Towards a Just Curriculum Theory: The Epistemicide 9781612058597, 9781315146904

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Towards a Just Curriculum Theory

Towards a Just Curriculum Theory: The Epistemicide responds to a need for ‘alternative ways of thinking about alternatively’ about education and curriculum. It challenges the functionalism of both dominant and specific counter-dominant education and curriculum perspectives and in so doing suggests an Itinerant Curriculum Theory (ICT) as a new path for the field. The volume brings challenges critical to educators to decolonize and to deterritorialize, providing scholars and educators a more nuanced analysis. By offering strategies to achieve a just curriculum theory, and by positioning curriculum theory to establish social and cognitive justice, this book aims to educate a more just and democratic society. With contributions from leading scholars across the field of education, this volume argues that to deny the existence of any epistemological form beyond the Western mode can be a form of social fascism, which leads to an uncritical reading of history. Together, the essays offer and encourage a more deliberative, democratic engagement that seeks to contextualize and bring to life diverse epistemologies, value-sets, disciplines, theories, concepts and experiences in education and beyond. João M. Paraskeva is Professor of Education Leadership and Policy Studies at University of Massachusetts Dartmouth, MA, USA.

In the memory of my mother and father

Towards a Just Curriculum Theory The Epistemicide João M. Paraskeva

First published 2018 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 © 2018 Taylor & Francis The right of João Paraskeva to be identified as editor 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 utilized 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 Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalog record for this book has been requested ISBN: 978-1-612-05859-7 (hbk) ISBN: 978-1-315-14690-4 (ebk) Typeset in Sabon by Apex CoVantage, LLC

Contents

Preface

vii

NOAM CHOMSKY

Acknowledgements   1 The Struggle Towards a Non-Functionalist Critical River: Towards a Curriculum of Hope Without Optimism

xi

1

JOÃO M. PARASKEVA

  2 Beyond the Politics of the Big Lie: The Education Deficit and the New Authoritarianism

51

HENRY GIROUX

  3 A Non-Occidentalist West? Learned Ignorance and Ecology of Knowledge

67

BOAVENTURA DE SOUSA SANTOS

  4 Imperialist Desires in English-Only Language Policy

91

DONALDO MACEDO

  5 Africana Philosophy

117

PAGET HENRY

  6 Decolonizing Western Universalisms: Decolonial Pluri-versalism from Aime Cesaire to the Zapatistas

147

RAMON GROSFOGUEL

  7 Against Coloniality: On the Meaning and Significance of the Decolonial Turn NELSON MALDONADO-TORRES

165

vi Contents   8 Educational Reforms Hostile to the Arts and Humanities: Neoliberalism and Citizenship

181

JURJO TORRES SANTOME

  9 Education, Knowledge and the Righting of Wrongs

195

VANESSA DE OLIVEIRA ANDREOTTI

10 Toni Morrison and the Discourse of the Other: Against the Hypocrisy of Completeness

207

CAMERON McCARTHY, RUSHIKA PATEL AND BRENDA NYANDIKO SANYA



Conclusion: Curriculum as a Scandal

221

JOÃO M. PARASKEVA

Index

255

Preface

Can Civilization Survive Capitalism?1 The term ‘capitalism’ is commonly used to refer to the U.S. economic system, with substantial state intervention ranging from subsidies for creative innovation to the ‘too-big-to-fail’ government insurance policy for banks. The system is highly monopolized, further limiting reliance on the market, and increasingly so: In the past 20 years, the share of profits of the 200 largest enterprises has risen sharply, reports scholar Robert W. McChesney (2013) in his new book Digital Disconnect. ‘Capitalism’ is a term now commonly used to describe systems in which there are no capitalists: for example, the worker-owned Mondragon conglomerate in the Basque region of Spain, or the worker-owned enterprises expanding in northern Ohio, often with conservative support—both are discussed in important work by the scholar Gar Alperovitz (2013, 2011). Some might even use the term ‘capitalism’ to refer to the industrial democracy advocated by John Dewey, a U.S. leading social philosopher in the late 19th century and early 20th century. John Dewey (1916) called for workers to be ‘masters of their own industrial fate’ and for all institutions to be brought under public control, including the means of production, exchange, publicity, transportation and communication. Short of this, John Dewey argued, politics will remain ‘the shadow cast on society by big business.’ The truncated democracy that John Dewey condemned has been left in tatters in recent years. Now control of government is narrowly concentrated at the peak of the income scale, while the large majority ‘down below’ has been virtually disenfranchised. The current political-economic system is a form of plutocracy, diverging sharply from democracy, if by that concept we mean political arrangements in which policy is significantly influenced by the public will. There have been serious debates over the years about whether capitalism is compatible with democracy. If we keep to really existing capitalist democracy—RECD for short—the question is effectively answered: They are radically incompatible. It seems to me unlikely that civilization can survive RECD and the sharply attenuated democracy that goes along with it.

viii Preface But could functioning democracy make a difference? Let’s keep to the most critical immediate problem that civilization faces: environmental catastrophe. Policies and public attitudes diverge sharply, as is often the case under RECD. The nature of the gap is examined in several articles in the current issue of Daedalus, the journal of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. Researcher Kelly Sims Gallagher (2013, 2008) finds that ‘[o]ne hundred and nine countries have enacted some form of policy regarding renewable power, and 118 countries have set targets for renewable energy. In contrast, the United States has not adopted any consistent and stable set of policies at the national level to foster the use of renewable energy.’ It is not public opinion that drives U.S. policy off the international spectrum. Quite the opposite. Opinion is much closer to the global norm than the U.S. government’s policies reflect, and much more supportive of actions needed to confront the likely environmental disaster predicted by an overwhelming scientific consensus—and one that’s not too far off, affecting the lives of our grandchildren, very likely. As Jon A. Krosnick and Bo MacInnis (2013, p. 11) report in Daedalus: Huge majorities have favored steps by the federal government to reduce the amount of greenhouse gas emissions generated when utilities produce electricity. In 2006, 86 percent of respondents favored requiring utilities, or encouraging them with tax breaks, to reduce the amount of greenhouse gases they emit. Also in that year, 87 percent favored tax breaks for utilities that produce more electricity from water, wind, or sunlight (These majorities were maintained between 2006 and 2010 and shrank somewhat after that). The fact that the public is influenced by science is deeply troubling to those who dominate the economy and state policy. One current illustration of their concern is the “Environmental Literacy Improvement Act” proposed to state legislatures by ALEC, the American Legislative Exchange Council, a corporate-funded lobby that designs legislation to serve the needs of the corporate sector and extreme wealth. The ALEC Act mandates ‘balanced teaching’ of climate science in K-12 classrooms. ‘Balanced teaching’ is a code phrase that refers to teaching climate-change denial, to ‘balance’ mainstream climate science. It is analogous to the ‘balanced teaching’ advocated by creationists to enable the teaching of ‘creation science’ in public schools. Legislation based on ALEC models has already been introduced in several states. Of course, all of this is dressed up in rhetoric about teaching critical thinking—a fine idea, no doubt, but it’s easy to think up far better examples than an issue that threatens our survival and has been selected because of its importance in terms of corporate profits. Media reports commonly present a controversy between two sides on climate change. One side consists of

Preface  ix the overwhelming majority of scientists, the world’s major national academies of science, the professional science journals and the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). They agree that global warming is taking place, that there is a substantial human component, that the situation is serious and perhaps dire, and that very soon, maybe within decades, the world might reach a tipping point where the process will escalate sharply and will be irreversible, with severe social and economic effects. It is rare to find such consensus on complex scientific issues. The other side consists of skeptics, including a few respected scientists who caution that much is unknown—which means that things might not be as bad as thought, or they might be worse. Omitted from the contrived debate is a much larger group of skeptics: highly regarded climate scientists who see the IPCC’s regular reports as much too conservative. And these scientists have repeatedly been proven correct, unfortunately. The propaganda campaign has apparently had some effect on U.S. public opinion, which is more skeptical than the global norm. But the effect is not significant enough to satisfy the masters. That is presumably why sectors of the corporate world are launching their attack on the educational system, in an effort to counter the public’s dangerous tendency to pay attention to the conclusions of scientific research. At the Republican National Committee’s Winter Meeting a few weeks ago, Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal warned the leadership that ‘[w]e must stop being the stupid party . . . We must stop insulting the intelligence of voters.’ Within the RECD system, it is of extreme importance that we become the stupid nation, not misled by science and rationality, in the interests of the short-term gains of the masters of the economy and political system, and damn the consequences. These commitments are deeply rooted in the fundamentalist market doctrines that are preached within RECD, though observed in a highly selective manner, so as to sustain a powerful state that serves wealth and power. The official doctrines suffer from a number of familiar ‘market inefficiencies,’ among them the failure to take into account the effects on others in market transactions. The consequences of these ‘externalities’ can be substantial. The current financial crisis is an illustration. It is partly traceable to the major banks and investment firms’ ignoring ‘systemic risk’—the possibility that the whole system would collapse—when they undertook risky transactions. Environmental catastrophe is far more serious: The externality that is being ignored is the fate of the species. And there is nowhere to run, cap in hand, for a bailout. In future, historians (if there are any) will look back on this curious spectacle taking shape in the early 21st century. For the first time in human history, humans are facing the significant prospect of severe calamity as a result of their actions—actions that are battering our prospects of decent survival. Those historians will observe that the richest and most powerful country in history, which enjoys incomparable advantages, is leading the effort

x Preface to intensify the likely disaster. Leading the effort to preserve conditions in which our immediate descendants might have a decent life are the so-called ‘primitive’ societies: First Nations, tribal, indigenous, aboriginal. The countries with large and influential indigenous populations are well in the lead in seeking to preserve the planet. The countries that have driven indigenous populations to extinction or extreme marginalization are racing towards destruction. Thus Ecuador, with its large indigenous population, is seeking aid from the rich countries to allow it to keep its substantial oil reserves underground, where they should be. Meanwhile the U.S. and Canada are seeking to burn fossil fuels, including the extremely dangerous Canadian tar sands, and to do so as quickly and fully as possible, while they hail the wonders of a century of (largely meaningless) energy independence without a side glance at what the world might look like after this extravagant commitment to self-destruction. This observation generalizes: Throughout the world, indigenous societies are struggling to protect what they sometimes call ‘the rights of nature,’ while the civilized and sophisticated scoff at this silliness. This is all exactly the opposite of what rationality would predict—unless it is the skewed form of reason that passes through the filter of RECD. Noam Chomsky

References Alperovitz, G. (2011) America Beyond Capitalism: Reclaiming Our Wealth, Our Liberty, and Our Democracy. New Jersey: John Willey and Sons. Alperovitz, G. (2013) What Then Must We Do? Straight Talk About the Next American Revolution. Vermont: Chelsea Green Publishing. Dewey, J. (1916) Democracy and Education: An Introduction to the Philosophy of Education. New York: The Free Press. Gallagher, K.S. (2008) DOE Budget Authority for Energy Research, Development, and Demonstration Database, Energy Technology Innovation Policy Group: Harvard Kennedy School of Government, June. Gallagher, K.S. (2013) Why and How Governments Support Renewable Energy, Daedalus, Volume 142, Issue 1, pp. 59–77. Krosnick, J. and MacInnis, B. (2013) Does the American Public Support Legislation to Reduce Greenhouse Gas Emissions? Daedalus, Volume 142, Issue 1, pp. 26–39. McChesney, R. (2013) Digital Disconnect: How Capitalism Is Turning the Internet Against Democracy. New York: The New Press.

Acknowledgements

This volume is a result of a collective political project in which I had the superior privilege of having the friendship and solidarity with so many colleagues, friends, and comrades. A word of profound gratitude to Boaventura de Sousa Santos, whose influence on my work goes beyond words. This volume owes so much to his work and thought, and I have been privileged by our interactions. Also, many thanks to Henry Giroux, Donaldo Macedo, Antonia Darder, Richard Quantz, and Dwayne Huebner for their strong support of my journey and for the constant input and feedback on my work. Also, I would like to express my gratitude to Noam Chomsky for his simplicity, care, and support. Many thanks to the students of the Educational Leadership and Policy Studies Doctoral Program for the constant heated and conflictive debates in our seminars that allow me to recalibrate and reforge my arguments. If I had to choose to whom I should dedicate this volume, they would be undeniably the ‘chosen.’ I cannot avoid mentioning our student cohorts (Counter-­Hegemonics, Synoptics, Critical Transformative Intellectuals, and Public Intellectuals) for their commitment to the critical transformative political project.

Note 1 Published with Authors Gracious Permission. Alternet, March 5, 2013.

1 The Struggle Towards a Non-Functionalist Critical River Towards a Curriculum of Hope Without Optimism João M. Paraskeva The epistemicide is the murder of knowledge (Sousa Santos, 2014, p. 92)

Once upon a time, a cook decided to gather all the birds in the world and asked the birds what kind of seasoning that they would like to be marinated in when they are cooked and eaten. The cooker was all of democracy, so it was claimed. One of the chickens replied, ‘we the birds don’t want to be eaten whatsoever period.’ The cook replied, ‘that is out of the question.’ Democracy doesn’t go that far. This little story describes rather well the metaphor of our globalized world. The world is organized in such a way that we just have the right to choose the flavouring for us to be marinated in before being consumed. And this world has been sold to all of us as a democratic world, that paradoxically the sovereignty of each nation is an object of museum. This little story, shared by Eduardo Galeano (2010), is a vivid example of the sadism and brutality of late global capitalism, which makes capitalism and democracy—equality, freedom, justice—mutually exclusive realities and thus a divisive social issue. This sadism and brutality exaggerated triumphantly as globalization consolidates itself as a social and economic matrix. Examples of such reality are painstakingly normalized. Let us have a look at what seems to be two apparently disparate realities. The first example was emphasized by the Marxist intellectual David Harvey (2016) at Harvard University, Graduate School of Design. According to him, ‘between 1900 and 1999 the US consumed 4,500 million tons of cement. Between 2011 and 2013 China consumed 6,500 million tons of cement. That is, in just 3 years China consumed 50% more cement than US consumed in all preceded century’. With Harvey, I leave to the reader the vast environmental, political, and social consequences of such real(ity), let alone the new and always innovative direct and indirect implications on modes and conditions of production of the capitalist system. The second relates with the current context in the United States and in Europe. A couple of years ago Apple and Oliver (1998) wrote a sharp piece entitled ‘On Becoming Right’ that could easily eloquently subtitle our

2  João M. Paraskeva current reality. Although Apple and Oliver’s piece was written to examine how communities and teachers ‘become right’ despite the lethal effects of ‘rightist policies’, in fact some of the impulses that underpin such ‘act of becoming’ are quite common in what we are witness today in both the US and Europe. In a way, this volume could not be available in a better time. As I am writing this introductory chapter, a very shocking paradoxical nexus frames our global momentum. Whereas in the US, the 2016 Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump unleashes hate and genocidal pastoral (only) to immigrants of color, and is well ahead in the polls; in the European Union rightist and far rightist impulses have erupted in nations such as France, Austria, Holland, and Finland, among others. Also, both the US and EU are confronted with massive floods of ‘immigrants’ that exacerbate and naturalize eugenic impulses on both sides of the Atlantic. Each scenario constitutes the obscene era in which we live. The truth of the matter is that while the radical right and right platforms show no euphemisms in putting forward a genocidal approach to address such neoliberal social sagas, specific left and progressive platforms were and still are in many cases too slow to address a social issue that was more than expected. Before a shocking reality, the victims witness a wrangle between ‘politics of denial’ and ‘denying politics.’ That education and curriculum are not connected with such politics is a fallacy. They are the carburetors of such policies. Education and curriculum are utterly implicated in the globalization of suffering. Throughout the centuries, many issues have established an irreparable fracture between left and right—not necessarily between liberals and ­conservatives—and within the right and left. Honestly, how often are we surprised to see liberals as ‘wolfs in sheep’s clothing,’ aligning completely with conservatives on divisive issues? Unfortunately, our experiences in this regard, especially in academia, are countless. From political economy to social policies and the role of the state, left and right maintain a clear rupture that was aggravated with the collapse of the Eastern European block and the uprising of belligerent liberatory praxis from non-Western, nonEurocentric oppressed communities. However, regardless of such clear differences, both left and right do articulate a strong nexus among education, curriculum, and capitalism (Walberg, 2003; Harvey, 2005, 2014; Chomsky, 2012; Macedo, 2000a, 2000b; Zinn, 1980) or to be more precise, a node between educational and curriculum and the world systems theory, as Wallerstein et al. (1996) would put it. In capitalist societies, education was always tailored to produce obedient ‘bodies’ and ‘minds’ with specific skills desired by the (post)industrial world, that is industrious individuals who not only accept but above all will defend structures of power and authority that will feed the capitalist accumulation equation, thus cornered workers as consumers without any form of control over the modes and means of production (Perelman, 2000). In this context, the relation between capitalism and real democracy is in fact nonexistent, and one of the institutions that could lead the development of

Struggle Towards a Critical River  3 a real democratic platform—i.e., education—is the real pipeline that legitimizes unjust social capital and inequality. Capitalism is a Western invention that frames social institutions—i.e., schools—as the armed arm that regulates the production of acritical, passive, submissive, and perpetually oppressed bodies and minds to perennially maintain and legitimize the key factions of the capitalist equation: inequality, exploitation, and accumulation. To expect a democratic society with capitalist schools is impossible. In a ‘democratic’ capitalist society, education and curriculum enslave students—both on the form and content—towards a path of credentialism, transforming them into commodities with a concrete hierarchical value in society—to a point that an A from Yale has a different currency than an A from a non-tier 1 higher education institution. To be more precise, education in a capitalist society is not about education; it is about training an army of workers that docilely perpetuate a system that, odd as it might be, enslaves them (see Zizek, 2012), which is a mechanical process that focuses on covering and not discovering (Chomsky, 2012). Also, learning, as a critical transformative process, has been prohibited. Crudely, education in a capitalist society is basically ignorance (Chomsky, 2010). As Chomsky (2010) argues, schools “don’t teach the truth about the world, schools have to rely on beating students with propaganda about democracy” (p. 17). This lethal absurdity is blatantly denounced by Macedo (2000a) when he claims that schools in the so-called open and free societies face formidable paradoxical tensions. On one hand, they are charged with the responsibility of teaching the virtues of democracy, and on the other hand, they are complicit with the inherent hypocrisy of contemporary democracies, where according to Chomsky, the term democracy refers to a system of government in which elite elements based in the business community control the state by virtue of their dominance of the private society while the populations observes quietly. (p. 1) Far from democratic education and curriculum praxis, Macedo (2000a, b) claims, “what we really have in place is a sophisticated colonial model of education designed primarily to train teachers in ways in which the intellectual dimension of teaching is often devalued” (p. 3). Education and curriculum are profoundly implicated by the dynamics of ideological production propelled by class, gender, and race segregation crossed with political, economic, and cultural categories. The fact that “poor children are now the majority in the US public schools” (Layton, 2013, p. 1) speaks volumes about the consequences of such an oppressive matrix. Education and curriculum in a capitalist society needs to be contextualized within the complex power matrix of Western modernity, profoundly committed with processes of historical engineering, that denies any valid episteme beyond the Western

4  João M. Paraskeva epistemological platform, marginalizing the massive majority of the population, fostering “a racial and ethnic massive gap” (Chomsky, 2010, p. 63). Needless to say, we are not claiming here a eulogy of the reproductionist position. As the history of progressive education and critical pedagogy shows, there are countless examples of education transformative capacities and praxis. Radical progressive and critical educators have been always on the front line, claiming a different nexus for education, curriculum, and society. The successes have been huge, no doubt about it. However, there are some severe contradictions too. As I was able to examine in Conflicts in Curriculum Theory: Challenging Hegemonic Epistemologies (2011, 2014), and in my introduction of The Curriculum (2015) during the 1970s and 1980s, the curriculum field was swamped by a plurality of scholars exhibiting a myriad of distinct, fundamentally Western, epistemological perspectives with tremendous repercussions (some of them severe) 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 Huebner (1959, 1966, 1977); Macdonald (1971); Mann (1968, 1975); Apple (1971, 1990, 1986); Giroux (1980, 1981a, 1983); Grumet (1981); McLaren (1986); Aronowitz (1974); Pinar (1974, 1975, 1980, 1981); Pinar and Grumet (1976); Wexler (1976); Willis (1977); Whitty (1985); Young (1971) and Bernstein (1971, 1977), 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 into perspective by returning to the general struggles that emerged in the field at the beginning of the nineteenth century (Kliebard, 1995; Pinar, Reynolds, Slattery, & Taubman, 1995; Schubert, 1986, 2008; Paraskeva, 2001, 2007, 2011a, 2011b, 2011c, 2014; Baker, 2009). One thing was quite clear: the field would not be the same anymore. One cannot 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

Struggle Towards a Critical River  5 I referred to as the critical curriculum river. This metaphor, which is based 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 show 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 counter-dominant 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, freedom, and social justice. At the forefront of this struggle are the valuable contributions of intellectuals, such as Addams, Dewey, Washington, Du Bois, Addams, Bode, Counts, Rugg, Greene, Huebner, Macdonald, Wexler, Aronowitz, Mann, Giroux, McLaren, and Apple, 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 Western epistemological terrains, each of these scholars and movements was able to construct sharp challenges to an obsolete and positivistic functionalist school system, despite receiving ferocious criticism from dominant and some counter-dominant perspectives. This group of scholars within the critical curriculum river dared to show everybody otherwise. 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 specific Western perspectives, these scholars, including Greene, Aronowitz, Apple, Giroux, Mann, Wexler, and McLaren, were able to reframe the education and curriculum debates by bringing a new language to the field, if not precisely to introduce particular powerful concepts. This progressive curriculum owes a great deal to the works of Williams, Gramsci, Huebner, Macdonald, Greene, and Freire, and later of Foucault and others. The field now faced the need to debate and understand concepts, such as hegemony, ideology, reproduction, resistance, transformative pedagogy, hidden curriculum, conflict 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 assuming the political as “the pillar’’ for the interpretation of curriculum and schools. To claim

6  João M. Paraskeva that we are before a nonmonolithic critical curriculum river within the progressive tradition that embodies a political approach towards schools and curriculum seems not only inaccurate and reductive, but also minimizes important political approaches that could be identified in other progressive perspectives. For example, no serious curriculist and/or curriculogus1 would deny the politicality and advanced approaches presented by Greene, Pinar, and others. Arguably, Pinar’s later work (and he would agree with this claim) 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, and the role of the (organic) intellectuals (cf. Gramsci, 1957, 1971; also Sassoon, 1982).

The Heyday of Neo-Gramscianism Equipped with a new semantic artillery, “neo-Gramscian” scholars, such as 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 pillar of the new frameworks of production and labor, its production, reproduction, resistance, and legitimation. In such a context, working class agency permeates both the economic and political fields, and 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, since 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. We examined this issue in previous volumes (Paraskeva, 2008, 2011a, 2011c, 2014). 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,

Struggle Towards a Critical River  7 1994, p. 199). Furthermore, this political perspective clashed irremediably with the reductive and atrophied Marxist dogma of the base/superstructure model; 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 shouldn’t be naïve in thinking that critical hermeneutics—which can be found in works such as Apple’s Ideology and Curriculum (the embryonic work of what I introduced as “Apple’s Trilogy”; see Paraskeva, 2004) and Ideology, Culture and the Process of Schooling—emphasize a concept, such as hegemony, for no particular reason. In examining a chapter from Ideology and Curriculum called “On Analyzing Hegemony,” 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 that he presents a new key to secular social and educational problems. 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) Undeniably in Giroux’s organic intellectuality the concept of the hegemony is examined and worked within and beyond the dynamics of ideological production. Giroux’s powerful incursions in the post structural and postmodern terrains offered the field the incommensurable latitude of the concept of hegemony well beyond the reductionism of ecoonimic and cultural reproduction. 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 commonsense assemblage that somehow poverty, inequality, class, race, ethnicity, and gender segregation are immutable and a naturality of human nature and not a consequence of an eugenic system of wealth distribution and unequal power (Darder, 2012a) utterly connected with the modes and conditions

8  João M. Paraskeva 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, she (2011, p. 2008) argues, 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 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. Hegemony also plays a major role in McLaren’s (1986) School 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, Reynolds, Slattery, and Taubman (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, Reynolds, Slattery, & Taubman (1995) argued: The 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,

Struggle Towards a Critical River  9 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) 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 won’t last though. The challenges especially from within were devastated.

A Functionalist Counter-Functionalist Critical Flow Such prominent leadership would face severe criticism, not only from the dominant tradition, but 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 post-structural 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) doesn’t de-value knowledge as a political issue per se. Wexler (1976, p. 8) clearly voices his political space and place, arguing that during the 1960s the purity of science has been put in question due to its promiscuous relation with the military agenda. Naturally, not only “Western science had 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.

10  João M. Paraskeva 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 undeniably severe and probably deserves much more attention than it has gotten 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) 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–Madison, Ellsworth took the opportunity to discuss this kind of turmoil in the course Curriculum and Instruction 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 post-structural 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 definitions [such as empowerment’, ‘student voice’, ‘dialogue’, and even the term ‘critical’] which operate at high level of abstraction” (p. 300). In her belligerent

Struggle Towards a Critical River  11 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 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). Sousa Santos’ chapter takes this concern into a total different level by.dissecting how ‘specific conceptions, theoretical frameworks ‘produced in the West’ have been systematically marginalized or even ‘produced as non-existent’ since they at odds with very marrow of Western modernity, that is capitalism and colonialism’. In his own words it is imperative to enlarge the historical experience of the West, namely by giving voice to western traditions and experiences that were forgotten or marginalized because they did not conform to the imperialist and Orientalist objectives prevailing after the convergence of modernity and capitalism. I convene these experiences and traditions not out of historical interest. The aim is to intervene in the present as if it had other pasts beyond the past that made it into what it is today. If it could have been different, it can be different. My concern is to show that many of the problems confronting the world today result not only from the waste of experience that the West imposed upon the world by force, but also from the waste of experience that it imposed upon itself to sustain its own imposing upon the others. (Sousa Santos, Chapter 3) 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 altogether from the crude realities of daily life. Giroux (1992) challenges Ellsworth’s

12  João M. Paraskeva (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, while 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) 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)

Struggle Towards a Critical River  13 Macedo (2000a, 2000b) is also quite sentient of the linguist oppression at the very core of the yoke of Western colonialism. Macedo’s (2003, 2006) approach against the hegemony of the English language is an insightful, sharp critique of the dominant educational tradition as well as a red card to some counter-dominant educational perspectives. Macedo’s chapter, for example, helps us understand how the bilingual education movement has been hijacked by the dominant ideology, and should not be understood as a simple critique of methodologies. As he claims ‘the present assault on bilingual education is fundamentally political’, it is an attack that requires political action. The linguist oppression in which curriculum plays a key role needs to be contextualized within the eugenic curriculum policies unleashed since the end of nineteenth century (see Selden, 2000). 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 examined and advance in Conflicts in Curriculum Theory (2011c, 2014), 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, 2011c, 2014), needed to be contextualized back at the turn of the nineteenth century.

Addressing Functionalist Counter-Functionalism 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 and how such formations are implicated in the construction of social inequalities This is visible, for instance, in both Giroux and Apple’s work. 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 counter-functionalist 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 towards 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

14  João M. Paraskeva 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. While Apple and Weis (1983) called for the need to perceive the structure of school’s ideological formation, thus arguing that the cultural sphere was relatively autonomous, McCarthy and Apple (1988) introduced the non-synchronous 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”

Struggle Towards a Critical River  15 (Apple & Weis, 1983, p. 25). McCarthy’s powerful position helped swirl the waters between and within the critical and post terrains. As he argues (1988a), 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 forced-marched into the field. (p. 8) McCarthy (1988) vehemently reacted against pitfalls of critical perspectives with neo-Marxist impulses by ignoring racism as an endemic reality in pre- and post-capitalist 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 pre- and post-capitalist societies, in general, and education, in particular, class and gender dynamics cannot subalternize race and vice versa (McCarthy, 1988). Later on, Carlson and Apple (1998) defended the need for a combined critical-post-structural 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 (1988) approach by calling for a spiral non-parallelist, non-synchronous 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 theoryreality 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

16  João M. Paraskeva 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 we 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 poststructural 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 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

Struggle Towards a Critical River  17 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 (1981) adamantly argues, the US 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—into 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, although 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, 1981, 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, 1981, p. 68). Education, as Freire (1974, 2010) notoriously argues, is subversive. That is despite its conservative bone framed by a “narrating subject (teacher) and patient listening objects (the students)” (Freire, 2010, p. 71), critical theorists and pedagogues must show the ability to go beyond such deterministic framework without falling into another one. The eugenic banking concept of education—that, odd as it might be, keeps reinventing itself not just at the curriculum level, but currently more than ever before at the level of teacher preparation p ­ rograms— that turns students into “containers, into receptacles to be filled by the teacher”, and fundamentally defines students by their deficits, denies the fact that “knowledge emerges only through the invention and re-invention, through the restless, impatient continuing, hopeful inquiry human beings

18  João M. Paraskeva pursue in the world, with the world, and with each other” (Freire, 2010, p. 72). In an almost radical sense, Giroux (1981) argues 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) re-emphasizes his challenge of the dogmatic trap in which crude radical intellectualism fell. While 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 Tom Horne, who was the current superintendent of public instruction, declared 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’. 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

Struggle Towards a Critical River  19 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 doesn’t stop here though. As if this were not enough, the state of Arizona will target the accents 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 (Wall Street Journal, 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 Worn has a point. Basically, the governor of the state of Arizona and Horne, limited to succor the ‘thought to oppress the oppressed’. In the midst certified genocide, it is said that not all ethnic studies are prohibited. The Jewish and Irish studies can still be taught. Only studies of ethnic minorities (Latinos) are prohibited. Certainly Freire could never imagine to have written such a perfect oeuvre; and certainly Martin Luther King Jr. could not have the foggiest idea that his whole social justice ideal—which helped to free millions from oppression and racism—would 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. Another graphic example of how hegemony and ideology operate in the daily life of educational institutions is the most recent un-hiring of Steven Salaita. Under the protectionist umbrella of defending democracy and civility, the University of Illionois at Urbana Champaign unhired recently hired Professor Salaita for his ‘acerbic and emphatic anti-Israel tweets’. Despite the world’s outrage (17,000 signatures and 3000 academics boycotting the institution) both Urbana’s chancellor and BOT maintain the dangerous puritanism of their principle. Indeed, this whole process(es) 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, 1996). 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

20  João M. Paraskeva of educational policies and curriculum (cf. 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 in the curriculum field (cf. Huebner, 1977). Enguita (2007) challenges us to re-think 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 (see 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,” “Consistently 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’s 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 & 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, portrayed 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

Struggle Towards a Critical River  21 the relationship between schools, the workplace and the dialectical role these two institutions have to other agencies of social and cultural reproduction. (Giroux, 1981, pp. 93–94) The inadequacy of certain critical tools is crystal clear in Giroux’s (1981, 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 (also see Sassen, 2004). It is in this context that he argues that we need a new direction for radical educational praxis that 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, 19981b, p. 71). Needless to say, for Giroux (1981a, 1981b, 2001), this is an ideological battle. However, Giroux (2001, p. 142) points out the dangers of an ideological frame reduced to an analytical tool. That is, while “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 conflicting ideologies are fought over, and another issue altogether to view schools as

22  João M. Paraskeva 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) Another critical theorist who deserves to be invited to this rumble is Roger Simon, unfortunately so unfairly ignored in much of the critical contemporary literature. Simon (1992) was quite vocal against the deterministic platform of traditional critical approaches claimed for a pedagogy of possibility. Simon (1992, p. 8) expressed his commitment “to help transform oppressive and exploitive social relations [claiming] that peoples dreams [i.e. of the oppressed] are situated in specific social relations”. Simon (1992) pushed the debate well beyond the reproduction model, arguing that education and curriculum could not ignore issues of identity that (co)exist in “the pervasive contradiction(s) of living everyday in a society that, though founded on the aspirations of freedom and democracy, continues to reproduce forms of dominance and injustice”. Together with Giroux and Simon (1998, p. 142) claimed that “curriculum study and teaching was something cetral to the practice of cultural politics”. 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 (2010) saw that as the clear, straightforward incapability of some critical scholars to understand the importance of understanding 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 achieve just by looking to the bellybutton of critical pedagogy, 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 be more precise, while critical educators understood that ‘the colonized were conceived to be out of history (ahistorical, or primitive), out of the borders of Europe as well as, in some cases, beyond the borders of the generally known world until then’ (Maldonado Torres, Chapter 7), the fact is that they fail to examine that the battle against such ‘historicity’ could not be successful by working only within specific Western epistemological frameworks. To avoid this, counter-functionalism functionalist 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 the one hand, it is against functionalists in which the counter-hegemonic 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

Struggle Towards a Critical River  23 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 I was able to examine in Conflicts in Curriculum Theory (2011a; 2014), to begin from the beginning implies totalitarianism still to confront the Cartesian model of modernity. This is, indeed, the great challenge, a challenge that the contributors of this volume attempt to address. 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. As a process of legitimation based on consent, ideology is profoundly connected with the complex power relations and structures. Quite instrumental within all hegemonic wrangles, ideology is so implicated in the way individuals think that they act socially in neutral way, with no direct or indirect influence in some of the most crucial social sagas, such as inequality and poverty. For instance, Massachusetts has begun the new teacher evaluation system in which a student sees the principal parading around with an iPad and all state of the art technology devices to monitor and evaluate teachers, yet s/he has to read from books that have no covers and are missing pages (imagine studying from a book and missing 20 pages); such connections are not that subtle. Or imagine, during the administration of a high-stakes test required for graduation in Massachusetts, teachers couldn’t even give kids complete dictionaries, so, if a kid needed particular words, the teacher needed to find the dictionary that had it, 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 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 intellectual journey; that is, their voyage did not remain fixed in the reproductive approach towards 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 Gore (1993); Watkins (1993); Pedroni (2002);

24  João M. Paraskeva Paraskeva (2006a, 2006b, 2007); Macedo and Frangella (2007); Lopes (2007); Baker (2009); Quantz (2011); Au (2012); Andreotti (2011); Cho (2013); (Brown & Au, 2014) and others reinforce the pain. 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 post-structural 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” (pp. 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 post-structural, 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 (2009) 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 (cf. 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 et al., 2007; Veiga Neto et al., 2007; Vieira, Moreira, Klein, & Garcia, 2007). These scholars argue that the issue clearly is not about claiming a particular fixed critical or post-structural posture or assuming a kind of mixed position, but about a move from the critical to the post-critical or the post-structural perspectives. The 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 an 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

Struggle Towards a Critical River  25 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 fixities; 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, 2011c, 2014), where I argued for the need for an Itinerant Curriculum Theory(ist) (ICT), a framework that I examined in great detail in Conflicts in Curriculum Theory (Paraskeva, 2011c, 2014). Conceptualizing it 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. ICT addresses also for example, if I may, Morrison’s ‘decolonial rationale’, one which ‘seeks to rewrite the novel, to ransack its visible structures and latent myths to activate new memories, new personas, new possibilities, and to put into play the concerns and dilemmas of those displaced to the outer limits of Eurocentric letters’ (McCarthy, Patel & Sanya, chapter 10). Moreover, how ‘non-existent’ subjects, to rely on Sousa Santos concept, ‘see themselves as writing one book- the book of counter-memory and its reply to the ‘English Book’, the book of authorial plenitude and completeness’ (McCarthy, Patel & Sanya, chapter 10). Needless to say that ICT, as McCarthy, Patel & Sanya’s (Chapter 10) approach helps us understand, is ‘neither straightforward nor monolithic. The position of oppositionality of the subaltern writer is fraught with nonsynchronous or contradictory interests, needs, and desires arising from dominant and subordinate communities that encroach on passions, sensibilities and commitments’. 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, Sgarbi, Passos, & Caputo, 2007), but also—and

26  João M. Paraskeva 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 ILEP—a program of the Bureau of Educational and Cultural Affairs of the U.S. Department of State. ILEP is in affiliation with IREX that has its own interesting list of sponsors, including the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. Ball’s (2012) recent insightful examination of the mudded avenues of philanthropies and education gives credibility to our claim. Popkewitz (2001) did not minimize the strategies used in the production of reason and social progress, stating that “modern empirical methods in 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: “Since 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). 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 counter-hegemonic 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 post-structural theories, Au (2012, p. 9) 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. Another great contribution to address the shortcomings of the critical terrain was made by a leading contemporary curriculum scholar who 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 financialization and culturalization of capital), but he also discloses the non-monolithic idiosyncrasies of Black curriculum matrix. 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

Struggle Towards a Critical River  27 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 mother land, and a cultural revolution that will lead to change). Admitting curriculum as ‘currere’, Taliaferro Baszile (2010) sharply and without any euphemisms, argued for autobiography as a counter-history, or history proper, claiming for a critical race currere, thus echoing McCarthy (1988); Ladson Billings and Tate (1995), among others, challenge against the condition of race within the field. Clearly critical theorists and educators were struggling with the inner contradictions within their own terrains. In a major blast to which the field did not pay close attention, Sousa Santos (1999), in a piece that we will dissect in great detail in other context, examined why it is so difficult to build a critical theory. In his words “in a world where there is so much to criticize, why has it become so difficult to produce a critical theory?” (Sousa Santos, 1999, p. 197). Critical theory, Sousa Santos (1999, p. 201) argues, among several issues, erroneously, perceived “society as a totality and, as such, proposes a total alternative to the society that exists”. Sousa Santos (1999, p. 202) claims, “there is no single principle of social transformation, and even those who continue to believe in a future socialist see it as a possible future in competition with alternative futures. There are no unique historical agents or a unique form of domination”. The history of education and its curriculum theory and development since its emergence in the West in general and in the U.S. in particular, is also the history of the capitalist system, that is, an 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 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

28  João M. Paraskeva 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 Policies (RTTT), it would be easy to admit that RTTT is just NCLB on steroids. Before we move on with 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 (TPA) 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 doesn’t 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 cloak of rationality. What the dominant hegemonic eugenic pedagogic tradition wants is a lean, mean, and packageable pedagogic environment, not something that pays serious attention to what is naturally messy, spontaneous, unpredictable, non-technical. 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, and the socalled Bakhtian 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, 1990; Giroux, 1981, 1992) and to understanding multifaceted

Struggle Towards a Critical River  29 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 Bakhtian 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 Bakhtin (1973) states, the human being always has “something that only [s/he] 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

30  João M. Paraskeva 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[, since 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, 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 are 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); fifth, the focus on the micro level “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); finally 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”. If the contradictions within the

Struggle Towards a Critical River  31 critical curriculum river were latent before the emergence of globalization, they became much more exposed and impossible to conceal with globalization. As Torres Santome (Chapter 8) explains, with globalization, despite its nefarious consequences, it is undeniable that ‘traditional subjects into which knowledge has hitherto been organized are becoming increasingly fuzzy, if not totally obsolete’. More recently, Darder, Mayo, and Paraskeva (2016) argue for the need to push the debates beyond the North American epistemological terrain. As they (2016, p. 2) claiming for the need to “interrupt an unintentional fallacy of a U.S. driven critical pedagogical canon”. That is, the future of such new itinerant position implies, to admit that, in a way, critical theories were (un)intentionally fuelling what Sousa Santos (2007) denounces as ‘abyssal thinking’. That is, Modern Western thinking is an abyssal thinking. 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. (Sousa Santos, 2007, p. 45) Such ‘non-existence, non-dialectical and invisibility’ is produced, reproduced, and legitimate in every classroom not just through the curriculum teacher proof materials and teacher education certified programs, although these constitute important components. The very dominant and counterdominant curriculum theories, since the emergence of the field as ‘a field of study’, also help perpetuated the institutionalization of such lines, coining its legitimacy under a concrete specificity of science. In a way, while traditional curriculum theory and development forms certified such ‘abyssal line(s)’, by producing, reproducing, and legitimizing the invisibilities and non-­ existencies denounced by Sousa Santos (2007, p. 45), the truth of the matter is that specific counter-dominant curriculum theoretical forms, despite some noteworthy achievements, were unable to avoid perpetuating such ‘abyssal lines and thinking’ (Sousa Santos, 2007, p. 45). For example, by organizing a counterattack on dominant traditions, most critical perspectives fail

32  João M. Paraskeva to pay attention that ‘critical theory and pedagogy itself’ needed to understand, for example, what Henry and Grosfoguel insightfully examine in their chapters here. That is, critical pedagogies for too long misread the importance of understanding, how the hegemonic forces were able to produce a ‘particularization of a universal reason that simultaneously produced the universalization of the European subject as its science and phenomenology’ (Henry, Chapter 5). That is critical pedagogies fail to fully unpack ‘the Western geography of reason’ so invigorated by the works of intellectuals such as Hegel, Kant, Husserl, and Weber (Henry, Chapter 5). In fact, as Grosfoguel argues in his chapter, if one pays attention to Kan’s anthropological works, one clearly perceives that ‘for Kant transcendental reason’ is predominantly male, white, and European and that African, Indigenous Asian, and Southern European (Spanish, Italian, and Portuguese) men and all women (including Europeans) do not have the same access to ‘reason’. Kellner (1989, p. 4) laudably identifies the paradox when he claims that critical theory “provides its own and specific theory and critique of modernity”. In weaving such matrix, critical intellectuals provided a “social and historical theory” (Kellner, 1989, p. 8) that however powerful and nonunified ended up eventually spreading its tentacles by relying only on Western epistemological frameworks. It goes without saying that I am not here to try to destroy or ignore the gains and advances conquered by theory and critical pedagogy. Nor is that the intention of the decolonial movement. What the decolonial and anti-colonial approach offers us is that it meets the needs and ‘organic faults’ exposed by critical theory in the process of understanding reality. That is while on one hand counter-dominant and counter-hegemonic approaches were able to champion and coin the field politically, by denouncing curriculum as a social classed, gendered, and raced artifact intertwined with economic, cultural, and political dynamics that blatantly produce and reproduce inequality. On the other hand, such radical critical and in many cases progressive approaches ignored that their criticism of the dominant curricular mechanisms rested solely and only on a Western epistemological framework—paradoxically the same on which the model they criticized was based. In doing so, clearly, and here the argument of Sousa Santos (2007) gains prominent significance, they have simultaneously reinforced the idea of invisibility of an entire epistemological framework beyond the Western epistemological territory and have ended up legitimizing an abyssal thought. In an odd—in many cases unconscious—way, certain critical curriculum avenues, to rely Sousa Santos’s (2007) approach, are in themselves abyssal. It is actually in this context that the work of Sousa Santos, and other leading critical decolonial intellectuals, such as Mignolo, Escobar, Galeano, Dussel, among others, gains momentum within the anemic critical space of curriculum studies. To be more precise, approaches edified by Sousa Santos and others, such as Paget Henry, Ramon Grosfoguel, and Nelson Maldonado Torres, are not crucial just because they brought a transformative language to our field, although this is a very rich contribution, and so we

Struggle Towards a Critical River  33 should swim in such new radical semanticist framework. What makes such approaches crucial for the future of our field is that they indeed help us to dismantle and resolve some contradictions within critical curricular theory, the greatest of which is undoubtedly the way in which the debate about the curriculum relevance was doomed to fail since its inception. It is obvious that I am not dilapidating the great achievements of specific approaches put forward by intellectuals like Bu Bois, Washington, Counts, Rugg, Bode, Huebner, Greene, Apple, Giroux, and Pinar, among others. What I am claiming is that the work of Sousa Santos and others helps to solve many of the problems these approaches were unable even to realize they existed. It is in this sense that I understand the contribution of the authors of this volume. Working on distinct theoretical perspectives, they allow us not only to improve and revise the critical theoretical framework but also to introduce into the critical curriculum debate—specially within what I called critical curriculum river (Paraskeva, 2011c, 2014, 2016a)—a powerful and different framework of analysis that goes far beyond denunciation. In fact, the works of Boaventura de Sousa Santos, Paget Henry, Ramon Grosfoguel, Nelson Maldonado Toress, Donaldo Macedo, Vasessa Andreotti, Camerin McCarthy, and Jurjo Torres Santome announces different and robust avenues within and beyond the Western epistemological yarn; in so doing, they help us to better understand how the curriculum field has ‘its hands smeared with blood’ in what Sousa Santos indentifies as ‘the epistemicide’, as well as unpack ways to confront the present and future challenges, also solving certain ‘theoretical embarrassments’. As contributors of this volume argue, critical thinking and pedagogies from a Marxist/neo-Marxist perspective, despite a notorious challenge against the hegemonic dominant traditions, are in the face of a major yet inevitable challenge: the need to decolonize. The approaches of these intellectuals reinforce in all of us what Eagleton (2015) in another context defined by ‘hope without optimism’. My claim is that the present and the future of the curriculum field is one of hope without optimism. Eagleton (2015) places both optimism and pessimism into the swamp of irrationality, thus dangerous. While the current social and economic events of late capitalism push right and left advocates to fall in such swamps, the fact is that, Eagleton (2015) states, radical progressive forces should rather be sentient of the importance of hope that will allow us to focus on the important battles we have before us. I am not saying here that we are facing the last theoretical moment. What I am claiming is that if, on the one hand, the future of the curriculum field has to go far beyond these approaches—why do they even allow it. On the other hand, it cannot avoid going through them.

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 greatly

34  João M. Paraskeva (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 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, the other with post-structural impulses. Drawing from Young (2001) and Spivak (1990), Andreotti’s 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 post-structuralist, postmodernist, and Marxist theories, Andreotti laudably reemphasizes the “indispensable and inadequate” character of Marxism and post-structuralism. 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, 2011c, 2014). As she claims in her chapter, critical pedagogies are in a deficit of theoretical coherence, one that needs to be sentient that ‘the righting of wrongs in the world through education requires us to think about the connections between “rights” and “wrongs” in a very different way. Perhaps a starting point is a shift in the understanding of knowledge from “knowledge versus ignorance” towards “every knowledge is also an ignorance” (of other knowledges)’. As I claimed elsewhere (2011a, 2014, 2016) and as this volume attempts to show, 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 post-structural

Struggle Towards a Critical River  35 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 Carnoy (1972); Young (1971); Dale (1977); Dale, Esland, and MacDonald (1982); Young and Whitty (1977); Whitty (1985); Bernstein (1977); and Bourdieu (1971). 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, 2014). 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 (see Sousa Santos, 2009, 2014). He argues Espistemicide is the murder of knowledge. Unequal exchanges among cultures have always implied the death of the knowledge of the subordinated culture, hence the death of subordinated groups that possessed it. In the most extreme cases, such as the European expansion, espistemicide was one the conditions of the genocide. The lost of epistemological confidence that currently afflicts modern science has facilitated the identification of the scope and gravity of the epistemicides perpetrated by hegemonic Eurocentric modernity. (Sousa Santos, 2014, p. 92) Thus as Sousa Santos (2014, p. 153) adds “is not an epistemological artifact without consequences” That is, “it involves the destruction of social practices and the disqualification of social agents that operate according to such knowledge’s”. One needs first to assume consciously, following Sousa Santos, Nunes, and Meneses (2007) 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 knowledge within and beyond the Western space. The “denial of diversity” they (2007, p. xxxiii) argue, “is a constitutive and a persistent feature of colonialism” (Sousa Santos, Nunes, & Meneses, 2007, p. xxxiii). They argue (2007, p. xxxi) that Epistemological diversity is neither the simple reflection nor epiphenomenon of ontological diversity or heterogeneity nor a range of culturally specific ways of expressing a fundamentally unified world. There is no essential definite way of describing, ordering, and classifying processes, entities and relationships in the world. The very action of knowing, as pragmatist philosophers have repeatedly reminded us, is an intervention

36  João M. Paraskeva in the world which places us within it as active contributors to its making. Different modes of knowing, being irremediably partial and situated, will have different consequences and effects on the world. 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’ (Sousa Santos, Nunes, & Meneses, 2007; Sousa Santos, 1997, 2007, 2009, 2014). 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’ (Sousa Santos, Nunes, & Meneses, 2007; Sousa Santos, 2004, 2005, 2007, 2014) 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 de-construct the current segregated society and re-construct a new societal framework based on the common good with all. It is critically transformative. Like Gore (1993), we don’t 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 we will see, 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 fuelled by egos that have been permeating the field and forcing it into what might be called its second moribund stage. Pinar (2012, p. 7) 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. That is, Pinar (2012) adds, “power, identity and discourse are no longer conceptual innovations or provocations precisely due to their takenfor-­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, p. 273) claims, as “social sciences researchers must acknowledge the colonizing impact of traditional social science research language and methodology (. . .) which have often perpetuate elitist, authoritarian, fragmented, and hence disempowering notions of poverty”.

Struggle Towards a Critical River  37 So far, we exposed some of the main arguments designed by a group of intellectuals engaged in what I have called critical progressive curriculum river (Paraskeva, 2011a, 2011c, 2014). We noted how this group of intellectuals working in the critical river, introduced in the field important concepts, such as hegemony, ideology, common sense, reproduction, resistance, hidden curriculum, conflict vs. consensus, as a way to challenge the reductive deterministic and functionalist nature of the dominant curriculum tradition. We argued, however, 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. We discuss 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 counter-functionalist functionalist and failing to solve explicit theoretical reductionisms and determinisms. However, we also highlight how certain intellectuals within such a critical river explicitly consciously assumed the ineffectiveness of the traditional critical model and sought new approaches to strengthen the political analysis of the field—although just within the Eurocentric platform. Despite being counter-functionalist functionalists, 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, as Sousa Santos (2007) claims, thus inclusive of non-Western epistemes—a decolonial struggle. Drawing on Sousa Santos and other decolonial thinkers, we argue 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, white-male, Christian, blue-eyes heterosexual cultural terrain, but also producing other epistemologies as non-existent (Sousa Santos, 2007). 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 student voice in practices and structures, they value (or use) students’ voice in their research as well and not just speaking for the students through their ‘observations’. Ellsworth (1989) argues that certain Western epistemological

38  João M. Paraskeva spheres, such as literary criticism, cultural studies, post-structuralism, feminist studies, and media studies, engaged in a struggle for an ideal 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 monolithical 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—as Sousa Santos (2014) argues—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 de-colonial 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, p. 2) 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”. Such decolonial move as Maldonado Torres (Chapter 7) examines ‘does not refer to a single theoretical school, but rather points to a family of diverse positions that share a view of coloniality as a fundamental problem in the modern (as well as postmodern and information) age, and of decolonization or decoloniality as a necessary task that remains unfinished’. However, as he argues ‘while there is not a single canon, movement, or path that defines once and for all what is decoloniality, there is a shared skepticism towards dehumanizing forms of thinking that present themselves as natural or divine’. As I was able to examine in great detail elsewhere (Paraskeva, 2016a, 2016b), African and Arab epistemological strength precedes Western epistemological framework as we know; we claim that African and Arab 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 as the only one. It goes without saying that schools and curriculum are not innocent devices in such espistemicides (see Sousa Santos, 2014). Curriculum is one of the incubators (if not the most important) of what Sousa Santos (2014) defines as the epistemicide. Curriculum, the way we know, it is a crucial piece in such epistemicide. It functions as an ideological matrix that solidifies, perpetuates, and legitimizes such epistemicide. Ellsworth (1989) adds to this, quoting Walkerdine: “Schools have participated in producing ‘self-regulating’ 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 globalization’s fundamentalisms, Baker (2009) also 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

Struggle Towards a Critical River  39 Munslow (2006) 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”. Contributors of this volume give credibility to Sousa Santos’s (2005, 2014) claim, that the diversity of the world is so immaculately infinite that no single unified theory or praxis can grasp; one needs to understand the Western epistemological legacy as profoundly connected in what some decolonial intellectuals call the coloniality of powers and beings, which is profoundly important to understand what we previously examined drawing from Sousa Santos (2014), as curriculum epistemicides. Welcome to the decolonial momentum— a momentum so insightfully examined by the contributors of this volume. I am not claiming that we are facing the last theoretical momentum. What I am arguing is that if, on the one hand, the future of the curriculum field has to go far beyond these approaches—and they helps hus great deal on that process—on the other hand, it can not avoid going through them. Such process of ‘going through them’ is, Sousa Santos, Nunes, and Meneses (2007, p. ix) claim, “the challenge facing critical theory and new emancipatory practices”. Such challenge, to recapture, Eagleton’s (2015) motto, is one of hope about the possibility of an “alternative epistemology” by “replacing the monocultuere of knowledge by an ecology of knowledges” (Sousa Santos, Nunes, & Meneses (2007, p. xx). In Chapter 2, Beyond the Politics of the Big Lie: The Education Deficit and the New Authoritarianism Henry Giroux examines the very core of neoliberal common-sense, as well as how it functions as a form of cultural politics and public pedagogy to win various degrees of consent, especially as it bears down on and works through myriad aspects of everyday life. Giroux not only denounces the politics of disposability and the demise of the state as a consequence of neoliberal governance, but also challenges us to think democracy beyond the capitalist framework in which epistemological diversity plays a key role. Giroux examines how anti-intellectual intellectualism colonizes the field and civil society in general, and how such anti-intellectualism sets the tone for eugenic processes of demonization and distraction, which are the very core of neoliberal conservative restoration, thus weakening democracy as a just way of living and thinking. In Chapter 3, A Non-Occidentalist West? Learned Ignorance and Ecology of Knowledge, Boaventura de Sousa Santos claims the existence of an endless multiplicity of epistemological spaces to argue for a non-­Occidentalist West ‘one of Jack Goody’s major contributions for our time’ that defies the eugenic cult of Western uniqueness and superiority. Without any euphemisms, Sousa Santos challenges the lethal, and ‘apparently unshakable’ hegemonic conception of the history of the ‘West and the Rest’. In so doing the author argues how specific conceptions, theoretical frameworks ‘thought produced in the West’ have been systematically marginalized or even ‘produced as nonexistent’ since they at odds with very marrow of Western modernity, that is

40  João M. Paraskeva capitalism and colonialism. Sousa Santos emphasizes the approaches of what he called ‘three eccentric figures—Lucian of Samosata, Nicholas of Cusa and Blaise Pascal—as powerful frameworks to help us edify a ‘non-capitalist, noncolonialist inter-cultural dialogue’. The author produces a clear call against epistemological fascism and ways of destroying it. Donaldo Macedo, in Chapter 4, The Hegemony of English Language, unveils the English language as a product of colonialism, but also the most powerful ideological device of cultural, economic, and political control. Macedo examines how the neoliberal ideology of globalization promotes dominating language policies and its lethal impact in school curriculum. In the West in general and in the US and Europe in particular, these policies lead to epistemological, linguistic, and cultural discrimination, as well as economic inequality while, worldwide, they aim to stamp out a greater use and participation of national and subordinate languages in world commerce and in international organizations such as the European Union. Democracy, social justice, and equality in schools and curriculum demands for epistemological justice and calls for broad, multiethnic participation, and the authors point us towards more effective approaches in an increasingly interconnected world. In Chapter 5, Paget Henry examines Africana Phenomenology. Henry fills an important intellectual void, unveiling towering arguments regarding the affirmation of the Afro-Caribbean philosophy as a powerful field of study. Henry not only challenges how particular official Western grand narratives haven been neglecting the importance of such influential epistemological terrain but also unveils the importance of Africana philosophy or philosophies in the construction of Western reasoning and its crucial significance for the creation of democracy and the democratic institutions in the so-called modern world. In so doing, Henry goes beyond a pale criticism of Western eugenic epistemologies and examines the importance of Africana philosophical consciousness in the struggle for social and cognitive justice. In Chapter 6, De-Colonizing Western Universalisms. Decolonial Pluriversalism from Aime Cesaire to the Zapatistas, Ramon Grosfoguel discusses the concept of the “Universal” within the Western philosophical tradition and proposes another, more decolonial way of thinking universality through the thought of Aimé Césaire, Enrique Dussel, and the Zapatistas. The first part examines the concept of the “Universal” from René Descartes to Karl Marx, while the second focuses on Aimé Césaire’s formulation of the concept, proposed from an Afro-Caribbean decolonial perspective. The third part analyzes the concept of transmodernity proposed by Enrique Dussel, and the fourth discusses the difference between postmodernity and transmodernity, using as an example the postmodern understanding of hegemony proposed by Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe, as well as the transmodern understanding of politics proposed by the Zapatistas in the “Other Campaign”. In Chapter 7, Against Coloniality: On the Meaning and Significance of the Decolonial Turn, Nelson Maldonado-Torres examines how a ‘specific system and worldview that started to become dominant in the context of

Struggle Towards a Critical River  41 the “discovery” and conquest of the Americas’ needed to be framed ‘reductively’ as colonialism, ‘understood as a political or cultural condition, but coloniality conceived as a matrix of knowledge, power, and being to which one can refer to as modernity/coloniality’. Drawing on intellectuals such as Mignolo, Quijano, Wallerstein, Dussell and others, Maldonado Torres ‘provides an account of modernity/coloniality as a catastrophe, or “down turn,” that fundamentally altered basic coordinates of being, power, and knowledge’. Moreover, the chapter unpacks how decolonial thinking ‘has existed since the very inception of modern forms of colonization—that is, since at least the late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries—and, to that extent, a certain decolonial turn has existed as well, but the more massive and possibly more profound shift away from modernization towards decoloniality as an unfinished project took place in the twentieth century and is still unfolding now’. Maldonado Torres argues that the crucial decolonial turn cannot be reduced to a single theoretical avenue; quite the opposite, it represents multifarious points of departure and outcomes perpetually unfinished. As the chapter dissects, the decolonial posture implies an open war to any for of cannon. Maldonado Torres insightfully argues that while wars for recognition, distribution, identity, and liberation are crucial, they will become inconsequential if they neglect the importance of epistemic decolonization. In the next chapter, Curriculum reforms as hostile to the Arts and the Humanities: Neoliberalism and Citizenship, Jurjo Torres Santomé examines how educational policies are founded on proposals aimed at influencing the construction of an ideal future society, as envisioned via particular ideological and political persuasions. Since the last third of the 20th century, educational systems have all too often undergone transformations. A prime example can be found in the numerous educational reforms beginning in Spain in the early 1970s and continuing into the present. Oftentimes, such reforms mask hidden agendas and intentions that government agents prefer not to acknowledge publicly. Nonetheless, the true reasons behind, and the effects of, such reforms are very directly apparent in the resources administrations allocate for their implementation; in the introduction or reinforcement of new subjects and contents; in the changes made to teacher education models; in the support and cooperation networks available to teaching staff; or in new functions assigned to school leadership teams and educational inspection services. The future of democratic societies depends upon educational systems that are both public and democratic. Yet rarely do business and financial interests include supporting educational systems designed to strengthen democracy, to produce critical, democratic, responsible, and solidary citizens. Vanessa Andreotti in Chapter 9, Theorizing hegemonies and resistances: mapping theoretical tensions, practical contradictions and cultural conundrums, draws on de-colonial, postcolonial, and post-­structuralist studies, to examine visual metaphors and to suggest different ways of articulating and analyzing difficult tensions in (meta) theorizing hegemonies and resistances in educational work. The first metaphor presents

42  João M. Paraskeva different approaches to modernity, its ‘darker side’ (Mignolo, 2002) and the challenges of moving debates beyond hegemonic, ethnocentric, ahistorical, depoliticized, salvationist, uncomplicated, and paternalistic historical patterns of engagement with ‘the Other of Western humanism’ (Gandhi, 1998). The second metaphor evokes visual symbols of the Occupy and World Social Forum movements to problematize homogenizing tendencies in theorizations of hegemonies and resistances at work in social and educational activism. The third metaphor contrasts competing educational agendas concerned with co-existence that emphasize institutional compliance through policy implementation (e.g., human rights) or existential approaches to plurality (e.g., radical relationality). This work is based on recurrent dilemmas and conundrums that I have encountered when wrestling with theoretical coherence in the interface between cultural studies, teacher education, policymaking, NGO involvement, and activist work. In the next chapter, Contesting the Hypocrisy of Completeness: Toni Morrison and the Conception of the Other, Cameron McCarthy, Ergin Bulut, Brett Garvin Grant, and Rushika Pate argue how many critics writing on the work of Toni Morrison continue to locate her work within a constricted frame of reference and place, that is, largely within the ethnocentric spatial limits of the United States and specifically as speaking only to the existential realities of the African-American community. These symbolic moves when initiated by radical critics are most likely informed by a desire to identify and accentuate the specificity and autonomy of black aesthetics. This chapter, Cameron McCarthy and his colleagues will pursue the topic of hibridity as it is articulated in her work. We will, where appropriate, draw attention to connections between Morrison’s work and that of African, Caribbean, and Latin American modernist/postmodernist writers, many of whom, like Wilson Harris of Guyana or Bessie Head of South Africa, see themselves as writing one book—the book of counter-memory and its reply to the “­English Book,” the book of authorial plenitude and completeness.

