For this response I would like to consider the following quotation: “In other words, the essential thing here is to see clearly, to think clearly–that is, dangerously–and to answer clearly the innocent first question: what fundamentally is colonization?” (Césaire, 172). We’ve read that Augusto Boal, who actualized and embodied Freire’s pedagogy in his “Theatre of the Oppressed”, was tortured and exiled from Brazil for his contributions to liberation. In the introduction to Freire’s “Pedagogy of the Oppressed” we learn the book was (and perhaps remains?) a black market item in many countries, particularly those in which citizens face down violently oppressive regimes. Why are these works (written and embodied) forbidden… why are they so dangerous? J. L. Austin reminds us of the power of the performative utterance–those statements which perform/enact/DO something in the world. Are the ruling forces well versed in their Austin? In their shared pedagogy, Freire and Boal create dangerously by cultivating clear critical consciousness resulting in dialogue, at its essence a word, a word that is the conjunction of action and reflection, that can then name the world and, in naming, create the world anew (Freire, 87-88). It seems right to me that Freire and Boal’s work exists in dialogue with one another, that in their dialogue they might collectively reimagine the world of pedagogy. But what of the second half of Césaire’s “innocent first question”? If it is together, cooperatively, that the oppressed may overcome their oppressors, reading backwards through the texts, my mind turns to alienation… separation. Colonization as separation: separation of person from person, person from their culture, person from their labor, and person from their humanity for the purposes of establishing and maintaining the economic supremacy of the colonizer. So I propose that Freire and Boal offer opportunity to think through a new question: in other words, the essential thing here is to see clearly, to think clearly–that is, dangerously–and to answer clearly the innocent second question: how can we be together?
Austin, J. L.. How To Do Things With Words. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1962. Freire, Paulo. Pedagoy of the Oppressed. New York: Continuum International Publisher, 2013. Césaire, Aimé. "From Discourse on Colonialism" Colonial Discourse and Post-Colonial Theory: A Reader. eds. Patrick Williams, and Laura Chrisman. 172-180. New York: Columbia University Press, 1994.