18. Education in an interconnected world: experiences of liberation in the global South

Any reading, regardless of its origin, which favors a monocultural analysis of the world’s diversity, reproduces an exclusivist logic. The Eurocentric rational project will create alterity as a previous space/time, where knowledge considered ‘inferior’ circulated, with local reach (MENESES, 2018). This was the counterpoint that legitimized the violent imposition of the hierarchical structure that underlies the power-knowledge relationship of modern scientific thought (ALATAS, 1974). This relationship operates through the permanent imposition of an abyssal thinking that divides the world into two parts: the modern Eurocentric world, on the one hand, and the ‘other’ spaces, colonial, of tradition, of the primitive, on the ‘other’ side of the line (SANTOS, 2007: 45-47). In this context, the global South refers metaphorically to the beings and knowledges that have been silenced, localized or destroyed as a result of the violent relationship between capitalism, colonialism and patriarchy and otherness. This is why the global South is simultaneously an ontological, political and epistemological utopian proposal. In the field of education – the domain of culture – colonization has acted through processes of violent political and epistemological intervention, which have resulted in the suspension of the organic growth of the institutions and histories of the colonized. As a conceptual structure that generates policies of violence, colonialism necessarily has various readings, depending on the power relations that justify this intervention. If in the colonizing countries colonial action was legitimized and continues to be legitimized in the form of a ‘civilizing contribution’, for the colonized, speaking from their experience, colonialism contains within itself a violent oppressive force, as identified by Césaire: I speak of societies emptied of themselves, of cultures trampled underfoot, of institutions undermined, of lands confiscated, of religions murdered, of artistic magnificence annihilated, of extraordinary possibilities suppressed (CÉSAIRE, 1955: 12). Consequently, colonization has translated into countless acts of genocide and epistemicide (SANTOS, 2018), linguicide (THIONG’O, 1993) and epistemic injustice (BHARGAVA, 2013), the effects of which continue to be felt in the daily lives of many educational realities. Conquest, the object of the colonial adventure, refers not only to goods and land; on the contrary, its ultimate goal is to conquer the cultures and minds of the colonized, filling their references with Eurocentric proposals. In a premeditated way, modern colonization, as an instrument of power, has insidiously sought to erase or reaffirm the peripheralization of beings and knowledge that do not conform to its references, erasing references to other pasts prior to European arrival. One of the pillars of this process, especially in what has been theorized as settlement colonies (MENESES, 2018), is the attempt to either destroy or sideline the knowledge of colonized and subalternized people, through the violent imposition of exogenous concepts and categories that guaranteed and continue to guarantee the representation and Eurocentric geopolitical direction of the ‘new’ territories and subjects (MUDIMBE, 1988). By trying to interrupt the educational priorities of the societies it subjected, colonialism produced (re)constructions of identities and histories, reconstructing, based on its references, the narrative and image of the colonized (MENESES, 2016). In today’s African contexts, even though most of the colonies have achieved political independence, the colonial relationship is still present at a political and epistemological level – the knowledge of the ‘others’ is still conceptualized as inferior or local, reproducing the colonizer-colonized epistemological domination. In many of the countries that have emerged from the colonial relationship, the modern Eurocentric project continues to perpetuate itself through education, where school usually plays the role of standardizing and homogenizing the knowledge that is considered valid. Eurocentrism, as a civilizing project, is based on an immense body of hegemonic knowledge: the epistemologies of the North. Insisting on the myth of ‘Europe’ as the center of knowledge (MBEMBE, 2014: 128), this modern project insists on imposing itself – at the level of fundamental categories – as a mirror of the knowledge society, thus generating an arrogant abyssal ignorance of the colonized side. This is how the non-recognition of beings and knowledge that (re)exist in territories subjected to oppression, the global South, is perpetuated. A global approach to the colonial educational process reveals the paradoxical nature of the colonization process, associated with various attempts at assimilation and cultural homogenization (BAGCHI et al., 2014). However, as Paulo Freire emphasized (1987), the awareness of the nature of their situation by the oppressed, as well as the identification of the oppressor, are key elements for involvement in a liberating struggle, based on their strengths, lived experiences and knowledge. Among the peoples of former colonies, the permanence of colonial relations is obvious. One example is the ‘obligation’ to use colonial languages in education (with national/autochthonous languages being relegated to local use, replaced by the languages of the colonizers); other examples come from the expropriation of fragments of knowledge from indigenous worlds, which are extracted and appropriated by Northern epistemologies to build the wealth of the colonizers (TUCK and YANG, 2012: 4). The occupation of territories, the transformation of their peoples into foreigners in their own land is one of the examples that illustrates the intimate relationship between capitalism and racial colonialism, a relationship full of violence: “They [colonos] arrived, They saw, They named and They imposed” (SMITH, 1999: 80). Following Fanon’s analysis of colonial violence, in this panel colonialism is used in a broad sense to refer to modern modes of domination based on epistemological and ontological deprivation, i.e. the refusal to recognize the full humanity of the other (MENESES, 2018). Participation in the emancipatory processes of the South has proved instrumental in denouncing situations of ‘subalternity’ and epistemic and ontological silencing, and in legitimizing knowledge forged in these struggles for a more egalitarian global, social, economic and epistemic justice, where the pedagogy of and for freedom is a collective action (CARVALHO, 2023). Liberating action, the fruit of the awareness of communities and oppressed groups (FREIRE, 1987: 56) translates the eminently pedagogical character of any revolutionary transformation, in which the method is awareness itself as the path to something apprehended with intentionality. Here, educators and students are mutually involved in the same task as subjects, demystifying reality and criticizing it in order to get to know it better, recreating knowledge, discovering themselves as permanent (re)makers of knowledge that challenge cognitive injustices. This pedagogical option is based on recognizing the presence of various ways of teaching and learning. This recognition reflects the fact that education operates in multiple contexts, even where there is no official school, through social networks and structures that guarantee the maintenance and transmission of knowledge between generations. As Brandão points out, “there is no single form of education; the school is not the only place where it takes place and perhaps not even the best; school teaching is not its only practice and the professional teacher is not its only practitioner” (2007: 9). So what knowledge should be present in an emancipatory educational process when the lives of countless peoples and communities in the global South are at risk? What knowledge do ordinary women, whose voices are often omitted, carry? The focus of this panel will be on a critical analysis of two axes: on the one hand, the persistence of the colonial legacy in contemporary education, a legacy that produces an “uncritical and imitative mind, dominated by an external source, whose thinking makes any independent perspective impossible” (ALATAS, 1974: 692); on the other hand, it seeks, from some localized examples, to value the diversity and specificity of other experiences and knowledge through the lens of education related to the (re)production of knowledge, languages and cultural practices. These interconnections are fundamental to our understanding of ecologies of knowledge, and to the development of intercultural translations based on a praxis of decolonization.