SJE3914H
This advanced seminar will examine the anti-colonial framework as an approach to theorizing issues emerging from colonial and colonized relations. It will use radical/subversive pedagogy and instruction as important entry points to critical social praxis. Focussing on the writings and commentaries of revolutionary/radical thinkers like Memmi, Fanon, Cesaire, Cabral, Gandhi, Machel, Che Guevera, Mao Tse-Tung, Nyerere, Toure and Nkrumah, the course will interrogate the theoretical distinctions and connections between anti-colonial thought and post-colonial theory, and identify the particular implications/lessons for critical educational practice. Among the issues explored will be: the challenge of articulating anti-colonial theory as an epistemology of the colonized anchored in the indigenous sense of collective and common colonial consciousness; the conceptualization of power configurations embedded in ideas, cultures and histories of marginalized communities; the understanding of Indigeneity as pedagogical practice; the pursuit of agency, resistance and subjective politics through anti-colonial learning; the investigation of the power and meaning of local social practice/action in surviving colonial and colonized encounters; and the identification of the historical and institutional structures and contexts which sustain intellectual pursuits. Students and instructor will engage in critical dialogues around intellectual assertions that the anti-colonial is intimately connected to decolonization, and by extension, decolonization cannot happen solely through Western scholarship. We will ask: How can educators provide anti-colonial education that develop in learners a strong sense of identity, self and collective respect, agency, and the kind of individual empowerment that is accountable to community empowerment? How do we subvert colonial hierarchies embedded in conventional schooling? And, how do we re-envision schooling and education to espouse at its centre such values as social justice, equity, fairness, resistance and decolonial responsibility?