Notes 1 I made a distinction between “curriculists” and “curricologus”. Please see João Paraskeva, Dwayne Huebner: Mythography of Curriculum Approach— Acknowledgements and Challenges (Porto: Didáctica, 2005). 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

Struggle Towards a Critical River  43 through names that enable us to label people as being “Hispanic,” and the term “Hispanic” itself denotes the colonial power/oppression of the Americas. However, Horne doesn’t 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 doesn’t understand the histories of these ethnicities, which he claims to be 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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Struggle Towards a Critical River  47 McCarthy, C. (1998) The Uses of Culture. 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) School as a Ritual Performance. New York: Routledge. McLure, H. and Fisher, G. (1969) Ideology and Opinion Making, General Problems of Analysis. Columbia University: Bureau of Applied Social Research. Paraskeva, J. (2001) As Dinâmicas dos Conflitos Ideológicos e Culturais na Fundamentação do Currículo. Porto: ASA. ———. (2004) Here I Stand: A Long (R)evolution: Michael Apple and Critical Progressive Tradition. Minho: University of Braga. ———. (2006a) “Desterritorializar a Teoria Curricular.” Papeles de Trabajo sobre Cultura, Educación y Desarrollo Humano, 2 (1). Retrieved www.doaj.org/doaj ———. (2006b) “Desterritorializar a Teoria Curricular.” In J. Paraskeva (org) Currículo e Multiculturalismo. Lisboa: Edicoes Pedago, pp. 169–204. ———. (2007) “Continuidades e Descontinuidades e Silêncios: Por uma Desterritorialização da Teoria Curricular.” In Associação Nacional de Pós-Graduação e Pesquisa em Educação, (ANPEd). Caxambu: Brasil. ———. (2008) “Por uma Teoria Curricular Itinerante.” In J. Paraskeva (org) Discursos Curriculares Contemporaneos. Lisboa: Edicoes Pedago, pp. 7–21. ———. (2011a) Nova Teoria Curricular. Lisboa: Edicoes Pedago. ———. (2011b) Desafiando os Slogans Educacionais: Itinerarios. Portugal: Edicoes Pedago. ———. (2011c) Conflicts in Curriculum Theory: Challenging Hegemonic Epistemologies. New York: Palgrave. ———. (2014) Conflicts in Curriculum Theory: Challenging Hegemonic Epistemologies. New York: Palgrave (upgraded paper back edition). ———. (2016a) Curriculum Epistemicides. New York: Routledge. ———. (2016b) “Opening up Curriculum Canon to Democratize Democracy.” In J. Paraskeva and S. Steinberg (Eds.) The Curriculum. New York: Peter Lang. 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. Perelman, M. (2000) The Invention of Capitalism: Classical Political Economy and the Secret History of Primitive Accumulation. Durham: Duke University Press. 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. (1974) (ed) Heightened Consciousness, Cultural Revolution and Curriculum Theory: Proceedings of the Rochester Conference. California: McCutchan Publishing Corporation. ———. (1975) Curriculum Theorizing: The Reconceptualists. Berkeley: McCutchan Publishing Corporation. ———. (1979) “What Is Reconceptualization?” Journal of Curriculum Theorizing, 1 (1), pp. 93–104. ———. (1980) “Life History and Educational Experience.” Journal of Curriculum Theorizing, 2 (2), pp. 159–202.

48  João M. Paraskeva ———. (2004) What Is Curriculum Theory. Mahwah: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates Publishers. ———. (2012) Curriculum Studies in the United States: Present Circumstances Intellectual Histories. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Pinar, W. and Grumet, M. (1976) Toward a Poor Curriculum. Dubuque: Kendall/ Hunt. ———. (1981) Towards a Poor Curriculum. Dubuque: Kendal/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. 241–266. Quantz, R. (2011) Rituals and Student Identity in Education: Ritual Critique for a New Pedagogy. New York: Palgrave. Rosa, M. et al. (2007) Narrar Currículos: Inventando Tessituras Metodológicas: Associação Nacional de Pós-Graduação e Pesquisa em Educação: Grupo de Trabalho Curriculo: Trabalho Encomendado. Caxambu: Brasil. Sassen, S. (2004) “Space and Power.” In Nicholas Gane (Ed.) The Future of Social Theory. London: Continuum, pp. 125–142. Sassoon, A. (1982) Approaches to Gramsci. London: Writers and Readers. Schubert, W. (1986) Curriculum: Perspective, Paradigm and Possibility. New York: MacMillan Publishing Company. ———. (2008) “Curriculum Inquiry.” In F. M. Connelly (Ed.) The Sage Handbook of Curriculum and Instruction. Los Angeles: SAGE, pp. 391–419. Selden, S. (2000) “Eugenics and the Social Construction of Merit, Race and Disability.” Journal of Curriculum Studies, 32 (2), pp. 235–252. Simon, R. (1992) Against the Grain: Texts for a Pedagogy of Possibility. New York: Bergin and Garvey. Sousa Santos, B. (1997) Um Discurso sobre as Ciencias. Porto: Afrontamento. ———. (1999) “Porque é tão difícil construir uma teoria crítica?” Revista Crítica de Ciencias Sociais, 54, Junho, pp. 197–215. ———. (2004) A Gramatica do Tempo. Porto: Afrontamento. ———. (2005) Democratizing Democracy: Beyond the Liberal Democratic Cannon. London: Verso. ———. (2007) “Beyond Abyssal Thinking: Fom Global Lines to the Ecologies of Knowledges.” Review, XXX (1), pp. 45–89. ———. (2009) Epistemologias do Sul. Coimbra: Almedina. ———. (2014) Epistemologies from the South. Boulder: Paradigm. 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. Spivak, 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 Ellisonian Eyes, What Is Curriculum Theory?” In E. Malewski (Ed.) Curricuoum Studies Handbook: The Nest Momentum. New York: Routledge, pp. 483–495. Veiga Neto, A. et al. (2007) Grupo de Estudos e Pesquisas em Curriculo e Pos-Modernidade: Universidade Luterana do Brasil (ULBRA) e à Universidade Federal do

Struggle Towards a Critical River  49 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 Meto­ dologico das Pesquisas sobre Currículo: Associação Nacional de Pós-­Graduação e Pesquisa em Educação: Grupo de Trabalho Curriculo: Trabalho Encomendado. Caxambu: Brasil. Walberg, H. (2013) Education and Capitalism: How Overcoming Our Fear of Markets and Economics Can Improve America’s Schools. Washington: Hoover Institution. 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. Watkins, W. (1993) “Black Curriculum Orientations, a Preliminary Approach.” Harvard Educational Review, 63 (3), pp. 321–339. ———. (2001) The White Architects of Black Education. New York: Teachers College Press. ———. (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. 158–167. Wexler, Ph. (1976) The Sociology of Education: Beyond Inequality. Indianapolis: The Bobbs-Merrill Company, Inc. ———. (1987) Social Analysis of Culture: After the New Sociology. Boston: Routledge and Kegan and Paul, p. 127. Whitty, G. (1985) Sociology and School Knowledge. London: Methuen and Co. Ltd. Willis, P. (1977) Learning to Labour. Farnborough: Saxon House. Wraga, W. and Hlebowitsh, P. (2003) “Commentary: Conversation, Collaboration, and Community in the US Curriculum Field.” Journal of Curriculum Studies, 35 (4), pp. 453–457. 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, R. (2001) Postcolonialism. A Historic Introduction. Oxford: Blackwell. Young, M. and Whitty, G. (1977) Society, State and Schooling. London: The Falmer Press. Zinn, H. (1980) People’s History of the United States. New York: Harper Colllins. Žižek, S. (2006) Bem-Vindo ao Deserto do Real. Lisboa: Relogio D’Agua. ———. (2009, May–June). “How to Begin from the Beginning.” New Left Review, 57, pp. 43–55. ———. (2012) The Year of Dreaming Dangerously. London: Verso.

2 Beyond the Politics of the Big Lie The Education Deficit and the New Authoritarianism Henry Giroux

Mcmaster University

Nothing in the world is more dangerous than sincere ignorance and conscientious stupidity Martin Luther King Jr.

The US public is suffering from an education deficit. By this I mean it exhibits a growing inability to think critically, question authority, be reflective, weigh evidence, discriminate between reasoned arguments and opinions, listen across differences and engage the mutually informing relationship between private problems and broader public issues. This growing political and cultural illiteracy is not merely a problem of the individual, one that points to simple ignorance. It is a collective and social problem that goes to the heart of the increasing attack on democratic public spheres and supportive public institutions that promote analytical capacities, thoughtful exchange and a willingness to view knowledge as a resource for informed modes of individual and social agency. One of the major consequences of the current education deficit and the pervasive culture of illiteracy that sustains it is what I call the ideology of the big lie—which propagates the myth that the free-market system is the only mechanism to ensure human freedom and safeguard democracy. The education deficit, along with declining levels of civic literacy, is also part of the American public’s collective refusal to know— “a focused resistance on the part of many members of society to deal with knowledge that challenges common sense, or to think reflectively about facts and truths that are unsettling in terms of how they disturb some of our most cherished beliefs, especially those that denounce the sins of big government, legitimize existing levels of economic insecurity, social inequality and reduced or minimal government intervention in the field of welfare legislation” (Judt, 2008, p. 420). The decline of civility and civic literacy in American society is a political dilemma, the social production of which is traceable to a broader constellation of forces deeply rooted in the shifting nature of education and the varied cultural apparatuses that produce it, extending from the new digital technologies and online journals to the mainstream media of

52  Henry Giroux newspapers, magazines and television. Politics is now held hostage to what the late Raymond Williams (1967, p. 15) called the “force of permanent education”, a kind of public pedagogy spread through a plethora of teaching machines that are shaping how our most powerful ideas are formed. For Williams (1967, p. 15), the concept of “permanent education” was a central political insight: What it valuably stresses is the educational force of our whole social and cultural experience. It is therefore concerned, not only with continuing education, of a formal or informal kind, but with what the whole environment, its institutions and relationships, actively and profoundly teaches. . . . [Permanent education also refers to] the field in which our ideas of the world, of ourselves and of our possibilities, are most widely and often most powerfully formed and disseminated. To work for the recovery of control in this field is then, under any pressures, a priority. For who can doubt, looking at television or newspapers, or reading the women’s magazines, that here, centrally, is teaching and teaching financed and distributed in a much larger way than is formal education (Williams, 1967, p. 15). William’s insight about the relationship between education and politics is more important today than it was in the 1960s when he developed the idea. The educational force of the wider culture is now one of the primary, if not most powerful, determinants of what counts as knowledge, agency, politics and democracy itself. The machinery of permanent education and the public pedagogical relationships these create have become the main framing mechanisms in determining what information gets included, who speaks, what stories are told, what representations translate into reality and what is considered normal or subversive. The cultural apparatuses of popular education and public pedagogy play a powerful role in framing how issues are perceived, what values and social relations matter and whether any small ruptures will be allowed to unsettle the circles of certainty that now reign as common sense. But education is never far from the reach of power and ideology. As the major cultural apparatuses and technologies of public pedagogy are concentrated in a few hands, the educational force of the culture becomes a powerful ideological tool for legitimating market-driven values and social relations, based on omissions, deceptions, lies, misrepresentations and falsehoods benefiting the apostles of a range of economic, educational and religious fundamentalisms. For the first time in modern history, centralized commercial institutions that extend from traditional broadcast culture to the new interactive screen cultures—rather than parents, churches or schools—tell most of the stories that shape the lives of the American public. This is no small matter since the stories a society tells about its history, civic life, social relations, education, children and human imagination are a measure of how it values itself, the ideals of democracy and its future. Most of the stories now told to the American public are about the necessity of neoliberal capitalism, permanent

Beyond the Politics of the Big Lie  53 war and the virtues of a never-ending culture of fear. The domestic front revels in the welcome death of the social state, the necessary all-embracing reach of the market to determine every aspect of our lives, the reduction of freedom to the freedom to consume, the pathology of social relations not under the rule of commodities and finance capital and the notion that everyone is ultimately responsible for their own fate in a world that now resembles a shark tank. Democracies need informed citizens to make them work, and they can only survive amid a formative culture that produces individuals willing to think critically, imagine otherwise and act responsibly. America seems to have moved away from that possibility, that willingness to think through and beyond the systemic production of the given, the pull of conformity, the comforting assurance of certainty and the painless retreat into a world of common sense. Hannah Arendt (1970, p. 417) understood the danger of such a state, which she famously called the banality of evil and described as a “curiously quite authentic inability to think”. For Arendt (1970), this was more than mere stupidity; it was a mode of manufactured thoughtlessness that pointed both to the disappearance of politics and constituted one of the most serious threats facing democracy. That threat is no longer merely a despairing element of philosophical reflection—it has become the new reality in American life. The political, economic and social coordinates of authoritarianism are all around us, and through the educational force of the broader culture, they are becoming more normalized and more dangerous. There is little distance between what I am calling an education deficit and the reigning market authoritarianism, with its claim to be both synonymous with democracy and unquestionable in its assumptions and policies. The education deficit, a hallmark achievement of neoliberal capitalism, has produced a version of authoritarianism with a soft edge, a kind of popular authoritarianism that spreads its values through gaming, reality TV, celebrity culture, the daily news, talk radio and a host of other media outlets now aggressively engaged in producing subjects, desires and dreams that reflect a world order dominated by corporations and ‘free markets’. This a world that only values narrow selfish interests, isolated competitive individuals, finance capital, the reign of commodities and the alleged “natural” laws of free-market fundamentalism. This type of turbo capitalism with its crushing cultural apparatuses of legitimation does more than destroy the public good; it empties democracy of any substance and renders authoritarian politics and culture an acceptable state of affairs. As the boundaries between markets and democratic values collapse, civil life becomes warlike and the advocates of market fundamentalism rail against state protections while offering an unbridled confirmation of the market as a template for all social relations. Notwithstanding the appeal to formalistic election rituals, democracy as a substantive mode of public address and politics is all but dead in the United States. The forces of authoritarianism are on the march, and they seem at this point only to be gaining power politically, economically and

54  Henry Giroux educationally. Politicians at every level of government are in collusion with corporate power. Many have been bought by industry lobbyists. This despicable state of affairs was particularly evident in the 2010 elections. Commenting on the colonization of politics by big money in that election, Charles Pierce captures the power dynamic and ideological relations that were in play at that time and have intensified since. He writes: In 2010, in addition to handing the House of Representatives over to a pack of nihilistic vandals, the Koch brothers and the rest of the sugar daddies of the Right poured millions into various state campaigns. This produced a crop of governors and state legislators wholly owned and operated by those corporate interests and utterly unmoored from the constituencies they were elected to serve. In turn, these folks enacted various policies and produced various laws, guaranteed to do nothing except reinforce the power of the people who put them in office (Pierce, 2012). More recently, The New York Times reported that soon after President Obama took office, “he cut a closed-door deal with the powerful pharmaceutical lobby [abandoning] his support for the reimportation of prescription medicines at lower prices” (Baker, 2012). For the Times, this back-door deal signified “to some disillusioned liberal supporters a loss of innocence, or perhaps even the triumph of cynicism” (Baker, 2012). In actuality, it signified a powerful new mode of capitalism that not only controls the commanding heights of the economy but has now also replaced political sovereignty with an aggressive form of corporate governance. The state and elite market forces, perhaps inseparable before, have become today both inseparable and powerfully aligned. From Reagan’s assault on the values of the welfare state to Obama’s bailout of the mega banks and the refusal to end the Bush tax cuts, corporate sovereignty as the pre-eminent mode of US politics is hard to miss. And the surrender of politics to corporate rule and an amalgam of antidemocratic forces is not a one-party affair. As Bill Moyers and Michael Winship (2012) have argued, “since 1979, 377 members of the Forbes 400 list or richest Americans have given almost half a billion dollars to candidates of both parties, most of it in the last decade. The median contribution was $355,100 each.” As is well known, President Clinton implemented deregulation policies that led directly to the economic crisis of 2008, while at the same time enacting welfare reforms that turned a war on poverty into a war on the poor. In fact, the most radical economic measures that Clinton undertook “related to further deregulation of the economy [amounting to] some of the most comprehensive deregulatory reforms of the 20th century” (Steger, 2010, pp. 60–62). Similarly, the Bush tax cuts for the wealthy not only increased the power of mega corporations and financial services to influence policy for the benefit of Wall Street titans and the rich more generally, but also largely punished the middle class and the poor. The Citizens United Supreme Court ruling made especially visible the hidden operations behind contemporary

Beyond the Politics of the Big Lie  55 politics: big money translates into political power. The economist Joseph Stiglitz is correct in insisting that, [we’ve moved from a democracy, which is supposed to be based on one person, one vote, to something much more akin to one dollar, one vote. When you have that kind of democracy, it’s not going to address the real needs of the 99% (Stiglitz in Goodman, 2012). Stiglitz’s point is right in one sense, though the current political system has nothing substantively to do with democracy and everything to do with a new form of authoritarianism shaped by the converging interests of the financial elite, religious fundamentalists, antipublic intellectuals and corporate political powerbrokers. This new mode of authoritarian governance is distinct from the fascism that emerged in Germany and Italy in the mid part of the twentieth century. As Sheldon Wolin has pointed out, big business in this new mode of authoritarianism is not subordinated to a political regime and the forces of state sovereignty, but now replaces political sovereignty with corporate rule. In addition, the new authoritarianism does not strive to give the masses a sense of collective power and strength, [but] promotes a sense of weakness, of collective futility [through] a pervasive atmosphere of fear abetted by a corporate economy of ruthless downsizing, withdrawal or reduction of pension and health benefits; a corporate political system that relentlessly threatens to privatize Social Security and the modest health benefits available, especially to the poor (Wolin, 2013, p. 14). According to Wolin (2014), all the elements are in place today for a contemporary form of authoritarianism, which he calls “inverted totalitarianism”.1 Thus the elements are in place: a weak legislative body, a legal system that is both compliant and repressive, a party system in which one part, whether in opposition or in the majority, is bent upon reconstituting the existing system so as to permanently favor a ruling class of the wealthy, the well-connected and the corporate, while leaving the poorer citizens with a sense of helplessness and political despair and at the same time, keeping the middle classes dangling between fear of unemployment and expectations of fantastic rewards once the new economy recovers. That scheme is abetted by a sycophantic and increasingly concentrated media; by the integration of universities with their corporate benefactors; by a propaganda machine institutionalized in well-funded think tanks and conservative foundations; by the increasingly closer cooperation between local police and national law enforcement agencies aimed at identifying terrorists, suspicious aliens and domestic dissidents (Wolin, 2008). The democratic deficit is not, as many commentators have argued, reducible to the growing (and unparalleled) inequality gap in the United States, the pervasiveness of lending fraud, favorable tax treatment for the wealthy

56  Henry Giroux or the lack of adequate regulation of the financial sector. These are important issues, but they are more symptomatic than causal in relation to the democratic decline and rise of an uncivil culture in America. The democratic deficit is closely related, however, to an unprecedented deficit in critical education. The power of finance capital in recent years has not only targeted the realm of official politics, but also directed its attention toward a range of educational apparatuses—really, a vast and complex ideological ecosystem that reproduces itself through nuance, distraction, innuendo, myths, lies and misrepresentations. This media ecosystem not only changes our sense of time, space and information; it also redefines the very meaning of the social and this is far from a democratic process, especially as the architecture of the Internet and other media platforms are largely in the hands of private interests (Couldry, 2012). The educational pipelines for corporate messages and ideology are everywhere and have for the last twenty-five years successfully drowned out any serious criticism and challenge to market fundamentalism. The current corrupt and dysfunctional state of American politics is about a growing authoritarianism tied to economic, political and cultural formations that have hijacked democracy and put structural and ideological forces in place that constitute a new regime of politics, not simply a series of bad policies. The solution in this case does not lie in promoting piecemeal reforms, such as a greater redistribution of wealth and income, but in dismantling all the institutional, ideological and social formations that make gratuitous inequality and other antidemocratic forces possible at all. Even the concept of reform has been stripped of its democratic possibilities and has become a euphemism to cover up the harsh realities of draconian cutbacks in wages, salaries, pensions and public welfare and the sharp increases in regressive taxes (Petras, 2012). Instead of reversing progressive changes made by workers, women, young people and others, the American public needs a new understanding of what it would mean to advance the ideological and material relations of a real democracy, while removing American society from the grip of “an authoritarian political culture” (Hall, 2009, p. 679). This will require new conceptions of politics, social responsibility, power, civic courage, civil society and democracy itself. If we do not safeguard the remaining public spaces that provide individuals and social movements with new ways to think about and participate in politics, then authoritarianism will solidify its hold on the American public. In doing so, it will create a culture that criminalizes dissent, and those who suffer under antidemocratic ideologies and policies will be both blamed for the current economic crisis and punished by ruling elites. What is crucial to grasp at the current historical moment is that the fate of democracy is inextricably linked to a profound crisis of contemporary knowledge, characterized by its increasing commodification, fragmentation, privatization and a turn toward racist and jingoistic conceits. As knowledge becomes abstracted from the rigors of civic culture and is reduced to questions of style, ritual and image, it undermines the political, ethical and governing conditions for individuals to construct those viable public spheres

Beyond the Politics of the Big Lie  57 necessary for debate, collective action and solving urgent social problems. As public spheres are privatized, commodified and turned over to the crushing forces of turbo capitalism, the opportunities for openness, inclusiveness and dialogue that nurture the very idea and possibility of a discourse about democracy cease to exist. The lesson to be learned in this instance is that political agency involves learning how to deliberate, make judgments and exercise choices, particularly as the latter are brought to bear on critical activities that offer the possibility of change. Civic education as it is experienced and produced throughout an ever-diminishing number of institutions provides individuals with opportunities to see themselves as capable of doing more than the existing configurations of power of any given society would wish to admit. And it is precisely this notion of civic agency and critical education that has been under aggressive assault within the new and harsh corporate order of casino capitalism.

Anti-Public Intellectuals and the Conservative Re-Education Machine The conservative takeover of public pedagogy with its elite codifiers of neoliberal ideology has a long history extending from the work of the “Chicago Boys” at the University of Chicago to the various conservative think tanks that emerged after the publication of the Powell memo in the early seventies (Giroux, 2007). The Republican Party will more than likely win the next election and take full control over all aspects of policymaking in the United States. This is especially dangerous given that the Republican Party is now controlled by extremists. If they win the 2012 election, they will not only extend the Bush/Obama legacy of militarism abroad, but likely intensify the war at home as well. Political scientist Frances Fox Piven rightly argues that, we’ve been at war for decades now—not just in Afghanistan or Iraq, but right here at home. Domestically, it’s been a war [a]gainst the poor [and as] devastating as it has been, the war against the poor has gone largely unnoticed until now (Piven, 2011). And the war at home now includes more than attacks on the poor, as campaigns are increasingly waged against the rights of women, students, workers, people of colour and immigrants, especially Latino Americans. As the social state collapses, the punishing state expands its power and targets larger portions of the population. The war in Afghanistan is now mimicked in the war waged on peaceful student protesters at home. It is evident in the environmental racism that produces massive health problems for African Americans. The domestic war is even waged on elementary school children, who now live in fear of the police handcuffing them in their classrooms and incarcerating them as if they were adult criminals (Smith, 2012). It is waged on workers by taking away their pensions, bargaining rights and dignity. The spirit of militarism is also evident in the war waged on the welfare state and any form of social protection that benefits the poor, disabled, sick, elderly, and other groups now considered disposable, including children.

58  Henry Giroux The soft side of authoritarianism in the United States does not need to put soldiers in the streets, though it certainly follows that script. As it expands its control over the commanding institutions of government, the armed forces and civil society in general, it hires anti-public intellectuals and academics to provide ideological support for its gated communities, institutions and modes of education. As Yasha Levine (2012) points out, it puts thousands of dollars in the hands of corporate shills such as Malcolm Gladwell, who has become a one-man branding and distribution pipeline for valuable corporate messages, constructed on the public’s gullibility in trusting his probity and intellectual honesty. Gladwell (who is certainly not alone) functions as a bought-and-paid mouthpiece for Big Tobacco Pharma and defend[s] Enron-style financial fraud . . . earning hundreds of thousands of dollars as a corporate speaker, sometimes from the same companies and industries that he covers as a journalist (Levine, 2012). Corporate power uses these ‘pay to play’ academics, anti-public intellectuals, the mainstream media, and other educational apparatuses to discredit the very people it simultaneously oppresses, while waging an overarching war on all things public. As Charles Ferguson has noted, an entire industry has been created that enables the sale of academic expertise for the purpose of influencing government policy, the courts and public opinion [and] is now a multibillion-dollar business (Ferguson, 2012). It gets worse, in that academic, legal, regulatory and policy consulting in economics, finance and regulation is dominated by a half dozen consulting firms, several speakers’ bureaus and various industry lobbying groups that maintain large networks of academics for hire specifically for the purpose of advocating industry interests in policy and regulatory debates (Ferguson, 2012). Such anti-public intellectuals create what William Black has called a “criminogenic environment” that spreads disease and fraud in the interest of bolstering the interests, profits and values of the super wealthy” (Moyers, 2012). There is more at work here than carpet-bombing the culture with lies, deceptions and euphemisms. Language in this case does more than obfuscate or promote propaganda. It creates framing mechanisms, cultural ecosystems and cultures of cruelty, while closing down the spaces for dialogue, critique and thoughtfulness. At its worst, it engages in the dual processes of demonization and distraction. The rhetoric of demonization takes many forms: for example, calling fire-fighters, teachers and other public servants greedy because they want to hold onto their paltry benefits. It labels students as irresponsible because of the large debts they are forced to incur as states cut back funding to higher education (this, too, is part of a broader effort by conservatives to hollow out the social state). Poor people are insulted and humiliated because they are forced to live on food stamps, lack decent health care and collect unemployment benefits because there are no decent jobs available. Poor minorities are now subject to overt racism in the right-wing media and outright violence in the larger society.

Beyond the Politics of the Big Lie  59 Anti-public intellectuals rail against public goods and public values; they undermine collective bonds and view social responsibility as a pathology, while touting the virtues of a survival-of-the-fittest notion of individual responsibility. Fox News and its embarrassingly blowhard pundits tell the American people that Gov. Scott Walker’s victory over Tom Barrett in the Wisconsin recall election was a fatal blow against unions, while in reality “his win signals less a loss for the unions than a loss for our democracy in this post-Citizens United era, when elections can be bought with the help of a few billionaires” (Goodman, 2012). How else to explain that Tea Party favorite Walker raised over $30.5 million during the election—more than seven times Barrett’s reported $3.9 million—largely from 13 out-of-state billionaires (Goodman, 2012)? This was corporate money enlisted for use in a pedagogical blitz designed to carpet bomb voters with the rhetoric of distraction and incivility. The same pundits who rail against the country’s economic deficit fail to connect it to the generous tax cuts they espouse for corporations and the financial institutions and services that take financial risks, which sometimes generate capital, but more often produce debts and instability that only serve to deepen the national economic crisis. Nor do they connect the US recession and global economic crisis to the criminal activities enabled by an unregulated financial system marked by massive lending fraud, high-risk speculation, a corrupt credit system and pervasive moral and economic dishonesty. The spokespersons for the ultrarich publish books arguing that we need even more inequality because it benefits not only the wealthy, but everyone else (see Wilkinson & Roberts, 2011; Pickett, 2010; and Judt, 2010).2 This is a form of authoritarian delusion that appears to meet the clinical threshold for being labeled psychopathic given its proponents’ extreme investment in being indifferent to others, incapable of guilt, exclusively devoted to their own interests (Deresiewicz, 2012). Nothing is said in this pro-market narrative about the massive human suffering caused by a growing inequality in which society’s resources are squandered at the top, while salaries for the middle and working classes stagnate, consumption dries up, social costs are ignored, young people are locked out of jobs and any possibility of social mobility and the state reconfigures its power to punish rather than protect the vast majority of its citizens. The moral coma that appears characteristic of the elite who inhabit the new corporate ethic of casino capitalism has attracted the attention of scientists, whose studies recently reported that members of the upper class are more likely to behave unethically, to lie during negotiations, to drive illegally and to cheat when competing for a prize.3 But there is more at stake here than the psychological state of those who inhabit the boardrooms of Wall Street. We must also consider the catastrophic effects produced by their values and policies. In fact, Stiglitz has argued that most Americans today are worse off than they were fifteen years ago. A full-time worker in the US is worse off today then he or she was 44 years ago. That is astounding—half

60  Henry Giroux a century of stagnation. The economic system is not delivering. It does not matter whether a few people at the top benefitted tremendously—when the majority of citizens are not better off, the economic system is not working (Stiglitz, 2012). The economic system may not be working, but the ideological rationales used to justify its current course appear immensely successful, managing as they do to portray a casino capitalism that transforms democracy into its opposite—a form of authoritarianism with a soft edge— as utterly benign, if not also beneficial, to society at large.

Democratic Decline and the Politics of Distraction Democracy withers, public spheres disappear and the forces of authoritarianism grow when a family, such as the Waltons of Walmart fame, is allowed to amass a combined wealth of some $90 billion, which is equivalent to the wealth of the entire bottom 30 percent of US society (Stiglitz, 2012). Such enormous amounts of wealth translate into equally vast amounts of power, as is evident in the current attempts of a few billionaires to literally buy local, state and federal elections. Moreover, a concentration of wealth deepens the economic divide among classes, rendering more and more individuals incapable of the most basic opportunities to move out of poverty and despair. This is especially true in light of a recent survey indicating that, “Nearly half of all Americans lack economic security, meaning they live above the federal poverty threshold but still do hot have enough money to cover housing, food, healthcare and other basic expenses 45 % of US residents live in households that struggle to make ends meet. That breaks down to 39% of all adults and 55 % of all children.”4 The consequential impacts on civic engagement are more difficult to enumerate, but it does not require much imagination to think about how democracy might flourish if access to health care, education, employment and other public benefits was ensured equally throughout a society and not restricted to the rich and wealthy alone. And yet, as power and wealth accrue to the upper 1 percent, the American public is constantly told that the poor, the unions, feminists, critical intellectuals and public servants are waging class warfare to the detriment of civility and democracy. The late Tony Judt stated that he was less concerned about the slide of American democracy into something like authoritarianism than American society moving toward something he viewed as even more corrosive: a loss of conviction, a loss of faith in the culture of democracy, a sense of skepticism and withdrawal that diminishes the capacity of a democratic formative culture to resist and transform those antidemocratic ideologies that benefit only the mega corporations, the ultra-wealthy and ideological fundamentalists (Judt, 2010). Governance has turned into a legitimation for enriching the already wealthy elite, bankers, hedge fund managers, mega corporations and executive members of the financial service industries. Americans now live in a society in which only the thinnest conception of democracy

Beyond the Politics of the Big Lie  61 frames what it means to be a citizen—one which equates the obligations of citizenship with consumerism and democratic rights with alleged consumer freedoms. Antidemocratic forms of power do not stand alone as a mode of force or the force of acting on others; they are also deeply aligned with cultural apparatuses of persuasion, extending their reach through social and digital media, sophisticated technologies, the rise of corporate intellectuals and a university system that now produces and sanctions intellectuals aligned with private interests—all of which, as Randy Martin points out, can be identified with a form of casino capitalism that is about “permanent vigilance, activity and intervention” (Martin, cited in Clough and Willse, 2011, p. 3). Indeed, many institutions that provide formal education in the United States have become co-conspirators with a savage casino capitalism, whose strength lies in producing, circulating and legitimating market values that promote the narrow world of commodity worship, celebrity culture, bare-knuckle competition, a retreat from social responsibility and a war-ofall-against-all mentality that destroys any viable notion of community, the common good and the interrelated notions of political, social and economic rights. University presidents now make huge salaries sitting on corporate boards, while faculty sell their knowledge to the highest corporate bidder and in doing so, turn universities into legitimation centers for casino capitalism (Bennett, 2010; Stripling, 2012).5 Of course, such academics also move from the boardrooms of major corporations to talk shows and op-ed pages of major newspapers, offering commentary in journals and other modes of print and screen culture. They are the new traveling intellectuals of casino capitalism, doing everything they can to make the ruthless workings of power invisible, to shift the blame for society’s failures onto the very people who are its victims and to expand the institutions and culture of anti-intellectualism and distraction into every aspect of American life. Across all levels, politics in the United States now suffers from an education deficit that enables a pedagogy of distraction to dictate with little accountability how crucial social problems and issues are named, discussed and acted upon. The conservative re-education machine appears shameless in its production of lies that include insane assertions such as: Obama’s health care legislation would create death panels; liberals are waging a war on Christmas; Obama is a socialist trying to nationalize industries; the founding fathers tried to end slavery; and Obama is a Muslim sympathizer and not a US citizen. Other misrepresentations and distortions include: the denial of global warming; the government cannot create jobs; cuts in wages and benefits create jobs; Obama has created massive deficits; Obama wants to raise the taxes of working- and middle-class people; Obama is constantly ‘apologizing’ for America; and the assertion that Darwinian evolution is a myth (Screeds, 2012; Mooney, 2012). Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney continues spinning this spider web of lies unapologetically, even when members of his own party point out the inconsistencies in his

62  Henry Giroux claims. For instance, he has claimed that, Obamacare increases the deficit (Coleman, 2012) argued that Obama has “increased the national debt more than all other presidents combined” and insisted that Obama has lied about ‘his record on gay rights’. He has falsely claimed that, Obama promised unemployment below 8 percent (Coleman, 2012) dodged the truth regarding “his position on climate change” and blatantly misrepresented the truth in stating that he pays a 50 percent tax rate (Ravitch, 2012). Diane Ravitch (2012) has recently pointed out that in making a case for vouchers, Romney has made false claims about the success of the DC voucher program. The politics of distraction should not be reduced merely to a rhetorical ploy used by the wealthy and influential to promote their own interests and power. It is a form of market-driven politics in which educational force of the broader culture is used to create ideologies, policies, individuals and social agents who lack the knowledge, critical skills and discriminatory judgments to question the rule of casino capitalism and the values, social practices and power formations it legitimates. Politics and education have always mutually informed each other as pedagogical sites proliferate and circulate throughout the cultural landscape (see Di Leo, Jacobs and Lee, 2002; Gaonkar and Provinelli, 2003; Lapham, 2004; Giroux, 2005; Sandlin, Schultz and Burdick, 2010). But today, distraction is the primary element being used to suppress democratically purposeful education by pushing critical thought to the margins of society. As a register of power, distraction becomes central to a pedagogical landscape inhabited by rich conservative foundations, an army of well-funded anti-public intellectuals from both major parties, a growing number of amply funded conservative campus organizations, increasing numbers of academics who hock their services to corporations and the military-industrial complex, and others who promote the ideology of casino capitalism and the corporate right’s agenda. Academics who make a claim to producing knowledge and truth in the public interest are increasingly being replaced by academics for hire who move effortlessly among industry, government and academia. Extreme power is now showcased through the mechanisms of ever-proliferating cultural/educational apparatuses and the anti-public intellectuals who support them and are in turn rewarded by the elites who finance such apparatuses. The war at home is made visible in the show of force aimed at civilian populations, including students, workers and others considered disposable or a threat to the new authoritarianism. Its most powerful allies appear to be the intellectuals, institutions, cultural apparatuses and new media technologies that constitute the sites of public pedagogy, which produce the formative culture necessary for authoritarianism to thrive. While a change in consciousness does not guarantee a change in either one’s politics or society, it is a crucial precondition for connecting what it means to think otherwise to conditions that make it possible to act otherwise. The education deficit must be seen as intertwined with a political deficit, serving to make many oppressed individuals complicit with oppressive ideologies.

Beyond the Politics of the Big Lie  63 As the late Cornelius Castoriadis made clear, “democracy requires critical thinkers capable of putting existing institutions into question. . . . while simultaneously creating the conditions for individual and social autonomy” (Castoriadis, 1991). Nothing will change politically or economically until new and emerging social movements take seriously the need to develop a language of radical reform and create new public spheres that support the knowledge, skills and critical thought that are necessary features of a democratic formative culture. Getting beyond the big lie as a precondition for critical thought, civic engagement and a more realized democracy will mean more than correcting distortions, misrepresentations and falsehoods produced by politicians, media talking heads and anti-public intellectuals. It will also require addressing how new sites of pedagogy have become central to any viable notion of agency, politics and democracy itself. This is not a matter of elevating cultural politics over material relations of power as much as it is a rethinking of how power deploys culture and how culture as a mode of education positions power. James Baldwin, the legendary African American writer and civil rights activist, argued that the big lie points to a crisis of American identity and politics and is symptomatic of ‘a backward society’ that has descended into madness, especially when one is forced to lie about one’s aspect of anybody’s history, [because you then] must lie about it all (Baldwin, 1963). He goes on to argue “that one of the paradoxes of education [is] that precisely at the point when you begin to develop a conscience, you must find yourself at war with your society. It is your responsibility to change society if you think of yourself as an educated person” (Baldwin, 1963). What Baldwin recognizes is that learning has the possibility to trigger a critical engagement with oneself, others and the larger society—education becomes in this instance more than a method or tool for domination but a politics, a fulcrum for democratic social change. Tragically, in our current climate “learning” merely contributes to a vast reserve of manipulation and self-inflicted ignorance. Our education deficit is neither reducible to the failure of particular types of teaching nor the descent into madness by the spokespersons for the new authoritarianism. Rather, it is about how matters of knowledge, values and ideology can be struggled over as issues of power and politics. Surviving the current education deficit will depend on progressives using history, memory and knowledge not only to reconnect intellectuals to the everyday needs of ordinary people, but also to jumpstart social movements by making education central to organized politics and the quest for a radical democracy.

Notes 1 Wolin develops his theory of inverted totalitarianism is great detail in his Wolin, Sheldon S. (2008) Democracy Incorporated: Managed Democracy and the Spectre of Inverted Totalitarianism. Princeton: Princeton University Press. 2 For a brilliant analysis of the effects of casino capitalism on those marginalized by race and class, see Roberts, Dorothy Roberts (2011). For a sustained

64  Henry Giroux and convincing argument for equality in the service of democracy, see Richard, Wilkinson and Pickett, Kate (2010) and Judt, Tony (2008). 3 Paul K. Piff, Daniel M. Stancato, Stephane Cote, Mdndoza-Denton and Dacher Keltern, Higher Social Class Predicts Increased Unethical Behavior, Proceedings of the National Academy of Science (February 27, 2012). A summary of these reports appears in Thomas B. Edsall, Other People’s Suffering, New York Times (March 4, 2012). 4 See Reuters, Nearly Half of Americans Struggling to Stay Afloat, CommonDreams.org (November 23, 2011). 5 Charles Ferguson develops this theme in his Academy Award-winning film, “Inside Job” and in his book, “Predator Nation,” by focusing on prominent economists such as Larry Summers, Martin Feldstein and Glenn Hubbard, all of whom appear shameless in their complicity with corporate power, greed and corruption.

References Arendt, H. (1970) Thinking and Moral Considerations: A Lecture, Social Research 38:3 (Fall) Baker, P. (2012) Lobby E-Mails Show Depth of Obama Ties to Drug Industry, New York Times (June 8). Baldwin, J. (1963) A Talk to Teachers, The Saturday Review (December). Bennett, L. (2010) Ivy League Presidents Find Time for Corporate Boards, Maced (June). Castoriadis, C. (1991) The Greek Polis and the Creation of Democracy, Philosophy, Politics, Autonomy: Essays in Political Philosophy. New York: Oxford University Press. Clough, P. T. & Willse, C. (2011) Beyond Biopolitics: The Governance of Life and Death, Beyond Biopolitics: Essays on the Governance of Life and Death. Durham and London: Duke University Press. Coleman, J. (2012) Five Lies from Mitt Romney, Huffington Post (May) Couldry, N. (2012) Media, Society, World: Social Theory and Digital Media Practice. London: Polity. Deresiewicz, W. Capitalists and Other Psychopaths, New York Times (May) Di Leo, J. R.; Jacobs, W. & Lee, A. (2002) The Sites of Pedagogy, Symploke 10:1–2. Dilip Parameshwar Gaonkar, D. P. & Provinelli, E. A. (2003) Technologies of Public Forms: Circulation, Transfiguration, Recognition, Public Culture 15:3. Edsall, Th. (2012) Other People’s Suffering, New York Times (March) Ferguson, Ch. (2012) The Sellout of the Ivory Tower and the Crash of 2008, Huffington Post (May) Giroux, H. (2005) The Politics of Public Pedagogy, in Jeffrey Di Leo, et al. (eds.), If Classrooms Matter: Place, Pedagogy and Politics. New York: Routledge, pp. 15–36; Giroux, H. (2007) The University in Chains: Confronting the Military-IndustrialAcademic Complex. Boulder: Paradigm Publishers. Giroux, H. (2010) Neoliberalism as Public Pedagogy, in Jennifer Sandlin, Brian Schultz and Jane Burdick (eds.), Handbook of Public Pedagogy. New York: Routledge, p. 486–99. Goodman, A. (2012) How Citizens United Helped Scott Walker in Wisconsin, The Guardian UK (June 7)

Beyond the Politics of the Big Lie  65 Hall, S. & Back, L. (2009) In Conversation: At Home and Not at Home, Cultural Studies 23:4 (July) Judt, T. (2008) Reappraisals: Reflections on the Forgotten Twentieth Century. New York: Penguin. Judt, T. (2010) I Am Not Pessimistic in the Very Long Run, The Independent (March) Judt, T. (2010) Ill Fares the Land. New York: Penguin. Jueseppi B, “The Complete ‘List Of Lies’ by Willard Mitt Romney, TheObamacrat. com (May) Lapham, L. (2004) Tentacles of Rage: The Republican Propaganda Mill, a Brief History, Harper’s Magazine (September), pp. 31–41. Levine, Y. (2012) Malcolm Gladwell Unmasked: A Look into the Life & Work of America’s Most Successful Propagandist, The Exiled (June) Mooney, Ch. (2012) Reality Bites Republicans, The Nation (June). Moyers, B. (2010) Interview with William K. Black, Bill Moyers Journal (April) Moyers, B. & Winship, M. (2012) Pity the Poor Billionaires, CommonDreams.org (June 1) Petras, J. (2012) The Politics of Language and the Language of Political Regression, Global Research (May) Pierce, Ch. (2012) Democracy vs. Money in Wisconsin, ReaderSupportedNews (June 2). Piff, P. K.; Stancato, P.K.; Stephane Cote, Denton, M. & Keltern, D. (2012) Higher Social Class Predicts Increased Unethical Behavior, Proceedings of the National Academy of Science (February) Piven, F. F. (2011) The War Against the Poor, TomDispatch.com (November). Ravitch, D. (2012) The Miseducation of Mitt Romney, The New York Review of Books, (June). Reuters, (2011) Nearly Half of Americans Struggling to Stay Afloat, CommonDreams.org (November). Roberts, D. (2011) Fatal Intervention: How Science, Politics and Business Re-create Race in the Twenty-First Century. New York: The New Press. Screeds, S. (2012) Short List of GOP Lies, Daily Kos (June) Smith, E. E. (2012) Police Handcuffing 7-Year-Olds? The Brutality Unleashed on Kids with Disabilities in Our School Systems, AlterNet (May). Steger, M. B. & Roy, R. K. (2010) Neoliberalism: A Very Short Introduction. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Stiglitz, J. (2012) Politics Is at the Root of the Problem, The European Magazine (April) Stiglitz, J. (2012) The 1 Percent’s Problem, Vanity Fair (May) Stripling, J. & Fuller, A. (2012) College Presidents Serving on Boards of Trustees’ Companies, MAICgregator (January). Wilkinson, R. & Pickett, K. The Spirit Level: Why Equality is Better for Everyone. New York: Penguin. Williams, R. (1967) Preface to Second Edition, Communications. New York: Barnes and Noble. Wolin, Sh. (2003) Inverted Totalitarianism: How the Bush Regime Is Effecting the Transformation to a Fascist-Like State, The Nation (May 19) Wolin, Sh. (2008) Democracy Incorporated: Managed Democracy and the Specter of Inverted Totalitarianism. Princeton: Princeton University Press.

3 A Non-Occidentalist West? Learned Ignorance and Ecology of Knowledge Boaventura de Sousa Santos

Is a non-Occidentalist West possible? In order to show what I mean specifically by Occidentalism, and whether a non-Occidentalist West is possible or not, I shall first discuss an author, Jack Goody, whose work has been dedicated to dismantling every one of the historical and socio-logical arguments invoked by the canonical history of Europe and the world to demonstrate the uniqueness of the West. My focus is his most recent book, The Theft of History (2006). Throughout this book, the author refers to the ‘West’, meaning Europe, ‘often western Europe’, a small region of the world which, for various reasons and mainly from the 16th century onwards, managed to impose its conceptions of past and future, of time and space, on the rest of the world. It has thus made its values and institutions prevail, turning them into expressions of western exceptionalism, thereby concealing similarities and continuities with values and institutions existing in other regions of the world. The hegemony of this position has reached such proportions that it is surreptitiously present even in the authors who have given more credit to the achievements of other regions of the world. Goody mentions Joseph Needham, Norbert Elias, Fernand Braudel and Edward Said who, he argues, end up being Occidentalist in their struggle against Euro-centrism. ‘A trap,’ he adds, ‘postcolonialism and postmodernism frequently fall into’ (Goody, 2006: 5). According to Goody, a true ‘global history’ is only possible to the extent that both Eurocentrism and Eurocentric anti-Eurocentrism, both Occidentalism and Orientalism, are superseded. Such history is more accurate on the epistemological level and more progressive on the social, political and cultural levels. Only this kind of history will allow the world to recognize itself in its infinite diversity, which includes as well the infinite diversity of similarities and continuities. This kind of history puts an end to all teleologies, because the latter always presupposes electing a specific past as a condition to legitimize a unique future. Is such history possible? Yes, if it is understood as being situated in the plurality of places and times from which it is written, hence as always having a partial nature. To what extent is the global history proposed by Goody partial? Goody thinks that the best way to fight Eurocentrism in a non-­ Eurocentric way is to show that all the things attributted to the West as

68  Boaventura de Sousa Santos being exceptional and unique—be it modern science or capitalism, individualism or democracy—have parallels and antecedents in other world regions and cultures. The West’s preponderance, therefore, cannot be explained by means of categorial differences, but rather by means of processes of elaboration and intensification. Goody’s conception of history has the great merit of proposing a humble West, a West sharing with other world regions a much broader mosaic of human creativity. Acknowledging that western creativity is relative implies negating the power of the reasons invoked to impose it worldwide. A more plausible explanation lies in the reasons of power, the ‘guns and sails’, with which the West knew how to arm itself. The partiality of this history consists in that the humbleness of the West vis-à-vis the world is reached by concealing the processes, themselves not humble at all and indeed quite arrogant, by means of which some versions of the achievements of the West managed to impose themselves internally, at the same time that they imposed themselves on the rest of the world. To be sure, Goody is aware of this, but by not giving it emphasis enough he suggests that the West’s geographical unity (problematical in itself) is transferred to the unity of its political, cultural and institutional acchievements. Thus, what is questioned is the exceptionalism of the West’s achievements, not the historical processes that led to our understanding of them today. Continuity with the world conceals the internal, categorial discontinuities. In a word, a humble West may turn out to be an impoverished West. Could this be an insidious form of Occidentalism? The very term— Occidentalism—has generated some controversy in recent years. At least two very distinct conceptions can be identified. First, Occidentalism as a counter-image of Orientalism: the image that the ‘others’, the victims of western Orientalism, construct concerning the West.1 Second, Occidentalism as a double image of Orientalism: the image the West has of itself when it subjects the ‘others’ to Orientalism.2 The first conception carries the reciprocity trap: the idea that the ‘others’, as victims of western stereotypes, have the same power—because they have the same legitimacy—to construct stereotypes regarding the West. The second conception and the critique of the hegemonic West it implies are now a legacy of critical theory and underlie Jack Goody’s oeuvre. To pursue it further, two paths are conceivable. The first one, pursued by Goody in The Theft of History, consists in identifying the West’s external relativity, that is to say, the continuity between the innovations attributed to the West and similar experiences in other world regions and cultures. The second one consists in identifying the West’s internal relativity, that is to say, the infinite diversity of western experiences and the continuity or discontinuity among those that succeeded and ended up being identified as specific of the West, and those that were abandoned, suppressed or simply forgotten. Either of these paths is legitimate. However, since either of them can be pursued ad infinitum, the global history or sociology to which either of them leads will always be

A Non-Occidentalist West?  69 partial. In spite of this, or perhaps because of this, it is worth pursuing both with equal perseverance. In this article I focus on the second path, taking off from Goody’s own arguments. Among the many thefts of history analyzed by Goody, I isolate three: the conceptions of antiquity, modern science and a teleology of the future. I will try to show that these thefts against alien, nonwestern property also took place among western co-proprietors and that from these inside thefts the West emerged greatly impoverished. We live in a time in which criticizing the West in the West comes close to self-flagellation. To my mind, this stance is necessary and healthy, given the damage brought about by the imperialism and neocolonialism on which the hegemonic West feeds itself. I believe, nonetheless, that devolving some of the objects stolen inside the West itself is crucial to create a new pattern of interculturality, both globally and inside the West. There is little to be expected from the interculturality currently maintained by many in the West if it does not entail retrieving an originary experience of interculturality. In the beginning was interculturality, and from there we went on to culturality. Only an intercultural West will want and understand the interculturality of the world and contribute to it actively. The same is probably true of other world cultures, past and present. To my way of thinking, it is imperative to enlarge the historical experience of the West, namely by giving voice to western traditions and experiences that were forgotten or marginalized because they did not conform to the imperialist and Orientalist objectives prevailing after the convergence of modernity and capitalism.3 I convene these experiences and traditions not out of historical interest. The aim is to intervene in the present as if it had other pasts beyond the past that made it into what it is today. If it could have been different, it can be different. My concern is to show that many of the problems confronting the world today result not only from the waste of experience that the West imposed upon the world by force, but also from the waste of experience that it imposed upon itself to sustain its own imposing upon the others. As regards antiquity, Goody (2006: 26–67) argues that the idea of the uniqueness of classical antiquity—polis, democracy, freedom, economy, rule of law, art, logos—is a Hellenocentric and teleological construction which, against the truth of the facts, aims to attribute the uniqueness of modern Europe to a beginning as unique as modern Europe itself. Such reasoning loses sight of the continuity between the achievements of classical Greece and the cultures with which it had close relations, from Persia to Egypt and from Africa to Asia, and neglects the latter’s contribution to the cultural legacy appropriated by the West. In this article I resort to Lucian of Samosata (125–180) to illustrate the existence of another classical antiquity, an antiquity that is centrifugal vis-à-vis Greece’s canonical achievements and multicultural in its roots. I am interested in Lucian of Samosata because I believe he can assist us with one of the tasks I consider crucial to reinvent

70  Boaventura de Sousa Santos social emancipation: distancing ourselves from the theoretical traditions that led us to the deadend in which we find ourselves. Regarding modern science, Goody engages in dialogue with Joseph Needham in his monumental Science and Civilization in China (1954—). According to Needham, up until 1600, as far as science is concerned, China was as advanced as Europe, if not more advanced. Only after the Renaissance, a cultural process exclusive to Europe, was Europe able to gain advantage over China by converting science into exact knowledge, based on mathematized hypotheses about nature and systematic experimental verification. Goody (2006: 125–53) refutes this break or categorial differentiation based on the Renaissance and its alleged affinity with the capitalist ethos (the relation between exact knowledge and profit established by the bourgeoisie). According to him, there was no scientific revolution and modern science is not qualitatively different from previous science; it is but the intensification of a long-lasting scientific tradition. I am not engaging in this debate. What I contest is the fact that, although duly highlighting the antecedents of the Renaissance and the existence of other renaissances in other cultures and times, Goody nonetheless agrees with Needham—and indeed with the conventional history of European modernity—as regards the Renaissance’s homogeneous characteristics and their relations with modern science. The truth is that in the Renaissance there were many different conceptions, some of them swerving substantially from the ones that came to ground the notion of exact knowledge underlying modern science. In order to illustrate one such conception, I resort to Nicholas of Cusa (1401–64), a great Renaissance philosopher, whose theories had no followers because they could never be used to support the arrogance with which the West engendered Orientalism and its double image, Occidentalism. Finally, The Theft of History is a radical critique of the teleology prevailing in the canonical, Eurocentric tradition of European and world history. Teleology consists in projecting into the West’s more or less remote past some unique characteristic or asset that explains the West’s preponderance in the present world and the linear certainty of its future trajectory. Goody critiques teleology by questioning, one by one, every originary asset or characteristic which is supposedly at the origin of the categorial or qualitative difference of the West in relation to the rest of the world. In this regard as well, my aim is not to question Goody, but rather to introduce another tradition of western modernity, a tradition that has been forgotten or marginalized precisely because it rejects history’s teleology, and so cannot be put at the service of the West’s religious and civilizing certainties. The tradition I mean is Blaise Pascal’s wager. Lucian of Samosata, Nicholas of Cusa and Blaise Pascal are my points of departure to reflect on the theoretical and epistemological conditions to supersede Occidentalism and put an end to the theft of history.

A Non-Occidentalist West?  71

Philosophy for Sale Let us suppose that, because they stopped being useful to their followers, the philosophies and theories that have accompanied us for the past decades or, in some cases centuries, were offered for sale: determinism, free will, universalism, relativism, realism, constructivism, Marxism, liberalism, structuralism, functionalism, poststructuralism, deconstruction, pragmatism, postcolonialism, and so on and so forth. Let us likewise suppose that not only the followers of given theories had come to the conclusion that their own theories had become useless, but also all the others. They would therefore not be interested in buying any of them. Potential buyers, if any, would be necessarily outsiders vis-à-vis the world—let us call it the academic world—in which the different theories had developed. Before deciding to buy, they would naturally ask two questions: how useful is this or that theory for me? How much does it cost? To avoid being left unsold, the different theories, or their creators for them, would have to reply persuasively, so as to suggest to the calculating mind of the potential buyer a good relation between utility and price. To be sure, since a large number of theories would be offered for sale, the competition among them would be very high. The difficulty the theories would have in answering the questions would greatly depend on the fact that theories are used to imposing their usefulness, not to offering it and defining it in terms of truth—the truth, of course, being priceless. The outcome of the sale would depend not only on the buyers’ purse, but also on the value they would ascribe to the uses of the theories; the latter would have no way of influencing either the purse, the value or the decisions. I am sure we all agree that if such a sale would in itself be a great scandal, the hierarchy of value-price it would establish among the theories would be even greater. But the scandal of scandals would be if lucky buyers, finding utility in theories which we consider rival (for instance, determinism and free will), were to buy them as one lot for the sake of complementary uses. Lest the scandal turn on me, let me add that, if such a sale were to take place, it would not be unheard of. Precisely such a sale was proposed around 165 CE by a centrifugal figure of classical antiquity, a marginal classic of western culture, who was born a ‘barbarian’, a ‘Syrian’, in Samosata, by the river Euphrates. I mean Lucian of Samosata and refer to his dialogue ‘The Sale of Creeds’ (1905: 190), in which Zeus, with the assistance of Hermes, offers for sale the various schools of Greek philosophy, some of them brought in by their own founders: Pythagoreanism, Diogenes, Heraclitus and Democritus (one lot), Socrates, Chrysippus, Epicureanism, Stoicism, Peripatetic Scepticism. Hermes attracts the potential buyers, all of them merchants, by shouting loudly, ‘For sale. A varied assortment of live creeds. Tenets of every description. Cash on delivery; or credit allowed on suitable security!’ (1905: 190). The ‘merchandise’ gets displayed and the merchants keep coming. The

72  Boaventura de Sousa Santos latter have the right to question every philosophy offered for sale, and they invariably begin by asking how useful each philosophy may be to the buyer, his family, or his group. The price is set by Zeus who, oftentimes, simply accepts the offers made by the buying merchants. The sale is totally successful. Hermes orders the theories to stop offering resistance and follow their buyers, and makes a final announcement: ‘Gentlemen, we hope to see you here tomorrow, when we shall be offering some lots suitable for plain men, artists and shopkeepers’ (1905: 206). In this as in other satirical works, Lucian of Samosata aims to create distance vis-à-vis the established knowledge. He turns the theories into objects, rather than subjects, creates a field of externality about them, and submits them to tests for which they were not designed. He does not allow them to argue amongst themselves, rather urging them to contend for the attention of strangers whose preferences they have no way of controlling. He subjects them to the chaos of the society in which they are produced and shows them that the truth to which they aspire—the truth described by Lucian as ‘this shadowy creature with the indefinite complexion . . . all naked and unadorned, shrinking from observation, and always slipping out of sight’ (1905: 213)—does not lie in corresponding to a given reality, rather in corresponding to a reality yet to be given, to utility in terms of social criteria and objectives in a broad sense. This distance vis-à-vis the theoretical canon is inscribed in Lucian of Samosata’s own origin and trajectory. Samosata, the city where he was born, now flooded by the Atatürk Dam, in Turkey, had been part of the Commagene kingdom, in ancient Armenia, later absorbed by the Roman Empire as part of the Syrian province. This was a region of very intense commercial and cultural crossings, endowed with a lively ‘Mischkultur’ in which Greek philosophy and literature coexisted with Christianism and Judaism, as well as with many other cultures of the near and middle East. Lucian, a Hellenized Syrian who called himself a ‘barbarian’, left his homeland to pursue his career as a rhetorician in the cultural centres of the Roman world.4 To my mind, today the distance vis-à-vis the received theoretical tradition is more necessary than ever, due to one of the most important features of our time, perhaps the one that best defines its transitional character (Santos, 1995). I mean the discrepancy between strong questions and weak answers. Strong questions address not only our options of individual and collective life but also and mainly the roots and foundations that have created the horizon of possibilities among which it is possible to choose. They are, therefore, questions that arouse a particular kind of perplexity. Weak answers are the ones that refuse to question the horizon of possibilities; they cannot, therefore, abate this perplexity and may, in fact, increase it. Questions and answers vary according to culture and world region. However, the discrepancy between the strength of the questions and the weakness of the answers seems to be common. It derives from the current variety of contact zones involving cultures, religions, economies,

A Non-Occidentalist West?  73 social and political systems, and different ways of life, as a result of what we ordinarily call globalization.5 The power asymmetries in these contact zones are as large today, if not larger, as in the colonial period, and they are more numerous and widespread. The contact experience is always an experience of limits and borders. In today’s conditions, it is the contact experience that gives rise to the discrepancy between strong questions and weak answers. The specificity of this discrepancy in the paradigmatic transition we are now living results from the fact that the problems of our time—the problems that call for strong questions—no longer concern the privileged knowledge of our time, i.e. modern science, to the extent that it became institutionalized and professionalized. In its origin, science was fully aware that the most important problems of existence escaped it, such as, at the time, the problem of God’s existence, the meaning of life, the model or models for a good society, the relations between human beings and other creatures which, not being human, shared with humans the dignity of being likewise creations of God. All these problems converged to another one, and one far more of a dilemma for science: the problem that science cannot account for the foundation of its scientificity, that is to say, of scientific truth as truth. From the 19th century onwards, however, as a result of the increasing transformation of science into a productive force of capitalism, a double reduction of such a complex relation among ways of knowing occurred. On the one hand, the epistemological hegemony of science turned it into one single, accurate, and valid kind of knowledge. As a result, only the problems for which science could have an answer were deemed worthy of consideration. Existential problems were reduced to what could be said scientifically about them, which entailed a dramatic conceptual and analytical reconversion. Thus emerged what I call, after Ortega y Gasset (1987: 39), orthopedic thinking: the constraint and impoverishment caused by reducing the existential problems to analytical and conceptual markers that are strange to them. With the increasing institutionalization and professionalization of science—concomitant to the development, pointed out by Foucault, from the ‘universal intellectual’ to the ‘specific intellectual’—science began to give answers only to those problems raised by itself. The immensity of the underlying existential problems disappeared, due to another reduction meanwhile occurring. As is usually the case regarding any hegemony, the hegemony of science spread beyond science, subjecting philosophy, theology and the humanities in general to a process of scientificization with as many multiple forms as the multiple faces of positivism. As orthopedic thinking stretched beyond science and the disciplines became institutionalized and professionalized, the problems they dealt with were only the problems they themselves could formulate. The result was academic answers for academic problems that were increasingly more distant and reductive vis-à-vis the existential problems at their origin, increasingly more irrelevant answers to account for the latter.

