In fact, the Islamic empire(s) “will reach its political and intellectual peak under Suleiman the Magnificent [that institutionalize] the use of meritocracy rather than hereditary nobility to administer the Empire” (Morgan, 2007, p. 77). Concepts, such as democracy and socialism, are well documented by Sharabi (1970) during the pre-Islamic and Islamic periods as well. Both democracy and socialism, Sharabi (1970, p. 50) claims, “as a principle of political organization was shown to have deep roots in the practice of early Muslim community, true socialism like genuine democracy, was to be found in Islam” (p. 79). Thus, [t]here was no point in turning to Europe when Muslims could find their best guide in their own heritage. What Islamic democracy in the Golden Age had to offer was far superior to anything provided by Europe. The doctrine of socialism was rejected on similar grounds. As it arose in Europe, it was seen as based on nothing but hatred and oppression.

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Even the socialist frameworks that erupted after World War I, and especially after World War II, in the Middle East, the roots of Islam were quite palpable (see Karpat, 1982). Socialism in the Middle East, Karpat (1982) documents, is “an extension of nationalism [and] has two facets” (p. xxxi). On one hand, “it may appear as a rejection of the Western economic system (capitalism), of excesses of individual economic power, and of class differentiation” (Karpat, 1982, p. xxxi); on the other hand, “socialism may also appear as an egalitarian movement to eradicate differences of wealth and position and thus pave the way for the social integration necessary for the survival of the modern state” (Karpat (1982, p. xxxi). The fact is that socialism “draws much of its ethical-moral strength from Islam and from the West. The Islamic ideas of charity, social justice and responsibility in the light of contemporary needs, provide powerful bases for socialist action” (Karpat, 1982, p. xxxi). Many of the most progressive predicates of Western (contemporary) societies—for example, the notion of truth and social justice—were already quite palpable in embryonic Arab civilizations. The nexus of religion, community (ummah), democracy, and education associated with truth and justice were quite powerful as well. In an attempt to understand how the notion of community is realized in societal practices, Waghid (2011) examines that “one of the aims of Islamic education is to produce a good person—that is a person of adah” (p. 17). Truth and justice were not mechanical insipid concepts and practices. Quite contrary just action refers ‘in a primary way to the harmonious and rightly balanced relationship existing between the man [or woman] and his [or her] self, and in a second way only between such as exists between and another or others” (Waghid, 2011, p. 17, cited Al-Attas, 1995). That is, truth and justice—the aim of a religious-based democratic community education—was not related just to “relational situations of harmony between the society and the state”; an “unjust person towards himself [or herself] is unperturbed about actualizing his or her potential as a thinking and spiritual person and will invariably cause harm to his or her society” (Waghid, 2011, p. 17). We are not claiming here that we are before an incontestable monolithic view of Islamic education. In fact, it is precisely the opposite. As Bamyeh (1999), Fakhri (2004), Waghid (2011), and others document, Islamic societies were not monolithic, which was an asset that created too many problems to the colonial powers (see Morgan, 2007). Waghid (2011) synopsis about the minimalist– maximalist view of Islamic education teaches us a great deal. While the minimalist view of education “is grounded in an understanding that truth and justice involves only people who are unified in a specific community on the grounds of religion, and that goodness cannot be extended beyond the parameters of homogeneous religious or non-religious boundaries” (Waghid, 2011, p. 16), the maximalist view of Islamic education (ta’dib) involves justice

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being done towards everyone and not merely confining righteous acts to one’s ethnic, cultural, political, literary or religious community” (Waghid, 2011, pp. 16–17). Whereas the former is too “limited in the sense that truth and justice for and towards people in society cannot merely be based on one’s allegiance to the Qur’an and Sunnah, [the latter acts] truthfully and justly towards all of humanity” (Waghid, 2011, p. 16). However, the maximalist view of ummah “extends the practice of community towards a political realm [that is] ummah is much a political society as it is a religious community [and] advocates an integrated view of Umah: religious for the individual and political for the cultivation of humanity” (Waghid, 2011, p. 18). Thus, umaatic practices “that are linked to practicing some of the ideals of democracy are in tantamount to adhering to a maximalist view of Islamic education” (Waghid, 2001, p. 19). This point is crucial as democracy and justice are not usually associated with Islam in the United States. In fact, “the practices of a democratic community (ummah) are not inconsistent with the primary sources of Islamic education” (Waghid, 2011, p. 19). Waghid (2011) outlines the basis of Islamic education: Firstly, the autonomy to oppose, speak out and criticize (hisbah), find expression in the Quran and Sunnah. Secondly, to judge through mistakes—better known as independent juristic reasoning (ijihad) can be considered to be another practice in Islam that can be associated with the notion of a democratic community (ummah). Thirdly, the practice of ikhtilaf (disagreement) encourages and legitimizes differences amongst Muslims in the interpretation of the primary sources of Islamic education. (Waghid, 2011, pp. 23–24) Despite current examples of the Occupy movement and the Arab Spring, it seems that such autonomy has been lost. In the Western case, for example, the need for difference/disagreement, has been ironically sanitized/neutralized from the so-called democratic educational system that both at the form and content shows no democratic basis. It is unquestionable that the Islamic period before the thirteenth century was culturally and economically quite powerful because of its educational system. In the four precedent centuries, for example, Baghdad was the center of a great cultural and economic and religious empire. Morgan (2007) writes, The first major urban hospital anywhere will go up in the tenth century. Two madrassas are established. They will grow into global universities, the 11th-century Nizamiya and the 13th-century Mustansiriyah Colleges. Mustansiriyah will offer free tuition, medical care, and room and board. Observatories will spring up at Shammasiyah, associated with the House of Wisdom, and in the private homes of freelance astronomers like al-Hasan and the Banu Musa brothers. By the 13th-century Baghdad will have 36 public libraries and 100 booksellers. (p. 60)

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Following Morgan’s (2007) exegesis, this cultural and economic dynamism transformed Baghdad “into the world capital of poetry [as] a result not only of the city’s wealth, diversity and inventiveness [but] from the fusion of two of the world’s most poetic cultures and languages, Arabic and Persian” (p. 62). In addition, Bamyeh (1999) claims, Ilm-al-Kalam, or scholasticism, “was one of the most foundational components of early Islamic philosophy” (p. 115). In fact, the centrality of language analysis in Islamic societies was huge. As Bamyeh (1999) documents, “there is little question that the relationship between language, representation and truth has been a central and recurrent feature of Islamic civilization since its inception” (p. 115). Such a full-blast scholasticism (Kalam) connected to religion gave birth to “the first major school of theology, the Mu’tazilah whose leading doctors flourished during the ninth century and whose cause was so zealous championed by the great Abbasi caliph Al-Mamun” (Fakhri, 2004, p. 45); this school attempted to congregate several antagonistic ranks of Islam. During this time, debates about free will, predestination, and grave sin (Kabirah) related to the loss of Islamic identity, among other issues, split early jurists (Fuqaha) and traditionalists (Muhaddithum) and show different interpretations of sacred texts, and concurrently, they developed a powerful intellectual environment. Such cultural zeal is quite visible also in other intellectual fields. For instance, one cannot deny the similarities between modern numerals in the West and the medieval Arabic-Indic numeral system (Morgan, 2007). Also, one cannot forget the impact of scholars, such as Ibn al-Haytham. Al-Haytham “resumed his own research on the subject of light” (Morgan, 2007, p. 102). According to al-Haytham, Morgan (2007, p. 103) argues, “no human mind, no matter how brilliant is capable of theorizing the physical world. It must be measured and observed”. Like scholars and scientists “of a thousand years later, [al-Haytham took] no scientific statements on faith” (Morgan, 2007, p. 103). Al-Haytham’s research on the very nature of eyeball will help later scientists to “develop a modern explanation of human vision” (Morgan, 2007, p. 104). Morgan provides the following details: Inspired by the human eyeball, [al-Haytham] starts to build what will later be known as the camera obscura. Five hundred years before Leonardo da Vinci, [al-Haytham] delves into things that will later be attributed to the great Italian and to Kepler and Descartes, when in fact they, like some Renaissance and post-Renaissance thinkers, are really replicating or building on what the great Muslim scientists had established long ago. Al-Haytham’s work will also pave the way for an early form of calculus. In one of his greatest and most audacious triumphs, Ibn-al-Haytham deduces that the curious interval of twilight, something that to the casual observer seems magical and to be taken for granted, and has various mathematical and physical explanations. He calculates

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that twilight only occurs when the sun is 19 degrees below the horizon. Using that fact he comes close to gauging the depth of the atmosphere, something that will not be verified until the 20th century, the century of space travel. Reaching out to the very limits of higher physics, he seems to be aware of gravity itself, and he writes about the attraction of the masses 600 years before Galileo and Sir Isaac Newton. (Morgan, 2007, pp. 104–105) CULTURAL POLITICS OF IGNORANCE AND MISEDUCATION Scientific exploration was not the only area in which the Arab world demonstrated advancements. For instance, the differences between religions show Quran in a different high level. Muhammad El Saadawi (2010) is “slightly more progressive in relation to women and indeed the Qur’an is more progressive in relation to women and freedom of mind than the Torah and New Testament” (p. 327). El Saadawi (2010) argues that [t]he Virgin Mary shows a fixation with virginity. There is no virginity of man and this produces a double moral and political standard: chastity for women and promiscuity for men, monogamy for women and polygamy for men. It is the basis of patriarchy. Virginity is the cause of veiling, of honor crimes, of the stoning of women and so on. Virginity is the basis of oppression of women, of double morality; it is the base of female circumcision, of clitoridectomy. That has been the evil until present day. And this is in the Old and New Testament. Aristotle’s biological theory is that the foetus gains life from the spermatozoid of the male and the ovum is silent; there is no life in the ovum. The woman is only the carrier of the foetus. Aristotle was propagating the inferiority of women. In Ancient Egypt is totally different: our Goddess Nut, she was the Goddess of the sky, of intelligence, and her husband Geb was the God of Earth, and he was representing the physical, the body. With the end of the matriarchal system and beginning of patriarchal system, everything was reversed. (pp. 327–328) In The Forgotten Queens of Islam, Fatima Mernissi (1993) examines how although “there is no feminine form for the words iman or caliph, the two words that embodied the concept of power in the Arabic language, [and] although no woman ever became a caliph there have been many who managed to be sultana and malika (queen)” (Mernissi, 1993, p. 13). Mernissi (1993) unveils the crucial role portrayed by Sultanas Radiyya, who seized power in Delhi in 634; Shajarat al-Durr, a ruler of Egypt who took power in Cairo in 648; and Madre de Boabdil, mother of the last Arab ruler of Spain,

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Muhammad Abu ‘Abdallah. Following Mernissi’s (1993) rationale women emerge in chaotic moments in history with a notorious social performance while being systematically silenced by a dominant view of the world. Western dominant discourse dangerously denies medieval Islam’s great achievements in areas, such as religion, philosophy, mathematics, astronomy, medicine, and poetry (Jahanbegloo, 2007, Torres Santomé, 2010). The cultural and economic quilt of pre-Islamic and Islamic intellectuals and intellectuality was so powerful, reaching nations, such as India, Ceylon, Indonesia, Malaysia, and China (Abu-Lughod, 1989) and, thus, shaping the world before the European hegemony. In fact, Abu-Lughod (1989) argues, “Muslim traders established colonies throughout the Asian world carrying not only their goods of trade, but their culture and religion” (p. 242). These cultural zeniths not only fostered the emergence of a solid bloc of Muslim secularists (“the term derives from the fact that this group of Arab intellectuals was Muslim, hence to be differentiated from the Christian westernizing intellectuals, and they were not religiously oriented, hence to be differentiated from the Muslim traditionalists and reformists” [Sharabi, 1970, p. 87) but also concomitantly will have a profound impact on education that was quite connected with social needs and desires. A good example is the “Ottoman education [that] was primarily professional education [providing] training in three principal fields: law, medicine and military” (Sharabi, 1970, p. 90). Some of the strong criticism toward the West erupted from the Muslims secularists who saw the West as incapable of dealing with “ethnic differences, naturally predatory, untrustworthy and a false civilization with a great spiritual poverty” (Sharabi, 1970, pp. 98–99). Moreover, Muslim scholars, Sharabi (1970) claims, were not driven by “economic impulses” (p. 20). The Eastern view toward the West was always one of skepticism, because Westernization, Sharabi (1970) argues, “brought domination closer” (p. 46). In fact, Sharabi (1970) explains that Europe could have nothing to offer Islam that was not tainted by its rapacious intentions toward the Islamic countries. Islam could not wish to borrow from it anything except those elements which directly led to acquiring the means of defending itself, to the possession of power. On the highest plane, these means again presented themselves in term of ‘ilm’; more directly, they consisted of new weapons and military organization and technique. Europe was now seen not so much as the seat of civilization, but has a civilization that possessed the secret of power and domination. (p. 47) European ignorance of the East was vast. Abu-Lughod (1989) claims that “a simple indicator of how isolated she still was from the system she sought to join. This was hardly surprising” (p. 159). Undoubtedly, ignorance is not innocent. As Sanjakdar (2011) claims, “Western discourse on Muslims and the Islamic world reflects ignorance at best and racism at worst”

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(p. 24). Abu-Lughod (1989) maintains that “if the classical Romans who maintained trade contacts and received imports from the far eastern world in the early Christian era remained basically ignorant of their ultimate trading partners, how could medieval Europe, cut off for hundreds of years, have been expected to know more” (p. 159). Examples of European cities, such as Cordoba in Spain and Tours in France (Morgan, 2007), as well as European icons, such as Marco Polo (Abu-Lughod, 1989), show how truncated the Western tapestry of history is: Too often, European writings view the medieval Italian maritime states as ‘active’ agents on a ‘passive’ Islamic society. The Italians are credited with introducing enormous and innovative mechanisms for transport and trade into a presumably less competent region. That argument, however, illustrates some of fallacies [edified by the West], namely, reasoning backward from outcomes and failing to discount perspective in evaluating narratives. Although it is true that the ‘West’ eventually ‘won’ it should not be assumed that it did so because it was more advanced in either capitalist theory or practice. Islamic society needed no teachers in these matters. (Abu-Lughod, 1989, p. 216) Morgan (2007) narrates a day of a Muslim family, the Ghafiqis, in the central park of Tours. They considered themselves as French Muslims. Morgan describes the roots of Tours1 and describes how Karima Ghafiq lazily enjoys reading a newspaper while Driss has been hooked by the secular non-Western heritage of the city. In Tours, the non-Western impulses were talking with Driss. Something in Tours Cathedral had to do with Muslim Morocco. Morgan’s (2007) mini-story reflects so many Muslims and Muslim descendants’ feelings when they face the same realities in numerous European cities. The West’s official Arab Muslim history—legitimized by the school system and by mainstream media apparatuses—“has been reduced to a string of dates, battles and conquests, painted as the forced imposition of a new religious order” (Morgan, 2007, p. 15). More than forced imposition, colonialism has been assembled as a process of salvation by the West. Odd as it might be, Arab Muslim civilizations have been reductively examined and criticized by their religious fundamentalism. While the examination of Arab-Muslim civilization from a religious perspective is not inaccurate at all, the commonsensical tendency to equate the Arab-Muslim civilization as being just based on a religious anchor not only is profoundly wrong, but it also hides the fact that in all civilizations (dominant and counterdominant), religions play a huge role and, in many cases, have totalitarian impulses. That is, on one hand, commonsensical official knowledge (Apple, 2000), which hides the fact that a huge mass of Muslims are “turning to religion [developing a] stronger visible religious identity [as] a result of many feeling impelled to enact and inhabit their Muslim identities in a more deliberate

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manner than may otherwise have been the case, as a way of expressing strong opposition and resistance to the West” (Sanjakdar, 2011, p. 24). On the other hand, silences and religion have been millenary preponderant in all civilizations. El Saadawi (2010) teaches great deal here. She (2010) “spent twenty years comparing the three holy books” and clarifies that “God is not a book” (p. 327), claims El Saadawi (2010, p. 322). Following El Saadawi’s (2010) reasoning, “religions are [millenary] servants of the political system and not the opposite” (p. 328). She adds, Why do we have fundamentalism? Because in three holy books there are fundamentalist teachings. Religion is a political ideology. All political regimes from the Roman Empire, all empires, including today’s empire, have used religion. Bush the leader of the American Empire uses Christian fundamentalism and, in a sense, Islamic fundamentalism and Jewish fundamentalism. [Take] Reagan, and Sadat [and Bush] the father. They were using the Islamic right-wing groups to do several things. They used them to fight against communism and Nasserist groups, again socialists, feminists, and even liberal democrats. They used them to divide the country with and by religion, for you know we have Christians in Egypt. They keep dividing people with religion. That is what the British Empire did; they divided people by religion. And that is what the American Empire is doing now in Iraq; they divide people by religion, Sunni and Shia. Israel created Hamas, the Islamic fundamentalist group, and now Hamas is killing secular Fatah. In Afghanistan the American Empire encourages the Taliban and bin Laden himself to fight communism. Many Egyptian young people were trained by the CIA, mostly Somalis and Sudanese. They collected unemployed young man; they trained them and gave them weapons to fight the Soviet Union. They are called ‘the Arab Afghans’. Usually, I say in my lectures, that George Bush and bin Laden are twins. (El Saadawi, 2010, pp. 324–325) Undeniably, the Western tapestry of history wove through the centuries a narrative that “(a) loses the strand that Islam’s rapid spread is caused in part by its economic success, not by conquest and forced conversion, (b) misses the thread that the religious conversion of conquered peoples is often low on the political agenda of the emerging Muslim Arab empire, and (c) forgets that the Arab rulers have no strong religious injunction to convert the people they colonized” (Morgan, 2007, p. 15). This twisted view of history ignores the huge impact of Islamic civilization’s education, and it becomes profoundly problematic, especially in our global momentum. If one unweaves the tapestry of Western history, one would realize the West ends up drinking the poison that it produced. Marquand (2011) proposes another historic route that is worth traveling. In The End of the West, David Marquand (2011) deconstructs the Western empire, going back as far as the fall of the Roman Empire. After the fall of the Roman

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Empire, “Western Europe sank into impoverished and anarchic mediocrity” (Marquand, 2011, p. 4); by the beginning of the eighteenth century, “the combined GDP [gross domestic product] of India and China was twice as large as Europe’s. Thanks to a mixture of force, fraud and guile, widening tracts of Indian territory fell under British rule in the second half of the eighteenth century” (Marquand, 2011, p. 4). Progressively, because of its colonial genocidal strategies, Europe assumed a dominant quasi-totalitarian position. That is, not only was Europe the center of the world, but Europeans took it for granted that their “Western” values predestined victories in a Darwinian struggle for moral and ideological supremacy. Europe was the home of ever-advancing modernity and progress. Its trajectory was a model for humanity. And within Europe, the same mentality prevailed. For the French, France was the heart of the European “west.” (Marquand, 2011, p. 6) Such centrality was ephemeral. With the advent of the World War I, Marquand (2011) argues, Europe engaged in a process of self-destruction, creating a serious dent in Europe’s dominant position. With the emergence of World War II, Europe’s dominant position was destroyed, and “in the immediate aftermath of the war, most continental Europe was devastated, and much of it was traumatized” (Marquand, 2011, p. 8). Pretty much the West was from that moment on in the hands of the United States and the USSR. Not only did Europe “cease to be the center of the world, [but also] it becomes the cockpit of a worldwide struggle for supremacy between two rival visions of human destiny and the good society, incarnated by two European Superpowers” (Marquand, 2011, p. 9). However, the millenary rhetoric of West– East, “which helped structure European’s self-understanding since the days of Herodutus and Pericles, survived [and] Washington DC became the new Rome, if not the new Athens” (Marquand, 2011, p. 10). Such cold-war momentum imploded at the end of 1980s with the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 and the collapse of the old Soviet Union in 1991 (Marquand, 2011), allowing the full-blast speed of the neoliberal conundrum that paved the way for the global momentum. It is at the very heart of globalization that the West shaken with the events of 9/11 in the United States, then subsequently in London and Madrid and the beginning of a huge financial crises starting in 2007. Marquand’s (2011) rationale deserves attention: It is already clear that the assumptions enshrined in Kipling’s ‘Ballad of East and West’ have been turned inside out. At the very heart of the West-East antinomy of the last twenty five hundred years lays the proposition that the ‘West’ was par excellence, the home of reason, efficiency and evolutionary success: that an enlightened, modern, rational and progressive ‘West’ confronted an unenlightened backward ‘East’.

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The Islamic Conundrum These assumptions are now manifestly absurd. The financial crises and all that followed from it showed that—at least in the narrow terms of economic growth that the American model had itself privileged— ‘eastern’ China and India were more efficient, more successful and more rational than the supremely ‘western’ United States; indeed, without the flood of Chinese savings that poured into the United States, American splurging would have been impossible. And India managed to combine success with a pulsating and rambunctious homegrown democracy, as vigorous as America’s own. (p. 19)

Global political authority was recalibrated, and today the United States is not the only “indispensable nation; China and India are also profoundly indispensables” (Marquand, 2011, p. 20). We are not claiming here that Islamic civilizations did not face serious tumultuous momentums throughout the centuries. In fact, Aksikas (2009) argues, the clashes between colonizers and colonized created enormous transformations and social fractures. These clashes plant the seeds for a state of shock and humiliation quite visible in “popular tales, poems, and songs that have fortunately survived” (Aksikas, 2009, p. 15). That is, “the fall of the Arab world into colonialism obviously troubles Arab consciousness” (Aksikas, 2009, p. 15). Such culture of humiliation paves the way for a growing and powerful anticolonial nationalist sentiment. As Aksikas (2009) claims, anticolonialism, the visible face of nationalism “became the dominant mood, though not the only one” (p. 15). In fact, the language of nationalism, national modernization, and renaissance becomes the mottos to challenge the colonizer. Atrocities, such as the invasion of Egypt by the armies of Napoleon in 1798, propelled the development of a modern renaissance consciousness. Aksikas (2009) claims that colonial occupation “made this ideology even stronger and more anti-colonial and anti-imperialist in nature” (p. 18). Arab intellectuals, Aksikas (2009) argues, were always driven by four epitomes, namely, “authenticity, continuity, universality and artistic style to express the present social ills” (p. 38). That is, [f]irst, the major concern of Arab intellectuals is to define their Self, which necessarily involves a definition of their Other, the West. The second preoccupation is with the past: How do Arabs conceive of their long, yet vague past, a past full of successes and failures, of victory and defeat, and of darkness and enlightenment. The third concern is a methodological one, both at the intellectual and scientific levels. What mode of action and analysis will guarantee to the modern Arab intellectual subject equality with the Western Other? The fourth and last preoccupation relates to the expression of this transitory situation, full, as it is, with uncertainties and contradictions. What kind of artistic or literary style is capable of depicting the current situation and diagnosing the present crisis? (Aksikas, 2009, p. 18)

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The intellectual legacy of Abu Bakr Muhammad (b. al-Sayigh), Abu Yusuf Ya’qub (b. Ishaq al-Kindi), Ibn al-Haytham, Umayyad Khalib (b. Yazid), Abu Ja’far Muhammad (b. Musa), Banu Munsu, al-Farabi, Ibn Sina, and contemporaries, such as Abdallah Laroui, Abdesselman Yassine, Samir Kassir, Adonis, and too many others, cannot be relegated to an inferior path, at its best, or a path of nonexistence, at its worst. The high caliber of such intellectuality and, consequently, the impact in what would be the later framework of Western Empire needs to be respected. In fact, overpowering cultural and economic domain of embryonic Islamic societies and moderncontemporary Western societies shows that “Europe’s inherent superiority and Islam’s inherent inferiority had been proven wrong” (Sharabi, 1970, p. 44). Although the clashes revealed a blatant genocide perpetrated by the West not only during the wrangle conflicts, but also in the aftermath of such quarrels by the way of Western societal institutions (i.e., education, churches and the media), which positively silenced and hid such rich historical legacies. Shockingly such genocidal Western ‘conquerors’ were quite incapable of avoiding the way Islam and Christianity rub against each other in very belligerent and contentious forms in many ways, yet undeniably in many dialogical ways as well. NAHDA: THE ARAB RENAISSANCE The struggle against Western hegemonic epistemological paradigms will also bring to the fore the importance of studying the Islamic Nahda, Arab renaissance, or as Kassir (2006) unveils how Nahdawis (the men of the renaissance) “reconstruct [themselves] on the basis of the discovery of the Other, the European Other” (p. 49). It was during Nahda, as Kassir reveals, that the world saw an impressive cultural interplay between the Western and Arab cultures. Profoundly connected with the mammoth Ottoman Empire, Nahda shaped humanism, a significant cultural and epistemological revolution, a “colossal metamorphosis” that created space for “the most extensive and varied debates: on scientific discoveries, the virtues of commerce, the struggle against superstition, women’s education, historical analysis rationalism” (p. 51). Nahda included both Muslim and Christian nahdawis. If it is important to understand why and how realities, such as Orientalism (Said, 1978) and Eurocentrism (Amin, 2009), have been edified and perpetuated by Western hegemonic scientific paradigms, it is no less important to perceive, study, and understand deeply what kind of debates are permeating non-Western societies. We need to challenge what Abu-Lughod (2001) calls the politics of negation portrayed by Zionists in the Middle East, which denies an identity to the Palestinian people and their culture. The issue is to understand the Western social construction of the so-called Arabic malaise (Kassir, 2006) and to perceive why, for example, as Boroujerdi (2001) argues, the intellectual and political landscape of civilizations, like Iran,

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often have been labeled “anachronistic, bewildering, enigmatic, incongruent, intricate, ironic, multidimensional, paradoxical, permutable, recondite, serendipitous, and unpredictable” (p. 13). According to Amin (2009), it is a mistake, to reduce power in Islamic societies to religious leaders— ulema—even though “the ruling class, or the hegemonic bloc to use a contemporary term, always included some religious members” (p. 63). Amin (2009) argues that reducing ancient societies “to theocracies contributes nothing to understanding the nature of the societies in question in all their complexity” (p. 64). Following Amin’s (2009, p. 66) rationale, Nahda “was not [an Islamic] Renaissance [but a strong] reaction to an external shock”. His critique deserves to be quoted in length: Nahda was not a rupture with the past; did not grasp the meaning of secularism, the separation between the religious and the political. This is the condition that makes it possible for politics to become the arena of free innovation, hence of democracy in the modern sense. The Nahda believed that it is possible to substitute a reinterpretation of religion purged of its obscurantist aspects. To this day, Arab societies are poorly equipped to understand that secularism is not a Western specificity, but a requirement for modernity. The Nahda did not understand the meaning of democracy, properly understood as the right to break with tradition. It thus remained prisoner of the concepts of the autocratic state. The Nahda did not understand that modernity also gives rise to women’s aspirations for liberation, the possibility to exercise their right to innovate and break with tradition. The Nahda reduced modernity, in fact, to the immediate appearance of its product: technical progress. (Amin, 2009, p. 67) In fact, the Nahda is not the birth of modernity but precisely its failure (Amin, 2009, p. 68). Morgan (2007) adds to this, highlighting what he calls “interfaith tolerance” (p. 17) to best describe such colonizer–colonized clanks. Scholars’ focus on the struggle against Western epistemicides will challenge and complexify such reading. The struggle against epistemicides will uncover not only the rich legacy of embryonic Asian-Arab cultures but also how powerful they were and still are in the assembly and consolidation of the so-called Western Empire; how Western circuits of knowledge and cultural production have been systematically and secularly engaged in ignoring, denying and silencing a lush cultural and economic civilizational; how much the West owes to a cultural and economic structure already in place in those quite developed Eastern societies; how (Western) science, and the very meaning of what is science, have been totally polluted by such gargantuan intellectual dishonesty, which is fabricated and legitimized according to a bias produced by a millenary Judeo-Christian fundamentalist hegemonic bloc.

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WHOSE SCIENCE? In his People’s History of Science, Conner (2005) challenges how science needs to be seen as race coded, a social fabrication controlled by a eugenic elite consolidated during “the age of triumphant European imperialism, and it served as a useful ideology to explain the natural right of white Europeans to dominate the darker peoples of the world” (p. 125). The official concept of what is science and what is accepted as scientific is not detached whatsoever from a racial ideology that claims ‘Caucasianism’ as scientifically and religiously superior and, concomitantly, “simply treated [other races] inferiority as self-evident” (Conner, 2005, p. 125). Such a racialized concept is classed and gendered coded as well. Western official narrative of science and scientificicism erases the important contribution of women in the history of science. Drawing on Smith’s rationale, Conner (2005) argues that “women play an essential part in the origins of botanical science” (p. 234). Arab-Islamic scholarship, Conner (2005) adds, was not just a “passive reflection of Greek triumphs, [that is] Muslim scholars were not simply the translators and copyists [for] they added extensive critical commentaries, sometimes based on their own original scientific investigations to the corpus of Greek science” (p. 161). In fact, “the transmission of Islamic science to the West [needs to be understood] as an act of violent expropriation, a corollary of the warfare that resulted in the destruction of Muslim power [say] in Spain” (Conner, 2005, p. 163). A great body of evidence leaves no doubt over the Egyptian influences in the Greek culture. Such evidence is “embedded in our language with words, such as algorithm, algebra, sine, cosine, [but also] in testimonies such as Herodotus who argue that geometry first came to be known in Egypt, whence it passed into Greece” (Conner, 2005, p. 123). Conner (2005) challenges how the West fabricates science as a pure (ir)real(ity), a result of non-mundane process of the daily life, which is disembodied from the subject. Science has always been a mundane process, and the human body continues to be the best scientific tool, not only by the East, as we can see from a Western seaman’s report: I have heard from several sources that the most sensitive balance was a man’s testicles, and that when at night or when the horizon was obscured, or inside the cabin this was the method used to find the focus of the swells off an island. (Conner, 2005, p. 56) Such graphic case shows how commonsensically official ‘science’ has been able to deny the value and expertise of people’s knowledge. In an extraordinary examination of the consequences of the clashes between colonizer and colonized, David Scott (2004) calls our attention to the important work of Stanley Diamond and his view of colonialism. Drawing from an essay written by Talall Asad, “Conscripts of Western Civilization”—a volume

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to honor Diamond’s work and thought—Scott (2004) portrays Diamond “as the great protagonist of the idea of Western civilization as a destructive force reordering the words of non-European peoples, and of anthropology as a ‘civilized discipline’ shaped by and self-reflexively responding to that destruction” (p. 8). The struggle against epistemicides is a struggle quite sentient that is a lost history that needs to be recaptured. The task is to challenge the Western dominant view of history. Until we do it, our debt for humanity will be open, since colonialism, as Machel claimed, is a crime against humanity. The task, therefore, is to replace the Western and Eurocentric bias of the curriculum with non-Western literature (McCarthy, 1998). Such a struggle will ‘fun^da^mental(ly)’ (sic) raise issues that are not of exclusive to Muslims [with] the aim to educate by provocation as well as to promote struggles, linking Muslims to others, struggles over racial and class discrimination, against colonialism, and so on; stresses and evokes shared, global colonial experiences of both oppression and struggles; expose liberal-secular hypocrisies and highlighted the intolerance of a supposedly tolerant [West]; engages with European culture, politics and values; and connects to a global ummah. (Swedenburg, 2010, p. 291) It would be wise to highlight here that such bias is not that detached from the cultural politics of translation that selects what is in and out of the official knowledge. For example, speaking with a very critical progressive teacher, she shared that, in searching for books about Hiroshima and Nagasaki, she struggled to find non-Western scholars’ novels that address such an embarrassing chapter of the world’s imperial history. As I argue frequently, something is quite wrong within Western society that keeps it from understanding the origin of the resentment (maybe justifi ably) that non-Western society exhibits toward the West. Meanwhile, the vast majority of individuals in the West know virtually nothing about non-Western social formations. Hate is not developed overnight, nor is it something that can be dismissed with flamboyant concepts, such as underdevelopment and barbarianism. This is not a minor issue, especially when the West keeps ignoring the role played in the dynamics of power, poverty, and education. Summing up, the struggle against epistemicides not only reveals multiple ways to pursue other forms of knowledge, besides those under the Western scientific epistemological umbrella, but it also confirms that the dominant stream of modern science is a reductive, functional paradigm project edified by white males. Shiva’s (1993a) words clarify this: The dominant stream of modern science, the reductionist or mechanical paradigm, is a specific projection of Western man that originated during the fifteenth and seventeenth centuries as the much acclaimed scientific

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revolution. Central to this domination and subjugation is an arbitrary barrier [between] “knowledge” (the specialist) and “ignorance” (the nonspecialist). This barrier operates effectively to exclude from the scientific domain consideration of certain vital questions relating to the subject matter of science, or certain forms of non-specialist knowledge. (p. 21) It goes without saying that the culture integrity of the empire was always in question. In his examination of the relation between culture and the empire, Said (1993) eloquently argues that “Africanist or Indianist discourses [needed] to be seen as the general European effort to rule distant lands and peoples [from a] mysterious East [anchored] in stereotypes about the African [and Indian] mind” (p. xi). Such an imperial strategy fueled always “some form of active resistance and in the overwhelming majority of cases, resistance finally won out” (Said, 1993, p. xii). Harding (1998, 2008) does not mince words in her deconstruction of the so-called clean Western Eurocentric cult of science. Modern science, she (1998) argues, “has been conceptualized as contrasting with earlier European and non-European cultures’ magic, witchcraft, pre-logical thought, superstitions or pseudosciences” (p. 9). In fact, “northerners have a problem in figuring out how to refer to the science and technology traditions of other cultures” (Harding, 1998, pp. 9–10). Needless to say, educational institutions and specifically higher education—so well connected with the modes and conditions of production of a Western Eurocentric capitalist system— have been profoundly responsible for a very eugenic view and praxis of science. That is, the Eurocentric depictions of objectivity and rationality is quite clear in the so many history, philosophy and anthropology departments that needed to be seen as “forms of institutional and social eurocentrism [fueling] Eurocentric interests” (Harding, 1998, p. 10). Such institutional Eurocentric praxis is the enzyme of social Eurocentrism, the very core of the epistemicide. Despite its eugenicist base, Western Eurocentric modern science has been framed as an immaculate ethical and ontological praxis organizing not just the very way one thinks about economics, politics, culture, philosophy, geography, sociology, literature, anthropology, biology, and medicine but, above all, also in creating a commonsensical common sense that one can only think scientifically by walking the very veins of such terrains. By denying or eclipsing other epistemes, Western Eurocentric modern science is an epistemology take that denies itself epistemologically. Modern science always constructed women as a nonexistent category; it never placed woman as a subject of science (Harding, 2008). This is not a Paleolithic debate. The recent eugenic claims by Watson calls our attention to his ‘socalled’ discovery of DNA, which highlights the gendered wrangle that also speaks volumes to how modern science edifies the very praxis of truth. At the very core of such modern scientific totalitarianism relies a classed, gender, and race dynamic (Harding, 2008), the same one that did not blink for a minute when using non-Western spaces and bodies as guinea pigs to

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test some experiments, or fabricate a particular war to test some ‘discoveries’, or to shamefully take advantage of Nazi scientists after World War II. The question remains to be answered: Whose science? NOTE 1. Tours is a town that goes back to the Gaelic and Roman times 2000 years ago, “[a] final home of a Roman imperial bodyguard who adopted Christianity and became the man Christians know as S. Martin. [The] Vikings pillage the city twice in the ninth and tenth century, [later] becomes the home of Huguenot Protestantism and booming of textile industry [and] during the Franco-Prussian war the Prussian siege of Paris, Tours even served as a temporary capital of France” (Morgan, 2007, pp. 2–3).

