Pedagogies of Difference

Rethinking Education for Social Justice

Peter Pericles Trifonas, Peter Pericles Trifonas

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2003
• ISBN:
  9781135955090
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

Peter Pericles Trifonas has assembled internationally acclaimed theorists and educational practitioners whose essays explore various constructions, representations, and uses of difference in educational contexts. These essays strive to bridge competing discourses of difference--for instance, feminist or anti-racist pedagogical models--to create a more inclusive education that adheres to principles of equity and social justice.

1

Toward a Decolonizing Pedagogy: Social Justice Reconsidered

CARLOS TEJEDA, MANUEL ESPINOZA, AND KRIS GUTIERREZ

Colonization, which sets out to change the order of the world, is, obviously, a pro-gram of complete disorder. But it cannot come about as a result of magical prac-tices, nor of a natural shock, nor of a friendly understanding. Decolonization, as we know, is a historical process: That is to say it cannot be understood, it cannot become intelligible, nor clear to itself except in the exact measure that we can discern the movements which give it historical form and content. (Fanon 1963:36)

I cannot be a teacher if I do not perceive with even greater clarity that my prac-tice demands of me a definition of where I stand. A break with what is not right ethically. I must choose between one thing and another thing. I cannot be a teacher and be in favor of everyone and everything. I cannot be in favor merely of people, humanity, vague phrases far from the concrete nature of educative prac-tice. Mass hunger and unemployment, side by side with opulence, are not the result of destiny. (Freire 1998:93)

In the contemporary contexts of what many refer to as the United States, working-class indigenous and nonwhite peoples are often reduced to ontological foreigners in the very space and time they occupy. In these contexts, people are assaulted by multiple and mutually constitutive forms of violence in the various dimensions—the economic, the cultural, the political, the linguistic, the sexual, the spatial, the psychological, and epistemological—of their daily lives. Defining violence as “any relation, process, or condition by which an individual or group violates the physical, social, and/or psychological integrity of another person or group,” Bulhan (1981:53) explains that violence inhibits human growth, negates inherent potential, limits productive living, and causes death. We contend that one cannot ignore this violence when calling for social justice, and that it is necessary to define explicitly one’s particular understanding of the term—in other words, the meaning of social justice that grounds one’s politics and projects. Meanings are never neutral; they are always situated socially, culturally, and historically, and they operate within the logic of differing ideologies that imply differing sets of social practices. These practices, in turn, serve and sustain particular sets of interests, while they simultaneously work against others. Hence, we argue that any notion of social justice should be interrogated with the following questions: What ideologies underlie particular notions of social justice? Who benefits from the instantiation of those notions? At whose expense are those notions instantiated?

We argue for a notion of social justice that recognizes that the contemporary United States is essentially characterized by an internal neocolonialism (Almaguer 1974; Barrera 1979; Blauner 1972) that has its origins in the mutually reinforcing systems of colonial and capitalist domination and exploitation that enslaved Africans and dispossessed indigenous populations throughout the seventeenth, eighteenth, and nineteenth centuries. We insist on a notion of social justice that acknowledges that the forms of violence and “microaggressions” (Davis 1995) experienced by dominated and exploited groups in the context of everyday life are both normalized and officially sanctioned by dominant ideologies and institutional arrangements in American society. Most importantly, we argue for a notion of social justice that sees dismantling our internal neocolonial condition and abolishing its multiple forms of violence as preconditions to the existence of justice between all peoples inhabiting the contemporary United States.

Working-class indigenous and nonwhite peoples’ interests cannot be represented by amnesia-ridden notions of social justice that ignore the current manifestations and effects of the corporal and cultural genocide that has been taking place in American society throughout the past four centuries. At worst, many of these notions are calls for social reform that ignore the racial and cultural dimensions of the social injustice we inherit from our colonial and capitalist past; at worst, they are calls for a more socially equitable (i.e., racially and ethnically diverse) participation in the existing structures of domination and exploitation. For us, the struggle for social justice is inextricably tied to the struggle for a politics and praxis of anticapitalist decolonization in the mutually constitutive terrains of social existence—in the economic, the cultural, the political, the juridical, and the educational. Focusing specifically on the educational terrain, we argue for engaging in the struggle for social justice through a decolonizing pedagogical praxis.

In this chapter, we outline an emergent theory of pedagogy—a decolonizing pedagogy—that stands in stark contrast to most social justice pedagogies currently in vogue. More specifically, we propose the concept of a decolonizing pedagogy to address the issue of social justice from and within the educational arena. We argue that an anticapitalist decolonizing pedagogical praxis is a concrete way to struggle for a social justice that serves the interests of working-class indigenous and nonwhite peoples in the internal neocolonial contexts of the contemporary United States. In what follows, we define our developing conception of a decolonizing pedagogy by providing a provisional definition of the term and outlining its constituent elements. This is followed by a discussion of some fundamental premises of our call for a decolonizing pedagogy and an outline of conceptual frameworks that currently inform its conceptualization. We conclude with a discussion of decolonizing pedagogical praxis that outlines its curricular contents and explicates its grounding in cultural-historical conceptions of learning and development.