74  Boaventura de Sousa Santos This vast process of epistemological monopolization did not occur without contradictions. They can be seen precisely in the discrepancy between strong questions and weak answers that characterizes our time. I select one such question at random: if there is only one humanity, why such a wide diversity of principles, conceptions and practices of human dignity and why such obvious divergences and even contradictions among them? The answer offered by orthopedic thinking consists in reducing said diversity to the abstract universalism of human rights: there is diversity as long as it is recognized by universal human rights. It is a weak answer because it negates what it affirms (universalism) by affirming what it negates (diversity). If human rights are multiple and internally diverse, there is no reason to believe that such multiplicity and diversity confine themselves to the ones that human rights contain (Santos, 2007c). Suffice it to realize that the internal differentiation of human rights, far from being an auto-poetical, systemic process, is the result of social contradictions and struggles which, among many other manifestations, translate themselves into rights. To be sure, the discrepancy between strong questions and weak answers is a general feature of our time. It constitutes its epochal spirit, but its impact on the global North and the global South is very different. Weak answers have some credibility in the global North, because that is where orthopedic thinking developed most and also because, once translated into politics, weak answers secure the continuation of the global North’s neocolonial domination of the global South, allowing the citizens of the global North to benefit from such domination without being aware of it. In the global South, weak answers translate themselves into ideological impositions and all kinds of violence in the citizens’ daily lives, excluding the elites, the small world of the imperial South, the ‘representation’ of the global North in the global South. In the epochal spirit, however, the feeling that this difference of impacts, even if real and abyssal, conceals the tragedy of a common condition grows deeper and deeper: the saturation of the junk knowledge incessantly produced by an orthopedic thinking that has long stopped thinking of ordinary women and men. This condition expresses itself in the ungraspable lack of credible and prudent knowledge capable of securing us all—women, men, and nature—a decent life.6 This lack does not allow us to identify, let alone, define, the true dimension of the problems afflicting the epoch. The latter appear as a set of contradictory feelings: exhaustion which does not conceal lack; unease which does not conceal injustice; anger which does not exclude hope. Exhaustion results from incessant victory indoctrination where citizens endowed with the simple lights of life see only defeat, solutions where they see problems, expert truths where they see interests, consensuses where they see resignation. Unease derives from the increasingly more apparent absence of reasonableness from the rationality proclaimed by orthopedic thinking, an injustice-producing machine that sells itself as a machine of happiness. Anger emerges at social regulation disguised as social emancipation,

A Non-Occidentalist West?  75 individual autonomy used to justify neoslavery servitude, the reiterated proclamation of the impossibility of a better world to silence the idea, very genuine if diffuse, that humanity and nature both are entitled to something much better than the current status quo. The masters of orthopedic thinking take advantage of exhaustion to turn it into total fulfilment: the end of history (Fukuyama, 1992). As to unease and anger, they are ‘treated’ with medical prostheses, the anesthesia of consumption and the vertigo of the entertainment industry. None of these mechanisms, however, seems to function in such a way as successfully to disguise, by functioning efficaciously, the abyssal dysfunction from which its necessity and efficacy stem. This epochal spirit suggests the same distancing vis-à-vis the theories and disciplines as the one displayed in Lucian of Samosata. Distancing implies the predominance of a negative epistemology and a concomitant, equally negative, ethics and politics. The reasons to reject what exists ethically, politically, and epistemologically are far more convincing than those invoked to define alternatives. Fully to assume our time means to acknowledge this disproportion and act from there. In other words, it means to radicalize rejection and look for alternatives while recognizing their radical uncertainty. On the epistemological level, the only one I here deal with, rejection implies a certain kind of epistemological direct action. It consists in taking over the theories and disciplines regardless of their owners (schools, trends of thought, institutions) with a threefold objective: first, to show that the theories and disciplines lose their composure and serenity when they are challenged by questions, no matter how simple, which they did not ask themselves; second, to identify complementarities and complicities where the theories and disciplines see rivalries and contradictions; third, to show that the efficaciousness of theories and disciplines lies as much in what they show as in what they conceal, as much in the reality they produce as existent, as in the reality they produce as nonexistent. To accomplish the first objective it is useful to conceive of experiments in which the theories and disciplines are left with no option but to resort to non-theoretical and non-disciplinary responses to questions they themselves have not foreseen. When questioned, their orthopedic manipulation of reality will be of no use to them. The answer will not be orthopedic. To accomplish the two remaining objectives, let us resort to Lucian of Samosata and metaphorically offer for sale, just like Zeus and Hermes, the different theories and disciplines. The latter, having consolidated themselves by dictating various forms of utility to society, will not readily accept that their utility be the object of assessment. Likewise, the theories and disciplines which, on behalf of capitalism, have theorized the universality of competition as opposed to cooperation, the economy of egoism as opposed to the economy of altruism, and buying/selling as opposed to the gift will not accept being themselves offered for sale, and by squatters, at that. Assuming the condition of our time consists in not only rejecting orthopedic thinking but also looking for alternatives from the point of view of their radical

76  Boaventura de Sousa Santos uncertainty. Before I engage in identifying these alternatives, let me analyze the two major uncertainties confronting our time. The paradox of finitude and infinitude. The first uncertainty concerns the inexhaustible and ungraspable diversity of social experiences in the world. The liberation movements against colonialism and the new social movements—feminism, ecology, the indigenous movement, the ­ ­ Afrodescendent civil rights movement, the peasant movement, liberation theology, the urban movement, the LGBT movement—in addition to enlarging the scope of the social struggles brought along new conceptions of life and human dignity, new symbolic universes, new cosmogonies, gnoseologies and even ontologies. Paradoxically, this process, pointing as it does to the infinitude of human experience, occurred along with another, seemingly contradictory one, which gradually revealed the finitude of the planet earth, the unity between humanity and the nature inhabiting the world (the Gaia hypothesis), and the limits of life sustainability on earth. What we call globalization contributed, in a contradictory way, to deepen a twofold experience of infinitude and finitude. How is it that in a finite world the diversity of human experience is potentially infinite? This paradox places us, in turn, face to face with an epistemological lack: the knowledge we lack to capture the inexhaustible diversity of the world. The uncertainty caused by this lack is even greater if we keep in mind that the diversity of world experience includes the diversity of knowledge existing in the world. Which kinds of knowledge could reveal the diversity of the world experience? How to go about identifying, evaluating and hierarchizing the many and so diverse kinds of knowledge constituting the experience of the world? How to articulate and compare the kinds of knowledge we do know with the kinds of knowledge we do not know? The paradox of urgency and civilizational change. We live in a time torn apart by two extreme and contradictory temporalities disputing the time frame of collective action. On the one hand, there is a sense of urgency. Global warming and the imminent ecological catastrophe, the conspicuous preparation for a new nuclear war, the vanishing life sustainability (water, for example) of vast populations, the uncontrolled drive for eternal war and the violence and unjust destruction of human life it causes, the depletion of natural resources, the exponential growth of social inequality giving rise to new forms of social despotism, social regimes only regulated by extreme power differences or status hierarchies of a new kind, neofeudal hierarchies. All these facts seem to impose that absolute priority be given to immediate or short-term action as the long term may not even exist if the trends expressed in those facts are allowed to evolve without control. Most certainly the pressure of urgency lies in different factors in the global North and in the global South, but it seems to be present everywhere. On the other hand, there is a sense that our time calls for deep and long-term civilizational changes. The facts mentioned above are symptoms of deep-seated structures and agencies, which cannot be confronted

A Non-Occidentalist West?  77 by short-term interventionism, as the latter is as much part of the civilizational paradigm as the state of affairs it fights. The 20th century proved with immense cruelty that to take power is not enough, that, rather than taking power, it is necessary to transform power. The most extreme versions of this temporality even call for the transformation of the world without taking power. This double and paradoxical uncertainty poses new epistemological and political challenges. It invites open-ended formulations of an alternative society, the strength of which has more to do with rejecting the current state of affairs than with defining alternatives. They consist in affirming the possibility of a better future and another possible world7 without knowing if the latter is possible and what it will be like. It is, therefore, a very different utopia from modern utopias. In order to face these challenges, I resort to two forgotten traditions of western modernity: Nicholas of Cusa’s learned ignorance, to confront the first uncertainty, and Pascal’s wager. Both conceptions were formulated by authors who lived the uncertainties of their time very intensely. Their doubts were not methodical, as in Descartes, but rather epistemological or even ontological. They were both ignored precisely because they did not go well with the certainties which western modernity aimed to guarantee. That is to say, they are at the antipodes of the orthopedic thinking that prevailed in the following centuries. They were ignored but, by the same token, they were not colonized either. They are, therefore, more transparent, both as regards their potential and their limits. Since they did not take part in the modern adventure, they stayed in the West but remained marginal to the West. They would have been useless, if not dangerous, for an adventure which was as much epistemological as political: I mean the imperial project of global colonialism and capitalism which created the abyssal divide between what today we designate as global North and global South.8 The traditions created by Nicholas of Cusa and Pascal are the South of the North, as it were, and are thus better prepared than any other to learn from the global South and collaborate with it towards building epistemologies capable of offering credible alternatives to orthopedic thinking.

Learned Ignorance Nicholas of Cusa, philosopher and theologian, was born in Germany in 1401 and died in Umbria in 1467. Between 1438 and 1440, he wrote the work entitled De Docta Ignorantia (Cusa, 1985). Confronted with the infinitude of God (whom he called the ‘Absolute Maximum’), the author engages in a reflection around the idea of knowledge in not knowing. The important thing is not to know, he argues; the important thing is to know that you do not know. ‘Indeed,’ says Nicholas of Cusa, ‘no greater knowledge can endow any man, even the most studious, than to discover himself supremely learned in his ignorance, which is proper to him, and he will be the more

78  Boaventura de Sousa Santos learned, the more ignorant he knows himself to be’ (1985: 6). What is new about Nicholas of Cusa is that he uses the excuse of God’s infinitude to propose a general epistemological procedure that is valid for the knowledge of finite things—the knowledge of the world. Since it is finite, our thought cannot think the infinite—there is no ratio between the finite and the ­infinite— but it is limited even in its thinking of finitude, in its thinking of the world. All we know is subject to this limitation, hence, to know is, above all, to know the limitation. Hence the notion of knowledge in not knowing. The designation ‘learned ignorance’ may sound contradictory, for the learned person is, by definition, not ignorant. The contradiction is, however, only apparent, since learnedly not-knowing requires a laborious knowing process on the limitations of what we know. In Nicholas of Cusa there are two kinds of ignorance: ignorant ignorance, which is not even aware that it does not know, and learned ignorance, which knows what it is that it does not know. We may be tempted to think that Nicholas of Cusa simply parrots Socrates, but this is really not the case.9 Socrates is not aware of the idea of infinitude, which only appears in western thought through Christian-based neo-Platonism.10 This idea, undergoing multiple metamorphoses (progress, emancipation), is to play a crucial role in the construction of the paradigm of western modernity. But its fate inside this paradigm is completely different from that in Nicholas of Cusa’s thought. The dominant versions of the paradigm of modernity turned the infinite into an obstacle to overcome: the infinite is the infinite zeal to overcome it, controlling it, taming it, reducing it to finite proportions. Thus, infinitude, which from the outset ought to arouse humility, becomes the ultimate foundation of the triumphalism underlying the hegemonic rationality, that of orthopedic thinking. On the contrary, in Nicholas of Cusa infinitude is accepted as such, as consciousness of a radical ignorance. The aim is not to control or master it, but to acknowledge it in a twofold way: through our total ignorance of it; and through the limitations it imposes on the accuracy of the knowledge we have of finite things. Before the infinite, no arrogance is possible, only humility. Humility does not mean negativity or skepticism. Reflective acknowledgement of the limits of knowledge implies an unsuspected positivity. Indeed, to acknowledge the limits is somehow to be already beyond them (André, 1997: 94). The fact that it is not possible to reach the truth with accuracy does not release us from searching for it. Quite the opposite, what lies beyond limits (the truth) rules what is possible and demandable within the limits (veracity, as the search for the truth). It comes as no surprise that, almost six centuries later, the dialectics of finitude/infinitude characterizing the present time is very different from Nicholas Cusa’s. The infinitude we face is not transcendental, resulting, rather, from the inexhaustible diversity of human experience and the limits to know it. In our time, learned ignorance will entail a laborious work of reflection and interpretation of those limits, of the possibilities they open and the exigencies they create for us. Moreover, the diversity of human

A Non-Occidentalist West?  79 experience includes the diversity of ways of knowing human experience. Our infinitude has thus a contradictory epistemological dimension: an infinite plurality of finite ways of knowing human experience in the world. The finitude of each way of knowing is thus twofold: it is made up of the limits of what it knows about human experience in the world; and the limits (albeit much larger) of what it knows about the world’s other ways of knowing, hence about the knowledge of the world supplied by other ways of knowing. The knowledge that does not know is the knowledge that fails to know the other ways of knowing which share with it the infinite task of accounting for the experiences of the world. Orthopedic thinking is no adequate guide for us in this uncertainty, because it grounds a kind of knowledge (modern science) that does not know well enough the limits of what it allows one to know of the experience of the world, and even less well the other kinds of knowledge that share with it the epistemological diversity of the world. Actually, besides not knowing the other kinds of knowledge, orthopedic thinking refuses to acknowledge their very existence. Among the available experiences of the world produced as non-existing, the kinds of knowledge that do not fit orthopedic thinking become particularly important. Thus, one of the main dimensions of the sociology of absences is the sociology of absent ways of knowing, that is to say, the act of identifying the ways of knowing which the hegemonic epistemology produces as nonexistent.11 To be a learned ignorant in our time is to know that the epistemo-logical diversity of the world is potentially infinite and that each way of knowing grasps it only in a very limited manner. In this respect, too, our condition is very different from Nicholas of Cusa’s. Whereas the not-knowing knowledge he postulates is singular and hence entails one learned ignorance alone, the learned ignorance appropriate to our time is infinitely plural, as plural as the possibility of different ways of knowing. At any rate, just as in the case of Nichola of Cusa’s learned ignorance, the impossibility of grasping the infinite epistemological diversity of the world does not release us from trying to know it; on the contrary, it demands that we do. This demand, or exigency, I call ecology of knowledge. In other words, if the truth exists only in the search for truth, knowledge exists only as ecology of knowledge.12 Once we are aware of the differences that separate us from Nicholas of Cusa, it is easier to learn his lesson.

Ecology of Knowledge Being infinite, the plurality of knowledge existing in the world is unreachable as such, since each way of knowing accounts for it only partially, and from its own specific perspective alone. On the other hand, however, since each way of knowing exists only in that infinite plurality of knowledge, none of them is able to understand itself without referring to the others. Knowledge exists only as a plurality of ways of knowing, just as ignorance

80  Boaventura de Sousa Santos exists only as a plurality of forms of ignorance. The possibilities and limits of understanding and action of each way of knowing can only be grasped to the extent that each way of knowing offers a comparison with other ways of knowing. Such comparison is always a reduced version of the epistemological diversity of the world, the latter being infinite. What I call ecology of knowledge lies in this comparison. The limits and possibilities of each way of knowing reside, thus, ultimately, in the existence of other ways of knowing. They can only be explored and valorized in comparison with other ways of knowing. The less a given way of knowing knows the limits of its knowing about other ways of knowing, the less aware is it of its own limits and possibilities. This comparison is not easy, but herein lies the learned ignorance we need in our time. The comparison is difficult because the relations among ways of knowing are haunted by an asymmetry. Each way of knowing knows more and better about itself than about the others. This asymmetry I term epistemological difference. It occurs among ways of knowing within the same culture and more intensely among ways of knowing existing in different cultures. It is also complex because, even though it is an epistemological asymmetry, as regards the praxis of relations among ways of knowing, it does not manifest itself simply as an epistemological question. Actually, it is experienced predominantly as a political question. That is to say, the asymmetry of ways of knowing overlaps the asymmetry of powers. As concerns ideal types, there are two opposite modes of activating this asymmetry. The first one is to maximize it by pushing to the utmost ignorance regarding the other ways of knowing, that is, by declaring the latters’ nonexistence. This I call epistemological fascism, because it amounts to violent destruction or concealment of other ways of knowing. Epistemological fascism exists in the form of epistemicide. The ecology of knowledge faces two problems: (a) how to compare ways of knowing given the epistemological difference; (b) given that the plurality of knowledge is infinite, how to create the set of ways of knowing that partake of the ecology of knowledge. To deal with the former, I propose translation; to deal with the latter, artisanship of practices. I analyze the topic of intercultural translation elsewhere (Santos, 2004). Here, I focus on the artisanship of practices.

Artisanship of Practices Just like epistemological fascism, the ecology of knowledge is an epistemological and political option. Since the set of ways of knowing integrating the ecology of knowledge is always limited, how these sets are constituted needs to be defined. In principle, an unlimited number of ecologies of knowledge is possible, as unlimited as the epistemological diversity of the world. Each exercise of ecology of knowledge implies a selection of ways of knowing and a field of interaction in which the exercise takes place.

A Non-Occidentalist West?  81 One and the other are defined in terms of non-epistemological objectives. The specific social and political contexts giving rise to the given concern determine the ways of knowing that will integrate a certain ecology-ofknowledge exercise. The concern with preserving biodiversity may lead to an ecology combining scientific, peasant or indigenous knowledge.13 The concern with fighting discrimination may lead to an ecology of ways of knowing produced by different social movements: feminist, anti-racist, gay, lesbian, human rights, indigenous, Afro-descendents, and so on and so forth. The concern with the spiritual dimension of social transformation may lead to ecologies involving religious and secular ways of knowing, science and mysticism, different liberation theologies (feminist, postcolonial, etc.), western, eastern, indigenous, African philosophies, etc. The concern with the ethical and artistic dimension of social change may include all the aforementioned ways of knowing, as well as the humanities as a whole and literature and the arts. The ecology of knowledge is the epistemological dimension of a new kind of solidarity among social actors or groups. It is an internally diverse solidarity, in which each group gets mobilized by its own, autonomous mobilization reasons, while believing that the collective actions which may turn such reasons into practical results go way beyond what is possible to carry out by a single social actor or group. The ecology of knowledge signals the passage from a politics of movements to a politics of inter-movements. This characterization of the reasons that create the need for the ecology of knowledge and select the ways of knowing which, in a concrete situation, integrate it, helps us as well to identify the fields of interaction in which the ecology of knowledge occurs. They do so in the context of social practices already constituted, or to be constituted, whose epistemological dimension is just one among others. From these practices emerge the questions addressed to the various ways of knowing in presence. Such questions are epistemological only to the extent that they are practical, that is to say, to the extent that they have consequences for the context of practices in which the ecology of knowledge takes place. Hence, the ways of knowing are faced with problems which, on their own, they would never pose. In general, the ways of knowing are taken by surprise and are often incapable of solving them. Crossed interpellation of ways of knowing is an attempt at overcoming such incapacity. The priority given to practices brings about a fundamental change regarding the ways of knowing in presence. The superiority of a given way of knowing is no longer assessed by its level of institutionalization and professionalization, but rather by its pragmatic contribution to a given practice. One of the motors of epistemological fascism, which has characterized the relation of modern science with other ways of knowing, is thereby deactivated. This pragmatic displacement of the hierarchies of ways of knowing does not cancel out the polarizations among the ways of knowing, but reduces them to those deriving from the practical contributions to the

82  Boaventura de Sousa Santos desired action. In this sense, the ecology of knowledge turns all ways of knowing into experimental ways of knowing. In this regard as well, Nicholas of Cusa’s teaching is fruitful. In 1450 he composed three dialogues—De Sapientia, De Mente and De Staticis Experimentis—in which the main character is the Idiot, a simple, illiterate man, a poor craftsman who makes wooden spoons. In the dialogues he engages in with the accredited philosopher (the humanist, the orator), the Idiot becomes the sage capable of solving the most complex problems of existence on the basis of the experience of his active life, to which priority is given over contemplative life. As Leonel Santos says (2002: 73), ‘The Idiot is contrasted with the learned, erudite man, one who holds scholarly knowledge grounded in authors and authorities, wherefrom he draws his competence, but one who has lost the sense of use and autonomous cultivation of his own faculties.’ The Orator provokes the Idiot: ‘How presumptuous of you, poor Idiot, to thus diminish the study of letters, without which no one progresses!’ (2002: 78). The Idiot replies: ‘It is not presumption, great Orator, that prevents me from remaining silent, but charity. Indeed, I see you devoted to the quest for wisdom with much futile toil. . . . The opinion of authority turned you, a free man by nature, into something rather like a horse tied to the manger by a tether and eating only what is served to him. Your knowledge feeds on the authority of those who write, it is limited to an alien, not natural pasture’ (2002: 79). And he adds: ‘But I tell you that wisdom cries out in the markets and its clamor resounds in the squares’ (2002: 79). Wisdom expresses itself in the world and in mundane tasks, especially in those that are the world of reason and imply operations of calculation, measurement, and weighing (2002: 81). In these extremely ironic dialogues, the Idiot is nothing but the propounder of Nicholas of Cusa’s learned ignorance.14 The dialogues show that the great arguments among the schools of erudite knowledge lose their importance unless their relevance for practical life and experience is fully demonstrated. Significantly, Nicholas of Cusa’s dialogues take place at the barber’s or in the humble craftsman’s workshop. The philosopher is, therefore, compelled to argue in a territory that is not familiar to him and for which he was not trained—the territory of practical life. This is the territory where all practical relations are planned, opportunities calculated, risks measured, pros and cons weighed. This is the territory of the artisanship of practices, the territory of the ecology of knowledge.

The Wager To face the second condition of uncertainty of our time—not knowing if a better world is really possible—I propose another philosophical suggestion of western modernity now totally forgotten: Pascal’s wager. Sharing the same forgetfulness and marginalization as Nicholas of Cusa’s learned

A Non-Occidentalist West?  83 ignorance, Pascal’s wager can also serve as a bridge to other, nonwestern philosophies and to other practices of social interpretation and transformation than those eventually sanctioned by orthopedic thinking. Actually, there is a basic affinity between learned ignorance and Pascal’s wager. They both assume the uncertainty and precariousness of knowledge as a condition which, being a constraint and a weakness, is also a strength and an opportunity. They both struggle with the ‘disproportion’ between the finite and the infinite and try to push to the maximum limit the potentialities of what is possible to think and make within the limits of the finite. Pascal starts from a radical uncertainty: the existence of God cannot be demonstrated rationally. Pascal says: ‘If there is a God, he is infinitely beyond our comprehension, since, being indivisible, and without limits, he bears no relation to us. We are therefore incapable of knowing either what he is or whether he is’ (1966: 150). This leads him to ask how to formulate the reasons that might persuade a nonbeliever to change his mind and start believing in God. The answer is the wager. Although we cannot determine rationally that God exists, we can at least find a rational way to determine that to wager on his existence is more advantageous than to believe in his nonexistence. The wager involves a certain risk of winning or losing, as well as the possibility of an infinite gain. To wager on God’s existence compels us to be honest and virtuous. And, of course, it also compels us to renounce noxious pleasures and worldly glories. If God does not exist, we lose the wager, but gain in turn a virtuous life, full of good deeds. By the same token, if he does exist, our gain will be infinite: eternal salvation. Indeed, we lose nothing by wagering and the gain can be infinite: ‘in the end you will realize that you have wagered on something certain and infinite for which you have paid nothing’ (1966: 153). The wager is rational because, in order to wager on the existence of God, you don’t have to have faith. Its rationality is, however, very limited, for it tells us nothing about the real existence of God, let alone about God’s nature. Since the existence and nature of God is always an act of faith, Pascal has to find some kind of mediation between faith and rationality. He finds it in custom. Says Pascal: ‘Custom is our nature. Anyone who grows accustomed to faith believes it’ (1966: 153). That is to say, by wagering repeatedly on the existence of God, the wagerer will end up believing in it. As in the case of Nicholas of Cusa, the concern derived from the uncertainty of our time is very different from that of Pascal. What is at stake now is not eternal salvation, the world beyond, but rather an earthly world better than the present one. Since there is no necessity or determinism in history, there is no rational way of knowing for sure if another world is possible, let alone how life would be there. Our infinite is the infinite uncertainty regarding the possibility of another and better world. As such, the question confronting us may be formulated in the following way: what reasons could lead us to fight for such a possibility, if the risks are certain and the gains so uncertain? The answer is the wager, the only alternative both to the theses

84  Boaventura de Sousa Santos of the end of history and the theses of vulgar determinism. The wager is the metaphor for the precarious yet minimally credible construction of the possibility of a better world, that is to say, the possibility of social emancipation, without which the rejection of or nonconformity before injustice in our world make no sense. The wager is the metaphor for social transformation in a world in which negative reasons and visions (what is rejected) are far more convincing than positive ones (identifying what we want and how to get there). The truth is that the wager of our time on the possibility of a better world is very different and far more complex than Pascal’s wager. The conditions of the wager are different as is the ratio between the winning and losing risks. What we have in common with Pascal are the limits of rationality, the precariousness of calculations and the awareness of risks. Who is the wagerer in our time? While for Pascal the wagerer is the rational individual, in our time the wagerer is the excluded, discriminated, in a word, oppressed class or social group and its allies. Since the possibility of a better world occurs in this world, only those with reasons to reject the status quo of the present world will wager on this possibility. The oppressors tend to experience the world in which they live as the best possible world. The same is true of all those who, not being directly oppressors, benefit from oppressive practices. As far as they are concerned, it is rational to wager on the impossibility of a better world. The conditions of the wager in our time also differ largely from those of Pascal’s wager. While in Pascal’s wager God’s existence or nonexistence does not depend on the wagerer, in our time the possibility or impossibility of a better world depends on the wager and the actions resulting therefrom. Paradoxically, however, the risks the wagerer runs are greater. Indeed, the actions resulting from the wager will occur in a world of conflicting classes and groups, of oppressors and oppressed, and so there will be resistance and retaliation. The risks (the possibilities of loss) are thus twofold: risks deriving from the struggle against oppression; and risks deriving from the fact that another and better world is, after all, not possible. Hence, the demonstration that Pascal offered his wagerer is not convincing: ‘Whenever there is infinity and where there are not infinite chances of losing against that of winning there is no room for hesitation, you must give everything’ (1966: 151). In our time there are, therefore, many reasons to hesitate and not to risk everything. They are the other side of the prevalence of reasons for rejecting the current state of affairs over reasons for specific alternatives to it. This has several consequences for the project of the wager on social emancipation. The first one concerns the wager’s pedagogy. Unlike Pascal’s wager, the reasons for the wager on social emancipation are not transparent. To become convincing, they must be the object of argumentation and persuasion: rather than the wager’s demonstrative rationality, the wager’s argumentative reasonableness. Since reasonableness is not the monopoly of any

A Non-Occidentalist West?  85 single type of knowledge, the wager’s pedagogy must take place in conformity with the ecology of knowledge a new type of popular education adequate to the needs of inter-movement politics.15 The second consequence of the wager’s condition of our time concerns the kinds of action deriving from the wager. The radical uncertainty about a better future and the risks involved in fighting for it result in privileging actions focused on the everyday and amounting to improvements here and now in the lives of the oppressed and excluded. In other words, the wager privileges actio in proximis. Because of its success, this kind of action strengthens the wagerer’s will and satisfies the sense of urgency for changing the world, that is to say, the need to act now lest later be too late. The wager does not fit actio in distans, for this would be an infinite risk before an infinite uncertainty. This does not mean that actio in distans is not there. It is, but not in its own terms. The changes of the everyday only ratify the wager to the extent that they, too, signal the possibility of social emancipation. In order to do so, they must be radicalized. Radicalization consists in searching for the subversive and creative aspects of the everyday, which may occur in the most basic struggle for survival. The changes of the everyday have thus a double valence: concrete improvement of the everyday and the signals they give of far larger possibilities. Through these signals, actio in distans becomes present in actio in proximis. In other words, actio in distans only exists as a dimension of actio in proximis, that is, as the will and reason of radicalization. Through the wager, it is possible to bring the everyday and utopia together, without dissolving into one another. Utopia is what is missing in the everyday to exempt us from thinking about utopia. Ortega y Gasset teaches us that the human being is the human being and her circumstance. I think we must go beyond him and say that the human being is also what is missing in her circumstance for her to be fully human.

Conclusion To have shown the possibility of conceiving a non-Occidentalist West is one of Jack Goody’s major contributions for our time. In this article, I have tried to enhance such a possibility. Obviously, there is a wide gap between conceiving of a non-Occidentalist West and transforming such a conception into a political reality. Actually, I am convinced that it will not be possible to bridge that gap while living in a world ruled by global capitalism. The possibility of a non-Occidentalist West is closely linked to the possibility of a non-capitalist future. Both possibilities aim for the same result, even though they use very different tools and struggles. The conception of a nonOccidentalist West translates itself into recognizing uncertainties and perplexities and turning them into the opportunity for emancipatory, political creativity. Until we confront the uncertainties and perplexities of our time, we are condemned to neo-isms and post-isms, that is to say, interpretations of the present which only have past.

86  Boaventura de Sousa Santos Inspired by Lucian of Samosata, the distancing I proposed vis-à-vis the theories and disciplines constructed by orthopedic thinking is based on the fact that they have contributed to the discrepancy between strong questions and weak answers that characterizes our time. Such discrepancy translates itself into two daunting uncertainties: the one deriving from the incapacity to grasp the inexhaustible diversity of human experience; and the one resulting from aspiring to a better world without the support of a theory of history indicating that a better world is indeed necessary or at least possible. To face these uncertainties, I have proposed two epistemological suggestions based on two particularly rich traditions of western modernity, both marginalized and forgotten by the orthopedic thinking that has dominated for the past two centuries: learned ignorance, the ecology of knowledge deriving therefrom, and the wager. They reveal that erudite knowledge has a naive relationship with the knowledge it considers naive. They denounce the precariousness of knowledge (knowledge that does not know) and the precariousness of acting (wagering on the basis of limited calculations). These proposals do not aim to eliminate the uncertainties of our time. They rather aim to assume them completely and use them productively, turning from constraint to opportunity. Even though learned ignorance, the ecology of knowledge and the wager are western in their origin, they represent a much broader rationality (because far more aware of their limits) than the rationality that ended up being dominant. Because they were marginalized and forgotten, they kept an openness vis-à-vis nonwestern traditions and problematics which western modernity lost by falling prey to orthopedic thinking. Because they were marginalized and forgotten, these traditions had a similar fate to that of many nonwestern ways of knowing, and so they are today better prepared to learn from them and, together with them, to contribute toward the ecologies of knowledge and interculturality. Learned ignorance, the ecology of knowledge and the wager do not bring about a kind of social emancipation, let alone a typology of social emancipation. What comes forth is simply reasonableness and the will to fight for a better world and a more just society, a set of ways of knowing and precarious calculations, animated by ethical exigencies and vital necessities. The struggle for survival and liberation and against hunger and violence is the degree zero of social emancipation; in some situations, it is also its maximum degree. Social emancipation is somewhat like the arte perfectoria of Nicholas of Cusa’s Idiot, who makes wooden spoons without limiting himself to imitating nature (there is no spoon in nature) but also without attaining the idea of spoonhood accurately (the spoon’s essence belongs to ‘divine art’). Social emancipation is, thus, every action aiming at denaturalizing oppression (showing that, besides being unjust, oppression is neither necessary nor irreversible) and conceiving of it in the proportions it can be fought with the resources at hand. Learned ignorance, the ecology of knowledge and the wager are the ways of thinking present in this action. Indeed, we only have proof of their existence in the context of this action.

A Non-Occidentalist West?  87

Notes 1 See Buruma and Margalit (2004). For a critique, see Bilgrami (2006) and for a critique of Bilgrami, Robbins (2007). For a very different version of this conception, the Chinese Occidentalism, see Chen (1992). 2 See Carrier (1992), Coronil (1996), Venn (2001) and, most recently, Gregory (2004). 3 On this topic see, among others, Santos (1995, 2004). 4 Lucian of Samosata is still today an eccentric figure of classical antiquity. Some classicists consider him a mere ‘journalist’ or ‘artist’. For an opposing view see, for example, C.P. Jones (1986) and Zappala (1990). A polemical treatment of Lucian as a satirist can be read in Sloterdijk (1987). 5 On the processes of globalization, see Santos (2002: 163–312). 6 The problematics of constructing a prudent knowledge for a decent life is analyzed in Santos (2007a). 7 ‘Another world is possible’ is precisely the motif uniting the social movements and organizations which, since 2001, have animated the World Social Forum (see Santos, 2006). 8 This abyssal division itself became an epistemological condition. On abyssal thinking see Santos (2007b). 9 Both concur, however, that what you know is far less important than what you don’t know, hence the need to give ignorance epistemological priority (see also Miller, 2003: 16). 10 Cf. André (1997: 94). 11 On the sociology of absences see Santos (2004). 12 Cf. Santos (2006: 18–29). 13 Specifically on the new ecological relation between science and other ways of knowing, see Santos (2007a) and Santos et al. (2007: xix–lxii). 14 The idea of privileging ignorance as a pedagogical principle has been approached by many authors, even if from very different viewpoints from Nicholas of Cusa’s. See, for instance, Rancière (1987). 15 Such a project of popular education underlies the proposal for the creation of the popular university of social movements that I have been defending (see Santos, 2006: 148–59).

References André, J.M. (1997) Sentido, simbolismo e interpretação no discurso filosófico de Nicolau de Cusa. Coimbra: Fundação Calouste Gulbenkian/ JNICT. André, J.M. (2001) ‘A actualidade do pensamento de Nicolau de Cusa: “A douta ignorância’ e o seu significado hermenêutico, ético e estético”, Revista Filosófica de Coimbra 20: 313–32. Bilgrami, A. (2006) ‘Occidentalism, the Very Idea: An Essay on Enlightenment and Enchantment’, Critical Inquiry 32(3): 381–411. Buruma, I. and A. Margalit (2004) Occidentalism: The West in the Eyes of Its Enemies. New York: Penguin Press. Carrier, J.G. (1992) ‘Occidentalism: The World Turned Upside-down’, American Ethnologist 19(2): 195–212. Chen, X. (1992) ‘Occidentalism as Counterdiscourse: “He Shang” in Post-Mao China’, Critical Inquiry 18(4): 686–712. Coronil, F. (1996) ‘Beyond Occidentalism: Toward Nonimperial Geohistorical Categories’, Cultural Anthropology 11(1): 51–87.

88  Boaventura de Sousa Santos Cusa, N. (1985) On Learned Ignorance (De Docta Ignorantia). Minneapolis: Arthur J. Banning Press. URL: http://cla.umn.edu/sites/jhopkins/DI-I-12–2000.pdf. Doyle, J.P. (2001) The Conimbricenses: Some Questions on Signs. Milwaukee: Marquette University Press. Fukuyama, F. (1992) The End of History and the Last Man. London: Penguin Books. Goldmann, L. (1966) Sciences humaines et philosophie. Suivi de structuralisme genétique et création litteraire. Paris: Gonthier. Goldmann, L. (1970) Structures mentales et création culturelle. Paris: 10/18 Union Générale d’Editions. Goody, J. (2006) The Theft of History. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Gregory, D. (2004) The Colonial Present: Afghanistan, Palestine, Iraq. Malden, MA: Blackwell. Habermas, J. (1990) Die Moderne, ein unvollendetes Projekt: Philosophischpolitische Aufsätze. Leipzig: Reclam. Holloway, J. (2002) Change the World without Taking the Power: The Meaning of Revolution Today. London: Pluto Press. Isasi-Díaz, A.M. (2003) ‘Lo cotidiano, elemento intrínseco de la realidad’, pp. 365– 385 in R. Fournet-Betancourt (ed.) Resistencia y solidariedad. Globalización capitalista y liberación. Madrid: Editorial Trotta. Jones, C.P. (1986) Culture and Society in Lucian. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Miller, C.L. (2003) ‘Reading Cusanus: Metaphor and Dialectic in a Conjectural Universe’, Studies in Philosophy and the History of Philosophy 37. Washington, DC: The Catholic University of America Press. Needham, J. (1954—) Science and Civilization in China. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Ortega y Gasset, J. (1987) El Tema de nuestro tempo. Madrid: Alianza Editorial. Pascal, B. (1966) Pensées. London: Penguin Books. Rancière, J. (1987) Le Maître ignorant. Paris: Fayard. Robbins, B. (2007) ‘Not without Reason: A Response to Akeel Bilgrami’, Critical Inquiry 33(Spring): 632–40. Samosata, L. (1905) The Works of Lucian of Samosata. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Santos, B.S. (1995) Toward a New Common Sense: Law, Science and Politics in the Paradigmatic Transition. London: Routledge. Santos, B.S. (2002) Toward a New Legal Common Sense. London: Butterworth. Santos, B.S. (2004) ‘A Critique of Lazy Reason: Against the Waste of Experience’, pp. 157–97 in I. Wallerstein (ed.) The Modern World-System in the Longue Durée. Boulder: Paradigm Publishers. Santos, B.S. (2006) The Rise of the Global Left: The World Social Forum and Beyond. London: Zed Books. Santos, B.S. (ed.) (2007a) Cognitive Justice in a Global World: Prudent Knowledge for a Decent Life. Lanham: Lexington. Santos, B.S. (2007b) ‘Beyond Abyssal Thinking: From Global Lines to Ecologies of Knowledges’, Review Fernand Braudel Center XXX(1): 45–89. Santos, B.S. (2007c) ‘Human Rights as an Emancipatory Script? Cultural and Political Conditions’, pp. 3–40 in B.S. Santos (ed.) Another Knowledge is Possible. London: Verso. Santos, B.S. (forthcoming) ‘If God Were a Human Rights Activist: Human Rights and the Challenge of Political Theologies’, Law Social Justice and Global Development. Festschrift fur Upendra Baxi 2.

A Non-Occidentalist West?  89 Santos, B.S., J.A. Nunes and M.P. Meneses (2007) ‘Opening Up the Canon of Knowledge and Recognition of Difference’, pp. xix–lxii in B.S. Santos (ed.) Another Knowledge is Possible. London: Verso. Santos, L.R. (2002) ‘A Sabedoria do Idiota’, pp. 67–98 in J.M. André and M.A. Gómez (eds) Coincidência dos opostos e concórdia. Caminhos do pensamento em Nicolau de Cusa. Coimbra: Faculdade de Letras. Sloterdijk, P. (1987) Critique of Cynical Reason. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Venn, Couze (2001) Occidentalism: Modernity and Subjectivity. London: SAGE. Zappala, M.O. (1990) Lucian of Samosata in the Two Hesperias: An Essay in Literary and Cultural Translation. Potomac: Scripta Humanistica.

4 Imperialist Desires in English-Only Language Policy Donaldo Macedo

While the issue of language of instruction remains of the major challenges in public education in the United States, the incessant debate over education reform, more often than not, pays little attention to the direct relationship between the imposition of English as the only viable language of instruction and the unacceptable failure rate experienced by students whose dominant language is not English. Even though the dropout rate for Latina(o) students in the sixth and seventh grade in the Boston Public Schools is between 60 to 65 percent, the almost on-going educational reform debate remains deformed to the degree that it almost always ignores the role of language in academic success. In fact, the current national educational reform debate never acknowledges “one of the last [civil rights] victories in the Lau v. Nichols case, which held that offering language-minority children only instruction in a language they could not understand violated the Civil Rights Act.”1 The dismissal of language in educational policy and implementation has traditionally been part of an education planning that excludes rather than includes an ever-increasing number of non-English that populate most urban public schools. In some schools, over 90 percent of students are classified as non-dominant English speakers (ELLs), and yet the recipe for addressing the academic failure of these students is more high-stakes testing and more obsession with English instruction that borders on the ridiculous. For instance, the state of Massachusetts promulgates a law that not only abolished bilingual education but made instruction in a language other English illegal. In the meantime, White male students in the Boston Public schools are “40 percent more likely than Latino males”2 to graduate from high school. Given the systematic high failure rate of Latina(o) students in the Boston Public Schools, a Boston Globe editorial highlighted that “parents and members of the community listed [one of] the characteristics they want in a new superintendent [of schools]: some who has experienced dealing with English language learners.”3 At the same time, that parents and members of the community are protesting the criminal high failure rate of non-dominant English speakers, policy makers and educational leaders are demanding more high-stakes testing in English only and more accountability while they operate with total impunity and remain unaccountable to

92  Donaldo Macedo the long-term damage their English-only educational policies are doing to what is now called majority minority schools and to society in general. In the meanwhile, the prison pipeline is increasing daily, with the very students who are victims of the manufactured failure of the supposedly democratic public schools. Part of the reason language is never considered as a major factor to be taken seriously in educational policy making is the imperialist view of English that dominates all sectors of the U.S. society—an imperialist view that ranges from the imposition of English as a patriotic act to the obscene accommodation of most educators and a very large segment of the society to the general failure of foreign language education in the United States. It is not at all uncommon to hear educated Americans say that they took four years of Spanish in high school and/or college but all they remember is: “Cómo está usted?” (How are you?). This comment is never made as an experience of failure or shame but as a dismissal of the school foreign language requirement and a confirmation of its unimportance. The superiority complex of viewing English as the international language, the language of commerce, the language of technology that everyone wants or needs to learn is part and parcel of the imperialist desire that even critical authors such as George Orwell betrayed in his otherwise progressive a critical posture by over glorifying and over protecting the “purity” of the English language when he complained that “English is ‘in a bad way’ and in a state of temporary decadence’, and protests against such ‘abuses’ as foreign diction [and] ‘American is a bad influence and has already had a debasing effect’ ”4 on the English language. Orwell conveniently forgot to mention the massive influence that French, as an imperial language, had on English and the massive Latinization that English experienced in the history of its development. Latin as an imperial language also has had a lasting imprint on the psyche of those who remain shackled by imperial desires that create the myth that if one majors in Latin, one must have superior intelligence—a proposition that writes off billions of people who are not part of Western world and are not impacted by Latin. What these myth makers and those who reproduce it fail to understand is the role of self-selection of Latin students given the small number of Latin majors and the questionable applicability in terms of employability. The smaller number of Latin majors as compared to majors in other disciplines contributes to small classes where Latin instructors can devote individualized attention to students, leading to greater academic achievement and enhanced student motivation. Hence, those students who choose to major in Latin partly select this specialization due a high level of motivation to pursue Latin studies. This higher motivation level can also account for the seriousness with which Latin majors approach their study. This same phenomenon is also observed in people who choose esoteric subjects to study. They generally excel in their academic pursuits. The proposition that Latin majors are inherently smarter gives rise to vacuous generalizations such as “if you study Latin, you can think more logically.” This claim not only reflects a academic mush thinking, but it

Imperialist Desires in English-Only Language Policy  93 also points to the illogicality of this distorted logic. As Lilia Bartolomé so insightfully noted, if one follows the illogicality that Latin is a superior language that makes learners more intelligent and more logical, it would follow that one must view native speakers of Romance languages (French, Italian, Portuguese, and Spanish), which were derived from and maintain closer proximity to Latin, as inherently smarter than speakers of English. This proposition would be summarily dismissed as illogical, and proponents of English-only language policy who view English as education itself would also contest this unverifiable claim since their assumption that English is a superior language of instruction constitutes the bedrock of the English-only policy. In Massachusetts, for example, it is illegal to use Spanish as a language of instruction. There are, however, concrete advantages to continue to use Spanish in the process of acquiring English as a second language. Continued literacy in Spanish would provide English language learners with greater access to the Latinize English terms that are considered higher-order vocabulary in standardized tests such as the SAT. To generalize that Latin majors are innately and uniquely smart is to accept that all Catholic priests are also innately and uniquely more intelligent that the general population by virtue of the many years they study Latin, which, until Vatican II, was the only language used in the Roman Catholic mass and other rituals. If one is to accept this line of argumentation, one must also conclude the superior intelligence of priests, due to their mastery of Latin, then, the only way to explain the behavior of many priests who molest children, as has been widely documented, is to argue that they are an exception—a subset of priests who were untouched by the superior sophistication of the Latin language and culture. However, this rationalization would constitute a selective understanding of history that blindly celebrates the exceptional contributions to the world made by the Roman Empire while willfully ignoring the debauchery, the carnage of their conquest, and the decadence that accelerated, shaped, and determined its end. The imperialist desire remains so seductive to the present day that some Latin specialists teach oral Latin, a language that has been dead for centuries. At the same time, some of these same specialists remain indifferent to the current linguicism taking place with the imposition of English-only mandates throughout the United States. In some cases, many of these same specialists, who want to teach their students to speak a dead language in a Herculean attempt to revive spoken Latin, also support the English-only laws that prohibit the use of languages other than English to be used in schools. These specialists fail to understand that their classist and elitist posture that consider Latin majors as smarter and Latin as a superior language refuse to recognize that the belief in the superiority and/or inferiority of languages already points to a form of imperialism that colonizes the mind, which, in turn, prevents those who have been colonized from seeing the colonizer’s predatory presence, his unrestrained desire to overpower not only the physical space but also the historic and cultural spaces of

94  Donaldo Macedo the invaded . . . his unbridled ambition to destroy the cultural identity of the indigenous, regarded as inferior quasi-beasts.5 Consequently, the assumption made by many Latin specialists who consider Latin superior to other languages attests to a mystified way of seeing the cultural penetration of the Roman Empire “as some sort of civilizing gift from the so-called Old World.”6 In their mystified way of perceiving the world, some of these Latin specialists attempt to re-write history in a way that they are no longer able to understand the significance and the deep meaning of Bertolt Brecht’s poem, “A Worker Reads History,” where his seemingly simple and accessible verses provoke deeper re-thinking about the selective selection of what history we teach, what history we learn, and how we conveniently interpret history through a social construction that willfully refuses to see the obvious as Brecht’s verses gently challenge readers to think beyond heroes and emperors who are usually celebrated in textbooks that erase the people’s history: Where did the masons go? Imperial Rome Is full of arcs of triumph. Who reared them up?7

One of the mechanisms that contributes to our disinterest in foreign language leaning, in general, and our ignorance regarding the role of language in identity formation, in particular, is the techinicist overemphasis on language structures cultivated by most language specialists—an overemphasis that prevents us from understanding language beyond its structure. That is, our inability to conceive language, as Anna Kim Reilly, a graduate student in my Sociolinguistics class, suggests, as soul, self, communal and individual identity . . . [as] a constant internal struggle between belonging and oppression that breathes, speaks, thinks and acts . . . [as a] . . . fiber of a human soul and the purest and most creative aspect of social existence. Language is never innocent, innocuous or polite but that’s exactly how it should be: Human.8 To the extent that language is human and reflects and refracts our soul, educators and policy makers need to understand the centrality of language in subjectivity formation and the adverse effect its prohibition and its relegation to an inferior status have on a person’s psyche as poignantly captured by Gloria Anzaldúa: “So, if you want to really hurt me, talk badly about my language.”9 If Anzaldúa is correct when she states that “I am my language,” it follows that I am also my culture to the degree that language is infinitely culture so if you devalue my language, you also devalue my culture since I am my culture—a space, a location where I am, and more importantly, as Paulo Freire suggested, in addition to being, I am becoming—a process that cannot take place outside language, outside culture, for these are signposts guiding my journey of becoming as they enable me to understand what it

Imperialist Desires in English-Only Language Policy  95 means to be in my world so that I can also make meaning in other people’s worlds. Hence, we need to recognize that we touch one another in language . . . [a recognition that is] . . . particularly difficult in a society that would have us believe that there is no dignity in the experience of passion, that to feel deeply is to be inferior, for within the dualism of Western metaphysical thought, ideas are always more important than language.10 Given this preponderance to disarticulate cognition from emotion, educators and policy makers need to understand that my language is not only “a map of my failures.”11 It is also a map of my joy, a map of my humanity, a map that teachers can use to make an enormous difference in the lives of immigrant students whose dreams, aspirations, and desires are often bottled up in a temporary English language barrier. I say temporary because we all know that, given the opportunity and appropriate instruction, all immigrant students can learn English since, as research has shown us, what distinguishes humans from other animals is the capacity to learn multiple languages. This capacity involves not only one’s first language but other additional languages as well. The myth that Americans are not good at learning languages has a great deal more to do with social attitudes than with the biological capacity with which all humans are endowed. It is hard to believe that in most African countries even those individuals who have been excluded from schooling and literacy speak two or more languages. In what is referred to as “more developed countries” such as Germany and Sweden, most students graduate from high school speaking multiple languages. If fact, in these countries, one would be considered ill-educated if one spoke only one’s native language. I provide this short background to highlight the impact of social attitudes on language learning and teaching and how the policy of English only in schools represents vestiges of Western imperialist thought that disarticulates the world of ideas from language which, in turn, dichotomizes cognition from emotional self. I am sure that Americans do not suffer from a language disability gene that causes the disease of monolinguism, which, according to the late Mexican author Carlos Fuentes, is a curable disease. What is operative in the lack of interest in other languages in the United States—a disinterest that needs to be understood within the general xenophobia which is currently shaping the national dialogue where language is now the last refuge where one can practice racism with impunity. In other words, English only in schools is promoted as for ELL students’ own good and not as a violation of one’s right to literacy in one’s language. What is important to highlight is the connection between English-only policy, the anti-immigrant law that legalizes racial profiling, and the closing down of ethnic studies in Tucson schools in Arizona. How would White Americans

96  Donaldo Macedo react if Arizona proposed closing down women’s studies programs? This is not too farfetched when you consider that Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia recently declared that “women’s rights and gay rights are not protected under the U.S. Constitution.” Against a landscape of language and cultural discrimination, most immigrant students do not feel welcome in either U.S. society or in schools. Hence, teachers who consider themselves agents of change and want to make a difference in their students’ lives need to factor into their pedagogy issues of language and cultural discrimination. If you accept that motivation is one of the most important factors in second language learning, teachers need to critically understand that a society that is so blatantly unwelcoming to immigrants cannot expect these same immigrants to be highly motivated to embrace a culture that, for many of them, particularly immigrants of color, devalues their cultural identity, their language, and too often, their dignity. I always felt perplexed and disarmed when I was struggling to learn English because I wholeheartedly bought into the myth that the United States was a nation of immigrants that offered shelter, equality, and freedom, yet I never felt free to speak my native language openly, particularly in institutional contexts. My Capeverdean culture was summarily devalued through the constant pressure to assimilate, which contradicts the very ideals of democracy, equality, and freedom. In other words, it is an oxymoron to celebrate the ideals of democracy in a society that, at the same time, is pressuring you to stop being in order to be. That is, you are OK so long as you become like the rest of us (meaning White Americans) and blindly accept our values even if these values mean accommodating racist attitudes and giving up your language and culture. In fact, there is often very little in school curricula that enables immigrant students to make sense of the ambivalence of their fractured cultural souls that yearn to make meaning out of the bittersweet existence of the diaspora. There is little in school curriculum that allows immigrant students to recapture moments of their childhood, which have been frozen in time and space. On the contrary, what the curricula offers is a forced assimilatory process reflecting society’s dominant values— values that constitute a quasi-cultural genocide designed to enable the dominant cultural group to consolidate its cultural hegemony. It is a process that, according to Amilcar Cabral, “succeeds in imposing itself without damage to the culture of the dominated people—that is, it harmonizes economic and political domination of immigrant groups with their cultural personality.”11 The sad reality is, even when you blindly assimilate and give up most of your cultural values and speak English flawlessly, you are really never accepted as fully American, especially if you are nonwhite. This total lack of acceptance is normalized in the English language, which requires hyphenation when referring to certain nonwhite cultural and ethnic groups. Hence, it is common usage in American English to have African-­American, ­Hispanic-American, and Asian-American, among other hyphenated Americans. Likewise, it would be uncommon to refer to European-American,

Imperialist Desires in English-Only Language Policy  97 German-American, British-American, and Belgian-American. Individuals belonging these groups whose similarity is whiteness are simply referred to as European, German, British, and Belgian. In other words, the very imposition of assimilation is replete with false promises and limitations—false promises inherent in the myth that requires that once you give up your culture and language and assimilate, then you can become fully American, a myth that is disconfirmed by the use of hyphenation and the continued segregation of nonwhite ethnic groups in schools and in society in general. The limitations are demonstrated by the fact that only people with White European ancestry enjoy the privilege of being called American without the use of hyphenation as a marker of unwashed ethnicity. Thus, the dominant ideology that imposes blind assimilation also requires that we become immune to the dehumanization implicated in the use of hyphenation, which, in turn, coerces the implementation of a cruel cultural and ethnic ranking that shapes and normalizes inequality. Cultural hegemony is successful when even the victims of the ranking see the process as natural and commonsense to characterize themselves as hyphenated Americans. Even though President Obama is 50 percent White, he will always be referred to as the first AfricanAmerican president or the first Black president. It would, however, be unnatural to refer to John F. Kennedy as an Irish-American president. Thus, to do otherwise and forcefully claim to be American without the hyphenated cultural and ethnicity qualifiers can be regarded as either not necessary or unnecessarily making a political statement that does not sit well with the dominant White ethnic group and also be regarded as wanting to too much to be ideologically White. Even my use of “dominant White ethnic group” jolts people who consider themselves apolitical (this consideration is already a political act) and, most probably, would raise the following question: “What do you mean by dominant White ethnic group? As mentioned earlier, even though President Obama is half White, he could not escape the hyphenation process, which, in turn, diminishes the authenticity of his citizenship as demonstrated by incessant questions about his place of birth and his religious affiliation. Even though Obama is the president of the United States, a sizable segment of the society expects him to constantly demonstrate his patriotism. Representative Issa from California considers him as “one of the most corrupt presidents in modern times,” because of President Obama’s compromised patriotism, Sarah Palin quipped that he apologizes for America and sees “America [as] the ­problem . . . [rather than] as the solution.” Given these contradistinctions, teachers need to be able teach more than correct English grammatical constructions. They need to also realize and share with their students that the bound grammatical morpheme ed marks more than past tense. Its misplacement, its absence in certain environments, and its misuse also marks one’s foreignness and otherness. Unfortunately, the otherness identification seldom valorizes; instead, it is typically used to devalue, demonize, and dehumanize. In essence, immigrant students who

98  Donaldo Macedo face this level of discrimination cannot just focus on the appropriate acquisition of the past tense marker. These students are confronted with a linguistic and cultural drama, as Albert Memmi so eloquently put it, which positions them to make imposed choices that, in the end, are really choiceless choices. Having said all this, it is always possible to learn English and succeed academically, but this success is often tied to the humanity and quality of teachers that one encounters in one’s English-learning journey. I was enormously fortunate that I crossed paths with John O’Bryant, the first AfricanAmerican elected to the Boston Public School Committee. He was a guidance counselor at Boston English High School when I was a student there. When John O’Bryant heard that I had been told by my guidance counselor that I was not college material and that I should go to Franklin Institute to become a TV repairman, he approached me and said: “Pay no attention to him. You are going to college. I’m mad. Didn’t he look at your grades? Come to see me in my office after school—you are going to college.” That I spoke three languages and I had good grades mattered little to my guidance counselor. What mattered to him was the folk theory that equated my temporary English language difficulty with my intellectual capacity. I always say that the fact that I am a writer and a professor today is an accident of history in that I was fortunate enough to have met John O’Bryant. Most of my friends were not as lucky and joined the ranks of school dropouts—a euphemism for those students who have been excluded from the school system. That is why I honestly believe teachers matter. They can make a difference, and I am who I am today because John O’Bryant saw a human soul behind my temporary English barrier. However, to make a difference, teachers need to go beyond good intentions and develop the necessary political clarity and understand the historicity that generates, shapes, and maintains the current xenophobia The vicious attacks on people of color, the demonization of immigrants, the dismantling of affirmative action, and the assault on welfare programs for the poor are part and parcel of an unapologetic dominant ideology that was unleashed during the Reagan administration. It is the same ideology that has positioned itself against all public institutions, particularly those sectors that are perceived to serve mostly the poor and people of color. For example, public education in urban areas that now serves mostly non-White and poor students is under siege as public housing is struggling to survive its so-called reform. Interestingly enough, when the public is aimed to strengthen the dominant sphere, we hear little from the media, politicians, and political pundits who work zealously to “end welfare as we know it.” These conservative mavericks take great pride in excoriating welfare mothers for cheating and not working, as proof of social-program abuse, but remain silent about the fraud rampant with the military industrial complex, as shown in the Pentagon’s paying $700 for a toilet seat or $350 for a screwdriver. It is the same silence that surrounded the welfare for the rich in the S&L bank scandal,

Imperialist Desires in English-Only Language Policy  99 which cost taxpayers over $250 billion. In this case, those cultural commissars find it convenient to embrace the public as a process to socialize losses as they pontificate on the worth of privatizing social security and holding the poor responsible for creating a “social catastrophe” and blame the great society programs not only for financial losses but also for drops in high school test scores, drug problems and . . . [according to Patrick Buchannan] a generation of children and youth with no fathers, no faith and no dreams other than the lure of the streets.12 Against a landscape of selective assaults on some public institutions, the bilingual education movement could not escape the wrath of the dominant ideology. However, the present attack on bilingual education should not be understood as a simple critique of methodologies. First and foremost, the present assault on bilingual education is fundamentally political. The denial of the political nature of the debate concerning bilingual education constitutes, in itself, a political action. It is both academically dishonest and misleading to point out to some failures of bilingual education without examining the lack of success of linguistic minority students within the larger context of the general failure of public education in major urban areas, that have created minority student dropout rates ranging from 50 to 65 percent in the Boston public schools to over 70 percent in larger metropolitan areas like New York City. While conservative educators have been very vocal in their attempt to abolish bilingual education, due to, according to them, its lack of academic success, these same educators have conspicuously remained silent about the well-document failure of foreign language education. In spite of the general failure of foreign language education in the United States, no one is advocating closing down foreign language departments in schools. Paradoxically, the same educators who propose the dismantling of bilingual education programs which have a higher probability of producing bilingual speakers, reiterate their support for foreign language education with the aim of developing bilingualism even though the failure rate of becoming fully bilingual through foreign language education is exponentially greater than in bilingual programs. The English-only movement’s position points to a pedagogy of exclusion that views the learning of English as education itself. What its proponents fail to question is under what conditions will English be taught and by whom. For example, insisting on immersing non-English-speaking students in English as a Second Language programs taught by untrained music, art, and social sciences grand-fathered teachers (as is the case in Massachusetts with the grandfather clause in English as a Second Language (ESL) Certification) will do very little to accomplish the very goal of the English-only movement. In addition, the proponents of English-only also fail to raise two fundamental questions: First, if English is the most effective educational

100  Donaldo Macedo language, how can we explain that over 60 million Americans are illiterate or functionally illiterate? Second, if education in “English only” can guarantee linguistic minorities a better future, as educators like William Bennett promise, why do the majority of Black Americans, whose ancestors have been speaking English over two hundred years, find themselves still relegated in the ghettos? I want to argue in this chapter that the answer to these questions has nothing to do with whether English is a more viable language of instruction or whether it promises non-English-speaking students full participation both in school and the society at large. This position would point to an assumption that English is, in fact, a superior language and that we live in a classless, race-blind society. I want to propose that the attempt to institute proper and effective methods of educating non-English-speaking students cannot be reduced simply to issues of language but rests on a full understanding of the ideological elements that generate and sustain linguistic, cultural, and racial discrimination, which represent, in my view, vestiges of a colonial legacy in our democracy.

English Only as a Form of Colonialism Many educators will object to the term ‘colonialism’ to characterize the present attack on bilingual education by conservative as well as many liberal educators. Some liberals will go to great lengths to oppose my characterization of the attack on bilingual education as a form of colonialism, rationalizing that most educators who do not support bilingual education are just ignorant and need to be educated. This is tantamount to saying that racists do not really hate people of color; they are just ignorant. While one cannot argue that they are ignorant, one has to realize that ignorance is never innocent and is always shaped by a particular ideological predisposition. On another level, the attack on bilingual education or a racist act due to ignorance does not make the victims of these acts feel any better about their victimization. The apologetic stance of some liberals concerning the so-called ignorance on the part of those educators who blindly oppose bilingual education is not surprising, since classical liberalism, as a school of thought and as ideology, always prioritize the right to private property while relegating human freedom and other rights to mere ‘epiphenomena or derivatives’13 A rigorous analysis of thinkers such as Thomas Hobbes and John Locke will clearly show that the real essence of liberalism is the right to own property. The right to private property could only be preserved through self-conservation. This led Liubomir Tadic to pose the following question: “Isn’t conservatism a more determinant characteristic for liberalism than the tendency toward freedom?”14 He concluded that owing to this insipid ambiguity, liberalism is always positioned ideologically between revolution and reactionarism. In other words, liberalism vacillates between two opposing poles.