REFERENCES Abu-Lughod, J. (1989) Before European Hegemony. The World System A.D. 1250–1350. New York: Oxford University Press. Abu-Lughod, J. (2001) Territorially-Based Nationalism and the Politics of Negation. In E. Said and C. Hitchens (eds) Blaming the Victims: Spurious Scholarship and the Palestinian Question. New York: W. W. Norton, pp., 193–206. Aksikas, J. (2009) Arab Modernities. Islamism, Nationalism and Liberalism in the Post-Colonial Arab World. New York: Peter Lang. Al-Attas, M. (1995) Prolegomena to the Metaphisics of Islam. An Exposition of the Fundamental Elements of the Worldview of Islam. Kuala Lampur: The International Institute of Islamic Thought and Civilization. Amin, S. (2009) Eurocentrism. New York. Monthly Review Press. Apple, M. (2000) Official Knowledge. New York: Routledge. Bamyeh, M. (1999) The Social Origins of Islam. Mind, Economy, Discourse. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Boroujerdi, M. (2001) “The Paradoxes of Politics in Postrevolutionary Iran,” in J. Esposito and R. Ramaazani (eds) Iran at the Crossroads. New York: Palgrave, pp., 13–27, p., 13. Conner, C. (2005) People’s History of Science. Miners, Midwives and Low Mechannicks. New York: Nation Books. Ekholm, K. (1980) On the Limitations of the Civilization. The Structure and Dynamic of Global Systems. Dialectic Anthropology, 5, pp., 155–56. El Saadawi, N. (2010) The Essential Nawal el Saadawi Reader. London Zed Books. Fakhri, M. (2004) A History of Islamic Philosophy. New York: Columbia University Press. Goody, J. (1996) The East in the West. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Harding, S. (1998) Is Science Multicultural? Postcolonialisms, Feminisms and Epistemologies. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Harding, S. (2008) Sciences from Bellow. Feminisms, Postcolonialities and Modernities. Durham: Duke University Press. Jahanbegloo, R. (2007) Elogio da Diversidade. Barcelona: Arcadia. Johnson, R. (1983) What Is Cultural Studies Anyway? Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies, University of Birmingham, Nº 74 (Mimeographed). Karpat, K. (1982) Political and Social Thought in the Contemporary Middle East. New York: Praeger.

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Kassir, S. (2006) Being Arab. London: Verso. Mann, M. (1986) The Sources of Social Power. Volume 1. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Marquand, D. (2011) The End of the West. The Once and Future Europe. Princeton: Princeton University Press. McCarthy, C. (1998) The Uses of Culture. Education and the Limits of Ethnic Affiliation. New York: Routledge. Mernissi, F. (1993) The Forgotten Queens of Islam. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Morgan, M. H. (2007) Lost History. The Enduring Legacy of Muslim Scientists, Thinkers and Artists. Washington: National Geographic. Said, E. (1979) Orientalism. New York: Vintage. Said, E. (1993) Culture and Imperialism. New York: Vintage Books. Said. E. (2005) Reconsiderando a Teoria Itinerante. In M. Sanches (orga) Deslocalizar a Europa. Antroplogia, Arte, Literatura e História na Pós-Colonialidade. Lisboa: Cotovia, pp., 25–42. Sanjakdar, F. (2011) Living West. Facing East. The (De)construction of Muslim Youth Sexual Identities. New York: Peter Lang. Sassen, S. (2004) Space and Power. In Nicholas Gane (ed) The Future of Social Theory. London: Continuum, pp., 125–42. Sassoon, A. (1982) Approaches to Gramsci. London: Writers and Readers. Sayyid, S. (2004) Islam(ismo), Eurocentrismo e Ordem Mundial. Revista Crítica de Ciências Sociais, 69, pp., 53–72. Schneider, J. (1977) Was There a Pre-Capitalist World System? Peasant Studies, 6, pp., 20–17. Scott, D. (2004) Conscripts of Modernity. The Tragedy of Colonial Enlightenment. Durham: Duke University Press. Sharabi, H. (1970) Arab Intellectuals and the West. The Transformative Years 1875–1914. Baltimore: The John Hopkins Press. Shiva, V. (1993a) Reductionism and Regeneration. A Crisis in Science. In M. Mies and V. Shiva (eds) Ecofeminism. London: Zed Books, pp., 21–35. Swedenburg, T. (2010) Fun^Da^Mental’s ‘Jihad Rap’. In L. Herrera and A. Bayat (eds) Being Young and Muslim. New Cultural Politics in the Global South and North. Cambridge: Oxford University Press, pp., 291–307. Tibbetts, G. (1981) Arab Navigation in the Indian Ocean before Coming of the Portuguese. London: Royal Asiatic Society of Great Britain and Irelan. Torres Santomé, J. (1996). The Presence of Different Cultures in Schools: Possibilities of Dialogue and Action. Curriculum Studies, 4 (1), pp., 25–41. Torres Santome, J. (2016) The Intercultural Curriculum: Networks and Global Communities for Collaborative Learning. In J. Paraskeva & S. Steinberg (Eds) Curriculum: Decanonizing the Field. New York: Peter Lang, pp., 503–526. Udovitch, A. (1970) Partnership and Profit in Medieval Islam. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Waghid, Y. (2011) Conceptions of Islamic Education. Pedagogical Framings. New York: Peter Lang. Wolf, E. (1982) Europe and People without History. Berkeley: University of California Press.

5

Oh, Oh, Is He or She European? What a Most Extraordinary Thing . . .

HOW CAN ONE BE EUROPEAN?1 Modern Western patriarchy’s special epistemological tradition is reductionist, since it not only “reduces the capacity of humans to know nature both by excluding other knowers and other ways of knowing, but also because it manipulates science as inert and fragmented matter” (Shiva, 1993a, p. 22). In a way, such a mechanism and reductionism are “protected not merely by its own mythology, but it is also protected by the interests it serves. Far from being an epistemological accident, reductionism is a response to the needs of a particular form of economic and political organization” (p. 23). The mechanical reductionist Western scientific paradigm, Shiva argues, together with “the industrial revolution and the capitalist economy are the philosophical, technological and economic components of the same process” (p. 24). This chapter examines what has been coined the pilfering of history. I challenge the Western-centric historiography and epistemological history as well “on which much of the classical and social theory is based” (Frank, 1998, p. 3). I offer substantive evidence not only about the parallels between the ‘East–West’—at least until the end of the nineteenth century but also how Western dominant groups were able to highjack and stifle certain laudable waves of development in Asian-Afro-Arab civilizations and simultaneously emphasize Western gradual ascendancy based exclusively on Western merits. In so doing, I observe how Asian-Arab-Afro civilizations well before the Renaissance show a high degree economically, culturally, and politically. In this chapter I dissect how the West was able to assemble a profoundly maculate version of history that inherently produces the nonexistence of high-developing stages from Eastern civilizations (Sousa Santos, 2007a, 2007b, 2014). I also pay attention to the way such official (yet pilfered) history has been produced, reproduced, and legitimated by the school systems since at least von Humboldt—what Chomsky (1992) calls historical engineering—and what I am calling curriculum epistemicides. Curriculum epistemicides are a capital crime in a society that claims social and cognitive justice. It is a crime against humanity. How have Europe and the West

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fabricated a hegemonic Eurocentric history? An issue that is worthwhile to consider (maybe in future research) is that, with the current push for STEM (science, technology, engineering, and mathematics) and consequent dismissal and eminent death of history and humanities, the manner in which history has been de-scientificized, marginalized from the very core of the regimes of truth, is a strategy so connected with the way the scientificity of science—which is the oppressor’s science—which has been produced, reproduced and legitimated to secure ideological control. This is also the power of the epistemicide. Following Andre Gunder Frank (1998), what we have been unveiled in the previous chapter as the Western tapestry of history is related to the fact that Western historians “received much support to write ‘national’ histories in ideological support of European and American national states and to serve the ideological, political, and economic interests of their ruling class” (p. 3). These eugenic interests made such historians have the temerity to go beyond their ‘nations’ and “to claim that ‘Europe’ or the ‘West’ was and is the navel (indeed the heart and the soul) of the rest of the world” (Frank, 1998, p. 3). Modern history, Frank (1998) claims, “both early and late, was made by Europeans, who built a world around Europe, as historians know. That is indeed the ‘knowledge’ of the European historians who themselves ‘invented’ history and then put it to good use” (p. 3). Such historical obliteration (Zinn, 2001) is so powerful and ossified that “there is not even an inkling of suspicion that it may have been the other way around, that maybe it was the World that made Europe” (Frank, 1998, p. 3). Evidence crushes us in a relentless and sick way, showing how Europe [and the West] has not simply neglected or underplayed the history of the rest of the world, as a consequence of which it has misinterpreted its own history, but also how it has imposed historical concepts and periods that have aggravated our understanding of Asia in a way that is significant for the future as well for the past. (Goody, 2006, p. 8) Edward Said’s Orientalism became an icon in the struggle against such historical tapestry. Orientalism, Said (1979) argues, is the very way Orientalists assemble the Orient as a monolithic cryptic, esoteric, mythic, underdeveloped, comprehensively vast zone, a conglomerate of civilizations reduced to its insignificance by a superior Western civilization. Orientalism in Said’s rationale represents an invention of an Asian–Arab blurred civilizational cultural ideologically coined with power dynamics and a cult of superiority only transmitted and consolidated by Western circuits of cultural production (see Johnson, 1983). In his Foreword to Guha and Spivak’s Selected Subaltern Studies, Said (1988, p. v) frames how subaltern studies were the formalization of the ‘Ipiranga yell’, against British dominance in India. As he argues, “Indian history had been written from a colonialist and elitist

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point of view, whereas a large part of Indian history had been made by the subaltern classes, and hence the need for a new historiography”. Since its beginning, the East–West civilizational clashes over the centuries revealed waves of advanced development and influences from the East deeply and widely analyzed and documented by Western researchers. In three volumes, Martin Bernal’s Black Athena—The Afroasiatic Roots of Classical Civilization challenges the dominant views about the origins of ancient Greece—or Magna Graecia—providing us with ample evidence of such startling development. In his first volume, Bernal (1987) exposed massive body of evidence bluntly refuting the vision of Eastern societies as economically, culturally, and politically backward. Reworking what Pinar, Reynolds, Slattery, and Taubman (1995) flagged, one must say that “contributions of ancient African civilizations are not indisputably significant in the evolution of global societies and world cultures” (p. 818); they are, indeed, the genesis of the Western civilization. Following his sometimes extenuating exegesis, Bernal (1987) discloses a set of interesting evidence that shakes the Western Hellenic superiority. Drawing from credible anthropological research(ers) (i.e., T. Spyropoulos), Bernal (1987) unveils how particular ancient Greek cities (i.e., Thebes) were founded by Egyptian colonies under the leadership of black pharaohs and not by ‘Greeks’, such as Amphion and Zethos, as Homer laudably proses. Bernal (1987) smashes the reader with data, arguing that, during the fourth and third millennia, Greece was systematically invaded and occupied by Indo-European speakers from the North that brought with them different and, in some aspects, more developed skills to Greece, such as irrigation techniques specific weapons, and so on. These invasions or infiltrations from the North consequently produced another great wave of influence and development: the language. While it becomes commonsensical to represent “Egyptians in a color officially called ‘dark red’ ” (Diop, 1974, p. 48), such scientific fabrication, Diop (1974) argues, express the real color of the modern falsification of history, one that forged a millenary paradox; that is, “if Egyptians were White, then all [the] Negro people and so many others in Africa were also White. Thus we reach the absurd conclusion that Blacks are basically Whites” (p. 49). As Munslow (1997) argues, one needs to challenge the temerity of ‘a’ genuine view of history one such ‘view’ has been basically “the creation and eventual imposition by historians (and I would add, and others) of a particular narrative from the past” (p. 3). MILLENARY MISCONCEPTIONS It is a truism, Bernal (1987) contains, that not only “the Greek language was formed during the 17th and 18th century BC [with a massive] IndoEuropean structure [that is] its Indo-European structure and basic lexicon are combined with a non–Indo-European vocabulary of sophistication”

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(p. 21) but also “that there is a generic relationship between the IndoEuropean languages and those of the Afroasiatic language superfamily” (p. 11). This is an important piece in the entire historical puzzle. So-called great, world-renowned Hellenists and Latinists (Goodwin Grimal and Rocha Pereira, among others) claimed that the ancient Greek language was anchored in Indo-European and Sanskrit languages. Quoting Georgiev and Renfrew, Bernal (1987) argues that Indo-European was already spoken in Southern Anatolia by the makers of the great Neolithic cultures of the 8th and 7th millennia, including the famous one of Catal Huyuk in the plain Konya. Georgiev and Renfrew propose that the language moved into Greece and Crete with the spread of agriculture around 7000 BC, when archeology suggests a significant break in material couture there. Thus, a dialect of Indo-Hittite would have been the language of Neolithic ‘civilizations’ of Greece and the Balkans in the 5th and 4th millennia. (p. 13) Few scholars, Bernal (1987) maintains, would argue that “it was in Mesopotamia that what we call ‘civilization’ was first assembled” (p. 12). In fact, as he (1987) advances, “with the possible exception of writing,” all the predicates for what we call ‘civilization’ were already quite visible, namely the existence of “cities, agricultural irrigation, metalworking, stone architecture and wheels for both vehicles and pot making” (p. 12). Such a level of civilization “capped by writing allowed a great economic and political accumulation that can usefully be seen as the beginning of civilization” (Bernal, 1987, p. 12). During the fourth millennia, Mesopotamia was the epicenter of a thriving civilization, followed by a prosperous third millennia, a civilization that “portrays a concert of rich, literate and sophisticated states stretching from Kurdistan to Cyprus” (Bernal, 1987, p. 15). Bernal (1897) does intend to create an Afro-Asiatic cult or theory, and it is irrefutable the Afro-Asian waves of influence and development in Ancient Egypt and Greece. However, it is also undeniable that “Egyptian and Phoenician science, philosophy and theoretical politics [were transmitted] by the ‘Greek’ founders of these subjects, most of whom studied in Egypt and Phoenicia” (Bernal, 1987, p. 22). In fact, as Goody (2006, p. 35) argues, “to talk about moral philosophy as peculiar to Greece is to neglect the writings of Chinese philosophers like Mencius”. The fabrication of ancient Greece as a superior, unpolluted culture and civilization gains huge expression through, and especially in the aftermath of, the Renaissance. During the fifteenth century, Bernal (1987) argues, we witnessed the reemergence of a reductive identification with (a white) ancient Greece, and “no one questioned the fact that the Greeks had been the pupils of the Egyptians, in whom there was an equal, if not more passionate interest” (p. 24). Odd as it might be—yet arguably not surprising— “the Greeks were admired for having preserved and transmitted a small

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part of this ancient wisdom” (Bernal, 1987, p. 24) and treated as if they actually represented an unpolluted civilization and not a result of a myriad of complex synchronic and diachronic trends of influence and development. Copernicus and Giordano Bruno, for instance, are another two graphic examples of how Afro-Asiatic science was profoundly influential in Western thought: Although Copernicus mathematics was derived from Islamic science, his heliocentricity seems to have come with the revival of the Egyptian notion of a divine sun in the new intellectual environment of Hermeticism in which he was formed. Giordano Bruno advocated a return to the original or natural religion, that of Egypt, for which he was burnt alive at the stake by the Inquisition in 1600. (Bernal, 1987, pp. 24–25) Interesting to notice is how Pankaj Mishra (2012) documents that Napoleon in conquering Egypt armed to his teeth with soldiers as well as “scientists, philosophers, artists, musicians, astronomers, architects, surveyors, zoologists, printers and engineers [showed] the highest admiration for the Prophet Muhammad and Islam [claiming] that the French were also Muslims, by virtue of their rejection of the Christian Trinity” (pp. 15–16). Following the waves of influence and development within the Afro-Asian– Western challenge, one unveils fascinating sequels as well; some of them a real social gangrene in contemporary societies today still. In examining the way that history has been fabricated to favor a particular Western superiority, Bernal (1987) denounces not the emergence but the development of racism—one of the ace cards of Western capitalist societies—and (anti-) Semitism. Bernal (1987) calls our attention to the creation of the University of Gottingen in 1734, the birth of the first ‘academic scientific’ on human racial classification, that “naturally puts Whites, or to use the new term Caucasians, at the head” of the racial hierarchy (pp. 27–28). Bernal (1987) goes even further, by claiming that racism and romanticism are two sides of the same coin, which became quite important in the fabrication of a Western hegemonic view of world history. Moreover, Bernal (1987) explores how “consciously or unconsciously, all European thinkers saw the Phoenicians as the Jews of Antiquity” (p. 33). The dominant view that world history is a perpetual ‘Semitic-Aryan’ dialogue is far from accurate. The very idea that “the Semite had created religion and poetry; the Aryan the conquest, science, philosophy, freedom and everything else worth leaving” (Bernal, p. 33) is not just reductive. It is false. Following Bernal’s (1987) rationale, we see that, throughout the centuries, we witnessed a systematic strategy to clean all the possible vestiges of nonwhite influence in ancient Greek civilization. For instance, “the final elimination of the Phoenician influence on Greece—and its complete dismissal as a mirage—came in 1920’s with the crescendo of Anti-Semitism resulting from the imagined and real role of Jews in the Russian Revolution and the Communist 3rd International”

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(Bernal, 1987, p. 34). By the 1930s, Bernal (1987, p. 34) documents that “all the legends of Phoenician colonization of Greece were discredited, as were reports of Phoenician presence in the Aegean and Italy in the 9th and 8th centuries BC. The many previously proposed Semitic origins of Greek names and words were all denied,” despite the “possibility of a massive Semitic component in the Greek vocabulary” (Bernal, 1987, p. 37). Bernal (1987) challenges obtuse views of science, especially what he calls “archeological positivism, a fallacy claiming that dealing with objects makes something objective” (p. 9). The favorite claim edified by archaeological positivists, Bernal (1987) argues, is the “argument of silence [that is] the belief that if something has not been found, it cannot have existed in significant quantities” (p. 9). Actually, following Bernal (1987) claims, the Western view of the rest is quasi repugnant: By the 1880’s academics saw Egyptian culture as a static and sterile cultural cul de sac. During the 19th century a number of mathematicians and astronomers were ‘seduced’ by what they saw as the mathematical elegance of the Pyramids into believing that they were repositories of a higher ancient vision. They were classified as cranks for this triple offense against professionalism, racism, and the concept of progress— the three cardinal beliefs of the 19th century. Among ‘sound’ scholars the reputation of the Egyptians has remained low. In the late 18th century early 19th centuries, Romantic scholars saw the Egyptians as essentially morbid and lifeless. At the end of the 19th century a new contrary but equally disparaging image began to emerge. The Egyptians were now seen to conform to the contemporary European vision of Africans: gay, pleasure-loving, childishly boastful and essentially materialistic. (p. 30) The idea that only dealing with objects makes ‘something’ objective—a flag of archeological positivism—is profoundly problematic and creates a fabrication of reality, not just detached but also totally deprived of any formal or informal subjectivity. Bernal (1987) argues that the Egyptian colonization of Greece made the “Egyptian language and culture play a crucial role in the formation of Greece” (p. 37). The fact that one has the innocence to believe that the Greek civilization comes out of the blue is at least disconcerting. Not only is this position far from the truth, but it also produces other precedent and parallel civilizations as nonexistent to borrow the concept from Sousa Santos (2007a; 2007b). In this context, Bernal (1987) justifiably defends that “that there must once have been people who spoke Proto-Afroasiatic-Indo-European” (p. 11). There is a racial contrast, Amin (2009) argues, between Europe and the Semitic Orient that created a eugenic European versus non-European dichotomous reality; “however, the Indo-European foundation, located at the level of linguistics, was [always] undermined” (p. 171).

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As one could imagine, Bernal’s Black Athena shook the academic world. In Black Athena Writes Back—Martin Bernal Responds to His Critics, edited by David Chioni Moore, Bernal (2001) makes a brief outline of Black Athena, reemphasizing that his three-volume opus work is “about the origins of Ancient Greece” (p. 2). Bernal (2001) overtly reiterates a Eurocentric concern “to the extent that Ancient Greece has been the most important single contributor to later Western European culture, either directly or through the Rome, Byzantium, and Islam” (p. 2). In his reply to his critics, Bernal (2001) relies on his major historical GPS put forward in the three volumes Black Athena, exposing that “in investigating Greek origins, [he has] found it useful to set up two schemes, which [he has] called the ‘Ancient’ and the ‘Aryan’ models” (p. 2). Bernal (2001) highlights once again, that “Greek is an Indo-European language, its phonetic and grammatical structures with relative regularity to those of the other extant ancient members of the large linguistic family that includes Sanskrit, Latin, and many other languages” (p. 3). Within Bernal’s (2001) Aryan model, Greek as a language was not homogeneous and [The Greeks were not] pure ‘Indo-Europeans’ or ‘Aryans’ [this Ancient model defends that] Greece was once inhabited by primitive tribes, Pelasgians and others [and] certain regions, notably Boiotia and the Eastern Peloponnese, had then been settled by Egyptians and Phoenicians who had built cities and civilized the natives. The Phoenicians, for instance, had introduced the alphabet, and the Egyptians had taught the Pelasgians such things as irrigation, the names of gods, and how to worship them. (pp. 3–4) Interesting to notice in Bernal’s reply to his critics is the way he reemphasizes how Ancient Greece civilization epoch was gradually redesigned and reworked by Western intellectuals all over the centuries. According to Bernal (1987; 2001), the ancient model was not doubted until the end of the eighteenth century. By 1820s, Bernal (2001, p. 4) claims, the ancient model “Northern European scholars begin to deny the ancient colonizations and play down Egyptian and Phoenician cultural influences on Greece” because of a wave of political reaction and religious revival that brought to the fore the “predominance of racism, romanticism and a twisted concept of progress,” and the “Greeks change progressively from that of intermediaries who had transmitted some part of the civilization and wisdom of the ‘East’ to the ‘West’ into that of the very creators of civilization”. Ancient Greek civilization, and concomitantly world history, was thus reconceptualized. Gradually Greeks were scientifically defended as the harbingers of “epic poetry characteristic of ‘the childhood of race, art associated with flowering youth, and wisdom that came with maturity” (Bernal, 2001, p. 5), a hegemonic production of history in the West, in general, and in Europe, in particular. As Goody (2006) claims, “humanism and Renaissance had to reinvent the past” (p. 35). Needless to say, as Amin (2009)

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adamantly stresses if the “Renaissance is separated from Classical Greek by fifteen centuries of medieval history [how] and on what basis is it possible [to] claim continuity in European culture?” (p. 169). Education was not immune to such an ideological task. Through Wilhelm von Humboldt, such redesigning of history achieved notorious consolidation that “sketched out a plan for a new education that would reintegrate men and woman spiritually torn apart and alienated by modernity. This reintegration would be accomplished with the help of study of what Humboldt saw as the most perfectly integrated people of the past: the Ancient Greeks” (Bernal, 2001, pp. 5–6). In charge of national education during the Prussian government in 1806, Humboldt “implemented many of his early ideas (namely, the idea of education as a complete training of the human personality), as well as establish the humanistic education of the gymnasium [school], and the university seminar focused on Altertumswissenchaft, the study science of Antiquity and of the Greeks in particular” (Bernal, 2001, p. 6). Humboldt’s plan helps the edification of a “predominant image of the origins of Greece [as] a broad Aryan model” (Bernal, 2001, p. 7), a model that would be pushed to a fundamentalist position by “extreme Aryans”. Both the ancient and Aryan models, Bernal (2001) argues, show a kind of “dual influence—and not a sole influence from the south and east” on Ancient Greek civilizations (p. 9). In this context, Bernal (2001) puts forward the notion of the revised ancient model, a world that is “more stimulating and exciting to inhabit than that of the Aryan model [that] is to say the Revised Ancient model generates more testable hypothesis; it enables one to check the parallels among civilizations around the Eastern Mediterranean and, when these parallels are found, it provides more interesting and intellectually provocative answers” (p. 11). Conversely today, in the United States and in many nations around the world, we really do not have a provocative curriculum and educational system, and despite the huge amount of different forms of resistance, the dominant educational tradition persists in the cult of a neutral educational system. In fact, the educational system is not interested in seeing any of this because the system is designed to work for those who benefit from the absence of this particular history. Education was not and is not innocent in the processes of production and reproduction of a particular view of history that ideologically detaches ancient Greek civilizations from its ancestral and contemporary civilizations. This ideological stance is so much alive at the embryonic stage of the curriculum field and in the struggle among humanists, developmentalists, social meliorists, and social reconstructionists, which is well documented in the works of Kliebard (1995), Tyack (1974), Krug, (1964), and others, as I had to opportunity to examine in greater detail in another context (Paraskeva, 2007a, 2011a, 2011b). Black Athena Writes Back is another critical testimony of how Bernal’s Black Athena tried to revolutionize the way that we understand the history of the world, and in a way, it did. It is important now to flag here some of

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the most important reactions against Black Athena, before I move to examining the way Western and European intellectuals have been able to produce and reproduce a twisted version of history. THE COUNTER CRITIQUE The importance of Black Athena is unquestionable. The fact that the work was, and still is, under systematic attack—“for purely scholarly reasons and from a mixture of scholarly and what [Bernal] perceives to be a right wing political motives” (Bernal, 2001, p. 1)—leaves little doubt about the degree in which it shakes the Western dominant view of history. Black Athena is against the historicidium perpetrated by the West. In a very Marxist sense, history repeats itself as a farce and then as a tragedy. Black Athena is no exception. However, Black Athena is not pioneering the four-stage process through which the disciplines reacted violently against new ideas—ignoring, dismissing, attacking and absorbing (Bernal, 2001). One of the greatest Portuguese intellectuals—if not the greatest—Fernando Pessoa saw his major work, Mensagem (Message), lose the most prestigious literary award in the country to the work of a minor scholar, whose work quasi nobody takes in great credibility. Moreover, the world of literature knows very well that, despite Pessoa’s Portuguese identity, he was apparently ‘discovered’ by the French cultive class. It is impossible to do justice here to the vast and dense paraphernalia of criticism that Black Athena instigates. These reactions to Black Athena provoked countless books, chapters, and articles in academic journals, and generic journals, as well as in in academic conferences and seminars, and a myriad of dynamic activity on the web as well. A mere synopsis would probably be an unwise and unfair move. With this in mind, I briefly highlight some of those violent reactions, quite cognizant of the limitations of any fair representation of such reactions, yet hope that this will foster the reader’s interest in digging into both Bernal’s work and the work of his critics. Bernal’s (2001) critics raised issues that were far ranging, challenging: his qualifications and credibility as a historian—identifying him more as a political scientist; the reliability of his sources and disturbing nature of his methodology; his confusion between analogy with real evidence; the way he plays with data regarding issues of race and racism; the way he denies to understand the linguistic tension between Greek as a linguistic shift and/or a language contact; his lack of accuracy and coherence in his fabricated epistemological spiral that claims ancient Greece has fundamentally an Afro-Asian/Egyptian DNA and because ancient Egyptians were black, ancient Greeks have a black pedigree; for his misrepresentation of Ancient scientific forms; for omitting and bluntly distorting the historiography; and for confusing myth with history. These issues are presented clearly in the works of Mary Lefkowitz, Lawrence A. Tritle, Robert Palter, and Clarence

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Walker, just to mention a few. Bauval and Brophy (2011), for instance, mentioned how Black Athena today, “in academic circles, is an anathema, even heretical [and how] even Afrocentrism is considered a pseudoscience and, to some, even a dangerous practice” (p. 162). Likewise, Clarence Walker (2004), also quoted by Bauval and Brophy (2011), claims Afrocentrism has a “mythology that is racist, reactionary” with an incongruous emphasis on ancient Egyptian culture and with no credible shred of evidence that ancient Egypt was black. Odd as it might be, one can see some parallels in too many current eugenic positions, as is the case of ex-superintendent Horne and the ethnic studies war in Arizona. Some of the most belligerent criticism on Bernal’s work came from Mary Lefkowitz. In her extensive oeuvre Black Athena Revisited, Lefkowitz and Rogers (1996) documents how “Bernal’s etymology of Athens is highly uncertain and improbable” (p. xi). Goody (2006, pp. 60–61) subscribes the importance of Bernal’s take; however, he raises reservations on the fact that, according to Bernal, “the shift of emphasis from the Ancient to the Aryan model only comes in the nineteen century with the development of racism and anti-[S]emitism”. According to Goody (2006) the ‘genocide’ started way back, and it is connected with “more general problems of ‘roots’ and of ethnocentrism, aggravated by the expansion of Islam from the seventh century” (p. 61). Islam, Goody (2006) states, was “a threat to Europe, not only militarily, which it became early on in the Mediterranean, but also morally and ethically” (p. 61). Despite such reservations, Bernal’s approach, Goody (2006, p. 61) is crucial since it is unquestionable that the nexus ancient Greece and Near East was systematically neglected, ignored, and erased based on racial dynamics. As the Mozambican saying goes, ‘one cannot straighten the shadow of a bent branch’. Despite such pugnacious criticism, Bernal’s opus magistra was embraced by a myriad of renowned scholars, such as Jack Goody, Andre Gunder Frank, Robert Bauval and Thomas Brophy, and Jurjo Torres Santomé, among others. Given the heterogeneity of such a group, it would be imprudent to coin them under any label as we see in too many instances. Black Athena overflows the debate beyond the narrow margins of the recondite field of ‘Classics’. It is our task as critical transformative curriculum theorists and scholars to embrace in such a powerful debate. THE ILLICITY OF HISTORY Jack Goody’s (2006) The Theft of History reinforces some of Bernal’s opus magistra (1987) Black Athena. Goody (2006) reveals the hostilities, claiming that “we know what Antiquity means in European context, although arguments have arisen among classical scholars about its beginning and its end” (p. 27). However, Goody (2006) questions why has “the concept not been used in the study of other civilizations, in the Near East,

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in India or in China?” (pp. 27–28). Goody (2006) shares Bernal’s (1987) rationale in this respect. That is, ancient Greece has been portrayed as a civilization that came out of the blue, detached from previous and contemporary societies. He questions the notion of antiquity as a unique Western ‘happening’. Goody (2006) asks where are the reasons, that justify such exclusion (or, better say, nonexistence) and the praise of European exceptionalism? Goody (2006) vehemently repudiates the simple-minded theological rationale that advocates European development as a linear line from feudalism (or embryonic capitalism) to contemporary capitalism. He (2006) is quite concerned—and rightly so—over the way Europe has been able to provide “a single reckoning of time and space” regarding history (p. 286). Goody (2006) highlights the role of China, which has been systematically undermined and obscured by Western voices. In addition, he bases his analysis on the works of scholars, such as Joseph Needham, Norbert Elias, Fernand Braudel, and Martin Bernal. Despite their differences, Goody was sensible to Bernal’s opus magistra. In light of this, Goody (2006) denounces that Prehistorians have stressed the largely single progression of earlier societies in Europe and elsewhere, differently timed but basically following a set of parallel stages. That progression continued throughout Eurasia up to the Bronze Age. Then a divergence is said to have taken place. The Archaic societies of Greece were essentially Bronze Age, though they extended into the Iron Age and even into the historic period. After the Bronze Age, Europe is said to have experienced Antiquity while Asia had to do without. (p. 28) The Theft of History is a powerful reaction against the way “Europe has stolen History of the West by imposing its own versions of time (largely Christian) and space on the rest of the Euroasian world” (Goody, 2006, p. 286). Goody (2006) challenges the “periodization that historians have made, dividing historical time into Antiquity, Feudalism, the Renaissance followed by Capitalism” (p. 286). These eugenic cartographies established a developmental code “leading from one to the other in a unique transformation until the dominance of the known world by Europe in the nineteenth century, following the Industrial Revolution that is considered to have begun in England” (Goody, 2006, p. 286). Evidence of an Eastern antiquity is quite palpable. During the Bronze Age, Goody (2006) maintains, “about 3000 BCE, Eurasia saw the development of a number of new ‘civilizations’ in the technical sense of urban cultures based upon an advanced agriculture employing the plough, the wheel, and sometimes irrigation” (p. 31). During this time, these ‘new civilizations’ “developed urban living and specialist artisanal activity including forms of writing, thus beginning a revolution in modes of communication as well as in modes of production” (Goody, 2006, p. 29). Such evidence changes dramatically