WHY SOCIAL JUSTICE FROM A DECOLONIZING PERSPECTIVE?

In California’s recent past, voter propositions designed to eliminate health and educational services to “undocumented, immigrant” populations (Proposition 187), to roll-back the limited civil rights gains of the 1960s (Proposition 209), and to prohibit the use of the home language in teaching and learning (Proposition 227) have been the order of the day. To some people, these propositions are mere vestiges of a racial discrimination and a social inequality that persist despite a long and concerted effort to uphold the founding ideals (e.g., liberty, democratic participation, and equality) of the American nation. To us, these policies are refurbished historical practices that produce racial and class domination and reiterate century-old questions: What are the value and place of nonwhite peoples in an Anglo-European nation and society? What should be the role of education for poor, indigenous, and nonwhite children?

These recent policies are manifestations of contemporary struggles and conflicting interests between differing groups in a neocolonial context that has been imposed, maintained, and dominated by Anglo-Europeans since the seventeenth century. They are manifestations of power, domination, conflict, and struggle that can be traced to European conquest, colonization, and imperialist expansion throughout the seventeenth, eighteenth, and nineteenth centuries.

While we acknowledge that the past is obviously not the present, we argue that the present can neither exist nor be understood outside of the past. It is impossible for social subjects to be ontologically disconnected; their being in the world cannot be detached from and unaffected by the time and space they have already occupied. In our recent past, social subjects, social relations, and forms of social organization have been so fundamentally marked by colonialism and capitalism that we believe it is naïve, erroneous, and even deceitful to contemplate our present existence without an analysis and understanding of the unfolding enconcretizations and effects of these. We are not, of course, arguing that we are living the actual colonialism or capitalist colonialism of the seventeenth, eighteenth, and/or nineteenth century. Clearly, many of the processes and practices of that colonial and capitalist domination and exploitation have evolved, have been altered, have been abandoned, or have been legally terminated. But it is also clear that essential features of that domination and exploitation continue to structure the social relations among differing groups in American society. We insist on discussing contemporary notions and issues of social justice from a decolonizing perspective because we understand that for working class indigenous and nonwhite peoples and their descendants the materialization of social justice, on the one hand, and the discrediting and dismantling of the lasting effects and contemporary manifestations of our capitalist colonialism, on the other hand, are inseparable.

FUNDAMENTAL PREMISES OF A DECOLONIZING PEDAGOGY

A basic premise of our call for a decolonizing pedagogy is that the dominant economic, cultural, political, judicial, and educational arrangements in contemporary American society are those of an internal neocolonialism produced by the mutually reinforcing systems of colonial and capitalist domination and exploitation that have organized social relations throughout the history of what today constitutes the United States. Given the underlying significance of this premise, we elaborate on the concept of internal neocolonialism.

The concept of internal neocolonialism we employ to characterize the dominant condition of social existence in the United States is indebted to the work of Barrera (1979) and Almaguer (1974). Barrera employs the concept in the development of a theory of racial inequality that is proposed as an alternative to the theories of deficiency, theories of bias, and theories of structural discrimination that attempted to explicate the issue of the Chicana/o inequality in the United States. In outlining this theory, he offers a discussion of colonialism and internal colonialism that is essential to the notion of internal neocolonialism we propose. Colonialism is defined by Barrera as follows:

Colonialism is a structured relationship of domination and subordination, where the dominant and subordinate groups are defined along ethnic and/or racial lines, and where the relationship is established and maintained to serve the interests of all or part of the dominant group (193).

Internal colonialism is distinguished from colonialism in the following terms:

Internal colonialism is a form of colonialism in which the dominant and subordinate populations are intermingled, so that there is no geographically distinct, “metropolis” separate from the “colony.” (194)

Almaguer (1974) links internal colonialism in the United States to advanced monopoly capitalism in a manner that is also essential to our developing concept of internal neocolonialism. In his examination of Chicana/o oppression in North America, Almaguer calls for a simultaneous analysis of capitalist and colonial structures, arguing that both the historical process of colonization (be it classical colonialism, neocolonialism, or internal colonialism) and the rise and spread of capitalism should be viewed as fundamental in the organization of social and economic power in the United States. He explains that the histories of oppressed peoples have been largely formed both by the rise of capitalism and the expansion of colonial domination, and he further theorizes that there is a dialectical relationship in the development of monopoly capitalism and the development of internal colonialism. He describes this relationship as follows:

...the colonial expansionism by which the U.S. absorbed vast territories paved the way for the incorporation of its non-white colonial labor force. This contributed in turn to the accelerated process of capital accumulation. Necessary for the development of modern capitalism... not only did internal colonialism and monopoly capitalism develop concurrently, but... both processes are intimately interrelated and feed each other. At the same time that the utilization of non-whites as a controlled, colonized labor force contributed to the development of the U.S. as a major metropolis of the international capitalist system, the attendant class system in the U.S. provided a means of reinforcing a racially and culturally defined social hierarchy... (42)

As this passage indicates, capitalism did not simply develop side by side with internal colonial domination; it became inextricably interrelated with it. More significantly, Almaguer contends that capitalism is now the dominant mode of production and that it continues to systematically perpetuate a colonial domination in which the brunt of its oppression and class contradictions “have been largely carried over on racial terms and fall on the backs of colonized people of color” (1974:42).

We define the dominant condition characterizing social existence in what today constitutes the United States as a colonial one because there continues to be a structured relationship of cultural, political, and economic domination and subordination between European whites on the one hand, and indigenous and nonwhite peoples on the other. What’s more, this relationship (which was imposed and institutionalized throughout the seventeenth, eighteenth, and nineteenth centuries and has been maintained, in essence, up to the present) continues to serve primarily the interests of the dominant white, English–speaking, and Christian population. We qualify it as an internal colonial condition because the colonizing/dominant and colonized/subordinate populations coexist, are often socially integrated, and even share citizenship within the same national borders. What’s more, we see this internal colonial condition, its forms of social organization, and its institutional apparatuses as inextricably tied to and perpetuated by capitalism and capitalist social relations—a capitalism that Almaguer discussed as advanced monopoly capitalism and we currently see as global capitalism (Stromquist and Monkman 2000; McLaren and Farahmandpur 2000). Our conception of internal colonialism, then, assumes the fundamentality of capitalism and capitalist social relations in the various dimensions of our neocolonial condition and social interaction.

We propose expanding the concept from internal colonialism to internal neocolonialism because we think it is necessary to distinguish between the forms of domination, oppression, and exploitation of the internal colonialism of the seventeenth, eighteenth, and nineteenth centuries, and the forms of domination, oppression, and exploitation that have characterized the internal colonialism of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Landmark legislation and its effects (e.g., the Emancipation Proclamation, the Fourteenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, the Indian Citizenship Act, Brown vs. Board of Education, the Civil Rights Act, the Voting Rights Act, the Indian Self-Determination and Education Assistance Act, and the Native American Languages Act) have altered the nature of the domination, oppression, and exploitation of subordinated groups. We think it is fundamentally important to acknowledge and account for significant changes in the condition that has characterized social existence in the United States. The past is obviously not the present, nor is the condition of the nineteenth century the same as the condition of the twenty-first century. We contend, however, that the condition characterizing the present maintains essential features of the condition that characterized social the past.

It is important to point out that our argument about the continuity of colonial relations is not grounded in simplistic representations of colonizing and the colonized populations. We are cognizant that the population of settling and invading Europeans was defined by difference and division along ethnic, linguistic, gender, and social class lines—not even the dominant population of Anglos was socially homogenous. Similarly, we are aware that there was tremendous diversity among both the indigenous population and African slaves. We are conscious that in referring to indigenous people, African slaves, and their descendants, we reference people from a plurality of groups with differing cultures, languages, and forms of social organization. Similarly, our conception of the processes and practices (both past and present) of colonialism acknowledges that not all European groups (nor differing social groups within the dominant Anglo population) have been equally complicit in the colonial relations of domination and exploitation that have taken place. Not all European groups have benefited equall...

Table of contents

• Front Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction. Pedagogies of Difference: Locating Otherness
• 1 Toward a Decolonizing Pedagogy: Social Justice Reconsidered
• 2 Challenging the Construction of Difference as Deficit: Where Are Identity, Intellect, Imagination, and Power in the New Regime of Truth?
• 3 Derrida, Pedagogy, and the Calculation of the Subject
• 4 Pedagogies of Difference, Race, and Representation: Film as a Site of Translation and Politics
• 5 Discomforting Truths: The Emotional Terrain of Understanding Difference
• 6 The Struggle for Happiness: Commodified Black Masculinities, Vernacular Culture, and Homoerotic Desires
• 7 Inside Noah’s Tent: The Sodomitical Genesis of Race in the Christian Imagination
• 8 Queer Pedagogies: Camping Up the Difference
• 9 Toward an Integrative Approach to Equity in Education
• 10 Toward a Deconstructive Pedagogy of Différance
• Contributors
• Index