Imperialist Desires in English-Only Language Policy  101 It is this liberal position of vacillation that, on the one hand, propels many liberals to support bilingual education and on the other hand, object to the linkage between the attack on bilingual education and colonial language policies. As a colonized person, who experienced firsthand the discriminatory language policies of Portuguese colonialism, I can readily see many similarities between the colonial ideology and the dominant values that inform the U.S. English-only movement. Colonialism imposes ‘distinction’ as an ideological yardstick against which all other cultural values are measured, including language. On the one hand, this ideological yardstick serves to over celebrate the dominant group’s language to a level of mystification (i.e., viewing English as education itself and measuring the success of bilingual programs only in terms of success in English acquisition), and on the other hand, it devalues other languages spoken by an ever-increasing number of students who now populate most urban public schools. The position of U.S. Englishonly proponents is not very different from the Portuguese colonialism that tried to eradicate the use of African languages in institutional life and by inculcating Africans through the educational system in Portuguese only with myths and beliefs concerning the savage nature of their cultures. If we analyze closely the ideology that informs the present debate over bilingual education—spearheaded by the conservative U.S. English-only movement—and the present polemic over Western heritage versus multiculturalism, we can begin to see and understand that the ideological principles that sustain those debates are consonant with the structures and mechanisms of a colonial ideology as succinctly described below: Culturally, colonialism has adopted a negation to the [native culture’s] symbolic systems [including the native language], forgetting or undervaluing them even when they manifest themselves in action. This way, the eradication of past and the idealization and the desire to relive the cultural heritage of colonial societies constitute a situation and a system of ideas along with other elements situate the colonial society as a class.15 If it were not for the colonial legacy, how could we explain the U.S. educational policies in the Philippines and Puerto Rico. English was imposed as the only language of instruction in the Philippines while the imposed American textbook presented the American culture not only as superior, but as a “model par excellence for the Philippine society”16 This type of mis-education was so prevalent leading T.H. Pardo de Tavera, an earlier collaborator of the U.S. colonialism, to write the following letter to General Douglas Mac Arthur: After Peace is established all our efforts will be directed to Americanizing ourselves, to cause a knowledge of the English language to be

102  Donaldo Macedo extended and generalized in the Philippines, in order that through its agency we may adopt its principles, its political customs, and its peculiar civilization that our redemption may be complete and radical.17 It is the same complete and radical redemption that the United States hoped to achieve in Puerto Rico when Theodore Roosevelt’s commissioner of education in Puerto Rico, Rolland P. Faulkner, mandated in 1905 that instruction in public schools must be conducted in English and making Puerto Rican schools: agencies of Americanization in the entire country, and where [schools] would present the American ideal to our youth. Children born under the American flag and the American soil should have constantly present this ideal, so that they can feel proud of their citizenship and have the flag that represents the true symbol of liberty.18 By leaving our colonial legacy unexamined, the choice to choose an effective methodology where students are denied the choice to study their language and culture is, for all practical purposes, a choiceless choice. Instead of becoming enslaved by the management discourse of the present bilingual educational reform that enhances the economic interests of the reformers, while securing their privileged social and cultural positions, educators need to reconnect with our historical past so as to understand the colonial legacy that undermines our democratic aspirations. Although Renato Constantino is writing about the colonial legacy in the Philippines, his thoughtful words are not only a propos but also illuminating regarding our present historical juncture in education: We see our present with as little understanding as we view our past because of aspects of the past which could illumine the present have been concealed from us. This concealment has been effected by a systemic process of mis-education characterized by a thoroughgoing inculcation of colonial values and attitudes-a process which could not have been so effective had we not been denied access to the truth and to be part of our written history. As a consequence, we have become a people without a sense of history. We accept the present as given, bereft of historicity. Because we have so little comprehension of our past, we have no appreciation of its meaningful interrelation with the present.19

Scientism as Neo-Colonialism Oppressive dominant ideologies have throughout history resorted to science as a mechanism to rationalize crimes against humanity that range from slavery to genocide by targeting race and other ethnic and cultural traits as markers that license all forms of dehumanization. If we did not suffer from

Imperialist Desires in English-Only Language Policy  103 historical amnesia, we would easily understand the ideology that informed Hans Eysenck’s psychological proposal which suggest that “there might be a partly genetic reason for the differences in IQ between black and white people.”20 It is the same historical amnesia that veils dangerous memories, keeping us disconnected from Arthur Jensen’s racist proposals published decades ago by the Harvard Educational Review. One could argue that the above-cited incidents belong to the dusty archives of earlier generations, but I do not believe we have learned a great deal from historically dangerous memories, considering our society’s almost total embrace of scientism as characterized by the success of The Bell Curve, by Charles Murray and the former Harvard professor Richard, J. Hernstein. It is the same blind acceptance of ‘naive’ empiricism that is providing fuel to the U.S. English-only movement as it attempts to ban bilingual education in the United States. Ironically, when empirical data are provided to demonstrate that bilingual education is an effective approach to educate nonEnglish speaking students as amply demonstrated by researchers such as Zeynep Beykont, Virginia Collier, Kenji Hakuta, David Ramirez, Jim Cummins, among others,21 the data are either ignored or buried in endless debate over research design and often missing a fundamental point: the inequities that inform and shape most bilingual programs. By and large the present debate over bilingual education is informed by the positivistic and management models that hide their ideologies in the false call for objectivity, hard data, and scientific rigor. This can be seen, for example, in the comments of Pepi Leistyna’s term paper on the political nature of bilingual education: “These are unsupported politically motivated claims! [the professor called for] a more linguistic analysis”22 As Leistyna recounts, this same professor told him: “I hope you have been reading some hard science”. The false call for hard science in the social sciences represents a process through which ‘naive’ empiricists hide their anti-intellectual posture—a posture that is manifested either through censorship of certain bodies of knowledge or through the disarticulation between theories of the discipline and the empirically driven and self-contained studies which enables the pseudoscientists to not challenge the territorialization of university intellectual activity or in any way risk undermining the status and core beliefs of their fields. The difference, [for scientists,] is that this blindness or reluctance often contradicts the intellectual imperatives of the very theories they espouse. Indeed, only a theorized discipline can be an effective site for general social critique—that is, a discipline actively engaged in self-criticism, a discipline that is a locus for struggle, a discipline that renews and revises its awareness of its history, a discipline that inquires into its differential relations with other academic fields, and a discipline that examines its place in the social formation and is willing to adapt its writing practices to suit different social functions.23

104  Donaldo Macedo As these theoretical requirements make abundantly clear, Pepi Leistyna’s arrogant dismissal of Freire’s social critical theories unveil the ideology behind the prescription that Leistyna should have been “reading some hard science”. The censorship of political analysis in the current debate over bilingual education exposes the almost illusory and schizophrenic educational practice in which “the object of interpretation and the content of the interpretive discourse are considered appropriate subjects for discussion and scrutiny, but the interests of the interpreter and the discipline and society he or she serves are not.”24 The disarticulation between the interpretive discourse and the interests of the interpreter is often hidden in the false call for an objectivity that denies the dialectal relationship between subjectivity and objectivity. The false call for objectivity is deeply ingrained in a positivistic method of inquiry. In effect, this has resulted in an epistemological stance in which scientism and methodological refinement are celebrated while “theory and knowledge are subordinated to the imperatives of efficiency and technical mastery, and history is reduced to a minor footnote in the priorities of ‘empirical’ scientific inquiry”.25 The blind celebration of empiricism has created a culture in which pseudoscientists, particularly in schools of education, who engage in a form of “naive empiricism”, believe “that facts are not human statements about the world but aspects of the world itself”26. According to Michael Schudson: This view was insensitive to the ways in which the “world” is something people construct by the active play of their minds and by their acceptance of conventional—not necessarily “true” ways of seeing and talking. Philosophy, the history of science, psychoanalysis, and the social science have taken great pains to demonstrate that human beings are cultural animals who know and see and hear the world through socially constructed filters.27 The socially constructed filters were evident when California voters passed a referendum banning bilingual education. While the school administrators and politicians were gearing up to disband bilingual programs, data from both San Francisco and San José school systems showed that bilingual graduates were outperforming their English-speaking counterparts.28 This revelation was met by total silence by the media, the proponents of English only, and political pundits. This is where the call for objectivity and scientific rigor are subverted by the weight of its own ideology. What these educators do not realize is that there is a large body of critical litearature that interrogates the very nature of what they consider research. Critical writers such as Donna Haraway,29 Linda Brodkey, Roger Fowler, and Greg Myers, among others, have painstakingly demonstrated the erroneous claim of “scientific” objectivity that permeates all forms of empirical work in social sciences. According to Linda Brodkey, “scientific objectivity has too often and for two long been used as an excuse to ignore a social and

Imperialist Desires in English-Only Language Policy  105 hence, political practice in which women and people of color, among others, are dismissed as legitimate subjects of research”30. The blind belief in objectivity not only provides pdeudoscientists with a safe heaven from which they can attempt to prevent the emergence of counterdiscourses that interrogate “the hegemony of positivism and empiricism”,31 but it is also a practice that generates a form of folk theory concerning objectivity believed only by nonscientists. In other words, as Linda Brodkey would so eloquently put it, “that any and all knowledge, including that arrived at empirically, is necessarily partial, that is, both an incomplete and an interested account of whatever is envisioned”.32 In fact, what these pseudoscientists consider research, that is, work based on quantitative evaluation results, can never escape the social construction that generated these models of analysis from which the theoretical concepts are always shaped by the pragmatics of the society that devised these evaluation models in the first place.33 That is, if the results are presented as facts that were originally determined by a particular ideology, these facts cannot in themselves illuminate issues that lie outside of the ideological construction of these facts to begin with.34 I would warn educators that these evaluation models can provide answers that are correct and nevertheless without truth. A study that concludes that African-American students perform way below White mainstream students in reading is correct, but such a conclusion tells us very little about the material conditions with which African-American students work in the struggle against racism, educational tracking, and the systematic negation and devaluation of their histories. I would propose that the correct conclusion rests in a full understanding of the ideological elements that generate and sustain the cruel reality of racism and economic oppression. Thus an empirical study will produce conclusions without truth if it is disarticulated from the sociocultural reality within which the subjects of the study are situated. For example, an empirical study designed to assess reading achievement of children who live in squalid conditions must factor in the reality faced by these children as accurately described by Jonathan Kozol: Crack-cocaine addiction and the intravenous use of heroin, which children I have met here call “the needle drug,” are woven into the texture of existence in Mott Haven. Nearly 4,000 heroin injectors, many of whom are HIV-infected, live here. Virtually every child at St. Ann’s knows someone, a relative or neighbor, who has died of AIDS, and most children here know many others who are dying now of the disease. One quarter of the women of Mott Haven who are tested in obstetric wards are positive for HIV. Rates of pediatric AIDS, therefore, are high. Depression is common among children in Mott Haven. Many cry a great deal but cannot explain exactly why. Fear and anxiety are common. Many cannot sleep. Asthma is the most common illness among children here. Many have to struggle to take in a good deep breath. Some mothers keep oxygen

106  Donaldo Macedo tanks, which children describe as “breathing machines,” next to their children’s beds. The houses in which these children live, two thirds of which are owned by the City of New York, are often as squalid as the houses of the poorest children I have visited in rural Mississippi, but there is none of the greenness and the healing sweetness of the Mississippi countryside outside their windows, which are often barred and bolted as protection against thieves.35 An empirical study that neglects to incorporate in its design the cruel reality just described (and this is often the case in our supposedly classless society) will never be able to fully explain the reasons behind the poor performance of these children. While pseudoscientists will go to great lengths to prevent their research methodologies from being contaminated by the social ugliness described by Kozol in order so that they can safeguard their “objectivity” in, say, their study of underachievement of children who live in ghettos, the residents of these ghettos have little difficulty understanding the root causes of their misery described by a resident of the community named Maria: If you weave enough bad things into the fibers of a person’s life— sickness and filth, old mattresses and other junk thrown in the streets and ugly ruined things, and ruined people, a prison here, sewage there, drug dealers here, the homeless people over there, then give us the very worst schools anyone could think of, hospitals that keep you waiting for ten hours, police that don’t show up when someone’s dying . . . you can guess that life will not be very nice and children will not have much sense of being glad of who they are. Sometimes it feels like we have been buried six feet under their perceptions. This is what I feel they have accomplished.36 What this woman Maria would probably say to researchers is that we do not need another doctoral dissertation to state what is so obvious to the people sentenced to live in this form of human misery. In other words, by locking children in material conditions that are oppressive and dehumanizing, we are invariably guaranteeing that they will be academically underachievers. Once the underachievement is guaranteed by these oppressive conditions, it is then very easy for research studies as described in The Bell Curve by Richard J. Hernstein and Charles Murray which, in the name of objectivity, are disarticulated from the political and social reality that shaped and maintain these oppressive conditions, to conclude that Blacks are genetically wired to be intellectually inferior to Whites. Along the same lines, an empirical study that concludes that children who engage in dinner conversation with their parents and siblings achieve higher rates of success in reading is not only academically dishonest but also misleading to the

Imperialist Desires in English-Only Language Policy  107 degree that it ignores the class and economic assumptions that all children are guaranteed daily dinners in the company of their parents and other siblings. What generalizations can such a study make about the 12 million children who go hungry every day in the United States? What can a study of this type say to thousands upon thousands of children who are homeless, who do not have a table, and who sometimes do not have food to put on the table that they do not have? A study that makes such sweeping and distorted generalizations about the role of dinner conversations in reading achievement says little about children whose houses are without heat in the winter, houses that reach dangerously cold conditions that led a father of four children to remark: “You just cover up . . . and hope you wake up the next morning.” If the father really believes the study results, he will suggest to his children, after they’ve all made it through another freezing night alive, that they should have a conversation during dinner the next night since it will be helpful in their reading development should they be lucky enough to make it through another night alive. What dinner conversation would the Haitian immigrant, Abner Louima, have with his children after being brutally sodomized with a toilet plunger by two white policemen in a New York police precinct? Would his children’s reading teacher include as part of his or her literacy development the savage acts committed by the White New York police against their father? These questions make it clear how distorted empirical study results can be when they are disconnected from the sociocultural reality that informs the study to begin with. In addition, such distortion feeds into the development of stereotypes that, on the one hand, blame the victims for their own social misery and on the other hand, rationalize the genetic inferiority hypotheses that are advanced by such pseudoscholars as Charles Murray and the former Harvard professor Richard J. Hernstein.37 What empirical studies often neglect to point out is how easily statistics can be manipulated to take away the human faces of the subjects of study through a process that not only dehumanizes but also distorts and falsifies the reality. What needs to be fully understood is that educators cannot isolate phoneme-grapheme awareness from social class and cultural identity factors that ultimately shape such awareness.

Fracturing Cultural Identities Most conservative educators as well as many liberals conveniently embrace a form of ‘naive’ empiricism in which scientism and methodological refinement are celebrated, issues of equity, class, cultural identity, among other sociocultural knowledges “are subordinated to the imperatives of efficiency and technical mastery, and [sociocultural factors] are reduced to a minor footnote in the priorities of ‘empirical’ scientific inquiry.”38 While the fields of Bilingual Education and English as a Second Language have produced a barrage of studies aimed primarily to demonstrate the effectiveness of

108  Donaldo Macedo English acquisition, these research studies conspicuously fail to raise other fundamental questions: Does cultural subordination affect academic achievement? What is the correlation of social segregation and school success? What role does cultural identity among subordinated students play in linguistic resistance? Does the devaluation of students’ culture and language affect reading achievement? Is class a factor in bilingual education? Do material conditions that foster human misery adversely affect academic development? These questions are rarely incorporated in ‘naive’ empirical studies that parade under the mantra of scientific ‘objectivity’ as a process to deny the role of ideology in their work so as to ideologically prevent the development of counterdiscourses that interrogate these studies major assumptions. As Paulo Freire would point out, when these educators claim a scientific posture, for instance, “[they often] try to ‘hide’ in what [they] regard as the neutrality of scientific pursuits, indifferent to how [their] findings are used, even uninterested in considering for whom or for what interests [they] are working.”39 Because most educators, particularly in schools of education, do not conduct research in ‘hard sciences’, they uncritically attempt to adopt the ‘neutrality’ posture in their work in the social sciences, leaving out the necessary built-in criticism, skepticism, and rigor of hard sciences. In fact, science cannot evolve without a healthy dose of self-criticism, skepticism, and contestation. However, for instance, a discourse of critique and contestation is often viewed as contaminating ‘objectivity’ in social sciences and education. As Freire would argue, these educators might treat [the] society under study as though [they] are not participants in it. In [their] celebrated impartiality, [they] might approach this real world as if [they] wear ‘gloves and masks’ in order not to contaminate or be contaminated by it.40 The metaphorical ‘gloves and masks’ represent an ideological fog that enables educators to comfortably fragment bodies of knowledge so they can conduct their research, for example, among children who live in Mott Haven to determine their phoneme-grapheme awareness disarticulated from the material conditions of Mott Haven as described by Jonathan Kozol in which children are lock in a chain of oppressive and dehumanizing circumstances that invariably guarantee that they will be academic underachievers. By reducing the reading principles or the acquisition of English, for instance to pure technicism (i.e., phoneme-grapheme awareness), these educators can easily disarticulate a particular form of knowledge from other bodies of knowledge, thus preventing the interrelation of information necessary to gain a more critical reading of the reality. These metaphorical ‘gloves and masks’ enable educators to engage in a social construction of not seeing, which allows them to willfully not understand that behind the empirical data there are always human faces with fractured identities, dreams,

Imperialist Desires in English-Only Language Policy  109 and aspirations. The fracturing of cultural identity usually leaves an indelible psychological scar experienced even by those subordinated people who seemingly have ‘made it’ in spite of all forms of oppression. This psychological scar is painfully relived by Gloria Anzaldúa: “El Anglo con cara de inocente nos arrancó la lengua.”41 (The Anglo with the innocent face has yanked our tongue), thus sentencing colonized cultural beings to a silenced culture: Ahogados, escupimos el oscuro. Peleando con nuestra propia sombra el silencio nos sepulta.42 (Drowned, we spit darkness. Fighting with our very shadow we are buried by silence.) The fragmentation of bodies of knowledge also prevents us from making the necessary linkages so as to understand that the yanking of linguistic minority students’ tongues is not only undemocratic, but it is reminiscent of colonial policies as recounted by the African author Semali: Then, I went to school, a colonial school, and this harmony was broken. The language of my education was no longer the language of my culture. I first went to Iwa Primary school. Our language of education was not Kiswahili. My struggle began at a very early age constantly trying to find parallels in my culture with what was being taught in the classroom. In school we followed the British colonial syllabus. The books we read in class had been written by Mrs. Bryce, mostly adapted and translated into Kiswahili from British curricula. We read stories and sung songs about having tea in an English garden, taking a ride on the train, sailing in the open seas, and walking the streets of town. These were unfortunately stories far removed from our life experiences. As expected, we memorized them even though they were meaningless. By the time I was in fifth grade Swahili was no longer the medium of instruction. English had taken over and Kiswahili was only a subject taught once a week. Kichagga was not to be spoken at any time and if caught speaking we were severely punished. Thus, one of the most humiliating experiences was to be caught speaking Kichagga while still in the school grounds. The culprit was given corporal punishment-three to five strokes of the cane on the buttocks.43 The expression “And then I went to school” is a common experience throughout the world, including first-world democracies like the United States where bilingualism and multiculturalism are under a constant assault by the Western cultural commissars. We conveniently fall into historical amnesia by forgetting the English re-education camps designed primarily to yank Native Americans’ tongues. Native American children were taken from their parents and sent to boarding schools with the primary purpose of cutting them off from their ‘primitive’ languages and ‘savage’ cultures.

110  Donaldo Macedo While we ominously forget the dehumanization of American Indian children in the so-called boarding school, we, nevertheless, proudly denounced the reeducation schools created by communist governments as examples of human rights violations. “And then I went to school” is, however, not forgotten by the American Indian writer Joseph H. Suina: School was a painful experience during those early years. The English language and the new set of values caused me much anxiety and embarrassment. I could not comprehend everything that was happening but yet I could understand very well when I messed up or was not doing well. The negative aspect was communicated too effectively and I became unsure of myself more and more. How I wished I could understand other things as well in school.44 Whether we feel the pain of Gloria Anzaldúa’s tongue being yanked in our own democracy, whether we connect with the painful experience and embarrassment in American schools as recounted by the Native American author Joseph H. Suina or whether we listen to the African author Ngugi’s lament for the loss of the Gikuyu language in Africa, these experiences undeniably share one common feature: colonization. We therefore learnt to value words for their meaning and nuances. Language was not a mere string of words. It had a suggestive power well beyond the immediate and lexical meaning. Our appreciation of the suggestive magical power of language was reinforced by the games we played with words through riddles, proverbs, transpositions of syllables, or through nonsensical but musically arranged words. So we learnt the music of our language on top of the content. The language, through images and symbols, gave us a view of the world, but it had a beauty on its own. The home and the field were then our pre-primary school but what is important for this discussion, is that the language of the evening teach-ins, and the language of our work in the field were one. And then I went to school, a colonial, school, and this harmony was broken. The language of my education was no longer the language of my culture.45 If we analyze closely the ideology that informs the present debate over bilingual education and the present polemic over the primacy of Western heritage versus multiculturalism, we can begin to see and understand that the ideological principles that sustain those debates are consonant with the structures and mechanisms of a colonial ideology designed to devalue the cultural capital and values of the colonized. It is only through a full understanding of our colonial legacy that we can begin to comprehend the complexity of our bilingualism in the United States. For most linguistic minority speakers in the United States, their bilingualism

Imperialist Desires in English-Only Language Policy  111 is not characterized by the ability to speak two languages. There is a radical difference between a dominant speaker learning a second language and a minority speaker acquiring the dominant language. While the former involves the addition of a second language to one’s linguistic repertoire, the latter usually provides the minority speaker with the experience of subordination in speaking both his and her language which is devalued by the dominant values and the dominant language that he or she has learned, often under coercive conditions. Both the colonized context and the asymmetrical power relations with respect to language use in the United States create, on the one hand, a form of forced bilingualism and on the other, what Albert Memmi appropriately calls a linguistic drama: In the colonial context, bilingualism is necessary. It is a condition for all culture, all communication and all progress. But while the colonial bilinguist is saved from being walled in, he suffers a cultural catastrophe which is never completely overcome. The difference between native language and cultural language is not peculiar to the colonized, but colonial bilingualism cannot be compared to just any linguistic dualism. Possession of two languages is not merely a matter of having two tools, but actually means participation in two physical and cultural realms. Here, the two worlds symbolized and conveyed by the two tongues are in conflict; they are those of the colonizer and the colonized. Furthermore, the colonized’s mother tongue, that which is sustained by his feelings, emotions, and dreams, that in which his tenderness and wonder are expressed, thus that which holds the greatest emotional impact, is precisely the one which is the least valued. It has no stature in the country or in the concept of peoples. If he wants to obtain a job, make a place for himself, exist in the community and the world, he must first bow to the language of his masters. In the linguistic conflict within the colonized, his mother tongue is that which is crushed. He himself sets about discarding this infirm language, hiding it from the sight of strangers. In short, colonial bilingualism is neither a purely bilingual situation, in which an indigenous tongue coexists with a purist’s language (both belonging to the same world of feeling), nor a simple polyglot richness benefiting from an extra but relatively neuter alphabet; it is a linguistic drama.46 An example par excellence concerning how our society treats different forms of bilingualism is reflected in our tolerance towards certain types of bilingualism and lack of tolerance towards other bilingualism expressions. Most of us have tolerated various degrees of bilingualism on the part of foreign language teachers and professors that range from heavy English accent to serious deficiency in the mastery of the foreign language they teach. Nevertheless, these teachers, with rare exceptions, have been granted tenure,

112  Donaldo Macedo have been promoted within the institutions they teach, and in some cases, have become “experts” and “spokespersons” for various cultural and linguistic groups in our communities. On the other hand, if bilingual teachers are speakers of a subordinated language who speak English as a second language with an accent, the same level of tolerance is not accorded to them. Take the case of Westfield, Massachusetts, when “about 400 people there signed a petition asking state and local officials to ban the hiring of any elementary teacher who speaks English with an accent,”47 because according to them, “accents are catching.”48 The petition was in response to the hiring of a Puerto Rican teacher assigned to teach in the system. As one can readily see, empirical studies that neglect to fully investigate this linguistic drama and treat bilingualism as mere communication in two languages invariably end up reproducing those ideological elements characteristic of the communication between colonizer and colonized. These ‘naive’ empirical studies cannot but recycle old assumptions and values regarding the meaning and usefulness of the students’ native language in education. The notion that education of linguistic minority students is a matter of learning the Standard English language still informs the vast majority of bilingual programs and manifests its logic in the renewed emphasis on technical reading and writing skills. For the notion of education of linguistic minority students to become meaningful, it has to be situated within a theory of cultural production and viewed as an integral part of the way in which people produce, transform, and reproduce meaning. Bilingual education, in this sense, must be seen as a medium that constitutes and affirms the historical and existential moments of lived culture. Hence, it is an eminently political phenomenon and must be analyzed within the context of a theory of power relations and an understanding of social and political production and reproduction. By ‘cultural reproduction’ I refer to collective experiences that function in the interest of dominant groups rather than in the interest of the oppressed groups that are objects of its policies. Bilingual education programs in the United States have, in fact, existed within a de facto neocolonial educational model. I use ‘cultural production’ to refer to specific groups of people producing, mediating, and confirming the mutual ideological elements that merge from and reaffirm their daily lived experiences. In this case, such experiences are rooted in the interest of individual and collective self-determination. It is only through a cultural production model that we can achieve a truly democratic and liberatory educational experience. While the various debates in the past two decades may differ in their basic assumptions about the education of linguistic minority students, they all share one common feature: They all ignore the role of languages as a major force in the construction of human subjectivities. That is, they ignore the way language may either confirm or deny the life histories and experiences of the people who use it. The pedagogical and political implications in education programs for linguistic minority students are far-reaching and yet largely ignored. These

Imperialist Desires in English-Only Language Policy  113 programs, for example, often contradict a fundamental principle of reading, namely that students learn to read faster and with better comprehension when taught in their native tongue. In addition, the immediate recognition of familiar words and experiences enhance the development of a positive self-concept in children who are somewhat insecure about the status of their language and culture. For this reason, and to be consistent with the plan to construct a democratic society free from vestiges of oppression, a bilingual education program should be based on the rationale that such a program must be rooted in the cultural capital of subordinate groups and have as its point of departure their own language. Educators must develop radical pedagogical structures which provide students with the opportunity to use their own reality as a basis for literacy. This includes, obviously, the language they bring to the classroom. To do otherwise is to deny linguistic minority students the rights that lie at the core of the notion of a democratic education. The failure to base a literacy program on the minority students’ language means that the oppositional forces can neutralize the efforts of educators and political leaders to achieve de-colonization of schooling. It is of tantamount importance that the incorporation of the minority language as the primary language of instruction in education of linguistic minority students be given top priority. It is through their own language that linguistic minority students will be able to reconstruct their history and their culture. I want to conclude that the minority language has to be understood within the theoretical framework that generates it. Put another way, the ultimate meaning and value of the minority language is not to be found by determining how systematic and rule-governed it is. We know that already. Its real meaning has to be understood through the assumptions that govern it, and it has to be understood via the social, political, and ideological relations to which it points. Generally speaking, the issue of effectiveness and validity often hides the true role of language in the maintenance of the values and interests of the dominant class. In other words, the issue of effectiveness and validity of bilingual education becomes a mask that obfuscates questions about the social, political, and ideological order within which the minority language exists. In this sense, the students’ language is the only means by which they can develop their own voice, a prerequisite to the development of a positive sense of self-worth. As Giroux elegantly states, the student’s voice “is the discursive means to make themselves ‘heard’ and to define themselves as active authors of their worlds”.49 The authorship of one’s own world also implies the use of one’s own language, and relates to what Mikhail Bakhtin describes as “retelling the story in one’s own words”.50 To tell a story in one’s own words not only represents a threat to those conservative educators who are complicit with dominant ideology but also prevents them from concealing, according to Vaclav Havel, their true

114  Donaldo Macedo position and their inglorious modus vivendi, both from the world and from the selves.51 Simply put, proponents of the English-only movement and other educators who are willing to violate linguistic minority students’ democratic rights to be educated in their own language as well as in English work primarily to preserve a social (dis)order that according to Jean Paul Sartre “sanctions misery, chronic hunger, ignorance, or, in general, subhunmanity.”52 In essence, educators who refuse to transform the ugliness of human misery, social injustices and inequalities, invariably become educators who, as Sartre so poignantly suggested, “will change nothing and will serve no one, but will succeed only in finding moral comfort in malaise.”53

Notes 1 Gary Orfield, “Tenth Annual Brown Lecture in Education Research: A New Civil Rights Agenda for American Education.” Education Researcher, August/ September 2014, Vol. 43, No. 6, p. 276. 2 Editorial, The Boston Globe, January 19, 2015, p. A10. 3 Ibid., p. A10. 4 Roger Fowler, Bob Hodge, Gunther Kress, Tony Trew, Language Control (London, Boston and Henley: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1979), p. 7. 5 Paulo Freire, Pedagogy of Indignation (Boulder, CO: Paradigm Publishers, 2014), pp. xxiii–xxiv. 6 Ibid., p. xxiv. 7 Cited in B. Bigelow, “The Human Lives Behind the Labels: The Global Sweatshop, Nike, and the Race to the Bottom.” Rethinking Schools, Summer 1997, Vol. II, No. 4, p. 1. 8 Anna Kim Reilly, “Language Philosophy Paper,” Unpublished manuscript. 9 Gloria Anzaldúa, Borderlands: The New Mestiza (San Francisco: Aunt Lute, 1989). 10 bell hooks, Teaching to Transgress: Education as the Practice of Freedom (New York and London: Routledge, 1994), pp. 174–175. 11 Adrienne Rich, cited in bell hooks, Teaching to Transgress: Education as the Practice of Freedom (New York and London: Routledge, 1994), p. 174. 12 Adam Pertam, “Buchanan Announces Presidential Candidacy”, Boston Globe, December 11, 1991, p. 1. 13 Mihailo Markovic, Liubomir Tadic, Danko Grlik, Liberalismo y Socialismo: Teoria y Praxis (Mexico: Editorial Grijalbo, 1977), p. 19. 14 Ibid., p. 17. 15 Geralso Navas Davilla, La Dialectica del Desarrollo Nacional: El caso de Puerto Rico (San Juan: Editorial Universitaria, 1978), p. 27. 16 Renato Constantino, Neocolonial Identity and Counter-Consciousness (London: Merlin Press, 1978), p. 66. 17 Ibid., p. 67. 18 Maria M. Lopez Lagunne, Bilingualismo en Puerto Rico: Actitudes Sociolinguisticas del Maestro (San Juan: M.I.S.C.E.S., Corp., 1989), p. 17. 19 Renato Constantino, Neocolonial Identity and Counter-Consciousness (London: Merlin Press, 1978), p. 66, p. 1. 20 H. Eyzenck, The IQ argument: Race, Intelligence, and Education (New York: Library Press, 1971).

Imperialist Desires in English-Only Language Policy  115 21 Zeynep F. Beykont, Academic Progress of a Nondominant Group: A Longitudinal Study of Puerto Ricans in New York City’s Late Exit Bilingual Programs. Doctoral Dissertation presented to the Graduate School of Education at Harvard University, 1994.   Virginia P. Collier, “A Synthesis of Studies Examining Long-Term Language Minority Student Data on Academic Achievement.” Bilingual Research Journal, 1992, Vol. 16, No. 182, pp. 187–212.   James Cummins, “The Role of Primary Language Development in Promoting Educational Success for Language Minority Students.” In California State Department of Education (Ed.), Schooling and Language Minority Students: A Theoretical Framework (Los Angeles: California State University, Evaluation, Dissemination and Assessment Center).   Kenji Hakuta, Mirror of Language: The Debate on Bilingualism (New York: Basic Books, 1986). 22 Pepi Leistyna, Presence of Mind: Education and Politics of Deception (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1998). 23 Carry Nelson, Manifesto of a Tenured Radical (New York: New York University Press, 1997), p. 19. 24 Ibid. 25 Henry A. Giroux, Theory and Resistance: A Pedagogy for the Opposition (South Hadley, MA: J.F. Bergin, 1983), p. 87. 26 Michael Schudson, Discovering the News: A Social History of American Newspapers (New York: Basic Books, 1978), p. 6. 27 Ibid. 28 San Diego Union Tribune, “Bilingual Grads Outperform Others in 2 Districts”, July 8, 1998, p. 143. 29 For a comprehensive and critical discussion of scientific objectivity, see Donna Haraway, “Situated Knowledges: The Science Question in Feminism and the Privilege of Partial Perspectives.” Feminist Studies, 1988, Vol. 14, pp. 575–599. 30 Linda Brodkey, Writing Permitted in Designated Areas Only (Minnesota: Minnesota University Press, 1966), p. 10. 31 Ibid., p. 8. 32 Ibid., p. 8. 33 Roger Fowler et al., Language and Control (London: Routledge & Keagan Paul, 1979), p. 192. 34 Greg Myers, “Reality, Consensus, and Reform in the Rhetoric of Composition Teaching.” College English, February 1986, Vol. 48, No. 2, pp. 154–174. 35 Jonathan Kozol, Amazing Grace: The Lines and the Conscience of a Nation (New York: Harper Perennial, 1996), p. 4. 36 Ibid., p. 39. 37 Richard J. Hernstein and Charles Murray, The Bell Curve: Intelligence and Class Structure in American Life (New York: The Free Press, 1994). 38 Henry A. Giroux, Theory and Resistence, p. 87. 39 Paulo Freire, Pedagogy of Freedom: Ethics, Democracy, and Civic Courage (Boulder, CO: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, 1998). 40 Ibid. 41 Gloria Anzaldúa, Borderlands: The New Mestiza (San Francisco: Spinsters/Aunt Lute, 1987), p. 203. 42 Ibid., p. 203. 43 Ladislaus Semali and Joe L. Kincheloe (eds.), What Is Indigenous Knowledge and Why Should We Study It? New York: Falmer Press. 44 Joseph H. Suina, “And Then I Went to School.” In Rodney R. Cocking and Jose P. Mestre (Eds.), Linguistic and Cultural Influences on Learning Mathematics (Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates Publishers, 1998), p. 297.

116  Donaldo Macedo 45 Ngugi Wa Thiong’o, Decolonizing the Mind: The Politics of Language in African Literature (New Hampshire: Heinemann Press, 1986), p. 11. 46 Albert Memmi, The Colonizer and the Colonized (Boston: Beacon Press, 1967), p. 107. 47 Alan Lupo, “Accentuating the Negative”, The Boston Globe, March 4, 1992, p. 19. 48 “Humanities 101, Westfield Style”, The Boston Globe, March 3, 1992, p. 16. 49 Henry A. Giroux and Peter McLaren, “Teacher Education and the Politics of Engagement: The Case for Democratic Schooling.” Harvard Educational Review, August 1986, Vol. 56, No. 3, pp. 213–238. 50 Mikhail Bakhtin, The Dialogic Imagination. Trans. Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1981), p. 294. 51 Vaclav Havel, Living in Truth (London: Faber and Faber, 1989), p. 42. 52 Jean-Paul Sartre, “Introduction.” In Albert Memmi (Ed.), The Colonizer and the Colonized (Boston: Beacon Press, 1967), pp. xxiv–xxv. 53 Ibid., p. xxvi.

5 Africana Philosophy1 Paget Henry

Given some of the exclusive claims on reason that the West has made, it has been difficult to see clearly the rationality of non-Western peoples. This eclipsing of the rationality of non-Western peoples, particularly people of African descent, has made problematic the status of theory in fields such as Africana Studies. Quite often, it is assumed that developments in this field will take the form of case studies that will help to confirm or disconfirm theories and methodologies produced by the West. In other words, nothing new of theoretical importance is expected to emerge from the growth of Africana Studies. Indeed, even some Africana scholars have associated theory and rational linear thought with white males. This is certainly not how I see Africana Studies. My disagreement with this view is confirmed with every new development in the growing field of Africana philosophy. Here the theoretical side of Africana Studies becomes particularly evident, given the nature of philosophical practices. In this chapter, I examine the case of Africana phenomenology, an emerging subfield within the larger discursive terrain of Africana philosophy. Like the larger terrain of which it is a part, Africana phenomenology is not very well known because it too has been forced to exist in the non-rational and a-theoretical shadow cast over it by Western philosophy in general and Western phenomenology in particular. Thus, our aim in this chapter is twofold: the first is to bring the field of Africana phenomenology clearly into view by outlining its contours, problems, and theorists. In particular, I will focus on the contributions of WEB Dubois, Frantz Fanon, and Lewis Gordon. Second, I will explore the philosophical implications of the emergence of Africana phenomenology as a subfield of Africana philosophy. These I will argue point to a metaphysical distinctness that can only be adequately engaged by a more comparative approach to philosophy.

Culture and Phenomenology By phenomenology, I mean the discursive practice through which selfreflective descriptions of the constituting activities of consciousness are

118  Paget Henry produced after the “natural attitude” of everyday life has been bracketed by some ego-displacing technique. An Africana phenomenology would thus be the self-reflective descriptions of the constituting activities of the consciousness of Africana peoples, after the natural attitudes of Africana egos have been displaced by de-centering techniques practiced in these cultures. This thematizing of the specificity of Africana phenomenology raises two important theoretical questions: the relationship of phenomenology to specific cultures and disciplines. In relation to the first of these, the notion of a distinct Africana phenomenology very explicitly suggests a cultural dimension to this enterprise. This cultural approach to phenomenology is an unusual one as it culturally conditions the certainty of self-reflective knowledge and raises very explicitly the need to do phenomenology from a comparative cultural perspective. This, I shall argue, is one of the important theoretical consequences that has accompanied the emergence of Africana phenomenology from its history of invisibility. With regard to our second theoretical question, the self-reflective core of phenomenology suggests that as an epistemic practice it is not peculiar to philosophy as a discipline. Rather, it is an activity that can be initiated from inside any knowledge-producing human discipline. It is also important to note that all human disciplines, including the logical and empirical practices of philosophy, produce knowledge in the natural attitude. Like philosophy, the other disciplines can all interrupt their everyday practices and engage the transcendental or knowledge-constitutive ground that supports their more routine practices. However, the distance to this ground varies between disciplines and is determined largely by qualitative differences in creative and knowledge-producing codes. But in spite of these differences, it is the existence of this shared ground that explains why phenomenological philosophy has been able to reach the transcendental spaces of other discourses and in the West has been enriched by Edmund Husserl’s reflections on the foundations of mathematics. In the case of Africana phenomenology, it is the reflections of creative writers and race theorists that have been particularly enriching. This problem of culture and phenomenology has in part been concealed by the ways in which reason and culture have been brought together in the identity of European phenomenology. In its classic formulations by Descartes, Kant, Hegel, and Husserl, European phenomenology was seen as the self-reflective practice that disclosed the latent movements of a universal reason, which was also the prime constituting force operating within the core of the European subject. Consequently, it was the phenomenology of this subject that would for the first time make manifest these latent activities of universal reason. The crucial significance of this reason as a constituting force was the perceived universality of its categories, positings, claims—in short, its self- and knowledge-producing capabilities. In its fully realized state, Husserl saw reason as “the form of a universal philosophy which grows through consistent apodictic insight and supplies its own norms through an apodictic method” (1970:16).

Africana Philosophy  119 However, this possibility of a universal reason was, quite paradoxically, limited to a very specific cultural particularity: the cultural particularity of Europe. This particularization of universal reason was at the same time the universalizing of the European subject as its science and phenomenology would give reason a fully realized vision of itself. In this peculiar configuration, Europe acquired a monopoly that made it co-extensive with the geography of reason. This geography is well known to us from the works of Hegel, Kant, Husserl, and Weber. For Husserl, the development of European phenomenology was tied to the question of whether or not “European humanity bears within itself an absolute idea, rather than being merely an empirical anthropological type like ‘China’ or ‘India’ ” (1970:16). To grasp the reality and presence of Africana phenomenology, this imperial geography and its exclusive relationship between reason and European culture has to be pulled apart. Without such a clearing, it will be impossible to perceive or even imagine the reality of an Africana phenomenology. In preparing the ground for such new phenomenological possibilities, a number of additional factors will also have to be reconsidered. Here I will briefly mention three: (1) the occasion for self-reflection; (2) the path into the practice of self-reflection; and (3) the role played by knowledge produced in the natural attitude in our constructions and reconstructions of the transcendental domain. In the history of Western philosophy, the occasion for phenomenological reflection has consistently been the problem of rationality and the consequences of rational/scientific knowledge production. Thus the dialectical logic of Hegel’s phenomenology was an attempt to keep the creative and explanatory agency of Spirit as an integral part of the changing discursive spaces produced by the rise of the natural sciences(1967:86–105). In Husserl, the occasion for self-reflection was the crisis produced by the positivistically reduced notions of rationality and humanity that accompanied the rise of mathematics and the natural sciences (1971:3–16). Habermas has formulated this reduction as the colonization of the Western life-world by its systems of technical and instrumental rationality (1987:322). It is only in its existential and grammatological variants that these problems of the rational cogito have been replaced by those of the desiring and the signifying subjects. In Sartre, the occasion for self-reflection is the bad faith that the European subject has consistently brought to the knowing situation and the capacity that bad faith has given it to mobilize reason in the service of unreason and untruth (1956:47–67). In Derrida, the occasion for self-­reflection has been Western philosophy’s practice (including its phenomenology) of restricting the nature and scope of writing, in relation to speaking and thinking, to a fraction of what it really is (1976:6–26). Derrida’s grammatology has as its goal the rescuing of writing from a metaphysically imposed obscurity, that is similar to Husserlian phenomenology’s goal of rescuing a more fully realized concept of reason from its positivistically imposed obscurity.

120  Paget Henry These variations within the overall telos of rationality that has governed the self-image of European phenomenology are important for raising the question of other occasions for self-reflection that are outside of this rational horizon. These possibilities are important for us as I will argue that the governing telos Africana phenomenology has been racial liberation and the problems of racial domination from which it springs. In our examinations of DuBois, Fanon, and Gordon, we will see how variations on the problem of racial liberation displace the problem of rationality as the source of occasions for self-reflection. The second and closely related set of variations necessary for a clear seeing of Africana phenomenology are those variations that have occurred in the paths to self-reflection. In Descartes, it was the method of radical doubting (1960:7–22). In Hegel, it was the practice of spiritual and theological meditation (1971). In Husserl, self-reflection was practiced through the phenomenological reduction (1975:5–20). In Sartre, it was through existential analysis (1956:557–575), and in Derrida, it took the form of reflection of the creativity of the systems of writing in which the subject was embedded (1976:75–93). What do these variations in methods of producing self-­reflective knowledge mean for some of the universal claims made by European phenomenology? Are these the only methods of producing selfreflective knowledge? I will argue that these variations problematize these universal claims, and that Africana phenomenology further complicates the situation by adding yet another method: that of poetics. The third and final point I want to make in preparing the ground for an Africana phenomenology is the relations between the everyday ethical/ practical projects of phenomenologies (rescuing reason, writing, or racial equality) and our constructions and on-going reconstructions of the transcendental domain. These constructions and reconstructions seem to be profoundly influenced by the nature of these world-oriented projects. Thus, Kant’s logical reconstruction of this domain was clearly shaped by his interest in clarifying the foundations of the natural sciences. Hegel’s spiritual reading was inseparable from his interests in clarifying the foundations and validity of the spiritual and theological discourses. Husserl’s goal of making the transcendental domain the pre-suppositionless and rigorously formulated foundation of all discourses was clearly related to his interest in clarifying the status of the processes of idealization that constitute the foundations of mathematics. Finally, Derrida’s semiotic vision of the transcendental domain is also inseparable from his project of clarifying the foundations of writing. These examples point to a circle of mutual influencing between the worldoriented projects of phenomenologies and their corresponding views of what is foundational or transcendental for knowledge production. But such a pattern of influence points to a historicizing of the transcendental domain that would limit any absolute claims for Spirit, logic, pre-suppositionless idealization, or arche-writing. In all of these accounts of the transcendental

Africana Philosophy  121 domain, there has been a clear tendency to extend their foundational reach beyond what this circle of mutual influence would suggest. In Africana phenomenology, this tendency has been distinctly weaker and could be related to the differences in the telos and nature of its ethical/practical project. With these three points in place, our conception of phenomenology should now be a more open and flexible one. This flexibility extends to its relations with cultures, historical processes, disciplines, ethical/practical projects, occasions for self-reflection, and methods of self-reflection. On the horizon of such a comparative conception of this subfield of philosophies around the world, the reality and possibility of an Africana phenomenology can be clearly seen.

Africana Phenomenology In the tradition of Africana phenomenology, the occasion for self-reflection has not been the positivistic reduction of rationality and the mechanized caricature of the European subject that it threatens to produce. Rather, the occasion for reflection has been the racist negating of the humanity of Africans and the caricature of “the negro” that it has produced. Unlike European phenomenology, these Africana reflections have been interested in clarifying the systemic error-producing foundations of the European humanities and social sciences that have had to legitimate and make appear as correct this racist reduction of African humanity. The positivistic reduction of European humanity and the racist reduction of African humanity are opposite sides of the coin of modern Western capitalism. The mechanical caricature is a part of the upper and rational side of itself that Western capitalism likes to affirm. The racist caricature of “the Negro” is a creation of the “underside” of this mechanized capitalism, a part of its irrational shadow that it cannot affirm but must project onto others that it perceives as its opposite. The sociological setting for the production of the caricature of “the negro” was not the Habermasian internal colonization of a life-world by its own systems of technical and instrumental reason. Rather this setting was the external colonization of one life-world (the African) by another (the European). This process of imperial domination by a society of a different race and a different culture shattered the traditional socio-cultural worlds of pre-colonial Africa. It racialized identities that were predominantly spiritual and physically captured, enslaved, and exported millions of Africans for economic exploitation on plantations in the Western hemisphere. In short, it was in this context of colonial conquest that Africans became part of “the underside of modernity” (Dussel, 1996) or what Husserl earlier referred to as “the Europeanization of all other civilizations” (1970:16). The implosive impact of this Europeanization on the life-worlds of African societies can be quickly indicated by some of its classic representations in literature. In continental Africa, Chinua Achebe’s novel Things Fall Apart has become one of the classic metaphors for the shattering impact of

122  Paget Henry European colonization. In the Caribbean, a novel that holds a corresponding symbolic status is George Lamming’s, In the Castle of My Skin. Here the impact of racialization or what Fanon will call negrification is much greater than in Achebe’s novel. The African has ceased to be a Yoruba or Akan and has become a “black”, a “negro” or a “nigger”. In Afro-America, Richard Wright’s Black Boy or Ralf Ellison’s Invisible Man would be corresponding works. In both of these novels, the process of racialization (niggerization) is even more extreme than in the case of Lamming. Thus the terrain of selfreflection in the Africana world has been a rather burnt out, exploded, and blackened one, very different from the technological dystopia of Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World or George Orwell’s 1984. In spite of this broken and blackened nature of the terrain of Africana self-reflection, it is still very much a human world with hope and genius. This hope has been one of its classic expressions by another Afro-Caribbean writer, Derek Walcott. He writes: break a vase and the love that reassembles the fragments is stronger than the love which took its symmetry for granted when it was whole. The glue that fits the pieces is the sealing of its original shape. It is such a love that reassembles our African and Asiatic fragments, the cracked heirlooms whose restoration shows its white scars (1993:9) This blackened imploding of the pre-colonial African consciousness and its loving reconstruction are two important poles defining the world of Africana phenomenology.

Dubois and Africana Phenomenology Although the roots of Africana self-reflection are to be found in Africa, the pattern of development of the field is such that it is best to start with the reflections of the period of enslavement and its aftermath. These periods produced the writings of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century ex-slaves such as Olaudah Equiano, Ottobah Cugoano, Frederick Douglass, Harriet Jacobs, Mary Prince, and David Walker. In the twentieth century, self-­reflective Africana writing continued in the works of Edward Blyden, Antenor Firmin, Marcus Garvey, Ida B. Wells, WEB DuBois, Alain Locke, Frantz Fanon, Wilson Harris, Sylvia Wynter, Lewis Gordon, and many others. Of these writers, the first to outline a comprehensive phenomenology of Africana self-consciousness was DuBois, whose life and work spanned the late nineteenth and the first half of the twentieth century. In his work The Autobiography, DuBois tells us that he entered Harvard with the goal of pursuing a career in philosophy. The courses he took exposed him to the thought of the American pragmatists, particularly William James and Josiah Royce, and the engagements of the school with

Africana Philosophy  123 Hegel’s philosophy (Zamir, 1995:113–133). This was the context in which the young DuBois encountered Hegel’s phenomenology. When we consider the latter’s impact on CLR James, Rene Menil (founding member of Legitime defense), Frantz Fanon, and Wilson Harris, it is probably the European phenomenology that has had the most influence on Africana phenomenology. Hegel’s phenomenology is a classic example of what Habermas calls a general interpretation as opposed to a general theory (1971:246–273). The former is a generalized narrative of self-development that is directed at a subject and must therefore have an “addressee”. General theories are aimed at objects rather than subjects. The application of a general interpretation thus becomes a process of self-application— one must literally try on the theory and respond to the experienced sense of fit. In other words, general interpretations require the explicit thematizing of the responses of specific subjects to its discursive offerings. In the case of general theories, application takes the form of an externally imposed subsumption that requires experimental evaluation rather than confirmation from an addressee. As a general interpretation, the application of Hegel’s phenomenology to the self-consciousness of the Africana subject can only be judged appropriate by the sense of fit this subject reports. The changes that DuBois made in Hegel’s phenomenology derived from the experience of an imperfect fit. For the young DuBois, the Africana subject was a culturally distinct, and hence non-European, site of original meanings, discourses, and experiences. Consequently, to make himself the addressee of Hegel’s phenomenology, DuBois’ engagements with it had to be different from those of European or Euro-American philosophers. As Hegel’s primary addressees, the latter could very easily test it by putting themselves in the role of the selfconsciousness that had reached the stage of the master. Further, they could identify with the earlier stages in this process of self-development as they were drawn directly from European history. Because the self-consciousness of Africana subject is not the primary addressee of Hegel’s phenomenology, self-application cannot produce the same results. Further, DuBois cannot identify with either the earlier or later stages in Hegel’s general interpretation as they are not drawn from the history of the Africana subject. Thus what DuBois will take from Hegel is how to view the racialized African subject and its possibilities for recovery from the standpoint of the self- and world-constituting activities of its consciousness. In short, it is the general phenomenological approach of grasping self and world from the perspective of a constituting consciousness that DuBois takes from Hegel. However, unlike Hegel, DuBois will not make an absolute onto-epistemic commitment to this perspective. For Hegel, the self-development of the European subject was not a smooth, unitary process of growth. Rather it was an upward movement that was marked by splits, doublings, and self/other binaries that resulted in premature exclusions and negations that would have to be overcome in subsequent

124  Paget Henry stages. Thus, in the paragraphs that open the section on “Lordship and Bondage” in The Phenomenology of Mind, Hegel writes extensively about the doubling or duplication that arises from the fact that self-consciousness exists not only for itself but also for another self-consciousness. In other words, it is the fact that self-consciousness must be both for itself and for another that produces its “double meanings” (1967:229). Here too we find another significant influence that Hegel had on DuBois’ phenomenology. The first attempt of the young DuBois to bring the Africana subject into an engagement with Hegel’s phenomenology was his 1890 Harvard commencement address: “Jefferson Davis as Representative of Civilization”. There, clearly in the role of the slave, DuBois presents the Africana subject as “the Submissive Man” who is “at once the check and complement of the Teutonic Strong Man” (Levering-Lewis, 1995:19). With this different metaphor of Africana selfhood, the young DuBois is here making a significant departure from Hegel on the basis of the different phenomenological history of the Africana subject. The “Submissive Man” is both check and complement to the European subject because not even to the latter’s mind is it given to recognize the whole truth of human ontogenesis (Levering-Lewis, 1995:19). Such a vision of the totality can only emerge from conversations in which the contributions of all civilizations are acknowledged and their complementarity recognized. With this concept of a global complementarity between cultures, DuBois breaks with the conflating of Europe and the universal that was such an integral part of Hegel’s phenomenology. This break in turn sets the stage for the positions that DuBois will take in his important essay, “The Conservation of Races”, and for the way in which he will engage Hegel in The Souls of Black Folks.

Double Consciousness and DuBoisian Phenomenology In the opening essay of Souls, “Of Our Spiritual Strivings”, DuBois outlines his theory of double consciousness which constitutes the core of his phenomenology. The double consciousness of which he speaks in this essay is not just the result of the Africana subject having also to exist before another self-consciousness. Its life in Africa made existing for another self-­ consciousness an already familiar reality for this subject, and quite possibly the Hegelian form of double consciousness. DuBoisian double consciousness results from the Africana subject having to exist for a self-consciousness that racialized itself as white. In the dialectic of racial recognition that takes place between the two, it is not the humanity but the blackness of the Africana subject that confirms the whiteness of the Teutonic “Strong Man”. As a result, the racialization of the African as black produced a very different form of doubling than in the case of Hegel’s non-racialized master or slave. For DuBois, this racialization of identities and supporting institutional orders were not leftovers from the traditional past but integral parts of the modern world order of European capitalism. It was as integral as the

Africana Philosophy  125 processes of commodification, colonization, rationalization, and secularization that Marx, Weber and Durkheim thought were so central to the rise Western capitalism. The growth of processes of racialization throughout the formative and mature periods of Western capitalism is evident in its expanding discourses on the hierarchies of races and the increasingly global reach of its institutions of white supremacy. In DuBois’ view, the impact of these processes of racialization on both the psyche and the transcendental consciousness of the Africana subject was the creating of new divisions within them—divisions that were different from Hegelian forms of doubling. With regard to the psyche, the new division was created by the shattering and contesting of the “We” or the collective identity of the Africana subject. It was shattered by the caricature image of “the negro” as the polar opposite of “the white” that existed and continues to exist in the mind of the European and the Euro-American. This stereotyped image of the African in the white mind was given some of its clearest expressions in the “blackface” that whites would put on when they played “negroes” on the vaudeville stage. It was the institutionalizing of this absolute racial distance between whites and blacks that shattered and contested the pre-colonial collective identities of the Akan, Hausa, Yoruba, Fon, and other African ethnic groups. DuBoisian double consciousness is a phenomenological account of the self-consciousness of these African subjects whose “We” had been shattered and challenged by this process of negrification. DuBois represented the double life-world created by racialization through the metaphor of the veil. Thus he spoke of life within and outside of the veil. This concept/metaphor is another important descriptive term in Dubois’ phenomenology. In Darkwater, DuBois gave us a hint as to how he had adjusted to life behind the veil. He retreated into a “tower above the loud complaining of the human sea” (1999:17), from where he would attempt to grasp and engage the world intellectually. This is one possible existential response to the involuntary presence of this racial veil. This response reminds us of George Lamming’s retreat into “The Castle of My Skin”, taking with him only the tools of the creative writer. Tower and castle are here important symbols of the response of Africana subjects to the double life-world created by the veil. In Souls, Dubois mentions the responses of other Africana subjects that were not so fiercely sunny: their youth shrunk into tasteless sycophancy, or into silent hatred of the pale world about them and mocking distrust of everything white, or wasted itself in a bitter cry, why did God make me an outcast and a stranger in my own house. (1969:16) It is these less-sunny psyches that will be the focus of Fanon’s phenomenology. Thus, along with the images of tower and castle, sycophancy, waste,

126  Paget Henry stranger, and outcast are also important descriptive terms of Africana selfconsciousness before the veil of the racial other. The specifics of this dilemma of the racial veil are such that it really has no counterpart in any of the stages of Hegel’s phenomenology of European self-consciousness. Zamir’s suggestion that Africana double consciousness can be seen as a case of Hegel’s “unhappy consciousness”, does not really work. The divided Hegelian subject moves between a desire for an “I” that is autonomous and self-constituting, and the need for confirmation and recognition from the other. These are some of the existential dilemmas that the Africana subject would have experienced before its racialization. In the phase of the former’s development that Hegel referred to as “the unhappy consciousness”, this divided subject has moved beyond the terms of the master-slave relationship to explore stoic and skeptical responses to its inner divisions. What Hegel calls the “double-consciousness” (1967:251) of this unhappy subject stems from an awareness of itself as “changeable” at the same time that it is also “consciousness of unchangeableness” (1967:252). As the latter, it must seek to liberate itself from its changeable existence but is unable to reach the life of the unchangeable. This is the particular “dualizing of self-consciousness” that constitutes the dilemmas of the unhappy consciousness. As a racialized subject, the Africana individual remains very much within the terms of the master-slave relationship. Consequently, the above dualizing is not the source of the two poles between which the Africana subject oscillates. This subject moves not between a changeable “I” and an unchangeable “Other” but between two “We’s”. Behind this particular experience of “twoness” is the earlier noted phenomenon of the external colonization of one life-world by another and the contempt and pity it produced. The self-reflections of the DuBoisian subject cannot avoid engagements with this specific type of twoness. He/she must encounter questions such as, “what, after all, am I? Am I an American or am I a Negro? Can I be both? Or, is it my duty to cease to be a Negro as soon as possible and to be an American?” (Levering-Lewis, 1995:24). One feels here the clashing of two racialized and hence irreconcilable collective identities. This is not the dilemma of Hegel’s unhappy consciousness. In addition to the splitting of the Africana psyche, DuBoisian double consciousness also refers to a similar splitting of the transcendental consciousness of this racialized subject. The internalizing of the caricature of “the negro” also produced significant changes in the categoric structure of the transcendental domain of the Africana subject. This complex set of categoric changes DuBois summed up under the label of “second sight” (1969:16), which is a new or second way of seeing self and world. Second sight is the ability of the racialized Africana subject to see him/herself as a “negro”, that is, through the eyes of the white other. It is new in the sense that it was not a capability that pre-colonial Africans had. This new half of the double vision of the Africana subject suggests that first sight is the ability to see one’s self

Africana Philosophy  127 through one’s own eyes. The categoric changes in the organization of the transcendental domain that are associated with double consciousness derive from the complex and changing dynamics that developed between first and second sight. To the extent that second sight, the ability to see one’s self as a “negro” replaced first sight, it constituted a major obstacle to any genuine Africana self-consciousness. Tied to the European or Euro-American life-worlds, second sight yielded the Africana subject “no true self-consciousness, but only lets him see himself through the revelation of the other world” (1969:16). In other words, this exclusive form of second sight is in reality a categoric form of self-blindness, a deformation, a detour rather than a positive phase in the development of Africana self-consciousness. This “negro” detour will only take the Africana subject down a blind alley. It is a classic case of false consciousness that will only take this subject away from its self. This struggle to see through the darkness of second sight is the categoric dilemma of Africana self-consciousness as disclosed by Dubois’ phenomenology. This dilemma of second sight affected Africana knowledge production as profoundly as those of the tower, the outcast, or the stranger affected self production.