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the entire Western historical economic architecture—an issue so well challenged by Andre Gunder Frank and others, which I soon examine. There is also ample and solid evidence that shows that the Minoans in Cnossos, Crete “were [the first European civilization] free and independent” (Goody, 2006, p. 31). In such context, to claim that the Greeks invented the alphabet is problematic to say the least. Greeks, Goody (2006) stresses, “added vowel signs to the Semitic schema” and in the eyes of some scholars ‘invented the alphabet” (p. 31). In fact, “a great deal could already be accomplished with the consonantal alphabet, sufficient for the Jews to produce the Old Testament which serves as the basis for Judaism, Christianity, and Islam alike” (Goody, 2006, p. 31). It is crucial to emphasize here, as Amin (2009) documented, that “Christianity, was born among Orientals before it conquered the West” (p. 170). There is a racial impulse that permeates religion as well. It is necessary, Amin (2008) claims, to “propose subtle, yet allegedly fundamental differences that make it possible to speak of the essences of Christianity and Islam beyond their historical expressions and transformations as if these religions have permanent qualities that transcend history” (p. 170), extending to issues of class, race, and gender. Following Goody’s (2006) rationale the problem of Hellenocentrism is precisely its denial that “a type of alphabet, one that did not represent vowels but only consonants, had long been available in Asia, from about 1500 BCE, where it had permitted a big extension of literacy among Semitic-speaking peoples, Phoenicians, Hebrews, speakers of Aramaic, later of Arabic too” (pp. 31–32). Moreover, Goody (2006) adds, “the Old Testament, and then the New, used a script of this kind, the contribution of which has often been neglected by classical scholars concentrating upon Indo-European languages” (p. 32). Goody (2006) further claims that [c]ommunications are not only of great social importance but often provide us with a model for a kind of development, from the shift between (purely) oral to written, from the emergence of logographic, syllabic, and alphabetic scripts, from the advent of paper, printing and electronic media; in this, one new form succeeded another but did not replace it as largely did the changes in means of production. There was a different sort of change. Scholars have emphasized the passage of prehistoric to oral societies to literate or historic ones as being of great significance. So it was. One mode of communication builds on another; the new does not make the earlier form obsolete but modifies it in a variety of ways. The same process took place with the coming of printing, which has been seen as an important revolution. So it was, like writing. But speech and handwriting continued to be of fundamental significance for mankind. Perhaps ‘mentalities’ changed, but at least the technologies of the intellect did, and there were many continuities, in economic as in political history. (p. 33)

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Such communications produced strong and diverse waves of development and influence. The development of communications foster what Goody (2006) calls “technology of the intellect [that is] the invention [and complexification] of the alphabet had opened the way to a new realm of intellectual activity that had been impeded by earlier forms of writing” (p. 35). Such features not only testify that “other cultures [before and parallel to Ancient Greece] were equally ‘civilized’ in a very general sense” (Goody, 2006, p. 36) but also forces one to rethink the entire Western puzzle of education and curriculum history as illicit. In this context, concepts and practices, such as the economy, politics, and religion, needed to be examined. In the volume, which focuses on language, Bernal (2006) acknowledges that language is the most controversial aspect of the Black Athena project (p. 1). Despite the fact that all the Indo-European languages have been viewed as a result of linguistic cross-pollination, “Greek, the language of the culture, [has been] seen as the cradle and epitome of European civilization, [that is] the extreme purity” (Bernal, 2006, p. 37). The fact that the clashes between East–West became so belligerent and “aggravated by the expansion of Islam from the seventh century” is credible evidence of how “Islam was conceived as a threat to Europe, not only militarily, which it became early on in the Mediterranean but also morally and ethically” (Goody, p. 61), as well as by the existence of a profoundly solid Eastern religious platform prior and parallel to ancient Greece. In fact, during antiquity, as also is true today, religion was part of the political, something that cannot be confined to just ancient Greece. In such context, and as previously discussed in Chapter 4, Goody (2006) stresses, the idea that ancient Greece invented and created democracy, freedom, and the rule of law is suspicious to say the least: Democracy is assumed to be a characteristic of the Greeks and opposed to the ‘despotism’ or ‘tyranny’ of their Asiatic neighbors. That supposition is invoked by our contemporary politicians as representing a long-standing characteristic of the West in contrast to the ‘barbarian regimes’ in other parts of the world. [These] represents a totally European and literally appropriation of history, of the ‘discovery’ of democracy. (p. 50) Goody (2006) builds evidence of how, say, free will was predominant in Africa, India, and China (p. 51). In light of this, the claim that Greeks discovered individual freedom and democracy should be surprising. Actually, such societal features in ancient civilization were quite visible in the works of Kropotkin and Durkheim (Goody, 2006). Although freedom is a very complex concept, one oversimplifies any analysis claiming ‘freedom’ as a reality ‘invented’ by ancient Greeks. The same needs to be said with the rule of law. Like freedom, the notion of the rule of law, “has been interpreted

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by members of literate cultures in altogether too narrow a fashion” (Goody, 2006, p. 58). In ancient China, for instance, “written contracts were used [as] documents of declaration, including transfer of land, and had been since the Tang period” (Goody, 2006, p. 59). As for the economy, it is also crucial, Goody (2006) argues, to challenge parochial approaches. Goody (2006) subscribes Gledhill and Larsen’s position, for which “we need to take a more dynamic, less static, view of the economy” (p. 41). That is, we need to challenge the very idea of market economy and take into consideration that probably “the emulation of the techniques of making porcelain in Delft and the Black Country, as in the case of Indian cotton, should be considered central to the study of Industrial Revolution” (Goody, 2006, p. 39). In fact, Goody (2006) “the market developed from well before Greece until the advent of Industrial capitalism” (p. 45). Although the Greeks had an economy, they were not the pioneers with this. ReOrient by Andre Gunder Frank (1998) is another critical approach that encourages us to challenge Eurocentric views regarding the world economic system. In his book, Frank (1998) “proposes to offer at least some basis in early modern world economic history for a more ‘humanocentric’ perspective and understanding” (p. 2). Such attempt, Frank (1998) adds, “is not so much to write a world history [not] even an economic history [but] to confront the received Eurocentric paradigms with a more humanocentric global perspective” (p. 4). We need, Frank (1998) defends, a “global perspective to appreciate, understand, account and explain [the] ‘rise of the West’, the ‘development of capitalism’, the ‘hegemony of Europe’, ‘the rise and fall of great powers’ ” (p. 4). Frank (1998) documents how “instead Europe used its American money to muscle in on and benefit from Asian production, markets, trade—in a word, to profit from the predominant position of Asia in the world economy, Europe climbed up on the back of Asia, then stood on Asia shoulders—temporally” (p. 4). Furthermore, Europe was certainly not central to the world economy before 1800. Europe was not hegemonic structurally, nor functionally, nor in terms of economic weight, or of production, technology, or productivity, nor in per capita consumption nor in any way in its development of allegedly more ‘advanced’ ‘capitalist’ institutions. In no way were sixteenth-century Portugal, the seventeenth-century Netherlands, or eighteenth-century Britain ‘hegemonic’ in world economic terms . . . In all these respects, the economies of Asia were far more ‘advanced’, and its Chinese Ming/Qing, Indian Mughal, and even Persian Safavid and Turkish Ottoman empires carried much greater political and even military weight than any or all of Europe. (Frank, 1998, p. 5) In the context of our current socioeconomic crisis, it seems like we are going back to the future. “If any economy had a ‘central’ position and

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‘role’ in the world economy and its possible hierarchy of ‘centers’ it was China” (Frank, 1998, p. 5). The parallels with today are shocking. Following Frank (1998) claims, Adam Smith, Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels “agree and disagree about early modern of history and the place of Asia in it” (pp. 12–17). While they all coined the discovery of the Americas and the passage to the East Indies by the Cape of Good Hope as the towering “revolutionary elements in the tottering feudal society” (Goody, 2006, p. 13), Smith, according to Frank (1998, p. 13), emphasized that “Europe was johnny-come-lately in the development of the wealthy of the nations”. The coming of Industrial Revolution and the beginning of European colonialism in Asia “had intervened to reshape European minds, and if not ‘invent’ all history, then at least to invent a false universalism under European initiation and guidance” (Frank, 1998, p. 14). In contrast to Marx and Engels, Frank (1998, p. 15) maintains that Asia was not more backward than Europe; Asia did have a mode of production, and the fact that Europeans invented the capitalist mode of production denies a huge and strong set of market relationships in Ancient civilizations, and concurrently shows Western civilizational arrogance that “dresses up history ideologically” (Frank, 1998, p. 16). While for Marx and Engels what was missing in the Ancient civilizations was a clear and powerful capitalist mode of production, Max Weber not only subscribes to such rationale but also adds the religious piece to the already-puzzled and -blurred equation (Frank, 1998). In a Weberian reading of the world, there was a powerful and superior European reality rationally clashing with the “mythical, mystic, magical, in a word antirational [religious] component” (Frank, 1998, p. 17) in ancient civilizations. The tendency to describe “Islam as mythical rather than critical” and Christianity “critical rather than mythical” is a Christianity view of history and became the dominant view (Sharabi, 1970, pp. 62–63). In his book Eurocentrism (2009), Samir Amin took a slightly different take than those of Frank, Goody, and others. Amin’s (2009) foci are fundamentally to examine and understand theoretically the concept of Eurocentrism from a historical materialist perspective. Eurocentrism, Amin (2009) argues, is a cultural Western assembly showing and consolidating a eugenic superiority claiming an universal truth that is quite far from the real(ity). Such a cult of superiority relies in an illicit history that claims Western economy and culture not only as eternal but also as something that emerges unpolluted and detached from any other external factors. Amin (2012, p. 4) claims that it is actually in such context that the very European identity needs to be questioned. Odd as it might be, Amin (2012) insightfully examines how “Europe definitely seems to be a reality” from outside, how the same is not so linear from an inside perspective (p. 4). Remarkably, the invention of a Western universal history not only created an illicit Western framework but also simultaneously produced an equally dishonest view of the rest of the world (Amin, 2009).

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Frank (1998) recaptures Bernal’s substantive arguments in Black Athena and Samir Amin’s Eurocentrism, arguing that “as part and parcel of European colonialism in the nineteenth century, Europeans invented a historical myth about their allegedly purely European roots in ‘democratic’ but also slave-holding and sexist Greece” (p. 8). Drawing from Hodgson and Blaut, Frank (1998) calls such ‘invented history’ “tunnel history [that is] derived from a tunnel vision, which sees only ‘exceptional’ intra-European causes and consequences and is blind to all extra European contributions to modern European and world history” (p. 9). Undeniably, too many researchers documented that in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, economic, scientific, and rational ‘technicalistic’ development “occurred on a worldwide basis and not exclusively or even especially in Europe” (Frank, 1998, p. 10). In fact, at “the beginning of [the] sixteenth century the principal civilizations in Asia had attained a level of technical and economic development superior to that of Europe” (Frank, 1998, p. 12). The dominant view of history, Wallerstein (2006) claims, “is remarkably simple” (p. 33). European scholars created an illicit view of historic events, well described by Wallerstein (2006): Only European ‘civilization,’ which had its roots in the Greco-Roman world of Antiquity (and for some in the world of the Old Testament as well), could have produced ‘modernity’—a catchall term for a pastiche of customs, norms, and practices that flourish in the capitalist worldeconomy. And since modernity was said to be by definition the incarnation of the true universal values, of universalism, modernity was not merely a moral good, but a historical necessity. There must be, there must always have been, something in the non-European high civilizations that was incompatible with the human march toward modernity and true universalism. Unlike European civilization, which was asserted to be inherently progressive, the other high civilizations must have been somehow frozen in their trajectories, incapable therefore of transforming themselves into some version of modernity without the intrusion from outside (that is, European) forces. (p. 33) What we need is a comprehensive horizontally organized global politicaleconomic macrohistory of simultaneous events, which is guided by the cyclical ups and downs that it should identify and analyze (Frank, 1998, p. 346). We do not want to write a world history, although that needs to be done, not even an economic history that is beyond my desire as it was Frank’s (1998). Such world history cannot be done as we see in the contemporary example that emerges from the European Union, which is trying to build a common unified history textbook to be taught in schools. The claim for the need of a world history here is not to silence some histories but actually to decolonize the current Western history, which is profoundly infected with misconceptions to say the least. In this case, unifying is definitely not the word, rather a puzzle—a myriad of local puzzles.

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With Frank (1998) and others, we want to confront “the received Eurocentric paradigms with a more humanocentric global paradigm” (p. 4). In so doing, arguably, if, on one hand, we are making a call to write the world history, on the other we are calling for a nonnegotiable struggle against curriculum epistemicides. Frank (1998), quoting Braudel (1992), argues that “’Europe invented historians and then made good use of them’ to promote their own interests at home and elsewhere in the world” (p. 4). TO DECOLONIZE THE NORTH It is needless to mention that the challenge against epistemicides is a collective one that needs to consolidate inside and outside Western cartography. As Shiva (1993a) argues, third-world and feminist scholarship has begun to recognize that such dominant systems “emerge as a liberating force not for humanity as a whole (though it legitimizes itself in terms of universal benefit for all), but as a Western male-oriented and patriarchal projection which necessarily entailed the subjugation of both nature and women” (p. 21). The task is to decolonize science as well. The struggle against epistemicides implies, as Shiva claims, the decolonization of the North as well. Shiva (1993b) notes, The White Man’s Burden is becoming increasingly heavy for the earth and especially for the South. The past 500 years of history reveal that each time a relationship of colonization has been established between the North and the nature and people outside the North, the colonizing men and society have assumed a position of superiority, and thus of responsibility for the future of the earth and for other peoples and cultures. Out of the assumption of superiority flows the notion of the White Man’s Burden. Out of the idea of the White Man’s Burden flows the reality of the burdens imposed by the White Man on nature, women, and others. Therefore, colonizing the South is intimately linked to the issue of colonizing the North. Decolonization is therefore as relevant in the context of the colonizer as in that of the colonized. Decolonization in the North is also essential because process of wealth creation simultaneously creates poverty process of knowledge creation simultaneously generates ignorance and process for the creation of freedom simultaneously generate unfreedom. (p. 264) This is crucial especially when we have an educational systems that discursively denies any spiritual reality as part of the human being although allows explicit manifestations of Christianity as long as coupled with patriotic habitus as can be seen in the school ritual of the Pledge of Allegiance. In fact, the struggle against curriculum epistemicides requires a curriculumcide of the current formal curriculum.

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According to Shiva (1993b), “decolonization in the North becomes essential if what is called the environment and development crisis in the South is to be overcome. The North’s prescription for the South’s salvation has always created new burdens and new bondages, and the salvation of the environment cannot be achieved through the old colonial order based on the White Man’s Burden, the two are ethically, economically and epistemologically incongruent” (p. 265). This decolonization process will help interrupt, to use Beck’s (2009) lens, Africa being seen as a “transnational idea and the staging of that idea, [which is] a counter Africa, an imagined community” (p. 27) fabricated by the oppressor, consumed by a self-depreciated oppressed (Freire, 1990), and remained ignorant of the fact that “for the slave there is nothing at the center but worse slavery” (Achebe, 2000, p. 95). This is precisely the same political sentiment that one sees in Appiah’s claims. According to Appiah (1992), “neither of us [Westerners and Africans] will understand what modernity is until we understand each other” (p. 245). After all, colonization needs to be seen as a shared culture “for those who have been colonized and for those who have colonized” (Smith, 1999, p. 45). However, any decolonizing struggle needs to be understood in what one might call an Mphahlelean framework, as South African writer Ezekiel Mphahlele (1965) explains: The blacks have reconciled the Western and African in them, while the whites refuse to surrender to their influence. This is symbolic of the South Africa situation. The only cultural vitality there is to be seen among the Africans: they have not been uplifted by a Western culture but rather they have reconciled the two in themselves. (p. 22) This sentiment was already palpable in Kenyatta’s (1960) argument that people in Kenya “are not worried that other races are here with us in our country, but we insist that we are the leaders here, and what we want we insist we get” (p. 301). Moreover, the struggle against epistemicides is not simultaneously a naïve romanticization of indigenous cultures that is quite fluent in some elements of the negritude movement. It is precisely the opposite. The struggle against epistemicides is, indeed, a struggle against what we might call “indigenoustude”—a mystification of indigenous cultures and knowledges. Mphahlele’s (1965) position, again, is crystal clear: Now to negritude itself. Who is so stupid as to deny the historical fact of negritude as both a protest and a positive assertion of African cultural values? All this is valid. What I do not accept is the way in which too much of the poetry inspired by it romanticizes Africa—as a symbol of innocence, purity and artless primitiveness. I feel insulted when some people imply that Africa is not also a violent Continent . . . Sheer romanticism that fails to see the large landscape of the personality of the African makes bad poetry. The synthesis of Europe and Africa does

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The complexity or consequences involving negritude as a movement—quite explicit in Mphahlele’s (1965) words—might be a good metaphorical signal to help us avoid some of the dangerous abysses that the curriculum field currently is facing: We are told that negritude is less a matter of theme than style. We must strive to visualize the whole man, not merely the things that are meant to flatter the Negro’s ego. Let it not be forgotten, too, that negritude has an overlap of 19th century European protest against machines and cannons. In the place of the cuckoo, the nightingale, the daffodil, Africa has been dragged to the altar of Europe. Negritude men should not pretend that this is an entirely African concept. (p. 25) Nkrumah (2006) is overtly corrosive with regard to negritude, labeling it as a “pseudo-intellectual theory serving as a bridge between African foreigndominated middle class and the French cultural establishment. It was irrational, racist, and non-revolutionary” (p. 25) Soyinka (1988) was also not shy in his criticism of the dynamics of the Western ideological formation at the very root of negritude. As he claims, negritude proponents were incapable of a clear rupture with Western indigenous rationality, thus mortgaging quasi-perennially the emergence of a real, new nonromanticized African voice. Undeniably, the struggle against epistemicides (those that have been edified by Western male hegemonic epistemologies) is a Herculean task but one that we cannot deny if we are truly committed to a real and just society. Actually, as Cox (2002) reminds us, “globalization is [also] a struggle over knowledge of world affairs” (p. 76). The struggle against the Western eugenic coloniality of knowledges is the best way to transform the school and its social agents into real leaders in their struggle to democratize democracy. As Sen (1999) claims, the emergence of democracy was the event of the twentieth century. The real issue, he says, is to perceive how a particular community prepares itself through democracy, not trying to scrutinize whether it is ready for a democratic society. This is a paradoxical time; as Sousa Santos (2005) argues, on one hand, “our current time is marked by huge developments and thespian changes, an era that is referred to as the electronic revolution of communications, information, genetics and the biotechnological” (p. vii). On the other hand, [i]t is a time of disquieting regressions, a return of the social evils that appeared to have been or about to be overcome. The return of slavery and slavish work; the return of high vulnerability to old sicknesses that

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seemed to have been eradicated and appear now linked to new pandemics like HIV/AIDS: the return of the revolting social inequalities that gave their name to the social question at the end of the nineteenth century; in sum, the return of the specter of war, perhaps now more than ever a world war, although whether cold or not is as yet undecidable. (p. vii) Daves (1990) also claims that “we are living in an era of profound global crisis for monopoly capitalism, a time of rising risks of nuclear omnicide, and a time [a] period in which the threat of fascism presents unprecedent[ed] dangers” (p. 21). As Andrew (2009) explained in “Leaner and Meaner? The Perils of McDonaldizing the Academy and Kinesiology,” which was the Alan G. Ingham Memorial Lecture that he gave at Miami University, one needs to engage and foster the critique of knowledge production within the academy and kinesiology. The task, Andrew stresses, is to challenge the accelerated process of fast consumerism—the accelerated rationalization of society associated with late capitalism that has led to an epistemological McDonaldization. Such an imperial pastoral marginalizes particular kinds of knowledge related to critical, sociological, historical, and qualitative analyses. Andrew challenges the way the corporate academic jungle surrendered to such a dangerous pastoral, which is a real obstacle to better understanding the human movement and frames education through charters, high-stakes testing, and Common Core, among others. It is the role of teachers as public intellectuals, Giroux (1994) argues, to position the curriculum in a way that decenters it from its Westernizing forms and content. The real issue, according to Giroux, is “how to democratize the schools so as to enable those groups who in large measure are divorced from or simply not represented in the curriculum to be able to produce their own representations, narrate their own stories, and engage in respectful dialogue with others” (p. 18). He argues further that one good way to do it is to be conscious of the difference between political and politicizing education: [While the former,] which is central to critical pedagogy, would encourage students to become better citizens to challenge those with political and cultural power as well as to honor the critical traditions within the dominant culture that make such a critique possible and intelligible [meaning] decentering power in the classroom and other pedagogical sites so the dynamics of those institutional and cultural inequalities that marginalize some groups, repress particular types of knowledge, and suppress critical dialogue can be addressed, [the latter] is a form of pedagogical terrorism in which the issue of what is taught, by whom, and under what conditions is determined by a doctrinaire political agenda that refuses to examine its own values, beliefs, and ideological construction. (p. 18)

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Schooling and education have to play a leading role in addressing one of most challenging issues that we have before us—democratizing democracy. Vavi (2004) argues that democracy is bypassing the poor, giving credence to Sousa Santos’s (2005) claim that we are living in an era with modern problems but without modern solutions. To democratize democracy, Sousa Santos suggests, we need to reinvent social emancipation, because its traditional modern form was pushed into a kind of dead end by neoliberal globalization. However, an insurgent cosmopolitanism or counterhegemonic globalization has propelled a myriad of social movements and transformations, challenging the hegemonic neo-liberal perspective. It is within the very marrow of such counterhegemonic forms of globalization—and in its clashes with the neoliberal hegemonic agenda—that new itineraries for social emancipation are developing (Sousa Santos, 2008). Such economic, political, and cultural quarrels were metaphorically coined by Sousa Santos (2005) as a clash between North and South, which would bring to the fore the struggle between representative and participatory democracy. Despite appearing hegemonic, globalization has been promoting a low-density democracy, one anchored in arguments about privatization, which is creating more social inequality. Thus, the struggle for democracy “is primarily a political struggle on the form of governance, thus involving the reconstitution of the state and creating conditions for the emancipatory project” (Shivji, 2003, p. 1). This is especially important to emphasize in light of the hegemony of neoliberal discourse, “which tends to emasculate democracy of its social and historical dimensions and present it as an ultimate nirvana” (p. 1). Somehow, we are clearly before what Sousa Santos (1998, 2007a, 2007b) calls a state that should be seen as a spotless new social movement; in other words, a more vast political organization in which the democratic forces will struggle for a distributive democracy, thus transforming the state in a new—yet powerful—social and political entity. Such a State is even much more directly involved in redistribution criteria, and profoundly committed with economic and cultural inclusive policies. (Sousa Santos, 2007a, p. 60) It is actually this state, as a spotless new social movement, “that will reawaken the tension between capitalism and [real] democracy, and this can only be achieved if democracy is conceived and plasticized as redistributive democracy” (Sousa Santos, 2007a, p. 41). The struggle for a redistributive democracy is the first crucial step in reinforcing the state’s role in a more just society, a claim addressed by Kenyatta (1960): If we unite now, each and every one of us, and each tribe to another, we will cause the implementation in this country of that which the

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European calls democracy. True democracy has no colour distinction. It does not choose between black and white. We want to prosper as a nation, and as a nation we demand equality, that is equal pay for equal work. We will never get our freedom unless we succeed in this issue. We do not want equal pay for equal work tomorrow—we want it right now. It has never been known in history that a country prospers without equality. (pp. 306–308) The task, therefore, is to determine how to reinvent a democratized democracy in an era in which globalization and localization are “the driving forces and expressions of a new polarization and stratification of the world population into globalized rich and localized poor” (Beck, 2009, p. 55). In fact, globalization needs to be understood as a process of globalizing particular localities (Sousa Santos, 2008). What we need, according to Nussbaum (1997), is “to foster a democracy . . . that genuinely [considerers] the common good” (p. 19). It is not good for democracy “when people vote on the basis of the sentiments they have absorbed from talk radio and never questioned” (p. 19). Most likely, an entirely new struggle has to begin. Mozambican writer Couto (2005) claims that this is the best way to move forward in order to challenge a past that was portrayed in a deformed way, a present dressed with borrowed clothes, and a future already ordered by foreign interests. Also, as Nyerere (1998) wisely claims, it will be judicious to not choose money as our weapon, because “the development of a country is brought about by people, not by money” (p. 129), which is something that marketers seem to neglect. Public education does have a key role in claiming that (an)other knowledge is possible and explaining how that is crucial for the transformative processes of democratizing democracy. As Aronowitz (2001), who is on Horowitz’s list of the one hundred most dangerous professors in the United States, accurately reminds us, “[w]e need to fight for a politics of direct democracy and direct action. The reinvigoration of the Left depends upon this” (p. 149). Such tasks imply a different theoretical curriculum wave, one that I have tagged elsewhere (Paraskeva, 2007b, 2011a) as an Itinerant Curriculum Theory (ICT), which is a future path of the critical curriculum river. Such theory needs to counteract an illicit history, needs to engage in the reconstruction of “the history of the world to make it clear that Europe was for most of the time a marginal zone and is probably destined to remain that” (Wallerstein, 2006, p. 43). In challenging Bernal’s opus magistra, Lefkowitz (1996) makes an interesting claim, which deserves to be highlighted (p. 4). According to Lefkowitz (1996), the theories, and Bernal himself, ask us to acknowledge that we have been racists and liars, the perpetrators of a vast intellectual and cultural cover-up, or at the very least the suppressors of an African past that, until our students and our colleagues

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Needless to say, Lefkowitz is not waiting for a ‘yes’ or ‘no’ kind of answer. There is ample evidence related with the colonial invasions and Columbus of how Western colonial power produced and reproduce a particular ‘historical engineering’, a curriculum epistemicide to emphasize and glorify Western white superiority while silencing Columbus as a mass murderer. After all, researchers are not the epistemological registers of the truth. Lefkowitz (1996) herself admits that “while in their view classicists are propagandists from the White European Ministry of Classical culture. In our view, classicists are historians who try to look at the past critically, without prejudice of any kind, so far humanly possible. It goes without saying that we do have a curriculum schema that intends to produce, reproduce and legitimate a cult of knowledge and neutral and pure. If classicists have indeed misinterpreted the facts about the Greeks’ past, they certainly have not done so willingly” (p. 5). We need to go beyond the ‘yes–no’ kind of answer and challenge why such debates are outside the classroom? What kind of curriculum theory and practice in a global momentum will foster such debates inside the black box? So far I have examined the limits and possibilities offered by some critical curriculum approaches. I defend that for this possible future to occur such critical curriculum political vein must go beyond the deadlocks within its own territories and pay attention and reach out to other epistemes past the Western epistemological hegemonic platform. I defend that such future is a challenge against epistemicides, and I argue that another knowledge and curriculum is possible. Such a curriculum will allow us to fight the coloniality of knowledge and the coloniality of beings. These struggles will challenge the way African and Eastern civilizations as well as oppressed civilizations in the West have been assembled or silenced by the Western mechanisms of production and reproduction of knowledge in a very simplistic and twisted way. Moreover, this struggle will challenge the ‘miraculous’ way that Western civilization came out of the blue, just due to noncentrifugal forces, absolutely disconnected and therefore cleansed from other unpolluted, barbaric, and underdeveloped civilizations, even though they were formed prior to contemporary civilizations. We examined and documented the importance of ancient Afro-Asian-Arab civilizations in the emergence and development of Ancient Greece and Western civilizational stages (from embryonic capitalist to late capitalist formations). We also have offered an analysis regarding the way history has been obliterated (Zinn, 1999) and how Humboldtian education was a great piece in the process of assembling and running a particular version of history, worshiping and deifying the West, not only by silencing and domesticating curriculum genocides as well as quashing ample evidence that, at the minimum, severely puts into question ancient Greece as a white ars magistra.

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In what follows, I put forward what I call ICT as a future for the critical curriculum river. I return to the arguments that I raised previously (Paraskeva, 2011a), and I chirurgically expand them, although I subjugated to the size limitations of the series. I address some of the reactions that ICT created (Paraskeva, 2011a) raised, and I reemphasize the need for curriculum theorists and educators to assume an itinerant deterritorialized position. NOTE 1. See Immanuel Wallerstein (2006, p. 43).

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To Deterritorialize Working Toward an Itinerant Curriculum Theory

In this chapter, I propose a reexamination and reiteration of the Itinerant Curriculum Theory (ICT), which I coined and conceptualized in Conflicts in Curriculum Theory: Challenging Hegemonic Epistemicides (Paraskeva, 2011). I make this proposal in response to my constant ideological rethinking of the project while respectfully sentient of the positive reactions to ICT in the previous AAACSs (American Association for the Advancement of Curriculum Studies) and AERA (American Educational Research Association) in Vancouver and in San Francisco, as well as from colleagues around the world, which was a pleasantly surprise. In doing so, they have helped me reinforce the need to strengthen the commitment of the field in the decolonial struggle against curriculum epistemicides. ICT, as I believe many would agree, indeed introduced and pioneered the struggle against epistemicides. As I have examined in great length in Conflicts in Curriculum Theory (Paraskeva, 2011), Huebner (1966) warned us of the importance of fighting for new ways to talk about curriculum, just as Deleuze’s approach allows us to perceive curriculum theory as (a) a way of deterritorialization, (b) as an act of becoming, and (c) as a simulacrum. In fact, Deleuze helps us fully understand the need to think and feel differently, to question, as Macdonald (1977) would put it, “what kinds of cultural tools are most appropriate for curriculum talk” (p. 15). DIALECTIC MATERIALISM: THE BEST-TO-DO CURRICULUM In one of his brilliant works, Huebner (1966) insisted that curriculum language is immersed in two tyrannical myths: “one is that of learning—the other that of purpose . . . almost magical elements [which] the curriculum worker is afraid to ignore, let alone question” (p. 10). He argues that “learning is merely a postulated concept, not a reality and objectives are not always needed for educational planning” (p. 10). For Huebner (2002a), the major problem in the world of education, “which has been short-circuited by behavioral objectives, sciences, and learning theory, was the fact that we

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were not dealing with the autobiography, we were not dealing with life and inspiration” (Tape 1). The language of education is full of “dangerous and non-recognized [and unchallenged] myths” (Huebner, 1966, p. 9), which makes it impossible to question whether the “technologists maybe were going in the wrong direction” (Huebner, 2002a, Tape 1). This becomes much more complex and alarming in a society that is facing the fact that “the problem is no longer one of explaining change, but of explaining nonchange” (Huebner, 1967, p. 174), and that a human being, by his transcendent condition, “has the capacity to transcend what he is to become, something that he is not” (p. 174): For centuries the poet has sung of his near infinitudes; the theologian has preached of his depravity and hinted of his participation in the divine; the philosopher has struggled to encompass him in his systems, only to have him repeatedly escape; the novelist and dramatist have captured his fleeting moments of pain and purity in never-to-be-forgotten aesthetic forms; and the [man] engaged in the curriculum has the temerity to reduce this being to a single term—learner. (Huebner, 1966, p. 10) As a reaction to this reductionism, Huebner (1966) proposed five value systems that contain “forms of rationality which may be used to talk about classroom activity” (p. 20). These value systems include the technical, which is expressed almost completely in the “current curriculum ideology”; the political, in which “all educational activity is valued politically; . . . [and] the teacher or other educator has a position of power and control”; the scientific, where “educational activity may be valued for the knowledge that it produces about that activity”; the aesthetic, in which “educational activity would be viewed as having symbolic and aesthetic meanings”; and the ethical, which sees “educational activity as an encounter between man [woman] and man [woman]” (pp. 14–18). For Huebner, in fact, there is a difference between curriculum languages, which model the thought of the curriculum specialist, and the need to understand the theorized educational act as a prayerful act, as proposed by Macdonald, Wolfson, and Zaret (1973). Notwithstanding the fact that “curriculum as a guidance strategy demands that educational activity be valued primarily in terms of moral categories,” Huebner (1964) saw learning as “the guiding concept in educational thought, . . . a major cornerstone in the [educational] ideology” (pp. 1–15). Based on this, Huebner (1968b) later divided the actual use of curriculum language into six categories: “descriptive, explanatory, controlling, legitimating, prescriptive, and the language of affiliation” (pp. 5–7). Huebner (2002b) explained that his idea “was not to transform the world. What I was trying to transform was the language by which we speak of education which then leads to the transformation of the world” (Tape 2). He believed that “the crucial problem was and still is the way everyday

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people talk about education. They are not aware of how that is limiting them in their view and their actions, or their control” (Tape 2). Based on Dewey’s (1902) belief that the function of the educator is to determine the environment of the child, Huebner (1966) proposed a broad and humane concept for the curriculum process in which the “educator participates in the paradoxical structure of the universe” (p. 8). In fact, Huebner (1968b) argued that “man and his language form a paradoxical relationship” (p. 4) that places him in a constant dialectical relation with the world (Huebner, 1967). The curriculum, therefore, must be perceived as an environment “which would embody the dialectical forms valued by society” (p. 177). Such an environment “must include components which will call forth responses from the students [that must] be reactive [and] must provide opportunities for the student to become aware of his temporality, to participate in a history which is one horizon of his present” (p. 177). We are thus confronted with a curriculum concept, the roots of which had, in fact, already emerged in Huebner’s doctoral thesis (Huebner, 1959; 1968b, 1974a). It is in this conceptualization that Huebner (1968a, 1968b, 1974a) defends education as a political act that transmits strong dynamics of power. According to Huebner (1974b), “schooling is inherently political, it always has been, [and] it always will be [because it] implies that someone or some social group has use of power . . . to intervene in the life of others” (p. 1). Thus, the use of power “to intervene in the life of others is a political act” (p. 1). Naturally, and given the political essence of education, Huebner (1962, 1979) defended the need to “destroy the prevailing myth that education can be conflict free, [a myth] that is reinforced by the so called objective methods of evaluation and the movement towards accountability in the USA” (1979, p. 2). Huebner (1977), in what for me is his best work, proposes “dialectical materialism as the method of doing education . . . [Although] current methods of education impede the development of dialectical consciousness or dialectical method, and deprive students and teachers of his power to live temporally, to live educationally” (p. 4), Huebner defends the need for a dialectical method. As he points out, “the materialist base of the method of doing education is the acceptance of Marx’s claim that it is not consciousness of men that determines existence, but their social existence determines consciousness” (p. 5). In this way, Huebner (1967) argues, educators should understand that the dialectical materialistic foundation extensive to all human life “is not futural . . . nor is it past, but, rather, a present made up of a past and future brought into the moment . . . in other words, man is temporal . . . [a] historical [being]” (p. 176). Huebner (1961) does not uphold schooling exactly as an art but as a “creative art,” in which students and teachers interact “as in a jazz quartet, each one find[ing] his own way of adding beauty to the jazz form” (p. 10). Thus, the classroom “is a busy place but not an unruly place” (p. 10). Just as “the poet cannot write without controlling words, the artist cannot paint

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without knowing symbols” (p. 11), so it goes in the “classroom studio, [where] part of the time is devoted to learning about the tools of the art and their limitation” (p. 11; Alexander, 2003). Clearly, the approach Huebner defended interfered a good deal with the power instituted in the field. The ideas that he defended would lead him into some heated and unpleasant confrontations with his peers during his final moments at Teachers College. In fact, tensions had been building from the beginning. There were his deep differences with Passow, because Huebner (2002a) “kept arguing against the tightening up of the standards” (Tape 1), and with Foshay and Goldberg, because Huebner opposed the excessive dependency on the learning theory that both defended. However, the crisis became more acute toward the end of the 1970s, when “Cremin was president and brought Noah . . . an economist, to be his dean” (Tape 1). Huebner could not agree in any way with Cremin’s political strategy for transforming Teachers College into “a world leader in the development of human resources” (Tape 1). For Huebner, it was totally incomprehensible and unacceptable that a historian of education “talked about human beings as human resources” (Tape 1), and from that moment he felt that he “no longer was a part of that institution” (Tape 1). Huebner (1975) felt that the field had surrendered to a dangerous demagogy (“don’t talk psychological individualism to me. Don’t preach Kant’s moral imperatives tinged with a religious doctrine of salvation. That is put-down language” [p. 276]), which explained the field’s accentuated and alarming theoretical frailty. Aware of Johnson’s (1968) and Mann’s (1968) approaches, Huebner (1968a, 1968b) stressed “the lack of organization of the ideas and efforts related to theorizing about curriculum and to the problem curriculists have with their own history of theorizing” (p. 2). The curriculum field, he warned, was following a dangerous course at various levels: The major problem seems to me that both at a local school level and also at the school of education level there is no real understanding of what the real educational problem is. They are so busy solving problems . . . that they are not able to take a long stance in order to invite people in to talk with them about what may be happening at their own level, or to teachers and students. The problem of school basically is a lack of respect for the individuality of the teachers and the student. When you build a system that ignores the human dimension of the interactions, that becomes the source of the problems. The school is not run for the benefit of the kids. The alienation that goes on in school is the source of the problems. It is the alienation of kids from themselves, kids from teachers, kids from their society. Part of the difficulty is that investment in education has occurred at universities at the research level. And the money that has gone into building the superstructure of the study of education with thousands of people involved means that there is less money to put in local schools.

