Betweener Talk

Decolonizing Knowledge Production, Pedagogy, and Praxis

Marcelo Diversi, Claudio Moreira

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781315433035
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Languages & Linguistics
• Subtopic: Communication Studies
• Index: Languages & Linguistics

In this literary, co-constructed narrative, two Brazilian scholars explore the spaces "in-between"—between their own biographies, one raised privileged, the other poor; between the experience of being raised in Brazil and finding acceptance in United States universities; between their lives in the academic establishment and their studies of poverty in Latin America; between the constraints of apolitical scholarship and the need to promote social justice; between contrasting styles of researching, theorizing, and writing. Their dialogue seeks to decolonize the world of American scholarship and promote the use of research toward inclusive social justice.

Part I
Betweenness and Decolonizing Resistance

Chapter 1
The Beginnings of a Critical Postcolonial Duo

Betweener Talk

We can't press the keys at the same time. But this introduction and the entire book are ours. Equally ours. Even as I type this sentence, 2,000 miles away from my writing partner, I know that these words, meanings, intentions, and emotions reside not in me but in us. Most of what we have written in this book inhabits the memories of our conversations, discussions, and occasional disagreements. We already do not remember who first brought up a significant number of ideas and concepts central to this book. And after a few attempts at keeping the story straight, we gave in and embraced the exhilarating experience of truly co-constructing a book together. We have found a dialogic voice that has made our individual work more meaningful, grounded, and, yes, fulfilling. We have found a voice we did not have in our work alone, a voice that seems, to both of us, more vibrant, truer to our experiences as betweeners and decolonizing scholars. Indeed, because of our collaboration in every line of this book, we feel we have achieved a higher understanding of what it means to be a betweener and a postcolonial scholar. Even when each of our voices is clear, as in the stories in Part III, we can see the questions, suggestions, and approving nods from each other that form the canvas on which these slices of lived experiences were drawn.

But because we experienced growing up and doing research in Brazil from significantly different perspectives, we also attempt to present our individual views on the central themes of this book: social justice, betweeners, oppression, the classroom as a site for struggle against ideologies of domination, methodology, and the role of decolonizing inquiry in knowledge production in the 21st century. We have decided to present our perspectives in the form of dialogue in order to recapture, as closely as we can, the very dialogic process that gave birth to this book.

We see this book as a stage where we perform our dialogue over social justice in the world we inhabit. In this stage, you will find three authorial voices: the co-constructed dialogical narration, as explained above, then Cláudio's, then Marcelo's. We hope you will find other voices as well as you read about our encounters with humans living at the margins of Brazilian society and knowledge production. We are not elected representatives of the worlds we describe and act on. But we have been shaped and marked by these worlds. And it is from these worlds that we speak and write.

Things We Talk about When Sitting at the Curb

"Why did you have to go to an American university to study Brazilian street children?" my friend Cláudio asked as we sat down on the curb in front of my parents' home in Brazil.

I didn't answer right away. I perceived the question as loaded with a postcolonial critique, partially because I had been asking myself the same question, but mostly because I was familiar with Cláudio's incisive challenges of the arrogance with which academics construct knowledge about oppression from the comfort of a privileged life. I also hesitated in my answer because of the sudden seriousness his question had brought to our long night of music, drinking, and delicious conversations about everything and nothing much—the things of our friendship throughout the years.

Not wanting to do the work, I joked about being a colonizer wanting to document the lives of the natives. Cláudio kept his eyes on mine, silent, smiling yet serious. He wasn't going to let me off the hook the easy way.

"I didn't learn the theories and methods to do this type of work until I started grad school," I said feeling a bit self-conscious about those two words—theories and methods.

"But how can you understand what these kids go through living so far away, in a safe place, taking classes from folks who know nothing about the hardships of Brazilian streets?" Claudio pressed on.

"Exactly! These theories and methods are not saying I can completely understand these kids' lives but that I can examine the social forces shaping their lives and portray their experiences in comparison and contrast with my own privileged upbringing here in Brazil."

"I don't know about that. Look, I know you mean well. I believe you care about these kids and their condition. But how can your study help these kids? You come, enter their lives, collect your stories, then you leave and go back to the beauty of your American campus. You get a degree and advance your career. But these kids will continue to get shot at."