The Ethical/Practical Project of Dubois’ Phenomenology As in the case of Hegel or Husserl, Dubois’ phenomenology was intricately linked to an ethical/practical project. This was a project of racial equality that included the deniggerization of Africana identities, the full recognition of the humanity of Africana peoples, and also of their cultural contributions to the shared problems of human ontogenesis. We saw glimpses of this project in the Jefferson Davis address. We will now develop it more fully by drawing primarily from Souls, The History of the Suppression of the Slave Trade, and The Philadelphia Negro. This ethical dimension of DuBois’ phenomenology is quite distinct and constitutes another area of a clear break with Hegel. DuBois’ project of racial equality displaces the Hegelian one of keeping the vision of Spirit a part of the rational world of the European subject. I will develop this distinctness of the DuBoisian project around three crucial points: (1) DuBois’ potentiated second sight; (2) his poeticist style of self-reflection; and (3) his commitment to racial and cultural equality. The categorical transformation represented by second sight was very much a double-edged sword. On one side, it guards against the achieving of true self-consciousness by Africana subjects, and on the other, it can give the latter very special access and insight into the dehumanizing “will to power” of the European imperial subject. This peculiar insight, which I am calling potentiated second sight, is a crucial link between the transcendental and the ethical dimensions of DuBois’ phenomenology. The potentiating of second sight is always a latent possibility in the racialized and divided self-consciousness of the Africana subject. This possibility can be activated in two basic ways: first through the recovery of a significant measure of first sight, that is, the ability

128  Paget Henry to see one’s self as an African as opposed to “the negro” that the white mind was constantly producing and projecting. This ability to see one’s self as an African will depend upon one’s ability to creatively uproot the “blackface” stereotype, and to reconstruct self and world within the creative codes of African discourses and symbols. To the extent that an individual or group is able to do this, they will have an alternative space from which to see through and critique the imposed “negro” stereotype. The Rastafarians are a good example of this first way of potentiating second sight. The second is clearly the finding of an independent point of self-elevation, such as DuBois’ tower or George Lamming’s castle. From such a point, there must be the cultivating of an informed and critical “I” that is capable of distancing itself from the caricature of “the negro” so that it is able to see clearly the latter’s formation, its white psychosocial significance, and also its dissolution. The cultivation of such an “I” would then become either a new form of first sight or some form of third sight. Whichever it is, in conjunction with the ability to see one’s self as an African, two very potent bases outside of the psychic terrain of “the negro” identity will have been established. Together they are not only able to see through and implode the imposed stereotype, but also to provide great insight into the psyche of the creators and perpetrators of this tragic farce. In the wide distances between the capabilities of the recovered African/tower identity and those of the “blackface” stereotype, the Africana subject had a living and reflectively accessible measure of the inhumanity of the Western imperial self. Lewis Gordon captures well the ironic dimensions of potentiated second sight when he notes that it emerges in the subject who has become aware of the lived contradiction of this deception, and who like Fanon is therefore able to announce “the absence of his interiority from the point of view of his interiority” (1995a:33). It is from the reflective immediacy of the decaying carcass of “the negro” that the critiques of potentiated second sight derive their ethical/moral power, pinpoint accuracy, and razor-sharp quality. In DuBois, our first glimpses of such critiques are to be found in his early short story, “A Vacation Unique”. In this story, Dubois’ hero, Cuffy, invites his Harvard classmate to disguise himself as a “negro” and to come and see the world from this point of view. Cuffy says to his classmate: “outside of mind you may study mind, and outside of matter by reason of the fourth dimension of color you may have a striking view of the intestines of the fourth great civilization” (Zamir, 223). In other words, what the classmate will get is an intestinal view of American civilization, of the hunger that drives it to dominate and racialize. This intestinal view of the white imperial self is repeated in Darkwater, in another of Dubois’ classic statements of what I have called potentiated second sight. In the chapter, “The Souls of White Folks”, he writes: of them I am singularly clairvoyant. I see in and through them. I view them from unusual points of vantage. Not as foreigner do I come, for

Africana Philosophy  129 I am native, not foreign, bone of their thought and flesh of their language . . . Rather I see these souls undressed and from the back and side. I see the workings of their entrails. I know their thoughts and they know that I know. (1999:17) How did DuBois know? By shining the light of his potentiated second sight on the creators of the “blackface” caricature that he has killed. To confirm that DuBois is not the only Africana subject in possession of this special faculty of second sight, we need only think of Cugoano, Douglass, Garvey, Fanon, Malcolm X, or Angela Davis. But it was DuBois who first gave it a systematic formulation, and as such it constitutes one of the distinguishing features of the ethical/practical project of his phenomenology. The second distinctive feature of this project is DuBois’ poeticist style of self-reflection. As noted earlier, all phenomenologies employ some technique of bracketing the natural attitude in order to reach the constituting movements of consciousness through what Husserl called “the self-evidence of original activity” (Derrida, 1989:163). The immediately evident self- and world- constituting activities of the Africana self were grasped by DuBois poetically, and explored more fully through the writing of novels and short stories. Thus in his approaches to consciousness, Dubois used what we can call a poeticist reduction in contrast to the spirituo-theological and phenomenological reductions of Hegel and Husserl. Further, in Souls, DuBois also made use of music to supplement his poeticist techniques of bracketing the everyday world. However, here again, DuBois made no absolute ontoepistemic commitment to his poetics in spite of its vital role in gaining him access to the original or founding activity of the Africana self. He always used it in conjunction with other discourses, particularly history and sociology as both supplement and check. Dubois’ bracketing of the natural attitude and the everyday world was specific to his poetics. In his historical and sociological writings, he returns quite easily to the everyday world. The dominance of intentional approaches that mark his poetics is reversed in these writings, where it takes second place to what we can call “extentional” approaches. As we will see, this shifting back and forth between intentional and extentional approaches is one important difference between the phenomenologies of DuBois and Gordon. Thus, the knowing subject in DuBois changed identity and discipline as it wrote its many works. Earlier we noted that for DuBois, it was not given to any one culture to see the whole truth. Similarly, it was not given to any one discipline or mode of the knowing subject to see the whole truth. The partiality of vision that DuBois saw as basic to all human cultures, he extended a fortiori to the disciplines and to the various modes that the knowing subject can adopt, including the poetic mode. Just as the “Submissive Man” must check and complement the “Strong Man”, so must poetics check and complement sociology and history, as well as being itself checked

130  Paget Henry and complemented by them. Although DuBois never explicitly thematized the principles by which he was able to bring these different disciplines and modes of the subject together to produce that powerful discursive synthesis that I have called his socio-historical poetics, they are the primary keys to the metaphysical foundations of his thought. We will return to these foundations later. Here it must suffice to note that the poeticist element in this synthesis gave DuBois his distinctive path to the process of self-reflection and thus access to the original activity of the Africana consciousness. The third and final factor in this account of the ethical/practical dimension of DuBois’ phenomenology is its clear commitment to projects of cultural and racial equality. In this commitment, we see the love that reassembles the broken fragments of the vase of which Derek Walcott spoke. The racial hierarchies, the class inequalities, and the caricaturing of identities produced by the coming into being of Western capitalism have given rise to human tragedies of major proportions. In both social and political terms, DuBois responded very thoughtfully and passionately to the devastating circumstances that these tragic outcomes created for Africana peoples. However, over the course of his long life these responses change a lot. In The ­Philadelphia Negro, DuBois outlined a program of limited assimilation, led by a black elite, to deal specifically with the problem of racial as opposed to class inequality. In Black Reconstruction, DuBois discovers and explores the potential of the self-organizing capabilities of the African American masses as a key part of the solution to the problem of racial inequality. In Dusk of Dawn, DuBois explores an ethnic enclave strategy that calls for a period of separate economic and political organizing before integrating into the larger social mainstream. With his departure for Ghana towards the end of his life, it is possible to argue that DuBois had given up on changing the racial order of America. But in spite of these changes in his sociopolitical responses, the racializing processes of Western capitalism, his ethical responses to the human crises that it produced never wavered. This unwavering ethical stance is most elegantly stated in the “final word” that closes The Philadelphia Negro. There DuBois links the problem of racial inequality directly to: that question of questions: “after all who are men? Is every featherless biped to be counted a man and brother? Are all races and types to be joint hiers of the new earth that men have striven to raise in thirty centuries or more?” (1996:385–6). DuBois tells us that Western civilization has answered these questions in the negative on the basis of a widening but still very limited and exclusionary conception of humanity. After speaking about the conditional admittance of groups like the Celts and the Asians, DuBois turns to the case of the Africans. He writes: but with the Negroes of Africa we come to a full stop, and in its heart the civilized world with one accord denies that these come within the pale of nineteenth century humanity. This feeling, widespread and deepseated, is, in America, the vastest of the Negro problems. (1996:387)

Africana Philosophy  131 Here is DuBois, the poet, closing with potentiated second sight a major sociological work. This in brief outline is Dubois’ phenomenology of Africana self-­consciousness. The Submissive Man, the tower, the veil, double consciousness, second sight, the love that puts the Submissive Man back together again are some of its distinguishing features. The double consciousness of which DuBois speaks cannot be adequately view as one of the stages of Hegel’s phenomenology. Rather it is the theorizing of a period of imperial/racial domination in the self-consciousness of the Africana subject that is absent from the life of Hegel’s European subject. Thus, when Shamoon Zamir asks: How is it then that DuBois can read Hegel quite so critically, before he has begun to read Marx, without (as far as is known) a knowledge of Kierkegaard, well before Alexandre Kojeve and Sartre’s commentaries on the Phenomenology, and very much against the grain of the readings of Hegel common in nineteenth century America? (1995:117) I think that in addition to DuBois’ genius, the answer is to be found in the uniqueness of this period of black racialization that DuBois’ phenomenology had to theorize. Although by no means complete within itself, this phenomenology revealed in its inner structure the paradigmatic form that other Africana phenomenologies, such as those of Fanon and Gordon would take. They all share with DuBois this distinguishing notion of double consciousness, different aspects of which they will thematize and develop.

Fanon and Africana Phenomenology If DuBois contributed the first important chapter to an explicitly thematized phenomenology of Africana self-consciousness, then the second was clearly written by the Martinican psychoanalyst and revolutionary Frantz Fanon. His major contribution to this particular subfield of Africana philosophy is the more detailed and incisive psycho-existential analysis of this historical phase of double consciousness identified by DuBois. In this effort, Fanon’s achievements in Black Skin, White Masks remain unsurpassed. There is no finer or more detailed account of the state of racial double consciousness. As self-consciousness, the human being was for Fanon “motion toward the world and toward his like. A movement of aggression, which leads to enslavement or to conquest; a movement of love, a gift of the self, the ultimate stage of what by common accord is called ethical orientation” (1967:41). It is Fanon’s view that every human consciousness has the capacity for these two kinds of movements. Further, it is the job of the phenomenologist and the psychologist to grasp in their originality and immediacy the specific meanings and the guiding telos of these two sets of creative movements that are inherent in human consciousness. This self-creative telos of individual human consciousness, Fanon comprehends as its “ontogeny”

132  Paget Henry (1967:13). Thus, the primary goal of his phenomenology is an account of the crisis confronting the ontogenesis of the Africana subject as a result of the historical phase of double consciousness that it is going through. In short, like DuBois, this crisis constitutes Fanon’s occasion for self-reflection, the contradictory condition that motivates his journey inward. However, again like DuBois, Fanon makes no absolute epistemic commitments to this ontogenic approach as a whole or to its specific philosophical and psychoanalytic dimensions. Indeed, given the socio-historical origins of this phase of double consciousness, Fanon insisted that “ontology cannot explain the being of the black man” (1967:110). Consequently, ontogeny must be supplemented by sociogeny. In other words, the self-constituting powers of the Africana consciousness must be dialectically supplemented and checked by the formative powers of socio- cultural orders. Within this onto-/socio-genic approach, Fanon further refines his path to the practice of self-reflection by rising the ontogenic question of how should “the psychic modality” of human consciousness be studied? Fanon identifies two distinct approaches to self-reflective knowledge within the overall framework of his ontogenic project. The first, which is on the “philosophical level” (1967:23), aims at the immediate grasping of the human subject through intuitive accounts of its basic needs and its movements towards the world. These intuitive accounts will always be incomplete and provisional, but at the same time very necessary. Hence, this philosophical approach requires that one should “strive unremittingly for a concrete and ever new understanding of man” (1967:22). In developing these intuitive accounts, Fanon made use of both a poetic and a Sartrean inflected phenomenological reduction. As in the case of DuBois, much of the power of Fanon’s writing comes from his ability to incorporate poetic insights into his socio-historical and psychological writings. Indeed, Fanon’s text is unimaginable without the self-reflective knowledge produced within the frameworks of these two epistemic reductions. Thus, an important part of making Fanon’s phenomenology more visible would be to make more explicit the ways in which he combined the use of these poetic and phenomenological reductions. The second approach to self-reflection that Fanon identified was psychoanalytic. In contrast to the concrete orientation of the first or philosophical one, this approach first constructs what Habermas would call a general interpretation of the development of the human subject, and then attempts to grasp the concrete individual in terms of its deviations from this model. The use of this psychoanalytic model led to Fanon’s engagements with Freud, Jung, Adler, and Lacan. In other words, Fanon will supplement and check his more concrete and philosophical approach to self-reflection with this more abstract and psychoanalytic one. As in the case above with poetry and phenomenology, the links that Fanon establishes between the psychoanalytic and the philosophical are themselves original, creative movements of Fanon’s consciousness towards the world that he did not explicitly thematize, but they hold the keys to the distinct metaphysical foundations upon

Africana Philosophy  133 which his thought rests. It is this complex and synthetic methodology that informs Fanon’s phenomenology. Its psychoanalytic dimensions separate it from Dubois’. However, both are interested in the “psychopathological and philosophical explanation of the state of being a Negro” (1967:15).

Double Consciousness and Fanonian Phenomenology What is the state of being a “negro”? It is a state of enforced negrification in which colonized Africana peoples lost their earlier cultural identities and became identified by the color of their skin. The outer form of this state is the substituting of an epidermal identity in the place of a cultural one. The inner content of this outer transformation is the socio-historical reality of being forced to live as the unconscious, liminal shadow, the repressed and undesirable side of the imperial European subject that had racialized its identity as white. The caricature of “the negro” is first and foremost for Fanon a dark projection that is basic to the cathartic and scapegoating mechanisms of the European psyche. This projective mechanism Fanon describes as follows: “in the degree to which I find in myself something unheard-of, something reprehensible, only one solution remains for me: to get rid of it, to ascribe its origins to someone else” (1967:190). The stereotype of “the negro” is a discursive crystallization of the contents of an “inordinately black hollow” in the European psyche that it must externalize and experience as belonging to someone else. Thus for Fanon, in the West, “the Negro has one function: that of symbolizing the lower emotions, the baser inclinations, the dark side of the soul” (1967:190). This is the meaning of negrification, the state of being a “negro”. Because the African is not a “negro”, negrification as a form of racialization produced what Fanon called a psycho-existential deviation, an aberration of affect in the psyche of Africana peoples. Such a deviation arises in the psyche of a people when “an inferiority complex has been created by the death and burial of its local cultural originality” (1967:18). In the case of Africana peoples, this deviation is the opening up of that racial fissure in their sense of a “We” that DuBois described as double consciousness. Fanon writes: “the back man has two dimensions. One with his fellows, the other with the white man” (1967:17). However, these two sets of relations are not always of equal weight. As negrification takes hold, the second set begins to transform the first. In its being for another Africana self-consciousness, the negrified African will be profoundly influenced by the relationship with the white other. Self-evaluation will take the form: I am better off or worse than another “negro” depending on whether I am whiter or more Europeanized. This detouring of all intersubjective relations through white norms and evaluations is a major disturbance in the interactive relations of the Africana subject that follows from its “two dimensions”. For Fanon, this “self-division” and its consequences are the keys to the state of being a “negro”. His approach to this internal division is to examine

134  Paget Henry carefully its distorting impact on the relations of “the negro” with others, both black and white. Fanon begins his analysis of the disruptive impact of this double consciousness with an examination of “the negro’s” attitude towards his own and the colonizer’s languages. Here Fanon shows that the distorting impact of double consciousness is the negrified subject’s desire to present him/herself as a master of the languages of Europe. Before the white other, this display of linguistic mastery is a bid for recognition and a demonstration of the degree to which he/she has rejected the African past. Before the black other, the same display may be an attempt to gain recognition for how far that individual has succeeded in Europeanizing his/her existence. The underlying disturbance in self-other relations that these attitudes to language reveal is the following: that the racialized African “will be proportionately whiter—that is, he will come closer to being a real human being—in direct ratio to his mastery of the French language” (1967:18). In the midst of this disturbance we can hear the DuBoisian questions: “What, after all, am I?” Am I a French person or am I a “Negro”? Can I be both? Fanon could have made the same point using religion, music, philosophy, dance, or literature as the sociogenic reality behind these psycho-existential deviations. However, this general account of the double consciousness of the negrified Africana subject was not the primary goal of Fanon’s phenomenology. Rather, it was the exploration of two specific possibilities within this broader disturbance in Africana self-other relations. The first was the tragic possibility of “the negro” who deals with his/her negrification by attempting to conceal it behind “white masks”. Fanon develops this possibility through examinations of cases of blacks who must have white lovers. In such cases, Fanon recognizes a self-negating desire in the black to be white, which for him represents the extreme point of self-alienation in “the state of being a Negro”. Fanon also makes it clear that not all racialized Africana subjects are in such extreme states of alienation. But nonetheless, he wants to point out their existence and examine them in detail. The second possibility within the broader disturbance in Africana selfother relations that Fanon takes up is indeed quite different. It is the agonizing possibility of an Africana subject working his/her way out of “the state of being a Negro”. It is here that the awakening of potentiated second sight makes its appearance in Fanon. What is the lived experience of the racialized Africana subject who is awakening from the nightmare and false consciousness of his/her negrification? This is the question to which Fanon brought the combined powers of his distinct phenomenological methodology. It is here that we can see the breathtaking moments in which the poetic and phenomenological reductions are brought together to produce self-reflective knowledge of the most profound nature. The early awakenings of the negrified Africana subject are marked by the experience of not being able to affirm a self of one’s own choosing in the presence of the institutionally empowered stereotype of “the negro” that the white psyche must externalize and project onto another. Thus it is the

Africana Philosophy  135 experience of walking a tightrope located between the opposing but unequal egocentric pulls of these two sources of Africana selfhood. This is what Fanon meant when he said that “the black man has no ontological resistance in the eyes of the white man” (1967:110). Normatively empowered by institutionalization, the image of the black in the white mind overpowers the self-image of the awakening Africana subject. This is the source of the power and weight of ordinary second sight. It is against this weight, and in spite of its ontological power, that the awakening Africana subject must fight to regain first sight, potentiated second sight, explode the caricature of “the negro, and affirm an identity of his/her own choosing”. Adding to the pain and terror of this struggle is the fact that below the tightrope on which the Africana subject is walking is “the zone of non-being”. To fail is to experience a collapse of one’s ego and a fall into nothingness. It is the stumbling and falling of this awakening subject on the edge of non-being, the experiences of going out of and coming back into ego-being that Fanon’s phenomenology describes so powerfully. This description begins with an archeological view of some of the organizing schemas that structure the consciousness of the Africana subject. At the most basic level, we find an intentional schema that consists of the motions of this subject towards the world that Fanon earlier described as being basic to human beings. He then goes on to describe a corporeal or bodily schema that is also an integral part of the Africana self-image. On the third layer, Fanon identifies an epidermal or historico-racial schema that is yet another important part of the identity of the Africana subject. These are the key frameworks that ground and shape the identity of our awakening man or woman. In the mind of this subject, joy and recognition should accompany his/her motions towards the other and the world. His/her bodily schema is the basis of a “physiological self” that balances one in space, localizes sensations, and makes one physically attractive to the other. His/her historicoracial schema was either African, African American, Afro-Caribbean, or Afro-Latin American. Fanon gives us several examples of the implosive ego collapse that the awakening Africana self has experienced before the institutionalized power of the white gaze. Echoing the youthful Dubois’ experience of racial stigmatization by a white playmate, Fanon uses the case of a young child to illustrate the power and content of the white gaze: “Mama, see the Negro! I am frightened”. Behind this fright was a very different set of intentional, bodily, and historico-racial schemas that challenges those of the Africana subject in the early phases of denegrification. The resulting clash between these negrifying and denegrifying perspectives Fanon describes as follows: “Assailed at various points, the corporeal scheme crumbled, its place taken by the epidermal schema. In the train it was no longer a question of being aware of my body in the third person but in a triple person” (1967:112). In other words, this encounter with the white other was experienced as “an amputation, an excision, a hemorrhage” (1967:112).

136  Paget Henry If this awakening subject is to achieve denegrification and potentiated second sight, such amputations and falls into the zone of non-being must be endured and overcome. In the zone of non-being, “an authentic upheaval can be born”, that is, new images of self, new projects for bringing one’s self back into ego-being can be undertaken. This push for rebirth is strong, defiant, almost compulsive. Through this agency Fanon’s awakening subject takes the broken pieces of his/her selfhood and refashions them into a new project of being in the world. One new project explored by Fanon is the possibility of asserting one’s self “as a BLACK MAN” (emphasis in the original). However, like the earlier project, this one could also go down in defeat. In the event of such an outcome, one must return to the zone of non-being with faith in its self-creating powers. Out of it will come other possibilities, such as asserting one’s self as a rational or scholarly person, as in the case of DuBois, or as an irrational seer, the very embodiment of unreason. These new projects of selfhood Fanon sees as dialectical possibilities that are open to the awakening black subject if he/she is “able to accomplish this descent into a real hell” (1967:10). In short, phenomenologically speaking, the zone of non-being is a valuable resource for the subject who is working his/her way out negrification and the double consciousness that it produces.

The Ethical/Practical Dimensions Important as the above inner struggles against negrification are, they cannot by themselves overthrow the institutionalized power of white racism. As we’ve seen, this racism was for Fanon both onto- and socio-genic in nature. It was not the truth of negrification that defeated this struggling subject but the social power that came with its institutionalization. This sociological dimension had to be defeated through revolutionary struggles of the type that Fanon described so powerfully in The Wretched of the Earth. Thus as in the case of DuBois, Fanon’s phenomenology is intricately linked to an ethical/practical project. This project has several distinguishing features such as its ethic of love or its commitment to national independence. For reasons of space, I will discuss only the ethic of love. The ethical dimensions of Fanon’s phenomenology have been given their most systematic treatment by Nelson Maldonado-Torres. The originality of his treatment is the elucidating of the place of love in Fanon’s ethics. MaldonadoTorres’s key to locating the site of Fanonian love is a masterful “phenomenology of the cry” (Maldonado-Torres, forthcoming) in Fanon’s work. He shows that when examined in this way, the cry leads us to the loving responses of which Fanon’s awakening subject is sometimes capable. These responses echo very loudly the love that reassembles broken vases of which Walcott spoke. For Maldonado-Torres, the cry is “a revelation of someone who has been forgotten or wronged” (forthcoming). It is the audible sigh that sometimes follows a train of defeated attempts at self-affirmation. But as Maldonado-Torres shows, the cry in Fanon is much more than this plea for

Africana Philosophy  137 self-preservation. It is also “a call for the Other” (forthcoming). It is this sociality in the cry of Fanon’s awakening Africana subject that is the source of its moving ethical power. In other words, even though this subject will often find him/herself on the edge of non-being, it is still possible to rise above pure self-interest to cry for and reach out to others who are in similar or worse states of negrification. Thus it is no surprise that Fanon begins and ends Black Skin, White Masks with such strong affirmations of his belief in the possibilities of love. This in brief is Fanon’s contribution to Africana phenomenology.

Lewis Gordon and Africana Phenomenology If the first two chapters in an explicit Africana phenomenology were written by DuBois and Fanon, then the third has been written by Lewis Gordon. His chapter makes several important contributions to this sub-field of Africana philosophy that both engage and carry forward the work of DuBois and Fanon. The way in which Gordon engages Fanon can be clearly seen in his Fanon and the Crisis of European Man, and his engagements with DuBois in his Existentia Africana (2000). These engagements make it unmistakably clear that Gordon’s occasion for self-reflection is also the racialization of Africana self-consciousness within the projective and exploitative structures of modern European capitalism. Here, for reasons of space, I will take up only two of the important contributions that Gordon has made to the subfield of Africana phenomenology. The first of these is the greater systematization that he has brought to this area of Africana thought. The second is his phenomenological analysis of “the state of being a Negro” in the postcolonial/post-segregation era. In other words, an era in which the institutional power of white projects of negrification have been significantly weakened as a result of the anti-colonial and anti-racist struggles of the 1960s. Let us begin with the first of these two important contributions. Gordon makes clear very early the nature of his method of study. He refers to it as “descriptive ontology or what is sometimes called existential phenomenology” (1995a:5). This is the methodology by which Gordon brackets the everyday world and enters on his own path to the practice of self-reflection. Gordon’s path inward to the study of consciousness has been shaped by strong influences from Sartre and Husserl, as well as his own practice of creative writing. Gordon brings these three reflective streams together to forge a path to the study of consciousness that is original and distinct, and thus different from the paths used by Dubois or Fanon. Gordon’s distinctness stems from the stronger Husserlian influences on this area of his thought than is the case with DuBois or Fanon. These influences account for the clear presence of reflections that are done within what Husserl called the phenomenological reduction, and the absence of the psychoanalytic strategies that are so strong in Fanon. Further distinguishing Gordon’s self-reflective path is the fact that the influences of his poetics are

138  Paget Henry not as strong as they are in the cases of DuBois and Fanon. However, Gordon and Fanon share strong Sartrean influences on their strategies of selfreflection. In short, to understand how Gordon sees the world when puts on his phenomenological glasses, we need to understand these factors shaping the curve of their lenses. Although Gordon and Fanon share strong Sartrean influences, they manifest themselves very differently in their reflective approaches to the study of Africana self-consciousness. Like Sartre, Gordon makes a sharper distinction between ego and consciousness than either Fanon or DuBois. It is consciousness rather than the ego that is the primary focus of Gordon’s analysis. This is an important difference with Fanon, who, as psychoanalyst, focused more on the ego. This accounts for the more philosophical as opposed to the psychological orientation of Gordon’s work. It also accounts for why Gordon’s contributions include the greater systematizing of the philosophical foundations of Africana phenomenology. With his focus on consciousness, Gordon’s definition of the human reality to be studied is different from Fanon’s. Rather than motion towards the world, which would reflect the desires of the ego, as consciousness Gordon defines the core of human reality as freedom. As freedom, we are not determined by any law or necessity from within or without. We are free to choose our existence with nothing to legitimate or guarantee it other than our choice. Consequently, we are primarily responsible for who we are and what we will become. However, according to Sartre and Gordon, phenomenological reflection reveals that the experiencing of ourselves as freedom produces disturbing feelings of anguish, of being nothing and hence an intense desire to be something definite. Thus we often evade this anguished freedom by fleeing into the facticity and determinateness of a closed ego. This ego could be structured around being a doctor, a lawyer, a philosopher, or a parent. As any of these forms of ego-being, I now experience myself as something that is definite enough to negate the nothingness and anguish of my freedom. This “effort to hide from responsibility for ourselves as freedom” (1995a:8) is what both Sartre and Gordon meant by bad faith. In bad faith, “I flee a displeasing truth for a pleasing falsehood. I must convince myself that a falsehood is in fact true” (1995a:8, 1995b). In short, to be in bad faith is to lie to ourselves and believe the lie. As Fanon’s ego produced a shadow, so too does Gordon’s. However, although the projecting of these shadows is crucial to their accounts of “the state of being a Negro”, it is important to note the significant differences in the origins of these shadows. Fanon’s is psychological and engages the Freudian concept of an unconscious, while Gordon’s is philosophical and has its roots in the dialectic between being and nothingness as its affects the formation human consciousness and freedom. It is the discursive use of the notion of bad faith to thematize this dialectic that enables Gordon to systematize the philosophical as opposed to the psychological foundations

Africana Philosophy  139 of Africana phenomenology. In Gordon’s case, it is the ontogenic tensions produced by the lie that separates the ego from its anguished shadow that produces the need for mechanisms of projective catharsis rather than the ego’s need to repress its “lower emotions”. But in both cases, self-reflection has produced portraits of the human subject as a site of agency that has to project a shadow while at the same time denying that it is doing so. And in both, this is directly linked to the production and persistence of what Gordon calls anti-black racism. This racism is for Gordon a bad faith attempt “to deny the blackness within” (anguished freedom) by projecting it onto the black skins of Africana peoples while asserting an ego that is structured around whiteness. This is the manner in which Gordon has more clearly systematized the links between phenomenological philosophy and the racialization of Africana self-consciousness. In addition to thematizing and systematizing the dynamics of bad faith that remained implicit in Fanon, Gordon has also taken up the challenge of making more phenomenologically consistent the linking of ontogenic dynamics such as those of bad faith, with the sociogenic ones (e.g., institutions) that come together to produce oppressive social realities like anti-black racism. Consequently, like Alfred Schutz, Gordon needs a phenomenology of the social world in addition to that of individual self-consciousness. But the ethical/practical project of transformation to which Gordon’s phenomenology is linked is not the one of rescuing rationality from its positivistic capture that Schutz shared with Husserl. Rather, with DuBois and Fanon, Gordon’s ethical/practical project is one of denegrification and racial equality. Consequently, he needs both a theory and a praxis that will allow him to link the strategic demands of dismantling racist social structures to the intentional activity of the transcendental domain as disclosed by phenomenology. In effecting this synthesis, Gordon achieves greater phenomenological consistency than DuBois or Fanon. The distinctness of Gordon’s synthesis is that it grasps institutions in terms of bad faith rather than their historical materiality as established social structures. From the perspective of bad faith, Gordon sees institutions as social practices that limit freedom or encourage the evading of freedom. These limits are conceptualized by Gordon as a continuum of relations that range from choices to options. “Actional” choices that are institutionally recognized or supported are instances of the social affirmation of one’s freedom. At the other end of the continuum are options. Options are “calcified” situations in which institutions are not only separated from the intentional streams of meaning out of which they arose, but at the same time severely restrict the set of choices they make available to individuals (forthcoming). Thus it is in terms of options and choices that Gordon thematizes the problems of class and racial inequality. Three responses of individuals and groups to these differences in options and choices are of particular interest to Gordon. These are theodicean justifications by elites with actional choices, implosivity by groups who are without them, and revolution. The first two are for Gordon bad faith responses and

140  Paget Henry are important for his intentional reading of institutions. Thus it is through the use of the notion of bad faith on both the ontogenic and sociogenic levels that Gordon is able to achieve a greater degree of phenomenological consistency. As noted earlier, Gordon’s second important contribution to Africana phenomenology is his analysis of the persistence of anti-black racism in the post-colonial/post-segregation era. In our examination of Fanon, we saw that negrification and anti-black racism, though having their roots in psycho-existential shadow of the white ego, derived a lot of their power and persistence from social processes of institutionalization. One of the primary marks of the post-colonial/post-segregation era has been the removal of many of the institutional supports that reinforced the stereotype of “the Negro”. Indeed, it is possible to argue that in the present era, there remain three crucial areas of American society that continue to provide institutional support for anti-black racism: the practice of residential segregation, law enforcement, and the entertainment value of anti-black stereotype in mass media. This is a very different world from that of Fanon’s or Dubois’. Can anti-black racism persist within such a weakened institutional order? The significant contribution of Gordon’s important book, Bad Faith and ­Anti-black Racism, is its detailed answer to this question. Gordon’s answer is a definite yes. This answer in the affirmative is based primarily on the persistence of strong projective needs arising from the bad faith practices of white subjects that are still externalized onto black bodies. In other words, unless whites find new scapegoats or more good faith ways of facing the anguish of their freedom, they will continue to see Africana peoples through the eyes of that unacceptable anguish. This distorted seeing will persist in spite of the removal of its institutional props. This persistence means that Africana peoples are still being racialized and its accompanying processes of double consciousness still being reproduced. For Gordon, the strongest indicator of this is the phenomenon of “black anti-blackness” which he analyzes as a manifestation of double consciousness. His analysis of black anti-blackness is a brilliant updating of CLR James’s classic summary statement of this peculiar phenomenon in, The Black Jacobins: “‘why do you ill-treat your mule in that?’ asked a colonist of a carter. ‘But when I do not work, I am beaten, when he does not work, I beat him—he is my Negro’ ” (1989:15).

Other Contributions In addition to DuBois, Fanon, and Gordon, other important contributions to an Africana phenomenology have been made by Sylvia Wynter, Wilson Harris, Rene Menil, Charles Long, Nelson Maldonado-Torres, James Bryant, and myself, which I can only mention briefly. My own contribution has been to open up the chapter on African existential thought before the start of colonization, slavery, negrification, and Europeanization (2000:144–166).

Africana Philosophy  141 Bryant’s contribution has been a careful phenomenological analysis of the transformation of pre-colonial African religious identities to Afro-Christian ones as a response to negrification. Long’s contribution has been a phenomenology of the rituals and ceremonies of African American religious life. As we’ve already seen, Maldonado-Torres’ contribution has been in the area of phenomenology and ethics. Harris’ contribution is a detailed exploration of the creative potential of zone of non-being or what he calls “the void”. Rene Menil’s contribution has been a Hegelian inflected phenomenological account of the internalizing of the stereotype of “the Negro”. Finally, Wynter’s contribution has been a historicizing and semioticizing of the transcendental domain that can be usefully compared to the work of the German philosopher Karl-Otto Apel. Wynter introduces these changes through her important concepts of knowledge-constitutive goals and liminal categories. These contributions together with those of DuBois, Fanon, and Gordon give us fairly comprehensive picture of the phenomenological dimensions of Africana thought.

Philosophical Implications of Africana Phenomenology We began our analysis of Africana phenomenology with a clearing of the cultural terrain needed to make this philosophy visible. In particular, this clearing was directed at some of the exclusive claims that had been established between rationality and European phenomenology, as well as the establishing of flexible variations in three crucial areas of phenomenological philosophy: the occasion for self-reflection, the path to self-reflection, and the ethical/practical projects of phenomenologies. Now that we have outlined Africana phenomenology in the space of this clearing, it should be evident that it is a discourse that has been conditioned by and draws on a specific set of lived experiences and the cultural traditions of Africa and Europe. In this sense, it is quite different from Western phenomenology. What are we to make of the differences between these two philosophical discourses? Are they of a similar nature to the differences within each of them? Are the rational and allegedly universal structures of Western phenomenology such that they can incorporate Africana philosophy as a particular case without significant philosophical remainders? From the nature of the variations in cultural contexts, occasions for self-reflection, paths to reflection, and ethical/ practical projects, I think it should be clear that neither of these phenomenologies could absorb the other as a case without significant theoretical loss. The variations just referred to are not quantitative but qualitative in nature. Thus in spite of important areas of overlap and convergence, these qualitative differences have created significant degrees of incommensurability between the creative and discursive codes of these two phenomenologies. The resulting divergences are such that they limit the universal claims of both, creating epistemic breaks that can only be engaged/ resolved through conversation and comparative analysis.

142  Paget Henry From the philosophical standpoint, these incommensurate or unassimilable differences are primarily the result of metaphysical differences in the a priori foundations pre-supposed by the knowledge-producing practices of these two phenomenologies. I am aware that Western philosophy is currently going through what Habermas and others have called a “post-metaphysical” phase. Does this mean that Africana philosophy is also going through a similar phase? I don’t think so. The metaphysical foundations of Africana philosophy have never included the absolute claims for reason that have been at the center of the transcendental foundations of Western philosophy. In the Africana tradition, reason has always had to share the metaphysical stage with poetics and historical action. Indeed, in its post-metaphysical phase—a phase in which it is scaling down its claims for reason—Western philosophy may move closer to some of the fundamental metaphysical positions of Africana philosophy. What is most striking about Habermas’ post-metaphysical arguments is that, like Derrida’s attempts to deconstruct Western metaphysics, they are profoundly metaphysical. Habermas uses the term metaphysical to designate the thinking of philosophical idealism from Plato through Plotinus to Kant, Fichte, Schelling and Hegel. On the other hand, he sees late medieval nominalism, modern empiricism, neo-pragmatism, and post-structuralism as anti-metaphysical philosophies (1992:29). What I see both of these groups sharing is the necessity of going beyond “physics” the moment that they step out of specific exercises of knowledge production to assess the onto-epistemic significance of those exercises. Thus empiricists cannot on the basis of empirical practices rule out or establish their priority over intuitive or other non-empirical modes of knowing. To establish such a claim, the empiricist must move beyond his/her specific knowledge-producing practice and by means of logic, rhetoric, future projections of knowledge accumulation, etc., make the argument for priority, or foundational status. It is these questions of discourse-constitutive priorities regarding explanatory factors (Spirit, matter, class, race), disciplines, methodologies, conceptions of the human being, and ethical/practical projects that constitute the ineliminable metaphysical elements in all discourses. They are shared by Habermas’ metaphysical and anti-metaphysical groups of philosophers. These pretheoretical or discourse-constitutive choices are inescapable, and their justification or non-justification takes us into the realm of metaphysics. When we direct our focus at the discourse-constitutive foundations of Dubois’ thought, we can observe the presence of a familiar set of competing explanatory factors, disciplines, methodologies, and conceptions of the human being as we find in Hegel or Husserl. What we do not find is a similar prioritizing or systematizing of these discourse-constitutive fundamentals in relation to reason or Spirit. DuBois appears to enclose these fundamentals within a very different set of epistemic norms, although he never really took the time to specify them. Consequently, there has been a lot of debate about this particular dimension of Dubois’ thought. Cornel West interprets this

Africana Philosophy  143 refusal to specify as a pragmatist evasion of epistemology (1989:138–140). Robert Gooding Williams objects strongly to this reading of Dubois’ refusal (1991–92:517–542). Within this unspecified Duboisian framework, reason and Spirit are two of the fundamentals rather than the supreme principle of prioritizing and systematizing. Earlier, we noted that DuBois did not make as strong an onto-epistemic commitment to the paradigm of consciousness as either Hegel or Husserl. The same was true of his attitude towards the method of poetics as well as those of history and sociology. In his important essay, “Sociology Hesitant”, DuBois argues for the possibilities of doing sociology from the perspectives of both a free and an externally determined subject. At the same time, he makes no arguments for continuity between the two positions or for a fixed, pre-theoretical hierarchical arrangement between them. One leaves this essay with the feeling that he is equally happy with both. I think that Dubois’ attitude to all of these discourse-constitutive fundamentals that he organizes and uses can be best compared to the attitude of a jazz musician to his/her improvisations. They are all real epistemic offerings, they possess creative potential, but they are partial and limited formations that could not only be done differently but also need to be checked and complemented. Thus most, if not all, of DuBois’ pre-theoretical orderings of selected fundamentals are provisional, variable, and in need of complements, and therefore change significantly in his different texts. This is the metaphysical position that we confront in Dubois’ works. Thus, there appears to be an improvisational aesthetic norm guiding the metaphysical orderings that make DuBoisian knowledge production possible. In the case of Fanon, we can observe a similarly relaxed and improvisational attitude towards the problems of prioritizing and systematizing discourse-constitutive fundamentals. This attitude is evident in his oftenquoted remark: “I leave methods to the botanists and the mathematicians” (1968:12). Without clear specification, Fanon employs poetics, existential philosophy, and psychoanalysis to define his path to consciousness. In this strategy, we saw that Fanon embraced the concrete intuitive method of existential philosophy as well as the more abstract method of a general interpretation used by psychoanalysis. Further, we saw that this multi-layered ontogenic discourse was implicitly linked to a sociogenic base. Methodologically speaking, this sociogenic base comes more fully into view in The Wretched of the Earth, where the focus of Fanon’s phenomenological analyses is not so much individual as it is national consciousness. Thematized in primarily Marxist terms, the relationships between the sociogenic and the phenomenological factors constituting the national consciousness of the colonized in revolt are configured differently. These and other breaks in the composition and ordering of discourse-constitutive fundamentals between this work and Black Skin, White Masks, remind us of similar breaks between major works by DuBois. The great metaphysical secret of The Wretched of the Earth is its almost-seamless synthesis of

144  Paget Henry existential phenomenology, transcendental phenomenology, psychoanalysis, Afro-Caribbean poetics, Marxist political economy, and Africana colonial history. How these different discourses were brought together, whence the “tidalectical” flows between them, or the occasions for shifting from one to the other? Of these creative and synthetic strategies Fanon does not really speak. He leaves us completely on our own and at the mercy of our own creative and synthetic capabilities. Although not quite as improvisational as DuBois, none of these priorities in factors of explanation, methods, and disciplines were made explicit, or the creative strategies by which they were synthesized carefully outlined. Thus the internal structure of Fanon’s psychosocial poetics remains as much a mystery as Dubois’ socio-historical poetics. However, in spite of these outward signs of disorder, Fanon’s discourses display remarkable coherence and unmatched explanatory power. To account for this, I suggest a set of improvisational metaphysical principles that are quite similar to those of DuBois. In the case of Gordon, where we find the greatest concern with the pretheoretical systematization of discourse-constitutive fundamentals, the presence of this improvisational metaphysics is clearly evident. Indeed, in Gordon’s case, the connection to jazz is direct as it appears in his work and through the fact that he is a jazz drummer. As we’ve seen, Gordon has established a clear priority of consciousness over the ego, the intentional over the extentional, and the free over the externally determined subject. However, at the same time, there is no absolute commitment to the paradigm of consciousness that matches Husserl’s or even the early Sartre. Rather what we find is a similar improvisational attitude towards this particular piece of discursive systematization. The difference between Gordon and DuBois or Fanon is not to be found in their attitudes towards specific systematic orderings but in the fact that DuBois and Fanon had more of these improvised orderings going at the same time. Gordon has fewer, has worked out the philosophical ones more systematically, but his attitude towards them is not final but improvisational. This distinct metaphysical position that we can observe in Gordon, Fanon, and Dubois was not evident in either the African or Afro-Christian phases of Africana philosophy. Rather, it emerged in the period that elsewhere I have called poeticist/historicist. This double designation was a way of representing the compound and synthetic nature of this phase of Africana thought. However, I did not really develop the provisional and improvisational nature of the creative codes that guided the formation of these compound syntheses. If indeed this still-to-be-thematized set of improvisational codes are the keys to the metaphysical foundations of this specific phase of Africana phenomenology, then it should be clear why it cannot be incorporated into Western phenomenology without significant philosophical loss. When more fully thematized, it is very likely to be an original metaphysics that reflects the experiences of Africana peoples and the distinct knowledge-producing practices that were developed under the world-shattering conditions of

Africana Philosophy  145 racialization and colonization. Its spirit is very different from that of EuroAmerican pragmatism or of mainstream of European philosophy. If I had to give this metaphysics a more conventional name, it would be creative realism, as what it assumes to be ultimately real is the creative act in its spontaneous movements rather than any of its specific creations. This is the creative code, the compositional principle of Africana metaphysics that makes it impossible for its phenomenology to be absorbed by the rationalism of Western phenomenology. Within the context of this improvisational metaphysics, the process of de-centering reason that Western metaphysics is presently going through could hardly be viewed as a post-metaphysical event. Rather it would very likely be seen as just one of many contrapuntal movements or complementary reversals that must take place among discursive formations. Such movements must take place as the capacity to disclose the whole truth is not given to any single discursive formation.

Conclusion In the foregoing analyses, I have emphasized the differences between Africana and Western phenomenologies. These differences were both thematic, such as the issue of racialization, and metaphysical, as indicated by the different rules guiding the prioritizing and systematizing of discourse-­ constitutive fundamentals. However, the broader comparative framework employed gave some indication of a number of areas of similarity. The question that now arises from this clearer outlining of Africana phenomenology is the following: in what from the Africana perspective is a post-imperial as opposed to a post-metaphysical age, how are these two phenomenologies to relate to each other? Clearly the next phases in these phenomenologies are not going to be identical. The cultural and racial differences will in all probability continue to be important sources of difference. What will the post-“negro” phase of Africana phenomenology be like? What will it bring to the philosophical table in the place of double consciousness, second sight, white masks, and an improvisational metaphysics? What will follow the “post-metaphysical” phase of Western phenomenology? What will it bring to the philosophical table in the place of its earlier claims for a universal reason? Is there a systematic relation between the post-imperial and the “post-metaphysical” phases of these two phenomenologies? These important questions can only be adequately answered by developing new and more innovative modes of comparative philosophical analysis that do not attempt to subsume culturally distinct philosophies under the categories of another. Rather, these new modes of comparative analysis should seek to create bridges, partial points or areas of complementary convergence, meta-philosophical discourses, and communicative groups between these culturally distinct philosophies. The need for such modes of comparative analysis is one of the important consequences that follow from this clearer recognition of Africana phenomenology.

146  Paget Henry

Note 1 Published with explicit permission from the author.

References Decartes, R. (1960). Meditations on First Philosophy, Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill Publishing. Derrida, J. (1976). Of Grammatology, Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. Derrida, J. (1989). Edmund Husserl’s the Origins of Geometry, Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press. DuBois, W.E.B. (1969). The Souls of Black Folk, New York: Fawcett Publications. DuBois, W.E.B. (2000). Dusk of Dawn, New Brunswick: Transaction Publishers. Dussel, E. (1996). The Underside of Modernity, Atlantic Highlands: Humanities Press. Fanon, F. (1967). Black Skin, White Masks, New York: Grove Press. Fanon, F. (1968). The Wretched of the Earth, New York: Grove Press. Fanon, F. (1999). Darkwater, New York: Dover Publications. Gooding-Williams, R. (1991–92). “Evading Narrative Myth, Evading Prophetic Pragmatism: Cornel West’s The American Evasion of Philosophy”, The Massachusetts Review, 32(4), pp. 517–542. Gordon, L. (1995a). Bad Faith and Anti-black Racism, Atlantic Highlands: Humanities Press. Gordon, L. (1995b). Fanon and the Crisis of European Man, New York: Routledge. Gordon, L. (2000). Existentia Africana, New York: Routledge. Habermas, J. (1971). Knowledge and Human Interests, Boston: Beacon Press. Habermas, J. (1987). The Theory of Communicative Action, Boston: Beacon Press. Habermas, J. (1992). Postmetaphysical Thinking, Cambridge: MIT Press. Hegel, G. (1967). The Phenomenology of Mind, New York: Harper& Row. Hegel, G. (1971). The Early Theological Writings, Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. Husserl, E. (1970). The Crisis of European Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology, Evanston: Northwestern University Press. Husserl, E. (1975). Ideas, New York: Collier Books. James, C.L.R. (1989). The Black Jacobins, New York: Vintage Books. Levering-Lewis, D. (1995). WEB DuBois: A Reader, New York: Henry Holt & Co. Maldonado-Torres, N. (Forthcoming). Thinking from the Limits of Being. Sartre, J.-P. (1956). Being and Nothingness, New York: Philosophical Library. Walcott, D. (1993). The Antilles, New York: Farrar, Strauss, Giroux. West, C. (1989). The American Evasion of Philosophy, Madison: University of Wisconsin Press. Zamir, Sh. (1995). Dark Voices, Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

6 Decolonizing Western Universalisms Decolonial Pluri-versalism from Aime Cesaire to the Zapatistas1 Ramon Grosfoguel This chapter discusses the concept of the “Universal” within the Western philosophical tradition and proposes another, more decolonial way of thinking universality through the thought of Aimé Césaire, Enrique Dussel, and the Zapatistas. The first part examines the concept of the “Universal” from René Descartes to Karl Marx, while the second focuses on Aimé Césaire’s formulation of the concept, proposed from an Afro-Caribbean decolonial perspective. The third part analyzes the concept of transmodernity proposed by Enrique Dussel, and the fourth discusses the difference between postmodernity and transmodernity, using as an example the postmodern understanding of hegemony proposed by Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe, as well as the transmodern understanding of politics proposed by the Zapatistas in the “Other Campaign.” Finally, I discuss the implications of all of the above for the debate on the left regarding the vanguard party versus the rearguard movement.

1.  Western Universalism: From Descartes to Marx There exists a long tradition of thought about the universal in the West. René Descartes, founder of modern philosophy with his motto “I think, therefore I am,” understood the universal as an eternal knowledge beyond time and space; that is, equivalent to a God’s-eye view. In the struggle against the hegemonic Christian theology of the period (mid-17th century), which, following Walter Mignolo (see The Idea of Latin America), I will call here the theo-politics of knowledge, Descartes placed the ego at the foundation of knowledge in a position previously reserved for the “Christian God.” All of the attributes of this “Christian God” came to be located in the “subject,” the ego. In order to be able to claim the possibility of a knowledge beyond time and space, from the eyes of God, it was fundamental to dissociate the subject from all bodies and territories; that is, to empty the subject of all spatial or temporal determinations. Hence this dualism between the subject and any spatial and temporal dimensions was a fundamental constitutive axis of Cartesianism. It was this dualism, which would allow Descartes to situate the subject in a “non-place” and a “non-time,” thereby making it

148  Ramon Grosfoguel possible to claim to speak beyond all the spatio-temporal limits of the cartography of global power. To be able to place the individual subject at the foundation of all knowledge, the internal monologue of the subject without any dialogical relation with other human beings allows him to claim access to truth in its sui generis form, that is, as self-generated, insulated from social relations with other human beings. The myth of the self-production of truth by the isolated subject is a constitutive part of the myth of modernity, the myth of a self-generated and insulated Europe, which develops on its own without depending on anyone else on earth. So we can see that just like dualism, so too is solipsism constitutive of Cartesian philosophy. Without solipsism, there can be no myth of a subject with universal rationality that confirms itself as such. We see here the beginning of the ego-politics of knowledge (Mignolo, The Idea of Latin America), which is nothing less than a secularization of the Christian cosmology of the theo-politics of knowledge. In the ego-politics of knowledge, the subject of enunciation is erased, hidden, camouflaged by what Santiago Castro-Gómez has called zero-point philosophy. The latter is a point of view that hides itself as a point of view, or put differently, the point of view that assumes having no point of view. We are dealing, then, with a philosophy in which the epistemic subject has no sexuality, gender, ethnicity, race, class, spirituality, language, or epistemic location within power relations, and a subject that produces truth from an interior monologue with himself without relation to anyone outside him. That is to say, we are dealing with a deaf philosophy, a philosophy without a face, which feels no gravity. This faceless subject floats through the sky without being determined by anything or anyone. Enrique Dussel (see, for instance, 1492: El encubrimiento) has reminded us on several occasions that the Cartesian “ego cogito” of “I think, therefore I am” is preceded by 150 years of the imperial “ego conquiro” of “I conquer, therefore I am.” We should recall that Descartes formulated his philosophy in Amsterdam at precisely the moment in the mid-17th century at which Holland came to be the core of the world system. What Dussel is telling us with this is that the political, economic, cultural, and social conditions of possibility for a subject who assumes the arrogance of speaking as though it were the eye of God is a subject whose geopolitical location is determined by its existence as a colonizer/conqueror, that is, as Imperial Being. Therefore, the dualistic and solipsistic myth of a self-generated subject without any spatial-temporal location within global power relations inaugurates the epistemological myth of Eurocentered modernity. This refers to the myth of a self-generated subject with access to a universal truth beyond space and time by means of a monologue. That is, through a deafness towards the world and through erasing the face of the subject of enunciation, a blindness to its own spatial and corporeal location within the cartography of global power. This Cartesian solipsism will come to be questioned by Western philosophy itself. However, what will remain as a more permanent influence of Cartesianism up to the present day is the faceless, zero-point philosophy that

Decolonizing Western Universalisms  149 would be taken up by the human sciences from the 19th century onward as the epistemology of axiological neutrality and empirical objectivity of the subject, which produces scientific knowledge. Despite the fact that some currents like psychoanalysis and Marxism have questioned these premises, Marxists and psychoanalysts still tend to produce knowledge from the zero-point, that is, without questioning the place from which they speak and produce this knowledge. This is fundamental for our purposes because the concept of universality that will remain stamped on Western philosophy from Descartes onward will be an abstract universalism. It is abstract in two senses: 1) Universalism Type 1: The first, in the sense of utterances, a knowledge which is detached from all spatio-temporal determination and claims to be eternal. 2) Universalism Type 2: The second, in the epistemic sense of a subject of enunciation that is detached, emptied of body and content, and of its location within the cartography of global power from which it produces knowledge. As a result, the split of the subject from body and space allows Descartes to produce knowledge with claims to truth, universally valid for everyone on earth. The first type of abstract universalism (that of utterances) is only possible if one assumes the second (that of the subject of enunciation). The first sense of abstract universalism, that of a universalism based in a knowledge with pretensions of spatio-temporal universality, of utterances “abstracted” from all spatiality and temporality, has been interrogated within this very same Western cosmology and philosophy. But the second sense of abstract universalism, the epistemic sense of a subject of enunciation that is faceless and placeless in spatio-temporal terms, that of the ego-politics of knowledge, has persisted in our own times through the zero-point of Western science— even among those who have criticized Descartes—and this represents one of the most pernicious legacies of Cartesianism. In Critique of Pure Reason, Immanuel Kant, writing a century after Descartes (in the 18th century), sought to resolve some of the dilemmas of Cartesian universalism by making the categories of space and time innate to the minds of “men,” and as a result universal, a priori categories of all knowledge. The transcendental Kantian subject cannot produce knowledge outside the categories of time and space, as Cartesianism claims to do, because these categories are already within the minds of all men. For Kant, these are the conditions of possibility of universalist intersubjectivity, in which all men would recognize a form of knowledge as true and universal. Against Descartes, human knowledge for Kant has limits and cannot know “the thing-in-itself.” But reforming and continuing the Cartesian tradition, Kant sees the innate a priori categories shared in the minds of all men as what allows for the organization of the chaos of the empirical world in such a

150  Ramon Grosfoguel manner as to be able to produce a knowledge which is intersubjectively recognized as true and universal. It is also important to note that Kant, also in Critique of Pure Reason, makes explicit the Eurocentrism that remains implicit in Descartes. In Kant’s work, transcendental reason is not a characteristic of all those beings who, from a decolonizing, anti-racist, and anti-sexist perspective, we would include among human beings. For Kant, transcendental reason belongs fundamentally to those considered to be “men.” If we take up his anthropological works, we can see that for Kant transcendental reason is predominantly male, white, and European (see Kant, Anthropology). African, Indigenous Asian, and Southern European (Spanish, Italian, and Portuguese) men and all women (including Europeans) do not have the same access to “reason” (see Eze). The geography of reason changes with Kant, since he writes from 18th-century Germany at precisely the moment in which other empires in Northwestern Europe (including France, Germany, and England) displace Holland and in competition among themselves constitute the new core of the world system. Kant maintains the Cartesian mind-body dualism and solipsism, but in a reformed and updated form. He questions the first type of abstract Cartesian universalism (that of the utterances), that is, the possibility of the eternal knowledge of the thing-in-itself, beyond all spatio-temporal categories. But he maintains and deepens the second type of abstract Cartesian universalism, the epistemological type, where upon making explicit what was implicit in Descartes, we see the privilege of “European man” in the production of universal knowledges. That is to say, on the level of the subject of enunciation a particular defines the universal for the rest of the planet. Therefore, when Kant proposes his cosmopolitanism, this is really a European provincialism camouflaged as universalist cosmopolitanism and sold to the rest of the world as an imperial design (see Eze). In the first three decades of the 19th century, Hegel revolutionizes Western philosophy in important ways. In both, the Lectures on the Philosophy of World History and the Encyclopedia, he questions solipsism in order to situate the subject of enunciation in its historico-universal context, and in the Phenomenology he overcomes dualism by proposing the identity of subject and object. Hegel accomplishes this by questioning Kantian transcendentalism in two ways: 1) instead of innate categories, Hegel historicizes philosophical categories (see Lectures), and 2) instead of the Kantian dualism about the impossibility of knowing the thing-in-itself, for Hegel truth is the whole, that is, the very process of the dialectical movement of thought that grasps the real movement of the thing-in-itself (see Phenomenology). For Hegel, the movement of thought moves from abstract to concrete. The development of categories runs parallel to universal history, as the latter is an expression of the former. Categories or concepts are deduced from the mediations, contradictions, and negations of thought, and move from abstract universals towards concrete universals. By the negation of

Decolonizing Western Universalisms  151 categories, Hegel does not mean their disappearance, but merely their subsumption, that is, that simple categories are maintained as determinations of more complex ones. Through this movement, Hegel claims to arrive at an Absolute Knowledge that is valid beyond time and space. By abstract universalism, Hegel understands simple categories—that is, those lacking determinations, which do not contain within themselves other categories. Simple categories, abstract universals, are Hegel’s point of departure for knowledge production. The concrete universal for Hegel represents those complex categories that, once thought, they have passed through various negations and mediations and are rich with multiple determinations (Hegel Encyclopedia; Lectures). By multiple determinations, Hegel understands those complex categories that contain through subsumption (but not disappearance) the simplest categories, after the latter are negated through a dialectical process of thought. The Hegelian dialectical method is an epistemic mechanism that subsumes and transforms all alterity and difference into part of the Same, until arriving at the Absolute Knowledge which would be “the knowledge of all knowledge” and which would coincide with the end of history, conceived in that way because from that point onward, nothing new could be produced on the level of thought and human history. In the claim to Absolute Knowledge, Hegel ends up betraying his innovation on the level of Type I universalism, that of utterances, when instead of continuing with his historicization of categories and utterances, Absolute Knowledge serves as a new sort of Cartesian universalism that is true for all of Humanity and for all time and space. The difference between Descartes and Hegel would be that for the first, eternal universalism is a priori, whereas for the second, the eternal universal would only be possible through an a posteriori historical reconstruction of the Universal Spirit throughout the entire history of Humanity. But by “Humanity,” Hegel does not mean all humans. He saw himself as the philosopher of philosophers, as the philosopher of the end of history. In continuation with the epistemic racism of those Western philosophers who preceded him, Hegel understood Universal Spirit, reason, as moving from East to West (Hegel, Lectures). The East is the stagnant past, the West is the present that developed the Universal Spirit, and white America is the future. If Asia represented an inferior stage of Universal Spirit, Africa and the indigenous world did not even form part of it, and women were not even mentioned, except when speaking of marriage and the family. For Hegel, Absolute Knowledge, which represents a concrete universal in the sense that it results from multiple determinations, could only be achieved by white-Christian-heterosexual-European men, and the multiplicity of determinations of Absolute Knowledge are thereby subsumed to the interior of Western cosmology/philosophy. Nothing remains outside in a position of alterity in Hegelian Absolute Knowledge. As a result, the Cartesian and Kantian epistemological racism of abstract epistemic universalism (Type II), in which the universal is defined on the basis of the particular

152  Ramon Grosfoguel (Western man), remains intact in Hegel. Other philosophies like those in the East are deemed inferior, and in the case of indigenous and African philosophies, they are not even worthy of the name philosophy since Universal Spirit never passed through those geographic zones. Karl Marx, writing in the mid-19th century, makes important modifications to this tradition of Western philosophical thought. I will limit myself here to the two types of universalism in discussion. Marx criticizes the Hegelian dialectic for its idealism and criticizes Feuerbach’s materialism for its mechanicism/reductionism, that is, for its lack of dialectic in the face of the human practice of transforming nature and oneself. For Marx, the Hegelian movement from the abstract to the concrete is not simply a movement of philosophical categories, but rather one of categories of political economy (see Grundrisse). Against Hegel, for Marx the determinations of political economy over the social life of humans gain primacy over conceptual determinations. Therefore, in Marx, the Hegelian elevation from the abstract to the concrete is understood as a movement of thought within the political-economic categories of his epoch. Although his definition of the abstract and the concrete is very similar to that of Hegel, in which the concrete is rich in multiple determinations, Marx differentiates himself from Hegel in the primacy that he grants to the categories of political economy and in positing a movement prior to the elevation from the abstract to the concrete, which Hegel does not recognize. This is the movement from the concrete to the abstract; that is, from sensory perception and empirical reality situated within a moment in the history of the evolution of political economy and class struggle towards more abstract categories (see Marx, Grundrisse). Just like Hegel, Marx historicizes these categories. However, that which serves as a starting point for Hegel, that is, the most abstract universal categories from which reality is deduced, becomes arrival points in Marx. In Marx’s materialist turn, the most abstract categories are those that are produced through a very complex historical-social process of thought. Therefore, for Marx, the movement of thought first moves from the concrete to the abstract in order to produce simple and abstract categories, only to then return from the abstract to the concrete to produce complex categories. Hegel saw the second movement (from the abstract to the concrete, from simple concepts to complex ones), but as a result of his idealism, he was blind to the first movement (from the concrete to the abstract, from empty concepts to simpler ones). For example, the category of labor is a simple one that emerges in a particular moment of human history when labor is socially detached from its concrete multiplicity. In agreement with Marx, this only occurs in the capitalist system when mercantile relations come to predominate in the social relations of production. Economic thought can only create this category as a simple and abstract concept at a determinate moment in the development of human history. Previously, to speak of labor one would refer to the concrete labor carried out by the person: shoemaker,

Decolonizing Western Universalisms  153 seamstress, farmer, etc. It is only when these various tasks are measured socially according to their exchange value (the socially necessary labor time for the production of a commodity), and not according to use value (the kind of qualitative labor involved in production), that the emergence of the category “labor” becomes socially possible as an abstract concept indifferent to particular concrete labor. That is to say, for Marx thought does not spring from the heads of people in a determinate moment of the development of Spirit as seems to be the case for Hegel, but emerges instead from the determinate, concrete, historico-social situation of the development of the political economy. So Marx epistemically situates the production of knowledge not as the result of the development of Spirit in an epoch, but rather of the material development of the relations of production and forces of production (“mode of production”). This grounding of the history of Hegelian Spirit in the history of the political economy and its relation to the thought of an epoch is what causes Marx to give a materialist turn to the Hegelian dialectic. As a result, Marx would emphasize the class character of the political, theoretical, and philosophical perspective in question. The point of view of the proletariat would be for Marx the epistemological departure point for a critique of what he deemed bourgeois political economy. This represented an important rupture with the Western philosophical tradition with regard to these two types of universalism. In Type I, the universalism of utterances, Marx situated these utterances, as did Hegel, in their historical context. Against Hegel, this historical context was no longer that of Universal Spirit, but rather the development of the political economy, the mode of production, and the corresponding class struggle. The conditions of production assume primacy over consciousness in all historical eras, still an abstract universal utterance, but one in which the operation of the determination “in the last instance” of economic processes will vary in each epoch. We have here an abstract universal that is filled with the political-economic content of every historical epoch, thereby becoming concrete. In Type II, the abstract epistemic universalism of the subject of enunciation, Marx situated the position from which subjects think in relation to classes and class struggle. Hence, against the tradition that spans from Descartes to Hegel, Marx situates his geopolitics of knowledge in relation to social classes. Marx thinks from the historico-social situation of the European proletariat, and it is on the basis of this perspective that he proposes a global/universal design as the solution to the problems of all humanity: communism. What Marx maintains in common with the Western Bourgeois philosophical tradition is that his universalism, despite having emerged from a particular location—in this case, the proletariat—does not problematize the fact that this subject is European, masculine, heterosexual, white, Judeo-Christian, etc. Marx’s proletariat is a conflictive subject internal to Europe, which does not allow him to think outside the Eurocentric limits of Western thought. Neither cosmological and epistemological diversality nor

154  Ramon Grosfoguel the multiplicity of sexual, gender, racial, and religious power relations are incorporated or epistemically situated within his thought. Just like the Western thinkers that preceded him, Marx participates in the epistemic racism in which there only exists a single epistemology with access to universality: the Western tradition. In Marx, in the epistemic universalism of the second type, the subject of enunciation remains concealed, camouflaged, hidden beneath a new abstract universal that is no longer “man,” “the transcendental subject,” “the ego,” but instead “the proletariat” and its universal political project, “communism.” Hence the 20th-century communist project was, albeit from the left, yet another Western global imperial/colonial design which under the Soviet empire attempted to export to the rest of the world its universal abstract of “communism” as “the solution” to global problems. Marx reproduces an epistemic racism much like that of Hegel, which does not allow him to grant to non-European peoples and societies either temporal coevalness or the capacity to produce thought worthy of being considered part of the philosophical legacy of humanity or world history. For Marx, non-European peoples and societies were primitive, backwards, that is, Europe’s past. They had not reached either the development of the forces of production or the levels of social evolution of European civilization. As a result, in the name of civilizing them and pulling them out of the ahistoric stagnation of pre-capitalist modes of production, Marx would support the British invasion of India in the 18th century and the U.S. invasion of Northern Mexico in the 19th century. For Marx, the “Asiatic mode of production” was the Orientalist concept through which he characterized non-Western societies. This “Asiatic mode of production” was characterized by its incapability of change and transformation, that is, by its always infinite and eternal temporal reproduction. Marx participated in the linearity of time characteristic of Western evolutionist thought. Capitalism was a more advanced system and, following Eurocentered modernity’s rhetoric of salvation (Mignolo, Local Histories), it was better for the non-European peoples to accelerate their evolutionary process towards capitalism through imperial invasions than to continue their stagnation in antiquated forms of social production. This economicist evolutionism would lead 20th-century Marxists down a blind alley. Marxist thought, despite being from the left, ended up trapped in the same problems of Eurocentrism and colonialism that had imprisoned Eurocentered thinkers of the right. At this point, I want to highlight two crucial points: 1. Any cosmopolitanism or global proposal that is constructed through the abstract universalism of the second type, that is, through the epistemological universalism of the ego-politics of knowledge, will not be able to avoid becoming another global imperial/colonial design. If universal truth is constructed through the epistemology of a particular territory or body (whether it be Western, Christian, or Islamic), and through the exclusion of others, then the cosmopolitanism or global proposal that

Decolonizing Western Universalisms  155 is constructed through this abstract universalist epistemology will be inherently imperialist/colonial. 2. Abstract epistemic universalism in the modern/colonial Western philosophical tradition forms an intrinsic part of epistemological racism. Another way of saying this is: epistemic racism is inherent to modern Western philosophy. If universal reason and truth can only emerge through a white-European-masculine-heterosexual subject, and if the only tradition of thought with this capacity for universality and with access to truth is the Western tradition (inferiorizing all non-Western knowledge), then there can be no abstract universalism without epistemic racism. Epistemological racism is intrinsic to a Western “abstract universalism” which conceals who speaks and from where they speak. So the question is: How can we escape the dilemma between isolated provincial particularisms and abstract universalisms camouflaged as “cosmopolitan,” but equally provincial? How can we decolonize Western universalism?