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To Deterritorialize School teachers have problems; they don’t have time to solve them, and the university people take these problems from the teachers into their rarefied atmosphere and use their empirical techniques to try to solve them. Clearly you have a theory-practice problem. The theory-practice problem is a political problem, in terms of who studies the problems of teaching. Teachers do not study their problems, and that’s the problem. Underneath this the continued attack on teachers, partially justified because the quality of teacher education is another major problem, and the assumption that you can improve teaching by undercutting the stamina and enthusiasm of teachers is a profound mistake. The use of Henry Ford’s production line in school [is] a complete nonsense ideology. (Huebner, 2002b, Tape 2)

Expressing disbelief at the course of events, Huebner lashed out and provided incisive criticism of the institutions that had strong responsibilities in the field, such as ASCD (Association for Supervision and Curriculum Development). Huebner (2002b) already considered ASCD a caricature of the initial 1940s project (Tape 2). By renouncing the vision of the school as “a manifestation of public life” (Huebner, 1975b, p. 280) and thus not perceiving educators as “political activists who seek a more just public world” (p. 280), ASCD was an institution without a future. Huebner (1976) recognized that the field was in a chaotic state: If The Curriculum (1918) marked the early maturity of the curriculum field, then the past ten to fifteen years were its golden years. Now the end is here. Many individuals and groups with various intentions have gathered together around this now aged enterprise, “curriculum.” Let us acknowledge its demise, gather at the wake, celebrate joyously what our forebears made possible—and then disperse to do our work, because we are no longer members of one household. (pp. 154–155) Looking at the state of the field at the beginning of this century, we have to concur that Huebner was, in fact, an avant la lettre curricularist. Incisive, Cicerian (meaning “cutting,” as in Cicero’s oratorical style) Huebner “was writing in an idiom and using a language that [the status quo of the field] was not familiar with, because [he] was bringing under question the predominant structure, namely, behavioral sciences” (Huebner, 2002a, Tape 1). After denouncing the absence of a critical and historical dynamic— something that Schwab had also denounced but in a somewhat simplistic fashion—Huebner gradually moved away from the field of secular education to that of religious education (Huebner, 2002a, Tape 1). Greatly influenced by Tillich’s Protestant principle, among others, Huebner was able to implement a much more critical project within religious education. Such a project “becomes one of the major vehicles for liberation, or recreation or creativity” (Tape 1)—a language “that secular education didn’t like to hear” (Tape 1).

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ABOVE AND BEYOND REPRESENTATIONALISM Reading Deleuze (1990a, 1990b, 1994) and reading about Deleuze (Agamben, 1999; Khalfa, 1999; Roy, 2003) allows us to understand how crucial it is to (re)shape our own image of thinking, which has been dominant in the course of history. The issue, Deleuze (1994) argues, is to subvert the world by questioning the dominant tradition within the very marrow of human thinking—this is representationalism. According to Deleuze, we need to challenge the representationalist thought that has subjugated our very thinking and is an obstacle we must overcome to be able to act more freely. Representationalism, Deleuze stresses, does not capture the global scale of difference. In framing Deleuze’s approach to theoretical and practical fields of education and curriculum, it can be argued that this approach is crucial to understanding teacher education. The overwhelming majority of teacher education programs are deeply insensitive to fostering different ways of thinking since they are imprisoned within irrational licensing requirements and unjustifiable state demands. Teachers are already exhausted by the attempt to produce students with “similarities” in the midst of increasingly diverse and intricate multiplicities (Roy, 2003). We need, according to the Deleuzean approach, to understand teacher education free from a representationalistic framework, which will allow young teachers to think in new ways and understand the productive and relational power of difference (Roy, 2003; Paraskeva, 2007b, 2011a). Indeed, it is difference, rather than similarity, that drives the whole process of changing. The challenge is to work within critical curriculum theory and practice to find mechanisms that incorporate teachers’ and students’ understanding of difference in positive ways (Roy, 2003; Paraskeva, 2007b, 2011a). What is at stake is the interface of identity and difference, and the need to challenge false assumptions, such as the existence of stable identities. Basically, drawing from Deleuze’s (1994) analyses, we need to fight for a curriculum theory and practice that depart from areas governed by the dominant systems of meaning that keep us confined within certain frameworks, but without neglecting or diminishing them. In a word, we need to deterritorialize curriculum theory. If we are able to do so, we also prove that every crack in the dominant platform produces differentiation that expands our powers of action and commitment and our emotions (Paraskeva, 2007b). In other words, curriculum theory should be read as an “act of becoming,” as something that seeks to produce difference and thus articulates new wor(l)ds (Roy, 2003; Paraskeva, 2008). Relying on Hartley (1977), I argue that curriculum theory needs to reflect the understanding that education should take us from the space and time in which we find ourselves, and that its effects can imprison us in a technorational meaning as a unique way of thinking. In short, education ignores ontological knowledge and unarticulated thought that speaks the language of the unpredictable, the imagination, and the passions—none of which can

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be reduced, discretely or objectively, to analyzable/quantifiable entities. Taking the example of teacher education, deterritorialized curriculum theory is exploring new ways of thinking and feeling and finding ways to produce new and different purposes of mind (Roy, 2003; Paraskeva, 2006a, 2006b, 2007b, 2008). In essence, curriculum theory should give voice to an engineering of differences by deterritorializing itself and looking for new ways of thinking and feeling about education. It is important that curriculum theory covers other spaces and times, which is something quite valuable in both Huebner’s and Deleuze’s approaches. Indeed, both perspectives challenge us to recognize that educational practices must move from traditional common sense to creating new values and new directions. In fact, Deleuzian concepts such as “encounters” and “simulacrums” are very important in this context. As Deleuze (1994) argues, there is something in the world that pushes us to think, and that something is not a subject of recognition but a crucial encounter. Curriculum theory needs an encounter with the very practices and the realities that surround it. In essence, and to rely on Deleuze’s (1990a) framework, curriculum theory should contribute to subverting and reversing the Platonic position, which sees the world as a reproduction of a particular original model and perceives it as a simulacrum or a copy without an original (Roy, 2003; Paraskeva, 2006a, 2006b, 2007b, 2008). As Roy (2003) argues, rather than approaching ‘things’ as ideal states, we need to find advantages in their own variations and dynamics. DETERRITORIALIZING CURRICULUM THEORY To fight for a deterritorialized curriculum theory and practices that privilege the cult of difference implies the need to understand education as a set of relationships in which the personal and political play leading roles. Moreover, and drawing from Deleuze and Guattari (1987), fighting for a deterritorialized curriculum theory and practice means being aware that growth and development do not occur through “the acquisition of systems, parts or components, but precisely for their loss(es)” (p. 48). In fact, whereas learning emerges in the modernist state “in terms of acquisition,” in the Deleuzean and Huebnerean approaches, it becomes more a creation of difference(s). As revealed previously, Huebner was profoundly critical of approaches that tended to reduce students to a pale category of learners. Both Deleuze and Huebner opened the door to deterritorialized curriculum theory and practices. In so doing, they allowed for the building of a new language in which we think of education as a critical source for edifying a more just society and leading to the transformation of the world; a world fueled by a cultural and economic justice. The great challenge facing curriculum theory is, in essence, to figure out how “to operate a new order, a new system anchored in new and powerful

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non-state ways of articulation, which imposes new geographies of centrality” (Sassen, 2004, p. 126). Therefore, we need curriculum theories and practices that reescalate their very own territorialities, which reflect a critical transformative awareness that the new order and counter-order must be seen within the framework of power relations. As Foucault (1994) argues, one does not have the discourses of power, on one side, and the discourses that oppose the discourses of power, on the other. Discourses are, rather, elements or tactical blocks in the field of power relations. The current dominant forces of education and curriculum have shown an unprecedented absence of responsibility by systematically refusing to think about schooling as being impeded by certain taboos. Schooling issues, such as assessment, subject matter, hours of attendance, textbooks, and the knowledge being transmitted, are wrongly accepted as dogma. Such a limited vision makes it almost impossible to have a vision of schooling without meeting such conditions. Recapturing Quantz (2011) arguments, “the assumption that humans act rationally is one of the earliest and most fundamental flaws of much educational policy” (p. 5). This is, indeed, the marrow of Quantz’s Rituals and Student Identity in Education. In fact, as Jorge Luis Borges (1962) stressed, reality “is not always probable, or likely.” Bourdieu’s (2001) analysis is crucial here. He argues that the official language has been imposed on the whole population as the only legitimate language and that it is produced and maintained not only by the authors who claim the authority to write, but also by the dominant curriculum forces that codify it, and the teachers whose task is to teach based on that language. The task, therefore, is to think of education in general and curriculum in particular from a diametric perspective, because, as Latour (2006) highlights, there is no greater crime than facing current intellectual challenges with the equipment of the past. We must deal with issues of interest, rather than with issues of fact, because reality is not just defined by issues of fact. Moreover, Latour argues, questions of fact should be seen as controversial and political versions of issues of interest. Defending a disciplined school that is bent to the rhythms of classification and compartmentalization, headed by spurious dynamics, and rendered to segregated outcomes, is to rely on Latour (2006), as matter of curriculum fact. Basically, one big Latourian question is whether one can seek another powerful descriptive tool that addresses these issues of interest, issues that will allow the production of new languages, new words of order (Deleuze & Guattari, 1987). Thus, relying on Deleuze and Guattari’s (1987) approach, deterritorialization is the new word of order of contemporary curriculum theory—something that we have been consistently claiming (Paraskeva, 2006a, 2006b, 2007b, 2008). Such a task is not utopian; the stability, the overcodification of such a concept is deeply related to an approach that understands curriculum theory and practices according to what Latour (2006), drawing from Tarde, called the sociology of mobility. That is, it is important to understand curriculum policies and practices while taking into

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account the fact that the social is not locked in a static conception of society but emerges from the mobile associations among ‘things’. ITINERANT CURRICULUM THEORY In essence, deterritorialized curriculum theory implies a commitment to fight for a different research platform, one that pushes research to a “level of instability, not stability, generating concepts also, in itself, unstable” (O’Brien & Penna, 1999, p. 106). In doing so, a deterritorialized curriculum theory increasingly becomes an itinerant theory, a theory of nonspaces (Auge, 2003). In essence, as Gough (2000) claims, one needs to assume a rhizomatous approach that sees reality beyond dichotomies, beyond beginnings and endings; an approach that breeds from the multiplicity of immanent platforms and, from its centerless and peripheryless position, defies clean knowledge territories (DeLeuze & Guattari, 1987; Eco, 1984). Said’s (2005) arguments are quite significant in this regard. He claims that when human experience is recorded for the first time and is then given a theoretical formulation, its strength comes from the fact that it is directly linked to actual historical circumstances and is an organic result of these circumstances. The subsequent versions of such a theory cannot reproduce its original power, because the situation has calmed down and changed. Through this, the theory has been degraded and deteriorated, has been domesticated, and has been transformed into a substitute for the same thing. Its initial purpose (political change) has been subverted. In essence, Said (2005) challenges the way that theories travel to distinct situations, losing in this process part of their original power and rebellion. We need a myriad of ways to build a deterritorialized curriculum theoretical posture that will force curriculum research to deal with multiple, not fixed, frameworks within ample and intricate epistemological waves. Although it is true that we are in the presence of an itinerant theoretical edification that tries to overcome previous theoretical formulations, it is also a fact that this itinerant position should be seen as transgressive. Along with Said (2005), one might say that “the purpose of curriculum theory[/theorists], is to travel, to go beyond the limits, to move, and stay in a kind of permanent exile” (p. 41). A theory of non-places and non-times is, in essence, a theory of all places and all times. The curriculum theorist is, as Jin (2008) put it, a constant migrant who experiences “a series of [epistemological] events” (Khalfa, 1999). I am claiming an atypical epistemological approach that will be able to deconstruct the images of thought. Such an approach will unfold naturally, as Merelau-Ponty (1973) put it, into voluntary and involuntary creations. Furthermore, the curriculum worker and creator needs to be seen as “an auctor, which is qui auget, or the person who augments, increases, or perfects the act (in fact), since every creation is always a co-creation, just as every author is a co-author” (Agamben, 2005,

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p. 76). The educational and curriculum theorist needs to be seen as an epistemological pariah who is challenging and challenged by a theoretical path that is inexact yet rigorous (Deleuze, 1990b). Such an itinerant theory(ist) provokes (and exists amid) a set of crises and produces laudable silences. The theory(ist) is a volcanic chain, showing a constant lack of equilibrium, and thus is always a stranger in his/her own language. He or she is an itinerant theory(ist) profoundly sentient of the multiplicities of lines, spaces, and dynamic becomings (Deleuze, 1990b). Such a theoretical course is defined by a cutting edge, a “Malangatanian” and “Pollockian”1 set of processes, not because it is abstract but because it is oppressive in its freedom. It is not a sole act, however; it is a populated solitude. This itinerant theoretical path, claims a multifaceted curriculum compromise, and “runs away” from any unfortunate ‘canonology.’ Such an itinerant curriculum theory is an anthem against the indignity of speaking for the other (Deleuze, 1990b). Following the critique of Bogues and Gordon, Walsh (2012) challenges the lack of attention of the intellectual production of people of color. She uses no euphemism targeting the left hemisphere as well: For the Left, “experience” in and of itself is not the problem. In fact, “experience” is important in that it both reveals the lived realities of oppression and of resistance and helps to think social change and revolution. Yet it is not the voices or intellectual production of those who have lived “this” oppression and resistance that has generally been of interest to leftist thinkers, but rather the interpretation and utility of this “experience.” That is to say, it is the intellectual practice of “speaking for” the subalternized and oppressed that has generally characterized leftist politics and leftist thought particularly in Latin America; a practice that tends to reproduce and maintain subalternization. The problem, then, and with regard to the discussion here, is with the ways leftist critical thinking continues to disparage, obscure or negate the intellectual production that derives not from modernity itself but from its other face, that is, from coloniality and from the subjects who have lived the colonial wound. (Walsh, 2012, p. 14) Such epistemic suppression is also quite visible in the ‘invasion’ of dominant and counterdominant Western epistemological forms in non-Western spaces and places. Ibarra Colado (2007) unveils such epistemic colonization through the translations processes: This process of epistemic colonization has been assisted by the increased translation of textbooks distributed by large publishing houses from the United States and other dominant Anglo countries, which guarantee the reproduction of their ideology. The analysis of syllabi from any Latin American university reveals the widespread presence of well-known American authors. Similarly, there are falsifications under the signature

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To Deterritorialize of ‘Latin American’ authors that have acquired the ability to think like Americans to the point of ignoring their native reality by abdicating their own identity. Furthermore, we must not forget the international bestsellers of the management gurus whose books occupy the largest spaces in the study programs and classrooms of Latin American universities.

The itinerary theory(ist) is much more than an eclectic approach; it is actually a profoundly theoretical discipline. After all, as Popkewitz (2001) claims, “the challenges about knowledge are not only about academic knowledge, but about cultural norms of progress and social change that are part of the politics of contemporary life” (p. 241). ICT confronts and throws the subject to a permanent, unstable question, ‘What is it to think?’ Moreover, ICT pushes one to think in the light of the future as well as to question how can ‘we’ actually claim to really know the things that ‘we’ claim to know if ‘we’ are not ready specifically to think the unthinkable, but to go beyond the unthinkable and mastering its infinitude. ICT is to be (or not to be) radically unthinkable. ICT is a metamorphosis between what is thought and nonthought and unthought but is fundamentally about the temerity of the colonization of the non-/un-/thought within the thought. ICT attempts to understand to domesticate how big is infinite, the infinite of thought and action. If one challenges infinity, ‘then it is chaos because one is in chaos’; that means that the question or questions (whatever they are) are inaccurately deterritorialized and fundamentally sedentary. The focus is to grasp that ICT implies an understanding of chaos as domestic, as public, as a punctum within the pure luxury of immanence. In such multitude of turfs, ICT needs to be understood as poiesis. It plays in the plane of immanence. Being immanence ‘a life’, ICT is ‘a life’. A life paced by a poiesis or a revolution? ‘Yes please’, in a full Žižekian way. ICT is, above all, the language for/of doing. Such language, Deleuze (1995a) claims, can’t be a homogeneous system, it’s something unstable, always heterogeneous in which style carves differences of potential between which things can pass, come to pass, a spark can flash a break out of language itself, to make us see and think what was lying in the shadow around the worlds, things we are hardly aware existed. (p. 141) ICT is a poiesis that itinerantly throws the subject against the infinite of representation to grasp the omnitude of the real(ity) and the rational(ity), thus mastering the transcendent. Being more poiesis than just theory (and not because it is less theory), its itinerant position epitomizes a transcendent nomadography, which is not transcendental. To rely on Deleuze and Guatarri (1995), “it is not death that breaks [the itinerant theorist] but seeing, experiencing, thinking too much life. There’s a profound link between signs, events, life and vitalism. I its organisms that die, not life” (p. 143).

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Such inquiry implies, as Deleuze and Guattari felicitously unveil, an itinerant theorist is not just as a war machine that judiciously collides with ossified truths and fossilized realities, but its itinerant existence is actually only possible in a permanent theater of war. Needless to say, that ICT is not a cavalier way with history. Nor it is just a pale reaction against the way such history has been quasi suffocated by hegemonic and particular counterhegemonic traditions. Although a concept—arguably a geophilosophical one—it goes well beyond an aesthetic wrangle between sedentary theoretical hegemonic and particular counterhegemonic platforms, and nomad(ic) approaches free from walls, dams, institutionally backward bourgeois turfs. ICT implies a nomadic inquiry but one that the foci occupies the truly total itinerant capacity of space(less)ness, a permanent smooth itinerant position, a perpetual search that whole heartedly aims at saturation. The nomadography of such theory is framed in the nonstop itinerant posture in which creators of poiesis seemed to be part of the history of thought but escape from it either in a specific aspect or altogether. Those cultural norms framed what one means by, say, philosophy, sociology, and what kinds of ‘official’ knowledge structure such fields of study. Catherine Walsh (2012) brings to the fore the position assumed by Rafael Sebastián Guillén, a master’s student in the Universidad Nacional Autónma de México, in 1980, in his dissertation defense. Guillén described philosophy as muddled, stating, “Philosophy. I am doing philosophy, we are doing philosophy. Philosophy of science to be more exact. Theory of theory. Mental masturbation that doesn’t even reach an orgasm” (Guillén, quoted in Walsh, 2012, p. 11). Guillén argues that philosophy could not be detached from the wrangle between science and politics. Walsh (2012) quotes him in length: [From this philosophy] it is necessary to take some distance. Leave the discourse. Detect its mechanisms of operation, the places in which it emerges, the places where it has effect, the places where it disappears. It is necessary to speak of philosophy as non-philosophy, to turn philosophical discourse against itself . . . to change the problematics . . . to make a political change in theory . . . [recognize] various forms of “doing” philosophy, various “practices” of philosophy . . . open up problematics that might produce new theoretical and practical intentions . . . assume a political position that makes possible an “other” discursive strategy, “other” philosophical work, and opens “other” spaces of theoretical production (p. 110, my translation). (as quoted in Walsh, 2012, p. 13) Such position would probably not have caught the attention of the public if Rafael was not a leader and was not Subcomandante Marcos or Subcomandante Insurgent Marcos, the leader of the Zapatista Army of National Liberation. Guillén (Subcomandante Marcos) is particularly focused on

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To Deterritorialize situating knowledge production in the local modern/colonial histories and local struggles of the “other America,” that is the America of the South—by which I mean the south, or souths, too often obfuscated in “America,” including the “souths” within the north as well as in and within the Caribbean, Central America, and South America, and most particularly Andean America. Such interest finds its base in the particular ways Andean indigenous and Afro-descendant intellectuals and movements understand and use epistemic production as a key component of their political projects, projects aimed not simply at confronting the vestiges of colonialism (decolonialization), but rather at the radical reconstruction of knowledge, power, being, and life itself. Projects aimed at “decoloniality,” understood as the simultaneous and continuous processes of transformation and creation, the construction of radically distinct social imaginaries, conditions, relations of power and knowledge. (Walsh, 2012, p. 11)

That is, these ‘other’ places, spaces, and positions that form the heart of my intervention here; ‘other’ philosophies and ‘other’ knowledges that challenge not only the definitions and boundaries of philosophy’s continental–analytical divide but also the geopolitical ordering of knowledge and the questions of who produces knowledge, how and where, and for what purposes. ICT attempts to turn curriculum theory against itself as well. It is a philosophy of liberation, which is sentient of the pitfalls of the internationalization dynamics within the curriculum field. Drawing from Fals-Borda’s Ciencia Propria y Conolialismo Intelectual, Mignolo (2008) astutely claims that “the planetary expansion of the social sciences implies that intellectual colonization remains in effect, even if such colonization is well intended, comes from the Left, and supports decolonization” (p. 232). That is, Mignolo (2008) adds, intellectual decolonization “cannot come from existing philosophies and cultures of scholarship. Dependency is not limited to the Right; it is created also from the Left” (p. 232). The itinerant posture provides powerful space in which to engage in a global conversation that is attentive of the globalisms (Sousa Santos, 2008); profoundly aware of the multiplicities of public spheres and subaltern counterpublics (Fraser, 1997); truly attentive to the production of localities (Hardt & Negri, 2000) and militant particularism (Harvey, 1998), and to the (de)construction of new, insurgent cosmopolitanism (Popkewitz, 2007; Sousa Santos, 2008); conscious of the wrangle between the globalized few and the localized rest (Bauman, 1998); and yet profoundly alert to the dangerous hegemony of the English language (Macedo et al., 2003). Such a conversation needs to occur in languages other than English. As I have mentioned before, it is a rude fact that the vast majority of counterdominant Western epistemological views seemed to neglect other linguistic forms and other forms of knowledge. It is no surprise that the majority of bibliographical references used by Western (mostly U.S.) scholars, even

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those whose lives are dedicated to the struggle for a just society, are by English-speaking scholars and in the English language. The overwhelming majority “does not know (and if they do know, they do not value) the scientific knowledge produced in the semiperiphery or periphery; it is considered inferior in everything; and it is easily cannibalized and converted into a resource or raw material by core science” (Sousa Santos, 2005). Obviously this is a result of a school system that overtly and officially undermines the importance of other languages based on a backward theory of language. The majority of students are not formally exposed to and engaged in other languages until middle or high school, unlike Europe and other cultures, yet they are surrounded by different languages. In some cases, it has become common to “use” indigenous realities, and scientists have co-opted and wrapped such realities in Western concepts, what Sousa Santos (2005) calls “the proletarianization of semiperipheral and peripheral scientists” (p. xxiv). Spivak (1995), in her notable book Can the Subaltern Speak?, challenges the ability of particular intellectuals to edify credible narratives based on the daily experiences of individuals “among the illiterate peasantry, the tribals, the lowest strata of urban subproletariat who have been visited by the epistemic violence of the colonial encounter” (p. 28). One should not forget, Guha (1983) argues, that subalternity is “materialized by the structure of property, institutionalized by law, sanctified by religion and made tolerable—and even desirable—[thus] by tradition, to rebel [is] indeed to destroy such signs” (p. 1). Recapturing towering arguments raised in previous chapters, these facts open the door for us to make the claim that Western epistemological views need to pay attention and learn from other non-Western epistemological views in and beyond the West and inside and outside the English language. Otherwise, claims against the English-only movement are just rhetorical. As Macedo (2000) insightfully reveals, we are experiencing the colonialism of the English language. Neglecting this struggle is to be complicit with cultural and linguistic genocide. Western hegemonic epistemologies were raised and sustained themselves by the imperialism of particular signifiers or, more accurately, by the imperialism of the signifier, thus only specific “official meanings” were validated. We are actually confronting a despotic overcodification, to use Deleuze’s (1990b) term, that legitimates particular political channels in the struggle between “langue and parole.” Moreover, as Kawagely (2009) stresses, literacy is not just about words; it is, rather, a holistic complex process and a journey of joy and pleasure. Making this journey, we will be able to teach what it means to be human, thus fighting one the biggest dangers resulting from technology: loneliness. One must not forget, as wa Thiong’o (1986) notes, that “language was the most important vehicle which power fascinated and held the soul prisoner. The bullet was the means for physical subjugation. Language was the means of the spiritual subjugation” (p. 9). Linguistic genocide is actually

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at the very core of the colonial and the neocolonial project. wa Thiong’o’s position is well worth noting: The real aim of colonialism was to control the people’s wealth; what they produced, how they produced it, and how it was distributed; to control, in other words, the entire realm of the language of real life. Colonialism imposed its control of the social production of wealth through military conquest and subsequent political dictatorship. But its most important area of domination was the mental universe of the colonized, the control through culture, of how people perceived themselves and their relationships to the world. Economic and political control can never be complete or effective without mental control. To control a people’s culture is to control their tools of self-definition in relation to others. For colonialism this involved two aspects of the same process; the destruction or the deliberate undervaluing of a people’s culture, their art, dances, religions, history, geography, education, orature and literature, and the conscious elevation of the language of the colonizer. The domination of a people’s language by the languages of the colonizing nations was crucial to domination of the mental universe of the colonized. (p. 16) And yet, as Achebe (1977) argues, “the only place where culture is static, and exists independently of people, is the museum, and this is not an African institution” (p. 29). Obviously the focus here is actually on the perverted importance of the museum of a place that socializes based on inaccuracies and not necessarily a truthful encounter with history. The museum, Visvanathan (2009) writes, “is a quasi rationality of piracy” (p. 488). In other words, the museum, as a Western political creation, “represents the paradox of West and East encounters that create a hierarchy of cultures legitimizing violence as legitimate tactic against those labeled as primitives, underdeveloped” (p. 489; Coomaraswamy, 1947). Hence, Coomaraswamy claims, more than being a cultural encounter, the museum incorporates the arrogant objectivity of Western modern science and its profound smell of death. The museum was and is the extension of a eugenic laboratory. However, as wa Thiong’o (1986) remarks, “African languages refused to die” (p. 23). This, too, is a crucial part of the deterritorialized posture. This is not a minor issue, especially because, as Popkewitz (1978) argues, theoretical frameworks need to be seen as political tools. Educational theory, he claims, is a form of political affirmation; it is potent because its language has prescriptive qualities. A theory guides individuals “to reconsider their personal world in light of more abstract concepts, generalizations and principles. These more abstract categories are not neutral” (p. 28). Fighting for a conversation that is sentient of the globalism in languages other than English is to struggle with a feasible ideal that has a secular tradition on the African continent.

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At the beginning of the twentieth century, the Reverend Agbebi (1903), an African engineer and spiritual leader, led a struggle to abolish English hymns and English books, as well as European names and clothes, in the African church. He called for “Christianity without its non-essentials”; despite his violent criticism of Christianity and its bloody association with European imperialism, he felt this would create a natural space for an African spirituality and religiosity based on “original songs” and discursivity (Agbebi, 1903; Falola, 2003). The official assembly of epistemicides is unveiled insightfully by Walker (2011): The late black feminist scholar and literary critic Barbara Christian stated in her famed 1987 essay “The Race for Theory”: “For people of color have always theorized—but in forms quite different from the Western form of abstract logic. . . . How else have we managed to survive with such spiritedness the assault on our bodies, social institutions, countries, our very humanity?” At the height of the Theory Wars, Christian’s intervention was a timely reminder that a plurality of epistemological positions was open and available when considering African American (re)production of knowledge. Indeed, this crucial observation serves as a prescient warning against an absolutist reading of Gayatri Spivak’s oft repeated claim, “The subaltern cannot appear without the thought of the elite.” It is in this spirit that I believe we can (re)turn to the construct of local knowledge as, in the words of Joan Scott, “an epistemological theory that offers a method for analyzing the processes by which meanings are made.” (pp. 110–111) THE DECOLONIAL TURN ICT is a curriculum turn; a ‘pluri-versal’, ‘not uni-versal’; a decolonial turn. ICT needs to be seen within the cartography of a decolonial being. Mignolo (2011a, 2011b) is of great help here as well, arguing that the genealogy of decolonial thinking is pluri-versal (not uni-versal). As such, each knot on the web of this genealogy is a point of de-linking and opening that re-introduces languages, memories, economies, social organizations, and at least double subjectivities: the splendor and the miseries of the imperial legacy, and the indelible footprint of what existed that has been converted into the colonial wound; in the degradation of humanity, in the inferiority of the pagans, the primitives, the under-developed, the non-democratic. (2011b, p. 63) Gough (2000) insightfully stresses, curriculum inquiry needs to be seen as a process that focuses on the pertinence of location as well as on “one form of

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contemporary cultural production through which a transnational imaginary may be expressed and negotiated” (p. 334). After all, “the globalization of knowledge and Western culture constantly reaffirms the West’s view of itself as the centre of legitimate knowledge, the arbiter of what counts as knowledge and the source of ‘civilized’ knowledge” (Smith, 1999, p. 63). Faced by such persistent efforts to maintain positional superiority, as Said would put it, one needs to be cautious of any attempt to claim the defeat of WesternEurocentric patriarchal epistemological hegemony within the field of education in general and in the curriculum in particular. Although I understand the context in which some curriculum theorists claim such victorious momentum—Pinar (2004), for example, declares that “the patriarchal and Eurocentric concept is no longer in fashion” (p. 224)—I prefer to point out that Western scientific hegemonic dominance is facing a profound crisis of epistemological confidence, as Sousa Santos (2005) would put it, which was instigated by a myriad of counterhegemonic Western and non-Western epistemological forms. Needless to say, although such loss of epistemological confidence “is opening spaces for innovation, the critique of epistemology will be for a long time much more advanced than the epistemology of criticism” (p. xix). Such curriculum labor is, Wraga (2002) claims, a “kaleidoscope of actions” (p. 17), and as Applebee (1996) argues, it raises complex questions about who should orchestrate such conversations. However, this is not the only crucial issue. Spivak’s (1990) political position helps a great deal here: For me the question “Who should speak?” is less crucial than “Who will listen?” “I will speak for myself as a Third World person” is an important position for political mobilization today. But the real demand is that, when I speak from that position, I should be listened to seriously; not with that kind of benevolent imperialism. (pp. 59–60) In an extraordinary exegesis about the secular, predatory policies in Latin America, Galeano (1997) alerts us of the dangers of internationalization as a crucial aspect in the complex epistemicidium matrix. Using Francis Bacon’s claim, Galeano (1997) argues “that knowledge is power, and it has since become clear how right he was” (p. 244). That is, “there is little universality in scientific universals; objectively they are confined within the frontiers of the advanced nations” (Galeano, 1997, p. 244). In fact, “the transplantation of advanced countries’ technologies not only involves cultural—and most definitely economic—subordination”. In a way, what internationalization has meant is in the case of Latin America and Africa and the Middle East, is that “underdevelopment is not a stage on the road to development, but the counterpart of development elsewhere” (Galeano, 1997, p., 245). In fact, Galeano’s (1997) approach exposes that internationalization has become synonymous for the five centuries of pillaging a continent of human resources, natural resources, agriculture, knowledge, and scientific capacity.