I knew Cláudio too well to take his comments as a personal accusation. Not to mention that his points rang true whichever way I turned them. Yes, I wanted to be doing something meaningful, but I believed there was more to it than my personal advancement. I have since wavered at times in my dialogic conviction, but during those days of street fieldwork I felt as strongly as ever that the only way to more inclusive systems of social justice was through the expansion of the dominant discourse about the Other. And this discursive expansion had to be done by challenging binary systems of either/or, normal childhood/abnormal childhood, good kid/bad kid, us/them, more human/less human, children/little criminals. Ideologies of domination, such as the one behind street children, depend on people accepting that humans can be summed up by essentializing dichotomies of self.

"Emic narratives about life in the streets can help others see these kids as more than little criminals," I finally said in rapid fire.

"Emic what?"

There. I had used jargon that carried a whole library of scholarship meaningful to me, but not to Claudio at the time.

"Look, it's not a new idea. And it's certainly not my own. Think about it this way. How do most people know about street kids?" I asked.

"From what they see in the streets, the news, the movies," Cláudio replied.

"Right! So people form their views of street kids from the narratives available to them. And these narratives are very one-sided, told from the point of view of the privileged, the ones with space to circulate their stories in the main channels that inform public opinion in our society. This is what the theories I am studying call dominant discourse. And in my view, the dominant discourse about street kids present them in only two ways, as victims and as little criminals. The emic perspective that I mentioned attempts to add the stories from the inside, from the kids and those working with them on a daily basis. These voices are missing from the dominant discourse, and this omission does great damage to all, especially to street kids, for they are among the most vulnerable in our society."

"Aren't you saying the same thing, that they are victims of society?"

"What I am trying to say is that their vulnerability is what makes them victims so often, victims to violence, abuse, and neglect. These kids are poor, darker-skinned, homeless, hungry, all of which would make the beginning of life pretty hard. And to top it off, these kids don't have parents, relatives, or any other caring and invested adults around to protect, guide, discipline, or supervise. Anyway, that is the sort of thing that these theories and methods are trying to examine and incorporate into the dominant discourse. They are lenses, tools, angles, etc. that point researchers to parts of experience that are missing from artificial yet pervasive dichotomous representations of the Other. In the case of street kids, these theories and methods might help me fill in some of the missing parts, like how do these kids make sense of their lives in the streets? What are their views about hunger, drugs, crime, justice, identity, choice, and future? What are their fears, joys, and dreams? How did they leave home? Why don't they go back? How come they prefer the streets to the shelters in town? E por ai vai, and on it goes."

"Hum."

"It's not a formula or magic power. It's about trying hard to listen to the Other with maximum attention and the least amount of prejudgment I can, even as I try just as hard to be aware of what my prejudgments may be."

"And how can all this, with the big words I don't understand, and that I am sure the street kids don't understand, how can all of this help these kids?" Cláudio asked.

"I don't think my research can help these kids very much," I said.

"So why do you do it, then?"

"Because I believe future lives can be improved by this kind of work. Once more people begin to see themselves in these kids' life stories, once these kids become less strange and more familiar to the critical mass, then there will be more political and systemic pressure for society at large to intervene in more humanizing ways. I don't have hard evidence to back up this belief. But I think it's a reality-grounded belief anyway. It is said that Victor Hugo's writings on the street urchins of Paris in the early 1800s, especially his writings about Gavroche, 'le Gamin de Paris,' the street kid of Paris, in Les Misérables, touched the popular thinking about Parisian street kids to the point of positive change. George Orwell wrote that he thought Charles Dickens changed the way people saw childhood and street urchins through his novels about the conditions of the urban poor in England. I don't mean to compare myself with such genius. It's possible my writings about street kids will never amount to much. But that is the idea behind my project. Get the unheard stories of lived experience out there. Expand the dominant discourse about street kids. Hopefully get people to see them beyond the little criminal image of today. Offer glimpses into these kids' lives. Move people to do something to change the current system. Perhaps this type of research and writing can help fuel some of that."

"I've never read these authors, but now I think I understand your point better. It's like what Chico Buarque has done here in Brazil through his music and poetry. It seems like a lot of people have become more aware about the struggle of the poor through his songs, especially because most of his audience is middle and upper class folk, formally educated and with more power to change things," Cláudio said.

"Yes, of course, like Chico Buarque! I hadn't thought about him," I said, now glad Claudio had started this conversation.

Look at what Chico Buarque did for the resistance against the military regime. His songs, so full of symbolic nuance and double-meaning, allowed a whole generation of youth and adults to express their discontent with the military regime's censorship, oppression of civil rights, and political dictatorship. He did help change the dominant discourse, as you say," Cláudio said giving me a teasing smile.