2.  Aimé Césaire and an “Other” Universalism In order to escape the predicament of the ego-politics of knowledge, it is absolutely necessary to shift the geography of reason towards “an-other” geopolitics and ego-politics of knowledge. Here we will shift the geography of reason from Western philosophers to the Afro-Caribbean thinker Aimé Césaire, native from the island of Martinique, who was Frantz Fanon’s teacher. Césaire is one of the most important decolonial thinkers, and his immense contribution forms the point of departure for an era of “Césairean Decolonial Sciences” as opposed to “Cartesian Colonial Sciences” (see Maldonado-Torres). I am going to focus here on an unexplored area of the literature on Césaire’s thought: his unique and original decolonial concept of “universality.” In his letter of resignation to the French Communist Party in the mid-1950s, which was addressed to the Secretary General of the time Maurice Thorez, Césaire attacks the abstract universalism of Eurocentric Marxist thought. Césaire writes the following: Provincialism? Absolutely not. I’m not going to confine myself to some narrow particularism. But nor do I intend lose myself in a disembodied universalism. There are two ways to lose oneself: through walled-in segregation in the particular, or through dissolution into the “universal.” My idea of the universal is that of a universal rich with all that is particular, rich with all particulars, the deepening and coexistence of all particulars. (84) Eurocentrism lost itself down the path of the disembodied universalism that dissolves all particulars into the universal. The concept of “disembodied” is

156  Ramon Grosfoguel crucial here. For Césaire, abstract universalism is that which from a hegemonic particularism seeks to set itself up as an imperial global design for the entire world, and which through presenting itself as “disembodied,” conceals the epistemic locus of enunciation. This epistemic movement, typical of the Eurocentric epistemologies of the “zero-point” and the “ego-politics of knowledge” has been central to colonial projects. With this critique, Césaire, setting out from the memory of slavery and the experience of the bodypolitics of knowledge of a French Caribbean Black subject, discloses and makes visible the white-Western geopolitics and body-politics of knowledge camouflaged under the “disembodied” abstract universalism of the egopolitics of knowledge. The universalist republicanism of the French empire has been one of the most important exponents of abstract universalism in its effort to subsume, dilute, and assimilate all particulars under the hegemony of a single particularity, in this case white Western man. It is this universalism that a large part of the white, creole elites in Latin America, imitating French imperial republicanism, have reproduced in discourses of the “nation” that dissolve African and indigenous particularities into an abstract, universal “nation” that privileges the particularity of the European heritage of white creoles over all others. But we see the reproduction of this colonial, Eurocentered universalism not only in discourses of the right, but also in contemporary Marxist and post-Marxist currents, as will be discussed below. Against this project of abstract, racist, imperial universalism, and against third-world fundamentalisms, Césaire’s decolonization, based on the AfroCaribbean experience, does not affirm a narrow and closed particularism which leads to a segregationist provincialism or fundamentalism that closes itself in its own particularity. For Césaire, decolonization instead means the affirmation of a concrete universal into which all particulars are deposited. If abstract universalism establishes vertical relations between peoples, Césaire’s concrete universalism is necessarily horizontal in the relations that it establishes between particularities. Here, the idea of concrete universalism acquires a very different meaning than it had in Hegel and Marx. If concrete universalism in Hegel and Marx referred to those concepts rich with multiple determinations but within a single cosmology and a single episteme (in this case the Western), in which the movement of the dialectic crushes all alterity into the Same, for Césaire (the concrete universal is that which results from multiple cosmological and epistemological determinations as opposed to a uni-verse). Césairean concrete universalism is the result of a horizontal process of critical dialogue between peoples who relate to one another as equals. Abstract universalism is inherently authoritarian and racist, while Césaire’s concrete universalism is profoundly democratic. Césaire’s philosophical intuition, thought through an Afro-Caribbean geopolitics and body-politics of knowledge, has been a source of inspiration for the formulation of practical ways out of the dilemmas of exploitation and domination in the contemporary world-system beyond Eurocentric fundamentalism and

Decolonizing Western Universalisms  157 third-world fundamentalisms. Inspired by Césaire’s philosophical intuitions, I will attempt to answer the following questions: What would represent today a Césairean concrete-universalist project of decolonization? What are the political implications of this project? How can these philosophical intuitions of Césaire be concretized in a project for the radical transformation of the colonial power-matrix of this “European/Euro-North-American capitalist/patriarchal modern/colonial world-system” (see Grosfoguel)?

3.  Transmodernity as a Utopian Decolonization Project A horizontal, liberatory dialogue as opposed to a vertical, Western monologue requires the decolonization of global power relations. We cannot assume a Habermasian consensus (see Habermas) or horizontal relations of equality between cultures and peoples when these are divided on the global level into the two poles of the colonial difference. However, we can begin to imagine “alter-ative” worlds beyond the dilemma of Eurocentric fundamentalism versus third-world fundamentalisms. I will focus here on the concept of transmodernity as conceived by Latin American philosopher Enrique Dussel. His particular use of the concept is an utopian project meant to transcend the Eurocentric version of modernity. In opposition to the project of Habermas, which sees as its central task the need to complete the unfinished and incomplete project of modernity, Dussel’s transmodernity is a project that seeks through a long process to complete the unfinished project of decolonization. Transmodernity would represent the concretization at the level of a political project of the concrete universalism that Césaire’s philosophical intuition invites us to construct. Instead of a modernity centered on Europe/ Euro-North-America and imposed on the rest of the world as an imperial/ colonial global design, Dussel argues for a multiplicity of critical, decolonizing perspectives against and beyond Eurocentered modernity, from the various epistemic locations of the colonized people of the world. Just as there is no absolute outside of this world-system, there is not an absolute inside. Alternative epistemologies can provide what Caribbean cultural critic Édouard Glissant proposes as a “diversality” of responses to the problems of the actually existing modernity (see particularly his Poetics of Relation). The philosophy of liberation can only come from the critical thinkers of each culture in dialogue with other cultures. Women’s liberation, democracy, civil rights, and those forms of economic organization that represent alternatives to the current system can only emerge from the creative responses of local ethico-epistemic projects. As a number of third-world women have pointed out, Western women cannot impose their understanding of liberation on women from the Islamic or Indigenous world (see Mohanty, Feminism; Lamrabet, El Corán). Similarly, Western men cannot impose their understanding of democracy on non-European peoples. This does not represent a call to seek fundamentalist or nationalist solutions to the global coloniality

158  Ramon Grosfoguel of power. It is a call to seek in epistemic diversality and transmodernity a strategy or an epistemic mechanism towards a decolonized, transmodern world that moves us beyond both the Eurocentric First-Worldist and Eurocentric Third-Worldist fundamentalisms. During the last 520 years of the “European/Euro-North-American capitalist/patriarchal modern/colonial world-system” we went from “convert to Christianity or I’ll kill you” in the 16th century, to “civilize or I’ll kill you” in the 18th and 19th centuries, to “develop or I’ll kill you” in the 20th century, and more recently, the “democratize or I’ll kill you” at the beginning of the 21st century. We have never seen respect or recognition of Indigenous, Islamic, or African forms of democracy as a systematic and consistent Western policy. Forms of democratic alterity are rejected a priori. The Western liberal form is the only one that is considered legitimate and accepted, provided that it does not begin to infringe upon hegemonic Western interests. If the nonEuropean populations do not accept the terms of liberal democracy, it is imposed on them by force in the name of progress and civilization. Democracy must be reconceptualized in a transmodern form in order to decolonize itself of its Western, liberal form, that is, from the racialized and capitalist form of Western democracy. By radicalizing Emmanuel Levinas’s notion of exteriority, Dussel sees the epistemic potential of those relatively external spaces that have not been completely colonized by European modernity. These external spaces are neither pure nor absolute, but rather they have been produced and affected by the modernity/coloniality of the world-system. It is from the geopolitics and body-politics of knowledge of this exteriority or relative marginality that decolonial thinking emerges as a critique of modernity, towards a transmodern, pluriversal, decolonized world of multiple and diverse ethico-political projects in which there can exist a truly equal and horizontal communication and dialogue between the peoples of the world that goes beyond the logics and practices of domination and exploitation characteristic of the eurocentered world-system. However, in order to achieve this utopian project, it is fundamental to transform the system of domination and exploitation of the colonial power matrix within the current “European/Euro-North-American capitalist/patriarchal modern/colonial world-system” (see Grosfoguel).

4.  Post-modernity vs. Trans-modernity? Nothing that I have said up to this point has anything to do with the postmodernist perspective. The transmodern position is not the equivalent of postmodernist critique. Postmodernism is a Eurocentric critique of Eurocentrism, and as a result reproduces all of the problems of modernity/coloniality. We will take the example of the postmodernism of Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe, and contrast this perspective with that of Zapatismo.

Decolonizing Western Universalisms  159 For Laclau and Mouffe, the processes of the formation of hegemony are constituted when a particular subject becomes an empty signifier through which all particulars are identified and stamped with meaning, establishing chains of equivalence between themselves and simultaneously creating chains of difference against a common enemy. This counter-hegemonic power bloc is always hegemonized by a particular that becomes the representative of all forms of oppression against a common enemy, but which does not incorporate each particularity into itself, instead dissolving these into the abstract universal of the empty signifier which represents the particular subject, articulated into chains of equivalence among the oppressed. Therefore, the shout of “Viva Perón” is an example of a hegemonic process (Laclau, La razón). This cry of “Viva Perón,” through which all of the oppressed would identify with one another, dissolves all particular demands into an abstract universal, in this case privileging the Peronist movement through its signifier “Perón,” which hegemonizes the popular power bloc against the common enemy. The problem with the position of Laclau and Mouffe is that they cannot conceive of other forms of universalism beyond the abstract, Eurocentered universalism in which a particular presents itself as representative of all particularities without recognizing them in their plenitude, thereby dissolving their particularity and preventing the new universal from emerging through the negotiation among particulars. Of course, for them there is a limit to the recognition of difference: epistemological alterity. The epistemic alterity of non-European peoples is not recognized in their work. They recognize only those differences internal to the horizon of meaning of Western cosmology and epistemology. For Laclau and Mouffe, there is no outside—not even a relative outside—to Western thought. Let us contrast this form of universalism to that which is proposed by the Zapatistas and the “Other Campaign.” It is worth clarifying that here I am not prejudging the failure or success of a political vision, since in political struggle nothing is guaranteed. It can win or lose, but what I want to emphasize here is an Other understanding of politics. The Zapatistas, far from coming to the people with a pre-made and canned program as is the case with most if not all political parties from right to left, set out from the Tojolabal Indigenous notion of “walking while asking questions.” This “walking while asking questions” proposes an Other way of doing politics, very different from the “walking while preaching” of the Judeo-Christian, Western cosmology reproduced in equal measure by Marxists, conservatives, and liberals. “Walking while asking questions” is linked to the Tojolabal understanding of democracy as “commanding while obeying,” in which “those who command obey, and those who obey command,” which is very distinct from Western democracy, in which “those who command do not obey,” and “those who obey do not command.” Setting out from this “Other” cosmology, the Zapatistas, with their “Tojolabal Marxism,” begin an “Other Campaign” from the “rearguardism” that moves forward “asking questions and listening,” instead of a “vanguardism” which “preaches

160  Ramon Grosfoguel and convinces” (see EZLN). The idea or hope of the “Other Campaign” was that after a long critical transmodern dialogue with all of the Mexican people, it will be possible to bring together a program for struggle, a universal concrete (in the Césairean sense) which bears within it the particular demands of all the subjects and epistemes of all oppressed Mexicans. The Zapatistas do not set out from an abstract universal (socialism, communism, democracy, the nation, as floating or empty signifiers) in order to then preach to and convince all Mexicans of the correctness of this view. Rather, they set out from the idea of “walking while asking questions,” in which the program of struggle is a concrete universal constructed as a result, never as a starting point, of a critical transmodern dialogue which includes within itself the epistemic diversality and the particular demands of all the oppressed people of Mexico. Notice that this is an-Other Universal, or as Walter Mignolo (see Local Histories) would say, a pluriversal very much different from those abstract universals of the “empty signifier” which characterizes the hegemonic processes of Laclau and Mouffe, ­Gramsci’s “subaltern,” or Hardt and Negri’s “multitude.” The decolonization of the Eurocentered, Western understanding of universality is a central task in order to make possible the Zapatista motto of constructing “a world in which other worlds fit.”

5.  Vanguard Party vs. Rearguard Movement This discussion has fundamental implications for contemporary debates on the left. The Leninist party sets out from a messianic Christian understanding of cosmology. When Lenin tells us “without revolutionary theory, there is no revolutionary movement” (23), he is using Karl Kautsky as a model. Lenin cites Kautsky to say that the workers were incapable of producing class consciousness and revolutionary theory because they did not have the capacity to spontaneously produce either their own theory or class consciousness. As a result, these can only arrive to them from without, that is to say, by preaching to them. And who is it that produces this theory and goes forth to preach it? For Lenin, following Kautsky, it is only bourgeois intellectuals, critical of their own class position, who can produce the consciousness and theory that the proletariat needs in order to emancipate itself. Hence the need for a vanguard party. This is another old debate which must be reconsidered through decolonial lenses. In Lenin via Kautsky, we see the old colonial episteme reproduced, in which theory is produced by white-bourgeois-patriarchal-Western elites and the masses are passive beings, objects rather than subjects of theory. Behind a purported secularism, this perspective reproduces Judeo-Christian messianism embodied in a secular, leftist Marxist discourse. The difference between Lenin and Kautsky lies in the type of messianism. Lenin reproduces in a very crude manner Christian messianism, whereas Kautsky reproduces Judaic messianism.

Decolonizing Western Universalisms  161 In Jewish messianism, since the Messiah has never arrived, what is important is the message rather than the messenger. On the other hand, in Christian messianism, since the Messiah is believed to have not only arrived, but also resurrected and still lives, the messenger is more important than the message. In Jewish messianism, the prophets announce the arrival of the Messiah and the end of earthly empires. In Christian messianism, the Messiah is there and the task is not so much to question what he said, but rather to give oneself over to the Truth (the Holy Message) of the Messiah unquestioningly. From this Leninist Christian messianism, we arrive at Stalin, a Christian seminarian converted to Bolshevism. Stalin is the result of Lenin. What happens when politics abandons Judeo-Christian cosmology for other cosmologies? Without denying the possibility of other messianisms, in the Zapatistas the decolonial turn appears in an “Other” form of doing politics which, setting out from Indigenous cosmologies from Southern Mexico, proposes alternate forms of political practice. The Zapatistas set out from “walking while asking questions,” and from there propose a “rearguard movement” which contributes to linking together a broad movement on the basis of the “wretched of the earth” of all Mexico. “Walking while asking questions” leads to what the Zapatistas call a “rearguard movement,” against the “walking while preaching” of Leninism, which gives rise to the “vanguard party.” The vanguard party sets out from a canned, a priori program which, through being characterized as “scientific,” is self-defined as “true.” From this premise follows a missionary politics of preaching in order to convince and recruit the masses to the truth of the vanguard party program. Very different from this is the post-messianic politics of the Zapatistas, which sets out instead from “asking questions and listening” and in which the “rearguard” movement becomes a vehicle for a critical, transmodern dialogue which is epistemically diversal, and as a result, decolonial.

Conclusion The purpose of this article is to show the limits of Western male concept of “uni-versal” and to show a different concept of “universal” produced from a different geopolitics and body-politics of knowledge. While the Western male philosophical tradition uses a “Uni-versal” notion that is imperialist and authoritarian, there are critical notions that are “pluri-versal” or “multiversal” developed from the Global South that represent a truly democratic decolonial alternative to the former. I tried to argue that the Western male philosophical tradition uses a concept of “Universality” that is inherently epistemically sexist and racist. I tried to show how Césaire, Dussel, and the Zapatistas are examples of an-Other way of thinking about the “Universal” that is open to epistemic diversity and inter-epistemic dialogues. The call for epistemic diversity here is not an “epistemic liberal multiculturalism” where every subalternized epistemic identity is represented, leaving intact

162  Ramon Grosfoguel the epistemic racist/sexist privilege of Western males. On the contrary, this is a call to overcome the provincialism of Western male epistemology and the invisibility it produces on the social-historical experience of subjects that have been submitted to gender, sexual, and racial oppression. The idea here is to produce a more comprehensive and rigourous critical thought beyond epistemic racism/sexism. However, in order to have a more rigorous concept of human dignity, democracy, women’s liberation, etc., we need to overcome the hegemonic temptation of defining these concepts in a Western-centric provincial way. The latter is the epistemology that leads to imperialist, patriarchal, and colonial paternalism where one (Western man) defines what is good for the rest (women, third-world people, gay/lesbians, etc.). To move beyond this schema would imply to take seriously the critical thinking produced from other genealogies of thought that have been historically subalternized and considered inferior to the West. This is neither a relativism of “everything goes” nor an epistemic populism where everything said by a “subalternized” subject is already equivalent to “critical thinking.” If I do not belong or do not know anything about a “non-Western” tradition of thought, I need a minimum rationality to decide with whom I will establish critical inter-epistemic dialogues. The criteria for me is political. In order to build dialogues and coalitions, we need to look for alliances and inter-epistemic conversations with those subjects that reunite in their epistemic-ethic-political projects a combination of two or more of the following “negative universality”: anti-patriarchal, anti-capitalist, anticolonial, and anti-imperialist. This “negative universality” leads to conversations within the Muslim world with Islamic Feminist and not with Al-Queda, or within the Aymara world with Evo Morales and not with Victor Hugo Cárdenas, or within the African-American world with Angela Davis and not with Condoleeza Rice, or within the Western world with Boaventura de Sousa Santos and not with Nicolas Sarkozy. Since not every “subalternized” subject or thinker from an “inferiorized” epistemology is already a critical thinker, “epistemic populism” should be refused. The success of the system is precisely to make those who are socially below to think epistemically like those who are socially above. So, we cannot use social location as the only criteria. Epistemic location is crucial here. What I am calling for is to take seriously the critical thinking produced by “subalternized” subjects from below as a point of departure to a radical critique of the hegemonic power structures and knowledge structures. The West does not have a monopoly over critical thinking. The “Westernized Left” falls into a coloniality of knowledge from the left that is as epistemically racist and sexist as the Westernized right-wing discourses. There are critical thinkers from other traditions of thought that have to be taken seriously not due to a “liberal multiculturalism” or a particularistic “identity politics,” but because of their important contributions to a better understanding of the power and knowledge structures of the system we have inhabited for the past 520 years. To ignore them or to not take them

Decolonizing Western Universalisms  163 seriously is a loss to the struggles for a more humane future. What we need to avoid is the kind of “positive universality” about solutions where one defines for the rest what is “the Solution” (socialism, communism, radical democracy, etc.). We need a “negative universality” to identify friends and enemies, but we should not have a “positive universality” about solutions. There will be as many solutions as ethic-epistemic-political projects exist in the world. How to solve the problems of patriarchy, capitalism, imperialism, and coloniality should be open to the diverse local imperial/colonial histories, diverse epistemic perspectives, and diverse contexts faced by resistance movements. The important thing is that we are all struggling for a more egalitarian, democratic, transmodern world beyond capitalism, patriarchy, imperialism, and coloniality. “Positive Universality” would imply to reproduce from the left once again the problematic Western-centric concept of “universal” discussed in this article. The “pluri” as opposed to the “uni” is not to support everything said by a subaltern subject from below, but a call to produce critical decolonial knowledge that is rigorous, comprehensive, with a worldly scope, and non-provincial.

Note 1 Published with Author’s gracious permission. Translated by George CiccarielloMaher. A nearlier version of the essay was presented at the Latin American Colloquium on Rural Education: Coloniality of Power and Alternative Latin American Perspectives, “National Pedagogical University”, Centro Regional Valle de Tenza, Sutatenza, Boyacá, Colombia (21 September 2006).

Bibliography Castro-Gómez, Santiago (2005) La poscolonialidad explicada a los niños. Popayán, Colombia: Editorial Universidad del Cauca. Cesaire, Aimé (2006) Discurso sobre el colonialismo. Madrid: Akal. Descartes, René (1996) Discourse on Method and Meditations on First Philosophy. Ed. David Weissman. New Haven: Yale University Press. Dussel, Enrique (1977) Filosofía de la liberación. Edicol: Ciudad de México. Dussel, Enrique (1994) 1492: El encubrimiento del Otro: hacia el origen del “mito de la modernidad”. La Paz: Plural Editores. Eze, C. Emmanuel (1997) “The Color of Reason: The Idea of ‘Race’ in Kant’s Anthropology.” In C.E. Eze (Ed.) Postcolonial African Philosophy: A Critical Reader. Oxford: Blackwell, pp. 103–140. EZLN (1996) Crónicas intergalácticas: primer encuentro intercontinental por la humanidad y contra el neoliberalismo. Mexico: Chiapas. Glissant, Edouard (1997) Poetics of Relation. Trans. Betsy Wing. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press. Grosfoguel, Ramón (2006) “La descolonización de la economía-política y los estudios poscoloniales: transmodernidad, pensamiento fronterizo y colonialidad global.” Tabula Rasa, 4, pp. 17–48. Habermas, Jürgen (1985) “Modernity: An Incomplete Project.” Trans. Seyla BenHabib. In Hal Foster (Ed.) Postmodern Culture. London: Pluto Press, pp. 3–15.

164  Ramon Grosfoguel Hegel, G.W.F. (1975) Lectures on the Philosophy of World History: Introduction. Trans. H.B. Nisbet. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Hegel, G.W.F. (1977) Phenomenology of Spirit. Trans. A.V. Miller. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Hegel, G.W.F. (2010) Encyclopedia of the Philosophical Sciences in Basic Outline, Part I: Logic. Trans. Dahlstrom, Klaus Brinkmann and Daniel O. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Kant, Immanuel (1978) Anthropology from a Pragmatic Point of View. Trans. Victor Lyle Dowdell. Carbondale, IL: Southern Illinois University Press. Kant, Immanuel (1998) Critique of Pure Reason. Trans. Paul Guyer and Allen Wood. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Laclau, Ernesto (2005) La razón populista. México: Fondo de Cultura Económica. Laclau, Ernesto and Chantal Mouffe (1985). Hegemony and Socialist Strategy. London: Verso. Lamrabet, Asma (2011) El Corán y las mujeres. Barcelona: Icaria. Lenin, V.I. (1977) What Is to Be Done? Peking: Foreign Language Edition. Maldonado-Torres, Nelson (2006) “Césaire’s Gift and the Decolonial Turn.” Radical Philosophy Review, 9. 2, pp. 111–137. Marx, Karl (1993) Grundrisse. Trans. Martin Nicolaus. London: Penguin Books. Mignolo, Walter (2000) Local Histories, Global Designs: Coloniality, Subaltern Knowledges and Border Thinking. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Mignolo, Walter (2005) The Idea of Latin America. Malden, MA: Blackwell. Mohanty, Chandra T. (2003) Feminism Without Borders: Decolonizing Theory, Practicing Solidarity. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.

7 Against Coloniality On the Meaning and Significance of the Decolonial Turn Nelson Maldonado-Torres

To Don Carlos, Emperor of the Romans, King of Spain, lord of the Indies and of the New World. . . . Lord sovereign: The greatest event since the creation of the world (excluding the incarnation and death of Him who created it) is the discovery of the Indies; and so it was called New World. Francisco López de Gómara, 15521

To the People of Mexico: To the peoples and governments of the world: Brothers and sisters . . . The flower of the world will not die. The masked face which today has a name may die, but the word which came from the depth of history can no longer be cut by the arrogance of the powerful. We were born of the night. We live in the night. We will die in her. For everyone everything. . . . For us nothing. . . . Housing, land, employment, food, education, independence, democracy, liberty, justice and peace. These were the banners during the dawn of 1994. These were our demands during that long night of 500 years. These are, today, our necessities. EZLN, Fourth Declaration of the Lacandona Jungle, 1996

Few statements in history capture the enormous significance and marvel for European Christians of the so-called “discovery” of the Americas as the judgment from Francisco López de Gómara, which considers it next in importance to the creation and the birth of Jesus Christ. The “discovery of the Indies” 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 for Europe, but gradually for the largest part of humanity. This new system and worldview, which came together with a new sense of selfhood, new institutions, and new civilizational and subjective goals, was premised on a fundamental division of humanity between those who deserved either the reality or the possibility of inner-worldly salvation and others who were considered less than fully human and ultimately condemned, as well as between human agency and the inert and always available-for-consumption-and-use world of nature (Wynter, 1995).

166  Nelson Maldonado-Torres The system and worldview that started to become dominant in the context of the “discovery” and conquest of the Americas has unfolded in ways that are neither entirely logical nor necessary, and that yet can be discerned through multiple continuities and discontinuities. Its fundamental tasks included colonial expansion, the 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. This was not only colonialism, understood as a political or cultural condition, but coloniality (Quijano & Wallerstein, 1992), conceived as a matrix of knowledge, power, and being to which one can refer to, following Walter Mignolo, as modernity/coloniality (Mignolo, 2000). Modernity/coloniality involves the conceptualization of large sectors of people as inherently colonial and/or enslaved. The European sense of amazement and marvel in face of the apparently new for them in the context of “discovery” was probably matched by the sense of horror generated in populations that were treated as dispensable and as permanently inferiorized and enslaved.2 What European Christians like López de Gómara perceived as a glorious beginning of divine proportions when he was writing in the middle of the sixteenth century turned out to be seen by those on the other side of the Manichean line as “that long night of 500 years,” as the Zapatistas put in writing in the Fourth Declaration of the Lacandona Jungle. In the early moments of the modern Western world what was the “new world” for some became a “long night” for others. There are two fundamental metaphors expressing and asking for different interpretations of the same civilizational system: one appears in a letter to a King, Lord of the Indies, introducing an ambitious “general history” of the so-called new world, while the other is part of a declaration that can be read as a manifesto for decolonization and is directed to people of Mexico (part of what was formerly called New Spain) and to everyone. One is driven by a project of conquest to define great part of the future, while the other is an account of the past that is very present (thus resisting linear temporality), while also acutely aware that the future might be, not for them who will die in the night, but for others. At least this is how they are prepared to fight the fight: nothing for them, everything for everyone, thus refusing also a separation between the ethical and the political. Together, the two key metaphors at play here, “new world” and “long night,” reflect the Manichean structure of modern reality: perpetual newness as the light of day and the place of salvation; the dark night as the destiny for those who are seen as essentially incompatible with or unable to fully accomplish the modern destiny. In like manner, this division also appears in the idea of the “new” and the desire for a sense of perpetual “newness” even among conservative sectors, predicated on others as irremediably backwards or primitive. And yet, out of this “night” continually

Against Coloniality  167 emerges the possibility of different rays of light and of new and better days. For coloniality is not only met with anti-colonial resistance, but also with decoloniality, understood as the multiple and varied forms of recreating the matrix of power, knowledge, and being, as well as of culture and structure, beyond the Manichean divisions that inhere at the center of modernity/coloniality and its naturalization of war (Maldonado-Torres, 2008). That is, the modern/colonial turn at the heart of modern Western civilization is met by a decolonial turn that challenges its formulations of problems, its goals, and its basic theoretical premises. I will here provide an account of modernity/coloniality as a catastrophe, or “down turn,” that fundamentally altered basic coordinates of being, power, and knowledge. As I have already suggested, in great part this alteration took place by a transformation in the meaning and order of time, space, and subjectivity. I will follow Frantz Fanon (2004, 2008) in demonstrating the degree to which this metaphysical alteration involves an eclipse of the self-other relation and its replacement with a Manichean conception of order and value. This order is one that makes war a permanent feature of modern societies. I will also follow Fanon in conceiving decolonization as a series of turns that posit modern colonization as a fundamental problem, on the one hand, and decolonization as an ongoing and unfinished project, on the other. I refer to the various shifts and changes that lead to this double activity as the decolonial turn. In addition to exploring the entanglement between coloniality, Manicheism, and permanent war, I will also provide an account of the decolonial turn, with particular attention to the genesis of the concept and early expressions. In the final section, I will turn my attention to Ethnic Studies, the scholarly space that provided the environment for the intellectual ferment that led to the formulation and exploration of the decolonial turn. I offer an account of Ethnic Studies as a decolonial scholarly space that is critical, international, and intersectional.

Modernity/Coloniality as Catastrophe, or Manicheism and Permanent War The modern/colonial Western world emerged with the positing of distinctions not only between the ancients and the moderns, but also between the fully human and those whose humanity could be questioned or denied. While the difference between ancients and moderns was temporal, referring to different moments in what European perceived as their history, the separation between the fully human, the sub-human, and the non-human involved unique expressions of spatial and temporal difference. The colonized were conceived to be out of history (ahistorical, or primitive), out of the borders of Europe as well as, in some cases, beyond the borders of the generally known world until then. Two kinds of modern subjects emerge out of this configuration: the modern Western subject living in the present and going towards the future in a space of massive production and consumption, and

168  Nelson Maldonado-Torres the also modern but considered primitive, ahistorical, or less historical than the Europeans subject living in the colony, the plantation, the slave household, and similar sites. All of these, combined and elevated to the position of the very basis of a civilization, played a major role in the transition from a common form of colonialism to modernity/coloniality. The modern/colonial paths of power, knowledge, and being that began to emerge in certain places and moments before 1492, but more systematically so after the massive expansion of Europe after the “discovery,” did not therefore affect everyone equally. The combined effects of discovery and colonization, as they took place in the context of already existing war, crisis, and an increasing social exclusion and slavery in the Iberian Peninsula, led to a gradual naturalization of war (with ideas about the value of masculinity and femininity, as well as enemies and slaves; see Maldonado-Torres, 2008) and a sedimentation of what, with Fanon (2004), one could refer to as Manichean conceptions of value and existence. Manichean in this context makes reference to the dichotomous division between good and evil. The permanent war of coloniality is an outcome of the specific ways in which “discovery” and conquest took place in the creation and expansion of the modern Western world. The emerging social and geopolitical Manichean reality in the context of “discovery” and conquest redefined the traditional Christian terms of salvation and damnation, leading to a world that would be experienced by some as a heaven or a hell on earth to which one belonged, not by virtue of faith or action, but by virtue of nature (Wynter, 1995). The sedimentation and naturalization of the emerging ideas, practices, and institutions defined the “new world,” understood not only as the Americas, but as the hegemonic set of assumptions in an increasingly globalized world. This is why the “invention” of the Americas (as O’Gorman, 1961 would have) is not solely of local or regional, but also of global significance, just as one also needs to consider all the other so-called continents and their inter-relations (see also Dussel, 1995; Quijano & Wallerstein, 1992; Wynter, 1995). In addition to instilling permanent war, Manicheism transforms the dynamics of human subjectivity and intersubjectivity. An important part of the argument here is that the colonized is not seen or treated by the colonizer simply as an “object” and therefore, that the colonial relation or the dynamics of the coloniality of power, knowledge, and being cannot be accounted for simply by the problem of objectification. There is an added dimension of phobia, hatred, homicidal tendencies, and desires that take place between the colonizer and the colonized in ways that do not necessary take place in the relation between subject and object. In that sense, the philosophical aporias created by the subject-object split in modern Western philosophy fail to capture the gravity of the tragic dimension of the modern world. For this reason, the understanding of coloniality requires an investigation, not only of the subject-object split, but also of the brutal separation between subject and subject that takes place in modernity. More precisely, coloniality

Against Coloniality  169 requires an analysis of the production of a social, epistemic, and symbolic order structured along the lines of human, sub-human, and non-human, where each of these concepts acquires meaning in relation to a Manichean, and not simply a capitalist, form of valuation. If the understanding of coloniality has to do with the catastrophic separation between the human, the sub-human, and the non-human, decolonization cannot be solely about overcoming the subject-object split, or about the rescue of the human from objectification, as some traditional humanism would have it, but about overturning a world that generates forms of valuation and lines of separation that make certain communities, symbols, ideas, and practices the object of a perpetual war. The constant violence in this order creates the conditions for, if not the necessity of, revolutionary violence, as Fanon aimed to make clear in his Wretched of the Earth. But the violence of the system is also evinced in apparently less-dramatic forms, as for instance, in the phenomenon of having “black skin,” yet living in a world that creates “aberrations of affect” that leads to desiring “white masks,” as Fanon explored in Black Skin, White Masks. The Movement for Black Lives makes this link between anti-black racism and permanent war in their first point in their policy platform: “We demand an end to the war against Black people” (Movement for Black Lives, 2016). The entire complex where the structural and the cultural, the social and the psychological, the ethical and the religious, as well as the epistemological and the political are involved, helps to explain why Fanon’s work, or decolonial thinking for that matter, could not and cannot simply take the route of traditional disciplines or area studies, as I will elaborate further below, in aiming to understand human reality. This means equally that liberal humanism, and one could add here Marxist humanism as well, typically find limits when they aim to spell out the condition of colonized existence and come up with ways to confront it. These limits are evinced in condescending, unilateral, or regulated and well-guarded attempts at “inclusion” as well as in accounts of revolutionary struggle that fail to take into consideration the radical character of coloniality and its permanent war. Decolonization, or rather, decoloniality, in this context, is to be understood, not as the entry or inclusion into modernity, since the colonized are already part of it and their presence is always-already premised on their subjection, but as a decolonial turn that challenges the basic coordinates of modernity/coloniality and that creates a human and humane world.

The Decolonial Turn Decolonial thinking has existed since the very inception of modern forms of colonization—that is, since at least the late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries—and, to that extent, a certain decolonial turn has existed as well, but the more massive and possibly more profound shift away from modernization towards decoloniality as an unfinished project took place in the

170  Nelson Maldonado-Torres twentieth century and is still unfolding now.3 This more substantial decolonial turn was announced by W.E.B. Du Bois in the early twentieth century and made explicit in a line of figures that goes from Aimée Césaire and Frantz Fanon in the mid-twentieth century, to Sylvia Wynter, Enrique Dussel, Gloria Anzaldúa, Lewis Gordon, Chela Sandoval, and Linda Tuhiwai Smith, among others, throughout the second half of the twentieth to the beginning of the twenty-first century. The events that led to the solidification of the decolonial turn include the collapse of the European Age in the first two World Wars, and the second wave of decolonization in Africa, Asia, the Caribbean, and other territories across the globe, including the Bandung Conference. The Caribbean region is crucial in this history because, even though it was not part of the large continental masses of the third world (Asia, Africa, and Latin America), it became a laboratory of early forms of modern colonization in the sixteenth century that continued to be divided among multiple empires for an extended period of time. Also very significant is that it was a zone the productive capacities of which depended on enslaved and forced labor, and that its territories were involved in the two most massive periods of decolonization: the wars of independence of the nineteenth century and the revolutionary struggles for decolonization of the twentieth. Moments and movements that played a role in the solidification of the decolonial turn and that are constitutive of it include the heightened perception of the linkages between colonialism, racism, and other forms of dehumanization in the twentieth century, the formation of ethnic movements of empowerment and feminisms of color, and the appearance of queer decolonial theorizing.4 Anti-colonial and decolonial political, intellectual, and artistic expressions existed before, but not necessarily in the same amount, or with the same degree of self-awareness and regional and global exchanges as in the twentieth century, when one can refer to an increasint self-conscious and coalitional effort to understanding decolonization, and not simply modernity, as an unfinished project.5 The decolonial turn does not refer to a single theoretical school, but rather points to a family of diverse positions that share a view of coloniality as a fundamental problem in the modern (as well as postmodern and information) age, and of decolonization or decoloniality as a necessary task that remains unfinished. While there is not a single canon, movement, or path that defines once and for all what is decoloniality, there is a shared skepticism towards dehumanizing forms of thinking that present themselves as natural or divine. This skepticism animates new forms of theorizing based on the scandal in the face of the continuity of dehumanizing practices and ideas. These dehumanizing forces, logics, and discourses hardly seem to find an end in the current neoconservative and neoliberal moment, or in the liberal and Eurocentric radical responses that it sometimes generates. Continued Manichean polarities between sectors considered more human than others, the accelerated rhythm of capitalist exploitation of land and human

Against Coloniality  171 labor—sometimes facilitated, as Fanon well put it (2004), by neocolonial elites among the groups of the oppressed themselves—as well as anxieties created by migration and rights claims by populations considered pathological, undesirable, or abnormal—to name only a few of the most common issues found today—make clear that decolonization will remain unfinished for some time. Likewise, decolonial movements of racialized populations in as varied places as the United States, Mexico, Brazil, Bolivia, Europe, Australia, and New Zealand, to name only a few, make clear that decolonization is relevant in the present and will continue to be so in the considerable future. Origin of the Term and Initial Publications While the notion of a decolonial turn serves to identify the work of authors, social movements, and artistic creators from the beginnings of modern colonization, the concept itself emerged in the context of bringing together and facilitating a conversation between various intellectuals involved in the modernity/coloniality network, Latin American philosophy of liberation, women of color feminism, “Latina/o” philosophy and critical theory in the United States, and the then-recently created Caribbean Philosophical Association. This exchange was carried out in the form of a conference with the title “Mapping the Decolonial Turn: Post/trans-continental Interventions in Philosophy, Theory, and Critique,” which occurred at the University of California, Berkeley, April 21–23, 2005. The conference attempted to contribute to the growth of South—South lines of reflection, which had already existed among some of the participants and the theoretical tendencies they held. Behind the conference were the explosion of women of color feminism in the 1980s; the debates around the 500th anniversary of the “discovery” of the New World in the late 1980s and early 1990s; discussions about modernity and coloniality between figures like Aníbal Quijano, Enrique Dussel, and Walter Mignolo in the ’90s and the first decade of the twenty-first century; the publication of book-length arguments about a decolonial methodology and imaginary by figures like Emma Pérez (1999) and Chela Sandoval (2000) at the end of the ’90s and early 2000s; the exchanges of “Latina/o” philosophers like Eduardo Mendieta and Linda Martín Alcoff with Enrique Dussel in the context of a reformulation of the Latin American philosophy of liberation in the ’90s (Alcoff & Mendieta, 2000); and the rise of interest in critical Afro-Caribbean thought and/or philosophy in the works of Sylvia Wynter, Paget Henry, and Lewis Gordon in the ’90s and the beginning of the following decade. Coming from the area of philosophy, I suggested the concept of a “decolonial turn” as a conceptual hinge and title for the event that hoped to bring together various intellectuals linked to the Latin American philosophy of liberation, Chicano and “Latina” feminism, and critical African American

172  Nelson Maldonado-Torres and Latin American thought. At that time, I was working on the theme of an ethical turn (based on Emmanuel Levinas, in particular) linked to the work of Fanon and the philosophy of liberation, which brought me to understand ethics as intimately related to politics, and politics not only in reference to the actions of the “polis,” but also the insurgencies that emerge from the underside of the colonial world. The relations between ethics and politics and the question of the relevance of the pragmatic and linguistic turns were themes that I discussed at length with Enrique Dussel while studying with him and considering his Ethics of Liberation: In the age of Globalization and Exclusion (Dussel, 2013) during its original year of publication in 1998. Shortly after that, I began to serve as Secretary of Hispanophone and Lusophone Caribbean in the Caribbean Philosophical Association, whose motto was “shifting the geography of reason.” Both the Dusselian philosophy of liberation and the Caribbean Philosophical Association pointed to the relevance of geopolitical space for thought and the necessity of identifying knowledges and forms of theory outside of the dominant geopolitical space of Europe. Very far from a mere geographic reductionism, the goal was to open thought to global dimensions that both decolonization and thought itself require. Being close to these Latin American and Caribbean movements was crucial for identifying common themes aimed towards a decolonial theoretical turn. All of this and more served as the backdrop for the appearance of the concept of the “decolonial turn” and the conference which carried the name “Mapping the Decolonial Turn.” After a formal introduction to the term in the introduction to the UC Berkeley conference (Maldonado-Torres, 2005), the concept of the “decolonial turn” was used in various publications. Perhaps the first was penned by me and titled “Césaire’s Gift and the Decolonial Turn” (MaldonadoTorres, 2006). Next, a special issue of the journal Comentario internacional: Revista del Centro Andino de Relaciones Internacionales was published in the second half of 2006 and the first of 2007. This issue, edited by Catherine Walsh, carried the title Insurgencias políticas y epistémicas y giros decoloniales [Political and epistemic insurgencies and de-colonial turns]. I had the privilege of presenting the “Central Theme” of the issue with an essay titled “La descolonización y el giro des-colonial” [Decolonization and the de-colonial turn] which also served as the title for a collection of essays compiled by the Universidad de la Tierra in Chiapas, Mexico (see MaldonadoTorres, 2006–2007; Maldonado-Torres, 2011a). Ramón Grosfoguel and I also used the concept in our respective articles in a special issue of the journal Cultural Studies (Grosfoguel, 2007; Maldonado-Torres, 2007), which later appeared in the anthology Globalization and the Decolonial Option edited by Walter Mignolo and Arturo Escobar (2010). Also in 2007, while the two special issues on “Globalization and the De-colonial Option” that Mignolo and Escobar edited were coming out English, Santiago Castro-Gómez and Ramón Grosfoguel published in ­ an anthology called El giro decolonial: reflexiones para una diversidad

Against Coloniality  173 epistémica más allá del capitalismo global [The decolonial turn: reflections for an epistemic diversity beyond global capitalism] (2007). This anthology has had a powerful impact and wide circulation within Latin America. It has contributed in part to the idea that the notion of the “decolonial turn” is a Latin American production, despite the fact that its editors make direct reference to a project that is as “Latino,” in the sense of Latinos in the United States, as it is Latin American. The genealogy presented in the introduction is less that of the decolonial turn than of the “modernity/coloniality group”—which some of us have always viewed as a network rather than a group, an opinion that is perhaps more prevalent today. That genealogy is important in order to understand how the various nexuses between intellectuals based in Latin America and those based in the United States played a crucial role in the formation of an analytical perspective that we now call the modernity/coloniality/decoloniality network, or mode of analysis. This production and intellectual exchange was doubtless an important part of the base for the formulation of the concept and content of the decolonial turn. The introduction to the Castro-Gómez and Grosfoguel anthology mentions the Mapping the Decolonial Turn conference and the different groups that were brought together there, but it does not specify that the idea of a “decolonial turn” refers precisely to that larger nexus of decolonizing and border thought, nor does it mention that various fields of study at the conference (Chicana feminism and Caribbean philosophy, for example) already had concepts of the decolonial that were independent from the “modernity/ coloniality group.” The greater part of the introduction was dedicated to presenting and explaining key points in the work of the “modernity/ coloniality group” with reference to major themes in Latin American thought, like eurocentrism and dependency, which reveals the links and differences of that mode of analysis vis-à-vis other theoretical bodies in Latin America, but doubtlessly also contributes to the view that the “decolonial turn,” which forms part of the book title, is specifically Latin American contribution. In any case, the valuable introduction must be seen as complementary to these other trajectories, and vice versa. It would perhaps also be necessary to write similar surveys examining Caribbean philosophy, African American thought, and Chicana feminism, among other modes of thought that played a role in the formation of the “decolonial turn” concept. Finally, publications that followed Castro-Gómez and Grosfoguel’s El giro decolonial anthology were a chapter in my book Against War (2008) entitled “Enrique Dussel’s Contribution to the De-colonial Turn,” an essay of mine titled “El pensamiento filosófico del giro descolonizador” [The philosophical thought of the decolonizing turn] in an anthology of Latin American, Caribbean, and “Latino” philosophical thought, another article entitled “Enrique Dussel’s Liberation Thought in the Decolonial Turn” (2011b) and two special issues of the free access journal Transmodernity in 2011 and 2012 under the title “Thinking through the Decolonial Turn.” In those two issues, various articles from the 2005 Berkeley conference were published

174  Nelson Maldonado-Torres in expanded form, together with some other more recent works (see Maldonado-Torres, 2011b, 2012). Notable in the two issues with respect to the genealogy of the decolonial turn is Walter Mignolo’s “Epistemic Disobedience and the Decolonial Option: A Manifesto” which offers an introduction to concepts and key historic moments of the decolonial turn. The Scholarly Space of the Decolonial Turn The “Mapping the Decolonial Turn” conference was sponsored principally by Department of Ethnic Studies at the University of California, Berkeley, which is significant for several reasons. First, what is called Ethnic Studies in the United States is a very particular academic formation resulting from a decolonial turn inspired by the Civil Rights movement, movements for ethnic and racial empowerment, and struggles for decolonization and liberation in the Third World. At Berkeley, this academic space arose as a collective demand from students from distinct ethnic and racial groups, united under the heading of the Third World Liberation Front in 1968–9. The principal goal of such an epistemic formation in the academy was what could be called the desegregation and decolonization of knowledge, which expresses crucial dimensions of the decolonial turn. In addition, the “Mapping the Decolonial Turn” event was one of a series of events that sought to deepen the thematic of modernity/coloniality, which came about as a result of changes in the Ethnic Studies Department. These changes include another student strike in 1999, where Ethnic Studies students newly regrouped under the banner of the Third World Liberation Front protested against the freezing of professor placements in the Ethnic Studies Department and other measures that were putting the department at risk. One of the results of the strike was the unfreezing of professor hires and the recruitment of modernity/coloniality theorists. Interest in colonialism and decolonization were central in the Ethnic Studies department from its beginnings, and the department already counted with multiple reputable and very influential thinkers and scholar activists whose work focus understanding systematic forms of dehumanization related to the long legacy of Western colonialism in various parts of the globe. This alignment between the main focus of a U.S. Ethnic Studies program such as the one at UC Berkeley, a program that houses the first doctoral program in the area, and the analysis of modernity/coloniality should not be a surprised as the decolonial turn entered the Western academy more centrally after the decolonization of multiple territories in Asia and Africa, the Civil Rights movement in the United States, including the end of formal segregation in schools, and the movements that led to the creation of Ethnic Studies and Women’s Studies programs in the United States. Ethnic Studies programs in U.S. universities are the outcome of the still-unfinished project of desegregating and decolonizing higher education. What happened in the late 1960s with the creation of Ethnic Studies

Against Coloniality  175 programs was not the reduction of concerns with distribution of resources and goods to demands for recognition, or of liberation to identity, as it is sometimes suspected, but rather the affirmation of an old demand beyond the affirmation of identity and the need for distribution of resources: the challenge that became explicit then (but anticipated by many others before) in the form of a student and social movement face to face with the modern research university was that of epistemic decolonization and the creation of new categories for a redefined humanity.6 The institutions of higher learning that were facing the demands for providing adequate resources for various identities could not see much beyond the question of identity itself. So, for the university, opening Ethnic Studies (as well as Women’s Studies programs) became a matter of re-presentation within the framework of area studies and/or the liberal arts and sciences, not one of decolonization or epistemic justice. The liberal university subsumed these programs into its logic, seeing them as not much more than containing measures to address social demands having to do with diversity, and then, after defining them in such limited way, faulted them for allegedly being too essentialistic and provincial. To be sure, sometimes, Ethnic and Women’s Studies have contributed to such characterization or that position, but they do not have to do much in order for the worst presumptions and conclusions about them to be mobilized against them. What is missed is the way in which those spaces allow for the necessary explorations and experimentations that go beyond the strict and largely self-imposed disciplinary and Eurocentric limits of the traditional humanities and social sciences. Not only the concern with identity has produced problematic expressions in Ethnic Studies; the same occurs with the imperative of liberation. As Lewis Gordon has demonstrated, identity and liberation are two of the most fundamental themes in decolonial struggle (Gordon, 1997, 2000a, 2000b). The problem emerges when liberation is translated as a claim for immediate political action, a kind of political immediatism that becomes antipathetic to theoretical reflection. When the two combine, that is, the worst aspects of the claim for identity and those of the search for liberation, then we have a form of what Lewis Gordon calls epistemological closure (Gordon, 2000b). When this happens, the particular contribution of Ethnic Studies scholarship to the project of decolonization tends to be neglected, not only by the academy itself, but also by Ethnic Studies programs. Beyond the dialectic between identity and liberation, and the expressions of its most problematic features, Ethnic and Women’s Studies posit the imperative of epistemic decolonization and the construction of new categories, critical discourses, and sciences. What I am suggesting, and what intellectuals seeking to advance the discourse of decolonization make clear, is that beyond the dialectics of identity and liberation, recognition, and distribution, we have to add the imperative of epistemic decolonization, and in fact, of a consistent decolonization of human reality. For that, one must build new concepts and be willing to

176  Nelson Maldonado-Torres revise critically all received theories and ideas. This is part of the “stuff” of the decolonial turn, and here resides the fundamental contribution of Ethnic Studies: Ethnic Studies is not merely a province in the Enlightened or Corporate University; it is, rather, a decolonial force in philosophy, theory, and critique that asks for and anticipates an-other kind of intellectual space. The international, diasporic, and global dimension alluded to with the concept of “mapping the decolonial turn” was very close to the internationalist vision of Ethnic Studies and its focus on the historical experience of African Americans, Asian Americans, Latinos, and Indigenous peoples, among many other groups. At Berkeley, African American feminism had left a considerable mark with the presence of Barbara Christian until her death in 2000, among other participants, and Chicana feminism found two important theorists in Norma Alcarcón and Laura Pérez. The Ethnic Studies Department at Berkeley, at the beginning of a new century, was a space where one could find an amalgam of intellectual currents that considered crucial the themes of colonization and dehumanization in the modern Western world. It was also a place for artists and activists interested in the theme of decolonization. All of this made the Ethnic Studies Department an ideal place to initiate a “mapping” of the “decolonial turn.” As suggested already, one of the reasons for which it is important to recognize the milieu of the Ethnic Studies Department in the formation of the concept of the decolonial turn is that Ethnic Studies in the United States tends to be seen, by intellectuals on the left as much as on the right, as a space anchored in interests in ethnic identity. While the right watches suspiciously or accuses Ethnic Studies of supposedly pushing aside aspirations towards national integration, the left criticizes a supposed blindness towards class inequality and the need to redistribute resources. It is little noted that the central focus of Ethnic Studies is not so much ethnic identities as such, but rather, in a broader sense, structures of power, social formations, and cultural expressions that create hierarchical divisions and naturalize the inferiority of certain communities, as well as the oppositional discourses and practices that oppose them and look to create other forms of being, power, and knowledge. If ethno-racial identity is relevant, it is in large part because identity itself can be understood as a locus where all of these forces and discourses converge, which is not to say identity is Ethnic Studies’ sole focus. The interest in identity also responds in part to the fact that colonialism undermines forms of group and subjective identification among the colonized. Colonialism acts with violence upon any sense of the colonized subject’s relationship with his or her community or surrounding world. The concern with identity responds in some measure to this condition. But the principal concerns and goals are liberation and decolonization. It is clear that the project of decolonization has primacy over any devotion to identity in that the proposal of the students who struggled for the formation of the Ethnic Studies Department at Berkeley was to create the Third World College, and not merely a space to cultivate the identity of

Against Coloniality  177 certain communities in the Unites States alone. I propose that the concept of the third world in the demand for a “Third World College” reflects a decolonial turn, and it must be seen in light of what I already mentioned regarding the concept of the third world. From the third world, the right and left positions on Ethnic Studies appear closer to each other than either position realizes: both are predictable reactions to spaces “of color” in the sense that both give license to simplify and reduce the complexity signaled by the project as it emerges from intellectual, artistic, and social movements of communities which, in their majority, are racialized. In other words, these reductionist observations about Ethnic Studies are a manifestation of racism at an epistemic level, while Ethnic Studies arises from a decolonial turn distinct from any turn towards the hegemonic left or right. The intellectuals brought together in the conference on “Mapping the Decolonial Turn” are as significant as the time and place where it was organized for understanding the richness of the concept of the decolonial turn and its post- and trans-continental character. But it is also true, as I have already indicated, that the idea responded to an interest in making an intervention in philosophical discourse. That is, part of the point is that just like there have been Copernican, phenomenological, pragmatic, and linguistic turns, there is also a decolonial turn. But the decolonial turn does not emerge from the European space just like it cannot be explained as part of the genealogy of European thought. It demands its own mapping, typology, and genealogy. The idea of a “decolonial turn” proposes a way of approaching a certain theoretical production of the third world and of intellectuals who recover the experience and thought of racialized populations in modernity. This approach is not derivative, as if the thought of the so-called periphery were also an echo of U.S. or European thought. The idea is to find bases for the emergence of what in the West is called philosophy, theory, and critique in the historical and lived experiences of the colonized. This can be summarized in the idea that colonization provokes thought [la colonización da que pensar], which is to say that colonization creates conditions that motivate certain forms of philosophy, theory, and critique. This does not preclude important relationships between forms of colonized thought and those which originate in the context of the colonizer, but the fundamental principles and potentials that the former introduce into philosophy, theory, and critique are found in the condition of colonization itself. These ideas, obvious perhaps for many intellectuals and groups today, were very foreign to those guiding the critical theory courses in which I participated then, and very foreign to the conversations on critical theory in which I still sometimes find myself today in Europe, the United States, and Latin America. To summarize, then, there was a body of theoretical work on the themes of the colonialism’s continuing existence and on the importance of decolonization, which collectively testified to a “decolonial turn,” to colonization as a problematic compelling theoretical reflection. This called for consideration

178  Nelson Maldonado-Torres on the multiple other areas and lines of thought that were part of this turn. During the conference, the concept served to motivate discussions on areas of common concern and to identify contributions to the understanding of colonialism and decolonization in relation to multiple elements, including black slavery and its legacy, the colonial dimensions of dominant conceptions of gender, and the influence of colonialism on the valuations and practices of sexuality, among other themes.

Notes Parts of this essay have appeared in Maldonado-Torres, 2011d and 2012. * 1 “A don Carlos. Emperador de romanos, Rey de España, señor de las Indias y nuevo mundo. . . . Muy soberano señor: La mayor cosa después de la creación del mundo, sacando la encarnación y muerte del que lo crió, es el descubrimiento de Indias; y así las llaman Nuevo Mundo” (n.p.; English translation is mine). 2 This point is related to the discussion about the colonial and decolonial attitudes, and to description of the “cry of horror” of the colonized as different from fear or anxiety, for instance, as found in Maldonado-Torres, 2008. 3 For genealogies of the decolonial turn see Maldonado-Torres, 2011c; Mignolo, 2011. 4 Figures such as Gloría Anzaldúa and María Lugones have been key figures in most of these moments or movements. 5 For a discussion of the idea of the unfinished project of decolonization, in contrast with Habermas’s conception of the unfinished project of the Enlightenment, see Maldonado-Torres, 2011b, and Grosfoguel, Maldonado-Torres, and Saldívar, 2005. 6 When I first wrote this session, I was bringing together two elements that are often brought out by Lewis Gordon (identity and liberation) with one theme that was and still is at the center of the modernity/coloniality/decoloniality network, that is, epistemic decolonization. Since then, Gordon has added a third component in his view of the basic questions that emerge in the context of colonization. He calls it the metacritique of reason, by which he means the critical revision of the concepts through which we understand identity and liberation—Gordon reflected on this most in his presentation at a panel honoring Fanon at the International Marcuse conference, University of Pennsylvania, October 28, 2011. Likewise, one can see in Walter Mignolo, who has long insisted on the need for decolonizing epistemology, an incorporation of the theme of “shifting the geography of reason,” initially proposed by Gordon as a recurrent theme for the Caribbean Philosophical Association.

Bibliography Alcoff, Linda Martín, and Eduardo Mendieta, eds. 2000. Thinking from the Underside of History: Enrique Dussel’s Philosophy of Liberation. Lanham, Md: Rowman and Littlefield. Dussel, Enrique. 1995. The Invention of the Americas: Eclipse of “the Other” and the Myth of Modernity. Translated by Michael D. Barber. New York: Continuum. ———. 2013. Ethics of Liberation: In the Age of Globalization and Exclusion. Edited by Alejandro Vallega. Translated by Eduardo Mendieta, Nelson M ­ aldonadoTorres, Yolanda Angulo and Camilo Pérez Bustillo. Durham: Duke University Press.