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Galeano’s perspective fits rather well in African and Arab/Middle Eastern realities as well. Although it must be done, Gough (2000) accurately describes how tough our task is: The internationalization of curriculum studies might then be understood not so much in terms of translating local representations of curriculum into a universalized discourse, but, rather, as a process of creating transnational spaces in which local knowledge traditions in curriculum inquiry can be performed together. Indeed, the need for vigorously and rigorously recuperating local knowledge systems, in both their performative and representational idioms, has been amplified for me by some recent experiences of doing curriculum work in southern Africa. Here, many local knowledge traditions have been rendered invisible by the effects of universalizing imperialist discourses and practices. In countries such as Zimbabwe and Malawi, for example, the concept of “good education” for the vast majority of African students, most of whom live in rural subsistence settlements, is equated with failing Cambridge University O-level examinations in English. (p. 339) As we flagged previously, institutions such as the International Leaders in Education Program (ILEP) and the Civil Society and Media Development (IREX) are graphic examples of how the hegemony works ideologically— sending teachers from foreign nations to be trained in the United States and returning to their nations profoundly acculturated and framed with a specific ‘official’ knowledge. In essence, the struggle against epistemicides consolidates a kind of new curriculum revisionism that challenges frameworks, claiming that the authority of particular discourses and hierarchies need identities rights, subjectivities, and experiences. This new kind of curriculum revisionism not only reinforces the need to complexify, clarify, and overcome (or not) particular tensions within a particular critical progressive curriculum river, it also offers juicy arguments for a truthful relational analysis of schools and curriculum, which allows us to have the most current tools to fight what Pinar (2004) claims is the contemporary curriculum nightmare—presentism. In fact, presentism has been fostered by representationalist approaches. We need a curriculum theory that does not obliterate the local or frequently mortgage within the Western geopolitics of power (Mignolo, 2008; Walsh, 2012). ICT helps understand how to situate curriculum theory into the project of modernity/colonialism/decolonization. Drawing from scholars, such as Radhakishnan (1994), and Appadurai (1990), Ibarra Colado (2007) claims, that “the recognition of ‘otherness’ brings us to understanding that global inclusion should not eliminate the particularities of every local reality. Even if globalization seems to mean the elimination of differences, there is evidence everywhere that indicates that these differences remain and multiply” (p. 3).

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A new epistemological intrans-discipline—based on epistemological disobedience—will allow us to understand more accurately our own struggles for pedagogies (Gore, 1993) that can solve the repressive and (un)finished myths (Ellsworth, 1989) and overcome functionalist traps (Liston, 1988), while recognizing that the task “is not to celebrate the challengers, but to read across disciplinary literatures” (Popkewitz, 2001, p. 241). Deterritorializing curriculum theory would pay attention to, as Smith (1999) would put it, solid political engagement in decolonizing methodological frameworks. As Kaomea (2004) argues, “[t]he process of decolonization requires our continual efforts toward questioning and revealing hidden colonial influences in past and current beliefs and practices, those of the haole (or foreigner) as well as those of our own kanakaa maoli (indigenous people), including our kupuna (elders), our ancestors, and ourselves” (p. 32). However, as Smith (1999) claims, decolonizing research does not imply a complete rejection of Western theories and research approaches. Conversely, it implies the deconstruction of dominant totalitarian Western views of science, challenges to what counts as science, and, above all, implies a profound collaborative work among native and nonnative researchers that is sentient of the complexities examined by Espinosa-Dulanto (2004) over “who gets to be native/indigenous vs. foreigner/outsider” (p. 45). In a way, as Mutua and Swadener (2004) insightfully claims, decolonizing research creates conditions to question, that is, “who defines and legitimizes what counts as scholarship, who has the power to name? How does naming reify existing power relations? Are the tools for decolonization only available to indigenous researchers or can this be a shared process? How has the discourse on decolonizing research been colonized or appropriated?” (p. 2). These are tough questions, because we know quite well that “the structure of the university is an impediment to the decolonization of research” (Blauner & Wellman, 1973, p. 324). Such difficulties are connected not only with administrative bureaucratic problems but also with the Paleolithic habitude of the sovereignty of the disciplinary knowledge. Western hegemonic scientific pastoral(s) were able to instigate and foster the cult of a paradigm anchored in “its strict and narrow divisions among disciplines, its positivist methodologies, that do not distinguish objectivity from neutrality, its bureaucratic and discriminatory organization of knowledge into departments, laboratories, and faculties that reduce the advance of knowledge to a matter of corporatist privilege” (Sousa Santos, 2005, p. xix). A severe critique of disciplinary knowledge comes from Smith (1999), who claims that the ethnographic “gaze” of anthropology has collected, classified and represented other cultures to the extent that anthropologists are often the academics popularly perceived by the indigenous world as the epitome of all that it is bad with academics. Hanuni Kay Trask accuses anthropologists of being “takers and users” who “exploit the

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hospitality” and generosity of native people. Livingstone refers to this discipline as the “science of imperialism par excellence.” (p. 67) The issue is how we engage in such a task. Žižek’s (2006) example is quite apt: This is an old joke that circulated in the defunct East Germany. It is about a German worker who found work in Siberia. Aware that all of his letters will be read by censors, he explains to his friends: “We will establish a code. If you receive a letter from me written in blue ink it means that I am telling the truth. If the letter is written in red ink, it means that I am lying.” A month later his friends received the first letter written in blue ink: “Here everything is beautiful, the shops are full of goods, the food is plentiful, the rooms spacious and well heated, the cinemas show Western movies, there are many girls available. The only thing missing here is the red ink.” (p. 17) Žižek shows us how people lie about the lie, thus concealing the truth. The real issue is to decide in which color we will write the itinerant curriculum theory. As Kliebard (1995) argues, the task of the curriculum field in the next fifty years is to develop alternatives to the ways of thinking that have clearly dominated the early years of the field, before the lethal impact of neo-radical policies; this is the better way for the field to have developed, but it is not ideal. Actually, it is the best interplay between theory and practice that one cannot dichotomize. I believe that it is not accurate to prioritize one over the other. Understanding curriculum in such a way shows how we are caught in a non-stable terrain that has been determined by the myriad experiences of students, teachers, and the community. These experiences reveal a relevant pedagogic environment through dialogue and negotiation, knowing, as I claim elsewhere (Paraskeva, 2010), that there is no social justice without cognitive justice. Such a curriculum posture also encourages what I called the curriculum indigenous (students and teachers) to engage in a nonstop confrontation with real problems, thus establishing a connection within daily life, which, one must say, is nondeterministic. As I have claimed in Conflicts in Curriculum Theory (2011a), and I am reiterating here, I am not claiming a way out that will please everybody. In fact, I do not aim to do so. An itinerant theoretical approach dares to violate the methodological canon and attempts to go beyond some interesting (counter)dominant clashes to overcome some dead ends and screaming silences, yet it is an epistemological struggle within the insurgent cosmopolitanism platforms (Sousa Santos, 2008) both inside and beyond the Western dominant cartography. As Sousa Santos (2005) argues, his project, which aims to reinvent social emancipation, “did not have a structured theoretical framework” (p. xxv). Instead, he argues,

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To Deterritorialize it is imperative to open up the theoretical, analytical, and methodological canons as a combination for renovation and transformation. Instead of a theoretical framework, the project had a set of broad analytical orientations that constituted a horizon within which various theoretical frameworks could fall. Such analytical horizons were was strictly necessary to motivate social scientists to join forces in the pursuit of objectives that are sufficiently important to be actively shared. These violations of the methodological canon were not committed lightly. The risk of chaos and cacophony was there. (p. xxv)

An itinerant curriculum theory, he continues, is a “deliberate disrespect of the canon, a struggle against epistemological orthodoxy” (p. xxv), and it attempts “to bring scientific knowledge face-to-face with non-scientific, explicitly local knowledges, knowledges grounded in the experience of the leaders and activists of the social movements studied by social scientists” (p. xxv). This is the very core of its nutritive faculty, to use Agamben’s (1999) Aristotelian approach. An itinerant curriculum theory is an exercise of “citizenship and solidarity” (p. xxv) and, above all, an act of social and cognitive justice. As Žižek (2006) would say, it is the very best way to understand how reality can explode in and change the real. What I am claiming here is a new emergent ideology, as Nkrumah (1964, p. 70), would put it, “which can solidify in a philosophical statement . . . and will be born out of the crises” of the field’s historical consciousness. An itinerant curriculum theory calls for a “philosophical consciencism” (Nkrumah, 1964, p. 70), that will not oppress the “Ellisonian self” (Taliaferro-Baszile, 2010, p. 487). Interesting to note is how we can find some of the same symptoms in the curriculum projects that I was able to analyze in Brazil. I am not claiming any kind of prescription for the field, not at all. It is just my understanding of how to overcome particular tensions and fractures that need not necessarily be seen as negative or malignant. Currently, the critical progressive curriculum river has shown us a myriad of different flows both in the United States and in many other countries (arguably difficult to accommodate in an encyclopedia or a handbook), and it is our task to encourage such a kaleidoscope of flows. It is likely that the more complex and unjust society becomes, the more flows will emerge. However, the fact that, for a substantive percentage of such flows, curriculum relevance is still a powerful proposition. It is no longer possible to carry on with and in the same epistemological framework. ICT champions such a posture. Relying on Habermas, Mignolo (2008) argues that [i]t is no longer possible, or at least it is not unproblematic, to ‘think’ from the canon of Western philosophy, even when part of the canon is critical of modernity. To do so means to reproduce the blind epistemic ethnocentrism that makes difficult, if not impossible any political

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philosophy of inclusion. The limit of Western philosophy is the border where the colonial difference emerges, making visible the variety of local histories that Western thought, from Right and Left, hid and suppressed. (p. 234) Summing up several years ago, I had the privilege of being invited to the Grupo de Trabalho de Curriculo (Curriculum Working Group) of the Associação Nacional de Pós-Graduação e Pesquisa em Educação (ANPEd, the National Association of Graduate and Research in Education) in Brazil to analyze samples of the curriculum research that was developed in a number of curriculum departments and education faculties at several top universities in Brazil. This analysis testifies to how this line of approach is emerging and consolidating in a very powerful way in some curriculum research projects that I examined. It shows us where the critical curriculum river is going, and that we have a lot to learn from such well-grounded and well-developed Southern Theory—that it is actually much more than a curriculum theory and, in some aspects, it does not waste its time in engaging in “hopeless Western epistemological tensions,” choosing instead to make a different path. Without a doubt, I can say the same from my experiences in Southern Africa and Angola, for example. The attempts to create a Public Comminitarian University in Saurimo—capital of Lunda Sul—based on an ecology of knowledges and involving local community leaders, a Sociedade Mineira da Catoca (Catoca Miner Society), and the national government, showed not only the vitality and scientificity of African epistemes but also their well-grounded critique on Western epistemological perspectives. As odd as it might be, non-Western scholars know a lot more, in some cases in precise detail, about what has been called Western epistemology than those in the West know, or care to know, about non-Western epistemologies. Doesn’t this need to be stopped? It seems that an itinerant curriculum theory offers a respectable way to address such concerns. These are real examples that the struggle against epistemicides is possible, that (an)other knowledge is possible, that the existence of a Southern Theory (Connell, 2007) and of a multifarious platform of Southern epistemologies (Sousa Santos, 2009b) is not an unattainable ideal. A Southern epistemology, Sousa Santos (2009b) claims, respects three fundamental pillars: (1) learning that the South exists, (2) learning to go to the South, and (3) learning from and with the South. This implies not only nonWesternizing the West but also avoiding any kind of Eurocentrism, something that some postmodern and postcolonial approaches ignored (Sousa Santos, 2009b). Although, as Autio (2007) accurately claims, some postmodern, postcolonial, and postcultural theories did challenge a classed, gendered, and racialized Eurocentric tradition, the task is, as Goody (2006) stresses, to seek a “global history” that is only possible if both Eurocentrism and anti-Eurocentrism-Eurocentric, as well as Occidentalism and Orientalism, are overcome. As Goody (2006) states, some postmodern and

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postcolonial approaches end up being Eurocentric in their very claim against Eurocentrism. Thus, the renarrativization of modernity and colonialism, to complexify Autio’s (2007) claim, implies also the renarrativization of postmodernity and postcolonialism. As I have mentioned before, however, this is not an indigenous struggle. The struggle against the mystification and monopoly of Western forms of knowledge cannot fall into the same trap of mysticism. The task is to try to understand and analyze not only how counterhegemonic knowledge is a particular form of indigenous knowledge but also how the two forms compare—what are their similarities and where do they differ? We need to ask crucial questions: Whose indigenous knowledge? Who benefits? How racialized is that knowledge? How classed is that knowledge? How gendered is that knowledge? How democratic are such indigenous knowledge forms? In doing so, we will avoid romanticizing indigenous knowledge—for it would be intellectually inaccurate to claim that indigenous cultural formations are free of any form of class, gender, and racial segregation. As Smith (1999) argues, educational scholars need to engage in indigenous theories. However, the itinerant theoretical posture that we recommend challenges the attempt to favor counterhegemonic indigenous knowledge from the North over indigenous knowledge from the South. This type of engagement can be a struggle that is deeply related to identity and does not dichotomize the ontological and the epistemological. It is not a struggle against science but a political commitment to advance a new understanding of science that implies an effort to decolonize the universities, in particular, the teacher-education programs. Why, Barnhardt (2009) asks, does one way of life have to die so another can live? One cannot ignore the fact that at the same time the curriculum field is claiming its internationalization, countries including the United States refuse to sign the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples (2007). With knowledge being the very core of the curriculum field, this is not a minor issue. The task is to fight for a pedagogy of indigenous knowledges that is seen as a struggle for a global onto-episteme, which is an understanding of the interplay between the ontological and the epistemological, and that sees indigenous knowledge forms as local knowledge that is significant within the global scenario. This is not a utopian aim. As wa Thiong’o (1986) argues, “[t]he peasantry saw no contradiction between speaking their own mother-tongues and belonging to a larger national or continental geography . . . [They] saw no necessary antagonistic contradiction between belonging to their immediate nationality, to their multinational state along the Berlin-drawn boundaries, and to Africa as a whole” (p. 23). (An)other science is not just really possible. It is real. ICT is a claim for a just theory, a claim for just science. It is possible for an ICT—which we argue is the best path for critical progressive curriculum scholars—not

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only to grasp precious concepts and dynamics, such as hegemony, ideology, power, social emancipation, class, race, and gender in the complex age of globalization (Sousa Santos, 2008) or globalisms, but also to better (re) address the towering questions of curriculum, starting with the one asked by Counts in the last century: Dare the schools build a new social order? While poverty and inequality keep multiplying, the question remains central. The devastated impact of neoliberal policies forces the intemporality of certain challenges. As such, I think ICT challenges the critical curriculum river to go beyond its counterdominant and dominant within the counterdominant positions, thus tuning the struggle for curriculum relevance into a struggle for social and cognitive justice. As I show later when examining Chomsky’s (1971) approach, while transforming society is crucial, it is no less important to understand it accurately. I am not claiming that ICT is a perfect theory; actually I claimed that there is no such thing as a perfect theory (see Quantz, 2011). Obviously there is room for critique, for instance, the clashes within the poststructural positions could be expanded. The ecological domain should not be so silent. ICT questions linguistic imperialism portrayed by English and other Western imperial languages. It also challenges the way science has been defined and legitimized based on the cultural politics of academic writing, which are not only social formulas but also legitimize the modern epistemicidium and are thus real obstacles to social and cognitive justice. ICT also challenges the internationalization momentum as well as whose language such epoch is occurring. ICT is an alert to the fact that the very struggle to internationalize the field of curriculum studies is a relatively recent phenomenon for the United States’ academic milieu. Curriculum scholars from Spain, Brazil, Argentina, Mexico, Italy, and other places have been internationalized many decades ago. This raises the issue that is quite visible in the analysis of ICT, that is, “Whose internationalization?” Scholars, such as Pinar and Gough, are readily aware of this and have been vocal and eloquent in alerting for this problematic. It will be reductive to see ICT as a binary theoretical path. ICT is not a clash between West and non-West epistemological domains. It is a decolonized epistemological anthem. It emerges out of the clashes within those paths though it goes beyond those altercations by arguing for an itinerant take—a perpetual theoretical platform of nonspaces and nontimes. ICT forces curriculum theory against itself, foster the contradictions within Western and non-Western dominant and counterdominant perspectives. ICT claims for a just theory. It is the people’s theory. And, in so being, as Marti (1979) argues, it is not just a labor of love; it is, like education and curriculum should be “an act of infinite love” (p. 74).

NOTE 1. See the work of Jackson Pollock, an icon of U.S. expressionism.

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Let’s go comrades, the European game is definitely finished, it is necessary to find something else. —Fanon (1963)

The Schwab-Huebner dialogism would be an interesting option to grasp the current state of modernity and to point to new directions. That is, within the current context Schwab (1978) would probably say that “the field of [modernity] is moribund. It is unable by its present methods and principles, to continue to work and contribute significantly to the advancement of [society in general and] education [in particular]. It requires new principles, which will generate a new view of the character and variety of its problems. It requires new methods appropriate to the new budget of problems” (p. 287). If modernity was actually in a moribund state in which it was struggling to address the major challenges facing the predatory demands imposed by the complex tangle and framed by the third hegemonic phase of capitalism (see Arrighi, 2005), the advent of a full blast negative globalization (Giroux, 2011)—with all its local sometimes quasi irreversible consequences (see Bauman, 1998)—its condition went well beyond a state of agony. To rely on the words of one of the greatest Tillichean progressive theologists, Dwayne Huebner, “now the end is near let us acknowledge its demise, gather at the wake, celebrate joyously what [Western Cartesian modernity model] made possible and then disperse to do our work, because we no longer members of one household” (Huebner, 1976, pp. 154–155). I guess Latour (1993) was not that wrong, and we were never modern. Sabet (2008) claims that “modernity failed to achieve the multi-dimensional fulfillment required by human society [that is] its alluring promise of a better life has masked a dwelling concern with human self-realization through spiritual as well as material development” (p. 31). Modernity, Dussel (2013) is under the gun because of the impossibility of perpetual submission from the ‘the others’. That is, “the exclusion and cornered into poverty [quasi-termination] of African, Asian, and Latin

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American alterity and their indomitable will to survive” pushed modernity to an unsustainable point. Modernist arrogance of the so-called scientificity of science (Giroux, 1981a), is in crisis, Munslow (1997) claims, “because of the objection that meaning is generated by socially encoded and constructed discursive practices that mediate reality so much so that they effectively close off direct access” (p. 11). That is “the metanarrative o scientific objectivity and the unfolding of progress through our grasp of the past is now under challenge” (Munslow, 1997, p. 17). More to the point, the real(ity) cannot be framed only from Western Modern Eurocentric dynamics of ideological production in which class, race, and gender play a key role, especially when, such dynamics are framed and frame the noncapitalist modes and conditions of production of non-Western precolonial societies as well (see Rodney, 1973). Modernity got lost (intentionally?) between the real(ity) and representations of the real(ity). For all practical purposes, the Western Cartesian modernity model is a hegemonic model with its arrogant claim to address global social issues is not just moribund, it is dead. Modernity, Harding (2008) claims, was/is a “misleading dream” (p. 23). Modernity’s final sentence was determined partially by modernity itself and its truly totalitarian cult, a cultural and economic napalm that attempted to erase all other epistemological manifestations, that paradoxically ended up being systematically reinforced and strengthened from the belligerent clashes with modernity. If colonialism is a crime against humanity, and colonialism and imperialism had no existence outside of modernity, then modernity is also not innocent in such crime against humanity, not because it was inconsequential in avoiding/thwarting genocidal policies and practices but precisely because it is very existence relies on its capacity to perpetuate massive genocide. History is not absolving, and it will not absolve the Western Cartesian modernity model. Great achievements in areas, such as space conquest and technologies, have been reduced to a pale inconsequentiality for the massive majority of the world’s population in face of slavery, genocide, holocaust, poverty, inequality, social and cognitive apartheid, intergenerational injustice, and the temerity to change nature, among other issues. Painfully all these sagas are at the very root of such modern societal tech advancements. To rely on Eagleton’s (2003) metaphor “it seems that God was not [modern]” (p. 1). The twentieth century, Thernborn (2010) claims, “was the last Eurocentric century” (p. 59). FROM ABYSSAL TO NON-ABYSSAL THINKING As I was able to unveil in Conflicts in Curriculum Theory (2011), Boaventura Sousa Santos (2007a, 2007b) denounces Western modern thinking as abyssal and challenges us to move to a post-abyssal thinking. Sousa Santos

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approach “offers some of the more accurate and refined critical analysis of the long crisis of epistemology” (Arriscado Nunes, 2008, p. 46). Modern Western thinking, Sousa Santos claims (2007b), “is an abyssal thinking” (p. 45). It consists of a system of visible and invisible distinctions, the invisible ones being the foundation of the visible ones. The invisible distinctions are established through radical lines that divide social reality into two realms, the realm of “this side of the line” and the realm of “the other side of the line”. The division is such that “the other side of the line” vanishes as reality, becomes nonexistent, and is indeed produced as nonexistent. Nonexistent means not existing in any relevant or comprehensible way of being. Whatever is produced as nonexistent is radically excluded because it lies beyond the realm of what the accepted conception of inclusion considers to be its other. What most fundamentally characterizes abyssal thinking is thus the impossibility of the co-presence of the two sides of the line. To the extent that it prevails, this side of the line only prevails by exhausting the field of relevant reality. Beyond it, there is only nonexistence, invisibility, non-dialectical absence. The motto of such abyssal thinking goes well beyond the radical impossibility of co-presence and a fundamental radical negation of [the] [an]other existences. The radicalization of such abyssal episteme is outshined by the “intensely visible distinctions structuring social reality on this side of the line are grounded on the invisibility of the distinction between this side of the line and the other side” (Sousa Santos, 2007b, p. 46). In a way, Sousa Santos goes well beyond Todorova (1997) regarding the ‘incomplete other’. That is there no ‘incomplete other’ (and ‘incomplete self’) because there is nothing beyond the abyssal line. Invisibility and nonexistence of the “one side” are the roots of visibility and existence of the “another side”. Knowledge and modern law are two major, distinct, yet interrelated, complex areas that represent the most refine accomplishments of such cultural politics of radical nonexistence and negation (Sousa Santos, 2007b). Within the field of knowledge “abyssal thinking consists in granting to modern science the monopoly of the universal distinction between true and false, to the detriment of two alternative bodies of knowledge: philosophy and theology” (Sousa Santos, 2007b, p. 47). That is, the “exclusionary character of this monopoly is at the core of the modern epistemological disputes between scientific and nonscientific forms of truth” (Sousa Santos, 2007b, p. 47). Such monopoly has been able to confine the epistemological struggle within a particular framework regarding “certain kinds of objects under certain circumstances and established by certain methods” (Sousa Santos, 2007b, p. 47). A monopoly that by producing other forms of knowledge as nonexistent—because unfitted with the scientific scientificity of the Western modern thinking (Giroux, 2011) ruled by “reason as philosophical truth or

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faith as religious truth” (Sousa Santos, 2007b, p. 47)—erases its own relativism and the relativism of “scientific” truth. The visible and legitimate belligerent battles among science, philosophy, and theology—one should not forget that we belong to a civilization that used to burn people alive because of their claim that the world was not flat—cartelize the Western Cartesian modern side and “their visibility is premised upon the invisibility of forms of knowledge that cannot be fitted into any of these ways of knowing” (Sousa Santos, 2007b, p. 47). That is, popular, lay, plebeian, peasant, or indigenous knowledges on the other side of the line [vanish] as relevant or commensurable knowledges because they are beyond truth and falsehood. It is unimaginable to apply to them not only the scientific true/false distinction, but also the scientifically unascertainable truths of philosophy and theology that constitute all the acceptable knowledge on this side of the line. On the other side of the line, there is no real knowledge; there are beliefs, opinions, intuitive or subjective understandings, which, at the most, may become objects or raw materials for scientific enquiry. Thus, the visible line that separates science from its modern others is grounded on the abyssal invisible line that separates science, philosophy, and theology, on one side, from, on the other, knowledges rendered incommensurable and incomprehensible for meeting neither the demands of scientific methods of truth nor those of their acknowledged contesters in the realm of philosophy and theology. (Sousa Santos, 2007b, p. 47) In such context, not just knowledge, but the very question/answer “what is to think” is totally prostituted. How can ‘one’ actually claim that one really knows the things that one claims to know if an immense epistemological platform that congregates a myriad of other forms of episteme has been viciously produced as nonexistent? Chomsky (1971) in his Bertrand Russell Lectures stated that a “central problem on interpreting the world is determining how, in fact, human beings proceed to do so. It is the study of the interaction between a particular biologically given, complex system—the human mind—and the physical and social world” (p. 3). The irrefutability of such insightful claim throws the Western Cartesian model abyssal thinking to the pillory sentenced to death without a possibility for an appeal. Chomsky’s (1971) sharp claim validates the impossibility of one single way through which human beings will try to grasp the world, as well as the relativism of the totalitarian impulses that have been secularly produced by the Western Cartesian modern model to produce, reproduce, and legitimate one-dimensional human beings (Marcuse, 1964)—a one-dimensionality that it is based on production of the “other dimensions as non-existent” (Sousa Santos, 2014). The intricate and different ways human beings experience the world exhibits how flimsy is the very modern hegemonic learning theory that has

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been coined scientific and thus official. Echoing Russell’s consulate, Chomsky (1971) argues that the very study of “human psychology has been diverted into side channels by an unwillingness to pose the problem of how experience is related to knowledge and belief, a problem which of course presupposes a logicality prior to investigation of the structure of systems of knowledge and belief” (p. 47). An abyssal framework fuels only such a one-dimensionality “to the extent that effectively eliminates whatever realities are on the other side of the line” (Sousa Santos, 2007b, 48). Moreover, such radical denial of co-presence, Sousa Santos (2007b) argues, “grounds the affirmation of the radical difference that, on this side of the line, separates true and false, legal and illegal. The other side of the line comprises a vast set of discarded experiences, made invisible both as agencies and as agents, and with no fixed territorial location” (p. 48). Welcome to the colonial zone, a zone that encapsulates “whatever could not be thought of as either true or false, legal or illegal” (Sousa Santos, 2007b, p. 48). The colonial zone is par excellence, the realm of incomprehensible beliefs and behaviours which in no way can be considered knowledge, whether true or false. The other side of the line harbours only incomprehensible magical or idolatrous practices. The utter strangeness of such practices led to denying the very human nature of the agents of such practices. On the basis of their refined conceptions of humanity and human dignity, the humanists reached the conclusion that the savages were sub-human. (Sousa Santos, 2007b, p. 51). One cannot delink the abyssal thinking from the political economy and culture of the material conditions underlying the emergence and development of capitalism. Modernity, Latour (1993) claims, shows an asymmetrical [modern] constitution (or constitutions) that, despite celebrating “the birth of man or announcing his death, [it] overlooked the simultaneous birth of non-humanity [an] equally strange beginning of a crossed-out God, relegated to the sidelines,” so connected with the development of a capitalist framework (p. 13). Modernity by itself, Amin (2008), argues, “is not only a cultural revolution; it derives its meaning only through the close relation that it has with the birth and subsequent growth of capitalism” (p. 88). It is actually the carburetor of such system. While the Portuguese–Spanish Treaty of Tordesillas could be identified as the first Western modern global line produced by such abyssal episteme, “the truly abyssal lines emerge in the mid-sixteenth century with the amity lines.” Sousa Santos (2007b) posits that the very Western modern claim of “beyond the equator there are no sins”, was a kiss of death to the other side of the line (pp. 49–50). Colonialism is “the blind spot upon which modern conceptions of knowledge and law are built” (Sousa Santos, 2007b, p. 50). Because capitalism and abyssal thinking are the two faces of the same coin, the cultural and economic

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politics of radical negation have been upgraded since its emergence. In this context one needs to understand the theories of the social contract within the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries that “makes up pasts to make room for a single homogeneous future”, that imposes a social fascism. Amin (2008) states that modernity “makes [liberal] democracy possible,” and furthermore, [i]t requires secularism, in the sense of separation of the religious and the political, [that is] the complex association of modernity, democracy, and secularism, its advances and retreats, has been shaping the contemporary world. The concrete forms of modernity, democracy, and secularism found today must, then, be considered as products of the concrete history of the growth of capitalism. They are shaped by the specific conditions in which the domination of capital is expressed— the historical compromises that define the social contents of hegemonic blocs. (pp. 87–88) Paradoxically, Sousa Santos (2007b) claims, social fascism is at the core of liberal democracy ever since: As a social regime, social fascism may coexist with liberal political democracy. Rather than sacrificing democracy to the demands of global capitalism, it trivializes democracy to such a degree that it is no longer necessary, or even convenient, to sacrifice democracy to promote capitalism. It is, therefore, a pluralistic fascism, that is to say, a form of fascism that never existed. Indeed, it is my contention that we may be entering a period in which societies are politically democratic and socially fascistic. (p. 61) With that said, social fascism is at the very core of the politics of radical negation that “result[s] in a radical absence, the absence of humanity, modern sub-humanity [thus] modern humanity is not conceivable without modern sub-humanity. The negation of one part of humanity is sacrificial, in that it is the condition of the affirmation of that other part of humanity, which considers itself as universal” (Sousa Santos, 2007b, p. 52). Modernity’s take on the lack of development of the ‘other non-Western’ surreptitiously hides a pedagogy of domination and violence. That is, the cult of Eurocentric superior culture, the fallacy of development paves the way for the necessary violence as the price of development and naturally “victims are culpable for their own violent conquest and for their own victimization” (Dussel, 1995a, p. 66) Needless to say, the abyssal global lines that have been framing the modern Western thinking are not static or fixed constructions. Nor do they express a monolithic movement. There are contradictory impulses within the very core of the modern Western thinking within the turfs of philosophy

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and religion, as well as between both. The same needs to be said to other side of the line so many times wrongly produced as monolithic as well. And there are challenges between both sides of the lines. One of the latest examples of such wrangles that changed dramatically the courses of the multiplicity of such global line was the anticolonial momentum. That is, “the other side of the line rose against radical exclusion of peoples that have been subjected to the appropriation/violence paradigm [demand] to be included in the regulation/ emancipation paradigm” (Sousa Santos, 2007b, p. 54). Today, the local consequences of globalization (Bauman, 1998) with the exponential multiplication of levels of poverty and inequality, while also showing the predatory DNA of the modern Western thinking, open space for the emergence of a post-abyssal thinking produced by what Sousa Santos (2007b) calls “subaltern cosmopolitanisms” (p. 55). That is, globalization, or the latest hegemonic period of capitalism (see Arrighi, 2005), is the evidence that “modern Western thinking goes on operating through abyssal lines that divide human from subhuman in such a way that human principles don’t become compromised by inhuman practices” (Sousa Santos, 2007b, pp. 52–53). However, particular counterhegemonic challenges within the very marrow of the modern Western thinking needed to be carefully rethought as well (Andreotti, 2011; Cho, 2012; Fraser, 2014; Paraskeva, 2011a). As I have been mention previously certain counterdominant Western platforms ended being so functionalists as the functionalism they were challenging. Among other issues they were incapable of acting with the decolonial, by decolonizing their position as well. What is then new between Western counterhegemonic epistemologies and subaltern cosmopolitanisms beyond the wrangle of Eurocentric Eurocentrism versus anti-Eurocentric Eurocentrism? What is new is that [t]he novelty of subaltern cosmopolitanism lies, above all, in its deep sense of incompleteness without, however, aiming at completeness. On the one hand, it defends the fact that the understanding of the world by far exceeds the Western understanding of the world and that therefore our knowledge of globalization is much less global than globalization itself. On the other hand, it defends the fact that the more non-Western understandings of the world are identified as it becomes more evident that there are still many others to be identified and that hybrid understandings, mixing Western and non-Western components, are virtually infinite. Post-abyssal thinking stems thus from the idea that the diversity of the world is inexhaustible and that such diversity still lacks an adequate epistemology. In other words, the epistemological diversity of the world does not yet have a form. (Sousa Santos, 2007a, p. xx) Acknowledging the limitations of particular modern Western counterhegemonic impulses, Fraser (2014) requests a new critical theory that adapts to

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the new reality of our times by incorporating the dimensions of the social crises a crisis that was unable to interrupt as well. As she claims (2014), if one reduces the emphasis just to the financial and economic aspects of society, one will lose the capacity to clarify the social, ecological, and political impulses and their relation with the economy. What Fraser is demanding is the need to run away from the functionalist temptation to focus exclusively in the logic of the system and to grasp the logic of the social action. Thus, Fraser (2014) claims, every critical approach that wants to address current social problems, needs to excel economicism by being multidimensional and excel functionalism by paying attention to the structure and agency. That is, today’s crisis is “multidimensional, encompassing not only economy and finance, but also ecology, society and politics” (Fraser, 2014, pp. 541–542). Fraser (2014) adds that critical theory addresses the three strands fueled by such crises, that is, the ecological, the financialization, and the social reproduction strands of the crisis. However, as she (2014) argues, today we lack such a critical theory. Our received understandings of crisis tend to focus on a single aspect, typically the economic or the ecological, which they isolate from, and privilege over, the others. For the most part, ecological theorists isolate the crisis of nature from that of finance, while most critics of political economy fail to bring that domain into relation with ecology. And neither camp pays much attention to the crisis of social reproduction, which has become the province of gender studies and feminist theory, and which therefore remains ghettoized. (p. 542) Fraser’s (2014) claim, I argue, is crucial and reinforces the claim to engage and move the critical path into a decolonized process. Otherwise, it is inconsequential. It needs to show the temerity to be post-abyssal, that is, to be non-abyssal: Post-abyssal thinking starts from the recognition that social exclusion in its broadest sense takes very different forms according to whether it is determined by an abyssal or by a non-abyssal line, and that as long as abyssally defined exclusion persists, no really progressive postcapitalist alternative is possible. During a probably long transitional period, confronting abyssal exclusion will be a precondition to addressing in an effective way the many forms of non-abyssal exclusion that have divided the modern world on this side of the line. A post-abyssal conception of Marxism (in itself, a good exemplar of abyssal thinking) will claim that the emancipation of workers must be fought for in conjunction with the emancipation of all the discardable populations of the Global South, which are oppressed but not directly exploited by global capitalism. It will also claim that the rights of citizens are not secured as