I was grateful to him, Cláudio, my good friend, for helping me make another important connection between resistance theory and practice of resistance, between art and social sciences.

"It will be interesting to talk about this again in 10 or 20 years," Cláudio said as we got up from the curb to go inside the house.

Crossing Paths, Making Bridges

Glimpses

Glimpse 1, around 1987

It was a long time ago, around the time I met Marcelo. Marcelo and I were talking and then he opened his wallet. Could not help myself. Never saw so many bills inside a wallet before. It's the thug in me. Marcelo, I am sure, did not notice a thing.

Glimpse 2, around 2005

Marcelo is now a construction worker with a drunken boss in Utah. I am trying to figure out how I can get out of my mess in Champaign. I don't want be a grad student for much longer.

Glimpse 3, around 1994

CLÁUDIO: "Hey, I'm only joking. I'm not racist. I make jokes about everybody. Blacks, blondes, gays.... I make jokes about myself all the time." MARCELO: "So stop making them. Hope you understand one day."

Glimpse 4, around 2007

With my moving fingers in front of my computer at home:

I am understanding

Learning

Becoming

The Brazilian white

Hybrid

The Bastard male product of the colonial rape

Somehow the product of the European fucker sounds okay

Thank you my brother.

Glimpse 5, around 2000

A day at the lake. Marcelo and I, other friends with us, walking along Michigan Avenue, Chicago, singing the Brazilian national anthem.

Glimpse 6, around 2001

Lost, I'm totally lost. I just came back from my fieldwork with soccer fans in Brazil. Now, I have to write a master thesis, and I don't know how. It's very confusing. I open Marcelo's dissertation. It's all there. I feel empowered. My good friend did a beautiful job. I start to understand his work and also to find my way. Marcelo is not the colonizing ethnographer.

This glimpse takes me to ...

Glimpse 7, June 1994

After a long night and many beers, Marcelo and I sit down on the curb in front of a bar that just closed. It is already dawn. It's gonna be a beautiful day. Putting my hand in front of my eyes to shade the first sunlight, I say to Marcelo: "So, now you are one of them. You come here," I say with a hint of irony, "study the street kids, and then go back to that beautiful university of yours. What's the name of the town, Champaign? Like the fancy French drink? You go back to your good life in the States. What about the street kids?"

Central Metaphor: Betweeners, Life In-Between

This book is about living at the margins, written from the standpoint of two betweeners. It is a book about our encounters with Brazilian street kids, sugar cane workers, organized soccer fan clubs, the production of knowledge, and, of course, the self. We are Brazilians living as academics in the United States, studying back-alley lives in Brazil. In our ethnographic fieldwork in Brazil, we are insiders as fellow nationals yet outsiders as researchers. We move from the poor inequality of the streets to the rich inequality of our families' homes. We are two friends from European-colonized Brazil who had to come to the United States to learn about Paulo Freire's conscientization and postcolonial inquiry. We are treated as white in Brazil and as colored in the United States of America. We can speak street vernacular as Brazilian natives yet have trouble discussing Pedagogy of the Oppressed in its original language—our own mother tongue, Portuguese. In Brazil, where we were born, we are called gringos by the folks we work with. In the U.S.A., where we live, the establishment calls us aliens. We call ourselves betweeners: (un)conscious bodies experiencing life in and between two cultures.

We are claiming this position, betweener, not to fix our identities but to situate ourselves in the socially constructed, fluid space from which we are writing, thinking, and giving meaning to the experiences represented in this book. This name does not tell the whole story about who we are and the type of scholarship we are trying to advance in this book, but we believe it gives us a starting point for the dialogic thinking in which we want to engage with readers. It also forecasts, we believe, other layers of betweenness informing the praxis and writing at play in this book: interdisciplinarity, representational blurriness, and the politics of knowledge production.

As you move into the more theoretical parts of this book, you will notice that we believe all humans experience this betweenness, although at varying degrees of intensity and cost. Living between the modern assumptions of childhood innocence and delinquent behavior, as street kids do, is certainly more intense and costly than, say, living as privileged foreigners in the U.S.A. In advancing this common assumption of betweenness, we are not attempting to level out or trivialize experiences of lived oppression. We do not all suffer the same way, with the same intensity, or under similar systems of (in) justice. We r...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Foreword
• Acknowledgments
• Part I Betweenness and Decolonizing Resistance
• Part II Stories from the Margins
• Part III Methodological Acts/Detours and Postcolonial Resistance: Decolonizing Scholarship for Social Justice in the 21st Century
• References
• Index
• About the Authors