Against Coloniality  179 EZLN. 2002. “Fourth Declaration of the Lacandón Jungle.” In The Zapatista Reader. Ed. Tom Hayden, 239–250. New York: Thunder’s Mouth Press/Nation Books. Fanon, Frantz. 2004. The Wretched of the Earth. Translated by Richard Philcox. New York: Grove Press. ———. 2008. Black Skin, White Masks. Translated by Richard Wilcox. New York: Grove Press. Kindle Edition. Gordon, Lewis R. 1997. “Introduction: Black Existential Philosophy.” In L. Gordon, Existence in Black: An Anthology of Black Existential Philosophy, 1–10. New York: Routledge. ———. 2000a. “Du Bois’s Humanistic Philosophy of Human Sciences.” In The Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science. ———. 2000b. Existentia Africana: Understanding Africana Existential Thought. New York: Routledge. Grosfoguel, Ramón. 2007. “The Epistemic Decolonial Turn: Beyond PoliticalEconomy Paradigms.” Cultural Studies 21.2–3: 211–223. Grosfoguel, Ramón, Nelson Maldonado-Torres, and José David Saldívar. 2005. “Latin@s and the ‘Euro-American’ Menace: The Decolonization of the US Empire in the 21st Century.” In Latin@s in the World-System. Eds. Ramón Grosfoguel, Nelson Maldonado-Torres and José David Saldívar, 3–27. Boulder, CO: Paradigm Press. Maldonado-Torres, Nelson. 2005. Post-continental Philosophy and the Decolonial Turn: Introduction to the Conference Mapping the Decolonial Turn: Post/TransContinental Interventions in Philosophy, Theory, and Critique. Berkeley: University of California, April 21. ———. 2006. “Césaire’s Gift and the Decolonial Turn.” Radical Philosophy Review 9.2: 111–137. ———. 2006–2007. “La descolonización y el giro des-colonial.” Comentario internacional: Revista del Centro Andino de Estudios Internacionales 7: 66–78. ———. 2008. Against War: Views from the Underside of Modernity. Durham: Duke University Press. ———. 2011a. La descolonización y el giro des-colonial. San Cristóbal de Las Casas: Editorial de la Universidad de la Tierra. ———. 2011b. “Enrique Dussel’s Liberation Thought in the Decolonial Turn.” Transmodernity: Journal of Peripheral Cultural Production of the Luso-Hispanic World 1.1: 1–30. Web. ———. 2011c. “El pensamiento filosófico del ‘giro descolonizador’.” In El pensamiento filosófico latinoamericano, del Caribe, y “Latino” (1300–2000). Eds. Enrique Dussel, Eduardo Mendieta and Carmen Bohórquez, 683–697. México, DF: Siglo Veintiuno Editores. ———. 2011d. “Thinking Through the Decolonial Turn: Post-continental Interventions in Theory, Philosophy, and Critique: An Introduction.” Thinking Through the Decolonial Turn: Post-continental Interventions in Theory, Philosophy, and Critique. Spec issue of Transmodernity: Journal of Peripheral Cultural Production of the Luso-Hispanic World 1.2: 1–15. ———. 2012. “Decoloniality at Large: Towards a Trans-Americas and Global Transmodern Paradigm.” Thinking Through the Decolonial Turn: Post-continental Interventions in Theory, Philosophy, and Critique. Spec. Issue of Transmodernity: Journal of Peripheral Cultural Production of the Luso-Hispanic World 1.3: 1–10.

180  Nelson Maldonado-Torres Mignolo, Walter. 2000. Local Histories/Global Designs: Coloniality, Subaltern Knowledges, and Border Thinking. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. ———. 2011. “Epistemic Disobedience and the Decolonial Option: A Manifesto.” Transmodernity: Journal of Peripheral Cultural Production of the Luso-Hispanic World 1.2: 44–66. Mignolo, Walter, and Arturo Escobar, eds. 2010. Globalization and the Decolonial Option. London: Routledge. The Movement for Black Lives. 2016. “End the War on Black People.” accessed October 22. https://policy.m4bl.org/end-war-on-black-people/. O’Gorman, Edmundo. 1961. The Invention of America: An Inquiry into the Historical Nature of the New World and the Meaning of Its History. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Pérez, Emma. 1999. The Decolonial Imaginary: Writing Chicanas into History. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Quijano, Aníbal, and Immanuel Wallerstein. 1992. “Americanity as a Concept, or the Americas in the Modern World-System.” International Social Science Journal 44: 549–557. Sandoval, Chela. 2000. Methodology of the Oppressed. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Wynter, Sylvia. 1995. “1492: A New World View.” In Race, Discourse, and the Origin of the Americas: A New World View. Eds. Vera Lawrence Hyatt and Rex Nettleford, 5–57. Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution Press.

8 Educational Reforms Hostile to the Arts and Humanities Neoliberalism and Citizenship Jurjo Torres Santome

Educational reforms are frequently the masks designed to conceal hidden agendas and intentions that governments would rather not acknowledge publicly. Their true raisons d’être and effects, however, have a direct impact on the resources the authorities dedicate to implementing them; on the new subjects and content introduced as an innovation, or on existing ones that are reinforced; on changes in models of teacher education; on the kind of educational materials that are published; on the support and cooperation networks provided for serving teachers; and on the new tasks assigned to school managers and inspectorates of education. The reasons, purposes, proposals, and practical measures of each educational reform that becomes law are logically influenced by the published diagnoses of the ills besetting education, and more importantly, by those that reach the widest audiences. Hence the tremendous pressures exercised by the most powerful social, economic, political and religious groups in their attempt to broadcast their analyses and solutions through the densely woven media network that is a characteristic of contemporary societies, and thereby condition the reforms that will be enshrined in legislation and subsequently put into practice. It is important to remember that one of the aims of the political dynamics that the various players in society set in motion is, more or less explicitly and intentionally, to influence and condition government decisions, and therefore also to influence education policy and practice. However, today’s globalised world brings with it a raft of new voices from new quarters. To the diagnoses made within states, of an obviously local nature (i.e., to the pressures of national and regional social groups and lobbies), we now have to add those deriving from each state’s membership of broader political structures, which in the case of Spain include the European Union, the OECD, G20 and the United Nations, amongst others. Against this background, it is easy to explain why the traditional subjects into which knowledge has hitherto been organised are becoming increasingly fuzzy, if not totally obsolete. Gone are the classical models that sought to offer a broad yet solid education in the intellectual, moral, social and relational fields, amongst others. Nowadays, the priority of the new goals

182  Jurjo Torres Santome put forward by the OECD, the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund and the European Union imply an overvaluation of knowledge relating to the marketplace, employability and the conversion of knowledge into human capital that can be used to compete in a globalised world.

The OECD as Watchdog of Education Policy In its mission to move education in a more economistic direction, the European Union has other powerful, but more concealed, ways of applying pressure. Amongst these, particular mention should be made of the strategy of utilising the recent obsession with measuring and comparing some of the results of the education systems of different countries, in the form of an international league table. Thus, for example, the OECD’s PISA project1 can be seen as an undercover way of putting pressure on countries to reform their education policies. We have to be aware that PISA has introduced a set of international performance indicators for assessing education systems without ever having been explicitly requested to do so, and what is even more striking, without any truly democratic debate on its reasons, purpose and even the ways it approaches this diagnostic task. PISA (and thus the OECD) contemplates no kind of sanction for the countries that do poorly when their educational results are compared internationally. However, the tremendous publicity given to the results of each study by the mass media, combined with the way in which these are interpreted by each of the latter, according to its ideology and controlling lobby, and the use made of them by the different political parties and social organisations within each country, have a distinct impact on the agendas of national and regional education ministries. No government wants to come off badly in these ‘official examples’ of best practice. As a result of the enormous media repercussion of these studies, together with their political exploitation by opposition parties, trade unions and business associations, a tool such as PISA becomes an efficient means of controlling educational agendas from behind the scenes. Reorientation strategies of this nature, based on empirical data that are presented as being objective and neutral, are more readily accepted by a population accustomed to being given statistics as if they were irrefutable arguments. We must remember that these are the same people who when at school learnt to place numbers and figures on a pedestal; one of the reasons for doing so being precisely that they found this kind of subject matter the most difficult, only managing to internalise its most mechanical and unthinking aspects. We live in an age dominated by statistics, one in which we are continually bombarded by this kind of data as if they were in fact an accurate X-ray of events, although in reality they are nothing more than a function of a set of variables chosen, organised and interpreted in accordance with the interests of the organisations that publish them.

Reforms Hostile to Arts and Humanities  183 The PISA studies, presented as the result of applying a series of independent objective technical tools developed free from the influence of any national education authority’s pressure and interests, have become the main international educational database, enjoying the greatest prestige and power to influence education policy not just in Europe, but in all the countries represented in the OECD. They are a reference used by governments, but also by all manner of social institutions (political parties, trade unions, parents’ associations, business organisations and the like), to put forward their opinions and even to attempt to undermine whoever is in power at the time, to suggest alternatives for the educational system, to make decisions and to target investment, amongst other actions. In practice this means that an international body, in this case the OECD, in fact conditions the design, content and structures of educational systems all over the world, since it has the most extensive networks and the greatest power to influence what we understand by the quality of school systems as a result of the imposition of its assessment model. Nevertheless, and as Norberto Bottani (2006) points out, PISA has several features that give it considerable pre-eminence and recognition at the international level. The first of these is its tri-annual nature, which allows for more constant monitoring of education policy and the measures introduced to improve test results. The second is that it always applies to the same three areas of knowledge, although each one in turn is given priority during each survey, accounting for two-thirds of the total number of questions and therefore being allotted more time for completion. Each test also includes a series of questions concerning students’ social and cultural context, what interests them and what motivates them; responses to these, however, are not compared with those of other tests and research tools of a more ethnographic and qualitative nature in order to calibrate their truthfulness or their real meaning and coherence. As a test, PISA is considered not to question the core curricular content determined by each country, since its main aim is to evaluate what are referred to as students’ “skills”. This matter is, however, the subject of criticism in countries like Spain, where the national and regional Education Ministries impose a syllabus with excessive content, obliging teachers to focus on getting their students to memorise a minimum quantity of relevant information for each of the numerous content areas that are compulsory by law. On the other hand, one of the most frequently criticised disadvantages of the PISA test is that it is given to students when they are fifteen years old, regardless of the school year they may be in at the time, thereby penalising those countries in which a significant number of students are obliged to repeat a year, as compared to those in which this does not occur (Norberto Bottani, 2006, p. 84). However, it has to be taken into account that the reason for giving this test to schoolchildren of this age is because fifteen is the

184  Jurjo Torres Santome lowest age at which compulsory schooling ends in the countries included in the survey. Let us return to the dictatorship of numbers and statistics. What cannot be measured numerically either does not exist or is of no relevance whatsoever. It is assumed that a simple paper and pencil test, taken on a day chosen at random, is sufficient to provide us with an X-ray of the quality and workings of a system as complex as that of education. Indeed, many public debates on the issue tend to ignore the decisive fact that tests of this kind condition the choice of the different kinds of content deemed to be the most appropriate for covering in the classroom, their importance being ranked in accordance with their usefulness in obtaining the highest scores in diagnostic tests such as these (Jurjo Torres-Santome, 2007; Wayne Au, 2009). Another implicit consequence that goes unnoticed is that if students do poorly in objective tests of this kind (however pretentious the adjective may be), it is their teachers who are held to blame. We are therefore dealing with an assessment model that ignores a wide variety of factors that may influence its results (Wayne Au, 2009). It must be remembered that the origin of evaluation models using standardised tests lies in the application of social efficiency movements to education, influenced by the capitalist models of production and the eugenic philosophies of the late 19th and early 20th centuries, which were based on the idea that a person’s IQ was determined by his or her genes (Steven Selden, 1999; Stephen Jay Gould, 1998). But as many research projects are now beginning to reveal, tests (whether international or national) designed to measure student achievement are unequal by design (Wayne Au, 2009), in that they inherently (re)produce inequalities associated with socioeconomic relations outside the sphere of education, as a result of selectively choosing cultural codes and content associated with certain social and cultural groups. Tests such as these choose options and assign priorities through the items they contain, and hence their capacity to produce and explain differing educational outcomes (Basil Bernstein, 1998; George Jr. Hillocks, 2002). In the words of Barry MacDonald (1995, pp. 15–16), an evaluation should take into account all the interests that can be identified, or to put it another way, nobody should be able to buy the evaluation or determine the questions because otherwise it would be a mere tool in the hands of those who are in a position to buy it. Remember that ‘all the interests’ means identifying the concerns of all the different groups regarding the activity being analysed, and in order to ensure that their interests are represented they all have to receive information about all the results. The reality of the situation, however, is that recent decades have seen the rapid development, an authentic explosion, of audit culture (Michael Power,

Reforms Hostile to Arts and Humanities  185 1999). This is very different from what a democratic culture of evaluation should be (Helen Simons, 1999; Barry MacDonald, 1995), one guided by a commitment to justice and equity as well as by the ongoing search for a school syllabus that is relevant to both schoolchildren and the community as a whole. What we now have are audits designed and analysed exclusively from the standpoint and in the interests of those who request and fund them; audits that look for ways of obtaining greater economic benefits in the short term without considering other personal and social costs. If we wish to understand the role of PISA, we need to first understand the intentions of the OECD. Its current model of education policy is guided by theories of human capital and oriented towards constructing and disseminating the knowledge needed to sustain current neo-liberal economic and productive models. The OECD presents the general public with a set of education policies with real possibilities of generating progress, wealth, wellbeing and by implication, justice. The pressure exerted on schools by both the media and parents to achieve better results in these assessments usually leads to major distortions in the main objectives of compulsory education. Concern for a truly comprehensive education ends up being subsumed by a much more restricted and (to put it more clearly) corrupt educational model (Richard Rothstein, Rebecca Jacobsen & Tamara Wilder, 2008), focusing on and dominated by the subjects and content included in assessments. And even in these subjects (maths, science and reading comprehension) what matters most are the skills needed to perform well in tests, rather than truly meaningful and relevant subject matter approached from an interdisciplinary (wherever possible) and critical standpoint to ensure real understanding of the knowledge being acquired. As these policies become deeper and deeper rooted, open public debate about both the purpose of education systems and the cultural content that should be the main focus of attention at this point in history will gradually disappear from the concerns of teachers and education authorities alike. As a result, we run the risk of working with syllabi that are completely ‘void’ of social and cultural content. However, we have to consider that PISA’s evaluations only look at three aspects of student achievement: reading comprehension and mathematical and scientific literacy. As soon as the results of these assessments are made public, these areas of knowledge immediately become the main focus of attention, not only for the government (which will henceforth dedicate all its efforts to reinforcing such content, putting more time and resources at its disposal), but also for parents and pupils, to whom it becomes extremely clear that the list of subjects in the school curriculum follows a strict ranking (Jennifer McMurrer, 2007). Everyone will assume that what really matters are the results in maths and science, with all other subjects and their content matter being relegated to second-class status (see Table 7.1). Curiously enough, as PISA becomes ever more firmly established as the reference point for measuring the quality of an education system, areas of knowledge and

186  Jurjo Torres Santome Table 7.1  PISA and the assessment of education systems The three aspects measured: *  Reading comprehension *  Mathematical literacy *  Scientific literacy Not assessed: • The compulsory content of all the subjects imposed by the National and Regional Education Authorities, including those of the three areas involved in the dimensions measured by PISA. • Writing and the ability to express one’s ideas, communicate and reason • Discussion skills and respectful communication • Artistic knowledge, procedures, skills and values • Literary education • The knowledge and skills needed to interpret and locate historical moments and events or political and social phenomena • Critical analysis • The ability to think, analyse and make decisions within an interdisciplinary framework • Psychomotor education and sports competences • Ethical and moral education • Education for citizenship and human rights • Conflict-solving abilities • Education for peace • Open-mindedness and solidarity with other cultures and peoples • Participation in the everyday running of schools • Environmental education • Health education • Consumer education • Road safety education • The ability to form educated and reasoned opinions • The ability to collaborate and help others • Personal responsibility and commitment to democratic values • The values and priorities for life in democratic societies • Cultural habits: reading, going to concerts, museums, talks, etc. • Mastering foreign languages • Media education • Emotional and sexual education

content such as these receive less and less attention within overall education policy as a whole, and thus in many of the syllabi of the great majority of schools. From the standpoint of the most powerful and ideologically conservative lobbies, the social sciences, philosophy, humanities and arts, since they usually focus on matters of current interest, are potentially much more dangerous for the prevailing political, cultural and economic powers, and therefore the temptation to devote enormous efforts to reducing their importance within the education system is correspondingly great. The

Reforms Hostile to Arts and Humanities  187 asking of searching questions about truth, goodness, justice, solidarity and beauty is not something that governments or the great majority of teachers would like to see become the touchstone for selecting educational content, or for choosing informational and educational resources, classroom work, homework or the evaluation of school-based learning. As Iris Marion Young (1990, p. 38) emphasises, [o]ppression consists in systematic institutional processes which prevent some people from learning and using satisfying and expansive skills in socially recognised settings, or institutionalized social processes which inhibit people’s ability to play and communicate with others or to express their feelings and perspective on social life in contexts where others can listen. What is striking, however, is that the majority of governments and education ministries that come off poorly in comparative evaluations tend to shift the blame on to the weakest links in the chain, namely teachers and parents. Let us just think a moment about the two most recent PISA reports, in which Finland tops the world education system rankings. Within this logic, it is interesting to note the features of the Finnish model; for example, a model that is truly committed to teacher education, in which teachers are seen as expert professionals able to work autonomously in schools and classrooms. This means there is no need for their government to produce oppressive and burdensome lists of compulsory content and competences, nor to make comparative assessments of students and by extension, schools. Nor are they so dependent on textbooks, which organise students’ and teachers’ lives from start to finish. The Finns have made a firm commitment to an inclusive, non-segregationist model, and their government invests heavily in education, and Finland has headed the league table of countries who dedicate the most resources to this sphere for at least a century. Why, therefore, does it not occur to the Spanish national and regional educational authorities to relate measures of this kind with improvement in our education system? The truth of the matter is that the OECD’s most important interests are put at the forefront of PISA’s priorities, the idea being to diagnose to what extent schoolchildren in the countries taking part in the survey are prepared to enter the labour market and are equipped with the skills they need to take their place amongst the workforce. As a result of the climate of public opinion created by these survey results, the best pupils are encouraged to study those subjects this global organisation considers to have the greatest potential for generating wealth within the framework of production and labour that prevails amongst nations nowadays. This insistence on a neo-liberal reorientation of knowledge, and thus of research and development policy, can also be observed in elitist forums such as the Conferences of Education Ministers of the G8 and G20, i.e., of the

188  Jurjo Torres Santome most highly industrialised and powerful nations in the world. Thus, for example, in the G8 meeting held in July 2009 in the Italian city of L´Aquila, which was attended by representatives not only of the member countries, but also of a further twenty nations and ten international organisations, a report titled “Sharing Responsibilities to Advance Education for All”2 was approved. This document, in addition to containing a series of more or less altruistic declarations of intent, with no obvious and forceful obligations attached, made it quite clear that once the stage of primary education has been completed, the fundamental role of any education system, for which a higher degree of teacher competence is needed, is the “development of skills for employability” (p. 6).

Embracing Financial Education This emphasis on the economistic dimension of the syllabus during compulsory schooling, and its attendant focus on education for employment, becomes even stronger during moments like the present, a time of major financial and employment crisis. In this regard, it is striking that the very few syllabus reviews and innovations introduced by education authorities should have to do with economistic dimensions of this kind. Such is the case of the new economic content that the Spanish government has announced it is going to introduce in the secondary school curriculum, referred to as financial education.3 This new additional content, which only serves to accentuate the economistic reorientation of the syllabus during compulsory schooling, will be introduced on the back of the powerful PISA report, which has already achieved mythical status. This report, published by the OECD every three years, which until now has measured skills in mathematics, reading comprehension and science amongst fifteen-year-old pupils in sixty-five countries, included a further test, designed to evaluate financial education, in its 2012 edition (the results of which will be released in 2013). For the moment, only eighteen countries have taken part in this evaluation of pupils’ skills in financial matters: Australia, Belgium, Brazil, China (Shanghai), Colombia, Croatia, the Czech Republic, Estonia, France, Israel, Italy, Lithuania, New Zealand, Poland, Slovakia, Slovenia, Spain and the United States of America.4 What is striking, however, is that countries with a significant welfare state and excellent results in the PISA survey, such as Finland, Sweden, Norway and Denmark, amongst others, have decided not to take part in this initiative. The importance of financial education for the OECD, which justifies its incorporation in PISA 2012,5 is condensed in a series of arguments that implicitly eliminate the need for a welfare state. Thus, for example, they refer to the urgent need to target “financial education and awareness” as a result of the “increasing transfer of risk to households, which are becoming

Reforms Hostile to Arts and Humanities  189 more and more directly responsible for the financial decisions essential to their future welfare”, mainly due to three important events: a) the major transformations that will affect retirement pensions; b) greater individual responsibility in matters relating to health and sickness, and the subsequent need to take out private health insurance; and c) the importance for families of properly planning and investing in their children’s education. In Spain, concerns of this nature had ceased to be an obsession until very recently, since the whole population was guaranteed enjoyment of these rights by law. One of the political trends in recent years, namely that of dismantling the welfare state, attempts to convince us, by using all manner of manipulation of statistics and news items, that such social conquests are no longer “assumable”; that, since we are in the midst of a massive financial crisis, the state has to cease to play its role as the arbiter of equity and redistribution, ceding the initiative to private corporations. This is clearly an attempt to hide the reality of the situation, this being none other than to redesign the state so as to create the conditions under which the neoliberal markets can open up new lines of business in areas such as health and education, which until now had been overwhelmingly in the hands of the public sector. The goal of the neo-liberal markets is to make huge profits in these spheres, without taking into consideration the social costs generated by market policies like these. We should be startled by the fact that instead of introducing knowledge of economics from a critical standpoint, the focus is on purely financial education. A critical education in economics, as a further branch of social sciences, should be directly linked with a political and social education, helping pupils to see that economic and political decisions are always interconnected and in one way or another have an effect on the life of every individual and on the social community of which they are part and parcel. One of the main objectives of an education in economics for a society of citizens, each with his or her attendant rights and obligations, must be to give us the tools we need to understand and participate in the decision-making process and in the management of public and private life, the two being intertwined. The knowledge, procedures, skills and attitudes that should form part of this area of knowledge must be those that best help us to analyse and understand what is happening in our community in the sphere of work and production; help us to find informed solutions to labour, economic and financial problems, enabling us to put forward proposals on how to organise ourselves in order to improve quality of life for all; and to act to prevent any kind of human exploitation whilst at the same time ensuring the sustainability of life on earth.

190  Jurjo Torres Santome Financial education, on the other hand, is implicitly based on the assumption that the neo-liberal model is the ‘logical’ one, and that there is no alternative. This is just another way of imposing and legitimising a particular political, economic and social model instead of others. Proof of this is that responsibility for the decisions about the compulsory content, educational resources and teacher education in this subject, according to the Spanish Ministry of Education, is shared by the Spanish Securities and Exchange Commission (CNMV), the Bank of Spain and the Ministry of Education itself. There is not a single mention of an alternative banking model, one that is more socially responsible, participative, caring, transparent, ethical and committed to the sustainability of our planet, for example that espoused by those banking corporations that belong to the Global Alliance for Banking on Values.6 Further proof of this neo-liberal bias was given in the Conference on Financial Education “Challenges Ahead: Turning Policy Guidance into Efficient Practices”,7 organised jointly by the OECD and the Spanish Ministry of the Economy and Competitiveness, with the support of the Russian Federation, the World Bank and the OECD Trust Fund, held in Madrid on 10–11 May 2012. Apart from representatives of the organising bodies, the only others present at this meeting were those of the most powerful mainstream banks and the leading international rating agencies. The OECD itself provides an explanation for the need for financial education which emphasises its individualistic dimensions. As André LABOUL, head of the Financial Affairs Division at the OECD has put on record, in June 2006 the G8 Finance Ministers acknowledged the work done by the OECD and its activities in the sphere of financial education. More particularly, they “acknowledged the importance of being able to count on better financial education and greater knowledge in order to enhance people’s capacity to use financial services and take efficient decisions concerning their present and future wellbeing”.8 This is a kind of education that we will be giving to young people who will consider it very difficult to correct the injustices that exist in our present-day world, and therefore equally so in the future. They will take social inequalities for granted, the fruit of genetic or religious determinism, or of random causes, and will be too limited in their capacity to understand how policies and current legislation give preference to certain individuals and social groups whilst prejudicing others. With education policies of this nature and their amplification (and in many cases manipulation) by the media when explaining them to the general public with a view to obtaining its consent, people will learn to see the economy as the only driver and raison d’être behind any decision taken or any measure put into practice. Politics, philosophy, ethics and the social sciences in general will be treated as less important spheres of knowledge. All the questions that might be asked (or not) about the reasons behind the events that take place in our societies will be excessively conditioned by

Reforms Hostile to Arts and Humanities  191 the structure of cultural content that the education system puts forward as being the most relevant and appropriate; by the procedures and skills pupils will develop during their time at school, by the moral dilemmas they will have to face and the ways in which they will ponder them and make their corresponding decisions. It is clear that with this kind of economistic and positivist emphasis in the syllabus pupils will find it difficult to question their own motives and actions, or to confront situations of injustice and privilege. This is a purely instrumental and economistic vision of everything that is studied in the classroom, an education that hinders the appearance of other, fuller and more multidisciplinary problematisations and visions regarding the true significance, value and functions of knowledge, and more generally of education itself, in the construction of a fairer, more caring and more democratic society. The educational reforms that have taken place during the last few decades have allowed us to provide an education that has been put at the service of an intense and clearly individualistic de-politicisation of society, one that attempts to isolate each individual pupil-citizen and prevent him or her from seeing him or herself as a member of a community with shared responsibility for its present and future. Attempts are being made to conceal this mercantilist emphasis by using a vocabulary that during the current period of economic crisis is not without its attraction, as well as being extremely convenient. Even more important than this, however, is the biased way in which this lexis is being interpreted, or rather exploited, in order to place it at the service of the most powerful economic sectors of society. It is essential to draw attention to the way in which we are constantly bombarded with business terminology, used in the slogans and concepts by means of which Education Ministries, large corporations and philanthropic-capitalist foundations attempt to win our consent for the neo-liberal and conservative realignment of our education systems. This is apparent in the use of buzz-words in the educational discourses by these organisations as they try to push through acceptance of the new neoliberal educational reforms: ‘employability’ and ‘entrepreneurial culture’. Neither the discourse of ‘employability’ nor that of ‘entrepreneurial culture’, in the framework within which they are currently used, call the current capitalist system of production, and by extension today’s labour market, into question. This philosophy will therefore have a decisive effect on the education provided by our education systems and its cultural content, teaching methodologies and assessment models. Official discourse places excessive emphasis on the urgent need to include education in entrepreneurship amongst the goals of any education system. However, at no time is any attempt made to clarify the meanings and models that underlie this concept, or the possible philosophies it might transmit. On the contrary, it is taken for granted that entrepreneurial culture is synonymous with educating human beings who fit perfectly within the capitalist

192  Jurjo Torres Santome system and can drive it forward. No mention is made of the existence of a radically different philosophy that uses the same words, but with a different adjective, ‘socialist’; applying, in other words, an alternative logic, a culture of socialist entrepreneurship. If we want our education system to really serve the purpose of reflectively and critically analysing society, it has to make it possible for students to question the logic behind the exploitation of both natural and human resources that underpins the capitalist model of business relations, as well as making knowledge of other alternative models of production available. Faced with reductionist approaches that attempt to explain that the only models are those of individual or state-owned property, other more cooperativist and communitarian models are overlooked, as are non-capitalist alternatives to interactions between workers, between the latter and the community, and more generally, with the public as consumers. Socialist models of production do indeed exist: like all human constructions, they can always be improved, but without losing sight of their underlying philosophy, which states that it is wrong to exploit human beings and to act in a predatory manner towards natural resources and the environment in general. In contrast to the exploitative logic of capitalism, we have the caring logic of the socialist models, and hence the urgent need to encourage, from both a social and educational standpoint, a new generation of entrepreneurs; human beings “committed to constructing a different model of production, in which the structural causes of unemployment, poverty and social exclusion are eradicated and the environment is preserved for future generations” (Víctor Álvarez, 2011, p. 175). Knowledge about alternatives, about different models of cooperative and self-managed production practices, is almost never included in school syllabi, thereby reaffirming the capitalist logic of private property as the only reality, with no alternatives that embrace models of production in which authentic participation and democratic control by the people can really exist. To learn means to ask questions of oneself and of others and to engage in dialogue with an open mind and feelings; it means accepting that we are all equals. To engage in dialogue means putting oneself on a level with one’s interlocutor, in an attitude of respect, acceptance, receptiveness and patience, trusting that such a dialogue can help us to clarify our ideas, solve our problems and show us the way forward. On the other hand, neo-liberal economistic models (based on exploiting the possibilities of globalisation and deregulatory policies placed exclusively at the service of large capitalist corporations) inevitably bring with them a massive increase in social inequality, not to mention the degradation and destruction of the Earth’s environment. The quest for the highest possible profit inherent to this model forcibly emphasises the exploitation of the workforce and makes it necessary to implement an unstoppable process of the manipulation of information and miseducation in order to obtain a

Reforms Hostile to Arts and Humanities  193 certain degree of consent from the population and thereby avoid open rebellion, channelling it instead into gentler, and logically more inefficient, forms of protest. This process of ever-intensifying exploitation and domination is only possible if people accept the logic that enabled Margaret Thatcher to maintain her policies for so long: “there is no alternative” (Vicenç Navarro, Juan Torres López & Alberto Garzón Espinosa, 2011). In a world that has been globalised according to neo-liberal parameters, it does not take an expert to see that a well-organised network of international institutions is increasingly and more and more decisively conditioning the policies that nations choose to adopt. The OECD uses PISA to control education, as we have seen above; the World Bank, the IMF and the European Central Bank do the same with the economy; the World Trade Organisation with the world of business, the labour market and output; NATO with defence policy and the arms market; the Vatican with religion and many aspects of social and family life and education. Global organisations like these have an enormous amount of influence, but we must be aware that have almost no need to give public explanations for their actions, nor are they held accountable for their deeds, their demands or even their errors. One of the keys to the power wielded by these institutions (with the exception of the Vatican) is their ability to process and publish statistical data on every country, to make comparisons and then publicise them. Their statistics continuously decide and reorient the decisions made by national governments, and even the political parties that happen to be in opposition make use of them in their criticisms of the party in power and the different ministries it governs.

Notes 1 www.oecd.org/pisa/ www.g8italia2009.it/static/G8_Allegato/G8_Education_Experts%2c0.pdf 2 3 www.educacion.gob.es/ifiie/investigacion-innovacion/programas-innovacion/edu cacion-financiera.html (Last accessed 27 July 2012). 4 www.oecd.org/document/5/0,3746,en_2649_15251491_47225669_1_1_1_1,00. html 5 PISA 2012, Financial Literacy Assessment Framework, April 2012 www.pisa. oecd.org/dataoecd/8/43/46962580.pdf 6 www.gabv.org/ 7 www.oecd.org/document/9/0,3746,en_2649_15251491_49258249_1_1_1_1,00. html 8 The OECD Project and the Activities of the International Network for Financial Education (Paris: OECD), p. 3.

References Álvarez, Víctor (2011). Claves para la industrialización socialista. Caracas. Centro Internacional Miranda. Au, Wayne (2009). Unequal by Design: High-Stakes Testing and the Standardization of Inequality. New York. Routledge.

194  Jurjo Torres Santome Bernstein, Basil (1998). Pedagogía, control simbólico e identidad: Teoría, investigación y crítica. Madrid. Morata—Fundación Paideia. Bottani, Norberto (2006). “La más bella del reino: el mundo de la educación en alerta con la llegada de un príncipe encantador”. Revista de Educación, Número Extraordinario, pp. 75–90. Gould, Stephen Jay (1998). La falsa medida del hombre. Barcelona. Crítica. Revised edition. Hillocks, George Jr. (2002). The Testing Trap: How State Writing Assessments Control Learning. New York. Teachers College Press. MacDonald, Barry (1995). “La evaluación como servicio público: Perspectivas de futuro”. In Mª José Sáez Brezmes (coord.). Conceptualizando la evaluación en España. Alcalá de Henares. Servicio de Publicaciones de la Universidad de Alcalá de Henares, pp. 15–23. McMurrer, Jennifer (2007). Choices, Changes, and Challenges: Curriculum and Instruction in the NCLB Era. Washington, D.C. Center on Education Policy. Navarro, Vicenç; TORRES LÓPEZ, Juan and GARZÓN ESPINOSA, Alberto (2011). Hay alternativas: Propuestas para crear empleo y bienestar social en España. Madrid. Séquitur. Power, Michael (1999). The Audit Society: Rituals of Verification. Oxford. Oxford University Press. Reprinted. Rothstein, Richard; JACOBSEN, Rebecca and WILDER, Tamara (2008). Grading Education: Getting Accountability Right. New York. Teachers College Press & Economic Policy Institute. Selden, Steven (1999). Inheriting Shame: The Story of Eugenics and Racism in America. New York. Teachers College Press. Simons, Helen (1999). Evaluación democrática de instituciones escolares. Madrid. Morata. Torres Santomé, Jurjo (2006). “Los indicadores de rendimiento como estrategia y medida contrarreformista en las reformas educativas”. In José GIMENO (Comp.). La reforma necesaria: Entre la política educativa y la práctica escolar. Madrid. Morata, pp. 155–179. Torres Santomé, Jurjo (2007). Educación en tiempos de neoliberalismo. Madrid. Morata. 2nd edition. Torres Santomé, Jurjo (2011). La justicia curricular: El caballo de Troya de la cultura escolar. Madrid. Morata. Young, Iris Marion (1990). Justice and the Politics of Difference. Princeton. Princeton University Press.

9 Education, Knowledge and the Righting of Wrongs1 Vanessa de Oliveira Andreotti

. . . the world we live in is shaped far less by what we celebrate and mythologize than by the painful events we try to forget. (Hochschild, 1999, p. 294)

Introduction I start from the assumption that certain features of modernity and humanism itself, which we often cherish as sacred grounds for our interpretations of social justice, paradoxically create the conditions of injustice we are trying to address2 (see for example Quijano, 1997; Gandhi, 1998; Mignolo, 2000; Maldonado-Torres, 2004; Souza Santos, 2007; Souza, 2011; Hoofd, 2012). The body of literature I draw on (postcolonial, decolonial, critical race and indigenous studies) problematizes the ethnocentric and hegemonic effects of key Enlightenment principles that are the foundations of modernity, such as rational unanimity in regard to conceptualizations of humanity, human nature, progress and justice, as well as Cartesian, teleological anthropocentric and dialectical reasoning (see Andreotti, 2011a; Andreotti & Souza, 2011). I take seriously Mignolo’s proposition that modernity’s ‘shine’ (i.e., its ‘light’ side represented in moral progress, freedom, rights, citizenship, Nation States, Protestant work ethic, property ownership, universal reason, representational democracy, etc.) is only historically possible and presently sustainable through its ‘shadow’ (i.e., its ‘darker’ side of colonialism, continuous exploitation, dispossession, destitution and genocide). The emphasis on modernity’s shine depends on a constitutive denial, or an active sanctioned ignorance, of its shadow. Inayatullah and Blaney (2012) argue that while the empirical agenda of progressive ethical advance takes precedence in achieving modernity’s sparkly goals, the continuous epistemic, cognitive, structural, economic, cultural and military violences necessary for this endeavour are placed securely in the past, as collateral damage, to liberate the future for the shiny heroic entrepreneurship and allegedly un-coercive leadership of those who can head humanity towards its imagined destiny, which becomes a “teleological alibi for death and destruction” (p. 170).

196  Vanessa de Oliveira Andreotti In proposing a serious engagement with the idea of the two faces of modernity (i.e., its shine and shadow), I acknowledge the difficulties of engaging in polarized orientations that embrace or reject modernity wholesale and dismiss the complexity, provisionality and contingency of different positions. I propose that the gray area in between unexamined embraces or rejections needs much further exploration. In this chapter, however, I focus on positions concerned with the exclusionary effects of ‘epistemic blindness’ (Santos, 2007) caused by the colonization of the imagination through education itself (including its progressive forms).

Education and the Expansion of Imagination In order to illustrate such effects, I will invite readers to construct the first metaphor with me: imagine a field of corn, harvest your cobs and peel off the husks. Place your corn cobs in front of you and compare them with Figure 9.1 (Andreotti, 2011a). My argument is that, in the same way that our experiences and imagination have been colonized by one variety of corn cob (i.e., yellow), our over-socialization in modes of being enchanted by modernity (epitomized in schooling itself) creates a condition of epistemic blindness where we see ourselves as autonomous, individuated and self-sufficient beings inhabiting a knowable and controllable world moving ‘forward’ in a direction that we already know and contribute to (Andreotti, 2011b). From this perspective, we are able to describe the world and define for others the best pathway for their development. This is different from, for example, seeing ourselves as non-individuated, co-dependent in relation to each other and insufficient before a complex, uncertain and plural world moving towards contestable ‘forwards’. This attachment to and investment in individual autonomy/independence, self-sufficiency and a single collective ‘forward’ is precisely what produces the idea of difference as a deficit rather than a necessary productive and creative force as many have suggested before. Audrey Lorde (1979) indicates that in order to address the problems created by this conceptualization of self/other difference must be seen as something different: Difference must be [seen] as a fund of necessary polarities between which our creativity can spark. . . . Only then does the necessity for interdependency become unthreatening. Only within that interdependency of different strengths, acknowledged and equal, can the power to seek new ways of being in the world generate, as well as the courage and sustenance to act where there are no charters. Within the interdependence of mutual differences lies that security which enables us to descend into the chaos of knowledge and return with true visions of our future, along with the concomitant power to effect those changes which can bring that future into being. Difference is that raw and powerful connection from which our personal power is forged. (para 6–7)

Education, Knowledge and the Righting  197 In translating these insights into educational thinking, I have found Spivak’s work extremely enabling as a pedagogical compass (rather than a map). Her insistence on hyper-self-reflexivity,3 self-implication,4 accountable reasoning5 and learning to unlearn, to listen and to be taught by the world have expanded possibilities for what I can do/feel and think as a teacher and as a ‘relation’. Two ideas in particularly have sparked very challenging questions and interesting possibilities: the idea of ‘education as an uncoercive rearrangement of desires’ (Spivak, 2004, p. 526) and the idea that this education should aim towards an ‘ethical imperative to relate to the Other, before will’6 (p. 535). Questions that sparked from these two ‘simple’ assertions include: How on earth can one uncoercively enable a “re-arragement of desires” that may command an imperative for an ethical responsibility towards the Other, “before will”? How can a pedagogy of self-reflexivity, self-implication, dissensus and discomfort support people to go beyond denial and feelings of shame, guilt or deceit (Taylor, 2011)? How is an education based on uncoercive rearrangement of desires different from transmissive, “transformative” or “emancipatory” education? How can one ethically and professionally address the hegemony, ethnocentrism, ahistoricism, depoliticization, paternalism and deficit theorization of difference that abound in educational approaches benevolently concerned with (helping, fixing, defending, educating, assimilating or giving voice to) the Other (Andreotti, 2011)? “How could a pedagogy address the arrogance of the consciousness of superiority historically lodged in the self” (Spivak, 2004, p. 534), including my own? How can we learn from social breakdowns in ways that complicate conversations (Pinar, 2009) and that might open ourselves to ethical obligations (Pitt & Britzman, 2003; Zembylas, 2010) and to being taught by the world (Biesta, 2012)? How can one theorize learners, teaching and learning in ways that take account of power relations, of the complexity of the construction of the self and of alterity and of the situatedness and the limits of my own constructions and theorizations? These questions also raise further issues in relation to knowing and acting in the context of righting wrongs through education. I will explore some of those issues through my second, third and fourth metaphors.

Education as a Vehicle for Social Transformation A common “feel good” teaching practice that I have often found in my field of study and work is an activity where a teacher educator gets student teachers to identify what is wrong with the world, what they imagine an ideal world would look like and what people should do to make things right. In most cases student teachers in the contexts I have witnessed come up with ideas related to pollution, homelessness, violence, poverty, destruction and (less often) discrimination as examples of “wrongness”. Next, symbols of flowers, clean streets, peace, harmony, nuclear families, children and people holding hands for “rightness”, and finally, education (as knowledge

198  Vanessa de Oliveira Andreotti transmission) is imagined as a means to get from wrong to right. Invariably, the assumption seems to be that “wrongness” is a result of ignorance or immorality, not of knowledge, and that once people have the right piece of information or have acquired ‘appropriate’ values, their patterns of behavior and relationships will magically change. In the context of teacher pre-service education or professional development, I have seen this exercise being used to introduce curriculum guidelines that justify or mandate the inclusion of themes like global citizenship, conflict resolution, human rights, peace or environmental education as part of the curriculum. In a similar way, the assumption on the part of policy makers and teacher educators seems to be that by delivering the right mandate or policy information, teachers and student teachers will immediately change their practices to include the new themes in the curriculum. I have seen many teacher educators frustrated when this does not happen, but assumptions about learning, knowledge and teaching—and the assumptions and effectiveness of the methodology used in this exercise—are seldom questioned. What I would like to suggest is that the righting of wrongs in the world through education, from the perspective I propose today, requires us to think about the connections between “rights” and “wrongs” in a very different way. Perhaps a starting point is a shift in the understanding of knowledge from “knowledge versus ignorance” towards “every knowledge is also an ignorance” (of other knowledges). The body of literature I draw on affirms that “wrongs” are caused by knowledge too. The “every knowledge is an ignorance” approach requires an understanding of how knowledges are produced, how they relate to power and how they may shape subjectivities and relationships in conscious and non-conscious ways. This shift in conceptualization on its own would change the exercise considerably. For example: after identifying “wrongs,” participants could be invited to perform an analysis of what (socially, culturally, and historically situated) systems of knowledge/power production produce such wrongs; after identifying “rights” they would be invited to analyze what kinds of systems of knowledge production produce the possibilities for the “rights” they are able to imagine, and what kinds of ignorance could block their imagination to other possible “rights”, or make their own knowledge systems complicit in the production of the wrongs they intend to right. This, in turn, would shift the question of methodology of righting wrongs significantly too: if education is the means to right wrongs, what kind of education could take account of the complexity, multiplicity, complicity and inequality inherent in the politics of knowledge production (including those happening through education itself)? What kind of education could support us to undo (at a deep psychic level, beyond surface cognition) the legacy of knowledges that make us blindly complicit in perpetuating wrongs? What kind of education could enable the emergence of ethical relationships between those who have historically marginalized and those who have been marginalized, moving beyond guilt, anger, salvationism, triumphalism,

Education, Knowledge and the Righting  199 paternalism and self-interest? What kind of education could equip us to work in solidarity with one another in the construction of “yet-to-come” collective futures in ways that do not require enforced or manufactured consensus? What kind of education could help us find comfort and hope in precisely “not having absolute answers” and being frequently challenged in our encounters with difference?

Education for ‘Saving Children’ My third metaphor evokes the image of a river with a strong current. If a group of people saw many young children drowning in this river, their first impulse would probably be to try to save them or to search for help. But what if they looked up the river and saw many boats throwing the children in the water and these boats were multiplying by the minute? How many different tasks would be necessary to stop the boats and prevent this from happening again? I suggest there are at least four tasks: rescuing the children in the water, stopping the boats from throwing the children in the water, going to the villages of the boat crew to understand why this is happening in the first place and collecting the bodies of those who have died—honoring the dead by remembering them and raising awareness of what happened. In deciding what to do, people would need to remember that some rescuing techniques may not work in the conditions of the river, and that some strategies to stop the boats may invite or fuel even more boats to join the fleet—they may even realize that they are actually in one of the boats, throwing children with one hand and trying to rescue them with the other hand. Therefore, education should help people in the task of learning to ‘go up the river’ to the roots of the problem so that the emergency strategies down the river can be better informed in the hope that one day no more boats will throw children in the water. Going up the river involves asking essential, difficult and often disturbing begged questions that may implicate rescuers in the reproduction of harm and expose how self-serving practices can be disguised as altruism. Questions such as: How is poverty created? How come different lives have different value? What are the relationships between social groups that are over-exploited and social groups that are over-exploiting? How are these relationships maintained? How do people justify inequalities and dominance? What are the roles of schooling in the reproduction and contestation of inequalities in society? When do institutionalized initiatives, such as the human rights declaration or military interventions, become helpful in promoting justice, and when do they worsen or create new problems? How would people respond if they realized that bringing justice to others meant going against national or local economic and cultural interests? How are Nation States—and nationalism—­implicated in the proliferation of divisions, fragmentations, fundamentalisms and inequalities? How have cherished humanist ideals contributed to the dispossession,

200  Vanessa de Oliveira Andreotti destitution, exploitation and extermination of peoples and the destruction of ecological balance? Through this metaphor, I propose that education is about preparing ourselves and those we work with to enlarge possibilities for thinking and living together in a finite planet that sustains complex, plural, uncertain, interdependent and unequal societies. In order to do this, we need an attitude of sceptical optimism or hopeful scepticism (as opposed to naïve hope or dismissive scepticism) in order to stretch the legacy of frameworks we have inherited. In simpler language, perhaps we need:

• to understand and learn from repeated historical patterns of mistakes, • • • •

in order to open the possibilities for new mistakes to be made more complex social analyses acknowledging that if we understand the problems and the reasons behind them in simplistic ways, we may do more harm than good to recognize how we are implicated or complicit in the problems we are trying to address: how we are all both part of the problem and the solution (in different ways) to learn to enlarge our referents for reality and knowledge, acknowledging the gifts and limitations of every knowledge system and moving beyond ‘either ors’ towards ‘both and mores’ to remember that the paralysis and guilt we may feel when we start to engage with the complexity of issues of inequality are just temporary as they may come from our own education/socialization in protected/ sheltered environments, which create the desire for things to be simple, easy, happy, ordered and under control.

Hopefully, once we go up the river together, we will be able to come down and address the issue of justice as an on-going agonistic conversation that is going to be really difficult, but that we cannot shy away from. Going up the river is necessary for substantially committing this conversation to a form of radical democracy that moves beyond practices embedded in historical patterns of

• • • • • • •

Hegemony (justifying superiority and supporting domination) Ethnocentrism (projecting one view, one ‘forward’, as universal) Ahistoricism (forgetting historical legacies and complicities) Depoliticization (disregarding power inequalities and ideological roots of analyses and proposals) Salvationism (framing help as the burden of the fittest) Uncomplicated solutions (offering easy solutions that do not require systemic change) Paternalism (seeking affirmation of superiority through the provision of help) (Andreotti, 2012, p. 2)

Education, Knowledge and the Righting  201 However, if we take seriously Spivak’s (2004) calls for hyper-self-reflexivity and a commitment to the Other ‘before will’, we need to become affectively accountable for the new and old problems our social justice solutions may engender. This for me means changing again the questions we ask, for example:

• How can we address hegemony without creating new hegemonies • • •

• • •

through our own forms of resistance? How can we address ethnocentrism without falling into absolute relativism and forms of essentialism and anti-essentialism that reify elitism? How can we address ahistoricism without fixing a single perspective of history to simply reverse hierarchies and without being caught in a selfsustaining narrative of vilification and victimization? How can we address depoliticization without hijacking political agendas for self-serving ends and without engaging in self-empowering critical exercises of generalization, homogenization and dismissal of antagonistic positions? How can we address salvationism without crushing generosity and altruism? How can we address people’s tendency to want simplistic solutions without producing paralysis and hopelessness? How can we address paternalism without closing opportunities for short-term redistribution?

The ethical responsibility towards the Other ‘before will’ poses a series of intense and tough demands. It requires us to have the courage, strength, confidence and humility to rise to the challenges and difficulties that these questions create; it commands that we educate ourselves to become comfortable with the discomfort of the uncertainties inherent in living the plurality of existence; and it calls us to become inspired and excited by the new possibilities opened by unchartered spaces, processes and encounters that do not offer any pre-determined scripts or guarantees. How do we teach for that? And how do we prepare ourselves to teach for that given that we have been over-socialized in forms of education that go exactly in the opposite direction of finding personal comfort and security in certainties (unequivocal fixed knowledge, right/wrong answers), conformity (external validation), subtle deference to institutional authorities, and unexamined ideas of autonomous and independent thinking?

Education for ‘Cultivating Humanity’ Sharon Todd (2009) warns us against common sense conceptualizations of humanity as ‘goodness’, something to be cultivated, constructed in contrast with violence (or ‘evil’) conceptualized as ‘inhuman’, something to be

202  Vanessa de Oliveira Andreotti eliminated. She argues that such conceptualizations fail to recognize humanity’s complexity, pluralism and imperfection and that an education for facing humanity would be more productive in addressing ethical questions related to our collective suffering and connections with each other. Jacqui Alexander (2005) suggests the idea of dismemberment as an alternative insight on questions of violence and inter-dependence. She states that . . . since colonisation has produced fragmentation and dismemberment at both the material and psychic levels, there is a yearning for wholeness, often expressed as a yearning to belong, a yearning that is both material and existential, both psychic and physical, and which, when satisfied, can subvert, and ultimately displace the pain of dismemberment. (p. 281) She (2005) suggests that strategies of membership in coalitions, like those of citizenship, community, family, political movement, nationalism and solidarity in identity or ideology, although important, have probably not addressed the source of this yearning. For Alexander, these coalitions have reproduced the very fragmentation and separation that she identifies as the root of the problem. She states that the source of this yearning is a ‘deep knowing that we are in fact interdependent—neither separate, nor autonomous’ (p. 282). She explains: As human beings we have a sacred connection to each other, and this is why enforced separations wreak havoc in our Souls. There is a great danger then, in living lives of segregation. Racial segregation. Segregation in politics. Segregated frameworks. Segregated and compartimentalised selves. What we have devised as an oppositional politics has been necessary, but it will never sustain us, for a while it may give us some temporary gains (which become more ephemeral the greater the threat, which is not a reason not to fight), it can never ultimately feed that deep place within us: that space of theerotic, that space of the Soul, that space of the Divine. (p. 282) Since contemporary theoretical discussions have conceptualized hostility either as a natural human response or an effect of discourse, it may be useful to think about it a little differently. Echoing Alexander’s (2005); Todd’s (2009); and Duran’s (2006) concerns for shifting root metaphors, my last set of questions refers to hostility as a social disease and to education as a host and/or a medicine for that: What if racism, sexism, classicism, nationalism and other forms of toxic, parasitic and highly contagious viral divisions are preventable social diseases?

Education, Knowledge and the Righting  203 What if the medicine involves getting to terms with our violent histories, being taught to see through the eyes of others (as impossible as it sounds), and facing humanity (in our own selves first) in all its complexity, affliction and imperfection: agonistically embracing everyone’s capacity for love, hatred, compassion, harm, goodwill, envy, joy, anger, oppression, care, selfishness, selflessness, avarice, kindness, enmity, solidarity, malice, benevolence, arrogance, humility, narcissism, altruism, greed, generosity, contempt and reverence? What if our holy texts (both religious, activist and academic), our education (both formal and informal), our politics and agency, and our ways of knowing and being have carried both the mutant virus that spreads the disease and the medicine that prevents it? What if learning to distinguish between toxins, viruses and medicines involves disciplining our minds, bodies, psyches, and spirits by confronting our traumas and letting go of fears of scarcity, loneliness, worthlessness and guilt (generated precisely by the imperative for autonomy/ independence, self-sufficiency and control)? What if we have to learn to trust each other without guarantees? What if the motivation to survive alongside each other in our finite planet in dynamic balance (without written agreements, coercive enforcements or assurances) will come precisely through being taught collectively by the disease itself? What knowledge would be enough, what education would be appropriate, and what possibilities would be opened, then?

Notes 1 A previous version of this chapter was presented in a Featured Presidential Session of the 2013 AERA meeting on April 16 in Vancouver, with Crain Soudien and Sarada Gopalan, entitled: Knowing Enough to Act: The Educational Implications of a Critical Social Justice Approach to Difference. This chapter was originally published as an article in the open journal ‘Other Education: The Journal of Educational Alternatives’. 2 This does not mean we should dismiss or abandon these concepts altogether. The idea is to understand their limitations as well as their gifts in order to stretch possibilities for thinking and living together, precisely based on the humanist idea that it is our responsibility (especially at the university) to question received wisdom (in this case, the historicity and limitations of democracy, human rights, development, individualism, freedom, secularism, etc.): we can ‘step up’ beyond the simplistic acceptance of given concepts (without throwing them away), and take responsibility to open up new possibilities for the future—this is explored further in the third metaphor. 3 This involves a constant engagement with three things: a)the social, cultural and historical conditioning of our thinking and of knowledge/power production; b)the limits of knowing, of language and of our senses in apprehending reality; and c) the non-conscious dynamics of affect (the fact that our traumas, fears, desires and attachments affect our decisions in ways that we often cannot identify). 4 This entails an acute awareness of our complicity in historical and global harm through our inescapable investments in violent systems, such as modernity and capitalism.

204  Vanessa de Oliveira Andreotti 5 This means upholding an ethical responsibility to being aware of the reproduction of historical harm through the solutions we propose. 6 Both ideas acknowledge that the problems of unexamined investments in harmful systems cannot be addressed in education through cognition alone.

References Alexander, J. (2005). Pedagogies of crossing: Meditations on feminism, sexual politics, memory and the sacred. Durham and London: Duke University. Andreotti, V. (2011a). Actionable postcolonial theory in education. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Andreotti, V. (2011b). (Towards) decoloniality and diversality in global citizenship education. Globalisation, Societies and Education, 9 (3–4), 381–397. Andreotti, V. (2012). Editor’s preface: Heads up. Critical Literacy: Theories and Practices, 6 (1), 1–3. Andreotti, V. and Souza, L. (Eds.) (2011). Postcolonial perspectives on global citizenship education. New York: Routledge. Biesta, G. (2012). Receiving the gift of teaching: From ‘learning from’ to ‘being taught by.’ Studies in Philosophy and Education, Special Issue on Existentialism, 1–13. Duran, E. (2006). Healing the soul wound: Counseling with American Indians and other native peoples. New York: Teachers College Press. Gandhi, L. (1998). Postcolonial theory: A critical introduction. New York: Columbia University Press. Hochschild, A. (1999). King Leopold’s ghost: A story of greed, terror, and heroism in Colonial Africa. New York: Houghton Mifflin. Hoofd, I. (2012). Ambiguities of activism: Alter-globalism and the imperatives of speed. New York: Routledge. Inayatullah, N. and Blaney, D. (2012). The dark heart of kindness: The social construction of deflection. International Studies Perspectives, 13, 164–175. Lorde, A. (1979). The master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house. Comments at ‘the personal and the political’ panel, Second Sex conference, USA. Available at: www.historyisaweapon.com/defcon1/lordedismantle.html (accessed May 10, 2011). Maldonado-Torres, N. (2004). The topology of being and the geopolitics of knowledge: Modernity, empire, coloniality. City, 8 (1), 29–56. Mignolo, W. (2000). Local histories/global designs: Essays on the coloniality of power, subaltern knowledges and border thinking. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Pinar, W.F. (2009). The worldliness of a cosmopolitan education: Passionate lives in public service. New York: Routledge. Pitt, A. and Britzman, D. (2003). Speculations on qualities of difficult knowledge in teaching and learning: An experiment in psychoanalytic research. International Journal of Qualitative Studies in Education, 16 (6), 755–776. Quijano, A. (1997). Colonialidad del poder, cultura y conocimiento enAmérica Latina. Anuario Mariateguiano, 9, 113–122. Souza, L. (2011). Engaging the global by resituating the local: (Dis)locating the literate global subject and his view from nowhere. In V. Andreotti and L. de Souza

Education, Knowledge and the Righting  205 (Eds.), Postcolonial perspectives on global citizenship education (pp. 68–83). New York: Routledge. Souza Santos, B. (2007). Beyond abyssal thinking: From global lines to ecologies of knowledges. Eurozine. Available at: www.eurozine.com/articles/2007-06-29-san tos-en.html (accessed February 27, 2012). Spivak, G. (2004). Righting wrongs. The South Atlantic Quarterly, 103 (2‑3), 523–581. Taylor, L. (2011). Beyond paternalism: Global education with preservice teachers as a practice of implication. In V. Andreotti and L. de Souza (Eds.), Postcolonial perspectives on global citizenship education (pp. 177–199). New York: Routledge. Todd, S. (2009). Toward an imperfect education: Facing humanity, rethinking, cosmopolitanism. London: Paradigm. Zembylas, M. (2010). Racialization/ethnicization of school emotional spaces: The politics of resentment. Race Ethnicity and Education, 13 (2), 253–270.

Figure 9.1  Corn cobs image (first metaphor) kindly offered by Nella de La Fuente

10 Toni Morrison and the Discourse of the Other Against the Hypocrisy of Completeness Cameron McCarthy, Rushika Patel and Brenda Nyandiko Sanya Indisputably, Toni Morrison’s work profoundly engages the contradictions within black/white relations in the United States (U.S.). With the elaboration of African-American aesthetic form, it also true that her work registers a deep affinity with central concerns of postcolonial writers. However, many critics writing on her work continue to locate her work within a constricted frame of cultural reference and place, that is, largely within U.S. boundaries and specifically as speaking only to the existential realities of the (U.S.) African-American community. These symbolic moves initiated by radical critics are most likely informed by a desire to identify and accentuate the specificity and autonomy of black aesthetics (see Ogunyemi, 1992). Conservative critics tend to deploy territorial strategies aimed at containing and bottling up Morrison’s muse, lest its energies spill over the social fire-walls that divide racial groups in this society (see Blackburn, 1973). Morrison’s affinity with postcolonial writers is seen in hybridity or radical contradiction and ambivalence towards received tradition, values and identity. Consolidated in the anthology, The Empire Writes Back (Ashcroft, Griffiths, & Tiffin, 2002), postcolonial writers challenge and critique Western constructions of former colonies. Like postcolonial writers, Morrison’s writing is counter-hegemonic; a performative act of resistance to the stability of the classical realism of the nineteenth-century novel, the “English book,” (Bhabha, 1994, p. 102) reproduced and extended in Euroamerican writers such as Henry James, Herman Melville, Ernest Hemingway and so forth. Her fictive world is not a Manichean system of signs; it is far more complex and addresses worlds concerned with the differences within and without. In the complexity, Morrison critically addresses historical issues with the end result being a strategic re-centering of dispossessed AfricanAmerican culture in American history, mirroring the work of postcolonial writers. In this essay, we would like to pursue hybridity as articulated in Morrison’s work. We draw attention to connections between Morrison’s work and that of African, Caribbean and Latin American modernist/postmodernist writers, many of whom, like Wilson Harris of Guyana or Bessie Head of South Africa, see themselves as writing one book—the book of

208  McCarthy, Patel and Nyandiko Sanya counter-memory and its reply to the “English Book,” the book of authorial plenitude and completeness.

Hybridity In Signs Taken for Wonders, Bhabha (1994) theorizes discourses of colonialism as a site of hybridization. For Bhabha, hybridization offers a resistance along surfaces that are different from the Hegelian dialectic of master-slave or the phenomenological other. Here, resistance is mounted not from marginal or exclusionary positions but from within hegemonic discourses themselves. It is waged from the interstices of an unstable boundary that desires to discriminate subject from non-subject. Most centrally, a hybrid space unsettles the authority and power of the hegemonic language as a symbolic sign of full presence or plenitude. Bhabha argues that the repressive deployment of the sign of hegemonic language in othered spaces is vastly different from its coercive function in the European space. It is primarily this difference that provides the basis for the colonial presence being always ambivalent because it is suspended between its appearance as original and authoritative and its articulation in the colonial discourse as repetition and difference. Morrison and her postcolonial counterparts find the realist novel’s claims to authority and completeness of knowledge, reason and ethics insufferable. It is in the text of the English Book that the non-West is marginalized, black people are denigrated and women are consigned to traditional roles of reproduction and domesticity. In response to legacies of the Western novel, the hybridizing process in postcolonial fiction involves three dynamics. First, there is a reflexive and self-conscious attitude towards language use and its imbrication in narrative omniscience and surveillance and the elaboration of unequal identities. Second, there is a deliberate deflation of characterization and the installation of antiheroic, flawed or broken personas at the epicenter of the novel’s discursive field. It is in the movement of the margins to the center that the Empire’s ragged and tagged strikes back. Third, the subject matter tends to have a socio-political resonance that takes us beyond the nexus of individual adventure, fate and fortune, and towards an exploration of problems associated with the relationship of the individual to community. In each of these areas, postcolonial writers do not make a clean break with the inherited or imposed traditions that they seek to deconstruct or replace. As Paz (1990) reminds us, postcolonial literatures engage in a deconstructive “reply” to Western canonical texts (p. 5). But let us look first at the specific situatedness of postcolonial fiction and Morrison’s affiliation to it.