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long as non-citizens go on being treated as sub-humans. (Sousa Santos, 2007b, p. 65) By recognizing the abyssal thinking as a hegemonic epistemological cartel, critical thinking will play a huge role in debunking such eugenicist platform. That is, “without such recognition, critical thinking will remain a derivative thinking that will go on reproducing the abyssal lines, no matter how anti-abyssal it will proclaim itself” (Sousa Santos, 2007b, p. 65). Postabyssal thinking, Sousa Santos (2007b) states, “is a non-derivative thinking; it involves a radical break with modern Western ways of thinking and acting” (p. 65). To think in nonderivative terms “means to think from the perspective of the other side of the line, precisely because the other side of the line has been the realm of the unthinkable in Western modernity” (Sousa Santos, 2007b, p. 65). It goes without saying that post-abyssal thinking needs to be seen as a collective move. To grasp fully the complexity of such abyss requires a herculean effort one that “no single scholar can do it alone, as an individual” (Sousa Santos, 2007b, p. 66). As Amin (2008) argues, “the globalization of strategies of dominant capital calls for a global [collective] response by its victims” (p. 77). Post-abyssal thinking is an alternative way thinking of alternatives of “learning from the South through an epistemology of the South [by] confronting the monoculture of modern science with the ecology of knowledges [that is] founded on the idea that knowledge is interknowledge” (Sousa Santos, 2007b, p. 66). Post-abyssal thinking implies a radical co-presence that is “practices and agents on both sides of the line are contemporary in equal terms” (Sousa Santos, 2007b, p. 66); it implies an ecology of knowledges “premised upon the idea of the epistemological diversity of the world, the recognition of the existence of a plurality of knowledges beyond scientific knowledge” (Sousa Santos, 2007b, p. 67). In so doing, post-abyssal thinking, in a hegemonic sense, renounces a general epistemology, providing the political clarity that “we probably need a residual general epistemological requirement to move along: a general epistemology of the impossibility of a general epistemology” (Sousa Santos, 2007b, p. 67). TRANSMODERNITY, BORDER THINKING, OR RADICAL CO-PRESENCE? YES, PLEASE With that said, Sousa Santos (2007b) post-abyssal thinking with its nonnegotiable claims of “radical co-presence” and of “a general epistemology of the impossibility of a general epistemology”, establishes a powerful liturgy with decolonial platforms, such as transmodernity (see Maldonado-Torres, 2008a) and border thinking (see Tlostanova & Mignolo, 2012). That is, I argue that Sousa Santos (2007b) post-abyssal thinking while rubbing

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fluently against the transmodernistic claim—perfectly tuned with some of its crucial fundaments—shows a different interface with some of the claims that frame the border-thinking theorists and platform. Transmodernity, Maldonado-Torres (2008a) argues, needs to be framed within the complex matrix of the decolonial turn. It is the fourth momentum of such turn. The decolonial turn, can be perceived as an expression of a particular manifestation of skepticism toward Western theodicy (a form of theodicy in which Western civilization itself takes the place of God and must be defended in face of any evil). It finds its roots on critical responses to racism and colonialism articulated by colonial and racial subjects since the beginnings of modern colonial experience more than five hundred years ago. The de-colonial turn is a simultaneous response to the crisis of Europe and the condition of radicalized and colonized subjects in modernity. It posits the primacy of ethics as an antidote to the problems with Western conceptions of freedom, autonomy, and equality, as well as the necessity of politics to forge a world where ethical relations become the norm rather than the exception. The de-colonial turn highlights epistemic relevance of the enslaved and colonized search for humanity. It seeks to open up the sources for thinking and to break up the apartheid of theoretical domains through renewed forms of critique and epistemic creoloization (p. 7). Hence, the decolonial is not a new turn. In fact, its first phase dates back to the end of the nineteenth century and is connected with the dilemmas of the emancipation of African Americans. The next belligerent phase erupted with World War I and World War II and the subsequent decolonization movements that emerged within the postwar debacle. It is in such sanguinary momentum that one needs to place the emergence and developments of critical epistemes within and outside Europe. The third phase blasted at the end of the 1960s. The possibility of the impossibility raised during major non-monolithic social movements, such as the ones connected with the May 1968 advent of the theology of liberation, the philosophy of liberation, subaltern theories were a clarion call for both the dominant modern Western thought as well as to counterdominant Western platform. Transmodernity is the call against the bloodthirsty, modern Western model, a wholeheartedly paradoxical momentum that relies simultaneously on rational emancipation and on a praxis of violence (Dussel, 1995a). As Maldonado-Torres (2008a) argues, “while modernity takes emancipation to an abstract universal or a global design, transmodernity offers the possibility of thinking commonality diversely” (p. 231). Dussel’s philosophy of liberation and the idea of transmodernity “are largely oriented by a perception of the limits of modernity, particularly as these are made evident from a global perspective that includes the South as a measuring stick of sorts for the radicalism of critical theories and as a place from which critical

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perspectives emerge” (Maldonado-Torres, 2008a, p. 232). Thus, transmodernity, Maldonado-Torres (2008a) “involves a double movement: on the one hand the subsumption of the ‘the best of globalized European and North American modernity’ from the perspective of liberating reason (not European emancipation), and on the other the critical affirmation of the liberating aspects of the cultures and knowledges excluded from or occluded by modernity” (pp. 231–233). Transmodernity challenges modernity’s paradigm of war (Maldonado-Torres, 2008a). Transmodernity not only validates that “neither modernity nor coloniality (or modernity/coloniality) has entirely erased the histories, the memories, and the epistemological and hermeneutical resources of colonized cultures or religious traditions” (Maldonado-Torres, 2008a, p. 232) but also reaches out to crucial counterhegemonic impulses within the very core of the modern Western thinking to transgress the abyssal global lines (Sousa Santos, 2007b). It is right here that post-abyssal thinking walks away from border thinking, not because of a negation of commonalities regarding the impact of the ruthless project of modernity but because of the refusal of border theorists to compromise in the importance of radical co-presence position as the need to search for a general epistemology of the impossibility of a general epistemology. Although the search for a general epistemology of the impossibility of a general epistemology is a leitmotiv of border theorists, they defend that such aim could be achieved not necessarily by the radical cult of co-presence. Mignolo (2012) examines border thinking in conjunction with colonial difference to unmask the dangers of simplifying modernity and coloniality as just two sides of the same coin. The wrangle between modernity and coloniality—although an integral part of the capitalist matrix—stretched differently (or, should we say, as Latour [1999] does, “happened” differently) around the globe. For example, whereas for an oppressed Latin American subject, “modernity and coloniality are clearly two sides of the same coin”, for a given North African subject, such as Rashida Triki, an art historian from the University of Tunisia, it is clear that “coloniality not only came after modernity, but it [is] not easy for her [or oppressed subjects like her] to understand that is, from the perspective of the Americas, coloniality is constitutive of modernity” (Mignolo, 2012, p. 50). That is, an accurate analysis of the capitalist matrix implies a clear understanding of the colonial differences (or, should we say, differences), a coloniality that “works in two directions, rearticulating the interior borders linked to imperial conflicts and rearticulating the exterior borders by giving new meaning to the colonial difference” (Mignolo, 2012, p. 50) or differences. Africa and Europe, as well as other parts of the world, such as Latin America and Asia, reveal different configurations of modernity and coloniality (Mignolo, 2012). Moreover, this is crucial to dissect the very roots of the modern world system. That is, as we have been arguing, in the new commercial circuits opened between the Mediterranean and the Atlantic “lays the foundation for both

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modernity and coloniality” (Mignolo, 2012, p. 51). This re-geoconfiguration of the planet so well explains epistemological clashes between social constructions, such as Occident and Orient. Mignolo (2012) does not mince words in this regard when he claims that “[o]ccidentalism was the geopolitical figure that ties together the imaginary of the modern/colonial world system. As such, it is also the condition of the emergence of orientalism: there cannot be an Orient, as the other, without the Occident as the same” (p. 51). Moreover, Mignolo (2012) adds, “the Occident was never Europe’s other but the difference within sameness: Indias Occidentales and later America, was the extreme West not its alterity. America, contrary to Africa and Asia was included as part of Europe expansion and not as its difference. That is why, once more, without Occidentalism there is no Orientalism” (p. 58). Mignolo (2012) challenges us to defy canonical cults that view “modernity as [a] European business and coloniality something that happens outside Europe”, arguing for the need to “connect and draw a genealogy of thinking from local histories subsuming global designs” (p. 51). Tlostanova and Mignolo (2012) defend border thinking as the epistemology of the exteriority and, as such, is the necessary condition for the decolonial projects. Contrary to Western critical paradigm, decolonial border thinking “is grounded in the experiences of the colonies and subaltern empires [thus denying] epistemic privilege of the humanities and the social sciences—the privilege of an observer that makes the rest of the world an object of observation” (p. 60). That is, border thinking is a move from the postcolonial through the decolonial “shifting the geo and the politics of knowledge [a] fracture of the epistemology of the zero point” (p. 60): The de-colonial border thinking brings to the foreground different kinds of theoretical actors and principles of knowledge that displace European modernity and empower those who have been epistemically disempowered by the theo and egopolitics of knowledge. The de-colonial shift is no longer grounded in the Greek and Latin categories of thought that informed modern epistemology in the European six imperial languages (Italian, Spanish, Portuguese for the Renaissance; French, English, and German for the Enlightenment) but in the epistemic border between European imperial categories and languages and categories that modern epistemology ruled out as epistemologically nonsustainable (e.g. Mandarin, Japanese, Russian, Hindi, Urdu, Aymara, Nahuatl, Wolof, Arabic). The epistemology of the zero point is ‘managerial’ and it is today common in business, natural sciences, professional schools, an social sciences. Border thinking is the epistemology of the future, without which another world is impossible. (Tlostanova & Mignolo, 2012, p. 61) It is precisely here that Sousa Santos’s post-abyssal thinking complexifies border thinking and thinkers. The claim that border thinkers need to

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“walk away from imperial abstract universals (e.g. critical theory, semiotics of culture or nomadology for everyone on the planet) that will account for all experiences and geohistorical violence and memories” (Tlostanova & Mignolo, 2012, p. 65) clashes frontally with the radical co-presence of the ecology of knowledges that frames post-abyssal thinking. While border thinking, “from an imperial perspective, is almost an impossibility [and] from a colonial perspective is a straightforward necessity”, my argument is that the call should be to decolonize, not necessarily just the imperial abstract universals pumped by Western modernity but the very source of such universals. Andreotti (2013) suggests a different and interesting way out of such wrangle. She (2013) acknowledges that both transmodernity and border thinking raise some problems. For instance, on one hand, she alerts us to the fact that transmodernity could well fall in the same dangerous universalisms of modernity, imposing a single story, one grammatology; on the other hand, border thinking by ‘the cult of cleansing’ could well be in a kind of reproductive position that border thinkers so accurately challenge. To resolve such content, Andreotti (2013) put forward the concept of hospicing; that is, one needs to look, say, at modernity like a dying human being who, because of the mess that he or she created, destroys his or her legitimacy to claim what one should do or not do. My argument, as I unfolded in my opening paragraphs of this chapter, tries to complexify such wrangle. My claim is that Western colonial modernity has been inconsequential in addressing and terminating social sagas, such as poverty, segregation, starvation, and misery not because it has a weak conceptual thesaurus, but precisely because its very existence relies on the production of those social sagas. While “economic equality is again increasing after its historical trough in the 1970’s, class structure of social forces is eroding” (Thernborn, 2010, p. 57). Needless to say, I am not defining modernity monolithically. However, while modernity dominant traditions were actually focused on genocidal practices as a way of existence, the counterdominant traditions—who we all owe great deal I must admit— despite the dents created within the dominant platform, have run out of answers and corned with frustrations exacerbated by dehumanized poiesis, such as Stalinism and Maoism. In a way, both dominant and counterdominant perspectives were cornered in the same “tunnel of history” (Harding, 1998) and because of that are not immune to the functionalist bug (Paraskeva, 2011a). Whereas the former is the master mind of the epistemicide, the latter, while in some cases led the struggle to denounce the epistemological cleansing at the very core of the modernity capitalist project, in too many cases and occasions have done little to terminate such purging. Epistemicides are endemic to the Western modernity. More to the point, modernity is a moribund platform to challenge such epistemological cleansing. Let me pause here and recapture a comment I just made previously, when I claimed that we owe quite a bit to specific counterdominant

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platforms in the struggle against epistemicides. If modernity is a toolkit to revert the epistemicide, how come we are in debt to certain counterdominant traditions within modernity? And it is here that I am more syntonic with Sousa Santos radical co-presence. DECOLONIZE (NEO-)MARXISM Despite the inconsequentiality of counterdominant/counterhegemonic modern Western approaches in the struggle against epistemicides, it is irrefutable that in so many ways, those positions paved the way—even through their limitations and silences—for so many massive triumphs against capitalism that are at the very core of modern Western framework. If there is a movement that provoked major shifts in humanity—toward a more human dynamic—during the previous century that was certainly (neo-)Marxism or progressive movements profoundly influenced by the (neo-)Marxist and progressive platform—not just in the West but all over the world as well. With that said, my argument is that we need to be sentient of the clots that create a stroke of such transformations toward a full social and cognitive justice. That is, there is epistemological validity in certain counterdominant approaches if one wants to unmask its limitations and challenges. Thus, a new critical thinking implies a duel with history, a clash with the tunnel of history (Harding, 1998). Such a duel needs to occur out of ‘Nkrumahanian philosophical consciencism’ (1964), which understands, for example, differences between critical/(neo-)Marxism and decolonial thinking. Quijano (2000b) together with Mignolo (2013) an others, claim Marxism as a critical and liberating project dwelling in the local history of Europe, in a relatively homogenous community where workers and factory owners belonged to the same ethnicity and, therefore Marxism relied on class oppression and the exploitation of labor. However as European economy and political theory expand and conquered the world the tools that Marx offered in the analysis of capital are of course useful beyond Europe. However subjectivities and knowledge in the colonial and ex-colonial world are as important as are divergent from European experiences. From those subjectivities, experience, religions, histories, everyday life, emerged border-thinking and de-colonial liberating projects. Marxism is then subsumed and incorporated into parallel but different projects. (Mignolo, 2013, pp. 16–17) Decolonial thinking, Mignolo (2013) adds, emphasizes not only “racial discrimination (the hierarchy of human beings, since the sixteenth century, that justified economic and political subordination of people of people of color and woman)” but also class segregation (p. 17). This decolonized attempt on Marxism we actually see in many African intellectuals, as I examined

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before, and in Abdel Khaliq Mahgoub in his “By Virtue of Marxism, Your Honor.” In his speech delivered in court right before he was sentenced to death, Mahgoub (2012) unveils how “can Africans utilize Marxist thought to create a progressive culture that embodies a systematic critique of all that is reactionary within their societies” (Hassan, 2012, p. 7). Marxism was a good ally to “emancipate [African] societies from the ravages of colonial dominance and transgression” (Mahgoub, 2012, p. 17). Hassan (2012) frames the importance of Marxism as part of the decolonial process, claiming, Never had violence, inequality, exclusion, famine and thus economic oppression affected as many human beings in the history of earth and of humanity. Instead of singing the advent of the ideal of liberal democracy and of the capitalist market in the euphoria of the end of history, instead of celebrating the ‘end of ideologies’ and the end of the great emancipatory discourses, let us never neglect this fact: no degree of progress allows one to ignore that never before, in absolute figures, have so many man, women and children been subjugated, starved or exterminated on the earth. (pp. 7–8) “I did not,” Mahgoub (2012) firmly denies, “knock on the door of Marxism for fleeting or transient gains” (p. 20). Conversely, “I was faithful to the cause of emancipation thorough building a sovereign, dignified Sudanese Republic in which its suns and daughter will enjoy its abundance and plenty” (Mahgoub, 2012, p. 20). Mahgoub (2012) was quite vocal in denouncing how focusing on emancipation allowed him to perceive crucial shifts in epistemology and political power. To decolonize or remap Marxism and critical theoretical platforms implies an itinerant take of Marx’s Eurocentric impulses, as well as the way Marxism and particular critical theoretical platforms have been used (see, for instance, Escobar, 2013; Cho, 2012). It is, in fact, possible to identify some decolonial murmurs in some approaches put forward by Marx and Engels. Obviously such claim does not undermine Marxism’s fundamental Eurocentric take. For instance, Grosfoguel (2010) nails it when he denounces Marx’s epistemical racism and his consequent inability to understand the potential of “the proletarian spirit of the Muslim masses” (p. 34). In Marx’s terms, Grosfoguel (2010) states, “Muslim people from Turkish origin are a mob of ignorant people that made the mobs of the Roman Empire look like sages” (p. 35). However, it is important to pay attention to some decolonial impulses—however, quite anemic, one would admit—in some Marxist pieces. Anderson’s Marx at the Margins provides one of the most critical comprehensive examinations of Marx writings “on societies that were for the most part peripheral to capitalism during his lifetime” (Anderson, 2010, p. 2). Anderson (2010) is referring to Marx and Engels’ pieces published in the New York Daily Tribune, which also appears in the volume On Colonialism

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(1853). In such pieces (Marx & Engels, 1853; Anderson, 2010) one needs to swim in Marx’s understanding of the colonial–decolonial processes. These writing show Marx concerned with capitalist modernity colonization effects in nations, such as India, Indonesia, Algeria, and China, which were “in one way or another at the margins” (Anderson 2010, p. 2). Marx (and Engels) was very clear that nations, such as Russia, India, China and Algeria (and one could add Indonesia), “possessed social structures markedly different from those of Western Europe. Throughout their writings, [Marx and Engels] grappled with the question of the future development of these nonWestern societies” (Anderson, 2010, p. 2); moreover, Marx and Engels’s New York Daily Tribune pieces exhibit examinations on “oppressed nationalities and ethnic groups [such as] Poland, Ireland, Irish workers in Britain and Blacks in the United States” (Anderson, 2010, p. 3). Thus, these two interconnected themes were not incidental to Marx’s theorization of capitalism, but part of a complex analysis of the global social order of his time. Marx’s proletariat was not only white and European, but also encompassed Black labor in [the United States], as well the Irish, not considered “white” at the time either by the dominant cultures of Britain and North America. Moreover, as capitalist modernity penetrated into Russia and Asia undermining the precapitalist social orders of these societies, new possibilities for revolutionary change would [Marx defended] emerge from these new locations. (Anderson, 2010, p. 3) Marx’s move to England, definitely marked the beginning of his close attention to non-Western societies, despite his writings, say on India, “have been a source of tremendous controversy with critics of Marx pointing to them as proof of his Eurocentrism” (Anderson, 2010, p. 11). There is some legitimacy in such critique, however. The British Rule in India (1853) is Marx’s first broad examination of a specific non-Western society. After coining “Hindustan as the Ireland of Asia” (Marx, 1853), Marx produced an accurate diagnostic of India under British rule concluding that “there cannot remain any doubt but that the misery inflicted by the British on Hindustan is of an essentially different and infinitely more intensive kind than all Hindustan had to suffer before” (p. 32). India had an ancestral social structure that was devastated by British colonial empire that since its occupation was more concerned in the development of a particular framework fully tuned with new modes and conditions of production imposed by the ‘new markets’. Actually Marx’s writings on non-Western societies are hegemonically based/crossed by (a) the need to contextualize such nations within/or without the modern capitalist modes of production and (b) the problematic notion that the destruction of realities such as India needed to be seen as sources of the revolution. Although such claim was not totally wrong, looking say to the African continent, in a

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way it is precisely one of the very roots of Marx’s incapability of avoiding a Eurocentric take. To accept such is to admit that the radical transformation is only possible once the way has been paved by the destruction created by the modern colonial capitalism. More than that, it seems that there is no change without going through the pain of Eurocentrism, especially for nonWestern societies that, as documented, showed a different, stable and less unequal social structure. That is, while, on one hand, Marx was accurate when he claimed that ancient non-Western social structures in nations such as India were the very source of Oriental despotism (Marx, 1853), on the other hand, it is also irrefutable that to admit that the conditions for revolutionary change would come at the price of massive destruction of nonWestern societies is to claim the historical inevitability of eugenic genocidal capitalism but, worse than that, to certify the epistemological subalternization of non-Western societies that masochistically need to be immolated under the merciless tortures of Western modernity. Jani (2002) advances an insightful examination of the tangle Marx(ism) and Eurocentrism by paying close attention to the works of Marx (and Engels) in the New York Daily Tribune as well. Quite sentient of the wellframed critique edified by intellectuals, such as Said (1979) and Warren (1980) among others, that claimed Marx(ism) as an Eurocentric thinker and platform “who saw the destruction of precapitalist Asian societies as progressive and tragically necessary for the advancement of capitalism” (Jani, 2002, p. 82), and, while agreeing that “Marx never rejected the idea that colonialism was essential for bringing capitalism to Asia” (Jani, 2002, p. 83), Jani (2002) claims that one needs to pay attention to a deeper logic between Marx’s ideas and the 1857 revolt of the British India. That is, Jani (2002) claims that, because of the impact of such revolt within and beyond India, Marx approach “increasingly turned from an exclusive focus on the British bourgeoisie to theorize the self activity and struggle of colonized Indians” (p. 82). Moreover, the conflict between the Asian mode and conditions of production and Marx’s growing attention of the struggle of the colonized India drove him to a now overtly and explicit anticolonial position (Jani, 2002). Marx’s approach on the revolt in India exhibits a refined understanding of the struggle of the colonizer and the colonized. In too many occasions in his (theirs) New York Daily Tribune scripts, Jani (2002) argues, Marx unequivocally denounces colonialism, “repeatedly using forms of the term ‘scientific barbarism’ to describe the colonizing project and its agents [and] emphasizes the degenerative role of the British” (p. 85). In these journalistic scripts, the brutality of colonialism, Jani (2002) stresses, is unmasked by Marx not as a necessity but as “an expression of the horrors of capitalism” (p. 87). Indian progress, Marx admitted, is a product of the struggle against colonialism. To remap Marxism and particular critical theoretical forms implies a clear understanding of Marxism’s Eurocentric root, which frames Marxism as

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Alternative Thinking of Alternatives a critical and liberating project dwelling in the local history of Europe in a relatively homogeneous community where workers and factory owners belonged to the same ethnicity and therefore Marxism relied on class oppression and exploitation of labor. However as European economy and political theory expanded and conquered the world the tools that Marx offered in the analysis of capital are of course useful beyond Europe. However subjectivities and knowledge in the colonial and ex-colonial world are as important as are divergent from European experiences. From these subjectivities, experience, religions, histories, everyday life, emerged border thinking and the decolonial liberating projects. (Mignolo, 2010, pp. 12–13)

To rethink Marxism and specific critical impulses requires a clear understanding that while “Marxism and de-colonial projects point toward the same direction [each] has quite different agendas [hence the] de-colonial projects cannot be subsumed under Marxist ideology [and] Marxism should be subsumed under de-colonial projects” (Mignolo, 2010, p. 17). In so doing, not only will we remap Marxism as source to unmask the coloniality momentum, but also we will block “Marxism to be an imperial ideology from the Left” (Mignolo, 2010, p. 17), in so many cases, a bloody misconstruction and misrepresentation as history documented already. Marxism legitimacy relies in its capacity to be remapped, to be de-Eurocentricized, to be decolonized. Thernborn (2010) frames the need of another Marxism within an accurate framework of the checks and balances of the counterhegemonic left as a political movement in its confrontational posture with the hegemonic groups. He claims (2010) that Marxism’s next momentum (i.e., post-Marxism) needs to be sentient of the Left successes and failures. While within the former, Therborn (2010) emphasizes “the discrediting of explicit racism and the fall of colonialism, the postwar argument over the welfare state within the advanced capitalist countries, the worldwide student of 1968 and the new feminist movement [that] questioned male radicals leadership of movements for liberation and equality in which traditional gender roles remained unchanged” (pp. 22–23). He (2010) highlights that the latter is “the failure of the left to cope with the distributive conflicts that broke out during the economic crisis of the seventies and eighties, the rendez vous manqué between protesters of 1968 and the existing labour movements, the rights capacity for violence, the implosion of communism in the 1990s’s, the fact that neoliberal policies did bring some material rewards and could not be denounced as a complete failure for the Right and the geopolitical events at the state level that have weighed heavily on the Left-Right balance of world forces” (pp. 23–25), such as the Sino-Soviet conflict, the Pol Pot–Vietnam conflict, and the state breakdowns in Africa, among other issues. Such checks and balances that determine (and are determined by) a radical different socioeconomic space, not only cornered the Left in many

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ways into a “defensive position [but also forces need of a different] Marxist social dialectic” (Thernborn, 2010, p. 57). That is “secularized Enlightenment modernism, of which the Marxist labour movement has been a major part and which has provided a congenial milieu for radical iconoclastic art and critical social thought has been seriously weakened” (Thernborn, 2010, p. 59). McLaren (2008), the leading U.S. educational Marxist, is not distracted by the decolonize move within the very core of critical theory and pedagogy. He (2008) flags the need for decolonizing Marxist critical perspectives within the framework of democratic education, as a way to break the oxymoron capitalism-democracy. While McLaren’s (2008) take is justifiably shy, it is important to stress how his approach denounces both the condescension of Western modern epistemologies in framing the world’s past and present, the theoretical illegitimacy of class as a unique category, fueling the modes and conditions of production of the capitalist beast, as well as the need for critical theorists and pedagogues to move beyond the current coloniality framework that ossifies particular epistemes, not as hegemonic but as unique. In his Marxian ruminations, McLaren (2008) shows not necessarily courage, but intellectual honesty to move beyond the centripetal—however crucial—debates between race and class predominance(s). After alerting the dangerous “flat-lined anti-politics of postmodernism” (McLaren, 2008, p. 47), as a ‘wrong turn’ in the decolonizing processes—one which attempted to rewrite class struggles within a complex linguistic formation of the politics of difference—McLaren (2008, p. 48) echoing Grosfoguel’s take, challenges Descartianism, as an arrogant matrix, one that not just “replaced God with man as the foundation of knowledge” but also specifically a particular God and a particular man, that is, the Western construction of God and man. That is, he (2008) argues, U.S. scholar’ eugenic-based superiority leads them to believe “not only that knowledge is immune from the structural antagonisms of geopolitics, gender and class struggle, but then there is such a thing as a state of universal consciousness that is coterminous with the intellectuals who represent the advanced guard of Western civilization” (p. 48). The task for critical educators, McLaren (2008) posits, is to teach critically “as a way of decolonizing democracy [which] means refusing to insure the supremacy of international financial capital, a commitment to troubling the investment and market prerogatives of transnational corporations, and to putting them under popular control of the people” (p. 49). While McLaren (2008) overtly claims that a new “critical revolutionary pedagogy implies necessarily a struggle to decolonize democracy towards a socialist alternative” (pp. 50–51), the fact is that, being justifiably a leading Marxist intellectual in education in the United States, the field, while praising his acknowledgment over the need to decolonize critical theory as the future of any critical revolutionary educator, the fact is that maybe in future works he needs to go deeper in some of his interesting ruminations, and reflecting on Marxism and (neo)Marxism as valid and legit answers

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within the current coloniality of power and being—an issue that McLaren (2008) covers yet superficially. Needless to say, here I am not undermining McLaren’s (2008) take. Precisely the opposite. My argument is that it would be important to see—like this volume attempts to do—how concretely McLaren (2008) reacts toward the struggle against epistemicides (the epistemicide being a commodity) and so welding within the modes and conditions of production of the capitalist society (Marx & Engels, 1853). While emphasizing the overall discredit of neoliberal ideologies, Thernborn (2010) argues that, in a post-Eurocentric world, admirers of Marx have to admit that crude and pure “Marxism turned out to be an unsustainable modernism and that Marxism was a profoundly European movement” (p. 61). As I examined before and will show later, its European DNA does not mean that both Marx and certain Marxist intellectuals were not paying attention (or never paid attention) to non-Eurocentric impulses. In such context, it would be an intellectual precipitation to equate the European condition of Marxism and a full blunt negation of non-Eurocentric social constructions. Thernborn (2010) unfolds trans-socialism as Marxism’s nonEurocentric next momentum, a perspective of social transformation that it is not postsocialist because [i]t starts from an acceptance of the historical legitimacy of the vast socialist movement and its heroic epic of creativity and enthusiasm, of endurance and struggle, of beautiful dreams and hopes, failures and disillusions—in short of defeats as well as victories. It retains the fundamental Marxian idea that human emancipation from exploitation, oppression, discrimination and inevitable linkage between privilege and misery can come only from the struggle by the exploited and disadvantage themselves. (Thernborn, 2010, p. 61) Such trans-socialist perspective, Thernborn (2010) argues, requires, among other issues, an accurate understanding of the social dialectic of capitalism, “the dialectic of ethnic collective identity among the oppressed and discriminated ethnic groups” (pp. 62–63). Precisely, due to the eugenic dialectics of capitalism rooted in unhesitant genocidal policies and practices, trans-socialism as Marxism’s next momentum needs to reinforce its attention to non-Western epistemological platforms and simultaneously address and resolve its dialectic puzzles. These dialectic puzzles are framed by and within a Western European epistemological terrain; despite its attempts to interrupt and eradicate world capitalism and its devastated consequences, without the temerity to engage in decolonial processes, a post-Marxism platform would be worthless of paying attention to. In this context, it is inaccurate to claim Marxism as “indelibly Eurocentric, complicit with the dominative master-narrative of modernity including that of colonialism itself” (Bartolovitch, 2002, p. 1). With this said and to rely on Bartolivitch’s (2002) approach, to claim the need to a decolonized

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Marxism is not a get together for “a world burial of socialism” (Galeano, 1991, p. 250; Bartolovitch, 2002). The impact of Marxism within so many brilliant, prominent and effective non-Western intellectuals is a clear sign of Marxism anticolonial insights and decolonial potential and should “give pause [to so many who frivolously “dismiss Marxism as a [pure and nothing else] European philosophy” (Bartolovitch, 2002, p. 4). Moreover, “if Eurocentrism connotes sustained discourse and worldview that makes (Western) Europe the center of the globe—politically, economically, theoretically and thus racially—then Marx of the India articles is not Eurocentric” (p. 11). Moreover, to decolonize Marx, is to denounce the myth of modernity. That is, Dussel (1995a) argues, it is undeniable that Marx “explains how the misery of the people (indigenous people, Africans, mestizos, peasants, laborers) of peripheral nations is proportional to the wealth of the rich within both peripheral and central capital” (p. 130). In ignoring all of this, modernity needs to be seen as myth. Marxist decolonizing processes cannot be delinked from the some of the work done by Negri. The interactions among Negri, Althusser, and Deleuze already reveal how Negri was quite concerned with Marxist theory’s capacity in addressing specific issues such as virtuality, deterritorialization, ryzhoma, materiality/ immateriality of labor, and multitude and new agency dynamics, as well as in unmasking a new theoretical Marxist path beyond Marx. Negri advanced new models of ontological supremacy of the subject in the face of an intricate global real drafting a violent critique of the Western capitalist hegemonic model that Marxism of the First, Second, and Third International unsuccessfully and tireless try to abolish. LINGUISTICIDES: WESTERNATIONALIZATION, NOT INTERNATIONALIZATION To decolonize (neo-)Marxist and critical thinking implies also a clear understanding of one of the most powerful tools of the modern Western abyssal thinking, linguistic terrorism, and genocide (Anzaldua, 2007). Language does play a key role in the decolonial turn. Amin (2011) contextualizes the linguistic struggle within a complex matrix of phonetic and conceptual writing (p. 168). Although China was five centuries ahead of Europe, the development of a strong diverse phonetic and conceptual writing invented in the Middles East was smashed with the advent of “capitalist modernity that [under] the mythology of a nation/state linguistically homogeneous [imposed] a common language foreign for many” with dramatic impact on a plurality of identities that coexisted dispositionally centuries before. The homogeneity of modern Western languages throughout the capitalist mantra—such as Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, French, English, and German, that, odd as it might be, some of them have a nonmodern Western linguistic base, speaks volume to one of the

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most important aspects of the modern Western coloniality. By imposing a uniform thesaurus to legitimate a paradigm of war (Maldonado-Torres, 2008a), paving a specific understanding of the world and the word, modern Western thinking celebrated indigeneities as nonexistent. As Anzaldua (2007) vociferates, within the modern Western linguistic board, Chicanas are “desenguadas, somos los del español deficient. We are your linguistic nightmare, your linguistic aberration, your linguistic mestizaje, the subject of your burla. Because we speak with tongues of fire, we are culturally crucified. Racially, culturally, and linguistically somos huerfanos—we speak an orphan tongue” (p. 80). This is a crucial issue for every itinerant curriculum theorist. ICT aims precisely ‘a general epistemology of the impossibility of a general epistemology’. That is an itinerant posture that is profoundly engaged in the commitment of a radical co-presence. It is non-abyssal because it not only challenges the modern Western cult of abyssal thinking but also attempts to dilute such fictional vacuum between lines. In such context, ICT is an act of resistance also at the metaphysical level. That is, the struggle against modern Western abyssal thinking is not a policy matter. It is also above and beyond that. It is an existential and spiritual question. That is, the struggle against the Western Cartesian model cannot signify the substitution of Cartesian model for another one. Also, the task is not to dominate such model or to rap with a more humanistic impulse. The task is to pronounce its last words, to prepare its remains for a respectful funeral. The task is not to change the language and concepts, although that is crucial. The task is to terminate a particular hegemonic geography of knowledge, which promotes an epistemological euthanasia. Post-abyssal thinking, while an overt challenge against the colonialism of English language (Macedo et al, 2003), as well as a call to arms against all other forms of linguistic colonialism perpetrated by other modern Western languages (see Paraskeva, 2011a), is also an alert against what Ahmad (2008) coins as third-world nationalisms and modern Western internationalization and internationalisms. In Conflicts Curriculum Theory (2011a), I engaged in an exegesis of the history of the U.S. curriculum field and presented ICT as a future for the field, I alerted for the need to walk away from all forms of romanticism regarding the nonmodern Western epistemes. ICT is not a nationalistic theoretical platform. I explicitly claimed in Conflicts Curriculum Theory (2011a) that one should fight any forms of indigenoustude. Ahmad (2008) unveils eloquently the dangers of such ideological trap. In assuming a fundamental nationalistic position as the key position, Ahmad (2008) argues, “the theoretical positions of ‘third world literature’ and ‘colonial discourse analysis’ would tend to subvert, with overt intent or not, the rich history of our oppositional and radical cultural productions” (p. 44). That is, one needs to build better broader knowledges on the basis of rich different within and beyond ante-, anti-, and pro-Marxist influences. The replacement of such complex ante-, anti-, and pro-Marxist influences

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for an “emptiness of third world nationalism is politically and theoretically a regression” (Ahmad, 2008, p. 44). ICT vividly alerts for such a mutation, so dear for the dominant and some counterdominant modern Western epistemological platforms. Nationalism (see Cabral, 1969; Fanon, 1968; Lumumba, 1963; Machel, 1985; Nkrumah, 1964, 2006), intentionally masks the fallacy of monolithism within nonmodern Western epistemologies (Paraskeva, 2011a). As a non-unifying category, nationalism implies progressive and retrograde kinds of impulses and so many different kind of ideologies and practices that “theoretical debates and global historical accounts are rendered all more opaque when the category of nationalism is yoked together with the category of culture to produce a ‘cultural nationalism’ ” (Ahmad, 2008, pp. 7–8). That is, cultural nationalism “lends itself much to easily to parochialism, inverse racism, and indigenist obscurantism, not to speak of professional petty bourgeoisie’s penchant for representing its own cultural practices and aspirations, virtually by embodying them as so many emblems of a unified national culture”. Being cautious of such “indigenoustude” (Paraskeva, 2011a, p. 3) is also being aware of the circuits of cultural production (see Johnson, 1983) through which such a third-world episteme navigates within the modern Western platform, as well as the current creed of internationalization that colonizes the field. Again, Ahmad’s (2008) approach is crucial here. As he (2008) argues, [t]he inclusion of some writers from the third world in our existing curricula would surely be a gain, but a relatively less significant one, especially if it is done in an eclectic sort of way and without negotiating the consequences of the fact that [epistemologies] from other zones of the third world—African say, or Arab or Caribbean—comes to us not directly or autonomously but through grids of accumulation, interpretation, and relocation which are governed from the metropolitan countries. By the time a Latin American novel arrives in Delhi, it has been selected, translated, published, reviewed, explicated, and allotted in the burgeoning archive on third world literature through a complex set of metropolitan mediations. That is to say it arrives here with those processes of circulation and classification already inscribed in its very texture. (pp. 44–45) Quijano (2010) frames such an epistemological yarn within the intricacies of the wrangle between colonialism and coloniality. Western modernity’s hegemonic epistemological take built and produced a dangerous simulacrum of social totality. Thus, the task, Quijano (2010) argues, is not “to reject the whole idea of [such] totality in order to divest oneself of the ideas and images with which it was elaborated within European colonial/modernity [but] to liberate the production of knowledge, reflection, and communication from the pitfalls of European rationality/modernity” (p. 31).

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Social totality not only denies but also precisely depends on a rich epistemological diversity that has been silenced; it depends on the existence of ‘others’ historically montage as invisible, nonexistent: Outside the West, virtually in all known cultures, every cosmic vision, every image, all systematic production of knowledge is associated with the production of totality. But in those cultures, the perspective of totality in knowledge includes the acknowledgement of the heterogeneity of all reality; of the irreducible, contradictory character of the latter; of the legitimacy, i.e. desirability of the diverse character of the components of all reality—and therefore of the social. The idea of social totality then not only denies, but depends on the historical diversity and heterogeneity of society, of every society. In other words it not only does not deny, but it requires the idea of an ‘other’—diverse, different. That difference does not necessarily imply the unequal nature of the ‘other’ and therefore the absolute externality of relations, nor the hierarchical inequality nor the social inferiority of the other. (Quijano, 2010, p. 31) Hegemonic platforms are total, not unique. That is, “the differences are not necessarily the base of domination” (Quijano, 2010, p. 31). Therefore, “historical cultural heterogeneity implies the co-presence and the articulation of diverse historical logic around them which is hegemonic but not unique”. That is why, credible criticism cannot rely on a “simple negation of all categories of Western modernity” (Quijano, 2010, p. 31), which, by the way, needed to be understood and framed as a plural reality (Boatca, 2010, p. 222). Undeniably the processes of legitimation of particular nonmodern Western epistemologies are profoundly connected with the practices of production, reproduction and legitimation of a given episteme that is utterly a poiesis of dominance and coercion. The post-al debates within the academia (Mignolo, 2012) beyond Eurocentrism and Occidentalism implies a relocation “of the ratio between geohistorical location and knowledge production” (p. 92). Such poiesis takes us to the contradictions within another current cult in our field: internationalization. Internationalization, Ahmad (2008) argues, “has been one of the constitutive traditions of the Left, but in this age of late capitalism it is best to recognize that certain kinds of internationalism also arise more or less spontaneously out of the circuits of imperialist capital itself, and the lines between the internationalization of the Left and the globalism of capitalist circuits must always demarcated as rigorously as possible” (p. 45). To rely on Ahmad (2008), our task is to demystify the very category of nonmodern Western epistemologies in the way it emerges “in metropolitan universities [as] something of a counter-cannon and which—like any cannon, dominant or emergent—does not exist before it fabrication” (p. 45). ICT denounces how internationalization has been, in

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so many ways, the new apparatuses through which modern Western epistemologies have been expanding the very process and significance of ‘what is to think’. It has exposed even more the open wound created by “the archives of Western knowledge and the question of cultural domination exercised by countries of advanced capital over imperialized countries” (Ahmad, 2008, p. 2). Coloniality, Quijano (2010) adds, is the current “form of domination in the world today” (p. 24) within the destruction of colonialism as an explicit political order, a process that keeps fostering the same modes and conditions of production that always sustained Western modern capitalist societies so well unmasked in works such as the Communist Manifesto in 1848. The production and reproduction of hegemonic forms of knowledge is precisely the institutionalization of a linguistic and cultural epistemicide that cannot de delinked from the modes and conditions of production, especially today, that more than ever before, have been treated as a commodity. For some reason, Marx’s Das Kapital starts with an examination of commodity. The aftermath of colonialism did not cease the “conditions nor the modes of exploitation and domination between peoples” (Quijano, 2010, p. 24). It is the repudiation of such linguisticide that we see in the quarrel led by wa Thiongo, Owuor-Anyumba, and Lo Liyong at the end of the 1980s. These African intellectuals led a movement in Kenya to abolish the Department of English at the University of Nairobi. wa Thiong’o, Owuor-Anyumba, and Lo Liyong (1978) fought for the emergence of a new Department of African Literature and Languages to replace the Department of the Language of the Colonizer, claiming the need to examining, understating, and studying Africa social reality with an African standpoint and through African linguistic mechanisms. Needless to say that at the very core of such crucial struggle was not a theory of replacement of one form of literature into another but a challenge to an explicit form of genocide in a postcolonial momentum through linguistic and literary mechanisms. Such genocide wipes out collective memory of secular Kenyan civilization, radically transforming the very identity of an entire nation. wa Thiongo, Owuor-Anyumba, and Lo Liyong did see language and culture more than a dynamic tool with the new colonial momentum within the postcolonial momentum; they saw it as the ideological device through which, gradually and steadily, African societies were been remake. In this context, they defended the abolishment of all departments of English in the entire continent. THE CLINAMEN: TOWARD AN ECOLOGY OF KNOWLEDGES My argument is that the alternative thinking of alternatives implies learning to unlearn, a decolonial take that aims a general epistemology of the impossibility of a general epistemology. Not to walk away but to crossover the

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abyssal lines to produce a non-abyssal thinking. This is undeniably a tough task. It requires an itinerant posture. It is requires thinking the unthinkable. It implies to dare to find a location beyond Eurocentrism, beyond Occidentalism; it implies defying not just the subalternization of particular forms of knowledge (Mignolo, 2012), but its production as nonexistent (Sousa Santos, 2014). To be more precise, “significant cultural achievement, intellectual progress, is this denied to [specific] spaces, which are deemed to be permanently locked into a cognitive state of superstition and ignorance” (Mills, 1997, p. 44). Eugenically, “knowledge, science, and the ability to apprehend the world intellectually are thus restricted to Europe, which emerges as the global locus of rationality” (Mills, 1997, p. 45). Although no one has any idea what the lives of the colonized would be without the colonizer, Memmi (1991, p. 114) argues, Western modernity was able to unleash and naturalized within the common sense that “Europeans conquered the world because their nature was predisposed to it, while non-Europeans were colonized because their nature condemned them to it”. However, as West (1999, p. 52) insightfully argues, Western modernity is an ignoble paradox; that is, “democracy flourish[ed] for Europeans, especially men of property, alongside the flowering of transatlantic slave trade and New York slavery”. In this context, West (1999) claims, that “global capitalism and nascent nationalisms were predicted initially on terrors and horrors visited on enslave Africans on the way to, or in, the New World” (p. 52). That is, the coloniality of being that stems from a particular colonial domination and colonial power matrix have “established a universal paradigm of knowledge and of hierarchical relations between the rational humanity (Europe) and the rest of the world” (Mignolo, 2012, p. 59). Colonial Western modernity, not necessarily despite but precisely because of its different configurations, has been able to postulate a particular subject–object–subject abyssal correlation that “it became unthinkable to accept the idea that a knowing subject was possible beyond the subject of knowledge postulated by the very concept of rationality put in place by modern epistemology” (Quijano, 1992, p. 422; see also Mignolo, 2012). The task is to go beyond abyssal thinking. That is the post-abyssal thinking is a post-abyssal epistemology, which spans an ecology of knowledges. Post-abyssal thinking while, as I have examined before, implies a radical break with modern Western ways of thinking and acting, such break does not mean slurring specific modern Western impulses. That is, “while forging credibility for non-scientific knowledge, does not imply discrediting scientific knowledge. It simply implies its counterhegemonic use. Such use consists, on the one hand, in exploring the internal plurality of science, that is, alternative scientific practices that have been made visible by feminist and postcolonial epistemologies and, on the other hand, in promoting the interaction and interdependence between scientific and non-scientific knowledges” (Sousa Santos, 2007b, p. 31).

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The ecology of knowledges is a matter of logos as well as mythos. It requires a “deeper understanding of human possibilities based on knowledges that, unlike scientific knowledge, favour interior rather than exterior force, or the natura naturans rather than the natura naturata. Through these knowledges, it is possible to nurture an enhanced value or concept of commitment that is incomprehensible to the positivistic and functionalist mechanisms of modern science” (Sousa Santos, 2007b, p. 39). That is, the ecology of knowledges foster the “new capacity for wonder and indignation, capable of grounding a new, non-conformist, destabilizing, and indeed rebellious theory and practice [a based] on the richness of the non-canonic diversity of the world and of a degree of spontaneity based on the refusal to deduce the potential from the actual” (Sousa Santos, 2007b, p. 40). As a destabilizing epistemology that aims to defamiliarize the canonic tradition of monocultures of knowledge, what is crucial within the ecology of knowledges “is not the distinction between structure and agency, as is the case with the social sciences, but rather the distinction between conformist action and what I propose to call action-with-clinamen” (Sousa Santos, 2007b, p. 40). Such a notion of action with clinamen, Sousa Santos (2007b) borrows from Epicurus and Lucretius the concept of clinamen, understood as the inexplicable “quiddam” that upsets the relations of cause and effect, that is to say, the swerving capacity attributed by Epicurus to Democritus’s atoms. The clinamen is what makes the atoms cease to appear inert and rather be seen as invested with a power of inclination, a creative power, that is, a power of spontaneous movement (Epicurus, 1926; Lucretius, 1950). Unlike what happens in revolutionary action, the creativity of action-with-clinamen is not based on a dramatic break but rather on a slight swerve or deviation whose cumulative effects render possible the complex and creative combinations among atoms, hence also among living beings and social groups (p. 40) Hence, the clinamen, Sousa Santos (2007b) claims, does not refuse the past; on the contrary, it assumes and redeems the past by the way it swerves from it. Its potential for post-abyssal thinking lies in its capacity to cross the abyssal lines. The occurrence of action-with-clinamen is in itself inexplicable. The role of an ecology of knowledges in this regard will be merely to identify the conditions that maximize the probability of such an occurrence and, at the same time, define the horizon of possibilities within which the swerving will “operate”. (p. 41) The ecology of knowledges needs to be seen as “destabilizing collective or individual subjectivity endowed with a special capacity, energy, and will to act with clinamen experimenting with eccentric or marginal forms of

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sociability or subjectivity inside and outside Western modernity, those forms that have refused to be defined according to abyssal criteria” (Sousa Santos, 2007b, p. 41). Eurocentrism is endogenous. In claiming a commitment of the radical co-presence, the itinerant curriculum theory is fully engaged in such ecology of knowledges, and the challenge of an itinerant curriculum theorist is to un-puzzle the nexus of physical—metaphysical. That is, we are bodies; we are not institutions although a schizophrenic system institutionalizes us. Our task is to unmask why we do not teach this and how can we teach for this. In that sense, ICT is an ethical take. Anzaldua (2007) brings to the fore the thoughts of Jose Vasconcelos, a Mexican philosopher who “envisaged una raca mestizo, una mezcla de razas afines, una raza de color—la primera raza síntesis del globo” (p. 99). He called such race “la raza cosmica” (Anzaldua, 2007, p. 99). Such a cosmic perception implies a theory of inclusivity, a cosmic theory “at the confluence of two or more genetic streams with chromosomes constantly ‘crossing over’ this mixture of races [and could add classes and genders] rather than resulting in a[n] inferior being, provides hybrid progeny, a mutable, more malleable species with a rich gene pool. From this racial, ideological, cultural and biological crosspollination an ‘alien’ consciousness is presently in the making—a new mestiza consciousness, una consciencia de mujer. It is a conscious of the borderlands.” Such conciencia, as Anzaldua (2007) coins it, or concientism, in Nkrumah’s (1964) currency, is clearly inclusionary. It is a call against the cosmic millenary crime committed by modern Western abyssal thinking, the epistemicide. How in education we deal with a collective denial of such epistemicide will speak volumes about the very color of one’s ideology. This is the real curriculum question of the twenty-first century. It is an ethical question.

REFERENCES Ahmad, A. (2008) In Theory. London: Verso. Amin, S. (2008) The World We Wish to See. Revolutionary Objectives in Twenty First Century. The Bamako Appeal, 107–12. Amin, S. (2011) Global History: A View from the South. Dakar: Pambazuka Press. Anderson, K. (2010) Marx at the Margins. On Nationalism, Ethnicity and NonWestern Societies. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Andreotti, V. (2011). Actionable Postcolonial Theory in Education. New York: Palgrave. Andreotti, V. (2013) Renegotiating Epistemic Privilege and Enchantments with Modernity: The Gain in the Loss of the Entitlement to Control and Define Everything. Social Policy, Education and Curriculum Research Unit. North Dartmouth: Centre for Policy Analyses/University of Massachusetts Dartmouth, pp. b–s. Anzaldua, G. (2007) Borderlands. La Frontera. The New Mestiza. S. Francisco. Aunt Lute Books.

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Conclusion Itinerant Curriculum Theory A Reiteration

In writing a new preface for the paperback edition of Conflicts in Curriculum Theory: Challenging Hegemonic Epistemologies, I remember a couple of years ago on a trip home coming across an outstanding volume of Ezekiel Mphahlele in a shop in Hillbrow, Johannesburg. Mphahlele’s shares a journey of the daily life stories of ordinary South Africans during the apartheid regime and how such stories were crucial to understanding the complex struggle against oppression, poverty, and harsh inequality. There is a passage of the volume that I would like to highlight. Mphahlele and Thuyvsma (2011) claim, “I want to write; I must write; I should write; I am going to write. This is what I said to myself one moonless night under an inky black sky . . . [but w]rite what? . . . Why should I write?” With such words South African intellectuals, Ezekiel Mphahlele (known as Es’kia Mphahlele) and Peter N. Thuynsma begin “The Unfinished Story” in Corner B. Mphahlele and Thuynsma’s questioning invokes for me so many other voices of intellectuals and countless horizons. Suddenly, I imagine a ‘trilogue’ between Es’kia Mphahlele, Steve Biko, and bell hooks. Steve Biko (1978), probably, would answer, “You must write what you like.” Quite rarely would hooks (1998) stress, “I write about work that does not move me deeply” (p. 137). However, Mphahlele would bring complexity to the arguments; one needs to say something to the world, and one needs to have something to say to the world. More to the point, one needs to have something to say to the world to be able to say something to the world. Mphahlele (2011) insists, So much has been written on the Bantu, but I have always felt something seriously wanting in such literature. I told myself there must surely be much more to be said than the mere recounting of incident: about the loves and hates of my people; their desires; their property and affluence; their achievements and failures; their diligence and idleness; their cold indifference and enthusiasm; their sense of the comic; their full-throated laughter and their sense of the tragic with its attendant emotional sobs and ostentatious signs of pity. What could I say to the world?” (p. 14)

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In writing Conflicts in Curriculum Theory (2011), I consciously faced the same challenges. Frustrated, like so many of us, with ambiguities and gaps within the vast and complex critical and poststructural terrains—despite the countless and crucial gains—I respectfully sought to go beyond such approaches and cautiously propose the need for an Itinerant Curriculum Theory (ICT) to address the complex issues that we are all facing under the pressure of a liquid momentum (Bauman, 1998), which characterize the current terrestrial globalization (Sloterdjik, 2013). Arlene Croce (1998) argues that the critic has three options: “(1) to see and review, (2) to see and not review, and (3) not to see” (p. 16). She actually adds a fourth: “to write about what one has not seen; [that] becomes possible on strange occasions” (p. 16). In this volume, I value not just “the need to see and review”; in fact, the volume does more than that. It reviews the field historically and addresses certain gains, strengths, and challenges of a particular radical/ critical progressive river. By so doing, I claim a future—itinerary—path and justify why we need a critical itinerant approach while being profoundly cautious about issuing any kind of recipe. The field immediately reacted to ICT. Such reactions came from different Western and non-Western angles and epistemological axes, through varied informal and formal academic ways. Some were quite positive. Others raised justifiable concerns in particular cases, and others not only completely misrepresented ICT but demonstrated by their objections precisely how important it is to challenge the epistemicide as well. It goes without saying that this is not an adequate space to address such reactions. But, for example, those who claim that I use ICT as an attack on Judeo-Christian Western white male hegemonic epistemology—intentionally or nonintentionally—misinterpret profoundly the argument. ICT goes well beyond such notions. Other reactions, again some of them either welcoming and praising the merits of ICT or flagging understandable concerns, deserved attention, and I will probably address these concerns in the near future. It is needless to mention that, for so many liberals, epistemological differences are terribly inconvenient. Humanized capitalism, tempered with flamboyant forms of multiculturalism, is so dear to them, and in some cases, they are not even prepared to go that far. The problem is that ‘that far’ is not enough. As Dwayne Huebner’s (2005) words remind me repeatedly, “many educators are not necessarily magnanimous individuals—neither open to diverse ways of thought, nor to significant criticism. Welcome to the club” (p. 1). ICT did try to say something to the field. It presents new terrains and theoretical situations. ICT participates in the complicated conversation (see Trueit, 2000; Pinar, 2000)—that cannot bend under the yoke of Western academicism—challenging Western curriculum epistemicides and alerting us of the need to respect and incorporate non-Western epistemes. William Pinar (2012, 2013) acknowledges the influential synopticality of ICT in his recent Curriculum Studies in the United States. He (2013) states,

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Conclusion There are other discourses influential now, sustainability perhaps primary among them. Arts-based research is hardly peripheral . . . One sign is the synoptic text composed by João M. Paraskeva. Hybridity is the order of the day. Pertinent to the discussion in that even Paraskeva’s determination to contain in one “critical river” multiple currents of understanding curriculum politically floods its banks; he endorses an “itinerant curriculum theory” that asserts a “deliberate disrespect of the canon” (2011, 184). In Paraskeva’s proclamation, this “river” has gone “south” (2011, 186). That South is Latin America, where we can avoid “any kind of Eurocentrism” (2011, 186) while not “romanticizing indigenous knowledge” (2011, 187). Addressing issues [such as hegemony, ideology, power, social emancipation, class, race, and gender] implies a new thinking, a new theory . . . an itinerant curriculum theory. (p. 64)

Although Pinar’s reading of ICT is crucial, I would clarify (maybe complexify) that ‘the’ South is not just Latin America. Again, Sousa Santos (2009b) is vital here: The South is metaphorically conceived as a field of epistemic challenges, which try to address and repair the damages and negative impacts historically created by capitalism in its colonial relation with the world. Such conception of South overlaps the geographical South, the group of nations and regions in the world that were subjugated to European colonialism and that, with the exception of Australia and New Zealand, never achieved levels of economic development similar to the Global North (i.e. Europe and the United States of America). (pp. 12–13) Thus, we “designate the epistemological diversity of the world by South epistemologies” (Sousa Santos, 2009b, p. 12). In this way, ICT addresses Sousa Santos (2006, p. xi) claim about the need for a new critical theory, a new emancipatory praxis that needs to be decolonized as well. As he (2006) states, “contrary to their predecessors, [such] theory and practices must start from the premise that the epistemological diversity of the world is immense, as its cultural diversity and that the recognition of such diversity must be at the core of global resistance against capitalism and of alternative forms of sociability” (p. xi). ICT attempts to create an itinerant path to address a problem. In so doing, it faces undesirable yet unavoidable, and needed, black holes (Deleuze & Guattari, 1987). ICT sees the confrontation with such holes as a reassembled set of processes towards a creative and desirable plan of consistency only possible by respecting a perpetual itinerancy. Such a theory/theorists understands the structure and flows of a given social formation. Its itinerancy allows the theory/theorists to grasp why the imposition, certification and legitimization of particular un-/re-/coding metamorphoses, as well as the eclipse

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so many others. That is ICT reads and challenges such codes that frame each social formation and fueled the wrangle of oppressor–oppressed. This is crucial because it allows one to master the complex processes of axiomatization of specific codes within the capitalist society from slavery in the 1400s to the current slavery constructions as de-/re-/coded flows of an economy and culture pumped by an epidemic of overproduction (Marx & Engels, 2012). ICT is an unblemished claim against dominant multiculturalist forms that are “Eurocentric, a prime expression of the cultural logic of national or global capitalism, descriptive, apolitical, suppressing power relations, exploitation, inequality and exclusion” (Sousa Santos, 2007a, pp. xxiii–xxiv)— that have been legitimizing a monoculture of scientific knowledge that needs to be defeated and replaced by an ecology of knowledges (Sousa Santos, 2003a, 2003b). ICT challenges the coloniality of power, being, knowledge, and labor (Grosfoguel, 2007; Mignolo, 2012; Quijano, 2000b); it is sentient that the “politics of cultural diversity and mutual intelligibility calls for a complex procedure of reciprocal and horizontal translation rather than a general theory” (Sousa Santos, 2007a, p. xxvi). Formalizing ICT in my mind, through my writing, through dialogues with others and the wor(l)d, has meant, and still does mean, considering the intricacies of its conceptions and assertions. Yet, its conceptualization and creation is a natural complex interaction with the wor(l)d, as was perhaps the case for Michelangelo and Picasso with their art. When one day Michelangelo was asked how a certain frame was painted, that is, where his idea came from, he answered, “I had no idea. The figure just stood there, looking at me. I just gave it life/birth.” Picasso had a similar dialogue with a Gestapo officer. In occupied Paris during World War II, a Gestapo officer who had barged into Picasso’s apartment pointed at a photo of the mural, Guernica, asking, “Did you do that?” “No,” Picasso replied, “you did.” Writing is, Gilles Deleuze (1995) argues, “bringing something to life, to free life from where it’s trapped, to trace lines of flight” (p. 141). These words of Michelangelo and Picasso also highlight the theory of translation that works through art. Similarly, ICT is a theory of translation that attempts to prevent the “reconstruction of emancipatory discourse and practices from falling into the trap of reproducing, in a wider form, Eurocentric concepts and contents” (Sousa Santos, 2007a, xxvi). Translation is crucial to the processes of coding and decoding between the diverse and specific intellectual and cognitive resources that are expressed through the various modes of producing knowledge about counter—hegemonic initiatives and experiences aimed at the redistribution and recognition and the construction of new configurations of knowledge anchored in local, situated forms of experience and struggle. (Sousa Santos, 2007a, xxvi)

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In The Struggle for Meaning, Hountondji (2002, p. 26) confesses his search dilemmas under the supervision of Georges Canguilhem and, later on, with Georges Balandier. Hontondji wanted to examine “all that history of ideas could teach us on the modes of existence of forms of knowledge and the conditions of the transition to science” Hontoundji’s (2002, p. 26) ambition was to identify and delimit, within the existing corpus, something like an archeology of science and technology and apply it critically to Africa”. Hountondji (2002) reveals the challenges in pursuing such object of study by engaging in a deep exegus of Husserl’s approach. Hountodnji’s (2002) approach is a vivid example of the inner challenges in examining Husserl without jeopardizing Africa as the focus of examination. Hountondji (2002, p. 78) explains that his strategy is his ‘struggle for meaning’, which was “work on the margins [and] to clear the field patiently, established the legitimacy and the outlines of an intellectual project that was at once authentically African and authentically philosophical”. Examples such as Acouba Sawadogo, an African farmer of Burkina Faso who has been restoring the soil damaged by centuries of drought (and desertification) through traditional farming techniques, cannot be arrogantly minimized or eugenically produced as nonexistent or nonscience, just because this work cannot be translated and framed within Western scientificity. Western intellectuals need to consciously acknowledge that the Western epistemological platform—both in its most sophisticated dominant and/ or radical critical counterdominant perspectives—is insufficient and inadequate to explain and change its own effects (Seth, 2011). A new system cannot emerge from the ashes of the old. It is pointless to think about the future just with(in) the Cartesian modernity model. It is actually hopeless to frame the present within such a dated model. Western counterdominant perspectives are crucial in the struggle for social and cognitive justice, yet not enough. As Sandra Corazza (2002) courageously argues, “we need to start taking seriously the task of a real theory of curriculum thought” (p. 131), one that opens the Western canon of knowledge and is responsive to the need for a new epistemological configuration. Such a journey of belligerent struggles—against dominant and within the counterdominant Western epistemological platform—aims to replace the so-called monoculture of scientific knowledge for an ecology of knowledges. Such an ecology of knowledges is an invitation to the promotion of non-relativistic dialogues among knowledges, grating equality of opportunities to the different kinds of knowledge engaged in ever broader epistemological disputes aimed both at maximizing their perspective contributions to build a more democratic and just society and at decolonizing knowledge and power. (Sousa Santos, 2007a, p. xx) As any other theoretical exercise to understand the educational world to transform it (see Pinar, 2004), ICT certainly exhibits a latitude and a

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longitude of borderless space to deepen certain claims. For example, among many issues, ICT highlights the linguistic imperialism framed by the English language and culture, as one part of the genocide. Conscious of this linguistic imperialism as a crucial part of the genocide, ICT allows one to respectfully understand, for example, how ‘camfrenglish’—“a language used in Cameron cities, invented created daily by the Cameron’s urban youth”—a language that deliberately violates the linguistic rules of French and English, and in doing they desacralize such imperial languages (Ela, 2013, p. 24). Camfrenglish, in cities such as Yaonde, is the people’s language. Darder (2012a), in her superb exegesis of the political economy of cultural theory and politics, brings language to the core of the battle against eugenics. As Darder (2012a) claims, “the complexity of language and how the students produce knowledge and how language shapes their world represent a major pedagogical concern for all educational settings” (p. 105). Language, Darder (2012a) argues, is more than a tool that epitomizes a specific learning theory or the cult of a flamboyant method. The language question intersects other social non-epiphenomena such as the question of authority, reframing equality and social and cognitive justice. Any critical theory that aims for cultural democracy cannot ignore the power of (noncelebratory forms of) biculturalism as a poiesis that determines culture and power relations in the classrooms (Darder, 2012a) ICT is a claim for a nonstop production of an epistemology of liberation, in the very best way promulgated by Sousa Santos, that rejects the perversity of colonial praxis of dominance based on “the ontic realization of Being” (Dussel, 1995b, pp. 44–45; see also Dussel, 2013) and works based and through a philosophy that liberates the very own liberatory philosophical posture—real philosophy of liberation that tries to formulate a metaphysics—not an ontology demanded by revolutionary praxis and techno-design poiesis against the background of peripheral social formations. To do this it is necessary to deprive Being of its alleged external and divine foundation; to negate fetishist religion in order to expose ontology as the ideology of ideologies; to unmask functionalisms—whether structuralist, logico/scientific, or mathematical (claiming that reason cannot criticize the whole dialectically, they affirm it more they analytically criticize or operationalize its parts); and to delineate the sense of liberation praxis. Only the praxis of oppressed peoples of the periphery, of woman violated by masculine ideology, of the subjugated child, can fully reveal it to us. (Dussel, 1995b, p. 15) That is, ICT consciously aligns with the need for an epistemology of liberation that requires the liberation of the epistemology itself. ICT also warns about the need to challenge any form of indegenitude or the romanticization of the indigenous cultures and knowledges, and it is not framed in any dichotic skeleton of West–Rest. In fact, it challenges such functionalist forms. Its itinerant dynamic pushes the theorist to a pluri (nonnecessary)–directional path.