Postcolonial Connections In his essay, A Note on the Genesis of The Guyana Quartet, Guyanese philosophical novelist Wilson Harris maintains that his novels depart “in peculiar degrees” from the “canons” of realist fiction (1985, p. 7). By classical

Toni Morrison and Discourse of the Other  209 realist fiction, Harris is referring to a body of writing canonized in various language arts at the school and university level; namely, the fiction of writers such as Jane Austen (Emma, Sense and Sensibility, Pride and Prejudice, Mansfield Park), Joseph Conrad (Under Western Eyes, Nostromo, Heart of Darkness), Charlotte Brontë (Jane Eyre) and so forth. Watt (1957) has argued that this body of writing emerged and reached a point of consolidation with the rise of the bourgeoisie in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. More recently, Said (1993) has expanded on Watt’s field of reference maintaining that the novel is implicated in the project of Empire and the demarcation of the post-Renaissance world into the material and imaginary spheres of center and periphery. The structure of the novel and its contents therefore cultivate and sustain a system of values, attitudes and reference that place the metropolitan, white European author/reader at “the eye of power”—at the center of an ethnographic and imperial gaze that freezes subordinate groups into the role of “Other.”1 Said writes: The [realist] novel is an incorporative, quasi-encyclopedic cultural form. Packed into it are both a highly regulated plot mechanism and an entire system of social reference that depends on the existing institutions of bourgeois society, their authority and power. The novelistic hero and heroine exhibit the restlessness and energy characteristic of the enterprising bourgeoisie, and they are permitted adventures in which their experiences reveal to them the limits of what they can aspire to, where they can go, what they can become. Novels therefore end either with the death of a hero or heroine [. . .] who by virtue of overflowing energy does not fit into the orderly scheme of things, or with protagonists’ accession to stability. (1993, p. 71) For over four decades, postcolonial writers have been writing to deconstruct the happy anthropological familiarities of form and theme in this inherited tradition of novel-writing in the West. Like Harris, Morrison seeks to rewrite the novel, to ransack its visible structures and latent myths to activate new memories, new personas, new possibilities, and to put into play the concerns and dilemmas of those displaced to the outer limits of Eurocentric letters. However, this project is neither straight-forward nor monolithic. The position of oppositionality of the subaltern writer is fraught with nonsynchronous or contradictory interests, needs and desires arising from dominant and subordinate communities that encroach on passions, sensibilities and commitments. For as modernist African writers Ngugi wa Thiong’o, Ayi Armah, and Yambo Ouologuem maintain, the location of the writer who is subaltern, minority, postcolonial is always already one of ambivalence. This is especially so if, in addition to belonging to a marginalized group, one writes in a language that historically served to prosecute hegemonic imperatives of a majority in an unequal society suffused by the

210  McCarthy, Patel and Nyandiko Sanya constant play of power. One of the persistent difficulties confronting the subaltern cultural worker is where to position oneself when the very logics of intellectual agency seem to catapult one out of familiar spheres of group intimacy and leaves one between points of affiliation with no place to call home. Ambivalence in situations is marked on the very bodies of the cultural worker who, through class and cultural and educational experience, represents a hybrid identity; an amalgam of a multiplicity of cultural multiplicities without fixed or settled parameters. Ambivalence is not simply the result of unyielding antagonisms or contradictions from the tensions between two spheres, as, say, in the opposition of a dominant constructed world and a subordinate “other” world. Instead, ambivalence weaves the contradictory pressures generated within the cultural worker himself or herself and between that cultural worker and their solidary life worlds. In her essay, the “Site of Memory,” Morrison (1990), reflects on the contradictory tensions and commitments that inform her work; for example, the tension between the social-historical disclosure of atrocities visited upon marginalized black people in the U.S. and the commitment to the imagination of the fantastical and allegorical in a manner that exceeds social documentation or commentary—a commitment to the relative autonomy of art: For me—a writer in the last quarter of the twentieth century, not much more than a hundred years after Emancipation, a writer who is black and a woman . . . My job becomes how to rip the veil drawn over “proceedings too terrible to relate.” The exercise is also critical for a person who is black, or who belongs to any marginalized category, for, historically, we were seldom invited to participate in the discourse even when we were the topic. . . . [But] fiction, by definition, is distinct from fact. Presumably it’s the product of imagination—invention—and it claims the freedom to dispense with “what really happened”. . . . [So] along with personal recollection the matrix of the work I do is the wish to extend, fill in and complement slave autobiographical narratives. But only the matrix. What comes of all that is dictated by other concerns, not least among them the novel’s own integrity. (1990, pp. 302, 305) Here one gets a hint of the multifarious commitments working through Morrison’s fiction. This agonistic space, transacted in a world of texts, precipitates Morrison’s rich, metonymic exploration of language. It is in language— naming and renaming—that the struggle over postcolonial minority identities and representation is engaged and fought out.

Language, Identity and the Hypocrisy of Completeness Poststructural and postcolonial theorists such as Derrida, Spivak, Shohat and Bhabha have deconstructed the authority of the sign by drawing the veil

Toni Morrison and Discourse of the Other  211 and revealing the hollowness of the claim to absolute presence. Comparably, Morrison (1992), in Playing in the Dark deconstructs the trestle of signification that provides the matrix of a purported white American cultural autonomy registered in Euro-American fiction. Here, Morrison challenges the language of self-referentiality that has been used to support the idea of a free-standing, self-forming white male identity and authority. If the sign has no intrinsic self-referentiality, what set of relational meanings ground notions of black identity? What is Caliban’s response to Prospero’s categorical ensnarement (Lamming, 1984)? Morrison’s strategy is two-fold. First is to (re)claim and exercise the power to construct new identities challenging and overturning oppressive monolithic representations of black people. Second is to facilitate and enable an ancestral anamnesis that forages in a collective cultural memory for the material that would inform the interiority of the collective identity to be constructed. The abyss to be avoided is the one that essentializes and freezes identity and imprisons one both in the past and in the re-inscription of a repressive colonial construction of primitivity and prehistory. Morrison elaborates this concern with identity in great detail in Sula (1973), where she interrogates the gendered subject positions ascribed to black women. Her characters in Beloved (1987) also reveal the gaze on the black women’s bodies with a focus on sexuality and nurturing roles, as sustained in popular culture and policies that impact black women’s everyday life. As Sethe succinctly states, “freeing yourself was one thing, claiming ownership of that freed self was another” (p. 95). By drawing attention to the ownership of self, Morrison is pointing towards more than mere surviving or existing and shifting the reader towards the crucial issue of identity constuction. This recurring theme of identity, in the life histories of most of Morrison’s characters, turns on questions that explore a life force that distinguishes itself from the living dead. The “living dead” is not an abstract or metaphysical force. It is the material inscription in everyday practices of conventional role expectations and the silencing of the agency of black girls and black women. Pecola, the central character of The Bluest Eye (1972), battles her own marginalization to the living dead every day until she ultimately loses the battle. Raped by her father, consumed by her desire for blue eyes (the symbol of ultimate worth and acceptance but also conventionality and Barbie doll domestication), she loses the battle: she goes mad. Here the very sign of completeness, “blue eyes”—like Melville’s “white whale”—is revealed to be both empty of meaning and yet full of the banality of evil. As if talking back to the fate of Pecola, Nel, Sula’s alter ego, speaks a new illusory discourse that announces agonistic desires and expectations: “I’m me. I’m not their daughter. I’m not Nel. I’m me. Me” (1973, p. 28). The point of identity gets located in the chiasma that marks the intersection of provisional knowledge and the unconscious where the experiential and the mythicism of folkloric “fate” collide. The symbolic is only a provisional knowledge that approximates the negotiation of the body and the social

212  McCarthy, Patel and Nyandiko Sanya world. This state of anticipation or provisional knowledge precipitates the ancestral connection in Morrison’s novels which is always imbued with signifiers derived from the riddles and mysteries of nature. Her more recent A Mercy (2008) also relies on anti-hegemonic discourse in exploring identity, in the “rewriting of home [as a] crucial link in the articulation of identity” (Davies, 1994, p. 85). In Florens, we encounter an ambivalence to the white, masculinized world, what Bhabha terms “in-betweeness” (2007, p. 13), a space where the displaced Florens destabilizes power structures.

Race The factor of race induces signs for the conventional address of black women and girls. As Sula observes, being woman and “colored” is the same as being a man. Here, Sula’s meaning echoes the social historical specificity of black womanhood offered by hooks (1981) in Ain’t I A Woman. Black women are simultaneously refused the privileges associated with being white in addition to the desire associated with being female and white. The linguistic system Morrison deconstructs is rooted in commodified popular culture: film, clothes and fashion, toys, freedom of movement and space. These themes are pursued with agonizing poignancy in The Bluest Eye in which an eleven-year old black girl, Pecola, whom “no one ever noticed,” seeks to fill the huge void created by ostracism, abuse and exploitation by invoking a racially subordinating wish fulfillment. With blue eyes people would picture her as the “perfect” female creatures of cinematic beauty: Shirley Temple, Greta Garbo and Ginger Rogers. This concern first appears when social workers deliver Pecola to the MacTeers for temporary guardianship. Immediately, we notice Pecola’s chilling obsession with the image of Shirley Temple printed on a cup of milk given to her by Frieda MacTeer. So much so that she develops an abnormal and insatiable appetite for milk. Shirley Temple symbolizes plenitude—part of a system of signs that bombards black kids on billboards, in textbooks and in the film culture. But Pecola’s mother is also addressed by the powerful images of white perfection: virtue, heroism, beauty and luxury taste. Morrison references the way the dominant system of beauty turns inward into a system of damning self-judgment and self-contempt. In Polly Breedlove we hear happiness linked to whiteness as captured in the cinematic fantasty of “white men taking such good care of their women,” and ownership of property (p. 97). The idealized world of cinema is also part of the real world of domestic labor that Polly expends in the service of her white employers, the Fishers. Confronted with the signs of plenitude, order and beauty, Polly grows to reject her own domestic situation, her hapless husband, her own children, particularly Pecola and her own identity. She too is cursed by a lack of beauty. This overwhelming sense of lack is painfully expressed in Polly’s denial of affection and rejection of her own daughter, Pecola, while enthusiastically embracing the child of blue eyes—Mrs. Fisher’s daughter. Here,

Toni Morrison and Discourse of the Other  213 popular culture introduces and sustains a deadening force into the lives of black people, providing the sign system that is part of a system of human wreckage: poverty, unemployment, domestic servitude, unequal and segregated services and self-hate. Differences constructed in a racial order lead to the reproduction of differences within where black people adopt a racially derived system of reference, valuing and naming that elaborates an internal order of distinctions. Language serves to create a vocabulary of spatial distinctions and separateness even when living in close proximity, in the same segregated geographic neighborhoods. In this constricted sense of space, intra-racial distinctions take on a bizarre quality, and domestic space is deeply marked and bounded. In The Bluest Eye, class distinctions among black people are registered in a language of shadings of color, excessive bric-a-brac and rigidity of the use of domestic space. When the social climber, Geraldine, comes home to find Pecola in her house, Morrison shows the easy access to a language of racial typifications that Geraldine draws on. Pecola’s body displays all the signs of the racialized black lower class: coarseness, dirtiness, blackness and a strange, metaphorical sense of evil. The world created in these novels is almost permanently damaged, and the system of communication between men and women is distorted. Women contend with the disempowerment of black men, which often manifests itself by devaluing black women in an attempt to secure some semblance of power (hooks & West, 1991). As in the Anne Petry story, Like a Winding Sheet (1971), men abused and frustrated and disrespected in the larger racial order apply its perverted terms to their relations with their women in the domestic sphere. Women consigned by a racial order to domestic labor, abused at work and home, take it out in their relations with their men and their children. The signifying chain of the racial order takes the form of Baudrillardian loop. Who but the wise old women—finally freed of men, whom they have outlived, no longer useful to the whites, who have exploited their labor, and beyond the silly, mundane cares of the world, approaching death—who but these women might find the terms to name the system that imprisoned them all their lives. And so in The Bluest Eye, on the occasion of Aunt Jimmy’s sickness, the old women of the town gathered together to bring solace and remedies to their dying friend. It is here that they reflect on their own lives and give a final summing up. Morrison writes that: “these old black women were synthesize in their eyes—a puree of tragedy and humor, wickedness and serenity, truth and fantasy” (1970, p. 110). They could now name and order their world in way that they were unable to do in their youth.

The Individual and the Community: The Search for Syncretic Identity By denying metaphysical condensation, Morrison does not allow social and historical differences to become transformed into universal cleavages.

214  McCarthy, Patel and Nyandiko Sanya The infanticide of Sethe, Eva Peace and Sula, and Makon Dead’s attempted infanticide, are contained by their historical specificity. These acts serve to problematize the notion of a neutral or universal system of ethics. By narrating “abnormal” acts of her characters like Sethe, Morrison interrogates the discourse of a code of ethics blind to its own social and hegemonic imperatives, thereby appealing to a different code of justice and responsibility. Sethe’s mother gave away the children begot through forced copulation with whites; Ella withholds nurture from the child produced in her rape; Eva Peace “purifies” her son whose humanness is diminished by his failure to withstand drugs and who seeks to revert to the womb; Sethe seeks to rescue her children from a fate of slavery that “kills them limb by limb.” In each and all of these instances the nurturing role of the female as a reproductive source of the community is put under sharply focused lens of critique. Narrow definitions of responsibility contend with greater concerns and render these events as highly ambivalent signifiers that provide a rich site for specific, complex perspectives while subverting and resisting the impulse to universalize both in broad human terms and narrow but nonetheless broad categories of groups and communities. Morrison seems to indicate that the history of injury holds possibilities for dissolution and regeneration for the black community. At issue in each of these instances is the disruption and interrogation of readings of actions that contradict social ethics of both the ancestral world and the modernized “civilized” new world. These actions, by abrogating the laws of both systems while resisting an easy disavowal, attest to the greater savagery of the conditions of black subordination allowed to prevail. The unfolding of these actions mimics the stereotype of savagery by a racist discourse, serving only to disrupt these charges by returning the charge of savagery to those responsible for the conditions that push wholesome characters to the brink and beyond. The events in Sula’s life underscore the dangers inherent in such a passionate and selfish individuality that refuses to negotiate with the collective. Sula’s extreme actions earn her the hostility of Bottom’s black community and culminate in an inglorious and scandalous death. Even though Nel reaffirms her faith in Sula by celebrating that exhilarated life in “We was girls together” (1973, p. 174), Morrison gives this avenue no generative possibilities. It is a dead-end. Even though Nel awakens to the meaning of Sula’s life, there is no indication that it would significantly alter both her life and by extension, the life of the black community. Control of one’s self, one’s body, in its interactions with a community, is the essence of “claiming one’s self.” Controlling the fear that blocks the passage to self-discovery and communal solidarity seems to be the encoded message of the demented Shadrack’s National Suicide Day idea. Sethe’s desperation and Eva’s uncompromising actions are the shifting and vague signifiers that become the site for Morrison’s interrogation of such extremes of passion. Such extreme of passions

Toni Morrison and Discourse of the Other  215 that drive the actions of Mr. Smith and Guitar in Song of Solomon (1977) are “suicidal” and do not offer the best possibilities for a syncretic identity. They are in Morrison’s opinion more likely to destroy identity. These extreme actions occupy an important position in all of Morrison’s novels, but they are not accorded a transformative role and they do no generate alternatives to the status quo. Like the fate of Shadrack’s National Suicide Day project, meant to overcome fear, these acts of extremism mostly culminate in disastrous failure. Ethnic extremism, even though it may be invoked on the behalf of community, actually has a polarizing effect. Morrison is calling attention to a lack of vision that she sees in an unbridled nationalism. More reflection is required for the elaboration of the kind of metaframe that would address the thorny issues associated with individual and collective solidarity and identity. Morrison’s representation here refuses solutions that are dependent on binaries. Instead, Morrison seems to gesture in the direction of a subjectivity of hybridity. The focus here is on feelings and intuitions that can help to construct identity when they are freed of the cognitive hold of symbolic absolutes. Unwilling to be controlled by a polarizing strategy in the arena of culture, Morrison’s writings show a consciousness of the barriers to the writing and reading of positioned perspectives that subvert the centre/margin polarities in most metropolitan societies. She seeks a way that would not reposition the discourse along polarized fences and degenerate into charges and illconsidered judgments. She employs a strategy reinscibes old lines of distinction by placing the discourse of the “margins” in the preoccupations of the “center”. In her critical essays, especially Playing in the Dark, she forces a re-reading of U.S. cultural production that sharpens the focus on the concealed traces silent in white cultural identity: the African presence as a powerful creative force in the elaboration Euro-American cultural forms. In her fictional work, Morrison abandons conventional ideological and polemical strategies and gives attention to the appropriation of metonymic signs that could provide the space for a new way of both writing and reading the perspectives once kept out of the discourse. Morrison’s own stated position on the economy of U.S. culture is: ‘response-ability’ that learn[s] how to maneuver ways to free up the language from its sometimes sinister, frequently lazy, almost always predictable employment of racially informed and determined chains. (1992, p. xi) In this way Morrison announces her motivated strategy of re-naming and re-ordering. In Song of Solomon, the ritual of naming provides the metonymic frame that offers both a transformative agency for a stronger cultural and communal identity and the space that makes possible the recovery and re-memory of a black history—a history that is a vital part of this

216  McCarthy, Patel and Nyandiko Sanya communal identity threatened by hegemonic cultural mechanisms. Both blacks and whites and the black and white in all of us are initiated into a polydialectical conversation with the past and present. Morrison’s perspectives can be read as being founded on the principle of a co-articulation. Past and present share an articulated relationship crucial for the efficient survival of the group. It is only within this co-extensive space that any meaningful construction and reclaiming of identity can take place. Song of Solomon bristles with biblical allusions, African ancestry in its reference to “Suleiman”, ancient wisdom and the stereotype of the musical and entertainment talent of African-Americans. These associations occupy ambivalent and contradictory positions from which they enter into a polydialectical conversation afforded by the space offered by this text. The Solomon of this novel, like his ancient African counterpart, is a legendary success story who is ruined by colonial and racial exploitation. This ancestral legend, accorded the ability to fly, is reproduced in the songs that children sing in ritual play. Emphasized here is a process of naming and remembering that affords a bridge between the present and a past dislocated both in space and time. Beneath the consciousness of nursery rhymes and role-play lies a mine of cultural wealth that offers the key to the re-memory and recovery of a subordinated history. This agonizing process of recovery of the past offers rich possibilities for the grounding of a strong communal identity. The sense of community that Milkman enjoys as he explores this cultural past is the prototypical case in point. The “Song” of the title therefore presents us with the type of ambivalence that positions postcolonial resistance and agency. The absence of an article deliberately renders this sign ambiguous. Lurking beneath, inside, alongside and over this sign is not only a referent that cannot be acknowledged by received English but a space for the situation of a repressed cultural history. “Song” we learn is the name of Milkman’s Indian grandmother whose name was “Singing Bird.” Song in this title offers the metonymic possibilities for the installation of a whole cultural history within the concealment offered by a disruptive sign. More significantly the ritual of naming becomes a site of resistance and cultural agency. Yet even though naming becomes a powerful site for cultural resistance and memory, Morrison is critical of processes that construct the past as essentialized ancestral authority. While Morrison clearly affirms the coextensiveness of the past with the present and emphasizes the necessity of remembering one’s cultural history, she does not accord the past mystical powers. In fact, Morrison demonstrates through Pilate how the most revered figures that connect us to the past can be wrong about the interpretation of the ancestral that always already lives with us. “Sing. Sing . . . You just can’t fly on off and leave a body” (1977, p. 147) does not command us to carry the bones of the ones we harm all our lives. Such a responsibility as demonstrated by Pilate’s life is too debilitating in the construction of a future. Nor are we to carry the bones of our own dead as Guitar and the Seven Days

Toni Morrison and Discourse of the Other  217 are obsessed in doing. All that the ancestors intend to communicate is that a “killing” is not a “death” which terminates the implication of the past in the present. So long as there is memory, the past continues to be co-extensive to a lived reality and can play a vital role in the hybrid construction of identity.

Conclusion Morrison’s treatment of conflictual relations between blacks and whites rarely takes the form of a cataclysmic confrontation, avoiding binarism and Manichean extremism. Rather, Morrison directs her reader away from a dualistic model of confrontation and treats the continued tensions inherent in black-white relationships as complex and ambivalent. Like many postcolonial writers, Morrison turns away from the classical realist novel’s preoccupation with the individual and centers the existential conditions of being and possibility within marginal communities, located in the broader concerns of language, identity and collectivity. So much so that she explores the ambivalence between binary oppositions: individual/ group, males/females, urban/rural, bourgeois/underclass, modern/primitive, black/white. Even under the burden of debilitating internal conflicts of will or purpose, her chararcters’ psychoses have communal implications. Careful not to imply that these instances are entirely delusionary or hallucinatory, Morrison elucidates the links between internal conflict and social historical forces. These disturbances therefore have almost psycho-tangible form and structure of meaning and reference. Thus, haunting ghosts, spirits or natural forces in her novels are a tangible part of the extended life-world that connects the living and the dead. In Beloved, the ghost of represents a mountain of black bodies perished in the middle passage through radical acts of abortion of enslaved women to save their children from the fate of shackles and the whip that defined the life of a slave. These aborted children return in the ghost of Beloved, Sethe’s own murdered child. In Song of Solomon, Makon Dead appears in a ghostly form to advise and guide his children. In Tar Baby, Jadine is pressured by the ethereal presences of a host of dead and living women of Elohe who entice her to follow the conventional role of passive nurturing. Morrison’s view is that these “ghosts” do not require an essentialist pogrom of political vengeance and rectitude. They present an incomplete task; the task of coming to terms with and burying the dead in a way that they can rest in peace and continue to live in this life without being the centre of grief and conflict. Only then can the past help us negotiate the present and the future.

Note 1 See Spivak’s (1988) discussion of the “other” in “Can the Subaltern Speak.” In this essay, Spivak offers a detailed examination of the conflictual self-other economy. Specifically, she presents a searing critique of Western processes of self-production which complicate the space in which the subaltern can speak. Spivak makes a

218  McCarthy, Patel and Nyandiko Sanya general claim that colonialism is to be understood as a process of “epistemic violence” which is itself defined as a “remotely orchestrated, far-flung and heterogeneous project to constitute the colonial subject as ‘other’ ” (pp. 281–282). Within a larger investigation of the construction of an other that consolidates the self, Spivak begins to examine the construction of an other that oppositionally consolidates the self. For example, she notes that the construction of the Sati (widow burning) as victim oppositionally consolidates the “self” of the West as a savior. Spivak’s pithy “counter-sentence” “white men are saving brown women from brown men” (p. 297) mimics and parodies this construction of the self through its opposition to the other. Similarly, Jan Mohammed (1986) formally and ideologically examined colonial power relations in terms of the “Manichean opposition,” between the “putative superiority of the European and the supposed inferiority of the native” (p. 82). He characterizes this “Manichean allegory” as “a field of diverse yet interchangeable oppositions between white and black, good and evil, superiority and inferiority, civilization and savagery, intelligence and emotion, rationality and sensuality, self and other, subject and object” (p. 82). Both Spivak and Jan Mohammed suggest that the self constructs itself through the fear or derision of the other along an ideological order of differentiation and hierarchicalization. The English book therefore constructs the colonized as a “population of degenerate types on the basis of racial origins, in order to justify conquest and to establish systems of administration and instruction” (Bhabha, 1990, p. 75).

References Ashcroft, B., Griffiths, G., and Tiffin, H. (2002). The Empire Writes Back: Theory and Practice in Post-Colonial Literatures. New York, NY: Routledge. Bhabha, H. (1990). The other question: Difference, discrimination and the discourse of colonialism. In R. Fergusson et al. (Eds.), Out There: Marginalization and Contemporary Cultures (pp. 71–88). New York, NY: The New Museum of Contemporary Art. Bhabha, H. (1994). Signs taken for wonders: Questions of ambivalence and authority under a tree outside Delhi, May 1817. In H. Bhabha (Ed.), The Location of Culture (pp. 102–122). Chicago, IL: Chicago University. Bhabha, H. K. (2007). Location of Culture. New York, NY: Routledge. Blackburn, S. (1973, December 30). You still can’t go home again [Review of the book Sula, by T. Morrison]. The New York Times Book Review, p. 3. Davies, C. B. (1994). Black Women, Writing and Identity: Migration of the Subject. New York, NY: Routledge. Harris, W. (1960). The Palace of the Peacock. London, England: Faber. Harris, W. (1985). A note on the genesis of the Guyana Quartet. In W. Harris (Ed.), The Guyana Quartet (pp. 7–14). London, England: Faber. hooks, b. (1981). Ain’t I a Woman: Black Women and Feminism. Boston, MA: South End Press. hooks, b. and West, C. (1991). Breaking Bread: Insurgent Black Intellectual Life. Boston, MA: South End Press. JanMohammed, A. (1986). The economy of Manichean allegory: The function of racial difference in colonialist literature. In H. L. Gates (Ed.), “Race,” Writing and Difference (pp. 78–106). Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press Journals. Lamming, G. (1960/1984). The Pleasures of Exile. London, England: Allison and Busby. Morrison, T. (1970). The Bluest Eye. New York, NY: Washington Square Press.

Toni Morrison and Discourse of the Other  219 Morrison, T. (1973). Sula. New York, NY: Plume. Morrison, T. (1977). Song of Solomon. New York, NY: Signet. Morrison, T. (1981). Tar Baby. New York, NY: Plume. Morrison, T. (1987). Beloved. New York, NY: Knopf. Morrison, T. (1990). The site of memory. In R. Fergusson, M. Gever, T. T. Minhha, and C. West (Eds.), Out There: Marginalization and Contemporary Cultures (pp. 299–305). New York: The Museum of Contemporary Art. Morrison, T. (1992). Jazz. New York, NY: Knopf. Ogunyemi, C. O. (1992). Order and disorder in Toni Morrison’s ‘The Bluest Eye’. Contemporary Literary Criticism, 10, 354–355. Paz, O. (1990). In Search of the Present. New York, NY: Harcourt Brace. Said, E. (1993). Culture and Imperialism. New York, NY: Knopf. Spivak, G. (1988). Can the subaltern speak? In C. Nelson and L. Grossberg (Eds.), Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture (pp. 271–316). Urbana, IL: University. of Illinois Press. Watt, I. (1957). The Rise of the Novel. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press.

Conclusion: Curriculum as a Scandal João M. Paraskeva

If all white human beings were to disappear overnight from planet earth, would racism be over? If there were never white human beings on planet earth, would racism never exist? If we only had one global theological political economy, would racism be over? If Christianism and Islamism were never in place, would we have ever had any form of religious fundamentalism(s)? To bring Sousa Santos (2015) to the discussion ‘if all educators, curriculists, and/or curriculogos in the world would be human rights activists’ would racism be over? What would be the real ideological colors of education and curriculum? If Marx was right, as Eagleton (2011) so eloquently argues, and I think he was in so many ways, like he was wrong in so many others, why, I repeat why, does one still struggle to erase racism and all other forms of segregation from our society? More complex: If Marx is fundamentally wrong—as even some (neo)Marxists claim—why do racism, and genderism, and classism, and sexism persist? Why the social incapability of ending once and for all what Westley (1997) calls ‘white normativity’? How many died already in so many nations in the world fighting against racism and all other forms of segregation? In a world in which 1 percent earns more that the rest, how many more people need to die before we end the endemic plagues of segregation, poverty, and inequality? What are we fundamentally missing in our examinations of racism and other millenary forms of segregation, such as classism, genderism, and ageism? What are we, educators, curriculists, and curriculogos, missing in our daily struggles against racism and other millenary forms of segregation? While the struggle against racism and all other forms of segregation has been a daily fact in the lives of so many people really committed with social and cognitive justice, the truth of the matter is that the last part of the last century and the beginning of the current has been stained with events, such as Ruanda, Bosnia, Palestine (Israel is in fact, the only nation in the world that changes borders almost every single day), torrents of immigrants arriving daily at Lampedusa, Greece, the Ferguson events in the U.S., the deportee program affecting the Azorean Portuguese American Community in Massachusetts, Rhode Island, and California, the open attacks in Arizona to Latinos/as and La Raza Studies, let alone the latest explicitly eugenic

222  João M. Paraskeva attack of Mexican immigrants from Donald Trump, currently number two in the GOP pools in his race for the US presidency. Surprisingly, Trump has been able to gain a massive roar from his electorate to a point that is making GOP peers and top candidates, such as Jeb Bush, concerned with such a xenophobic take. Democracy is clearly an illusion. And paradoxically under the umbrella of democracy—that doesn’t mean much by the way— democracy has been killed daily in our schools, universities, judicial system, health care, etc. While this is not a new phenomenon—Adolf Hitler used the democratic mechanisms institutionalized by democracy to kill democracy (see Wolf, 2007)—the fact is that it is achieving a point of unsustainability. As Clarke (2005) stated, the “point of neoliberalism is not to make a model that is more adequate to the real world, but to make the real world more adequate to its model” (p. 58). Needless to say that we are before tough questions. To know ‘knowledge’ was always ‘thy’ challenge. To know that we don’t know what we really don’t know is ‘thy real’ challenge. As Smith (2006) argues, “knowledge of the problem of knowledge is the scandal of philosophy” (p. 1). This being the case, curriculum is a scandal. The way that we know it, the way and what it has been smashed/banked in our heads and souls is a scandal. Let me go back to Smith’s (2006) arguments. She states, “the scandal is philosophy’s apparent inability to show how, when and why we can be sure that we know something or, indeed, that we know anything” (p. 1). Smith (2006) corroborates Williams (2001) methodical doubt when she questions if “it [is] possible to obtain knowledge at all [adding] that scepticism is the skeleton in Western rationalism’s closet” (p. 2). I would add that scepticism is just one side of the coin. The other is the systematic and endemic position of understanding that there are no other powerful epistemic forms beyond the Western Eurocentric epistemological domain. The resolution of such scepticism cannot be addressed just from within the Western Eurocentric episteme. Fostering such scepticism in a just way cannot be done by systematically ignoring other forms of episteme beyond the Western epistemology. In a way, Western rationalism is engaged in a ‘convenient scepticism’, one that labours daily in a hall and digging with the wrong tools. In this context, curriculum by paving the way for one totalitarian reading of the wor(l)d based on a Western Eurocentric epistemological platform is a double scandal—the way we know it, the way it has been developed, and the way it has been examined, debated, and theorized. While there is no single and unique way to address the questions raised before, and in fact, one should run away from any recipe, I would state that one of very embryonic forms of racism and other forms of segregation relies on the way that we systematically frame the way we think, a way that subtly— however aggressively-overtly if need be—ignores other epistemological forms. The perpetuation of such scandal clearly manures fertile conditions for social havoc. Such havoc has been cooked daily in the classrooms (see Ben-Jochannan, 2004). There must be something fundamentally wrong in

Conclusion  223 our approaches—despite laudable advances and achievements—that keeps energizing one of the very embryonic forms of racism—that is the way we think by ignoring other forms of epistemologies. Society will not change if one doesn’t change mentalities. It is impossible to dare to change by working in the same platform that actually creates such segregation mechanisms. Orr (2006) once stated that educated people did some of the biggest atrocities in the world. Segregation categories, such as race, class, and gender, are dynamic. As Mbembe (2013) argues, race—and one could add, class or gender—“doesn’t exist as a physical natural, anthropological or genetical matter [quite conversely] it is a useful fiction” (pp. 26–27); “it is constantly produced” (p. 40). That is, it is not only a past or present issue. It is also a future matter as well. That is one is before a “constantly changing or metastable subject [and such] metastability is the function of human reality” (Gordon, 2000, p. 71). One cannot ignore that much of the so-called prosperous epistemologies and its concomitant xenophobic hegemonic ‘authority’ (Ben-Jochannan, 2004) has been produced and reproduced by the school curriculum. In what follows, I would like to think about alternative ways of looking into alternatives—as Sousa Santos (2014) would put it—to terminate such curriculum scandal, which needs to be framed within the context of Western modernity. The Schwab-Huebner dialogism would be an interesting option to grasp the current state of modernity, from a Western perspective, and pointing to new directions. That is, within the current context Schwab (1978) would probably say, 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, 2006)—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 n[h]e[re]ar 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.

224  João M. Paraskeva For all practical purposes, the Western Cartesian modernity model, an hegemonic model with its arrogant claim to address global social issues, is not just moribund; it is dead. Modernity, Harding (2008, p. 23) claims, was/is a “misleading dream”. 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 its 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 the face of slavery, genocide, holocaust, poverty, inequality, social and cognitive apartheid, intergenerational injustice, and the temerity to change nature, among other issues. Painfully, all of 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, Therborn (2010, p. 59) claims, “was the last Eurocentric century”.

From Abyssal to Non-Abyssal Thinking As I was able to unveil in Conflicts in Curriculum Theory (2011), Boaventura Sousa Santos (2007) denounces Western modern thinking as abyssal and challenges us to move to a post-abyssal thinking. Sousa Santos 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 (2007), “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

Conclusion  225 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, 2007, p. 46). Invisibility and non-existence 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 refined accomplishments of such cultural politics of radical non-existence and negation (Sousa Santos, 2007). 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, 2007, 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, 2007, p. 47). Such a 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, 2007, p. 47). A monopoly that by producing other forms of knowledge as non-existent—since unfitted with the scientific scientificity of the Western modern thinking (Giroux, 2011) ruled by “reason as philosophical truth or faith as religious truth” (Sousa Santos, 2007, 47)—erases its own relativism and the relativism of “scientific” truth. The visible and legitimate belligerent battles amongst science, philosophy and theology—one should not forget that we belong to a civilization that used to burn people alive due to 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, 2007, 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

226  João M. Paraskeva 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, 2007, p. 47) In such a 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 non-existent? 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 sharp claim (1971) 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, reproduc,e 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 been coined as 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 such only-one dimensionality “to the extent that effectively eliminates whatever realities are on the other side of the line” (Sousa Santos, 2007, p. 48). Moreover, such radical denial of co-presence, Sousa Santos argues (2007), 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)

Conclusion  227 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, 2007, 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, 2007, 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 (2007) 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, 2007, p. 50). Since capitalism and abyssal thinking are the two faces of the same coin, the cultural and economic 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

228  João M. Paraskeva expressed—the historical compromises that define the social contents of hegemonic blocs. (pp. 87–88) Paradoxically, Sousa Santos (2007,) 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 subhumanity [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, 2007, 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, 1995, 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 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 also, 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 anti-colonial 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, 2007, p. 54).

Conclusion  229 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 (2007) 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, 2007, pp. 52–53). However, particular counter-hegemonic challenges within the very marrow of the modern Western thinking needed to be carefully rethought as well (Paraskeva, 2011, in press; Andreotti, 2011; Fraser, 2014; Cho, 2012). As I have been mention previously, certain counter-­ dominant 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 counter hegemonic epistemologies and subaltern cosmopolitanisms beyond the wrangle Eurocentric Eurocentrism vs AntiEurocentric 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, 2007, p. xx) Acknowledging the limitations of particular modern Western counterhegemonic impulses, Fraser (2014) requests a new critical theory that adapts to 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

230  João M. Paraskeva 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 adress 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 long as non-citizens go on being treated as sub-humans. (Sousa Santos, 2007, p. 65) By recognizing the abyssal thinking as a hegemonic epistemological cartel, critical thinking will play a huge role in debunking such a 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, 2007, p. 65). Postabyssal thinking, Sousa Santos (2007) states, “is a non-derivative thinking;

Conclusion  231 it involves a radical break with modern Western ways of thinking and acting” (p. 65). To think in non-derivative 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, 2007, 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, 2007, p. 65). 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, 2007, 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, 2007, 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, 2007, 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, 2007, p. 67).

Transmodernity, Boderthinking, or Radical Co-Presence? Yes, Please With that said, Sousa Santos’s (2007) 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, 2008) and border thinking (see Tlostanova & Mignolo, 2012). That is, I argue that Sousa Santos’s (2007) post-abyssal thinking while rubbing 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 (2008) argues, needs to be framed within the complex matrix of the de-colonial turn. It is the fourth momentum of such turn. The de-colonial 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

232  João M. Paraskeva 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. Hence, the de-colonial is not a new turn. In fact, its first phase dates back to the end of the nineteenth century as connected with the dilemmas of the emancipation of African Americans. The next belligerent phase erupted with WWI and WWII and the subsequent decolonization movements that emerged within the post-war 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 1960s. The possibility of the impossibility raised during major non-monolithic social movements, such as the ones connected with the May ’68, the 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 counter-dominant 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, 1995). As Maldonado-Torres (2008) 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 perspectives emerge. (Maldonado-Torres, 2008, p. 232) Thus, transmodernity, (Maldonado-Torres 2008) 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)

Conclusion  233 Transmodernity challenges modernity’s paradigm of war (MaldonadoTorres, 2008) 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, 2008, p. 232) but also reaches out to crucial counter-hegemonic impulses within the very core of the modern Western thinking to transgress the abyssal global lines (Sousa Santos, 2007). It is right here that post-abyssal thinking walks away from border thinking, not due to a negation of commonalities regarding the impact of the ruthless project of modernity, but due to 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. While the search for a general epistemology of the impossibility of a general epistemology is a leitmotiv of border theorists, they defend that such an aim could be achieved not necessarily by the radical cult of co-presence. Mignolo (2000) 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, while 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, 2000, p. 50). That is, an accurate analysis of the capitalist matrix implies a clear understanding of the colonial difference (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, 2000, 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, 2000). 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 modernity and coloniality” (Mignolo, 2000, p. 51). This re-geoconfiguration of the planet so well explains epistemological clashes between social constructions, such as Occident and Orient. Mignolo (2000) doesn’t 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

234  João M. Paraskeva condition of the emergence of orientalism: there cannot be an Orient, as the other, without the Occident as the same. (p. 51) Moreover, Mignolo (2000) 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 (2000) challenges us to defy canonical cults that view “modernity as an 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 (2000) 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 post-colonial through the de-colonial “shifting the geo and the politics of knowedge [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 d ­ e-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, 2000, p. 61) It is precisely here that Sousa Santos’ post-abyssal thinking complexifies border thinking and thinkers. The claim that border thinkers need to “walk

Conclusion  235 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 borderthinking 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 due to the mess that created destroys its 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” (Therborn, 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 poesis, such as Stalinism and Maoism. In a way, both dominant and counter-dominant perspectives were cornered in the same “tunnel of history” (Harding, 1998) and due to that not immune to the functionalist bug (Paraskeva, in press). While the former is the mastermind 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 is 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 counter-dominant platforms in the struggle against epistemicides. If modernity is a tool kit to revert the epistemicide, how come we are in debt

236  João M. Paraskeva to certain counter-dominant 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 counter dominant/counter hegemonic 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 which is at the very core of modern Western framework. If there is a movement that provoked major shifts in humanity—towards 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. With that said, my argument is that we need to be sentient of the clots that create a stroke of such transformations towards a full social and cognitive justice. That is, there is epistemological validity in certain counter-dominant 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 occurs out of ‘Nkrumahanian philosophical consciencism’ (1964), which understands, for example, differences between critical/(neo)Marxism and de-colonial thinking. Quijano (2000) together with Mignolo (2010) 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, 2010, pp. 16–17) De-colonial thinking, Mignolo (2010) 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 de-colonized attempt on Marxism we actually see in many African intellectuals, as we examined before, and in Abdel Khaliq Mahgoub in his “By Virtue of Marxism, Your Honor.” In his speech delivered in court right before he

Conclusion  237 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 de-colonial 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, p. 20) 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, 2010; Cho, 2012). It is in fact possible to identify some de-colonial murmurs in some approaches put forward by Marx and Engels. Obviously, such a claim does not undermine Marxism’s fundamental Eurocentric take. However, it is important to pay attention to some de-colonial 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 (1850). It is in such pieces (Marx & Engels, 1850; Anderson, 2010) that one needs to swim in Marx’s understanding of the colonial—decolonial processes. These writing show Marx concerned with capitalist modernity colonization’s 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 (& Engels) was very clear that nations such as Russia, India, China,

238  João M. Paraskeva and Algeria (and one could add Indonesia) “possessed social structures markedly different from those of Western Europe. Throughout his writings, [Marx & Engels] grappled with the question of the future development of these non-Western societies” (Anderson, 2010, p. 2); moreover, Marx and Engels’ New York Daily Tribune’s 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 U.S.], 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 though. 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 produce 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 the need to contextualized such nations (a) 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. While such a claim was not totally wrong, looking say to the African continent, in a 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

Conclusion  239 non-Western societies that, as documented, showed a different, stable, and less unequal social structure. That is, while on the 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 non-Western 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, due to the impact of such revolt within and beyond India, Marx’s 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 anti-colonial position (Jani, 2002). Marx’s approach on the revolt in India exhibits a refine understanding of the struggle of the colonizer—colonized. In too many occasions in his (theirs) New York Daily Tribune scripts, Jani (2002, p. 85) 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”. 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 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

240  João M. Paraskeva 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. Therborn (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’s 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 1990’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)

Conclusion  241 Such includes 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 socio-economic space, not only conned the Left in many ways into a “defensive position [but also forces need of a different] Marxist social dialectic” (Therborn, 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” (Therborn, 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 specifically a particular God and a particular man, i.e., the Western construction of God and man. That is, he (2008) argues, U.S. scholars 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

242  João M. Paraskeva 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 U.S., 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 within the current coloniality of power and being—an issue that McLaren (2008) covers yet superficially. Needless to say, I am not here undermining McLaren’s (2008) take, precisely the opposite. My argument is that, it would be important to see—like this volumes attempts to do—how concretely McLaren (2008) reacts towards the struggle against epistemicides (being the epistemicide a commodity), so welding within the modes and conditions of production of the capitalist society (Marx & Engels, 1853). While emphasizing the overall discredit of neoliberal ideologies, Therborn (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 we examined before and as we will see later on, 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. Therborn (2010) unfolds trans-socialism as Marxism’s non-Eurocentric next momentum, a perspective of social transformation that it is not post socialist since It 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. (Therborn, 2010, p. 61) Such trans-socialist perspective, Therborn (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

Conclusion  243 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 de-colonial processes, 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” (Bartolovich, 2002, p. 1). With this said and to rely on Bartolovich’s (2002) approach, to claim the need to a de-colonized Marxism is not a get together for “a world burial of socialism” (Galeano, 1991, p. 250; Bartolovich, 2002). The impact of Marxism within so many brilliant, prominent, and effective non-Western intellectuals is a clear sign of Marxism anti-colonial insights and de-colonial potential and should “give pause [to so many who frivolously dismiss Marxism as a [pure and nothing else] European philosophy” (Bartolovich, 2002). 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 (1995) 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 amongst Negri, Althusser, and DeLeuze already reveal ho Negri was quite concerned with Marxist theory’s capacity in addressing specific issues, such as virtuality, deterritorialization, ryzhoma, meterialidade e imaterialidade do trabalho, 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 a 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.

Linguisticidices: 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 de-colonial turn. Amin (2011, p. 168) contextualizes the linguistic struggle within a complex matrix of phonetic and conceptual writing. While China was five centuries ahead of Europe, the development of a strong diverse phonetic and conceptual writing invented in the Middle East was smashed with the advent of “capitalist modernity

244  João M. Paraskeva 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 co-existed dispositionally centuries before. The homogeneity of modern Western languages throughout the capitalist ­mantra—such as Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, French, English, and German, odd as that might be, some of them have a non-modern Western linguistic base—speaks volumes to one of the most important aspects of the modern Western coloniality. By imposing a uniform thesaurus to legitimate a paradigm of war (Maldonado-Torres, 2008), paving a specific understanding of the world and the word, modern Western thinking celebrated indigeneities as non-existent. As Anzaldua (2007) vociferates, within the modern Western linguistic board, chicanas are “desenguadas, somos los del espanol 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 since it not only challenges the modern Western cult of abyssal thinking but also attempts to dilute such a fictional vacuum between lines. In such a 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. The struggle against the Western Cartesian model cannot signify the substitution of the Cartesian model for another one. Also, the task is not to dominate such a 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 that promotes an epistemological euthanasia. Post-abyssal thinking, while an overt challenge against the colonialism and hegemony of English language (Macedo, Dendrinos, & Gounari, 2003), as well as a call to arms against all other forms of linguistic colonialism perpetrated by other modern Western languages (see Paraskeva, 2011), it 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 the need to walk away from all forms of romanticism regarding the non-modern 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

Conclusion  245 of such an 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, pro-Marxist influences. The replacement of such complex ante, anti, proMarxist influences for an “emptiness of third world nationalism is politically and theoretically a regression” (Ahmad, 2008, p. 44). ICT vividly alerts for such mutation so dear for the dominant and some counter-dominant modern Western epistemological platform. Nationalism (see Cabral, 1969; Lumumba, 1963; Machel, 1985; Nkrumah, 1964, 2006; Fanon, 1963), intentionally masks the fallacy of monolithism within non-modern Western epistemologies (Paraskeva, 2011). As a non-unifying category, nationalism implies progressive and retrograde kinds of impulses and so many different kinds 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, 2014, p. 168) is also being aware of the circuits of cultural production (see Johnson, 1986) through which such 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, The 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

246  João M. Paraskeva 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 of 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) Social totality not only denies but precisely depends on a rich epistemological diversity that has been silenced; it depends on the existence of ‘others’ historically montage as invisible, non-existent. 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 therefor 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 non-modern Western epistemologies are profoundly connected with the practices of production, reproduction and legitimation of a given episteme that is utterly a

Conclusion  247 poesis of dominance and coercion. The post-al debates within academia (Mignolo, 2011) beyond Eurocentrism and Occidentalism implies a relocation “of the ratio between geohistorical location and knowledge production” (p. 92). Such poesis 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 non-modern 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 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 de-linked 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 by 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 1980s. These African intellectuals led a movement in Kenya to abolish the Department of English at the University of Nairobi. wa Thiongo, Owuor-Anyumba & Lo Liyong (see wa Thiongo, 2012) 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 examine, understate, and study African social reality with an African standpoint and through African

248  João M. Paraskeva 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 post-colonial 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 post colonial momentum; they saw it as the ideological device through which gradually and steadily African societies would be remade. In this context, they defended the abolishment of all Departments of English in the entire continent.

The Clinamen: Towards an Ecology of Knowledges My argument is that the alternative thinking of alternatives implies learning to unlearn, a de-colonial take that aims a general epistemology of the impossibility of a general epistemology. Not to walk away but to crossover the 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 to defy not just the subalternization of particular forms of knowledge (Mignolo, 2012), but its production as non-existent (Sousa Santos, 2007). 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 due to 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 in a post-abyssal epistemology, which spans an ecology of knowledges. Post-abyssal thinking while, as we have examined before, implies a radical break with modern Western ways of thinking and acting, such a break doesn’t 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 counter-­hegemonic 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, 2007, p. 32)

Conclusion  249 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, 2007, p. 40) That is, the ecology of knowledges foster the new capacity for wonder and indignation, capable of grounding a new, nonconformist, 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, 2007, 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, 2007, p. 40). Such notion of action with clinamen, Sousa Santos (2007) 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. Hence, the clinamen, Sousa Santos (2007) 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-withclinamen 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)

250  João M. Paraskeva 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 sociability or subjectivity inside and outside Western modernity, those forms that have refused to be defined according to abyssal criteria. (Sousa Santos, 2007, p. 42) 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, p. 99) brings to the fore the thoughts of Jose Vasconcelos, a Mexican philosopher that “envisaged una raca mestizo, una mezcla de razas afines, una raza de color—la primera raza síntesis del globo”. He called such race “la raza cosmica” (Anzaldua, 2007, p. 99). Such 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 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 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 volume about the very color of one’s ideology. This is the real curriculum question of the twenty-first century. It is an ethical question.

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Index

abyssal thinking 31, 87n8, 224 – 227, 229 – 231, 233 – 235, 243 – 244, 248 – 250 Achebe, Chinua 121 – 122 African intellectuals 236, 247 Africana 117 – 146 Ahmad, Aijaz 244 – 245, 247 Amin, Samir 227, 231, 243 Anderson, Kevin 237 – 238 Andreotti, Vanessa 24, 33 – 34, 41, 195 – 197, 200, 229, 235 anti-abyssal 230 anti-colonial 32, 137, 167, 170, 228, 239, 243 anti-decolonial 32 Anzaldua, Gloria 94, 109 – 10, 114n9, 115n41, 170, 178n4, 243 – 244, 250 Apple, Michael 1 – 2, 4 – 9, 15, 20, 23, 33, 35 – 36, 42n3 Aronowitz, Stanley 4 – 6, 8, 11 Arrighi, Giovanni 27, 223 Auge, Marc Autio, Tero 26 Baker, Bernadette 4, 24, 38 – 39, 54 Bartolovitch, Crystal 243 Bauman, Zygmunt 223, 229 Bernstein, Basil 4, 35, 185 Bhabha, Homi 25, 207 – 208, 210, 212, 218n1 Boatca, Manuela 246 border thinking 231, 233 – 236, 240 Bourdieu, Pierre 35 Cabralism 96, 246 capitalism 1 – 3, 11, 14, 27, 33, 40, 52 – 54, 57, 59, 60 – 62, 68 – 69, 73, 75, 77, 85, 121, 124 – 125, 130, 137, 154, 163, 173, 192, 223, 227 – 230, 236 – 239, 241 – 243, 247

Carnoy, Martin 35 Cesaire, Aime 40, 147 – 63, 170, 172 Chomsky, Noam 2 – 4, 226 class 3, 5 – 6, 7 – 9, 12 – 16, 29 – 30, 37 – 38, 54 – 55, 59 – 61, 84, 94, 101, 107 – 109, 113, 130, 139, 142, 148, 152 – 153, 160, 176, 185, 210, 213, 223, 235 – 236, 239, 241 clinamen 248 – 250 cognitive justice 36 – 37, 40, 221, 236 colonialism 11, 13, 35, 40 – 41, 67, 69, 71, 76 – 77, 100 – 102, 154, 166, 168, 170, 174, 176 – 178, 195, 208, 218n1, 224, 227, 231, 237, 239 – 240, 243 – 244, 246 – 247 coloniality of being 248 coloniality of knowledge 162 coloniality of power 39, 163n1, 168, 242 common sense 6 – 7, 19, 37, 39, 51 – 53,  201 consciencism 250 counter hegemonic xi, 22, 26, 32, 159, 207, 229, 233, 236, 248 critical theory 8, 13, 15 – 17, 21 – 24, 27 – 28, 32 – 33, 37, 39, 68, 171, 177, 229 – 230, 235, 241 – 242 cultural politics 6, 12, 22, 28, 39, 63, 225 curriculum 1 – 43 curriculum relevance 33, 36 – 37 Darder, Antonia 7 – 8, 23, 31, 33 – 34, 36, 38 decolonial turn 33 – 42, 161, 165 – 178 decolonization 38, 41, 156 – 158, 160, 166 – 167, 169 – 172, 174 – 178, 232 decolonize critical theory 242 decolonize marxism 243 decolonizing the mind 116n46

256 Index decolonizing democracy 241 decolonizing knowledge 174 DeLeuze, Gilles 243 delinking 15, 227, 243 Derrida, Jacques 119 – 120, 129, 142, 210 deterritorialize 13, 25 development 2, 13, 27, 31, 73, 92, 107 – 108, 113, 117, 119, 122 – 123, 126 – 127, 132, 150, 152 – 154, 184, 187 – 188, 196, 198, 203n2, 227 – 228, 238, 243 Dewey, John 5 dialectic materialism 152 Dussel, Enrique 32, 40, 121, 147 – 148, 157 – 158, 161, 168, 170 – 172, 228, 232, 243 Eagleton, Terry 6, 33, 221 ecology of knowledges 39, 231, 235, 248 – 250 education 2 – 5, 7 – 9, 13 – 15, 17, 20, 22 – 23, 26 – 27, 30, 51 – 64, 85, 91 – 92, 100 – 102, 165, 174, 181 – 193, 195 – 204, 210, 221, 223, 241 – 242, 250 Egyptian 69 Ellsworth, Elizabeth 10 – 11, 37 – 38 empowerment 10, 37, 170, 174 epistemic privilege 234 epistemic racism 151, 154 – 155, 162 epistemic sexism 162 epistemological disenfranchisement 38 epistemicide 33, 35, 38 – 39, 80, 235 – 236, 242, 247, 250 Escobar, Arturo 32, 172, 237 epistemologies of the South 231 eugenics 2, 4, 7, 13, 17, 22, 27 – 28, 38 – 40, 184, 221, 230, 239, 241 – 242 eurocentrism 37, 67, 150, 154 – 155, 158, 173, 229, 238 – 239, 243, 247 – 248, 250 fascism 40, 55, 80 – 81, 227 – 228 Foucault, Michel 5, 16, 24, 73 Fanon, Frantz 117, 120, 122 – 123, 125, 128 – 129, 131 – 141, 143 – 144, 155, 167 – 172, 245 Fraser, Nancy 24, 229 – 230 Freire, Paulo 5, 17 – 19, 22, 94, 108 functionalism 13 – 33, 37, 71, 229 – 230 Galeano, Eduardo 1, 32, 243 gender 3, 5, 7, 9, 12, 14 – 15, 21, 32, 70, 148, 154, 162, 178, 201, 211, 221, 223, 230, 240 – 241, 250

genocide 19, 35, 96, 102, 195, 224, 243, 248 Giroux, Henry 4 – 9, 28, 33, 35 – 36, 39, 51 – 64, 113, 115n25, 223, 225 globalization 1 – 2, 31, 38, 40, 73, 76, 172, 223, 229, 231 Goody, Jack 67 – 70 Gordon, Lewis 117, 120, 122, 128 – 129, 131, 137 – 140, 141, 144, 170 – 171, 175, 178n6, 223 Gore, Jennifer 23 – 24, 26, 36 Gramsci, Antonio 4 – 7, 24 Grosfoguel, Ramon 32 – 33, 40, 147 – 163, 172 – 173, 178n5 Harding, Sandra 224, 235 – 236 Hardt, Michael & Negri, Toni 160 Harvey, David 1 – 2 Hassan, Salah 237 hegemony 4 – 8, 13, 16, 18 – 19, 21 – 25, 29, 37, 40, 67, 73, 96 – 97, 105, 147, 156, 159, 197, 200 – 201, 244 Henry, Paget 32 – 33, 40, 117 – 146, 171 history 4 – 5, 12, 14, 19 – 20, 22, 27, 38 – 39, 52, 57, 63, 67 – 70, 75, 83 – 84, 86, 92 – 94, 98, 102 – 103, 127, 129, 143 – 144, 185, 201, 207, 211, 214 – 216, 224, 227, 235 – 237, 239 – 240, 244 – 245 homogeneity 244 hooks, bell 114nn10 – 11 Huebner, Dwayne 4 – 5, 20, 33, 42n1, 223 human rights 42, 74, 81, 110, 186, 198 – 199, 203n2, 221 humanism 42, 169, 195 imperialism 69, 93, 163, 224 indigenoustude 244 – 245 inequality 3, 7, 16, 22 – 23, 32, 40, 51, 55 – 56, 59, 76, 97, 130, 139, 176, 192, 198, 200, 221, 224, 229, 237, 246 Islamic 154, 157 – 158, 162 Itinerant Curriculum Theory (ICT) 25, 244 – 245, 247, 250 James, C. L. 115n21,123 Johnson, Richard 245 Kliebard, Herbert 4 Ladson Billings, Gloria & Tate, William 27 Latour, Bruno 223, 227, 233 linguisticides 247

Index  257 Macdonald, James 4 Macdonald, James; Wolfson, Bradley & Zaret, Esther 46 Macedo, Donaldo 33, 40, 91 – 114 Maldonado Torres, Nelson 22, 32, 38, 40 – 41, 136, 140 – 141, 155, 165 – 178, 195, 231 – 233, 244 Marcuse, Herbet 178n6, 226 Marx, Karl 40, 147, 152 Marxism 34, 71, 149, 159, 230, 236 – 237, 239 – 240, 242 – 243 McCarthy, Cameron 14 – 15, 20, 25, 27, 33, 42, 207 – 218 McCarthy, Cameron & Apple, Michael 20 Mclaren, Peter 4 – 5, 8 – 9, 241 – 242 Memmi, Albert 98, 111, 116n46, 116n52 memory 25, 42, 63, 156, 208, 210 – 211, 215 – 217, 248 meritocracy 68 Mignolo, Walter 147, 160, 166, 171 – 172, 178n6 militant educators 57 modern 26, 31, 35, 38, 40 – 41, 52, 68 – 70, 73, 77, 79, 81, 97, 121, 124, 137, 142, 155, 157 – 158, 196, 217 modernity 3, 11, 23, 32, 35, 39, 41 – 42, 69 – 70, 77 – 78, 82, 86, 121, 148, 157 – 158, 223 – 224 modernity/coloniality research project (MC) 41, 158, 166 – 169, 171, 173 – 174, 178n6, 233 Munslow, Alun 39 Muslim 61, 162 neo-Marxism 24, 236 – 243 neocolonialism 69 neogramscianism 9, 22 – 23 neoliberalism 41, 181 – 193, 222 Nkrumah, Kwame 236, 245, 250 non-abyssal thinking 224 – 231, 248 non-West 2, 37, 117, 154 – 155, 162, 208, 228 – 229, 238 – 239, 242 – 243, 250 North (global) 74, 76 – 77 occidentalism 67 – 68, 70, 87n1, 234, 247 – 248 oppressed 2 – 3, 7, 18 – 19, 22, 29, 62, 84 – 85, 112, 159 – 160, 171, 230, 233, 238, 242 oppressor 84 Paraskeva, João, M. 1 – 43, 221 – 250 Pinar, William 4, 6, 8, 25, 33, 35 – 36, 42n2, 197

Popkewitz, Thomas 26 postmodernism 30, 34, 67, 158, 241 post-abyssal thinking 229 – 231, 233 – 235, 244, 248 – 249 poverty 7, 23, 36, 54, 60, 192, 197, 199, 213, 221, 224, 229, 235 power matrix 3, 157 – 158, 248 Quantz, Richard 24, 27 – 30 Quijano, Anibal 41, 166, 168, 171, 195, 236, 246 – 248 race 3, 5, 7, 9, 12, 14 – 15, 21, 26 – 28, 43n4, 63n2, 100, 102, 114n7, 118, 121, 142, 148, 195, 212 – 213, 222 – 223, 241, 250 radical co-presence 231 – 236, 244, 250 Renaissance 70, 209, 234 representationalism 195 Said, Edward 209, 239 Sanya, B. Patel, R. & McCarthy, C. 207 – 218 Sassen, Saskia 21 Schwab, Joseph 223 scientificity 73, 225 segregation 3, 7, 97, 108, 137, 140, 155, 174, 202, 221 – 223, 235 – 236 semiotic 120, 235 sexuality 5, 148, 154, 162, 178, 211 slavery 61, 102, 140, 156, 168, 178, 214, 224 Sloterdjik, Peter 87n4 Smith, Linda 170 social justice 5, 19, 30, 37, 40, 195, 201, 203n1 sociology of absences 79, 87n11 Sousa Santos, Boaventura 11, 25, 27, 31 – 33, 35 – 40, 67 – 87, 162, 221, 223 – 231, 233 – 234, 236, 248 – 250 South (Global) 74, 76 – 77, 161, 230 state 2 – 3, 6, 15, 18 – 19, 23, 26, 39, 53 – 60, 77, 84, 91 – 92, 106, 112, 115n21, 118, 131, 133 – 134, 137 – 138, 188 – 189, 192, 212, 222 – 223, 240 – 241, 244 subjectification of debt 27, 62, 235 subjective economy 165, 176, 225 synopticality xi Tlostanova, Madina & Mignolo Walter 231, 234 – 235 Torres Santome, Jurjo 31, 33, 41, 181 – 193 translation 80, 178n1

258 Index transmodernity 40, 147, 157 – 158, 173, 231 – 236 wa Thiong’o, Ngugi 116n45, 209, 247 – 248 Wallerstein, Immanuel 2, 41, 166, 168 Watkins, William 8, 23, 26 Western eurocentric 222 Western modernity 3, 11, 39, 70, 77 – 78, 82, 86, 223, 231, 235, 239, 246, 248, 250 Western-centric 162 – 163

Wexler, Phil 4 – 6, 8 – 10, 35 Whitty, Geoff 4, 20, 35 Willis, Paul 4 Wraga, William 26 Wright, Erik Olin 8 Yoruba 122, 125 Young, Michael 20, 35 Young, Michael & Whitty, Geoff 20, 35 Zinn, Howard 2 Žižek, Slavoj 3, 23, 34