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More important, ICT confronts and throws the subject to a permanent, unstable question, ‘What is it to think?’ Moreover, ICT pushes one to think in the light of the future as well as to question how can ‘we’ actually claim to really know the things that ‘we’ claim to know, if ‘we’ are not ready specifically to think the unthinkable, to go beyond the unthinkable, and to master its infinitude. ICT is to be (or not to be) radically unthinkable. ICT is a metamorphosis between what is thought and nonthought and unthought but is fundamentally about the temerity of the colonization of the non-/ un-/thought within the thought. ICT attempts to understand to domesticate how big is infinite, the infinite of thought and action. If one challenges infinity, ‘then it is chaos because one is in chaos’; that means that the question or questions (whatever they are) are inaccurately deterritorialized and fundamentally sedentary. The focus is to grasp that ICT implies an understanding of chaos as domestic, as public, as a punctum within the pure luxury of immanence. In such a multitude of turfs, ICT needs to be understood as poiesis. It plays in the plane of immanence. Being immanence, ‘a life’, ICT, is ‘a life’. Is a life paced by a poiesis or a revolution? ‘Yes please’, in a full Žižekian way. ICT is a poiesis that itinerantly throws the subject against the infinite of representation to grasp the omnitude of the real(ity) and the rational(ity), thus mastering the transcendent. Being more poiesis than just theory (and not because it is less a theory), its itinerant position epitomizes a transcendent nomadography, which is not transcendental. ICT challenges book worship (Tse Tung, 2007, p. 45). In fact, ICT also encourages us to pay attention to the multiplicity of forms to read the wor(l)d. The verbalization of pain and oppression is quite visible in Africa, for example, in art forms such as dance and painting. Dance, Marc Ela (2013) argues, in a country financially and economically moribund is not just a way to face inequality and oppression. It is, he (2013) states, “the very best way to face discouragement” (p. 26). ICT is an attempt to help us to think in another form of human being. Corazza’s (2002) insightful framework is crucial here as well. As she claims, and I honestly think ICT addresses her claim, the challenge is to fight against what she coins as assentado curriculum towards a vagamundo curriculum; that is, “to create [or co-create] a vagamundo curriculum one needs to question how can one think about the unaddressable, the unthinkable, the non-thinkable of the curriculum thought, the exteriorities, the self different, the self other, the other self” (Corazza, 2002, p. 140). Corazza (2002) adds, that such curriculum thought is meaningless, a real vacuum, without the effective forces acting upon such thought, as well as without the effective indeterminations that forces such thought [or forms of thought] to think otherwise, differently, through the creation of new concepts required by the real experience and not just by the possible experience, thus allowing new life experiences. [In fact] the strength of (an)other knowledge, as well as a new philosophy, will be measured by the concepts

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that it is capable of creating, or its capacity to renew meanings which impose a new framework on things and to assentados actions, shuffle their syntax, and organizing its thought in a clumsy logic. (p. 140) Corazza’s (2002) sharp take equips intellectuals with the necessary extraordinary tools to understand why some African scholars, such as Axelle Kabou (2013), Jean Mark Ela (2013), and others, justifiably counterargue the Western and non-Western hegemonic apparatuses with the following question: “What if Africa refuses development?” The definition of development must be seen through other lenses beyond its Western monocultural conceptualization of the needed development for the global South. Whose purpose does this development serve? What is the cost to those beneath its grinding wheel of so-called progress? In such context, ICT is really a matter of human rights as well, because of its commitment to social and cognitive justice. This is a commitment that challenges dominant multicultural forms, creating the conditions for and intercultural reconstruction of human rights, toward an intercultural postimperial human rights, that respects, among other issues, (a) the right to knowledge, (b) the right to bring historical capitalism to trial in a world tribunal, (c) the right to democratic self-determination, and (d) the right to grant rights to entities incapable of bearing duties, namely, nature and future generations (Sousa Santos, 2007a, 2007b). ICT is a clarion call to challenge curriculum epistemicides by engaging fully in the complex struggle for social and cognitive justice. This call is an intergenerational matter of justice, as well. ICT is seeing to rely on Saramago’s metaphor. In one of his best novels, Seeing, Noble Prize–winning Portuguese intellectual Saramago describes pictorially how, with the vote, the citizens of one nonidentified country (most probably Portugal) blocked the normal daily life. That is, on a typical gray, wet winter day in Portugal the huge majority of the population decides to not show up to vote until late afternoon. The narrative explains the gradual panic of politicians who do not know what to do before such democratic scandal. Suddenly, almost at the end of the day, the population shows up and votes. Shockingly, after counting the votes, officials announce that the majority of the votes were blank. Such political embarrassment is examined, and a lot of reasons come to the table, including the unpleasant weather conditions. The government schedules another election on the following week on a very pleasant sunny day. To national consternation, the results are worst: more than 80% of the votes are blank. The government reacts immediately against such outcome as if a crime has been perpetrated. A state of emergency is put in place; such a state paved the way for a state of siege, with the intelligentsia spying on citizens, taking them for interrogation and lie-detector tests. The story goes on with surreal examples narrated by Saramago. Saramago’s Seeing is crystal clear for all of us really committed to the struggle against epistemicides. Seeing goes well beyond the understanding of

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how to use democracy to save democracy. It is a call for a blank vote from all of us really committed with social and cognitive justice not just against the modern Western dominant and specific counter-dominant forms that colonize the very way we can think, but also against the complex matrix of circuits of cultural production so well unmasked by Ahmad (2008) as well as our own very existence in our academic settings. In claiming a “seeing” position, ICT allows us to move on toward a world that we wish to see, a world that was proposed in the Bamako Appeal: (1) a world based on solidarity among human beings and peoples, (2) a world based on the full and complete affirmation of citizenship and equality between the sexes, (3) a universal civilization that offers the greatest possibility for the creative development of the diversity in all area, (4) a world that constructs civilization thorough real democracy, (5) a world based on the recognition of the non-commodity status of nature, the planet’s resources and agricultural lands, (6) a world based on the recognition of the non-commodity status of cultural products, scientific knowledge, education and health, (7) a world that promote policies that closely combine unlimited democracy, social progress, and the affirmation of the autonomy of all the nations and peoples, (8) a world that affirms the solidarity of the people of the north and the south in the construction of internationalism on an anti-imperialist foundation. (see Amin, 2008, pp. 108–111). More to the point, and as I have mentioned in Conflicts in Curriculum Theory: Challenging Hegemonic Epistemologies, ICT should please everybody. It will certainly not, as I was able to see in certain academic events in our field (to be honest, more in the United States). While appeals for a co-presence conversation to rub Sousa Santos’s (2009b) and Pinar’s (2004) approaches against each other, it is not a cross-cultural conversation. We actually need to challenge the cult of cross-cultural conversations. Al-Azmeh (2009) helps a great deal here. One needs to radically question the notion of cross-cultural conversation [n]ot because [one] wishes there to be an eternal incomprehensibility between peoples, or because I wish to promote xenophobia, and encourage ethnic cleansing and correlative acts of barbarism. It is rather because I believe that the notion of cross cultural conversations rests upon an unreflected assumption of the fixity and finality of the interlocutors in this conversation which even at the ends of serious philosophical authors tends to cause reason to denigrate to the tritest statements on common maximums of etiquette. It is the very same assumption of fixity and irreducibility underlying the etiquette of interculturalism and multiculturalism as a form of conservatism etiquette, that [one] sees so apparently paradoxical correlative of the sorts of assumptions about

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others—other ethnoi, other religious groups—that prepare the grounds, in the realms of conceptions and imagination for the entire range of possibilities extending from the rapturous fascination with the exotic at one extremity, to bellicose dehumanization of the Other and genocidal dehumanization of the Other. By championing the commitment to a non-abyssal thinking and defying the eugenic cult of cross-culturalism, ICT put forward, along with Mignolo (2012, 2013) and Escobar (2013), among others, un paradigma otro that “does not fit into a linear history of paradigms or epistemes [that] runs counter to the greatest modernist narratives [and] reaches towards the possibility of non-European modes of thinking” (Escobar, 2013, p. 34). Such paradigm otro frames and fuels the debate about Western modernity within the so-called modernity/coloniality research program (Escobar, 2013, p. 33) that challenges dominant perspectives in the study of modernity that could well be framed as “intra modern perspectives” (Escobar, 2013, p. 34). Euro-centered Western modernity, Escobar (2010) states, cannot be dissociated from the global–local quarrel (p. 37). That is, Euro-centered Western modernity is a particular local history that was able to “produce particular global designs in such a way that it has subalternized other local histories and their corresponding designs” (Escobar, 2013, p. 38; Mignolo, 2013). The modernity/coloniality research project (hereafter MC) conceptualizes such colonial–coloniality momentum “grounded in a series of events [social constructions] that distinguished it from established theories of modernity” (Escobar, 2013, p. 38). That is (1) an emphasis on locating the origins of modernity with the Conquest of America and the control of the Atlantic after 1492, rather than in the most commonly accepted landmarks such as the Enlightenment of the end of the eighteen century; (2) a persistent attention to colonialism and the making of the capitalism world system as constitutive of modernity; (3) the adoption of a world perspective in the explanation of modernity, in lieu of a view of modernity as an intra-European phenomenon; (4) the identification of the domination of others outside the European core as a necessary dimension of modernity with the concomitant subalternization of knowledge and cultures of these other groups; (5) a conception of Eurocentrism as the knowledge form of modernity/ coloniality—a hegemonic representation and mode of knowing that claims universality for itself. (Escobar, 2013, p. 38) Such MC frames its research agenda by emphasizing notions such as (a) modern colonial world system—as an assemble of processes and social formations that encompass modern colonialism and colonial modernities; (b) Coloniality of power—a global hegemonic model of

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Conclusion power in place since the conquest that articulates race and labor and peoples according to the needs of capital and to the benefit of white peoples; (c) colonial difference and global coloniality—which refer to the knowledge and cultural dimensions of the subalternization processes effected by the coloniality of power; the colonial difference brings to the fore persistent cultural differences within global power structures; (d) coloniality of being—as an ontological dimension of coloniality on both sides of the encounter; (e) Eurocentrism—as the knowledge model that represents the local European historical experience and which became globally hegemonic since the seventeenth century. (Escobar, 2013, p. 39)

ICT needs to be seen in such framework as well. It is sentient of MC, yet it is not exhausted by it. Its itinerant perpetual dynamic creates that incapacity of surrender to a concrete framework. However, ICT attempts to complexify MC. For instance, it does not necessarily “run counter the greatest modernist narratives” (Escobar, 2013, p. 34). It definitely runs against dominant modernist great narratives and through some counterdominant modernist great narratives, such as Marxism, for example, and, in so doing, decolonizes it. However, even in the attempt to smash certain dominant Western modernist great narratives, ICT pays cautious attention between the wrangle of religion, that is, Christianity, and spirituality and how such yarn was/is crucial in the construction of the (non)existence of the ‘other’ (see Marc Ela, 2013). In such sense, ICT is a theory of liberation, liberation from certain constrains of critical pedagogy as well without denying it. Critical pedagogy exhibits particular pedagogical forms as part of an ongoing individual and collective struggle over knowledge, desire, values, social relations, and modes of political agency [that is] critical pedagogy is central in drawing the attention to questions regarding who has control over the conditions for the production of knowledge, values and classroom practices; [critical pedagogy] is a form of provocation and challenge [attempting] to take people beyond the world they are familiar with and makes clear how classroom knowledge [are] always implicated in power (Giroux, 2011, pp. 5–6). More to the point, ICT sees such ‘collective struggle over knowledge’ as a struggle that today needs to go well beyond the Western epistemological platform. We all stand respectfully on the shoulders of others, and Giroux’s (2011) helps a great deal. That is, by insightfully framing critical theory and pedagogy as a language of critique and of hope and possibility, that is, a critical pedagogy “that addresses the democratic potential of engaging how experience, knowledge and power are shaped in the classroom in different and often unequal contexts” (Giroux, 2011, p. 5), he built a foundational field that one can explore in the struggle against epistemicides. ICT is a clear call against the precariously of any fixed ossified theoretical position.

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Needless to say, this implies severe conflict, a conflict that was always part of our daily lives. To metaphorically adapt Dussel’s (1995b) approach, “from Heraclitus to Henry Kissinger if by everything one understands the order or system that world dominators control, their power and armies, we are at war—a cold war for those who wage it, a hot war for those who suffer it, a peaceful coexistence for those who manufacture arms, a bloody existence for those obliged to but and use them” (p. 1). ICT is the people’s theory, an epistemology of liberation quite sentient that there is no theoretical and/or political incompatibility between Marxist critical impulses and non-Western epistemes. For instance, if one pays close attention to Giroux’s language of hope and possibility and the way that he frames critical theory and pedagogy, one does not see any incompatibility for an itinerant curriculum theorist to rub against other critical Marxist impulses and non-Western epistemes. This clearly implies decolonizing processes within the very core of critical and Marxist matrix. Is this not what Marx actually alerted us to when he claimed the need for a ruthless critique of everything that exists? REFERENCES Ahmad, A. (2008) In Theory. London: Verso. Al-Azmeh, A. (2009) Islams and Modernities. New York: Verso. Amin, S. (2008) The World we Wish to See. Revolutionary Objectives in Twenty First Century. The Bamako Appeal, pp., 107–12. Bauman, Z. (1998) Globalization. The Human Consequences. London: Blackwell Publishers. Biko, S. (1978) I Write What I Like. Johannesburg/ Sandton: Heinemann Publishers. Corazza, S. M. (2002). Noologia do currículo: Vagamundo, o problemático, e assentado, o resolvido. Educação e Realidade, 27 (2), pp., 131–42. Croce, A. (1998). Discussing the undiscussable. In Maurice Berger (ed) The Crisis of Criticism. New York: New Press, pp., 15–29. Darder, A. (2012a) Culture and Power in the Classrooms. Educational Foundations for the Schooling of Bicultural Studies. Boulder: Paradigm Publishers. DeLeuze, G. (1995) Negotiations 1972–1990. New York: Columbia University Press. Deleuze, G. e Guattari, F. (1987) A Thousand Plateaus. Capitalism and Schizophrenia. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Dussel, E. (1995b) Philosophy of Liberation. Oregon: Wipf & Stock. Dussel, E. (2013) Ethics of Liberation. In the Age of Globalization and Exclusion. Durham: Duke University Press. Ela, J.M. (2013) Restituir a Historia as Sociedades Africanas. Lisboa: Edicoes Pedago. Escobar, A. (2013) Worlds and Knowledges Otherwise. In W. Mignolo and A. Escobar (eds) Globalization and the Decolonial Turn. New York: Routledge, pp., 33–64. Giroux, H. (2011). Zombie Politics in the Age of Casino Capitalism. New York: Peter Lang. Grosfoguel, R. (2007) The Epistemic Decolonial Turn: Beyond Political Economy Paradigms. Cultural Studies 21(2–3), pp., 211–223. Hountondji, P. (2002) The Struggle for Meaning. Reflection on Philosophy, Culture and Democracy in Africa. Athens; Ohio State University.

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Huebner, D. (2005) E-Mail Correspondence. Kabou, A. (2013) E se A Africa se Recusar ao Desensvolvimento? Lisboa: Edicoes Pedago. Marx, K. and Engels, F. (2012) The Communist Manifesto. New York: Verso. Mignolo, W. (2012) Local histories / global designs: Coloniality, subaltern knowledges and border thinking. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Mignolo, W. (2013) Introduction. Coloniality of Power and Decolonial Thinking. In W. Mignolo and A. Escobar (eds) Globalization and the Decolonial Turn. New York: Routledge, pp., 1–21. Mphahlele, E. (2011). Corner B. New York: Penguin Classics. pp., 15–29. Pinar, W. (2000) Introduction: Toward the Internationalization of Curriculum Studies. In D. Trueit, W. Doll Jr, H. Wang and W. Pinar (eds) The Internationalization of Curriculum Studies. New York: Peter Lang, pp., 1–13. Pinar, W. (2004). What Is Curriculum Theory? Mahwah, NJ: Erlbaum. Pinar, W. (2012) Curriculum Studies in the United States. New York: Palgrave. Pinar, W. (2013). Curriculum States in the United States: Present Circumstances, Intellectual Histories. New York: Palgrave. Quijano, A. (2000b). Colonialidad del poder y classificacion Social. Journal of World Systems Research, 6 (2), pp., 342–86. Seth, S. (2011) Travelling Theory: Western Knowledge and Its Indian Object. International Studies in Sociology of Education, 21 (4), pp., 263–82. Sloterdjik, P. (2013) In the World Interior of Capital. Towards a Philosophical Theory of Globalization. Cambridge: Polity Press. Sousa Santos, B. (2003a). Prefácio. In B. de Sousa Santos (org.), Democarizar a Democracia—Os caminhos da Democracia Participativa. Porto: Edições Afrontamento, pp. 25–33. Sousa Santos, B. (2003b). Para uma sociologia das ausências e uma sociologia das emergências. In Boaventura de Sousa Santos (org) Conhecimento prudente para um vida decente: Um Discurso sobre as ciencias revisitado. Porto: Afrontamento, pp., 735–75. Sousa Santos, B. (2006). The Rise of the Left the World Social Forum and Beyond. London: Verso. Sousa Santos, B. (2007a) Another Knowledge Is Possible. London: Verso. Sousa Santos, B. (2009b). Beyond abyssal thinking. From global lines to ecologies of knowledges. Review, 30(1), pp., 45–89. Trueit, D. (2000) Democracy and Conversation. In D. Trueit, W. Doll Jr, H. Wang and W. Pinar (eds) The Internationalization of Curriculum Studies. New York: Peter Lang, pp., ix–xvii. Tse Tung, M. (2007). Oppose Book Worship. In Slavoj Žižek. Slavoj Žižek presents Mao on practice and contradiction. London: Verso, pp., 43–51.

Index

Abdi, Ali 94, 98–9, 105, 108, 126, 130 Abu-Lughod, Janet 136–9, 141, 150–1, 155 abyssal thinking xiii, 14, 218–20, 237–8, 242–4 Achebe, Chinua 104, 179, 202 Adejumobi, Saheed 119 Africana 93, 97, 106, 117–18, 129 African Intellectuals 13, 85, 90–2, 97, 104–5, 107, 109, 128, 230, 241, 248 African Renaissance 98 Agamben, Giorgio 193, 196 Agbebi, Mojola 203 Ahmad, Aijaz 238–41, 256 Aidoo, Ama Ata 98 Akiwowo, Akinsola 92–3 Aksikas, Jaafar 154 Al-Attas 146, 160 Al-Azmeh, Aziz 256 Amin, Samir 70–3, 79, 85–6, 99, 119, 121, 155–6, 167–8, 173, 176, 221–2, 225, 237, 256 Anderson, Kevin 231–2 Andreotti, Vanessa 35, 43, 223, 229 anti-abyssal 225 anti-colonial 122, 154 anti-decolonial 102 Anyon, Jean 61, 667 Anzaldua, Gloria 237–8, 244 Appadurai, Arjun 205 Appiah, Kwame 978, 104, 106, 179 Applebee, Arthur 204 Apple, Michael 18–23, 26–8, 32, 34–5, 40, 43–4, 127 Arab 156–7, 162–3, 184, 205, 239 Aronowitz, Stanley 18–22, 25, 183 Arrighi, Giovanni 7, 15, 39, 71, 217, 223

Asuwada principle 92 Atieno-Odhiambo 103 Auge, Marc 196 Autio, Tero 37, 209 Baber, Zaheer 102 Baker, Bernadette 3, 6, 9, 36, 46 Bakhtin, Mikhail 40–1 Bamyeh, Mohammed 146, 148 Bantu Philosophy 97 Bartolovitch, Crystal 236–7 Battiste, Marie 81–2 Bauman, Zygmunt 1, 15, 200, 217, 223, 249 Bauval, Robert 171 Beck, Ulrich 183 Berardi, Franco 4 Bernal, Martin 103, 164–74, 183 Bernasconi, Robert 125–6 Bernstein, Basil 18, 43 Bhabha, Homi 37 Biko, Steve 248 Black Athena 164, 168–72, 174 Boatca, Manuela 103, 114, 240 Bogue, Anthony 26 border thinking 76, 81, 225–30, 234 Bourdieu, Pierre 43 Braganca, Aquino 1, 11, 12, 99 Brophy, Thomas 171 Cabral, Amilcar xv, 5, 66, 99–100, 107–8, 110–12, 114–16, 239 Cabralism 112 carnival 40–2 Carnoy, Martin 43 Cesaire, Aime 54, 99, 108, 121, 123 Chakrabarty, Dipesh 43 Chomsky, Noam xii, 14–15, 61, 64–5, 162, 220–1

262

Index

class xiii, 4, 6, 20–2, 25–8, 41, 45–6, 66, 83–4, 100, 112–17, 121, 137, 140, 146, 156, 158, 163, 170, 173, 180, 210–11, 218, 229–30, 234–5, 250 clinamen 241, 243 cognitive justice xi, xiv, 10, 13, 44–6, 53, 73, 81–2, 86, 162, 207–8, 211, 230, 252–6 colonialism ix, xv, 8, 12, 14, 56–8, 74, 76, 84, 90–1, 96, 99, 101, 104, 105, 107, 111, 114–26, 151, 154, 157–8, 176–7, 200–5, 210, 218, 221, 226, 231, 233–4, 239, 241, 250, 257 coloniality of being 60, 81, 242, 258 coloniality of knowledge 67, 80, 84, 184 coloniality of power ix, xi, xv, 2–3, 53, 56, 60, 70, 73, 76–8, 82–3 common sense 20–1, 31, 45, 57, 60, 68, 159, 194, 242 Connell, Raewyn 90, 92–4, 98, 209 Conner, Clifford 157 consciencism 8, 10, 123, 208, 230 Coomaraswamy, Ananda 202 Corazza, Sandra 252, 254 counter hegemonic 17, 23, 27, 251 critical theory 5, 7–8, 11, 21, 26, 28–9, 33–6, 40, 42, 45, 72, 77, 84, 112, 223–4, 229, 235, 250, 253, 257 Croce, Arlene 249 cultural politics 25, 39, 97, 120–2, 127, 129, 139, 158, 211, 219 curriculum i, xi, xiii, xiv, xvi, 1–3, 9–14, 18–24, 26, 28, 30, 31, 32, 35, 37–46, 53, 59, 61, 63, 65–7, 69, 71, 73, 77, 82, 86, 93, 106, 121, 129, 135–6, 158, 162, 169, 171, 174, 178, 180–4, 188–9, 191–6, 203–5, 208, 211–16, 218, 238, 234, 249, 250–2, 254, 256 curriculum relevance 44, 45, 208, 211 Darder, Antonia vi, xiv, 3 15, 21–2, 35, 42, 46, 48, 253 decolonial turn 15, 42, 77, 80, 81, 203, 226, 237 decolonization 101, 200 decolonize critical theory 235 decolonize Marxism 237 decolonizing democracy 235

decolonizing knowledge 252 decolonizing the Mind 126 DeLeuze, Gilles 124, 188, 193–9, 237, 250–1 delinking 77–9, 81 deterritorialize 14, 188–9, 193 development 7, 13–14, 26, 39, 53, 55–6, 60, 82, 93, 98–100, 103, 105, 108–9, 114–20, 126–7, 135–9, 142, 154, 162, 164–6, 171–9, 183–4, 190–4, 204, 221–2, 232, 237, 250, 255–6; underdevelopment 13, 91, 119, 121, 158, 204 Dewey, John 19, 109 dialectic materialism 188–92 Diop, Cheikh 103, 129, 164 division of labor 56–8, 72, 114, 119 Dussel, Enrique 1, 6, 53–6, 66, 121, 129, 214, 222, 226, 237, 253 Eagleton, Terry 20, 218 ecology of knowledges xii, 11, 83–4, 209, 225, 229, 241–4, 251–2 Eco, Umberto 196 education i, xi, 3, 9, 14–15, 18–19, 21–45, 69, 81, 98–9, 105, 108–9, 111–14, 123, 126, 139, 146–7, 150–2, 155, 158–9, 169, 181–3, 188–95, 204–5, 209–11, 235 Egyptian 103, 129, 152, 157, 164–71 Ekholm, Kajsa 136 Ela, Jean-Marc 129, 253–5, 258 Ellsworth, Elizabeth 24–5, 45–6, 206 El Saadawi, Nawal 149, 152 Elungo, P.E.A. 129 empowerment 24, 45 epistemicide i, 11, 46, 56, 59, 67, 82, 94, 97, 103, 122, 127, 159, 163, 184, 229–30, 236, 241, 244, 249 epistemic privilege 13, 53, 58–9, 67, 75, 228 epistemic racism 67–9 epistemic sexism 67–9 epistemological disenfranchisement 98 epistemologies of the south 1, 11–12 Escobar, Arturo 77, 231, 257–8 ethics of opacity 55, 123–5, 127 ethics proper 123–5 eugenics 122, 253 Eurocentrism 13, 45, 53, 57, 67, 69–70, 75–6, 82, 84–5, 91, 105,

Index 155, 159, 176–7, 209–10, 223, 232–3, 237, 240, 242, 244, 250, 257–8 Eze, Emmanuel 69, 129 Fakhri, Majid 141–8 Falola, Toyin 203 Fanon, Frantz 69, 80, 92, 108, 117, 121–3, 128, 239 Foucault, Michel 19, 28, 36, 75, 76, 79, 195 Frank, Andre 14, 162–3, 171, 173, 175–7 Fraser, Nancy 36, 200, 223–4 Freire, Paulo x, xiv, 19, 29–31, 34, 97, 99–100, 107, 110, 179 FRELIMO 108, 111, 120 FRETILIN 120 fuqaha 140, 148 Galeano, Eduardo 1, 8, 204 Gbadegesin, Segun 93 gender 3–4, 6, 19, 21–2, 25, 27–8, 33, 58, 63, 67, 69, 80, 98, 121, 159, 173, 210–11, 218, 224, 234–5, 250 genocide xi, 4, 31, 60–3, 66, 83, 102, 107, 115, 118, 120, 126, 129, 155, 171, 201, 218, 237, 241, 253 Giroux, Henry 9, 15, 18–35, 40, 43–4, 69, 181, 217–19 globalization 10–11, 53, 56, 85, 153, 180, 182–3, 204–5, 211, 217, 223, 225, 249 Goody, Jack 141, 163, 165, 168, 171–6, 209 Gordon, Lewis 126, 128, 197 Gore, Jennifer 36–8, 44, 206 Gramsci, Antonio 18–21, 36, 75–6, 100, 110 Greek 54, 70, 78, 82, 95, 103–4, 129, 138–9, 141, 145, 157, 164–70, 228 Grosfoguel, Ramon 5, 13, 15, 53, 56–8, 67–9, 73–6, 231, 251 Guattari, Felix 195–6 Guha, Ranajit 75, 163, 201 Gyekye, Kwame 95, 97 Hallen, Barry 99, 102, 104 Hamminga, Bert 95, 98 Harding, Sandra 159, 218, 229–30 Hardt, Michael 200

263

Harvey, David 200 Hassan, Salah 231 hegemony xv, 1, 3, 18–22, 28, 30–7, 41, 45, 56–7, 59, 69, 104, 136, 150, 175, 182, 200, 204–5, 211, 250 Henry, Paget 15, 93, 96–7, 103, 128–9 history 1, 6, 9, 14, 19, 25, 27, 31, 32, 38–9, 46, 54–8, 60–6, 70–3, 79, 82, 84–6, 90–1, 94, 100, 103, 115, 117–19, 122, 126, 129, 135–8, 141–2, 144–5, 150–2, 157–9, 162–78, 183–4, 190–3, 199, 202–3, 219, 222, 229–34, 238, 257 homogeneity 94, 97, 237 Hooks, bell 19, 61, 63–6, 82, 248 Hountondji, Paulin 94–5, 97, 252 Huebner, Dwayne 19, 32, 188–94, 217 humanism 106, 155, 168 human rights ix–xi, 1–12, 255 ijihad 147 imperialism i, ix, 14, 63, 66, 82, 90–1, 100, 115, 120, 122, 124, 157, 201, 204, 207, 211, 218, 253 indigenoustude 178, 238–9 inequality 21, 29, 34, 83, 85, 119, 127, 182, 211, 218, 223, 234, 240, 248, 252, 254 Islamic 13, 85, 90, 120, 123, 135–60, 166 Itinerant Curriculum Theory (ICT) i, xiii, xvi, 1, 9, 37, 73, 77, 121, 183, 188, 196, 197, 207–9, 248–50 James, C. L. 117 Jin, Ha 196 Johnson, Richard 135, 163, 239 Kabirah 148 Kabou, Axelle 255 Kalam 148 Kaomea, Julie 206 Kaphagawani, Didier 96 Karpat, Kemal 146 Kassir, Samir 155 Kawagely, Angayuqaq 206 Kenyatta, Jomo 90, 99, 182 Khalfa, Jean 193, 196 Khoza, Reuel 102 Kliebard, Herbert 18, 72, 169, 207 Krug, Edward 169

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Index

Ladson Billings, Gloria 39 Las Casas, Bartolome 62–3 Latour, Bruno 11, 195, 217, 221, 227 Lazzaratto, Mauricio 2, 3 Lefkowitz, Mary 170–1, 181–3 linguisticides 237 Loewen, James 61, 65–6 Lumumba, Patrice 100, 108, 118, 120, 239 Macdonald, James 19, 43, 93, 188, 189 Macedo, Donaldo 15, 36, 200–1, 238 Machel, Samora 96, 99, 111, 113–14, 117, 120, 122, 158, 239 Mahgoub, Abdel 231 Maldonado Torres, Nelson 5, 54, 57, 60, 67, 74, 77, 82, 225–7, 238 Mallon, Florencia 75 Marcuse, Herbet 220 Marquand, David 139, 152–4 Marti, Jose 13, 221 Marxism 8, 15, 36, 43, 71, 91, 102, 125, 224, 230–7, 258 Marx, Karl ix, 7–8, 39, 96 100, 107, 120, 176, 230–7, 251, 259 Masolo, D. 102 Mbiti, John 97 McCarthy, Cameron 26–8, 32, 39 Mclaren, Peter 19, 22–3, 235–6 medicine 103, 126–8, 137–8, 140, 142, 150, 159 Memmi, Albert ix, 122, 242 memory 57, 71, 81, 83, 98, 122, 137, 241 meritocracy 145 Mernissi 149 Mignolo, Walter 1, 3, 5–6, 53, 55–6, 71, 73, 75, 77–81, 108, 200, 203, 205, 208, 225, 227–30, 234, 240, 242, 251, 257 militant educators 111 Mills, Charles W 68–9, 104–5, 242 Mishra, Pankaj 166 MLSTP 120 modern x, 1–11, 15, 22, 37, 53, 55–60, 65, 67, 70–3, 79, 83–5, 102–5, 125, 127–8, 136–40, 146, 148, 153–9, 162–4, 175–7, 182, 200, 202, 217–44, 256–7 modernity 3, 5–8, 13–14, 53–86, 90, 94, 101, 108, 153, 156, 169, 177, 179, 197, 205, 208, 210, 217–18, 221–2, 225–42, 252, 257

modernity/coloniality research project (MC) 257, 258, 273 Mondlane, Eduardo 99, 112, 117 Morgan, Michael 136–41, 145–52, 156, 161 Mphahlele, Ezekiel (Es’kia) 179, 248 MPLA 120 Mudimbe, Valentim-Yves 97, 99, 101–2, 104 muhaddithum 148 Munslow, Alun 46, 164, 218 muntu 95 Muslim 54, 137, 139–40, 145, 147–8, 150–2, 156–8, 166, 213 Mutua, Kagenda 206 nahda 155–6 Negri, Toni 200 negritude 98, 105, 179, 180 neocolonialism 115, 117, 124 neogramscianism 20–1, 34, 36 neoliberalism xii–xiv, xvi, 1–5, 10, 39, 57, 83, 107, 145, 153, 182, 211, 234, 236 neo Marxism 42 Ngara, Constantine 94–6, 110–11 Nkrumah, Kwame 8, 10, 99, 114–18, 123, 180, 208, 239 Nkulu, Kiluba 109 non-Abyssal Thinking 218, 242, 257 Non-West 56, 211 North (global) 6, 12, 75, 83, 84, 145, 164, 178–9, 210, 250 Nussbaum, Martha 183 Nyere, Julius 99, 108–9, 118, 120, 183 occidentalism 209, 228, 240, 242 Odiembo, Isaya 98 Omoregbe, Joseph 128–9 Onyewuenyi, Innocent 95 oppressed 4, 21, 30–1, 34, 41, 55, 66, 73, 91, 112–13, 116–17, 121, 123, 126, 136, 179, 184, 197, 224, 227, 232, 236, 251, 253 oppressor 7, 99, 116–17, 125–6, 163, 179, 251 orality 92 orientalism 163, 209, 228 Oruka, H. Odera 99, 104 Oseghare, Anthony 105 PAIGC 111, 120 Paraskeva, João, M. i–ii, ix–xv, 1, 5, 18, 20–1, 26, 34, 36–7, 43–4,

Index 47, 71–73, 77, 82, 86, 102, 183, 185, 188, 193–5, 207, 223, 229, 238–9, 250 Pinar, William 8, 18, 20, 22, 37, 43–4, 47, 164, 204–5, 211, 249–50, 252, 256 Popkewitz, Thomas 37, 198, 200, 202, 206 post-abyssal thinking xiii, 218, 223–5, 227–9, 238, 242 postmodernism 8, 11, 23–4, 27–9, 35, 75–6, 209 Power Matrix 86, 122, 242 Prinsloo, E. D. 102, 106 Quantz, Richard 15, 36, 39–41, 195, 211 Quijano, Anibal 2, 13, 53, 56–60, 70, 78, 84, 230, 239, 240–2, 251 Qur’an 140, 147, 149 Rabaka, Reiland 112 race 4, 6, 19, 21, 22, 25, 27–8, 33, 38–9, 47, 56–60, 63, 65, 70, 73, 82, 90, 94, 97, 116–17, 126, 157, 168, 170, 173, 179, 211, 218, 235, 244, 250, 258 radical co-presence 225, 227, 229–30, 238, 244 renaissance 54, 59, 71–2, 80, 98, 136–7, 148, 154–6, 162, 165, 169, 172, 228 representationalism 193 Rodney, Walter 99 Rogers, Guy 171 Rukare, Enoka 123 Sabet, Amr 217 Said, Edward 5, 79, 155, 159, 163, 172, 196, 204, 233 Sanjakdar, Fida 150, 152 Sankara, Thomas 124, 153 Sassen, Saskia 195 Sayyid, Salman 135 Schneider, Jane 136 Schwab, Joseph 192, 217 scientificity 13, 91, 126, 163, 209, 218–19 Scott, David 157–8, 203 segregation 21, 69, 121, 210, 229–30 semitic-53, 103, 167, 173 Sen, Amartya 180 Sharabi, Hisham Bashir 145–6, 150, 155, 176

265

slavery 80–1, 90, 102, 116, 119, 126, 179–80, 218, 242, 251 Sloterdjik, Peter 249 Smith, Linda 79, 84, 90, 103, 157, 176, 179, 204, 206, 210 social justice i, xi, xiii, 1, 19, 31, 42, 45, 146, 201 sociology of absences 83 Sousa Santos, Boaventura i, x, xiii, 1–3, 5–12, 14–15, 43, 45, 82–4, 92, 103, 122, 162, 167, 180, 182–3, 200–1, 204, 206–7, 209, 211, 218–23, 225, 227–8, 230, 242–4, 250–3, 256 South (Global) 1, 11–12, 75, 76, 83–4, 178–82, 200, 209, 210, 224–6, 250, 255–6 Spikav, Gayatri Chakravorty 43–79, 163, 201, 203–4 state 28, 78, 117, 182 subjectification of debt 2; subjective economy 2–4 Swadener, Beth 206 Swanson, Dalene 95, 98, 105–7, 125 Swedenburg, Ted 158 synopticality 249 Ta’dib 146 Tate, William 39 tempels 94 Thernborn, Goran 218, 229, 234–6 Tlostanova, Madina 3, 6, 79, 80, 225, 228–9 Todorova, Maria 219 Todorov, Tzvetan 61, 63, 65 translation xii, 11, 77, 136, 141–2, 145, 158, 197, 199, 251 transmodernity 13, 53, 85, 225–7, 229 Tse Tung, Mao 254 Tyack, David 72, 169 ubuntu 95, 98, 106–7, 110–11 ubuntunism 107 Udovitch, Abraham 137 Ujamaa 95, 106, 108–11 Ummah 146–7, 158 Visvanathan, Shiv 202 Waghid, Yusef 146–7 Wallerstein, Immanuel 71–2, 91–2, 99, 123, 177, 183, 185 Wa Thiong’o, Ngugi 8, 11, 201–2, 210, 241

266

Index

Watkins, William 22, 36, 381 Westerncentric 68 Western Eurocentric 1, 3–5, 9, 81, 159 Western Modernity 6, 68, 94, 225, 229, 233, 239–40, 244, 257 West (global) ix, xxi, xv, 10, 13–14, 39, 46, 53, 56, 60, 68, 70, 73, 84, 91, 94, 101, 104, 109, 119, 135–46, 148, 150–8, 162–4, 168, 170, 172–5, 184, 201–2, 209, 211, 228, 230, 240, 242, 253 Wexler, Phil 18–20, 22–3, 35, 43 Whitty, Geoff 18, 32, 43

Willis, Paul 18 Wiredu, Kwasi 129 Wolf, Eric 136, 161, 189 Wolfson, Bradley 189 Wraga, William 38, 204 Wright, Erik Olin 22 Yoruba 93–4 Young, Michael 18, 32, 43 Zaret, Esther 189 Zinn, Howard 61–2, 64–5, 163, 184 Žižek, Slavoj 1–2, 4–5, 9–10, 34, 42, 198, 207–8, 254